Yesterday a friend forwarded me a link to a blog post How to Build a Mobile Website  where they go in to lengths of how you can do it yourself and best practices for a mobile site, but what really got my attention was this initiative by Google called howtogomo.com where you can actually test how your website looks on a mobile device.

To give you an idea, I’ll show you what I did after reading this information for a long time client of us Sofia Salon & Spa.

Here is how it looked yesterday morning.

 While all the pictures and content was there, there was no way you could read it without zooming on a smartphone. Along with the customer we evaluated and we agreed on  the basic functionality we wanted for a mobile user and we came up with the following.

 Now, the mobile user has the basic navigational functionality thumb friendly with quick access to click to call, map for directions to the Salon and Social Media engagement links. They also have the option to see the full site and switch back.

Another little known trick on the iPhone that you will need to educate your customers is on how to add your site to their home screen. From the lower menu on the screen, they need to select the icon with the upper arrow and then select “Add to home Screen” and they will get a faster direct link to your site any time.

You can only decide the basic functionality that works for your business, but we can certainly help you achieve it.

 Once again let us know, is your website smartphone ready?

I have always said that systems don’t make companies successful what makes a company successful is their people and their willingness to evolve and embrace new things.

I mentioned that your company marketing is no longer a job for the marketing department alone.

So in this new marketing era let’s find out:

• Is your company using social media?
• Is your team participating on social media?
• Does your company have a blog?
• How often do you blog?
• Is your team helping promote your content?

Your company has a marketing department and you have a website, so you are all set right? Well let me ask you something, do you know?

• What is your website traffic?
• Is it growing?
• Is your website generating a healthy stream of lead?
• Are you converting those leads into customers?

Because at the end of the day, you cannot manage what you cannot measure, do you have defined goals of what you want to get from your internet marketing? If you don’t, how can you measure the ROI of your Internet marketing efforts? How can you measure social media ROI?

Las reglas han y seguiran cambiando, una solucion no puede ser con contadas excepciones,  el uso de mercadeo masivo, medios tradicionales y los anuncios televisivos puede ser que funcione para ciertos casos, la pregunta es: Tiene usted los recursos economicos para contar su historia a los costos que debe pagar por eventos especiales de programacion televisiva?

Así que la alternativa es dirigirse a la gente que comparte su visión del mundo, digamos que usted, como la mayoría de la gente que conozco, odia los mosquitos, ya que son una plaga durante todo el año aquí en la Florida, y usted se pasó las últimas dos semanas haciendo una investigación sobre nuevos productos para tratar esta plaga y encontro el el ultimo grito de la moda en este tipo de productos, entonces usted escribe un blog sobre esta experiencia y la comparte en sitios como Facebook y LinkedIn. Las personas que también odian a los mosquitos leen acerca de esta experiencia y hacen comentarios y ¿sabe que pasa? que ellos visitan su sitio y aprender más sobre los productos y los servicios que usted ofrece y ademas aprenden mas de su empresa, no es un mal negocio ¿no cree?

Ese seriá el tipo de mensaje que yo le sugeriria  a alguien que tiene un negocio de seguros, debido a que las compañías de seguros no quieren asegurar las protecciones externas para los mosquitos debido a la temporada de huracanes, de manera cada vez más personas están buscando alternativas al problema.

La lección en este caso es: generar y compartir contenidos interesantes dirigidas a los que comparten su visión del mundo.

Creditos de Fotografia:  adam*b

Yesterday at 4:45pm I received an email from a Financial Institution, this is not one of those scam alerts, and the lady was informing their customers from that particular office that some documents were going to be available on their website, the title included something about going green, when I opened, big surprise, instead of the bcc the Lady used the cc field of the email system and now the email that I shared with the institution along with the ones from the customers are all there, so I have a list of all the active customers for that branch.

Immediately, I called their office and nobody answered the phone, it was before 5:00pm, so I decided to send an email back to inform them of the situation, didn’t heard from them so I sent an email to the Senior Vice President’s at 5:47pm. I didn’t hear back from them until this morning at 9:10am, when the Senior VP called me to apologize, finally at 9:55am I received an apology from the Lady that sent the email on the first place.

Everything would have been good, but noooo, they were up to fix the problem, the Lady in question decided to “recall the email” guess what, I received the list of ALL the customers AGAIN, I called back, again I left a message and they called me back, this time I demanded that they keep these Lady away from their email system until she gets retrained in the use of a computer.

Here are some points that I will recommend for any Small to Medium Business (SMB) to take into consideration:

• eMail on your mobile device is not a “hip thing” anymore

You need to be able to access your email ALL the time, not only your personal stuff but your professional email system (I really hope you have them separate), you need to give your customers the importance that they deserve, people appreciate this.

