James Wynne is Director of User Experience for Sandstorm and has been in digital product development since 1996. He has worked as a UX designer for a myriad of clients including large eCommerce brands, mobile device manufacturers and integrated marketing agencies.
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Our social media strategists develop overarching strategy recommendations, content strategy suggestions, content calendars, follower strategies for re-sharing content, response strategies, and sharing opportunities to capitalize on current news and events. We are always at-the-ready to investigate your audiences, uncover what they like, and the way they behave in order to multiply the impact of your social media marketing efforts. We've achieved significant results with B2B social media marketing.
Here's an example for a B2B technology SAAS client:
One of our B2B tech clients reached over 50,000 people in 24 hours because of a pair of strategically placed socks! A consumer packaged goods B2C client went viral and went from <100 - 23,000 Facebook fans and 32,000 contacts in their database in 4 weeks. All from identifying and building relationships with those influential content producers who make other word-of-mouth marketers drool. View more of our work.
Using proprietary tools that allow us to learn as much as we can about what is being said about your brand, we can swiftly and efficiently determine the strongest social media marketing strategy and messaging campaign to inject your ideas or angles into the conversation in order to generate more social media engagement, improve search engine optimization, integrate with your web design strategy, and amplify your brand experience.
This blog was posted by Sandy on August 26.
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In 2017, people are more engaged with video than ever before. Content might be king, but video is the king’s hand.
Visual Content Is Up
You want someone to read your tweets? Include a visual.
Across the board, posts that have images or video just perform better. It’s why Twitter and Facebook not only let you add an image, they often auto populate the main image from your shared article into the post.
And users can’t get enough. According to Hubspot, 43% of users want more video, and marketers say it has the best ROI.
Businesses Are Catching On
According to Vidyard, 85% of businesses have staff and resources for producing video. And those videos serve a wide range of industries and purposes. Technology and manufacturing companies produce the most videos, which makes sense considering that most videos are demos, tutorials, and testimonials.
At Sandstorm®, our creative team has experience in video creation, and we’ve created video for several of our clients.
Keep It Short and Sweet
Attention spans aren’t getting any longer—at least according to a study from Microsoft that says our attention spans are shorter than a goldfish—so there’s no need to make lengthy videos. Most videos should be less than 3 minutes—with the exception of product demos, which can be longer. Nobody’s cozying up with popcorn to watch your video; they want to see it and move on to the next.
Could a video be right for your company? It all depends on your brand and your audience, but video can be a simple way to easily and quickly introduce your company, products, services, or even highlight your culture. Let us help you tell your brand story through video.
This blog was posted by Jason on August 25, 2017.
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Stronger member engagement. Increased traffic. Connecting with Millennials.
If I just listed everything on your association’s wish list, then gamification has a lot to offer you.
Gamification is all about motivation. It plays on people’s competitive nature and love of recognition to encourage them to accomplish goals. And gamification works wonders. Studies show that gamification can lead to a 150% boost in engagement, which is why more than 70% of the Global 2000 according to badgeville.com have at least one gamified app.
How can you start taking advantage of gamification’s benefits? We’ve created a quick walkthrough to help you power up member engagement.
1. Add a profile progress bar.
Users want goals and they want to feel like they’ve accomplished something. More than 75% responded to a survey saying that they want an indication of progress.
LinkedIn has mastered this technique to get members to build out their profiles: rewards for completing a profile, clues that offer direction, and tapping into users’ competitive nature to see who is looking at their profile.
2. Include provocative language in the profile form.
Asana challenged its users by asking them to describe themselves in seven words. When they made that switch, their response rate increased 98%. With just a simple form change, you can get your members to be more engaged right from the start.
3. Use points to incentivize members to come back.
Learning a new language can seem daunting, unless you use Duolingo. The popular language education app grew to 110 million users in just three years, and it keeps those members coming back by giving them experience points for each completed task.
4. Award badges for participation.
It can be difficult to get off the couch, but Fitbit encourages users to push harder by awarding badges for milestones. And the awards aren’t just for running a marathon, they start with tasks that the user can actually achieve and build from there.
At Sandstorm®, we can design new and exciting ways to engage your members through gamification.
Watch the video below for more ideas, or contact us to talk about what we can do for you.
This blog was posted by Janna on August 10, 2017.
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Sometimes it feels like there are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. Until we give back.
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School recently conducted a study that says, “Giving your time to others can make you feel more ‘time affluent’ and less time-constrained than spending your time otherwise.”
