As we have written in the past, the sheer amount of work involved in Internet marketing – and especially social media – makes it nearly impossible for business owners and marketing managers to handle on their own. But, since so much of social networking involves personal communication, we are often asked which parts of your social media strategy you can safely outsource to others.

The quick answer is “anything you don’t have time to manage yourself.” Typically, that involves things like writing posts and updates, researching keywords and links, and responding to routine inquiries from clients and colleagues. In truth, you can probably outsource as much or as little of your social media marketing campaign as you would like, so long as you keep these three rules in
mind:

It’s still about your voice and brand. Although another person may be writing your posts or looking after your updates, they should be familiar enough with you and your organization to stick to a theme and voice that is similar to the one you would use. In other words, they should be working under your direction, not simply generating content.

You should still be involved. In addition to helping your social media consultant or community manager to come up with topics and ideas, you may want to step in and personally post updates and tweets from time to time. That will help your social media marketing be more authentic, and also keep you in closer touch with your customers.

Make it clear that you’re getting help. There’s no reason to shy away from the fact that you have others involved in your social media marketing accounts. That’s especially true in this day and age, where your customers and colleagues are going to expect that you have a team working for you. Be upfront about these relationships. In our organization, we designate our tweets with initials, for example, so it’s easy to tell who is posting a particular comment or responding to a question.

Social media marketing can be easy or difficult, highly effective or a waste of time, depending on what sort of professional help you have on your side. Keep these tips in mind and outsource the parts of your social networking plan that you would rather not handle or don’t have time for.

Do you need a professional online marketing and social media team on your side? Contact us today for a free meeting.

In keeping up on the local Calgary online marketing community, we’ve noticed an interesting trend: Roughly once every three days, a new job listing is posted by a major Alberta employer for a professional who can help them to manage their social media marketing.

What do they know that you might not? What can a social media consultant do for you?

Also referred to as a “community manager,” a full- or part-time social media consultant can help you grow your business online in a number of ways. Here are just a few of the most important ones:

Social media marketing content creation. Most managers and business owners don’t enjoy writing things like posts. Having someone else handle it for you can save a lot of time and take a great deal of stress out of the process.

Respond to inquiries and requests. From colleagues wanting to link with you to customers tweeting questions about your products, a social media marketing consultant can ensure that inquiries are answered quickly and completely.

Issue press releases and other statements. Are your customers getting the good news about your products, awards, and testimonials? If not, then it might be time to make sure that someone else is staying on top of these activities.

Looking after your online reputation. Internet reputation management is a quickly growing field, and there’s a great reason for it: What your customers are saying about you on sites like Facebook and Twitter – whether it’s good or bad – can have an enormous impact on your ability to increase your sales online. A community manager can keep an eye out for feedback to see what kinds of impressions are being shared, and make sure they’re accurate.

New positions for social media marketing are popping up all the time, because social networking sites have turned into big business. Who’s looking out for you and your company?

If you’re looking for a social media consultant you can trust, or a speaker who can explain the process of finding customers over Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to your audience, then don’t hesitate to contact us today.

And how much do you really need to? When I speak to audiences about the growth of the Internet and online marketing, I can virtually guarantee that this question is going to come up at some point or another. It doesn’t matter whether I’m speaking to a group like Alberta Rural Development, a conference of entrepreneurs, or even a meeting of Think Local Market; people seem to intuitively grasp that there’s too much to do online, and not enough time to do it.

And so, it’s not surprising that one of the things they want to know is how often I’m actually on the Internet. My usual answer is: “Always.” I say it with a bit of a smirk, of course, and I’m obviously exaggerating… but probably not as much as you might think.

Why am I connected to the Internet on a nearly round-the-clock basis? Obviously, part of the reason is that web design, online marketing, and social media management are a big part of my career. I have to be connected to keep up with my work. Even if I were in a different industry, however, there would still be plenty for me to do just to keep up with a “normal” online marketing plan – from search engine optimization content to tweets, Facebook updates, and more.

Really, that’s what the audience members who ask these questions want to know: How can they even attempt to keep up with at all?

The realistic answer is that they can’t. There’s just too much out there. The benefits of a well-designed, continuously updated online marketing plan are too huge to ignore, and yet the to do list is more than any otherwise-busy professional can handle. That’s why outsourcing some of your online work isn’t just preferable, but practically a necessity.

Having another person or team who can look after your accounts, generate content from your direction, and otherwise keep your website and social profiles moving step-in-step with your business goals keeps the machine running. It certainly doesn’t exclude you from having any participation and input, but it takes a process that would be otherwise unfeasible and unrealistic and puts you back in control.

If you are looking for the magic formula that’s going to let you grow your business or organization over the Internet in just half an hour a day with no outside expenses, then there isn’t one. But if what you want to find is a realistic way to meet your online and off-line business goals, then the answer is to call in outside help for the activities that matter most.

To get help putting your Internet marketing plan into action, or to find out about David’s availability for a speaking event, contact us by phone or e-mail today.

If you read medical news, or happen to have high cholesterol, then you may have already seen that new tests show that the popular drug Lipitor doesn’t just improve heart health, but may also prevent other kinds of diseases, too. In other words, it doesn’t just do what it’s supposed to, but brings other positive side effects along for the ride.

Within the medical industry, these other good things that happen are called “legacy effects.” They are great if you or someone you know takes Lipitor… but what does it have to do with online marketing?

Probably more than you realize. That’s because anything you do online – from search engine optimization to social media marketing and online newsletters – tends to help everything else you do as well. In other words, if you do something that helps you attract visitors or convert customers well enough in one area, it’s likely to help you in another, too.

Here are a few quick examples, and how you can put them to use in your business:

A good SEO plan can make PPC advertising cheaper. That’s because the major search engines like Google place “quality scores” on your pages. So, the higher they rank naturally, the less you are likely to pay for sponsored traffic to your site.

