Blogs

One thing many of my clients struggle with in their marketing plan is how to integrate PR. Press releases are a free and effective way to raise brand awareness and remind your customers why you're special. Here's a brief article with suggestions of what and when to share with the public, and where you should share it. One thing she doesn't mention but is quite important, is if you have a cooperative local newspaper, that's always the first place to share your press for small businesses who rely on local customers.

According to the latest Pew Internet and American Life survey, search engines are still used considerably more than social sites for users trying to find information about local businesses.

The internet is the source that people most rely on for material about the local business scene and search engines are particularly valued. Newspapers and word of mouth also rank high as sources.

In looking at the data though, search engines surpass newspapers by a bit, and surpass social media sites significantly:

We're intelligent creatures. We know the basics for using our iMacs, and we can most definitely figure out how to eject a disk. If you're old-school Mac, you know you can drag the icon to the trash can, although that often instills momentary fear thinking, "I don't want to destroy that!" Then there are the basic options of clicking the little eject button beside the disk name in Finder, or right clicking on the icon and selecting "Eject".

Social media is rapidly becoming every bit as important as having a website, in some cases even more important. Social media is all about people interacting with their personal networks online, through such sites as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. People are talking, and they're probably talking about you and your business, which is why it's important to harness the power of social media. I'll be writing more about all of these soon, stay tuned for more articles about social media in the coming weeks.

A couple of years ago I developed a private library for housing scientific parameters, with the goal of sharing information and facilitating peer review of said parameters. It was a very detailed application with extensive regulations on what information was entered, how it was entered, and who was allowed access to view, edit or comment on each individual parameter. The part I found most intriguing was how they intended to use it for facilitating peer review.

Do you ever wonder about the first impression visitors have of your site? What does the average person think when they stumble onto your site? Well wonder no more! CLUE is an app by Zurb that creates memory tests of your web page, then gives you the results. Remember my article about the "5 Second Rule"? You only have 5 seconds to capture a new visitor's attention when they first land on your site, or they will click away.

If you sell products on your site, you need to be aware of how important those photos are, they can make or break the sale. This article has good information about how to improve your photos for little cost, and suggestions for what works well when incorporating video.

• 5 Tips for Improving Product Photos and Video on Your Ecommerce Site

I have written most of this before, but this article is a good reminder of why you should be looking at your visitor statistics, or at least asking your friendly webmaster to do it for you.

7 Things You Didn't Know Google Analytics Could Tell You

 Facebook is better used as a customer-loyalty program, not a customer acquisition program. Some interesting facts:

Better stay on Twitter for the warning next time...
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/tweetwaves-vs-seismic-waves/