Speed of the Site

With the right web platform, businesses are able to have access to a rich and powerful web application framework with a supporting cast of tools, servers, and technologies to help them succeed on the web. By choosing a web developer for your website, you are choosing a framework (PHP, .NET) with their own advantages and disadvantages. A web developer will choose the framework for developing a website depending on the requirements and his or her technical proficiency. Make sure it matches your strategy and not just your budget.

Good Control of CMS

Content is the key to a successful website. Solid content requires superior organization and better-quality management. Each business or organization has its own strategies for collecting, organizing, storing and maintaining the information intended for consumption by an audience.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

CMS is a set of processes, applications, and databases that help businesses create, store, coordinate, and publish information with a consistent method in a useful format and in a timely fashion. Companies need to spent considerable amount of time evaluating CMS platforms and their use based on the requirements set forth by each company. One important thing to consider is the skill level of the people who will be directly involved with the chosen platform on the daily basis.

Keywords and Internal Linking

Keyword research, competitive analysis and solid content are a must. Don’t attempt to go after the one 1 word keywords like “cars” “shopping” “lawyer”(reach for the moon why don’t you). Most people start with the most popular term in the industry, throw in a couple of variations and call it done. You need to learn your audience. Target words from your users, evaluate your traffic reports from the web tools you are using and constantly update your web content to support your rankings. One more reason why you need a good CMS in place: to edit, add, delete and create more pages-see CMS above. Know what it will take to compete and then build for success.

Your website’s content is filled with the opportunities to link to other pages throughout your site and help users find their end destination faster. For a successful internal linking strategy have your user in mind and go through your site sections and pages to see where you can insert some contextual links to other pages that you consider to be your most popular landing pages. The link connections should be valid, meaning that the target key phrases are seen on the destination page and are easy to spot.

Social Media Marketing and Distribution

The world of social media is vast and growing. Facebook with 500 million users leads the revolution that is disrupting advertising professionals, marketing experts, and small business owners alike. If you use social media the correct way, that is to build and strengthen relationships, you can build brand awareness, loyalty, and generate word-of-mouth marketing. Simple dissemination of your web content to 30 networks you just registered does not work. To succeed with social media marketing, you need to ensure that your branded messages to your audience provide meaningful content that adds value to the reader’s experience.

Watch this Google video.

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The deal would give Twitter an application that has won praise among sophisticated users for its slick interface and enhanced capabilities, while closing out a potential threat to Twitter’s fast-growing service. TweetDeck had been in acquisition discussions with UberMedia, a Pasadena Web company founded by entrepreneur Bill Gross, in a deal that was valued at less than what Twitter offered. UberMedia has been amassing a collection of Twitter applications which some commentators have speculated could ultimately be used to create a rival social network to Twitter.

The exclusivity terms of UberMedia’s offer for TweetDeck expired in mid-April, allowing TweetDeck to respond to the Twitter offer, according to the source. A Twitter spokesman said the company does not comment on rumors. TweetDeck and UberMedia did not immediately reply to requests for comment. The deal comes a little over a month after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to the company as executive chairman to oversee product development.

Twitter, which allows people to send 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of so-called followers, is one of the Web’s most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and Zynga. The service has become a popular communications tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, and has played a role in several geopolitical events, such as recent uprisings in the Middle East.

In December Twitter was valued at $3.7 billion in a $200 million funding round led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Subsequent auctions of Twitter shares on the secondary markets have suggested investors were valuing the shares at more than $7 billion. Twitter’s offer for TweetDeck is between $40 million and $50 million, according to the source, depending on how Twitter’s shares are valued.

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Clearly someone is wrong here and I believe the LargeCap CEO, in most cases, have better resources and make better decisions identifying tools that help his/her company sell products or services. Throughout history other important marketing tools were bypassed by smaller companies who were forced to catch up, and once a few “old line” CEO’s get fired because they refuse to adapt and are viewed as – missing the Social Media boat – you will see the this New Media Marketing tool part of day to day operations. Managers in general pay attention to the reasons their predecessors were fired. Most don’t realize the vast difference between a Fortune 500 company and how they operate versus a SamllCap company.

