This is all part of the our master plan to VIBE the world with our home-made  retail promotions tool. VIBE is a personality test that measures a user’s aspirations in order to match products to people.

For more, get VIBE’d at myalohavibe.com

Introducing a brand new website we made for the

And here’s the gang from the Storymanager side who got this site up and running: John, Kaui, Kai, Adam, Mia and me (Steve). Thanks guys for kicking butt on this one!!! Of course we’re all still hard at work adding features and dialing it in, so stay tuned!

So what’s cool about this site? First we came up with a content strategy to blog about all the cool places visitors can get to by riding the Trolley. This help visitors get why Trolley is such a good deal – smart, eh? But better yet, all that blog content helps get us ranked higher in search engine placements. More content, more traffic, more sales. So far we have over 100 posts on cool Honolulu places and the list grows daily. We also repositioned the service as, “The Fun Way to See Hawaii” and re-branded the Waikiki Trolley look and logo. Yup, Tommy Trolley got a new shirt! Other communications programs like Map Guides and re-wrapping Trolley cars are in production as of this writing. We’re also integrating other cool web stuff like online ticket purchasing, social media, google maps, traveler tips, concierge services, etc…

BTW, after a soft launch and zero promotions, our first month’s analytics show that the content strategy has resulted in Unique Visitors up 1,243%, Page Views up 40%, Bounce Rate down 30% and Average Time on Site up 67%. And better yet, we just got through our first SEO pass last week so are expecting to slam those numbers next month… Alooooooha!

OK, so we facelifted our site again (after only living with the last version a month)… why? Because our site was a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes. The last version was a quick web-job just to get our new works out there. Slam, bam, thank you guys… so when we had a bit of a breather, we went back to make a site that was less generic and really us.

So what about all that “brand equity”? No worries, we’re not that big. People who know us will find us. We think this sets a good example: i.e., don’t get hung up with thinking you can’t move off your “brand” – it’s far better to make a communication that folks ‘get’ than sticking with old stuff. Besides, you can simply notify your old-skool clients of any critical contact changes. The real game is usually in attracting new customers, so get your message right and don’t stop iterating until you do.

We’d love your fed back on this site, so please Contact Us

1. Dump the Postcard. Contrary to what you might think, big fancy photos on your homepage can be a yawner. This is particularly true if you use the same photos in print or video collateral to get folks to come to your website. Think of your web presentation as the next act in your play. Don’t replay the same scenes over and over: get on with your story. On the other hand, if you tell a visual story that they haven’t heard yet, postcards can effective.

2. Provide Useful Information. Viewers go to websites looking for answers and information. Don’t keep them waiting – give them the intel or they’ll turn you off.

3. Make Content Skim-able. Internet viewers skim more than they read. So make your content skim-friendly. That means plain, simple and direct. Short sentences or even fragments are fine. Plain English is superior. Less is more.

4. Start with a Bang. Internet advertisers pay more to be on the first scroll. We all get that. But you should also get that is makes sense to also get your most important stuff up high on the page. You gotta grab and impress them before they’ll read the fineprint.

5. Activate Your Punchline. Sales folks call this a “Call-to-Action” which in web lingo generally means a link to the next step in the selling process. That might mean more information, linkage to a shopping cart or up-sell to more products. As a general rule, every page of your website should have a link at the end of the page that pushes the viewer to a Next Step. You might also consider Next Step links at the top of each page and in intermediate positions if the page is a long scroll.

STEP INTO YOUR AUDIENCE’S SHOES: The next time you look at your site, look at it from their perspective: does it grab you?

