Five Business Uses For Social Media

Are you using social networking sites to full potential for your business? How many of these 5 different applications do you currently take advantage of?

1) To get breaking industry news. Since social media is real-time, you can often get advance notice or inside information about events, announcements, regulations, innovations, and more. Staying in touch with a community of customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, consultants, regulators, and others can help keep you on the leading edge in your industry. Note: the quality of what you can learn will depend on the quality of people you follow and interact with.

2) To research your competitors. To observe what competitors are doing, what they are saying, what they are offering, how they may be expanding, and what consumers think of them.

3) To research your prospects. To observe what consumers are saying to each other, what they are wishing for, where there might be opportunities for new products or services, where needs aren't being met in the marketplace. (Killer bonus: learn exact words and phrases to use in keyword targeting for your advertising and website!)

4) To connect with prospects. Be careful how you approach this. Most people on social media networks are there to be social, and may lash out at people who are obviously trying to sell them something. Answer? Leave the sales pitch at the door. If you offer good advice consistently, people will learn to trust you and will come to you when they need to buy what you sell. Just link to your website and carry on.

5) To connect with other businesses. You can promote your products or services by interacting with your retailers and resellers. Or you can put yourself in front of thousands of new consumers by connecting with complimentary businesses. Or you can help promote your industry by working with your competitors. (For example, if you have a local business (landscaping, painting, computer installation, hair salon, clothing store, etc.), you can chat and share tips with identical businesses and consumers in other cities without risk. This makes you both look great.)

Give some thought to this list, as it may help add depth or scope to your social media activities, or it may help you focus on the primary reason that you're on there. Remember, the benefits of using social media will be different for a dentist, car dealer, musician, manufacturer, retailer, etc. And remember to be social before anything else!

Six Blog Credibility Tips

1) Use proper grammar and spelling. Sure, there's a lot of bad grammar on the web, and that's to be expected of the average uneducated schmuck. But if you are passing yourself off as a writer you have no excuse for bad writing. At least check your spelling.

2) Publish original content. Prove you are an authority on your subject. A good way to kill your own credibility is to offer nothing but regurgitated material, like summaries and links to other blogs, articles, and news. If you don't have, at the very minimum, an extremely unique point of view about something, why are you blogging anyway?

3) Provide evidence and supporting material for what you are saying. You can gain credibility by backing up your thoughts with stories, studies, examples, references, quotes, and other evidence. Just remember point #2, and don't create posts with nothing but stolen material.

4) Blog only when you have something worth saying, not simply because "it's time to", or someone said you should. I blog about once or twice a month. Others blog several times a day. Don't be influenced by what others say or do. Unless you blog for an audience that's illiterate, quality rather than quantity will sustain your blog over the long term.

5) Don’t ramble. Edit large posts into smaller ones if possible. Remember, there are blogs and then there are full-blown news, opinion, and editorial pieces. People are busy. Blogs should be concise, on-topic, and easy to read.

6) In terms of the physical layout of a blog, don't make advertisements the focus. First, that's a violation of most terms of service, and second, it will be obvious you are just making stuff up to blog about in hopes of making money from the ads. Having ads on a blog is fine, but if your content is nonsense, no one will ever come there to click the ads anyway.

Six Basic Keyword Reminders

Between doing market research, drafting mock-ups, and repeatedly asking clients to send you information, web designers can have much to do when designing a website. Which means sometimes even the most basic SEO elements get lost in the shuffle.

Remember, a site that can't be found in a search is useless, regardless of how nice it looks. It's always good to go back and double-check your keyword implementation towards the end of a site design.

1) Don't always take your client's advice on the best keywords for their industry or market. Take their suggestions, but do your own keyword research, because consumers often use different words than people within the business realize or expect.

2) Don't assume your client's competitor's sites are designed well. Their keywords/phrases may or may not be well chosen, so don't just start copying them in an effort to compete. Be careful looking at competitor info.

3) Don't simply choose keywords/phrases for your client's site that are hot in their industry, choose accurate ones that describe what they really do. The whole point of keyword selection (for legitimate business websites) is to get the correct visitors to the site. Traffic that isn't looking for what your client really sells is useless traffic, and will be a waste of their time to deal with.

4) Page titles such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber" are useless to both visitors and search engines.

5) Page descriptions such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber", or even "Joe's Lumber is your #1 source of lumber" are a waste of an important search engine tagline.

6) Use only one or two H1 headlines containing keywords, not dozens of them. In theory you could put the entire contents of a page inside one big H1 tag, but then search engines would see the whole thing as equally (un)important. Focus search engines toward several specific, logical, important elements that contain targeted keywords.

