Since the list of 120 or so SOPA supporting companies hit the Internet a couple days ago, the lines have been drawn; People are publicly promising to pull thousands of domains from domain registrar Godaddy after it appeared on the list as a supporter. Other people are calling those people “bullies.”
Whether you’re for or against it SOPA has become somewhat of a pain point amongst techies, with the overwhelming majority, including me and almost every other writer on the TechCrunch team, leaning heavily towards “against.”
SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) essentially allows ISPs to block entire domains because a piece of hosted site content infringes copyright. As the bill approaches deliberation in House of Representatives next month, a steady stream of Internet companies have taken anti-SOPA stands. After all, sacrificing innovation to save a dying business model is a close as it gets to anathema in these parts.
Here’s a list of all the publicly anti-SOPA tech/Internet companies I could find. Please add other ones you know of in the comments.
We are glad to be back and to share with you the insights we gathered at our annual “Excellence & Innovation” conference in Las Vegas. Every year, all four Principals of WSI Pro Marketing travel to collaborate with our fellow digital marketing professionals from around the world. At E&I we share digital marketing best practices, mobile website design strategies, lessons learned, and discuss a wide array of digital marketing technologies, techniques, and trends. This year we had the privilege to meet with over 400 of our peers, a group that represents the world’s most innovative and successful digital marketers.
We are pleased to pass along to you the critical “take aways” from the conference. The next several blog posts will focus on sharing effective ideas and strategies that you can employ to expand your business market share. We feel strongly that client education is a critically important prerequisite for online marketing success.
Without a doubt, the buzz this year centered upon “mobile marketing” and how the “smart phone” is revolutionizing online consumer behavior. Over the recent past, WSI Pro Marketing has enjoyed the recognition for being the benchmark for delivery of successful mobile marketing solutions across the entire global network. Our very own Darren Kincaid served as the featured panel member addressing the focused topic of “Mobile Marketing Trends and Solutions”. Also, the WSI Pro Marketing mobile website portfolio page was touted as the standard for form and functionality and universally advertised as something digital marketing professionals across the globe should emulate.
We recently uploaded a very interesting and insightful mobile marketing whitepaper to our white paper/education page. You’ll find several other interesting works out there that span the subjects of Social Media Marketing, Brand Reputation Management, the power of Email Marketing, and a number of other subjects.
Check back on our blog in the coming days as we continue to share the keen insights captured at this year’s “Excellence & Innovation” conference.
Mobile communications is driving what some leading experts are coining “the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century”.This is the conclusion of Ms. Mary Meeker, managing director of the Morgan Stanley Global Technology Research Team, who Barron Magazine affectionately refers to as the “Queen of the Net”, and who played a significant role in Morgan Stanley's assist in launching the Google IPO.I guess you'd say we consider her a credible reference.
Two months ago, Ms. Meeker presented summary marketing conclusions to Google at the most recent “Events@Google” series presentations.Her major points:
Mobile Internet is ramping up substantially faster than the desktop computer did.Her team arrived this conclusion by comparing the adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch to that of AOL and Netscape in the early 1990s.
Consumer demand for mobile and social networking services will become increasingly insatiable. Of course all internet marketers understand the importance of these two subjects, but Meeker’s research puts extraordinarily high numbers against these two subjects.
Within the next five years, more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PC’s.She commented that business owners that are entrenched within the mobile marketing sphere will “…likely win big, potentially very big while (those who weren’t) will wonder what just happened”.
Fascinating conclusions and predictions wouldn’t you say?From WSI Pro Marketing's experience and observations, the only thing we question is whether or not it will take five years for mobile search to exceed desktop computer search. We currently serve clients who witness a full 20% of their total search volume emanating from mobile devices.We know our own clients (and their clients) increasingly use their personal smart phones during the morning and evening commute (always as passengers we trust), use them periodically throughout the workday, and even at home itself when desktop computers are readily available.Who among us has not found our smart phones accompanying us to the living room during “family time”.
Now, how does all this effect the business owner today? The answer is simple. Find a smart phone and navigate to your business website. Note the comparatively long load time as the smart phones of today simply do not possess the computing power of the desktop. Note the degree of manipulation required to view the critical data. Now, realize that in the impatient world of today's consumer, you suffer the very real possibility that web prospects will quickly exit your site in search of something more friendly to navigate.
