Return on Engagement Cover

I sent Return on Engagement off to Focal Press last Thursday just before 5:00 p.m. Final word count was 99,265 words, final image count was around 250, and there were dozens of sidebars, hundreds of quick tips, and seven case studies, including an entire chapter on Kurani Interactive’s awesome Book of Odds project. Topics range from using mRSS feeds to creating web video and semantic metadata. And just about everything in between. I have received positive feedback from the publisher so far regarding how well-organized the content is, which feels great, considering it took nearly a year to write.

Find out more info at:

Return on Engagement page on Mightybytes >>

Return on Engagement page on Amazon >>

We should have a Facebook page launched with a week or so as well.

Phew!

SEO For Success at Community Media Workshop was a full-house with participants ranging from large companies to small non-profits and back again. Community Media Workshop did a great write-up of the three hour seminar on their site and included a video interview with one of the participants.

Here’s what one of the participants had to say: “Tim Frick was a very good speaker. He knew his material and communicated it well and kept the group interested. Good use of examples and group involvement.”

Read the CMW Notes >>

Download the Presentation (16MB PDF) >>

Return on Engagement

What do you think? Focal requires a sub-title as well, so we have tentatively agreed to:

The Web Designer’s Field Guide to Digital Marketing

I’m a bit hesitant to restrict the book to only web designers because I think anyone who creates web content could benefit from it, but then again maybe I’m a bit biased.

Got any ideas? Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

Also, I’m on the hunt for good case study subjects! I’m particularly interested in people who have gotten some sort of tangible return on their social media or web content efforts. If you know anyone, please contact me. Thanks a gajillion.

Ratings from the 64 participants who attended this workshop:
“Tim had the highest ratings, across the board, when asked to rate Content, Presentation and Style.”

What the participants had to say about this workshop:
“Engaging powerpoint – easy to follow”
“We loved Tim’s knowledge of tools we can immediately use”
“Nice speaker presence!”
“It dealt with the subject in a very practical way that was understandable”
“Informative, engaging!”
“Tim did a great job!”
“Much better than ‘Cats’!”

(OK, just kidding on that last one.) If you would like a copy of the slide deck from this workshop, you can get it from the link below.

Download: Managing Your Online Presence: The Dynamic Content Approach (5 MB PDF File)

The panel, titled 30 Tips in 60 Minutes, will focus on tips regarding digital/online marketing tools and strategies that help to best enhance business. I have been asked to discuss blogging, social media and other techniques Mightybytes has used to increase site traffic, search engine results and business revenue. The panel will be moderated by my good pal Stacy Jones, Marketing Director at Shakespeare Squared and will also feature Patrick Riley, Director of Sales and Marketing for Rand McNally, Beau Clark, VP of Product Management for Follett Digital Resources, and Gladys Rosa-Mendoza, Information Architect at Rosa & Wesley, Inc.

The seminar is open to AEP members and non-members with a different pricing structure. Full details can be found on the AEP site.

The folks at Isle Royale National Park sure could use some lessons on effective pricing strategies. I took my mother to America’s least used national park as a belated birthday present recently and was flabbergasted not only by how overpriced our visit was but by how many hidden surprise fees popped up around every corner as well. Granted, I understand that a visit to any national park is going to be an exercise in financial indulgence. Tourists are captive audiences at these places and the national parks do a great job of exploiting that fact. However, is the constant need to shell out cash hand over fist (much to the detriment of your vacation experience) really providing good customer service that will result in repeat business? I think not.

The trip out to Isle Royale from Copper Harbor, Michigan is in itself no, ahem, walk in the park. It starts and ends with a three and a half hour boat ride that cost $392.00 for three of us. And though my mother is indeed quite spry for her age, I didn’t think that sleeping in a tent on the ground after a full day of hiking was really in her best interest, so I opted for a night in one of the island’s single-room housekeeping cabins, which set me back another $300.00. So before we even left for our overnight Isle Royale experience, I was down nearly $700.00.