• You don’t need to know the answer

But as soon as something happens, you need to put yourself in front of the problem, if anything, to assure your customers that even when you don’t have all the details yet, you will investigate what is going on and that you will correct the situation.

• This also apply to Social Media

You cannot prevent bad customer service situations from happening but there are plenty of companies out there big and small that are doing a great job to monitor and respond immediately when this things happen.

Do you have your own Customer Service blunt to share?, or do you want to share another point, please leave us a comment.

(names were changed for now, but I’ll make certain that all the people involved receive a link back to this post)

First of all, you must understand that Social Media is a 2-way communication channel and you need to be ready to engage in conversations. Another important thing is that you need to be authentic, people can see you from a mile away, so don’t be afraid to recognize that you don’t know all the answers and that your products and or services may not be a fit for everybody, (yes I know, what a shocker right?)

So here are some tips that will help you improve your Social Media Presence.

•  Listen to your Audience

Just like you, people don’t like people that talk about themselves all the time, you need to shut up and listen to the conversations that are happening in the socialsphere, what motivates your target audience? what are they asking?, what is their need of information?. If you can figure this one out, you will have more than half of the battle gained already.

•  Create new content

New content has 2 desirable side effects for your IMS, on one hand the search engines love fresh content but on the other hand it helps to improve your website traffic once promoted on Social Sites.

•  Make it worth share

If you were listening to what your target audience is talking about and you read our first tip, you shouldn’t have any problem to come up with some interesting and remarkable content that your audience is willing to share, with the people that have the same interest that they do and that may not be part of the people that you reach directly.

• Make it easy to bookmark and share

If the software you are using on your website doesn’t have it and you don’t know how to put it on, find someone that can add those share buttons pronto, which one is best?, it depends on your strategy. You’ll be surprised to find out how people is willing to share relevant, remarkable content.

•  Participate in the Conversation

Don’t be afraid to engage in conversations with your target audience, be honest and do not participate in sterile conversations, you are not a golden nugget to be liked by everyone. If you know the answer, share it! Comment on other peoples blogs be constructive not simply “Good Information!” and share their postings, they will pay forward, (most of the time)

Do you have another tip you may want to share? Remember to participate in the Conversation.

We have seen the new push from IBM to get their Business partners to use Social Media, but is Social Media the panacea that will fix all the marketing problems? If it is not part of an integrated Internet Marketing strategy, I doubt it.

When I said that I doubt that Social media per se will fix your marketing problems is because for starters, it s just one piece of the New Marketing puzzle, you still need to identify who your buyer personas are, you need to figure out where they hang out on the internet and how you are going to attract them to your site and   you need to have in place procedures to create fresh content to keep the attention of the visitors generated by social media. Further more, you need to share internal knowledge and no one better than you and your employees to do that.

You need to get better results from your website as a part of a comprehensive Internet Marketing strategy, it is without a doubt the 24 by 7 connection between your company and the world, are you taking advantage of that?

On the other hand you and your team need to think about Search Engine Optimization SEO, you have to make certain that all the pages on your website are properly structured so that the Google’s and the Bing’s crawlers can pickup and index correctly your content.

Basically you need to start following an Inbound Marketing methodology for your Internet Marketing efforts and educate your employees on this new 2-way marketing schema, is no longer you pushing your message out and everybody has to listen, but instead establishing conversations with real people who expect to talk to real people.

In today’s information age of Marketing and web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business.

Marcus Sheridan-AUTHOR OF THE SALES LION BLOG MARKETING SPEAKER

En cambio usted deberia analizar las estadisticas de su sitio de Internet:

• La gente esta consiguiendo mis paginas?
• Cuanto tiempo se mantiene la gente leyendo mis paginas?
• Estoy obteniendo nuevos prospectos a travez de mis paginas? (si, su pagina de Internet le deberia generar nuevos prospectos)
• Estoy atrayendo a las personas indicadas a mi sitio de Internet?

Si su pagina de Internet fue desarrollada basandose en una metodologia de mercadeo entrante (Inbound Marketing), usted se deberia concentrar en producir mas contenido para atraer sus personajes de compra (buyer personas) de una manera regular.

Usted debe crear ofertas atractivas con llamadas a accion para que sus visitantes se conviertan en prospectos y luego en clientes.

Usted debe concentrarse tambien en la creacion de paginas de ofertas optimizadas (landing pages), para que pueda captar clientes potenciales y medir los resultados.

