!!!!! Squee !!!!!

After a solid six years working remotely out of four different home office locations, we now have a tidy and smart little office space to call home. It’s at:

305 Edison Way, Reno

It was a little rough around the edges before we arrived, but after painting, carpeting and trim work, it’s looking pretty snazzy.

Outside…

Inside…Erin’s office. Note the freight truck passing.

The Conference Room. Thank you to Cartbarn, for the loan of some very comfortable chairs.

Besides giving you some pictures, and an invitation to come by for a tour and cup of coffee at any point, we have a few things we really love about this place, and some important reasons this location suits us, and by extension our clients, so well.

First, we are within shouting distance to the coolest golf-cart and golf-cart accessories establishment on the West Coast – The Cartbarn! In fact, we’re in the upper floor of their office/warehouse. How’s that for local, family businesses supporting each other? It can be said we do love the folks we are so fortunate to work with.

Second, and really most importantly, we are in the heart of Reno’s long-established infastructure, manufacturing, and logistics core. Our immediate neighbors are NV Energy, Reno Fire Department, Washoe County School District, Truckee Meadows Community College. We’re within walking distance of multiple distribution centers, technology manufacturers, and the Reno Tahoe International Airport runway.

Not only are these companies our client base, they are a great metaphor for what Trinity Applied Internet does differently than shiny agencies in high-rise buildings. Now we love shiny agencies as much as the next guy, they rock, but when they need the custom platform, backbone, and a solid foundation, they come to us. We code the grid, as it were, and just we’re as proud of our working-class systems integration and rapid prototyping work, as we are of our best marketing website.

So, come on down and take a peek! We’re excited to share the GIANT freight trucks rolling by outside our picture windows, the totally awesome late sixties/early seventies architecture of our space, and the energy and zen of getting significant work done.

And now, back to regularly scheduled programming…in weeks to come we have Google mixing it all up again, some new staff introductions, and some educational thoughts on native vs. app-based mobile development.

Time to toot our own horn, again! We are excited to announce we’ve finished another version of Server Technology’s custom-built Ruby on Rails content management system, complete with a sharp and professional front-end redesign. The new website features a Product Selector application designed for sales, a simple but powerful back-end admin area designed for marketing, and a comprehensive products database that stores everything from datasheets to engineering schematics, designed for a global manufacturer on the forefront of their industry. Trinity Applied Internet has been Server Technology’s applications solutions provider going on five years now, and we are proud to say their website’s next generation is built to last for many more.

In other news, we have moved into our new space and have some other interesting changes on the horizon, so stay tuned in the next week or two for more on that!

By 2011, with the adoption of content management systems, blogging for business, and social media, some websites are re-written almost daily.  A company may have a core group of followers that are listening in for wisdom, tips, and the next good deal, or they may constantly be testing and re-purposing content in order to continue attracting a stream of new customers — or both.  Now, especially in certain industries, if you are not continually adding new information you will be at a real disadvantage in both naturalized search and keeping your audience engaged.

Let’s say you have assigned your resources and planned accordingly. Your new website, with a couple solid pages, has launched to rave reviews. You have a blog ready to be filled up, and social media set up to push your blog content to. What now? How, exactly, do you come up with valuable content that will support all the work you have already invested in this marketing effort?

The Content Crunch Part B, Step 1:  Start Simple

First, just … start. My completely non-studied or academically supported opinion is that writing great content is about 60% getting past the point of procrastination. Take twenty minutes, write a few words down about what you know (your product is a great place to start.) Keep in mind that depending on your site design, three paragraphs and 400 words are usually more than enough for a page. Leave it for a day, then go back and edit it, and – do not be afraid to post it! Hit publish on that blog! Update that page!

You can (and will) always get better, later.

The flip side of this is, if you are a prolific and careful writer, you will need to pare down what you’ve got. Pretend you are summarizing your 15 page article into a three paragraph abstract. That’s all you need (for now, and possibly forever.)

The Content Crunch Part B, Step 2: Work Ahead

Web content management systems offer a really neat feature: the ability to use the system not only to put the content up on the site, but to draft and review it. You can create a page or a post with not so much as a whim of an idea, leave it in your queue until you are inspired to expand and finish it, send it out to your team for review, and edit it comprehensively before it ever gets published to your website or blog.  Take advantage of this to leave yourself starters for later, when you don’t feel so full of ideas. Start a page on a new product or service and keep adding to it as you get more information, so that by the time you know what you’ve got, you are mere moments away from publishing it.

This is especially essential when a team of people is responsible for updating your content. Case in point: here at TAI we have four blog contributors, who are all busy people. By working ahead and having a number of fully finished or even partially drafted posts in the system, when one writer is delayed, another post can pop in and take its spot. It took us a long time to figure this out, but it works pretty well.

Next time: Step 3 and Step 4, and more ideas as to how to generate valuable content for your readers.

We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.

If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy.  The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos,  posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.

This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.

After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.

We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)

The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.

We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?

Despite their response making us a little giddy–

(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)

– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.

And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.