The credit card was charged long before the trip started, but the nickel-and-diming began the second we stepped into the ferry office. At check-in we were informed that a “fuel surcharge” of $5.00 per passenger was due prior to departure. Once we were safely in the middle of the lake, the captain announced that each passenger would be charged a “user fee” of $4.00 per day while at the park and would we mind please paying said fee at the snack bar. After the line died down, they wasted no time announcing the names of those who were too lazy to hightail it to the snack bar and pay their fee.

And so it went. Outrageous meal pricing for mediocre food notwithstanding (I’ll get to that in a bit), it seemed that around every corner we were constantly greeted by park employees who shared the news of some sort of utility tax or registration fee for the food we wanted to eat, the activities we wanted to engage in, or the place we wanted to sleep. Each time this happened the little subliminal cash register in my head went cha-ching as the service fees mounted up. To the National Park Service’s credit, they did give us a half-day canoe rental as part of our lodging fee, though whether or not that made up for the fact that our cabin’s sheets came ‘pre-used’ is up for debate.

The final straw came when we decided to hike through the lunch hour, opting to forego another overpriced sit-down dining room meal for what we figured would be a much more cost-effective sack lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Once again we wore the silly tourist dunce caps when the woman at the register asked for sixty-seven dollars plus change for our three simple bag lunches. Yes, you read that right. Sixty-seven plus dollars for three PB&J sack lunches. Just let that sink in for a minute.

The look on my mother’s face was priceless. “I beg your pardon?” she asked with an obvious tone of incredulous disbelief.

“They’re the same price as our regular lunches,” Register Woman said in a heavy Texan drawl, shrugging her shoulders as though sticker-shocked customers were merely a regular, unfortunate annoyance of daily life at Isle Royale National Park.

Being the foolish, cornered tourists that we were, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of pristine northern woodlands at the ass-end of nowhere, we dutifully (but begrudgingly) paid for our lunches and grumbled to no end upon discovering that our PB&J’s were DIY sandwich kits with single-servings of disposable Smuckers packets. Of course after a two-mile hike and several miles of canoeing, they tasted as good as any four-star lunch ever could. But that’s beside the point.

When all was said and done an overnight trip to The Island for three people cost over a thousand dollars, not including tourist chotchkes like t-shirts and maps. Mom’s certainly worth it and sadly, I’m sure I’ve spent more on a single evening of revelry at some time in my life, but the money’s not really the point. The bitter aftertaste the entire experience left me with is. If you don’t leave your customers with a warm, fuzzy feeling once all is said and done, does it really matter how much your products or services cost?

At Mightybytes, our clients ask us for line-item ’smorgasbord’ pricing all the time. The key difference, however, is that those line items are meant to help clients understand up front the specifics of what they are paying for. Admittedly, additional charges are sometimes just unavoidable. Scope creep, unexpected expenses, software licensing fees, the list of things that can push a project over budget is a long one. But we strive to keep those unavoidable charges the exception rather than the rule. If we nickeled-and-dimed our clients the way Isle Royale did, I fully expect that Mightybytes would be out of business within six months. It’s a psychological difference in approaches, I guess, but one that has worked for us, so I’m sticking to it.

As an aside, I might add that our commute to the Isle Royale ferry from my house was a mere eight miles. If you are considering a visit, you should definitely tack on additional costs and travel time for getting to an Isle Royale ferry from wherever you are. Ferries leave from Houghton and Copper Harbor, Michigan as well as Grand Portage, Minnesota.

In this age of high gas prices and questionable economic times I really wonder at the efficacy of Isle Royale’s pricing structure. Certainly I’m not the only one who has exited the ferry after a trip there and felt, quite literally, taken for a ride. With a pricing track record like Isle Royale has, is it really any wonder that this getaway destination boasts the moniker of ‘least used national park’?