We’re sure by now, that many of you have heard about British Petroluem’s (BP) fake PR account on Twitter (@BPGlobalPR). The account, which now has over 10 times the followers of the real BP Twitter account (@BP_America), has gained internet notoriety for its satirical criticism of the way that BP has handled the Gulf oil spill crisis, and despite attempts by BP to get the fake account shut down, the account remains active. Why? Because according to Twitter  the account is classified as a parody and therefore doesn’t infringe upon BP’s rights.  

Unfortunately for large corporations, Twitter has the power to not only highlight a company’s successes, but also open them up to the opportunity for customer criticism on a large scale, exhibit A and B being the new parody for AT&T (@ATT_Wiresless_PR) and the fake Steve Jobs account (@ceoSteveJobs). Since the release of the new iPhone 4, and the slew of problems and customer complaints that followed, AT&T, the iPhone 4-carrying company, and Apple have come under some serious social media attacks most of which have been leveled at them via Twitter and other social media.

Seems a little intimidating right? Well, before you all get scared away from using Twitter or any other social media site altogether, we have some tips for you on how you can manage your brand and handle a crisis successfully through social media (and hopefully avoid getting your own parody account in the process).

1. Be Transparent. Being authentic and genuine with your social media audience all the time can ensure that they trust you during a crisis. Building and creating trust on an ongoing basis can help you to manage a crisis when it arrives.
2. Address issues quickly. It’s important to take the time to consider carefully how you will respond to criticisms, but don’t take too long! Leaving criticizers to stew over an issue only makes the situation worse. Respond quickly and honestly and you should be able to calm an issue before it gets out of hand. 
3. Don’t be afraid to apologize. Every company makes mistakes every once in a while. The best way to deal with them is to acknowledge the issue, take responsibility and apologize. 
4. Make it up to them! When an issue does occur, make amends! Saying sorry isn’t always enough. Sometimes a situation requires proof of your contrition and your willingness to regain your customers’ good will. 
5. Listen, but take comments in stride. It is important to remember that there are dedicated customers out there who will complain in a genuine crisis, and then there are those who just like to complain. Not all criticism is constructive and recognizing the difference is an essential aspect of brand  and customer relationship management.

It’s important to remember that while social media is an effective medium for engaging with your customers, it is also a channel through which they can engage with you. Keeping this in mind can help you better manage your relationships with your customers and your brand through social media.

We just finished our webinar, "9 Tips to Convert Website Visitors to Leads" and we think it went well.

As usual, we got a few more questions than we could answer during the Q & A period at the end of the webinar, and as promised, we'll address them here.

Does conversion rate have a direct impact on sales?

Yes. Increased conversion rate, leads to more leads handed-off to sales, which leads to more opportunities created. This is especially true if you're optimizing your website not just for increased conversion rates, but for targeted traffic since this leads to more qualified leads. Using some of the tips we suggested in the webinar, like publishing your pricing on your website, is a great way to increase the quality of your leads.

Which is more effective, a text link or a button for a call-to-action?

Both are effective in different ways. We usually recommend using both for variety as buttons usually draw a visitors attention more quickly, but a text link can be included in the body copy of you site to follow a logical flow.

Why is benchmark data for conversion rates important?

Benchmark data can help you establish how effective your website's optimization tactics are. If you are far below benchmark conversion rates, then you know you have lots of room for improvement. A good resource for benchmark conversion rate data is the Fireclick index.

We hope you found the information in today's webinar useful. For those of you who were unable to attend you can view the full recording here. Don't forget to sign up for our next webinar, "Growing Your Business with Social Media."

We know that finding inspiration for a higher education web design can sometimes be difficult. Whether you are updating a current site, or planning an entire redesign, ensuring that you get all the right elements for an effective site can be challenging. To help give you a creative boost, we've found 7 effective higher education website designs from around the world. Enjoy!

Emily Carr - Vancouver, CANADA

Let's start with Canada shall we? (We are located in Vancouver after all). Emil Carr's website has a nice clean layout and design, with bright highlight colors and rotating images on the homepage that emphasize some people of mention at the university and some of their artistic achievements.

University of Boston, Bostonia - Boston, USA

Bostonia is actually a micro site of the University of Boston. The website makes great use of large images and a magazine-style layout. 

Bournemouth University - Dorset, UK

Bournemouth University's website has another very clean layout with lots of whitespace, bright accent colors and easy-to-use tabbed navigation.

Queen's College, University of Melbourne - Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Queen's College is part of the University of Melbourne and the website has a colorful eye-catching design, and is the best on our list in terms of social media integration on their homepage. The site does an excellent job of pointing potential students to their social media accounts especially Flickr.

National University of Singapore - SINGAPORE

The National University of Singapore has another simple layout, with easy navigation for university news, upcoming events and galleries and good social media integration with a link to the university's Twitter feed in the main body of the page.

