We're a little late to the "10 Things for 2012" blog dance. Rather than playing Miss Cleo and attempting to forcast exactly what is going to be big in 2012, we went with a Tired (trends that are ready to go away) and Hired (what we feel is up and coming) approach. (Hey, Tired v. Hired is the best we could do on a Friday, so cut us some slack.) Here are a few things we're keeping our eyes on - some more closely than others:
Last week, I led discussion at the monthly Sioux Falls Content Strategy Meetup, examining the role analytics plays in content strategy. And the week before that, Sarah Werner started working as Click Rain's very first official Content Strategist.
2012 is already shaping up to be a year of content at Click Rain. Is your website meeting your company's goals? Design and coding are still crucial, but fresh, relevant content is increasingly becoming a priority for both users and search engines.
Have a question about your content? Ask a local gang! Or hit up Sarah on Twitter. Useful content makes the web better for everyone, so do your part— make sure your content has a purpose, and that it is representative of your brand. Beyond the walls of Click Rain, 2012 can and should be the Year of Content across the web.
This past October we welcomed Ryan Egan to our team of online marketing strategists. Since we decided to keep him, we figured it was about time for everyone else to get to know him.
Ryan was born and raised here in Sioux Falls. After attending Bible College in Plymouth, MN, he landed his first job at a church as their Director of Worship. In this position, Ryan got a taste of the online world as he helped the church set up a website and pastoral blog. From there, Ryan went to an international educational curriculum company. Here Ryan managed their social media channels and other online efforts. This experience adequately prepared Ryan for his role here at Click Rain, where he will be managing social media accounts for clients and strategizing other online marketing magic.
Ryan’s wife Christine has been a member of the South Dakota Symphony for 13 years, where she plays in the 2nd violin section. She is also a teacher at the Case School of Music. Ryan and Christine have two children, Layla and Michael.
Now to the good stuff…
Chelsey: Favorite food? Ryan: Pasta or sushi. Puerto Vallarta is one of my faves.
Chelsey: Do you Dew? Ryan: I do! But not diet…
Chelsey: Mac or PC? Ryan: Mac.
Chelsey: Droid or iPhone? Ryan: I’m getting an iPhone because Click Rain is cool like that.
Chelsey: Any random talents or hobbies? Ryan: I play five instruments and enjoy reading fiction.
Chelsey: Why Click Rain? Ryan: I found the position on Twitter and applied right away. I see this company going nowhere but up, and want to be a part of it. The workplace culture here is also awesome.
Chelsey: What are you most excited about? Ryan: The opportunity to work with so many different clients and industries.
Chelsey: What is your first impression of life as a Click Rainer? Ryan: Rad.
We're all about giving here at Click Rain, and we want to help you spread the joy to your friends and relatives this Christmas season. Here are three of the best cloud services for you to share with your gift list this year. And best of all, they're free!
Spotify
Spotify is the free music streaming service that made its official US debut earlier this year. With Spotify, you can stream any of the millions of songs from the Spotify library, connect and sync your own MP3s, and even enjoy limited mobile connectivity. (Paid users get additional benefits, including full mobile streaming.)
If you're ever logged into Facebook, (and who isn't these days?), you've probably already seen your News Feed inundated with your friends' current listening habits. (The News Feed has gotten so song-polluted that one industry expert has started calling it "the scrolling Spotify feed.")
In spite of the occasional annoyances, Spotify still has great gift potential. Besides simply introducing your gift recipients to millions of songs from the Spotify library, why not make them a custom playlist? Give your friends a playlist of your favorite Christmas tunes, or just make a playlist to show your kids, nieces, or nephews how much better the music was "back in your day". Playlists are the new mixtapes, and Spotify makes it easy to create and share.
Hangouts on Google+
As much as Christmas is a time of togetherness, sometimes we can't be with the ones we care about during the holiday season. Connecting virtually is often the next best thing, and Hangouts on Google+ make it easy to feel together even when you can't be together.
Videoconferencing is not a new technology, and Skype has already brought internet telephony out of the office and into the living room. But where Google Hangouts excels is in the ease of use. If you have a free Gmail account, you're already one click away from being a Google+ user. From there, all you need is a webcam and a quick plugin download to start "hanging out" with your friends. You can invite multiple people into your Hangout, and even connect from Android and iOS devices.