The solution for strategic and proactive business owners are custom mobile web digital marketing solutions. These custom mobile websites VERY closely mimic your existing website, present all critical calls to action within a single view, and are based on "economy of code" that ensures the mobile site loads quickly. We invite you to visit our Mobile Web Digital Marketing Solution page to see how a few of our client's main websites are converted for mobile. Please note that the "cell phones" on that page present active links that demonstrate exactly how these sites are demonstrated on mobile devices.
Finally, if you are a strategic and proactive business owner who wants to embrace custom mobile web solutions to give your business a competitive advantage, we invite you to contact us anytime.
B2B marketing involves a recipe, planned and orchestrated across multiple channels in order to build credibility and generate an increase in leads. To gauge the effectiveness of your marketing plan or recipe, it’s important to regularly evaluate your marketing initiatives against the overall sales and business goals you are trying to achieve. You can then calculate the ROI of those marketing efforts.
When using Twitter as part of your B2Bsocial media marketingplan, in order to ensure the greatest return, consider the following tips:
1. Have multiple employees as users – One way to ensure a steady flow of messages from your company Twitter account is to have many users represent your business and brand. This expands the amount of content, the style of that content, and the amount of conversations. This shows multiple people’s (employees) views and ideas rather than just one.
2. Understand the timing of your tweets – Review the analytics and get an understanding of the specific days and times your company’s messages are more likely to be read and shared. If your followers retweet and share content more frequently at lunchtime or early in the week, be sure that your most compelling content hits during those times.
3. The information must have value to your existing or potential customers –Twitter adds to your effective B2B marketing campaign because it is able to share your message with a large number of people in a short amount of time. Instantly, your message can be shared with a community. And the more valuable the content, the more likely it is to get passed along.
4. Encourage your employees to tweet – Encourage your employees to create their own personal Twitter accounts and share news about the company, its goods and/or services, and its culture. Your companies Twitter strategy needs to incorporate the use of brand messaging, which gives personal value to prospects and existing customers.
Remember, and this is very important, B2B social media policies and training need to be in place before your employees begin to tweet personally about the company.
5. Optimize – At search.twitter.com it’s easy to find out who is tweeting about a particular topic and how frequently that topic is mentioned. Here you can quickly size up the market and the level of interest for your top keywords, therefore this is a smart place to begin your B2B Twitter strategy.
You should use a similar keyword research strategy for Twitter as you would for creating web content. Obviously the keywords and phrases should be relevant to your industry; and you should target those keywords. Who are your biggest competitors and what are they doing? Who’s part of their conversation?
However, also use lay person terminology; include popular keywords or industry trends in your tweets.
6. Hashtags – The # sign is a hashtag and it is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. People use the hashtag symbol before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search. These tags build a targeted search and they are powerful ways to find, and send out content to a wider audience, not just your own followers.
Research current hashtags in your industry or create a new hashtag to promote your updates. Many B2B consumers start with a simple hashtag search on Twitter.
Keep in mind, when your employees are at an industry event or trade show, they should participate in the hashtag stream, most every event has one. They can tweet about the event, retweet other people’s experiences and, tweet links to your company’s blog posts, promotions and booth information.
7. Proper URL length – The maximum amount of characters you can have on a Twitter update is 140. So leave out non-essential information. For optimal social messaging with Twitter, there are web tools, such as bit.ly that are URL shorteners.
8. Become an information resource – Sharing content, information and news from sources and companies other than your own provides additional value to your followers, increases your credibility, and increases the chances that your tweets will be shared. One of the keys to an effective B2B social media program is sharing.
9. Use the right tools – There are many Twitter tools that can help your existing marketing strategy. Industry knowledge and a well thought out B2B social media strategy are essential elements to increasing your brand recognition and presence. Combined with the right tools, you can achieve optimal results and reach your projected business goals.
The catchy UPS advertising tag line “What can Brown Do for You” is strategically designed to educate their target market on the multiple benefits of UPS service offerings. The intent of this blog post is to educate you about the subject of business blogs, how they drive revenue growth, and the specific execution strategy employed by WSI Pro Marketing. This is just one element of our overall organic search marketing strategy.
