Archive for the ‘Business Resources’ Category

Remember the old saying, “Location, location, location?” The familiar adage reminds us that a location of an entity has so much to do with that entity, and how it is perceived. If you’re running your own business of any kind, having your location made known on Google Places is a must. Google Places is a tool for business users to publish their business information based on their location for free. Consider it a yellow pages of sorts, only categorized by location instead of alphanumerically.

When you Google something like “Pizza”, Google automatically assumes your zip code based on your ISP, and displays local results for businesses that pertain to your query. These listings are based on their address, and contain the location, as well as a phone number, website, business hours, a short description, as well as up to five categories and a business photo. As a business owner, it’s important that you have your business listed in these results. When you list your business with Google Places, Google uses the address you provide to relevantly display your business with search results, as well as it’s location in Google Maps, free of charge. As a business owner, using Google’s unique method of returning localized search results along with listings on it’s popular map service should definitely be a part of your online marketing plan.

As business owners take their marketing plans to the Internet, a viable component of those plans is the commercial email. This type of advertising works, brings potential consumers to your site and generates sales. But, there are very specific rules that you should follow to avoid being in the spam category.

Enter the CAN-SPAM Act. This law sets requirements for commercial messages and gives your recipients the right to have you stop emailing them. This law is also applicable to business-to-business email, including messages to former customers announcing a new product line.

False or misleading header information is unacceptable. The “From,” “To,” “Reply-To” and routing information must be real and identify you or your business as the initiator.

Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately identify the content of the message.

Tell recipients where you are. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This could be a street address, a USPS post office box or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency.

An opt-out feature is required. Recipients must be able to stop receiving your emails. This is called an opt-out. Design the opt-out so it can be easily located with a clear explanation. Usually this a return e-mail address at the bottom of your message.

Honor opt-out requests promptly. You must process opt-out requests within 10 business days and any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process these requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial e-mail.

Selling or transferring opt-out requests is illegal. Once people have told you they don’t want your e-mails any longer, you may not sell or transfer this information.

Pay attention to what others are doing for you. Even if you hire a company to manage your e-mail marketing, you are still responsible for any mistakes or non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Penalties for violating these rules can be very stiff–up to $16,000 per violation for both you and the company that managed your commercial e-mail.

Writing is hard. There’s no doubt about it. It’s also lonely and isolating. Try staring a blank page, and then put some words on it. Your words. Not someone else’s words. If you take the short cut and copy someone else’s words, that’s plagiarism.

Internet plagiarism has become a very serious topic as the amount of information available to anyone anywhere at anytime increases each day. And so plagiarism can be very tempting, given the ease of the Internet.

Many people assume that because some words on the web don’t have a visible copyright, those words are up for grabs. As we learned in the previous YSM blog on copyright laws, that is not necessarily true. All material on the Internet is copyrighted, and therefore owned by someone. Violating that copyright is plagiarism and plagiarism is stealing.

Academics and students have long struggled with plagiarism, how to find it and how to discipline a student when that student plagiarizes. This article in the New York Times does a decent job of discussing academic plagiarism. The comments section is also a good read, as educators challenge students’ ignorance of what Internet plagiarism really is.

When you do write an article, a blog or a paper, you can use someone else’s words, just as long at that information is cited and attributed to the original author. Attribution can also include posting links to your source material as a way to identify the author. However, if you want to use the words from a private blog, it’s best to ask permission first and avoid any misunderstandings.

For more information about plagiarism, what it is and how not to do it, go to plagiarismtoday.com. Then settle in and enjoy using your own words to create your own story.

Here are some new interesting facts about Twitter from Mashable and Twitter, including how they’re getting 300k new users daily, and how they’re working to make Twitter more prolific and easier to use, as well as well as expanding on the mobile platform.

Twitter Surpasses 145 Million Registered Users. (Mashable)

The Evolving Ecosystem. (Twitter)

via Mashable, and Twitter.

