This is an interesting brand association given that the fast food restaurant Carl’s Jr. has never toted health conciseness as there primary brand message…I believe their brand motto is “If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face” not exactly they health first message that Men’s Health magazine portrays.

You would think that this would be a conflicting brand message but the campaign doe’s bring a certain brand synergy by utilizing Men’s Health “eat this, not that” association of books. By associating with a recognizable line of books Carl’s Jr. has positioned their turkey burgers as a true “healthy” alternative to their regular menu items.

This campaign works because Carl’s has always tried to position themes selfs as a mans fast food restaurant featuring bikini clad Paris Hilton and other guy-centric images in their ads. So Mens Health provides a perfect association it is a masculine magazine that focuses on helping men live healthier more fulfilling lives while maintaing a strong masculine appeal.

The two brands match up nicely saying you can still have a manly yet “healthy” burger when you choose a Carl’s Jr turkey burger.

It will be interesting to see if this camping is a success that generates a synergistic cross over between loyalist of both brands.

I feel like with fledgeling magazine readership we will see more magazines attempt to leverage their brand image and readership in this kind of way.

Many times this simple yet crucial step is over looked resulting in lackadaisical behavior that will cause you and your organization major headaches down the line.

Think of your domain name registration as the “title” to your car. If you bought a new car you would want to make sure you safe guard your title. You would leave it at your friends apartment, you would have your secretary keep it in her desk and you most certainly would register the title in someone else’s name.

So why would you do that with your valuable piece of Internet real estate…I mean sure it only cost $11.95 now but once its developed it will be worth at least $25.95 right?

So here are some simple tips to protect you and your business from facing major headaches down the line.

1) Know where your domain is registered – This sounds simple but many people dont even remember where they purchased their domain name to start with. Keep your receipt and know where your domain is registered. If you lose the info you can find where your domain is registered by using a whois inquiry.

2) Safe Guard your login info – Be sure to keep your login information on record but store it in a safe place. You don’t want a disgruntled employee or partner transferring, canceling or attempting to steal company domain names.

3) Keep your Who-Is-Record up to date – You are required by ICANN to keep your whois records up to date every year. If you don’t update your whois info they can seize your domain.

4)Keep your admin email address current – This is vital, you need access to your admin email because if you have any issues with the domain this is where your notifications will be sent. If you don’t have access to this email account you will have trouble transferring and renewing your domains.

5) Consolidate all your domains under one account – For the sake of simplicity and peace of mind keep all your domains registered under one account. This will make it easy to keep track of expiring domains.

6) Register for multiple years – By registering your domains for multiply years (I would recommend 3+) you avoid worrying about your domain expiring and it is generally believed that it helps with your sites SEO rankings.

7) Never register with an ISP(internet service providers) or shady registrar – Use an domain registrar that you can trust. Consider utilizing your web master or web site developers registration service. It is in their best interest to keep your site up and running. Many registration companies will attempt to make it as hard as they possibly can to transfer your domain and than they will hit you with exuberant fees to renew. ISP’s are notorious for having terrible control panels and poor customer service.

So keep your domain under control and watch your web site grow with out all the little annoyances and headaches of misregistering a domain name.

As explained by John Hrvatin, Internet Explorer program director:

The older Cufon library depended on legacy, non-standard IE behavior fixed in IE9. The IE9 behavior is correct (as in, IE9 now behaves like all other browsers) and won’t change so we’ve worked with the Cufon authors on a fix for the library. And as we find sites affected by this, we contact them to let them know there’s an updated version of Cufon to use.

So, it turns out, the font rendering engine Cufon used in IE8 will not work in IE9. If you are a developer that has used Cufon in the past, it is important that you update your Cufon files on your server to the latest version (currently 1.09i) to ensure that IE9 uses see the fonts on your website properly.
Luckily IE9 is still in its early stages and currently has below a 3% browser market share, but as more users upgrade, this will become more of a problem for developers that have not updated Cufon on their sites.

