Out of the Fog Marketing

Believe it or not, "Twitter" beat out h1n1, Obama and Michael Jackson as the most popular word in the English language in 2009. While it's not completely fleshed out, online social interaction is here is stay. Read the full story.

If your company doesn't already have a social media strategy, now is the time to get one. In the very least you should do a land grab for vanity name URLs on Facebook and claim your company profile on LinkedIn and corporate/product fan pages on Facebook. And start to play with Twitter. There are tools such as Ping.fm that link all these social sites and your blog together, so in 5 minutes per day, you can provide a status update on each site with just one login.

Labels: interactive marketing, Internet marketing, ping.fm, social media, social networking, twitter, web marketing

Check out Adobe's web-based application, Kuler, to view a gallery of created color themes or create your own from a particular base color or even a photograph. The tool is especially useful in presentation and website development.

Labels: adobe, color theory, graphic design, kuler

Interview with Matt Cutts more than hints to the fact that the speed at which your site loads may start to enter into the search ranking factors. You can test the speed of your site and get access to many free tools at the this Google site speed page. We especially like the Page Speed Firefox app.

Labels: google, google search, Internet marketing, matt cutts, web marketing

Check out this nteresting post by Andy Edmonds on using Google Analytics to monitor your brand. I tried it on a couple of accounts and found some pretty interesting results. You can set it up in 5 minutes per account.

Labels: branding, google analytics

Free media coverage is one of the best deals going. If you want to see your company's name in print, scan the daily emails from Help a Reporter Out (HARO). It will only take you 5-10 minutes each day to scan dozens of inquiries from reporters looking for information on stories they are writing. Our efforts in responding to HARO posts recently landed us a nice mention in Oregon Business Magazine.
Here's some advice when pitching editors through HARO:

1. Make sure your response is relevant to the editor's inquiry. For example, don't send information on electric vehicle sales if the writer is doing a story on low-cost auto repair.
2. Think before you write. The information you provide should be descriptive yet to the point. Don't send paragraphs of information on a first reply. The writer will contact you if he needs more info.
3. Be patient. We get action on only about 10% of the responses we provide. However, the ROI is still there.
   

Responding to editor and freelance writer inquiries can be a great addition to your public relations strategy. Combined with press releases, media outreach can get your company great press which often garners new leads and establishes your management team as experts.

Labels: HARO, peter shankman, press pitches, public relations