The 1 hour monthly group sessions are available online for your convenience!

Within each 1 hour session there will be ½ an hour of education and ½ an hour of “sharing” and questions using Anymeeting.com (instructions will be emailed to you before the group begins).

Over the 6 months, we’ll welcome expert guest speakers in different areas of social media and blogging and cover all basic forms of social media including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, multiple blogging platforms and anything else the group feels we need to touch on.

Groups are limited to 8 members in each Internet marketing “support group”.

Bonus! – Each participant also receives an hour of my time individually via phone or Anymeeting.com to cover their own personal challenges and strategies! We can follow up on topics covered in the class or deal specifically with the challenges of your company.

We’re starting with two Groups to cater to different people:

• Beginning – Are you a beginner? Do you know where to start on how to set up a Facebook page? Do you have a basic one set up and 1-5 followers? Twitter is a mystery? Well then you’re probably a beginner!
• Intermediate – If you have your Facebook and Twitter pages set up and have some followers, but now need to know how to safely and profitably expand. If you’d like to know more about blogging, Pintrest and other “hot” social media platforms, then the Intermediate is for you.

As soon as we have 5 members we’ll begin (approximately mid-May). The sessions will run for 6 months with the option to renew at the end of the period.

Please email me if you have any questions about what will be covered, what level you should sign up for or any other questions.

Off the Pinterest website:

“Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. To get started, request an invite.”

According to “Readwriteweb” Pinterest is growing fast, and 80% of the site’s users are women ages 25-44.

Go check it out! Yes, you need an invite – but just request one and you’ll be on it soon!

Courtesy of Phillip C

This past week we’ve had car troubles, or as I got fond of saying “mechanic troubles”.  To make a long and painful story short, we had one car in the shop 3 times and the other one one time in the space of two weeks. This wasn’t including the 3 tows to get the car to the mechanic.

So, how does this relate to your website?

We felt vulnerable.

I’m not totally stupid about cars – I know enough to usually know when it’s electrical or cooling or when I need new tires. However, cars have gotten more complicated and I’ve gotten so I just want mine to run.

This isn’t unlike your website. You may not understand how to write HTML or even how hosting or domain services work, but you just want your website to have correct information and to have an email connected with it that works.  Like your mechanic, you check to see if the person is nice and if they seems knowledgeable, but if you have no idea what they’re talking about you might not know.

So, how do you pick someone? In my case, I asked our tow truck driver – he actually dissuaded me from my first choice and pointed me to someone he’s been recommending for years. So, I asked an unrelated expert.

Do you know someone else who has had a website built and loves it? Ask their advice, but ask around – different businesses may require different solutions. Ask questions and see how they’re answered. Personally I never trust an internet web person that says you “have” to have anything. Everything is optional and I think baby steps are best when it comes to internet marketing.

Ok, so you’ve hired someone, how do you know what to ask for? If they’re good, they’ll give you good advice, but be skeptical. I always recommend that people start small and get SOMETHING off the ground. Don’t wait for a $2000 web store to be built when you can just have a simple site with some text and a phone number. Try not to be too picky – sometimes just having the information out there is a good start. You might have the perfect website (in your mind) but as you get up and going you might change your mind. Websites can be changed, but you can’t take back the thousands of dollars you paid to have something developed you don’t need.

In the end, any website will still require marketing. Your website is not a guarantee that you’ll get business – it’s just a start.

Trust a web person just the way you trust a mechanic, ask for references, look for signs of good work and proceed with caution.

Imagine being at a cocktail party where everyone is talking at once (sounds like a typical party, eh?) – it’s confusing and overwhelming.

However, if you could zone in on all of the people talking about a subject that interests you it might be more interesting and you would meet and connect with interesting people. Make sense? That’s a hashtag! Your way of organizing the chaos!

So, how do I use a hashtag?

Let’s say I’m interested in #hairstyles. The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone’s already created a related hash tag.

After going over a few pages of results, there are plenty of tweets with the term “hairstyle” in them, however I’m not finding any that have included a hash tag.

So now if I want to create a community of people who will share their love of hairstyles, I can create my own hash tag.