In the beginning of the internet, website designers had little more to choose from than whether to display a Serif or Sans-Serif font. Eventually more specific fonts could be defined; however there was no guarantee that the end-user had that font installed on their system. So a list of fonts in order of which was preferred would be defined, and in many cases is still used today. With CSS, a typical font style may look like:

A code like this will show Helvetica assuming the end-user’s computer has that font installed. But if the user does not have that preferred font, the browser would use whichever font on that list the user has, and if they don’t have any of those specific fonts, it would just display whatever sans-serif font is available. While this system works fairly well for most standard text blocks such as articles, it is not as ideal for headings or other areas where a more unique font might look better in a design.

There has always been an alternative way for web designers to display text in unique font. By creating the text as an image in a graphics program such as Photoshop, designers can use any font styling they want, and know that it will look the same on every user’s computer. And while this is a great thing to do for select images such as collages or other graphics heavy parts of a web page where the text is combined with an image, it is generally not recommended solely for the purpose of displaying text. Search engines will not be able to read the text from the image, and so they will not take them into account for SEO. It also cannot be read by computer programs that help people with disabilities read a website.

In recent years, there have been new advancements in web fonts. In 2004, almost a decade after the internet started becoming widely used, sIFR was introduced. sIFR stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, named in part by its creator, Shaun Inman. This method uses the widely-distributed Flash plug-in to render text as a Flash object, so because Flash can embed any font style in the same way that an image can, this is a method to display fancier text styles to the end-user.
There are a couple drawbacks to using sIFR. The biggest being, while almost all users in 2011 do have the Flash player, there are still some users who don’t, or others who intentionally block Flash, and they will not see the fancier font text, they will just see the regular text style. Another issue is that, while usually not very significant, replacing text on the page with a Flash object can slow down the load time of the pages.

The newest and arguably best solution for web font replacement right now is called Cufón. It has been around almost four years, and is essentially similar in method to sIFR, but without the use of the Flash player, so it has the advantage of not requiring a plug-in. Cufón uses javascript, which is built into every modern browser, and the javascript file contains a font generator, which will generate and replace the regular text with the stylized fonts when the page is loaded.
Of course, Cufón is still not a perfect solution. As I recently realized when upgrading from Internet Explorer 8 to 9, many sites using Cufón do not show the text correctly in IE9. It turns out that the way Internet Explorer 8 rendered the javascript engine that display the fonts was different than the way it should have, and so Cufón needed to be updated to work properly in IE9. To update Cufón, download the latest version from their site, and update the cufon.js file on your web server with the latest release.

In the hopefully not-too-distant future, web fonts will be much easier and widely standardized than they have been up to this point. With CSS3 and its font-face property, it appears that the future looks bright for web fonts. But CSS3 still isn’t supported by the majority of currently installed browsers, so until computer users update their browsers en masse, for now, the solutions mentioned above will be the way to go to have visually appealing fonts on websites.

Your website’s bounce rate can be a great metric for monitor the overall effectiveness of your site. Bounce rate monitors the percentage of visitors to your site that leave your web site after viewing only one page. Bounce rates can be a great indicator as to the effectiveness of your company’s homepage or landing pages. A high bounce rate percentage is a strong indicator that visitors to your site are not finding the information they are looking for or your “call to action” is not working.

Bounce rates will vary depending on the industry of the site and the goals of the specific page. As a general rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the 20 percent range is good where bounce rates of 40 percent or higher should throw up some read flags and further examination.

Media and blog sites will tend to have higher bounce rates generally. Niche and regional specific sites can also generate slightly higher bounce rates. The lower your bounce rate the more likely it is that your site is converting browsers into customers and sales leads.

If your site is experiencing a high bounce rate start investigating what might be causing visitors to leave your landing page. Reorganize your landing pages and work to define your “calls to action” while presenting relevant information quickly can help encourage visitors to click on to the next page.

A great way to target down the source of your bounce rates and work to improve your content is to utilize A/B testing.  By modifying page elements and testing them against your current site design, offers, or call to action, you can quickly derive the source of the issue. Even if you are not experiencing significant bounce rates, A/B testing is still a great way to keep a handle on bounce rates and on page conversions.

