Rogers State University & ATHLETICSITE.COM partner for third-best outsourced website in NAIA

The athletics department of Rogers State University recently cleaned up at the NAIA-SIDA convention, winning multiple awards for publications. We at ATHLETICSITE.COM are also thankful to have played a part in RSU claiming third place for outsourced athletics website in these awards.

RSU release

List of awards on the NAIA website

Congratulations Hillcats!

How big does your brand "sound"?

The topic of the Civil War evokes many responses. Some view it as a terrible tragedy that should have been averted at all costs. Historians immerse themselves in it. Collectors and "buffs" view the War Between the States in an almost romantic light. Extremists can use imagery to create and/or fuel hate and fear. Marketers can learn lessons from the strategies of both Union and Confederate armies, which learned those strategies from centuries before.

The first major conflict of the Civil War was at Manassas, Virginia. So unacquainted with the atrocities of war was that generation that residents of Washington traveled out to observe the perceived Federal routing of the rebels. The eyewitness account of Corporal Samuel English of the Second Rhode Island Volunteers reads in part:

"Next, orders were given for us to fall back and protect our battery as the enemy were charging upon it from another quarter, and then we saw with dismay that the second R. I. regiment were the only troops in the fight; the others having lagged so far behind that we had to stand the fight alone for 30 minutes; 1100 against 7 or 8 thousand. It was afterwards ascertained from a prisoner that the rebels thought we numbered 20 or 30 thousand from the noise made by us while making the charge." ¹

Did you catch that? A band of 1,100 gave the perception of 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers, simply based upon its volume. The Yankees weren't the first ones to use this tactic (see the story of Gideon's band of 300 men in the Bible's book of Judges), nor the only ones. Perhaps you've heard of the "Rebel Yell". No, not Billy Idol's album or track from the same-titled album.

The Rebel Yell, of which the exact sound is debated, was a fiercesome sound that contained elements of an Indian war whoop and the cry of a pack of dogs on a hunt. From the enemy's accounts, it was a shrill cry that came across as something other than human, or at best from a deranged people, that was most certainly intimidating. "If you claim you heard it and weren't scared that means you never heard it," one veteran recounted.

What does this mean for marketers, or public relations, or the self-employed businessman whose word-of-mouth advertising means his own words coming from his own mouth? If there exists any magic formula to getting your name out there and being heard, maybe it can come from the Civil War. Let's analyze the two examples above.

The first key is volume. What kind of ambassador are you for your own brand? Have you tacked up a shingle expecting the world to rush to your door. How well-known are you? Even though I'm a web guy, for now let's forget about search engine optimization, what your Alexa rank and Google PageRank are, and what kind of traffic you generate online. Does the guy across the street know what you do? Is your business known in your own town?

The real estate people have it the easiest here. We look for the sign in the yard to know who's listing the house. Other home improvement companies (roofing, windows, shutters, gutters, paint, landscaping, etc.) will often put out signs beside their work. If you make cakes, perhaps you can invest in stickers to place on the containers in which your cakes are delivered. A phone number and memorable website address can drive more business your way. That's less obtrusive than actually putting your labeling ON the product you make (here's looking at you, car dealerships).

The second key is content. Now the Confederate Army produced a "maniacal maelstrom of sound that ... never yet came from the throats of sane men."² Ok, at first glance you're probably thinking that you don't want "maniacal" and "insane" as a part of your marketing. Whenever you consider that the soldiers wanted to communicate fear in the hearts of their enemies, they were pretty spot on.

Does your marketing say what you do? Let's try this exercise: open up the Yellow Pages to any given page and look at the business names. (I purposely picked some local, one-shop companies as opposed to national chains to eliminate brand recognition.) Yorel Integrated Solutions -- can you guess what they do? Another from the same category is L2 Technologies -- have an idea yet? Now try this one: Software Solutions and Designs, Inc.; I bet you're in the right neighborhood now. As good as that name is, they certainly did not choose (or fare among what was left) as well in the domain name department: www.ssdplus.com. Who did better? Try PC Corner Computer Center, LLC, with the domain name www.pccorner.org ... it would only be better if they'd scored the dot-com version. (The category was Computers - Dealers, if you're curious.)

Here's another marketing exercise. Can you recite your mission statement in 40 words or less? You (and your employees by extension) should know your business better than anybody. Know what you do, then do it well.

So make your brand "sound big". Use as much volume as you can afford, keeping in mind that some advertising is free. Say what your business is about--you can flavor it with humor or creativity (or maniacal insanity), but in the end you must create a need, then tell effectively how your product or service meets that need.

