• Keep your image size small
• Use keywords in your image filename (keyword.jpg)
• Use keywords in your alt tags (alt="keyword text")

4. Internal Links
Most folks think that when it comes to links, the only way you can optimize is through back-links from other, higher-ranked sites. While back-links are a very important part of SEO, there's still opportunity to gain ground by optimizing your internal site links.

A few helpful hints:

• Use optimized anchor text for your navigational items. For example, instead of using the text "services" for your products page menu link, use something more descriptive, like "graphic design services".
• Find opportunities to link to other pages on your site within the body copy of both your interior pages and blog content.

Again, don't go too crazy. It can look odd to both search engines and visitors if there are links everywhere.

5. Site Load Time
Google uses site speed as a ranking criteria for organic search. Numerous sources have tested this and not only does improving site performance increase your keyword rankings, but it has great behavioral effects as well. Speed improvements can also result in a major reduction in your site's bounce rate.

There are many ways that you can optimize your site speed, here are a few good places to start:

• Keep small image file sizes
• Be careful of large flash files, video and graphic elements
• Try Google's Asynchronous tracking code for analytics.
• Don't go cheap on your hosting - go with someone good.
• Move on-page CSS and javascript to external include files.

These are just a few good starting points to understanding and puttinh into practice some factors to achieve greater search engine success. However, we have just scratched the surface of a quality website design and best SEO practices.

Contact Project BIG fish to learn more about our web design, development and SEO services as well as a great CMS that is sure to fit any organization's budget!

Nice review by UTYA.web.id of Drupal as a CMS solution for a high traffic Web site:

"In addition of being a popular web application framework and blogging engine, Drupal also provides a modular framework for content management. Started by a close group of students as their personal bulletin board, today Drupal is the software solution that is used by some of the major traffic generating websites.

With a range of built-in features, which can be strengthened even more by freely available add-on modules, Drupal provides for a powerful Content management system for managing a community driven feature rich website."

Read the full Drupal review +

The truth is there are a number of very good CMS solutions out there, including Drupal, Joomla, EngineExpress and FinCMS. But ultimately they all do relatively the same thing - they provide you the power to edit content on your Web site.

Making a decision on a CMS should include a number of factors including the size of your site, the expected growth, your in-house capabilities, custom features and budget.  At Project BIG fish, we assist clients to develop a sounds strategy for their site and then and only then help to make an informed decision tto the best solution for your success.

Contact Project BIG fish today to let us help you with this very important aspect of your online presence.

At the end of the day any successful advertising or marketing piece is build around mixing a compelling headline with a great visual. These two elements are the cornerstone of grabbing a readers attention in that very short window of opportunity.

As a creative consultant, the sky is the limit when it comes to a compelling headline. We are only handcuffed by our own imagination. However, the visual is where most great concepts suffer. It would be great if there was a unique stock photo for every concept, or if the client had their own photography for every campaign but 9 out of 10 times this is just not the case.

Our designers piece together what they can from a combination of what we have in house, what we can get royalty free or in an abstract format. BUT there is another way... custom photography.

Pending the concept of course, the cost and time needed for a custom photo shoot is probably going to end up less than the cost put toward stock photography, which might show up in another ad, and the time spent to piece it together.

PLUS at the end of the day, you now have a CD of photography that you own and can utilize throughout your advertising and marketing efforts. Photos that are unique to your organization and hit the concept with perfection.

Let me give you a recent example....

We have a client who wanted to create a series of hard hitting direct mail for a political campaign. However, to make the developed concept really work we needed a set of photos that was just perfect and specifically captured the other candidates in the race and the major issues that differentiated them.

We decided to setup a one day photos shoot, hire 4 models and shoot 3 scenes for each of the direct mail pieces. The entire process from when we made the decision to move forward until the first comps of the mail pieces was one week.

This was no ordinary request either. We needed 4 models who each looked like the other candidates in 3 drastically difference scenes: A police line-up, a desert in the Middle East and a hospital room.

How did we pull it off? A very fast-pace and creative team, the beauty of social media and the power of photoshop.



And the result... a successful concept implementation and a very happy client!

The moral of this story is don't let your creative concept suffer when you can't find the perfect visual. Find a creative fish who will straighten up that dorsal fin and find a way to make it happen. Contact Project BIG fish - we love a good challenge.

What would Facebook's 500 million active users do if the world's largest social network were to be shut down? Better yet, what would you do?

Interesting post from Fast Company on July 15th:

What would Facebook's 500 million active users do if the world's largest social network were to be shut down? Better yet, what would you do?

That was the topic covered in a study conducted at Stanford by Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist of Amazon, who asked respondents to imagine a scenario where Facebook were shut down and all its data destroyed. Can we live without the service? The results provide insight into what matters most to users of social networks.

According to the study, approximately 40% of respondents would back up photos, compared with the 38.7% who said they would back up contacts, which suggests that pictures are just as important to social networking as having contacts. "Photos are a very important way to maintain richness in social relations," says Chuanyang Chee, who helped Weigend conduct the study. Indeed, the study attempts to show how social networks are important in creating a "collective memory," and how its features, such as photo albums, help contribute to "each individual's online autobiography." About 38% of respondents said photos were Facebook's most important feature, whereas only 28% said the newsfeed was its best feature.

Of course, a smaller percentage of respondents provided a refreshing answer to the question: They would do nothing if Facebook were ending. Chee says that this small segment actually didn't care about whether their Facebook account were deleted, but only because they either "already backed up all their contacts or because they use another program to store all their photos."

Still, there were some--an unfortunately tiny fraction of respondents--who would not be concerned if Facebook ended, even if meant losing all their data. "These are people who are in touch with their close friends--they already have all their necessary information," explains Chee. "So it's not as important to them to stay in touch through Facebook."

