Skybox Creative Blog

Instagram, the uber-popular iPhone mobile app that lets users edit, stylize and share their photos, added an impressive 2 million users last month, coming close to the 15 million mark. The mobile app company attributes the boom to the launch of iPhone 4 and the holidays – more party photos to share! But their growth rate is strongly outpacing the other leading mobile-based app, Foursquare. And what’s really impressive about that is that Foursquare is on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone and Palm.

Sure, Instagram had its eyes set on mega-growth before its 2.0 launch earlier this year. And as we mentioned in an earlier blog, usability was its number-one improvement. Users can choose from four new filters with the 2.0 launch. And now, if you change your mind after you’ve taken a photo, you can apply a different filter fast – up to 200 times faster than in 1.0. But ease of use explains coming BACK. Why do people use Instagram in the first place?

Why? TTIUWP.

“This thread is useless without pics.” Now more than ever, with mobile devices and tablets, we are visual internet users. Everyone who’s friends with you on Facebook or following you on Twitter wants to SEE your San Diego SantaCon pics. Instagram offers this still-by-still and encourages users to comment on each other’s pics. They make it easy. And having a funny username, commenting on other users’ photos (especially with emoticons) and engaging people who comment on your photos really helps create a community of followers.

The Real Story

But Instagram does more than document activity. It lets the user tell a story. Using Instagram means participating in two key components of interactivity – creativity and inspiration. Instagram’s filters help you tell your unique story by adding emotion – a sepia filter for nostalgia, a color-pop filter for irony – and help you connect with your audience in, well, the blink of an eye. A single snapshot of a San Diego sailboat can be romantic or retro, depending on the filter. And not only can you add filters and effects, you can also easily add depth of field (something that can be tough to pull off even with more complex software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop).

And the best part is, you get to play around until you decide. This is really the key to Instagram’s success. They let us play, get inspired and get creative. All from our phones and all for free. It’s no wonder Apple named them 2011 App of the Year!

Instagram photos above taken by President + Creative Director of Skybox Creative, Angelina Sereno. Follow her by name or @happygumdrops!

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Branding Agency with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

Once you’ve got a Facebook page as part of your social media marketing plan, it’s time to think about what to do with it. We know, from our own personal use of Twitter and Facebook that it’s all about staying active. We want to be in that news feed! And if you’re a business looking to engage customers, it’s even more important. After all, action – whether it’s foot traffic for your San Diego beachfront taqueria or “likes” on your small-business blog – means business. And nowhere is that more true than in the world of social media marketing.

But aside from posting company or product updates, commenting on industry news and answering customer questions, how do you keep your Facebook community alive?

The Social Media Examiner has recently published a list of the ten best Facebook apps for building community.

Facebook apps don’t just mean Farmville anymore. There are now tons of apps on the social media giant that help highlight top fans and helps you engage with your fans by sharing videos, photos, slides and get feedback from users. And what’s great is that, since they’re designed to be used and disseminated in the social networking world, they’re pretty easy to use.

Praise Your Customers

Everyone likes a little positive feedback – especially in social media. I mean, why else do we post our best San Diego sunset pics? We want the “likes”! A couple of the apps noted by the Social Media Examiner – “Fan of the Week” and “Booshaka” — track your fans’ activity on your page and get points or even a personalized shout out for being active.

Interaction Action

Many of the Apps in the top ten have to do with company-customer interaction. Livestream lets you post live video events to your page and even has a chat feature for interaction. ContactMe lets you customize fields for fans who want to get in touch and Constant Contact lets fans sign up for newsletters right from your Facebook page. Scribd, the company that offers document-sharing services in the real world, also offers a service for the virtual one, Scribd for Pages.

Other apps can help you manage updating content and scheduling posting. For the rest of the top ten, check out the article. Or, for a deeper list, check out Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page.

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Branding Agency with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

We love, love, love social media! What better way to gain favoritism with search engines, gain brand awareness and have fun!

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With nearly 80% of online Americans using blogs, Twitter and social networking sites, social media provides a unique opportunity for businesses to reach and embrace their customers beyond traditional media, allowing businesses to define and communicate with a specific niche market. Business owners should no longer be asking if they should use social media, but figuring out how. We’ve put together a list 5 major factors to consider while creating and maintaining social media in your marketing and communications plan:

1. Know Your Customer:
Social media has nothing to do with you and everything to do with your audience. We have given way to a digital society and with all demographics using social media in almost equal portions, there is no typical social media user. That being said, all social media users do not frequent the same sites making it imperative to get to know your customer and find out which platforms are best for reaching them. Go where the attention is; visit forums that apply to your business and get involved posting and answering questions. This will not only create a following, but give you insight into specifics about your target market. Once you’ve defined your niche, keep thinking about your target, listen to your customers, and refine your content accordingly.