1 www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/bullrun.htm

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rebel_yell

New designs and redesigns

Check out the new website for Cameron University Athletics (www.cameronaggies.com) and Southern Wesleyan's redesign (www.swuathletics.com).

If you have a mobile device and want to see our mobile sites, visit our clients' sites who have implemented mobile:

• Rogers State (www.rsuhillcats.com)
• North Greenville (www.ngcrusaders.com)
• Tampa (www.tampaspartans.com)
• Wisconsin Lutheran (www.wlcsports.com)

More exciting news coming in the next month!

New Clients and New Launches

We'd like to announce the addition of Miles Community College (Miles City, MT) and Cameron University (Lawton, OK) to our list of clients. Miles CC will have a new site coming out later this month, and Cameron will likely launch in December.

Launching in just a few minutes will be Mars Hill College (http://www.mhclions.com/).

Our text blAst (text messaging) and mobile site features are fully functional and will be added to all clients' sites within a few weeks.

Two schools and the NCCAA join the fold

We are pleased to announce that Southwestern Oklahoma State University and East Central University (Okla.) have partnered with ATHLETICSITE.COM for their athletic websites. Both members of the Lone Star Conference, it increases the number of LSC clients to four and the number of Oklahoma schools to five.

We have also reached an agreement with the National Christian College Athletic Association to become a corporate partner. As our part of the deal, we will be launching a new NCCAA website this summer that will automate many of the processes that the national office spends time on daily or weekly. Headquartered in Greenville, S.C., the NCCAA creates an avenue for athletes in Christian colleges to compete for national titles, but the mission goes much deeper than athletics. A heavy emphasis on community service and evangelism sets this organization apart from other national governing bodies. Three clients are members of the NCCAA: Palm Beach Atlantic University, North Greenville University, and Southern Wesleyan University. We'd like to add to that number as a result of this partnership, but our primary reason for seeking this relationship is the fact that we share the same beliefs and athletic philosophy.

If you haven't seen it already, check out the new Coker College design at www.cokercobras.com.

Partnership with New Media TV brings you an incredible price point option

BREAKING NEWS
The best value in college athletics websites just got better.

Through a partnership with New Media TV (formerly known as Penn Atlantic, Inc.), we are now able to offer an additional price point. Using an ad-based-revenue system, the cost to your school can be as little as $1,000 per year.

Our non-ad site is still available at $3,500 annually for the first three years of the contract, a savings of 30% off our standard rate of $5,000.

HOW IT WORKS
We will place a tall ("skyscraper") ad on the right hand side of your content, and a few other ads at the very bottom of your pages. Site visitors will be accustomed to seeing ads on other major websites, so it will not seem unusual to see them on your site. Aside from those unobtrusive ads, your site will look and function like any of our other sites.

Contact us today to be the first to get in on this new deal!

New Launch; Free Online Tools for You to Use

Tampa's new site is up at www.tampaspartans.com. We've implemented some new technologies on the site and feel it is a great improvement from the old site. One feature that did not exist in any form on the old site is the presence of the online store. The store is powered by Prep Sportswear, and you can access the store directly at www.BuySpartan.com.

We would like to invite you to follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/athleticsite) and fan us on Facebook (www.bit.ly/9DEa2l). Notice how that last link does not appear to go to Facebook? That's the first of the online tools I want to show you, if you have not seen them before.

www.bit.ly, along with other sites like www.tinyurl.com, are URL shorteners. Long story short (no pun intended), they will take a link that could consist of 100 or more characters and shorten them all the way down to just a handful of characters. TinyURL has an advantage in that you can make a custom URL, as long as you are the first one to register/submit it. For example, if you are making a link to your live stats which is quite long, you can paste your link in the tinyURL form and then specify a custom link like www.tinyurl.com/ABClivestats ... almost as good as grabbing a domain name for your live stats! The advantage of Bit.ly is that your link is as short as 17 characters long like mine above.

Along with the link shorteners, another tool you may find useful from time to time is an online image editor I discovered called SumoPaint (www.sumopaint.com/home/). If you're used to Photoshop, this interface is going to be very familiar. It puts at your fingertips the most common tools you'd need to quickly edit an image for your website: crop, scale, sharpen, color adjust, and even a pretty amazing number of filters for a free product. While I doubt it will supplant your need for good photo editing software like Photoshop and its competitors, it might mean you can purchase one less copy for your office if the other computers only use an image editor for the basic tools available in SumoPaint.

I hope you've enjoyed this post, and I plan to include more tips to help you with your online work next time!