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Four Little Used Facebook Marketing Tactics

May 26, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

There are many ways to market your website and business with social media.  Many are pretty common such as like buttons and adding your facebook link to your webpage etc .  Others are more obscure and just as important.  We are linked to a post that talks about four different items.

Use Insights to Gain Metrics.  Just as we need to know the traffic for our website, we need to know how people are using our Facebook page AND our website.  You can find out how people are sharing from your website.

Allow Facebook Comments on your regular website.  This gives a lot more visability to your website.  A simple like can be hidden in the large amount of  information on Facebook.  A comment can really standout.

Keep track of local business listings.  These are automaticly created by facebook and others can edit them. You should as well for obvious reasons.

The last item in the post is about Facebook boxes showing friends which is fairly common.

An excellent article you can read more about at SEOmoz.com.

Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media
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Utilizing Twitter for Business Marketing

May 15, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

While many business people are just beginning to understand the value of Facebook as a marketing tool, most still dismiss twitter. This is a mistake for many reasons.  Twitter is growing at an amazing pace which you can read about here.  It is very much connected to rocket like growth of mobile web.  In short, it is not going way,  it is growing.

Secondly, utilizing Twitter can be fairly low effort. Publicizing what you are thinking or reading is easy with the correct tools.  You can have facebook posts automaticly tweeted. You can tweet about interesting subjects as you read them to share the knowledge base. You can put buttons on your website and blog to let others tweet about your content or products.  You can include a window of your tweets on your site to give it a more interactive feel.

Connecting twitter to your Facebook, blog and website are no brainer ways of creating more traffic on all of your sites and since it takes very little effort, why not do it. For more tips on how it can help with your business, read this article.

 

Filed Under: Social Media, Twitter
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Self Updating Applications

May 3, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Part of the beauty of true cloud based applications is constant updates.  You do not need to worry about App 2007 that was designed in 2005 and beta tested until 2008 and what it will do to your data in 2009 when you decide to run the update.   True web apps run tests and roll them out as they are working.  Google is the champ with constant updates and tests being marketed as beta so you can try them out and provide feedback.  Then they select the best and brightest and roll them out to everyone.  The ideas that a customer or Google engineer had as an option just show up on your screen or as an option.

Last week Google highlighted a few of these updates.  They range from nice features such as putting your own picture behind Gmail to easier uploads and a whole new app for Droid phones.  The phone app takes pictures of text and then converts it and saves it as a text document.  No additional cost. No upgrades. Just use it!

 

Filed Under: Cloud, Google, Uncategorized
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Considerations for Choosing a Cloud Provider

May 2, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Moving to the cloud does not free you from the decisions you should be making about your information systems. You still need to consider the backup, the security, how you get your data back and where data centers are located. These are all homework items that should be done up front and included in your agreements. When done right they make your cloud computing experience as free of worries as you can get with systems that are in house or in the cloud.

Here is a good article outlining some of these considerations.

Filed Under: Cloud, SMB Technology Tagged With: ,
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Cloud Based Point of Sale

April 30, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

No longer do you need to buy specialized cash registers, software or servers for multiple POS units.  Pose is working on a system that allows you to lease a system in the cloud.  This could be a single system that offers an Internet store and handles sales in store.  Your data would always be backed up.  You could access it on a tablet or remotely.  The system is scheduled to be available in June.  You can read more about it at TechCrunch or at the POSE site.

Filed Under: Cloud, SMB Technology
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Facebook Launches Deals to Rival Groupon and Social Media

April 26, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

In what could be a complete turn over in the social discount arena, Facebook is launching their Deals program in five cities overnight.  This will be combined with check-ins which can get you bigger discounts and a virtual currency.  You check in with more people, you get a bigger discount.  For businesses it will be better than the current Groupon and Living Social because they will not have to pay for the discounts to Facebook and Facebook will be able to provide marketing information.  Of course there are concerns here about a new currency and more information sharing but seems to be the price paid for more social and mobile services.   More in the attached article from ReadWriteWeb.

 

 

Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media Tagged With:
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We are now a Google Apps Reseller

April 23, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

We are now a Google Apps Authorized Reseller.  And does this mean we have gone all in for Google? Yes and No.  We firmly believe in Google Apps and becoming a reseller gives us

access to more information on deployment, better access to support and the ability to manage client accounts from a dashboard. While we are amazed at what Google Apps can do for any business, it is not the only answer. We are keeping a very close eye on Microsoft Office 365 and we think that will be the answer for some people.  But if you want Google Apps, we are here to help you upgrade to the cloud.

Filed Under: Google
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Working on Our Fifth Google Apps Conversion

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Office 365 in Beta with New Marketplace

April 20, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Office 365 is now in wider beta mode where almost anyone can signup.  You are limited to 25 Office Pro and 25 Web Office clients for 50 total per installation.  The beta does not allow for custom domain names or federation with active directory.  All other functionality appears to be in place.

There is now a marketplace store for applications and services.  Right now the 100 or so listings is heavy on the services listing with only four actual applications.  I’m sure this will grow as Office 365 goes live later in 2011.  Hopefully the apps will all be connected to Office 365 unlike the Google Apps Market which seems to allow anything remotely connected.

 

Filed Under: Cloud, Office365 Tagged With:
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How Secure is the Cloud?

April 20, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Not completely but what is completely secure? When you store information in the cloud it is as secure as the providers and locations you choose to use. If you pick great vendors and have good contracts, your data is likely much more secure than when it was in your server on premise. Did you have backup and protected power? Fire suppression systems? Offsite backup separated geographically? Where your systems constantly patched and protected by a firewall? I doubt many small and medium businesses can answer yes to all of these questions. Pick a provider that can answer yes to these questions and you will have a piece of mind knowing your data is safe.

Security is always balanced with useful. Sometimes the most secure way to keep information is to make it completely unusable. Most cloud applications raise both sides of the equation. Your information is more easily used and it is more secure.

A couple of new items you must address are a method of making sure you have a backup copy in your possession in case the provider goes out of business. If you pick one with a good financial position that helps. You don’t have to worry about Google going out of business.

Filed Under: Cloud
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