If you are in advertising and you aren’t coming to Aaron Draplin today you are dumb! Aaron was raised in the Michigan Northwoods, schooled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and is currently hunkered down in the mighty Pacific Northwest.  The Draplin Design Co. proudly rolls up its sleeves on a number of projects related to the Print, Identity, Web Development, Illustration and Gocco Muscle categories. He makes stuff for Coal Headwear, Union Binding Co., Field Notes, Richmond Fontaine, Nike, Wired, Timberline, Ford Motor Co., Viva Voce, Hutchco, Patagonia, Chunklet, Incase, Giro, Cobra Dogs, Burton Snowboards, Hughes Entertainment, Megafaun, and even the Obama Administration, if you can believe that. At Draplin Design Co. they pride themsevles on a high level of craftsmanship and quality that keeps them up late into the wet Portland night.

Aaron is quite possible they best design related speaker ever to walk the earth. Today, using scientific proof and state-of-the-art multimedia techniques, he will deliver a suckerpunch of a talk that aims to provide bonafide proof of work, the highs and lows of a ferociously independent existence and a couple tall tales from his so-called career in the cutthroat world of contemporary graphic design.

Aaron is Just a regular guy with a trajectory a little dirtier than yours, his talk is open to all oncomers brave enough to show up. If you are a youngster, you may find yourself inspired to attack your design future in a different way. If you are established, you may just leave feeling grateful you don’t have anything to do with him. Hard to say. Let’s do this!

You can still register online by clicking here.

Or if you are too lazy you can just show up at:

Doors Open: 4:30pm
Program: 5:15pm
Where: A Club, 416 W Sprague, Spokane
Cost: $10 Members, $20 Non Members
Includes: Appetizers and Non Alcoholic Beverages, Cash Bar available

The Spokane Area Workforce Development Council was created with the mission of leading a dynamic, demand-driven workforce system and helping to innovate workforce solutions for the Spokane Region. The Spokane Area Workforce Development Council focuses on: closing the skills gap, supporting job creation, increasing wages, improving productivity, reducing poverty, and developing a highly responsive and effective workforce system in the Spokane region. The members of the Spokane Area Workforce Development Council represent key industry sectors of our regional economy. The council is also strengthened by the addition of regional education and community leaders working together to leverage resources and meet regional workforce challenges.

The Spokane Area Workforce Development Council has hired Zipline Interactive to assist with the planning, design, and development of a new content managed website. Our team will be working with the Spokane Area Workforce Development Council to determine the best methods for reaching its goals online, and then we will work together to develop and execute a plan to reach those goals. The completed website is expected to launch in the fall of 2012, we will keep you posted.

Zipline Interactive client and friend Kim Davidson was featured in the latest issue of the Spokane Journal of Business in an article about locally-grown, sustainable foods. The article, aptly titled Locally-grown, sustainable foods gets higher profile, talks about how more and more consumers want to trace their groceries back to the dirt they were grown on.

Kim is a co-owner of Davidson Commodities. Davidson Commodities distributes the PNW Co-op Specialty Foods brand to many regional stores and restaurants. PNW Co-op Specialty Food products include: Sunrise red lentils, Shasta yellow lentils, Spanish Pardina brown lentils, York white garbanzo beans, Pedrosillano garbanzo beans, and the green split peas. Davidson is currently working to obtain a sustainable agriculture certification which will soon appear on the labeling for these products.

The article goes into detail about the pending certification and the current trends in sustainable agriculture. Read it online at: http://www.spokanejournal.com/article.php?id=8139

Recently, Google and Intuit teamed up to offer free websites to small business across the United States. Locally in Spokane, Google and Intuit have been running advertisements both on the radio and online that encourage business owners in need of a website to get one through this new program. This effort has also been promoted by Greater Spokane Incorporated (GSI) through its newsletter, Facebook, and Twitter which each reach thousands of area business professionals.

Understandably, several web developers have been upset by this offer, and we have been asked by many people how we feel about GSI promoting a program that arguably takes business from area web development companies. This controversy has grown to the point that it has been featured in an article in today’s Spokesman Review business section. Since it seems to be a growing issue we thought we would throw our opinion in the ring.

Here at Zipline, we strongly believe that every business should have a website. Today, 97% of consumers look online for local products and services. The Internet has largely replaced the phone book as the go to location when searching for businesses. For a business to be successful in today’s marketplace they must have a website. The program offered by Google and Intuit is an excellent way for business with a very small or no budget to create a simple website that will help them better compete.