If you can't be with friends and family in-person this year, Google Hangouts might just be the best gift of the season.
Dropbox
Give the gift of cloud storage this year! Dropbox is essentially a free folder that "lives" on the web. You can put files in that folder the same way you would a folder on your desktop. The difference is that with Dropbox, those files are automatically synched across all of your devices-- multiple computers, laptops, and smart phones.
The best part is sharing your files. Are you constantly emailing photos, videos, or documents to friends and family? Share Dropbox with them instead, and give them whole folders with the click of a button.
And by giving the gift of Dropbox, you're also getting something in return. Thanks to a generous referral program, for each user you refer to Dropbox, you get additional space in your own account. With enough referrals, a free standard 2GB account can quickly grow to 10GB. To give is better than to receive, but giving AND receiving simultaneously may be the best of all.
Bonus: Browser Upgrades
Traveling this holiday season? Take a look at your relatives' computers. Are they using Internet Explorer 6 or 7? Why not upgrade them to a more stable, more secure browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari? This isn't just an isolated gift, however; because of IE's inability to render modern websites, removing these outdated browsers is a gift to web developers the world over. Mark and Brady are thanking you already.
From all of us at Click Rain, have a merry Christmas and a blessed holiday season.
Jodi Schwan from the Sioux Falls Business Journal talked with KFSY News about their recent Reader's Choice Awards and gave some love to Click Rain. Check out the video below.
Every year, the Sioux Falls Business Journal honors local businesses and community leaders with their Readers Choice awards. Hundreds of readers voted this year in over 50 categories and we managed to take home some hardware. Below is an excerpt from the Sioux Falls Business Journal on the accolades.
Paul Ten Haken refers to himself and his crew at Click Rain Inc. as “online marketing nerds.”
His small but growing band of marketing strategists certainly has made a name for itself in a relatively short time.
Ten Haken started Click Rain as the lone employee in 2008.
In 2009, he and Click Rain won in three categories in the Sioux Falls Business Journal’s annual Readers Choice Awards. In 2010, they won in four categories. This year, they won in five: best small-business owner, best small company, best up-and-coming business leader, best IT/Web-consulting firm and best user of social media.
Let's face it. Social media allows us to share a lot of information - and overshare a lot of information. But posting about our feelings, opinions, and ideas just wasn’t enough; we can now instantaneously pinpoint our geographic location. Facebook, Foursquare, Path and other networks use GPS tracking to locate our precise location at the exact time we post. Cool, right?
Credit Sesame, a personal finance tool and website, conducted a survey of 50 ex-burglars in the UK. Nearly 80% of them said they had used Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to target which properties to rob. Gulp.
Two Dutch dudes, @boyvanamstel and @frankgroeneveld, have done some pretty interesting work to show social media users just how dangerous our free-flowing, geo-targeted updates can be. They created pleaserobme.com to demonstrate to location-based social addicts how it might not only be friends and family that are seeing their updates. The site used the Twitter API to pull any previous location-based posts and voila! Select a city and see who's not home. Their hope was to strike a little fear in people and cause them to think twice before posting about their next weekend away from home. The PleaseRobMe guys put it this way:
The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home.
Here are our recommendations concerning three of the major social media platforms and location-based posting for the 5% of you out there that are using this functionality.
Facebook - Make sure you know and understand your privacy settings. If you plan to disclose valuable location-based information via your updates, make sure your profile visibility is reasonable. And, make sure you trust your network when you are bragging about the bender you're on in Vegas.
Twitter - Remember that Twitter is a different platform than Facebook and should be treated that way. If your feed is unlocked, try to stray from tweets like “IN MEXICO FOR THE NEXT WEEK BABY!” or “Just boarded the plane for some needed R&R #cya” You get the point. If you are dying to say something about a vacation or extended time away from your home, try not to.
Foursquare - Foursquare is great if you like to keep tabs on where you and your pals have been around town. But remember just that, you and your pals. Don’t allow people you don’t know or trust to follow you on Foursquare. You don’t want your instantaneous update about the fact that you are across town for the rest of the day to fall into the hands of the wrong person. Yeah, it may be fun to unlock badges, receive deals upon entry, and be rewarded for mayorship; but it also has the possibility to turn you into a human homing device.