In a rapidly moving, technology-driven, deadline-oriented work environment, it’s easy to feel time deficient. Think about it: Not only do we find ourselves heads down in our day-to-day work, we seldom make time to relish our colleagues and get to know them on a deeper, personal level outside the office.
Cue the volunteer work. Over the past 2 summers, Sandstorm® has been supporting Ravenswood Community Services (RCS) by volunteering at their pantry and distributing food to over 250 families on the north side of Chicago. But the reality is that this opportunity provides us with a much-needed pause and sense of awareness—while giving us a chance to accomplish our mission of doing good work for good people.
The same Wharton School research shows that thinking about the present moment, instead of the future, can make you feel less hurried or rushed because it slows the perceived passage of time. During our volunteer windows, not only are we focused on our tasks and ensuring that the local residents are being assisted properly, we also find ourselves in a relaxed yet spirited environment. In other words, we’re living in the moment.
Through these volunteer experiences, it’s not surprising that the time to bond and serve others has other advantages. According to the Huffington Post, volunteering through the workplace can actually boost employees’ productivity, pride, gratitude, and ethics.
So the next time you or your team get caught up in a hectic work week, live in the moment, polish your sense of purpose, and positively impact others around you by volunteering. You’ll feel like a million bucks.
This blog was posted by Alicia on July 20, 2017.
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After a three-year hiatus, the Guac Off has finally, and gloriously, returned to Sandstorm®!
We were a much smaller company when the Guac Off was created; we held the first one at my house on a Saturday and everyone attended with their families. As Sandstorm grew bigger and bigger, it became harder to find a day and time when everyone could attend. Eventually, the event dropped off the calendar, but it was never forgotten.
I really wanted to bring back this fun event, but knew that we had to change it up to make it happen. Every month we have a “You Rock” meeting where the whole company gathers to celebrate our awesomeness, have lunch together, and talk about our growth. Usually we have pizza, but this time we had Chipotle and all of our secret guacamole recipes.
Ten Sandstormers brought their guacamole to the table. Many were delicious, and a few boozy options raised some eyebrows, but in the end, there was one clear winner. Congratulations to Megan Culligan, who was crowned our new “el Champion” on Tuesday! She won in a landslide with her very tasty mango guacamole.
In true Sandstorm fashion, we’ve posted pictures and a quick victory speech from our champion on our Facebook page.
The revival of the Guac Off proves that it’s never too late to come back to a good idea and refresh it. If you need help bringing your ideas back to glory, let us know.
This blog was posted by Alma on July 13, 2017.
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Personalization is the best way to engage your users in a conversation, and it’s increasingly something that they expect from your website. Almost 75% of users prefer to do business with organizations that use personalization to make their experience more relevant; the same percentage of users get frustrated with websites when content has nothing to do with their interests.
I recently partnered with .orgCommunity to help associations better understand how to leverage website personalization. In the webinar Spectrum of Personalization, you’ll see 5 examples of personalization in action, from simple to complex, and take away some tips to help you get started today.
Get inspired! Watch our webinar below.
This blog was posted by Sandy on July 6.
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Understand critical factors, trends and relationships affecting your business and how to effectively pivot in order to achieve your business goals. Using your business goals, target metrics, and other drivers defined in our marketing workshop, we determine the appropriate analysis to help you understand what is happening with your business.
For example: Is there a seasonality to purchasing certain products? Is geography related to purchases? Do generational cohorts (e.g., millennials, Gen Xers, etc.) affect my business? Why is this happening? What is the relationship of X & Y? Does X cause Y?
We can help you understand the data available, plan for the analysis and conduct the analysis to help you answer key business questions.
Through statistical analysis and a personalization strategy, we can help connect you with the right audience by delivering the right message through the right channel on the right device at the right time, by offering a customized user experience based on demographics, geography, behavior, context, and other knowledge of the consumer. This ties your business goals and positioning to your online experience, with a roadmap around analytics, optimization, and personalization to maximize conversion rates.
This blog was posted by Nick on July 5.
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I just got back from a fun conversation with Kristi Ross and Tony Battista at Tastytrade for their show Bootstrapping in America. It was an honor to be asked to share my experience as an entrepreneur with a CEO I admire.
And it’s that passion for new ideas and perspectives that’s helped us find inspiration in the unexpected for our clients. Just one example that came to mind during my talk with Kristi and Tony was how we found inspiration for a community bank in 1871, the Chicago incubator.
