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http://www.freshtilledsoil.com Mar 11, 2010 by mattboynton - Conferences and Events, entrepreneurship
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Why We Love Boston World Partnerships
We do a lot of networking. I mean, A LOT. Naturally, after a spending half your day frantically organizing business cards and realizing that networking is replacing your social nightlife, you start to find the events and organizations that are truly worth going to.
Here’s a shout-out from the heart to Boston World Partnerships.
Few organizations in Boston that we’ve experienced bring the diversity of people together you find at BWP events. It’s not just mass crowds of service providers, startups, or those fancy corporate people. It’s a healthy mix of everybody brought together with a common cause – to keep Boston cool enough to dissuade you from moving to San Francisco. While they can’t [yet] change the weather, they are on a mission to help you grow your business and get people working together on raising the bar in Boston.
I like the range of events in terms of intimacy. You do have the large, free-for-all networking events, which are great for getting into the scene and meeting lots of people, and they also have smaller gatherings like strategy sessions for startups which allow members and connectors to have more relaxed and helpful conversations with each other. The focus isn’t to just meet more people and collect business cards, BWP brings those together who are enthusiastic about working with other people grow businesses here.
And every once in a while, they have a hot event at a cool Boston venue. Next Tuesday, they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary at the Liberty Hotel with some wildly successful speakers and an awesome guest list.
We’ll be there.
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Mar 10, 2010 by Alex S - Social Marketing, Social Media
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Social Media Revolution
If you haven’t seen this yet, you must:
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http://www.freshtilledsoil.com Mar 9, 2010 by mattboynton
- Conferences and Events, Web Design, entrepreneurship
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MIT100K Semi-Finals Event: Effective Web Design, Getting Funding, and Landing Your First Customers After the Business Plan Competition
We’re excited to be sponsoring the MIT100K Business Plan Competition and have the opportunity to help the winner boost their web presence, which can help an early-stage startup have an edge when seeking more funding or funding their first customers.
Why is this important?
Having a well-designed site gives you cred. A good first impression and delivering your message effectively to initial customers (think: early adopters) or investors is key when you may not yet have a whole lot else to show for yourselves yet. When you’re featured in Mass High Tech’s “Startups to Watch” you want that traffic to convert into initial sales, inquiries, or investors, and for your design to have a positive effect with these initial visitors.
If you’re developing and selling a web application, it’s better to show what your first customers can expect to see and get them excited about it, rather than having a “coming soon page”. Even screenshots and a quick tour of your application can do wonders when it comes to converting initial customers even if you haven’t built out your application yet. In fact, this is a good way to test the viability of your web business without going into heavy development right off the bat. We call the initial mockups of an application rapid prototyping.
When you launch your initial site you should build a blog to start your search and social media marketing by developing online thought leadership and traffic to your site. Even if your business isn’t ready for launch yet, it’s important to have an excited group of primary customers who you can rely upon for beta testing or initial sales, as well as being able to update the investment and entrepreneurship community on how things are going for you. Visibility and maintaining interest from the different audiences is vital to gaining traction.
We met one of our clients RetireLife at the Babson business plan competition – here’s RetireLife founder and CEO Megan Shea’s take on the subject:
“By creating your web presence early on in your startup you can begin to understand customer preferences and ways they use the site to define and optimize your message as you scale the business – we have taken our learning from the past year coupled with the UI expertise of Fresh Tilled Soil to completely redesign our website to make it more user-friendly and fit for our target audience” – Megan Shea, RetireLife
We love talking about this. You can find us at the MIT100K semi-finals this Thursday or get in touch with Matt Boynton
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Mar 9, 2010 by Richard - Process, Social Marketing, entrepreneurship
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Creating Online Buzz Without A PR Company
We’ve always been slightly suspicious of formal public relations efforts. It works for lots of companies but in a social networking world public relations has a harder job remaining credible and authentic. We’ve been working on our own ideas and learning from our friends at Grasshopper to build a simple sales-orientated buzz process.