Wait, friends exist outside Facebook?

Read Full Article

The biggest problems organizations face when trying to achieve some level of success with their e-newsletter plans is a lack of consistency.

I'll be the first to admit, I face the same challenge. Our goal at the beginning of year is to be consistent with our e-newsletter. But the very first time there is a conflict with a client deadline or other client factors, this is the very first item that gets moved to the bottom of the TO DO list. And yes, this happens quite often.

However, this should NOT be the case. e-Newsletters work. They work for small business, they work for associations, they work for political or advocacy campaigns and they ESPECIALLY work for non-profits. We see a notable jump in our web traffic every time we send out our "Around the fish Bowl" e-newsletter. And, there are strategies, if you know your audience, to see even better results.

Best results are a formula of consistency, timing and quality content. Content is and will always be King. Your audience has to be somewhat interested in what you are writing about or your email will be greeted with the delete button faster than I can even type the word delete. But consistency and timing also are major factors of success. Your audience has to get use to expect your email and be hit with your email and at a time when they can give it a glance. We're not expecting every email to be read from top to bottom, every link to be clicked and for the reader to forward to each and every friend. We just want to keep our name in from of our audience and provide some helpful or entertaining content.

I find this to be especially true when it comes to non-profits. The very best way to keep your donors, supporters and those who you are still trying to convert to your cause is a consistent e-newsletter. Folks want to hear about your cause and even more importantly they want to read about what you are up to how and how your organization is helping. Success stories and progress reports are invaluable to a non-profit. Those kinds of stories will turn into donations. People want to see that their donations are making a difference. And, please do not overlook the fact that photos and especially video can plan an instrumental role in telling those stories. A photo can tell a 1,000 words and a video infinitely more.

So, here's to my personal goal of NOT pushing the Project BIG fish email to the bottom of my TO DO list each and every week and to more of you understanding the value of a good e-Newsletter strategy.

Interesting article posted at intac.net about what the internet may be in 2020. I think they have some good ideas but all very safe ones. I believe we will see much more significant changes in 10 years on the internet than they are forecasting simply by the ongoing convergence of cable and internet.

Agree or disagree? What are your predictions?

Two years ago, Project BIG fish launched Project little Fish, a small side project originally built for the three company principals to post photos and stories about their children. This side project has grown over the last two years, as friends, family and then the public began to create free accounts to blog about their children and family. Project little fish was a great success and the most popular feature was the ability to share on Facebook. Many people requested further integration with Facebook and we also understood that many parents simply use Facebook to post photos and tell stories rather than keep a seperate blog web site. We asked ourselves, What if we combined a personal blog site with Facebook and allowed users to maintain separate web sites while taking advantage of this popular social media platform?

My Little Guppy has been in development for many months and we are very excited to see it finally launch. We will also be phasing out Project litle fish over the next few months, migrating users to the new platform.

Please visit MyLittleGuppy.com for more information or click here to start your free My Little Guppy account today.

Project BIG fish is proud to be among the winners of the 16th Annual Communicator Awards as announced by the International Academy of the Visual Arts. With thousands of entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring the creative excellence for communication professionals.

Project BIG fish is honored with an award in the Not-for-Profit category for "A Story of Hope" – an integrated marketing campaign for Gede Foundation. The project centered around a rebranding effort for this global non-profit foundation helping to spread awareness, education and medical help around HIV issues in Africa. Working with Gede, the Nigeria Film Commission and the Government of Nigeria, Project BIG fish produced a documentary-style video that anchored the roll-out of the new Gede Foundation identity. The work included a new logo, website, print collateral and "success report" - a printed depiction of the history and stories of success over the first 8 years of the foundation's work.

Said Thomas Frank, Creative Director of Project BIG fish, "This is the type of campaign that is a winner on many levels. Our client is doing incredible work in Africa and just being able to document that effort and see it first hand was an amazing experience. I can only hope we have the opportunity to work with more clients in the nonprofit sector like Gede that may need a hand in bringing awareness to their cause and monumental efforts."

Special thanks to the entire team put together for this project, including:

Thomas Frank, Creative Director
Wanda Ng Fontana, Art Director
Shane Larrabee, Director of Technology
Dave Braun, Executive Producer
Margaret Miller, Field Producer
Max Fischer, Director of Photography
Glen Piegari, Location Sound
Jeff Kosmicki, Editor

Project BIG fish is a DC-based creative agency specializing in helping non-profits of all sizes to refine their brand and create communication tools to best tell their unique story.

View a summary of the "A Story of Hope" project.

About The Communicator Awards:

The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals. Founded by communication professionals over a decade ago, The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. This year’s Communicator Awards received thousands of entries from companies and agencies of all sizes, making it one of the largest awards of its kind in the world. Please visit www.communicatorawards.com for more information.

The Communicator Awards is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a "Who's Who" of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms.

About Gede Foundation

Gede Foundation is a nonprofit organization established and registered as a 501 c-3 organization in Washington, DC USA in 2002 and in Nigeria in 2003.

There mission is to work for the benefit of the people of Africa to restore to them the right to a sense of self worth and a life of hope, health and happiness through programs that educate, promote healthy communities and help eliminate the stigma of illness.

Learn more at www.gedefoundation.org

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4210534.htm

Google has just unveiled a new feature to edit video on YouTube. The YouTube Editor will allow users to perform some rudimentary video editing entirely online. It's not going to challenge desktop software in the feature department, but it will serve the needs for basic editing.

The tool will allows you to:

• Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video
• Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos
• Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs
• Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click -- no upload necessary

There is no way to edit other's videos for obvious copyright reasons, but I wouldn't be surprised to see video sharing features added down the road. This could be another feature destined for integration with Google's upcoming Chrome OS cloud connected platform.

