Web & Social Media

Sure. There are search engine optimization practices out there that you coordinate: targeting keywords in your industry, optimizing web pages and title descriptions, but let’s face it, the internet is big… real BIG, over one trillion pages. What if you don’t have the budget for an SEO strategy, you aren’t a big player in the industry or you have a small niche market that you want to advertise to?

The Google Local Business Center is a must visit for your business then. In general, it’s good to add any business to it, but certainly for businesses attempting to attract customers in their local community. As you may know, Google allows you to add your business to a directory and then enhance your profile with all kinds of information about your business, products, and services. This is a free listing and every small business should take advantage of it.

Google shows these listings when someone makes what is a geographic based search, for example “Dayton banks“. The results show in what is called the “Google 10-Box” above other listings. When someone clicks on one of these results they are taken to the profile through Google Maps. Check out Bing Design’s google listing.

Here’s a short clip showing the features Google Local Business Center added recently that can greatly benefit your small business, helping you to effectively promote, analyze trends, and cater to your niche.

Need some more advice? Check out a recent post for some simple tips you can do to improve your search results.

A hacker attack this morning, shut down Twitter, and Facebook, and Live Journal. Twitter said in its status blog that it was “defending against a denial-of-service attack.”

OK, but how was I going to let people know what I’m having for lunch? Or that the sun is finally out?

The outage began at about 9 a.m. EDT, and still had lingering access problems midday, though both Twitter and Facebook seemed to be functioning at least intermittently, giving social media addicts a collective sigh of relief.

A public-relations manager in Manhattan, said she felt completely lost.”I had to GOOGLE SEARCH Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need.” OH, lighten up!

Some are keeping their sense of humor.

We are hording tinned foods and begun sacrificing our pets in case this truly is the beginning of the end. We can hear looting in the streets. We can smell cars burning. We can sense peoples microblogging frustration. We are crying to ourselves. TechChuff

It’s all fun and games till WoW goes down too, and we have to fend off the hoard of zombie-men stumbling into the streets in search of cheetos and brains. Roy

What about the children?? antje wilsh

Nine months after …. a lot of babies will born! daniel

Whether you are a non-profit organization or a multi-billion dollar corporation, you have a brand. You created the brand to give your products and services an identity… Now that brand has shifted to become a relationship between consumers and brands. In fact, brands are being shaped by consumers and potential consumers.

As a brand steward or brand manager, it is your role to recognize that consumers and their buying decisions are being influenced by a variety of people and/or media through conversations with them, both online and off.

Social Influence Marketing is about employing social media and social influencers to achieve the marketing and business needs of an organization.

As brands are being defined in real-time by an increasingly vocal audience, brand management will require greater transparency, access and response to connect with consumers. Fluent, a report recently published by Razorfish, touches on the need for Social Influence Marketing. Here are the few takeaways from the report … there are over a dozen good implications for any brand, no matter what industry or size:

• Brands must socialize with consumers. It won’t be enough for brands to craft powerful messages and push them through different media channels. They will need to participate directly in conversations with consumers and provide more meaningful value exchanges.
• Brands must develop a credible social voice. Regardless of the industry, brands will need to focus on developing credible voices. These voices will need to be more engaging, personal, humble, authentic and participatory than traditional advertising messages.
• Brands must provide a return on emotion to their consumers. Social media is a great tool for building brand relationships in which both the brand and the consumer reap equal returns. This goes back to my post on measuring the value of engagement with your consumer and what the ROI of social media means to your brand.
• Brands must know the effect of influencers throughout the marketing funnel. It is essential to know how influence changes in each stage of the marketing funnel. That information should drive when to focus on which influencers and how to surface content from those influencers on corporate-owned digital properties.
• Consumers look for brands that help them connect. People naturally gravitate toward brand categories that can help them converse and connect with others, such as music and entertainment, food and beverages, gadgets, arts, non-profits and causes.

Look at it this way:

71% of respondents share product and service recommendations in the social media-sphere at least once every few months.

Launched nine months ago, the Google Chrome browser already has over 30 million people using it regularly – people who live on the web – searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. (Gee, I wonder who Google is talking about?! LOL)

Google has just announced a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at Netbook computers first, but will eventually port the operating system onto other computers such as laptops and desktop systems. This sort of computing is often referred to as ‘cloud-based computing‘ – meaning that your applications (and files) are not internal, but running virtually online. That means less upgrading, less software purchases. The draw-back is less control and ownership.

This new OS runs within a new ‘windowing system’ using Linux, with its key aspects being speed, simplicity and security. The software architecture is simple:

• For application developers, the web is the platform.
• All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.
• And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
• Designed to be fast, lightweight, you can launch and get onto the web in a few seconds.

Computers need to get better. They should just work. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.

Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

For some fun, have a look at this Graphic Novel
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html

Excerpts for this post taken from an article posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director for Google. Joyce Jones also contributed.

Web technology has come a long way in a few short years. I’ve been surfing the wave of these new developments as they have come along.

To see just how far we’ve come online, check-out the Internet Archive for a history lesson.

In the 90s, not much was possible unless you used a lot of imagery to make a page look ‘designed’. Today with the use of CSS, pages have finally begun to shape-up and mirror their paper-clad cousins in print media. You can add fonts, colors, graphics, positioning to page elements, and if done well, they will look pretty much the same on any browser (yes even IE).

Over the past few years, I’ve preferred to build my pages using ‘pixels‘ versus ‘points‘ or ‘%’. Why? For me, it was due to consistency. I could define an <h1> tag for a page headline as “16pt” and it might look fine for me, but on a Windows computer, the page might get horsey (and huge!).

On the other hand, if I said that an <h1> tag should be “16px“, I could almost always guarantee that regardless of computer or platform, the font and page would be pretty consistent.

Over the past few years using “em” has been the size designation of choice.

Web developers know that an “em” is a percentage of the body font size. So if you have a headline (<h1>) defined as “2.5em” that means the headline will be 250% larger than your body copy. Or if you have a caption and you want it to be tiny, you might define it as “.3em” (or 30% of the body size). So if you had body copy defined as “12px” as a rule, your caption would be just “4px” tall, and your headlines would be “30px” tall. Make sense?

But like all good things, there are potential problems. I recently noted that if I define my browser font settings so that all my fonts use a specific font and size in Firefox (which I tend to do), pages that show content based on a combination of “em” and “%” without a fixed “px” size, can really get small.

The CSS for BINGenuity.com uses “76%” as the designated size for body copy. For most folks this works fine. But for me, since I have designated specific fonts sizes for my page, this CSS style takes my 12pt font size, and then takes it down to 76% through the page’s cascading style sheet (CSS). So I get a rather small standard body copy size of about 8px.

Thankfully my eyes are pretty good (for now) and I can read things much smaller, but it is tough.

The point being made is that we need to consider users, like me, who like to define their own fonts and sizes. If we are using CSS that is based on “em” and “%” for fonts without a defacto size in pixels, we might end up with some strained user eyes.

But we can’t always be safe defining a page based on pixels either. If a user has a screen resolution set very high, a base font of “12px” might still be tiny.

So test and compare before deciding on what works best for you.