How Businesses Are Using Foursquare To Promote Themselves

The iPad and the Future of Marketing

by Hartley Riedner

With more than 300,000 units sold within the first weekend, the Apple iPad is on track to be as popular as the iPhone (AT&T reported about 150,000 iPhones were activated the first weekend when released in June 2007). In less than three years, the iPhone has changed what the public expects, not only from their mobile device, but also from their favorite brands. Now marketers are scrambling to develop apps that provide another dimension to the consumer experience. So how will the iPad evolve the brand experience?

In a post for TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/ct25pM), Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff writes that “we are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator.” If Cloud 1 is defined by chat, type, tabs, pulling information and the notebook, then Cloud 2 is all about video, touch, feeds, pushing information and the tablet. Benioff calls this transformation “cloud + social + iPad.”

I believe that the touch and video aspects of the iPad are going to have an especially large impact on the future of marketing and advertising. Advertisements are going to be forced to become even more interactive, finding new and better ways to engage their target audience. Consumers will be able to touch, drag and manipulate products that appear on a sidebar, or touch to play a video to see the product in action. Wired Magazine offered the industry a glimpse into the future with the video demonstration of their new iPad App (http://bit.ly/ccCLkR). The user in the preview touches a car in an advertisement, and turns it 360 degrees. In a body wash ad, the user touches the words to have more or less information appear. An article that highlights a product is touched to go directly to the product website.

Tablets are a new, mostly untouched avenue for marketers to reach consumers. And the tablet format will become much more pervasive as competitors like HP, Google and Dell join the race. The iPad is pushing brands to the brink of the next phase of marketing, and I think brands that are quick to embrace this opportunity will be seen as innovative, relevant and savvy, and those brands that are resistant to the tablet format will be seen as (literally) out of touch

How to Improve Conversion Rates with Design Elements

If you are tracking lots of unique visits to your website but your conversions are low, you might want to try some different design elements to improve your analytics. We try and target between 4% and 7% and if your site is converting below that you may have a poor design or your Keywords may also be too broad. Click Here for a good tool to use to research search volume on a particular Keyword so you can also make sure you are not using Keywords in your Title Tags, Meta Tags and URL Strings that are not being searched. Watch the video below.

Why Social Media Revolution

This is a good video from Socialnomics that illustrates some old and some new information about Social Media trends and statistics.  Share this with those you know who are on the fence about what the phenomenon is all about.  Never has there been such a robust channel that is rapidly accelerating the time to market for customer acquisition, conversion, retention and optimization.  Ask us at Digital EYE how we can help you increase your referring traffic and conversions using Social Media.

Social Media Marketing Spend to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2014

By Mashable

We already knew that social media marketing budgets were on the rise, but now we know by how much. Forrester Research is out with their Interactive Marketing Forecast for the next five years, and estimates social media marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums.

Of course, social media is starting from a smaller base. Forrester estimates that $716 million will be spent on the medium this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).  Read Entire Article

How To Create A Killer Email Offer In 10 Minutes Or Less

This is a good article with lots of information on how to set up an effective email marketing campaign.  The real secret however is the subject line.  You need to follow the strategy that the Grocery Store Tabloids use.  Every article on the front page starts with these type of headlines:

• Learn The Secrets Of….
• The Truth About…
• 5 Ways to….

When people are scanning their Inbox, they open the eMail depending upon what the subject line says.  Humans by nature are curious and will more than likely open an email that peaks their curiosity.  If you are getting low open rates, and click throughs write us at Digital EYE and we will send you a White Paper on writing effective Subject Lines.

Learn More

How I Use Twitter

By: Jeremiah Owyang

Everyone will approach Twitter in a different way, and should find the way that works for them, here’s my approach on Twitter:

[Rather than answering "What are you doing" reframe your thinking to answer "What's important to my followers and me?"]
How I use Twitter, I try to add value, here’s how:

1) As a ’shared feed’ reader. I’ll post up links of what I’m reading that I find is interesting in near real time, and give some commentary. I try to add value here, rather than adding to noise. So use me as a news filter.