2. Start Small:
Social media is a never ending commitment that requires time, energy and effort. Instead of attempting to tackle every platform at once, realistically choose one or two that are the best for reaching your market. Establish specific business goals and objectives and define who will be responsible for keeping activity going. Do a little bit often, constant activity even in small quantities is much more effective than showing up inconsistently.

3. Be Personable:
Social media doesn’t equal self-promotion. Posting and tweeting exclusively about the company isn’t going to produce results. Let your customers in to show your humanity. Offer advice, information and be the conduit between your audience and valuable content and resources. Before you link to content, make sure it is relevant and adds value to your audience. Be social, comment and help others by asking questions, stimulating conversation and responding thoughtfully.

4. Measuring Success:
Relationships, trust and credibility are not built overnight, so be patient. Focus on who is engaging and grow your community from there. Rather than trying to acquire a whole new customer base, use social media to build relationships with existing customers. A loyal, devoted start will lead to organic growth and a stable future. SPAMMING= No Traffic, you wouldn’t sell out your friends, so don’t sell out your customers.

5. Get Help:
It’s impossible to be an expert at everything, so don’t hesitate to hire a social media expert to help in maintaining your social media presence. Remain involved by communicating what voice you want portraying your brand and by delegating what content and information is discussed. Don’t be afraid to respond and comment even if you are not responsible for the main content.

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Brand Consultancy with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxseo.com or call us at 619.381.3825

In case you needed further incentive to create a Facebook presence – outside of their 800 million active users – the social network has announced that starting in January, 2012, they will be offering free ads to small businesses. Teaming with the National Federation of Independent Business and the US Chamber of Commerce, Facebook will offer up to $10 million of free advertising to 200,000 small businesses – or $50 each.

Part of the program will be teaching small businesses how to leverage Facebook for eCommerce. Users will be able to learn how to build a Facebook page and how to create a paid ad campaign. These campaigns can include display ads and “Sponsored Stories”. This is Facebook’s program that allows, say, a skate shop in San Diego to highlight videos posted by one of its customers using their product. These lessons will be offered through a series of webinars and live on Facebook’s cross-country road show that they’re organizing with the help of states’ Chambers of Commerce. Details on Facebook Tour ’12 will be announced down the road.

The eCommerce possibilities of the social networking site are pretty impressive. It’s a marketing tool that can show off your videos or feature your special offers and discounts. It can also serve for real transactions: hotels, restaurants and basically any service company can take reservations. And for customer service – both showing customers love and showing attentiveness to their complaints — Facebook is truly great.

You can get some ideas from small businesses that are maximizing Facebook at the Social Media Examiner 2011 Small Business Facebook Pages Awards.

This is practically a risk-free opportunity for jumping into eCommerce. When it costs nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose!

Like.

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Brand Consultancy with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

Using social media for marketing sounds like a great option for small businesses – you can brand yourself to a niche market and extend your marketing reach beyond traditional avenues. But just how is a small business supposed to wrangle Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now even Google+? Managing posts and tweets and friending the right people can all be a bit overwhelming.

Fortunately, there are plenty of companies already using social media marketing that can serve as great models. Social Media Examiner recently handed out their 2011 Small Business Facebook Pages Awards to companies who are already maximizing their social media reach on Facebook. And if you look at the winners, there are some common characteristics.

Most of the pages feature great visuals – photos, logos and video – and offer a wide variety of content including blogs, customer testimonials, and Q & A’s. And without exception, the pages feature clear branding with appealing design and use of logo.

But what’s interesting is that the pages were often standouts for very small-business-y reasons. That is, people like the same things about mom-n-pop shops online that they do in the real world.

Yeah, it’s Personal

All the winners of the Small Business Facebook Pages Awards kept their pages personal. Some, like SnapRetail, feature photos of staff to put faces to their company name. Companies Piggies & Paws, Easy Lunch Boxes, and Garden Quest were praised for their consistent, individualized responses to wall posts. And Dog Training Ireland and and Brasserie Sixty6 use Facebook to accept reservations – personalized customer service right online.

