Chief executive officer

Optimizing Content Creation for Conversions

May 8, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Content can mean everything to a small business that is based online. While having a high search ranking may bring in more traffic, it doesn’t always equal more sales. However, marketers who make a focused effort on creating only the highest quality content can not only improve their positions on search engine rankings, but also obtain more conversions than those who go with more mass produced, lesser quality content.

Putting Your Content to Work for You

Creating content isn’t just a simple matter of tossing up blog post about your products or services and hoping it promotes or sells itself. In a time where businesses of any size are swiftly becoming media outlets in their own right by publishing their own original insights related to their industries, companies should not ignore the opportunity to be a part of the conversation on their own with high-quality and original content marketing.

However, it is important to remember that just publishing high-quality content is still not enough. It is important to focus on how you can put that content to work to help you attain your personal business goals online, covering everything from attracting relevant site traffic to helping direct your visitors to your most valuable conversion or ecommerce pages. The right content marketing campaign will involve strategic planning and a constant and consistent execution if a business intends to increase online conversions. Optimizing your content

How to Accelerate Lead Quality and Conversion

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What is Content?

By now you likely know that content can be any number of things. Everything from eBooks, blog posts, webinars, podcasts, case studies and more can be very educational, relevant, high-quality content that brings audiences back to your site and with each return, closer to your valuable conversion pages or links. Make sure that your content supports your own business goals and the educational needs or wants of your target audience.

Content Marketing Strategies

There are a few optimal thoughts to keep in mind and keep your websites content focused on.

Content should speak to the content audience
Identify the goals you expect your content to achieve
Create your audience profile
Do your keyword research

As with any type of content, anytime, it is incredibly vital to have a content writer who can engage your readers effectively. We have covered some of the best ways to fit a content writer to your specific needs on DBMEi with several of our professional freelance authors and guest contributors content. Take the time to check them out.

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@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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Boosting Revenue with Social Media

April 29, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

For many marketing companies, management of corporate or small business level social media has become a full-time endeavor. For this reason it can be vital to learn what impact your efforts are actually having on your brand awareness. Gaining this knowledge will help you to understand what it may take to boost your business’s bottom line.

The Noisy Social Media Environment

Social media networks are busy places. Once a user has built up a large friend or fan following, the information can stream by at light speed. There are plenty of opportunities to place ads to garner that extra attention from those who may not be able to meticulously pick through their social media networks information, but still scan it for an overall idea of what the internet world had to offer today.

In a recent release of a study by the Adobe Digital Marketing Team, some statistics may have shown why consumers and businesses may not be benefiting from social media like they could.

36% of tweets with valuable content are swallowed by a more boring majority.
37% of those who do use social media networks say that the ads they see are not very useful.
63% of social community managers spend more than 30 hours per week.
26% spent 41 to 50 hours on their community administration and management.

Account proliferation seems to contribute to the overload currently experienced on social media networks. The Adobe study showed that many companies with over 1,000 employees, had an average of 178 social media network accounts. Not only can this clog up the networks, but it can also make full brand analytics rather difficult to test in some cases. Many social marketers also report that they feel they lack resources. Many of those also reporting that they often struggle to measure ROI, which ironically, does not help for getting new resources.

Measuring Social Success

There are obviously many business, large and small who are utilizing their Facebook fan pages to great benefit for their businesses and brands. Facebook and YouTube both have emerged as leaders in social marketing successes. These two market leaders dwarf their competition with an unparalleled critical difference in terms of time spent by users on those sites.

The study also showed that recommendations from other social users can affect the level of enjoyment a possible consumer may feel about a video. When it comes to websites and content, the study also showed that users tend to stay logged in more than twice as long when doing so with social plug-ins.

Many other social networking and social media statistics found in the study can also be vital to understanding how to implement

Social sharing increases email click-throughs

CTR without sharing shows up around 26%.

Twitter – 5.0%
Facebook – 5.4%
LinkedIn – 9.6%

People use social networks to find local business

In 2008 4% of consumers reported they used social networking sites to find local business.