2) As a chat room. We collectively work out problems, issues, and I gain insight to other people’s viewpoints. Often when conversations are just between a few folks, I shift to direct messages or email –sparing my community from hearing my minutia.

3) Event capture: Lately, when I attend an event (like Mark Cuban’s presentation at BlogWorldExpo, or Teresa’s webinar on Facebook yesterday) I’ll fire off the top nuggets I learn.

4) Listening tool: It’s interesting to find out what others are sharing and talking about, from very personal to big concepts. I frequently use the search tools around different topics to keep on top of what’s happening.

5) Traffic driving tool: I use it to direct people to this blog, sometimes (I’ll admit) a bit too enthusiastically. Google Analytics indicates this is one of the largest referrers of folks to my blog.

6) For work: When I’m conducting interviews or briefings that aren’t confidential, I’ll state who I’m speaking to and what I find interesting, if you listen closely, you’ll hear me tweet about other interesting findings from my job as a social media analyst. Also, I will announce new research, request interviews, and promote workshops, conferences and other services.

How I don’t use Twitter

1) Personal Minutia: I rarely talk about waking up, eating lunch, or starting my car, instead, I want to add value.

2) Excessive personal discussions: I’ve been criticized for not @replying at people, but it’s because I’m sensitive to not overload the community with a discussion that’s only relevant to a few people. Instead, I may direct message them, favorite a tweet, or shift to email. Update as of Sept 2008, I have sent/received over 4000 direct messages, out of 10,000 updates. So 40% of my communications shift to private discussions.

A few people have found me too noisy (filling up their stream) but there’s a simple solution, although I would hate to see it happen, one can simply opt-out. You’ve got to do what’s right for you and I understand.

If you’re a Web Strategist at a company or agency, read Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter.

I hope to see you on Twitter, add me as a contact. Also, one of the keys to Twitter is to add people you know, it then becomes more like a chat room. Following me alone isn’t sufficient, see a list of active twitter accounts on Twitter Poster.

So, how do you use Twitter?

Watch This Video About The Future of our Country

This is a video about the United States and speaks to many of the challenges we face as the world changes and our nation goes though a shift in wealth and power.  Mortgaging the future of our country at a time when the world is becoming flat is a slippery slope and only time will tell if our nation will be able to sustain our current position as the global economic leader in GDP, technology and innovation.

10-Point Checklist For High Visibility in Google

Google is the pre-eminent search engine (SE) with no close competitor. Given that inclusion is free, your Web pages must be in it. We’ll show you how to top the Google SERPs, that is, be found at the top of the search engine results pages. These techniques are known as search engine optimization (SEO) and require a small investment of your time.

I took two of my sites to the top of the SERPs in three months, so it can be done. My pages have few competitors: my challenge was mainly to get past false positives such as resumes, job vacancies, articles, and so on. If you are competing with “real” sites that are selling competitive products such as the ones you read about in your spam e-mails, you can get there within a year with some persistence.

Goal

Google SERP

You must understand that SERP positioning is dynamic – what you see depends on no single factor. It depends on the viewer’s location, the type of search used (basic, advanced, regional, filtered, and so on), the content of the page, their keyword density, the page rank (PR), the search term (words or phrase), and so on. Therefore, you need to plan your site carefully.

Ten-Point Checklist

1. Domain Name and Server

Get a.ca domain if your audience is likely to look for Canadian sites. Use a global, top-level domain (gTLD) such as.com if your business is not local. A unique, topical name such as “dentist-atlanta.com” should rank higher in the SERPs than “dentist.com” or “smithclinic.com” (if the search term is likely to be “dentist in atlanta” or similar).

It is nice but not essential if the web host gives your site a unique IP address, but it is highly advisable to host your site on your own dedicated server. Shared web hosting means that a server could host thousands of web sites, and Google’s spiders would be slowed down.

If you already have a Web site, you can find out its IP address using cmd.exe or an MS-DOS prompt, e.g. “ping cnn.com” and call up the displayed IP address in the browser. If you don’t see the expected web page, it has a shared IP address.

2. Page Title

An ill-planned page title is the Achilles Heel of a Web page. This is the text that appears at the very top of the browser window.

