It's a Mesh: merging web, mobile and traditional marketing

The new website for Southern Virginia Regional Alliance has launched, including foreign language versions created on the fly.  Glerin designed and developed the new website for the regional economic development initiative spearheaded by Lt Gov Bill Bolling, and including the counties of Halifax, Henry, Pittsylvania and Patrick as well as the cities of Danville and Martinsville.

We were recently selected to design the logo and website for a new regional economic development group in Virginia, the Southern Virginia Regional Alliance.  Last Friday, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling was in town to kick off the alliance and to introduce the group's new Executive Director, Leigh Cockram; the new logo was unveiled to the public at the event.

If your website doesn't have a mobile version, you must correct that!  Too many sites either display poorly on mobile devices, or even worse, don't display at all.  Recently I tried to visit a site on my iPhone, but it opened up to a blank white page; when I got back to the office I browsed to the site on my laptop and found that it's built entirely on Flash.  That results in nothing to display on the iPhone!

Luckily, when I initially tried to visit the site I wasn't looking to buy or researching a company I may want to do business with; if that had been the case, they would have had a lost sale.

It's time to start thinking about your company's mobility.  No, not upward mobility - how you can take advantage of the fast-growing mobile device market to promote your brand.

The key with mobile apps is to come up with an idea that's helpful or fun, making people want to use it, all the while discretely promoting your brand.  I love an app that a friend's company developed for the iPhone, that showed the UV index for your current location - the precise location, of course, thanks to the GPS in  the user's iPhone.  It was developed for a suntan lotion company.  Helpful - yes.  Blatant advertising - no.  Branding promotion - yes.

With more and more people using mobile devices to access the web, it's crucial for you to have a mobile version of your website.

We have a lot of clients who are interested in online advertising and don't know where to start.  If you're not using AdWords yet, here's your chance to try out Google AdWords for free with our $100 free AdWords vouchers.

As a member of Google Engage for Agencies, we offer our clients Google AdWords campaign development and management.

I struggled with whether to do this post or not.  Those who know me well know that I'm not a troublemaker or rabble-rouser; I cringe at stirring up trouble, especially for others in their jobs. As a business owner, I know how hard it is to get everything right and make the pieces all fit together. Having said that, I had an experience recently that I really do feel has a good lesson in it and have decided to share it in the spirit of learning and improving, not in attacking or flaming.

Usually companies do a better job in their traditional sales and support services than through social media, simply because people are still getting used to it.  This is a case in reverse.  It is not meant to be an indictment of the company I had the experience with, just an example of how one area can be on top of things but another drop the ball, negating gains made by the one doing a good job. [UPDATE: please read to the end for response from Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social.]

Your site visitors care about one thing - how you can help them get what they want.  They don't want to read all kinds of long, boring prose about how great your company is or it's history, nor do they want to have to give you their name and email just to be able to view more information about your products or services.  Your visitors want a solution to their problem - whether they're looking to buy a product online, or whether they just want a good laugh from your joke of the day.  Don't scare them away by demanding information from them before they're ready to provide it to help themselves.

I thought the following pretty much went the way of the 90's, but recently I was researching a product and ending up on a major company's website, only to find that I couldn't even reach the product information page without encountering "let us know who your are!"  Well....NO!  I immediately left the site and returned to Google, and the company lost a sale to another site.  There are too many competitors out there for you to alienate potential customers by demanding information from them before you've earned it.

If you aren't familiar with QR codes, I can pretty much guarantee that you've seen them around and just didn't know what they were.  QR (Quick Response) codes are similar to bar codes but can hold much more data; they enable you to pass along information to clients and prospective clients who are able to scan them with a QR code reader, usually a smart phone.  The codes can hold data such as: a web url, contact information (vcard), a Google maps location, and SMS message composers.  The sample at right contains the url to this website:  http://www.glerin.com.

Our new SoVaMusic app for iPhone and iPad is available on the App Store, and the Android version will be coming soon.  So what does this mean to businesses in our region of Southern Virginia?  For serious advertisers it could mean a lot.

35% of searches will be affected - think you can possibly dodge that?

