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.

Happy Holidays everybody! As the new guy here Hall I have spent the last few weeks cutting my teeth on all things Internet Marketing. Needless to say, it has been busy. All of sudden, we are knee deep into the holidays and I haven’t done a lick of shopping.

I need a plan, and I need it now!

Rather than totally freak out. I look to Santa and all the elves in the North Pole for lessons to make my plan successful. You’ve seen the Christmas shows, all the elves running around crazy trying to build the toys, load the sleigh and get Santa off and running out the door. It looks like total chaos. What the TV shows do not show you is the full project management department and the comprehensive project plan that is behind the holiday festivities.

There are lots of little kids depending on Santa. For that very reason, the entire elf team follows the methodology developed at the American Management Association and their process for the “Accidental Project Manager”.  And Santa’s elves know that following a process is the most predicable way to be successful on a project. Let’s face it; projects are about creating a defined deliverable, within a reasonable time and within a reasonable budget. With the holidays looming, there isn’t much time to fumble around without a process.

Their plan looks something like this: Happy Boys and Girls – receiving toys on Christmas Eve without bankrupting Santa’s account.

The way they do it is to break the process down into four parts.

Initiate (Why, What) Build a business case defining the customer, problems, solutions and estimated costs.

Make the list and check it twice.

Plan (How long, How much) Create a schedule breaking down tasks, predecessors, estimates, timeline and risks.

Work backwards from Christmas Eve, determine timelines, costs and potential problems that may occur in assembling something like a toy truck.

Execute (Do) Turn tasks into action items, addressing any issues that arise and resolve any questions that occur. These get tracked, assessed and recommendations made to keep the project on track.

Coordinate and create all the parts and pieces that go into a toy truck; Build the chassis, wheels, assemble the parts, painting, quality control, packaging, processing and handling.

Close (How’d you do?) Use actual data that is captured during the process, and determine what went well and what can be improved.

Review how happy the little boy is with the truck. Determine whether they were delivered to the correct house at the correct time. Make note on how things can be improved in the future.

While I only have one household to spin my holiday magic, I am still going to break down my efforts into the distinct phases. Make my list, check it twice, review my time available and budget, and head down to my local shopkeeper to help me make my purchases. I am also going to remember to review my process- hopefully before my credit card statement comes in January.

Happy Holidays everybody- Wish me luck!

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.

Before you open any gifts this season, let’s take a moment to talk about Open Source, and why it means everything to the way your website works. It’s easy for Open Source to become one of those buzzwords that you hear all the time but never really get to know. In reality, it’s a drastic departure in a new direction that will save your company time and money – even if your business has nothing to do with software.

First, lets start with the alternative: proprietary software. Proprietary software is a pretty basic model where a company will build a product, and if you want to use it, you pay them for it. Sounds simple, right? A good software example for this is the Windows operating system. An even better example for our purposes would be the Encyclopedia Britannica (just go with it). In both of these cases, you have a company who develops a product in a certain way they think will work for the most amount of people.

Now let’s get back to open source. Wikipedia states “the term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials.” Now that’s kind of confusing, but the idea of Wikipedia isn’t. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the world’s largest open source projects. What open source really means is something along the lines of “community built”. The definition up above is getting at the idea that anyone can access the building blocks of the project and contribute their own pieces to the whole.

Now what exactly does this have to do with your company and saving money? Lets talk about the Internet. In the last ten years, the internet has gotten pretty complicated. If you want a slick looking website, you’re not just going to write a couple pages and call it done. Instead of a giant image on the homepage, you’ll want to put an image slideshow in its place. If you want to update your content all the time, you’ll want to use a CMS. This is where open source comes into play. That image slideshow you’ll use will most likely be an open source project, just like the CMS you choose to power your website might be as well. There are a few key benefits of open source software that will make a world of difference to your website:

1. Price: FREE
   Can’t go wrong there. Open Source projects are super cost-effective because there’s virtually no true startup costs to using them. Contrast this with proprietary software, and you’re in for some big sticker-shock.
2. Features: Lots of ‘em
   This is a big area where open source projects can shine. Proprietary software operates around what it’s creator deems will be most profitable to include. Open source, on the other hand, operates around whatever its users decide to build for it. Pick one of the bigger open source projects like WordPress or Drupal (both CMS platforms) and you’ll find a lot of features that don’t necessarily fit the cookie-cutter mold.
3. Security: Very High
   One of the big original arguments against open source software was that anyone could download and look at the code, so that made it less secure. In fact, most people now believe this makes it more secure. Instead of a handful of people working to ensure there are no security holes, anyone can download the software and review it for security issues, which get submitted back into the software and released into the community. In some cases, this can turn into hundreds or thousands of people contributing to something that will help keep your website secure.

