Using social media channels is a great way to promote your business. But a lot of companies view social media only as a means to an end – as a way to push people to their own website.

From my perspective, these companies are missing a key point about social media: the fact that most people don’t want to be redirected. They’re on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube for a reason. They want to be entertained. To catch up on the news. To interact, comment, get in on the conversation.

With that in mind, smart companies are focusing less on getting people away from social media sites – and more on establishing a strong brand presence within them.

Here are some great ways to do that.

• Facebook. Facebook pages aren’t fully customizable, but they do have some strong features. You can create custom tabs on your Facebook page and sell things using PayPal. You can also create custom landing pages. If you search for “Starbucks” on FB, for example, you’ll go straight to their Starbucks Card tab, rather than their Wall. All of this customization is done using FBML, Facebook’s proprietary markup language.

  And although this isn’t exactly customization, some companies are using FB as a customer service portal. Look at the posts and comments on Best Buy’s page, for example. Best Buy is resolving customer complains within FB – not wasting time redirecting customers to its home page. What a great concept.

• Twitter. Like Facebook, Twitter also lets you customize your page to reflect your brand. Atomic’s Twitter page, for example, is decked out with our logo, contact information, and brand colors. We’ve also included with headshots of our staff and their Twitter handles.
• YouTube. YouTube allows for elaborate customization – look how Coca-Cola has designed its YouTube channel to reflect its current “Celebration” campaign. Dr Pepper hasn’t done quite as much work – its “I’m a doctor” campaign videos run on a standard Dr Pepper background. But still, the channel is customized. That means you don’t have to go to these companies’ websites to experience their brand; they’ve brought their brand to you.

Here at Atomic, we’ve been helping lots of companies take their website presence and apply it to social media sites. Ready to do the same?

Each year, the Greater Dayton Advertising Association and the American Advertising Federation honors creative excellence in advertising by inviting accomplished advertising and design firms to take part in the Hermes award competition.

There are three levels of Hermes awards: Gold, Silver and Bronze. Recipients of the Gold award are publicly recognized at an annual banquet, given the opportunity to say a few words of acceptance and gratitude among their creative peers and, most importantly, given a life-size bust of Hermes himself.

This year, Atomic Interactive was honored to receive its first Gold Hermes Award for excellent creative design in the Public Service category. It is rare for a company as young as Atomic Interactive to be honored with a Gold Hermes Award. We at Atomic showed our appreciation and excitement with the nomination and eventual award when every employee of Atomic, along with our significant others, attended the awards ceremony at the Dayton Masonic Temple.

Atomic was presented with a Gold Hermes Award for creating a website for GetUp Montgomery County, an initiative to encourage the children of Montgomery County to lead healthier lives. Atomic founder and owner Ian Lawson and Atomic employees Anthony Wartinger and Alexis Branham created a beautiful, fun site that appeals to both adults and children alike.

At Atomic, creating an excellent website relies on establishing a functional and pleasant relationship with each client, which is precisely what happened when Atomic collaborated with GetUp. We were more than pleased to work with Lorraine Russel, Chris Schlorman and Jim Gross, Montgomery County Healthy Commissioner. Each of these members of the GetUp team played an integral part in the development of their award winning website. We feel grateful any time we get to work with a client who is receptive to our creative vision and GetUp displayed a great amount of confidence in our abilities as a design team.

For Atomic, the Hermes award ceremony was a tremendous success. Along with the Gold Award, we were also honored to receive three Silver Awards and three Bronze Awards. The Silver Hermes were for the design of Buckeye Business Solutions’ website in the category of Interactive Media; in the Public Service category for the design of a Digital Learning Portal website for the Public Health Department of Dayton & Montgomery County and for a Digital Storytelling website for the ThinkTV Network, also in the Public Service category. The Bronze Hermes were all awarded to Atomic for design in the category of Interactive Media for the following website designs: Bullen Ultrasonics, Siesta Key Vacation and MacTown.

Currently, our Hermes Head is proudly displayed in our Downtown Dayton office. It will serve as a reminder to all of our employees of the fun time had at the awards ceremony and as an incentive for creating websites in the future that are also deserving of the Hermes Gold Award.

If you’re a web developer and you’re not using jQuery, I have three words for you: get with it.

jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes working with JavaScript a lot easier. Basically, it helps you code more efficiently and more cleanly than you could using regular JavaScript code. It cuts out a lot of the mundane work that used to be required to add different types of animations and interactions to a page. In short, it helps you find whatever you want on a page, and make it do whatever you want.

If you’re not a web developer, the main thing you want to know about jQuery is that it can help make your website interface much more user-friendly. For example, you can use jQuery to …

• create calendars that let customers click on a date to make a reservation for an event
• create seating charts that let customers select a seat on a plane, or in a theater
• create forms and make sure that customers fill out forms properly
• let customers “rate” shopping items by clicking on a certain number of stars
• let customers magnify part of an image – such as the image of a product they’re thinking about buying

Having your developer use jQuery is also important because, frankly, it saves so much time. That means we can build more functionality and more interactivity into your site more quickly. That keeps development costs down and helps your project get done in a timely fashion.

I like to think of jQuery as a library of shortcuts for web developers … effects that we can pick up and plug in to your site without reinventing the wheel. Again, this saves you time and cost.

Nearly every site we build at Atomic uses jQuery in some form or fashion. A great example is our site for MacTown. We used jQuery to create a horizontal slider on the homepage to highlight different product categories. We also used it to create a shopping cart with drag-and-drop functionality, which simplifies the purchasing process. And who doesn’t want to make it easier for customers to buy stuff?

Interested in talking about how animation and interactivity can make your site more user friendly? Contact us anytime.

We had the pleasure over the last three weeks of having Casey Spitnale, an intern from The School of Advertising Art join our team. Casey is an uber-talented young designer with a passion for interactive and motion design. We gave Casey a rough idea for a motion design piece that would show off the killer design work and not-so-serious environment of Atomic Interactive. Casey infused his creativity and technical knowledge to create a fun, professional looking piece that exceeded our expectations.

Often when I’m talking with a potential customer, they get stuck one question. Is improving their website really worth the investment?

They might want a good website in theory. But paying for it can seem like money spent on overhead, without much return on investment.

That’s why I help customers figure out clear business goals for their website, before they get started. Goals intended to help their business grow.

Those goals could include things like having more customers:

• Fill out a “request for estimate” form
• Click a “chat with a salesperson” button
• Download a brochure, sales flyer, or white paper
• Watch a sales video
• Download a coupon
• Sign up for a mailing list
• And, of course, make a purchase!

Once we set goals for a website, its value becomes more clear. And our job as web developers also becomes clear: design a site that will achieve those goals.

We do that in a lot of ways. By creating a professional website that lends credibility to the business. By building intuitive navigation that lead visitors through a desired “path” in the site. By making contact information easy to find. By creating easy-to-use forms. And by designing effective calls to action.

The proof in the pudding is when we measure results against the goals. We can measure just about anything using Google Analytics. But we also love to hear firsthand results from our customers. Like when HotSpring told us that the majority of their sales were now coming in through their website. Or when K12 Gallery told us that online donations were starting to roll in.

From my perspective, a beautiful website is great. But if it’s not helping your business grow, it’s just so much ink on … well, a screen.