We’d like to get to know you, your business, and shine the spotlight on your latest product or service. Please connect with us before any of these events to schedule an opportunity to talk and get your business some well-deserved free exposure.

The three events we are attending in April are:

PopCrunch2008 – TechCrunch meets PopSugar Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008 Time: 6:30 pm – midnight Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood Tag: PopCrunch2008

Ad:Tech (sf) Dates Attending: 4/16 – 4/17 Time: All day Venue: Moscone Center Tag: adtechSF2008

Web 2.0 Show (sf) Dates Attending: 4/23 – 4/25 Time: All day Venue: Moscone Center Tag: web20sf2008

Some of the tweeps I’ve already scheduled interviews with include:
@jpostman
@americancliche
@arielwaldman

You should follow them, if you are not already. Please @ me on twitter if you’d like to meet up.

“Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology.”

If you are in Austin, give us a shout on Twitter – @mattsurfs & @cabad – we look forward to meeting you.

One of our first supporters, 37 Signals mentioned Nourish in Signal vs. Noise and the Basecamp product blog. We were also pleased to find ourselves mentioned on Emily Chang’s eHub as well as on Killer Startups. RSS Ray, an Internet radio show with a focus on RSS marketing featured Nourish in an interview with founders Matt Browne and Chris Abad in a recent broadcast. Nourish also received a plug from Smashing Design Magazine in an article on user interface best practices. And of course a special thanks goes out to digital-telepathy for promoting Nourish on it’s blog and throughout their network.

Of the 1,000 users already signed up and making use of Nourish, Homegain Real Estate Blog has already made Nourish an essential part of their marketing strategy . When asked if they would recommend Nourish to other marketers, Jessica, Homegain’s Marketing Communications Manager replied, “Definitely, it eases tasks that I used to have to do manually and lightens my personal work load. It’s automated, done well, has customized functionality, and lets the visitors subscribe to the newsletter.”

With the future of RSS to email communication bright (NBC recently purchased competitor SendMeRSS.com, formerly Rmail), Nourish is poised to be an industry leader in connecting RSS publishers to readers with unprecedented accessibility. Integral Impressions co-founder Chris Abad speculated, “Nourish will be widely known as the quickest and easiest way for bloggers to provide an email newsletter to their readers. It will be the popular standard in the industry for converting an RSS to email.”

In the coming months, as we continue to build on Nourish and expand its possibilities, we hope that we will continue to see the amount of support and enthusiasm we’ve enjoyed with its launch. To that end- you can follow the latest news on Nourish by following our Twitter site.

Each member will have time to introduce their blog and discuss their experience.

• How many comments do you average?
• What blogging platform do you prefer and why?
• What is the best way to get images and photos on your blog?
• Have you had any experience with Podcasting or Videoblogging?
• What tools do you use to promote your blog?

This is an opportunity for everyone to benefit from the unique experience of others. If you have any interest, Join the MeetUp group even if you can’t make this particular meeting.

A very special thanks to our PR friends in Los Angeles who referred the reporter.

Watch Fortune Small Business Magainze for Integral Impressions in the next couple of weeks!

The solution is simple, declare bankruptcy! Lawrence Lessig first wrote three steps to cleaning up your inbox.

1. Collect the email addresses of everyone you haven’t replied to. Paste them into the BCC field of a new message you’ll send to yourself.
2. Write a polite note explaining your predicament. Apologize profusely – Lessig managed five mea culpas in as many paragraphs – and promise to keep up with your email in the future. Try to sound credible.
3. Ask for a resend of anything particularly pressing, and offer to give such messages special attention.

To expand on this idea, I would offer these additional steps to get your inbox back in order.

Migrate your communications to a blog.

This simple step will allow you to more effectively communicate by placing content meant for multiple people in one central location. For example, updates on products or pricing, even in the research stage, should be done with transparency. Allowing your base to see where you are going is the best and most cost effective way to ensure you are heading in the right direction.

Direct your sphere to the right place.

Adding to the idea of BCC list or sphere list, announce that you are looking to expand the channels of communication. A blog is a simple and pure public forum. They make it extremely easy to participate and the dialog found in the comments section usually wind up being more valuable then the original message.

Make “You’ve Got Mail” a happy message again.

We have become desensitized to new mail. Just as businesses have become overwhelmed in responding in a timely manor, recipients have lost the patience. Just as a car alarm going off does not get a second look these days, the importance of email is so low that most valuable communications are lost in the pack. By moving your “housekeeping” items to a public place, you can train your sphere to accept and appreciate communications directly from your firm. With such poor standards by most firms in drip email campaigns or email blasts, these tools for the most part are not effective. While countless articles can critique on what type of content makes an effective email, all improvements are useless if they never open up the communication in the first place.

