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The wholeness of Google+ has the spirit of the moment.

Marc — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:18:25 +0000

Or said another way, Google+’s gestalt is the zeitgeist! I think that small business marketers using the web will find competitive advantage through early adoption of Google+. Seems, over the last few months, for there to be a malaise regarding Facebook and since the June 28th’s “release” of Google+ a lot of excitement and evangelism. The “wholeness” approach to Google’s making the web a social network versus using a site as a social network, like Facebook, is new. Although small it is growing exponentially, Google+ is estimated to have now, as of this week, reached 9 million users (according to Search Engine Watch). And perhaps even more telling as to the general spirit swelling around Google+ are the pwns animated gifs like these -

So what can you do now to begin learning and gaining in Google+? Two quick suggestions:

If you haven’t already, sign up for a personal profile Google+ at the Google+ home page. There is also a good Google+ FAQ on that page. I am finding, right now in the limited Beta, that after 10pm PDT is most likely to be successful in signing up.
Add a Google+1 button to your business website. If you have a WordPress based website it is as easy as installing a plugin. I like this one - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-plus-one/. If you haven’t adopted WordPress for your website platform, or want to do it “old school” here is the Google+ code link – http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Measurements – Four Favorite WordPress Stat/Analytics Plugins for your Site’s Dashboard

Marc — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:30:36 +0000

One of the treats with a WordPress based website is how easy it is to measure results of your posts and other marketing activity. What gets measured gets done and the plugins discussed in this post can help.

Of course you can get all this from Google Analytics, and if your hosting company provides the server host logs, in programs like AWStats, Webalizer and Analog those too. But you have to login in to those services. I think it is great as long as your are in the Admin area of your WordPress based website to see how your site traffic is while you are right there … writing a post, approving comments or otherwise updating the site.

Below are four WordPress stat plugins that I like. Not sure which one I like better, they all provide a little bit different view of your site traffic and depth. They are all current (as of this post date) work well with WP 3.0 and fortunately they all seem compatible with one another.

WordPress.com Stats

If you have activated Akismet (and you should) you should also install and activate WordPress.com Stats. It uses the same API key that you use in Akismet. WordPress.com Stats provides an excellent data set for quick review with nice “drill-down” functionality. All the data is processed in WordPress’ servers so this plugin will not slow down your site or load your server. Very fast. Ultra easy to setup.

Analytics360

This plugin was developed by Alex King for MailChimp. (Alex is also the author of the indispensible Twitter Tools plugin.) Analytics360 allows you to pull your Google Analytics data into your WordPress dashboard for easy review TOGETHER with your MailChimp data. In one panel you can see how your posts and email are driving site traffic. Trends in site traffic and list growth. And your site’s top traffic sources.

This plugin does require Google Analytics (also free) and will work with or without MailChimp, but the basic MailChimp account is free and allows you a list of up to 500 addresses and 3000 sent emails per month. If you don’t already have Google Analytics tracking in your site, Google Analyticator is a very simple to use plugin that makes placing the Google Analytics script easy.

Clicky

I am liking Clicky more and more; it has very easy to read, useful interface and uses your real time site data. Joost de Valk (a true WordPress SEO master) created a new Clicky plugin to take advantage of the many new statistical features offered by Clicky. The basic Clicky stat account is free and provides some unique views of your website traffic. It is simple and quick to setup a Clicky account and then install and enable the Clicky plugin.

Woopra Analytics

“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.” And I find that somehow the Woopra’s WordPress plugin stat reporting interface is fun to use (“fun” and “stats” don’t normally go together) and again provides some unique perspectives into your site visitors and traffic. Like all the other plugins listed here you will need an account for the data tracker, but the basic Woopra account is free and simple to setup. Just visit the Woopra website and sign up. Then place the script in your site’s footer, activate the plugin and you are good to go.

May you have great measurements! If you have any questions just email me. All four of the tools are running on this site.

The Zen of Twitter and Facebook

Marc — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:28:51 +0000

Almost everyday I hear the question “What is the difference between Twitter and Facebook and why do I need both?” They are similar in that both are the “water” that can help make the internet marketing of your small business thrive. But they are very different forms. A simple answer is that Twitter is an emotional flow like a river, while Facebook is more stable and retains inputs like a sea. Like rivers and seas; both are important, both are water, both are different. You need both Twitter and Facebook social networks to maximize your internet marketing ans SEO. They both represent different form of communication.