Summarizing WSI Pro Marketing’s blog strategy: The primary focus of our blog marketing strategy is to improve our client’s web search results, steadily increase their website visitations, and ultimately to convert ever-increasing numbers of web “surfers” into new clients. Unlike personal blogs, which focus on promoting conversation, WSI Pro Marketing blogs are only tangentially concerned with generating conversation. Our blogs concentrate almost exclusively on promoting business brand recognition, value proposition, back links, and increased search engine results.
What is a WSI Pro Marketing Blog: An internal page on your company’s website and linked from the main menu. The blog page itself displays and links to the accumulation of individual blog posts.
What are WSI Pro Marketing Blog Posts: "Conversations" rich in your industry's search phrases with embedded click-able links to the company’s products/services/web pages. We use the term “conversation” because we author blog posts using the first person voice of the business owner. We create a new web page (new URL) for every individual blog post. As it pertains to earning prominent search engine (Google/Yahoo/Bing, etc) results, the importance of new web page and web content is undeniable. Google/Yahoo/Bing indexes each individual blog post with corresponding positive effect for your business.
Blog Syndication: "Pushing" each of your blog posts (again, in fact new web pages) to web directories, social websites (Facebook, Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter, etc). This is the heart/soul of our strategy. It is the process that builds links to your website across the internet and ultimately drives your Google/Yahoo/Bing scores increasingly higher
The WSI Pro Marketing Blog Process:
On an agreed to recurring basis, we upload blog posts to your website. These can be WSI Pro Marketing-generated, client-generated, or joint venture works. For client-generated works, we edit those works to guarantee that the blog post incorporate high-volume search phrases as well as strategic links to the relevant product and service pages.
Once a new blog post is loaded, that same day we will push out or "syndicate" the blog post as previously described.
The End Result: This strategy and implementation process drives (without exception) positive return on investment (ROI) for our clients. Each month we empower our clients to calculate the ROI on our services by demonstrating objective analytical results. The objective results include (but are not limited to) the exact number of website generated calls into the business, the exact number of web “contact us” form leads, Google’s own site visitation statistics, and more.
If you internet marketing support team is not demonstrating and defending a positive return on your marketing investment, then you’d be smart to either establish that or change service providers. We welcome the opportunity to demonstrate what WSI Pro Marketing can do for you.
In November, WSI PRO Marketing launched a new website for the Grill and Fireplace shop at West Sport in Sudbury, MA. Their new online solution is developed on WSI e-fusion platform. West Sport sells fireplace inserts, wood burning stoves, pellet stoves and grills throughout the Massachusetts MetroWest region.
Owner, Larry Shewan, has been selling grill and hearth products in Sudbury since 1975. He prides himself as a one-stop-shop, installing and servicing everything that they sell. You can browse any number of stoves, inserts, accessories and grills in their newly remodeled showroom. They pride themselves on their product knowledge, product lines and their high level of customer service. Stop by and see why Larry and West Sport have been in business for over 35 years.
It’s mid-December and that time of year when we all tend to reserve moments for soulful reflection. The calendar year 2010 was a banner year for WSI Pro Marketing on many fronts. We will take a moment here to share the celebration via this blog post as a heartfelt thanks to all of you who helped make it happen.
We celebrate our colleagues throughout the global WSI network, their success, and the selfless nature in which information and insight was shared. The WSI network truly enabled us to realize technical and strategic efficiencies that directly translated to steadily increased service value and client return on investment. Thank You WSI colleagues. We truly value our relationship with you.
We celebrate our clients, each one of you. We are humbled to report that this year, a record year for business development, was 100% sourced from your continued trust and direct referrals. We are humbled by your referrals to family, friends, and associate business owners. You put your name on the line for us and we appreciate that. We are humbled by those clients who span multiple industries and trust us to market their multiple enterprises. Thank you WSI Pro Marketing clients for allowing us to serve as welcome members of your team.
We celebrate our staff. Simply stated, you make the business work. It is your insight, skill, dedication, and attention to detail that sets your firm apart from the competition. We value our relationship with each of you immensely.