The Title tag text should be brief and readable, avoiding superfluous words and punctuation marks. Begin with the most valuable keywords, e.g. “Root canal specialist dentist clinic, Mayfair, London”, not something like “***** Fred Smith, BDS – 5 Stars Dental Clinic *****”, or worse, “Welcome to my home page”, or “Untitled”.

3. Style Sheet

Placing style definitions in a.css (Cascading Style Sheet) file moves the body text close to the top of the document and shrinks the page size. Many Javascript effects can be replaced by CSS. Fast-loading pages are good for both humans and search engine crawlers.

4. Meta Tags

Google ignores the Keywords meta tag for ranking but other SEs use it. An extract from the Description meta tag sometimes appears in the SERP; sometimes you see a snippet from the body text. Moderation and relevance should be your benchmark for placing keywords in these tags.

5. Content

• Quality content is rewarded by top placement in the search results. For example, if you sell new cars, used cars, and car service, you would have three branches, each containing pages relevant to that theme.
• Links to popular causes, memorial ribbons, HTML validation, page counters, etc. could distract visitors to other sites.
• Optimise images and keep the page size low.
• Place key phrases towards the top of pages and in heading tags such as H1. Don’t get hung up on a single keyword for the whole site. Pick different ones for different pages so that you have more ways to be found. Optimise for the search terms used by your paying customers, if you can identify them, not casual visitors.

• Consider (this depends on the size and nature of your business) placing noncommercial pages such as staff pages, personal hobbies, genealogy and so on at a secondary level but not linked from the entry page. Some of my ranking success comes from hosting my hobby pages below my commercial site, because I cannot justify buying a domain for each of my interests. I legitimately link them to my resume, which has a link to my business site. This enables free placement of the secondary pages in otherwise for-fee directories.6. Links and Folders
• Link a site map from the home page so that crawlers can find the rest of your pages.
• Link each page to the home page and to others in its logical group (but not to every other page in the site). The anchor text should use key phrases and words.
• Use keywords for folders, image names and Alt text but don’t overdo it. e.g. /hamilton/lawyer/divorce.htm, alt=”Perth plumber” The deeper your directory structure, the less likely it will be spidered regularly.7. Neighbourhood WatchGet quality incoming links from sites that share your theme. Without referrals, it’s near impossible to be visited by Googlebot. Try to get such links from sites with PR3 (Page Rank – see below) or better, not from link farms that are clearly built to boost PR. Make it easy for other sites to use keyword-loaded phrases in their links, say, by offering a cut-and-paste slice of HTML anchor code. Here is an example you can use to link to this page:Links from lower-ranking peers will not penalise you; they simply won’t appear in Google’s list of backward links to your page. You cannot control who links to you, but you have control over who you link to.Add a judicious number of outbound links to topical peers of the same or better calibre. Google likes links to authoritative sites, but don’t overdo the external links. Although such sites might not overtly link to your site, their site statistics file might get crawled and constitute a link back to you.8. CloakingCloaking hides content from humans and SEs, which is generally a bad practice. Good reasons to cloak include hiding parts of your optimised pages from amateur competitors or to show different pages to different visitors based on their browsers.Subscriber-only sites also manage to get into SEs. They use a cloaking practice known as “agent name delivery”, which is a slab of code that checks whether the visitor is a crawler or a human. Crawlers get to see the whole site, but others are directed to a sign-up form.9. Avoidable PracticesThe following practices could get your site banned from Google at worst or lower its ranking at best:
• Gimmicks. Pointless Javascript effects such as cursor trails and transitions do nothing for your viewers but place a lot of code above your body text. You want your content close to the top of the page.
• Bad HTML code. Novice hand-coders might copy some HTML tags without understanding their meaning. One webmaster used the robot directive
• Multiple sites with duplicated content, e.g. http://www.example.net and http://www.example.com hosted on the same server or different ones, as this is considered spamming. Use a permanent redirect on all secondary sites to point to the main domain.
• Multiple copies of the same page. This is typically an entry or “doorway” page optmised for different keywords to lure different people, e.g. crackz.htm, serials.htm, passwords.htm, and so on.
• Hidden content. This can be repetitive text on the same colour background or a layer with coordinates that are off the visible page. It begs the question why the author does not put this effort into creating visible text.
• Flash-Only pages. A solution is a user agent entry check that displays Flash to enabled browsers, but plain HTML to crawlers and other human visitors.
• Frames. Googlebot will crawl links in the Noframes text, but not ones in the framed pages. Other SEs might not crawl frames, so it is better to use tables and more so to use CSS. If you must use frames, ensure that you use the correct Doctype declaration for frames. I have noticed that Googlebot can now crawl links in frames but sometimes it cannot.
• Submission software or service. They could submit your site to thousands of unknown SEs. You will get a lot of spam, abuse, and possible inclusion in link farms that will ruin your reputation in Google’s eyes. After all, can you name more than five major SEs?
• Session IDs. Sites that require session IDs from crawlers will get poor visibility because the previous session will have expired by the time Googlebot returns.
• Over-optimisation. [Update 11/2003] Many sites that followed a strict “SEO formula” found that they could not be found at the top of the SERPs, or in the index at all. There is speculation that such tactics cause the sites to be filtered out of the search results.10. PatienceHaving optimized and submitted your pages to Google, get on with growing your business, because Google takes time to rank you. Work on getting quality, inbound links from high-ranking sites that feature the same subject matter. Increase your content and keep it fresh. Get free or paid listings in Google AdWords, Overture, Yahoo, Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), and reputable engines such as MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves.

