Getting started, the increased search options make for a great abyss of web and advertising, so I have to approach things with the specific questions that narrow the field. Who needs our help getting their name or brand out? What kind of clients do we want to have? Who could be more concise with their message or more clear in their language? For me, answering these questions is challenging and fun.

Expanding our client base is important for the future of JLB and I hope to make this a natural process. I am not a telemarketer or a commissions based employee, I am a mouthpiece for a design team in Franklin with services to offer and clients (past and present) who are pleased with the results. So with the combined talents of our professional team, I hope to get our message out to those in need of our expertise. Satisfaction guaranteed!

JLB has been using outlets like Twitter and Facebook for a few years now, and at the beginning of 2011, we unveiled a social media package for our clients. It’s been received well, and we’ve signed up a dozen or so businesses to our social media services in the past six months. Part of this initial success is the way that we’ve organized our approach to the practice of social media.

Getting your company in the conversation doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming — you just have to plan well. One approach we’ve been recommending to current clients is to map out an overarching social media strategy.

1. Identity your voice.

Of course, good brand management dictates that you’ve already defined your company’s voice. If you’ve run a print ad or if you publish to a blog regularly, then you’ve already set a certain tone and public demeanor. If you haven’t thought about this, now is the time.

2. Know the playing field(s).

Do you know the difference between a status update (Facebook), a tweet (Twitter), or a post (LinkedIn and Facebook)? They are different ways to broadcast your message, ways to show your company’s personality, ways to tout your products. Each have their own rules, their own quirky nuances. What might play on Twitter may not work on Facebook, and vice versa. It’s important to strategize “the how” as much as “the what” of your message.

3. Plan your posts.

Typing out an unremarkable sentence like “Busy day at the office. Lots of phone calls” isn’t going to bring any extra attention to your brand. And it might just turn off your regular audience. Sitting down in front of your computer thinking “Okay… I’ve got to say something!” and then just typing the first thing that comes to mind is not a good way to communicate.  It’s much better to sit down once a month or once a week and “script” out your posts. We’ve done this for ourselves and our clients, and we can tell you it doesn’t take a long time. When you take a moment, regularly to think it out, the quality of your posts is infinitely better than anything you can come up with “on the fly.”

4. Build your audience(s).

How are you adding followers (Twitter), likes (Facebook), or Connections (LinkedIn)? Building an audience takes time and weekly attention. If you want to reach out to more folks across the country, you have to learn the ins and outs of following and listening to others. It’s a social network, after all.

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When you step back and think about it, your company’s “voice” on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. is really an extension of your overall brand. Social media tools should reinforce your brand and extend it through these new channels. Rather than being a separate communications campaign, social media offers the opportunity to fully integrate your communications online.

“What’s PodCamp?” you ask… well, it’s one of the South’s premier un-conferences for online interactivity. Think of it as a gathering for nerds, geeks, entrepreneurs, small business owners, big business owners, and pretty much anyone involved or interested in online communications. If you have an interest in social media and/or social networking, then PodCamp is for you. PodCamp describes itself as “a forum for bloggers, marketers, content creators, educators, podcasters and the like to gather, network and learn about the latest trends, tricks and technologies in the interactive world – ultimately making them the superlative gurus in online communications.”

That might sound a little intimidating… PodCamp is really for anyone who is generally interested in online communications. The conference features 35 sessions presented by some of Nashville’s most prolific social media experts, web developers, and content creators. Sessions feature titles like “The Ultimate WordPress Experience,” and “How Mobile Bar Codes Can Help Your Digital Get Physical,” and “Mobile Marketing: How Your Business Can Use It Today.”

An estimated 550 people will attend this year’s PodCamp — and maybe more — PodCamp’s prominence has been growing. (Even The Tennessean has pre-covered the event in its weekend paper.) For our part, JLB is pleased to say that we’ll be featured as a panelist at one of the sessions on Saturday morning. At Paul Campbell’s, “We Did: Stories of Startups,” JLB is set to be one of 4-5 panelists representing small tech in Middle Tennessee.

For those interested, it’s not too late to sign up. And it’s free to attend PodCamp. Just visit the official website and register. We’ll see you there!

What is “Holiday Hiatus,” you ask? It is the much anticipated end-of-the-year break for Team JLB. Think of it as a college Christmas break… for adults. Typically, we take our annual work Hiatus near the middle-end of December and 2-3 weeks later, we re-emerge (kind of like friendly bears coming out of hibernation) to tackle the new year, sometime during the first week of January. This year, we are taking our Hiatus on Dec. 17 and return on Jan. 5.

