@BasilPuglisi

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

Business Coach

Blog 2.0 – Puglisi’s Blog 2011

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Happy HolidaysPuglisi’s blog has seen a slow and steady increase in its visitors, so much so, that it will undergo a few upgrades and looks for 2011. The blog founded by Brand Marketing Educator, Basil C. Puglisi will move from text based blog articles to media…. after all if it’s a blog about digital media it should include some of the web 2.0 feel.

The blogs original intention was to be a personal space for Puglisi to store research thoughts, track stages of development in digital trends and develop a base of knowledge to act as a resource to reinforce his seminars and events.

In Jun 2010 – 32 visitors that where tuning in to read about Digital Media and Visibility Marketing.  As of Dec 28, 2010 the blog had 208 visitors a month and continues to grow despite little if any advertising.

In 2011, we be stepping up the professional brand of the blog, you can expect to see everything that Basil C. Puglisi has learned over the last decade with a healthy mix of digital and academic expectations being executed.

Changes coming in 2011:

1) Citations: It’s just good practice to make sure that you share sources when writing. This reinforces that your work has research value and is developed from more than one point of view.

2) Charts, Pictures and other visuals: If we are talking about growth, locations or people, we should show you what we have seen or found.

3) Video: This is the fastest growing trend in the world, be it for learning, marketing or documentary videos is no surprise that YouTube is the second largest search engine.

The road map to developing a successful blog is a process, one that must develop a good foundation and then add the bells and whistle, or in this case the sources, and media. While some have criticized the lack of advanced features on the blog, it turns out that the development of a good content foundation still supersedes any social media or technology driven media. In this case, now that the foundation has been laid, we move into the more advanced features in 2011.

Happy Holidays!!! Social Media Do and Don’t

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So as we hit Christmas Eve, I like to take a minute and share a few Social Media etiquettes for the general year, but ring even more true for the Holidays.

1) Don’t sell anything!

At this point if you haven’t capitalized on your call to action you lost that chance by now. After all social media is about trust, consistency and professionalism, not selling.

2) Engage in genuine content.

Find ways to thank people, share info for free that has value to it, even if you hold back a little at least your getting in the spirit of giving and those on the other side might do them in return come the new year…hint, hint…

3) Be at peace with the (social) world.

This is a time for peace and relaxation, there is enough stress without you adding to it, expect the site visit to be short. Put away the sword, find things positive about what you agree with, reinforce similarities even with competitors… being the fair and honest (you) will mean everything to people when it comes time to spend money.

4) Stay engaged.

While now is not the time for long drawn out affairs, stay true to what others expect, if you check in everyday, hour, whatever, stick to this, consistency is almost as important as content.

5) Have fun.

This is what makes you different, just like someone smiling over the phone, you can tell when the person engaging you in social media is doing it because they are having fun, or because they are forcing it.

Happy Holidays!!!

Please be safe & responsible!

How to advertise your business with Google?

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Google is no doubt the biggest search engine in existence today, with 1.2 billion searches happening every day.

Advertising through such a company can give your business more exposure than any other advertising method. But there are so many ways to advertise with them. Which one will suit your business? The main objective of advertising online is to create exposure when people search an item they need.

Here are three methods of advertising your business using the search engine Google.

AdWords

The oldest and most known system is called AdWords and it is the main source of income for Google. How does it work?

This application lets users create their own ads using tools and keywords. The ad will appear on the Google search result page, on the right side and on top of the search results under the tag “Ads” in small letters.

The good thing about AdWords is that you, the advertiser, choose the keywords that will trigger appearance on related searches. You pay only when the ad is being clicked on and the visitor goes to your website.

The advertiser can set a limit to how much money he is willing to spend for his ad to appear and this, among other factors, determines the actual placing of the ad on the list. It is called PPC (pay per click) advertising, and the bidding starts at $0.05 for a single click. The minimum required budget per day to advertise with AdWords is only one dollar. You can select the daily budget and select specific area or the time to display your ad.

This program is very popular because it allows its users to control every aspect of the campaign. Each aspect can be fine-tuned to increase efficiency and improve result in terms of getting the right people to your site.

What sounds very simple, is nothing but. Searching the terms AdWords on Google will yield a plethora of sites ready to teach you how to work with the system and improve your return. Google evolves and adjusts all the time, coming up with new logarithms to stave off hackers and people who are trying to game the system. Running a successful AdWords advertising campaign can be complex, even when dealing with the system on its most basic and principal level.

Advertisers have made their knowledge of working with AdWords their main source of income, abandoning their initial goals, the more they got immersed in this world of PPC advertising and understood how different factors influence their click-through rate.

