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Building an online presence for your business requires more than just a website.  Social networking has become many users’ first step in looking for businesses online. In fact, visits to social networking sites like Facebook overtook search engine use for the first time in the UK last year, and the same thing is poised to happen in the United States as well. Increasingly, people are looking to their friends and extended networks to see what products they use and services they like, rather than just searching for keywords and hoping for the best.

And really it makes sense. Testimonials and word of mouth have always been very powerful advertising tools. Every restaurant out there advertises itself as the best, but a good recommendation from a friend whose opinion you trust does more to sway your opinion than all the advertising in the world. That’s why having a presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is important. It gives your customers the opportunity to connect with you and do some of your marketing for you.

Facebook offers businesses a chance to connect to their customers, and allows customers to provide feedback on your products and services, and have conversations with one another. The versatility of Facebook layouts gives you virtually unlimited freedom to design a layout that is creative, informative, and encourages your customers to visit and recommend you often. The flipside of that freedom is that a poorly-designed, jumbled, or even boring layout can confuse customers or even turn them off, especially if your competition has taken full advantage of the possibilities of Facebook design. If you want your businesses custom Facebook page done well, as with many business decisions, it’s best to hire a professional.

When all is said and done, you want a custom well-designed Facebook page to do three things: provide information, encourage conversation, and represent your business.

The most important thing for your Facebook page to do is provide the information that your potential customers are looking for: what products you offer, what kind of services you provide, where you are located, what area you serve, what your hours of operation are, and how you get in touch with someone if they need more personalized attention. You probably already have this information on your website, but it is worth duplicating on your Facebook page, because search engines don’t return Facebook results, and searching on Facebook doesn’t return web results. Facebook is like its own alternate universe, so it’s worth the time to duplicate all of the basic information about your business on your Facebook page. (more…)

I just took the Advanced Search Advertising Exam through Google Adwords testing center and
passed with a 93% score. Not as high as I’d expected, but I was cocky after doing well on the last exam and didn’t study and thus was surprised by Adwords API questions I didn’t expect. Also taking the exam at 10:30pm on a Saturday probably didn’t help much. Ah well.

With more than 500 million regular Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Citysearch users, maintaining a presence on these social media services is a no-brainer as part of your overall marketing strategy. Unfortunately, how to actually do it requires a little more consideration. Fortunately, we’ve come up with a few tips to tweak you social media marketing strategy to get better return on the time and effort you put into your social media management.

An Account is Not a Strategy – It’s tempting to think that because Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Citysearch offer free accounts and access to powerful marketing tools, that you can, with a few tweets or status updates, suddenly find yourself with 500 million new customers. But it doesn’t work like that. Social media marketing is much more about reputation management and connecting to your current customers before you can effectively spread your brand through social media services. Your best bet is to find an expert who knows the ins and outs of social media management, and who can adapt them to the unique needs and goals of your business.

Bring Facebook to your site – Since Facebook Connect launched in 2008, users don’t have to actually go to Facebook.com to be on Facebook. They are essentially “always on,” meaning they can “like” posts, articles, videos, and just about anything else they find on the internet. Adding “like” buttons to your product descriptions and other website features is a fast and easy way to let your customers instantly share your business with their social network. Letting your users market to their friends for you is one of the most basic and powerful methods of social media marketing.

If you want to take it a little further, you can bring your customers’ Facebook feeds to your website with the Like Box. With just a little cut and paste coding (which you will find at the link), you can add the Like Box to your site so that your users can keep up to date with their feeds without navigating away from your site. Having a little piece of the web’s most popular social media services on your website can only improve your customers’ experience.

Harness the Power of Facebook Ads… – Facebook offers two types of advertisements: Marketplace and Premium ads. If you’re just getting started in social media marketing, you probably want to test the waters with Marketplace ads so you can get the hang of keyword-focused marketing. Marketplace ads are short ads that appear based on keyword searches, locations, and user demographics. They can drive traffic either to your Facebook business page or directly to your website. The average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of a Facebook ad is about $.25, so it is a cost-effective way to get your message out there.

…But Don’t Count on Them – According to a recent report by social media marketing analysts Webtrends, clickthrough rates for Facebook ads are pretty low, averaging only 0.051 percent in 2010. For the math-impaired, that is just over one-half of one-tenth of one percent. There are two things to keep in mind about that number though. First is that the CPM price for Facebook marketplace ads is per one thousand views. So for every thousand views, you pay an average of $0.25, for about five clicks. Five pairs of eyes for a quarter is a pretty good deal, even if they don’t all turn out to be buyers. The second thing to keep in mind is that Facebook is not just a platform for advertisements. The key to effective social media marketing is the “social” part. Get your current customers to connect to your Facebook business page and let them disseminate your message through their networks. Get conversations going about the parts of your business that excite you, and you can excite your customers and grow your brand. Brand growth, far more than actual sales, is the primary focus of social media marketing.

Tweet Responsibly – Using Twitter can be a great way to keep your customers in touch with what’s going on at your business right now. But as with any social media tool, there are users (including business users) who mistakenly think that all of their followers care about every move they make and every random thought that occurs to them. People use Twitter to get relevant both relevant information and random thoughts, but over tweeting contributes to noise on your followers feeds, and can even cause them to stop following you. On the other hand, you don’t want to tweet too little and leave your followers in the dark. The best strategy is to set a range of tweets (typically between five and ten, depending on what comes up) to stay within every day. Some days you’ll have a lot to share, and you’ll go over. Other days will be slow or too busy to tweet, and you’ll fall short. That’s okay, this isn’t set in stone, it’s just a broad goal. That way your followers know you’re out there, but they don’t overdose on information. (more…)

Coalition Technologies, (we’re a Los Angeles web design firm), was recently presented with the opportunity to design a web site and a custom application for a financial group that handled backing for aerial technology development.

Its always fun to have the chance to address these types of challenges- three or so different fields, several different business models and target demographics, and a deadline to figure it all out in.

What do we know about aerial technology? Not much. Can I tell the difference between a Boeing 747 and a Cessna or a Piper Cub? Absolutely. Can I tell you how the different fabrication elements and electrical components differ from one another? Absolutely not. Do I know what the major navigation equipment manufacturer is for most of our modern jets are? I do now.

During the course of creating our proposal we were able to study up on the various aerial technology elements that our client was interested in backing financially, who the major players were, and where they operated out of. Once that was all said and done we had to look at the potential customer’s business model- how did they generate revenue, what was their conversion rate, and how much their average closing was worth to the business.

After that was all done, we still had to do our own jobs. Come up with branding for our customer, talk through the various website design elements that influenced their company image, and then look at building a custom site application to help set them apart.

What a fun job.

I am pretty convinced that these two giants of our digital era are going to be coming to blows in the near future. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been secretly spreading rumors around each others backs in their Los Angeles board rooms (or wherever they have their board rooms).

I’m so convinced, I drew this depiction of what I perceive to be the coming future:

Two giants face off on the field of combat!

When my predictions become true, everyone can buy this image from me for $5.00. Otherwise, you’re not authorized to reproduce. The image.

In all seriousness, there is definitely going to be some head butting going on. Google’s been working on developing a viable way to incorporate social networking into its core business for too long, and Facebook has been growing too fast and is undoubtedly starting to nibble away at Google’s advertising. Google tried Buzz, and flopped at it, because of user privacy concerns. Facebook has a patent on social search, which was approved in February of this year, after a good seven years in the US patent office. Google’s coming out with Social Circle at some point in the near future, and is already trying to use social popularity as an algorithm factor for their search results.

Too many of our LA marketing clients are looking to be present in both- to make an impact in organic search, you have to get a great SEO campaign running. To make a splash in social media, you have to have a great promotion and brand identity that you can leverage for connections. Money is going to both places and that’s a problem for both of them.

Who has the advantage right now? Google, without a doubt. They are the name in search engines, with over two thirds of the market share. They have their own browser, their own mobile phone OS (I know Android is open source, but it is basically Google), and still process a ton of queries that lead to Facebook’s pages.

But it also creates complications- Google’s stock is a good measure of its success (and it’s confidence). With Internet Explorer 9 getting rave reviews, Bing and Yahoo joining forces, and Apple pushing back against the Android devices with iPad 2 and possibly an upcoming iPhone release, its getting hit from all angles. If I were a betting man, I’d be pulling my money from Google unless they can come out with a knock out punch on one of these opponents soon. If Facebook joins in on the melee with Google as the punching bag, this could be the internet’s version of shock and awe.

Just saying. And besides, there’s a picture. Pictures are worth 1000 words, right?

I finally got around to taking the Google Adwords Fundamentals certification exam and passed a score of 96%! I thought I would’ve gotten a 100% score but a few of the video ads questions tripped me up since I haven’t used those much before.

Click here to see my score.

Recently I had to develop a WordPress blog that has multiple categories. We wanted to be able to show different design elements on the category template for specific templates.

