This summer, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau (GFLCVB) and Starmark took home three 2009 Flagler Awards, given out at the 42nd Annual Governors Conference on Tourism. The GFLCVB’s Vacation Planner, out-of-home advertising on the Long Island Expressway and post-election ad were all winners.
Earlier this week, the Harvard Business Blog published a short article about the six social media trends for 2010. One of the featured trends states that ‘sharing no longer means email’. (the other 5 can be found at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org).
What this means is that virtually every website, and almost all information on the web, will need the ability to be easily shared by readers and visitors across their social graphs or social networks and connections. Each page or ‘chunk’ of information (whether that’s a video, a blog post, or a web page) will have associated links to share the information across Facebook, Twitter, and a myriad of other social platforms. You’ve probably noticed these links and icons showing up on the web sites you visit.
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On the evening of October 22nd, more than 50 guests joined Starmark’s Oktoberfest celebration at the StarBar, the agency’s onsite Networking Center. The spread featured Bavarian fare like bratwurst, sauerkraut, pfeffernusse cookies and genuine German beers, all with very long names. Guests included Starmark clients, employees, business associates and local leaders in business, the arts, education and politics, such as Broward County Mayor Ken Keechl.
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Mobile tags are like barcodes that you can place anywhere, and which users “snap” with the camera on their mobile phones. When they do, the tag typically links to online information that can be as simple as a website, or as complex as a deep and engaging storytelling experience.
There is a lot of potential for advertorial uses with these tags:
Headline tags – or “H” tags – are among several behind-the-scenes heroes that speak to search engines in order to improve your search engine rankings. These HTML tags are used to create a hierarchy of the key words on your web page, from H1 (most important) to H6 (least important).
Starmark international has hired Justice Mitchell, an award winning Interactive Creative Director, as the firm’s new Interactive Creative Director.
Mitchell joins Starmark from Luckie & Co., where he served as Vice President of Interactive & New Media Services and Group Creative Director. During his tenure with Luckie he lead the interactive creative strategy for top brands like Little Debbie; Bayer Advanced, a retail division of Bayer Crop Science; AT&T and Regions Bank. Other digital brand and social media campaign development experience includes State of Alabama Tourism, Audi USA, Wynn Resorts, Levi Strauss & Co. and multiple Walt Disney® World Companies.
Congratulations to Starmark’s CEO, Peggy Nordeen, who this week was named the Chair of the Broward Alliance and was honored by the South Florida Business Journal as a Diamond Award winner. The Diamond Awards recognize ten outstanding South Florida CEOs for their dedicated service to business and the community. We are proud of you!
The deeper you go into a website, the trickier it can be to find your way back. For example, Jill Consumer has been shopping for an automobile on your website for 30 minutes, but now she’d like to go back to a vehicle she saw 20 pages ago. She doesn’t necessarily want to hit the back button 20 times or open up her History and figure out which page it was. That’s where breadcrumb navigation, or selection list navigation, comes in.
Even in the web world, print is still your friend. That’s why it’s a good idea to use a direct mail campaign to reinforce your web marketing. For example, send a printed piece to your mailing list to alert them they will soon receive an email announcing a big sale, new inventory and so on. Likewise, you can send out direct mail to follow-up on your email marketing.
When we have done this for our clients, we have seen as much as a 24% boost in the overall return.
A t-shirt can be much more than a fashion statement – it can be a billboard seen by almost half a million people a month. This is the premise of Jason Sadler’s brainchild, IWearYourShirt.com.
In This Economy, He Wears Shirts Well
Sadler had the ingenious idea to sell the upper-half of his wardrobe throughout 2009, using his chest as a billboard to promote whatever company paid for the privilege. The price he charges corresponds to the day of the year, with January 1 a bargain at just one dollar and December 31 going for $365, the maximum.
In creating a web presence, there are a lot of different ways to go in terms of layout, text, images, colors, offers and so on. So how do you know which direction will help you achieve your goals? AB Testing allows you to test two variations of a web page or email blast in order to determine which is more successful. (Think of it like bracketing for the NCAA finals.) For example, does an orange “buy now” button work better than a green one? Does a subject line with a freebie offer work better than one with a discount offer? Is it more effective to place the navigation bar at the top or on the left? These may seem like trivial differences. However, once your AB Testing results come in, you’ll discover they’re huge.
Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media sites in the world. And that alone is enough motivation to sign up and start putting this free networking tool to work for you. Another reason is its ease of use. Twitter lets you create a running micro-blog of just 140 characters or less. The social element of Twitter allows you to “follow” other users and vice versa, monitoring one another’s updates and messages via IM, cell phones and the Web.