Responsive Tumblr Blog for General Mills

Jeff Wagner — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:31:19 +0000

I bet you didn’t know that General Mills keeps one of every product they create and it’s stored in an archive room (well, more like a bunker) that’s logged, filed, and may never see the light of day again. Actually I didn’t know this either until they brought me down to their archives and let me see some of the interesting products they’ve come up with in nearly 150 years.

General Mills History Blog

General Mills came to Spyder Trap with an idea that they wanted to share with the world some fun and hilarious moments of their historic past. This project needed the content to be on a platform where it could be easily added by the client and shared by the consumer and user. Tumblr became the platform best suited to handle the publishing, management and engagement of their content.

With today’s Internet accessible from every device and screen possible, we utilized Responsive Web Design to allow the user experience and content to shine on smartphones, tablets and the desktop.

Vintage Design

Most of the products that’ll be featured on this site are long from the past, so the look needed to have a very vintage feel to it. General Mills had some great illustration work of their company from very early on (late 1800′s) that I had to bring into the site in some shape or form. Use of old logos and a worn polaroid helped complete the vintage look and feel for the theme.

Tumblr Features

Here’s a condensed list of features designed and developed into this site:

Responsive Web Design
Content Management
Photo & Video Uploading
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest Sharing
Integrated DISQUS Commenting and Notes
CSS Mobile Menu

We’re extremely happy to have been given the opportunity to collaborate with General Mills on this project and we hope the public enjoys the wins and slightly epic fails that a company can have throughout it’s entire history.

View the General Mills History Blog.

Talking Tumblr On Mashable, Using Tumblr To Get Focused

Aaron Weiche — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 12:00:32 +0000

Today’s web is growing with more content platforms focused on ease of use to publish text, links, photos, video and more. Tumblr is one microblogging platform that is finding it’s way to the mainstream, especially in the last year since launching in 2007.

Currently, Tumblr powers over 12 million blogs and many small business marketers are considering how yet another tool fits into their web, content, search, social and blogging strategy. At Spyder Trap, we’re involved in conversations on Tumblr and we’ve also started utilizing it ourselves.

Tumblr For Small Business

Spyder Trap’s President Mike Rynchek recently discussed Tumblr in a Mashable article “The Pros and Cons of Tumblr for Small Business”. Rynchek was one of a handful of online marketing experts interviewed for the article as they looked at the benefits for small businesses.

Mike and the other experts agreed that your online communication needs to start with goals and if Tumblr can help you achieve those, then it’s a good move. Mike stressed that those goals should not be directly monetary, but along the lines of driving traffic, brand awareness, communicating expertise and engagement.

“I look at Tumblr as an ingredient in a bigger recipe,” he says. “Tumblr helps facilitate your search efforts, which in turn drives more traffic to your site. This helps give you an indirect return on investment. Tumblr can also help create another indirect return through engagement.”

As you look at what you are trying to accomplish online, consider how Tumblr and it’s benefits might enable that.

Spyder Trap Uses Tumblr To Get More Visual

We’ve started using Tumblr ourselves for 2011. Spyder Trap In Focus gets updated a few times a week with photos that show our people, office culture, projects and more.

This photo is just one of the many staff, office and project photos we are posting to our Tumblr site.

When we started considering Tumblr, two driving reasons were behind our decision:

1. We identified that Tumblr would be an easy way to add a specific type of content (photos), make publishing easy for us and consumption easy for visitors. While we already blog and use other social channels at length, our Tumblr site is a visual channel of our company.

2. As an online marketing firm, it’s up to us to know the tools and services out there for our clients. Using it ourselves allows us intimate knowledge on what clients would benefit from Tumblr.

Just as we outlined above, we wanted Tumblr to add to our mix, not duplicate. In landing on a photo-only use, we are producing content we didn’t share before to an audience we might not have reached.

Doing What’s Right For You

As a small business you have to carefully plan and manage your time and resources. Tumblr might be a great way to share more content and expertise about your business, it might also not be the right choice for your current marketing strategy.

With any social and web service, make sure you fully grasp its benefits and what goals they can help you accomplish if you utilize them. Doing your homework and putting together a plan will help you make a decision on tools like Tumblr and adding to your online equity.