It would seem like you need to create some custom code to show a different template based on the category ID or slug. Actually, it’s pretty simple. WordPress has a template hierarchy that is used to find which template file to use. All you have to do is create a category file with the following file name structure:

category-[slug].php
category-[ID].php

Just fill in the slug or category ID from your WordPress and you’re ready to go. For example, category-news.php would be used only for posts using in the ‘news’ category. If you do not have a category-[slug].php, WordPress will look for category-[id].php

Simple!

To take it one step further, we wanted to be able to load a different template for a single post in a specific category.

First you need to edit your single.php file. I would recommened creating a backup of your current single.php since this step will remove all code from your current version.

WordPress looks at the single.php file to display the content of a post. Based on the category ID we will redirect WordPress to a custom template instead of using the standard single.php. Here’s how it would work:

    <?php
    $post = $wp_query->post;
    if ( in_category(‘2’) ) {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/news.php’);

    } else {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/blogpost.php’);
    }
    ?>

In short, the first two lines setup a query. The second line tells WordPress that if the post is associated to category 2 then load the new.php as the template file. The next line tells WordPress to load the blogpost.php as the default.

Creating multiple templates is easy! Just use the “elseif” conditional tag and we can add an extra template file. You can use as many “elseif” statements as you need to match up your templates.

    <?php
    $post = $wp_query->post;
    if ( in_category(‘2’) ) {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/news.php’);

    } elseif ( in_category(‘8’) ) {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/events.php’);

    } else {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/blogpost.php’);
    }
    ?>

Quick and painless!

I am hearing now that there are several hundred dead as a result of the tsunami in Japan. Apparently most of these deaths are from the massive flood as it swept inland, especially through the Sendai island. There is a limitation to the amount of information that is available because of power still being down, and most traditional lines of communication also being out. Traditional news media seems to be just as behind the curve as I am. From the reports I’m hearing, it sounds like the prime minister of Japan is sending in their national guard to help with rescue efforts. Its still too early to be thinking about the repairs or cost of repairs yet, but Japan is moving quickly to help those who need it.

I’ve been assembling lots of Youtube videos since the quake hit Japan at around 11 o’clock PST last night- let me know if there is one I am missing.

Video Tsunami warnings in Japan after earthquake

More earthquake video and tsunami footage

Old video from 1993 Tsunami in Japan

Fires burning at petro-chemical plant in Tokyo following earthquake on Youtube

Office shaking in Tokyo earthquake video- HOLY SH*T

Fires caused by Japan earthquake

Miyagi Prefecture in Japan earthquake video

Tsunami waves on local news in Japan

Tokyo earthquake video

Probably some of the most amazing videos I have ever seen. The most incredible thing here is that there doesn’t seem to be the huge loss of human life that we experienced with the earthquakes elsewhere in the world. Truly the Japanese’s focus on being prepared for these types of monstrous events has paid off. Notice in some of the footage how the people are running into the streets with old military style helmets- they definitely look like they have some idea as to what they’re doing. Although, some of the office workers sitting at their desks in Tokyo and Sendai as the earthquake rocks the buildings, makes me wonder if they are really that aware, or just not caring. ‘Ah, just another 8.9 earthquake’, running through their head?

I do love listening to the English speakers swear up a storm as the March 11 earthquake rocks them. I wonder if my lack of Japanese speaking skills limit me from hearing the f bombs there too.

This really is a huge event but it speaks to advantage of putting more forethought into your building and engineering. It probably saved millions of people. Some of the tsunami videos are worrisome because you can see cars driving on roads moments before the waves crest over them. I hope all those people made it out okay.

I’m trying to find footage from the nuclear facility that was shut down because of the earthquake, but can only find still footage. I got the news last night about this from my younger brother and am still surprised that it seems to be news to a lot of people. Very very dramatic stuff, and I hope everyone is okay.

These amazing videos coming out of Japan across social network sites…. Its incredible that these buildings staid up. And that so many people in Japan whipped out their cell phones and started filming these incredible snapshots of the earthquake in Tokyo as it occurred. The size and power of this thing is shocking- when I first heard about it, I thought we would most certainly see another one similar to the Indonesian tsunami. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to have happened, and from most of the news and video about the earthquake, it looks like most people are okay. There is some scary moments in the tsunmi video clips that show cars driving just in front of the waves as they strike. Hopefully the people managed to find a way out or to high ground. I’ll try and get posts up on the news and information relating to this as it comes out of Tokyo and the rest of the country of Japan.

At an office building when the Japan earthquake strikes

A supermarket in Japan when the earthquake hit

Inside a personal residence when the earthquake strucks

Tsunami wave sweeps Sendai

Another video of tsunami waves in Japan