Watch this video from Andrew at rewboss to get a sense of how it works:

Don't be shy! As we engage in a new client relationship, the key to happiness is constant communication and the ability to talk things through. Give it to me up front! What I'm talking about is how to most effectively use us and in turn, we can then best service you.

So, as the inception of your new project begins to take form, start to work out as many ideas that pop into your head and roadblocks that you may face. Then, on our first date, or our kickoff meeting ; ) this is the time for you to let us know as much as possible about your campaign's goals, possible strategies, tactics and more.

Here are some basic points to use as guidelines:

Objective
What is it that you want to do and what is your end goal? All the other in between questions will help us in shaping your project and setting the criteria. Some of these in between questions are:

• Is this the first of its piece? Is there a previous edition? If so, how do you want to improve it?

• Will this work in conjunction with another existing piece? If so, can we see it?

• What is the lifespan of this piece? What kind of flexibility do you need for it to grow with your company?

• What is the content you have? Is the copy complete? Do you have original photos?

• Is there an existing brand guideline to work with?

• Who is the audience? What are the demographics to consider?

• Is there something you have seen in passing that you like? This will give us a point to reference.

• What are things we should stay away from? Any certain colors, shapes, words? 

Timeline
Every project should have a reasonable deadline. Without a finishing goal the project will go willy nilly and could never finish as your other daily work takes priority. A few reasons we set deadlines are:

• Work up a production schedule -- this help you with organizing on your end and also helps us schedule you within our overall workload.

• How will your project be distributed? Consider building in time for a site launch, your brochure to go on press and then to the mail house.

Budget
We understand you may want to hold this close to your heart, but for us to determine your best route it always helps to know how much you have budgeted. Remember, we are not car salesmen. It comes down to trust. If you hired us, that means you trust us and if you trust us, that means we will do our best for you, as our reputation and the integrity are on the line. Things you should budget for:

• Design/Consulting time -- this will be given to you in our initial proposal and it will give you an idea of the time we need to complete the task.

• Third party vendors -- these could be services we use outside during the course of your project. Third party vendors could be photographers, hosting provider, specialty developers, video editors, printers, etc.

These are just some questions we ask as we embark on our creative journey together. An open and honest relationship will lead to a happy and health trip as we skip, hand in hand, towards the golden PMS 130 setting sun.

Thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple’s corporate tiff with Adobe over the performance of Flash on Apple products, you may know of HTML5.

If you have an iPhone or iPad you know that Adobe Flash will not display, rendering many sites worthless. This especially effects those sites serving video based content with Flash such as Hulu.com and many news outlets. Steve Jobs has talked a lot lately about HTML5 as an alternative to Flash video and is doing his best to use the popularity of the iPhone and iPad to force content publishers to adopt the new standard and give up the use of Flash.

HTML5 is actually much bigger and encompasses so much more than the press would have you believe as they track the shots fired between Apple and Adobe. HTML5 is the next major version of HTML, the core language used to display Web sites. A major goal of HTML5 is to reduce the dependency on proprietary plugins to deliver rich media content. This includes Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and others. Currently when we include video or animations within a web site we do so with Flash. This relies on the user having installed the correct version in order to view the contents of the site. Not having Flash (Adobe claims 99% of all internet enabled desktops in mature markets have Flash installed as of March 2010 – http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/) or having an older version can disrupt the user’s expereience with install/upgrade prompts or a site that does not display properly.

HTML5 aims to rid these obstacles by making such things as video and audio a core part of the language and browser, thus not relying on the end-user to have the latest software in addition to their favorite web browser. Though all major browsers currently support elements of HTML5, HTML5 is still a working draft with the W3C (www.w3.org).

At the Fish Bowl we are working on an ever increasing number of projects that include video production of all scales and believe the demand will only grow over time. I have no animosity toward Adobe Flash as it has served us well to deliver rich media content for years. However, I look forward to reducing the number of usability obstacles and integrating video into even more projects in the future.

Interesting articleposted last week on the emergence of Facebook as an online video space. Personally I think the quality of the video on Facebook is a little bit better than YouTube, however YouTube remains dominant in potential views.

By Jack Marshall, ClickZ, Jun 7, 2010

As traffic to Facebook continues to grow, the social network is beginning to emerge as an important stakeholder in the online video space. According to online measurement firm comScore, the number of users viewing video on the site has been growing consistently over the past twelve months, and it could end the year with the second greatest reach of all online video providers in the U.S., second only to YouTube owner Google.

Data from comScore's Video Metrix service suggests the number of unique U.S. users viewing video content on Facebook has grown from 13.3 million in April 2009 to 41.3 million in April 2010, representing year-over-year growth of almost 211 percent.

In the two-month period ending April 30, unique viewers grew from 36.6 million to 41.3 million, positioning Facebook as the fifth largest video property on the Internet in terms of reach behind Google sites, Yahoo sites, Fox Interactive Media properties, and Vevo. If Facebook continues to grow its audience at its current rate, however, it's on course to take the second spot by the end of 2010.

Though much of the content currently available on Facebook comes in the form of embedded YouTube units, comScore's numbers only reflect video content hosted by Facebook itself. Views of YouTube video on Facebook therefore contribute towards Google's total, suggesting the social network's role in delivering video content to users is larger than the numbers suggest.

Research released this week by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project also suggests users are beginning to gravitate towards social networks rather than dedicated video sharing sites to host their content. Though working with a relatively small sample of 1,005 U.S. adults, Pew found that 52 percent of video uploaders said they post to social networks, compared with 49 percent that post to video sites such as YouTube.

