Whether you’re representing your company or yourself, it’s important to be easily recognized by a photo or image.

Think about big brand campaigns… whatever they do, their colours, fonts and graphics are the same throughout. How many times have you glanced at a billboard, web banner ad or commercial and immediately know the company because the name even appears?

Across the web when we’re Tweeting, liking things on Facebook and commenting on blogs, there are many opportunities to attach an avatar or profile picture. There are two important things to remember on this:  Read more...

It’s been over a year since the Bing search engine launched.  It’s done fairly well, often beating Yahoo! in terms of market share; not surprisingly, though, it doesn’t come close to Google.  However, lots of people are considering Bing to be a positive alternative to Google.

Including Facebook.  Facebook may not be the first place you’d go to do a search, but if you’re looking for something on Facebook, whether or not Facebook itself has results, it offers web results served by Bing.  See the screencap below.  Read more...

I just love Facebook advertising.

Contextual advertising has become more and more specific as the web grows and evolves. Thanks to Facebook, it’s gotten more detailed than ever. Facebook profiles contain TONS of information about a user. Age, sex, marital status, education level, job title, interests, activities – you name it, you tell tell Facebook all about it. And this has become an advertisers dream.

If you haven’t ever created an ad for Facebook, I highly suggest you jump on and start the process – you don’t need to pay anything. Take a look at just how specific you can get:
 Read more...

In February, I spoke at a luncheon for the Advertising Association of Winnipeg.  Today, I spoke at a luncheon for the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.  I had decided to use the same presentation with some tweaks, knowing the attendees would be very different (they were).  I figure, an hour two should get this presentation where it needs to be.  WRONG!  So many changes have occurred in the past 3 months, I spent several hours updating copy and screencaps to reflect the very latest.  Read more...

Facebook and Google have been making a lot of changes in the past few weeks, and some of their changes have included terminology.

Facebook Pages – Becoming a “fan” of a Facebook page is gone, you now “like” a page. Therefore, they aren’t called “Facebook Fan Pages” anymore.

Google Places – This used to be your Google Local listing. Now you have a Google Places page.

Make sure you update your marketing materials – nothing screams “I’m not up on the latest social media” like having outdated terminology in your advertising.  Read more...

For those of us that have been around for a while, there are certain terms and references that make us cringe. This is especially true when talking about web site stats and analytics. So, I’m going to break down some of the terms that are commonly found and referred to when looking at site stats.

My number one recommendation/pet peeve…

Stop using the term “hits”.

It’s hard to say how people were using the term “hits”.  Sometimes it sounded like they meant page view, sometimes like visit, and sometimes like visitor.  All three very different things.  Hey, what’s the difference between those three anyway?  Read more...

Last year there was a lot of confirmed talk from Google that in the new year, page loading speed would become a ranking factor.  This is something already taken into consideration on the PPC side (quality score is affected by landing page load times) so it’s not surprising to see that it’s coming on the organic side too.

Earlier this week, it was announced – it’s here. In fact, on some data centers, the new ranking factor has been in place for several weeks. Now it’s across the board.  So if you’re seeing your rankings slip, it may be time to take a good hard look at your site and see where it’s slow.  Read more...

It’s been speculated for sometime that Google will do SOMETHING to compete with the massive social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. After some attempts like Friend Feed and Wave, Google’s attempting it again with their new product – Buzz.

Buzz is actually pretty invasive and is causing serious concerns about privacy. It is a part of Gmail, a link below your Inbox on the left-hand side. It is updated with status updates (done manually), RSS entries, shared RSS posts, Tweets and more from your friends.  Read more...