Banner Ads

Another system for advertising online is Banner ads. Banner ads use Flash, eye-catching graphics or animation and appear on specific web pages. When clicked the banners connects you to the advertised site.

Banners can be created by a person without vast knowledge in coding and HTML (the language used by programmers). There are websites that offer an  already designed banners for sale, Google AdWords published Editorial Guidelines that serve as guideline for writing online ad copy. The guidelines include everything from spelling and style to recommendations on length, keywords and content.

The better the ad relates to the website it’s placed on, the more likely it is to be effective and create a click-through.

There are some ways you can place your banner on a desired website; in one system, Banner ads are triggered by keywords supplied by the advertiser. Another way is to exchange banners with a site you would like your banner to appear on. There are banner exchange programs, which a little search on the web will unveil, and you can contact the search engine companies like Google, Yahoo etc and have them place your banner ads of different sites. With this system keywords trigger the appearance of the banner, and you, the advertiser has no control on where they appear.

Banner Ads are usually charged by Cost per Impression (CPI, or CPM). Often a price will be set based upon a cost per thousand impressions, or views, and depend on other factors.

 Banner ads can be harder to control, however, because any changes requires a new banner to be uploaded. Placement on some pages may be pricey at times.

Experts recommend Banners be only part of your online advertising campaign. Combining them with other methods like e-newsletters, search engine advertising and search engine optimization will yield the maximum effect.

Google Places

Google Places is a location based service that allows you to list your business on Google maps. Google allows business owners to manage their physical business location information. This information appears on the search result page when the location and kind of business is typed into the search bar. It is a free service which business owners have to “unlock”.

There is of course a premium service that allows business owner to update their information, add a picture that will appear on the front page, add reviews and special offers.  A tag appears on Google maps that shows the location of the business.

Users of the service will get a decal for their place of business that will allow users to scan it with a smartphones and go straight to reviews about the place. Google advertises it as being useful by the computer and in the physical world. 

This is one of the great ways to get targeted traffic to you website from the place you are located.

What is a Digital Brand?

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Digital brand is a collective impression of all that is posted online about a person or a business. Many people share their experiences, opinions and pictures using different social media platforms.  The total of this information is what creates a person’s digital brand.

The digital brand is like a credit report. It communicates the character, professionalism and reputation and how likely a person is to make smart decisions.

Same goes for businesses. Everything that is said, shared or complained online becomes the digital brand of the company. A paradigm shift which has occurred in the last few years between organizations, businesses and their consumers, governments and their constituents has changes the playing fields. The customers now have access to vast amounts of information; they are both mobile and connected, and they have more power to change the market.  How do organizations present themselves and engage in the marketplace is what digital brand is all about.

Due to the way the Internet is fast evolving, especially through the social web and social media sites, there is now a plethora of information that can be used to hold a dialogue between a Brand and a consumer, or groups of consumers. Digital brand engagement focuses on communication via the web. If in the past the exposure of your brand was most of the advertising work, it has changes so that engagement with the brand is becoming more and more important and taking the place of simple exposure.

Consumers can now be very selective about which brands they choose to interact with; and have the ability to communicate their thoughts and feelings globally. Brands can take notice of what is being said about them, their product or service by monitoring conversations taking place outside of their own website.

Digital Branding is the process of planning and managing communications to the user of your products or services. It is an extension to traditional marketing efforts employed to manage your business. Digital branding software enables you to track the activities of all your customers and monitor their interaction with your business. It will help you maintain intimate content with your customers and avoid customers feeling the effect of mass marketing to them. The resulting data can help you in planning future campaigns and tailoring responses.

Through “buzz monitoring” tools, and there are a number of tools to choose from, businesses can find out what is said about them. The value of the information provided can be increased further when the buzz monitoring data is correlated with the site analytics data. It’s important to listen and observe the buzz, and analyze its impact prior to engaging. Digital Branding helps marketers optimize their campaigns to maximize conversion rates.

For a successful digital branding you have to create experiences that are authentic and feel genuine, it has to be adaptive and to respond to the customer’s involvement. It has to be relevant and useful and appealing to the customer specifically. It has to be transformative, fresh and establish an emotional connection with the brand. The experience has to be immersive – they should lose track of time while engaging with the brand and it has to be social – enable sharing and contributing to the conversation.

When planned effectively, digital branding is a cost effective and often inexpensive method for extending and managing a brand, products and service awareness

Using Podcasts to Promote Your Business

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A Podcast is a prerecorded audio or video program you can upload to your website or post on hosting sites and is made available for people to download, listen and view. They can do it either on their computers, or on other mobile devices such as iPods, smart phones and iPads.

To put it simply, podcast is blogging with sound or video instead of text.

For those recordings to be considered a podcast there has to be a series of postings, creating a cross between a lecture and an advertisement for example.

