Tag: PR

Categories
video web

Social TV On The Web – Or Social Web On TV?

Social media gets more diverse every time someone uploads the video on YouTube. It gets more popular every time someone watches that video. And, obviously it gets more social when you pass a link to or embed a video into your blog or web site. It’s hard to say who exactly came up with this idea (I think it is instinctive thing), but “do as I do” routine almost never fails.So every time some creative video gets out there, some other people think “hey, I can do that too”. And they try to.

Forget the reality shows your parents used to watch. WWF is a good stunt work. Next generation reality shows are going to be different. Studios still casting people who look good on TV, but that’s about to change. In the world where everybody can become his own video producer for less money than cost of a semester in a decent private college, next TV would be whole home-made. People increasingly watch videos online instead of regular TV. Ubiquitous broadband (including high-speed mobile), YouTube on your mobile device (hello, iPhone) and next-gen TVs with network hook-up will let you watch your favorite web site in your favorite cafe, in the comfort of your living room, on the go. Or upload your footage just as easy.

Just make sure you get that lens cap off before you start shooting.

Categories
PR

Offline-Online Promotion For Small Businesses – Part 1

Small businesses identified by the number of employees they have. The following are criteria of a small business:

  • financing for the business provided by one individual or only a few individuals;
  • business’s operations are geographically localized, except for its marketing function (may not hold true for online businesses, but nevertheless);
  • the number of employees in the business is usually fewer then hundred.

Small businesses in USA, according to Small Business Administration:

  • represent more then 99.7 percent of all employers;
  • employ more then half of all private-sector employees;
  • pay 44.5 percent of total US private payrolls;
  • generate between 60 and 80 percent of net new jobs annually;
  • produce 14 times more patents per employee then do large patenting firms.

Nevertheless, small businesses have very limited means of self-promotion, comparing to the big guys in the industry. However, just like big guys, they can promote themselves in fashions that are both affordable and efficient. For example, for local retailers an online promotion of their web site would not do any good.

Most of our clients are small businesses. They often share some insights on how offline promotion helps them save or make money. One of the ideas they came up with was to print address labels and mail remainders of their dealer promotion packages to the potential customers instead of dealers. Receiving an attractive custom-printed brochure, booklet or wall calendar can make all the difference for some. Printing of cheap address labels was made very affordable by online merchants and local print shops and company has already invested in printing those promotional packages anyway. Idea was a huge success, and such mailings became one of the favorite promotional tools of this company.

Categories
blog seo

More fun with Alexa and stats

As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.