South by Southwest

Band of Skulls at KLRU

3 front row knuckleheads

Between beer bashes, amazing music and super hot tacos that would take the paint off your car, we attended a crazy number of panels and gleaned the current big picture on interactive. So from 30,000 feet (literally – I’m on the last leg of my flight back to Honolulu), here’s what our gang thought the lay of the land to be:

3 Big Themes of SX 2010

1. The Cloud, More Mashups & Social Media. This is largely a recap of 2009, but the trend toward applications built on shared information resources continue at an exponential rate. Just about everyone has had a taste of this already through google map and YouTube integrations. Then there’s the myriad of social media applications like facebook and twitter that are connecting the world like never before. We’re unbelievably lucky to be witnessing this new age of mind-melding and global interaction. It’s without doubt one of the most amazing evolutionary steps in our species’ history so stay tuned… hey, if you don’t believe me, checkout grandma printing maps and commenting on facebook… Pandora’s box is open and we’re all looking.

2. Mobile (iPhone & Android) Apps. One panel on mobile apps started with a hand-count on mobile devices. Out of a couple hundred people, only a few were not on iPhones. Of course the audience was largely comprised of techies (not corporate blackberryites), but the hand-count mirrored the reality that 95% of mobile apps are Apple-based. Further, as of this writing, the iPhone app market is estimated to already exceed $1B a year and the number of Apple app downloads recently topped 3B so for at least for the near term it looks like mobile apps will still be all about Apple.

3. Geo-Location Apps. This is a particularly juicy subset of the mobile app space in that it’s largely about finding individuals via mobile devices through global positioning technology. English translation: technology that can place you and your mobile phone on a map. Which makes for a whole new level of tools to create “addictive behaviors” – nice buzz-term, huh? A crazy number of cool geo-plays are on the way so stay tuned for some headline-grabbing launches this year. Indeed, every year at “South By,” one or two new plays really stand out with this year’s darlings being Gowalla and FourSquare who use geo-location technology to make discovery games that reward participants with social interactions, status kudos and prizes.

The plays we saw working were by and large not “toys” nor fads. They were apps that featured real-world benefits so many stand an excellent chance of finding some legs.

Now it’s time to detox and recover so we can be ready for next year. Thanks to our friends in Austin for showing us a good time as always… Keep it weird Austin… Looking forward to SXSW 2011!

WHOA, FOREVER? That’s a long time. So you better do it right, no? The stakes are high so get a pro. Here’s one of out favorites at work: Kimee Balmilero chatin’ up the RumFire experience at the Sheraton Waikiki.

Kimee has decades of for-real acting under her belt. Like real drama. Not just community theater or advertising slots. Check out how she makes it look easy – but keep in mind that only the pros make it look natural and effortless performances so don’t be fooled – get the best you can afford.

There are a lot of CMS options. FYI many CMS platforms grew out of blogging systems, so don’t ignore what you previously knew as  a blogging platform as it now can likely provide just what you’re looking for in a publication system. Some of the options include: WordPress, Joomla,  drupal, Typepad, and Blogger. So get into the 21st century. Get your site onto a CMS now.

Here’s a really customized example called myalohavibe.com that’s built on the WordPress platform. Over 640 restaurants in Hawaii maintain their own content on this free promotional network. And they actually do it! Cool no?

So get with the program and into the 21st Century. Get your website onto a CMS and start amping your story!

Checkout the new Hawaii Restaurant Association website.

We heaped on coolness including:

• Self-Editing News Format
• HRA Member Promotions
• Social Network Integration
• New Navigational Architecture
• A Catchy New Name & Look

BTW: Here’s the ‘before’ hawaiirestaurants.org website:

1. Get the Right Tools. Content Management Systems (blogging platforms like WordPress, Typepad, Blogger) make it really easy for you to edit and re-edit your writings. CMS makes it easy for you to edit and re-edit at the speed of thought. Seriously, the writing experience on a CMS is more like sculpting – it’s fun, immediate and gratifying. Do a CMS.

2. Write Like You Talk. Colloquial is fine for most web writing. Conversational language implies immediacy and honesty. Write what’s on your mind and don’t puff. Go au naturale. Be a word nudist. Un-stuff those falsies and you’ll get more action.

3. Write for Skimmers. Most folks don’t really “read” on the Internet. Heck, if you’ve read this far into this paragraph, either you’re a super-nerd or my writing is A-W-E-S-O-M-E! By this point for most, I might as well be writing, “#!@$^@ @()*&&^ $!&!!!?” But seriously, people skim. So help the skimmers by putting the important stuff up front (first sentence), make bullet-point lists and boldface appropriately.

4. Write Short. Keep paragraphs short – like even single-sentence paragraphs. Use a lot of punctuation – hyphens, commas, brackets – to break it up. Sentence fragments and even single-words are fine and easily consumable. When editing, look to cut out “and” uses if possible. Short works. Neat, huh?

5. Link. Linking to related sources is both helpful to your readership and helps your page rankings. So for example, here’s some perspectives by others: ProBlogger.com, BloggingTips.com, instigatorblog.com.

Writing for the Internet is an art unto its own. And as Rob Schneider says in the movies, “You can do it!”

Top 10 Naming Tips:

1. Make it Short. Ideally the shorter the better as it reduces viewership impedance. Short names also brand better – i.e., shorter is easier to treat graphically. 6-10 letters is good, less is really good.

2. Make it Meaningful. The best names actually mean something. And that makes them intuitively easy to remember and pass on. Made up words may be cute or goofy, but they require marketing expense to get folks to remember them.

3. Use a Metaphor. Metaphors are a really efficient way to communicate a complex idea. They also can provide the basis for a great symbol or icon. For example, if you were doing a career site, the word “grow” or “sprout” might be better than “career” as you could then use a leaf or flower icon rather than a two-guys-shaking-hands-image.

4. Make it Likable. You want your viewers to want to tune in so likable means sticky.

5. Make it Easy to Convey. In part that’s why you want it short. But you also should avoid difficult spellings or pronunciations. Also, don’t use underscores or hyphens – they’re just too hard for people to remember and describe to others.

6. Get the .com Address. It’s the default. It’s the intuitive place for folks to go. Even if you are an organization and want to operate under a .org, get the .com and redirect it to your .org address. If you don’t, you could be inadvertently be sending traffic to someone else’s .com version of the site. Some Internet futurists believe that eventually it won’t matter what the extension you use, but the marketing guys have more of the pulse of the lay world and they universally agree that you should go for the .com… we agree with the latter.

7. Get All Similar Addresses. Domains are cheap – like $9-15/year so grab all the territory you can get. That includes alternative spellings, common misspelling, pluralized versions, and numerical alternatives (e.g., 2, to, too, two), etc. What you don’t want are squatters drafting on your name, particularly if there is a high likelihood of confusion. For example, in researching this post, I was looking for a site called BUYDOMAINS.COM but inadvertently went to two wrong sites before getting the right one: BUYDOMAIN.COM is a direct competitor and DOMAINBUY.COM is a porno site – boy was I pleasantly surprised!

8. Grab All the Territory You Can. starting with a more generalized name is better as it allows for future growth. For example, in Hawaii, many sites use “HI” or “808″ (the telephone area code) as part of their addresses like “restaurantHI.com” or “808golf.com” But “HI” is more expandable to other localities if the enterprise grows (and it’s shorter) so it’s generally the better alternative.

9. Make Sure Multiple Word URLs Read Well. Domain names don’t allow spaces, so make sure that the resulting coined word isn’t bad. For example, you don’t want to end up with “Sam’s Hits” becoming SAMSHITS.com (don’t bother trying to get it, it’s already taken and is a sex toy shop). Also, try to avoid repeating consonants like “Jims Salads” which would read as JIMSSALADS.com.

10. If You’re Not Using a .com Extension, verify that you’re not infringing on an existing trademark. The truth is that if the .com is available, you likely have no problem as the trademark holder would already own the address. But if you’re going for a more obscure extension like .biz or .tv, then you could be setting yourself up for a trademark problem in the future. If you must go down that extension path, check your name candidates with a trademark attorney or search them at USPTO.gov.

Happy naming!