How To Enhance Your Design Studio’s Brand

There are certain businesses that, given the nature of the marketplace they are in, rely more on their branding than on others, and with furniture design studios being in a sector where image plays a huge role, branding is certain to be important. There are many ways to enhance your branding, and if you follow the advice of professional web designers at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au, digital marketing is one of the most effective.

Digital marketing is often associated more with online sales and promoting businesses online, and whilst they certainly are important goals of a digital marketing campaign they are not the only ones. In fact, if you consider that your brand influences potential clients offline, you will recognize that digital marketing can enhance your offline activities immensely. Here are 5 actions that will ensure your digital marketing promotes and augments your brand.

Be Proactive In Seeking Positive Reviews And Testimonials

The internet has changed the ways people buy products enormously. Now, potential customers carry out far more research online than ever before with regard to what they are buying, and crucially, on any company they are considering buying from. That means they look for reviews so one of your priorities to boost your brand and reputation must be to ask your satisfied clientele to post reviews and testimonials on your website and other websites.

5 Essential Website Functions That cPanel Enables You To Do

Across the huge array of different website hosting companies, you will find a variety of services and functions which are offered to clients. This will include the control panel that is used to manage the website and in the vast majority of cases that will be cPanel. Although not the only control that can be used to manage websites, it is the one that most website owners recognise and have experience of using.

One of the benefits of cPanel’s widespread use across most hosting companies is it means that should a website owner wish to switch hosting companies, or at least try a different one for a new website, there is not a huge learning curve with respect to managing that website. cPanel looks and operates pretty much the same on all hosting accounts, which means if you are happy with it on one web hosting service, your will be happy with it on any other that uses it.

Who Should I Invite to My Kindling Campaign?

Customers often ask about how large of an audience should they invite to a particular innovation challenge or topic. While there’s no right answer, there is an important consideration to think through when selecting an audience—how size impacts the potential for serendipity as well as the potential for noise for your participants:

Trade-off

As an example, picture your Kindling Campaign where you’re trying to solve a problem that’s been plaguing your business. As you increase the audience size, you increase the likelihood that people’s different perspectives will combine to help inform a potential solution (see this described by Rick Michelman in our Michelman customer video). This is represented by the serendipity axis, where a larger audience increases the opportunities for interactions and creative outcomes.

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A Simple Guide To Web Hosting For Beginners

For anyone starting out with their first website, one of the foundations which need to be in place for that website to exist, or more accurately for anyone to be able to visit that website, is a website hosting service. If this is the first time you have planned to launch a website, the functions and jargon that applies to web hosting might not all be clear, and thus we thought it would be useful if we offered some basic guidelines for beginners.

We must make clear that what you are about to read is as generic as we could make it so the information should apply to most of the web hosting services you might be considering. For details on the specific hosting services any provider offers, you will need to speak to them directly, especially if they have various plans available which offer different options.

Marketing by Making Decisions

We spend a lot of time working with our Kindling customers to help them build sustainable innovation programs. And no matter how creative or how forward-thinking the organizations we work with prove to be, time and time again we see that the single biggest predictor of success is management’s active commitment to the program.

Active commitment can be best demonstrated by actively making decisions around participants’ contributions. And we’ve found that by communicating these decisions is the best marketing for the program itself.

Show and Tell
We always emphasize that an internal marketing effort can make a huge difference for the program. On a basic level, this means selecting a name for the program, establishing a visual language, creating posters and other giveaways, and offering encouragement and rewards. The goal for this generalized marketing of the innovation program is to make sure that the participants, who are invariably super-busy, know that the program exists and what the goals and expectations are for participating. We think of this as the broadcasting of a mass message, or as general advertising for your program.

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Drive Your Social Media Content with Kindling

At Kindling we use the Kindling application to discuss and evaluate potential product features, to address engineering issues, to develop strategic goals,—we’ve even opened up a Category to our customers so that they can contribute their ideas to the development of the Kindling application. Nice. And we use Kindling to cultivate our brand and develop marketing ideas, including social media content.

Every organization can use Kindling to develop a workflow of ideas for social media which the entire company can participate in. This is how we did it.

Beginning earlier this year one of our key efforts in marketing has been to systematically generate meaningful content that could be useful to people concerned with innovation and tasked with running an innovation program, for which our software is elegantly useful. In this interest I wanted to simplify and make our Twitter content more coherent while providing clear channels for our people to contribute to. I identified 3 hashtags (for these channels) for us to use:

#kindlingapp, about the company and product, including writings about Kindling in relation to innovation best practices;
#kindlingtips, for tips on how to use Kindling, especially in relation to an innovation program, culled from Kindling Academy and our Best Practices guides;
and #kindlingreads.

A Brand New Kindling for Decision-makers

Our mission is to make software that people enjoy using. Historically, we’ve focused much of our energies on the participant of Kindling, making it fun and easy—no training required easy—to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas. This emphasis has been very much by design, as the more powerful and complex features useful for evaluating large quantities of ideas are only useful if you first have a large quantity of ideas. And you’ll only ever have a large quantity of ideas to deal with if your community is actively engaged.

(Our approach stands in contrast to our competitors, who have chosen to build advanced features with the associated complexity for evaluating large quantities of ideas, and now are trying to backfill simplicity and usability into their applications. This is a difficult, if not impossible, knot to untie.)

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Heartbleed

On Monday, April 7th, a major bug in the popular SSL library OpenSSL was announced, generally known as Heartbleed. The vulnerability, in a nutshell:

Without using any privileged information, authentication codes or credentials we were able to steal the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication.

Kindling uses OpenSSL on our servers for HTTPS connections, and as soon as the vulnerability was announced we began working to mitigate our exposure by upgrading our versions of the affected libraries and invalidating any secure keys that might have been leaked. Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services, also quickly moved to prevent exploitation of the vulnerability within their infrastructure.

Some Tips on Innovating with Kindling

Companies often come to us looking to solve a particular challenge in their organization or for help with their innovation program as a whole. We enjoy working with them, and they find that Kindling provides a structured approach toward innovation and problem solving, while integrating throughout their organization, increasing communication, and reducing organizational barriers. We’d like to offer some ways in which Kindling can help with innovation in your organization.

1. Find out what your company can be doing better

Ask your employees where they see room to improve. What are the biggest inefficiencies in your company? Where is there room to cut costs? Everyone in your organization has ideas—listen to them.

2. Organize conversations around ideas

Eliminate the email CC problem. Not on an email chain? Getting too many emails? Include all participants from the beginning and reduce the risk of missing someone who might have shared a game changing idea.

Eat, Work, Enjoy

Seeking balance between work and life is so often on people’s minds. More enjoyable work could tip the balance a little towards more life.

Some principles to live by:

  1. Eat good things.
  2. Work at what you love.
  3. Join the conversation, communicate well.
  4. Don’t go to bed with ideas buzzing around your head—share them.
  5. Find inspiration.
  6. Make your voice heard.
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