October 2006 - BPWrap

Favicons – How To Make Them Work For You

A previous post, The Favicons Are Coming, provides a short introduction to favicons. It was written in the fond hope that Internet Explorer Version 7, in trying to emulate Mozilla Firefox as it so often does, would perhaps make favicons a robust feature of Internet surfing. In Firefox, you’ll find these small 16 x 16 pixels icon images for a given web page appear in several places, namely the address window, on a tab and also in your Favorites or Bookmarks list. They provide instant recognition of a web site and for the ones I know well are all I display in my Bookmarks toolbar in my default Firefox browser. Here for example are the ones associated with this and related websites:

Well now Internet Explorer Version 7 is officially released. After some thorough testing, the IE v.7 way of handling favicons seems no better than previous versions. You can get the sense of frustration of many others in a forum entry, Keeping The Favicon in IE Favorites, which started in November 2005 and still has not produced an answer. In The Favicons Are Coming, we paid tribute to Microsoft as the inventor of the .ico favicon file and set out the advice accordingly. It was largely correct, but here we re-present the information in a more practical fashion. The first part will detail how to make favicons work in Firefox. The second part (optional and provided only for the really keen) will detail how you can try to make them work somewhat in IE and other browsers.

Making Favicons Work In Mozilla Firefox

1. Make your 16 x 16 pixel icon image as a .png or a .jpg file. For example you might call it myfavicon.jpg Load it into a suitable place on your domain, say http://www.mysite.com/images/myfavicon.jpg
2. Add the following code in the HEAD section of any web page for which you wish the favicon to appear.
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.mysite.com/images/myfavicon.jpg" type="image/x-icon">
3. The favicon image will appear correctly in all the places it should.

Trying To Make Favicons Work In Internet Explorer

1. The IE way involves an icon image file with the extension .ico A .ico file is not just a .bmp file renamed with the extension changed to .ico. It is a much more complex file that holds two icon images, a 32 x 32 pixel file and a 16 x 16 pixel file. You can if you wish only include the 16 x 16 pixel image. A somewhat old article, Making a Favicon, describes the process well. You normally can start with a .bmp file or .jpg file and convert it to a .ico file. The AxiomX Pixel Toolbox 1.1 is free software that will handle this conversion, usually without too much trouble.
2. You then load up the .ico image file to the root folder of the website, i.e. at http://www.mysite.com/
3. The favicon image will sometimes appear the very first time you visit a website and sometimes will persist in your Favorites list. More often it disappears after a first appearance and is replaced by the generic IE favicon. Since Firefox will correctly handle such a .ico file, this is a worthwhile thing to do if you have the time. It may also be helpful for other browsers.

How Well Will Your Favicons Work?

Always in Firefox: rarely in Internet Explorer

However much effort you put into creating and loading favicons, other browsers than Firefox may still handle favicons unreliably. For example, Opera will sometimes display them and sometimes not. It will also use the favicon.ico image in the root file if it exists for some purposes and will use the favicon identified by the HEAD link tag for other purposes. Other websites may also use favicons in an unpredictable way too. Normally Bloglines should show favicons correctly but even when viewed in Firefox will not always do so.

The favicon is such a useful identifier for those who see it that the effort is certainly worthwhile. Hopefully as time goes on, more and more browsers will come in line with the Firefox approach to favicons.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – A Pull Marketing Tool

USP
selling your unique products.

The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) has been a key marketing tool almost as long as the term marketing has been used. Rosser Reeves coined the phrase in his book, “Reality in Advertising”, in 1961. His definition was as follows:

The proposition to the customer should be: “buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
The proposition itself must be unique.
The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product.

Many now try to use the concept without realizing that it is very much a pre-Internet concept. Rosser Reeves was with a major New York advertising agency, Ted Bates & Co. It was very much a Push Marketing concept. It focused on driving home a central, research-based selling point. The well-heeled clients put mega-bucks behind the USP to get it in the faces of their prospective clients.

The world has changed mightily since then. It’s Permission Marketing time. The prospective purchaser is in control. If people don’t know about your company, then you’ve somehow got to stand out from the crowd. It’s Pull Marketing that you’ve got to practice. Technically Unique Selling Proposition is hardly the right term. No one is going to wait around to hear a proposition from someone they’ve never heard of. Indeed some people now use USP to mean Unique Selling Point, and that’s perhaps a better working definition now.

Whether it is Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point, the essence of the USP is still correct. It’s got to be something that is attractive to that potential purchaser and is in a sense unique. They won’t be able to get the same thing from anyone else. .. and it’s got to be transmitted almost in the blink of an eye before they click away to one of the many other potential suppliers.

It’s always useful to test and refine ideas and it should be said that these reflections came through discussions with a client as we attempted to hone the Unique Selling Proposition. The market is an intensely competitive market, scrapbooking supplies, and the company involved is called Arte Latin-Oh! The eventual USP we developed together is ‘Spanish Scrapbook and Papercraft Supplies with True Latin Warmth‘. We’ll now see how well it performs in the ‘blink of an eye’ test.