For Team JLB, it is a definitive way to mark the turn of the year. We’ve worked hard up to this point — more hours than we planned on — and the Hiatus is a way to re-charge our batteries. A rejuvenation opportunity, if you will. We don’t quite reverse the aging process, but it does give us time for rest and reflection, as we prepare the charge into a new year.

Strategically speaking, the Holiday Hiatus comes at the perfect time of year — when most client projects have wound down and most clients are spending time away from their offices. Then, as soon as things start to percolate in the new year, we’re back in action … refreshed, re-charged and ready to work.

No — we don’t quite “shut it all down.” Someone is still monitoring e-mail at JLB HQ during the Hiatus. If a site crashes or an e-mail stops working or your logo breaks (what? not again…), we’re still johnny-on-the-spot. But the Hiatus is a designated time of rest for our team. And it’s a critical component to each year — giving us a chance to come back with fresh perspectives and new ideas for our clients and their communication strategies.

With all of that said, we hope you enjoy your holidays, too. And… we’ll see you soon. Merry. Merry. And Happy. Happy.

What makes this project notable is how it reflects a series of emerging trends in client requests (and subsequently in the tasks we’ve been executing this year). The key elements requested by Forest Park include: graphic design, web development on an easy-to-use content management platform, search engine optimization, and social networking set up and strategy.

Of course, design and development have been part of our bailiwick for more than seven years now, but the emergence of the importance of a strong (yet simple) content management system, solid search engine optimization, and relevant social networking over the past few years now plays a significant role in the way we design and, subsequently, engineer a website. For example, when we create a design, we are always thinking about ways to incorporate as much text as we can, while still maintaining a strong sense of aesthetic. (We care about textual volume because the search engines tend to give more weight to pages with more content.) Likewise, we are always cognizant of how to incorporate social networking icons or “widgets” (badges that stream status updates into a page).

These days, many clients want as much control over their websites as they can have. An effective, manageable system for updating site content is paramount. We realize that clients want to do things quickly and easily.

Marrying great design with robust functionality, developing pages that will be indexed by search engines (and found by “googlers”), and sync’ing sites with social networking strategies… all are critical to contemporary web design and development.

Events & Weddings Costa Rica, is a company focused on creating unique, customized wedding and honeymoon experiences in one of the most beautiful countries in the Western Hemisphere. Recently, Samantha Kohn, owner of ECR, approached JLB and asked us to create a clean, professional graphic design in an easy-to-manage content management system. (We’ve known Samantha for a few years now, having helped optimize a previous iteration of her website with very successful results.)

The result of our endeavors? A pretty little website with a tad more than 60 pages of content (yes — we even helped Samantha import all of the existing content from her previous website), engineered on a very robust CMS (thank you, WordPress) with a slideshow tool and an easy-to-update News section, where Samantha can feature various weddings that she’s planned. The best part? All of her content is even better situated for Search Engine Spiders (read: even stronger SEO than before).

Wanna get away? Check out the new site…

Franklin Synergy Bank has just opened a new branch in Franklin and they had their Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting today! JLB has worked closely with Aimee Punessen, the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Public & Investor Relations to make sure the Grand Opening was a success.

Constant Craving catered the food, Southern Events provided the necessary event equipment and supplies, Cornerstone Music did the sound and the TMA Group (another client of JLB) supplied the shuttle to and from the parking garage. Kevin Wimpy Photography was around again to document the entire event.

Everyone worked hard to pull off a successful Grand Opening for FSB!

The Chamber, established in the late 1920s, now serves Williamson County as the premier business organization resource for the area. The Chamber’s diverse membership provides a foundation for monitoring business and community development, and its commitment to the community and its members has helped foster an environment for business growth in this area.

Project Scope

• website graphic design
• website engineering (html, css, php)
• information architecture
• website content management system
• search engine optimization

Project Tools

• wordpress (website content management system)
• google analytics (website statistics)

See the site here…

Our challenge: to create a lead-generating website with strong visual appeal, easy-to-navigate sections, and outstanding search engine optimization. From graphic design, to strategic information architecture, to website engineering, and forward-thinking content placement & markups, Team JLB aims to improve Stratum’s web position and help build its name-recognition on a national level.

It’s a worthy series of tasks we look forward to executing over the next few months.

I don’t think that I, personally, can hold back Team JLB’s excitement any longer. So I think I’ll give you a little sneak peek:

BAM! What’s that you ask? Well, in T minus umm… soon… the entire face of jlbworks.com will change. That’s right. We’re dang close to launching the new JLB 2010 site.

Get pumped.