Having many people involved with social media for your company can be really beneficial in terms of spreading the work load, as well as being more responsive to customers. However, with multiple people, it may also be difficult to maintain a consistent branding with different voices and styles. Besides having brand guidelines, creating a social media persona can make it easier for those involved to understand how the company brand should sound and act online. [Read more...]
May
27
2011
Digging in the Cache – ASCII Art
Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. Way back when (ok, not really that long ago), computers and printers did not have graphics capabilities. If you wanted to make pictures, you were stuck with the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII standard. Some of the oldest known examples were created around 1966 by Kenneth Knowlton, who was working at Bell Labs at the time. While computers (and phones and tablets, etc.) have graphical capabilities these days, ascii-style art is still used in text-based communications like email, text messages and Tweets. [Read more...]
May
25
2011
11 Ways to Improve Your Business Website
Yesterday we explored 7 reasons why business websites are still important. Once you’ve decided that your business website is a vital part of your online strategy, how do you improve it to make it work better for your business? Let’s take a look at ways you can improve your business website. Please feel free to add your own tips in the comments. [Read more...]
May
24
2011
7 Reasons Why Business Websites Are Still Important
With all the hype around Facebook, blogs and Twitter, I often get asked whether a business still needs a website. YES! YES! YES! (seriously) Having a good website for your business is even more important now that technologies like Twitter and Facebook make it easier for more people to find you. Here are my reasons why having a website for your business is still vitally important: [Read more...]
May
23
2011
How to Make Using a QR Code Valuable to Your Customers
Marketers love QR codes (see example at left) because they make it easier to track offline actions. I’m not as convinced that consumers think very highly of them. They require a smartphone (or other device) with a QR scanner installed (usually free) and they have to provide some sort of value to the consumer. Often QR codes are used in conjunction with some sort of promotion or deal in order to get consumers to use them. I think there is some value in QR codes for consumers (not just for marketers), here’s an example of how they could work…. [Read more...]
May
20
2011
Digging in the Cache – The Million Dollar Homepage
Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. Up this week: The Million Dollar Homepage. We’d all like to earn $1 million on our website, wouldn’t we? Well, Alex Tew did just that. With the world’s ugliest website (yah, that’s the website on the left), which had nothing but ads. How’d he do it? [Read more...]
May
19
2011
Building an Ecosystem, Not just a Network of Networks
If you think about it, as business owners, we’re creating a network of networks. We have a community that we’re part of with this group, and we belong to this association, and online we may use Twitter and Facebook and other places to build networks. But how often do these networks work together? What we need to think about it how to create an ecosystem where everything supports everything else. [Read more...]
May
18
2011
Using Social Media to Build a Better Brand
I had the distinct pleasure to hear Olivier Blanchard speak at Ungeeked Elite in Chicago…. (sorry, lead a discussion). And have had a number of great conversations with him in person and online since. In Chicago he spoke about Social Media ROI and his view on online strategy is very similar to mine (business strategy and objectives and basic marketing first!), so it was really cool to connect with someone like-minded and hear how they talk about it and think about it (for the same reason, I’m really looking forward to reading his book, Social Media ROI
). If you have a chance to hear him talk or to talk to him, I highly recommend it.
I came across this presentation that Olivier did a few years ago, but he does a great job about talking about how social media helps you build a better brand:
Digital Branding and Social Media
View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard
What do you think?
(the link to the book above is an amazon affiliate link)
May
17
2011
Using Game Mechanics to Increase Engagement & Participation
One of my favorite discussions at UnGeeked Elite in Chicago was by Tom Tentoglou about Gamification, or adding game mechanics into business in order to increase engagement and participation. Gamification isn’t about building games (necessarily), it’s about using aspects of games that people find enticing. It’s not really news that people are motivated by achieving things (just look at high-powered stock brokers). But these motivations can be added to just about anything to increase participation or encourage people to do things you’d like them to do. [Read more...]
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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