Six Persistent Web Design Myths

Over the last few days I've been browsing some other web design sites and chatting with people. Here's a sample of some of the untrue, yet surprisingly persistent, beliefs still shared by many web designers:

1) An older website will rank higher in searches than a newer one
2) A site with many pages will rank higher than a site with few
3) Search engines have difficulty reading inside tables
4) You can tell a search engine how often to visit a site
5) It is important to submit sites to search engines
6) Code that is "compliant" with "standards" makes some kind of difference

There are other myths still circulating in the web design industry as well, some based on things that used to be true a long time ago, and some with no foundation in reality. This short list seemed like the most common.

It's hard to know if colleges are teaching this stuff by mistake, or if some bad apples in the industry are (still) intentionally trying to mislead new designers. Or perhaps people who are teaching themselves are being misinformed by what they see on poor quality sites and forums.

In the back of my mind, I'm inching closer to creating some kind of training course... although having confused competitors is fantastic. What to do?

Twitter Unveils User Photo Galleries

Twitter is now rolling out a photo hosting feature, with a preview of a user's images on their profile page and a link to a gallery of all their pictures.
You can access anyone's photo gallery either by clicking the link, or by adding "/media/grid" after their profile page address.

The profile shows 4 previews... https://twitter.com/#!/cnn

from the gallery page... https://twitter.com/#!/cnn/media/grid


This is similar to what Facebook did long ago, showing a row of pictures at the top of user profiles. While Twitter says there's no way to control it, it seems the preview contains the 4 most recent pictures.

Now we'll see if people get as creative with the Twitter photo previews as they did with the Facebook photo previews.

One Great Security Advantage
Since Twitter allows you to upload a photo as part of any standard tweet, it eliminates the need to give third-party applications (twitpic, yfrog, img.ly, etc.) any access to your account. This is really fantastic because it eliminates any possibility of password theft or spamming your timeline.

Six Basic Web Design Reminders

Here's a summary of some web design reminders that all webmasters should know, yet sometimes get overlooked in all the haste and details of building a website.

1) Design sites so they look and work properly on all browsers.

2) Design sites so they look and work properly at any resolution.

3) Be sure your sites still function and look right if a css call fails.

4) Be sure your sites still work when security-conscious users disable Java, Flash, scripting, etc. in their browsers.

5) Be sure your sites still look and work right if embedded objects fail (or are blocked per point #4 above). Don’t rely too heavily on plug-ins and widgets. Use trinkets sparingly for highlights, not the majority of basic content.

6) Keep your clients focused on their customers, not themselves. Gently remind them that the website isn't being built for their own amusement or to impress their buddies or competitors, but for their customers, future prospects, the public, or whatever the case really is.

Top-Ranking Success: Graywood Sporting

This top-10 ranking web design is another site update. The company is a manufacturer's agent in Canada for sporting goods. (In other words, if you owned a sporting goods store and wanted to sell Winchester ammunition or SOG knives, you'd go through Graywood Sporting.)

The original website used detrimental text graphics in place of real text, the small amount of real text was Times Roman, every page was offset to the far left for no reason, everything was one shade of green upon green, and nothing was optimized for search engines to make any sense of.

Updates included centering pages, adding a custom background image, editing and formatting all the text, adding a plain text footer to every page, switching to plain text navigation links, SEO of every element from page titles to images, and updating the manufacturer, distributor, and sales contacts.

The redesign makes it cleaner, more colorful, and easier to read for visitors. And of course the real benefit to the client is a top-ranking website.

Top-Ranking Success: Heritage Cattle Company

This is one of our very rare web design make-overs; we don't normally do "SEO work" on existing sites, since it tends to be more of a hassle than just building a site correctly from scratch. You have to go through someone else's code and remove stuff, add stuff, and edit almost everything, which ends up being twice as much work. In this case I knew the owners and did them a big favor.

The result? We turned a site that literally couldn't be found into a top-ranking winner.

The existing site had been up for a few years, yet we spent a hilarious half an hour trying to FORCE it to appear in search results and failed! We tried the name of the company, the town, the owner's names, and all those things combined and in long-string quotes, and still the site wouldn't come up on Bing, Yahoo, or Google.

It seemed the site either wasn't indexed or had possibly been banned (although that would be unlikely across all three of the big search engines). But we did find it indexed in all of them. It was just such poor web design that search engines didn't see anything of value and didn't know how to categorize it.

The first change was a new header on every page, with the company name, address, and phone number in plain text. Next was editing the copy to immediately tell visitors and search engines "We are a cattle farm that sells natural beef", which could have been implied from the original site but wasn't obvious. Then a pile of photos were added, since there were few. After that, tweaking all page elements for clarity.

The intention was to get it ranking well for "natural beef" in the Peterborough and Keene regions of Ontario. But now it actually ranks in the top 5 for "natural beef Ontario", which is substantial. It's certainly a long way from spending half an hour unable to find a site you know exists.

Top-Ranking Success: Discovery Child Care

This is a fun and bright website using the client's selection of green and yellow to match their print material. There are many photos throughout the site, featuring parents and children at the day care.

The target audience is parents seeking child care in Peterborough, Ontario, so there are useful links and documents for them on the website. The parent handbook is one of several forms available to view or download, and links to regulatory and industry groups are prominent on the home page.

Top-10 ranking for this site was achieved by designing the site in the simplest possible way. Four pages with clean and obvious navigation; no ads, scripts, or embedded content; no css or other off-page or off-site calls. Nothing that doesn't directly describe the child care center. All content runs straight out of the root directory. Search engines and visitors have instant access to all content on the website within two clicks from anywhere.

Top-Ranking Success: Robin Walton

Another rewarding top-10 website we designed is RobinWalton.ca, for a freelance illustrator in Ontario Canada. Robin is a true freehand artist, using chalk and pencil. The world is overflowing with computer graphic designers, so it was a treat being able to build a top-ranking website for a traditional artist.

The site is simple, basically a bio of the artist and some of her sample illustrations and drawings.

In terms of the top-10 website ranking, there weren't a lot of elements to add to the site that would have been of value to visitors, so we merely optimized what we had. In her effort to gain new book publishing clients, it was important that we kept the site simple and focused: freehand illustrations by a freelance artist. Paying attention to the basics was all it took. (This site has a broader audience than our typical local sites, being the entire province of Ontario, yet the ranking work remained much the same.)

Top-Ranking Success: Cassel Entertainment

Cassel Entertainment is another of our top-10 ranking local websites, in the category of wedding DJs in the Peterborough, Ontario region.

This is a typical DJ service, providing music for indoor and outdoor events. Dan Cassel, owner and disc jockey, primarily provides music for wedding dinners, receptions, and dances. But he also does graduation dances, office parties, reunions, or any other type of get-together.

Dan wanted the site to be classy, and made a specific request for a vintage '57 Chevy. After several designs, the result was a prominent custom black & white graphic at the top left of each page. He was pleased with the addition of a couple dancing beside the car. His logo was also custom made, as were the spinning music notes in the navigation links.

In terms of ranking, other local DJ sites aren't built very well (many are "home-made"), so getting him ranked in the top-10 didn't require any special effort, other than sticking to the basics of proper web design. During research it was found that DJ websites rarely have backlinks, other than directory listings. DJs tend to serve one-shot clients who don't have their own websites. That could be something to consider in the future if necessary. In the meantime it's already a top-ranking site with good traffic.

Top-Ranking Success: Inside Security

This is an industry-specific site designed for security guards. The province of Ontario Canada has new training and testing requirements for all guards, private investigators, and bouncers, and everyone needs to learn what it's all about, both current employees and new applicants.

The site was designed to provide straightforward facts about the new training course and test, and has tons of specific links to important information (mostly government acts and regulations). The layout is simple, using solid neutral colors for extended reading without eye strain.

There's an Ontario security industry overview, specific security course and test information, and a page explaining private security work for new guards.

This site achieved top-10 ranking because of a huge amount of detailed 100% original information, a very targeted audience, and focused SEO elements. It's getting a ton of traffic. A top-ranking success.

One Major Prediction For 2011

I believe there will be one major sweeping change in 2011 that will drastically affect computers, similar to the disappearance of the floppy drive.

... the disappearance of hard disk drives with moving parts.

Already there are larger and larger USB thumb drives (also called jump drives, flash drives, USB keys, and memory sticks) available, yet they are very expensive. For instance, Tiger sells a 256GB model for $1000 (256GB Kensington flash drive).

Many netbooks have already eliminated hard drives, using flash memory similar to that of thumb drives. Prices will drop significantly in 2011 as more and more of this type of memory is manufactured and it becomes the new standard for more devices like cell phones, laptops, and external drives. It is smaller, faster, noiseless, shock resistant, not prone to wearing out, uses little power, and doesn't get hot. This type of memory will eventually replace today's hard disk drives, and I think 2011 will be the year it begins to be shipped in place of standard spinning drives.

We'll see how much a 256GB thumb drive costs in December of 2011.

P.S. This leads to other questions too, like whether today's HDD manufacturers will shift succesfully into this new media or be left in the dust of the current leaders in flash memory. And whether recordable DVDs will continue to have any purpose at all.

Other Solid State Drives:
- 480GB internal drive, PCIe mounted - $1637.99
- 256GB external flash drive - $749.99