By Laura Baldwin | April 20, 2011

When the E*TRADE baby made his first appearance (Superbowl 2008), no one imagined he would become one of the most popular figures in advertising to date. Currently, he has over 30,000 Facebook fans and nearly 12,000 Twitter followers (not to mention Youtube views). Etrade.com even devotes an entire page just to display all 25 of the little guy’s commercials.

These days embedding video in websites is commonplace – so why aren’t you doing it? Here are 5 reasons you should.

1. Video is entertaining.

We love video. Look at how much time the average person spends watching TV and movies. Consider that a lot of people who surf the internet instead are watching video there! We love he movement, the activity, seeing and hearing other people. Video is engaging and can be a lot of fun, adding a lot of energy to otherwise still and silent websites.

2. Embedding video is a cost-effective marketing tactic.

Besides being entertaining, web videos are an extremely cost-effective marketing tool. It’s a lesson that many companies are starting to pay attention to—embedding video to attract new business. The process of developing web video is simpler than you think, and its benefits more than outweigh its cost.

Embedding video on the web can reach audiences beyond, and in addition to, television viewers. A company like E*TRADE can make a 30 second television commercial and then post it to YouTube. As the video becomes popular, people can find it online via search, watch it anytime, discuss it with others, share it with friends, embed it to their own blogs, upload it to Facebook, tweet about it, and on and on. The cost to E*TRADE for all this extra exposure? Nothing but a little time.

3. Web video is so easy!

YouTube is one of the easiest ways to embed your video—and it’s free! Businesses get their own channel to display multiple videos, and YouTube servers are designed specifically to host and stream video. Your standard web server isn’t, so you might end up spending a lot more time accommodating that kind of functionality and bandwidth directly on your website.

“If you have several videos on YouTube, they can be embedded as a set on your website,” explains Allan Emerson, designer and web developer at RSA. “Then, if you add a new video to the set on YouTube, it is automatically fed into the player on your website. You can even change the play order to ‘feature’ a different video in the first position if you want.”

4. Video helps with search engine optimization.

Embedding video in a website, especially through YouTube, has another important advantage—it helps search engine optimization (SEO). A video can be “tagged” with certain keywords that can help increases its presence in search results, and therefore bring more traffic to your site.

Further, when peolpe share your video through social media, or link to it from blogs and other websites, you not only get that traffic, but those backlinks to your website as well.

5. Embedding video offers a personal touch.

As our Video Production Manager Jack Sitch says, “Video is such a great addition to any website. It instantly allows you to make more of a personal connection and it can really provide a positive first impression.”

Whether your video is simply a welcome message, a brief introduction, or a specific demonstration of your work or products, it allows viewers to learn about your business. “Even more,” says Jack, “it’s a way to build trust and sincerity. Seeing a face and hearing a voice is the closest thing to making an introduction, as important as that first handshake in person.

Now what?

So how do you make the video in the first place? There are many DIY tools out there, from cheap cameras to free software, and some businesses prefer to go that way. Others use a video production studio or find an advertising agency that produces video for the web. It’s all a matter of what kind of quality you’re willing to publish. After all, the quality of work in any industry can be drastically improved by great tools and long experience.

As it happens, RSA has both. As a full-service marketing and advertising agency, we can handle every aspect of embedding video in a website, from the early planning stages to producing the video and formatting it for the web. RSA can do it all, and for less than you’d think.

“Planning is the most important step in any process,” Jack adds. “After that, we can develop a storyboard and script, line up props and talent, complete ad graphics as necessary, and produce your video in a matter of just days or weeks. The key is to know what goals you want to accomplish and what market the video needs to attract, which is why you want to develop a plan with a marketing professional first. If not RSA, we can sure recommend one for you.”

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By Jack Sitch | April 20, 2011

In March we welcomed Rodrick Feggins as the newest member of our video production department. An accomplished motion graphics professional from San Antonio, Texas, Rodrick brings knowledge and skill in 3-D graphics, compositing and motion graphics that bolsters and expands RSA’s capabilities and quality of work.

Another addition to our team includes the Canon 5D mkII HDSLR camera, recently used in two pieces for the South Dakota Lottery and the Downtown Association. Videos shot with the Canon have the cinematic look and feel of Hollywood, and the camera’s depth of field draws the viewer’s attention to the most important images in the production.

On the creative side, we produced outstanding television commercials such as the Black Hills Stock Show’s “2011 Generic“. As you’ll see, this graphics-intensive piece captures the depth and excitement of the Stock Show.