Let’s face it; if you’re online, and live in today’s world, you’ve heard of, and probably use YouTube. Since Feb. 2005 when it was founded, YouTube has grown by leaps and bounds, adding new features, and more options. If you have an Apple iPhone or an Android-powered smartphone, YouTube can be found in the palm of your hand, 24/7. Aside from being the world’s largest online repository of video, businesses use YouTube to promote their products, run advertising campaigns and post commercials as well.

YouTube self proclaims that “people are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.” To think that your business cannot benefit from the grossly large demographic that YouTube has to offer  is absurd, and a mistake many businesses are making today. YouTube in many ways is saturating the population like color television did when it first came out.

For the business, it is essential that even if you don’t post videos, or don’t post videos regularly, that your business has a YouTube presence. As with any booming social media tool, it has an positive impact on your target demographic simply by having a presence.

Should you want to update and use the site for promotional purposes, make your updates meaningful. In a world where the next video out of billions to be viewed, what’s going to make yours stand out to your audience? Don’t forget to market your YouTube content outside of just YouTube. Herein lies the greatest potential for your business. Informational videos, promotions, and commercials that are uploaded by your company shouldn’t just sit on YouTube waiting for the random viewer. Include your videos in e-blasts, post the videos to your company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Doing so will help your channels viewers/subscribers to increase, and will help word about what your business has to offer move quicker in your market.

If you’re a business owner, or you simply work for a business, chances are you use email marketing to get things done almost daily. But what’s to ensure that your emails to clients/subscribers are perused and read, rather than simply deleted without even opening. Is your e-blast a benefit to the receiver, or a nuisance?

Make it Visual

Put some pictures in your email. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, and it certainly shouldn’t cost you any more. It can be as simple as a graph, or some colored diagrams to illustrate what the email is about. Consider a colored header or a footer to make things cleaner and more appealing to the eye. Lines, tables, and simple fonts can also help increase the readability of your email.

Make it Relevant

As with a newspaper, an article in a magazine, or even a Twitter account, the information presented must be relevant enough to the reader for them to continue reading. Relevance takes on a greater importance in the digital world where it is ten times easier to just click onto the next piece of information when one becomes disinterested. Information in your companies e-blast must be interesting enough for recipients to continue reading. Don’t include information that is redundant, or not relevant. Don’t send out an entire e-blast for a few lines of something new. Make your emails to-the-point, while containing relevant and useful information surrounding your topic. Links can and should be used, but they should not generate an entire newsletter.

Consider Your Audience

An e-blast should never go out to a particular audience based just on assuming that they want the information you have to present because they asked for other information about your company or its services. Always allow quick, easy, and visible opt-in and opt-out procedures. If a recipient is expecting an e-blast from your company say, monthly, and on a particular subject, they’ll be happy to receive it and eager to show it to their colleagues in the same field.

Consider Your Technology

Never send e-blasts from your personal email account. Always rely on your e-marketing people to handle your e-blast’s delivery. Sending e-blasts from your personal account looks very unprofessional and can also lead to your account being suspended.Email looks and feels more professional when sent from dedicated email-list software, which will in turn lead to greater readership, and growth of your subscribers.

Email is a powerful tool in the business world to deliver business-related content to your clients.  By following a few simply guidelines and letting the right people handle your email, you can successfully e-market your business. Use a company like Wilson Monnig Creative to handle your email and online marketing needs.

Google mail? Since it’s unveiling as an invite-only service on April 1, 2004, Gmail has done nothing but grow, accelerate, and succeed when it comes to webmail. A free service to anyone who signs up for it, Gmail has become the industry leader in searchable, organizable, easy-to-use email.  Let’s take a look at Gmail’s main features.

1. Threaded emails

Remember when you used to email someone back in, say, 1999? You’d send them a message, they would reply and so on, until your inbox was chock full of individual messages. Sure, they were all quoted in each message so you could keep track, but your inbox was a mess and impossible to keep tabs on. Enter Gmail. When someone replies to your email in Gmail, it takes a nice little slot in your inbox, along with all the other messages in that conversation.

