Blue Tent Marketing

Incline Ski & Board Shop is locally owned and operated and has been serving the Aspen/Snowmass area for 25 years. With prime locations near the Gondola at Ajax, and at the mall in Snowmass, Incline strives to provide the best value and most convenient service around.

To that end, they stay open later than other ski shops so customers can avoid wasting time in the dreaded lines of a powder day morning rush instead of dropping lines in the newly fallen snow. Incline has been so strong for so long in this highly competitive business, because of their dogged commitment to value and service. These were the watchwords that drove the recent redesign of their site. The site is a powerful tool for customers to save both time and money. They save precious time by booking rentals online, and they earn a discounted rate by doing so ahead of time instead of showing up on the first morning of their vacation and hoping for the best. By making online reservations ahead of time, customers know that the specific equipment they want will be right there waiting for them. Offering value is a huge priority for Incline. That’s why they offer only premium equipment, including local brands like High Society Freeride Company.

Shout out to the great team who made the redesign happen. Congratulations to Lauren for doing a great job with PM and Design, we’ll miss you during your leave! Michael and Dan did a great job with development, and Moira ensured a deft deployment of the site. Tim killed it with a tight Google Analytics and SEO setup and our fearless leader Pete Scott made the project possible on the sales side.

Ever wonder how the search volume for one of your top keywords varies over time?  Curious as to why your site saw a decrease in organic search traffic despite a month of improved search engine rankings?  Trying to determine when you should ramp up your paid search campaign?  Look no further.  Google Insights for Search is a powerful tool that allows you to compare search volume patterns across search terms, location and time ranges.  The tool is helpful for many aspects of your search engine marketing efforts including:

Seasonality: Budget and plan your internet marketing efforts (and your business) according to the seasonality of your top keywords.  For example, if you run a snow plowing business, determine when people are searching for relevant keywords in your geographic area and ramp up your paid search campaign accordingly.  Consider increasing your budget proportionally to the search volume.

Geographic Distribution: Where do you customers live?  Compare search volume across countries, regions and cities.  For example, if you are responsible for marketing for a vacation rental company in Colorado, you may need to know when people in different geographic regions start planning their ski vacations.  From the data below, you can compare different geographies and target these markets accordingly.  With paid search, you can create unique campaigns for individual cities and states and can increase and decrease their budgets according to the search trends.

Predicting the Future: Will the search volume for your top keywords increase, decrease or remain steady over time?  Do you need to ramp up your search marketing efforts to capture a larger share of search traffic in 2010 compared to 2009?  Using extrapolation of data, Google helps to predict the future of search for specific keywords.  Use their forecast tool, to help plan your search strategy for 2010.

Lindsay Reither
Director of Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics

Let’s say your rental or real estate company has just decided to redo your website and spark up your online marketing initiatives.  You’ve been talking budget and have your heart set on a start date, but are you really prepared to start shopping around?  Having a few things in order will make this shopping process run a lot smoother, depending on who you are dealing with.

Where are you now?

• Who hosts your current site?
• Do you have access to that site?
• Do you own your site or the content management system that runs it?
• Do you even have the ability to make changes to the site in house?  Would you like to?
• Will you lose any 3^rd party solutions due to switching web/hosting providers?

Don’t be surprised if your web developer or online marketing company wants to learn more about your business.  This is the job of every good online marketing company, so be prepared.

• How many brokers do you have?
• How many active listings do you have?
• What is the average price of those listings?
• What do you specialize or want to specialize in? Luxury, Beach front only, Ranches
• What is your high and low season?
• Who is the final decision maker for this project?
• Who will be the point person during the project and all projects moving forward?

How well are you performing and what do you consider a win?

• How many contact forms get filled out each month requesting more information?
• What are most people asking for?
• When someone calls in, did they find you through your site?  Where on the site? Where did they originate from? How do you know a call came from the site?
• What is the total number of sales leads coming from your current site per month?
• How do you track those leads and make sure that they are getting the proper follow up by your employees?
• Are you considering changing the way that your users book online?
• What is your current online booking percentage?
• What is your 1-3-5 year goal for your online booking percentage?
• What current measurements do you have in place to track marketing effectiveness?

