Tech Trends

There’s been a lot of talk lately about society moving from an information age into an imagination age. We have our technology and information, and now we are searching for creative ways to use and receive them.

Richard Florida’s book “The Rise of the Creative Class” explains this change in society: “Leading this transformation are the 40 million Americans – over a third of the national workforce – who create for a living. In the future, they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither.”

As a creative professional, I am delighted that creativity and imagination are becoming more valuable in the workplace. However, this means that maintaining your creative edge will become even more imperative to your success. Here are a few tips to ensure you will be rising with the rest of the Creative Class.

Stay Inspired
It is important that you remember why you chose a creative field to begin with. Make sure you are going to art shows if you are a visual artist. Read a great story if you are a writer. Visit a technology trade show if you are a programmer. Seeing creative work in your field, or even unrelated to your field, will help you stay inspired and create great work.

Know Your Process
We all work differently, and sometimes this means at different times of the day. If you know that you are the most creative in the evening, set aside an hour or so each evening to think about your projects. If you need a few hours to think about each project before you start, make sure that is part of your process. Finding out how you work the best will not only help you produce better work, it will also help you work smarter, not harder.

Think Outside the Box
For creative professionals, the time spent outside the four walls of an office is equally as important as the time spent inside. Life, and all of its sights, sounds and emotions are going to be your greatest inspiration for outstanding work. We need to be in touch with the world around us because we are creating for it. Remember that your ideas are what make you valuable, so go out and find some.

How do you foster your creative edge? Share with us your strategies. Join our conversation on Facebook and Twitter .

–Lesli Walsh, Graphic Designer at Sunny

With brand pages finally making the switch to the Facebook Timeline, it may be a good time to review your brand’s content strategy.

The Facebook Timeline redesign was created to help spur more engagement with users, who are likely current customers or potential customers. Instead of advertising or selling, Facebook’s rules and redesign are pushing for more personal interaction. Here are three tips for increasing engagement with your followers.

Be Real. Facebook is banning the brand pages from advertising in their cover photo, and encouraging liking or sharing their page to receive some sort of prize. These are all tactics many businesses have been using to build followers. Our advice is to be real about your company or brand instead of salesy. Be personal and you will encourage interest and sharing of your page naturally. No one wants to feel bombarded with sales. People want to be informed, they want to know what’s going on, and they want to feel like they are a part of it.

Be Visual. Take advantage of the new design with an awesome cover photo. This is a great branding opportunity and can be viewed publicly, so make a good first impression. Post visuals on your page often. Posting a photo or a video can help encourage more viral sharing and increase your reach. Photos drive up to twice as much user engagement then text posts. Using visuals can be a great way to compliment the message you are sending out.

Be Conversational. Think about tone and style. What does your audience react most to? You should talk to your users as if they were in front of you. A conversational tone can still be polite, professional, informative, but it can also be fun, quirky, and humorous. Whatever you choose to represent your brand, remember you are talking to real people and they will respond in similar ways as if you were speaking face to face.

The bottom line– never forget about your audience. They are your customers, your followers, your fans. Talk to them and listen, and use Facebook as a way to share your company not just sell.

Recently, my son brought the “Happy Box” home from his pre-school.  The “Happy Box” is a plastic container about 10-inches wide, 14-inches long and seven inches deep, in which toys or other trinkets are placed and brought to school.  The other kids in the class then have to ask questions in order to guess what is inside the box – “Is it soft?” “Is it round?” “Does it have wheels?” And so on.   It’s a guessing game of show and tell.

So when he brought the “Happy Box” home, I told him I’d get inside it, go to school with him and surprise all his classmates with the fact that someone put a dad in the box.

His immediate response was, “No dad, you’re too big.  Only if you’re small can you go in the ‘Happy Box.’”

It made sense to me.  After all, no dad, much less one standing at 6-feet, 4-inches, would fit inside such a small container.

It also got me thinking about business and why so many businesses seem to forget  the same simple concept when it comes to their websites.

Too often, businesses try to squeeze the same website built for a desktop or laptop viewing onto mobile devices like iPhones or iPads.  It doesn’t work. To quote my son, “You’re too big.”

Mobile websites should be a part of any digital strategy.  Squeezing a full site onto a 5-inch phone screen isn’t fair to the brand, but it is particularly unfair to the consumers who are trying to view the site.

It is no surprise that Americans are attached to their mobile devices.  According to recent statistics from the Mobile Technology Association of Michigan, there are more mobile devices in the United States than people (327 million devices to 315 million people) and 84-percent of us keep our mobile phones no more than 10 feet away from us at all times.

