Posts tagged online marketing
Marketing lessons from my shoes
Sep 27th
By Andrew Berthoff
I recently purchased new shoes online. I like to support local companies, and I always look for things distinct, so I returned to shop at John Fluevog. I don’t often buy shoes, but always enjoy checking out the unique styles – flamboyant or relatively conservative – that this Canadian shoemaker offers.
Shopping online is generally an anonymous experience – call it soulless (as my late fatherused to say, “No pun intended”? Why not?!). With most online shopping sites, the transaction comprises a pre-formatted e-mail confirmation of the purchase and, then, maybe a week later, the arrival of the goods in a plain box with no personalization, no comment, and no thanks for your business.
Andrew Berthoff
Not so with the Fluevians. Even online, they understand that their customer service needs to fit with the style and spirit of the brand – personalized, appreciative and just a shade irreverent. After choosing and purchasing my shoes, I received an e-mail confirmation:
Thank you for placing your web order with John Fluevog Shoes!
We will contact you again within 5 business days to confirm which of our fine locations will be fulfilling your order, and then again when it is shipped. Read the rest of this entry »
Five SEO facts hidden in your domain name
Sep 21st
by Krista LaRiviere
When Google crawls your web site to index and rank your content it has to start somewhere. That somewhere is the front door to your site – your domain name. It’s time to take inventory of your domain name and make sure the welcome mat is out for those Google robots.
Krista LaRiviere
Don’t overlook these five important SEO signals that could make a difference between a Page One and a Page Two ranking.
1. Expiration Date – Do you know when your domain name will expire? If your domain expires two weeks from now and you haven’t renewed it yet Google, might get the sense that you’re not committed to the domain and therefore the web site.
Domain names are relatively inexpensive compared to a decade ago. A dot com domain costs a couple hundred dollars for a 10-year term. If you want to signal to Google that you’re serious about your business and domain, it is a good idea to register it for a longer period of time. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to Rebecca Black’s Friday
Mar 18th
By Nestor E. Arellano
Who says you can’t buy fame in the social net? Well I did, last year. And I guess I’m having crow for dinner.
Tens of thousands of teenagers on March break will probably be cranking up Rebecca Black’s iTunes hit single Friday anytime to herald the weekend – not withstanding, or perhaps because, of the fact that it has been called the “the worst song ever.”
Nestor Arellano
When Rebecca’s feel good ode to the final day of the work week aired on YouTube in Feb. 10 it garnered a few thousand views. By this Thursday, “Friday” had hit more than 12. 7 million views on YouTube, had been the among the top trending topics on Twitter for more than three days and at 99 cents a pop was among iTune’s number 69 top selling songs. Read the rest of this entry »
Video Blog: Keeping the Canada in your ad copy
Oct 6th
My kids and I used to play this game every time we watch movies on TV. We try to spot the visual cues that would give away whether or not the flick was shot in Canada.
Nestor Arellano
Back then, it always seemed to amaze them that local cities like Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal could be used as stand-ins for cities like Seattle, New York or Paris.
Bleaching out the Canada from their metropolitan landscape may be profitable for some Canadian locales seeking Hollywood dollars, but marketing guru Terry O’Reilly, author of the book The Age of Persuasion, says the same strategy could backfire on businesses selling products and services.
“Every product has a story and when you tell that story in an engaging way that sets your product apart from others in the market and adds value to your product,” says O’Reilly. Read the rest of this entry »
How professional service firms can become more valuable
Sep 7th
What is your firm’s value proposition? To effectively answer this question, begin by identifying where your firm falls on your industry’s value chain. To understand the changing dynamics of the value chain concept, observe what’s happened to the music business.
Tim Williams
Consumers are still spending roughly the same amount of money on music, but the money isn’t going to the record companies and music stores; it’s going to iTunes. The money in the music business value chain is still there—it just moved.
The same is happening in other rapidly evolving industries. Companies are spending, but they’re spending in new and different areas of the value chain.
Should Biz Go Buzz? -Google wants social networking to go to work
Feb 17th
By Carmi Levy, independent technology analyst and journalist
By now, every Gmail user on the planet has either tried Google Buzz out, or is counting the hours until the new social networking capability is rolled out to his/her specific account. 
While the debate rages over whether Google Buzz is a Facebook killer – this is a business-focused blog, so I’ll leave the Buzz vs. Farmville/Mafia Wars issue for someone else – the real story has nothing to do with consumers. Buried not too deeply in Google’s announcement was this bit about the company’s plans “to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.”
Google’s plans to drive social networking deeper into its fast evolving Google Apps suite represents yet another inflection point in the evolution of both social networking tools – which up until now have been seen largely consumer-focused – and Web-based productivity applications whose stripped down feature set made them a showstopper for most enterprises. Read the rest of this entry »
How are your users surfing?
Jan 21st
It is no secret that I believe that a company’s web presence is a direct reflection on the quality of their brand and by extension their products or service offerings. Is it fair that consumers judge a company by the quality of their web interaction? Probably not, but it happens millions of times a day all over the world. 
The difficulty in producing a good user experience on the web lies in the fact that there are so many components that go into making a “good” web site or web application. There are the content providers, the information architects, the graphic designers, the web developers and potentially many others. Sometimes, in small organizations, these roles are each fulfilled by the same person. Sometimes, in larger organizations, the people that fulfill these roles might never meet. Regardless of the development dynamic, a lot of effort is expended on many different levels in order to produce a web site or web app. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Google really fed up with censorship and spying in China?
Jan 13th
Google’s very thinly veiled intimations of pulling out of the world’s largest Internet market highlights the issue of industrial espionage that trouble’s many foreign firms doing business in China.
The search engine giant would conceivably employ the most sophisticated security systems to protect its network. But if the king of the Web is crying it can’t take the heat anymore where does that leave smaller organizations?
Read the rest of this entry »