A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released periodically and often, that can be downloaded through web syndication. Academics at the Community, Journalism & Communication Research group at the University of Texas propose a four-part definition of a podcast: A podcast is a digital audio or video file that is episodic; downloadable; program-driven and has a host and/or theme.

Podcasts are meant to entertain, inform and sell your products.

They are considered to be the most innovative way to market your business online, because they are cheap and relatively uncomplicated to produce. They can be done by anyone with a microphone and a video camera, and there are many venues to distribute them.

Podcasts are unique because the user is actively seeking them. Unlike advertisement that is forced on the listener or watcher, your podcast is something the user opts to listen to and give it his undivided attention. They establish a way for you to connect to your customers and create a brand in the global marketplace. In a way they are similar to the old radio shows when people tuned in to hear what will happen next.

Podcasts, unlike any other form of advertising solicits a subscription from the listeners. When a new podcast is released it is automatically fed to all those who are connected to the business.

Experts believe that listening to podcasts is more effective than reading a text. You cannot skim over a few lines, and jump all over the place. When someone is talking to you or showing you something you are actively seeking, there are better chances for undivided attention.

It is a regular line of communication between the business owner and the client helping build brand loyalty.

Making a podcast is smart business because:

  1. More people are looking for them these days. Customers get to know you, the business owner, through them. It creates familiarity with the business.
  2. Podcast can be played anywhere, anytime. If yours is an audio podcast it can be heard while driving or exercising. If it’s a video podcast, it can be watched on smartphones wherever they are; in line at the post office, during lunch etc.
  3. There is less competition today in the podcast world than in the article world.
  4. It is quick and less time consuming than blogging or having an article published in one of the article sites.

How to make your podcast effective?

-Make them search engine friendly. Just as with everything else on the internet targeting specific keywords is important and can make a difference between ranking next to nothing and getting high ranking. Make a keyword conscience decisions about the description of you podcast.

-Post them on Social network sites.

-Good Organization. A good organization of your podcasts is important in making it easy on your followers to choose what they want to hear or see. It will also make is convenient for people that come into you podcast in the middle of a series, to find the beginning of the thread.

-Offer RSS feed. If you don’t want to use e mail to alert your followers to a new podcast, offer subscriptions.

-Do some research. Subscribe and listen to other podcasts in you niche. Knowing what others are talking about it important. Learn from their mistakes. What struck you as good and what you need to stay away from. Make comments on other people’s podcasts to make yourself heard and known.

-Get feedback. Use it as a learning opportunity. Allowing interaction compels people to listen on.

-Write your copy carefully and choose your words wisely. If you do not have a pleasant voice, ask someone else to record it for you; an employee, a friend or hire a radio announcer.

Social Brand Visibility: BuzzFeed

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BuzzFeed, a company founded in October 2006, is a trend gatherer (‘aggregator’) that uses web crawling technology and human editors to link its users to the most popular stories around the web. It provides a snapshot of the viral trend in real time, all the time.

The home page contains a list of posts from users and staff. The content is usually a video, an image or a link. It is free for all to see, without registration.

With registration, every user creates his own homepage, opening with the interesting stories from around the web in the categories that he chose. The homepage also contains the links to their most recent contributions. As a way to encourage users to post links, there’s a scoreboard of how many times they have posted and how many times their posts reached the front page.

Users participate in the site by reacting to what others have posted with a system of badges. These are tags given to posts like “WTF”, “TRASHY”, “GEEKY”, “CUTE”, “OLD” or “LOL”. When enough users feel the same way about a post, the tag is attached to the post permanently alerting other users to its content.

The research done by the site is used by many bloggers, journalists and social media experts to gauge the pulse of the internet community.

In its best month (November 2010) BuzzFeed had 525,000 visitors a day, the majority of which are from the USA (371,000). It is less popular in the UK (37,000) and Canada (39,000) visitors.

Strategies for going Viral and creating Visibility!!!

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At the beginning of this month, in New York, a gathering of some of the most interesting people in the social media circuit took place. There were interviews with leaders of Foursquare, Gawker, Hulu, Yahoo, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, News Corp and more.

One of the presentations was by Jonah Peretti, the co-founder of The Huffington Post who serves today as the CEO of Buzzfeed. Peretti has been advising companies such as Procter & Gamble and Sony Pictures about their viral strategies.

If someone knows about going viral, it’s this guy, and what he said should be listened to;

–          The biggest network you have at the moment are the bored people sitting in their offices, connected to high speed internet. This network is bigger that all the traditional existing networks combined. Create something that will draw their attention so they will pass it around. Make it easy to understand, easy to share and include in social media.

