Feb
8
As a project manager for an Interactive Marketing Agency, I am always looking for ways to make my job easier. In today’s cloud-based world, it seems like every day there are new tools available that make it easier, quicker and cheaper than their PC-based competitors. Here are 3 tools I use on a daily basis and why I think they are swell! Skitch Skitch is a screenshot tool that allows you to capture, edit, and annotate images from anywhere on the web. Here’s what I like: Easily accessed from a browser plug-in Quick editing tools available within the Skitch pop-up
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Nov
9
Social Media is the buzz of today’s business landscape. If you are in B2B sales, you may be wondering if Social Media is worth all the visibility it receives. If so, how can you use it to increase sales success? Is it really useful or just a waste of time? The answer is that Social Media can greatly enhance your ability to make a sale – the tricky part is that it takes some work on your part. If you have been selling for awhile, you would probably agree that selling is the act of aligning your “solution” with another’s
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Aug
3
A combined 55.8% of online consumers rate Facebook pages influential (32.9%), very influential (16.7%) or extremely influential (6.2%) in making purchases from the retailer or consumer goods company behind the page, according to data collected by Compete in April and May 2011. A combined 26% of online consumers visit the Facebook page of a retailer/consumer product company once a month or more. This is an important statistics to remind companies that posting on Facebook regularly can increase awareness and sales. A company Facebook Page must be compelling, visually stimulating, and have real-time engagement. It is all about the fans, not
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Jul
27
Email, news, search, and shopping are the top “me time” activities for Moms: Moms control an estimated 80% of all household spending, or $1.7 trillion a year, and companies must understand how women’s shopping behaviors change when they have children. Some key stats on Mom’s Smartphone usage: – Nearly 60 percent of moms have smartphones, and 62 percent of moms access the Web through a mobile device on a regular basis—up from 22 percent just two years ago. – Moms spend an average of 6.1 hours a day using their smartphones, compared with 2.5 hours for moms who have
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Feb
15
Green Bay, WI – Envano, in partnership with e1evation and a large tractor manufacturer, entered the Region V NAMA awards and received two first place awards. The first award was in “Audio/Visual/Electronic Media Tools” and featured the clients Blog. The second was in “Other Social Media” and highlighted a group of social media tools including blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Scribd, UStream and Google Reader. The Best of NAMA Awards are sponsored by the National Agri-Marketing Association. NAMA is the nation’s largest professional association for marketing and agribusiness professionals. Winning entries in 2010 were selected from among 1,199 entries that qualified
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Dec
10
Social media certainly has its benefits for those who love dining and drinking. From free drinks for Foursquare checkins, to Twitter notifications about happy hours, to Facebook messages about free food, there’s always something tasty happening online. But the social web offers a lot more than just discounts and deals when it comes to drinking and dining. Restaurants and bars are giving social media users a backstage pass to the food and the people who make it. Chefs and restaurateurs are using social media to reveal how their dishes are made, generate familiarity with chefs and provide a means for
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Oct
18
Scribd vs Slideshare When it comes to online document sharing there are many options. The two most popular are Scribd and Slideshare. Scribed allows users to view, print, download and upload documents in a variety of formats including PDF and MS Word. It has an embeddable PDF format which makes it easy to place files into webpages or blogs. It also has a text-to-speech feature where files can be converted to MP3 for play-back purposes. Slideshare bills itself as the “business media site” for document sharing. As with Scribd, users may view, print, download and upload documents and easily embed them
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Sep
15
Hearing and addressing an unhappy customer’s concerns will usually swing them over to the very happy customer you desire – Why in the world wouldn’t you ask an “already” happy customer to toot your horn a little? A few weeks back, I got some work done on my car at a local dealership. In all honesty, I took my car to this particular dealership, because I’m the Mayor of it on Foursquare. Even if I just needed an inspection, why not also use this as another check-in to continue securing my mayorship, right? So why is this important? There was
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Sep
7
Location based check-in type services are this year’s overhyped topic – with good reason. While you may not understand why someone wants to be the mayor of their barber shop, you do need to recognize the behavior that social location services such as Gowalla,Foursquare, Yelp! and Facebook Places represents for the local business. Shoppers these days are using the Internet to find everything locally and increasingly using mobile devices, services and apps to effectively bypass even the web to find a merchant. What that means is that local small businesses need to find ways to tap into the behavior and not necessarily try
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Sep
1
Have you heard? Social Media is important for your brand. Monitoring your efforts and Responding is an extremely important piece of the puzzle. If you ignore your Social Media efforts, you’ll miss great opportunities to interact & win! Unless you literally run your business with your ears plugged and your eyes covered, you are aware of the importance of social media and its impact on both brand and bottom line. However, while social media is the topic du jour in mainstream news, on blogs, in books, at conferences and at your local Starbucks, we may still underestimate its overall promise
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