Social media marketing helps SEO. With the return of real-time search results, Google and the other engines are factoring social content more heavily into their search results. So, the more you post to Facebook and Twitter, the more traffic you can receive from other sources.

Maintaining a high-quality online newsletter makes the rest of your site more profitable. That’s because you don’t just get traffic from people clicking through from your newsletter; you also get exposure from others who have been forwarded your articles, or search engines that have indexed some of your content.

The point is that a good online marketing plan is like a strong medicine. Even if you’ve instituted it to achieve one specific goal, if you handle things well enough, you’re likely to get other side benefits, as well. So, the sooner you get started, the sooner you can watch the rest of your website and company grow.

A lot of web designers and business owners aren’t quite sure what to make of Facebook advertising just yet. On the one hand, it’s incredibly targeted and relatively cost-efficient; and on the other, it doesn’t yet offer the same kind of scope and exposure as some of the more-established programs like Google ad words do.

As a result, a lot of people are deciding to jump in headfirst or avoid it altogether. Those might both be mistakes.

Here’s why: There is definitely an opportunity to grow your company by advertising on Facebook. But, until some of the more prevalent strategies have been tried and tested, it’s probably better to start slowly and build up your Facebook advertising campaign from there. And besides, there might be a more efficient use that lots of people are overlooking – using Facebook ads to test markets and messages.

The one thing Facebook advertising is great for, and the one true advantage it has over the pay per click systems offered by Google, Yahoo, and Bing, is that it allows you to locate a market not just by the keywords they have entered into a search box, but demographic information they have supplied about themselves.

That means you can target a specific offer to a specific group of people in a way that simply isn’t possible elsewhere. Want to know how men in their 20s respond to a special price? Put up an ad and you’ll know within a couple of weeks. Need to see whether the language you’re using resonates with seniors? Put it on a Facebook ad and find out.

The real value of this kind of testing isn’t just that it could be profitable, but also that the lessons you learn could help you tighten up your marketing and advertising in other areas, like print ads, the landing page copy on your product pages, or even your other pay per click ads. In other words, using your Facebook marketing in the right way could help make every other dollar you spend on marketing – online or off – earn a higher return.
Online marketing via Facebook advertising is still growing and taking shape, but if you are looking for a great way to use it, why not try testing different markets and messages and seeing where they take you?

One of the great tragedies in life, and business online, is that nothing lasts forever… and that very few things even last for very long. Get a fantastic haircut, and you’ll quickly find your hair hasn’t stopped growing; buy a wonderful suit, and you’ll notice that it’s only a matter of time before it has to be taken in or out because you’ve either gone on a diet, or need to.

In some ways, it’s the same with your small Calgary business website. Even if you invest in a high-quality design that fits your company perfectly, impresses visitors, loads correctly across all kinds of browsers, and helps your company to make more money, it’s probably going to need to be tweaked or updated eventually.

The good news is that great websites don’t have to be completely replaced very often. In fact, it’s often a matter of just making a few small changes when you need them. Here are a few things you should definitely add or review on your business website, even if you aren’t ready for a major redesign:

Social media links and integration. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are big business. It’s important that you have links to your profiles and content on these sites, since they can make it easier for people to find you outside of your business website, and vice versa.

Search engine optimized pages and content. Moving onto the first or second page of the results for your most important keywords on Google, Yahoo, and Bing can be an enormous boost to your business, but it’s getting harder to improve your search engine rankings all the time. For that reason, it makes sense to review your pages from time to time, to ensure that they’re optimized, and that you are still emphasizing the right keywords and phrases.

Product descriptions and prices. It goes without saying that accuracy, especially in product descriptions and prices, is an important part of the upkeep on your business website. Still, there are a surprising number of companies that regularly fail to keep this kind of data current. Whether you’re using a content management system or not, be sure that your site is up to date.

FAQs, contact information, privacy policies, and other details. More and more, people are basing their online buying decisions on how certain they feel that you’re going to do what you say you will, how quickly they can expect their order, and what they think you’ll do with their personal information. Make it easier for them to buy with clear, customer-friendly details on your business website.

Psychologists will tell you that there are large groups of people who feel overwhelmed by “information overload,” or the ever-growing and expanding amount of data that’s available on the Internet. We regularly meet with small business owners who seem to be suffering from a similar effect – one we might call feature overload – where they aren’t sure which of the “must-have” tools and technologies need to be integrated into their next web design.

In other words, they often aren’t sure exactly how new a new business web design actually has to be in order to be an effective marketing tool.

Even though it might run contrary to a lot of thinking within the industry, we’re going to go out on a limb and say for the record that having the latest and greatest features on your business site isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t get us wrong, there are definitely some fairly-standard features – like a good content management system, social media integration, search engine optimization, etc. – that can make your company more profitable in a hurry. But there are also a lot of things that just add to time and expense of your business site, make it more complicated for people to use, and generally get in the way of good usability.

Good design is classic. The way we code websites might change, but the basic ideas and information that most customers are looking for has remained fairly constant for thousands of years. In other words, you might use an online video to tell a potential buyer what you would have explained in a brochure 10 years ago, but the focus still needs to be on the right message, rather than on any one specific web design tool.

A good, high-quality business web design can easily last 3 to 5 years before it needs any major changes. If you find that you’re needing to redesign your business website a lot more often than not, it could be that you aren’t investing in quality layouts to start with, or are being too distracted by small changes, rather than concentrating on your most important business goals.

Having a new website for your company can be very exciting, but having one that helps you make more money month after month is usually a lot more rewarding.

Not long ago, it was announced that the President of the United States would be opening up an official Twitter account, making him probably the last mega-famous personality on the planet to sign up for one.
Along with being an interesting factoid on the growing importance of social media and the effect it has on public opinion, the move also raises another issue that’s closer to home for most of us: You no longer have an excuse not to keep up on social media marketing.

