What is the rule on branding when it comes to clothing?

September 25th, 2009

This is one of those questions that seems minor to me, put as it turns out is a big deal to some of our team members, so want to get a professional opinion.

Scenario:  We have some logoed shirts. We have a new shirt order being made by various people within the firm. The shirts are in good taste, look professional, etc. All will have our logo. Controversy – all sorts of styles (all professional) and colors are being requested – a navy polo, a white long sleeve, a pink whatever. So, what is appropriate?

  • a) Company apparel with uniform colors (ie, company colors); various styles ok, but uniform colors?
  • b) Company apparel on whatever colors (they will match of course); various styles ok?
  • c) Something else? Sorry to bother you with this, but I need some support to back up my decision, whichever way it may be.

    • - CPA Partner 

    This is one that you may not like my answer, but it’s what I’ve seen time and time again, and my personal management style matches up to this, so here goes. This is classic employee relations FIRST, brand second. What you’re discussing, like you mentioned, is minor. It’s not making or breaking your company. Losing an employee or keeping one happy, is far more important than if someone wants a pink shirt with a white logo.

    So let them get what they want. Let pink go on pink, let white go on pink, let anything go that stays under a professional looking umbrella. Color, in this instance, is just not as important.

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    Is it bad to reuse blog posts?

    August 31st, 2009

    Someone told me it isn’t good to re-use a blog post.  Is this true and if so, why?
    - process guru

    The answer to this depends entirely on how you are planning to re-use your blog post. 

    At Silver Square we are big believers in the idea of repurposing your content. If youv’e gone through the trouble to research, create, and put some polish on something valuable there’s no reason to use it once and then forget about it. The key is to find other channels where you can share this information.

    So suppose you give a speech to you local chamber of commerce about what the next 6 months are going to look like in your industry. The speech is well received and everyone thanks you for your time. Are you done? No way. Take the notes from your speech and turn them into a blog post. Write an article for your newsletter. Shoot a simple video where you cover the key points from the speech and put it up on YouTube.

    In each case, you’ll need to tweak the message a little to fit your audience in each of those venues.

    Now back to the idea of re-using blog posts. Some unsavory characters have attempted to get rich on the web by scraping the content off of other sites and publishing it on their own. Google and other search engines don’t want to respond to search queries with a long list of the exact same article on ten different sites. So they have complicated algorithms that attempt to determine which site is the authoritative source of the content. That’s the one that shows up in search results.

    The other sites don’t appear. If this kind of things happens on enough of their pages, they start looking really suspect in the eyes of the search engines. (You probably don’t want your site to look fishy to Google.) This phenomenon is known in the search industry as penalizing duplicate content.

    If you want your post to appear in two different blogs, I would advise rewriting it. You can use the same ideas, but don’t copy and paste the post word for word.

    Sound too difficult? Well, the two blogs probably have a slightly different audience or tone even if they cover similar topics. Think about how you need to present your ideas differently to that audience, and the minor rewrite will come easily.

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    How many people are following my blog with RSS?

    August 25th, 2009

    How do you know how many people selected to RSS your blog?  Is there a way for me to track that?
    - process guru

    If you’re not familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it’s a way of letting your readers subscribe to your blog. Rather than constantly checking your blog’s website to see if any posts have been added, they will be notified when there’s new content. Although the technology works very differently, it feels a lot like your favorite sites send you an email when they have something new. RSS feeds are included by default in every major blogging solution.

    You can actually see how much activity your RSS feed is getting in your standard web traffic statistics. As far as your web servers logs are concerned, accessing the RSS feed is the same as accessing any other page on your website. The activity level shown there is misleading, though. 

    When I subscribe to your RSS feed, I’m actually telling a piece of software to regularly check the site for me. So if my software is checking your website for new content every hour, that will show up as 24 hits in your server log even though I’m just one subscriber. Someone else may set their software to check for updates every 30 minutes. That person will contribute 48 hits in your server log. 

    You can filter the results by unique visitors if your site analytics package allows that, but even those results may underestimate or (more likely) overestimate your actual number of subscribers. And that’s all assuming you’re someone who regularly gets into your website statistics, and very few people are. So what’s the solution?

    While there is no 100% accurate method for tracking your subscribers that we know of, a good option is to filter your feed through FeedBurner. This service is owned by Google, is free to use, and is a good idea for anyone who’s serious about blogging. Rather than having your subscribers access your RSS feed directly off your web server they access FeedBurner, and FeedBurner communicates with your web server. The reward for this extra step is you get to take advantage of all the cool features of FeedBurner without needing to hire someone to build them specifically for your RSS feed.

    Using FeedBurner has more advantages than we’ll get into here, but one of them is a reasonable estimate on the number of subscribers you have. While even this number isn’t completely accurate, it’s still useful. If you see your subscriber count according to FeedBurner doubles from one month to the next, it’s reasonable to assume that your real number of subscribers approximately doubled, too.

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