Universidad Europea de Madrid - Madrid, SPAIN

This website has a nice image rotator that depicts several of the degree programs available at the university and it makes a pleasing use of dark colors in it's design, the only website on our list to do so. The homepage also has clear social media links and a detailed news feed. For optimized usability, the site  has obvious links at the top of the page to the webpages for other languages for the benefit of  international students.

Saxion University of Applied Sciences - Deventer, NETHERLANDS

Saxion University has the most minimalist layout on our list today. Despite it's simplicity, it maintains great consistency through the site and has nice bright hover states for the top navigation. The only drawback of their no-nonsense design is their lack of social media links, even though the university does have at least one social media account @saxion on Twitter.

This is a guest post written by Randa Codron, a Marketing and Communications Specialist for WaterTrax, one of Marqui's SaaS partner companies.

Anyone who has a business online should know that the internet is one of the first place prospects turn when they are evaluating vendors for different products and services and with so many vendors available on the web, first impressions are everything.  Your website needs to catch your visitors attention, convey the integrity of your brand and express the quality and reliability of your business immediately. Having a proper design is an integral aspect of capturing your prospective clients' interest. Whether you are a designer yourself, or your company is in the process of hiring a design firm, here are 5 things that you need to know about effective website designs. 

1. Pretty with Punch
Pretty pictures and designs can be nice to look at, but you need more than that to really grab your website visitors’ attention.  Make sure that your pretty pictures pack a punch, that they don’t just draw on an emotion, but also create a solid connection to your objectives. If you are designing a website, make sure you are creating context for understanding within the overall flow of the content. Your job is to bring it all together.

2. Let It Breathe
Don’t overcrowd your pages with too much “stuff”. Give your headings, your keywords, your callouts and your images enough space to breathe.  

3. Orchestrate a Story
You only have a few moments to capture the attention of your website visitors, but also cater to their intelligence. Tell your story across the page, share the visual cues generously and cleverly in a way that flows and engages your visitor.

4. Ease of Use Drives Consumption
This applies to anything and everything that you do. Make it easy to consume email marketing  and click through thru rates will improve.  Design a website that is easy to use and people will use it. Create a website with simple navigation, visual cues, callouts and so on and visitors will love it. Design with a focus on BEHAVIOR and you’ll be amazed at the results.

5. Nourish Your Imagination
It is too easy to forget how important it is to get out from behind your screen. Go for a walk. Go ride a bike and come back inspired!  Take a moment out of the day to feed your imagination and pass the inspiration on to your website visitors through an engaging  creative site.

This week's post has a great infographic filled with information on Facebook, a post from Search Engine Guide on the goals of social media and some marketing tips from one of the world's most renowned super villains!

This infographic from Mashable shows information on Facebook's growth, and there might be some facts that surprise you about one of the world's most popular social networks.

This post on the goals of social media gives a great overview of the ways that social media can help you: build your brand, drive conversions and increase your organization's web presence. Often businesses lose sight of the primary goals of social media for small business and this post is a great way to help bring social media targets back into perspective.

We all know that establishing yourself as an evil mastermind has to involve at least a little bit of marketing skill. Well here are a few marketing tips from Dr. Evil, on how you can achieve worldwide marketing domination (courtesy of Copyblogger).

We hope you've found this post informative and as usual, we hope you have a great weekend!

Image found on Flickr from ConradKilroy

In our last post, we discussed the difference between features and benefits and why both are important for your product marketing.  In today’s post (part II) we’ll explain how you can make the most of features and benefits in your product copywriting.

1. Determine the problem that your ideal customers are trying to solve. Understanding the key pain points your target customers face can help you get a better idea of what benefits and features they are looking for. Once you know what your ideal clients are looking for, it is much easier to write about your solutions in a persuasive, customer-centric style.
2. Connect the solutions to those problems with the product or service that you deliver. Make it clear to your prospective customers that your product, service or solution solves their problem, in no uncertain terms. It also doesn’t hurt to target the features that make your products or services stand out above your competition. How can you help solve their problem in a way that your competitors can’t?
3. Tell them not just the results, but why those results matter. You can take this idea to the next level, by explaining not just the benefits of your product or service but also how those benefits can help their overall business or marketing strategy.  It’s important to explain how your solutions can benefit your customers, but by putting those benefits in the context of an overall business strategy, you can put the numerous ways your solutions help into the broader perspective of overall business improvement.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup began in South Africa on June 11th and for one month soccer fans all over the world will be glued to their TVs and computers to watch it. While the World Cup has always been one of the world’s most viewed sporting events, this year will be the first in which social media plays a major role.

