Services and resources
Sites
Other services
A while ago, to have a website was good enough. But in these last years, the ways of communicating with your public have changed a lot. For each type of client, we can build a different project that point directly to an ideal public.
Maybe, in your case, to build a podcast would be a good idea to make your customer feel closer to your company values... or, if you are an artist, maybe a blog would do it. But always with an RSS feed...
What? What are we talking about? Well, some of these names are confusing, aren't they? RSS feeds, podcasts, CMSs and Wikis. So, this is where we'll try to explain them, what each resource can do in order to solve your online communication problem.
We'll give you an example of a digital communication plan: Carambola's website itself. It has some of these resources we were just talking about (in the Brazilian Portugues version, at least; not all of them are available in English yet). A blog about our day-by-day online life, a podcast about digital design questions, some courses about digital design, and a RSS feed.
If you were a food industry, for example, maybe it would be interesting to add a forum, an intranet, to publish a corporative manual, to design some corporative presentations and a wiki.
If any of these terms are weird to you, please, see below what each can do for you.
Podcast
The term podcasting comes from the union of pod (from the famous i-pod, Apple MP3 player) with broadcasting. It's a way for distributing news (to your internal or external audiences) through an audio show. It is a service that can be incorporated at your communication plan. We can produce a podcast show as well as train some of your employees to do it in your company.
You can have, for example, Purina's podcast, that talks about animal care... Or listen to the excelent TWIT podcast, about technology news.
Ok, if you want to take a look at the Carambola podcast, you can visit it here, but we warn you it is in Brazilian Portuguese!
Blog
Well, by now, almost everybody knows what a blog is... a site where you can write about anything. What you write goes to a database and as soon as you publish it, it is there for everybody to read! It is this characteristic that attracts people, its simplicity and practicality.
You can think of a blog as being your private channel to friends or fans (if you are an artist) or to your clients. You can use it to display new products, new works, new shows, you can publish photos there, or videos, and it is a very easy to use.
Just one more thing: if you think that blogging is something used just by teenagers, and not by companies, please take a look at this article before you close the question about it. There are some very interesting cases about companies that make a very good use of their blogs to get closed to their customers and communities.
CMS and wiki
CMS means Content Management System. A CMS is not a new media, it is just a resource that allows you to update your website without the intervention of a webdesigner. A blog, that we just mentioned above, is a kind of CMS. In other words, you can do it all alone, like you do with a blog. You'll have an username and a password, and once you log in, you will get to what we call an admin interface, where you can write and publish a new article, create new areas for your website, upload and publish a photo, delete an old page, etc.
Of course, you can sophisticate this simple model. You can have a team of writers adn editors, and the text written by a writer is published just once an editor aproves it. In other words, you can stablish control over the flow of publication of your website, if your business needs it. Or you can do it single-handedly. A CMS, as you may already figured, is essencial to a news website or an online magazine that updates its content in a daily basis. Not so essencial to a small medical clinic, that will update not that often.
A wiki is a kind of CMS that you should consider if you want to build an open database about a specific subject. If you ever visited wikipedia, you should be familiar with its structure: anyone can post an article and anyone can edit it. This kind of CMS (yes, a wiki is a type of CMS) is adequate if you have a big amount of people who would be interested in posting. A wiki can be configured so it's not that open, in order to give more control of the content.
Using a CMS ends up making you having a RSS feed, so let's see what it can do for us.
RSS feed
A RSS feed is a new way for people to read the news. But not just the news of the big portals, but the news about your website as well. Imagine that you could buy just the sports part of a newspaper, for that's just what it matters to you. Well, a RSS feed is channel of information formated in a standard way, so your user can read it outside your website, in a RSS reader program. This way, if you want to make your public near to your last news, products, works or projects, it is a good idea to build a RSS feed.
Once a user sign up for your RSS feed, the content of your website goes automatically to his RSS reader everytime there is something new published. Great, isn't it?
If you want to know more about it, please, take a look at this website.
Corporative manual
A manual can be distributed in electronic format, instead of printed. We can use hipertext to cross reference topics to make it more accessible. Besides, when you use digital media you won't have to print a different version everytime something change!
Some examples of types of contents that can benefit from being transcribed to a digital format:
- technical information
- internal rules
- patient treatment standards
- documental procedures
- laws and articles
- codes, acts and statutes
You can make the content available through a CD / DVD ROM (for your clients) or publish it in your intranet (just for your employees) or put it online (open it to the world).
We have already developed some manual for FDE (a Brazilian Educational Foundation) and Grupo Pão de Açúcar (one of the most successfull Brazilian supermaket companies).
Digital portfolio
If you have a autoral website, if you are an artist, a photographer, or a graphic designer, have you ever think about merging your portfolio into your business card? From time to time we make CD cards, a small CD that fits in your pocket with your potfolio and all the data you want your clients to have. It is one more way to publish your work and make it available to your public.
Projects presentations
You have prepared your project content very carefully and now you have just to present it to your colleagues or superiors? You will give a speech or present a course? You need this material for your data-show presentation to grab your public attention?
And you are about to make those Powerpoint presentation, right?
Why don't use graphics, photos, video, animations, a soundtrack, some narration, all tied up through a nice graphic design? We can make it using Flash, a software that allows much more interaction and media rich content.
So, if you are curious about any of these services and resources, please, contact us.