Out of the Fog Marketing

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success. While it details how a person's environment, cultural background and lucky breaks have contributed to success, I could not help wondering how things such as the year in which you start year your business and the location of your company affect the chances for success.

We happened to start our second office in Ann Arbor, Michigan just as the auto industry was really tanking. This meant we had less competition in terms of other agencies which were left standing. We didn't specialize in auto, therefore, we didn't take a big hit. We did, however, focus on small to midsized technology companies which are plentiful in the southeast Michigan area, especially in college towns. I'd like to think some of our success was due to hard work and creative talent. But I have to wonder...how much was our success due to the factors discussed in Outliers?

What are your thoughts on lucky breaks vs. hard work?

Labels: book review, business failure, business success, malcolm gladwell, outliers

According to a report by Nielsen Online, social networking site use has surged 73% and exceeded web-based email usage for the first time ever! Last year alone the time spent on social media sites increased by 73%.

Labels: marketing, nielsen, social media, social networking

One of the largest behind-the-scenes updates to Google's search technology in three years is in the works. On August 10th, Google quietly began soliciting feedback for "Caffeine," a new system for Web searching that is being tested.

Google makes almost constant changes to its search algorithms and infrastructure, but it hasn't made an update of this magnitude since 2006, said Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google who is considered one of the driving forces behind the company's approach to search.

Preview Caffeine to see how it might affect your company's search result rankings. So far we have not seen a huge difference in rankings for Clarity Quest's site or our clients' sites. In all cases tested so far, the changes were actually positive for us. I credit this to the fact we build links the correct way through public relations, social media and rich content.

Feel free to post your comments to let us know what you are seeing.

Labels: Google Caffeine, Internet marketing, link building for SEO, SEO

In an article titled, “Who wants to be an Entrepreneur?” AP writer, David N. Goodman, reported that “the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation has launched a $9.25 million initiative to find 800 Detroit-area people this year with the ideas, talent and drive to start businesses that could help the nation's struggling auto capital develop a new economic base.”

On August 18th there will be the final session for the Detroit FastTrac to the Future program. Individuals are encouraged to come and present their businesses ideas with hopes of gaining the collateral to develop their own businesses in this trying economic climate.

With Michigan having the nation’s highest unemployment rate, at 15.2 percent, this program hopes to “create thousands of jobs, spur growth of small businesses, help auto suppliers diversify and make sure minority businesses fully participate in the new green economy.”

By year's end, the Detroit FastTrac program seeks to pick 800 people to help, with the hope that 400 will end up starting businesses with the overall goal to create 1,200 new companies over the next three years.

We at Clarity Quest are excited about this business venture for Michigan residents and hope that we will be able to help publicize these new businesses using our marketing services.

For a link to the full article, please click the link below.
http://www.wwj.com/pages/4976532.php

Animoto is an easy tool for creating quality videos that can be used for both personal and professional purposes. All you have to do is upload pictures to the Animoto website, select background music to play with your video slide show from the numerous choices on the Animoto website, or upload music directly from your own computer, and add some text to direct your audience through the video and you’re done.

Animoto Tips for Better Video
While Animoto takes a lot of the leg work out of creating professional looking videos, a few tips to maximizing the use of this tool can make your slide shows look even better. At Clarity Quest, we use Animoto to create videos not only for our IT and health care clients, but also to advertise the benefits of using Clarity Quest as a technology marketing firm. We have seen the benefit to creating these Animoto videos, and have been so impressed with the results that we have posted several on our website.

Here are some tips Clarity Quest has found that help to create better videos with Animoto as well as some tips from the creators of Animoto:

1. When uploading photos to Animoto, always pick photos that have a landscape orientation as portrait photos can sometimes format oddly during the video render process.

2. Animoto will automatically determine the duration of each picture in the video slideshow but if there’re pictures that you really want to emphasize in the video, select the images in the video editor and use the spotlight button.

3. When adding text to your video, always make sure that their pictures on either side of the text slide else your text will lack any moving video in the background.

4. Your choice of music determines the transition speed. If you select a slow classical song, your music video will have slow transitions whereas if you select rock, the transitions will happen fast.

5. Animoto consumes around 15-20 images for their 30 second shorts. If you upload more images, they are likely to be discarded in the final video so pick the best shots before starting the render process. For full-length videos, you an upload up to 300 shots but the number of pictures used would really depend on the choice of your music - slow music means less pictures.

6. While most people use Animoto for creating fast slide shows, you can adjust the video speed to 1/2x for a more traditional slide show.

7. If you want to brand your Animoto slide shows, make sure that the last image in the slide show is not a photograph but an image of your logo.

8. To prevent images from getting cut off in your slide shows, try putting a 50 to 100 pixel border around the image to prevent loosing the edges of your pictures and create a more professional-looking image.

9. If you have a full-length video (business) account you are able to turn off the “created by Animoto” and music credits text that appears at the end of the slide show. Right before you go to render your video there will be options to turn off this text with the simple click of a button.