Hear more about Sandstorm’s beginnings, how our culture helped differentiate us, and how we differentiate our clients. Check out our episode of Bootstrapping in America.
This blog was posted by Sandy on June 29, 2017.
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At Sandstorm®, we thrive on designing and developing exciting new websites. But we also know how important a great event can be. That’s why we couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity in creating a site for ACG.
The Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) is the global community for business leaders focused on driving middle market growth through mergers and acquisitions. As a chapter-led organization, ACG is heavily focused on events, holding over 1,200 around the world each year for industry professionals and the association’s 14,500 members to network.
In order to drive their own growth, ACG turned to us to design and develop a website platform that provided individual sites for the global organization as well as its 58 chapters. Each site not only needed to be mobile friendly and visually appealing, it needed to be user friendly and easy to manage for each chapter, an objective we were able to achieve as a result of several efforts:
- Attending ACG’s annual event and conducting stakeholder interviews to hear directly from leaders and members what they needed from the new website
- By integrating the Drupal 8 content management system (CMS) with the netFORUM association management system (AMS)
- Conducting a usability study on the new design to ensure it was intuitive and easy to use
- Building a collaborative space for chapters and committees to digitally communicate and share essential documentation
We’re honored to help ACG continue driving middle market growth around the world. Check out the new ACG website for yourself.
This blog was posted by Emily Kodner on June 20, 2017.
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I wrote my first song at the age of two; it was called “I Can Do It By Myself.” Unfortunately, that became my mantra for longer than I’d like to admit, and it wasn’t until my twenties that I discovered the profound impact mentoring could have in my career and personal life. Since then, I’ve been incredibly lucky to meet men and women with the passion to guide me through my exploration of the world. And I’m especially grateful to work alongside so many of them every day.
Mentorship is an essential part of our culture at Sandstorm®. As our founder and CEO Sandy Marsico recently shared with ABC News, having a great mentor was essential to her success, which is why learning and sharing is one of our three core values. Our amazing directors not only share their decades of expertise with fellow Sandstormers, they’re active in the community, educating and inspiring the next generation of developers, designers, and strategists, too.
I’ve benefitted immensely from our creative directors’ mentorship—shout out to John and Janna for anything I missed during our company You Rocks. And it got me thinking about how mentorship has helped other Sandstormers in their careers and personal lives.
Learning From the Best
As a budding copywriter, Creative Director John Rausch was fortunate to be mentored by the creative genius who wrote the immortal "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun" jingle for the Big Mac. “In the years I worked for him, I learned a lifetime's worth of insights into developing impactful creative work,” John shared. “But perhaps the most significant thing he taught me was the importance of paying it forward—sharing my own passion and acumen with the creative professionals who would come to work for me.”
Finding Solutions Through Empathy
As a resident assistant at Central Michigan University, Strategist Megan Durst found a mentor in her resident director. “He taught me a lot about understanding people’s motivation,” she said. “It really helped me empathize with my students and help them find solutions to their problems. Not only have those skills been critical in my personal life, they’ve been equally essential in my career as well.”
Teaching the Next Generation
Executive Creative Director Janna Fiester’s undergrad professor has remained a mentor ever since her time at Ball State. Her professor even encouraged Janna to earn an MFA and become a professor herself, which she did. It was during her time as a professor at UIC that Janna began mentoring students of her own. “Now one of my mentees is also a client. She still calls me her mentor and a strong influence to choosing design as a career.”
Lifelong Relationships
Amanda, our Director of Business Integration, found an amazing mentor in her volleyball coach—even getting the opportunity to coach alongside him when her daughter reached high school. “He gave me great advice throughout my entire life: in business, coaching, and in my personal life. He truly cared about me and making sure I was successful. He's had such a profound impact on my life and always went out of his way to help me, even without asking.”
Friends in High Places
Front-End Developer Joe Ruel was fresh out of college when he met one of his mentors. As Joe recalls, “My mentor guided me through many aspects of development and helped me find my passion in front-end development.” Though his mentor moved onto another company, they kept in touch. Over the next year, Joe heard so much about his mentor’s new company that he applied for a position there. Sandstorm Senior Front-End Developer Jeff Umbricht continues to be a guiding influence in Joe’s life, and was quick to note that Joe got the job on the strength of his considerable skills alone.
How has mentorship impacted your life? We’d love to hear your story in the comments.
This blog was posted by Bill Kurland on June 1, 2017.
