FRESH PAINT

That’s right, folks – LaunchDM’s Fresh Paint blog is moving. Not to worry; we’re planning to keep it fresher than ever as a section of our main web site. We completely reworked our site and made a nice cozy spot where Fresh Paint could hang her hat. Yes – Fresh is a lady. She’s like a yacht that won’t cost you lots of money to keep afloat and she won’t make you sick when you take her out on a rough day.

The new web site went live yesterday and, though the paint’s still fresh, we’ve opened the Fresh Paint wing for business. Come by and check it out. We want to keep the communication open so let us know what you think, what you’d change, etc.

Many of you attended the Greater Reading Visitors Bureau “Social Media 101″ workshop at Penn State last week while some of you are just happening across this blog post. For those of you who weren’t a part of the live session, we basically had a really solid discussion on the topic of social media, what it’s all about, ways a brand can use it and how to get started – total above-the-trees look at social networking.

The intent of this post is to review what we covered last week and give everyone a platform where we can communicate, which is why we’re delivering the overview on this blog – one of the many forms social media comes in.

You can reply to this article simply by clicking on “Holla Back” below. If you don’t want to post your reply publicly please feel free to email me directly at bill@launchdm.com.

First off, if you haven’t already seen the clip from 69 News, here it is. I think we had more fun than they’re giving us credit for here…

Social Media and Marketing
We discussed what social media is and how it’s used in marketing. A great synopsis of that topic is covered in Wikipedia.

Facebook
We discussed Facebook and the variety of ways it can be used for your business. If you haven’t signed up for a personal account (”profile”) you should do that now. Don’t be afraid… if you don’t like it you can turn it off. You’re obviously curious – you chose to come to the workshop and you’re still reading so just sign up for Facebook. Once comfortable with how Facebook works, you can create a Facebook page for your business/brand/organization.

There are a few different types of Facebook accounts for organizations. The Create a Page page begins to cover what each type of account is intended for. In a nutshell, a formal business or organization should have an “Official Page.”

Twitter
We discussed Twitter. I think Twitter is the simplest form of social media and maybe the least understood. All you’re basically doing is writing a post of 140 characters or less. Those characters can be used for web URLs (addresses) to bigger things like blog posts, web sites, YouTube videos – even to Facebook pages. It’s a real-time ticker showing only the info from the sources you care to follow. You can follow others and others can follow you – it’s social.

The Twitter 101 page does a good job of covering the whats and hows. Give this page a read before getting started with your account. Again, sign up for a Twitter account if you’re curious. You can always shut it down. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, setup an account for your business.

Online Branding
Another great thing about most of these media platforms is that they are customizable – at least somewhat. Like all branding initiatives, consistency is super important. you want people to know their visiting your web property regardless of whether it’s your web site, your Twitter page or your YouTube channel. Consistency is important not only in regards to design but also in your messaging – make sure the message you’re communicating is consistent.

For example, check out our family of online media outlets below. The base platform of each of the following is free of charge. And the last four below were “designed” by me. I am not a designer nor am I a programmer/developer. Social media sites are designed to be used by average people with average skill sets.

LaunchDM web site
LaunchDM blog (”Fresh Paint”)
LaunchDM on Twitter
LaunchDM on Facebook
LaunchDM on YouTube
LaunchDM on Linkedin

Jason Yeakle (Yay!-kle) recently joined the LaunchDM team as Senior Designer / Developer with over 14 years experience from Pittsburgh, PA to Charlotte, NC. Given our strength on both sides of that design and development coin, Jason’s skills are an amazing addition and complement to our existing team.

Frankly, for the last couple of years, some of us have had a hard time interpreting what the geeks were saying. We felt sorry for them and would look at them with our you-poor-thing, wanting-to-understand eyes. Jason bridges that communication gap and can explain why aesthetics are important to our geek friends.

It’s a new day at LaunchDM. Geeks and designers are having lunch together, discussing pets and babies. We just finished an NCAA basketball pool – and Sal, a geek, actually won! Thank you, Jason. You complete we. Note the subtle/geeky/creative “br” on his shirt…

Seriously, Jason – we’re really psyched to have you here.

VF Corporation (composed of brands such as Lee, Wrangler, The North Face, Vans, Reef, Seven For All Mankind, and many more) “is a $7 billion-plus apparel powerhouse” (their words). VF was headquartered in Berks County, PA (home of LaunchDM) from 1899 until 1998, when the corporate offices were moved to Greensboro, NC. VF Outlet, Inc. (VFO) was the only chunk of the main VF Corp. that remained in Berks County after the move.

LaunchDM has been a proud web and design purveyor to VFO for the past two plus years – since the company decided it was time to create a leading set of web properties for VFO. As a smallish, Wyomissing-based design and digital shop it’s very cool having ties to a corporation that had so much to do with making the Reading, PA area what it is today.

WHERE WE’VE BEEN TOGETHER

The work LaunchDM has done to date for VFO constitutes one of our most successful online remakes. In 2007, 108 years after VF’s predecessor, Reading Glove and Mitten Manufacturing, was founded, LaunchDM was given the opportunity to create a family of three fresh web sites for VFO. The main “mother” site is a very interactive and constantly evolving web property catering to VF’s stores across the U.S. The other sites are for VF’s outlet centers – one in Wyomissing, PA (the oldest existing outlet center in the country) and the other in North Dartmouth, MA.

VFO wanted the vfoutlet.net property to rival the likes of their competitor’s web sites. (more…)

by Bill Combs

Brian Dunn is the CEO of Best Buy. I’m a producer/marketing guy for a very small company in Wyomissing, PA – but in this story I’m Joe Consumer. Brian and I had a conversation a couple of days before Thanksgiving… on Twitter. Brian tweeted, “Our people can sing! Check out our Caroler commercials…” The tweet at the bottom of the screenshot below was my response to Brian’s post. You can read up from there. It’s all warm and fuzzy…

I follow Brian because he, and Best Buy as a whole, put Twitter to good use in a variety of ways from a marketing perspective. My goal in writing this post is to simply throw something out there and potentially start a conversation. I think this instance of social media communication demonstrates the power of Twitter from a corporate point of view.

If you’re a bigger company reading this post you may be thinking, “so what… Best Buy uses Twitter” but many of our clients don’t have big internal marketing departments and haven’t yet approached the social media space. The possibilities interest us as they may our clients and other smaller companies. (more…)

The Scrapple Scramble is a golf outing. All proceeds to benefit The Reading Hospital Regional Cancer Center. Signup/Sponsor here.

All we had to do to increase our Facebook fan count by 20% in one day was go skiing. Check it!

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) update: Google, Bing or Yahoo the term “modular buildings for sale” – Modular Genius is one of LaunchDM’s SEM clients.

Get some tail…

and a bunch of info about Aerial Sign North on their new web site. ASN is a cool aerial banner company with air bases in NJ and FL – offering nationwide advertising from these bases and a network of partner carriers. So, put that in your yellow piper cub and smoke it.

Partner Portal 2.0

Check out a short trailer showing how LaunchDM helped salesforce.com build their new Partner Portal 2.0. LaunchDM did all design and front-end development and Model Metrics, a cool company out of Chicago, built the back-end brains and orchestrated a huge chunk of the planning for this project.

Chamber

No, not the superhero from X-Men. We’re talking about the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce Web site that went live in April ’09. There’s much to come, including a media gallery with videos, photos and podcasts. Mutants are weird, the Chamber is cool.