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Innovation Drives Marketing & Strategy
I spent the day at the Marketing Symposium at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. In these tight economic times, many of the companies are spending a little more time in deciding where to allocate resources (both personnel...
Protect Yourself and Your Customers from Credit Card Theft
The article I wrote on credit card theft from online businesses is up over on Practical Ecommerce… Having even one credit card number stolen from your site can tarnish your reputation and impact sales for years. It is important to be aware o...
Why IT is not a cost center [automation]
A profit center is a unit of an organization that generates both revenue and expenses. Its goal is to have revenue exceed [...]ShareThis
Twittering for Business Startup Guide
Yesterday we discussed some issues you should consider when deciding whether or not to twitter for your business. Once you’ve decided to go forward, here’s how to get started: Choose a Name You’ll need a twitter name so that peo...
Free B2B Webinar - Sales Growth in a Down Economy
Sales Engine International is hosting this free webinar on Nov 19th at 2pm EST. Ad Operations Online has more info. ShareThis
To Twitter or Not To Twitter
Twitter has become fairly popular over the last year and is a powerful tool for communicating with your customers. However, as with most business decisions, you should consider some things before you make your decision: Is Your Audience on Twitt...
Why IT isn’t a cost center [intro]
I’m going to take a chance that my old accounting professors aren’t Sazbean readers because in this series of posts, introduced here, I will be violating some Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures. If Dr. Burke or Mrs. Kim are read...
How Not to Comment
Commenting on other sites and blogs can be a great way to extend your network. However, there are some ways of commenting which can actually hurt your reputation and brand. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you would want your comment on your ow...
11 Ways to use Social Media for your Business
Now that you know a little more about what social media are, how do you use them for your business? Listen to what your customers are saying, not just about you, but what their concerns and problems are. Network with other companies and customers...
Why Every Business Should Have a Content Management System (CMS)
You may not be aware of whether you have a content management system (CMS) for your website. However, if you have a system that allows you to change and add content to your website without coding in HTML or some other language (php, asp, etc.), t...
What is Social Media?
I had an interesting conversation recently about social media. It seems that a lot of business owners kind of know what it means. If you ask them about it they’ll say “oh is that like facebook or something?” or “it’...
F isn’t for Fast
My college roommate never knew how he was doing in his mechanical engineering class. He would tell us that asking the TA about his grade was a waste of time; she would only tell him in a heavy Asian accent that ‘He do failr’ which, w...
Free Webinar - Should Businesses Advertise on Blogs?
Some of the key questions this webinar will answer: How do online consumers discover blogs and navigate between them? Who is the key blog audience, and what does this audience look like as a set of consumers? How do blogs factor in to online cons...
Free Webinar - Improve Project Results with Social Collaboration
GroupSwim is offering a free webinar on how to use social collaboration to improve project results on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 1pm EST. Details and registration are here. GroupSwim, which we covered here, is an unique intelligent communit...
11 Tips for Getting Readers for Your Business Blog
You’ve set up a blog for your business and started writing. Now, how do you get readers? Content, Content and more Content - Did I mention content? The only way to attract and keep readers is with great content. Share - You started a busi...
Think Like a Publisher, Not a Marketer
You have to stop thinking like a marketer, an advertiser and a communicator and start thinking like a publisher. Create information your consumers want, and they will share it, this is the idea behind creating the World Wide Rave content. “On the ...
Marketing hasn’t always been social?
It took thousands of years before people who had no useful skills realized they could earn money by wearing nice clothes and designing deceptive brochures. -The Joy of Work by Scott Adams If the corporate world ran as Scott Adams described it to m...
Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents
Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results - a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don...
Business Blogging - What to Write
Once you have your business blog set up, what should you write? We mentioned briefly in the Business Blogging Startup Guide that you should write about anything your customers would want to know, but what is that exactly? Showcase Your Expertise ...
This post will make you more attractive and successful
Now that is a headline. It’s bold. It’s confident. Its not true, but who cares? If you read this far than it did its job, hooking you the reader in through my digital storefront and into my shop to peruse my wares. That is what ma...
Business Blogging Startup Guide
Once you’ve decided to start blogging for your business, all the little steps may become overwhelming, so we’ve created this guide to get you started. Blogging Software/Platform First you need to decide where you’re going to blog...
Using Twitter for Customer Service
In the last year, Twitter has been quite the buzz for online marketers. We use it in different ways. It could be for pimping out events, linking to different blog posts, or just random tweets about our pet peeves, or the status from the latest ...
Email Intelligence Marketing Webinar Series
ExactTarget and Marketing Sherpa are teaming up to offer a series of webinars covering email intelligence marketing and these topics: Top 5 Takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Benchmark Guide Making the Sale: Response and Conversion Build...
Ruby one-liners get answered
The guys over at Rails Envy, a Ruby on Rails enthusiast podcast, have a running joke. Their catch phrase? - ‘Rails can’t scale.’ Yeah, I wasn’t too sure I got the joke either. Then I heard it myself in CIO level discussio...
Creating Leads with Customer-Centric Design
Now that we’ve had an overview of what customer-centric design is, let’s discuss how it can be used to create leads. Providing Valuable Information Having a reason for customers to visit your site is the first step in creating leads. T...
Slowdown in RSS uptake good for advertisers?
