Three blogs to put on your radar

May 14th, 2010

I have been telling clients and contacts these last few weeks about three main blogs that I ready daily. To my surprise, none of the people have known about these blogs… but they should! This made me believe that maybe our readers aren’t aware either, so if you’re in to reading good marketing/technology/blogging blogs to help you with your own marketing, put these three at the the top of your read list.

  1. Problogger – This blog is for beginning bloggers, advid bloggers, money-making bloggers… you get the picture? If you’re looking to read up on how to improve your blog, this is IT! So check out the blog, get yourself subscribed and start working on your blog posts. If you’re really committed to improving your blog, consider his guide 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. I have looked through it and it has quality material.
  2. Mashable – This blog has a slant toward technology and social media, but it’s still a groundswell of amazing information. How-to guides, the latest news on the iPad, what Google is up to and what videos are trending on the Internet are just some of the topics you’ll find.
  3. Seth Godin’s blog – This is just another daily read on my list. He keeps his posts short and to the point, which makes it easy to keep up with yet adds a bit of zing to your marketing day. Typically inspiring, always informative.
Raquel Richardson
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Website Influence Grows – Up to 83%

March 31st, 2010

When people ask me what they can do for their marketing, I always start with the website.

  • Do you have one?
  • Is it good?
  • How do you know it’s good?
  • What are you measuring?
  • Are you blogging?
  • How are you consistently working to improve your site?
  • What new tactics are you adding to bring in traffic?

Your website is one part of your marketing mix, but it’s a big, big part.

One of our clients, Maddox Industrial Contractors, came to us last fall for marketing help. Their website was, in one word, atrocious. They hadn’t shared any love with their website, or, marketing in general. Lost images, broken links, poor representation of their brand and lacking content spelled disaster. After going through the market snapshot service we provide, they decided that website needed immediate attention… and it’s paid off to the tune of consistent sales leads. New business is knocking… and they have used the new Maddox website to help them determine if they want to talk.

In real life, it’s working for Maddox. In statistical life, 83% of people are saying a company’s website influence their buying decision. This news released by HubSpot says:

The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial services; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services. 

According to the survey, this is a significant increase compared to 2005, when 69% of buyers assigned websites at least “some influence” over this decision. Furthermore, the number of people who say websites have “a great deal of influence” rose to 28% compared with 16% in 2005.

Take a look at your website with your prospect’s eyes. What do they see? Are they seeing too much of your face and not enough about the value you bring? Are they finding remarkable content? If you’re not sure what they are finding, ask us. This is a perfect use of our small dose, big consulting service. We’ll tell you straight up… challenges and solutions.

Raquel Richardson
business smarts, marketing & sales, web
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Fans, Followers, For Reals?

March 12th, 2010

Ryan Puckett and I recently met for breakfast and had a fun talk about the use of the word “fan.” I said, you should write a blog about that… and here it is. What do you think of the word fan? We would love for you to chime in…

guest post by Ryan Puckett

Ok, so I have no research to back this up, but I’m absolutely convinced that one of the major barriers to more people using social media (especially in marketing) is the lexicon that accompanies it.

Last year at Blog Indiana, I remember one colleague saying that she has a hard time getting her managers to understand what a blog is and why there is a need to do it. The answer to her problems, according to another colleague, was to stop calling it a blog and just call it a web site. If she wanted to go a step further, she could call it a web site that is updated easily and frequently.

I’ve known many people to start using Twitter and they get totally freaked out when they receive that first email with the subject line, “Ryan Puckett is now following you on Twitter.”

Ack! Why is Ryan Puckett stalking me? Who is he and am I supposed to stalk him too?

The terms “follower” and “following” give Twitter a creepy vibe for the newbie, but once you realize that it’s really a subscription to somebody’s Twitter feed, it’s not so hard to get your head around it and realize no harm will be done, nor will your vacation beach photos be published on TMZ.

Another odd term is “fan.” ABC Graphic Design Company suggests you become a fan on Facebook. Really? I know the owner, but I’ve never even used their services. How can I be a “fan?”

Again, the problem is in the lexicon. When I think of fans, I think of the Jimmy Fallon in “Fever Pitch” or the scary Robert Dinero stalking Wesley Snipes in “The Fan.”

However, once you realize that being a fan really means subscribing to a company’s Facebook updates, it isn’t so hard to get your mind around it.

This week, my Twitter feed has been all abuzz about folks heading to South by Southwest, otherwise known as SXSW. Somehow, this music and film festival became a hub for interactive, marketing types in the last few years and it’s where Twitter took off and increasingly popular (and sometime annoying) Foursquare made its debut too.