According to Beet.tv , Akamai , the world’s largest operator of a network of computers, published on its website information showing that, "[The 11th (the first day of the World Cup 2010)] was the busiest day for bandwidth demand for news sites,” since the inception of the Net Usage Index for News (August 18, 2005).  According to their information there were, “11 million visitor requests per minute to its network, up 233 percent from the normal demand at [that] time,” and, “the previous record for bandwidth requests for news sites was the Election Day victory (11/5/08) of President Barack Obama where demand peaked at 8 million visitor requests per minute.”

The 2010 World Cup is the first cup since the enormous popularity growth of social media. The last FIFA World Cup, which took place in 2006, was too early to make use of some of the more popular social media tools like Twitter and Facebook (both which launched in 2006). Many social media experts predicted that this year’s cup would be the biggest sporting event ever to hit social media platforms due to its international appeal and social media's ability to share not only the events themselves, but also fans’ individual opinions and experiences which can be communicated in real-time. Now that the first week of the competition is finished, we can  see that those predictions are accurate. With the official FIFA Facebook Fanpage at well over 45,000 fans and @FIFAcom FIFA's Twitter account at almost 70,000 followers, it doesn't look like the tide of fans/followers flocking to these accounts for their event information fix will be slowing down anytime soon.

We will have to wait until the cup is over to get official stats on the role and impact of social media during the event, but it is pretty safe to say that it is an enormously popular trending topic in social media, and that as the matches come to a head, the World Cup's presence on social media platforms will only increase.

How Can You Watch the World Cup Using the Web and Social Media?

• Facebook – official group for worldwide fans of the World Cup 2010
• Twitter – official news from FIFA @FIFAcom and  each country’s team Twitter Feed
• Tweetbeat
• Worldcup Blog – the official World Cup 2010 Blog
• Live Streaming Video – ESPN3.com  (live streaming all but 10 of the 64 matches with ESPNradio and ESPN Mobile streaming the rest) and UnivisionFutbol.com (streaming every match)
• View game highlights and recaps on: Footytube, FIFA on YouTube, Fifa.com
• Mobile – ESPN 2010 World Cup App

Many people don't understand the difference between features and benefits, and unfortunately, this can be a huge detriment when you're writing product copy. If you're not describing the right aspects or characteristics of your product or service then you could be wasting your time by trying to sell something that your target audience doesn't want or need. Since this is such an important part of writing product copy, advertisements and sales collateral, we've decided to give you a quick overview of the difference between features and benefits and how you can make them work for your business' content writing strategy.

What is a Feature?

A feature is a physical or tangible aspect of, or a factual statement about, a product or service that you are promoting.

What is a Benefit?

A benefit is what happens to your customers, when they take your product or service and implement it. In other words, a benefit tells your customers why  your features matter or "what's in it for them."

So--Do People Buy Based on Benefits or Features?

Common marketing knowledge says that most prospective customers like to buy based on benefits and there is solid reasoning behind that theory. People are often looking for solutions to the problems that they have in their lives and a benefit explains to them how your product solves those issues. When customers enter the buying process and begin evaluating vendors they want to know how owning your product or using your service will improve their business. For instance, imagine that you're a B2B organization that has 24 hour customer service. Great, so what is the benefit? The benefit from your customers' perspective is that they can get the help they need with your product anytime they need it, day or night.

But...

It is important to remember that a benefit is a result of a feature and without the feature itself, your benefit can seem untrustworthy, illegitimate, and sometimes, downright silly. It's one thing to tell your prospective customers that you can provide them the help they need, when they need it, but without first explaining to them that you have a 24-hour customer service call-center (for example) then they have no real reason to believe that they actually can get that kind of help, for all they know, that's just a persuasive sales pitch.

What Does All of This Mean?

At the end of the day, what you really need to effectively sell your products are benefits verified by features. If you list a relevant feature and then explain why that feature is important to your customer you can bring to life the exact reasons why a customer should buy your products or hire you for the services you provide.

Hopefully this post gives you a better idea of the differences between features and benefits when it comes to product marketing. Stay tuned for part II of this post, in which we'll explain how you can make the most out of features and benefits in your content.

Update: Part II of this post can be read here.

What is Google Caffeine?

Caffeine is Google’s new system for web indexing (see the announcement on Google’s Blog here). Google started testing Caffeine in August 2009, and the final product was finally released on June 8th, 2010 and is now being used for all Google searches. According to Google, Caffeine provides “50% fresher results for web searches than [their] previous index” and it is the largest collection of web content they have ever offered. Caffeine allows Google to update their search index much faster so that as new information is found, it is immediately updated within their index so that, “You can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

So How Does it Work?

Google’s old index consisted of multiple layers, some of which were updated faster than others (this updating could sometimes take a couple of weeks). This process meant that content wasn’t added to Google’s search index until a layer was updated, so there was a significant delay between content being published and the content actually appearing in the search results.

Caffeine on the other hand, analyzes the web in small portions continuously so that instead of having to refresh an entire layer, Google can just add new pages directly to the search index as they are published, which means that the published content will appear in Google’s search index faster than ever before.