Let’s face it: If the Commander-in-Chief of the United States can find time to send 140 characters now and again – or at least delegate it to someone else – then can you really claim you don’t have the time to do the same? After all, he’s got state dinners, economic crises, military strategies, and even a reelection campaign to contend with… and he’s doing it all on a government salary. Most of us aren’t having to make time for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn under those kinds of constraints.

Of course, we are being a little bit silly with this idea, but the point is that saying you don’t have time for social media marketing is similar to saying you can’t spare a few minutes to send out invoices, or have time to talk your best customer. It’s very likely that you are incredibly busy, but you make time in your day’s activities because they’re the ones that will keep money coming into your business every month, not to mention growing and successful for years to come.

With more than 700 million people regularly logging into Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, social networking sites represent a market that no business that’s bigger than a man and a donkey selling fruit on the side of the road can afford to ignore. They don’t just allow you to reach more people, but also to forge better relationships with the customers you already have, and encourage them to send referrals your way. How could anyone be too busy for that?

Take our advice, and the President’s example, and get started with social media marketing if you haven’t already. It is another habit you’ll have to add to your daily routine, but one that could ultimately pay you back several times over.

It can be easy to get the itch to imitate something you’ve seen a competitor do online, especially when they’re sitting well ahead of you in the search engine rankings, or expanding their company at a time when you’re treading water and are struggling to get by. In fact, we meet with small business owners every day who are motivated to make a change in their website or online marketing plan simply because they’ve seen someone else do the same.

There are times when a competitor’s move can inspire or necessitate doing something different, but take care that you don’t choose a losing Internet marketing strategy.

Why do we point this out? Because not everything is as it appears from the outside. Unless you have a great deal of personal insight into your competitor’s books, there’s nothing to say that they aren’t pouring a lot of time and money into the wrong things. Or, it could be that they’re drastically increasing their Internet marketing budget simply because the rest of their business is doing so badly. It’s surprisingly common for struggling companies to turn their efforts to find new customers after it’s already way too late.

To keep you from copying someone else’s mistakes, here are a few quick things to look for when examining a competitor’s website or online marketing campaign:

Run the numbers. Take a hard look at what the other company is doing and try to make an educated guess at what kind of return they’re likely to be seeing from it. You won’t have all the figures, naturally, but by talking to your web design team in thinking about prices and percentages, you might be able to come closer than you think.

Imagine what a similar activity will cost you. If you were to try the same thing, or something similar, what would the cost be? Compare that to a conservative estimate of what you think it’s earning them, and then try to decide whether it’s an idea that’s even worth considering.

See if there’s a better or more efficient way. Often times, the first business to try something isn’t the one that gets it right. See if there isn’t some way to improve on your competitor site or idea, and you might just make the breakthrough that they weren’t able to find.

Effective online marketing takes a lot more than a small business website. Contact eKzact – One of Calgary’s best web design teams – today to find out what we can do for you.

Amazing as it seems now, there was a time not so many years ago when no one, except the most tech-savvy small businesses, had regular access to a webmaster or IT professional. Granted, those people were around, but you generally called on them when you needed something fixed, not because you wanted one on staff. Now, of course, nearly everyone has an internal or contracted team to keep their small business site up and running and their technology online – to go without would quickly put your company at risk.

That’s how I’m starting to feel about community managers – men and women whose job it is to keep your online content and social profiles up to date and moving forward.

Why? Because as with all things on the Internet, change is coming faster than most of us had anticipated. Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter aren’t just gaining steam – they are bulldozing any previous notions we had about how customers find us and communicate with us. The profiles you have on these websites affect everything from your repeat business to your online reputation, and even search engine optimization. To go without them means to give up valuable ground to other companies who would love to take new accounts away from you.

The way a community manager fits into this mix is by making sure your posts and profiles are all up to date, on point, and keeping your online marketing efforts in sync with one another. That’s why, here at eKzact, we’ve made our community manager a big part of our ongoing work, and invite you to take advantage of this service. The web (and especially social network marketing) has simply gotten too big, and too important, for most of us to keep our hands around while still running our companies – why not let a professional help us keep things moving in the right direction?

When social media was first taking off and gaining steam, Facebook didn’t really have much in the way of competition, at least when it came to users’ attention. MySpace had gotten there first, but was mainly used by the younger crowd, and Twitter didn’t offer the depth of communication and connection that a site that allowed you to connect with your friends, relatives, and colleagues did. And so it was no surprise that when Facebook announced plans to add advertising features to its site, companies of all sizes lined up around the block to give it a try.

Now, just a short while later, a lot of what made Facebook unique is starting to wear away. Other companies, like Google and Bing, are finding ways to integrate “likes” (through +1 and similar add ons) into your profile and share preferences with other users. But despite these changes, Facebook still represents a completely unique advertising environment, and one most small businesses should at least try. Here’s why: Facebook doesn’t just market based on what it thinks it knows about you – it works off of data users provide about themselves.

This might seem like a minor difference from search engine optimization, or pay per click advertising, where searchers indicate what’s on their mind at the moment. But when you think about it on a deeper level (or have worked with search engine marketing strategies for some time), you often find that what people type into Google’s query box isn’t always exactly what they meant. And with new auto complete features coming into full swing this year, it’s even harder to tell whether someone meant to find your website, or just something that was vaguely similar.

Search engine optimization and other forms of online marketing aren’t going anywhere soon, and we’re not even going to argue that Facebook is “better” at finding customers than anything else. What you should know and remember, however, is that the fact that it pulls information that people give themselves makes it one-of-a-kind… at least for now. For some products and services, that’s an online marketing edge that just can’t be matched anywhere else.

If you’re wondering whether Facebook could be a great online advertising platform for your company, contact one of Calgary’s best Internet marketing partners – eKzact web design – today for a free consultation!

There are a lot of things social networking sites are great for, like sharing news, advertising online coupons, and reaching out to new potential customers. When small businesses first get involved with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and social media in general,  however, they often don’t use them to their marketing potential.

