Today I finally understood Tumblr and why it is significantly different then Facebook and I had to share because I think it just saved my sanity.

Throughout your life experiences (school, sports, jobs, etc) you meet people along the way. These people that you see in person face-to-face is often reflected in your Facebook friend’s list. Most people will Facebook friend people they have met in real life or when these friendship circles combine. Tumblr is a set of people who share their thoughts and personality in an online space. During this process you follow people you often share the same interests or opinions. This creates almost a hybrid cloud-based friendship circle. Many Tumblr users wish that their Tumblr friends were their real life face-to-face friends.

Facebook is like the friends you went to high school with where tumblr is the friends you WISH you went to high school with. Tumblr is where you can surf though someone’s thread of post but never be considered as a creeper.

Catamount, a medical billing expert, needed a website that spoke to their customers and provide a foundation for future services. Building them on a Content Management System offered them a scalable website that could grow as they grow.

See their website here

A website is like a traffic coordinator. Unlike brochures or flyers, a website helps a user get to information or fulfill a task quickly. Isoflux’s four value propositions help a user identify the services Isoflux can provide while staying consistent to their brand.

A one-page website helps mobile users, a growing trend, see the information quickly without having to click around onto subsites. We also developed a brochure with a QR code to make it even easier for Isoflux to direct traffic to their website and explore.

Click here to visit the website

It is important for any political campaign to motivate people to support their campaign. Statistics show that you have very little time to capture a visitors attention.

What we learned from the Tom Richard’s political campaign is that users spend around 1.5 minutes on a website and even less time on homepage. This information motivated us to focus the website around the campaign message with a clear call-to-action button.

Click here to visit the Sandra Doorley website

The right to petition our government is guaranteed in the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution. There’s usually several ways you can do this: picketing, drafting a letter with signatures, petitioning our House of Representatives, or Senators, but now the White House is going to launch We the People, and easy online tool to create ideas and petition the White House policy makers to actually do something about it. What we at Moxie find exciting about this website is that is has several examples that we all can learn from in how you can use a website to make your organization grow.

Motivate through Interaction

The White House video is under 1:30 minutes, but it packs in so much and asks users to do two things (sign up for alerts and think of ideas). What we can take from this is that the video compliments the call-to-action on the homepage and illustrates how video helps to create a return on investment. Read more here about how you measure the return on investment of a video.

Most of Moxie clients use Google Apps and have access to the feature of creating online spreadsheets. Creating online spreadsheets can make it easy to create wild videos like this one or check out all the features in Google Doc’s Presentations.

Cater to Different Learning Styles

When you thinking of what you need for your website, it is always a challenge to remind yourself that a website is not for you. It is for the people that will visit it. We often remind clients that if you start to inject your personal preference, say flowers or leaves, into the design of the website, you may loose focus of the goals of your website. The White House has done an excellent job identifying that users need illustrations and text to explain the process of how the website works. If you dont read the text, the images make it easy for someone to understand the workflow involved if they were to sign  up. Keeping this in mind for your website or areas you can improve can help motivate users to contact you.

Having a Facebook business page is a great opportunity to create brand loyalty, engage directly with your customers, and share photos of your events. Now, you can take it a step further.

Facebook just released a feature that lets Business and Individual users tag business pages in photos. A group of friends can tag each other and now the food on the table, too. Photos from a concert can tag the artists on stage to their favorite food/beverage stand. Contests can be created for the best tagged photo of a business’ product. The possibilities are endless. Some things to note:

1. You do not have to be a fan of the product or business
2. Tag as you normally would in a photo, but search for the business name or product
3. I have experienced some issue tagging a couple pages, but as usual with new features, these may take time to fix.

JP Anderson is a guest blogger for Moxie

Forgive me budget, for I have sinned. I have paid for keywords on some of the best search engines in the world with hardly anything to show for it. I have but three confessions:

First, I have placed too much hope in the contact us button (aka. the savior). I have not allowed easy ways for the paid traffic to make themselves known after spending upwards of $3 per click. If only I could’ve offered a give-away, a simple landing page, or even an e-newsletter they could sign up for. These things would’ve at least given me some idea of who is perusing my site. Maybe, just maybe, not every person goes through the mental process of saying “I have read everything I need to read. I must find the contact us button so I can reveal everything the organization needs to put me in their sales funnel.”

Second, I have not developed any landing pages that would be relevant to the search terms being used to drive traffic. In Halligan and Shah’s book Inbound Marketing, they indicate the likelihood of converting traffic increases by 15% when a landing page is present. They even reference studies which suggest that a well designed page can convert up to 50% of certain audiences. Such data makes me want to put on the breaks before spending any more money on PPC.

Third, I have no easy way to develop and make landing pages. The design of our site is safely under lock-and-key by an overworked IT staff, making it virtually impossible to implement strategic changes. But, don’t worry, atop my Christmas list this year will be a way for me to make mission-critical adjustments to our web pages. Already underway are conversations with low priced landing page designers and a software application that allows me to easily develop my own custom landing pages on  a third-party site to minimize my IT staff involvement. These changes couldn’t happen soon enough.