When contrasting Twitter and Facebook in this way I am reminded of a passage from the Tao interpreted by John Heider in the “The Tao of Leadership”

Imagine that the life force is like water in the river and in the sea. The sea, greater than the river, lies below, open and receptive. The busy, rushing river enters the sea, is absorbed, and is transformed.

Here is a great post by Kevin Marks titled “How Twitter works in theory”, which could in my opinion be more accurately titled “The Way of Twitter” . Regardless, if you want a deeper understanding of Twitter, go read, now. And you will learn how to appreciate and better use the Twitter phenomenon to present your goods and services on the internet. And why I think it is so important that your website be able to actively participate and manage both social networks.

Jill and Kevin’s Wonderful Fun Wedding Processional

Marc — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:12:43 +0000

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet. Fun! Uplifting! (And the best reason ever to have a video of your wedding.) I hope it inspires ever more people to be creative in planning their wedding.

“JK Wedding Entrance Dance”

Measuring and Improving your Social Media Impact

Marc — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:01:13 +0000

As Web 2.0 evolves to returns the internet to its social media roots, albeit with great advancements, interconnectedness and opportunity, it is useful to try to get an idea how well you are doing. After all, the first step towards improving is measurement.

Fortunately Google has a tool, wouldn’t you know it . Let’s begin reviewing what is called the Social Graph and how it tracks social media links. A Social Graph is a representation of internet based “relationships”. These relationships can be of any nature being presented through blogs and social networking websites presenting our information and presence. A social graph can then define your combined social networking “community” from the different social networking sites and blog you participate in. (This last part is why I am strong proponent of using a WordPress web/blogsite to act as a hub to help manage and improve the effectiveness of your Social Graph.)

Now to how Google can help. The Google Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people more easily available Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick gives an introduction to has an excellent short video over view explaining the workings of the Social Graph API.

Now lets use two simple forms provided by Google get some personal Social Graph measurements!

The first for site connectivity we will measure how your URLs for your websites and social network pages are connected. How many of your sites can be reached from each of your URLs?

And second, who are you connected to? The contacts you link to and the contacts that link to you.

Keep score, work to increase your social medial connections. It has been a constant for as long as we have had civilization … the more connections you have, the better opportunity you have for success.

A new wedding zietgeist

Marc — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:40:00 +0000

This is going to be one of those lazy blog posts where I suggest you go read someone else’s blog, but it is Sunday afternoon and Rebecca Grinnals at Weddex blog has a great post about what I think will become the new wedding zietgeist, or cultural climate, which values meaning above luxury.

Her prime basis for the emergence of a new cultural climate? One of the most important cultural catalysts of the recent past … Sex In The City. Rebecca’s post is really worth the read and some thought.

The secret life of a blog based website

Marc — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:34:00 +0000

A blog based website is not a “normal” website. Like Clark Kent it may look normal, but it has some special powers.

Recently I wrote that it was my opinion that for marketing purposes a blog based site made the best wedding professional website. It stimulated some questions that asked to me explain more why or how a blog based site is better.

There are four basic parts to my opinion on this and it is a little technical so I provided some links in my explanation for more detail.

First is fairly obvious, the desire of most brides-to-be to obtain a lot of information before making purchase decisions and the ease of which the owner of blog based site can present new information through site updates, for site visitors to share comments and easily bookmark it on social networking sites like Digg. This allows the blog based site owner to meet the target market bride-to-be desires for wedding related information and benefit the blog based site owner with the competitive advantage of customer engagement, and potentially viral marketing.

The second part is a little more obscure or secret to many of us and has to with the inherent nature of most blogs relationship to search engines. Blog based sites are very “friendly” to search engines easily presenting their text based content. In the background a blog based site creates a brand new web page for most updates, which is noticed by search engines and often gives the site increased search relevancy ranking. Blog based sites also have an additional group of blog only search engines. Blog only search engines such as Technorati work by indexing blog article tags and then presenting those articles in order of the most recent. The more a blog based site updates and provides relevant tags, the more the site will be in the top search results.

