SEO Software Review

One of the most important areas for any website owner is to ensure that after they have their spunky site designed that people can actually find it via the search engines. We’re not going to talk about the techniques of that here as it has been covered in earlier articles, however we are going to evaluate some of the better programs that can help industry professionals and even the site owner evaluate SEO software should they be prepared top spend time and energy to follow through on the findings.

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QR Codes and MVS

I try and stay up to date on the QR code thing. In case you haven’t heard of it, Quick Response codes allow a user with a smart phone to take a scan of a square bar code type image and this in turns takes the user to a particular place online (a form, a web page, competition, photo gallery, information sheet etc etc)

Similar to QR Codes is MVS. This is a technology that is currently being developed and stands for Mobile Visual Search. This also allows the user of a smart phone to download an app and take a picture of an article or newspaper (and apparently products) in which your phone will then take you to that page to read more.

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Facebook – Why it works for some businesses and not others

Over the last few years we have been doing lots of consulting with smaller businesses about their Facebook business pages. Every single time we ask them what the goal is, the answer is the same – get as many likes (fans) as we can.

So ok – this is a fair enough strategy, however the energy it takes to continually generate new fans is exhausting for a small business as they don’t have the massive dollars the larger companies have. The other side to this is that recent studies have shown that only 1% of Facebook Fans actually engage (or communicate with) your brand. Great! – You’ve now used your marketing budget to attract as many fans as you can afford and only 1% will communicate! It just doesn’t feel like a solid strategy.

Taking a backward step here and looking at social media, we need to remember why it is so popular. This is a way for people to connect with each other. It’s massive because your voice as an individual can reach places you can’t in your smaller circle of friends. It also ads credibility, status (being the first to discover something cool), it’s  a way to stay in touch and retouch with old friends. See the pattern? – It’s all about ME ME ME and this is perfectly normal human behaviour. Read more…

Brand Awareness Online

One area that we go over a fair bit lately with our clients is the need to have a strong brand awareness strategy.

In short what this means in the online advertising world is that it is OK to embark on a strategy that just looks at promoting your business brand. Actually, it’s more than ok, it is a must.

You see the habits of off-line purchase decision making and online purchase decision making are very similar in many ways. I think we need to get out of our heads that off-line and online advertising are at 2 different ends of the spectrum. We also need to stop thinking about online advertising as clicks on ads. Read more…

Tags | Brand Marketing

The Newspaper Industry – How bad is it?

Just a quick one today.

Was reading a lead from one of our Twitter Followers about the issues facing the US newspaper industry.

I won’t go into detail, however it is an interesting read that outlines the following (quoted from The Boston.com site).

“Newspapers have been hit hard by the loss of readers and advertisers to the Internet, while the national economic slowdown has intensified the advertising slump. In recent months, the Rocky Mountain News has closed, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has significantly reduced staffing and moved entirely onto the Web, and several major newspaper companies have filed for bankruptcy protection. Read more…