In order to get more out of social media sites, you can’t do all the work yourself. Here are a few ways you can make your profile stronger by getting your customers in on the act:

Ask customers to submit product photos and stories. If you sell something that people interact with regularly, or depend on as part of their day-to-day jobs, then they might be able to say far more about your products than any marketing copy ever could. The more other buyers can see customers using your merchandise, the stronger impression it’s going to make in their minds.

Hold contests to find the next marketing tagline or offer. This is a great way to get customers involved for two reasons: one, you give them the chance to tell you what they’d really like to see you offer in terms of products and pricing; and two, because you subtly alert them that a big sale or event is around the corner. Why not offer a coupon or gift certificate to the customer who can help you come up with the next great social marketing idea?

Get feedback and testimonials from buyers. Obviously, few things help you sell online like positive reviews and feedback. But even if all the news isn’t good, you still win. That’s because you don’t just find areas where you could improve your company and service, but you also show potential buyers that you’re willing to listen and that their concerns are important to you.

Give discounts for passing your name along. In the same way, giving premiums, gifts, or bonuses for referrals isn’t exactly a new concept. But by making these offers on social media sites, you’re making it a lot easier and more convenient for your customers to take advantage. Give them an incentive to tell other people about the great things you do, and you might persuade them to go out and do it.

Need an online marketing team that knows social networking sites inside and out? Try one of Calgary’s best by contacting eKzact today!

That’s actually a little bit of a trick question; the reality is that they have been for a while. With major search engines like Google, they are factoring in real-time results from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites, the trend of merging SEO and social networking began quite a while ago. And now, with Facebook’s introduction of more search features, Google’s +1 rollout, Google Buzz, and the gaining popularity of public profiles, it’s starting to show itself in a way that the average web user can recognize.

So what should you do with this knowledge?

There are two definite courses of action. First, you want to be absolutely sure that all of your content – including and especially social media profiles and updates – is optimized just as a webpage would be. That means paying attention to your keywords, using filenames that can increase your search positioning, constantly adding new updates, and generally paying attention to the ways people can find you. Google alone figures more than 200 factors into their algorithm for each and every search; you can bet they’re paying attention to what you post on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, and will continue to do so going forward.

The second thing you can do is get full leverage out of your social media profiles. In other words, since search engines are going to factor them in and point to them anyway, make sure that potential customers can find lots of great things about you and your LinkedIn profile, Facebook fan page, and other social networking destinations. In a perfect world, one of your social profiles would do just as good a job selling you as your company’s home page would.

The lines between SEO and social media are blurring, but if you get into the habit of optimizing your content on both ends, that can be a great thing for your business.

Is your business falling behind on search engine optimization and social media marketing? Work with Calgary’s best to get back on track – contact eKzact Web Design And Internet Marketing for free consultation today!

Google and the other major search engines have reported in the past few years that “image result” queries are on the rise. This isn’t all that surprising — lots of people check out pictures of nature, super-models, sports events, and more — and might seem like it has nothing to do with you and me.

The reality, though, is that people aren’t just looking up celebrities and postcard landscapes… they’re also searching for images of friends, colleagues, and vendors.

What does this have to do with you, or your online marketing? It’s simple, the bigger and better you get, the higher the odds are that someone is going to decide to try to put a face with your name and Google you for image results. Or, the more pictures there are of you online, the more likely it is that someone searching your company is going to come across one of them. In either case, think carefully about what they would find. Is it something that would help, or hurt, your professional image?

If you aren’t sure, then your first step should be to perform a similar search yourself. Many people do this and are surprised at what comes up. For one thing, there might be a lot of photos of another person with the same name but (whether obviously or not) isn’t you. And for another, you could come up with photos you haven’t seen in years, snapshots where you have been tagged on other people’s social media profiles, pictures from old jobs or news articles, and so on.

Regardless of what you find, there are two things you deftly should do: first, try to remove anything that might harm your long term professional prospects; and secondly, make sure there are at least a few places where people can find a nice, comforting, professional photograph of you. In fact, go ahead and spend a few dollars having one done if you need to — it’s a small investment with a potentially large payoff.

Most of us aren’t famous enough that we have tons of adoring fans searching out our photos online. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can afford not to clean up our image online.

Need common sense advice and uncommon Internet marketing results? Get in touch with the team at eKzact — we’re one of Calgary’s leading web design, online marketing, e-commerce, social media, and everything else you need to keep your business moving ahead on the web.

If there is one thing nearly every eKzact client would wish for, it’s more marketing exposure. After all, isn’t that what search engine optimization, social media marketing, and even web design itself are really all about?

And yet, the majority of businesses and professionals miss out on one of the spots where they could put a welcome tagline for their business and have it seen by thousands of people every year: their e-mail signature.

Think that it’s not a powerful place to include an offer or reminder? Think again. Not only is it one spot where you probably have repeated access to customers and potential customers, but it’s also something that’s seen when your e-mail is printed or passed on to another person.

Here are four ways you can use the valuable space at the bottom of your next e-mail to help your company market itself better:

Promote a product or special. If you have something your customers might be excited about, like a new product or discount pricing, that they might’ve missed elsewhere, this could be the perfect place to give them a reminder.

Include links to social media profiles. If you’ve read this blog at all over the past few months, you already know how important social media is to your overall marketing plan. Encourage people to join or follow you online by including links with each e-mail.

Highlight a piece of recent news. Did you win an award, snag a major contract, or otherwise do something professionally that you’d want customers to know about? If so, include a quick headline and a place for them to click through.

Offer a special report or white paper. Downloadable information pieces work well because they let people know you’re an expert on your subject. If you have one, your e-mail signature can help more people find it.

Need new online marketing ideas for your company? Get in touch with eKzact, Calgary’s premier web design and Internet marketing partner.

There are a few things almost every online marketer loves about Twitter: its fun, dynamic nature, the way you can instantly reach thousands of people or more with the click of a mouse, and the fact that just one or two compelling sentences can be passed on hundreds of times.