2. Google Search for Email

Remember when Google began to dominate the online search scene? You could search images, documents, and of course, the internet. But until Gmail, searchable email was sketchy and hard to use at best. Gmail allows you to search your email, using that same technology that Google used for their famous search engine. Just like the search engine, you can use all the boolean search terms as well as include/exclude terms.

3. Labels

Gmail allows users to set up labels for different messages, much like folders in Outlook or other email programs. Users can color-code the labels for different items, and apply filters to incoming messages to flag them with a particular label. Labels are particularly useful when using Gmail for more than one email account, and for people receiving massive amounts of email daily. They streamline the email organization process, and when combined with threaded conversations make for a much more organized email inbox.

4. Filters

As already mentioned, filters can be set up to automatically categorize emails. Once a filter is set up, when incoming messages apply to a given filter, the filter will then categorize according to a particular label, or mark the message as read, etc. Filters keep the inbox from becoming one big cluttered mess. They can even delete messages upon arrival if the messages meet given criteria.

Gmail is the all-in-one email solution. It can be set up to check/send email from multiple accounts, and it can also be used via POP access to an email client like Microsoft Outlook.

Copyright law has become more of an issue with the universality of the Internet. Designed to protect the originators of intellectual property, the laws can be restrictive. The Creative Commons license for copyrighted material now offers flexibility for both the originator and the potential user. A non-profit organization founded in 2001 with support from the Center for the Public Domain, Creative Commons offers free licenses designed to bridge the gap between a standard copyright and the public domain.

What if you want to share what you created, but still want to control how your material is used? That’s where a Creative Commons license comes in. This type of protection isn’t a substitute for a copyright, but does allow you to determine use restrictions. Instead of “all rights reserved” it’s “some rights reserved.”

For instance, you can allow your work to be shared, copied and distributed, but under your terms. These licenses include:

• Attribution. With this license, you let others distribute, remix, tweak and build on your work as long as they credit you as the original creator. Attribution Share Alike uses attribution as a basis, but user must credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. Both licenses allow commercial use.
• The Attribution Non-Commercial license allows others to remix, change and build on your work for non-commercial purposes, but again that new work must acknowledge you. The user doesn’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
• Attribution No Derivatives. With this license you allow the user to re-distribute material for commercial and non-commercial use. However, the material may not be changed and must be used as a whole, and credited to you.
• If you choose a Creative Commons license, there are other sub-category licenses available. You have the freedom to decide how generous you wish to be and still get your work out there for recognition.

In addition to individuals, many large companies have a Creative Commons license of some form for selected sharing.  Google allows CC-search capabilities and allows users to CC license their content on Picasa, Google Knol and documentation at Google Code. Flickr also incorporates CC licensing options while the band Nine Inch Nails used CC to release Grammy nominated Ghosts I-IV as an Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license. The band offered tiered purchases and eventually landed the #1 paid MP3 Amazon download in 2008.

CC licensing has helped to dissuade online illegal and inappropriate use of creative material, but the best avenue is to obtain a copyright from the United States Copyright Office. The standard copyright will help much more in case legal issues arise.

Photo viewing/sharing site Flickr (by Yahoo) got a major update this week; changing and implementing several new features. They added a dark preview mode to dim everything from the background of a picture, as well as faster easier to use controls for photo navigation. According to the site’s blog, they’ve “made it easier to find when a photo was taken, it’s location, camera/exif info and your name in one location to the right of the image.” They have an expanded focus on the story, (who, what, where, etc) of your photos, in an effort to increase the social aspect behind image-sharing as well.

Check out the blog straight from Flickr, and don’t forget to tell us what you think of the new design.

If you’re visiting YourSocialMedia.com, chances are you are already aware of the growing impact that Social Media can have on your business, and its importance as your business grows. Social Media can be a great tool to use when promoting and marketing your business, but it can also be used to keep your finger on the pulse of your business and its influence on your target market, and online in general. Social media monitoring can be used to generate target markets, gather details about how your business is perceived online, and it can help you make important business decisions about where to take your business in the ever-changing online world.

Take a look at this article from Mashable.com about how to successfully monitor social media from a business perspective.

10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring.