ElementsDaily

… With Online, Browser-based Image Editing

San Luis Obispo, CA – August 7, 2008. Elements, an interactive marketing agency, today announced that they have added online, browser-based image editing to their ElementsLocal & ElementsConnect software platforms. ElementsLocal is an online local marketing platform for franchise companies, ElementsConnect is a website management system for businesses to manage their online marketing initiatives.

With the addition of online, browser-based image editing, ELEMENTS’ customers can now manage 100 percent of their website without leaving their ElementsLocal or ElementsConnect dashboard. No need to edit a photo before uploading, just upload the image and do almost anything to it with simple little sliders.

“Image editing, mainly re-size and cropping, has always been an expensive, complex and time-consuming hassle for website managers,” said Michael Boyer, Chief Marketing Officer. “With the integration of Picnik, we have solved a problem for our clients that will save them money and time, without any additional charges.”

About Picnik – www.picnik.com

Picnik lets you clean up your pictures without knowing a thing about photo editing. Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos. With Picnik you can do everything you usually do in Photoshop, but it’s so much easier.

About ELEMENTS – www.elementsinc.net

ELEMENTS is an interactive marketing agency, we design and develop online business applications and corporate web sites. Our online business applications provide industry specific platforms which enable companies to harness the power of the internet to streamline their business. Our world-class interactive services provide marketing solutions for mid-market and franchise companies. From conception and strategy to design and implementation we combine masterful creative services and proven technology expertise with forward-thinking business strategies to deliver a successful solution for deployment of enterprise web initiatives.

As an interactive marketing agency, we are always trying to find new ways to save time, provide better quality, or to check in on the ‘Jonses’ and see what they are offering their customers

Widgets

This first tool is a customer service dream. It’s called ‘Jing‘ and essentially, it allows you to take quick pics and videos of your screen and then share it with other people. If you’ve created an image, Jing will allow you to use some general tools to make the image more lively, such as an arrow or text box.

What’s even cooler, is that this tool comes with a very useful feature, a free account at Screencast.com when you give Jing a try. Once you have uploaded your image or video to Screencast, it auto-generates a link for you to send to someone else who can now view your newly created image or video. Screencast even auto-generates embed code…WOW!

Check out this image I created.

And here is a video I created.

For more info, go to techsmith.com, a great company with great ideas.

Lets move onto some real fun. I play a little game here at the office. It’s called, ‘Copy-Mac.’ The rules of the game are simple:
1. Listen to the cool features Mac users say they have that PCs do not.
2. Find a PC tool that copies those features exactly.
3. Show them…

One feature many Mac users love, is the tile-window feature. I have recently come across a tool that lets me continue to play this game. The tool is called ‘Admiral’ created by Mexircus and it’s not only useful, it’s fun to use, especially if you are like me and have tons of windows open at any given time.

Compare: here is the PC view with Admiral; and below that is the Mac version,

PC View:

Mac View:

These are just a couple of tools that I have found to be fun and useful.

Photo Sharing

Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world – has two main goals:
1. We want to help people make their content available to the people who matter to them.

Flickr is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos or video from one person to another in whatever way they want.

2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.

Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take or videos you shoot with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go about organizing things today, are great — until you get to 20 or 30 or 50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed, but the “album” metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement.

In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your stuff – not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos and videos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes as metadata, you can find things so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.

Others:

Webshots
Share your pictures through photo messages, online photo albums, custom prints and gifts. |

Snappages
Fully flash built interface with 3D slideshows and an image editor.

Fotki
Free unlimited photo hosting for blogs, 9 cent prints, and photo contests.

Shutterfly
Free unlimited storage, 12 cent prints, as well as calendars and photo books.

Contacts/Business Network

Linkedin – Your professional relationships are key to your professional success. Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

Others:

BNI International Web Site
BNI – International Website … BNI is the largest business networking organization in the world. We offer members the opportunity to share ideas, …

Ryze business networking
Ryze Business Networking, make business connections, make new contacts and … The prospects of social networking sites that focus on business-oriented …

Project Management

Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.

Others:

AceProject.com
Ace Project PM Software website. Commercial.

EasyProjects.net
EasyProjects PM Software website. Commercial.

ProjectInsight.net
ProjectInsight PM software website. Commercial.

People Search

Spock is “Google,” but for people. I use Spock to find out more about other companies or people I interact with. If i know more about them, I can probably help them more effectively. Of course the most relevant use is to find old friends, collegues, or even your boss…

Others:

Wink
Search using the world’s largest people search engine. Find people by name and get their phone number, address, Websites, photos, work, school, more.

PeekYou
PeekYou’s free people search engine allows you to find, contact, and track anyone online. Find photos, links, work, school and family info and much more.

Video Sharing

YouTube
Hosts user-generated videos. Includes network and professional content.

Break.com
Hosts user-generated videos. Includes network and professional content.

Viddler
You need to be logged in to use this feature. If you don’t have a Viddler account, you can join Viddler right now. It’s easy and free! …

5min
Find the best how to, instructional and DIY videos.

The list could go on forever…

What are your Favorite online tools?