Las razones para embarcarse en un proceso de rediseño de las paginas de Internet (especialmente en esta economia) debe ser para impactar su negocio, no para satisfacer los gustos o deseos de sus usuarios internos. Lo que usted quiere al final del dia es mas trafico, mas prospectos y mas clientes.

Si usted todavia piensa que necesita rediseñar su pagina de internet, tenga cuidado, existen muchisimas formas en que este proceso puede producir peores resultados de los esperados. Si usted cambia drasticamente la estructura de las ligas de su sitio sin crear las correspondientes redirecciones 301 a las nuevas paginas, usted puede perder todo el tiempo que habia avanzado ganadose la confianza de Google.

Finalmente unas palabras con respecto a la estetica de su pagina de Internet, POR FAVOR, haga las cosas bien de una vez por todas. Para la mayoria de las personas, es mas importante el contenido que el diseño, asi que concentrese en producir contenido de calidad que pueda ser usado y sea beneficioso para sus consumidores y que pueda ser compartido con otras personas porque es unico y notable.

I’m happy to hear the Google is cracking down on low-quality sites; this is a wake up call for those that were convinced by these so called “Magnet Sites Programs”.

As per the official Google blog:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites; sites which are low-value for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites; sites with original content and information such as research, in depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

When you use these services, what you are actually doing is diluting your authority and competing against your own website. You would have been better served if you have just created more relevant unique content with the keywords that you were after.

You have your company domain and you have had your website up and running for a long period of time, let’s say that your company is on the travel industry “flybynight.com” and now you want to promote travel to “thenewspot”. Instead of opening a bunch of small micro web sites using domains like flythenewspot.com, gotothenewspot.com, cheapflytothenewspot.com……you could have just created either thenewspot.flybynight.com or flybynight.com/thenewspot and it will have probably increased your authority when someone search for thenewspot because your main domain “flybynight.com” is already considered the authority for the travel industry.

There are neither shortcuts nor magic dust for a successful Internet Marketing strategy you need to follow a methodology and stick to it.

“I should move forward but cannot forget the past”, “that the planets are aligned to help me as long as I don’t expect help”, “that my partner is willing to help me as long as I don’t piss her off” (duh).

I guess that my sudden fanaticism should be attributed to the story in the news about the horoscope change, which by the way I wonder how it started.

My theory is that organization that covers the entire Horoscope writers association, meet and determined that they needed to do something drastic and developed a marketing plan to make more people interested and read their horoscopes. So what a better way than drop an statement  that because is so controversial causes people to start talking about it and make remarks about it, which in turn makes people read their horoscope more often than they did ever before.

So that’s it, when are you going to do something controversial?. Something that get people to talk about your Company….your Industry?

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep expressing my ideas because my horoscope for today says that:

 “It’s challenging to keep your ideas to yourself today because there are things you want to do and the support of others can be the key to your success.”

What is your take on this one? Let me know!

It is important to understand the influence that Social Media and specifically twitter and facebook have in search results, while the big Search Engines Google & Bing still maintain that they only look to it for Social Search, it is undeniable the role that it may play in the future specially to determine authority. You can read more about it here.

So what can you do to promote your content?

1.- Allow people to easily share your content: While it may look like an obvious thing to do, many people still missing the train on this one, make certain that you have share buttons to twitter, facebook like, facebook share and maybe linkedin on your blog, make certain that you have and RSS of your blog postings and finally that you have a way for people to subscribe by e-mail to your blog.

2.- Use your network: Ask your friends, employees and maybe customers to tweet, share and like your content, encourage them to participate. A person is more willing to share content and tweet about it when they see a big number of retweets and/or likes. Besides they are your friends isn’t that what friends are for?

3.- Are you sharing your blog on your emails? Google has a headline animator that generates an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items and can be embedded on your email signature.

4.- Participate on Social Media and comment on blogs:  Many modern blogs use the “nofollow” tag on the anchor links that people enter when posting a comment on a blog, but when you participate and comment on other blogs you also get noticed not only by the author of the blog but also for the people that follow that particular blog, if your comments are not just “I like your post” or “I Agree”, but a meaningful note, you get noticed and people that may share your point of view will gravitate toward and check the link back to you.

5.- Remind your contacts about your content: Sometimes people miss your post, one way to reach out could be to include a teaser of your post in your newsletter, if the subject is of their interest they may click back to your site and read the story.

There are many other ways to accomplish this, but these are the basic ones that you should be doing and the ones that have worked for me. Finally don’t be afraid to ask for what you want if it is comments, ask people to comment if you want them to subscribe by mail just ask them.