Speaking at the UO American Marketing Association

I spoke last night at the UOAMA which is a student run marketing organization that aims to connect students with professional marketers and offer insight into the marketing profession through the avenues of solid leadership, strong communication, real-world marketing experience, and charitable involvement.

I spoke on the topic of online marketing and social media marketing. Unfortunately my wife Ishi couldn't be there.

It was an interesting group of young students, and an interesting group.

Here is the outline I used for my speech:

Your Website

• Make an outline for your site
• Keep your goals simple in everything you do
• Be involved with planning with your designer
• Have control, ask for a content management system (CMS)
• Understand and have control over your META tags
• Pay for good Internet hosting
• Buy your own domain name
• Use a website traffic / analytics package
• Name your pages and folders using keyword rich names
• Bulleted and ordered lists
• Simple, readable content that gets to the point
• Keep design readable, appropriate for audience and accessible across all platforms, browsers.
  

Market Analysis

• Maintain a keyword list
• Identify top keywords
• Use Google to define your market arena
• Asses your competitions strengths & weakness
• Identify your allies and partners
• Track top ranking using spreadsheet
• Use Google Alerts for new additions
• Monitor market on a schedule
  

Link Management

• Maintain a keyword list
• Match keywords with top link targets on your site
• Keep keyword and link list fresh
• Track your outbound link traffic
• Exchange valuable links
• Research sites to get links placed
• Use keywords inbound and outbound links
• Quality not quantity
  

Content

• Content Creation
• Write fresh content on a regular basis
• Use your keyword list to enrich content
• Use your link list to link your content to site
• Change your site copy from time to time
• Write for users but consider search engines
• Universal Search
• Use Google's navigation as reference.
• Create content in multiple format
• Syndicate to multiple locations
  

Social Media Marketing

• Listening to the Conversation
• Blog Monitoring
• Question and Answer Monitoring
• Forum Monitoring
• Video Monitoring
• Image Monitoring
• Audio Monitoring
• Search Engine Monitoring
• Reputation Monitoring
• Listen to what people are saying
• Respond quickly to negative feedback.
• Content Creation
• Blog
• Articles
• Videos
• Image
• Audio & Podcasts
• Slideshows / Screencasts
• Wikis
• Activity Streaming
• Blog Syndication
• Social Bookmarking
• Audio Syndication
• Video Syndication
• Image Syndication
• Press Syndication
• Micro Blogging
• Social Networking
• Maintain a profile on top social networks
• Make friends
• Join Groups
• Keep it Active
  

Conclusion

• Have a plan
• Maintain a keyword focus
• Maintain a link focus
• Track the market
• Assess your performance
• Adjust your strategy often
• Schedule
• Dedicate time every week
• Even if its one hour
• Build momentum and rhythm
  

You can view a presentation at: http://www.originalwebsolutions.com/online_marketing/index.html

Small Business Online Operations Plan

I have been working with my brother-in-law to really escalate the operations of his small business Thinwrench, which offers custom wrench and tool manufacturing. He has had the business since the 1990's and has had the site since I believe 2001.

The site gets a fair amount of traffic and it generates a small trickle of orders for him though out the year, but nothing really significant. It is impressive though considering he does next to nothing to maintain or evolve the site, it's content, and online presence.

So we are always trying to get together and breathe some life into it. He is a real smart guy who has almost zero time to put into his business outside his day job. This is definitely a common problem for aspiring entrepreneurs.

So I have launched a new BETA version of his small business web site using the same look, but hoping to give him a new set of content management (CMS) tools to assist him in making his site maintenance and syndication easier.

My goal with the new small business online operations plan is to give a simple framework to:

• Maintain his simple, easy to use small business web site.
• Plan and implement a traditional and online marketing campaign for his small business.
• Plan and implement a social media marketing campaign for his small business.
  

So I put together a basic outline that lays out the plan for:

• Writing home page, about us, and contact us content for use on his web site as well as throughout his online marketing and social media marketing efforts.
• Develop a list of initial products he will offer through his small business web site.
• Develop a list of initial services his business will offer through his small business web site.
• Establish a basic keyword marketing strategy to use as a framework when marketing his site and writing content.
  

