Archive for April, 2010
New Chart: How Important is Social Media to Your Strategy?
April 30th, 2010 | 
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Hmm, no surprises then. The reality is that most businesses don’t have the first clue where to engage or how to engage with social media. I’ve been doing a bit of training recently covering setting up campaigns, which tools to use for distribution, interaction and very important – tracking.
Tracking what is going on is the real gem and there are some cool and ‘free’ tools out there that you can get started with today.
The bottom line is that it’s just about taking that initial dive in. Yeah, sure, you’ll flap about a bit just like your first time in a swimming pool and you’ll take the odd gulp down the wrong hole but in time your business will find it’s niche and your prospects will find you.
In 5 years time you’ll wonder what all of the fuss was about.
For some quick and easy training that you’ll enjoy check out my fastrack social media training packages
Google Webmaster Tools – Digital marketing software tools update
This new update from Google in the webmaster tools is awesome. Selecting keywords for fine tuning and weeding out keywords that are not worth pursuing never got any easier!
Check out this post by the Chaffmeister.
Legal Marketing For Professional Services Shift
I’ve recently been exploring the opportunities for professional services firms within the sphere of social media and I found a great piece by Suzanne Lowe & David Kipp of Ross & Baruzzini (consultancy) that supports my findings.
It is startlingly clear that due to cultural and structural barriers many firms are not allowing themselves to leverage their internal resources for marketing and selling activities and are thus side stepping the potential returns that shifting towards engaging with social networking environments could return.
To be effective social media marketing relies directly on experts imparting knowledge to those asking the questions. For example if I’m interested in a conveyancing service from a law firm for example then a quick tip from an actual conveyancing solicitor via a LinkedIn discussion would be more welcome than a nod towards the firm from a marketing practitioner.
The case for allowing staff to market on behalf of the firm is doesn’t need to be made any clearer to some firms and there are many that are already taking the initiative (especially in the States) as this quote from the article suggests “This “new normal” professional firm more effectively harnesses people for marketing and selling, no matter what their function or station”.
So the question is not whether you move towards a culture and internal structure where “every person gains competency in marketing and business development”, it’s when.
Another reason why your people are your greatest asset.
Check out the article http://www.management-issues.com/2009/11/27/opinion/82442-7607.asp#
Horizontal Attention Leans Left (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
More wisdom from the master of all things ‘usability’ Mr. Jakob Nielsen. This one is a nugget about how web pages are typically viewed with the conclusion that the left side of a page gets more attention than the right.
Genius or just plain obvious?
Again though it begs the questions should we all just follow these conventions and have web pages that all look the same or perhaps just agree that for certain sites like news delivery this works and for others like a gimmicky FMCG brand with a load of interactivity it perhaps doesn’t.
Posted in Uncategorized, User Experience, Web Site Design | 
Tags: usability, User Experience | 
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