Finally, and most importantly, we celebrate our families. Throughout this year (and all previous years) you provided unwavering patience and support. We sleep well knowing that you will selflessly sustain the same going forward. We can’t love and thank you enough.
WSI Pro Marketing colleagues, clients, staff and family…..our recipe for profound professional reward!
Many of our clients have asked us to provide bullets on what to expect when a project commences. There will be a flurry of activity in the early parts of the project – too many to mention here – but the major items include the following:
Obtain FTP access to the old site
Scrape content from the old site for use on the new one
Create a Google account and install analytics on the old site to establish a baseline evaluation of current activity
Create client spreadsheet in Google to capture/share internet marketing activities
Provides you 24/7 real-time status updates—and this IN ADDITION to 24/7 Email/Phone contact readiness
Perform keyword research to begin SEO work
SIMULTANEOUSLY we will be going through the following phases of the site build:
Phase 1: Concept Draft. We create the look of your new site; we will work with you to get the exact look/style/color you want
Phase 2: Function Design. Skin the concept draft onto our powerful WSI eFusion website platform.
Phase 3: Site build-out. Using the best of your current content and any new content you desire, we will build out the pages on your site.
Phase 4: Internet Marketing. Simultaneous with site build-out, we work CLOSELY with you and your staff to perfect a SEO strategy based on YOUR business goals and objectives.
Phase 5: Launch. Once all work has been done, we will launch the new site and EXECUTE a multitude of proven SEO techniques customized for and driven by your Internet Marketing Strategy
Phase 6: Measure and manage. this is where you truly benefit by teaming with a professional marketing staff. We continually analyze, measure, and strategize in partnership with you. We modify both the site and the marketing strategy to maximize your web-generated leads.
This is just a high-level overview of the process. We will be in steady and reliable contact with our clients as we guide them through every phase and throughout the life of our internet marketing partnership.
“Fun” and “run” have never belonged in the same sentence, as far as I’m concerned. I just shake my head when I see a “Fun Run” advertised. For me, running is daunting and that first mile can be brutal. But runners will tell you that if you gut it out and focus on technique, you will overcome the initial pain and find that it is actually replaced by pleasure. I find this analogous to Social Media Marketing. You may have attended a seminar in which you were told that you are missing out on a significant opportunity if you don’t jump on the Social Media bandwagon today. But that first mile is overwhelming. Where do I start? What should I focus my time on? How does all this socializing turn into business? Over 98% of every blog that’s been started has been abandoned for this very reason. Facebook and Twitter pages suffer the same fate. Business owners need a social media running partner and that’s where WSI comes in.
Taking advantage of social media to maximize business results doesn’t necessarily mean you have to spend all day Tweeting or catching up on Facebook. In fact, we find that 95% of our clients do not have the time to blog on a regular basis, much less spend time on Twitter or LinkedIn. Over the last 2 years, we have developed a social media formula that places the onus on WSI, the social media experts, to do the heavy lifting while the business owner addresses social media from the 10,000-foot level. One way we do this is through Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO involves using a network of social bookmarking and social news portals like Digg,Delicious, StumbleUpon, and others to post content and links about the business in an effort to drive people and search engines back to the business website. We also use blogging to turn the company website into an information resource through a strategy we call Content Marketing. At least weekly, we write and post articles on the site blog and then immediately syndicate the content to approximately 100,000 potential visitors. Search engines pick up and index this information very quickly make it possible to be found in regular searches, driving in even more traffic.
The results have been staggering. Many of our clients enjoy a dramatic lift in traffic to their sites. Additionally, they see a linear increase in leads and sales from the site. By gutting out the first mile of a consistent and calculated social media plan, businesses are able to outpace their competitors and enjoy the rewards of competing in the social media race. With WSI as their running partner, it just might be a “Fun Run” after all.
One of the things we've learned about blogging, syndicating blog posts, and WSI eFusion in general is that having punctuation in URLs other than dashes and underscores is generally a bad idea. Where does the punctuation come from? The blog Title is the culprit. In blogging platforms like WordPress, URLs are automatically stripped of punctuation but in eFusion, the punctuation has to be edited out. Fortunately, this is very easy to do in eFusion as you'll see in the video below:
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