Authored by Chris Daley.

Contact Information

Many visitors go to restaurant websites simply looking for the address or phone number. They are either ‘Googling’ you from their computer or their cell phone and they should easily be able to find this information without visiting another page or watching a flash intro. Have the phone number and address in plain text, preferably in the header (but if not, above the fold), and your customers will thank you.

Maps

Google Maps are a great way to help your visitors find your restaurant. Instead of directly linking to websites like Mapquest or Yahoo Maps, embed the map on the page so your customer isn’t taken to another site.

Rich Media

Many websites force an experience of music, animation, or long intros on their visitors—including to their loyal repeat traffic—and all it does is annoy them. Your website should do nothing else but connect people with your restaurant. Put your vital information in an obvious place and you will be rewarded. The more you overuse Flash, the less likely someone is going to be able to print and save your most important marketing materials.

The Menu

Your menu should be the primary focus of your website. It should be current and easy for you to update using a Content Management System, or a “CMS.” It should also be formatted for visitors to print easily. If your restaurant prints new menus on a daily or weekly basis, you can serve both your updating and printing needs at the same time.

Updating your “specials” is a great way to draw patrons by promoting their favorite dishes, urging them to try something new, or offering a great deal. Documenting your specials on your website provides customers with a history of your creative culinary work and reminds them of what they enjoyed. Furthermore, allowing your customers to comment on your menu items and specials, or send menu items to friends, is an innovative opportunity to explore, similar to what you see with each product on Amazon.com. These user generated reviews show that you appreciate your customers’ opinions as well as give you honest feedback on your selection and service.

Email Sign Ups

Start building a database of your customers now. Even if you’re not sure when you’ll start emailing, it’s never too early to begin collecting email addresses from your interested customers. Building a database of your customers’ contact information is the first step to communicating with your customers interactively. Each page of your website should have an email sign up form so it’s simple to stay in touch.

Basic contact info, a map, limited use of rich media, a solid menu with updated specials, reviews from customers, and email sign up forms are several fundamentals of the restaurant website.

The next post in this series will shed some light on how restaurants should leverage local search, city directories, listing sites, and blogs to drive reservations and exposure.

After the 30 second ad spot finished, a screen flashed with Park Terrace’s contact info and website address. Due to poor design, the website address didn’t stand out among the contact information and only truly web savvy buyers would have visited the site. As an Internet junkie, I went to the site out of curiosity (and not to mention, its my job). Park Terrace’s marketing team needs to work to build interest and traffic to their website because they can’t rely on curious Internet marketers as their only potential home buyers.

The ad dollars spiraling down the tube didn’t stop at the TV commercial. The TV commercial had a weak lead-in to the website and an even poorer call to action. If someone did pull up the website, there was no clear path presented on the home page. It was as if the marketers weren’t clear what they wanted their visitors to do. Did they just brainstorm seven buttons that they thought people would like? Or was there a larger strategy in place? My guess is the former.

Assuming I was still interested in getting more information about Park Terrace, I began looking for the Interest List in order to join it. The Interest list is the primary way prospects stay in touch with your home development, and to not drive Interest List registrants tells me the marketer has yet to see the benefit of it.

I sifted through the stagnant content and found the Interest List on the site. Wouldn’t you know, I was faced with a 13-field web form that scrolls the page and begs me to abandon my activity. Marketers that send people to such web forms that don’t instruct prospects on what will happen next, most likely don’t know themselves.

Your web form or sign up page ought to have a clear explanation on what will happen after you sign up. The page should even have a sample of the newsletter you might send, or set expectations as to how frequently you might be contacted. Better web forms let users choose their preferences on what types of emails they wish to receive. I filled out my information as painlessly as I could, and hoped to hear from someone at Park Terrace.

I checked my email a few minutes later and I got a message from “Intracorp.” How Intracorp is related to Park Terrace, I couldn’t tell you. I had to read the email in detail to know it was connected to Park Terrace. Besides inviting me to the sales office in a plain text email, there was little care put into this message. The email address itself was: sales@intracorpcompanies.com and the from name that appeared in my inbox was Intracorp.