RSA’s production team recently traveled to Gillette to produce a commercial for Casey Peterson and Associates’ new Gillette office called “Trust.” In this commercial, you’ll meet the Gillette staff and hear some of the most common reasons CPA’s clients trust them to help with their businesses and personal finances. You’ll notice here, as well, that when shot with the Canon 5D, the images bring a simple beauty to the commercial not usually seen in local television.

As our video production department takes on new and exciting projects, we invite you to stop by and meet Rodrick or see some of their outstanding work. And maybe while you’re here, you can quiz us on how we can help grow your business with a new video and our other creative services. From television and radio commercials to training and long-form videos to simple web videos, we have the experience and the team to take your current messaging to the next level.

- Jack

By Tony Dodd | April 5, 2011

Smart Phones

Mobile devices are becoming more and more popular, and the mobile web is an alluring place for web surfers, offering all kinds of communications capabilities on the go. Yet it’s still a very new arena for many people, especially here in South Dakota.

The capabilities of mobile phones and devices now make mobile a serious contender to traditional website access. In the next few years this technology is predicted to surpass the amount of internet users currently utilizing desktop computers.

Why should I create a mobile website?

There are limitations to mobile web such as limited screen space & slower connections speeds. To date, a large amount of mobile web users are attempting to get to vital information about companies and topics quickly, but they can run into problems because many websites are not ready for mobile viewing.

A traditional website won’t always work. Having all the content from your website show up on a mobile device may frustrate the visitor, making their experience slow and hard to navigate. A little forethought can help reduce frustration.

Is mobile browsing really that popular?

Consider the following:

• Cell phones are in the hands of 5 billion people worldwide and over 290,000 in the United States.
• Over 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone and the demand for mobile access to the Internet has skyrocketed with experts predicting broadband subscriptions surpassing 1 billion around the world this year.
• One third of those who do not own a cell phone live in households where someone else has a cell phone.
• 20% of all U.S. households are now “mobile-only.”
• More adults have a cell phone than have an iPod or mp3 player.
• As of July 2010, 23% of mobile phone owners have accessed a social network via a mobile phone, 20% have used a phone to watch a video and 11% have made a charitable donation by text message.
• 11% of mobile phone owners make purchases through their phones.

Now the question should be, “do I want my business to be found and easily accessed on the mobile web?” I would think the answer is yes!

Based on the work we’ve done for clients getting their websites mobile ready, I can say this is an increasingly popular trend, and a cost-effective way to reach web users in a whole new way. If you want to create a mobile website, give us a call!

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Photo courtesy of Robert Bejil Photography

By Nancy Marshall | March 16, 2011

[This guest post from Nancy Marshall Communications in Augusta, Maine, was written by Matt Rideout, Internet Account Coordinator and Social Media Strategist, and originally posted on the Alliance of Marketing Communications Agencies blog.]

Ever seen the movie “Hackers”? Computer programmers can be “different” sometimes, and their terminology for computer stuff can reflect that. Today we’ll be looking at different sorts of search engine optimization “hats,” as they are called, specifically black hat and white hat search engine optimization. Call them yin and yang or good vs. evil. Each hat has its own culture of followers, code of ethics, as well as its plusses and minuses.

One of the most important factors affecting the ranking of your website in search engine results is the number of links that point from other websites to your website. The more high quality links pointing to your site, the higher your site will show up in search engine rankings. Google will assume that because all of these websites are linking to you, that your site must be a great authority on its subject. Nancy Marshall likes to say that it’s like a person in real life. If a person has a lot of important and popular friends, then people will assume that person is also important and popular.

Chances are you have seen an advertisement or received an innocent-looking email from someone promising something like “Page 1 Results for only $199 per year!” There are a lot of search engine optimization (SEO) firms out there promising the same results for what seems like an incredible price. Is this too good to be true? Yes and no.

These cheap SEO firms usually need to employ a “black hat” (here we go with the hats again) strategy in order to boost the ranking of your website… And I use the term “firm” loosely; it’s most likely one guy living in his parent’s basement. Black hat techniques are those that are not approved of by search engines as ethical optimization techniques.

The most common form of black hat SEO involves spamming links to your website across thousands of other websites. These are websites that the SEO Company owns or that they have hacked, yes, hacked. Many black hat SEO firms are run by hackers that exploit security flaws in people’s websites (websites that are usually running outdated and insecure software). Hackers fill these websites with machine-generated and keyword-rich content; content that is confusing or useless to people, but still indexed by search engines.

