There was a great article recently on Fast Company’s blog entitled “Google’s success may mark the end of everything else”. You can read it here – http://ow.ly/5PtAM . I enjoyed reading the article, as the domination of the tech space by certain companies has always been a topic of interest to me dating back to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuits. Whereas JD Rucker raises some very valid points, there are also some that I disagree with due to the much bigger picture.
As a Communication major at school, I spent a large amount of time studying the ideas of the great Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is best known for his famous phrase “the medium is the message” in 1964, which in simple terms is the theory that the context of a message is more important than the message itself. (For more, see this Wikipedia article.)
Approximately two months ago, the “Canada, Get Your Business Online” initiative was launched. Supported by big names such as Google, the aim of the initiative was pretty self-explanatory; getting Canadian businesses to build websites. According to Google, 100,000 Canadian small to medium sized businesses were/(are) not online, a sharp contrast to the 80% of Canadian consumers who are online.
Whereas this initiative was definitely a step in the right direction, it may not have been the most effective way to address the online disconnect between Canadian SMBs and consumers. For those unfamiliar with the initiative, it offered both free website creation through a templated “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) website provider, and a year of free .ca domain registration, in addition to a few other perks.
It’s that time of year again when the top 16 teams in the NHL begin their playoff quest to become Stanley Cup Champions. With my beloved Vancouver Canucks in the running to take home this important trophy, I’ve noticed that there are a few tips that social media users can take away from hockey.
Make it a team effort.
No hockey team has ever been successful based on the strength of one player, and your social media presence will most-likely be the same. Clients and other users you interact with online appreciate seeing the human side of your business, so give as many people on your team as you can the chance to have a role in your social media presence.
Anyone who has worked with Pay Per Click advertising will tell you that it is quite easy to spend a large amount of your budget without seeing any real results. Because of this, it’s important to make sure that when you design the messaging behind your Pay Per Click campaign, you design it properly for the Pay Per Click service you are hoping to employ:
There was an interesting story in the Online Marketing world recently, when JC Penney was, so to speak, charged with crimes against the internet by Google. Even though it was not of their own internal actions, the famous American retailer was essentially removed from Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) after their Online Marketing company not only spammed the internet with irrelevant links for JC Penney’s website, but even went so far as to pay for these damaging links to be posted on different bookmarking sites.
I’m currently in the middle of reading Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail”, which speaks of the endless opportunities the internet is providing online retailers to cater to niche markets, and the resulting increases in sales that are possible. Within the book, there is a particular example that stood out to me.
Anderson speaks of the example of two mountain-climbing books, one released in the 80’s and one just a few years ago. Although it did not originally see large sales, the book from the 80’s suddenly exploded following the successful release of the newer book. How could this have happened?
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