@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Basil Puglisi's Brand Blog #AIassisted

Making People Aware Of Your Business With A Small Budget

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There are quite a few simple and easy ways to get the attention of potential customers of your company with only a small budget to work with. This may sound like a difficult thing to do since the bigger companies have a lot more money and resources to work with, but it is in fact one of the original ways of doing business and works just as well now as it did way back in the day.

One smart thing that you can do is to make up a nice coupon book online or to give out to the local residents through the mail. This coupon book will offer discounts on whatever it is that you are selling and start to get people on your side about your products. Nothing makes people more excited than knowing that they do not have to pay the going rate on something that would normally cost them an arm and a leg.

Another really simple and inexpensive way to get noticed is to get your business phone number listed in the local phone books. This usually does not cost a thing, but make sure to use a land line because cell phones will probably run a little bit more money than you will likely want to spend on that type of advertisement.

Find Digital listings, there are a lot of comapnies and websites that provide listing services for FREE!!! Take the time to get an accurate listing, some even offere customization or updates for free.

You can also try to get your company enlisted at a trade show or some type of job fair scenario. This will get the public to notice you. As we all know, word of mouth marketing is probably the best and cheapest way to do business these days. As long as people are able to bear witness to an actual company and the products or services that they are selling, they will buy into it if it fits their needs.

Even though using a website to promote your company can get a little bit pricey at times, being able to split the cost with another company is a good way for both of you to save a little bit of cash while allowing the public to catch a glimpse of your company. This will also allow you to start building business relationships with other companies and show that you can be counted on to help out if you are needed to.

All of these things are cheap and easy ways to get your company off of the ground. Most people do not have a lot of spare money lying around when they start a new business, so it is best to find creative ways to work with what you have at the moment and build on it as you gain more and more income.

Using Social Bookmarking To Rise Your Small Business Through The Ranks

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We all know that there are quite a few different ways to promote your company using all of the amazing resources that we have available to us now with the internet. One of the best ways for you to get your company noticed is through social bookmarking which allows you to get your social blog or personal business website ranked. This ranking system lets you and your business partners get noticed quickly and build the popularity of your small business.

Digg & StumbleUpon

There are two very popular social bookmarking websites that have millions of users search for things that interest them each and every day. Digg is probably the most popular these days because it allows users to interact with each other and share tips on how to get their own blog or website looked at more often. StumbleUpon is another very popular website that does similar things to Digg, but also has some audio and video options to compliment the chat style that Digg has. These websites have really led some companies to turn the corner and head toward years of prosperity.

Be Aware of Spammers

Like is the case with many other social and open sourced websites, you will have to pay close attention to and watch out for spam web links. There are always going to be those people out there that want to infiltrate your website and even cause it to shut down. Whether it is competitive businesses or just a few hackers trying to get their kicks, you must to aware at all times as to what type of activity is going on on your website. It is not always the easiest thing to monitor, so you should also try looking into hiring yourself a WebMaster if at all possible.

Find Some Assistance

There are a few things that you should know in regards to getting your website and company noticed. These things are very simple and, in many cases, deal with common sense problem solutions. First, make sure to have some of your friends and family members help you out with raising the awareness amongst the community about your website. Maybe not everyone will be interested in what you have to sell, but at least they will know that your small business exists. Secondly, do a little bit of research as to how you can get your website affiliated with other more popular ones on the internet. This will drastically increase the chances of you getting yourself noticed.

Social bookmarking is making a huge difference in how people network their businesses around the world and will continue to assist in building these smaller companies into huge conglomerates. There will be more of these websites popping up all over the internet, so keep your eyes peeled for them to open up and jump on board.

Interlude.fm – Interactive Video

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could interact with music videos? If you could decide which of the musicians in the band you would like to follow?  If you could choose which version of the song you’d like to hear?

And if you could do that, where will the road lead in brand recognition and advertising?

Yoni Bloch thought it could be great. The young Israeli musician, who happens to be a computer geek, gathered his computer savvy friends and posed these questions to them.

A year and a half later, Interlude.fm came into being. It was first presented at the Techonomy convention in May 2010, and is now gathering more and more interest.

What Interlude does is allow you to choose your adventure and influence what you see. While watching a music video, you are asked, from time to time, to make a choice who you would like to follow.  When you do, you will see a different version of the video than you’ve seen the first time. The beginning and end always stay the same, and the music continues seamlessly without interruptions.

To understand what it means, let’s assume the video takes place at a party. Like in the demo shown at the convention, you can see what happens at this party from different angels, by choosing to follow different band member each time. At times you are being asked you if want to hear the music in a different style, a cappella as opposed to instrumental, for example.