It's important to note, however, that scale does not yet constitute volume for Facebook video. On average, users viewed just 5.6 videos on Facebook during April, compared to an average of around 7.5 per user on Yahoo and Vevo, and a whopping 96 videos per user on Google properties. Long-form video site Hulu also attracted an average of over 24 views per user.

Project BIG fish Creative Director Thomas Frank woke up this morning and for the first time in who knows how many years could read the digits on his bedroom clock. Said Tom, "It was unbelievable."

Tom had Lasik surgery yesterday and can now actually see what he is designing. For 12+ years Tom has been the creative director at Project BIG fish and couldn't actually see very well. O' he hid it well with those black frame glasses or his "invisible" contact lens. But really he just put blue here and green there and this image over there and these words here but he really had no idea how it all actually looked. The clients all loved it though and Tom kept designing.

But what if Tom could actually see? Said Tom, "this could be bigger than BIG. This could be HUGE."

So, if you're in the midst of a project with BIG fish, you may want to consider having Tom take another look at what has been designed and if you are about to start a new campaign, why wouldn't you contact Project BIG fish?! What other Creative Director cares so much about his client's work that he would go through such an ordeal to see in HD.

Meet Tom and the rest of the team at Project BIG fish:
http://www.projectbigfish.com

The Club for Growth site was designed, developed and is maintained by Project BIG fish, for which we recently received a 2010 Pollie Award.



See the new Scorecard tool at http://www.clubforgrowth.org/projects/

I've watched Lost since it kicked off in September of 2004 and it has been a constant point of debate in our office for years. From the random questions of why is their a polar bear on the island or the whole good vs. evil biblical connection to the more business implications of how effectively they have used the internet to promote the show, I  believe it has made us all in the advertising and marketing world give some thought to what can be done online and how fun and interactive advertising really can be.

There is a great article by Joy Tipping of The Dallas Morning News addressing some of these points. Check it out below... and on a a personal note, I love 'LOST' but I do rank the finale as #3 of all time, just ahead of 'The Sopranos' and just behind '6 Feet Under.' 'The Bob Newhart Show' remains #1.

Complex mysteries of 'Lost' changed how we watch TV
By Joy Tipping, The Dallas Morning News

May 23--After six seasons that featured a plane crash, a smoke monster, polar bears, time travel, an H-bomb blast and an epic battle of good vs. evil, this century's first cult TV phenomenon promises to solve many of its mysteries tonight.

As Lost fans gather to mourn the end and parse the endless theories and details, TV gurus say the ABC show has changed the medium and enriched pop culture by cultivating an Internet base of obsessive fans and using new technology to enhance viewers' experiences with snazzy extras such as mini "mobisodes" for cellphone viewing and content hidden on-screen for hard-core fans. It also countered the notion that today's TV audiences don't care about complex serial storytelling.

Watching Lost is "like being in a really dysfunctional relationship -- you love it, and you hate it, and you can't get away from it," says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University in New York.

Read Full Article:
http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/145302009

And for a little fun, also see: LOST's alternate endings....
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/jimmy-kimmel-live-lost-endings-10726542

THIS should be the very first question a new client asks and should then be directly followed by "How do i create a site that best services the traffic that does arrive?"

It absolutely amazes me how many potential clients want to focus 100% of their attention and BUDGET on the design of their website and ignore completely how to drive more traffic to the site. These two pieces to the puzzle are essential for the success of any website. You gotta put a budget into driving traffic to your site and then figure out through the design and development process how to convert that audience to leads, donors, subscribers or whatever the ultimate goal may be.

The two tasks are woven together and need to be dealt with jointly throughout the entire design process. From your site map to your page content to the functions of your site, we need to devise a plan that is heavily influenced by how you will drive traffic to your site as much as what they will do once they arrive.

Contact Project BIG fish to learn more about how we approach a new website from both the perspective of building a great site and driving your audience to the site. And here are a few tips about what to be thinking about in terms of driving traffic:

1. Publish Quality Content

Of course, you should be sure that you have worthwhile content on your site so that once you have visitors, they have something to see. But did you know that publishing quality content can also help to attract traffic to your site in the first place?

Search Engines Can Send Traffic

Search engines continually crawl web pages and index what they find. So, whatever you have published on your site becomes part of the directory people get results from when they search (e.g. "security services", "restaurant in austin, texas", "homeowner tips", etc.).

Think of search engines as catalogs of most of the information on the web. As long as you're publishing a unique perspective on a topic, new people should find your website this way.

Publish a Blog

Blogging is an easy way to get content onto your site in a highly readable way, and in a way that search engines can easily index the information. There are also blog search engines, such as Technorati, out there that will index your articles and could potentially drive a significant amount of traffic to it.

Syndicate your blog content using a RSS to email or to Twitter or Facebook feature to help build a base of regular readers.

2. Advertise

This one may be obvious, but sometimes the obvious is overlooked. There are many opportunities out there to advertise the content of your website. Before you begin to gain momentum through the other suggestions, maybe spending within your business' budget for some advertising may be the key to early success.

Search Engine Advertising

Pay Per Click
Examples include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter. Companies like Google have massively grown as a result of search advertising, and for the most part, this would not be true if it wasn't effective in driving traffic to websites.

By advertising on search engines, you can bid on the advertising space people see when performing searches on what they're interested in.

Advertising on Websites & Newsletters

Referral / Sponsorship Advertising
Some website owners will install an advertisement block, such as Google AdSense to allow advertisements relevant to the content on their site. By exploring this option, a link to your website will appear on pages the agency you use deems worthwhile, and you'll pay based either on the number of clicks or impressions (views).

