Looking for an inexpensive marketing idea to keep the attention of your Facebook audience and direct them to your website? Escape the boring uniformity of all those other Facebook pages and engage your fans (or “likers,” as the case may be) with some attractive branding. You can create your own custom tabs on your company Facebook page by adding the “Static FBML” app which you can get here. Once that is done you can start making your own branded tabs.

Here are seven great tab ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Landing or Welcome page – Greet your viewers with a branded page telling them why they should fan you up instead of having your wall as the default. Check out what some of the bigger companies like Starbucks and Adidas have done on their welcome pages. Create your own special tab and then change your default landing tab in your wall settings.

2. Product Catalog or Lookbook tab – Show off your best sellers or seasonal items. Check out this example we created for Dav Rainboots. You can even add links straight to your website shopping cart if you want.

3. Weekly Special – Offer discounts to keep people coming back again and again to see what’s new. It doesn’t require a whole lot of effort to change this out once a week. Weekly Specials will keep your audience engaged and give you another reason to update your status. You ARE updating the status on your company profile at least three times a week, aren’t you? Here is an example from our sister company, Pi Studio Printing.

4. Contests – Once you have enough of a FB following you can keep your fans interested by developing a contest and creating a tab on your page with all of the details. One of our clients who makes organic dog treats asked everyone to upload a pic of their dog and state which treats it prefers. We created a page for them to post the winner every month. People love to share pictures of their pets so it was a huge success and kept folks checking back to see if their dog won. What kind of contest could you initiate that would engage your biggest fans?

5. Testimonials – Place photos of your satisfied customers along with a short statement about why they love you so much on a tab. You can even ask for people to post photos of themselves with your product stating why they like it so much and voila! Instant testimonial. All you have to do is create a tab to place all of these posts on so they don’t disappear in the never-ending Facebook stream.

6. Company History – Use this tab to spread the gospel of your brand showing how you became what you are today. This would be similar to your ABOUT US page on your own website and could even link directly to your ABOUT US page.

7. Coupons – This is a great way to get your special deals out to the public and get them coming in to your store or office right away. People love to feel special and get a good deal at the same time so make sure to have FACEBOOK FAN EXCLUSIVES. Create downloadable or printable coupons for this page.

Remember that your Facebook page is like a mini website showing off your brand. It is easy to change and sculpt your message on a daily basis. If you would like to brainstorm about ideas for your company’s page, feel free to call us (805.383.0054) or take one of our fun half day Social Media Strategy Development seminars to learn great tips and tricks. We can also design fantastic graphics and manage the tabs for you if you prefer. Check out our Social Media services today and get started using Facebook to your advantage now!

Purchase David Pu’u works here at our Studio Shop.

Please join Pi Design as we launch our new venture, Pi Studio Printing. We are opening our doors on March 12th to artists, photographers, friends, family, clients, and design professionals! To showcase the capabilities of our latest addition to the Pi family—the giant Epson Stylus Pro 11880 printer, we will be showing the breathtaking work of David Pu’u, editorial photographer and cinematographer. David will be in attendance and to share his experiences traveling the world photographing and filming surfers, sea life and other wondrous phenomena.

Please join us for refreshments and great company as you tour the Pi Studio Printing facility. This grand event takes place two days prior to our favorite holiday, Pi Day! In honor of this glorious day we will, of course, have much pie on hand as well as other roundish treats.

Pi Studio Printing will be raffling off all kinds of great prizes like gift certificates to Vie, the Spa upstairs, David Pu’u prints and more!

Leave work a bit early on Friday and come have some pie with Pu’u. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

When: March 12th 2010 from 3:30pm to 6:30pm
Where: 760 Las Posas Road, Suite A1 and A2, Camarillo, CA

To RSVP click here

Read more about David Pu’u here: http://www.davidpuu.com/bio.php

These days, there is a lot of hype about the power of social media in business regardless of industry. While some people jumped right in and started engaging with online communities to build their brands, others hesitated a bit before getting their feet wet. Still, some people remain skeptical and have yet to take the social media dive. Here are six reasons to cannonball into social media’s pool of opportunity.