2009 – 7%
2010 – 9%
2011 – 15%

Social Drives Sales but Faces Perception Challenges

During a self-assessment of women’s marketplace influence, 73% of young adult women described themselves as influential information sources. It also showed that orders that come in via social media networks are commonly larger than those through more traditional digital means such s email, search engines, or even ad displays. In the same realm, the study showed that social sharing can actually trickle down to orders. A quarter of online shoppers who shop at least quarterly, and log into their Facebook accounts at least once a month have made purchases based on a social recommendation.

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Obama Signs Bill for Crowd Funding [News]

April 24, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

President Obama recently signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups or JOBS Act. Noted as a game-changing bill, the JOBS Act is a bipartisan bill that aims to make it easier for start-up businesses to expand and hire more employees to help aid further the so far, very sluggish, US economic recovery.

This new bill will classify start-up businesses as emerging growth companies, allowing those business owners to rely on online investors who can help raise the vital start-up capital required. Sites like Kickstart offer a very similar format currently. Companies like this that allow users to raise money for start-up ventures will be able to sell up to $50 million in their own shares before being required to register with the SEC. The new bill also doubles their current limitation to now allow up to 1,000 shareholders.

During the bill signing ceremony, President Obama stated that “One of the great things about America is that we’re a nation of doers. We think big, take risks and believe that anyone with a solid plan and a willingness to work hard can take even the most improbable idea and turn it into a solid business.” Obama signed into law the JOBS Act while flanked on both sides by Congress members as well as some of our nation’s top entrepreneurs. Many have taken this as an act proving that our politicians are beginning to better understand the role that entrepreneurs have to play in American economics.

How will this effect start-ups?

The JOBS Act is only an initial step in a much larger battle to make it easier for business entrepreneurs to create vital new business, expand their growth, hire work workers and create the economic growth our country is desperate for. It will help to increase capital formation as well as pave the way for other smaller businesses to gain more public visibility.

Start-ups will now be able to gain financing via crowd funding allowing those who participate to raise up to $1 million a year without having to do public offerings. That step currently requires state-by-state registrations that can cost business owners thousands of dollars. The hope is that this type of funding will begin to open up many more opportunities for necessary capital to begin flowing into our nation’s start-up businesses. In turn, new companies that can now create jobs will help to steer our economic perils back onto the right path that benefits each and every one of us.

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CEOs and Social Media Influence in the Workplace

April 15, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Although there is already a growing list of reasons why it is beneficial for every member of a company’s team to participate in social networking, there may be another new reason that should encourage further consideration.

BRANDfog Study

A recent study conducted by BRANDfog shared some rather concerning statistics about CEO participation in company leadership via social media platforms. The general consensus is that top business executives are slower than their employees and consumers when it comes to using social media for communications.

64% of CEO’s are NOT engaged on their company’s website or social media networks
Only 5% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are on Twitter
Only 4% of global CEOs have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn
Only 13 Fortune 500 CEOs have active Twitter accounts

If that alone isn’t enough reason to encourage CEOs and others in similar positions in their company to join Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, then it may be important to understand that on the same study, 86% of respondents rated a CEOs engagement on social media networks to be either important, very important, or mission critical.

Why CEO Engagement is Important

There are a few reasons why CEO engagement on social networks can be beneficial. During the BRANDfog study respondents answers also indicated that 78% of CEO participation on social media networks led to better communication. 71% of them agreed that it can lead to improving brand image, and 64% agreed that it provided more transparency, an element vital to a successful social media marketing campaign. The study has also shown that 82% of respondents listed as employees believe that a company can garner more trust when the CEO or leadership teams communicate via social networks.

Can a CEOs Social Media Presence Influence Purchasing Decisions?

The study says yes. The majority of the study’s participants, 77%, shows that consumers are more likely to buy from a business whose CEO uses social media opportunities to help define their company’s values and leadership principles. 94% of those respondents also agree that the C-list leaders participation in social media can help to enhance a brand’s image.

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What is in Our Mobile Future?

April 12, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

In 2011, the number of Smartphone’s sold exceeded the number of personal computers. At its current projection, the number of mobile devices will significantly outnumber the PC’s in just a few years.