Banner & Skyscraper Ads
These ads are graphical in nature (as opposed to the often plain-text search ads) and appear directly on someone's website, often via a third-party service like DoubleClick.com.

You can also contact website owners who advertise on their sites to discuss a paid agreement for an exclusive ad on their site.

Offline
There are always the old standby, traditional means of print advertising. At one point, this may have been only marginally effective. But as the online experience continues to become more ubiquitous in the lives of people, your efforts to advertise offline in meaningful ways should translate to the benefit of your website.

Consider advertising on whatever print materials you use, both at your physical location and at materials you use for business promotion (business cards, advertisements, etc.)

3. Build a Reputation

Some traffic building techniques are highly visible and easily measured. But there's another that is less so but very important -- your reputation. The type of word of mouth advertising that holds true in the realm of offline may even be amplified online.

The main way to build a reputation that helps to drive traffic to your site is as simple as providing a product or service that people find useful. But you can further the cause by putting your name out there where people interested in your industry tend to interact:

- Publish blog articles that are easy to link to and share with others, and link to other blogs in your articles whenever possible.

- Post highly relevant comments on others' blogs and in related forums.

- Encourage your email subscribers to forward your messages, which should contain a link to a page where the recipients can sign up easily.

Hope you found this information useful and please contact Project BIG fish when your ready to start your next web project!

If your not leveraging social media yet to help your organization, you better start considering when and how. Here are 5 interesting case studies on how some large organizations are succeeding through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube...

1. Conan O’Brien‘s “The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour”

The Program:

One Tweet promotion program

The Numbers:

• One Tweet and a national 32 city comedy tour sold out in 2 hours
• Channel used Twitter.. Followers 939,000
• 40 staff on Production
• The bank account ($32 Million in severance pay from NBC to bankroll the production)
• The number one ranked tour on leading ticket vendor websites in the US, according to The AP. “[This] is unheard of for a comedian,” said Glenn Lehrman, spokesman for the Stub Hub online ticket site. “The top spot usually goes to a sports event or big-arena pop concert.”

2. Ford Motor Company’s Ford Fiesta Project

The Program:

Ford Fiesta Movement that involved selecting 100 socially vibrant individuals who were provided with the European version of the Ford Fiesta 18 months prior to it being manufactured and released in the USA. These socially media aware fanatics were encouraged to share their experience with the Ford Fiesta over the 6 months on their Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube channels.

The Numbers:

• 11 million Social Networking impressions
• 5 million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving)
• 11,000 videos posted
• 15,000 tweets.. not including retweets
• 13,000 photos
• 50,000 hand raisers who have seen the product in person or on a video who said that they want to know more about it when it comes out and 97% of those don’t currently drive a Ford vehicle
• 38% awareness by Gen Y about the product, without spending a dollar on traditional advertising ( Fords model “Fusion” doesn’t have that awareness after 2 years of being out in production and yet it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional marketing spend).

3. General Motors Chevy Competition

The Program:

Eight teams of social media embark on a combination road trip/scavenger hunt competition from their hometowns to Austin behind the wheel of some of Chevy’s newest products. Along the way they’ll need to complete 50 “challenges” in order to determine the winner. The winning team will be the one that not only has completed the most challenges, but has done the most interacting with their community on Twitter and their own sites.

The Numbers:

• 61.1 Million social web impressions from March 8 to 21 (with overwhelmingly well above 98% of those being positive, as far as the reports and measurements that I saw) with
• 15,924 online mentions including
• 13,440 Tweets (this is more than double the number of tweets about Chevy in Jan-Feb)
• 1,216 blog posts
• 1,268 other posts (including comments, photos and videos)
• 33,500 page views through Facebook and ChevySXSW.com
• More than 300 pieces of positive user-generated content posted to ChevySXSW.com (including 250+ videos)
• Chevrolet added 8,764 fans to its Facebook page (up 12.7% in 3 weeks);
• @Chevrolet Twitter followers were up +68% in the month of our SXSW activation

4. Toyota’s iQ Economy Drive

The Program:

Toyota in the UK put together a social media marketing program that saw two bloggers attempting a 500-mile road trip in a Toyota iQ, all on a single tank of petrol. The trip would take the two drivers to 18 UK cities and every step of the journey would be shared through social media

The Numbers:

• In terms of coverage, the hyper-miling activity resulted in 64 blogs, including Wired, the New York Times and Treehugger reporting the attempt
• Toyota reaching a potential audience of over 105 million readers worldwide
• It reached a possible 3.7 million in the UK alone.
• Traffic to the iQ blog increased by more than 212%

5. Obama’s Presidential Election

The Program:

To be elected as President using the web and social media channels

The Numbers:

• Over 3 million individual donors were mobilised through social media
• Motivated over 2 million social networking participants
• Created and promoted more than 200,000 offline events across the country
• Total of 6.5 million donations online
• $500 million in donations online
• More than 13 million people provided their email addresses to the campaign website over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 types of messages
• In total, more than 2 billion e-mails landed in inboxes
• The campaign website helped create over 2 million user profiles
• There were over 400,000 blog entries
• People spent more than 14 million hours watching over 1,000 Obama campaign-related videos on YouTube
• There were more than 50 million views of Obama Campaign YouTube Videos
• 1.2 billion minutes of YouTube view time.

By the way if your not convinced here are four more numbers

• March traffic 94,000 hits
• March unique views 59,000
• Time 12 months

Have you tapped into the leverage of social media yet?

Stumbled upon Beach Park, a water park in Brazil, which has an insane-looking giant waterslide called, appropriately enough, Insano. To promote it, a digital agency sent out a pretty neat e-mail, designed to give you the feeling of flying down the horrifying contraption. The JPG from the e-mail is posted below.