Keep in mind that the tag will use up some of your 140-character limit, so you’re going to want to keep your tweet fairly short, and yet create interest.   For example,  an intro #hairstyle tweet might go something like this

Check out the #hairstyle on Victoria Beckham at the British Fashion Awards 2011 in London! Love it or hate it? http://goo.gl/Rs4Ws

Hopefully this will start a conversation and get the information moving. It will also connect you with people who have similar interests.

Use Search as a way to find hashtags that are already happening that interest you or connect to your business.

Think all of this is silly? Or just for advertising? Then check out Project EPIC – based in Boulder this project is a “multi-disciplinary, multi-university, multi-lingual research effort to support the information needs by members of the public during times of mass emergency. In this age of social media, we bring our behavioral and technical knowledge of “computer mediated communication” to the world of crisis studies and emergency response.”

How awesome is that to track crisis and emergencies through social medial. I’m sure you’ve already caught a glimpse of top news stories breaking via twitter or Facebook before they even hit the main stream media. Who knows where this information stream will stop and you, and your business can be a part of it.  They use “Tweak the Tweet” to directly track data:

Tweak the Tweet is a hashtag-based syntax to help direct Twitter communications for more efficient data extraction for those communicating about disaster events. Use requires modifications of Tweet messages to make information pieces that refer to #location, #status, #needs, #damage and several other elements of emergency communications more machine readable.

Hopefully these tips give you a better guideline on how to use the “Twitter” stream better for fun or profit! Remember to have a conversation and not just tweet out ads! It’s good netiquette!

So when I say that 90 percent of the potential of the Internet has not been realized it doesn’t seem to make sense. But think about it. The Internet didn’t exist for the public twenty years ago (it was still in development and limited to universities and governments). The smartphone has only been available for eight years and has only really taken off in popularity in the last four or so.

So where is this 90 percent potential? Of the 156 million websites that are on the Internet, most of them are for companies to acquire a web presence for the purpose of sales. There are also social media sites (which is really just a buzz term for marketing), blogs, commentaries, news sites, video sites and online stores.

But how many of these sites are actually for increasing productivity? How many are for tracking a companies effectiveness, not just in sales and marketing, but in whatever that company does? Clearly, there is so much more untapped potential, particularly in a distributed business like the transportation industry.

If you look at the workflow processes at your business you will see what I mean. What are you doing by hand that you can do with a computer over the Internet? Here at Widget Incorporated we are specialists in realizing this untapped potential. We will consult with you, get to know you, get to know your business and will suggest a customized solution that can give your business a competitive edge in this high tech world.

After all, most businesses don’t realize that 90 percent of the potential of the Internet is unrealized but you can be certain that they will. In this fast paced, fast changing, competitive world can you afford to be left behind?

But the particular advantage of ASP.NET is the clear and definitive separation of presentation and code. Developers who used Delphi, Visual Basic (yes, the old Visual Basic) and other visual languages for applications development can appreciate this. A form is a form and is never confused with the code that affects the form’s behavior. Perhaps this was because the form was developed “visually” – one painted a form (remember Powerbuilder? It actually called its different components “painters”) and it would be inconceivable to confuse this in any way, shape or form, with the code.

Some of us remember the early days of Windows development when forms were created with code. But then there was the transformation of thinking that separated the layers. A similar thing seems to have happened with web development with ASP.NET – the code lies apart from the presentation layer or form. Classic ASP and Php not withstanding – a good programmer using these platforms should still ensure that code and presentation are separate (yes, it’s possible – it’s rarely done and most programmers confuse the two, but I consider this a bad practice).

But what about Javascript? This code component – interpreted and executed on the client machine can also be (and usually is) separated from the presentation HTML. Most programmers will create a separate .js file for their script – which, ordinarily I would consider good practice. But this ideology has several pitfalls when it comes to Javascript.

1 – Code reusability. In any environment, when one develops a site, it’s necessary to make a copy of any .js files. This means that when you are developing a site and you make changes to your script then, unless you have a central script repository, you end up with diverging copies and this is a bad thing. Even if you have a script repository then any changes must be copied back and, well quite frankly, it’s easy to forget to do that and, again you have diverging copies.

In Visual Studio you can create class libraries for your server side code and this can be one library that is shared amongst several sites, but when you ask for a .js file it makes a copy of the file.

