Inked Digital

What the heck is a digital consultant? How can he/she/them help me? Why am I starting this post with questions? Sorry.

Just because many folks are still wrapping their head around ‘interactive marketing’, ‘social media’ & ‘web marketing’ I thought it would be cool to figure out a title that covers all the things that we help others do.

We are like consultants… however, every thing we do is digital. Digital isn’t just the web. Digital is… well… digital. We do a lot of things on the web. We create websites, run ad campaigns, run social media campaigns, manage brands and climb the Google page charts. We also build iphone, ipad and android apps. We’ve been involved with touch screen media (before the ipad!). We’ve ran marketing campaigns for real estate companies, niche retail stores, musicians/artists, other ad agencies, record labels and other small businesses.

So yeah, we are consultants of the digital kind. Got an idea you need help implementing? Give us a shout and let’s see where we end up.

Because of our close relationship with Daniel Island, it’s only fitting they get some huge love from us.  About 4 years ago I was introduced to the Family Circle Cup on Daniel Island.  I fell in love with tennis that day and haven’t missed a tourney since.  It was awesome to watch the matches and see all the fans.  I had no idea.

Yesterday, Charleston beat out Atlanta, GA and Richmond, VA for the title of “Best Tennis Town”.  Congrats Charleston (and Daniel Island)!

I’ve worked with Daniel Island for quite some time now and it’s a wonderful town.  We’ve recently been knee deep with them on some projects.  A few that will launch very soon.  If you are looking for Charleston real estate then this is the place to go!  Yes, that was a nice little SEO plug.

Read more about the Best Tennis Town award here.

Foursquare is growing rapidly! Currently the ‘checkin’ leader, small businesses are wondering how to make the most of it. More importantly I hear “how do I sign up to offer deals to my visitors, clients, shoppers?”.

While most think setting this up will require a full blown agency, it doesn’t. It’s actually pretty easy. First we want to visit Foursquare.com/businesses.  Next we’ll need to identify your business. Use the search to find your business.

Once you find your business, you’ll see a little banner to the right that say’s “Do you manage this venue? Claim here”. Click Claim Here. From here we’ll start the process of claiming your venue/business.

Here you’ll need to decide if you are claiming this venue with a current Foursquare account or creating a new one. Once done, you’ll go thru a few questions about your business/venue. Then you’ll have to verify your business. The quick and easy way is to do so by phone number.

Once verified you can start offering your deals/specials. Pretty simple, right? The biggest complaint has been the verification and activation process time. Their popularity has set them back a few weeks so be patient or hope they get faster.

Questions? Don’t want to deal with this? Let us know, we can help set it up and hand it over once done or even hang around and help you manage it. It’s up to you, just know you don’t need a big fancy agency charging you crazy amounts of money for something that is free!  (we are not a big fancy agency, we are a small quirky agency… just so we are clear.)

Failure to launch is all I can say.

I’m a huge Apple fan. I’ve owned many Apple computers and devices since the 80s, I was on the iphone bandwagon until just a month ago and I don’t let go of my iPad often. However, Apple has launched a service that I don’t think they really ‘thought’ out… or maybe they did and just didn’t test it well.

Ping was announced earlier this week and has been plagued with major issues since the launch. Accessing Ping was a major issue but could be blamed on the onslaught of traffic after being announced. Connecting to Facebook or other services was there, then gone and as of now not available… unless I’m missing it. Which is my biggest complaint for Ping. The user interface. It looks pretty until you try to use it- then you are left trying to figure out navigation and where you are.

That’s the first blow I’ll receive I’m sure- “you’re an idiot if you can’t figure it out!”. Again, that’s the problem, I did figure it out and I still didn’t get how this was supposed to revolutionize how I find & share new music! Obviously new services don’t always start out well- we all remember the growing pains of Twitter and the fail whale.

Can Apple save the service before we all give up. Probably. Will they listen to outside users to make it better and adaptable to the things we think will make it better? Hopefully.

If you are on Ping and have a different view point please share. I want to like it, I think the concept is great and has been needed for years. There are many times when I’m listening to music and just want to hit a button and share it with my friends.

Haven’t tried Ping? Give it a try, maybe I’m over thinking it? If you give it a shot, connect with me. Good luck figuring that one out… I couldn’t tell you how to find my username or even give you a link to make that easy.

As you can see we put up a new site in the middle of the night. It’s about the only time we have to work on our own stuff these days. And that’s not a complaint!

With the new site, we decided that our space here was to inform you what we do, share who we’ve worked with and let you know how to connect with us. And one other thing, share information about marketing- interactive & digital marketing. With that said we have to commit to blogging more, so here goes. We’ll blog more.

Our “placeholder” site was up for 8 months. Much longer than we anticipated, so what have we been doing that was so important? Growing, learning and creating new stuff…

• We’ve built a few iphone apps
• Launched 3 new sites and have 4 in development
• Launched our SEO tools for multiple clients (custom dashboard for managing all your SEO)
• Designed a mess of new logos
• Created some amazing new maps with the new Google Maps 3API (really cool and will be live in the coming weeks-  you’ll hear about it)
• Integrated WordPress sites with Salesforce and MLS for custom data collection and sharing
• Tested a new ‘Giving Back’ strategy.  More on this and how to get your Non-Profit in the mix (free of course)
• Stretched our client base from coast to coast.. well shore to shore.  From the beaches of Hawaii to the beaches of South Carolina.
• Managing AdWords.  Lots of Adwords accounts.
• Marketing music!  We love music and love working w/ indie bands.  Recently had a song we’ve been pushing show up in the AC Billboard charts top 100.
• New offices.  Well, we moved in sometime around May but it’s just now starting to look like a real office.  Yes, two pictures on the wall count as decorating.

So there you have it.  That’s some of the stuff we’ve been pushing this year.  We have been truly blessed to stay as busy as we have.  Our clients/partners are all happy and we look forward to continuing our strategic, methodical growth.