We started with the basics like “What is Social Media” and expanded to “How to develop your campaign” and finished up with “How to talk to your audience” and tools for measurement of your campaign.

Rather than keep it all to ourselves (and the rest of the conference attendees), we thought we’d share it with you…after all, it’s the social thing to do! So here’s our presentation: “Build a larger audience with social media in the mix”

The session was well received at the conference, but we’d like to hear from you. Leave us any questions you have about social media or the presentation in the comments section.

Things have been changing here. We’ve had some people recently come and go within the ranks. And this change has been the catalyst for us to take a step back and look at the future of the company. As a collective of innovators and artist and all-around-awesome people, we’re taking what we know is best as a foundation and amping it up a notch. Here’s what to expect in the coming months:

• We’re in the process of redesigning our site to run on WordPress to bring out the best in our work
• We’ll be posting A LOT more blog entries
• We’re always learning and educating both ourselves and our clients
• We’ll be doing some speaking engagements and giving FREE webinars
• We’re going to bring the best practices and emerging technologies to you through FREE ideation sessions

So how would one stay on top of all of the upcoming events? Simple. We give you 3 simple ways to stay in touch:

1. Follow us on Twitter
2. Add or bookmark our RSS Feed from our blog The Sweetspot
3. Subscribe to our NEW ongoing eNewsletter here

Keep a lookout for all the awesome new things coming from your friends at Stalelife.

Thanks,

Kurt Pennypacker
Founder/President

Our Task

To design a site that is beautiful and represents their brand and their mission.  CARES  wanted to boost online donations, gain more advocates, encourage volunteerism, and have an online store all connected to a Content Management System (CMS).

Our Solution

We chose to build their new site on WordPress. This allowed a customizable CMS that moderately web savvy staff could use. It’s easy to use,  open-source, and has plenty of plug-ins for social media. We built their template from the ground up—taking our design, coding the front-end, and hooking it up with the back-end database.One part of our design was a nice, big, colorful “Donate” button to help generate online giving from the site’s visitors. The button links directly with CARES’ Paypal account.

However, getting funding and donations is one thing, but gaining voices to spread the message and getting folks to volunteer is another. To help CARES generate a grassroots effort  we connected the site to their Flickr account and Google calendar.  This allowed them to show off their new photos and keep their advocates in the loop with upcoming events.

Finally, CARES needed the ability to run an online store within their site.  So we beefed up the layout of their store using custom code snippets that have buttons linking directly to Paypal. We educated CARES staff through a series of online classes—led by Stalielife—so they could cut and paste the snippets and edit using WordPress’ basic functions.

The site has an overall robust feel from a simple easy-to-use blogging engine. The site helped sell out a benefit show of The Full Monty and has boosted volunteerism and involvement at all of their recent events.

View the site >

Our first class is Object Design: Sketch and Illustration (Tumblr Blog) and is taught by our friend Craighton Berman of Gravity Tank. It’s a great class on object sketching and ideation. It’s been great to work the brain with some free-form thinking about product design and usability. The class goes beyond that with exercises on communicating your idea through various media and building concept visualization.

You may ask…how will this help your clients? Simply put, by going back to basics…forcing us to breakdown our thought process from an old perspective from our college days — one that isn’t worried about budgets, billable time and deadlines. Taking a back-to-basics approach helps to gather ideas in a loose thought environment and will spawn new solutions or designs for our clients.

With just 3 weeks under the belt, I can tell this is going to help bring new insights to all of the future Stalelife projects. Check out some sketches and work from the first few classes.

Some notes and sketches from class.

Developing muscle memory for circle drawing.

Exercise with objects in 2-point perspective.

Around 240,000 people will benefit from the most recent Annual Appeal from World Bicycle Relief. If you don’t know them, WBR is a smart and well-run non-profit that provides sustainable transportation to help people go farther, carry more and cut their travel time considerably.

You can see our full case study here.

A lot of hard work and strategy went into this endeavor – a true team effort between Stalelife and the Communications and Development groups at WBR. Our approach was integrated with old and new tactics, and the results will make us stronger for years to come.

In the end, we surpassed initial goals by 25%, raised the total donation amount and nearly doubled the amount of advocates on the WBR lists. But most important, we helped the group that helps so many. And that feels good.

