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

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'm so proud of all of the area business people who have been coming out to the free monthly social media workshops!  A number of them have been able to come to all three so far, and every month we also have new participants. A few of Monday night's participants are in the photo at right.

We were fortunate to have Ben Capozzi, Director of the Business of Art & Design Program at Southern Virginia Higher Education Center and Halifax County's King of Twitter, help out with the Twitter workshop this month. You'll be glad to know that Ben plans to help out with future workshops as well.

6pm Tuesday, December 6 will mark the kickoff date for a free series of workshops to be delivered by Glerin. The first workshop will be an overview of the major social media outlets, explaining what each is, how they differ from each other, what they're used for, and how they can be used together in a coordinated way.

Topics covered will include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and more, plus using blogging and newsletters in coordination with social media.

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 have a business Facebook page you may be wondering what the impressions and feedback stats are that you see under each post; you can use these stats to help gauge the effectiveness of your posts and how interesting they are to your followers.  Exactly what do the terms "impressions" and "feedback" mean?

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.

Face it, we're all bombarded with too much information today and the last thing we want to do is read more of it - UNLESS there's something in it for us!  If you want to make sure that your subscribers read your newsletters, and maybe even pass them along to their friends, you should concentrate on providing helpful or fun information rather than dragging on about your company and how great it is - BORING!

Newsletters aren't so much about promotion as they are about creating and maintaining relationships with your customers.  By providing helpful or fun content, you'll make your readers look forward to the next issue rather than just deleting it unread from their inbox - or worse yet, unsubscribing themselves from the newsletter.  Which brings me to another point: your newsletter should always include an Unsubscribe link; not only is it rude not to do so, it's actually illegal.

Or in this case, the keyword star.

As the web matures and becomes more entwined with our lives, sometimes words aren't enough to attract search engines.  The latest buzz is that having videos on your site will not only give you more interesting content, but may also help with your search engine placement.  Search engines are trying to give more variety in their results, and the word is that the algorithms are stacked to give preference to pages including video.

While website development is our core business, the philosophy that drives our business extends much further than that.  Over the years we've been fortunate enough to work with some great clients and most of them are still with us; just today we did some maintenance work for a client who's been with us since 1997!