Once his site is up with the new content we will start laying out:

• Marketing Plan Outline
• Online Marketing Plan Outline
• Social Media Marketing Plan Outline
• Advertising Plan Outline
  

We will keep each plan and strategy simple and realistic and easy to implement. My goal is for him to be successful and not get overwhelmed with strategy and execution and never get anywhere.

He probably has 4-8 hours a week maximum to spend on his web site maintenance, content creation, marketing, advertising, and overall online presence. That isn't much.

He has to execute in the 1st round so he has a deep understanding of how the site maintenance, marketing, social media marketing and advertising process works before he can delegate to anyone else. This is critical as the owner of a small business.

So keeping it simple and obtainable, and employing an agile process for executing, evaluating and planning for changes every week is crucial.

I will keep posting on his progress, challenges and successes.

Participate in Question and Answer Sites to Market Yourself

I go through spurts where I monitor and participate on Question and Answer web sites. Usually I monitor Yahoo Answers & LinkedIn Answers via RSS feeds.

I gather a lot of information and knowledge this way and keep organized using tags in Google Reader and Google Notebook.

I also participate and give my answer or feedback on questions from time to time.

I haven't been doing this for a couple months now, but I did actively participate for months at a time.

I recently got the following email off LinkedIn:

For a while now, I've been digging around for answers to a question that no one seems to be able to answer. Your name keeps coming up in my searches. If you don't mind, I would like to tap your brain.

How would you project your monthly costs in terms of storage and bandwidth if you didn't know

how much traffic to expect on your startup photo/video sharing site?

This is just one notable connection I've made via social networks, thought it showed the value of a continued presence for your business on Questions and Answer web sites.

Bad Debt in America and How Bad it Really Is

I was just watching Bill Maher and was listening to their discussion on Kevin Phillips book called Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, and Cornel West said something that summed up how sad things really are:

We can see how sad this really is.
If we really want to tell the truth in a powerful way.
We have corporate greed running a muck.
We don't have enough jobs with a living wage for fellow citizens.
Unavailable health care and child care for millions.
Disgraceful school systems.
Failing infrastructure.
Then you have a political sphere where you can't have a critical debate or dialogue about these issues.
Then we have imperial occupation in Iraq.
That is the makings the collapse of an empire.

Cornel West said several things that were extremely well spoken and enlightening, but this statement really summed up my concerns at the moment during this election.

Fast Track to Widgets, Facebook, and OpenSocial Apps

I have been deploying large amounts of widgets, Facebook and OpenSocial applications to various social networks and platforms lately.

Even though I am a programmer I have been able to do much of my heavy lifting using tools that are already available to me without any programming at all.

I use a combination of Youtube, Ning, Flickr and other social media content platforms. I then syndicate using their native tools and build widgets using Widgetbox. Once I have my widgets deployed on Widgetbox I can then easily deploy to Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, IGoogle, Orkut and any other platform that embraces OpenSocial.

I am putting together a series of slides based upon this process for others to use. Look for another post regarding this process.

50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth

My wife and I just finished launching a new site for a client called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It is the revised, updated edition of a book originally released in the 1990's and was New York Times bestseller.

We have been working hard for 3 months to design, develop and launch the site to support he book's release by Earth Day.

It is a significant site for us. It is our first major release on the Original Web Solutions Version 4.0 Architecture and if I must say is a really nice site.

We are really proud of the design and architecture. It uses the OWS Network build methodology deployed on the Mosso Hosting Cloud to support the amount of traffic. In the first 12 hours we have had 500 people.

Also this site is exciting because of its simple approach to enlightening the world about little things they can do to save the world!

Make sure and check it out. www.50simplethings.com.

Yet Another Google API, this Time for Visualizations

The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations.

The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community.

You can embed visualizations directly into your website and display attractive data on your website by choosing from visualizations created by the developer community.

The Google Visualization API provides simple Gadget extensions to its API to create visualization Gadgets. Publish these here or in the Gadget directory. Become an active participant in the developer community; reuse and share visualizations with others.

Create extensions to Google products: Write visualization applications for Google products such as Google Docs. With a growing list of products that support Gadgets, syndicate your app.