But if there’s one thing most of us don’t particularly love about Twitter, it’s finding the time to think up new tweets, login to the site, post them, and generally find ways to stay on top of our accounts. After all, we barely have time to manage our own businesses… who can login to Twitter five times a day?

For that reason, more and more businesses are outsourcing their tweets. That is, they’ll set a tone, along with some keywords or important messages, and hand them over to a third party, usually a community manager, virtual assistant, or outsourced social media professional.

Like most ongoing business tasks, this can be a great way to delegate the responsibility you don’t have time for yourself. But as with those other tasks, it’s a good idea to check in and see how things are going once in a while.

That’s because the person you hire to manage your Twitter account, unfortunately, might not always have your best interests in mind. In fact, I’ve noticed a surprising number of accounts and profiles that are obviously being steered by someone who has their own agenda — and one that certainly is not always in line with their client’s.

Check in on your account now and again and make sure that the tweets you are seeing aren’t overly self-centered or self-promotional. If they are, you could be paying someone else to effectively hijack your account and use it to promote his or her own brand, rather than the bottom line business goals you set in the beginning of the relationship. It’s not an enormous problem, yet, but one that we see often enough to stay on the lookout for.

Do you need help integrating Twitter and other social media sites into your online marketing plan? Get in touch with eKzact Web Design today. We’re Calgary’s best online marketing team because we turn your business needs into an Internet reality.

Amongst the things business owners and marketing managers are quickly learning about social media marketing are that it’s important — Facebook alone has more than 500 million members and growing fast — and that it’s hard to keep up with.

Between the profiles, updates, tweets, and LinkedIn requests, managing your company’s communications can quickly become a part-time job.

And in fact, in some circles it has.

More and more businesses are relying on “community managers” to keep their social networking communications professional and consistent. Whether they are in-house or a paid vendor, this person is responsible for keeping your accounts up to date, managing the impression you create, and keeping an ear to the ground to see what sort of results you’re getting.

Sound interesting? Here are four things a community manager can do for you:

Keep an editorial calendar. Instead of simply posting messages randomly, a community manager can make sure you hit the right topics at the right intervals by helping you plan ahead.

Post and tweet regularly. We all know how easy it is to lose track of what you’d like to do in a day because you get busy with other tasks. A big part of the community manager’s job is making sure your posts and tweets go online when they should.

Manage feedback. Want to be sure the conversation keeps going? Your community manager can approve and even encourage feedback from visitors to your Facebook fan page and another profiles.

Keeps you updated. Want to know how many followers you have, whether they’re joining at the rate you expected, or if your social media marketing is paying off? These are metrics your community manager can easily gather and report back to you with.

As you probably noticed, having a community manager for your social profiles can be a great way to fill in some of the gaps in your online marketing plan. If you have wanted to do more with sites like Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn, but can’t seem to find the time, then consider adding one to your team. It could be someone on your staff, and outsourced professional, or a member of your web design/online marketing team. What matters isn’t where they work, but that they keep your social media marketing on track and moving forward.

Want to see better results from your social media marketing? Try working with our team — we have helped dozens of companies in Calgary, just like yours, to turn Facebook friends and Twitter followers into loyal customers.

Part 3 of 6

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Part 1 of 6

Next: Part II – Why is Online Marketing Such a Big Deal?

In a lot of ways, the explosion and evolution of social media marketing – the attempt by companies to reach customers through sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube – has been similar to other trends, like search engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising. First, the new technology or medium comes along. Then, sensing that the public has embraced it, companies try to get in the act and find a profit. Once they have figured that out, they attempt to refine their approach make the profits margins a bit tighter while looking out for competitors.

One important difference is showing itself this time around, though: companies aren’t waiting to find the profits and tighten them up. Perhaps because of the tight economy, or just because they’ve been burned by flashy new online marketing ideas before, they’re finding increasingly complicated metrics to put into the mix. Rather than simply spending and looking for results, as businesses have done with the Yellow Pages, direct mail, magazine ads, and countless other forms of marketing for decades, they’re going straight to the bottom dollar.

But should social media ROI measuring really be a full-time position?

The answer to that question depends a lot on what your company is spending on social media marketing, both in terms of time and money. If it’s simply another way to reach your customer base, then a complicated, time-intensive system probably isn’t needed. But if you’ve committed a lot of resources to the social marketing effort, why not bring in or transfer an employee to the cause? After all, that person might be able to help you find areas where you could be saving (or earning) a lot more than you pay them per hour by finding and interpreting the relevant numbers.

It’s a sure bet that, in the future, there are going to be lots of dedicated social media marketing managers who just focus on the relevant statistics, and especially ROI. Whether you need to be the first company on the block to have one, however, depends a lot on how heavily committed you are to finding business through social networking in the short term.

Need help getting your social media marketing plan in order? Get in touch with eKzact Solutions, a today – we have the experience and expertise to help you turn profiles and facebook fan page designs into profits. See website design Calgary for more details.

For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, public speaking opportunities are a great way to position yourself as a leader in your industry, while making a little bit of cash at the same time. With that being said, however, there are a few things you might want to consider if you aren’t planning on making your first paid speech your last.

There are seven quick tips for creating speeches that are entertaining and informative:

Don’t do “death by PowerPoint.” There was a time when PowerPoint was new, exciting, and cutting-edge… unfortunately, that was for about five minutes in the early 90s. Now, it’s just another tool to supplement your presentation. Rely on it too much, and your audience will start to wonder you are trying to hide beneath all those slides and multimedia clips.

Remember that preparation is the best way to beat stress… In surveys, people regularly report that public speaking is their number one fear – one step ahead of dying. You probably wouldn’t be reading this article if you had a crippling fear of presenting to groups, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a bad case of nerves before speech. It happens to all of us.

The best way around this problem is simply to over-prepare. The more you know, and the more ready you are, the fewer butterflies you’re going to feel in the pit of your stomach as your speech approaches.