While this program will certainly have an immediate impact on the bottom line of some area web development companies that specialize in small business websites, we believe that overall, it will have a positive long-term impact on both our local economy and the local web development industry. From what we have observed, due to the limited functionality of the websites created, this offer appeals to very small businesses and start-ups that have limited budgets and often are unable to afford to hire a qualified professional web developer. Many of the businesses that are utilizing this program are businesses that would pay for a similar online service or would opt-out of having a website altogether. As web developers, the last thing we want a customer to do is to opt-out of having a website because their budget will not allow for one. As we mentioned earlier, in today’s economy a website is integral to the success of a business. Without a website, many of these business may not be around in a year or two. What we would prefer, is that these businesses get a free website today and use it to help grow their business. This will both generate money for our local economy and help to insure these businesses survive to purchase traditional websites from us in the future. As these companies grow, they will certainly outgrow the limited free basic website offered through this program, at which point they will likely hire a local professional web developer to build them a real, functional, business website. In addition, this offer will also have a positive impact both immediately, and long-term on companies offering other web services like search engine optimization and search engine marketing because there will be more area website owners in need of these services.

Overall, we believe this offer is a good long-term strategy for our region and applaud GSI for promoting it. We are huge proponents of encouraging businesses to use the Internet to market themselves in any way possible. In fact, often when we are contacted by businesses without an adequate budget to create a standard website, we will refer them to other, smaller local web design companies, or online services such as the Intuit website build to get a basic website and encourage them to return to us once they have outgrown that solution. While we sympathize with those that have been negatively impacted and understand their concern, here at Zipline we have not seen any impact on our project workflow due to the offer, and we strongly believe that long-term we will be building new quality websites for many of the businesses getting the simple free websites today!

Learn more about the free website program!

Hinson Gravelle & Adair LLP is a law firm based in Westlake Village California. They have been providing their business clients with excellent, customizable service since the firm was founded in 2002. The firm’s partners Wayne Hinson, Doug Gravelle and Eric Adair met more than 20 years ago as in-house attorneys for the multinational corporation Texaco. Over the years, they have developed a strong understanding of the work product expected by the most sophisticated clients, and see themselves as counselors, not merely attorneys who blindly litigate without regard for the client’s budget. Hinson Gravelle & Adair LLP is a full service law firm but is well known for their skill and ability in environmental and energy law.

Hinson Gravelle & Adair LLP hired Zipline Interactive to assist with the development of a new website. Our team worked with Don Adair, the firms independent marketing representative, to plan and design a new WordPress powered website. The completed website is based on a heavily customized version of the Walk responsive theme. The completed website features a fun and unique design that is 100% responsive providing users with an excellent browsing experience on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. The website is also fully content managed using the the tools and functions available in WordPress.

Visit the completed website online at http://www.hinsongravelle.com/

The Washington Grain Alliance (WGA) represents the Washington Grain Commission (WGC) and the Washington Association of Wheat Growers (WAWG) to create a unified industry voice. The Washington Grain Alliance strives to speak with one voice for the 20 Eastern Washington counties that produce mass amounts of grain.

Wheat and barley are the primary grain crops grown here in Washington. For decades, Washington farmers have worked the land and its soil to produce some of the highest quality grains in the world. Grain products grown in Washington are sold all around the globe, bringing in millions of dollars to the regional economy each year.

The Washington Grain Alliance has hired Zipline Interactive to assist with the design and development of a new content managed website. The new WGA website will become an information hub for the regions wheat buyers, farmers, and consumers providing them with the latest news and industry research. The completed website will be powered by our ZLCMS content management system making it quick and easy for the WGA staff to update and share content.

Founded in 2005 by professional baseball player Jeremy Affeldt and his wife Larisa, Generation Alive is a movement of young people responding to the needs of other young people wherever, whenever, however. Jeremy’s passion comes from his Christian faith to treat others as you want to be treated. He believes to live out his faith means to help those who can’t live out their dreams, those who simply live to survive another day due to poverty. His beliefs lead him to create Generation Alive to help the youth of America learn to live a life of compassion towards other youth who live with the pain of extreme poverty.

Generation Alive hired Zipline Interactive to design and develop a new content managed website. The completed website is powered by our ZLCMS content management system and provides the Generation Alive marketing staff with full control over its website content. The completed website also sports a fun and engaging design, along with number of new features including an event calendar, social media integration, and Paypal powered donation system.

Visit the new Generation Alive website online

On May 16th Aaron Draplin will be coming to Spokane to inspire creatives of all types at an AAF Spokane sponsored event. If you aren’t familiar with Aaron Draplin, he is a world famous designer and marketer who has worked on projects for clients ranging from hotdog vendors to presidents.

If you work in any creative capacity, you will not want to miss this event. Draplin will be speaking at this year’s HOW Conference in Boston shortly after his stop in Spokane and we will be getting a sneak peak of what he will be sharing with the world in June.

Check out this description of the event pulled from the AAF Spokane Facebook page:

Using scientific proof and state-of-the-art multimedia techniques, Aaron James Draplin of the Draplin Design Co. delivers a suckerpunch of a talk that aims to provide bonafide proof of work, the highs and lows of a ferociously independent existence and a couple tall tales from his so-called career in the cutthroat world of contemporary graphic design.

Just a regular guy with a trajectory a little dirtier than yours, his talk is open to all oncomers brave enough to show up. If you are a youngster, you may find yourself inspired to attack your design future in a different way. If you are established, you may just leave feeling grateful you don’t have anything to do with him. Hard to say.

