Social Media: Comment on Facebook’s Timeline Takes Off
January 19th, 2012
Jeff DeChambeau, a Senior Analyst at T4G, an IT services company, made a comment on a start-up community site (Facebook timeline is too awful to be an accident) on how Facebook is manipulating user behaviour to increase brain activity and increase susceptibility to advertising , along with a link to his personal blog.
Here’s a good article that covers the kind of things we do for Toronto Small Business clients after the essential web site optimization has been done. Content curation, blogging, white papers, photos, videos and article syndication all support the promotion of a small business’s expertise in a particular domain:
Will “Daily Deals” Hurt Your Small Business Site’s Reputation?
September 21st, 2011
The number of daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial continues to grow but research shows that deep discount offers may be doing more harm than good for a small business’ on-line reputation.
The data gathered included over 56,000 reviews for 2,300+ merchants who ran 2,500 deals on Groupon. The analysis seems to show the two sides of the deal-of-the-day website – from one perspective, the number of reviews for the business on Yelp goes up because of the daily deals (which for some could be seen as a good thing). However, the average rating scores from reviewers who reference daily deals are 10 per cent lower than scores coming from “business as usual” reviews.
There’s no explanation offered for why the customers using Groupon gave less positive reviews on Yelp, and the report leaves business owners pondering the question: is it worth running daily deals (expensive but can bring in new customers), if it’s at the expense of a lowered on-line reputation on user review sites like Yelp?
While world-wide car manufacturers don’t fit the profile of most Toronto small business (especially when it comes to social media marketing resources), I found this article instructive in showing several ways how investing time in social media actually has business payback:
Kia redesigned the seats for their Optima SX sedan after noticing complaints from consumers and automotive writers on the Internet.
Ford invites consumers to submit their vehicle improvement ideas directly to the automaker via a website called thefordstory.com.
Nissan (with three Twitter streams and Facebook pages for each of its vehicle brands) social media is becoming the de facto process to receive and resolve customer-service issues.
Conversion: Your B2B Web Site should be a Sales Rep
August 30th, 2011
When looking at sales funnel development for a B2B web site, I am struck by the similarities between the expectations for a website and those for a human sales rep.
Sales Rep
Website
Develop Pipeline
Capture traffic
Differentiate Company and Solution
Convince visitor you have their answer
Close
Convert visitor into prospect
It follows then that the web site has to show elements that mimic a sales rep, especially when guiding a visitor down the path towards becoming a client.
Site navigation and properly placed CTAs (Call to Actions) that lead the visitor to make a commitment (such as signing up for a newsletter, webinar or whitepaper) are essential to ensuring your site becomes the lead generator you want it to be.
As small business owners bravely move into social media, creating content on blogs and social networks like Facebook and Linked In, it’s clear that search engines are promoting optimized videos, especially Google (who owns YouTube) – Videos can help you leapfrog up the Google Search Rankings. So in the spirit of walking the talk, here’s the first in a series of educational videos to help Turn Your Website into a Sales Rep.
Twitter celebrated its 5th birthday last friday, showing off a lot of high-powered traffic statistics but still unable to provide a monetization plan i.e. how will they make money?
What happens if Twitter runs out of investor money, in other words, they go bankrupt. A lot of social media consulting advice is directed at being engaged on Twitter, and so millions of users including small businesses are investing time and energy (and rarely efficiently) in the hopes that Twitter energy somehow will translate into a customer or two.
Seems to me that Google+ could easily extend their “Circles” idea to include a Twitterish experience.