… And that that practice makes perfect. By the same token, once you have planned out what you want to say, practice it until you feel comfortable enough with the material that you feel like you could give your speech without notes. That’s not to say that you should go without notes, of course, but that put in enough time to be sure your presentation has a good chance of going smoothly.

Avoid repeating yourself. A sign of a weak or unprepared speaker is that they will come back to the same point again and again, using it as a crutch to stand up for the rest of their presentation on. Your audience doesn’t want to hear the same thing several times over, so break that habit of repeating yourself.

Avoid repeating yourself. See what I mean?

Anticipate the questions your audience will ask, and then be prepared for them. In every topic, there are probably 5 or 10 questions that are naturally going to come up. Anticipate them, and rehearse the answers you’re going to give. By thinking about these things ahead of time, you can give replies that are quick, crisp, and insightful – everything you would want for the rest of your speech.

Treat humor, quotations, and statistics like you would a powerful hot sauce. A good joke, an interesting fact, or a timely quotation can all add a bit of punch to your speech… but only if you don’t overuse them. Consider this as you plan out your major topics and talking points; go too far and you will overwhelm your audience and risk having them lose your main points.

Here’s a quick social media marketing tip for you: make a regular habit of jumping online and posting, at length, about the first things that come to mind. Just go ahead and grab that little filter in the back of your mind that tells you to hold back and crumple it into a little ball. In fact, the more personal, or damaging, material you can come up with, the better.

Don’t worry about it… your employer, business partners, and clients won’t mind one bit.

By now, you’ve surely figured out that I’m having a little bit of fun too. Most of us have figured out (and some of us the hard way) that what we post online isn’t ever really temporary. It can linger with us long after the instant we wrote or thought it in, and often without the sense of context and timing that were originally there.

A purported “guru” in social media recently wrote on Twitter: “Are you promoting your company, your brand, or yourself? All things being equal, people will do business with those they know, like, and trust. Therefore, you are more important than the company you work for, or the products you sell.” This blogger might believe that today, but I wonder if he’ll feel differently in a week, or month, when he can no longer find corporate clients willing to pay him to tell their employees to put themselves first and ignore the company mission. In other words, there’s a good chance he’s going to wish he could take that back.

Moments of extreme candor online at blogs and social media sites may not benefit you in the future. Talking about about personal issues, religious or political views may indeed alienate prospective clients or future employers.

The Internet has a much longer memory than most of us realize when we are using social media. You might think that because you’re not famous, or you aren’t baring your unmentionable parts on a webcam, that what you say or post isn’t going to follow you around. But your thoughts, opinions, and off-the-cuff remarks – especially the ones that aren’t going to look so flattering in the light of day – tend to do a good job of following you around.

What you Tweet, and what you post online, it’s probably going to hang around for a long time, or at least for a bit longer than you are going to be running wild on planet Earth. Keep that in mind, and use it as a guide to stop yourself from saying something that might cost you a friend, an account, a promotion, or anything else – now or years down the road.

Social media might be one of the newest and greatest thing, but those of us who’ve been around the web design and online marketing industry for a while have seen similar trends take shape before. And while the technology and possibilities might be ever more exciting, some of the same sorry trends are starting to pop up, as well.

Case in point: a lot of men and women who were selling computer support or promotional products a few months ago are now suddenly marketing themselves as “gurus” that can help you find the enlightened path to profits from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Given that guru actually means “Hindu or Buddhist religious leader and spiritual teacher,” among other definitions, it would seem that these folks are failing in just about every sense of the word. That’s because most of them can’t help you with your social network marketing plan anymore than they can tell you their name in Hindi. What they are realizing, however, is that business owners and online marketers are scrambling for answers, or at least some kind of edge, in this new and increasingly-competitive field.

What you need to know and remember is this: social media is not snake oil; there are customers to be found, and profits to be made, from the major social networking sites, not to mention a handful of others that are still popping up. Neither, however, is a “quick fix” that’s going to replace the hard work of identifying your target market, making a compelling offer, and generating lots of interesting content. Those are the things that have always driven business on the web, and that’s not likely to change for a long time.

The next time you hear or see someone who is practically screaming that social media is changing the way the Internet works, go ahead and believe them. But hold off on sending them a small fortune for their products or advice; just because they don’t know what a guru is doesn’t mean you have to act like you don’t, either.

If you are looking for answers regarding social media marketing, search engine optimization or website design, please do not hesitate to drop me a note.

A classic piece of advice warns us to keep our friends close, but our enemies closer. But what would it say about our frenemies?

If you aren’t familiar with the term, frenemies are the men and women in your social and professional circles – like former employees, competitors and their employees, clients you have let go after a disagreement, past lovers, etc – who were once friendly but now have the ability to do you harm. Running into them on the street, or at a dinner party, can be awkward; having them hanging around your social media profiles can be a real business-killer.

The reason is simple: it doesn’t take a lot, especially online, to damage your reputation. Because a lot of potential customers and clients are coming to you for the first time, they don’t have any impression of who you are, the great work you do, all of the reasons they should choose to buy from you. And so, just one or two negative pieces of information from a frenemy – even if it’s false information – can stop buyers from giving you another look.

So what’s the answer? On the one hand, you could become intimately familiar with the privacy and access settings available on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites. A better and more effective approach, though, is to simply keep your toughest conversations off-line. That is, once you have determined someone on your contact list could, and potentially might, do some harm to your business, then make sure they can’t connect with you any longer. It might be difficult or awkward, but it’s a lot better to have that conversation upfront… and away from your clients.

Don’t simply stop with deleting away your frenemies, however. To keep your reputation intact, you’ll need to stay proactive and monitor what people are saying about you regularly. The only thing worse than having a lot of frenemies on the Internet, is finding out that they are hurting your business months or years after the fact.

In every business, there are going to be things that don’t go the way we had hoped, and relationships that don’t work out. The important thing isn’t to make sure that every person you’ve ever met is completely happy with you, but that the dissatisfied few aren’t trashing your reputation all over the web.