Explaining what RSS is to most people is a bit like explaining baseball’s infield fly rule to casual observers. There is futility in even trying because to get it you have to be more than a casual observer. Similarly, if I was to say to a ...
Customer-Centric Design - Your Customers Care, so Should You
We’ve mentioned customer-centric design in several of our recent branding and customer service posts. Using customer-centric design on your site is extremely important to your customers. Why? Because they only care about what is important...
Increasing Pageviews per Visitor
As we’ve been discussing, sometimes businesses get caught up in the need to increase traffic to their website. This “traffic” often equates to the number of visitors to a website or the number of total pageviews. But, as Traffi...
Looking for a Different PPC Network?
LookSmart may be one to consider. They’ve just added enhancements to make it easier for advertisers to target their customers. Ad Operations Online has the details here. ShareThis
Recommended Web Strategy Reading
Want to learn more about Web (or Internet) Strategy? Web Strategist and Forrester Jeremiah Owyang has compiled a reading list. ShareThis
What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
Now that you’ve considered the methodologies for your Internet Business Strategy, assessed the current situation, and created vision and goals, it’s time to figure out all the requirements. Requirements in terms of an Internet strateg...
Your customers want your brand as a friend
Cone, Omnicom Group’s strategy arm, released some data from a recent survey measuring brand trust. This research claims that 93% of the 1092 Americans surveyed thought that companies should have a corporate presence on social media. It went...
Quick Tip - Google Alerts
Are you interested in keeping tabs on something specific out in the web or in the blogosphere? Ever wondered how PR firms manage to contact you right after you posted a nasty comment about their client on your personal blog? Or are you fascinate...
Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
Once you’ve figured out the methodologies for your Internet strategy and analyzed your current situation, the next step is to craft your vision and goals. Here are some questions to consider when creating your vision and goals: What do we ...
The impossibility of speed
Microsoft, founder, organizer and social chair of the Desktop First Foundation, now sees through their own well trenched oppositions and admits that maybe, possibly it makes some sense for some applications to simple live out on the internet. The...
Tom Wilson, CEO of Palace Sports and Entertainment on “The Palace Way”
Tom Wilson, CEO of Palace Sports and Entertainment, spoke about “The Palace Way” at a local networking event last week. Palace Sports & Entertainment operates The Palace, DTE Energy Music Theater, The Detroit Pistons, The Detroit ...
Internet Business Strategy - What is the Current Situation?
Before beginning to strategize, you need to create goals for your business. In order to create goals you need a solid grasp of your current situation on the Internet (your current web presence). To get an idea of your current internet situation t...
More important work to do
Today, Web 2.0 technology just may be passing from the “cool kid’ phase to the business-to-business phase. ~ Jim Kerstetter Webware.com is reporting on the Web 2.0 Expo in New York with coverage of the change in tone and tenor of confe...
How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
In the last post in this series we summarized the steps of a internet strategy plan. In the next series of posts, we’ll go into more detail. Thinking about methodology or what steps you are going to take to come up with your plan is an imp...
The Establishment thinks we are stupid
People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes. ~Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson That was a pullquote from an interview with ERP software company Lawson’s CEO Harry Debes. He was answering the reporter&...
Measuring Business Goals
Page views, visits, uniques, bounce rate, etc. These are all good statistics to help you understand how your website is performing. However, more importantly is measuring how your website is obtaining your business goals. To do this you first n...
How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
One of the main services we provide to clients is creating an Internet Business Strategy. While I’d like to think there is a certain level of expertise to creating a formal Internet strategic plan, I do believe that every business owner can...
Strategies to Increase Your Audience
You have a website and a blog for your business. You have a loyal group of readers, but how do you increase your audience? ProBlogger has some good tips in 7 Strategies to Invite More People Into Your Audience. Even if you don’t have a bl...
Advertising Network Vibrant Launches Related Content Product
Vibrant, a leader in contextual advertising solutions, has launched a related content product. The related content system uses Vibrant’s patented contextual technology to automatically link to related articles, video, images, and audio on t...
Interview with Jonathan Rivers, Executive VP of AdJuggler
AdJuggler (originally covered here) is an ad serving and management system which targets small and medium-sized publishers. Jonathan Rivers, Executive Vice President, took a few minutes to explain how AdJuggler is different from the big ad servin...
Sazbean’s Wordle
Jonathan Feinberg, Senior Software Researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center has made an interesting contribution to the landscape of visual folksonomy: wordle.net. Wordle is an impressive and expressive twist on the ‘tag cloud’...
What is a Brand?
Our recent discussions on branding (here and here) brought up an important topic - what is a brand? Sometimes business owners think a brand is just a logo or a marketing message, but I think it’s much more: Visual - A brand usually has a vi...
5 PR Mistakes You Can Avoid
Many small and medium-sized business owners do their own PR and marketing. Even if you have an agency handling your marketing efforts, Web Analytics World has a good post on Top 5 PR Mistakes. ShareThis
Marketing Tips for Website Content
Writing your own content for your business website? Search Engine Guide has some great tips to keep in mind that will help with your marketing efforts. Remember, if you don’t provide the customer with the information they need and want whe...
ANA cautions against Google, Yahoo deal
The WSJ is reporting on a letter, sent from the Association of National Advertisers to the Department of Justice, cautioning against the proposed deal between Google and Yahoo. The ANA is citing the usual suspects when objections to mergers, acqu...