The Past and Future of Mobile

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As mobile use increases in the future, AI may also have a large impact on the users mobile experience. Many online services will play a large part in helping us to organize and go about our daily lives. AI combined with vital algorithms will:

Organize and handle personal information
Alert us about important events
Help us decide which products to buy
Monitor everything from calendars to health care
Help us manage services with consideration for our personalized consumer needs

With a realistic projection on the evolution of mobile devices, it also indicates that we are likely to move away from typing all of our days jargon into tiny keyboards on Smartphones and more towards touch screen options, device ‘bumping’ or ’tilting’, sensory triggers, voice activation and other types of communications that mimic ‘human’ gestures and fluidity.

To Smart App Infinity and Beyond

Although apps will continue to play a huge role in the manner it does now, there will likely be more options for consumers in helpful virtual

programs that enhance what we have now for messaging systems, virtual shopping options, entertainment, news and more. We are currently seeing this type of forward progression in apps that offer a more personalized experience. They tend to learn the behavior of the user, continuously get smarter, and stay updated on you over a period of time. As our technology for mobile devices and apps continues to grow, so does our opportunity for new developments.

Be Prepared

Once you have decided to utilize mobile platforms for your business, there are many determining factors to consider when creating the most effective business plan for your personal business needs. If you plan to bypass desktop devices and putt full focus on mobile or just implementing it slowly into your businesses marketing campaign plans, you will need to have an idea of projected requirements to meet the same standards as time goes by. One of the best ways to ensure you are giving it the proper focus is to stay on top of trending industry news and be ready to implement new and helpful interactive programs, assistance, and mobile products in very short periods of time.

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Google Started Changing the Way Search Results are Shown

April 11, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Every time Google changes the algorithms of its search engine, it sends shivers down the spines of many who rely on that calculation to get a better placement on the search engine’s result page (SERP). That is why Google is very careful and secretive when a change like that is coming. But Amit Singhal, the top Google Search executive, confirmed recently they are working on something big.

What they are trying to do, he said, is for the search to work more like we humans understand the world. By cross referencing millions of entities that Google has been collecting in the past few years, the new search engine algorithms will attempt to understand the context of the query and give direct answers instead of sending you to a website to find out by yourself.

For example: If you ask what the deepest 10 lakes in the US are? Today, you are getting results based on the keywords and a list of websites talking about lakes, but not the exact answer to your question. In the future the first thing that will appear is a direct answer to your query. You can see it already happening with the “best guess” results. Type in “who is the chancellor of Germany” and see what you get.

Another example: If you ask information about a place, Lake Eerie for instance. Today you get all the websites that have anything to do with the lake. In the future, first you will get all the information Google has collected about the lake: depth, location, altitude, average temp and so on.

Google and Metaweb Tech

A little more than a year ago Google purchased a start-up company called Metaweb Technologies. The company had an index of 12 million entities; movies, books, companies and celebrities. (For the sake of comparison, Wikipedia has 3.5 million English entries.) Amit Singhal said that since this acquisition they have expended the index to 200 million by developing “extraction algorithms” that can organize data in a semantic way from around the web.

What would it do to the listings on the first page if a large amount of information will appear first? A person who was briefed on Google’s change says it may impact directly the results of 10%-20% of the queries. There are billions of queries performed each day.

Google hopes that with the new search results, people will spend more time on their page and see more relevant ads, but it is still unclear how it would impact the ads which appear beside the search results. People familiar with the project say the changes will appear in the next few months. Amit Singhal says it will be rolled out slowly and will be a year-long process.

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Improved Facebook Advertising Campaign Performance

April 10, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru... — Image via CrunchBase

Social media marketing, research has shown, is the fastest growing platform for advertisers. With promises of increased customer engagement and low marketing costs, advertisers flocked to this platform in droves. 76% of companies in the US use social media. Over three quarters of marketing officers believe they will increase their ROI this year through social media and plan to increase their budgets. But ROI is not easy to measure with social media. The different metrics will yield different results. Are you doing whatever it takes? Are there some things you don’t know about?