Market with Me, Not at Me

One of the ways award-winning pages kept it personal was by offering interactivity. Top-ranked Intrepid Travel features an interactive game and an online community. Others, for example, New Jersey Family use their Questions tabs to ask fun questions – think of it as a trivia night at your local pub.

And a Little Quid Pro Quo Never Hurts

Several of the award-winning Facebook pages offer incentives for “Liking” the page. Some of these are simply “Facebook Specials”, like at Obeo, but Arizona Pro DJs actually gives out prizes. If you’re in a business with easy giveaway “perks” or are able to offer free consultations, this can be a great way to get your brand out there. Maybe that San Diego surf shop can hand out a free surf lesson?

So these are some of the lessons learned from this year’s top small business Facebook pages. Of course, Leo Burnett’s marketing adage holds as true for social media marketing as it does for traditional marketing, “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.”

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Brand Consultancy with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

Skybox Creative recently revamped its website by making a few key changes that substantially improve the overall impact of the site. Although the general feel of the website remains the same, the new adjustments undoubtedly optimize user navigation, maximize compatibility and SEO, and really shine the spotlight on their clients and recent projects.

The most evident difference is the switch from the main flash image area to javascript. Although Flash is great for creating impressive design elements, problems arise with compatibility and SEO interference issues. With the jQuery slider, viewers can be assured that all elements will always be accessible from any device. This prominent section features new work for clients such as PETCO, Iaomai Medical Ministries, Michaela Moryskova, and OfficePlanIt. Additionally a series of logos are showcased under the slider, placing an emphasis on some of the more prominent clients Skybox is working with.

Another smart and quick addition to the new site is the full-color social media icons now featured in the upper right of the header. Also placed in the footer, these icons create an easy segway for viewers into the other great outlets Skybox has to offer.

Skybox Creative is a brand consultancy with an emphasis on web development and technology solutions. Get in touch today! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

Are you a designer looking for a fresh new approach to crafting websites or a business owner with a website? Web design is a dynamic field, and designers have to constantly be on the lookout for new trends on the horizon if they want to stay relevant. What users are captivated by now is a definite shift from what they were craving last year.  Let’s take a look at some of the hottest web design trends, and how they’ll improve the effectiveness of your site in the modern day web design market!

1. The rise of CSS3 and HTML5

CSS3 and HTML5 basically offer simpler ways of incorporating modern web elements into your designs. CSS level 3 supports stimulating elements like border effects, gradients, animations, media queries, multi-column layouts, and more. Development of CSS3 began years ago, but designers are just starting to see what a powerful tool it is for simplifying certain Photoshop-level tasks.

Now, Flash is still king when it comes to creating stunning design elements, but HTML5 is making a steady rise as well, as it offers some of the same tools and functionality of Flash, without Flash’s incompatibility and SEO interference issues.

2. Large Backdrops

Huge backgrounds = huge trend. Massive, high-res images, either illustrative or photographic, have recently been adding to visually striking online experiences. Of course, the background photo or artwork must be content appropriate, in order to grab your audience without disrupting the user experience. The key to creating an impacting design that incorporates this trendy element is to make sure the imagery is in harmony with the content, and doesn’t overpower it. Take a look at this stunning example.

3. Simple Color Schemes

Simplicity is always in when it comes to modern design, but the key to achieving it without ending up with lackluster designs is to go for daring colors like green or red. The use of shades of black, white or grey in a layout has been exhausted — it’s time to experiment with more inspiring color schemes, while limiting the palette to two or three colors to keep it tasteful. Collision Labs’ website features such a simple, yet powerful use of color.

4. Mobile Compatibility

2011 marks another year of continued technological change. Users need to experience not only more magnetizing online environments, but also formats that are still comfortable to use on smartphones, netbooks, and tablets. Expand your audience by keeping your websites touchscreen friendly — they can no longer rely on information from hovering or drop-down menus. Think outside of standard web browsing. For example, mobile technology makes people more receptive of unique browsing setups, such as horizontal scrolling. Lastly, if you want to keep your iPad and iPhone user audience intrigued, your design must be flexible enough to accommodate to both vertical and horizontal viewing orientations,

5. Depth!

With the increasing demand for all things 3D — movies, TV’s, even smartphones, it’s not surprising that users are developing a craving for more depth perception. Despite the inexistence of actual 3D Technology, a real sense of dimensionality can be achieved using blurred background layers, skillfully paired with shadowy, jumping-off-the-screen foreground elements. Visit this amazing 3D flash website.

