Web Design and Development in Greenville, SC | Merge

About five or six years ago, I rang the death knell on Rock n' Roll.  Anything on local radio was pretty much trash in my estimation, and finding anything new by any other means just wasn't easy enough to draw me away from my CD collection.  Things didn't change overnight, but it almost seems that way. 

A long, long time ago, say 1999, if you wanted new music, you went to the music store.  Either an Earshot or a big box, buy the CD, and pop it in your car on the way home.  You probably bought the CD because you heard the band on the radio at some point, or saw them on MTV, when they used to play videos.  Essentially you had two (three if you read Rolling Stone or Spin) channels from which to hear about new music.  Things are a little different today.

I love The Black Keys.  You know how I heard about them?  An EA Sports game via Playstation 2 about 4 years ago.  A little embarrassed to admit that, but glad I found them.  How 'bout a band you've probably never heard of, Dirty Sweet.  They are from San Diego and get zero radio play. I found them through the iTunes store looking for new Black Keys stuff and stumbled upon them through the "Listeners also bought..."  One of my favorite bands now.  What about a band I'd never heard of until literally 2 minutes ago, Railroad Earth.  They just popped onto my Pandora station.

The web is making it increasingly easier for bands to get their music to the masses. Long gone are the days of buying a $30 "import" to hear your favorite band live.  Pearl Jam released 72 live CD's about eight years ago after a tour, all available online.  Even that seems tedious now.  I saw them in Columbia in 2008 and downloaded the show three days later.  The band that refused to use Ticketmaster a few years back now has an iPhone App. 

Artists have long been the best marketers, and bands like OK Go aren't waiting on their labels to help sell records these days.  Check out their recent op-ed on the topic.  Ben Harper (along with countless others) has his own YouTube channel.  Many an artist use Facebook to share songs and video with their fans, who in turn share it with their friends.

Bottom Line:  The web has made it very easy for music and artists to find you.  No more do you need to get in your car and drive to buy music, now you can just buy music while you happen to be in your car.

For our non-profit friends out there, here is a quick success story of a grassroots organization and their use of the web and social media to make a big splash from day one. 

Fall 2009 - The Red Shoe Society (RSS) Board is formed, comprised of eleven volunteers.  The goal from the outset is to be the sought after young professionals philanthropic organization in the Upstate while creating awareness and raising funds for the Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Carolinas.

November/December 2009 - Planning begins for the year, with the first introduction to the public to be held on February 10, 2010, the "Open Your Hearts for the Ronald McDonald House."

December 2009/January 2010 - The board secures Good Life Catering, the Next Innovation Center, Highland Brewing Company and West End Wine and Spirits to provide the space, food and drink for the event.  All of which donate in kind (a good portion of their costs, if not all their costs in most cases) for the event.  

January 2010 - The invitation process begins.  The goal is to get 150 people to the event, and be happy to get ten new paying members that night. 

• Invites are done via email and Facebook.  An event is created and then shared by the board members. 
• Based solely on Facebook friends of the board members, the Open Your Hearts event was seen by a minimum of 3,800 people.  This is assuming  it was only sent out once by each board member.  It was also pushed on twitter.

The event ends up raising $1,980 for the Ronald McDonald House in roughly 2 hours. 

• This covers the cost for just over 22 families to stay at the house for one night each. 
• Close to 200 people attend. 
• The total cost of the event is $77.74.
• The year end goal for membership is 100.  As it stands today, after only one event, membership is over 30 young professionals, not including the board. 

Bottom Line:  Good strategy + dedicated volunteers and/or staff + plus the power of the web can lead to great things for your organization. 

It's that time of year when you're done assessing what's happened and you look forward to what needs to be done.

In the past eight years, Merge has seen a lot of change in the web industry. We've seen Front Page come and go (thank goodness), Inktomi was the hot search engine back in and around 2000, Yahoo! was serving up results by Google! (their original logo had an exclamation point), companies like Pet.com and WebVan.com promised the world and then left us empty-handed. The web eight years ago was a trial and error era--we were figuring it out as we went along.

With the crash of the dotcom days and the reality of unrealistic expectations, the over-exuberance of the web was self-corrected and for an 18 month period, the web was relatively quite and the world was resigned to having some convenient electronic brochure sites living on the internet. Then Web 2.0 came along. Big fonts and snazzy interactions. A new philosophy was attached and buzz words flew: "User-Generated Content" and "Social Networks" soon became the rage. Companies that couldn't spell their own name started popping up, like Flickr and Del.icio.us arrived on the scene. Myspace.com, known only to bands and teens at the time was building momentum, and a little company called Facebook.com, then restricted only to colleges was making its own headway. Blogging became mainstream, and in the election of 2004 "bloggers" began to get some traction and notoriety.

It seemed the web wasn't dead after all.

Soon, Murdock buys Myspace.com for $500 Million, Zuckerburg was reportedly offered $2 Billion for Facebook by Yahoo! and soon thereafter Newsweek plastered a picture of a web entrepreneur with a preposterous valuation. Were we back to craziness? Maybe.

Web 2.0, User Generated Content and Social Networks converged into what we call Social Media today. In 2008, Social Media started raising eye-brows. By the end of 2008, everybody had to have them some Social Media. In 2009 the momentum kept up, and Social Media experts arrived on the scene. What was once  incomprehensible and we left alone millions of teenagers to MySpace, Facebook opens up and is no longer restricted to colleges, soon finds its highest growing demographic to be....grandmothers.

