This week, here at FamilyLink, we released Dadtastic.net. Dadtastic does two things:

1 Make clever Father’s Day t-shirts for Dad.

Here is my favorite t-shirt image. I bought this on for my dad last week.

2 Dadtastic.net gives you a simple way to celebrate Father’s Day on Facebook.

To celebrate Father’s Day simply click “Share on Facebook” and it will automatically upload the image to your facebook.

This being my first project as a Social Marketing Manager at FamilyLink, I am hoping hoping hoping that it goes very viral before Father’s Day.

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One of my instructors at BYU, John Richards—a Utah Angel Investor, was talking about Facebook in a lecture series at BYU. He was asking us how Facebook has become so huge? He then explained that it was in part because they started with the College age students. This is what has given Facebook the coolness factor.

It is great to see Ruckus following in Facebook’s footsteps. I imagine that Ruckus was inspired almost entirely by Facebook’s stratagy and that they already have plans to release their music to the general public as some point down the road.

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Given the escalation of divorce rates in recent years, a 50th wedding anniversary in 2007 represents a true accomplishment. According to recent statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau: “About 52 percent of currently married couples had reached at least their 15th anniversary in 1996, and 5 percent of them had reached at least their golden anniversary (50 years).” Making it to 50 years is a pinnacle that only few couples attain.

“Over that period of time a couple builds a legacy that can’t be measured in material possessions, but rather the lives they have touched through their union,” says Donna Pilato, Entertaining guide for About.com. More than golden anniversary mints, a 50th anniversary gives family and friends an opportunity to take a ride down memory lane and honor a very special couple.

When Barb Sasaki of New Jersey started planning for her Turner parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party for July 2007, she wanted to craft the perfect festive environment. Invitations were sent to family and friends. The big party was decorated with gold while sound of once popular 1957 music filled the air. She even convinced her dad to make his famous homemade wine. Guests were each greeted at the “sign in” book with their own labeled photograph of her parents. Barb went all out. Still, she wanted a 50th wedding anniversary gift idea that would represent the legacy of the lives her parents had touched over those 50 years.

It was with the “guest book” that Barb really got imaginative and pulled her 21st century cards. She discovered a website called MemoryPress.com where she could create a 50th wedding anniversary gift book, add her favorite memories and invite family and friends to contribute to the book from their own homes. The book blossomed into 143 pages of photos and memories contributed by family and friends. “It was the highlight of their 50th anniversary party! We used it as the guest book. Everyone wanted to sit down and look at it! My Mom and Dad were both brought to tears when we presented it to them and Mom told me the other day that Dad has read it cover to cover 8 times now in the 6 weeks or so since the party and cried every time!”

Barb realized that giving her parents memories was more valuable than gold or a perfect party. The Internet, via MemoryPress.com, made celebrating a 1957 couples’ lives with the memories and photos of family and friends as easy as email.

Match.com and eHarmony.com help people fall in love online, now MemoryPress.com is helping couples celebrate their lives online as an unforgettable 50th wedding anniversary gift. MemoryPress 50th wedding anniversary books can include everything from the couples 1957 love story to drawings by their grandchildren. Why not? After all, it’s 2007.

I helped Neal write this article today.

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We hope that we will soon win out the keyword “family history publishing” in searches on Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask.

So this means that I need to get as many people as possible to link to this new URL: http://memorypress.familylearn.com/family-history-publishing

Once we get the keywords for the five books we have figured out, then we will begin added others to the homepage.

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Here is a link to watch the trailer if you have not already seen it: Click here to watch the trailer.

So it comes out on the 23 of this month. As far as I can tell this is a grass roots marketing Campaign. I can tell you. Whoever was smart enough to get the leaders of the LDS church to watch this was brilliant. I am guessing that move alone will bring in a couple hundred thousand customers.

There I go, turning it into a marketing thing. The movie looks fantastic, I will be there on opening day.

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I decided that he must know what he is talking about because websites that make you re-type your email address, don’t let you use usernames with “@” symbols, give you unreadable confirmation codes, and don’t work unless you are on internet explorer DRIVE ME NUTS! If you are learning internet marketing you should read these.
Yet I don’t know if I agree with Guy on is his veryt “do not”: Enforced immediate registration. When we released iMemoryBook in November we started out with a very nice system that allowed you to dive into and create your book without registering. You could create an entire book and it was just saved in your cache. Yeah, we thought it was the greatest idea ever. An incredible 30% of traffic landing on beta.iMemoryBook.com were going right into the online bookmaking application! They would play around, even get started on a book, but then they would forget to click the red call to action: “Save this book” (after clicking “save this book” they would move into the registration process. Because iMemoryBook is so new, many people come to the site, love what they see and then say, “I will do one of these books later.”

