I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.

-- William Lloyd Garrison

I am going to rant about the overuse  of the word 'passion'. I hear companies and people using it to describe themselves. NOTE to Them: Passion is not something you announce, it will announce itself if it is a fact.

Do not put this word in your bio to describe yourself. i.e. an SEO 'expert' says they are passionate about social media... and they have a Facebook profile, not a page, not a Twitter, Google+, Linkedin or Pinterest account.  This makes me think that you are 'lukewarm' or tepid about social media and do not understand it at all. It also makes me think you are a big liar and a waste of my time.

You may as well be saying 'Cleaning up dog poop is my passion'.

Don't Send Another E-mail Until You Read This Eric Groves Sr. Vice President, Constant Contact Recent posts 5 Comments

• 0
  inShare
• 
  In response to a deluge of unsolicited e-mails, many customers opt out of future notifications, block the sender and are less likely to be repeat customers.
  
  We've become accustomed to this tug-of-war when it comes to eliciting customer responses to marketing campaigns. After all, we've been trained to think that a 2 percent response rate is actually good. Can you think of any other realm where a 98 percent failure rate is considered good?
  
  It doesn't have to be this way. You can actually build a good rapport with customers, entice them to want to continue the conversation with you, and inspire them to be repeat customers through effective e-mail campaigns. But first, you must earn the right to connect with your customers in between purchases.
  
  Before you send your next e-mail, take a closer look at the ways customers view their experiences interacting with your business. Is your staff friendly and helpful? Is your website easy to navigate? Have you been explicit in letting customers know that you won't sell their contact information or reach out to them without their permission first?
  
  If your customers haven't had a positive experience with your business and you blindly e-mail them, you're not only going to dissuade them from future purchases, you'll also run the risk of them interrupting your flow of business through negative word-of-mouth.
  
  It comes down to providing a great experience for customers whether they're in your store on your website. Once they've been satisfied with the service you've provided, you want to inspire them to stay in touch.
  
  The simplest, yet least effective way to do this is to ask if they'd like to receive future e-mails or to connect in other ways, such as your Facebook Page. Instead of simply asking for their coveted e-mail address or blindly asking them to Like your Page, display examples of what these items look like and tell them of the benefits insiders get, such as special offers. This way they'll have a clear image of what they'll receive from you in terms of a newsletter or a promotion, for example.
  
  Also, instead of asking if they want to receive your email, entice customers by asking a more specific and targeted question such as, "Do you get our monthly newsletter?  There's a copy of our latest edition here. As you can see, we try to share some of our insights and also provide our readers with special access when new products are released. Would you like to be included?"
  
  By being more specific and touting the customer benefits of hearing from you, you'll be able to attract the customers who are most likely to appreciate and act on your e-mails. You'll also get higher open rates and higher returns on your marketing campaigns.
  
  Remember, the goal isn't to capture the e-mail address. It's to earn the right to continue the conversation.
  
  

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Top Ten Reasons Your Local Business Must Be Online

Whether the local clients are big or small, it doesn’t matter how much business you need to do, an excellent website is essential. One of the greatest mistakes local businesses make is assuming their physical presence inside a neighborhood is they have to attract clients. Another big mistake is believing that because of small or mid-size, an internet site isn’t affordable or necessary. Think about the following top ten reasons your company should be online if you are planning not only to survive, but thrive in the current economy:

1. Location
Whether you will find the best location on the market or you’re tucked inside a corner nook office inside a vacant strip mall, an online business makes it simple for additional customers to locate you. A possible customer who may never have needed the services you receive or products before won’t drive around searching for you – and end up forgetting the Phone book. Probably, that potential client will use the web to understand more about local listings. If you are not there, you’ve lost sales.

2. Expertise
An internet site is a lot more than the usual report on your business’ name, hair straightners themselves. An excellent website showcases not just marketing, your expertise with informative articles, videos, photos plus much more.

3. Promotion
Today, a business’ website can serve as a “hub” for any wide selection of marketing activities. You are able to advertise sales, promote services, announce giveaways and provide valuable “freebies” in return for customers registering for your list. If you have an internet site, newsletter, ezine, e-mail marketing along with other valuable promotional opportunities open and spread before your vision.

