It’s Here: The Fancy Foods Show Presentation, Tips, Resources and Podcast
Posted Wednesday, July 9th, 2008, By: Lisa
Whew! It took a bit of work, but Lizzy and I have finally had a chance to format, polish and post the materials from the Fancy Foods Show presentation LAD participated in on June 30th, 2008 in New York City. The presentation, on narrowcasting, interactive PR and marketing and how to reach online media was a three part team with yours truly (Lisa Donoughe), Lizzy Caston, our resident interactive expert and James Curry, the Chief Editor of Epicurious.com.
Included below is the complete PowerPoint Presentation in 3 parts, a partial podcast of the presentation and a list of tips and resources. Just click on the More button below to get the whole shebang.
For those of you who were able to attend the presentation in person, thanks so much again for your enthusiasm, good questions and lively discussion. Lizzy said it, and I’ll say it again, you were one of the best audiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of presenting to.
And as always, please feel free to drop us a line here or leave a comment.
Listen to the Podcast of Lisa Donoughe Here:
PowerPoint Part 1 - Lisa Donoughe:
PowerPoint Part 2 - Lizzy Caston:
PowerPoint Part 3 - James Curry:
Narrowcasting and Interactive Marketing and PR Resources:
These are some of our favorite books:
The New Rules of Marketing and PR – David Merman Scott
The Long Tale – Chris Anderson
Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Naked Conversations - How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers – Robert Scoble
Publish and Prosper - Blogging For Your Business – DL Byron
The Corporate Blogging Book – Debbie Weil
Websites:
All About Search Engine Optimization
Social Networking Explained in Plain English. A cool series of videos on YouTube that explains everything you need to know about new interactive media! You can access the series here.
What is Narrowcasting? A Wikipedia Article
Blogging Tools and Platforms:
These are programs that come with already built “templates” to make it easy for you to build and maintain your blog. Some include web hosting and allow for custom domain names (such as www.ladcommunications.blog), others do not. Here are some that LAD recommends:
www.wordpress.net. Requires some comfort level with programming and web technology but is one of the best platforms for creating professional and well designed blogs for businesses. You’ll want Wordpress.net, not the basic freebie wordpress.com.
www.typepad.com is a bit easier to use than WordPress but is also a bit more limiting.
www.movabletype.com is similar to WordPress.
www.blogger.com is the easiest to use, but can be much more limiting than the platforms mentioned above.
Warning, Lizzy has had horrible experiences with Serendipity and does NOT recommend this program.
Ten Tips for Hiring a Quality Web Company:
Finding a good web company or designer is a lot like finding a good contractor for your house. It’s all about skills, reputation, price and quality work that meets your needs. While there is no one size fits all for hiring a web design firm, here are some tips:
- Do they listen, ask a lot of questions about your company, your needs needs and available budget/skills/resources and offer options rather than recommend a solution at the beginning, a one-size-fits-all approach, or based on a template?
- What does the web company’s own website look like? The websites they have done for other clients? If you don’t like the sites they’ve built in the past, chances are you won’t like the one they build for you either.
- Are they following web accessibility standards? It’s easy to check.
- How long have they been in business? The sad truth is web companies go belly up all the time, leaving clients without services and with expensive sites to start again from scratch. The longer they have been in business, the less risk.
- Do they charge everything a la cart, or do they provide options such as packages that include training, technical support for a certain amount of time, certain changes, etc. without additional fees? Will the Web company own the rights to the code on your website or will you own the content, structure and code? Be careful in getting all the details written down of what is and is not included in the price and contract. This can make a world of difference in ongoing support and hidden costs.
- Do they provide timelines and deadlines for completed work? If not, this is a big red flag that your work may not get completed on time.
- Do they ask for feedback throughout the process including user user testing, allow for feedback and requested changes, etc. before the site goes live? If not, they should.
- Are they easy to get a hold of? With but a few exceptions, it should take no more than 24 business hours for a web company to get back to you.
- Do they provide written documentation of their code, a how to manual for users or other important instructions?
- Do they have a positive attitude, have great references, and are they patient and responsive? A no brainer, but if you aren’t comfortable working with them, then that’s a bad sign of things to come.
Here’s another good article on finding a good web design firm: How to Hire a Web Designer
How to Hire a Good Search Engine Optimization Company:
These two articles pretty much sum up everything you need to know:
July 10th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Thank you so much for this presentation and for providing me with the followup materials. I learned alot from you and can’t wait to try some of this stuff out for our own marketing.