Unsatisfied with the registration rates, Ben and I decided that we wanted to experiment with asking for their email before we let them in. PhotoBucket has been extremely successful with this technique and is now gaining 80,000 new visitors a day! The idea here is that when a potential customer comes in for a visit, “just taking a look at our system”, we can continue to keep in contact with them by Email until they are ready to create their iMemoryBook. We want an email list. We also decided that our email list is going to be fun and helpful. We will NEVER generate an automatic newsletter. Each one will be handcrafted to be exciting and interesting.

So to the dismay of Neal, Dwain, and Paul–who had spent an enormous amount of time creating the online bookmaking application so that you didn’t need to be registered to use it, we are now testing the “forced registration”. Thus far conversion rates have tripled! I think it is working well.

Other Possibilities:
I am still not certain we have done it just right. I sometime wonder if we should add an opt out option at the bottom of the registration that says: “No thanks… I just want to look” like Screenit.com? Here is a screen shot (screenit needs a makeover):

The funny thing is that I have never registered for Screenit, but I have used them dozens of times to learn if a movie meets my standards. Perhaps we should create something like zohowiki, a link that says “log in as a demo user”. Here is another screenshot:

Zoho once did this with ZohoWriter(like MS Word but online) and sheets but now it is gone. I wonder if the “demo” user wasn’t working. I thought that they must work, that is what got me to start.

What I like most

I lean to this option because it would give our potential customers the chance to see a book that is full of content. Currently when you start an iMemoryBook there are no photos and they are very generic. I like the idea of them being able to view, edit, and play in a book that has already been started. It might help them catch the vision.

Two Problems

I see two downfalls with the Zoho’s demo plan: 1) This option could possibly make it harder to get emails so that we can follow up. I can see myself, very interested in the service, but because I have now seen the system I don’t have any reason to register because I am not planning on making a book today. It is very important that we have an email to follow up with periodically. 2) Our demo books would have thousands of users on them at one time, I can see that causing a collaboration nightmare.

I am not sure how we will have our registration page in the end. It will take a lot of testing to learn which way is best. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

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Today we received a gift in the mail from ClickRiver, the new pay-per-click ad system for Amazon. They gave us “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation“ by Lynne Truss (I wonder if they noticed that every time I write it is a grammatical and punctuation nightmare). The book is Amazon’s way of saying “thank you” for FamilyLearn’s participation in the BETA release of ClickRiver. How fantastic is that!

I can tell they are working very hard over at ClickRiver. We can all learn a lesson from this gift.

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Everything begins with research:

1. Register with Wikipedia and study their suggested readings (takes about 30 minutes):
   

   The five pillars of Wikipedia
   How to edit a page
   Help pages
   Tutorial
   How to write a great article
   Manual of Style

2. Find and read about other companies related your company. Note what you like about the articles and what you don’t like. I am a very visual person so this helped me more than the tutorials.
3. You can learn the basic write up language for Wikipedia in a short time, but I suggest that you snatch an article that someone else has already posted and then click “edit this page” and copy out all their content. You can now use this content as a template for your posting. Replace their text with your text, their images with your images, and their links with your links. In the end you will have created a well organized article.
4. Properly site any content you use.
5. External Links: You can link them to official pages on your website, your blog, and recent articles about your website. These links are very valuable so choose them carefully and make sure that they are appropriate to the cause of Wikipedia.
6. Don’t sell ANYTHING. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The greatest danger of writing your own article is that you are partial to your business. Be careful.

Each post you make is just the beginning. Over time others will refine your article and correct your mistakes.  Please comment if you have had experience with Wikipedia.

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$200 dollars free PPC

$100 dollars free PPC

Adcenter normal Homepage

In class the idea came up that someone could go to business door to door and sell them $200 of adcenter credit for $100. Ben was saying that if everyone here at work signed up we could get over $1000 dollars in free advertising for the launch of the New BETA iMemoryBook system.

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After using ClickRiver, I thought that I would let you know a couple of my initial thoughts on ClickRivers pros and cons:

Pros:

• With ClickRiver, marketers now have a 4^th huge advertising median (other three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN) that will be affordable to businesses of any size.
• ClickRiver is simple and easy to use.
• ClickRiver has a Keyword suggestion tool I haven’t seen on Google, Yahoo, or MSN: You can type in one of your competitors URL’s , for example I typed in MyFamily.com:

Then you can just select with keywords you would like to bid on.

• We are most excited to test targeted keyword sets that are related to the millions of Amazon books relevant to iMemoryBook’s content .

Cons:

• ClickRiver doesn’t have the ability to insert dynamic keywords.
• ClickRiver will not advertise your product unless the search bar was used. This means that if someone is only browsing Amazon through the menu, your ad will not come up; even if they browse through what would otherwise be relevant keywords.

When it comes to usability in the pay-per-click marketing world, here are our rankings:

1. Microsoft Adcenter
2. Amazon ClickRiver
3. Google Adwords
4. Yahoo Search Marketing (after using the others, Yahoo feel like a dinosaur, I hope they release their new site to the public soon)

We will report on how they produce later.

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