We could go on all day about this, but these are just a few reasons why we always try to use open source software whenever possible. Of course, it’s important with anything to assess the quality of the product – whether open source or proprietary. To learn more about open source vs. proprietary CMS projects, check out our article on What is the Difference Between an Open Source and a Commercial CMS? If you’re curious whether there’s open source software already at work on your website, just ask!

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.

Time is so important during the holiday season! We need time to buy and wrap our gifts, time to celebrate the holidays with family, time to reflect on the past year and think of the new year. Sometimes I get so busy planning and thinking ahead of everything that needs to get done that I don’t focus enough to enjoy the present.

Well Google just stopped me dead in my tracks and made me pay attention to now, now, NOW! Recently Google introduced Real-Time Analytics. Though it’s still in beta phase most of us can see and check it out now (hint: you also have to be using the new version of Google Analytics). You can access Real-Time by clicking on the home tab in your analytics, then you’ll find “Real-Time” on the left hand navigation.
From here you get an overview of how many active visitors are on your site right now! You can see their top referrer sources, top active pages, top keywords, and their locations! Holy cow this stuff is awesome!

As neat as this tool is and as much as I can geek out over it, I also think about how it can be applied. Here are some ways I thought of:

• After you post a blog or add a link on a social networking site, you can more instantly see the effects of that content to your website traffic. We used to be able to see that a day later and we’ve gotten used to it.
• Another application might be as a user experience tool you’ll be able to see how visitors are being referred to and navigating throughout your site.
• Not that you’d ever want this to happen, but in the case of a PR crisis you could watch the real-time analytics to learn information about the people who are engaging with to better target the communication messaging.

Although I am not completely “sold” on the usefulness of Google Real-Time Analytics (yet) I strongly believe that Google will continuously make updates to enhance the tool over time. Right now it’s super cool and also reminds me that the present should be embraced!

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.

Is your site ready to handle the next wave of smartphones and tablets in Santa’s sleigh this season? It used to be easy to design a website…you figured out how you wanted the site to look, sketched it out, and build the site to size. Then came the smartphone… That’s okay, we’ll add a mobile site (which is super important, by the way). That’s when things started to get a little hairy. You had the 9.5” iPad, then the 7” Android tablet, then the 5” Android phone, and that was just the beginning. Obviously a website built for a 17” screen won’t look nearly as good on a 9.5” iPad or a 5” Android phone, so what’s a web designer to do?

Then came Responsive Design. Responsive design says that you can build one website that looks good everywhere – phones, tablets, computers, even on your nephew’s Wii console. Before you get too excited, remember that mobile sites are still important. There’s a big difference between making a specialized experience tailored for conversion on mobile devices and having a mobile version of your site display on a phone. But mobile site or not – if you’re looking for a way to ensure your business website doesn’t look like you designed it on a bar napkin when it gets inside a phone or a tablet, Responsive Design is your ticket home.

So how does it work? Pretty simply actually…and kind of not. It all starts with the design of the site. Think of your website like a newspaper. Newspapers are designed in columns, with some elements spanning a couple columns, while others are broken out into individual smaller sections. When you design your site in columns (a.k.a. a “grid” layout) with Responsive Design, tablets and smartphones will automatically reorient the site content to fit the device. For example, if you have a main content section and a sidebar on your site, the sidebar may move below the content in the center column to make more room for your content. It’s a simple change, but it makes a big difference when your screen is 4” big.

Want to see some responsive grid layouts in action? Try checking out http://960.gs/, scroll down to the examples and click “Show Grid.” Whether you get your shiny new smartphone this holiday season or not you should be thinking about how mobile is shaping the way consumers research products and services on line. Is your website ready?

Flickr Photo Credit: Alice Harold

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!