You make your own version of the video, following band member A, then switching to see what band member B is doing, than to a girl dancing in the middle of the room. You can review your version of the music video, download it to your computer and share it with friends on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or your blog. There could be hundreds of versions of the same song, the same video, constructed by different people, who share it with one another.

What does it do? From publicity, advertising and brand recognition point of view doing all that prolongs the time a person interacts with the product. When videos are concerned, it triples, on average, the viewing time. The song itself is played many times as the viewer chooses a version of the video he likes best. The product is displayed longer and by being able to influence events, a feeling of familiarity is created.

Interlude.fm took it a step further. Another application of the program targets commercials; If you are looking at a car advertisement, for example, which shows a silver car driving down a road between high rises in an urban setting, you can opt to change the color of the car and you can choose to change the setting in which the car is driving. Now a red car is shown driving by the ocean or in a rural area. You can interact with it; change it over and over again with a simple click of the mouse.

Another feature of the program is the ability to instantly compare versions of the same song, and navigate from song to song to see how different artist performed the same song. Again, the move from one video to the other is done seamlessly without losing a beat.

The best part? Interlude.fm technology can be embedded on any corporate or designed website. The customer can provide the video footage and keep complete creative vision of his product, or he can take advantage of the production services of Interlude.fm to create new footage.

Intelude.fm allows users to create unique versions of a video, using pre-recorded video/audio, and share it quickly and easily with their friends. Users can compare versions and decide which one they like best. The end result will always be greater use, greater play and greater interaction with your product.

Google bookmarks

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Google Bookmarks allows its users to bookmark their favorite pages and save them remotely so they can be accessed from any computer with a use of a password.

Why is this service important? You do not have to have your computer with you when you want to show something interesting you have bookmarked.

If your computer crashes, you have a place to go to and retrieve all the bookmarked pages you had.

Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it. Google allows the users to post their bookmarks and share them with others.

Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities.

With Bookmarks, you can also organize your content using labels and/or lists. Like labels, lists let you organize your bookmarks into categories for easier retrival.

Social Brand Visibility: Tumblr at Your Service

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A different kind of social media can be found in a site called Tumblr. They declare themselves as being the easiest way to express yourself. How can you do it? By quick and easy blogging.

Tumblr was co-founded by David Karp and Marco Arment in 2007. It emphasizes its customization and ease of use, with a simple sing up and log on. No need for knowledge in the world of coding and computer language. Each user gets his own tumblelog where he can post his thoughts and feeling.

Posting can be done either by text, quote, picture, video, link, audio or chat. Participants follow other members’ tumblelog, just like it’s done on Twitter, for example.  Updates of the people you follow appear on the dashboard in one stream.

Users can “like” a post to let other users know what they found interesting and reblog it on their own tumblelog. They can comment on posts and start a conversation.

When it was launched, 75,000 bloggers left their previous platforms and converted to Tumblr almost immediately. Since then, more than 3 million users joined in. Tumblr has mobile apps that let bloggers blog from wherever they are.

As of the beginning of 2010, the site averages 2 million posts a day. With 15,000 new users joining every 24 hours, it is still growing rapidly.  What’s more, it has a retention rate of 85%, compares with Twitter’s 40%.

Tumblr is amazingly fast and processes 10,000 posts an hour. It lets you update post to your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well. All their services are clearly offered on the front page and are, as they promised, easy to use.

Social Brand Visibility: Do You Digg It?

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“A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.” This is how Digg calls itself.

A user driven social network site, everything on Digg has been submitted by members. Other users can vote on the submission and the most popular stories go up to the top and are displayed on the front page. In its initial version, in 2004, you could also bury a story by digging it down. In later versions this feature has been deleted. Of course viewers can leave comments about what they saw.

If you want to know the hottest news and what people are talking about at the moment, Digg will provide that. “The power of breaking stories before anyone else”, is how one of the founders, Kevin Ross, calls it.

The front page of Digg contains the title of a story others have found interesting, a short description and a link. One click will get you to read the whole story. You can customize your home page by deciding which major news media you would like to follow and your areas of interest. The categories include business, entertainment, gaming, lifestyle, offbeat, politics, science, sports, technology and world news. A story that has wide interest and posted on Digg has been known to crash a site or two.

As of November 2010, Digg is ranked 125th in website traffic, with unique monthly visitors standing on 15.1 million. It is estimates that 34% of the site users are from the United States, where it ranks # 74 and it is even more popular in Pakistan where it ranks #18.

Visitors to Digg.com view on average 4.4 unique pages per visit.