In the meantime, corporate America silently was investing and plugging away at the web. Amazon, once a dotcom joke for operating for so long in the red turns out to be a darling of the time and a case study for ecommerce. Companies like Lowes and Home Depot, who, for a long time wouldn't even offer their goods for sale over the web, have become respectable destinations themselves.

The past eight years we've seen big industries begin to crumble under the practicality of the web. Sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist.org and Pandora.com brought amazing value to the consumer, and helped change entire industries. The adoption of smart phones and especially the introduction of the iPhone put the web in your pocket, enabling one to take photos, interact with their networks, find places--and even make a phone call here and there--accelarated the dependence of the web.

And that's where we are in 2010. The web was once a great hope. It moved to being highly skeptical to a mere convenience. In 2010 and beyond, we will see the web as indispensable. Corporations are using the web to run their phone systems. Web sites for some, have replaced their entire operation. For others, it offers a significant percentage of sales and turning back is not an option. While yet others, with the benefits of cloud computing, are moving key systems and processes to a bunch of web servers that are just--out there.

Consumers too are more dependent than ever on the web. From email, to GPS, to the trend of media being delivered over the web (Netflix, ebooks, iTunes, etc.).

2010 and beyond, we will continue to see an evolving web. A web that is accessed from everywhere. Within the next five years, we will probably have forgotten Facebook, and newspapers and television will no longer be provided by a paperboy or the cable company. The web will be the vehicle. The web (and technology) itself will be a major driver in creating and providing value by companies to society. Also, society will continue to provide value to culture itself via the web.

In summary, I'm not espousing that the web is the great end all and let's all worship the web. However, I think it offers so much value that as consumers, we will continue to demand more and more is moved to and provided via the web. We'll demand devices work well with the web. And we'll expect the companies we deal with--whether it's the bank, grocery store, video store, pharmacy, doctor--you name it--provide convenience through the web. It can be done. The market will continue to work so it will be done.

Bottom Line: We not only rely on the web, but we are now dependent on the web. The web will continue to evolve to be a more integrated part of our lives and it will also provide a significant platform for innovation, adding value and growth to our economy for years to come.

We've met with a good number of companies over the last few months. Two weeks ago was the first I had heard anyone say that a major reason for the decision to revamp their web efforts was because it would do a lot for company morale.  They were coming out of what was not their best year, like most, and they really wanted to turn the corner and reinvigorate the company.  They went so far as to say the new website launch would be a major part of the upcoming annual meeting.

Looking back, this was a recurring theme for many companies, just no one ever said exactly what this company said.  Makes sense, it is the first thing anyone looks at when they are making a decision to work with you.  I've heard a lot of employees, from sales reps to CEO's to IT folks, say they are embarrassed to send potential clients to their website.  The important thing here is that the web is, at the very least, an extension of your brand.   I'm also a firm believer that your brand starts with your people, and if they feel like their branding and marketing efforts are not being supported by the website, then you actually do have a morale problem.  The bigger problem begins when this sentiment leaks to outsiders and potential clients. 

Bottom Line:    Company morale has long been about relationships between people; colleague to colleague, boss to employee, etc...  Don't neglect the relationship between employees and your web presence, it is becoming more important than ever.

Automatic Online Backup / JungleDisk by Rackspace

Every companies worst nightmare is losing important documents as a result of a harddrive/server crash. If you are currently backing up your files manually then you are taking a risk. JungleDisk by Rackspace offers automated backups for both desktops and servers. It’s schedule to automatically run during on a daily basis. It has the ability to filter certain types of files and folders and has versioning capabilities. If a file is deleted or becomes corrupt, it’s previous version can easily be restored.

Benefit: Automatic, no upkeep necessary.
Cost: As low as $4 a month for businesses.

Centralized Information Gathering / Google Docs

All in one solution for sharing documents and using surveys or questionnaires. Centrally located documents that can be shared with anyone and easy to manage. Merge uses shared documents as follow-up surveys for webinars, and job applicant questionnaires. Although there are other solutions out there, for basic questionnaires, Google docs is both free and easy to setup. Results can be exported to Excel to use offline.

Benefit: Centralized Information Gathering
Cost: Free

Cost Effective Email Marketing / iContact

Merge, as well as several of our clients, use iContact for their email marketing needs. Icontact is easy to setup and once the original newsletter is designed it is simple to replace copy for each new email. In comparison to similar services, Icontact is more cost effective because they charge by list size rather than amount of emails sent. This is ideal for businesses that heavily use email marketing and also for companies wishing to decrease the costs of print marketing.

iContact is also useful for tracking your readers. For each email, you can see the open rate, bounce rate, unsubscribers, etc. The biggest investment in using online marketing in this way is creating valuable content so that readers don’t unsubscribe or mark as Spam.

Benefit: Cost Effective Marketing
Cost: Depends on size of list

Numerous Smaller Web Apps

• www.google.com/adwords - Increase traffic to web site
• www.google.com/analytics - Improve web performance
• www.istockphoto.com – Cost effective stock photos
• www.wordpress.com – Free blog platform
• www.dropsend.com – Sharing large files with clients
• www.Gliffy.com – Free flowcharting for process improvement
• www.google.com/Top/Business/ - Increase Local Search Traffic
• www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com – Fast and easy communication to your network

Bottom Line: There is an abundance of free or cost effective web apps out there that can benefit your company.  Let 2010 be the year that you take advantage of all the web has to offer.