4. Connection
Local businesses can interact with clients in multiple ways by going on the internet. After you have an internet site, it’s not hard to give a blog or incorporate popular social media into your web online marketing strategy.

5. Interaction
Although you easily interact with your customers online, you may also connect to them! What this means is gaining valuable understanding of your company, your product or service as well as your services. Visitor comments, polls, contact queries and much more will help you develop and enhance your business to satisfy your customers’ precise needs.

6. Management
Just how much time and money might your company save if clients could place orders for pickup or delivery as well as book appointments for the services online? I have listed a number of the good ways going on the internet will help you better manage your company.

7. Reputation
Most of us have already been through it of hunting for a online businesses, simply to be disappointed or delay through the discovery, none exists. An excellent website will construct your business’ reputation and credibility within the eyes of prospects.

8. Convenience
Consumers today associate the web with convenience. Whether they’re trying to find your business’ location, a coupon they are able to quickly print for savings or a good way to make contact with you to learn more, customers perceive the possible lack of an internet site as “inconvenient.”

9. Competition
An excellent website sets you leagues aside from local company competitors. You are able to offer more info, better service, a far more enjoyable experience and valuable promotions than may possibly be performed offline.

10. Scalability
Probably the most significant reason the local business should be online requires the capability to adjust and develop long-term as the business grows. An internet site will help you meet the requirements of individuals customers and still attract brand new ones while you move from the solo business to some small company, a small company to some mid-sized business, as well as on as high as the strategic business plan aspires.

CompuKol Connection When you need results, our expertise eclipses the competition! Skip to content Search « The Marriage of HR and Social Media
 
Leveraging the Web Presence of Your Business

Your business, no matter what you do, must have a web presence today. However, the inane presence of your business on social media channels is not enough. You must learn what to do and what not to do to succeed.

If you choose the appropriate tools and use them effectively and with the right goals in mind, your web presence will make a huge different in the success of your business. You need to identify your desired return on investment (ROI) up front and use the tools to achieve that particular goal. Of course, your ultimate goal is the same as the ultimate goal of all business owners—to convert as many followers (or prospects) as possible to paying customers.

• Choose quality over quantity: When you engage through social media, you are building relationships. Building strong and significant relationships doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, nurturing and a great deal of effort. You will see that the effort is well worth what you will get in return. Those relationships will last for a very long time and you will be engaging with people whom you can count on and whom you can educate and be educated by. An extremely important principle when working toward turning your prospects into actual customers is WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Your entire objective must be about solving the problems of the other people. Nobody is interested in how wonderful you and your business are. Their only concern is about what you can do for them to make their life and their business better.
   
• Choose your social media channels carefully: The social networks of your choosing should be used as communication tools (one-on-one) with existing customers, prospects, journalists, etc.
   
• Engage as much and as often as possible: Even though the desired end result when it comes to social media engagement is to sell your products and services, your direct goal is to build relationships. Nobody will buy anything from you if they don’t trust you and find you to be credible. It takes a great deal of engagement and a great deal of time to get other people to the point where they will buy from you. A great way to strengthen engagement with other people is by giving them valuable information in the form of newsletters or blog posts. Your prospects sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog posts. That is a very important first step that your followers have taken. Eventually, the appropriate prospects will become your customers. Social media is a small but extremely important part of your overall marketing strategy.
   
• Gently lead your followers to buying from you: Once you have built a strong  relationship with your followers, you should feel comfortable about encouraging them to buy from  you. At this point, there is mutual trust and respect. Make sure that you include your call-to-action in your communications, which will help to get them to connect with you even more.
   
• Consider the purpose of social media as developing friendships, not as developing leads: When one of your online connections interacts with you, instead of simply thanking them, communicate with them more deeply and actually have a discussion with them. This will go a long way and serve you well. They will soon start to regard you as an expert and a person whom they wish to follow in order to learn more and more from you.
   
• Make sure that what you are offering is something that they want to share with others: If you don’t offer people something that they need or want, they won’t come back to you. You need to make it clear to them that your purpose is to solve their problems. After you have developed the relationship and have given a great deal to them, if they still are not willing to buy from you, they are not the right customers for you.
   