Everyone uses check-in and location based services differently, and there is certainly no right or wrong way to engage these tools. However, keep in mind the exposure you are giving people on your activities and whereabouts when you whip open the iPhone in Cabo. Leave the mayorship to someone else.
By: Chris Prendergast, Online Marketing Strategist
It's been a tumultuous autumn for Google Analytics. The free site tracking tool has seen many improvements and feature roll-outs as Google develops a new (and they claim, "improved") back-end interface. But even with the addition of new tools and reporting methods, bloggers are much more vocal about one feature that was removed: keyword referral data.
First, the good news: One of the most requested Analytics features was real-time tracking, and Google finally released it to all accounts earlier this month. Real-time tracking allows site owners to view the exact number of users on the site at any given time, as well as information like 1) how a user got there, 2) what page they're currently on, and 3) what city they came from.
This feature helps bring Google Analytics in line with other web-stat tools like Omniture or Mint, but what value does it bring? Not a great deal. It's neat to watch visitors come in from a recent Tweet or Facebook post, testing the Bitly measure of "link half life" in social media. But that's its biggest selling point— the "neat factor".
Other new features bring less wow but greater insight. One such example is the Site Speed report. Not technically "new"— it was launched a few months ago requiring a special tracking code— it now has mass appeal, providing data on default Analytics installs, no new code needed. This report allows developers to track the page-load speeds of actual users with actual browsers. The report segments by page, (tracking the fastest and slowest pages on a site), but also by geography. Now a company knows why they haven't been selling any widgets in Malaysia this month.
The final new feature highlighted today is my favorite, the Visitor Flow Visualization. The Visitor Flow Visualization uses a Sankey diagram to show the routes visitors take through a site, with line thickness representing the percentage of visitors who took that path. This is an enormously useful tool for content strategists to analyze the effectiveness of their page's goals.
If the goal of the Services page is to cause a user to contact the sales team, for example, how many users actually went from Services to Contact Us? How many users went back to the homepage? And how many left the site altogether?
With this update, Google didn't give us any new data. These numbers were always available in the Navigation Summary report and with advanced segmentation. But each page on a site had a separate Navigation Summary, and it was tedious and confusing to navigate them all. The Flow Visualization collects all the data from those Navigation Summaries into one convenient, easy to manage, and perhaps even beautiful report. Good work, Google.
In spite of all these additions, search engine optimization blogs are still more concerned about the loss of data in the Keyword report. The Official Google Blog announced last month that they would start encrypting search data from logged-in users. The Google Analytics Blog quickly weighed in on the change, acknowledging that this would cause Analytics users to lose that valuable keyword data from their reports. Where site owners used to be able to see the exact search terms that led a user to their sites— search terms like click rain, competitor keyword bidding, or knifey spoony t shirt— now those queries will show up as "(not provided)" when coming from users logged into their Google accounts.
But bloggers, analyzers, developers, and site owners will all need to do a better job of dealing with uncertainty. The old Analytics is going away in January, and it's time to embrace the new Analytics, along with all the neatness, insight, beauty, and yes, uncertainty that comes with it.
The Sioux Falls Convention & Visitors Bureau has partnered with Click Rain to relaunch their website and implement a multi-channel online marketing plan. The site was officially unveiled at a press conference yesterday during the Sioux Falls CVB Advisory Council meeting. New features include things such as an interactive trip planner, TripAdvisor integration, travel packages, and an extremely powerful content management system. We're proud to have earned the trust of the Sioux Falls CVB and look forward to continuing to position our great city online as one of the best places in the country to live, work, and play!
Today we at Click Rain are honored and proud of our amazing Veteran, Eric Ellefson! Eric has been a member of the SDANG (South Dakota Air National Guard) here in Sioux Falls since January 1993, when he officially signed the line.
Over the past 18 years, he has proudly served along side an outstanding group (AMMO) as they work on the bombs, missiles and other assets needed to support the F-16 mission.
The military has brought him around the world and back including 4 tours to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as recently 2010.
Thanks for your service Eric! Enjoy your Starbucks giftcard and Christmas Story leg mug!