Franchise companies have many challenges, one of which is local marketing. Traditionally, it has been difficult to produce consistent local marketing campaigns that drive leads to the local office. These campaigns normally consist of some sort of direct mail, “yellow pages” or print advertising, all of which are becoming much less effective in these techno-savvy times.

A new recipe for local marketing includes 2 cups website, 1/2 cup email, 1 cup search engine and a dash of tracking. Mixed well to make a successful local marketing campaign.

2 cups Website – A website is made of visual imagery and textual content. When mixing up your website, please choose only natural and relevant text for your content. This will allow the search engine and website to blend well together and produce a better tasting (more leads) dish. Use the combination of visual imagery and text to produce the fragrant smell (call to action) that entices your guests (site visitors) heads toward the kitchen (your contact information)

1/2 cup Email – An email is one page of your website delivered to your contact’s email box. It’s a combination of problem-solving and education. If you can brew these two items together to create interest and anticipation then you have succeeded in stirring up interest in your website. Email should never outwardly sell your services, but should educate your customer.

1 cup Search Engine – Search engine is the final and most often forgotten ingredient to your successful local marketing campaign. Search engine is only effective if it is incorporated well with website. If your website and search engine have similar content then customers will find website in their search engine queries.

A dash of Tracking – To realize success is to measure success. Use Google analytics to track your website and your traffic sources to understand if these ingredients are producing an increase in customers coming to your website. This tool will also show you the increase the number of customers who contact you.

We hope you enjoy this new recipe! If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

There is a general consensus that 80 percent of results are produced from 20 percent of the work. Think about this statement for a second. What this is really saying is that 80 percent of the work you do only contributes to a small amount of the results you produce. It also means that 20 percent of your customers or clients are responsible for 80 percent of your revenue. How much time do you spend each week working with the 80 percent of your clients who don’t buy from you?

I remember when I discovered the 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle) – I was plugging away at a development project which looked like it was about to go over schedule and over budget. I looked at what I was doing and realized I was using a lot of time answering phone calls, emails, and building modules that didn’t need to be built to get the project out the door. I turned off the phone and email and focused completely on the required parts of the project. I finished the project in two hours!

After this experience I realized that I could apply this to many areas of my life and ended up developing a simple set of rules for getting through the work day:

1. Batch process as much as possible: This means taking common, repetitive tasks and grouping them to a specific time of day. For me, this means I read and respond to email only twice per day. This was hard at first; people would come by my desk (and still do) to see if I received their email. I setup an auto-response message letting people know when I am available to answer their email and if they needed me immediately they could send a message to my cell phone. This one step saved me at least three hours every day.

2. Get rid of the distractions: Turn off the email program and disable any audible notices that sound when a new message arrives. Turn off the ringer and all phone calls go immediately to voice mail. I have an out-going message stating that callers can email my cell phone for emergencies, otherwise I returns calls at a specific time. This saved me another hour each day.

3. Automate as much of the work as possible: ElementsConnect and ElementsLocal are built on this principle. We create a template or templates (we can provide this service) that websites will use and choose a default for new pages that need to be created. We also built a set of page layouts (we provide several of these upon install) that can be inserted into content pages once they are created, again with the ability to select a default.

This covers 20 percent of the effort needed for getting a site up and running, and 80 percent of the work is done! Hiring a copywriter is a good way to produce your site content. I had an excellent experience with elance.com (craigslist.org also has a lot of freelance listings). The copywriter I hired from elance.com gave me a very affordable rate and produced some of the best content I have ever read. Once your copy is ready, copy and paste it into your pages and your site is nearly done. The navigation builds itself, as do the sitemap.xml and robots.txt files. You may want to add a few extra features here and there (slide shows, a blog, etc.) but your site is effectively complete. Automation is your friend!

4. Duplicate relationships that bring you the most benefit. For example: if you have two clients who responsible for 80 percent of your orders, and twenty that you are always talking to but never buy anything from you, stop calling those twenty people. Concentrate on finding more clients like your two high volume customers. For me this was finding more people who I could have interesting discussions with, which eventually lead me to meeting my wife.

There you have it, 4 simple rules to make your life easier to manage. The hard part about all of this is getting everything in place – and having the strength to put down the Blackberry.

Driving high-quality leads with your website is a long-term strategy that requires commitment, persistence and patience. As many people will tell you, content IS king, please internalize that and realize that your customers are at your website because they are looking for better information …

It’s our job to give it to them …

Write Great Content

Your website content should be useful to your users. They need to see value in your articles and your topics. Customer testimonials, case studies and work examples are great for service based businesses. Product businesses should concentrate on differentiation with competitors and testimonials.

One new article per week to give your customers consistent meaningful information about your company, your people and your accomplishments.

Tell People About Your Great Content

Always mention your website in all advertising. Submit a press release to the PRWeb or Business Wire to inform people about your great content and accomplishments. Send press to the Chambers, clubs and community organizations that your company is affiliated with.

Use your trade media to drive qualified people to your website by featuring your content in articles or advertisements in industry trade publications.

Link to Others with Great Content

Linking to others websites with quality content will tie your brands together. The more you link to other websites the more links you’ll receive to your website, which increases your websites search engine listings.

Your users will also remember that your website was the go-to source for information from your content and the links on your site.

Just remember, that great content is the foundation for driving great qualified leads to your website.