I know of many businesses that are scared to death of using social media. They fear someone writing something bad about them. Worse yet if it’s a blog they are writing something bad about us on our own website.
It seems to me that if someone has something bad to say about you or your business they are probably going to say it to as many people in as many places as they can. If you can get them to say it in a place where you can control and answer their concerns, you are way ahead of the game. If you don’t even know where or what they are saying it’s a lot harder to deal with. Best of all if you are able to work out a solution to their issues you look like a hero.
That’s just the bad stuff that can happen, if you have a positive message about your business people will listen harder when they’re told (or shouted to) by your customers. Not only that they will happily let you know if you are on the right (or wrong) track. What better way to make your customers happy than to ask them what they want or to have them suggest something that you haven’t thought of.
One of the things that I have gotten out of my short go around with Twitter so far are some good blog posts. Try Shannon Paul’s post called…
It’s finally going to happen. As I wrote in my post Pittsburgh Happenings – The ‘Burgh Sees All, Pittsburgh PA is going to install cameras everywhere.
The manufacturers claim that they help solve and prevent crimes. Well, of course they say they do, they’d be foolish to say anything else, they want to sell these systems, but prevent crimes? I’m not so sure. I am sure that as in the past whenever something good comes from this the cameras will get the credit even if it was just traditional investigation that got the job done.
“You can zoom three blocks away and read a business card or a license plate,” said Darrin Lipscomb, president of Avrio Group, a Maryland firm that won a competition to be the city’s surveillance camera vendor. “We’re going to have very sophisticated viewing stations that will allow any number of people to view these cameras in any number of ways.”
I want to know who is watching the watchers? and what is going to happen to the data? Even though the City assures me the data will go away I know that these days data never truly goes away. It’s much too easy and cheap to save, store and move around.
I keep reading that crime has gone down (but it’s too early to tell for sure). The studies that I have seen haven’t shown any real drop, the crime just moves to where the cameras aren’t. In the end I think that this money would be better spent on something that will really make me more secure everyday, like more detectives or fixing the potholes and making the roads that I drive every day safer.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
One of the things that I like most about Google is that they will let almost anyone play with their toys and they have some great toys. Tom Scott has created Real World Racer: A Google Maps Racing Game.
Tom uses the satellite photography from Google to let you plot out race courses almost anywhere in the world. You can chose from several default cities and tracks or you can create your own.
You get a red car to control using the arrow keys on your keyboard and the computer races white cars against you. If you know where you’re going you can take illegal short cuts.
I raced here in Pittsburgh and I especially liked driving across the river. It’s all very cool.
One of the best ways to move your site up the search engine results page for your keywords is to have incoming links from outside websites. The higher ranking and more authoritative these sites are the better it is for you.
The problem that people and companies with new sites run into is how to get these popular sites to link to them. Unless you are already a household name there are few authoritative sites that will easily share their “link juice” with an unknown, right?
That’s not necessarily true. I was reading a post today by Dana Larson on the Online Marketing Blog called 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites. It offers some great ideas on where a new site owner can get links from authoritative sites that will help you get started.
The post and commenters had some good ideas that you should check out, but it also made me think of some more. For example
- If you have an account on a social networking site like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. you can easily get a link to your site from there. While it’s true that most of their content is locked up behind your password and Google can’t read it, if you have a link to your site on your profile page and select “make it available to everyone”, you have a link to your website from some of the highest ranking sites there are today.
- If you belong to a group like a networking group, or a professional group many of them will give you a link as well.
I was watching TV and it seems lately that all the ads were things like “save money”, “lose your job and return the car”, “0% interest” or “good as new”.
My wife said to me that these are things that should have been done long before.
That got me thinking. It may be a good idea for now, but not too long ago not enough people were tuned in the the recession/depression, lose your job, lose your savings mentality to make a message like that take hold. Even if it is a good idea or something that should be done.
Marketing messages are always changing. If no one is listening, it doesn’t matter how great what you are saying is. Right now, people are not in the mood to hear about anything except saving them money. Sometimes just changing the way you present your product or service can change whether it’s noticed or not, even if what you have to offer is still the same.
I discovered a post at MediaPost Publications with some good ideas for today’s marketing messages whether it’s email or some other media.
In addition to designing websites, I am getting requests lately to just manage data for clients.
For example, shopping cart databases, Google or Open Office Documents. Some password protected and some not.
Because I like to also host my customers sites I know where to go to manage these files
I use cPanel which is free and open source. They make it pretty easy to do.
I put up some garden pics in my Photos section today.
Spring in my window
Spring in my back yard
Flowers just starting to bloom
Update 3-22-09 – I had so much fun with gardening Saturday that Sunday I went to the 2009 Spring Flower Show at the Phipps Conservatory. I posted more pictures.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
I have written before how much I like my G1 AndroidTM phone. The applications keep on coming every day. Here’s one that I’m trying out today when I go out for a skate. It looks very cool.
My Tracks is an application for your AndroidTM phone that enables you to record GPS tracks and view live statistics – such as time, speed, distance, and elevation – while hiking, biking, running or participating in other outdoor activities. Once recorded, you can share your tracks, upload them to Google Spreadsheets and visualize them on Google My Maps.
I had a customer who wanted to start an email newsletter last year. I installed a mailing list management program and then spent quite a bit of time explaining how I thought sending it should be done. I wanted to pass that information along so I wrote a series of posts on how to start an email newsletter. There is some good information there about how to handle the mechanics of sending out a newsletter.
I was recently asked similar questions by a new client who wanted to do the same thing and I sent them to my blog posts. Afterward they had other questions having to do with the actual content of the newsletter. What kind of content should they have, should they use the site name of give it another name, and how often to send it?
I usually don’t write the content of a client’s website, I’ll make suggestions, but I believe that no one knows your business like you do. These newsletter questions were about the content, but they were very good questions that were asking for guidelines and I felt that I should find an answer for them.
The Email Insider blog came through for me again with this post and if you are considering starting a newsletter, it’s something that can be a great benefit to read. Rather that just repeating their post I thought I would just pass it on for you to read. Be sure to read to the end, the commenters provide some good additional information.
It never fails. I start to write or wonder about a particular subject and then articles and blog posts start to appear as if by magic. I’m sure it’s just bacause I’m more tuned in to picking out the ones that I’m thinking about from the crowd, but I also wonder if the Law Of Attraction is at work here or even if that’s how it works.
Last week I wrote Is Social Media Worth The Time? and then today I see several new things on the subject. The one that caught my eye is How to Tell If Facebook Is Wasteful or Worthwhile, For Your Business on the Free Traffic Tips site written by Tinu Abayomi-Paul. There were some great ideas on how to get social networking sites to work for almost any business without sucking up the entire day. I’m going to try out some of these ideas and let you know how they worked for me.