As Google works non-stop to refine their search algorithm and filter out junk and spam, it’s only a matter of time before these backlinks are rendered useless. Thus black hat SEO firms must continuously spam your link or your ranking will start to drop rapidly.

You’ve heard of that old saying, “slow and steady wins the race,” right? It certainly holds true for search engine optimization as well. White hat link building is a slow and steady process of acquiring back links on legitimate websites with contextually relevant content. One or two of these high quality backlinks can be worth more than thousands of low quality spam links. Best of all, these high quality links continue to mature and become worth more over time.

So how do you tell if your current search engine optimization company is providing you with high quality links? Yahoo site explorer is a great tool that will allow you to see all of the inbound links coming to your website, and then you can click and see for yourself what those pages look like. If you own a hotel, are your links coming from a few dozen travel websites and travel blogs? Or are your links coming from hundreds of websites full of garble and random machine generated content like “printable map coupons for your Thanksgiving dishwasher.” Depending on how much you are paying your SEO firm, you may be surprised, or not.

By Justin Mather | March 3, 2011

[When asked to write a post for the RSA blog I thought, hey I'm not a writer - and what was I even going to write about? Think Justin....think! Then it happened, my WDT intern Pierre (his name has been changed to protect his innocence) walked in and said "what's goin’ on?" And just like that I had a topic. I tried to get Pierre to write this, but he's lazy and doesn't prioritize very well. You know, he puts school and his job before his internship. Silly intern. Anyway, here's my masterpiece…]

Don't forget my coffee

We love us some interns!

Each year many brave souls apply for various internship positions here at Robert Sharp & Associates, and each year we select a few candidates who show us they want to learn and are excited about what they can do. When they show up for work, we show them what an ad agency is all about: sex, drugs and Facebook!

An internship at RSA starts with you getting me coffee and a Taco John’s breakfast burrito (relax, I’ll pay every third time) and ends with REAL world experience. Rather than just filing and other menial tasks, you’ll attend important meetings and be encouraged to participate in discussions. You’ll be shadowing a professional and actually doing real agency work. Whether it’s brainstorming a creative idea to promote a product or helping to maximize the most out of a budget (or the coffee grounds), you’ll gain valuable experience during your time here.

Internship Opportunities

Is it cheap labor for us? Maybe. Is it a great opportunity for you? Absolutely. We have internships available in account management, graphic design, audio/video production and event management. There is plenty of room for growth, and we like to bond with our interns. Some have even been known to work here after they graduate.

Just like our team here, we like our interns to be a well-rounded bunch. There is no mold to fit into when it comes to our agency – just read our bios. Do you love motorcycles? Are you a bookworm? Obsessed with online gaming? It doesn’t matter. As long as you have a passion for what you do (and a 4.3 GPA), you are welcome here. That’s right, we only accept smart people (insert overly-used acronym here).

It’s a melting-pot

Many unique personalities have come through these doors. A variety in attitude and style is what we want. We like the free-thinking and detail-oriented creative, as well as the OCD project manager with the loud boots. It takes all types of pieces to put this puzzle together, and once you think you have it done, the picture changes and it’s a whole new puzzle.

So be welcome, all applicants, and don’t forget the coffee and tacos.

By Molly Albrecht | February 16, 2011

Analytics? Bounce rate?

What language are they speaking?

I have to admit, I thought I might need a passport and a pocket dictionary on my first day at RSA. That day I attended several meetings with the search engine marketing team, and most of the words buzzing around me sounded like a foreign language.

I’m the first to admit, I’m a search engine marketing (SEM) newbie.

I applied for the interactive marketing specialist job at RSA because writing skill was included in the job description. That sounded ideal, since I love writing and studied journalism in college. Little did I know the job encompassed so much more, and I’d be grasping to understand parts of it.

I’ll let you in on a few of the secrets I’ve learned.

Luckily for me, I’ve discovered that writing is an integral part of what an SEM specialist does. The main goal is helping clients’ websites appear higher in search results when people look for them on Google or Bing.

We help clients improve in search results by writing and distributing press releases and articles that link back to their websites. Making sure the article contains pertinent keywords that people search for doesn’t hurt, either.

However, writing skill is certainly not the only skill require for success.