It is these things that I utterly admit for the sake of a better tomorrow.

Signed, a frustrated marketer.

About the Author
JP Anderson serves as Director of Admissions at Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, NY. He is currently completing a Master of Science in Strategic Marketing at Roberts Wesleyan College. You may find him on Twitter and on Linkedin.

If you are thinking, “UGH! Not another social media trend I need to keep track of”, then you might miss the train! This article explores how you can stay ahead of the game and use Google+ towards to help your business grow.

Google+ lets you post status updates and group them in “Circles” that you name such as “high school friends”, “Clients”, “Inspirational Bloggers”, etc. You control which circle your posts go out to. Anyone can add you to their own circle, but you will never see the name of the circle you’ve been added and vice versa.

Google+ gives people the diversity of twitter and includes the friendliness of facebook with more control than either.  A very cool feature is ‘hangouts.’ This is an easy to use live video chat that lets up to 10 people ‘hang’ together. Its best feature is that the camera moves seamlessly to the person who is speaking. No hops, skips or jumps.

We can begin to see how both circles and hangouts might work with business. We could create market research opportunities, communities, ad hoc groups, etc. All to get real time input on our products, service or reputation.

Audience
At the moment, there are over 750 million Facebook users. This gives businesses (particularly those that sell to consumers) an easy platform to connect with people. The tricky part is getting people to notice you, breaking through all the noise and then keeping your ‘likes’ interested. Facebook’s Open Graph system allows web designers to use information from Facebook profiles to generate leads. For example, ‘friends’ of fans of your products are shown ads related to your products.

Google has over 200 million gmail users and millions more that use their search engine everyday. Their online documents, spreadsheets, and extensions are heavily used by the business community. However, in the Facebook world, I am more reluctant to add people in my circle of friends whereas with Google, anyone can add anyone. In other words, you do not need to worry about friend requests, defriending, or endless newsfeeds from people you may or may not want status alerts from. Google+ allows you to control the information you see and share with.

Business Pages
In Facebook, we create a Facebook page that is linked to our personal Facebook account, to create a micro-site or place on Facebook that provides hours of operation, links, and insights to who our fans are. We can share useful and relevant information to fans of our sites and gather data at how it has engaged them with our brands.

Google Places, separate from Google+ provides an ideal place for businesses to have a space to advertise their location and services. Google+ doesn’t try to recreate Google Places on Google+ and it is to be determined how they will integrate this.

How should I integrate Google+ into my Business?
Google+ is a place you should create a personal account and inport your email contacts and create circles that are meaningful to you. In addition:

• Sparks. Much like Facebook “interests” or twitter has tags, this is where you can list your interests. This can be a great place for you to add topics that interest you personally such as “running” or “movies” to your business interests such as “public market”,”real estate” , “clothes” or anything relevant to your business. Doing this now might pave the path for opportunities as more users jump on the Google+ train. These sparks might later be associated with circles that are relevant to your business.
• Circles. You can add people that are co-workers, clients, or friends to their respective circles. Creating your account motivates your team to do the same. It will be easier later to share things with customers in your circle or invite them to place comments about your business on Google Places
• Profile. Allows you to indicate what you are “looking for”. Businesses owners should indicate “networking”. Your place of work can also be indicated and if your business is not suggested, you also need to work on a Google Places account. This will be important to tie your businesses to searches and hopefully interests/sparks of others.
• +1′s. While surfing the internet, you can press the +1 button to websites, articles, etc of things that interest you orrelevant to your business. From the Google site:

+1 is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Let visitors recommend your pages right in Google search results and help your site stand out.

• People in your circle might be interested in what you +1 and how its relevant to your business. Check out the +1 video here. Understanding this area isimportant because Google is allowing web designers to soon customize user’s experiences based on their +1 activity. Also, if you get your circle to make recommendations on your business, people in their circles will see their recommendations in search results. You can be the catalyst for opportunities down the road.If your business has Google Ads, it will be important to understand +1s because Google will tie user’s +1s to the Google Ads that appear on websites.Notice on the image to the top right that shows my list of +1s and the image on the left that shows when I search for our Graphic Designer’ profile page it indicates that me and Ryan are both fans. Think of how powerful this can be for your business and the circles you can create.

Nick Shippers: Founder of MyMoxie.com, web designer and developer from Rochester, NY. Add Nick on Google+
Deb Mourey: A social attitude, whether you’re in business, non profit, education or government, is critical to engagement and success. She teaches in two Master’s programs and is Board Chair of a nonprofit.

PlanetGPA is an international recruit team that helps students connect with universities they are a good fit for based on GPA, financial ability, interests, etc. Their service is free to students. To help bring on board university administrators, PlanetGPA looked to Moxie for a brochure that was a tri-fold to fit into envelopes and contained a QR code that made it easy for those interested and with a smart phone, can quickly get to the Planetgpa site

Click here to view the brochure