As social media becomes more pervasive, Google's search results have become less relevant to those who are looking for real-time news.  The latest changes in Google's search algorithm are the search giant's attempt to compete for those searchers by providing "the most up-to-date results."  Your site's ranking in search results will undoubtedly be affected since the company expects the changes to affect about 35% of searches.

We've found that there's a lot of confusion about the difference between mobile apps and mobile websites, even amongst many so-called developers - believe it or not! The difference is very simple. A mobile app runs natively on your mobile device and must be installed on the device; many can be used regardless of whether you have an internet connection. A mobile website is a version of your website that is stripped down to make it faster to load on a mobile device and easier to read and navigate on the small screen. Usually there are less graphics and extraneous information on mobile sites, but you should always include the option for mobile visitors to choose to view the full site.

We all know we need to keep our websites backed up, but let's be honest: how many of you actually follow through and keep a current backup?  And I don't mean just files; you need to backup your database also.  Good intentions don't count when your site has been hacked or your server explodes.  We can take the pain out of backing up your site, but you need to set it up now - not after your data has been lost.

Tuesday evening we were honored to have Andy Beal, renowned online reputation management expert and founder of Trackur, Skype-in to our blogging workshop and speak with the participants, taking questions and sharing his insights.  Thank you, Andy!

We live streamed the workshop and also videotaped it to make available for later viewing. Unfortunately, the next day we found that Murphy's Law took effect during Andy's speaking with us: we didn't realize the camera had accidentally been left on earlier when testing, and the battery died without our being able to video all of his segment. Ok, no problem; we had a backup plan because we were doing a screen capture of the Skype segment. Old Murphy struck again, though, and the quality wasn't good enough for use. Soooo, I apologize and will try to recap some of what went on. I'm sure I'll be leaving out a ton of good information, though, and am so disappointed :(

Tomorrow night marks our fourth workshop in the monthly series of free workshops we're doing for 2012 (the first one was in December, 2011), and we're excited to welcome special guest speaker Andy Beal. Not only will this workshop be recorded for online video, but we'll also be live streaming from the Mechdyne cave at Riverstone Energy Center.

Andy Beal, internet marketing consultant, award-winning blogger, professional speaker and coauthor of the critically-acclaimed book Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online will join us via Skype. Andy has appeared on ABC News, CNBC and NPR and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times , Business Week, Inc. Magazine, Forbes and many other publications - and now he'll be appearing in Riverstone Energy Center! He is considered “the Indiana Jones of reputation management.”

It's not easy to sit down and convince somebody who is trying to keep their small business afloat in a tumultuous global economy that they shouldn't always be concerned with the sale first when marketing to the modern consumer. Most people who don't have experience in social media just down-right don't take advice like that seriously. It's true, though.

Everyday, internet users are bombarded with people trying to sell them something, to the point where most of this marketing becomes part of their peripheral world. It's not hard to demonstrate this. Most of you probably have a Facebook. I want you to go use Facebook for 20 minutes (seriously, right now, before you make it past this parenthetical aside and spoil the point) and then come back and tell me 10 Facebook ads that stuck out to you. If you're like the vast majority of everyday browsers, you probably can't because you've developed a bit of an immunity to it. 

I know our clients get tired of hearing this, but I can't say it enough: social media is about networking and building relationships, not about broadcasting your own message incessantly.  Nobody cares about you and your product.  They care about how you can help them - whether it's solving a problem or just having fun.

My friend Ben Capozzi is a good example: he followed a link in an email to read a story by an awesome artist whose work he admired, then reached out in the blog comments section saying he enjoyed the story. Then he tweeted the story to his followers. Guess what?  The blogger followed him back after that, and Ben ended up being asked to participate in a project he was doing. You just never know who you might meet through social media, just like you never know who you might meet at a party.

Today we had a client who, in setting up her LinkedIn account, had accidentally invited hundreds of people to connect by importing her contacts. Panicked, she gave us a call wanting to know if there was any way she could withdraw some the invitations.

The good news is that, yes, you can withdraw invitations but the bad news is that you have to do it one invitation at a time so it's a pain if you have hundreds to deal with like her. Here's how to cancel invitations that you sent, keeping in mind that you can only do this If the person hasn't accepted your invitation yet: