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Aug
07
2008

Tips for Creating Online Video Ads

By | Internet Advertising, News & Notes

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Free and low-cost video creation and editing tools have made it easy to create your own video ads.  Whether you’re creating your own video ads or having someone else create them, Ad Operations Daily offers some tips to help create a high-impact video ad.  Google offers video ads as part of their AdWords program – a cheap distribution network to consider.

Aug
06
2008

How to Get Your Social Network Users to Fill Out Their Profiles

By | Social Networks

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“Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that’s all I care to share about myself – will you be my friend?” Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It’s not very useful or inspiring.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you’re talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though? – ReadWriteWeb – Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles

ReadWriteWeb’s article describes a common problem on social networking sites – getting users to engage and fill out their information (let alone post and contribute).  Their suggestions mostly depend on the functionality of the social networking software, but here are some ideas from a community evangelist and internet marketing viewpoint:

  • Reach out – If you greet new users and make them feel welcome, they are more likely to put the time into their profile and the community.  Reaching out to users who haven’t updated their profile can have a similar result.  Sometimes people just need to feel a
  • Highlight – By highlighting changes and updates that are made on profiles throughout the site, people may be reminded or enticed to update their own profile (people love to be famous)
  • Feature – Choose some interesting profiles to feature on the social network to showcase good profiles – sometimes people just need a good example.
  • Recommend – Recommending people to each other based on their profiles can be a powerful way to get people to connect.  For empty profiles, make note of this possibility for when it is filled out.
  • Entice – Sometimes good old marketing schemes like free giveaways are the only way to get certain people off the couch.  Offering a discount or freebie from your business may be relatively cheap way to accomplish this.

Getting people to fill out their profiles is important not only from a business standpoint (yours), but also for encouraging new people to join.  People will be reluctant to contribute or give you information if they community does not seem to be active.  You may need to recruit some go-getters to help you get things rolling.

If you have ideas or ways that have worked on your own social networks, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

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Aug
05
2008

Rulebreakers as Frontrunners

By | News & Notes, Tech

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As impressionable children, we all heard the little gem ‘Crime does not pay’.  I think we can all agree that this is a rule to live by, generally.  Was listening to the Buzz Out Loud podcast on the drive in.  Rafe Needleman, editor for CNET’s Webware.com, commented that the well respected iPhone app company Tapulous got their earily start creating applications for jailbroken iphones.  Since jailbreaking your phone is not illegal in the US, the market for applications that ran on these ‘modified’ phones may not have been a black market, but it was definately gray.  Tapulous’ experience in that early market positioned them perfectly for when Apple created the iPhone App Store for application purchases, which has become a viable business model for the company.

No moral to this post, just an interesting observation on the ebb and flow of deliniage between whats unethical and whats just good business.

Aug
04
2008

Yahoo delivering on user created potential in search

By | Tech

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Back in April we covered the web 2.0 expo announcement of Yahoo’s Search Monkey, a search result modification API.  Now Yahoo is making the bold step of bringing a small group of Search Monkey applications into the default search results space.  My prediction: Yahoo is evolving into a specialty search company.

When announced, Search Monkey was Yahoo’s early days search tool that summed up the company’s commitment to an open application development platform.  Programmers working in the Search Monkey space were able to create specialized results within the Yahoo search application.  If, for example, you run a restaurant and you wanted your chef’s three best entries listed with your name in the results, it could be done in Search Monkey.  The catch was, people using Yahoo needed to install your Search Monkey app into their Yahoo profile in order to see the special results. That was, at least, before now.

Yelp and LinkedIn are the first two companies outside of Yahoo to have their Search Monkey applications added to the default search engine for Yahoo.  The specialized look that Yelp and LinkedIn developed for their searches will now be in every Yahoo search result by default, meaning every Yahoo search page with Yelp or LinkedIn results will be serving up rich, contextualized information.  I have to believe that other companies are seeing this as their best chance to help push their unique content out to one of the big three search engines.

This move begins what I feel is an important journey for Yahoo to distinguish itself from Google and Microsoft.  User generated search results like Search Monkey may give Yahoo a speciality search advantage.  If you know that Yelp (a resturant recommendation site) has more informative results in Yahoo, you’re going to start using Yahoo for your resturant searches.  While it remains to be seen how many Search Monkey apps Yahoo brings into the fold, this is likely only the beginning.  Yahoo’s press release suggested that both the Yelp and LinkedIn app were seeing 15% click-thru rates when tested in an A-B group, which is a very high percentage in search.  It seems logical to me that as long as your app has a high rate, and your content is well structured for semantic markup (a requirement for Search Monkey to work properly.  See Microformats), you too may find your user-created search layout added into Yahoo’s main trunk some day.  Now you just have to contextualize your site’s content and write your custom Search Monkey application.  Need any help?

Aug
04
2008

SEO for Business – More Than Just Keywords

By | SEO

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I was speaking with a client today who said his previous SEO company asked him for 20 keywords and got his website on the front page of Google for all of them.  But he still hadn’t seen his traffic go up, nor seen any leads from the experience. I think this provides a very important lesson about SEO – first you need to understand your business goals and your goals for your website.

Just because you’re on the front page of the search engines for some keywords you think are important doesn’t mean you’ll get more traffic or leads.  You don’t know if those keywords are the same as what your potential customers are using.  SEO is really an ongoing experiment in finding out how your customers want to find you.

After speaking with the client for awhile longer, he came to the conclusion that he really wanted more leads from his website.  In his experience he’s found that he closes 80% of business from people who contact him.  Leads are important way to increase his sales and are a good goal for his website.  Now we have something to work with – and SEO isn’t the only answer, it should be part of an overall Internet strategy.

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Aug
01
2008

Which Social Networking Sites Are Best for Promoting Your Business Website Content?

By | SEO, Social Networks

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One way to increase the awareness of your products and services (and your brand) is to have your website and/or blog content show up on social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc.  Users of these social networks will hopefully discover your useful content and visit your site – possibly becoming returning visitors and passing on your name to co-workers, family and friends.  Social networking sites usually have different types of audiences, so it is worth investigating them to see which ones work best for your target visitors.

Here is an summary of some of the top social networking sites:

  • Digg – Started initially in the tech industry as a way to link and rank news and articles and has quickly spread to gaming, and off-the-wall.  Digg is trying to widen their audience, but in my experience, many business-related articles are quickly lost in their huge amount of submissions.
  • FaceBook – Started as college students only, but now open to all.  Best for connecting with long-lost friends and for networking with acquaintances.  There are business networks and groups, but FaceBook does not make it easy to separate close friends with business networking acquaintances.  One possibility is to create two personas – one for work and one for personal use.  Posts from your blog can be displayed in your profile and you can create pages to promote your business.
  • MySpace – Probably one of the more mainstream of the social networks, MySpace is heavily used by younger generations and by entertainment and music groups wanting to connect with their fans.
  • LinkedIn – Targets business users who want to keep track of their networking contacts.  Business can join and create groups to promote themselves.
  • Del.icio.us – Is a link sharing social network where you can share links with notes and tags.  Can be useful across multiple industries and a nice way to add more content to your own blog/site (check out their widgets).
  • Technorati – Started as a way to view news on tech blogs (hence the name) and see their ranking (as a function of how many other tracked blogs link to them) – is now used across many industries for an overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere.
  • StumbleUpon – Has a fairly general audience who use the site to ‘stumble upon’ new content that others have submitted.
  • Newsvine – Started as a sort of portal with voting for content from news organization, it now accepts content from anywhere, but still heavily favors news websites.  May be worth a look for your business blog since you can also start your own column on the site.
  • Sphinn – Targets Search & Internet Marketing Professionals.

As mentioned previously, it is also worth taking a look at industry websites to see if there are smaller niche social networks and communities in your own industry.

Need Help using Social Networks to Promote Your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

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Jul
30
2008

Instant Widget, simply add RSS [Recipe]

By | Content

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Lets talk content for a second.  If you took a moment to consider the websites that you find useful in your business sector most of them are going to be text based.  In the financial industry for example, your Bloombergs, Reuters, Barons and Wall Street Journals are all brokering in letters and numbers.  Words are their currency, more than dollars, Yens, or Pounds.  Likely your corporate site, too, is trading on its reputation to educate your customers through words.  All this textual content is going stale if unused.

One idea for your websites leftover content is to make a quick content widget.  They’re delicious, non-fattening and fun at parties.

Prep time is 15 minutes.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need.

  1. Text based content
  2. An RSS feed on that content
  3. A widget automator

I take the first ingredient for granted and assume your corporate website is not just a blank page surrounding a small ‘Coming Soon’ picture.  Now with your content in hand, gently break it up into smaller pieces.  These pieces are going to be used in our RSS feed.  RSS feeds are great little additions to any website.  They help make content on your site easily available to other computers by encoding it in XML.  If you don’t know if your site has an RSS feed, go ahead and ask your web programmer.  Okay, now that we have our content broken up we can put it into our RSS feed.  The feed isn’t going to do much right now, so just let it rest on your website.  We’ll come back to it.  Now, lets create our widget using your choice of widget automator sites.  For this recipe, I will be using SpringWidgets, but you could use WidgetBox or ClearSpring.

To use SpringWidget you will need to register a free account.  Lets do that now at the top right of the screen.  Once that is done, go ahead and click on the Express Widgets button on the left of the main page.  Now its time to add your RSS feed to the mix.  Take your RSS feed and slowly enter it into the field.  Try not to spill. SpringWidget will now use your RSS feed to pull in your content, wrapping it with a decorative box pattern.  That’s it, you have a widget for your content.  Almost good enough to eat.