6 Reasons Why LinkedIn Is So Critical In A Job Search

A candidate recently asked me, “How do I find a hiring manager in a large company like Microsoft?” There are a lot of ways to do this but one of the easiest and best is using LinkedIn. When I recommended this to the candidate he completely agreed, however, the problem was he only had about 60 connections. Too few to be effective.

Some benefits to a large LinkedIn database of contacts:

1. People can find you. The more people at the second and third degrees of separation the more times you will show up in a search. For example, I have around 500 contacts. However, I am linked to over 5 million people on LinkedIn. When I search for a candidate that is a huge database.
2. LinkedIn will eliminate the need for resume databases on Ladders, Monster, Careerbuilder and other job boards. This is because it costs on average between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars to have access to these resume databases. LinkedIn is free. Why would a recruiter or any company pay that when we can use LinkedIn for free.
3. Resumes databases by the job boards are not pick up by Google or any search engine. These are the ones you want to make sure you show up on. LinkedIn is and you can even improve your search results for as little as $25 a month. (See prior blog article SEO Your Search On Google)
4. It helps you find the people you want an introduction to. This is very powerful. I have helped numerous people with introductions as a result of LinkedIn. On a weekly basis I receive requests indicating they found a person in my connections and would I make an introduction. I always agree.
5. Even when working this is a great tool for resources, customer contacts and introductions, references, service providers and even potential hires for you or your company.
6. On a personal basis it is a great way to stay in-touch with friends, colleagues, prior employees and networking contacts. When you update your profile they will get a notice and likewise when they update theirs.

Work hard at building your connections. Make every effort to reach that magic 500+. If you use Outlook download the LinkedIn tool bar. It makes inviting people very easy.

There are many more positives to building your LinkedIn network than there are negatives. Many have resisted. I believe this recession has proven to be good thing for everyone’s network.

If you have other ideas share them by adding a comment. Lets help everyone build a strong network.

A good way to start is building a network is making sure your profile is complete. If it isn’t start there and then begin expanding your contacts. Don’t miss the opportunity to get a high ranking on Google.

You can download for free our “8 Matrix LinkedIn Profile Assessment” tool.

8 Ways Restaurants Can Use Facebook Pages

We are seeing more and more restaurants using Facebook as a way to get more customers.  With the new FBML technology we can now build full Facebook Platform applications for our customers that deeply integrate into a user’s Facebook experience.  We can hook into several Facebook integration points, including the profile, profile actions, Facebook canvas, News Feed and Mini-Feed. This a real breakthrough and if you or anyone you know owns a bar or restaurant they should read this article on 8 ways restaurants can use Facebook pages to gain more clients. MySpace had this and I used it for my Golden Spoon Yogurt Stores goldenspoonyogurt to learn how to use Facbook Pages and build your fans click this link  Read More