Open source content management systems offer a variety of benefits that proprietary CMS fail to deliver. Lower costs, more flexibility and control over your website, community support and other advantages make WordPress a better platform for hosting a website than a proprietary CMS. No Licensing Fees Because the content and design is not proprietary, initial fees when building a website on WordPress are minimal. Downloading and upgrading the software is free, and although some plugins and add-ons cost extra, these fees are generally relatively small. With proprietary CMS websites, there are typically only a few extensions that come standard and adding additional extensions can often involve high licensing and customization costs. Although there may be development costs associated with adding non-standard WordPress capabilities that aren’t available through plugins, these costs are probably much less than what you would pay for a proprietary CMS to develop the same capabilities, and offer the additional benefit of freedom to choose any developer to – Read the full article
E-mail: it’s one of the earliest and most widely used forms of communication on the Internet, even in the age of Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, and social media. It can also be one of the most scandalous – and potentially one of the most embarrassing – sources of personal information, or just plain bad manners. Indeed, a lot of people can do with a little primer on E-mail etiquette in today’s world – regardless of whether they’re corresponding for business purposes, sending important information to various recipients, or marketing through E-mail. So for the sake of those who aren’t quite sure whether or not they have been misbehaving on E-mail, here are a few must-follow tips on E-mail etiquette: Keep it short and sweet E-mail marketers should be familiar with this rule. The longer your E-mail message is, the higher the chances are that your recipients are not going to read all the way through it. It’s a sad fact – Read the full article
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how Old Spice was enjoying wild popularity from its viral video campaign featuring “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” a towel-clad hunk who responded to fans’ tweets with personalized videos. This week, Old Spice is finally seeing evidence of the results they had undoubtedly hoped for: an increase in sales. Although initial reports suggested that Old Spice sales were actually down in the weeks after the campaign, Nielsen released new sales figures this week, revealing that sales have increased by 107% in the last month. Not surprisingly, following Old Spice’s overwhelming success, copycat campaigns have begun to pop up from other companies. This week, Cisco released a viral video featuring “Ted from Accounting,” asking fans to tweet their questions about Cisco products and services to Ted, who would then post personalized video responses to Cisco’s blog. While Ted from Accounting was not as suave and sophisticated as the Old Spice – Read the full article
Social media is often used as a method for users and consumers to make public statements about products and services. While this gives the public more power to evaluate brands, businesses can also leverage social media to connect with customers. As social media becomes increasingly important in marketing campaigns, companies are turning to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to create personalized responses to individual users that captivate consumers in a way that traditional forms of mass media are incapable of reproducing. Wieden + Kennedy Portland, the ad agency that represents Old Spice, launched a campaign earlier this year featuring Isaiah Mustafa as a towel-clad macho man representing the brand as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” or more familiarly, “The Old Spice Guy.” The first set of commercials was created for television but gained popularity on YouTube, acquiring over 13 million views. After its wild popularity online, the advertising team behind the campaign focused on social media to popularize the – Read the full article
“Retweetable tweet”? Okay, we’ll be the first to admit it’s a silly title. Five years ago no one would have had any idea what we’re talking about. But if you’ve been keeping up with what’s happening on the web, chances are you have heard of the many positive, non-silly things social media can bring to the table. Take for example Twitter: businesses, celebrities, entrepreneurs, Internet marketers, and even celebrities are now leveraging the microblogging platform to enhance their presence online. So should you! One of the many useful features of Twitter is the ability to “retweet” someone else’s tweet (text-based post). If you post tweets that your Twitter followers would find compelling enough, and worthy enough of being shared to their own followers, then they can simply “retweet” your post – and effectively extend the reach of the message you’re trying to get across. Naturally, anyone who wants to succeed and stand out on the web will want to support – Read the full article
One of the more interesting trends in Internet marketing today is the idea of outsourcing content creation and copywriting. Here’s how it works: you run a small business, you become too busy with work, and on top of that – as though your calendar wasn’t crazy enough, as though you actually had time – you find yourself having to refresh your website or company blog with new, engaging content. You have to meet the demand for new, diverse information about your product, your brand, your industry. And you’re not even a writer by profession. One can only do so much, right? If only you can leave the writing to those who do it for a living. Enter your team of freelance writers, eager to develop content and copy for your site. They may be regular readers of your blog, looking to contribute their own content; they may be freelancing neighbors from just around the corner; or they may come from – Read the full article
Remember the Marshall McLuhan phrase, “The medium is the message”? Well, in the era of social web and social media, that might undergo a slight modification. It might be more appropriate to say instead, “The audience is the message” – that is, if we’re to describe the findings published in a recent data study by 360i. According to “The State of Search”, the whitepaper released this November by the company, most of the social media search listings that appear for brand-related queries are actually created by individuals not affiliated with the brand. This includes customers. Fans. Advocates. Maybe a few haters, too. They – and not the brand marketers – control or publish a staggering 77% of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook listings that appear for brand searches. What this means is that when someone searches for “Insert Brand Name Here” on social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, then chances are that the results that come up were published – Read the full article
A viral marketing campaign is one of today’s best (and most cost-effective) ways to let people know about your business. It can take on many forms, like videos, pictures, interactive Flash games, e-books, and even text messages. If done properly and executed creatively, your viral marketing campaign can excite immediate word-of-mouth enthusiasm from people. It can be viewed, read, “liked”, and bookmarked countless times, spark memes, remixes, and spoofs, generate tons of links, and shared on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, etc. With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and you won’t have to spend so much money for advertising placements. But how do you do it properly? Is there a formula to achieving a million hits on YouTube? How do you make sure your viral content gets passed around by friends and strangers on Facebook? Because of the wide variety of viral campaigns found on the Internet these days, – Read the full article