We are definitely a mobile society, looking for information quickly while on the go, and accessing the Internet from our smartphones and tablets at an astonishing rate.  Business website should take that into account and be presented in the same way the reader is viewing it.  Today that means mobile.

Let’s not keep trying to fit everything in the “Happy Box.”

Facebook is changing things up again, and this time, the changes will impact brand pages.

By the end of the month all Facebook brand pages will have to make the switch to the Facebook Timeline. While some of us have already updated our personal pages, the Facebook brand page will have a few different rules and regulations.

Why the Facelift? This isn’t just another, let’s spice up the appearance of Facebook update. Facebook is changing the medium of your brand’s channel to encourage online engagement. The design and new regulations help make that happen. The ultimate goal of Facebook is to create an environment that isn’t spammy or full of advertising. The new rules and design push businesses to communicate and engage, rather than host and promote. After all, engaging and interacting with consumers is the point, right?

What’s Changing? The brand page timeline layout is almost an exact replica of the timeline design for personal pages. Here’s a quick look at what’s changing:

The Cover: Your page will have one large cover photo for an image with a smaller icon. Think of this as a great branding opportunity for your page. This cover photo does have new rules and regulations. For example, businesses are not allowed to advertise, encourage liking, or list contact information here. Visit Facebook for more information on page rules and regulations.

The Display: The new timeline removes tabs where pages previously hosted information on events or other initiatives. Instead, you have a choice to display four apps in a line, such as company photos, videos, blogs, etc. Facebook does allow users to see more apps, simply by clicking “more.” Think of this as a new outlet for what you may have hosted in your past page tabs.

Milestones: Just like a personal page, the milestones are used to mark major events. Brands can use it to educate their followers with important events. Think of this as a way to help craft your brand’s story.

How to Adjust? Your brand page will be forced to change over to the Facebook Timeline on March 30th, 2012. Take some time to explore and plan out your new design ideas. Check out these examples from Mashable for some inspiration.

Remember that social media can be a great way for your company to engage and share information with users online. Take advantage of the new Facebook Timeline and use it as a platform for social discussions.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the ads for the Super Bowl aired, and as always, the media has had a feeding frenzy rehashing the best, worst and the most controversial ads. However, at Sunny Media Group, we were examining the current trends and changes we’d like to see with Super Bowl ads in the future.

Expect teasers, previews, and series. Super Bowl Ads are no longer a singular event to be shown on the day of the Super Bowl. This year, many companies showed teasers or even their full commercial in the weeks leading up to the day of the Super Bowl via commercials or viral videos on the internet.

For example, think of M&M’s campaign to finally reveal the brown M&M character. The big event centered around finally showing her to the world on the day of the Super Bowl, but there were many teaser videos along the way leading up to the actual commercials shown on Super Bowl Sunday.

Expect repeats, but hopefully redoes. Some commercials reappear year after year with only slight modifications. For instance, Go Daddy has now recreated its racy commercial using sex appeal for several years now. The initial campaign did cause quite a stir and was successful in generating buzz for the company. But now it’s played out. We’re looking forward to seeing something new from Go Daddy, and hopefully their next campaign will be less demeaning towards women.

Our hometown favorite, Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit” was featured again this year. This second version fell flat, critiqued as being too closely tied to the upcoming political campaign for the presidency. Us Michiganders were also offended that the commercial wasn’t even produced in Michigan (unlike the first).

Due to the hefty cost of the Super Bowl ads, it’s likely that these series trends will continue next year in attempt for companies to try to get the most bang for their buck. We just hope that new creative campaigns will also be incorporated by the repeat offenders so we aren’t stuck watching the same tired commercials with a slight twist.

When a U.S.-based company gets applause from China on editorial policy, it raises some eyebrows.

That is exactly what’s taken place recently with Twitter, the popular micro-blogging social media site.  Earlier this year, Twitter announced its ability to censor tweets in a given country (see Twitter blog post here).  China responded with an editorial in its state-run newspaper, stating, “It is impossible to have boundless freedom, even on the Internet and even in countries that make freedom their main selling point.”

China doesn’t believe the Internet should house a free, unencumbered exchange of ideas.  And apparently Twitter doesn’t believe it anymore either.