Click and hold your browser's scroll bar and pull down.

Have you or your company been searching for a way to dispose of unused computers and electronic devices? Check out PC Recycler Inc. Established in 2003 by the father and son team of Jeff and Jeremy Farber, this organization promises Zero Landfill Disposal and Zero Export while maintaining the highest level of security required to fortify the integrity of an organization’s data.

PC Recycler understands that by providing a green alternative to the computer recycling dilemma, this allows many in the community to help reduce their personal carbon footprint. According to their website, more than two million pounds of electronics have been collected at their Chantilly, VA location since Community Collection’s inception in 2005.

There next event is this Saturday May 8th from 10:00am to 2:00pm at 4005 Westfax Drive, Suite A, Chantilly, VA.

Computer recycling events are for all residents of Virginia (VA including but not restricted to Fairfax County, Herndon, Alexandria, Arlington, Reston), Washington DC, Maryland (MD) and any surrounding areas. Anyone who can drive to the facility can take advantage of their computer recycling event.

Learn more at http://tiny.cc/dgbx6

The Obama administration has certainly changed how the government is using technology but it is really  just the beginning of how we could leverage technology to interact with the public, provide valuable information and allow innovation to happen in government.

A great example of this is from an article in the May 2010 issue of Fast Company...

It's a good thing Gavin Newsom checks his Twitter feed during meetings. Otherwise, San Francisco's mayor would've missed a life-changing missive about ... potholes? "It really made me wonder," he says. "What if we used social media to make our city services work better?" That stray tweet led to the city's first-of-its-kind Twitter account (@SF311), which encourages residents to send queries and messages about nonemergency issues. But it also underscores the city's open-source stance on government. Just as Google, Facebook, and Twitter released their programming interfaces to app makers, San Francisco opened its arsenal of public information -- train times, crime stats, health-code scores -- to software developers. "There's a tremendous amount of tech talent here," Newsom says. "We'd be fools not to leverage it." To date, more than 140 data sets have been liberated, spawning roughly 30 smartphone apps, such as Crimespotting (browse interactive city-crime maps), Routesy (see real-time train schedules), and EcoFinder (locate the nearest recycling spots). But San Francisco's open-source stance doesn't stop at the city limits: In February, it launched an idea-sharing site, which blueprints everything from citywide health insurance to banning plastic bags. And in March, it released the API for its 311 city-service center. Boston; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C., have already pledged to adopt the new standard.

Interesting article by Brian Morrissey of AdWeek as based on impressions generated in Facebook's news feed. However, unless you are a rather large brand, I'm not sure how much this applies to most organizations. Blanked statements like "each Facebook fan = $3.60 " is a catchy headline but does it really make any sense?

I would argue the the most important factor for smaller businesses, politicians and nonprofits is the simple fact that Facebook can go a long way in improving customer relationships and promoting new products and service.

Articles this like are simply the old guard attempting to normalization things. The power of web analytics and your customer data isn’t about coming up with normalized numbers to apply blandly across all consumers, but about segmentation, detailed analysis and accountability. It’s about understanding and activating your true client base, and not necessarily treating them all the same.

Share your thoughts on the following article...

Brands have rushed to Facebook to build fan bases, with some amassing millions of connections. The nagging question has been: What is the monetary value of these fans?

Social media specialist Vitrue, which aids brands in building their customer bases on social networks, tried to put a media value on such communities.

The firm has determined that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.

The company's findings are based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, the stream of recent updates from users' networks.

Vitrue analyzed Facebook data from its clients -- with a combined 41 million fans -- and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed.

"It's important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you're leveraging it," said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue.

Not all brands are created equal. Vitrue found wildly divergent impression-to-fan ratios. Some marketers generated just .44 impressions per fan, while another saw 3.6 impressions. Strutton chalked that up to sexier brands having more engaged connections, giving them access to the news feed more often. The impressions are not unique.

Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand's 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. Using Vitrue's calculation, Starbucks' 6.5 million fan base -- acquired in part with several big ad buys -- is worth $23.4 million in media annually.

"It helps [marketers] justify the spend they're making, especially in acquiring a fan base and engaging that fan base," Strutton said.

"When you start to [add] engagement value, it goes higher," said Strutton. "We were trying to get an easy-to-understand valuation terminology."

In an online effort spearheaded by TOMS Shoes (i have no affiliation other than I am a fan), I'm joining over 80,000 people who have pledged to go barefoot today. Follow me on Twitter as I give my perspective on a day without shoes @projectbigfish

Why am I not wearing shoes? 2 reasons actually...

First and foremost I think TOMS Shoes is a pretty outstanding organization. TOMS Shoes was founded on a simple premise: With every pair of shoes you purchase from TOMS, they will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One. Using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good is what they're all about. The TOMS One for One business model transforms their customers into benefactors, which allows growth of a truly sustainable business rather than depending on fundraising for support.

Second, I'm inspired by how they have used online strategy and social media at the core of their marketing efforts. They are a fantastic example of how non profits, political campaigns and even for-profit organizations should utilize social media to drive their mission. Learn more at http://www.onedaywithoutshoes.com/

Please, follow me throughout the day on Twitter and I'll let you know how it is going. And if you see me walking down the street, don't step on my toes!

I had the great honor to accept a 2010 Pollie Award on behalf of the whole team at Project BIG fish and our client, Club for Growth, at the American Association of Political Consultants Pollie Awards this past Saturday night in Phoenix, Arizona. We were excited to be recognized with a Silver Pollie for the Best National Public Affairs Web site.

Since we did not receive one of the BIG, BIG awards, I was not give the chance to give my prepared acceptance speech other than to the guy waiting next to me for 30 minutes at the post-awards party as we attempted to signal the bartender ;) For those of you who know me, you know for a fact, I would have enjoyed addressing the great crowd at the Awards dinner.

