Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Mar 17, 2010

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4. Competition: Both you and your customers can gain competitive advantages by being plugged into the chatter around your company. Be sure you are monitoring and have the necessary authority in place, or have access to such authority, to move quickly. – 5 Cs that businesses should consider to avoid business disaster online (Communication Overtones)

There are a lot of things companies need to be aware of when using social media. This post starts with a good starting 5. Think of them not as a reason to avoid social media, but what you should educate and prepare for as you set corporate policies.

Google determines the language of a website by the Title and/or the Meta-description.

Have a look at these search results. The first thing you notice is that the Titles and Meta-descriptions are in Italian. The second is that Google is offering to translate every page. Click on anyone one of the search results however and you will see the page it wants to translate is in English. You see the same thing occurring with the French language portion of the website. – How Google detects language (Econsultancy)

As companies expand their operations into different countries, having their websites crawled by the local language search engine is an important business tool. Apparently Google determines the language of a website by the title and possibly the meta description – which seems odd, but Econsultancy did a bit of testing. They have good recommendations on how to leverage this to create sitemaps for different languages.

What’s the most effective ad you’ve ever come across?

Think about this for a second. Not the best ad, which might encompass creative masterpieces, three-minute epics, or jokes and sight gags that still have you laughing a week later. These certainly get and hold your attention. But the true measure of an ad is its effectiveness in selling a product, promoting a brand, or otherwise driving action. For example, the long, drawn-out “wassup” from a Super Bowl ad long ago stills own a place in our vernacular (to be fair, mostly because “The Office” revived it), but can you recall the brand that created the ad? – SEM: A Call to Action (Search Engine Watch)

A missing call to action is one of the most common marketing/advertising mistakes made. You can have a great ad or website with a perfect description of the product or service that makes anyone who sees it want to buy it. But without a good call to action, you’re leaving sales on the table. You don’t want any type of confusion about what the next step in the process is. A good call to action will almost stand by itself and should be readily visible on the page.

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