• Show your followers what they are missing: If you want to entice your followers to engage with you (and eventually buy from you), you need to tease them with enough information that will make them want more. Prove to them why they can’t possibly live without you and your business.
   
• Encourage as many top-quality interactions as possible: Your interactions with others should be meaningful and fruitful. Relationships (if they are worth anything) take a lot of time and a lot of love. The stronger your relationships, the more the other people will be willing to share what you have with other people with whom they share a relationship. Before you know it, you will have gone viral!

Conclusion

It is so important to have a strong web presence and to really leverage it in the most effective manner for your business. The stronger your reputation online, the more people will flock to you and the greater your chances of increasing the success of your business in a really strong way. If your web presence is effective (which includes top-quality content), it will drive a high volume of traffic to your website and you can start to interact with more and more people.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

About the Author.  Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications LLC. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn founded CompuKol Communications to help small businesses and entrepreneurs increase their exposure and reputation on the Internet. CompuKol consults, creates, and implements communication strategies for small businesses to monopolize their markets with a unique business voice, vision, and visibility. Prior to that, Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company’s Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. His expertise includes social media marketing strategies; internet marketing; web presence design; business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development. Mr. Cohn earned a Master’s degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master’s degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ. Mr. Cohn is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Why Hire an SEO SEM SPECIALIST Posted by admin on September 10th, 2010 | Comments Off Why Hire an SEO/SEM SPECIALIST?

In efforts to increase sales and profitability, more and more companies are turning to online marketing initiatives – specifically, search engine optimization. Search Engine Optimization or (SEO) is the art and science of blending technical and marketing skills together into a finely tuned website that is both search engine-friendly, ranks well for specific keywords and phrases, and is tailored to your audience from a buyer and seller perspective.

According to a recent U.S. study, only 20% of all businesses outsource search engine optimization programs to professional SEO firms. The remaining 80% either do not conduct search engine optimization at all or they believe they have the resources and skills to do it in-house. Of this 80%, it is probable that 90% of these companies can’t be found on the web – they don’t exist. In order to generate any amount of significant web visibility, your website must typically rank within the top-30 results.

So, the question comes down to what is in your company’s best interests?
Conduct your SEO program in-house or out-source it. To answer this question, let’s first take a look at the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to implement and maintain a successful search engine optimization program.

SEO knowledge and skills required

1) Basic understanding of how search engines and directories work.
This may seem overly obvious, but you would be amazed how many people do not understand how they actually work. This knowledge provides the foundation for your SEO program.

2) Website design
Although SEO is not completely a technical marketing process, it does require a fair amount of technical knowledge of what constitutes search engine-friendly web design. Certain web design elements can either help your search engine rankings or hurt them. You simply have to know which is which.

3) SEO experience
This is the most important and most difficult knowledge to obtain. If you have never implemented a SEO program, then you are in for a big surprise. Search engine optimization programs require a lot of research and are extremely time consuming. Most importantly, they require actual SEO experience. This means knowing what SEO strategies and tactics work and which ones don’t.

In-house vs. out-sourced SEO programs

If your company is considering conducting your search engine optimization program in-house, here are some questions to consider.

• Who will be responsible for analyzing, developing, implementing and measuring the success of your SEO program?

• Is this considered the role of your IT department, Marketing department or some other individual(s) within your company?

• Do they have the time, knowledge, and resources to successfully implement and maintain your search engine optimization program? And do they really care if it works or not?

IT Department

Typically your IT department handles multiple daily tasks from trouble-shooting your company’s LAN or WAN to fixing the sales department’s laptops? Out of a busy IT person’s day, what priority and focus do you think he or she will commit to for your SEO program? And even if your IT department has some skills in web design or development, these skills make up only a small percentage of the knowledge required for a successful search engine optimization program.

Marketing Department

Typically, your marketing department juggles many marketing projects at once and faces strict completion deadlines. From handling new print collateral campaigns to getting ready for new product or service launches, marketing personnel’s time is spread very thin. In addition, how knowledgeable is your marketing department in the technical aspects of web design and search engine optimization? Do they have the time to become well-versed? Do they have sufficient internal resources? Often the answer to both questions is no, they do not.

