The Blog

The American Consumer Satisfaction Index out this month shows that Sprint Nextel’s rating jumped 11% from 2009 to 2010. The increase for the telecom industry over the same period was an average of 4.1%. This is wonderful news for Sprint Nextel, but it turns out that it only brings them up to par with their main competitors. Two years ago, they were at the lowest point of customer satisfaction in their history.

That made me wonder: did they do anything special which they can continue to build momentum with, or did they just stop sucking? Birch Studio’s first step into any project is research, so I figured I should research this as well in hopes of learning something. As one might expect, there was a slew of press around this and quite a few differing opinions. The original source of my data, ACSI, is a significant arbiter of information in the US economy so its reports carry quite a bit of weight. (more…)

In the last installment, I covered matching words and phrases on your website to those that a potential customer may use to search for your service or product. I also cleared up the mystery of meta tags. This month, the topic is tweaks that you can make in your HTML code for better optimization.

Let’s go back to how Google thinks. (Artificial intelligence, at your fingertips.) It wants to look at your page in the way a human reader might, so it can optimize the results that it provides to its human readers. One thing we instinctively look for when we read is a hierarchy of information.

And here’s how we think: Hey, look, there’s some big text at the top of the page. That must be what the page is about since it’s in the most prominent part of the page (outside of the navigation, presumably). I see lots of text below that, interrupted by some more prominent text. That must be the body of the page and some sub-headings that describe the section of text below. Oh, cool picture. What’s that all about? Oh, there’s a caption about the photo. Okay, now what’s this page about?

Does that sound familiar? At every point along the way where I’ve identified a piece of information on the page, there is an HTML tag – a bit of code at the beginning and end of a group of words  – that identifies the bit of text within it as an element with purpose. The heading at the top of the page is usually set off in the HTML code with H1 tags, like this:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

These tags, by convention, are used to create the visual hierarchy for the human reader. Google leverages that to read that content as a very important clue to the focus of the page.

<h2>This is a subheading</h2>

Other tags in everyday use that are helpful to Google in categorizing your page’s content include body tags, paragraph tags, captions and alt tags for images and anchor text. Anchor text is of special note since it is the (often underlined) text that links a user from one page to the the next. This type of hypertext is foundational to the “web” of the internet. The nugget you need to know about that is that the text within the anchor tag is highly informative to Google about the page that it is linking to. So, instead of saying “Click here for information about antique toasters”, where “click here” is linked, you would want to link “antique toaster.” For example, “Learn more about antique toasters.”

There is a lot more to tell of this quest to collude with artificial intelligence but I’ll leave it at that for now. (more…)

In the last installment, I covered basic search tactics – how people type what they want to find. In a nutshell, more specific search terms yields more specific results. Your job is to match those specific terms on your site. And preferably in the order people type them in.

Words (more…)

[ This is the first in a series of SEO articles.]

I led a workshop for the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce a few months back and realized how many myths and questions there were about SEO. I want to dispel some myths and answer a few questions in the space of the next few editions of Fish Wrap. (more…)

This is the science of slicing people – well – groups of people, into segments that can be isolated, measured, tracked, tested and solicited to. This sounds like a cold way to look at humanity. The good news in this is that you don’t need to feel manipulative to simply ensure that the people who want to buy your offerings receive your message in the most effective way possible. Customers consume your services and products for different reasons. They cover the entire range of human experience, from critical needs such as food and shelter, to wants such as comfort and entertainment, to aspirations such as enriching experiences and enlightenment.

An interesting place to start pondering where you can fit into this spectrum is by fitting what your organization delivers into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I wouldn’t expect that your offerings would be able to be represented in each of the levels of the hierarchy but it certainly can shine some light on what motivates your customers to use your services or products. (more…)

Quick question: You get word that your organization will be receiving an unexpected sum of money. What do you do with it? It’s a question I like to ask myself from time to time. I’d be quite happy to actually have that unexpected infusion but that’s not the point.

For me, it is an exercise in prioritization. If you’re responsible for running and growing a business, most likely you’re thinking of the next step while still working on the one in front of you. Often, the answer to the next step is where to put your resources. If you had more resources than you have now, where would you put them? How would you get the most return? What virtuous cycle can you start with some additional capital? Does it need to be capital or can it be a personal action such as increasing your networking efforts? (more…)

If you’ve been paying attention, you probably know that our current economic problems are related to confidence in the health of the economy and cash flow. When things are going well, the two usually go hand-in-hand to create a virtuous cycle of economic growth. Right now, they are working hand-in-hand to create a vicious spiral. While the current picture isn’t a good one, I’m confident we’ll recover and be stronger for it. As a strong believer in the concept of “circles of influence”, it makes sense to consider how we can contribute to a quicker recovery while strengthening our brands at the same time. I’m going to cover both confidence and cash flow from the perspective of branding and marketing.

So – you ask yourself – what can I as a marketing professional do to help our good nation out of this economic malaise? Well, you can provide your customers and prospects new opportunities to interact with your brand: directly, by setting up at events, calling customers to check in and sending out offers, or indirectly, through print, web and broadcast media. Except for a few sectors walloped by the recent financial crisis, customers are still there doing what they’ve always done, albeit with tighter belts. They are sitting on the sidelines a bit more, going through their own personal pains and perhaps re-evaluating their priorities. (more…)

You are welcome to leave comments and request new topics here, or email David Robinson through the Team Page.

In the August 2008 and September 2008 tips I touched on the significance of creating artifacts for your organization. This month, I’ll take that to the next logical step: building your brand with artifacts.

As with historic artifacts, the more we find, the more we know about a past civilization. Each part holds information about how people lived, how they related to others and how they died. With an organization — a business, institution or government agency — the principle is the same in that artifacts show a lot about how it “lives”, but in practice, the objects serve a different purpose. (more…)

The conceptual premise of The Center for the Constitution’s brochure was that we tacitly understand contextual clues in our environment. We instantaneously observe the materials, textures, level of precision, craftsmanship, style, colors and so on. Through some amount of cultural acclimation, we are able to look at man-made objects and glean some idea of whence the object came. We determine timelines, geography and culture. In the blink of an eye. (Blink is an excellent read for more on this.)

The added bonus here is that a person looks at some piece of something and their mind instantly puts it in a context. That’s creativity at it’s best. Design has the power to transport one’s mind very far, very quickly. As visual designers, we’re in good company along with other great other creative professions – music, architecture, textiles, theatre … (more…)