Also, we’ll welcome George Riddell, NW ADDY Award Chair, as he presents the winners of the 2012 Northwest Regional ADDY awards. These local entrants are now on to the National ADDY competition, where they’re competing against entries from around the nation. Join us in learning a little more about the regional awards, and cheering on our winners!

Zipline Interactive is proud to be a sponsor for the event along with our friends at Boom Creative, Sixth Man Marketing, and Seven2. We will be there and we hope to see you all there!

Learn more about the event at the event page on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/408666199155425

Lean more about the event and RSVP on the AAF Spokane website:
http://www.aafspokane.com/aaron-draplin

Founded in 1979 by Jeff Heimbigner, Skyhawks has grown to become a leader in the youth sports industry. Today, Skyhawks provides sport camps in 15 different sports including: soccer, basketball, flag football, baseball, tennis, capture the flag, skateboarding, lacrosse, golf, volleyball, cheerleading, and track & field. Their camps and programs are currently available to youth in over 500 different communities across 15 states and they are still growing!

Skyhawks hired Zipline Interactive to assist with the design and development of a new conversion focused website. Skyhawks does a great deal of online marketing, so it is imperative that when a consumer lands at the website, they are able to quickly find what they need to make a purchasing decision. Our team worked with Ed Reese at Sixth Man Marketing to design and develop a website that makes it quick and easy for consumers to get camp information, find camps in their area, and register for those camps. The completed website is powered by our ZLCMS content management system, giving Skyhawks the ability to manage and update their own content, photos, and videos as desired. In its brief time online, the new Skyhawks website has already seen a significant increase in conversion rate over its predecessor and we will be continuing to track and modify the website to raise the conversion rate even higher!

Visit the new Skyhawks website online

Tracking for social media is one area major area where Google Analytics has be lacking. While social media has increasingly become an important marketing tool for many businesses and organizations, the quality of analytics for social media has not grown at the same rate as the adoption of social media. Google has offered some rudimentary social tools for the last year or so but they have recently increased the quality of tracking available for your social media activities. The new tools give you an opportunity to measure the value of your social media activities through Google Analytics.

The Google Analytics tracking tools are built to help measure the following ways users interact with your business or organiation:

Sources: As your content is shared and people come to your site, it’s important to understand how visitors from different social sources engage with your site.

Conversions: Shared content URLs become the entry points into your site, driving traffic from social sources. Measuring the conversion and monetary value of this traffic will help you understand the impact of Social on your business.

Pages: People increasingly engage with, share, and discuss content on social networks. It’s important to know which pages and content are being shared, where they’re being shared, and how.

Social Plugins: Adding Social Plugin buttons to your site (for example, Google “+1″ buttons) allows your users share content to social networks directly from your site. Your social plugin data shows you which content is being shared, and on which networks.

While we have had the ability to gain some knowledge of these activities, they have simplified the process particularly when it comes to pages. Pages are an area that have been more difficult to get analytics data on. Below is a description from Google about the tracking they have introduced for pages:

Navigate to Pages to see engagement metrics (Pageviews, Avg. Visit Duration, Pages/Visit) for each URL.  Sort by Social Activities in the table to identify your most viral content.

Click a URL in the table to see the originating social networks for that URL. For social data hub partner networks, you can also see offsite sharing for the URL: how the URL was shared (for example, via a “+1″ or “reshare” action), the networks on which it was shared, and the conversations that took place (Activity Stream). Read About Activity Stream Data to learn how this data is collected.

Another area that is important to many of our clients is conversion tracking. At one point Facebook offered conversion tracking for their advertisements but until now it has been difficult to track conversions on goals from social websites.

Another big improvement from Google is its expanded conversion tracking ability for social media:

The Conversions report allows you to quantify the value of Social. It shows the total number of conversion and the monetary value of conversions that occurred as a result of referrals from each network.  Click Assisted vs Last Interaction Analysis (just below the Explorer tab at the top of the report) to see how each network contributed to conversions and revenue via assists and last clicks.

Assisted Conversions and Assisted Conversion Value:
This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the social network assisted. An assist occurs when someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but returns later to convert during a subsequent visit. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the social network.

Last Interaction Conversions and Last Interaction Conversion Value:
This is the number (and monetary value) of last click sales and conversions. When someone visits your site and converts, the visit is considered a last click.  The higher these numbers, the more important the social network’s role in driving completion of sales and conversions.

Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions:
This ratio summarizes the social network’s overall role. A value close to 0 indicates that the social network functioned primarily in a last click capacity. A value close to 1 indicates that the social network functioned equally in an assist and a last click capacity. The more this value exceeds 1, the more the social network functioned in an assist capacity.

Note that you must define goals and goal values in order to see data in this report.

Google has made some great strides with the updated social tracking tools that have been added to Google Analytics and they will be very helpful for our clients, however, I am still holding out for better, more user friendly social dashboard that makes it easy for non technical customers to understand the impact of their social media activities.

Blog post discussing the new social media tracking

Learn more about social media tracking with Google Analytics

Instructions on setting up social media tracking with Google Analytics