How many times has a friend or family member mentioned that they where looking for a good (insert service here) and you reply “oh yeah I went to this great place in place in (insert city) or I think the place was called (insert name)

This person loved your service wants to recommend your business but they can’t remember all of your info. So what does this person do? They hop on the Internet and start searching on Google.

So they punch all of information they know about your business into a search engine and bam out comes the results….”oh there they are its called “your company name”

Because you have a web site that ranks well for business relevant search terms this person was able to find you and refer you to their friend.

Here is another example. Say your company has a hard to remember url, well the person receiving the referral probably wont remember your url but they will remember your company name. Once again a quick search for your name yields your web site and boom you just got another referral.

Web sites feed referrals, having a web site allows co-workers and friends to quickly email text or forward your business information. Every small business persons knows that referrals can be their most significant source of business because referrals are pre qualified and a layer of trust has already been established easing the sales process.

I hear small business people tell me all the time in response to where do your current customers come from? They say “referrals” proudly. They quickly follow with I don’t think a web site will help me because all of my clients are from referrals.

My response is how many referrals are you losing because you don’t have a web site?

Now days with the mass of information available on the Internet many times when a friend or colleague refers us to a product or service we quickly check the Internet for information on that company. We want to see for our self if the company being recommend is worthwhile. We are a skeptical bunch who often times trust reviews of strangers on Yelp or Google just as much as we do our friends.

So make sure the source of this information is your source. Managing your review sites and maintaining a web presence is vital to capitalize on the new wave of referral customers.

No ones personal brand is more consistent and organic than the mellow Hawaiian singer, song writer, and film maker Jack Johnson. Jack Johnson’s brand is so organic that it comes with a USDA stamp right on it. Johnson’s smooth, mellow, laid back style is as even keeled as the sound of his acoustic guitar.

Johnson’s brand is very strong and his consistency of presentation is very high. Concertgoers and album buyers know exactly what to expect from Johnson and he always delivers right on point. Because of this his brand has flourished despite the waning market for musicians. But with all of this mellow predictability Johnson has been criticized for being to dependable and not exciting enough.

The solution Johnson has always been great at using his temperate persona in juxtaposition to other more flamboyant characters or diverse images. Johnson is very savvy at utilizing unique video content that plays perfectly with his mellow style. He paints his basic character against a colorful wall of creativity to create dynamic experiences.

Some perfect examples are Johnson’s video for Taylor Featuring comedian Ben Stiller. Stiller’s neurotic and fast paced character was perfectly infused with Johnson’s to create a memorable and exciting moment that was refreshing for Johnson’s brand.

In Johnson’s Sitting, Waiting, Wishing video he pitted him self as a static character immersed in a chaotic setting where the world was going backwards as he went forwards steadily just strumming his guitar as things burst into flames, food fly’s at him and he is thrown around the room. This creative video was the perfect way to spice up a predictable brand with out deviating from the essence of the brands message. You have the character or brand behaving predictably in an unpredictable environment.

Jack Johnson latest juxtaposed interactive branding effort will be sure to draw some excitement. In Johnson new interactive marketing campaign he pits him self against the rebel-rousing comedian Andy Samberg in the Andy Samberg vs. Jack Johnson “At or With Me” Teaser. The campaign is complete with a landing page pitting the two characters against each other and the whole thing is integrated with a Facebook ”like” function allowing users to vote on who they think will be victorious in the brawl.

This campaign works because of how unexpected it is. No one would ever expect the mellow Johnson to engage in a brawl so by pairing him with a comedian know for stirring things up think Samberg and Justin Timberlakes SNL skit “dick in a box” and you get a brand experience that is sure to infuse some excitement into even the most predictable brand.

This technique works with out diluting or degrading the brand because the application of juxtaposition is so unexpected that it is immediately recognized as humor, but it is not so predictable that viewers will over look the message in the “snow blind” way that static brand messages often are.

So if your brand feels to static and tired now might be the right time to use a little brand juxtaposition to breath some fresh air into your brand.

At first when you load the site you might be confused by all of the windows that quickly queue in the lower right corner causing your initial reaction to think you are getting hit by spam pop ups. However the site utilizes HTML5 embedded video to guide the user through the interactive experience that also includes very user friendly drawing board and post card creation interface.