How to Use social Media to Spread the Word – YouTube

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Many small and medium businesses try to engage their customers through Facebook and twitter. Another venue you might want to look into is YouTube.

Here are some examples of small and medium businesses who took advantage of YouTube and the results that effort generated.

Case Study # 1:

A hair care product company, operated by the owner a woman from Los Angeles, decided to increase her visibility by going on YouTube. While pocking around in the site, she notices a few questions posted by users of products in her niche. She offered support, advice and suggested trying her products. She urged the users to tell her if it worked for them.

The result? 2 years later there are over 5,000 videos showing people using her product. The attention has helped raise her sales by 40% and pushed her 7 year old company into profitability.  The products are now sold in Whole Foods and Target as well.

And she didn’t post one video of her own. She waited for the video bloggers (vloggers) to do that: “When dozens of different vloggers with their own unique hair types actually video themselves applying the product in the shower in one continuous take, it’s hard to dispute how it ends up looking” She says.

Recently she hired some of the vloggers to help her in her YouTube campaign.

The push shouldn’t be a hard sale. Forum posters can smell those a mile away, she says. Companies have to establish themselves as being helpful so their recommendation will be taken seriously.

Case Study # 2:

A knife company used the same tactic. They didn’t start a conversation about their knives, but they reacted to questions and offered suggestions. They interacted with the posters by sometime offering them to try a knife for free or for a limited time.

Today, there are almost 4,000 video blogs about their company. They make sure to stay on top what is being said. To provide good customer support, the company employees (all 5 of them) are alerted every time a comment comes in and they answer, sometimes from home and in the middle of the night.

Being accessible promotes loyalty to the brand, says their marketing director. Forums reflect that.

Case Study # 3:

Makers of a new, very small, digital camera learned the hard way how important it is not to hard sell. Their efforts to brand the camera on bike riding forums backfired. People were annoyed with them and pointed out foreseeable problems even without seeing the camera up close.

The company listened to the complaints and laid back. The result? 7,500 videos about their camera, done with their camera are currently posted on YouTube. More than 15% of their business comes from YouTube.

Listening to Vloggers helped the company to further develop their equipment into niches they have not thought of. When people talked about mounting their small camera on remote control cars and planes, they manufactured a kit for that purpose. It is one of their best sellers.

You can use YouTube for more than just posting videos. Using their channel system is a good way to find out what people are talking about, what they want and what they suggest. Then you can assess how it pertains to your business.

Word of Mouth Goes a Long Way

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What is social media, really? It is a way for people to connect without taking into consideration physical distances and limitations. It is a way for people to ‘hang out’ together without leaving their homes.

It is also a way to broadcast to the world, in 140 characters or less, how you think and feel at the moment and what are doing or about to do.

Social media can be also used to wade through all the sea of information that is at our fingertips. Peer recommendation narrows the playing fields. People can share things they have discovered, create lists which can be exchanged and used as a specialized search engine. Social media enables people talk about the events of the day, news or gossip, and share their expertise with other people.

That is where social media and small business interact. A good word of mouth can go a long way.

To be affective in a social media campaign there are few things you should know before jumping in:

Be relevant to your audience. If you are creating campaigns that are meant to be seen around the world, make sure it will be understood by the market you aim to engage. Look at the twitter campaign of a company like Dell, for example.

Build credibility and trust. Let people know you on those social circles, forums, blogs and groups in your niche before you jump into selling. Establish yourself as an expert in your field. Be consistent and answer questions in a timely manner.

Listen to what people have to say, adjust and improve. That is one of the great benefits of social media. You can hear loud and clear what your target audience wants and talks about. Whole Foods has a Twitter account that is very active and used to post actionable advice. (i.e. “Bring it back to the store and we will…”)

Be visual and fun on your social media pages, if it fits your brand.  Look at what McDonald did on their Facebook pages or what Carl Jr. does on their YouTube channel.

Show your customers you care about them and about your product. Convince them you are there to improve their lives. Provide tips, Q&A and advice. Look what Nike does on their blog as an example.

Transparency. Show people that you take their advice seriously. There might be ideas in those posts you haven’t thought of. Starbucks, for example, has a website for ideas and they show where this idea is at the moment; under review, reviewed, coming soon etc. People know they are not wasting their time posting. This is a way to build a community.

Consistency.  You have to keep the brand alive and create familiarity. You’ll have to be active and update regularly.

There are many examples of successful social media campaigns done by big companies. American express, for example, did a short campaign to win a few VIP Glee Experience Tour tickets and got 250,000 requests. Papa Jones is working with Facebook, creating competition for creating a new pizza that will eventually be sold at it stores. Pepsi Co. created a campaign to name their new Mountain Dew drink through Facebook. Virgin America offers promotions through their Twitter account (They offered 50% off tickets to the 500 first clickers). It sold out within 3 hours.