6. Parallax Scrolling

As mentioned above, creating a sense of depth in a website design is extremely visually pleasing and trendy. A super-hot web design trend that can help make this happen is Parallax scrolling. Some might recognize this effect from its use in old school video games, but now it’s a popular way of amplifying websites to their ultimate three-dimensional potential. A parallax scroll can be achieved through either CSS or JavaScript methods: layers are used to give the illusion of a 3D space. You have to see the Parallax effect at work for yourself to comprehend the unique user experience — check out Old Pulteney’s website featuring Parallax scrolling.

7. Typography

Each year we see shifts in typography trends. Primarily, it’s the growth of font-replacement technology (Cufon, Font Squirrel, or Fontdeck, for example), paired with a bigger, more daring aesthetic, that characterizes the most current typographic tendencies. The influence of traditional print design in the realm of web design is a hot trend as well. More and more websites are typographically driven — the key is to focus on relaying your message, in a highly legible way, through words and images.

8. QR codes

QR, or Quick Response codes are popping up everywhere! They’re on business cards, signs, buses, magazines, and anything else that an owner of a camera-equipped mobile device might need more info about. When users take a photo of the unique barcode with their camera phones, the websites associated with that code will be called up. Featuring this code on your website, your print material, or as your avatar would be a handy way of providing site visitors with a shortcut to your mobile site.

9. Social Media

Social media is a huge marketing tool, but in what way can web design cater to this? Visually, you can incorporate eye-catching social media icons, or even feature live twitter feeds,  as many websites now are, to create a sense of intimacy. For businesses, though, the rise of social media demands changes in strategy, more than design aesthetic — it’s absolutely crucial in this era to rely on a separate social media site. This is simply because it’s so much more likely to get people to discover you through Facebook or Twitter than your own separate domain.

Skybox Creative is a brand consultancy with an emphasis on web development and technology solutions. Get in touch today! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

AOL and Nielsen recently released a study which showed that nearly a quarter of all social media messages, and about half of all industry-specific social messages contain links to content. There is definitely a direct relationship between content sharing and brand messaging — a staggering 60% of content-sharing messages mention a brand or product name. At 66%, email remains the primary sharing tool, but social-networking platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, are quickly taking over due to their pervasiveness.

So what is the significance of these numbers? They show that marketers need to use content to become involved in the social conversation — content is what fuels the social media boom, and is therefore key to any marketing buy.

So how can a business take advantage of these tendencies? Here are some tips to maximize the benefits of content sharing:

Blogging: Use relevant keywords to create brief, engaging headlines. Also, you should obviously strive to make your content interesting, but above all, it is most effective to write about a recent topic, or to offer a unique perspective or opinion — readers want to be the first to share in their social circle. Additionally, it has been found that new blogs posted around 7am are most susceptible to sharing.

Facebook: Post every other day for maximum sharing. Avoid technical jargon, and complex phrases — people prefer to read well-written, but simple sentences. When deciding when to make a post, accommodate to the times of highest Facebook activity: early evenings and weekends. Also, try to include graphics or video — these have been shown to generate the most links and sharing.

Twitter: Keep your tweets short and grammatically-correct, but avoid using abbreviations or special terms that may be too technical. Google key words that are effective in marketing (“you”, “free”, “new”, and “great” are a few), and include them in your tweets for best re-tweeting. Also, the best time to promote new blog posts on Twitter is around 10am, weekdays.

About the study: Findings are based on Nielsen’s NM Incite Social Media Monitoring tools, Online Behavior Panel and Attitudinal analysis, tracking more than 10,000 social media messages; and on a survey of more than 1,000 Nielsen Online panel members for 10 consecutive days, December 14-23, 2010.

Skybox Creative, Inc. – Elevate your acclaim with effective brand + web design.

We all love Google for offering a plethora of AMAZING free products and services, we recently switched our email system over to a Google Apps account and we’re loving it!

Just when we think Google has done it all, they roll out a new series of helpful tools to manage our professional and social lives. Many of us have heard of (or have an account with) FourSquare, but how many of us have heard of or utilize Google Latitude? The app can be accessed from any smart phone or computer and allows you to “check in“, gain status and unlock offers. Sounds like FourSquare may be in trouble!

Google Latitude lets you connect and share with your friends, track your status progress and unlock offers based on your current status level.

Google Latitude - Access it from your computer or your phone

Read the most recent article on the Official Google Blog.

Need to stay current on social media and search engine trends? Get in touch with us today! info@skyboxcreative.com

Skybox Creative Inc. – Much more than just web design and branding!