Although still in a state of refinement here is the process and some specific tasks associated with each step. Keep in mind this specific checklist is in context of creating buzz for Fresh Tilled Soil so the relevant audience targets would be exchanged for each appropriate client should we go that route:
Buzz Process Checklist:
- Read through the list of design blogs that are looking for contributions and add each one to a spreadsheet (use Google docs if you can so we can all have access to it and make edits if necessary) Read more
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Mar 8, 2010 by Alex - Case Studies, General, Non-Profit
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Exciting News for Infante Sano… now World Connect!
This week began on a positive note as FTS was happy to assist Infante Sano, a Waltham-based non-profit client focused on improving the health and wellbeing of women and children in under-resourced communities, in re-branding their site to connect to a larger audience. Infante Sano is now World Connect offering two giving channels to help vulnerable women and children – Mothers to Mothers, which supports changemakers in health, education and income generation projects, and Kids to Kids, which funds innovative youth arts, sports, education and environmental projects.
Fresh Tilled Soil team member David Romero was primarily responsible for migrating the existing Donation and Account programming logic from the existing site to World Connect, ensuring full continuity during the transfer. He also worked closely with Jacquelyn Caglia, Director of Development and Communications, to craft a custom content management system powering both World Connect and Kids to Kids featuring an intuitive Project system which powers the unique initiatives that Kids to Kids lists on their Projects section.
We wish World Connect continued success as they increase their reach eastward anticipating new programs in Africa in the coming months.
Why Prototyping Is a Better Way to Design Web Apps
I was on the phone to a client yesterday talking about the way the mobile application development industry is changing. Traditionally the applications are cobbled together in a horizontal way by “gluing” the various code stakes together with custom middle ware. This approach avoids having to build the entire vertical stack but creates downstream issues when code from different sources conflicts with each other. Some cutting edge designers and developers are taking a vertical development approach, which essentially builds the entire stack from top to bottom avoiding any middleware and potential problems. Read more
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Mar 1, 2010 by Richard
- Case Studies, General, Web Design
- No Comments
Morality of Profit Site Launches
Today we launched The Morality of Profit website. Alex, our creative head, did an amazing job with this clean crisp layout. The book by the same name will be launched with a cover reflecting Alex’s design.
The Morality of Profit is a global project sponsored by The S.E.VEN Fund inviting discourse on the morality of profit. The competition seeks pieces that explore a range of positions through the lens of diverse cultural, religious, philosophical, and academic traditions.
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Feb 26, 2010 by Alex
- UI Design, Usability, Web Design
- No Comments
Free-Form Style Forms Increase Conversion
We just found an awesome post from www.LukeW.com about how redesigning forms to read like conversational paragraphs can boost conversions up to 40%:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1007
Can’t wait to give it a try.
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http://www.freshtilledsoil.com Feb 25, 2010 by David Pye - Case Studies, Process, Search Engine Marketing
- 2 Comments
Organic SEO Leads to Client’s $15 Million Dollar Deal
Recently renamed the Search and Social Marketing department, our SEO team had more to celebrate this past weekend than just the Superbowl. Everyone at Fresh Tilled Soil was delighted upon learning Friday that our long time process engineering and design build firm client, SPEC, closed a new deal worth $15,000,000. High spirits around our Waltham office increased further when SPEC informed us that the initial lead landed on their doorstep as a result of our organic search engine optimization services. The term which lead their new client to SPEC’s website was “boston process engineering” and after looking at the following screenshot you’ll see why the introduction was no accident.
In addition to the top organic listing seen just below the Google Maps image, Fresh Tilled Soil’s Search and Social Marketing department also spent time getting Spec’s website to the top of the local search listings. The ensuing dual-coverage on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) made Spec’s corporate website impossible to miss, and a very profitable new business relationship has been the exciting eventuality.
Selling goods and services online is a multi-step process, with each facet dependant on the others all the way down the line. To dust off a tired marketing analogy, there’s no point in leading a horse to water if it isn’t going to take a big gulp once it gets there. It’s as true today as the moment a hundred years ago when it was likely coined – and is frequently repeated within our Waltham walls in one form or another. Everyone at our company is thrilled about Spec’s recent accomplishment, and it’s a perfect example of the way in which we strive to “partner” with our clients. To never abandon, but rather work with them from start to finish. Beginning with the earliest discovery phases and carrying right on through to a website’s final conversion analysis. We did this with Spec – and now it’s your company’s turn.