Check out the video it is very exciting and hopeful an indicator of fresh new creative interactive media sites to come. You will need a Google Chrome Browser to view the video given that the HTML5 video is only embedded properly on this browser type and it does not feature cross browser capabilities.

It will be interesting to see HTML5 as it pushes to replace flash and with Google jumping on the HTML5 wagon along with Apple whose ipad and ipod devices do not support flash we should see more development utilizing HTML5 over flash.

So what has spawned my sudden enthusiasm for well…enthusiasm! Willy the owner and operator of a small hot dog shop in North Hollywood called Vicious Dogs. Willy has enough enthusiasm for all of us. He runs his small hot dog restaurant with passion and pride and he displays his enthusiasm at every turn.

From the moment you walk into Vicious Dogs your are quickly greeted by a jovial “hello how can I help you today!” Quickly with out the slightest prompting he will pitch you the dogs off of his menu quicker than the reverend can spout the gospel. His great chrism is followed by a trite story “this is the dog that built this restaurant” as he displays like he is a man passionate about hot dogs but he is no huckster he is just a enthusiastic friend sitting behind a counter ready to give you the best hot dog in the world.

Now the hot dog was amazing but I have a feeling that he could have served a basic ketchup and mustard hot dog on white bread and you would have left there satisfied.

The reason for this is he didn’t limit his enthusiasm to cooking the hot dog routinely he walks through the restaurant thanking his patrons for eating at his restaurant and immediately gathering feedback on their experience. He is truly invested in his customers happiness and effortlessly he builds customer loyalty. His enthusiastic business approach didn’t stop there. As soon as the line in his restaurant disappeared he quickly strolled out side and with in minutes his upbeat conversation had lured five new customers right into the shop ready to try out his energetic hot dog creations.

So what can we learn from this? It doesn’t matter who you are or what your business is people are drawn to enthusiasm. The simple act of being enthusiastic about his hot dogs was enough to entice people to take a shot on his restaurant.

As small business owners and entrepreneurs we are always up against the big guys in the industry but one way they can never compete with the hands-on business owner is in the area of passion. Your passion and enthusiasm for what you do is a competitive advantage that can not be easily duplicated or manufactured but it is quickly contagious, your employes and co-workers will be instantly struck by your enthusiasm allowing them to utilize their own internal enthusiasm.

Going forward don’t be afraid to let your patrons and co-workers see your passion let them share in your enthusiasm. Sharing enthusiasm is the perfect brand building platform. When we experience a brand with genuine enthusiasm it sticks with us and we feel like we where apart of a magic moment! Build loyalty with your customers and establish a strong competitive advantage using the power of “enthusiasm”

Be like Willy and let the enthusiasm fly!

Your business personality is important and often times for small business and solopreneurs the presence of the owners personality is a vital part of its success but therein lies the problem. In standard office and corporate environments people are reminded to leave their personal life, problems, worries etc.. at home but for the passionate entrepreneur this can be troubling how do you leave theses things at the door when their is little separation between your work life and home life. You constantly take your work home and your personal life to work.

So what happens when personal troubles seep into your business? Making your personal troubles and drama present in your enterprise can be shockingly detrimental to your business at times even crippling. It is important to remember that often times the professionals your business services or works with are not prepared to deal with your home life and they don’t want to.

Building that work life balance we often hear reference to is crucial to preserve the integrity of your organization even if you are a solopreneur. Bringing toxic negativity to your work is a simple way to destroy your brand and alienate your patrons. Your first rule should always be to never make your personal problems the problems of your associates, patrons or customers. Everyone has their own problems and although your transparency of character has served you well in business it will not do you justice to tarnish that with a infiltration of personal problems.

We have seen how the recent marital dramas of the Los Angeles Dodger owners the Mccourts has had a troubling effect on the organization as a whole steaming all the way down to the club house.

Just remember don’t be a toxicpreneur, keeping your positivity up even during the down times will server your organization right and lead to continued loyalty amongst customers and employees.

Your business is you but your business should always be the best face of you, just like any brand, consistency of character is key and if you show inconsistency and draw too much negative attention your brand will suffer.