While few people the have amazing skills to keep us entertained AND educated, we’ve found that a little comedy can go a long way.

Like these presentation graphs from GraphJam.com, a part of the iCanHasCheezBurger family. They’re spot on, as far as graph design goes, and the content depicts facts and figures of well-known pop culture songs, TV shows, news and other items in mainstream culture.

Here is an example showing stats from a famous B-52’s song.

From GraphJam.com

Imagine playing Love Shack while showing this before you present the quarterly sales figures to the board. Or making a point about the need for product placement advertising with a graph that shows how the movie Office Space helped sell staplers. You’ll see your audience relax and come to ease with your presentation.

We’ve also found that the site is a great place to roam around if you’re suffering from creative block. Nothing beats humor to get you going.

Hugs are so fun and necessary to life, and this group got plenty of signatures with “intimate networking” (think of the anti-online social networking). A true win win.

We’re mulling over ideas for SXSW 2008 – we want to stand out and have fun with a campaign that draws attention, very akin to this one. Want to help us turn the conference upside down? Have an idea? Let us know.

Happy weekend, friends.

The idea du jour was that the brand far outweighed real benefits. It was always pure justice when our measurable creative was tested versus a heavy brand approach and won (a good 100% of the time, seriously).

Enter the mid-2000s and now marketers are starting to see, the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) theory has reached epic proportion. Social networking allows customers to talk and give their opinion, just like your neighbor telling you about a great oil change joint, or the horrible service at the local greasy spoon.

There’s no place to hide these days, and there’s no way to “counter” bad news except with superior service.

Here’s an example – Son & Heir clothing, a boutique sports t-shirt shop. We recently ordered and the package contents looked like this:

The shirt arrived on time. It was exactly as ordered. AND they gave us a Dum Dum Pop and a note to say thanks:

Small things, sure. But the small things lead to much more. For instance, we’ve already told many sports-nut friends who might be interested in their sweet design offerings.

Transparency in the modern age is real. If you rely heavily on advertising to sway opinion – or your company is constantly seen in a negative light – it’s time to re-direct your funds and your attention to your customers. Make sure the user experience is something worthwhile, and you will be rewarded time and again.

After all, your customers are talking to anyone who will listen (and read), because nowadays it’s easier than ever to do.

It’s no real mystery – broadband is in 86% of the homes in the US. Nobody has to wait for video or flash to load, it just happens. And as a result, online advertising is up 27%.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), Internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion for the fourth-quarter of 2007 – up 28% from the same period in 2006. For all of 2007, $25.5 billion was spent.

We’re all for a nice integrated approach – know your audience and spend your budget wisely. But the online numbers don’t lie, and they are definitely something to keep in mind come planning time.

1.) Social Bookmarking – Users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. To get your site into the pool, add simple 3rd party widgets to your site like Add This. It’s FREE and you get analytics so you can learn more about your users.

2.) Blogs – You’re reading ours. A blog is an extension on your main site – a place for relevant and timely content, events, video and images. People subscribe to your “feed” because they like what you have to say. Again, it’s FREE and doesn’t require much technology knowledge to update.

3.) Twitter.com – A micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets” – simple 140-character entries) to the people who subscribe to their feed. If you have valuable daily information you could extend your reach with people who find value in your information.

4.) Facebook, MySpace and Bebo – Most social networks have built-in calendars for you to post events, bulletin boards, blogs, photo and video sharing and comment sections for people to share their love for you. But don’t think your page will run itself. You’ll need to share the love and give thanks.

5.) Email newsletter lists – It’s not new, but the systems are now more accessible. Services like Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and Emma offer an easy-to-use interface for entry fields, database controls, message composition and data transfer to Excel.

Traditional advertising still has value. But the most successful companies are the ones that integrate social media into their marketing strategies.

For more information on how these services (and others) can improve your site, drop us a line. We love talking strategy.

That wasn’t the tagline, but that was the sentiment at Stalelife when we became Internet famous on Adomatica. The blog covers the advertising market with a focus on Austin, home to our south office.

You’re daily distraction from client satisfaction is Robert’s chosen winner for April’s tag.

Let it be known, however, that we don’t Live the High Life all the time.
We just really enjoy alliteration.