MINDSCAPE

Being a part of this industry sometimes taints our team members’ perspectives of how others view our work. Like, doesn’t everyone understand why creating compelling content is so important? Or why managing your online presence by offering something of value to your stakeholders will make a difference for your organization? The answer is no. Which leads to opportunities for us to often begin a relationship with the process of educating. Just read some of the other posts from my team members, Rebecca Dutcher and Erin Jones. They begin relationships with our new clients, by sharing solutions we can provide. Sometime solutions for problems our clients don’t recognize exist. So, what does this have to do with my topic of blogging? Well, it’s really the same concept. Managing your personal presence online can make a difference for you – personally and professionally. And doing this by creating content (words or images) that is insightful, can help others.more

My dog loves to run with me. The minute I put on my running shoes, he heads to the bathroom where he knows I keep his leash. I don’t even think I love running that much. So, why is it that dogs love to go for a W-A-L-K? And why do young children just naturally want to run, skip, or hop. You hardly ever see a child under five that is just walking, unless being aided by the hand of an adult. Well, I can’t answer those questions, without looking more indepthly at the sociology of our society. What I can do is probe for ways to encourage myself and others to want to run out the door and face what’s next. The phrase above my kitchen door reads “carpe diem.” I don’t honestly feel like seizing the day, everyday. But, most days I do. I’m generally energized to take on the challenges of the day whether it involves work, teaching, running kids around or something just about me.more

Relationships change all of the time. Some are more lasting than others, depending on the circumstances. And today with technology tools like Facebook it’s much easier to continue relationships that might have otherwise ended. In another post, I talk about how we need to spend as much effort on our internal customer relationships as our external ones. But, what happens when that internal customer is no longer “internal” to our business? Natural evolution. People leave companies and move on to new opportunities. And organizations ask people to leave when their skills or performance no longer fit or there are financial constraints. The majority of us have experienced this, except for the few brave souls who have always been entrepreneurs or have only had one employer.more

Can you do without thinking first? Can you think without having done before? I’m not trying to begin a philosophical read here, but rather trying to share the context of a few conversations I’ve had in the last couple of weeks. Let’s recognize that we all need to be thinking all of the time, or life just doesn’t work. Some people just seem to be more purposeful about it. Not that all thinking should be purposeful, some of it should involve building dreams and seeking out possibilities. People who have the ability to create these types of visions within organizations are often called leaders. But, leaders don’t exist in specific positions, they’re among us at all levels of an organization. These individuals may have started out as the kids who always asked “why” and just never stopped. They are the Contributing Team Members (CTM’s) who always have a new inspiration to do something radical or make a minor change that improves a process or final result. These people have mastered the idea of “what ifs…”, but may have a more difficult time in carrying out these ideas.more

It’s the time of year when we’re feeling generous. We’re in the mood to spend money on others, even people we don’t know.more

Why Franchise’s Should have a Network of Websites Franchise businesses have a unique opportunity to leverage the power of online marketing (SEO) at both the franchisor and franchisee level. As search results become more localized and focused on the searcher, branching out into a network of websites can open up exceptional results from search and brand recognition. Often the corporate franchise website will represent the entire entity as well as a page or two for each location. All of the information visitors find in search will be from the corporate prospective and lead them to a location page where the visitor can find a little bit about the franchise in their area. Search engines see this as only one website. A network of franchise websites, meaning each location has its own website, will deliver more opportunity to be found in search. Local websites will also allow each franchisee to tell their story, share local images, testimonials and more information geared for their area than could ever be included on a single corporate site.more

I recently met with a B2B firm who is hoping to dramatically grow sales as quickly as possible. Their dilemma is how to make this happen with the most return on their investment. They feel that hiring an outside salesperson to pound the pavement and the phones is the surest way. Sooner or later, someone is bound to be in the market for what they’re selling and they’ll be in the right place at the right time to make a sale. It could take 10 cold calls to get a meeting or it could take 50. Once they get a meeting, how much time will it take to convince the prospect that they need the service? And then, that they’re the best company to offer it?more

One of PHP's strengths that I like the most is its versatility as a prototyping language. While the venerable MVC and friends are important in a large project with a lifespan measured in years, sometimes you just need to jot up a quick utility script or internal tool. In these cases, PHP's global context and loose typing really shine as you can mash everything into one sloppy file to start with, then gradually refactor logic out into functions and includes. That said, I've never liked mixing languages in the same file. scans pretty easily, but any more complicated than that and it gets pretty unreadable pretty quickly. It can also do a real number on syntax highlighters, which makes debugging a painful process. For generating well-formed XML of any dialect, you can't get much more thorough than PHP's built-in DOM implementation but there's nothing concise about it, and I'm trying to be fast, here.more

I received a cryptic message from Eric Patterson, one of our Software Engineers today. He pointed me to a javascript error report that he noticed while trolling through them and eating lunch.more

You’ve probably heard this phrase before…people leave managers, not companies. Let’s explore this idea a bit. I can find all kinds of surveys that ask people why they quit their jobs. And I can find a variety of answers that give further insight. There are differences of course, just like there are differences in people. One thing stands out, however, and that is the health of the relationship between a Contributing Team Member (CTM) and his/her manager relates directly to overall satisfaction with a company. Why is this relationship so critical? Because for the most part, your manager is the daily “face” or “voice” of your employment brand (I’ve talked about this concept in a previous post). Your organization doesn’t greet you in the morning, provide you with challenging work or give you feedback on your performance. But, your manager does. And how this person handles those roles and communication opportunities is how you largely measure your satisfaction with your organization.more

