We don’t have a hard launch date yet — our awesome clients must come first — but we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re ready to launch.

The internet is certainly a different medium than traditional print advertising — coupons are certainly still an option. And while we think there’s probably better, more creative ways to try and bring people into your store — it’s worth trying it out.

Google places (the website formerly known as Google Local Business Centre) allows you to have coupons available to customers when they search for you on Google Maps.

Contact us if you’d like help getting set up on Google places and making sure people can find you — and your coupons!

This article on Copyblogger talks about 5 reasons your newsletter isn’t getting the response you think it should from your customers. The 5 reasons they give are:

• Your newsletter isn’t helpful
• Your voice isn’t particularly compelling
• You’re not telling stories
• You have a half-hearted call to action
• You don’t have a specific frequency

You’ll have to read the rest of the article to get all the details but something that is important to remember is that these rules don’t just apply to your newsletter. They also apply to your website. Many websites aren’t really helpful, compelling, lack a true story or narrative, have half hearted calls to action and, in the case of many blog based web sites, aren’t updated frequently enough.

Try viewing your website through they eyes of someone who doesn’t know anything about your business. What would they want to find out? What would they expect to find on your site? Try to put aside your own preferences, likes and dislikes and focus on what content should be on your site to help someone want to engage with your business.

You should contact us if you’d like to figure out what the content should be on your website.

From the feedback we got we’ll definitely be doing another one in the future — be sure to sign up for our newsletter if you’re interested in attending.

On to the resources and links!

Slide Deck

Slides available on slideshare.net

Links and Resources

Here’s a few of the tools and links mentioned in the seminar that you may be interested in:

• http://analytics.blogspot.com — Google’s blog on all things analytics.
• Ego — Analytics tracking app for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad
• http://www.bitly.com — tracking links you post on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
• Dashalytics — Analytics tracking widget for OS X
• Analytics App — for iPhone/iPod touch and for iPad

Photos

Check out flickr for photos from the seminar.

Did we forget anything? Some questions that you didn’t get answered? Send me an email or leave a comment and we’ll do our best to answer your question.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your business could do a better job of engaging with your customers. And be sure to sub­scribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

Taking into account that there are four of us in our group doing the same thing daily and cumulatively having the largest following on Twitter and Facebook, the results have been quite shocking and a little disheartening. Calculating the number of votes we get per day, it’s just over 100. Divided between four of us, that is 25 each. And seeing that I’m voting 5x for myself (one on each browser and one on my phone browser) each day, that’s 20 per day! Seeing that I have 31,815 followers on Twitter alone, that’s 0.06% of my followers that are actually voting (and that’s taking into account that people are voting only once!). Not to mention that I also got the infamous Gary Vaynerchuk to ask his 878,000+ followers to vote and my SEO friend, Dean B to sprinkle it through is network…which got us probably a couple dozen votes in total.

Emphasis mine.

While a karaoke contest isn’t exactly the greatest metric for follower support, it does provide an interesting data set to investigate how loyal your followers/fans are on social networks. As we’ve posted about in the past, visitors to our website from Facebook do seem more inclined to spend longer on your site than Twitter followers do but that doesn’t require any actual action step other than to leave a browser window open.

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments section of that post, including one comment from Erica that confirms what we’ve been seeing with our clients:

My largest asset is my email list. With ~4,000 people on it, it outperforms EVERY other method by thousands of times. Second is my blog’s RSS readership–though they don’t buy as much, they tend to engage.

But I can blast out an email to my list and get hundreds of click-throughs and replies in a matter of minutes. Don’t know what it is about email, but it really is effective, and at this point I think any online business without a list is doing itself a disservice.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your business could do a better job of engaging with your customers, including starting up an email newsletter.

And be sure to subscribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

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Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your business could do a better job of engaging with your customers. And be sure to subscribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

So what do you think? Have you, as a consumer, changed your expectations of companies you purchase from in regards to their responsiveness? Are you frustrated if the store you buy from doesn’t have a Facebook, Twitter or even a web page that you can complain to or praise them on?

For the business owners out there — does your business have a way for your customers to engage with you? And more importantly perhaps — are you engaging with your customers in the social media arena that they are trying to engage with you in?

The conversation is going to happen whether you’re there or not. It’s certainly better to be a part of it and attempt to make a positive out of a potential negative.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your business could do a better job of engaging with your customers. And be sure to subscribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

Clever bit of viral marketing by Xerox. Nowhere in the video does it even mention a Xerox product, the Xerox brand or tagline or the way Xerox can help you until the very end. Think of the marketing dollars put into producing a video of this caliber (in the tens of thousands of dollars) to only have one mention of their brand.

Direct link to video

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“We typically get up to a 20 percent increase in conversion rate on products that have a video, and also a lower return rate at the same time. It’s hard to put an exact dollar amount on it, but I would say that the videos have made a substantial difference by increasing our traffic, our conversion rate, and our sales.”

Lars Hundley, President of Clean Air Gardening from this article.

Video is something that can work on any site that is selling a product, not just sites about gardening. Imagine that you’re in need of a desk for your new office. You browse through a catalogue from a local store and see pictures, dimensions and colour options for a variety of desks. After deciding on one that you like, you go check out the store’s website to see if they have any in stock.

While that site is loading, you google the model of desk you’re looking at and come across another store’s website listing that same desk at the same price. They happen to have a quick, 30 second video tour of that desk. It shows someone sitting down at the desk, opening a few drawers, reaching for a pen, etc. You notice an extra drawer in a spot that you couldn’t see in the pictures from the catalogue. This means it won’t fit in your new office. The video gave you a better idea of how the desk looks and functions and prevented you from buying a desk you would have had to return.

Would you go back to the original store’s website/catalogue to find another desk? I’d guess most people would stick with the new site and enjoy the quick videos that help show what the desks are actually like.

Pictures tell one story about your product and are important to have, but video can help separate you from your competitors. It also opens you up to a whole new market that might not otherwise find you, but now can on video sites such as Youtube.

Contact us for information on how to get video on your website.