Curious to see how we go about our days? Take a peek into the world of your favorite interactive agency—in haiku form.

So many divs here
Hey you, will you do these mods?
Fixed it, you’re welcome

Need to call client
How is the ______ job going?
How are you on time?

I need a print quote
This font is not web friendly
Bigger logo here

Optimization
Your dreams are organic search
Analytics, please

Delete, edit, write
Serial comma or no?
Copy decks, always

With FourSquare hitting the 10,000,000 user mark this past week it’s time you do more than just claiming your business? You could go play real FourSquare with the hipsters in the park or you could start taking advantage of all the different features that FourSquare has to offer your business for free!

Create a FourSquare Special

When a FourSquare user checks-in, they are often times rewarded with some type of special. There are seven different types of specials including:

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• Swarm Special:
  • If 43 people check-in at your bar, everyone whom checked in will get 10% off of their bar tab
    • Can limit the frequency that this occurs and what number makes a swarm

• Friends Special:
  • Check-in with four friends and receive a free appetizer
    • FourSquare allows the number of friends that must be checked-in to be awarded the special

• Flash Special:
  • First 50 people into the store starting at 10:00 AM receive a coupon for $25.00 off of their purchase of $100.00 or more
    • Gives an incentive for individuals to come to your store at a specific time and specifically spend a certain amount of money

• Newbie Special:
  • On your first check-in, receive a free pedicure with the purchase of a manicure
    • Establish that relationship and hopefully gain a devoted customer

• Check-in Special:
  • A special every time a customer checks-in to your place of business

• Loyalty Special:
  • Every third check-in, receive a free desert with your dinner
    • Same concept as the Subway stamp card, reward your loyal customers for their loyalty

• Mayor Special:
  • If you are the mayor as of election day 2012, receive a free hour long party for you and 15 friends. All check-ins while mayor will be rewarded with 20% off of your bill.
    • Again, reward your loyal customers

This week, we’ve been biking to work. The weather’s been relatively cooperative and potholes have been avoided, so it’s been a good thing.

Also a good thing, staying alive and safe when you’re riding your bike. Because if there’s something we like more than bikes, it’s being safe on them! So then:

1. Ride in the street, not in the sidewalk.

Come on now. It’s way unsafe to ride on the sidewalk, and not nice to the people who aren’t riding bikes on the sidewalk. Use the bike lane and share the road with other bikes and cars.

2. Don’t ride with music.

Go headphones-free, people. Because then you can hear what’s going on around you, yes?

3. Wear a helmet.

Helmets can be doofy looking, but you’ll thank us later after you thought it’d be OK to ride on the sidewalk with your headphones in and hit your head. We want to keep our brains in our heads.

Got any other pro biking-to-work tips? Share ‘em below, and stay tuned for more two-wheeled updates!

For those of you in charge of your website analytics, you may have noticed that “new version/old version” tab up in the top right hand corner of Google Analytics. Maybe you’ve clicked it, maybe you haven’t. I know myself, when Google announces a new release to their software platforms, it can be a little daunting – the data you you are used to seeing may have been moved, there are new metrics in place, more info to report on – I know, it can be overwhelming. When AdWords was released (2 versions ago) and forced us all to get used to their new interface, I went into panic/hysteria mode…. that being said, I thought I’d write this week’s post on some of the new features of Google Analytics, and hopefully decrease that anxiety that comes over clicking “new version.”

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• While you can no longer see metrics right from Account Home, new links have made it easier to jump to different reports in each of your profiles. For example, from Account Home you can jump right into your Conversions tab.
• You now have the ability to create multiple Dashboards that contain any set of graphs. These can now be set by hierarchy, department, interest, or any rule to allow different departments in your organizations to view what is important to them.
• If you’re looking for some of your typical reports, the names have changed. Network Properties and browser capabilities is now under Technology, Top Content is now Pages, Goals are now Conversions, and Visit Duration and Page depth are now Engagement.
• The UI has changed a bit – you are now going to see somewhat of a cleaner look and feel, though it doesn’t differ much from the previous version.

