It has been a while since my last post here. We have been very busy not only looking after our fantastic clients, but preparing to re-organize our business and launch a new brand – BOLD BEAVER.

For the last nine months, we have been quietly testing a new integrated approach to online marketing with a few select clients. It is not merely an incremental change from our previous web design and social media projects, it focuses on bringing all of the different components together (website design, SEO, social media, email marketing, analytics, etc.) to focus on bringing more targeted traffic to your site, converting more qualified leads, and ultimately growing your sales.

We are building on the proven Inbound Internet Marketing methodology developed by the great MIT spin-off, HubSpot in Boston, and we are doing it under the new name of the BOLD BEAVER Inbound Digital Marketing Agency.

Does this mean the end of YourSiteOurServer.com? No Way!

YourSiteOurServer will continue to offer domain registration, and website hosting services as its core business. If you have a website design project or web application that you would like help with we will be glad to help you out. But, if you are ready to take your online presence to the next level and leverage the full potential of an integrated digital marketing strategy to significantly grow your business, then come and visit us at BOLD BEAVER to learn more about that.

You will notice some changes to our website over the coming weeks as we finalize the transition. There shouldn’t be any serious disruptions.

Thanks for you continued support of YourSiteOurServer.com and we look forward to introducing you to new opportunities to grow your business with BOLD BEAVER.

Please let us know what you think of the new site’s design. What do you like? What don’t you like? We really want to know.

Earlier today I tweeted a link to a good article from this morning’s Globe and Mail about what to look for in a social media consultant. It has some very good advice, some things that I don’t agree with and some critical things that are missing.

What’s missing?
 

Although certainly helpful, this article and it contributors have missed a couple of hugely important points. Why does a business want to engage with social media and what is the return on investment?

You cannot make a good investment of your company’s recourses without having clear goals. While some very large companies can find value in a PR campaign that delivers only brand promotion, this is not the case for most small to medium sized businesses.

We advocate for an integrated Inbound Internet Marketing methodology that utilizes social media as one of a suite of tools to help your business Get Found, Convert Leads, and Grow Sales. Ask your prospective online marketing / social media consultant about measurable ROI. If they don’t have a clear plan for measuring ROI, they are going to waste your money.

The Good
 

Don’t confuse brand with results. As with any industry, an expert’s credibility is important … It’s not hard to develop a ‘personal brand’ on social network, oftentimes with large numbers of friends or followers. It’s also possible to build a brand by dispensing advice far and wide, without actually having successfully managed a business plan.

Ask for examples and references.

Watch out for number-mentality. Metrics are important in the online world, to be sure, but the most important one is your bottom line. “If you have a consultant on your hands who wants to talk about viral hits and follower counts, that’s a problem,” says Ian Capstick, principal at MediaStyle.

I agree with Mr. Capstick on this. Good metrics are vital to good management, but you have to be measuring the right things. This comes from understanding the business goals of your marketing campaign and the relative contribution of each tactic, like social media, to those goals.

We advocate the approach of being your inbound online marketing partner. A good consultant will first want to understand your business goals and opportunities, and then work with you on an ongoing basis to achieve measurable and sustainable results in growing your business. Throughout the process, there are stages of rapid growth and then things level off for a while.

Choose a partner that is not just looking for the quick hit and run. Make sure they plan to work with you to build consistency and push through those plateaus to reach your next goal.

The Bad
 

Know when to stay in. As always, aim to have a clear vision of whether going outside your own firm for social-media advice is worth it in the first place. Mr. Capstick suggests that businesses and organizations that are bringing in less than $1-million in annual returns are wasting their money by not doing social media themselves. “If you’re not DIYing your social media, you’re an idiot,” he says.

Mr. Capstick’s penchant for hyperbole is showing a bit here. This may be because he seems to approach social media as purely a PR exercise for brand development. However, for the thousands of small to medium businesses out there under his $1 million threshold, who have a stable cash flow and are looking to grow their business by investing in an integrated online marketing plan that includes a social media component, there are many affordable options that will yield measurable results.

My experience has been that most small to medium sized business owners are already busy running their core business and don’t have the time to take the DYI approach. That is where partnering with a good inbound online marketing consultant can make a lot of sense.

Look for a consultant that is focused on your business growth goals and has a methodology for delivering measurable results.

After the baby-boomers, the echo boom of Gen Y (defined as anyone born between 1980-2000) are the largest demographic group in the USA and Canada. According to a new study by L2, digital media is by far the most effective means to reach this group of often affluent consumers. The L2 study was based on an international survey panel of 535 young adults who expect to be earning more than $80,000 per year in the near future. Of key interest to advertisers and marketers, it delved into the implications for luxury marketers looking to connect with prestige-oriented members of this rising generation.

Not surprisingly, Facebook dominates the Gen Y media mix, with 81% using it every day; that’s about twice the proportion who read newspaper content (45%) or watch TV shows (44%) every day.

A solid majority gave social media an important role in their consumer decisions, with sixty-three percent saying that they use social media to engage with brands, and over half said their attitudes toward brands were shaped by Facebook, blogs and online video produced by brands. Over 25% reported using mobile devices to access social media content.

Of special note for online marketers: 45% said they read blogs every day.

Online video is making impressive strides among the Gen Y affluent audience: 42% of the sample group said they watch TV shows online, while 27% watch movies online. It’s no surprise that mobile is playing an increasingly important role in digital marketing, with 13% saying they had watched video on a mobile device in the past 24 hours.

This survey also shows that it is not just new media, when Gen Y consumers view traditional media content, it tends to be via digital channels. For example, 66% of respondents said they read newspaper content online. However, there is considerable variation between media: 71% of respondents said they still read print magazines, compared to just 24% who read magazine content online.