Some Quick Facts About Caffeine According to Google:

• Every second Caffeine processes thousands of pages in parallel (if this were a pile of paper, it would grow three miles taller every second)
• The new Caffeine index takes up to 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
• Caffeine adds hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data per day

What Does Caffeine Mean for Your Search Engine Optimization?

No one can really say for sure what affects Caffeine will have on a website’s rankings since the new indexing system is still so new, but quite a few SEO experts are already coming out with their theories. While this new indexing system isn’t a change of Google's ranking algorithms (meaning that Caffeine won’t change how  Google ranks your page) it could, and most likely will, still have an effect on your site’s SEO. Updates and changes like this make it obvious that it is crucial to have an effective content management strategy and system in place. While we don't know the exact effects that Caffeine will have, using tools like a content management system  and having a good content creation and management infrastructure in place can help to mitigate the negative effects that could be caused by the new indexing system.

For now, the best way to see how Caffeine will affect your rankings is to test it and monitor how you perform in Google search results. If you want to do a comparison of how your site ranks in old Google and new Google you should try the site “Compare Google Caffeine” which provides the search results for both indexing systems and can give you an idea of how your site is affected.

Today's post has a recent study showing the most popular online brands and a presentation with some great statistics about social media budgets, spending and usage.

This study from NeilsenWire gives some great statistical data on the most popular online brands including: Facebook, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia. The data shows the popularity of these brands by percentage of the world's population and time spend on their sites as well as the popularity of various social media sites by geographic region and specifically Facebook's popularity by country.

This presentation on the  2010 SEMPO Survey on the state of search engine marketing gives an overview of the survey and highlights the data findings and is definitely worth taking a look at.

The statistics include:

• 59% of companies will invest more on social for 2010 than they did in 2009
• 62% of companies run their social media efforts in-house with internal resources
• 51% of companies aim to increase brand awareness and enhance reputation through social media in 2010
• 62% of companies evaluated social media marketing success in terms of brand awareness

We hope you find these links helpful and as always, have a great weekend!

We recently wrote a post on how you can get started with small business blogging and it gave you our tips on how you can start a company blog successfully, but where do you go from there?  You’ve got a company blog in place successfully, it’s been launched and you’re ready to celebrate your success, but what are the next steps? Well, without an engaged group of subscribers following your blog it’s not going to be optimized for success, so the next stage of the blogging process is to get more subscribers for your blog.

How do you get more blog subscribers?

1. Make it easy for them to subscribe to your RSS feed. There are several ways you can make it simple for readers to subscribe: offer email subscriptions, display the RSS icon where people will see it, include a call-to-action like “sign up now.”
2. Submit your blog’s RSS feed to feed directories. This will help you reach out to potential subscribers who use these directories to locate feeds they’re interested in and would like to follow. 
3. Talk to your readers not at  your readers. Posing questions to your readers, or requesting their opinions, can be a great way to interact with your audience and increase your following. Another way to do this is by making sure that when people comment on your posts, you respond quickly. If people think they are being listened to they are more likely to subscribe and return as loyal followers. 
4. Make sure you promote your posts. If you already have a loyal following on different social media sites or newsletter recipients, these are a great resource for new blog subscribers. Make sure that they have a chance to read your posts in the medium that they originally chose to follow you in (post links to them in social media accounts, or keep them updated in your e-newsletter) and then make it easy for them to convert into blog subscribers by providing links to your blog and RSS feed. 
5. Offer consistent quality.  Don’t underestimate the power of providing your readers with great content. This may not be the fastest method of garnering more subscribers but it is certainly one of the best ways to create a relevant and loyal following.

Today's bi-weekly web marketing webinar was on sales and marketing alignment and was presented by our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp and our VP of Sales, Mike Cowan.

For those of you who couldn't attend, here's a recap of some of the main takeaways:

• The web has changed the way prospects navigate the buying process
• Marketing and sales collectively own a single customer funnel
• Collaborating at key interface points and measuring processes can help encourage alignment
• Having an effective sales and marketing infrastructure (relationships) is integral to alignment
• Continuously reviewing and refining (having a 360 degree view of customer acquisition) help alignment and improves sales and marketing processes

 If you'd like to view the recording of this webinar, you can watch it here.

The subject line of an email may be the shortest piece of content that you write for your email campaigns, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. In fact, email subject lines are one of the most important elements of your emails, and they are often the deciding factor on whether or not emails are opened and read by your recipients. Unfortunately, they are often also one of the most difficult aspects of your email copy to write. The challenge when it comes to subject lines, is to create interest in your email’s topic and convey the purpose and content of your email, all in 50 characters or less (all the space that you have in a typical subject line).

