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Mobile + Tablet Device Test Kit
Have I mentioned my mother is an industrial seamstress? Let me tell you, it’s an awesome skill set to have in the family.
She just finished this bag for us to take our heap of mobile devices in to client meetings. Some highlights:
- Reenforced exterior protects all the cargo.
- Individual device sleeves in contrasting color.
- A sticker on the back of each device calling it out as a test device and a matching card in the device sleeve — that way everything gets back where it should go and we know what is out at a glance.
- Clear pockets lets you see each device.
- Each pouch comes out separately and then velcros to the spine like the pages to a book. This lets us change the configuration.
- Most of our devices are shown in this photo, there are two missing right now, but we have:
- iPad 1
- iPad 2
- iPad 3
- iPhone 3G
- iPhone 4
- iPhone 4S
- Galaxy Tab 10.1
- Acer Iconia A100
- Nexus One
- Droid X
- [we are looking for another Anroid mobile running Ice Cream Sandwich]
- There is a black bag without a window for all the various cords and cleaning cloths.
- We also made up and laminated a sheet we can walk through with clients to get them familiar with some device concepts at the beginning of a meeting. You can download it here.
All in all, it’s super awesome and we can’t wait to show it off this week. We are building more and more responsive sites and mobile apps — these are projects that work with the same base code across a myriad of devices—and this is a great way to review them with clients on various environments.
Thanks Mom!
Looking for another Android and/or iOS Developer (or two!)
Are you an iOS or Android developer (or both)? We are looking to bring on another subcontractor to help us with our mobile apps. We have projects you can start on immediately.
You need to be a great person who meets deadlines, is easy to get along with and writes superb code. We are designers and developers at heart that have the business side covered—we are ethical, pay on time, are efficient and passionate.
You can learn more about us at www.sawayaconsulting.com. If you like what you see shoot an email intro and include links to any apps you’ve worked on. Bonus points if you do this full time so we can meet during business hours. Extra bonus points if you are in Utah.
Revising a Small Business Social Media Strategy
We are at a point where our old social media strategy is no longer working for us.
Our Strategy from 2010 — Now
Let’s look at where the business was and what we were doing.
The business
We started in 2006, Steve joined full time in Fall 2008 and I followed in Spring 2009. We were just getting going and we made a detour. Fast forward to the end of 2010. We were exiting a startup partnership and woke up to very little work on and a scarce amount of money. The economy was in the tank, but we needed to drum up business.
We revised our website first and foremost. Your website is your home base for everything else. Then we put the following strategy into place.
- We have a twitter account for our business (click here to follow @sawayaconsult). We were posting a few times a day.
- We were reviewing everyone that followed us and following almost everyone back.
- We read all the tweets that came through.
- We performed a series of searches daily to find people that were looking for what we had to offer. We picked up a few great projects and met some new people this way.
- We have a Facebook page for our business (like us here).
- We didn’t post to it very often.
- We did hook up our blog to it.
- We posted some images from our portfolio to Facebook. This actually posed another problem I’ll talk about below.
Blog
- We were rocking the blog.
- We were posting series, we had a great posting schedule (series on Tuesdays, whatever on Fridays).
- We had some fantastic Google rankings because of it.
The Benchmark Right Now
- Our business is crazy awesome busy. We are building some really cool corporate tools, we’re doing a ton of web and mobile apps. We have another developer working here full time and are looking to round out with another Android developer and looking at bringing another designer in on several projects.
- We haven’t kept our portfolio up to date (see top bullet point). Posting portfolio images to Facebook was slowing us down — we were quadruple posting our work to our blog, our site, Behance and Facebook — each piece with it’s own resolution and support in graphics. Too daunting. Didn’t get finished.
- We haven’t kept up blogging, sort of due to time, sort of due to having no blog focus. Is our blog for clients? potential clients? other designers/developers? is anyone but Google listening? Does it matter if no one else is? Overwhelming questions when you’d rather be building a new interface for an awesome client project.
- We haven’t been blogging so our SEO has tanked. Hard core. But it’s hard to worry about the phone not ringing all the time when it IS RINGING ALL THE TIME. New people are still finding us — and our existing clients are doing more and more projects with us. And unlike so many service companies (looking at you telco and TV providers) our existing clients are more important than potential new clients. We give them the best and only take on more if there is anything left over.
- We haven’t even been reviewing new twitter followers, haven’t been reading tweets beyond the private list of “friends in RL”. We hardly tweet. Again, see top bullet — but also add in a sprinkling of overwhelming.
- Update our portfolio. Not only is it out of date, but it grew organically (like a weed) and looks bad. We are revising it, adding some sorting and moving our client list to a new page. That is about 80% complete.