These are just a few of the questions we like to ask before working with a company.  It is vital for us to learn more about your business so that we can become a long term partner that ultimately will only succeed when you succeed.  Even though the economy has a glimmer of recovery you simply cannot afford to jump into bed with a company that is only in it for short term buck.

-Sam Campise

Sales/Opportunity Manager

Anyone questioning the effectiveness of SMS marketing need only look to the recent tragedy in Haiti.  A fellow Colorado company mGive manages the Red Cross’s mobile donation program.  Donors are able to quickly and easily make a $10 dollar donation to the Red Cross in support of their critical relief efforts in Haiti.  All it takes to help is a simple text message sent for any mobile phone.

In only a few short days this mobile marketing campaign has gone viral and generated over $8 million! To put that in perspective, that’s more than the Chinese Government’s monetary contribution to the crisis thus far. What’s more significant is that these funds were generated from a demographic that would otherwise have gone largely untapped.  Although dwarfed by the contributions coming form most governments, NGOs, and corporations, these funds have been gathered efficiently and economically from a donor base that doesn’t typically write checks or take the trouble to go online and fill out a donor form.  The power of this medium as a marketing channel is clear.

Blue Tenters are doing their part, and we’re told that the Marines will be landing shortly in Haiti to help.  Click here for a way to donate online to the Red Cross, or text “Haiti” to 90999.

This year’s “Give a Little, Win a Lot” holiday campaign has confirmed our suspicions: We really do work with some of the most amazing companies as well as some pretty remarkable people. We’re so excited to see how our clients and prospects have resolved to contribute to the greater the good this holiday season. Here’s a sneak peek at just a few of the “contribution responses” we’ve received so far in response to our holiday campaign:

From The Lachicotte Company:

We have continued to participate in Toys for Tots and turned in donations from our company agents and staff to children who will enjoy toys for Christmas this year due to these gifts given in love. Also, our Christmas cards to vendors and business associates let them know about donations in their honor given to two local community ministries of which our staff and agents are a part in helping throughout the year: Father Pat’s Lunch Kitchen and Pawleys Island Presbyterian Bread of Life Ministries. We are glad to give back to our area throughout the year and take this time to say Merry Christmas to all!

From Baby Decorator:

Baby Decorator exists to guide new parents to create warm and nurturing nurseries for their newborn babies. However, for the babies that aren’t so fortunate as to be well and healthy, we support the March of Dimes “Fight for Preemies”. Their mission is to enlighten women and to teach through health and prenatal care how to have a healthy, full term baby. November was Fight for Preemies month and on our website we linked to their efforts. We also offered a free nursery design tot he winner of the best blog as chosen by “Bloggers Unite”. We are trying to help the new little ones who need our help.

From Real Estate of Winter Park:

One of our missions as a company is to give back to the great community in which we live so it may continue to be great. We contribute many dollars each year to the Grand Foundation which is an umbrella for giving to most all non-profits in our area. We focus a lot of our contributions toward children’s causes (Grand Kids, the Learning Center, CASA) and we are a sponsor of the Grand County Blues society which funds Blues in the Schools and delivers instruments and music to children around the country. As for other artistic vertures, we give to the Grand Arts Council and again, the Blues Society. We also like to contribute to Mtn Family centers which provides a food bank and clothing to families in our area. We host a food drive each year and have also coordinated the school supply/backpack drive each year.

From East West Resorts – Beaver Creek/Vail:

We have “adopted-a-family” through the Salvation Army. Employees are all contributing gifts and cash to the family. The gifts and a City Market gift card will be delivered to the family on Christmas Eve to help make their holiday happy. EWR emplyees also manned one full day of “bell ringing” outside of Walmart in Avon for the Salvation Army.

From Ranches West Inc.:

I have about a 1/2 dozen charities that I make donations to annually – from St. Judes, Childrens Hospital-Denver, Montana Food Bank,American Cancer Society including a small rural school and my local church. Your propgram to foster philanthropy is great!! Thank you for spreading the word and helping us all realze we all have something to be greatful about! Merry Christmas to you!

These are just a few of the inspiring contribution stories we’ve received so far in response to our holiday campaign. We’re honored to work with such an amazing group of people! Stay tuned to see who the lucky winner will be on New Year’s Day …

Happy Holidays!

– The Blue Tent Team

These are just a few major highlights of things we gained in Drupal 6, and what we will gain in Drupal 7.