We know this is difficult, we all face the same hurdles when coming up with interesting subject lines as much as the next marketers. To help make your lives a little less difficult, here are our  tried and true tips for creating effective, gotta-open-it subject lines for your email campaigns:

1. Know your audience and what they’re looking for. You know your target audience better than anyone else, so use that information to create targeted email subjects for your recipients. You know if your audience is more interested in informative, educational emails, e-newsletters or promotions (and if you don't, it's probably time to do some research). Utilize this information to give your audience what they're looking for and they will be more likely to open your emails.
2. Create a sense of urgency to drive action. People are much more likely to open your emails if you leave them feeling like they will miss out on a valuable opportunity if they don't open your email right away.
3. Be your own guinea pig. We all get hundreds of emails a day, many of which we don't bother to open and often barely even glance at. However, once in a while a email comes along and its subject line really grabs your attention and you feel a strong desire to open it. Keep track of what has worked on you in the past, and you can probably get a good idea of what works in general.
4. Be personal. Subject lines are an easy aspect of your email to personalize. You can target your subject line based on product or content preferences of your recipient, or on past interests, clickthroughs, purchases or actions on your website.
5. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Keep track of what types of email subject lines have worked for you in the past and stick with them. Email subject lines that have had success in the past are probably on the right track and are likely to continue to be successful in the future.
6. Be concise and get your point across.  When it comes to email campaigns, you only have one opportunity to make an impression on your recipient and you generally, according to size requirements of most email providers, only have 50 characters or less to do so. If you're email subject lines are too long, or the relevant information is at the end of the line, there is a chance that it will get cut off and your message won't be communicated properly.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is an enormous tragedy that is affecting millions and for British Petroleum (BP), the company responsible for the spill, it is a brand reputation disaster. While there are many ways that a company can protect their brand reputation and do some serious damage control, BP decided to take a surprising approach. They purchased all available keywords connected with the oil spill on search engines like Google, and Yahoo so that the first result  that appears in these search engines directs people looking for information to BP's official website. For instance, when someone searched a term like "gulf oil spill" the results came back looking something like this:

So what was BP's reasoning behind this? According to a spokesperson for the company, they purchased these terms in order to “make the information on the spill more accessible to the public.” 

Since implementing this strategy BP has come under some harsh criticism for their tactics, and many critics feel that their choice was unethical. Many search engine marketers are questioning whether trying to control what the public finds when they search for information on the oil spill is just a reputation damage control tactic, rather than a way to inform the public about the oil spill itself, especially since many non-technical web users may not realize the difference between paid listings and actual organic news results. 

As of this morning, the ads seem to have been taken down (see below). Does this mean that BP has decided they no longer want to “make the information on the spill more accessible” or are they merely crumbling under the pressure they are receiving for their questionable methods?

No matter what their reasons for buying the ads in the first place (or taking them down) it seems pretty obvious that their latest venture has done little or nothing to improve the public’s opinion of their brand. 

Personally, we think that BP should start taking the advice of their fake BP PR Twitter account which has already garnered over 100,000 followers.

If you'd like to read some articles on this subject we suggest you look at the resources below:

Fox News - BP Manipulating Search Results on Google, Critics Accuse 

ABC News - BP Buys 'Oil' Search Terms to Redirect Users to Official Company Website

This week's post has two great presentations, one on internet trends in 2010 and one on web design, a video on how to use LinkedIn answers to your advantage and an infographic with some Twitter Facts & Figures.

This presentation, on internet trends for 2010, from the CM Summit,  has some excellent statistics and points on mobile marketing and cloud computer among others.

Last week we published a blog post on using LinkedIn to market your business. This video gives a good explanation of how you can implement one of the tips we mentioned in the post, using LinkedIn answers to generate leads and establish yourself as a thought leader.

This infographic, gives some good insight into the basic facts about Twitter usage today.

This presentation discusses the question of whether specialist or generalists are better for your business when it comes to web designers.

As always, we hope you found these links helpful, and have a great weekend!

Social media security and privacy are hot issues in the web marketing world right now. Many companies are (finally) becoming more aware of the business risks associated with social media and are adopting social media policies for their employees.

A recent security threat report by Sophos, an internet security company, has shown that many businesses are aware of this issue, even if they're not all taking many effective steps to protect themselves. The report found that:

• For 2009 there was a 70% increase in the proportion of businesses reporting spam and malware attacks originating from social network websites. Over one third of these businesses reported receiving malware attacks from social media sites (Sophos Security Threat Report, January 2010).
• For 2009, more than 72% of the firms surveyed feel that employee behavior on social media sites pose threats to the security of their business (Sophos Security Threat Report, Januay 2010)

To help you, here are our top tips for protecting your business:

1. Don't ignore the risk. Understanding and addressing the risks associated with social media is an important first step towards insulating your business from issues like malware and spam attacks.
2. Create and communicate social media policies to raise security awareness. Creating policies which dictate how your employees can use social media with regards to your business, and communicating them effectively to raise awareness, are great ways to help mitigate the potential risks your company faces from its employees use of social sites.
3. Be careful what you put out there. Remember, just because the contacts on your social media account are listed as your friends/followers/contacts doesn't mean they have protecting your organization's best interests at heart. Anything you put out in social media whether personal or professional can be read by these people and then spread with potentially disastrous consequences.
4. Keep your security software up-to-date! Hacking of social media sites has already proved to be a risk. Securing your organization's computers by making sure that your security software and firewalls are functioning properly can help you diminish the chances that your company's information will get stolen.
5. Commit to social monitoring. Monitoring  the social media sphere is an important aspect of any security strategy. Properly monitoring social media sites can help you not only be aware of the current security threats (new malware attacks etc) that are out there, but it can also help you address issues that arise as quickly and painlessly as possible and can help you determine if your employees are actually following your social media policies. 

Most marketers understand that email is still one of the most effective and inexpensive tools you can use for your lead generation, but, while email is important it has some specific limitations, one of the largest being that it is restricted to the size of your email list.

Social media on the other hand, another inexpensive lead generation tool, doesn’t suffer from this restriction. When it comes to social media, sharing content and information is its fundamental purpose, and so when you share content within social media you’re not only reaching your contacts (followers, fans, subscribers etc.) but also their contacts. 

So how come too many marketers don’t put these powerful mediums together?

When properly combined, social media has the power to expand your reach beyond your current marketing database and ultimately give you the opportunity to reach a much wider lead pool.  

Here are some of our tips for integrating your email and social media.

1. Figure out which social media sites your customers use. Do you know what social media sites your customers use? It’s important that you know exactly where your target audience likes to share their content and that you have active corporate accounts on those sites with links to your email subscription form.
2. Use your e-mail list to build your social media following. Your email list is a great place to start finding relevant social media contacts. People who have already opted-in to receive information from you and who are already using social media, are usually excellent candidates to follow you on social media. 
3. Add links in your emails to each of your social media profiles. This relates to the point above. Remember, it’s not just about following your email list, but giving your subscribers the opportunity to follow you on social media. This also gives anyone they forward your emails to the opportunity to follow you as well. 
4. Find out what your target audience is talking about. One of the best ways you can use social media is to listen to what your target audience is saying. Understanding current issues, conversations and topics of interest within your target audience, can give you the information you need to send out more targeted, relevant email campaigns, which in turn, can help you ensure that your emails get opened more often. 

Graph Source: E-marketer

Most companies know that social media is a hot trend right now in marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that these companies understand how social media can help their marketing or why it got so popular in the first place. Well, in our opinion, one of the biggest reasons why social media is so popular (and effective) when it comes to B2B marketing is its ability to generate leads for your company.

How can social media accomplish this?

1. Social media can increase your company’s reach. Social media lets you publish your company’s best practices and expertise quickly and easily to platforms that reach millions of people instantly. The better your content, the more likely it is to get viewed, which means that with some good quality content, you have the capability of reaching millions of potential leads in a matter of moments.
2. Social media can establish your company as a thought leader. Thought leadership is an essential way to build trust for your company. Buyers often trust companies that can demonstrate their knowledge about their buyers’ problems, and can prove that they know how (and have the solutions) to fix them. 
3. Social media facilitates word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth has been, and continues to be, one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business. Buyers tend to trust peer referrals more than any other source of information and since social media allows people to share their experiences (both good and bad) with a wide range of people, this can help increase trust in your company’s products and services. 
4. Social media can help your company’s SEO. Social media sites usually have good authority in search engines and because of this, inbound links from these sites are extremely helpful to your SEO. The higher your company ranks in search engines, the more often you get found by potential customers and often, buyers trust companies that rank higher in search engines.
5. Social media can connect you with other local professionals. This is related to the word of mouth point above. Using social media allows you to connect with other professionals in your area or industry so that you can share information, and create discussions. Developing conversations with other professionals can help lead to business relationships that often generate quality business opportunities.
6. Social media let’s you search for interested parties.  Social media is a great way to locate and target leads that are looking for your products or services at the moment of interest. A quick search on a site like Twitter, can instantly show you all of the Twitterers that are discussing products and services like yours at the exact moment they begin the conversation. 

There are many traditional ways to generate more leads for your business, but social media is a great way to augment your current lead generation strategies, after all, you can never have too many sales-ready leads!

Almost every website has a goal (an action that they want their visitor to take) and no matter what the goal, whether it is to get more leads, increase RSS subscribers or just to boost sales, a call-to-action should be used to encourage your visitors to take that action.

Whether your call-to-action is a text link, a button or any other graphic or copy, optimizing them for effectiveness can have a huge impact on how many people actually do what your call-to-action asks them to do. 

Okay, you understand that effective calls-to-action are important, but how can you improve them?