- Clean up Twitter. See who is following us, see who we need to follow back. Organize some new lists and check those lists that are most interesting to us regularly. We can do this in Hootsuite. I will start working on that today.
- Either pick a blog focus or don’t pick a blog focus—but make that choice. I’m going to say that we aren’t going to focus on one audience. We are going to continue to post whatever is interesting to us, relevant to our business, and/or helpful for people (our how to articles that are unrelated to our business drive the most traffic, but zero conversions). Also, we need to accept that if we aren’t going to focus, we aren’t going to grow a huge audience and therefore not have huge blog numbers—but it all helps drive SEO. More water in the harbor, all the boats rise.
The new strategy for 2012
The business
As far as I can see, we’re going to be busy. We’re going to add capacity as we can and be grateful every day for what we have and where we’ve come from. We’re going to stay just hungry enough (like I could eat a string cheese, not like I’m starving and want to eat a horse) to make sure we stay on our game, and we keep making clients ecstatic.
- Organize into lists. I’ll have another blog post on this in the future.
- Interact with lists as appropriate.
- Check daily – tweet daily.
- The way our blog posts to Facebook looks overwhelming (text comes through in a big block). I’m either going to find a better plugin or hand manage this.
- Clean up our photo sections — but just repost from our website, no customization.
- Create a custom Page.
- Tie into Facebook-specific features. Run an ad, run a poll, maybe a contest. See what comes of it.
Blog
- Get back to posting, at least once a week. This needs to be a priority—prep the ground for gardening so it’s ready when you need it. If we make Thursday our goal posting day, and I make sure that I write on Friday or the weekend for the next week (for those times that I don’t have a bunch of them ready to go) then we should be good.
- Look at syndicating some articles if only to provide an extra focus/motivation.
I’ll report back after this has been underway for a while! Is it time to revamp your company’s social media strategy? What changes are you planning to make?
This work includes the photo “Ranger Rendezvous,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © The U.S. Army.
Sawaya Consulting Year End Review – 2011
I love the week between Christmas and New Years — I’ve always taken that time to look forward to a fresh start, make some goals and archive the past year. Here are some of the thoughts jumbling around right now:
- Archiving a year and archiving a job are totally different now than it was three or five years ago. Space on a computer is no longer an issue and at this point it’s safer to have files on my machine that backs up to a Time machine than to have CDs of work floating around.
- I don’t have personal resolutions this year—just trying to stay on the path of keeping up my yoga practice with Fluid Heart Yoga and our bi-weekly workout at Age Performance. Even though I have a flexible work schedule the time these things takes is difficult to find.
- I have a few goals for our business next year. Most notably we need to redo our online portfolio. It grew organically. Like a weed. And is overwhelming at this point. It doesn’t even include our latest projects. The other goal I have is to execute on the work we have scheduled for the next two months. The last few weeks of the year are always insanely busy for us as people wrap up budgets and plan for next year, and this year is no different. We have more business to do in the first two months of 2012 than we did in all of 2010.
- 2011 was a record year for us. We took on more clients and more projects than ever before (and even my legendary organizing and project management skills were taxed to the max and I spent several weeks reviewing schedules in my head instead of sleeping). I am happy to report that we delivered on all projects and continue to have happy clients and repeat business.
- For the first time we had clients cold call us. People found us online and asked us to bid on their projects. A few of them turned into really solid, awesome clients and we have some great things on tap with them next year.
- We were doing a few things with social media at the beginning of the year (I teach a workshop on Social Media), but as it became clear that was going to be the realm of marketers and PR people and we stopped focusing on it. I have a couple great recommendations if you are looking for this kind of work — and we can still help with a very basic strategy and implementation.
- As the rise of mobile design and development started to hit corporations we were involved in explaining this to several companies. We have a presentation you can see here. More and more we’re moving into mobile apps — we’ve always focused on information / design + technology and this is just a new way to serve it up. The thinking behind mobile apps came naturally to us — the tedious intricacies did not. Fortunately we were able to welcome Dave Morgan to help us with our native apps (iOS/Android).
- Steve and I spent the last few days buying a dishwasher and new disposal and washing the walls and ceilings. This is why adults become no fun to children. We spend our winter holidays doing these kinds of things.
Any minute now Steve, Dave and I are going to eat some waffles and plan our strategy for the next couple of months. I’m so fortunate to have such a great team, great clients and great business. It’s an exciting time in history to do what we are doing.
If you haven’t checked out our year-end holiday app, you can do so here.
This work includes the photo “Next Year I Will,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, ©Guerrilla Futures | Jason Teste.
Our Holiday Mobile App
This year we sent out a Holiday Mobile App instead of a printed card. It was a great way to have something we can show clients as we talk through building mobile apps and what you can do with an HTML5 app instead of a native iOS or Android App.
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Get the App now (please click link from your smartphone) |