My speech may have went something like this...

"Enough applause. Please, please take your seats. I want to thank the AAPC, President Ayers, the judges, our fellow AAPC members, my parents, their parents, President Obama, my wife, my kids, our clients, my colleagues, my table-mates tonight, those I rode the bus over here with as well as the world in general for this recognition of our hard work. Although, I thought we greatly deserved the AAPC Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award for our 1+ years as a member and our first Pollie, I will, with honor, accept this prestiges award and hope that it is not confiscated going through airport security tomorrow morning.

I can not take all the credit for the Club for Growth website. [Psss... anything that doesn't work on the site is the fault of one of the developers]... We have a great team of strategists, designers and developers at Project BIG fish including my partners in crime, Shane Larrabee and Wanda Ng. Shane worked tirelessly with our developers to bring this site to life after my team came up with all sorts of rather challenging requests and our client's continues thirst for that additional "really, really cool function that will be unbelievable."

Our client, the Club for Growth gave us a great opportunity to build a unique site that with good planning and a bit of luck launched at just the precise time that Club President, Chris Chocola was on FOX News. The TV appearance sparked a giant spike to site visitors, new club members and donations... a spike that sparked the statement, "where in the hell are all these people coming from?!"

So, thank you again and please check out clubforgrowth.org and, even more importantly, give Project BIG fish a ring when your starting your next campaign... www.projectbigfish.com - OK, OK, i am now leaving the stage. Enjoy the rest of your time in Arizona!"

Side note: I was stopped and pulled into a security room  at the airport as I tried to explain that this flame/knife looking item was in fact an award and I had no intention of doing anything but putting my seat belt on and sleeping the entire flight back to DC. I would even decline the free peanuts and drink if that would make everything OK.

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The American Association of Political Consultants is the professional organization for people working in the field of politics in the United States. Learn more at www.theaapc.org.

The Club for Growth is a national network of thousands of Americans, from all walks of life, who believe that prosperity and opportunity come through economic freedom. Learn more at www.clubforgrowth.org.

View the Club for Growth Case Study +

Great blog post from the team at WildFire. Wildfire is a service we use to help our clients engage social network users, through interactive campaigns like sweepstakes, contests and give-aways. According to Jupiter Research: companies that run contests or sweepstakes have twice as many fans on their sponsored social network pages as those who do not.

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You’ve taken the time to create a fun, engaging promotion for your users and fans, and you’ve set it up to run from right inside your Facebook Fan Page. The campaign just went live.  Now, you can sit back and wait for it to spread in a viral way, right? Well, not quite.

Creating a promotion and sitting back to “hope for the best”  will not lead to success. Unless you’re one of the lucky multi-national companies who seem to have infinite brand awareness and tons of fans who send news on its merry viral way instantly, you’re going to have to kickstart the spread yourself a bit. Here are some of our favorite advertising strategies that will help you do that…and the good news is, many of these wont cost you penny!

1. Messaging Your Fan Base

If you have an existing fan base, the first thing you should do is reach out to them by posting to your wall multiple times during the promotion. This will not only provide your existing fans with a compelling reason to visit your fan page and engage with your brand, but it will also enable them to spread the word about your promotion to their friends.

We recommend that you message your fans at least three times throughout the promotion – once as soon as you launch, once mid-way through the promotion and once a few days before it ends to remind your fans that time is running out. You should also be thoughtful about when you message your fans. For example, if your most of your fans are from the United States, be sure to post during times that North Americans are most likely to be online.

2. Enlist the Help of Your Friends

Don’t have any fans to promote your campaign to? Why not kick-start your campaign by enlisting the help of your friends? Post a feed story to your personal Facebook profile so all your Facebook friends learn about your campaign. Ask your friends and colleagues to do the same, and if they just copy and paste your statement, it should then take less than 30 seconds and will enable you to reach hundreds or even thousands of people.

3. Sending Out an Email Update

If you have a mailing list for your company, send out an email to your subscribers encouraging them to enter your campaign. Promotions such as coupons or giveaways provide a strong incentive for your readers to open the newsletter, especially if you send them out on a regular and thus expected schedule. This is also a powerful way for you to turn your existing newsletter subscribers into fans of your Facebook page.

4. Update your Twitter

Speaking of Twitter, you should promote your campaign through it too! Tweet out messages in 140 characters or less, and use link shorteners like bit.ly or tinyURL to recreate the long URLs to your campaigns into short, Twitter friendly versions. Bit.ly is extra useful because it tracks the clicks your shortened link receives, so if you wanted to measure the results of your linking, it’s easy to set up a free account.

5. Targeted Advertising

You can use targeted advertising on Facebook to drive users to your campaign. It takes 5 minutes to set up your ad and you can target users according to age, gender, geography and other criteria. For example, did you know you can target your “Best Web Design” contest to people who, in their Facebook profiles, wrote that they are employed as Web Designers, or like Web Design, or any interests you could list in a Facebook profile? Facebook ads make it easy to get as specific as you need, to reach out to potentially like minded people to see your promotion.

6. Register your Contest or Sweepstakes in Online Directories

There are many websites that are dedicated to the tracking and indexing of huge lists of running contests and sweepstakes, and they have dedicated user bases who check the new listings every day, to see the daily changing lists of prizes they could win at various places. Consider registering your sweepstakes or contest with some of these sites–it’s usually free to list in exchange for you to link to the index on your web page, but even this is usually optional. Being tracked by such indexes could be a great way to pull in a group of users who are by nature, or by hobby, highly engaged with promotions.