Facebook is the most valuable platform, statistic shoes, with over 15% of the social media marketing business, while rating and reviews, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube are there as well starting at about 10%.

Last month, a company called Techlightenment unveiled its new product called Alchemy 2. The company which is a leading provider of Facebook marketing technologies, helps solve traditional Facebook challenges of scale and performance, and has features that reduce the time spent on manual processes because the platform does it for you so you can focus your attention on higher value decisions.

The company promises that marketers will get 80% higher CTR and 50% lower CPC using their platform compared to the average Facebook campaign. Alchemy 2 allows user to take advantage of what Facebook has to offer; timeline, Sponsored Stories and Custom Action ads.

Here is what this platform includes:

Create a campaign fast and easy. You can create hundreds of ads in a few minutes.

Combine location, target audience with your creativity.
The system allows you to dynamically insert keywords and locations.
Analytics will tell you how many end users you will reach.
Easy re-posting of campaigns in one click.

Optimize and track. About 70% of what used to have to be done manually can be done by alchemy 2.

Optimize by setting up rules based on which actions are taken.
Track multiple conversion points.
Control your budget by targeting groups and locations.
Optimize to CPA with tracking solutions and analytics.

Manage and Report.

Drag and drop the data you have to see how effective the campaign is.
You can easily change the metrics, and have complete control of how the budget is being allocated.
You can see CPA and conversion data at the ad level. The platform will calculate your margin and optimize accordingly.

Image via CrunchBase

Will Ashton, Managing Director of Alchemy 2 at Techlightenment said: “Alchemy was the first Facebook advertising platform to market in 2010. We have redesigned the platform for the release of Alchemy 2 to make it even more sophisticated and agile. As Facebook makes updates to its platform, Alchemy 2 is well positioned to be updated as near to real-time as possible, allowing users to make near immediate use of new features and ad formats.”

Techlightenment was bought by Experian in January 2011.

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Customer Engagement for Small Business

April 2, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Telling business owners that they need to have some plans for customer engagement is easy. However, once they have absorbed that tidbit of helpful information, many may be lost as to what customer engagement can actually entail. Most likely, there is nothing that you in particular are selling, that can’t be found somewhere else. So what can the small business owner do to show that their product is the right choice for the consumer?

Be a Customer for a Day

Spend a day emulating the actions that your prospective consumers do.

Call your customer service number.
Go through the motions of purchasing your own product.
Fill out your contact forms.

Make sure that your customer experience matches your outlook and ideas.

Build Communication Options

Not everyone uses Facebook and Twitter believe it or not. Make sure you have traditional methods of communication as well as digital ones. List phone numbers and a physical address for your business, even if it is online based.

Exercise and Act on Your Listening Skills

customer-engagement-cycle — c/o www.retailshakennotstirred.com

It isn’t enough to reply to customers questions or request with generic terms. When prospective consumers ask for discounts or other beneficial options, show them you are listening by enacting them. You will get no better word of mouth advertising then having a consumer who can say “I asked for a discount, and they gave me one!” This doesn’t mean you have to offer that discount to everyone who asks, but you should never outright ignore those request.

Show Your Integrity

Since bad news can travel with light speed on the internet, you may need to go out of your way to show your customers that not only are you expert at what you do, but that you back that professionalism with personal integrity. Show your customers that the people behind the brand care.

Let Your Customers Advertise for You

Anything that you can do to get your consumers to share their product or service experiences with the public will provide you with two benefits. Obviously it will give you the valuable advertising you are seeking, but it will also provide you with media that you can post to help build top-notch links for your site. Don’t expect your customers to do this for no reward though. Their time is valuable too. Try to run contest for the best written or video reviews of your project. Reward the winners appropriately for their time spent talking about your products and services.

Above all it is important that any consumers approaching you for your products or services walk away with the sense that you are a brand they can trust and rely on.