Need help managing your online reputation and social profiles? At eKzact, we have the tools and experience to make sure your Internet self is just as professional and profitable as you are.

Cheers – David A. West
Calgary Social Media Consultant
Search Engine Optimization Practice

Historians like to point out that the cold war might have been responsible for much of the technological and industrial growth the world has seen over the past few decades. Without the high-stakes competition and constant threat of attack, the thinking goes, we might not have been pushed to create the Internet, advanced mobile devices, and many of the other things we’ve all come to know and love.

But of course, there was that constant fear under threat of attack…

If you are involved in online business, you probably know what I’m getting at. It’s great that the web, and search engines especially, is growing by leaps and bounds, but at the same time, it seems like every new week brings another wrinkle in the SEO game – one that your competitors would love to use to put you out of business.

Since it doesn’t seem like people are going to stop trying to get to the front of Google, Yahoo, and Bing anytime in the near future, how can your business win a search engine arms race that never seems to stop?

Well, you can start by employing all the weapons at your disposal. Make sure that it isn’t just your web designs that are optimized, but that your social media profiles, blog, online videos, and other content are set up in a search engine-friendly way as well. Having all of these elements coordinated and working together is far more important than using any one of them perfectly

And secondly, you can do what the West did when it stood off against the Soviets: trust the market. If there was anything we learned from the whole experience, it was that rigid planning (in the case of the Russian economy) had a hard time competing with an open flexibility. Rather than worry too much about the future, simply concentrate on your short-term game plan and then adjust as needed going forward.

The search engine optimization cold war might be underway, making the game of finding customers harder and more competitive, but that’s no reason to hide in your virtual bunker. Just get all your forces moving in the right direction and let your instincts take over.

Want to put your SEO plan over the top? Talk to me or my team to see how we can help you reach the best positions on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Social media marketing, up to this point, has been something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, with hundreds of millions of users and more joining every day, it’s a trend that no business owner can afford to ignore. But on the other, lots of marketers have rightly pointed out that for all the fun and excitement, it seems hard to trace a clear line from having strong social networking profiles and increasing your sales.

Just because there isn’t necessarily a clear line, however, doesn’t mean there isn’t any line.

For one thing, social networking sites allow owners and marketers to communicate directly with clients and customers in a way that they’ve never been able to do before. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn give unparalleled one on one with buyers, allowing you to establish deeper relationships with them, gain new customers through referrals, and get valuable feedback.

Maybe even more importantly, though, is that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing are increasingly weighing social media content more heavily into their rankings. In other words, the stronger you are on social networking sites, the easier it is for customers to find you everywhere else. Knowing that search engines love social media, here are five things you can start doing right away to help your business online:

Start social media profiles. If you don’t already have accounts on the major networks, create them today. You can’t benefit from profiles that aren’t there.

Post regularly. Likewise, the best thing you can do for your social media marketing plan is to use it. Accounts that aren’t updated can’t do you much good.

Be interesting. Social media marketing is all about what your customer wants to read. Find out what issues and problems matter most to your buyers, and then comment on those.

Market softly. Don’t try to hit customers over the head with your marketing message. Instead, consistently reinforce it with interesting and entertaining content.

Put everything together. No single account on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social networking site is going to be enough to put your search engine optimization efforts over the top. Use them all together, linking each profile to the others so you can get the most out of your time and effort.

If you’d like to see your search engine optimization and social networking profiles do a better job of working together, contact me today to see how our team can help.

David West
Calgary Web Design Professional

Since its early days, one of the greatest strengths of the Internet has been that it isn’t just a one or two-way street – it’s a constantly growing and evolving global community. For those of us who have been working with it for a while, it’s still a source of astonishment, and even a little bit of pride. That’s because no matter what your interest, problem, or situation, the web is the one place you can go and be reasonably sure you’re going to find someone who can help you find an answer or point you in the right direction.

The rise of social media sites has only fueled that trend. By letting us get in touch with each other on a deeper level, it’s giving us the chance to help each other find information and solve problems in a way that just wasn’t possible even a few years ago.

But it hasn’t all been good news…

All of this access to people means an entirely new bounty of possibilities for marketers. That’s not a bad thing and another itself, of course – the more options buyers have, the better off we all usually end up. But, in the rush to online profits, lots of businesses have decided to take shortcuts, offering page after page of “junk” content just to bring in hits, but without offering any real value to searchers and buyers.

And so, the question I will put to you today is this: are you adding valuable content to the Internet… or just polluting it with more junk?

The answer is something you should always give thought to, and not just because there are still people like me out there who take the concept of the Internet as a community seriously. I consider it my own backyard.

Your reputation, and the reputation of your company, is going to be almost entirely dependent on the service and value offer, along with what you post to your website and social media profiles. Once you begin to become associated with anything that feels vaguely like “a waste of time,” then your online sales or your reputation are going to suffer.

Besides, do you really want to be known as just another person or company selling something on the web? Wouldn’t it be far better to be recognized as a leader in your field? Making useless and constant noise in your backyard doesn’t make you a community leader. The same behaviour online does not make you a leader in your field.

The future of business online – as it is anywhere else – rests in the hands of those who give customers a great reason to part with a little bit of their time and money to get something better in return. The web is shrinking our world, and there’s no room left in it for marketers who just want to pollute it with empty content.

One final point on reputation – what you Tweet today is not going to go away. In fact, what you blogged in 2007 is still available for reading online, even though the blog has long been taken down.

Want to see your business thrive with quality content and a world-class social media marketing plan? Get in touch with my team today to find out what kinds of solutions we can offer your company. Reach out to me through the contact page, or through our Calgary Website Design site, where we host an array of professional products, services and consulting programs.

As Apple’s “Ping” social networking platform continues to pick up steam – not to mention users and content – it’s a reminder to those of us in the online marketing community that social networking isn’t just a new set of websites, but a trend that’s still evolving and taking shape. And really, Ping just represents the next logical step – big companies creating their own networks to help showcase their own products and build semi-private social circles.