I respect people who work with their hands. I have some small idea about what it takes to change my car’s oil, or put in a new pond in the back yard. But I don’t know what it takes to rebuild a car’s engine or design the landscape for a new shopping complex. I have some small idea what it takes to put a laminate floor in a living room, but no real idea of what it takes to organize multiple companies to complete the renovation of an old theatre. I don’t have any desire to muddle around in those sorts of professions. It seems difficult and time consuming to me and I acknowledge that much of my perceived difficulty lies in my lack of knowledge for that industry. I’m alright with that, because I work in an industry that people have an idea about, but may not know all that goes into building a full project. Computer programming, and the web specifically, is my industry. And like me and changing my car’s oil, you know how to open a browser and navigate to your favorite website. But do you know what it takes to build that website? Well, that’s quite a large question, and involves gathering technical requirements, architecting the data structures, designing the look and feel of the site, programming the site, testing, deployment, scope changes, and analyzing the data once the site is live.more

Big brands and little brands work really hard clarify their message; what makes them different or better than the others. They spend hours identifying how they want to be perceived in the market, who they want to emulate or personify as a brand. What brands stand out in your mind? What thoughts come to mind when you hear Ford, Chevy, Starbucks, BP? Think about those brands for a minute. Now, what’s your personal brand? Who are you? What do you stand for?more

This post was originally published on creativewebbusiness.com. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle lately in the Facebook marketing community regarding the changes the platform has been making to its newsfeed algorithms. Late in September, business pages began to notice engagement rates with their posts dropping through the floor. The reason is that REACH - the number of people seeing the company's posts - has plummeted as a direct result of Facebook's latest newsfeed algorithm changes. This has been going on slowly for many months, but this month it reached a head. Facebook's official statement regarding the algorithm changes is as follows: "We're continuing to optimize News Feed to show the posts that people are most likely to engage with, ensuring they see the most interesting stories. This aligns with our vision that all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family." Huh. So that's how they're going to play it.more

Let's face it, SEO (search engine optimization), or SEM (search engine marketing), can be elusive terminology. What is it? What does it mean? Who can do it? How hard is it to learn? Can I do it myself? In an age where information is just a Google search away, we can learn about anything, anytime, from nearly anywhere. SEO/SEM is no different - anyone can learn how to do it, much like you can learn how to do lots of new things by researching online. You can learn how to repair a clothes dryer, install a door, build a website and much, much more. Not that you’d want to take those things on yourself. But, how does the quality of the work compare with professionals? The role of an SEO "professional" changes constantly. While your company may be interested in SEO for your website, you're really interested in online success. Marketing the site, or optimizing it for the search engines, includes a lot of different elements like content, page structure, inbound links, social media connections and much more. Search engine algorithms have nearly or over 200 different elements.more

How would we recognize your confidence in the workplace? This is one of my favorite interview questions and I have to say, one that is memorable to most people. I can remember the first interview I performed. Not as a job seeker, but as a company representative. My manager was supposed to be the interviewer, but something came up last minute that pulled him into another activity. So, he asked me to fill in. I was nervous! And it did not go very well. I wasn’t sure how or what to ask, and I think I resorted to pretty typical interview questions with very little insight about the person as a result. Now, I can say I have interviewed hundreds of people for a wide variety of roles in several different industries. And I love it…it is the best part of my job!more

Hi, my name is Marjorie. I'm a relatively new addition to the Mindscape team - I accepted a position here in June (although I've been working with Mindscape as a contractor for close to a year). My background in creative writing, search engine optimization (SEO) and both B2B and B2C marketing have given me a unique skill set which I'm excited to add to Mindscape's arsenal: digital copywriting. So let's talk about digital content, for a minute.more

The world just came crashing down. It doesn’t matter if it’s a server crash, a client sent out 100,000 emails for a website that is not finished, or if management decided it had to have the new features done by Saturday. The final result is the end of the world. Project Managers are running and yelling, engineers are seething and reaching for a bottle (of antacid) and everyone on the team is getting a phone call or a talking to in order to make sure it GETS DONE NOW. Emergencies happen all of the time, and though you can see them building sometimes, you rarely know when the storm is going to hit. When the storm does hit, it’s the people that will do the work that get hit the hardest. They have to cancel plans, stay at the office late hours, and work until its done.more

I have the opportunity to work with a really amazing team within Mindscape. Our team focuses on helping our clients use the power of the web to further their businesses. A part of this is online branding, making sure the content present in the digital realms drives customers to the right places. In the world of HR and Contributing Team Members (CTM’s), we can take this same basic concept and apply it differently. I’m talking about employment branding. There are two perspectives to employment branding: how current CTM’s view/value what their employer provides them and how prospective CTM’s view/value the possibilities of working for an employer. Both of them play a significant role in the ability of employers to first attract and recruit great team members and secondly to create an environment that retains and keeps the team members motivated to be great.more

How are you measuring against your goals for 2012? We’re all in this together. Time goes by faster and faster, everyone is “busy.” Like many professionals and businesses, we took time in late 2011 and earlier this year to identify our goals for 2012. As we begin the planning process for next year, it is a good time to look back on those objectives and see how we’re doing. Why? Well, looking back at what you set out to do can be energizing as we head into the home stretch of the year. Remember all the planning, conversations and excitement when you set those goals? Rekindle that excitement and go for it. You still have over three months left in the year.more

Database seems to be one of those magical words that everyone can use and understand the main concept. “It’s where my stuff is stored,” is the most basic definition of a database, and most people don’t look too far beyond that. But, for those of you that are curious, here is a basic overview of how a Database works: First, let’s break down the hierarchy for a database. A database server contains many (dozens, hundreds, thousands) databases. A database contains many tables. Each table can consist of a few or lots of columns. Rows populate a database, giving a value to each column in the respective table. This is really much simpler than it sounds. Essentially, each table in a database is just a large Excel-like spreadsheet. Here is a visual representation to help you out: http://screencast.com/t/3yKOrVn0lmore