Easy for them, you say. They have PR departments and people devotes solely to social media. How can I, the small business owner do all this and still run a business?

Even though those campaigns are called “free”, you still need to invest in them – your time. There are ways to make it easier:

  • Your campaign is not as big as theirs. You will not have that amazing response the first time you try.
  • Delegate, if you can. Don’t try to do it all by yourself. Create a separate account for every employee, and share in the responsibility.
  • If you do not have employees, you can hire an off-site specialist who can help you set it up and update it, with your personal collaboration of course. A couple of hours a day should be enough.
  • There are programs which allow you to get all your social media alerts on one page, for easier navigation.
  • The next step can be to have software that will alert you every time your niche is mentioned in social media sites. It is a way to get early leads and establish yourself as an expert.

It is not all-or-nothing proposition. You have to put your toes in the water if you want to learn to swim. A good word of mouth can go a very long way.

Archos 101 Android Tablet to Release Monday

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One of the most anticipated tablet releases in the US was held up recently. The Archos 101, which is to feature Android 2.2 was set to release in early October, and while the 8GB model was introduced to the market, techies everywhere where part of the hold out to get the 16GB which provides twice the internal storage at only $50 more, clearly a value worth waiting for.

The real question is how many will become available if Archos does indeed launch the Google Android Tablet this upcoming week? After all with so many holding out for the 16GB one has to wonder how they sold out so quickly of the 8GB….

Some feel that the 8GB was an easy choice as the Archos 101 features a micro SDHC slot allowing for expandable storage up to 32GB, with the option to be able to switch out the portable storage.

The Archos 101 features a powerhouse of technical specs all available on the site:

http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_101it/specs.html?country=us&lang=en

The one major flaw that the tablet seems to have is an extremly higloss screen, not that I will complain as my use is likely to be mostly indoors and feel that a matte screen protector is likely to pop up shortly.

On the WOW side of things, let’s start with flash and google sync, the Archos company seems to be limiting the Apps store to AdLibbs, but as we all know google is your friend, so expect workarounds to release 5minutes after its release and very simple ones at that.

Flash content is back on the rise now that webmasters everywhere are finding ways to streamline the loading time and creating websites that have a robot.txt pointing to what the search engines need to know to climb the rankings. The google suite of clanders, e-mail and document sharing make the android tablets an attractive business tool, oh and the screen is designed with multimedia in mind based on 16:9, not the iPad’s 4:3.

How do I know that the release is set for monday, well its no secret:

“We are estimating to see the Archos 101 16GB on our webstore as of this Monday.”

Thank you,Brian D – Archos Sales Support

(no spell check sorry heading out fast wanted to release ASAP)

Google’s New Product Ads

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When looking to buy a product on the internet, what are you most interested in finding?

Most people are interested in two things; the look (image) of the product and the price. After completing the query customers have to go from site to site, look for that specific product and do some comparison shopping. Wouldn’t it be cool if those two elements will pop up with the search results?

Google thinks so. Just in time for the holidays, Google introduced a few days ago a new type of ad to their advertisers, called “Product Ads”.

No more few lines of text based on keywords appearing in the search result. Now you can see the picture of the product and the price in one glance on the search result page. Google is stepping into comparison shopping.

The system has been tested for the past year on some 800 advertisers and is now open to all.  As a user of Google search engine, you probably have noticed it under shopping results. A picture, a price and the website.

“Product ads” marks a shift in how Google runs its business model. No more different keywords and different biddings for each phrase using AdWords. . Advertisers can now pay only when a purchase is made, not per click that directs customers to their site. The other big change is that Google chooses when to show the product.

The advertiser give Google the feed to its products and Google automatically matches queries to what it thinks the customers is looking for.

Business owners who have tried Product Ads, say they liked the results. You might give up a little on the flexibility of different keywords but what you gain is big savings and eliminating the guessing game and the risk of AdWords. If before a hundred clicks with no conversion had to be paid for, now if there are a hundred clicks and no conversion, advertisers don’t pay for it.

Google product manager says that in the test period the click through rate increased by 50% compared to text ads. The new system is different from the “image ads” Google introduced a few months ago, which show up only if customers click the images search. These are still tied to keyword search and are still paid per click.

“We think it means we’re going to have a much broader range of products in Google,” said Dennis Woodside, vice president of ad sales for the Americas. “Product Ads” make a lot of sense for e-commerce sites and follows Google’s increasing venture into comparison shopping on the search engine result pages.