1. Create a sense of urgency. What is one of the best things you can do to encourage people to act on your call-to-action? Make them feel like they need to do it right away or else they are going to miss out on a valuable opportunity.
2. Tell them what you want them to do. Make your calls-to-action as specific as possible. By avoiding generalities and specifying exactly what you want your visitors to do, whether it is to click, download or sign-up, you can enhance the chance that they will do what you want them to. 
3. Make them impossible to miss. One of the worst things you can do when creating a call-to-action is to let it blend into the background. If your calls-to-action are text links, make sure they are underlined and a different color than the rest of your text, and if they are buttons, make sure the buttons are large and colorful so they stand out and that they are clickable. Oh, and don’t forget to keep them above the fold. People hate scrolling, and if they have to scroll down to see your calls-to-action you are going to miss out on a lot of conversions. 
4. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, test!  Implementing the ideas above and then testing them to see what works best is one of the easiest ways to improve your calls-to-action.  Making the changes, and then never measuring their success against your old ones, doesn’t help you get a better understanding of what works, and what doesn’t for your business. Every organization is different and what works for one, may not be ideal for another. Test to see what works for you and then use that information to your advantage when creating calls-to-action.

Try implementing these ideas and see what works for you, and if you need some inspiration check our our post with 80 examples of B2B buttons.

Today's post features some social media applications that allow mobile users to contribute to efforts to help with the Gulf oil spill, an emerging social media site meant to protect children and parents alike,  an e-book on developing a successful social media strategy, and some eco-friendly new concept cell phones (to inspire your mobile marketing efforts).

The Gulf oil spill tragedy, has left many people with a desire to help out. This post from Mashable shows several social media efforts to aid the gulf.

Social media privacy and security is an increasingly important issue today, with more and more children and young adults trying out different social networks. This new start-up, still in it's beta testing stage, works to help parents and children use social networks together in a safe environment.

This new, free e-book from the Diva Marketing Blog, is a great resource to help you establish your social media marketing strategy.

Mobile marketing is a huge channel for online marketing companies today. The innovative environmentally friendly concept cell phones in this post from Webecoist.com show that new technology and the environment don't have to be at odds. Maybe one day soon you'll be able to receive your mobile email on one of these phones!

With education budgets getting tighter and tighter, and the number of responsibilities and possibilities available for university web departments growing, the typical work load for higher education web professionals has dramatically increased over the last few years, and it doesn't look like it's going to slow down anytime soon. On top of that, the newer applications like mobile web marketing and social media are continuing to become more popular and education websites are under more pressure than ever to compete.

Most universities know that to stay competitive on the web today, an institution needs a dynamic website with significant social media functionality to ensure that your website is up-to-date, that your content is fresh, and that you provide web-savvy students the information they need in a format they like and recognize.

More often than not, the answer to getting your website to the level it needs to be at is to introduce a web content management system (CMS). An effectively implemented CMS can help you create and edit your content quickly and easily, keep your website relevant and the distribute the content development workload so it is no longer in the hands of and over-worked IT or communications department.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

If you think a CMS might be right for your higher education institution, here are a few tips on how you can choose the right CMS to meet your needs:

1. Define organizational goals. Once all the stakeholders in your institution are ready for the change to a CMS, it’s important to define the key goals of each department, faculty and the institution as a whole and  to communicate those goals between the future CMS users. Once these goals have been established, you can start deciding what functionality can help you reach those targets, and how you will track them to measure your success.
2. Prepare a new content strategy based on distribution. Your new content management strategy will be based on a distributed model rather than a centralized one.  One of the most beneficial features of a CMS for education is that it puts content creation into the hands of multiple individuals rather than one web or communications department. However, this will affect your content development strategies and plans, and will require communication/training on proper content development so that you can ensure you have proper brand consistency in place and that you understand how you are going to define workflow and approvals across departments and how you will maintain scheduling ownership.
3. Do your research, and understand what you need. It is important when you are evaluating vendors that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need. Many CMS vendors offer products that are much more complex, or too simple for the goals that you want to accomplish. Before looking at possible solution, it is a good idea to do a comprehensive analysis of what your needs are as an organization based on the goals you defined earlier. Choosing a solution that has the correct functionality to meet your website’s targets can ensure that you end up with a product which effectively meets all of your organizations needs. 
4. Don't focus solely on the technology.  The most important feature of a CMS is that is allows non-technical users to edit and create content more easily. To focus solely on the technological aspects of a CMS rather than the user experience it provides, is counteractive to your goals and the benefits of implementing a CMS in the first place. Make sure that when you’re choosing your CMS you focus on the product's user interface, support system, help and the overall user experience, rather than the more technical aspects (although those are still important).

Bonus tip: another final point that I'll add that can be beneficial depending on the size of your institution, is to choose a vendor that offers a solution which is targeted specifically towards the higher education industry. These CMS products can have additional education-specific features that more general content management systems don't provide,  which can help make your site more appealing to your target audience and lower implementation costs.