You can use many data sources with one API. A visualization apps created using the API are able to access any compliant data source with no required code changes to your application. Developers can start building apps immediately using Google Spreadsheets as a supported data source.

Here are a few examples of the visualizations that are created in the Google Visualization API Gadget Gallery:

Google Releases and AJAX Language API

Google added another interesting piece to its API stack. Now with the Google AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript.

The language API is designed to be used to translate and detect languages on the fly when off line translations are not available.

It is a nice addition to the Google Family of API's and great for internationalization of web applications.

New Workstation Setup

I just got a new levovo Laptop. It was presetup with Windows XP.

It took me 30 minutes flat to setup completely for my needs.

1. Installed my web development environment.
2. Installed my database development environment.
3. Installed Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.
4. Installed Firefox.
   

Done, everything else I do is web-based. All my email, docs, files, everything is either on Google, Amazon Web Services or some other Web Service.

Almost there in accomplishing my goal in living online.

Man I love it.

LinkedIn Offers Company Profiles

LinkedIn just announced they are offering that, "Now Companies too have profiles on LinkedIn".

I have always used LinkedIn as a business facing presence for myself. It has linkages for all my employees?

Now, you'll be able to see over 160,000 profiles of companies on LinkedIn, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to non-profit organizations as well as LinkedIn's own Company Profile page.

Company Profiles on LinkedIn is an overview of a company's industry data in combination with LinkedIn data along certain key metrics.

Seems like a logical step to me.

What can it do for a business to have a social network profile on LinkedIn?

Widgets and Social Network Applications are Temporary

I was just driving home tonight and thinking about all the widgets and OpenSocial applications I have been developing lately.

Starting thinking about the limited distribution OpenSocial Applications and the wide distribution of widgets.

I was playing with a real sweet Flash Distribution that was driven from XML. I was thinking about the different ways I could distribute it on web sites and social networks.

Of course I think about how to make some use it and adopt it.

Then I thought, is it really necessary to have some continue using an application?

Can they just add it, get some value, and send back?

If 100 people use and adopt it or 10,000 use it and lose it...what is more valuable.

Just curious.

Amazon Launches New Web Service for Fulfillment

Amazon added another layer to their stack of web services to. They added the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS) which allows merchants to tap in to Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and logistics. Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a web service interface, fulfill orders for the products and ship a product to a customer.

There are two sets of APIS – Inbound and Outbound.

The Inbound service gives merchants the ability to create and send shipments to an Amazon fulfillment center from your vendors.

The Outbound service gives merchants the ability to ship products from Amazon FCs to their customers. This service revolves around the concept of a fulfillment order. The order contains a destination address, a shipping speed, and a list of item/quantity pairs to be shipped. The createFulfillmentOrder function is used to initiate the shipping process.

They are moving forward in basically offering a wholesale version of everything the do in-house.

Google Reader and Google Notebook as My Knowledgebase

I use Google Reader and Google Notebook on a daily basis. I read and consume feeds from 300+ blogs daily. I scan, read, visit and participate in many of the posts.

I then either tag the blog entries in my Google Reader.

Or I visit the blog and highlight some or all of the text and add to my Google Notebook.

I keep huge amounts of information in both of these.

With the combination of tagging in Google Reader and organizing in notebooks in Google Notebook and keep track of meaningful information.

Both give me a search tool to then pull this information up at anytime.

What a great database.

Liveblogging, Reminders, Tasking and Calling Myself

I have been using Jott for that last few months to record tasks, record events, publish blogs, and other general communications by calling Jott and leaving a voice mail or "jott" and it translates and sends to the link that I dictate.

I am pioneering using this for live blogging of events and sending out user generate reporters.

Today I came across Utterz which is a simlar to Jott, but adds in the pictures and videos but utilizes a larger list of links you can post to.

Utterz seems like a true live blogging tool, where Jott seems like a personal assistant and publishing tool.

Legal Rights Involved with Photography

I enjoy taking pictures of anything and everything. I am always curious about the legal rights of taking pictures of people and places.

I just read a great post called Photography and The Law: Know Your Rights which contained the The Ten Legal Commandments of Photography.

It has great information about some common misconceptions surrounding the legalities of taking pictures of people and places.