A significant part of SEM involves analyzing statistics to measure our efforts and recommend a course of action. This process is also known as analytics. After a few days of hearing the term described — and referencing my pocket dictionary — analytics started to click in my completely non-analytic brain.

Analytics measures everything from the number of visits to a website to its top traffic sources. We can tell clients with 99 percent certainty whether someone from Australia visited their site, or if most folks came from right here in South Dakota.

We can even tell clients how long – down to the exact second — a visitor stayed on a website. This is also known in the industry as the bounce rate.

Interestingly, the SEM team can tell when a person decided to leave a client’s website because they’d either found what they were looking for, or left for another reason. Maybe the site’s music was annoying or too many ads popped up. Though we can seldom tell the exact reason a person departed, we can hypothesize – and help a client fix the issue. We’ll do all we can to ensure site visitors find what they are looking for.

Before starting at RSA, I was unaware that so much information could be gleaned about website traffic — and that SEM jargon is indeed its own language. Although I’m still learning the ins and outs of SEM — and still have my RSA passport handy — everything sounds more like English now. I also know that the knowledge I’m gaining is invaluable to our clients.

It’s vital to be able to show them how their efforts are paying off. So much more work and analysis goes into the how than most would ever realize. But hard work leads to great rewards when we type a keyword into Google and see that a client is ranked No. 1.

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Photo courtesy of Danard Vincente

By Marsha Ahrenkiel | January 13, 2011

check in anywhere

Shades of The Island of Dr. Moreau! (hint: Google H.G. Wells)  Modern-day mad scientists (let’s call them “software developers”) have been merging social networking concepts with a range of other technologies and rolling out new hybrid beasts that could eventually change your marketing and public relations strategies.

One that we’re keeping a close eye on here is a species known as “location based social networking” (LBSN) – combining short message service (SMS), aspects of gaming, smartphone technologies and GPS capabilities.

Location-based Race

A number of competitors are active in this marketplace. You might have heard of or use Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook Places, or forerunner Brightkite – free  services that allow users to “check in” and announce their location to others through an app downloaded to their phone or via SMS text message. Users can earn rewards for exploring new places and doing interesting new things, and can leave tips, reviews and recommendations for others who later check in.

Early on, some of these services were available only in the largest metropolitan markets around the world.  Successes there have caused them to open access to locations everywhere. They’re becoming more business-focused as well, seeing the huge potential to match businesses eager for customers with nearby LBSN members in the process of choosing their next stop.

Why you should care

Certainly, any business that would like to grow its reputation as a local hotspot or mustn’t-miss tourist destination can immediately see the possibilities here. Imagine a visitor to Rapid City relaxing in their hotel room and using Foursquare through their iPhone (or Droid or Blackberry) to see if people in their network have recommendations for restaurants or activities, and to look for discounts and incentives from places nearby.

And Foursquare might indeed be the one they’ll be using. Business buzz is that Foursquare is currently best positioned to break out of the pack and follow the Facebook and Twitter trajectory to “new household word” status.

Foursquare users earn points for checking in at locations and the person with the most points attached to a particular venue becomes its “mayor” – which affords them bragging rights and sometimes nifty rewards. Users can also find and unlock “badges” earned by checking in at various locations or performing certain tasks.

This is one of the fun aspects of the network and an ongoing incentive to stay engaged with Foursquare. In October of this year, astronaut Doug Wheelock unlocked the NASA Explorer badge by checking into Foursquare from the International Space Station. Back here on earth, you’ll see references to it popping up in a number of locations — like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal websites, and your local Rapid City Walgreens.

So if you get a new smartphone, download a LBSN app and give it a try.  If you want to promote your business this way, give us a call.

(and BTW — if your brother-in-law soon smugly confides that Foursquare could just be the next Twitter – you can now yawn and say . . . “oh yeah, I already heard that.”)

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Photo courtesy of teamstickergiant

By Kyle McCabe | December 21, 2010

Ok where's the Easy button?

A client said in a recent meeting about his service (paraphrasing here):

“A lot of our customers want things very simple, and I always have to tell them the simpler you want it to be for you, the harder and more complicated it is for us to set it up.”

I heard this and thought to myself, wow – he could be talking about web development. He wasn’t, but I am.

The “Easy Website” Button

We also have many clients who come in and say they just want things to be simple and easy. This is understandable, as I imagine few people really enjoy complication.