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Bottlenose Surfs the Stream for You

March 20, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

For many with large social networks, reading through social feeds can begin to require the same time and energy as any other full-time job. This social media overload can be frustrating to those who are dependent upon their social networks for industry news, communication with friends and colleagues, or research purposes. How do you separate the videos from the web links? How do you filter through the spam, jokes, and memes to find the information you need.

Bottlenose may be a serious competitor in an industry that is filled with similar tools. Bottlenose allows you to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams by a specific set of criteria.

Bottlenose Custom Stream Filtering

bottlenose-beta-2-single-column — c/o http://www.vexite.com/

Bottlenose allows users to create their own custom streams by:

Media Types – Videos, Web links, Images
Mentions – Messages and their relevance to you and your industry
Popularity – Topics that have been made popular by user aggregation, retweets, and shares

Users can also select actions to add such as apps that will play sounds when the stream updates. Although actions are a bit limited at the moment, Bottlenose relays that they have many more action options coming soon.

Sonar Term Clouds

This may be one element that sets Bottlenose above and beyond its competition. When you use the single column view tab, you can click on or observe any stream topic and the Bottlenose sonar will display a term cloud. You can control your term cloud in a variety of ways.

Changing Time Periods
Changing Term Density
Toggling People, Messages, Hashtags, and Topics

Users can zoom on their term clouds to open it in a feed. Clicking on the users relative to your account can also show you terms that are associated with that person, or even just let you view their feed.

Although Bottlenose is clearly in its relatively early stages, it seems to be growing up to be a very functional and useful stream aggregation tool.

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Reference.me – A Unique Business Social Site

March 15, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Since almost every social site claims to be unique, yet there are several floating around that seem to mirror each other, we have come to understand that often ‘unique social site’ in reality means, social site with a unique name. So when I came across Reference.me, I gave it a shot, but without any genuine expectations for uncommon features.

referenceme_1naslovna — c/o www.domain.me

Trusted Networks

We have other social sites that rely on trusted networks. LinkedIn immediately comes to mind. Currently the largest business social network online, LinkedIn has over 120 million users. Many people use it to connect to business partners and other colleagues, or even employees and customers.

While most of us likely have a LinkedIn account and profile, accept or decline contacts on a daily basis, and even update our profiles when business opportunities change, we usually stop just short of using our LinkedIn profiles outside of a social bookmark on our website or link on our email signatures unless we are in the process of actively building on that network.

How Does Reference.Me Work?

Your trusted network on Reference.me actually comes with a very impressive visual reference of who your trusted network represents. It differs immediately from other social networks in one specific way. Log in is only integrated with Google + currently. However, once signed up, and logged in, you can still easily integrate your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Integration with LinkedIn will also fill out many of the details, work references, education, and skills on the Reference.me details tab.

There is no messaging on Reference.me, no activity streams, groups, or anything else you may be called to join in, or at least not yet. That doesn’t mean that Reference.me doesn’t have a shining quality or two at this stage in its development game.

Reference.me Pros

The site already has a great setup when it comes to a quick list and profile viewing opportunity with a few different filter options. Arranging your network by skills, location, companies, strongest connection, or even alphabetically supplies users with the ability to quickly locate members in their network that may not be so readily available on the top of your network. This layering feature is absolutely unique from any other social business network available on the net currently. It provides a more in-depth look at how the rest of your network functions with their own, giving potentially more elaborate insight if browsing the networks of perspective new hires, new colleagues, or even consumers.

The references system on Reference.me is impressive, as well it should be on a social site with such a URL. Grabbing a reference from their system is as easy as clicking on a name and choosing the big tab that pops up. Under the tab you may also see that the source is already a trusted one for you, or that you may need to request them to join your network so that they too receive trusted status on your Reference.me account.

online_business_networking — c/o www.growyourbusinessnetwork.com

Reference.me Cons

Reference.me cons are as mostly as listed above. There is no messaging on Reference.me, no activity streams, groups, or anything else you may be called to join in, and for this reason Reference.me may not be seen as a full-bodied network that promotes major interactivity.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be what the team at Reference.me is going for. Reference.me seems like a great place to send a prospective client, employee, or consumer when they ask for references, whole references, and nothing but your references.

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