Other individual(s) within your company

Ok, so the responsibility falls onto someone outside of your Marketing or IT department. Who will that be and why are they responsible for your SEO program? Providing these individuals with a new “project of the month,” will typically result in another check mark off of their monthly to-do list and frustration by top management of why their website is not producing any sales results.

Summary

From a business standpoint, it makes sense to try to leverage internal resources to maximize your company’s productivity and profitability – whenever possible. However, there must be a line drawn in the sand between knowing what your organization’s capabilities are and what they are not.

As you can see, there is more to search engine optimization than meets the eye. In order to implement and maintain a SEO program, you must acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources. This can be done by hiring a professional search engine optimization firm. Professional SEO firms have dedicated resources and experience to support your company’s web marketing initiatives. By leveraging their experience and know-how, your company can quickly and more efficiently implement a successful search engine optimization program.

Demand grows for sustainability across the supply chain – according to new Norwich colocation data centre

March 17th 2011: Sustainability is set to become one of the top three considerations in the purchasing decisions of large UK companies over the next 18 months as the pressure of environmental regulation makes them demand commitment to good environmental practice throughout their supply chain.

In London, the Lord Mayor‘s office has launched the Green Procurement Code to offer organisations assistance with ‘greening’ their supply chain and earlier this month BT revealed a new procurement policy that calls for its 6,000 contracted suppliers to measure, report and reduce their carbon footprints.

“The message is clear,” said Alex Rabbetts, Managing Director of data centre specialists Migration Solutions, “sustainability is not just for big companies – it now going to be important to anyone who wants to sell to them as well.”

The ‘greening’ of the supply chain will mean that companies will need to understand and be accountable for the environmental performance of every aspect of their business and their own suppliers, and this includes how their computer services are hosted.

“For many ‘online intensive’ businesses how and where they procure their hosting will have the biggest impact on their carbon footprint,” said Rabbetts. “The data centre that hosts them will be energy-intensive and companies need to ensure their hosting partners are taking the right steps to minimise their environmental impact - otherwise their carbon footprint will become yours!”

Ask the company that hosts your computers services these five simple questions and see if they will help or hinder your sustainability credentials?

1. What does the data centre do with the heat that its IT equipment generates?

Forward thinking data centres will have heat-recovery plants which re-use heat generated in the technical room to supply hot water and radiators in the communal areas of the data centre, reusing valuable energy that less advanced data centres waste.

2. Does the data centre use the free cooling provided by the UK’s climate?

With a good UK location and state-of-the-art chillers, a data centre can benefit from over 8,000 hours of free cooling every year. The latest technology intelligently monitors the ambient temperature outside and uses it to cool the equipment wherever possible – the chilling equipment only starts running when the ambient outside temperature rises above a pre-set level.

3. Is the air-conditioning system up to the latest environmental specification?

Make sure your host’s Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units are non-ozone-depleting.

4. Check the data centre’s lighting – does it have motion activated LED lights in all areas?

Unlike conventional light sources, LEDs in many applications will last for more than 10 years of operation. Importantly LEDs do not generate heat like conventional lighting and use only one tenth of the power to produce the same light. Motion activated lighting makes good environmental sense as data centres are managed remotely most of the time.

5. Does the data centre have the right credentials?

The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and The Green Grid are the key organisations – is your computer services host a member of either?

“Whilst data centres and computer rooms are huge users of power, much can be done to reduce and minimise their impact on the environment,” says Rabbetts. “Our new Norwich colocation data centre, Sentry42 , uses the most environmental heating and cooling systems possible and I expect it to be an important link in many companies sustainable supply chains when it opens in May.”



This press release is presented without editing for your information only.

Full Disclosure Statement: The GREEN (LIVING) REVIEW received no compensation for any component of this article.

Is Flash dead? 14/05/2010

By Mark Wilson

The Flash vs. Steve Jobs debate has really kicked off in recent weeks, even though the issues underpinning this argument have been around for years.

No one can ignore Flash and its importance in the media ecosystem. Whether we like it or not, Flash has long had a big role to play in creating rich interactive tools and, particularly in recent years, in delivering video and ads.

