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Anyone who has ever suffered through a migraine knows the symptoms: headache, distorted vision, irritability, dizziness, nausea, etc. Anyone who has ever gone through a website content migration has probably experienced some of these same symptoms. Whether we all like it or not, in the world of digital media content migration is a necessary evil. Actually, strike that, it is a necessary good. Without the ability to perform a migration, all content would have to be manually copied from the current content management system (CMS) or entered manually into the new system. As with migraines, the key to a headache-free migration is prevention. The most important preventative steps are to understand: how your content is represented in the source system; how you would like it represented in the destination system; and how you will you need to process or transform the content while moving it. Once you have defined these three points in detail, you have essentially defined your migration path. We recently … Continue reading
Posted in: content migration strategy, content strategy
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For the past nine years, I have been planning and promoting Elliance’s educational seminars and webinars for university administrators and business executives as an avenue to share knowledge and build relationships. So much has changed since we started offering these events that the only way I can evaluate the evolving needs of our audiences is by asking them. That’s where online surveys enter the picture. If you haven’t used an online survey recently, you’re missing out on a quick and affordable way to gain valuable insights about your prospects and customers. With 2016 winding down, now is a great time to send a survey. Here are some pointers that will help you avoid common mistakes and create a survey that will yield accurate, measurable and useful information. The Top 12 Survey Tips Before you write your first question, clearly define your purpose and know exactly what you want to measure. This will help to create a survey that includes only … Continue reading
Posted in: online marketing surveys
I’ve noticed more and more, emojis are showing up in my inbox. My favorite restaurants and retailers are tacking little images of suns, fireworks and ocean waves to their email subject lines. I found myself clicking on them more often, and got curious if others did too. Do emojis really trigger spam filters? As a major emoji enthusiast, a connoisseur if you will, of the best way to emojify my conversations, I had to know. If there were badges for Google search proficiency, I’d consider myself highly proficient. My fourth grade librarian, Mrs. Williamson, would be elated to know that I’m still actively using quotation marks and plus and minus signs in my search fields. So imagine my surprise when I searched Emojis + Spam Filters and couldn’t find a single reputable article from the last year with data to support that adding an emoticon to the subject line of an email would trigger the spam filter. Mail Chimp makes no mention of emojis in … Continue reading
Posted in: email marketing
The widespread adoption of social media was a marketing game-changer. By 2014, social media users had surpassed two billion, by January of 2015, 42% of the world’s population had access to the Internet and, today, over half owns a smart phone. The numbers are staggering. But despite predictions just a few years ago that social media would lead to the demise of email as a viable marketing platform, the email apocalypse never materialized. While it may lack the novelty of its younger digital marketing cousins like search, social and PPC, email is getting new love as an invaluable—and in many cases—superior marketing channel. Need proof beyond the number of times you check your own inbox a day? Email volume continues to grow exponentially, marketers are expected to invest $2.3 billion in email campaigns this year alone and email remains the number one activity on smart phones and other mobile devices. Future-minded marketers didn’t abandon their email outreach to chase social … Continue reading
Posted in: Digital Marketing, email marketing
With the holiday rush upon us and a new year quickly approaching, taking a moment to reflect on past victories and envisioning future endeavors is a welcome pause. Changing behavior, enacting new ideas and nurturing relationships should be at the forefront of all businesses this holiday season and into the new year. In fact, it is pretty much the story line for the redemption of infamous businessman Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you aren’t familiar with or need a refresher on the tale then here’s the lowdown. Scrooge was a shrewd businessman with a bad attitude who made his fortune managing a London accounting house. A full-fledged curmudgeon with quite a few nasty quirks like rudely hovering over stacks of coin, brow beating his sole employee Bob Cratchit, hoarding the office coal and frequently venturing on profanity laced tirades of “Bah!” and “Humbug!” To take it a a step further, he likened taking a vacation day … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, Digital Marketing
One of the best gifts that I ever received was a copy of the book How to Take the Fog Out of Writing by Robert Gunning. At the time, I was just two years out of college with a tendency for verbosity, $10 dollar words and copy that often well exceeded my allotted word count, much to the dismay of our graphic designers. My writing lacked precision; I was indulging my whims as a writer at the expense of my readers. Two decades later, I’m still a work in progress, but that book transformed the way I wrote and made me a more effective copywriter in far fewer words than I ever thought possible. Sometimes less really is more. Today, writing clear, concise copy is more critical than ever, thanks to character limits, short attention spans and the limited screen size of our pervasive digital devices. Fortunately, there are tools to determine if your writing is clear of fog, readable … Continue reading
Posted in: content marketing, Inbound Marketing
The Greeks called it their Muse. The Romans called it the Ingenium (the genius). I call it whatever that magic is that gets some meaningful words onto the page. Inspiration. I recently heard a great re-air of a RadioLab interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love. In it, she tells the story of poet Robert Frost working on a particularly lengthy and draining piece for weeks and weeks and weeks. He finally finished the thing, completely dissatisfied, even though he’d put so much effort into it. Sigh. After all that. Nevertheless, Frost woke up the next morning, and sat down to write… “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” (Arguably one of the most well-known poems of the 20th century… No joke, it was last night’s Final Jeopardy! question.) It was as if Frost was being rewarded for his hard work, Gilbert says. Sometimes that’s how the creative process works. Sometimes it really does feel like 99 percent … Continue reading
We recently met around the conference table at Elliance to discuss the pros/cons of pursuing an RFP opportunity — a major state research university wanting to sharpen its brand focus and tell a better capital campaign story in order to raise a nice round $1 billion dollars. Needless to say, with that kind of money on the table, stakes are high — for the customer, of course, but also for Elliance. Although the four senior people around the table could claim a combined 70-plus years of higher education marketing and higher education branding experience, none of us had ever worked on a capital campaign of this magnitude. The RFP spelled it out clearly: “significant demonstrable, direct work experience and expertise in the field of fund raising consulting and projects related to fund raising for institutions of higher education is essential.” My colleagues read this as a well-manned checkpoint and major obstacle. Their body language suggested skepticism and discouragement. I leaned … Continue reading
Most people draw a clear line between conventional marketing of products and services, and social marketing, which broadly defined applies marketing principles to change human behavior in order to improve health or benefit society. But what happens when you bring a social issue forward that almost nobody knows even exists — one that goes to the very heart of an American ideal as old as the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. True in countless respects, but not when it comes to gauging a child’s future academic success. Some children simply are born “gifted” or “talented” — and that wealth of talent spreads equally across all segments of the American population, regardless of race, religion, geography or family income. Researchers count about 3.4 million academically gifted American school children in grades K-12 who happen also to be poor. Here is where the story gets interesting. Year after year, grade after … Continue reading
We are proud to announce the launch of a responsive web design magazine for Carnegie Mellon alumni and friends. Initially launched a decade ago before RWD was born with uncertainty about whether alumni would engage with an online version, the magazine was initially designed for desktop and laptop devices and had a smaller content management system. As the multi-device world matured and the number of users increased, the magazine was sorely in need of an upgrade, which we magically completed in a short 3 months. How did we achieve the herculean feat in a short 3 months? Four secrets. First, we reused the existing design and Sitemap instead of reinventing new ones. Second, our seasoned development team has been on a roll transforming numerous websites into responsive web design; they have worked out most of the challenges around navigation, breakpoints, image sizing, optimal page size, and other subtle issues. Third, during the initial build, we had the foresight and taken … Continue reading