SmallCap Stocks are classified by their market capitalization of 1 Billion or less and most market watchers categorize stocks in 5 categories 1) MegaCap, 2) LargeCap, 3) MidCap, 4) SmallCap and 5) MicroCap. There are roughly 15,000 publicly traded companies in the US Markets and 70% of these are in category 4 or 5. This means that only 30% of companies have Market Caps above 1 Billion dollars.

If I were to advise an investor about what to look for in a smaller stock investment, it would be to examine the companies Social Media strategy in 2011 and how it’s working ……this will tell you much more about the management of the company than you know.

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Flash forward to 2011 and you have zero latency Profit and Loss to your smart phone immediately upon making your trade deducting or adding money to your account and calculating the margin. The progress has been rapid, but most of the large steps have been taken in the last 5 years as internet speeds have solved the last mile and costs have dropped. There have also been many software developments to achieve zero latency and useful tools to track trading positions and move money around. The input errors we saw from the 70′s are virtually eliminated at entry and the “out-trade” errors are a thing of the past making execution seamless.

The next steps for Financial Services will revolve around Social Media and its effect on investors, traders and CEO’s and how they communicate. This is already taking place as platforms develop and dominating networks like Twitter introduce $Dollar signs and #Hash keys which become universal symbols across the networks. 

Nearly every company will have a FaceBook page or a Twitter account before long. I will monitor the useful software as I write for Vesta Digital and hope you will follow along as we watch the way we invest and communicate change over the next few years…the days of  and key punch cards are gone!!!!

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The proof that social media marketing works is not measured in ROI or sales but rather in retention and what happens as a result of your social media marketing efforts.
The frequent questions executives and business owners ask are: “How much money will I make?” and “How many new sales will I have? While logical, these questions are not necessarily the right questions. With social media, it is not how much you make but how much of a difference your social media efforts make to attract new customers.

Even though social media has great potential, many organizations do not properly integrate social media in their marketing and communication efforts. The underlining point is that social media is not a one-way communication channel, but instead a medium for listening, analyzing, and driving those conversations.
The companies that realize the full potential of social media are not only experimenting with multiple channels, but also creating metrics to measure impact and using new tools to understand how to enter into a new conversation with their customers.

How does an organization gain not only an understanding of their audience’s social network but know when and how to reach out to a customer or prospect?

• Listen
• Segment
• Engage
• Gain Expertise and Validation

Range of Social Relationships

Jen Roberts offers her scientific break-down from a customer perspective of their interest in being ‘friends’ with your organization as follows:

• Don’t talk to me. Ever. I’m still recovering from our last encounter.
• I don’t want to be your friend but I do need answers. Where can I find them?
• I like you and I’ve clicked a button.
• I like you and love discounts. Let’s talk.
• I love you and I want to co-create.

Benefits of Social Media

One of the benefits of social media is that it can help reinforce existing ties and that is one way of looking at consumer relationship; the strength of that tie between the consumer and your brand. Analyzing and filtering for consumer insights or preferences is a critical piece for surfacing consumer intentions that can provide a unique perspective on the degree to which a consumer wants to be engaged.

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What are QR Codes?

A great way to tap in to that huge market is to use QR codes (or quick response codes). QR codes are fuzzy little black and white blocks that contain a bar code. The code can be scanned by smartphones with cameras. The codes then redirect people to a website, play some sort of animation, or do all sorts of neat tricks.

How can I use a QR Code?

There are several places you can put a QR code to drive traffic to your website. First however, you need to figure out what you want out of your QR code. Do you want more traffic on your website? Do you want people to visit your store? Do you want people to call in? These questions need to be answered before developing a QR code.

Once you’ve formulated the idea for your QR code, it’s time for execution. It’s extremely important to remember that QR codes are new, exciting, and fun. If you send people just to your homepage with a QR code, they’re likely to lose interest right away. Consider sending them to a special landing page or a mobile version of your website. It’s just more interesting for first time customers that have already shown interest by scanning your QR code.

Once you’ve decided what you’re going to do with a QR code, you need to choose the medium in which your codes will be distributed. You can choose to stick them on your packaging, direct mail, business cards, print ads, but one of the most interesting ways to drive traffic to your business website is to add QR codes to your social media pages. Using QR codes can really help with your social media marketing because many people just can’t resist scanning the barcodes with their phones to see what’s in store.