So what does an “easy website” mean to our clients? Usually it has to do with the user interface and how difficult or easy it is to make changes to web content like events, blogs or photos. But often the easier this is, the harder it was to make it so. In other words the road to “easy” can be packed with complications.

You need drag-and-drop capabilities? We understand – that makes it way easy for you, or even your visitors. But to get that done we’re talking about quite a few hours of programming, or at least tossing a few bones at a third-party dev for existing software, which still needs to be integrated. Basically it’s easy for you, difficult and time-consuming for us. Which means it’s also expensive for you.

The trick is to find a balance between what you can spend and how easy you really need things to be. Can you live without drag-and-drop?

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Photo courtesy of James Cridland

By dnorfolk | November 16, 2010

[This guest post from Darcy Norfolk at Adworkshop was originally posted on the Alliance of Marketing Communications Agencies blog.]

In this age of web-enabled Smart phones and other “Smart” devices that are flooding the market, we here at Adworkshop have noticed that the number of “apps” (applications) and mobile sites being downloaded is skyrocketing.  As a matter of fact, our advertising agency in upstate New York came across an eMarketer report on a recent survey conducted by Adobe which found that most mobile users prefer to get their content from mobile websites rather than mobile applications. The only categories that showed a higher mobile application download preference were games, music and social media.

It seems to us that the same businesses that were saying a year ago “we need a mobile site!” are now starting to think “we need an app!”, but may not be aware of the details involved in developing either one.  Apps are generally easy to download, but research by Pinch Media recently revealed that unless the app is a game, “less than 5 percent of downloaded apps continue to be used 20 days after being downloaded.”  That means that the life cycle of an app has run its course in under three weeks, which loosely translates to a wasted investment.

Adobe also found this to be true. Two thirds of the surveyed group preferred to download an app for a game rather than browse a mobile website for one. eMarketer’s report noted that “while consumers may use the mobile web more often, the immersive nature of apps allows them to play just as large a role in marketing communications.”

Mobile web development costs are lower (no need to develop an app for different platforms such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. etc. etc.), it’s much easier for a site to be found in search engines, and consumers seem to prefer using the familiar format of a mobile website for sourcing content. However, our website design team has noticed that the performance of an app is quite high compared to some mobile sites because the code runs locally on the user’s device.

Even so, many signs seem to point toward mobile web.  Besides the lower development costs, there are no “additional costs” tacked on, such as entry costs, which some app stores charge with each upgrade.  Plus, there’s no need to share any sales revenues as a result of someone using a mobile website (app stores can take up to 30 percent of your revenue!).  Anyone on the web has access to your mobile site, but with an app, you rely on the app stores’ policies and procedures on how many users can download and install the app.

Some marketing professionals feel that apps are temporary; others feel they are here to stay. There are conflicting opinions all over the place.

We here at Adworkshop encourage you to do some research or consult a marketing agency when deciding if now is the time to go mobile with either an app or mobile web.

By Kyle McCabe | November 9, 2010

Have a nice cup of ANGRY BADGER!

Change is hard. How many times have we heard that? Change is hard because it involves risk, effort, and some level of emotional investment. We don’t like that stuff – it’s uncomfortable. We fear it (This is one case where “it’s more scared of you than you are of it” doesn’t apply).

The status quo is predictable. It’s controllable. It doesn’t involve any new or extra effort. We like that stuff – it lets us coast and enjoy what we have. It’s all warm and fuzzy. Curl up by the fire with a good book and a cup of status quo. Oh yeah.

But the status quo can change. And when it does, you find you’re holding an angry badger, not a warm cup of goodness. Suddenly you’re looking at the same risks and efforts, but less time to figure it out. Better to embrace change before it embraces you and grinds you into dust (Or scratches up your arms and poops on your carpet). Better to see it coming and adapt.

So many businesses are stuck in their current rut, not realizing this was never meant to be permanent. The world changes constantly, and it’s not waiting for you. Being a well-established brand isn’t good enough anymore (Hi, GM. Oh hi, Yahoo…didn’t see you there). You’ve been successful doing things one way, perhaps, but that success doesn’t secure your future.

Adapt and grow, or be overrun. That’s always been the reality of business, it’s just become much more apparent these days where change happens much more quickly and on a grander scale.

So publish that website. Write that blog. Start your new company. Try out Twitter. Buy that cool, new phone. Hire that new team member. Take a risk, people. No one ever got anywhere by sitting around. Well yeah, unless they’re in a car.

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Photo courtesy of cpoke