From June 11 – 17, we’ll be biking to work with the Active Transportation Alliance’s Bike Commuter Challenge! A number of us at envisionit already ride bikes to work, and we’re excited to join all the businesses and organizations in Chicago participating in the event.

Stay tuned for two-wheeled updates from your favorite interactive agency.

Especially given the epic snow and storms that so many cities around the nation have had over the last few seasons, we’re pleased at EIM to share one of our latest website launches: AllianceDKI.com.

Alliance Disaster Kleenup is a Chicago North Shore based 24/7 disaster response company. Providing emergency disaster services nationwide, the vastly experienced and accomplished ADK team is equipped to solve any disaster scenario, from a community-wide flood to residential wind damage to fire damage at a commercial property. While they had a website that worked to house most of their important content, service offerings, and emergency contact info, they felt it was time to update the website to more actively promote the breadth of their capabilities and freshen up the brand.

A few specific needs included:

• Editing capabilities to keep the site fresh with timely updates related to local or national emergencies, weather, etc.
• Conveying ADK’s large-scale capabilities. While they provide disaster solutions for commercial and residential properties, they also can serve much larger scale, community-wide catastrophes across the nation.
• Bringing their Pre-Incident Planning services more to the forefront of the site, to help users prepare for disasters and try to find ways to prevent or lessen the devastation, not just react to it.

The new Alliance Disaster Kleenup website features an editable accordion feature on the homepage that speaks to some of the company’s key services and capabilities, including large scale solutions, 24/7 disaster response and response time, and the pre-incident planning they offer for businesses nationwide. The new site architecture also supports these priorities, while the overall design is clean and easy to navigate, and features multiple easy touchpoints for contacting ADK in an emergency.

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The web marketing team here at EIM often gets asked casual questions about search engine optimization, be it at the office or even out at a social event. A client might ask about the newest tactic they happened to read about or how social media impacts organic search results. A family member might ask for an explanation of what exactly SEO means (this is a very common one). And we still get people wondering if you can pay for the top spot in the organic results of Google (you can’t).

With all these questions and varying levels of understanding, and with the almost daily changes in the search and social marketing industry, I thought it would be good to take a look at some basics in SEO philosophy.

5 simple SEO philosophy reminders:

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1. Discipline yourself to stay focused. Content structured smartly and targeted tightly around your product or service offering will attract a more valuable corner of the search engine market and generate higher conversion rates once your visitors arrive on your site.
2. Think about your consumer. Content they want to see and anything that makes their experience on your site more engaging, more pleasant and more productive will lead to them talking about you and linking to you.
3. There are very few quick fixes when it comes to SEO. Search Engines are looking for who’s growing a following, developing quality content, and building a solid reputation within their respective space. The way a business would ideally gain attention and increase sales over time organically is exactly what SEO professionals are trying to emulate. So yes, the very nature of SEO is a manipulation of that organic growth, but it still needs to in fact emulate it. Any tricks that someone might suggest for “sneaking” your site up the results pages is bad business and will likely end up hurting you.

In March, Google released their brand new +1 button to their search results. This button is Google’s response to the Facebook “like”, and allows users to publicly +1 search results and ads on the Google network. This button can help you find quality web pages, based off of what people in your Google community are “+1ing “

Take a peek at this quick video provided by Google to learn a little more about the +1 button.

Originally, the +1 button was released to be displayed only on the search engines, but due to multiple requests Google has released a version of the button that can be placed and displayed on individual web pages.  This allows webmasters to add the +1 button all pages across their site, and gives the consumer the opportunity to +1 said page if the find the information useful.

What’s the benefit?

The Google +1 button is a great way to help your site stand out amongst multiple other sites in your category or that provide a similar offering as you do.  When users traverse the web they will be able to see all the pages people in their Google community have “+1ed” your page on Google search, and the total amount of people that have “+1ed” the individual pages itself. Knowing that one of their friends has liked a page can strongly encourage interaction with your site as apposed to others.

Google has provided an easy code/button generator that allows you to create your own +1 button is various sizes and the 44 available languages, and simply post the short code onto your page.

Happy +1ing!