Archive for December 2010
Lawrence Kansas Web Design: The Great YouTube Experiment
As we enter 2011, I am putting together a little social media experiment. You will have to watch the video to see just what I am doing.
For more proof, here are screen shots taken 12/31/2010 at 6:51 pm.
From Google:
From YouTube:
I am a bit under the weather today thanks to my neighbor (I think you can hear him actually getting sick at one point; you can see me turn to the right at the very end if you pay attention) and so I am going to keep this post uber brief.
Long story short, video is going to blow up marketing for businesses on a couple of different levels and this post is just the start of a number of posts I hope to put up going through 2011. I am using the term Lawrence Kansas Web Design, but this is something that will be changing given Google’s new push to turn towards local search. The point though remains the same, and that is video can play an important (and relatively cheap) role in ending your worries about finding new customers. That’s the plain and simple of it.
Now, I also want to talk about the video itself about. I once had a professor in college who lived by the adage “Some research is better than no research,” and what one should keep in mind here is that although the lighting sucks, the chroma key doesn’t look great and the talent is obviously not that chipper, IT BEATS THE NOTHING THERE IS OUT THERE. If the fact that your 12 year old son, daughter, niece or nephew can record a decent clip of you talking about your business and put it online, and your competition doesn’t have such friendly and helpful family, you will start getting more traffic and customers because of it. Simple, and as cheap, as that.
In upcoming videos I will start talking about what you can talk about on these short videos to help inform your potential customers. We will also talk about the added bonus of using videos to help your business not only through organic search, but the incredibly important and still unrealized local search options.
I am off to bed! Happy New Years, and we’ll see you next year (yuk, yuk).
2011 Is All About Facebook Marketing
I wanted to drop a quick line off before I head to Colorado for the weekend. We are taking our annual ski trip and it should be a great time. The forecast is calling for fresh snow the entire time we are there, so I felt like posting something before I left and then won’t feel like a bum 
I listened to a webinar led by Ed Dale and Dan Raine, and they were talking about how important Facebook is going to be in the upcoming year. Facebook has been in the news a little bit lately, given that Mark Zuckerberg was Time’s Man of the year for 2010, Facebook announced it expects to see $2 billion in advertising revenue, and that 81% of Gene Y-ers use Facebook DAILY.
The real reason they are gung ho on Facebook for 2011 is that quite simply, that’s where the people are. At last count Facebook has 567 million users, and half of them login daily. The other reason that they are so keen with Facebook is that anyone who uses the site has to accept friends requests or like something before they can interact with it. Why do people like Facebook? There’s no spam.
I could go on for quite a while about how Facebook makes business easier for everyone involved, but the real key is what to do to start a Facebook page for your business. If you are the owner, it helps to have your own personal profile as well to initially send out page recommendations to. You can include family and employees, but do make a point to say you’d appreciate their helping you out by accepting and passing it along to their friends.
The real key to growing your number is to have some marketing material that you can 1) utilize and pass along on the site and 2) tell your in store traffic that you have a page and that you’d like to see them check it out. A great way to build likes is to have a small discount or offer that first time visitors who “like” your page can print out for some small extra or goodie. It’s not much, but it’s definitely something that they will tell other’s about.
Since I run my own marketing business, the upcoming DHC fan page for Lawrence Kansas and Kansas City Web Design will have a special where people who like the page get a free hour’s worth of consulting on their social media. There are plenty of ways you can differentiate your self from your competition, but time is running out to be the “hip” kid in your field.
And with that, I’m off to hit the slopes! Happy Holidays!