7. Reach Out to Popular Bloggers

If your brand is part of a social category, like video games, or parent blogging, or cooking groups for example, try reaching out to recognized personal bloggers in that industry. Often, these talented writers have large followings of readers who trust their opinion and will check out a promotion if the blogger endorses it with a mention. For example, McMommy, a popular parenting blogger from Florida tweeted out her participation in a Cadillac promotion for charity. 24 hours later, her most engaged Twitter followers brought her vote tally from 65 (when we first voted for her after reading her tweet) to 665 (when we checked the counts the day after). Now that’s being social.

Did you know Phoenix averages more than 310 sunny days per year?

Here's to that sun shinning bright this Saturday, March 27th. I'll be traveling to Arizona to attend the 2010 Pollie Awards & Conference. On behalf of the whole team at Project BIG fish, it will me my honor to accept a 2010 Pollie for excellence in web site design and development.

The weather forecasts is sunny with highs in the 80° and a 0 percent chance of rain. Stay tuned for up-to-the minute weather reports and  a full recap from Arizona.

And if you are also attending the Pollie's this year, give me a shout (cell: 202/607-3624 or email: tfrank@projectbigfish.com). I may buy you a drink or at the very least tell you how freakin' hot it is out there ;)

Learn more about our online philosophy +

A sign of things to come I am sure. On a second attempt, it did install. You can see in the following image that this is truly a testing platform as the standard browser styling is completely missing. The good news, our web site displays just fine.

Interesting article posted by Bruce Horovitz of the USA Today about social media's impact on filling out those NCAA office pools.

There was a time when March Madness was just about basketball.

But with social media as a tool, some of the nation's savviest marketers are turning the college basketball's championship tournament into something more akin to an online hoops party for lovers of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. People can tap on their laptops or mobile phones and play along with all kinds of games and contests and, yes, even watch the games.

The 64 teams picked Sunday will play for the title in the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament over the next few weeks. For marketers from Coca-Cola to Papa John's, it's a social-media marketing event, a chance to coax consumers to play with their brands.

"It's the ultimate sporting event for social media," says Jason Kint, general manager at CBSSports.com. In addition to TV coverage, every game can be watched free online. For $9.99, you can watch the games on your iPhone.

But folks aren't just watching. They're chatting. Five of the 10 busiest "peak" minutes of Internet traffic ever were linked to the NCAA tournament, says Akamai, a Web technology firm.

Marketers are trying to be part of that chat with:

• Involvement. Coke Zero is sponsoring a Department of Fannovation Brain Bracket asking fans to vote online for the best idea to improve the tournament. "We're empowering fans to shake up the status quo in college basketball," says Linda Cronin, director of interactive media.

• Phone apps. MillerCoors launched an iPhone app, Tip 'n Spin, in which folks earn points by balancing a basketball on a Miller Lite bottle. "Marketers struggled in the past for a forum for daily interaction with consumers," says Mike Davitt, Miller Lite marketing chief. Social media offer that forum.

• Contests. Applebee's is offering $1 million to whomever picks the winners of all 63 tourney games via its Facebook page with Twitter updates.

• Sweepstakes. Papa John's Papa's in the House Hoops Sweepstakes on Facebook let fans pick the prize: a $2,000 shopping spree and pizza for a year, says Jim Ensign, digital marketing chief.

• Sex appeal. Captain Morgan rum is asking fans to pick their favorite Morganette (women who tout the brand at bars) on Facebook to win a free trip to Las Vegas. "This is how our target customer lives his life," says Tom Herbst, marketing chief. "He chats, e-mails and watches TV on his computer. It's where he communicates."

Related Links:
Join our office pool

Are NCAA pools good for the office? You bet!
By WALT BELCHER  | The Tampa Tribune

Interesting article sent over by alumni fishHead, Thrine Harpring. Just another great example of why you really should treat a campaign like a business and hire a professional creative agency rather than hanging your brand on a volunteer who sends in a "fun" logo idea. The very last line in the article is great!

U.S. Senate candidate on how campaign 'stole' Columbus logo
By Greg Wyshynski

Marc Delphine was fond of the logo a volunteer had designed for his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Oregon: a silver star wrapped in a star-spangled banner that his designer told him evoked the letter 'D' for branding purposes.

It certainly was a memorable symbol. In fact, it was already being used by the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets, as Delphine was stunned to discover on Wednesday.

The Blue Jackets PR staff was alerted by fans over Twitter of the trademark infringement, and passed the matter along to their legal department and then to the NHL. Delphine said he received a phone call from The Oregonian newspaper about misuse of the logo, followed by "30 consecutive emails" from around the country about it.

"They were all like, 'What are you doing with their logo?' and I was like, 'I didn't make the logo!' and we pulled it immediately," said Delphine, a Libertarian candidate making history as the first openly homosexual man to run for the U.S. Senate in Oregon. "I'm not interested in any kind of infringement. We don't even need a logo."

He said a volunteer associated with his Web site developer created the logo and donated it to the campaign. As you can see, the Blue Jackets' current logo (right) was simply flipped from left to right and the red circle synonymous with the Ohio state flag was removed. Instead of a 'D' the logo actually makes a 'C' for Columbus.

Sometimes you get what you pay for, according to Delphine. "I don't know if you know anything about Libertarian candidates, but they typically don't have a lot of money coming in. I was thinking this was so nice, but it was too good to be true," said Delphine, a self-professed "huge sports fan" but not a hockey fan. "It's not very original."

The logo was removed from the candidate's official Web site, though it remained on Delphine's Facebook page as of Wednesday afternoon.

He said he hoped his candidacy wouldn't become synonymous with this logo foul-up. "If anything, I hope this raises awareness for the Columbus Blue Jackets," said Delphine.