Having read Jay Baer’s blog post about the Starbucks Digital Network to come to all stores this fall, I became quite impressed with Starbucks’ movement towards material or person-to-person community, local-business support, and access to non-local news and entertainment sources, all for “free” or, rather, with the expectation of purchase. I gain a sense that apartments with close-location to Starbucks may become a bit more desirable to those who may have previously frowned upon the purchase of cappuccinos stained by capitalism. As Baer questions, “…does this change where you might go get your next cup of coffee and how you come to discover music and other consumer products,” he considers the shift in the meaning of ‘end content.’ Yes, I think this will affect where someone will buy their next coffee for a full sit-and-enjoy session, but not for those in and out purchases. And sure, this will affect people who already search and buy music from iTunes music purchases, – Read the full article
It used to be that marketing teams and technology people didn’t really interact apart from uncomfortable meetings about getting a new offer onto the latest website build. But with the rise of mobile-optimized websites, custom branded apps, locality services, and integrated messaging campaigns, the lines between marketing and technology are blurring. Marketers today must be comfortable talking about HTML5 and integrated databases. Technologists today must be comfortable talking about audience segments, targeting, and messaging strategy. But mobile technology is changing more than how we work together. It’s literally changing how we market and where we put our marketing investment. Poor Old E-mail E-mail was called the ‘killer app’ for at least a decade. Its power to connect with audiences led to an entire generation of technologies to gather addresses, segment lists, target messages, test performance, and provide service. Only, young people today don’t (or rarely) use it. They use instant message technology and social networks, with mobile (and SMS) figuring – Read the full article
In my experience with Internet Marketing and SEO, I have come across a multitude of Internet marketing and SEO terms. A lot of these terms usually have very vague or technical definitions that leave you confused and frustrated. I know how you feel, trust me, I have been there. Fear not, I have compiled a list of internet marketing and SEO keywords in layman’s terms for you people that are new to SEO and internet marketing. 1. Anchor text , anchor link – When you are reading content, and a word is clickable and contains a link. 2. Backlink, back-link – a link from an outside website (outside source) that points back to a website. (i.e. all the links that connect back to your blog) 3. Broken link – a link that fails to connect to it’s intended destination 4. Cloaking – When a website presents one version of itself to the user and another version to the search engine. – Read the full article
Forgive us? We’re feeling kind of guilty that we’ve written a number of Twitter articles that provide a lot of tips on how to use the popular social media site – without providing an equal number of examples. So let us make it up to you with these great examples of how today’s biggest brands and businesses are using Twitter. Starbucks (@Starbucks): The Seattle-based coffee giant offers “freshly brewed tweets” to a loyal following of over 1 million Twitter users. Check the brand’s profile out, and you’ll be surprised by the number of @replies/mentions they tweet in a day. That’s what engagement is all about. All too often, companies misuse Twitter by spamming their followers with relentless sales talk and ads – without caring to respond to mentions or direct messages. Sure, while Starbucks does post the occasional promo or new offer, the brand’s use of Twitter is mainly to connect intimately with fans and customers. It listens, and as – Read the full article
A Facebook Page with lots of fans can do wonders for your brand. Not only is Facebook a naturally “viral” online channel for engagement; its Fan Pages are also a pretty flexible Internet marketing platform, with space for lots of apps, optimization opportunities, multimedia content, social sharing, and trackable information. Of course, to maximize Facebook’s power, you actually have to get people to officially “like” your page. Without enough “likes”, you may be wasting effort on something that’s not reaching anyone at all. You’d be like a chef preparing 30 starters and 50 main courses for a restaurant that has less than 10 customers. The product/service/brand may be good, but no one knows enough about it. Want more Facebook fans? Need more people to like your Facebook Page? Here are 11 really effective tips: Comment and reply. If someone posts on your Wall, don’t ignore it. Respond in a timely manner. Say thank you or write a meaningful comment that – Read the full article
The last few days I utilized the new search engine Bing. I was skeptical at first of the new Microsoft product but was quickly impressed with the raw power of this new “decision” engine as they are branding it. I took notes in search results compared to yahoo and Google and I am going to share some of my insights into what I discovered (and opinions) 1. Bing has a better image search, I like the pop out feature to see the image a bit larger as well as the amount of images that are returned on the first page. It looks like they use “citations” to determine the image and do not have as much focus on alt and title tags. As webmasters have used images as an opportunity to put more keywords into the meta data, Google images has become less relevant. 2. Bing is showing favor to major websites, they are not showing site links except for – Read the full article