I wonder what kind of new words will come out of Austin this year? I’m predicting something weird like “salute.” Can’t you just imagine getting an email that says “Ryan Puckett is now saluting you on Salute.com” or trying to explain to your manager that they need to start “saluting” their “army.”

What does all of this mean for marketers? Easy. Use normal words to explain these concepts to your clients, managers and those in the C-suite. In other words, keep it real.

Raquel Richardson
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Update Your Profile Picture Across Multiple Websites All At Once

February 19th, 2010

I visited a social network this morning that I haven’t been to in almost three months. I wasn’t surprised to see that it still had an old picture of me on my profile. I thought I had updated my picture on all my social media networks a while ago, but this wasn’t a network that I go to a lot. It did get me curious, though, so I checked some of my other profiles. It turns out I only thought I updated all my online avatars with that new photo. More than half still had my old photo up.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could update my photo in one place and have it updated everywhere? I think so, and the folks at Gravatar agree. They’ve created a central repository where you can upload photos of yourself.

Then any social network or other website that uses Gravatar doesn’t need to ask you to upload a photo. They can look at the email address you used to sign up and pull the image straight from Gravatar. So when you update your Gravatar photo, it automatically updates your photo on every site that uses Gravatar. Makes life a lot easier.

Who uses Gravatar?

I’d love to tell you that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN all use the Gravatar protocol. They don’t. If you want to update your photo on these sites, you have to go to each one individually and upload an image.

Most of the action that Gravatar gets is on blogs like this one. That’s right. If you create a Gravatar account (it’s free) and leave a comment on this post, your picture will show up right next to your comment. It will also show up on comments you leave on thousands (if not tens of thousands) of other blogs.

What if you leave a comment and you don’t have a Gravatar? Nothing breaks. You’ll just have a non-descript gray icon that looks vaguely like a human being. I find that when I’m reading a blog post with a long list of comments, the ones with a unique image next to them tend to catch my eye.

Why doesn’t every site use Gravatar?

My first guess is that they want to allow you to be unique on their site. You might put a casual photo of yourself on Facebook and a more professional photo of yourself on LinkedIN. I prefer to have one photo that works in a professional or casual context, but maybe I’m in the minority.

Clay Mabbitt
social media, web
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The Pope has spoken, and he says you should blog

January 24th, 2010

You probably think that headline is a joke, but it’s far from it. Mashable reported that Pope Benedict XVI has shared that the cultural shifts have come and it’s time to reach out in the social media world. The Pope himself has launch social media efforts and wants others to follow. Here is an expert from his original message:

“The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.”

Social media is defintely here to stay. It can be a perfect outlet for your message, with one of the key phrases of the Pope’s message being:  “exercising their proper role as leaders of communities.” Use these wonderful outlets to see how you can speak to and engage your community. If you want more on this topic, I’ve listed a few other posts as reference:

Raquel Richardson
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Under the Hood of Your Blog: Tags vs. Categories

January 15th, 2010

When you start writing a blog post, the process is pretty easy to grasp right off the bat. You give your post a title. You type the main text (like what you’re reading now). Then things get a little stickier. You can select categories your post falls under. You can also create tags and attach them to your post. Understanding categories and tags seems to be a common speed bump people encounter when they first start blogging. You may gather from the names “category” and “tag” that they are meant to be some means of organizing your blog, but how? Are they different? How do you know when to use a category versus a tag?

While no analogy is perfect, I’ve got one that might help clear up some of the confusion. If your blog was a book, it would probably have chapters. And let’s suppose you gave each chapter a title. When a new person picks up your book, they could look at the table of contents and quickly scan the chapter titles to get an idea of what you talk about in your book. A book on earth science might include chapters like Geology, Oceanology, and Meteorology. If a reader is particularly interested in Oceanology, they could jump right to that chapter and start reading. The chapter titles are the categories of your blog. It’s a way of describing the organization of your blog from a big picture perspective. On our blog, the post you’re reading right now is under the category: Web.

Other people may come at your book in a different way. They have a specific topic in mind, and they only want to look at the places where you talk about that word in the book. If all I care about is plate tectonics, then I don’t need to look at the table of contents. It’s faster to look in the index to see where you mention plate tectonics and go straight to those pages. When you create a tag in your blog, it’s like putting that tag in the index at the back of a book. And when I click on a tag on your blog, I’ll get a list of all the posts where you have used that tag. This post is tagged with the word: blogging.

So how did that analogy hold up? After reading this do you have a better grasp on tags and categories?