However, Flash is wholly dependent on the platforms it runs on, not the other way around. If leading platforms don't or won't support it, it will die. The pace may be slower, but it will ultimately go the way of its older sister Shockwave - once the champ of interactivity on the web but really a hangover from the CD-ROM age.

Steve Jobs is correct that Adobe has under-delivered on the promise of Flash for mobile platforms for years. He's correct that it performs terribly on Macs, for no good reason other than Adobe's shoddy coding. He's also correct that Flash is in no way an open technology, although the irony of this coming from the leader of the modern Apple is lost on none of us.

The reality is that Flash is looking old and tired compared to Apple's shiny new platforms. Unfortunately for Adobe, those platforms are currently running away with the consumer market and it's unlikely that we'll see anything to change that trend any time soon.

The iPad is the vanguard for the new tablet computing category and the current poster-boy, but it's really the smaller iPhone platform format that counts right now. Tens of millions of units in the hands of extremely happy consumers, a proven commercial infrastructure supporting it, dominance of mobile web traffic, and almost unlimited growth potential still ahead of it. All this success, without Flash.

The iPad looks set to continue the trend. It's a really exciting product. It has sold its first million units at time of writing in less than a month and it's a genuinely interesting new type of experience. Rich interactivity, sophisticated applications and incredible performance - again, all without Flash.

Flash has its uses, and some of them are genuinely valuable. The ability to save a Flash app as a native iPhone OS app in CS5 was an inspired idea by Adobe, and immediately useful to us for prototyping. We can build prototypes to test on the iPad and iPhone quickly and easily: it's a great solution. It makes exploring design solutions for the iPhone OS simpler and faster.

So why have Apple outlawed it for the deployment of live apps?

Setting aside the obvious fact that Steve wants everything running on his products directly under his control, the obvious answer is that Apple can make more money by exerting more control over their platform. They're protecting their interests, albeit in their typically heavy-handed way. In their position, most of us would do the same. Apple is innovating on a scale far above everyone else, and they take risks for which they are admired and envied. While it's true that committed, platform-specific development will always lead to a better performing product, and a better experience for the consumer as a result, it probably has little to do with Apple's real motives. But let's be clear, it is their platform.

Apple is succeeding by innovating and dominating key consumer markets. Innovation is and always will be the right way to succeed. Apple has become very, very good at innovating in just the right areas.

Adobe has been a disastrous innovator. They have grown sloppy and fat on the proceeds of what is without doubt an impressive monopoly position. Nothing has offered genuine competition to Flash for a long time, and the same is true in many of their core software markets too.

Adobe desperately needs to innovate. Flash has taken an internet eternity to show its face on mobile platforms because Adobe dropped the ball. They failed to overhaul Flash's underlying architecture while the going was good, preferring to evolve the platform slowly, incrementally adding new capabilities while relying on Moore's law to prop them up. Flash got better as desktop computers got faster. The emergence of rich mobile platforms, energy-efficient processors and the need for highly optimised code to run them on, caught Adobe snoozing. Or more accurately in a deep, snoring slumber.

It's not exactly the first time this lethargy has struck Adobe; there has been an endless wait for a meaningfully accessible Flash solution.

All is not lost for Flash. HTML5 is bandied around as the cure for all ills but it does not do everything Flash can. Yet. But it does many, many things much better and it is -properly - open. Adobe could try open sourcing Flash and let the community solve its problems for it, but I just don't think the community has the will for it or the affinity with Adobe to make it happen. Everyone who could make a difference is looking to HTML5 and its sibling technologies, and they're unlikely to turn away from that to help sort out Flash.

If Adobe were smart, and had the nerve for it, they would have been putting insane amounts of resource into building new creative tools that make Flash obsolete. It should have been their agenda, their innovation driving them to stand on stage saying 'here's the future beyond Flash'. Let's hope they have.

Apple, for all its faults, has never been afraid to leave things behind, to recognise a dead end and turn around. Adobe needs to get some of the same blood in its veins and start focusing hard on innovation. They need to win by being better; by making their technology so good that everyone wants it on their platform.

If Adobe do their job properly, Steve will be inviting them to tea instead of sending them snotty letters that make it abundantly clear that they're really not welcome in this neighbourhood - and that would be good for all of us.