In addition to a poor commercial, weak call to action, half hearted web presence, and an abysmal web sign up form, the wasted marketing dollars didn’t stop there. What if I had been this über-hot prospect that was ready to buy right away and filled out accurate information? I never received a call or another email from the sales team. If these hot leads go uncalled, there is no faster way to waste marketing dollars—especially in today’s home buying market.

Now that you have shared the experience of what I went through, here’s how to do the same campaign more effectively. ###

First, keep the commercial, but add a Call-to-Action. Keep it simple; something like, “visit us online at ParkTerraceCondos.com for updates and availability.” Having some reason to go the website is tantamount.

Once you have successfully motivated your visitors from your TV commercial to the website with a call to action, you need to back the call to action up with a very obvious plug on your home page or landing page. The offer that was being advertised should be one of the first things people see. If I have the mindset that I am going to your website to get updates, I better see a place I can type my email in and get these announcements without having to dig through your entire site.

After successfully getting me to the Interest Registry, do me favor and make it easy it for me. I am here, now don’t waste my time. I only really want to give you my email, maybe name, and in asking everything else, you are wasting both of our time. Don’t ask me where I heard of you, you should know that already. Don’t ask me if I have any pets, unless you are going to send me targeted messages about my pets within the first 2 weeks of our so called ‘relationship’. You need to earn the right to ask questions like current address, pets’ names, and number of family members. You can build your database overtime asking for this information after (and only after) I determine your project is a fit for my family.

Keep the web form simple, minimal, and to just what’s absolutely necessary and nothing more. Explain to me why it’s worth my time and personal information to sign up. What am I going to get? How often? From who? Why is it important? Let me know what kind of communication road map you have planned. Better yet, let me know you have a plan and I will be more willing to subscribe.

Now you got me! You had a great commercial with compelling call to action. You linked to the landing page or call-to-action directly and I found it easily. I arrived at your webform and wasn’t intimidated by the questions and I gave my personal info. Kudos to your marketing department. Now, don’t mess it up.

I expect an email soon from your team. And not just any email, a good one. It better be from your sales team, it better having branding for Park Terrace, and it absolutely should set the tone for future emails to come. The initial email is your first impression and you don’t want people getting the feeling your emails look more like spam than professional marketing updates.

Take the time to write some valuable content about your development in advance and share it with me over time. Maybe email me right away, then within 3 days, and another communication a week later from sign up. Having regular scheduled content via email to deliver to your readers can make a big difference in readership and participation. The more pertinent you can make your first email communication, the more likely I am to continue reading the next one.

As I write this blog post I still have heard nothing from Park Terrace, though I am not surprised. Most marketers don’t know what they do is wrong, until they do it right. If this post inspires someone to try some of the techniques our firm has had proven success with, I welcome a discussion about them.

At Integral Impressions, we help marketers and advertising agencies raise expectations, surpass historical benchmarks, and be the most innovative agency they can be. If you have clients in need of a better marketing experience, we hope you consider speaking with us.

Remember these four rules in publishing dynamic content on your site.

Perspective

Participation

Practice

Patience

The next great phase of how content is written, read and stored is upon us. There’s a blog born every half second. Content is being pushed to the net faster then ever before but it does not end there. It lives on the net, constantly being updated and added to by the reader. The content and message takes on a life of it’s own. We are moving from a society of passive viewer to active participant.

As Kevin Kelly wrote almost 2 years ago in Wired, “When we post and then tag…teaching the Machine to give names, we are teaching the Machine…..Each time we forge a link, we teach it an idea…..Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page…teaching the Machine” The machine is the net. We are the net. We are the machine!

What does this mean to our clients? Simple. Embrace change. Move from developing websites to creating portals. Portals where information and ideas are formed. Provide a place where users come to act not react. Allow the user to define your product and pitch. Allow the user to create your marketing. Allow the user to not only be intimately involved in the process but rather create it.

Over the next few months, Integral Impressions will be launching several of these portals. Our goals and the goals of our clients is to change the way the net is used by their clients and prospects. Regardless if you think Web 2.0 is building or rebuilding the net, you have to agree that it is designed today with an architecture of participation.

Authored by Chris Daley.

Apple puts together product guides by industry to help Mac users adapt to “the switch.” They help guide professionals, like Realtors, to find the best software that works with their new machine. Apple mentioned they wanted to include us in the selection of companies promoting Real Estate software that works on a Mac.

What this means for Outlandish is an endorsement from someone we hold the highest respects for in our industry, it means better exposure in the Mac community, and it also means more people will hear about Outlandish.

Feel free to view the Real Estate Tools guide on the Apple website or go directly to the Outlandish promo page and be sure to try our product.