I had a cool social media twitter marketing experience yesterday. The company I work for was looking for some project management software. I had a couple ideas, but I thought I’d see if the twitter community could offer any suggestions. I posted a tweet asking opinions about a certain software (Company A). I didn’t get any reply’s (sadly) to the tweet, but I did get a new follow soon after. I checked out the new follow’s twitter profile, clicked through to their web page, and found myself on a competitor’s (Company B) website to the software I mentioned in my tweet. Brilliant!

Here’s how I think this works. Company B is using a twitter search (twitterfall, search.twitter.com, or the like) to filter any tweets that mention certain words in reference to Company A. When they saw that I mentioned Company A, they simply followed me. That’s it. They rely on the fact that I’m curious enough to find out who is following me. Plus, they have a huge advantage–I’m already thinking about project management software in the back of my mind. So when I land on their site, I’m much more likely to stay awhile and see how Company B compares to Company A.

This is smart marketing because I, personally, did all the discovery. I was not bombarded with a message or an ad, I was simply given an opportunity to discover something on my own. When I found their site I was excited because now I have another potential solution to offer my employer. And it wasn’t forced discovery, so I’m more likely to recommend Company A and Company B to anyone who is looking for project management software.

This technique has huge potential for social media marketing.

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This is a couple weeks old, so I must be a little off my game. If you haven’t had a chance to see this yet, watch it now. Way to go T-Mobile, now that’s how you create a viral ad campaign! All those people making videos with their cell phones, and more footage on YouTube, the execution was fantastic.

Thanks to adliterate for the heads up.

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There are a few new features on the LEVEL website I just finished a week ago. Since it’s initial release, I have added several flash slideshows that feature the employees of LEVEL. The photos were taken by myself and the CEO, John Foley.

The slideshows operate as part of the Faust structure of the website. If you have flash player, you see the slideshow. If you don’t, you see a static image. Either way, you are getting some content. And underneath it all is the HTML code that search engines need to index the content and images.

Check it out! www.levelbrand.com

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LevelBrand.com is a brand new redesigned website I just finished for my current employer, LEVEL. This site has been a while in the making and has kept me very busy, which is the main reason my blog has been a little bare recently. LEVEL is a brand and reputation agency in Minneapolis, and I have been there for almost a year working as Interactive Designer.

This new site was a very big undertaking, but I enjoyed every minute of it. And I am excited to share a couple techniques that add to it’s clean design and universally accessibility. The first is sIFR (scalable Inman flash replacement). This technique allows for headlines to be replaced with more interesting fonts that everyone with flash player installed can see. If you do not have flash or javascript enabled, you still see standard web fonts for headlines, so no information is lost. This technique helps to enhance the design of the site, while still allowing those headlines to be coded in HTML to be crawled by search engines for SEO purposes.

The second technique is called Faust (flash augmenting standards). The basic principle of this technique is to create your website using building blocks. First, you start as basic as possible using standards based HTML so all your content is out there for SEO. Second and third, add CSS for styling and javascript to enhance user interaction. And finally, display rich interactive flash content over top of your static HTML for those users who can see it. This technique can be seen in the work section of the site. If you have flash player installed you will see a fade between images as you click through the thumbnails. If you do not have flash, but you do have javascript enabled, you will get the same flip between images only without the fade. This is javascript controlling the transition instead of flash. If you have neither of these, you will be redirected to a new page which will display the larger image. Anyway you look at it, the viewer is seeing content. This is good news for anyone concerned with having a website that is universally accessible. And, all the image and alt tag code is written out in the HTML so search engines can read it as well.

My role in this project included everything besides writing copy. I designed, art directed, and programmed the site. I also took my first hack at developing the site specifically for SEO. The website also features some of my photography from a previous post, and some from around LEVEL’s office space.

Check out the site! www.levelbrand.com

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Here are a few ads that are up around Minneapolis right now. The ads were done by LEVEL, my employer, for Medica. The ads play off of juxtapositions between picture and headline. I did some of the photo editing and retouching for the ads including some intense paper shred retouching.

I had the chance to get out of the office for a few minutes this afternoon to shoot these pictures to put up around our office. It’s kind of hard to catch buses on the move; luckily the one here was parked :)

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