Happy New Years from Spoke!

We hope everyone had a great holiday season. We are busy working on a new Spoke site which we will launch in the next month, but in the meantime we wanted to post some of recent client work:

The Ticket Guys

We just launched a new e-commerce site for The Ticket Guys. This site moves the client forward with a site that has more robust and dynamic navigation, a nice AJAX/ jQuery enabled custom site search and a clean new look that is consistent with their brand.

If you haven’t heard of them, The Ticket Guys are a great ticket broker in St. Louis – view their site at www.theticketguys.com.

Sentry Retirement

Spoke recently launched a new brand for Sentry Retirement including a new logo, business collateral and website. Sentry is a financial services company focusing solely on Retirement Planning in St. Louis.

Check out their site at www.sentryretirement.com

Selerant

Selerant is a Product Lifecycle Management software company with offices around the world. Their DevEx software is a web-based PLM software focused on specific industries.

Spoke designed and developed their corporate site, tradeshow banners and user conference logo featuring custom illustration. Check out the site at www.selerant.com.

It’s starting to feel like winter in St. Louis and Spoke is ready to celebrate the holidays with our last SpokeFriday of the year.

If you haven’t been to one before – SpokeFriday is our monthly happy hour to gather friends of the agency and to make new ones. As a virtual agency, the majority of our creatives work off-site so we use these happy hours as an opportunity to gather our creative teams, clients, friends of the agency and anyone else who is in St. Louis who would like to attend. Come for networking, drinks, appetizers or just to meet some friendly people in St. Louis.

• RSVP on Facebook
• Tweet about this using #SpokeFriday tag

The wait is over… Spoke Friday is back! We’ve moved into our brand new office, finally finished unpacking, and are ready to start breaking stuff.

To make up for lost time, we’re going to start a bit earlier (and probably stay a little later) than usual and make it an open house:

October 1
Noon- ?
Spoke Marketing
3145 Locust
Saint Louis, MO 63103

• RSVP
• RSVP on Facebook
• Tweet about this using #SpokeFriday tag

Hope to see you here!

P.S., if you can’t make this one, you’ll have plenty of chances…we signed a five year lease.

1. They are easy to write
   We don’t need to worry about things like facts, paragraphs or writing style. Just bang out a point and a sentence or two to convince the reader.
2. Content is king
   Or so I’ve been told. In the interactive world, impressions to your site matter. An easy way to do that is through blog post or articles. When you lack inspiration, just come up with another top 10 list.
3. They don’t require tricky things… like facts
   Research is tough, why bother, just make broad generalizations and people will believe them anyway (e.g. “Impressions to your site matter”). Besides, they are reading your post, you are the expert.
4. You are busy
   We are all busy, so why waste your time reading something that requires concentration. If you wanted to do that you’d buy a book or a magazine.
5. Twitter only allows 140 characters
   So people must not like to read anymore. One of the great things about not having editors and facts is that logical failures (like the one in previous sentence) go unnoticed.
6. People search for them on the internet
   See the chart below. I’ll leave the interpretation of the data to your imagination. But believe me search engines are important.
   
7. People retweet top 10 lists
   They really do. Honest. Heck here is a picture of a top 10 search results on twitter. Some of these have been retweeted.



8. It makes the reader feel smart
   Readers may think to themselves, “This is easy, I could have written this” (note, they are probably correct). So instead of a smug journalist, you come off as smart, but not-too-smart-for-his/her-own-good blogger.
9. Counting is fun
   We learned to do it as children, and unlike Calculus and Algebra, it’s something we actually use every day. People usually put a weak point in #9, to reinforce the strength of their 10th point. For proof, watch David Letterman’s top 10 countdown.
10. Top 10 lists can drive comments to your site
    People can think of one you forgot to include and say “Hey Brian, great list, but you forgot to talk about engagement. Social media is all about engagement these days”.
    If I missed any reasons, please do this below and prove me right. If there are no comments, I’ll just assume my list was perfect and you found no flaws in it.

Summer is here and so is the last SpokeFriday at our current office. It has served us well the last two years, but it is now time for Spoke to move on to bigger digs (a block down the street).

If you haven’t been to one before – SpokeFriday is our monthly happy hour to gather friends of the agency and to make new ones. As a virtual agency, the majority of our creatives work off-site so we use these happy hours as an opportunity to gather our creative teams, clients, friends of the agency and anyone else who is in St. Louis who would like to attend. Come for networking, drinks, appetizers or just to meet some friendly people in St. Louis.

• RSVP on Facebook
• Tweet about this using #SpokeFriday tag