But as we watch the blend of music and social profiles unfolding, three questions come to mind: First, do we really need another social networking site? Secondly, what is Apple doing differently than anyone else? And finally, what can other businesses take away from all of this?

Do We Really Need Another Social Site?

As to whether we really need another social profile site, we probably don’t. But we’re going to get one… and another, and dozens after that. Until the bigger players have figured out all the ways to make this thing work, and the smaller creative firms stop shaking the ground beneath their feet, new social media avenues are going to keep coming.

What Makes Ping a Game Changer?

What makes Ping a game-changer is that it isn’t only center around the people you know, but the products Apple wants to sell you. As I mentioned, this makes it a logical next step in the evolution of social networking, but an important one. The more companies like Apple can get you, your friends, and your family involved with each other through their platform, the more they stand to profit. Expect that other marketers – especially in sports, media, and entertainment – will follow suit.

So what does this mean for your business?

Well, if you are a Fortune 500 behemoth who can corral millions of your customers into the same online venue, then it means you should probably get your development team cracking on a new social networking site.

On the other hand, if you are like the rest of us, without your own billion dollar advertising budget, then the message is clear: watch where the traffic is going to follow it. The more social networking sites that spring up – and especially those that were involved or run a particular topic, product group, or industry – the better chances you have to target to a very specific group of buyers. Pay attention to where they are going and make sure your best customers can find you.

Ping might not be anything new in terms of technology, but it is a different way to think about the business possibilities of social networking. It’s not going to be the last word, though; you can be sure that dozens of other sites will be coming along soon.

Do you need help staying on top of your company’s social media marketing plan? My team over at eKzact has helped dozens of business owners just like you to turn contacts into clients and to gain customers online. Contact us today to see how easy it is to get started.

Cheers – David A. West
Search Engine Optimization Advisor
Social Media Consultant

A lot of times, when the “next best thing” finally rolls around, it’s a little bit of a disappointment. Whether it’s a changing technology, a new product, or even an event we’ve all been practically holding our breath for, few things live up to the hype. Google Wave was a great example of something that I really looked forward to, but as you may know it has already been shelved by Google. A lack of adoption was cited as the reason.

But when it comes to what our team is thinking of as the new hottest trend in online marketing, well… let’s just say that the future looks brighter than ever.

We aren’t talking specifically about search engine optimization, social media, or even new forms of content management – instead we mean something that both is and isn’t all of them. In fact, this new breakthrough isn’t even all that “new” at all, but the slow culmination of a trend that started in the industrial age. Are you ready to know what it is yet?

It’s the increasingly specific nature of the way people are searching and shopping online.

Your customers are no longer content to look for “jackets” or “Hawaii vacations.” More and more, they are getting more specific, scouring the web for “green goose down zip ups,” or “eco-friendly Maui bed and breakfasts.” Whereas they used to be all right with searching for what they want, they now expect search results – and online stores – to be delivered to them just as they request it.

So how is this a good thing for online businesses? Because not only are our customers getting a better deal for their time and money, but it frees us to do the things we are really good at. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, we can start to focus our businesses on the products and services we enjoy, and the ones that leave us with the most profit.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in online marketing. If you feel like your company isn’t attracting the very best customers it could be, talk to me and see how our Calgary web design team help.  My goal is the same as yours, to help your business achieve everything it can online.

Where should you be devoting the most time and energy to your social network marketing efforts? This is an important question for any company that has to choose where to devote their time and resources, and there aren’t many of us who don’t.

Let’s start with the raw numbers: Facebook has more than 400 million members, while Twitter has just over 100 million, and LinkedIn only counts around 50 million. So Facebook is the clear winner, right?

Well, maybe not. Because even though Facebook might be the giant on the block, Twitter is currently the fastest growing, and because LinkedIn is typically used only by professionals, it has the highest potentially-great-client-to-contact ratio, meaning that someone you meet there has the best chance of buying big from you later.

In truth, however, none of these statistics or ideas matter all that much. That’s because they all look at things from the wrong point of view. The most important social networking site is the one where your customers spend the most time. Wherever it is in cyberspace that they like to hang out, is exactly where you should be.

Often, those of us who have been in marketing, online or off-line, for a number of years start to unconsciously make things a little more complicated than they have to be. I suspect that’s the reason so many people are wondering about whether they will be more successful with this social media site or that one. If you want to get the most out of your time and money, just follow the Golden rule and go where your clients are. Learn to give them what they like, where they like it, and you’ll be just fine.

Social media marketing requires the combination of simple concepts with flawless execution. At eKzact, a Calgary website design company, we know the technology and terrain, and can help you add new sales through all the social media consulting platforms.

Social media, for all its wonders and delights, is in danger of becoming the ultimate form of online marketing “busy work.” The reason why is pretty simple: with hundreds of millions of users logging onto Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter fairly consistently, companies know they can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity to participate; yet at the same time, few of them have actually figured out how to make any money from their profiles and content.

The result is a game that everyone wants to play, but no one seems to know how to win.

And so, we want to ask you: are you simply “doing” social media, or are you working your social network marketing plan? If you aren’t sure of the answer, just ask yourself a follow-up question – what are you hoping to get, in terms of real-world business results, from setting up your profiles, posting updates, and otherwise tweaking your content? If you don’t know, then there’s a good chance you’re wasting a lot of your time.

Just because social media sites can be a lot of fun, and because everyone is using them, doesn’t automatically make them a great place to spend your marketing time and dollars. That’s not to say we think you should dump your Facebook and Twitter accounts today; there definitely are opportunities to reach new customers through these channels. But if you find yourself just logging in, making a few posts, and then checking up on your friends, then you already know those are wasted minutes.

If you aren’t sure how to turn your social networking contacts into clients, talk with us over at our Calgary web design company to see how we can help turn your online profiles into real-world sales.