1. More and more people are online more and more regularly. In this current economic downturn you need to find the ever-elusive customer. It is a fact that the average person is spending more time online. The number of people doing so also increases daily. You must find them and engage them. Traditional advertising just isn’t working the way it used to. Magazine and newspaper subscriptions are way down because websites are providing the news much more quickly and in a more affordable manner. TV and print advertisements have become expensive. The popularity of consumer review sites like yelp.com are changing the way people think and shop.

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We all have bad habits. Whether it’s an affinity for fast foods, use of Arial instead of Helvetica, or adoration for alcohol, there’s always room for improvement. Do you take too many trips to the coffee room during the course of a workday? Are you chatting with friends on Facebook instead of finishing those TPS reports?

This is for all the designers in the world. We feel your pain. We have compiled a list of our own New Year’s DESIGN Resolutions to benefit everyone who cares to read them. Let us all improve our capacities as designers together. Make them your own! Add to them!  The top 3 contributors to the ongoing list of New Year’s Design Resolutions will receive a Pi Design Creative Juice Canister! Come on, we know you all want one.

1. Get my creative juices flowing more freely by standing up from desk more often and experiencing the real world. Sharene Lewis
2. I will inspire the flat screen and page with multi-dimensional thinking. Cheryl Pelly
3. Broaden my color palette past grayscale. Joel Dualan
4. Get more sleep. Stop writing blog entries in the middle of the night. Sharene Lewis           
   
5. I vow to never again use Comic Sans (or any other Microsoft font) under any circumstance, ever. Danny Preslar
6. Promise not to roundhouse kick employees to the head who make bad typeface choices anymore. Sharene Lewis       Read the rest of this entry »

We had such a great response to our previous post on this subject matter that we compiled the comments to craft these new gems added a few more submissions of our own. Thanks (and apologies) go out to Barbara, Kathleen, Jerry Lund, Joe Howard, Ed at CR Print and Josh Brown for their comments, which we so selfishly tweaked to fit our twisted thought process.

1. I already have an idea for my logo, on this bar napkin, and I shouldn’t have to pay someone just to stick it on a 3.5″ x 2″ piece of paper along with my name and phone number. Can’t you just make copies of it? Oh, but I want to make the letters nice and clean and maybe spruce up my drawing a bit.
2. I can download free fonts and a paint program to create an effective brochure for my upcoming trade show… Can’t I?
3. 4 Colors?! WTF?! There are billions of colors in the world and that !@$#@ designer only wanted to print with 4 of them?!?!? Read the rest of this entry »

Alright! I devoured his book like I would a snack sized Butterfinger. LOVED IT! Of course, I did. He’s Gary Vaynerchuk. For those of you who have no idea, Gary Vaynerchuk, is the creator of Wine Library TV and author of Crush It! He is a vivacious (to say the least) and inspiring speaker. Watch and learn how Social Media will make or break your business. It really IS that important.

Here’s another of his keynotes. It’s a bit raunchy and in-your-face, but brilliant all the same.

Now go and get excited about what YOU do and CRUSH IT!

There are so many changes happening in our industry these days that I find myself reading several books at time. Following are my three favorites from the past year.

“Six Pixels of Separation” by Mitch Joel

If you have been putting off taking your business into the world of Social Media, hoping the silly time sucking craze will just go away, then you must read this book. Even if you have gotten your feet wet on Twitter, you still need to read this book. “Social media is not a fad,” says Mitch Joel. He guides you through the world of Wikis, Twitter and blogging and explains the necessity of getting involved in the conversations going on out there. Take control of your company’s messaging and branding through the great internet tools available now. READ THIS BOOK TODAY!

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A Tale of Two Cards

There are a constant barrage of business cards left on my front porch from tree trimmers, cleaning folks, landscapers, gardeners and others insinuating that I am not doing a very good  job of these things myself. I don’t take offense because I am busy and don’t put as much attention into my house as I probably should. Hopefully my friends and family get that and don’t think less of me. But, as I am sort of in the market for a cleaning person, I kept two cards in particular from last week. Read the rest of this entry »

In order to help the designer truly capture the essence of your company when designing or redesigning your corporate identity it is necessary to provide them with some background material. This is often done with a design brief but simply answering these questions should give any designer a great head start in the right direction.

1. What services and/or products do you offer?
2. How would you describe your corporate culture?
3. What makes your company unique? Read the rest of this entry »