By now, pretty much everyone who has a website knows that search engine optimization (SEO) is important. Search engines account for the majority of website traffic and using SEO properly can help you ensure a solid return on your website efforts. There are a lot of factors involved in creating a SEO strategy that can help your new website rank higher in search results.

So—where do you start?

Target your keywords.

The first step to any successful SEO strategy is to define the keywords which you want your website to rank for in search engines. Try to pick words based on relevance, traffic volume and achievability.  There are some great free tools to help you pick your keywords, we suggest you try Free Wordtracker, and Google Adwords because they are feature-rich and not to complicated for beginners. If you want to learn more about targeting keywords take a look at one of our webinars on SEO.

Okay, so now you’ve chosen your keywords, what are the next essential elements to your SEO?

• Title Tags. Title tags tell search engines what your webpage is about. It is important that your title tags are descriptive of your webpage, use your keywords and follow a consistent format.
• Headings. A heading is an H1, H2, or H3 tag which is placed within your website’s HTML and helps search engines: denote page structure, define which information on the page is most important, define what is in the content of each section on a page, and builds relevance for your keywords.

• Meta Descriptions. Meta descriptions set the blurb in the search engine results and act as a kind of “teaser” for your visitors. It’s best to keep the description to 155-160 characters and to put your keyword in and especially to make sure that it accurately describes the content of your page.

• Alt Tags. An alt tag tells a search engine what your pictures are about. This is helpful for SEO, and is important for the accessibility of your site. For your visitors with a disability, or those that use screen readers, alt tags are an essential way for them to interact with the content on your page. 
• Keyword Density. Keyword density is the number of times a keyword occurs on the a webpage in proportion with the other words on the page. This is an important step in your SEO strategy because it helps you build relevance around your keywords, it re-affirms that what you say in your headings and title tags is actually what your page content is about. In general, it's best to keep your keyword to about 2-7% of any given page’s content.

• Anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink and it tells search engines what the next page is about. This is an important way to improve your clickthrough rates (informing a user about what’s on the next page encourages confidence for them to click).

We know it seems complicated, but SEO is an important way to ensure that your website redesign is successful. If you redesign your site, but don’t put any SEO tactics to work, it is unlikely that you’ll see much of ROI for your website and don't forget, one of the best ways to tell if your new SEO strategy is working, is to measure the results. Two free tools we recommend for this are Google Webmaster tools. If you want to learn more about how to measure the success of your SEO take a look at our post on “Getting Started with Web Analytics.”

Let’s face it, LinkedIn is probably one of the most overlooked social networks today in terms of marketing, and yet it is one of the best social media outlets available to connect with other businesses and professionals in your industry. LinkedIn allows you to develop a professional identity online and connect to your peers, contacts and other professionals to help generate leads and visibility for your business online. Here are our tips (that we've tried and tested) for using LinkedIn to market your business.

• Create events. LinkedIn Events are a great way to engage with your clients and leads online. Any event, whether online or offline can all be posted here, with a blurb about the event and a link to a register page (or instructions on how to register). The events can be created by anyone, including attendees, and you are able to invite anyone in your network to the event or just let them know about events you are attending or are interested in.
  
• Use groups and connect. LinkedIn groups can help you connect with other thought leaders in your industry, discuss events, news and issues in your space and to market your company and services. Many people join groups but don't really participate past the initial few days. A great way to avoid this is to start a group about a topic that interests you, invite your network and connections and grow a group where you can monitor and engage with your current connections, and potential customers.
• Increase your visibility. With LinkedIn it's easy to use your profile to generate leads (connections), establish partnerships with professionals that complement your business and expose your brand to others in your network.
• Optimize your profile for SEO. LinkedIn is actually a relatively good site to get inbound links from. Optimizing your profile with your website and blog (and including the proper anchor text like the example below) can help you get relevant, inbound links. A great opportunity to use this feature is to get every person in your company with a LinkedIn profile to include a link to your company's website with appropriate anchor text. This can help you rank higher in search engines, increase your inbound links, build targeted traffic to your site and help to improve your authority in your niche.

• Answer questions. The LinkedIn "Answers" feature is a good way to help you display your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. In this section you can answer questions from other LinkedIn users on specific topics that relate to your product or services, and you can drive readers to your website's educational content or blog posts as well. 

• Promote your blog on your company’s page. Your company profile has a "news" area that can connect to an RSS feed and automatically update your company profile with new blog posts. Promoting your blog on your company's profile can help increase inbound links, and drive traffic to your blog, while you establish yourself as a resource.

• Follow other companies that interest you. LinkedIn now allows you to follow other companies with LinkedIn profiles. If you type a company into the search box and arrive at their profile, it's simple to click follow and your profile is automatically linked to their list of followers. Following companies in your space can help you connect with other companies and potential clients (especially if you work in the B2B industry).