Clay Mabbitt
web
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Top 10 Posts of 2009

January 6th, 2010

As we think about what we want to include on the blog for 2010, we decided to look back at the topics from 2009 that generated the most interest. Social media shows up repeatedly, although somewhat surprisingly none of our posts about Twitter cracked the top 10.

I was pleased to see my post on humorous t-shirts did so well. Maybe that’s why Angela and Raquel each got me a t-shirt for Christmas. With that in mind, I’ll be writing posts this year on shiny new cars and European vacations.

  1. Top 10 (Safe For Work) Funny T-Shirts You Can Buy Online
  2. Hot Technology for 2010: Google Wave
  3. Think like your clients
  4. 2009 Companies to Watch
  5. Facebook Fan Pages Are Better Than Groups
  6. Preview Our New Home Page
  7. 8 Strategies For Building Your Business With Flickr
  8. Preview of the New Silver Square
  9. What’s On Your Business’s Facebook Page
  10. How To Look Good When Your Website Gets Shared on Facebook
Clay Mabbitt
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Blogging Just Got Easier: Release of WordPress 2.9

December 21st, 2009

I’ve been a fan of WordPress for several years because the development team has always managed to strike a perfect balance between the needs of a site developer like me and the needs of the site owner who needs to be able to make updates to the content of the site. Most site owners are not web developers themselves, so they need an interface that makes it easy to add pages, images, and video to their site. WordPress has make those tasks simple for years, but release 2.9 adds a few features that take this simplicity to new heights.

Embedding Video

In previous versions of WordPress, embedding video from a site like YouTube on your web page had a few extra confusing steps. You had to find the embed code on YouTube, switch from the visual editor to the HTML editor in WordPress, and the whole process felt a little clunky. Now you can just paste a link to your YouTube video into the middle of your WordPress page. When a visitor views the page, the video will automatically be embedded. Simple.

So when I edit this page, I paste in the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FEyMO713-Y …but you see:

Editing Images

Gone are the days when you need to use photo editing software to crop, rotate, and resize your images before uploading them. You can now do all of those functions from right within your WordPress site.

And of course there’s also behind the scenes changes that help me as a site developer out, but you don’t care if there are better filters for query_posts and WP_Query. And the great thing about using a content management system like WordPress is you don’t have to.

Clay Mabbitt
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Indy Social Media Breakfast: The Great (Ghost Blogging) Debate

December 10th, 2009

This morning was the second Indianapolis Social Media Breakfast. Raquel represented the side opposed to ghost blogging, and Ryan Puckett was speaking in favor of ghost blogging.

This was a tricky topic because it’s hard to treat it as a black and white issue. Where’s the line between ghost blogging and editing? Is the blog written for a company or an individual? You can check out a stream of the debate below. The meat of the conversation starts about 8 minutes in.

You can also check out what the audience was saying during and after the event on Twitter by following the hashtag #indysmb.

Clay Mabbitt
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How do I get people to read my blog?

December 7th, 2009

We recently released a post about the significant traffic builder a blog can be, and, in our December newsletter (sent only to newsletter subscribers) we talked about creating the right kind of content for your audience. This begged the question from a few of you:  How do I get people to read my blog?

First, let me step back and say kudos to you for starting your blog. Keep it up! Now to get those readers… below are some tips for getting your work out and about. Give some a try and let me know how they work for you. I always like to hear real-world success stories! (or, the opposite of those stories; we all can learn from those!)

  • Make it a habit to update your status on Facebook and LinkedIn and wherever else you’re posting status updates to mention your blog. You can talk about that you’re writing your blog, put a link to the latest post, mention the headline and link to the rest, etc. Just keep it out there in front of people so they KNOW one actually exists.
  • Use Twitter to push your posts out on a daily basis. If you’ve been blogging for an extra long time, like us, then you have mounds of content you can push out on a regular basis. Use the archives! History has proven it’s relevance time and time again; don’t think because it’s older than a week it’s not good information to share.
  • Mention your blog on your business cards. Learn to bridge the gap between the real and virtual world and talk about your work when you’re talking to someone at networking events, grocery store lines, at your kid’s actvities. If it’s helpful, it won’t seem out of place. Figure out how to work it in.
  • Comment on other blogs (read: those blogs with lots of followers) and link to your post/blog as relevance to your comment. This is a proven tactic to get like-minded readers following you.
  • Get a little crafty on LinkedIn and join groups that want to know your info. Post your blog there and comment on other group posts. Share, share, share.
  • Be like us and post your blog front and center to your homepage. Visitor’s are sure to see your most recent posts and possibly keep coming back for more.

Get rolling on a few of these, be consistent and keep adding relevant and valuable content to your blog. You’re sure to get the readers you’re looking for.

Raquel Richardson
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