What’s amazing is this announcement comes right after the close of 2011.  Last year, social media, and Twitter specifically, was given a tremendous amount of credit for assisting the so-called “Arab Spring” and providing everyday people the ability to communicate with each other – particularly about repression and injustices – on a mass scale while skirting the traditional and state-run media which either weren’t reporting the stories or weren’t allowed to.

There have even been incidents of people accidentally tweeting about major world events – remember the guy who was live-tweeting Osama bin Laden’s capture?

What if Twitter’s policy had been in place during those events?  Would we have had first-hand accounts of the happenings in Egypt or Libya?  Would we have been able to read about the mission to capture one of the FBI’s Most Wanted?

Twitter’s appeal has been, and hopefully continues to be, that it is playpen for the voices of individuals from any walk of life from anywhere on the globe.

Do you have followers? Then you have a platform.  Do you have a voice? Now you can be heard.

The voice of the people – as individuals – from around the world is being heard 140 characters at a time.  Why would Twitter consider censoring what has become, in many cases, a movement in social justice?

Of course, some may argue the pure amount of voices in the Twittersphere are too voluminous and results in white noise.  Some will even argue that Twitter cannot be a serious agent of social change when Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber have 18 million and 17 million followers respectively.

Neither of those arguments are the point.

The point is, individuals have had a voice and have accomplished amazing things, raising awareness about a number of wrongs thanks to Twitter.  And now Twitter’s new policy may, in fact, limit that by censoring tweets from on any topic it deems unsavory from any location it chooses.

Of course, since they were able to read the tweets from Egypt in 2011, China thinks that’s quite all right.

Over the holidays, I received the new Kindle Touch and this device sparked the usual conversation I have with my grandmother. Fascinated with the type and the screen, I bragged to her about the realistic appeal it has to a physical print book. Her response was quite clear: “You people have ruined everything.”

And for an 80-year-old Detroiter, she really has seen it all change. This got us thinking at Sunny Media Group, what else are we going to see “destroyed?”

Over the years we have seen technology continue to stream together tools and services into more convenient, united devices like the smartphone. The rise of the smartphone, combined with the arrival of tablets like the iPad into the mainstream, has killed off the need for many of my grandmother’s technologies. These new devices simultaneously act as a clock, a radio, a camera, a map, a dictionary, a book, and a window into the news world.

But aren’t these “new” items (smartphones and tablets) just a repackaging of older tools? The iPod is only another version of a portable radio. Shrinking and repackaging my grandmother’s technology has been the trend for quite some time now, but she doesn’t like our new styles.

So what else will my grandmother see “ruined” soon? As we continue to bulk up our devices into supermachines that stream everything, here’s Sunny Media Group’s guess at what will change:

For a look at other tech predictions check out Mark Smith’s article in the Detroit Free Press.

What do you think? Feel free to share yours with us. Talk to us on Facebook or Twitter.

Amanda Lewan
Content Strategist

It’s a brand new year, and now is the time individuals resolve to start it off on the right foot by setting goals for the next 12 months. Here are five New Year’s resolutions that your business can benefit from in 2012.

Resolution 1: Become a presence in your local community. Face-to-face networking is still vital in our business world. Get your name out there by attending networking events and joining local organizations. This is a great way to learn about local resources for your company and advertise your business at the same time.

Resolution 2: Engage your customers through Social Media. The more social you are with these sites, the greater your results. We’ve been spoiled with websites such as Hootesuite and Tweetdeck that allow us to schedule posts ahead of time. If you really want to interact with your customers and use social media to its full potential, it’s not enough to simply set it and forget it. Try commenting on other Facebook pages, connecting with friends and followers, or retweeting things that apply to your business or that you find interesting. Don’t be afraid to give your business some personality!

Resolution 3: Refresh your website. It’s great to be present in social media, but don’t lose sight of the fact that social media will connect customers right back to your website. Keep your website current and up to date.

Resolution 4: Optimize for mobile devices. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by the year 2015 more people will access the internet through their mobile devices than their PCs. Smart phones and tablets are here to stay, and they’re only getting faster and more user-friendly. Join the revolution and make sure that your website is mobile friendly.

Resolution 5: Finally, take time to relax. It may sound like the opposite of being productive, but in reality taking time to eat a healthy lunch or get a good night’s sleep will improve your productivity in the long run. Your brain needs time to refresh to help you dream up your next great idea, and taking breaks help you stay motivated and focused.

Like personal goals, these business resolutions aren’t going to deliver results overnight. But if you take the time to work on them, 2012 is bound to be a successful and productive New Year.

Jennifer Stuard
Marketing Specialist