2 – Cross-browser compatibility. If it were a perfect world then all browsers would behave the same way, but it isn’t (see The Compatibility Game for more on this) and Javascript is the worst offender. There have been many attempts to standardize the language by creating shell languages such as JQuery, Prototype and Mootools but these solutions lead to the next problem:

3 – Overhead. With Internet download speeds getting faster this may not seem like as much of a problem as it did to us programmers who worked on limited memory machines on slow phone line connections (my first modem was a 14.4K device) but why have all of that dross when only a fraction is needed? Abundance
is still no reason for waste. Would you carry your entire chest of drawers with you on a plane for an overnight trip where you only need one pair of underwear, socks and a shirt? Of course not – it’s an absurd notion, but programmers will happily do it.

So we, at Widget Incorporated, thought about this and wondered how we could come up with a way to solve all three problems. And we believe we have. We call it Injammies Technology. With it we can ensure code reusability, cross-browser compatibility and low overhead – we only send what we need.

And it’s exclusive to web applications designed and built by Widget Incorporated. Just look for the “Built with Injammies Technology” logo on our portfolio pages to see just what Injammies Technology can do for your application or call Widget Incorporated on 1-800-470-9073 for more information. There is always a better way – and we believe we’ve found it!

by Mary-Frances Main

Until just recently, unhappy customers had two options to complain formally: send a written letter/email, or ask to speak to a manager. Of course, this was in addition to personally telling all their friends about their experience.

Along comes social media and now unhappy customers can now announce their complaints to a much larger audience: not only to their friends, but to anyone who’s listening. One statistic says that more than 93% of people shop via the internet, and online reviews are big factors in decision making.

The bottom line: online reviews matter.

So, someone posted a bad review, now what?

Unfortunately, people can be difficult to deal with, but at the end of the day most customers just want to feel they’ve been heard. Ignore an angry customer and they’re much more likely to continue to complain publicly.

Take the “ugly” in stride and address issues with the goal of arriving at a solution. By addressing customer concerns in a timely fashion and with a polite tone, those negative reviews will end up showing how well your company deals with issues and provides great customer service.

Don’t ignore, but address.

Be sure to set up profiles on major social networking sites, and take ownership of your public persona. The more open you are, the better, and taking good and bad feedback in stride will earn you respect among consumers, building a loyal base of customers over time.

Being a professional is the key, be sure to separate your personal feelings from the criticism and maintain professionalism. Once you post online, it’s public. One poorly timed nasty comment towards a customer only takes a fraction of a second to post to Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook.

Move the conversation out of the public space.

Suggest to the customer moving the conversation to a phone or email conversation or private Twitter conversation. It is virtually impossible to solve problems in 140 characters (if Twitter), and there is no need for the problem solving to be done publicly.

You’ll see this quite often in major companies like GoDaddy and Comcast, where the Twitter representative will ask that you DM (or direct message them) so they can handle your issues in “private”.

Encourage positive reviews.

So, you’ve followed all of this advice and still have negative reviews to deal with, or perhaps there aren’t very many reviews for your company at all. The simple solution for this is to encourage happy, satisfied customers to post reviews and responses online.

A great way to encourage positive feedback posts is to e-mail reminder messages, simply and politely worded, asking customers to post positive feedback regarding their experiences. Most people will be flattered that you wanted their feedback and will be happy to post something.

In the end, handling social media complaints should be no more difficult or time consuming than handling complaints that come in from traditional channels.

If you have the full version of the Adobe Creative Suite then it comes with a program called “Fireworks” which is helpful in situations like this. All you need to do is select the part of the image that you want to map (by whatever means you care to do so – this is only for getting coordinates so erasing parts of the image and doing a magic wand selection works nicely. Then, right-click the selected area and choose, from the popup menu:

Modify Marqee -> Convert to Path

And then, right-click on the vectored object that is created and select:

Insert Hotspot

From the main menu, select:

File -> Export

And choose from the Export drop-down “HTML and Images”. Give your exported file(s) a name (just like saving anything else) and you’re done. When you open the HTML file that is created (with the name you gave it) you will find and image map defined with the area you selected.

Pretty cool, huh?