Related:
Exclusive Product Offering (EPO)
Brand Montreal or USP Montreal
Search Engine Marketing Strategy and USPs
The NUB Of Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Getting Leads And Selling

Tags: USP, Unique Selling Proposition, Pull Marketing, Spanish

For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations

Wal-Mart & Edelman learn PR must be candid.

PR is often used as a shorthand for Public Relations. Public Relations attempts to manage how an individual or company will appear in the media. If the company has good news then the PR people work to get the media to showcase it. Conversely if the company has some difficult stories to handle, then the PR people try to ensure that as little damage as possible is done to the corporate image. With the traditional media, that was a reasonable objective for the PR group. However now the Internet has changed the rules of the game. Much more transparency is required in company activities since the Internet radar screens are much more active and effective.

This was clearly illustrated by the furore that developed around a PR activity that Edelman and Wal-Mart did. Wal-Mart’s PR counsellors at Edelman created a blog ostensibly authored by a couple traveling across America in their RV and spending nights parked in Wal-Mart parking lots. Edelman wanted to make consumers think that Wal-Mart is a great place to use as the anchor point for a road trip. When it became clear that this was a fake blog, as it quickly did, everyone jumped on Edelman. Blogging heavyweights, such as Shel Holtz, Scott Karp and Robert Scoble, pointed out the manifest deception of such an approach. This was particularly heinous from a company like Edelman that has made much of the benefits of social media efforts. It took a few days for Richard Edelman to fess up and acknowledge what he called an error in failing to be transparent.

Given that the Internet exists, there is need for absolute transparency and sincerity. Not least because the chances of being caught out are very high. Edelman pointed out his support for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Code of Ethics.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Code of Ethics.
(The “WOMMA Code”)
Summary
1. Consumer protection and respect are paramount
2. The Honesty ROI: Honesty of Relationship, Opinion, and Identity
3. We respect the rules of the venue
4. We manage relationships with minors responsibly
5. We promote honest downstream communications
6. We protect privacy and permission

Code of Ethics sounds like something worthwhile that you should strive to honour. That really sets the bar too low. To ensure the best corporate image, you’ve really got to regard that Code of Ethics as an absolute minimum of good corporate behaviour. In that way, you can be reasonably sure that your PR (Public Revelations) will not do damage to your corporate image.

Tags: Wal-Mart, Edelman, PR

The News Feeds Are Coming

Internet Explorer Version 7.0 has been getting closer for some time. We are told it will be finally released this month. It will feature a much bigger emphasis on news feeds than its predecessors and than its rival, Mozilla Firefox. Whether that is due to the proddings of one of the most visible (now-ex) Microsoft spokespersons, only they know.

There is a very visible icon to alert you to the presence of news feeds on any web page. You will already have heard a gentle swish as you arrived at a web page with a news feed. For anyone wanting to get the attention of prospects and customers on news items, what more could you ask for.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

Tags: Internet Explorer, Version 7.0, news feeds

Late Is Rude And Customers Notice

Small Business Trends has an excellent item by Jack Yoest entitled, ‘Late Is Rude and Bad for Small Business‘. Apparently President George W. Bush is one person who often uses the phrase ‘Late Is Rude’. He is so right. It certainly can be a sign of disrespect to whomever you are meeting.

The article is all about when you start doing something. The same concern for time is often important when you stop doing something. Perhaps the person you are involved with has another engagement to get to. Perhaps someone else is waiting to use the ‘equipment’ you’re using, whether it be a conference room or an exercise machine.

The most important end time of all is the time when you told the customer that the product would arrive or the new system would be running successfully. Many suppliers seem unaware of how important time of delivery is to most customers. It’s a very visible sign of the total quality being delivered. Even when there are no adverse economic effects of a late delivery, it’s still late. The customer is waiting. It’s even worse if they’ve not had news on why the delay is occurring.

That’s the downside of time associated with a product or service. If you deliver late, then the product/service is just that much less satisfactory than it might have been. There can be an upside to time. You can turn it into a distinguishing mark of your products and services. Delivering on time or even ahead of time is so unusual that you’ll really stand out from the crowd. I remember a very rich Norwegian lawyer friend of mine. He was very successful in the early days of the North Sea gas finds. On most issues he had a 48-hour turn round policy. Whoever heard of a lawyer who reliably delivers answers and documents within two days? What a great USP (Unique Selling Proposition). He left the competition trailing in the dust. It certainly worked very well for him.

In some ways, it’s one of the easiest features that you can build into a product. Yet what an enormous benefit it will be to many customers. There are no worries that it may arrive late, when you buy from ABC Corp. All it takes is some planning and making sure that the resources are there to do the job on time. Most importantly the whole team must have the enthusiasm and commitment to deliver the product on or before the promised time.

So don’t just be on time to avoid being rude. Be on time because it’s one of the easiest ways of delivering an important benefit to your customers. If you do, they’ll probably tell their friends about it too. So it’s a win/win situation.

Related: Time Is Critical

Tags: time