Back to Work!

Well let's get the most important fact out of the way; today is my birthday! Teajai has ordered me to take tomorrow (Friday, April 1st) off. I half expect to get a phone call tomorrow morning from Teajai saying "Hey I really need you to come in after all." Then 10 minutes later her calling back LOLing and yelling "APRIL FOOLS! SUCKER!".

I'll let you guys know how that turns out.

On to other less important stuff. We're busy! There's tons of work being done, and to be done. It seems to me like a lot of companies are doing some Spring cleaning and getting their websites updated (or revamped). It's a lot of fun, we're cranking out some really creative & effective stuff.

We've got a new sales woman. Cari has been working with Teajai for the past couple weeks getting ready to start hitting the proverbial pavement and finding out who else needs our services and just don't know it yet.

We are consolidating our domains & will be able to more effectively administrate our hosted sites. I'm really excited for this, means a lot less logging in and out of servers & more time getting what I need to get done, done. On that note I want to encourage any web developers out there who host their clients to check their disk space usage! We had a client who was using 20 gigabytes (yeah, twenty thousand four-hundred eighty megabytes) of space on ONE EMAIL ACCOUNT. It was ridiculous!

Teajai keeps prodding me to post more updates, and after posting this blog I realized I actually kind of enjoy it.. I may have to start doing it more often. Until then I have to wrap up some other work before I leave for the week. Take care guys!

The Social Element of Extreme Makeover

The last several weeks I've been hard at work supporting on of my clients, Bob Cook Homes, while they go through the process that most people see in a scant hour of the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. One of the big parts of making this home come together quickly was the power of social media. In fact, one of the local newspapers noticed wrote a short article about the topic.

Everyone always wants to know how you measure the effects of social media. Here are the bare numbers of this particular campaign -

From the 17th to February 24 (during the build):

• 82 Twitter posts which garnered 131 RT & 2235 clicks.

• 119 FaceBook updates which produced 329 'likes' and 199 comments.
  Plus approx 500 new fans & 3238 visits to the extreme website.

• 5 blog posts to date have had 2193 views and growing
  

• 5 email blasts that had an average of 57% open rate and 49% click through rate.

Those are pretty darn good numbers - some would question, however, is that a good measurement?

The real measure is what happened as a result of the above. With all the social we were able to get workers to the right place when needed, get fabric transported from other states by volunteers to the build in Wichita, get extra siding on the site in under an hour, deliver enough beverages to the site in a single day that the crew never had a problem finding their favorite drink from that day forward. Just to name a few real life examples.

Could the same be accomplished in other business situations? Absolutely IF the same amount of time & effort are put into it. I've had similar successes on a smaller scale, a direct correlation to the amount of time involved.

So the big reveal is over, at least for those of us in Wichita KS. Our work is pretty much done. The rest of the country will get to see the hard work of the volunteers and Bob Cook's awesome team sometime in May.