Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Ahh… Here it finally is! My favorite day of the entire year; Christmas Eve Day! It’s full of so much excitement and anticipation! This year I tried to stretch it out as long as possible. I think I started listening to Christmas music the first week of November! It seems Google got in the spirit this year too. Has anyone noticed any of the fun effects they have added to their search results over the past month?

• By far one of the most fun toys I’ve played with this season; brought to us by Gmail, you can send a call/video from Santa! I highly recommend checking this out!
• Type “let it snow” in Google’s search engine, watch the snow fall, and then scrape the snow using your mouse (only works in some browsers).
• I absolutely love Christmas lights and, apparently, so does Google; check out their holiday doodle. You click on it and it lights up and then plays a song!
• Try using Google’s search engine and type in words including “Christmas” and “Santa.” Google’s results page becomes decorated with a string of holiday lights.
• YouTube even got in the spirit by adding a snowflake button to some of the videos so, when you click it, it starts to snow inside the videos!

It’s been fun to see how Google has gotten into the spirit. It seems like it was contagious too; people searching for the words “let it snow” increased more this month than it ever has! It’s nice to see that Google is helping spread Christmas cheer! Now I’m off to do the same thing!

I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday season!

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

As we approach the end of the year, it is a good time to be making big lists of things we want to get checked off for the coming year. As many of you know, video and video marketing have been very popular this year. Making, editing and hosting videos for your business has never been easier.

The elves over at YouTube have been very busy in the last few months. So as you make your 2012 list, spend some time with two of YouTube’s newest upgrades – Analytics and New Channel Designs.

YouTube Analytics

As with most social networks, YouTube has always had an Analytics program. They called it Insights and you could view them at the bottom of almost every video. Now YouTube has beefed up their analytics. If you have a YouTube account (and videos on it) you can log into your account and check out the new analytics.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics, you will definitely see some striking resemblance (YouTube is owned by Google in case you didn’t know). In the new Analytics you get a snapshot of how all of your videos are doing on the Dashboard. You can see which of your videos are most popular. From there you can dive deeper in to the data by looking more into Views, demographics, playback locations, traffic sources, how long people watch your video, video interactions and more.

For more information on YouTube Analytics and a fancy infographic you can check out the YouTube blog.

New Channel Designs

Now that we have some solid numbers to look at… we can take that information and with the new look of YouTube Channels – we can make a perfectly branded channel design that appeals to our customers!

YouTube had customized channels before but there wasn’t much you could change in the form of layout. Now with the new channels, when you edit your layout, you can choose from 4 template layouts. Hopefully you will find a better layout to display your videos the way you want them to.

There you have it. Those are the biggest changes to YouTube that you should take advantage of for your business.

If you want more from this post, feel free to watch this currently trending holiday video… of the HMS Ocean crew excited to be able to come home for the holidays. Even Mariah Carey thought it was the best video ever.

Enjoy more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

During a pretty brutal return home from SMX Social Media in scenic Scottsdale this week, I started reviewing notes of easy takeaways that I could start implementing right away. One presentation that resonated was by Courtney Seiter from Raven Tools.

We use Raven Tools along with many others here at Hall, and having used Raven for a number of years now, I happen to be a big fan. One tool she shared is the very cool – and very free – platform, Storify. Of course she already used Storify to sum up the social trends shared this week (great minds think alike).

So I thought I’d use Storify to aggregate the tweets about social tools and tracking resources discussed at SMX this week:

View other posts from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

Google+ announced on Monday that they are now allowing businesses and brands to create their Google+ pages. For information on Google+ for business, please see the list of resources below.

What I want to talk about is the importance of claiming your business name on sites like Google+. Like many of you, the launch of Google+ makes me anxious – another presence to manage, create content for and try to build an online community on.

No one is sure what will become of Google+, if it will defeat Facebook or exactly how it is going to relate to search results. What we do know is that they sure are going to try and with the forces of Google behind them, there will be some impact.

If you don’t have a content strategy yet for Google+ or know how you are going to integrate it into your other marketing efforts, it is still important to grab your business name on Google+ page for branding purposes. This is also important for other popular social media sites you may not be participating on yet.

At this time, anyone can create a business page for anything they want without proof that that are associated with that URL or entity. Big brands will soon have a verification process but for many of us that will not apply. So in theory, anyone can set up a page under your business name and URL. I doubt it will turn into the Wild West but it makes sense to protect your brand before an issue arises.

We probably have all heard by now the struggles some businesses have had getting control of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts set up by a fan, an enemy or a rogue employee. Let’s not let that happen with Google+ too. Setting up a Google+ business page takes a matter of seconds. Trying to reclaim your business name by complaining to Google or the page creator could take hours, days, or even months.

Not ready to fully participate yet?

If you are not ready to participate on Google+ yet, that is fine. Set up your page, fill in the fields allotted and let it rest until you are ready.

Depending on your corporate voice you could:

• Leave a first status update that you set up the page but are working on the best way to use this new space
• Update your status with other ways people can currently connect with you
• Post links of some of your best older content from your site or blog that could use new eyeballs etc.

There are plenty of options on how to start your Google+ strategy but the first and most important thing is claim your space and protect your brand. Also, with Google+ brand pages you can create multiple pages. If you have a popular event, product or service that should stand alone from your business page – you should claim that too.

Resources on Google+ for businesses:

• Upcoming Hall Webinar – What are Businesses Supposed to do with Google+?
• Search Engine Land – Google+ Pages Now Open For Businesses, Brands, Places & More
• Google Blog – Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about
• Mashable – Google+ Launches Branded Pages
• SocialFresh – How To Create A New Google+ Page And Connect It To Google Search

Photo credit: Elke.Fleing