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Why Social Bookmarking?

You absolutely need to use social bookmarking sites when you publish new content, whether that’s new web pages, blog posts, or news and press articles. Social bookmarking works because it will drive large amount of traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking communities view bookmarks either chronologically, by tags, or by search engines. When you bookmark a page on your website and share it with an online community, it classifies that page as useful within the particular category you specified. The bookmark is then disseminated and shared among a viral community.

Social bookmarking is the third most effective medium of searching and finding useful information, preceded only by Google searches and directly visiting websites. It is a powerful marketing tool you should use to promote the information on your website and drive an amount of traffic almost equitable to what you get from Google searches.

How to use social bookmarking effectively

Rich Brooks of Social Media Examiner wrote in a recent blog post:

“It’s always best when someone else bookmarks your content, so it might makes sense to have a small ‘bookmarking club’ with friends where you promote each other’s work. This ‘seeding’ will often encourage others to bookmark your content.”

His advice is very useful in that bookmarking your own content will work in terms of search rankings, but it may end up looking like just promotional efforts in the eyes of your consumers.

When you publish new content (i.e. new web pages or blog posts), make sure you bold your keywords, add related links back to your website, and use tags to categorize your information to make searches more effective. Then, bookmark your site on a few different social bookmarking channels like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious.

In a day or two, review your web analytics and see exactly where your traffic came from. You’ll be surprised to see how quickly social bookmarking can work for you.

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If you have a high-involvement product that requires educating your consumer, it can work against you to have a lot of copy in your website trying to explain it. Consumers don’t want to put forth a lot of effort once they reach your website. You have less than a few seconds to grab their attention, and an even shorter amount of time to convince them you have a solid product.

Use videos

Using videos is not only a fun, easy, and quick way to explain your product, but it is a great way to increase your social media marketing activity. The amount of users on video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo give you a great opportunity to reach broader audiences.

Once you post a video on your website, people have the ability to share it with others. Because videos by nature are just easier to understand than large blocks of copy, information is more likely to get passed on.

What kinds of videos you should post

There are so many things you can use a well-constructed video for. You can have a page on your website filled with videos like:

• How-To’s and tutorials
• Testimonials
• News and press
• Product information
• Product demonstrations
• Customer video responses

Using videos for this kind of information gives your customers a little more value. Watching someone in their own consumer market talk about your product will do a lot more for your credibility than just reading about it on your website and seeing a picture.

How it Helps Social Media Marketing

Once you post a few videos, you’ll start to see how much easier it is to share information verbally rather than through written words. Set up a YouTube channel and have people subscribe to it. By embracing the myriad of ways you can use social media, you will be able to build up a larger consumer base and your consumers will be more interested in interacting with your company.

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Interactivity is becoming increasingly important for consumers and their purchase decisions. A business website gives the consumer general information and a professional business presence. A blog allows consumers to see updated and fresh information, testimonials from recent purchasers, and even comments and conversations posted by existing customers.

Search Engine Optimization

Blogs are also great for increasing your search engine optimization, or your visibility online. By posting fresh content on a daily basis you increase your search engine ranking and the ability for people to see you online. Blogs can also drive traffic to your website by providing useful information while also using links and a call to action to direct your readers to your company site.

Personal Touch

Having a blog on a site like WordPress or Blogger will give your company a personality that many other companies don’t have. Publishing more personal content rather than pushing sales pitches gives you an advantage over your competitors. Because consumers are seeking more intimate relationships with the online companies they purchase from, a blog can be a great way to establish communication, relationships, and credibility with your consumers.

How To Integrate Your Blog and Website

There are several ways you can integrate your blogging platform and your business website. If you choose to use an existing platform like WordPress or Blogger, make sure to include links on every post you publish that directs your readers back to your website. Also, have links to your blog on the homepage of your business website. This encourages people to learn more about you, your company, your product, and your consumers.

If you wish to have a more seamless integration, consider investing in a content management system that includes a blogging platform. This means that your blog will be an actual page of your website and you wouldn’t need to send your customers away from your website in order to connect with them.

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