Compounding all this is the unique “push” power of web feeds and feed readers. Most blog based websites have the advantage of automatically creating a web feed which allows your target market to be presented information about website updates automatically on a daily basis, thereby enhancing customer engagement. This may be a little obscure to many of us but it is fairly well known by our bride-to-be target market’s generation. They know all they need to do is click on the orange syndication image in the right side of their browser’s site address window to add a blog based site to their feed reader, easily getting a summary list of updates of the websites in which they have interest. They can then click through from the summary to visit your blog based website. Helping to insure the blog based website owner the competitive advantage of customer engagement.

Lastly, development and ownership costs of a blog based website are frequently much less than conventional websites.

So, in short summary my opinion is based on the reality that the blog based website owner often has higher search results, receives the additional competitive advantage of customer engagement and saves money.

The perfect wedding professional website is a …blog?

Marc — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:10:00 +0000

But, probably not your father’s blog.

Web technology and, more importantly, web users are continually changing. We all realize the importance of our websites, and there is a range approaches from simple static text, dynamically generated pages to gorgeous flash presentation sites. They all have had a place in the evolution of the web and web users.

To understand what’s the best answer for today we need to examine two perspectives; 1) what our target market web users are seeking in their web experience and 2) what search engines value or rank highest. The good news is that these two perspectives have very similar and compatible objectives. They both seek; fresh, relevant, easy displayed and read content. And in these objectives contemporary blog platforms excel for the services business owner. Some of the fastest growing wedding professionals I have observed began with a simple blog that the used to regularly share their work and philosophy with prospective clients.

A blog is; content rich, easily updated, personal, search engine friendly (unlike flash), browse-able on virtually all devices including mobile (again unlike flash) and fast (once again …). And today’s blogs can be attractive. Many of them don’t even look like blogs, but they are. Take a look at the low-cost, easily adaptable WordPress themes available from Revolution. And, realize that you can easily post new images and stories about your work into those blogs almost as easily as sending an email.

I am beginning to think that over the next year new well designed blog platforms will become the standard for wedding professionals who want to have the highest website return on investment. If you would like more info just drop me an email. I can also refer you to web professionals who are familiar with these new style blogs. Look forward to your comments.

Today’s brides-to-be want your email

Marc — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:04:00 +0000

If you still think that email doesn’t work, please read this very recent article from eMarketer. It is an excellent summary of recent consumer direct marketing channel preference.

Some important information from the article:

“Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail. More than three-quarters said they had made such a purchase in response to direct mail. …

About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years.”(emphasis added)

The article has more info and very useful tables showing preferences by age groups. Please take a short read of the full one pager.

What the surveys used in the article should reveal is that if you are not getting good results from your email marketing it is probably the result of the marketing message. Don’t settle for poor results.

With the cost of direct email being less than 10% the cost of direct mail while nearly as acceptable to the customer (and the fact that I also offer a unique quality targeted bride-to-be leadstream) one of my objectives is to help wedding professional clients refine their marketing message to reach today’s brides. I do that not only through this blog, but also a weekly ezine newsletter, frequent teleseminars, dedicated small online groups and individual review.

The marketing messages many of us have relied upon have seemingly lost much their effectiveness as our prospective Internet savvy bride-to-be clients have become more sophisticated. Thankfully it usually only takes a minor rethink and some simple changes to recapture marketing success. Direct marketing still works and direct email has the best return on investment.

Surviving and avoiding weddings from hell

Marc — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:24:00 +0000

Just an article from CNN on weddings from hell and how to survive them.

Some astounding disasters are described, but I liked best the closing paragraph’s argument for simplicity -

Future brides and grooms may also want to remember that the more bells and whistles they dream up for their wedding, the more chance there is for trouble, says Samantha Schoech. “Weddings have gotten bigger and grander these days and I think that leaves you open for more disasters,” she says. “If you want white doves to fly over you right as they’re saying ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife,’ you’re asking to get pooped on.”

Simplicity can be foundation for both elegance and economy. Perhaps Samantha Schoech has offered an Occam’s Razor ( “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.”) for weddings and receptions?

As professionals are we aiding brides-to-be in being able to consider that “less is more”?