The serving options are endless.  You can play around with your widget, style it how you want.  Once you are ready, the bottons on the left will help you embed this widget into Social Networks like Facebook, blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress, or anyone’s web page using the Javascript code.

Jul
29
2008

Using Social Networks for Business – Now what?

By | Social Networks

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Now that you’ve done some thinking about what your business goals are for social networking and investigated where your target audience is…

What will be the reaction to your message?

If You’ll Be Joining Existing Communities…

If you’ve decided to use existing communities and social networks to connect with your audience, take care not to put them all off by posting about how great your company/products/services are.  You’ll need to approach social networking as a way to help your customers (which will also help you).  Start by answering questions and trying to be as helpful as possible.  If the community allows you a profile page – fill it out and post blog entries if possible.  Once you’ve established a reputation for being helpful, you can make some inquiries of the community (to try to accomplish some of your business goals), be they feedback, reviews, etc (obviously some goals won’t require any inquiries if they’re directed towards increasing sales & traffic).

If You’ll Be Starting Your Own Community…

Starting your own community is the most difficult way to go, but sometimes it is the only way to reach your intended audience.  You will need a fairly large time committment to post content (lots of it), market and champion your network.  If you can enlist the help of some fairly vocal customers, it will help your cause (in terms of both effort and reputation).  Since a large part of the initial content will probably be posted by you, again concentrate on helping your audience.  Post frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers, blogs about what the company is doing, and information to help with your products and services.

Help Your Customers

Hopefully you’ve noticed the common thread: using social networks should be about helping your customers.  Helping them should lead to help for you and will give you a reputation for caring and listening when you need to ask them for assistance.

Other Posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

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Jul
28
2008

Widgets added to Buzzword Bingo

By | Content, Tech

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My boss just asked me to look into this Techcrunch interview with Eric Feng, CTO of Hulu announcing embeddable widgets for their online media site.  Must be a slow news day over at TC.  Am I alone in my surprise that Hulu didn’t launch with embeddable widgets?

Here’s the thing, widgets are a fundamental part of modern web communities, information distribution, viral marketing, you name it.   Just about anything we are trying to discuss here at Sazbean can involve a widget of some form.  They are incredibly important components for building better online businesses. And yet, the term ‘widget’ is getting all fuzzy and nondescript.

The word ‘widget’ has a nasty habit of sticking in the minds of almost anyone who casually reads tech articles hoping to glom onto buzz words they can throw at their IT department in the morning.  It sounds just technical enough to be important while retaining the rounded corner friendliness that glosses over all the scary details.   Widgets have become MacGuffins you check off on a list, like shifting paradigms and finding synergies.  In truth, widgets are invaluable.  But to use them correctly, you have to first decide if you are a provider or a consumer.

Widgets themselves are simply small kernels of code.  In the web today they exist to extend some content or function out from a single website to hundreds, thousands or millions of separate sites who want that content or function associated with their page.  Likely the example with the most exposure is the Google AdSense widget, which is a small kernel of code that Google wrote and millions have placed on their website’s pages.  When talking about widgets there are are always two parts to play, like a dance.   One part takes the lead by making the widget which connects to either their site or a publicly available, usually popular site (e.g. Flickr or YouTube).  The other part follows by embedding that widget in their site’s HTML source code.

From my experience, anyone thinking of adding widgets to their site need first decide on the goal.  Do you want to provide your content or service out to the world or are you looking to add content or services onto your business site?  Are you looking to drive traffic to your site, or are you hoping to keep them there longer?  Is there a service or function for which your online customers are pleading or is there something your site does that is better than the competition that you would like to brand?

The first half of the next series will deal with getting widgets for your site.  Useful business widgets that can instantly improve your sites value.  Then, we will look at a few services that can take your content and make it into its own widget, something your customers can load on their site and help spread the word.

Jul
24
2008

Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

By | SEO, Social Networks

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Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

This is also an important question because there are a limited number of hours in the day and we need to put our efforts into what makes sense for our business.  Just because you heard about MySpace in the news doesn’t mean that your audience of roofing contractors is there or has even heard about it.  You’ll need to do a little research to find out where your audience is.

Here are some places to look:

  • Start with publications focused at your audience – their websites often offer or link to a existing community.
  • Look to see if there are dedicated groups on existing social networks (like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc).
  • Use Google to search for your industry name to see if any other websites have or link to a network.
  • Try a blog search to find blogs (try Google Blog Search or Technorati) in your industry – they often have communities or link to them.
  • Ask professionals in your industry if they know of any online communities.

If you still come up blank it may be that there isn’t a community for your industry (yet).  Before you run off to start your own community, it is also important to understand your audience.  Are they even online?  Do they just read websites or will they create content and join the conversation?  The Profile tool at the Groundswell site can help you understand the tendencies of your audience.

Other posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

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