Facebook is announcing unified messaging. SMS, Facebook messages, email, Facebook chat, all put together. Very cool.

It is rolling out starting today. You can even get an “@facebook.com” email address so that non-facebook users (yes there are still a few left) can send messages to your new Social Inbox. Although, the Facebook blog post, clear says “Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key.”

The messaging system is also designed to be platform-agnostic, so users can send and receive messages via mobile, IM or Facebook. It’s designed to make it simpler for users to communicate in real-time with their real friends, wherever they are. The system will be rolled out slowly over the next few months in an invite-only process, Zuckerberg says.

All indications are that Digital Marketing is seeing strong growth, particularly in the B2B sector.  According to the latest data from Forrester Research, spending on Digital Marketing will grow from $27M last year to $54M by 2014 – that’s doubling the market size in 5 years!  “Social marketing is great for building more intimate relationships with your clients and prospects,” wrote Forrester’s Michael Greene. “But many marketers are diving into social marketing without a coherent social marketing strategy.”

For more details on the numbers the gang a Mashable put together this great infographic below.  See the full article at the Mashable Business Blog.

Our friends over at Mashable have put together a great overview assessment of where we’ve been and the potential evolution of social media over the next 5 years.  Below is a excerpt.  See the full article at Mashable.com

Over the last five years, social media has evolved from a handful of communities that existed solely in a web browser to a multi-billion dollar industry that’s quickly expanding to mobile devices, driving major changes in content consumption habits and providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.

With that framework in place, the next five years are going to see even more dramatic change. Fueled by advancements in underlying technology – the wires, wireless networks and hardware that make social media possible – a world where everything is connected awaits us. The result will be both significant shifts in our everyday lives and a changing of the guard in several industries that are only now starting to feel the impact of social media.

Where do you think we are headed with social media ?

This is a real winner! I have tried lots of new products and feature enhancements to help manage my daily flood of email, but the new Priority Inbox feature that Google has rolled out this week is the best I have seen in a long time. It was easy to setup and I found three overlooked important messages the first time I used it.

I have relied on Google’s excellent spam filters for years to sift the bogus crap out of my inbox, but I have trouble finding the messages from real people hidden in the jumble of newsletters, service update notices, the latest offers from my favourite companies, and those friends that insist on forwarding every email they read to everyone they know. I am sure that I am not alone.

Yes you can use your email client’s inbox rules to help sort things out, but what about when you use webmail or a mobile device to access your mail? Gmail’s server based filtering rules go a long way to help organize the chaos, but it is really tiresome to have manually add more and more special case filtering rules every time I subscribe to an email newsletter, or I add a new client.

What if my inbox paid attention to which messages I tend to read first or most often? What if it looked at who I actively engage with new messages and replies? What if it used that information to predictively sort my messages, putting the ones I am most likely to want to see at the top? Enter Google’s new Priority Inbox.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nt3gE9dGHQ

Google began rolling out this new feature to Gmail users on Monday. It is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. To activate it, look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in the top right corner of your Gmail window. You will still have access to the regular inbox view, but I am betting that after you train the new priority filter, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

We have been seeing social media comments from Twitter and Facebook as part of the Google search results since late last fall. Now that experience has been significantly refined and enhanced. Today, Google Realtime Search has been refreshed with three key additions: conversation view, location refinements and Google Alerts for updates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSRlXUyJjEQ

Conversations Not Just Comments

The new conversation view feature lets you display tweets chronologically from the original comment and grouping replies and retweets so that you can see the evolution of the conversation and not just the most recent comments. Readers can click “Full conversation” below an update to access the threaded-view.

Monitoring Local Sentiment

The improved location features now let you zero in on your community of interest. If you are a small business and interested only in the conversation about your industry in your town, you can now specify exact locations in the “Custom Location” box to narrow results to a particular city, state or country. If you are a larger organization and concerned with looking at results from a number of different regions, there are also quick links below each update to show only results from that same region.

Automated Alerts

Keeping an eye on the conversation just got a little easier. Google has now made it easy to add your social media search to your Google Alerts. Simply click the “Create an e-mail alert for [search term]” to setup a Google Alert for “Updates.” Updates is a new type of alert for the status updates that Google Real-time Search indexes. You can choose the frequency of your email alerts to be as-it-happens, once per day or once per week basis.

Where To Find It

Google Realtime Search, continues to be accessible via the left-hand search options menu as “Updates”, and now also exists as a standalone product at google.com/realtime. It is currently being rolled out to all users. If you don’t yet have access and want a sneak peak, you can do so here.

In case you missed the earlier announcements from Facebook, they plan to remove application boxes and application info sections as well as reduce the width of application tabs. These changes come into effect the week of August 23 – that is today! The biggest impact for our clients is that Fan Page tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide (current) to 520 pixels wide to accommodate a slightly revised design.

The Facebook developers blog references the key changes:

Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the “Boxes” tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.

Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

The full details are in this post from October 2009.

Contact me if you are unsure of how these changes affect your Facebook fan page or if you need help making the adjustments.

Cheers,RLM.

Like me, you may have been frustrated with the visual artifacting in Safari when using rounded corners that appears to let some of the background colour of the rounded element bleed through and muddy the rounded corner effect. Well, thanks to Mike Harding for his post with the solution. Set the following CSS property for the affected element:

-webkit-background-clip: padding-box;

Mike also warns, “It’s important to note that if you are using the shorthand notation to specify your other background properties then this should be added after those. It seems that the shorthand notation implies a default clip value which will override one that’s previously set. ”

If you have other tips on how to improve web designs, please pass them on and we will post them here.

Cheers,RLM.