–          Put the business in the front, but don’t forget the fun stuff. He calls it the “Mullet Strategy”. Keep your website serious and business-like in the front and all the crazy remarks in the back. Have a place on your site to start a conversation.

–          If you are dealing with a brand, you should spend some money on advertising. Pushing a new brand through viral means is very difficult. You should spend money to seed it around the internet, or as he calls it: “Pay for the seeds and get the viral for free”.

–          Target the maniacs. The web is ruled by people who gets worked up about a subject and do the work for you. “Content is more viral if it lets people express their personality disorders.” He says.

–          Spread the word. Make sure some people are carrying on your word, and keeping it alive. He brings an example from religion – the Mormon Church, which actively spread the word and recruiting members, is growing in numbers at a higher rate than any other, older religions. It’s not just the quality of the idea that counts, it’s the effort you put into spreading it.

Now think how you can apply these 5 principles to your business.

Social Brand Visibility: Slashdot

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Slashdot is an aggregator of news about science and technology related stories. They call themselves “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters”. 

Slashdot started as a blog in 1997 by the computer science student Rob Malda. It became a site a year later.

The name definitely shows a sense of humor. When asked about the origin Malda said the name was chosen to confuse those who tried to pronounce the URL of the site (“h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org”) over the phone.

Users provide suggestions of new articles and links and Slashdot editors select the stories that will appear on the home page that day. They provide a one-paragraph summary and a link to an external site where the story originated. Each story can become a topic of conversation and a thread for comments and discussion. Those discussions can get up to 10,000 posts per day.

Slashdot traffic is estimated to be over 5.5 million visitors per month, and the site has won many awards. A term “Slashdot Effect” was coined after a story was posted on the site which sent much traffic to the source. Statistics shows that about 50% of the users check in to see the news of the day, while the other half stays and takes part in the conversations.

Slashdot Japan was launched in 2001 and carries the US stories as well as the local ones.

As of June 2010, Slashdot rank is 1,323, with the average user spending 3.7 minutes per day on the site and 45,393 sites linking back to it.

Social Media Trends for 2011

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2010 was a banner year for social media. It was the year in which Facebook overtook Google in site traffic. It was a year in which some surveys claim that 95% of companies are using LinkedIn to look for prospective employees.

The use of social media through mobile devices tripled. The tablet became popular and threatens to revolutionize laptops and school books.

What can we expect in the coming year? Here is what a few experts agree on:

–          Big companies will take a serious look at the social media, integrating it not only locally but globally.  Companies like Dell computers and Jet Blue are already doing it.

–          The mobile and tablet war creates social computing – the competition is heating up with new tablets and smart phones coming into the market. It will create more discussions on the web. Social media will be on the go even more than it is today – out of the house, out of the office on the move; in trains, planes and automobiles. There will be more competition, variety and affordability in devices.

–          Facebook location based services will probably overtake all the others. With the huge amount of users –over 500 million – and with tons of data and the programs behind it, they will become the biggest.

–          There will be a social media overload. The average user experiences Facebook, Twitter, G mail, chat, Skype, Tumblr etc. Many experts in social media have adopted systems to access all of them at once but average users might get a case of schizophrenia, with so many profiles on so many social networks. Integration will have to become more wide spread.

–          Social media will be integrated into other tools, making websites important again and more modern.

–          More and more companies will turn their social media connections into customer service, answering questions and complaints.

–          Social recruiting will get bigger. Even small companies will go to social media to find new and better applicants.

Social Brand Visibility: Ping.fm

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A relatively new company, Ping.fm, founded in 2008, comes to answer a burning question: how to control your social media from one place.

Posting an update on Ping.fm will push it to different social media sites simultaneously. Users can update their status only once, without logging in to different sites.

At the moment their alliance reaches to more than 30 social media sites. Users can configure their account to connect to services like: Bebo, Blogger, Google Buzz, Delicious, Facebook, Friend Feed, Friendster, hi5,Identi.ca, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Plaxo, Yahoo 360 and more.

Ping.fm might be a nice addition to everyday users, but for marketing professionals and social media experts it might be God-sent.

To make it even more useful the site has a character counter to make sure you don’t go over the 140 characters per tweet, and a “record video” link allows you to upload videos.

The dashboard allows you to set it up so you can ping from your e mail, instant message, mobile phones etc.

The only problem with Ping.fm has to do with your contact lists. If you have the same contacts in a few social media sites, they will be getting the same message from different sites, a fact that may annoy them.

At its core, social media sites are meant to be a communication platform, where you connect with people in a two way conversation. Ping.fm might turn it into one-way broadcasting mechanisms.

Approximately 37% of the site’s visitors are from the US, where it is ranked #746. It is also popular in Pakistan, where it is ranked #177.