Improvements in Drupal 6:

• Native draggable sortable fields, such as upload field and cck fields, including images.
• Views 2, not available for Drupal 5, brings multiple displays per view, straightforward theming, and powerful relationships.
• Menu groupings (not the one single giant long menu page). Menu item sorting by drag and drop.
• A much improved theming system

Improvements in Drupal 7

• Dashboard (a customizable control panel providing high-level access to content and configuration)
• Fields in core, on everything (nodes, users, taxonomy)
• Image handling in core
• Admin theme called “Seven” in core
• Toolbar and customizable shortcut bar
• Overlays, lightbox-style modals for editing and configuring
• Edit links on everything: menus, blocks, content.
• #d7cx: a coordinated movement to have many contributed modules ready for use when Drupal 7 is released.

Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει

"Nothing endures but change." – Heraclitus, Greek Philosoper (535 BC – 475 BC)

This is one of my favorite aphorisms of all time. We easily observe and experience the truth of this statement in our daily lives – it’s as easy as looking out the window. We detect changes in the weather, in the position of the sun, and the movement of the clouds in the sky. As humans we’ve evolved to become keen observers of change – ultimately so that our perceptions may positively influence our actions.

Web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, has a great old post titled "Making Web Analytics Actionable: Focus On What’s Changed." In it, he lets out the "dirty little secret" of web analytics that in most cases, it’s doubful that the "top 25" of anything (referrers, keywords, etc.) changes much at all. The point is that there are changes in traffic, in engagement, in referral sources occuring within your web analtyics data. Which raises the following questions:

Are you able to detect these changes?

What actions do you take as a result of these insights?

Most likely, the answer to the first question is no. Lucky for you, the team over at Juice Analytics has released an updated version of their Firefox Google Analytics Plugin that allows GA users to easily access some key change metrics within their standard GA reporting dashboard. Specifically, the plugin allows analysts to regularly access change report metrics in the Keyword and Referring Site Reports. This is a very meaningful report that gives you insight into how your internet marketing efforts are actively affecting your overall performance. You’ll quickly be able to see new referring sites within the past three days, as well as keywords with greater than 50% increase in referral traffic. This is data that once was buried and difficult to access, and is now literally at your fingertips, for free, with the click of your mouse! Thanks Juice Analytics!

Of course, the question remains: Now that you have visibility into this data, what will you do with it? How will these insights into these constant change metrics influence your ad spend, your PPC budget, your marketing strategy? As always, we’re here to help …

– Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

Thanksgiving is the greatest American holiday. It’s an authentic celebration of the things that matter most in life – things to be thankful for. All too often, these are things that we take for granted. Taking time to pause with our family and friends to consider all that we have to be thankful for, just might be one of the best gifts anyone could ask for. So without further ado, here’s short list of some things we’re thankful for:

Our clients (of course!)
Our jobs
Our work
Our friends and family
Our health
Our troops
Fresh air
Clean water
Tasty food
Wilderness
Wild places
Storms
Sunshine
Snow
Skis
Powder days
Waves
The internet
Search engines
The social web
Flex time
Vacation
Kids
Smiles
Music
Laughter
Tolerance
Inspiration
Beauty
Exercise
Endorphins
…

What else? How about you? What would you add to this list?

Have a Happy Thanksgiving! Our offices will be closed tomorrow and Friday. We’ll be back at it on Monday!

– Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

Drupal Distributions are pre-configured for a specific type of site and use a variety of contributed modules.  Here are some that have been in the spotlight recently.

Tattler , created by Phase2. “Tattler (app) is an open source topic monitoring tool for today’s Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on the topics you want.” Listen to the Acquia interview with Phase2 about it.

Managing News , created by Development Seed, is also for aggregating news and data.  Read an article about customizing your Managing News.

Open Atrium, also created by Development Seed, was recommended on the American Express Open Forum.

- David Lanier
Director of Web Development

Watch White House new media team members discuss the new WhiteHouse.gov web site which was launched recently on Drupal.

An updated version of Aegir, a powerful hosting framework for Drupal, is released.

Eric Clapton’s site launches on Drupal.

Davy Van Den Bremt posts a slide deck outlining Drupal 7 from an end user’s perspective.

- David Lanier
Director of Web Development