Notes From the Desk

Recently, a friend of mine was in a job interview and was asked to explain a few things on his Facebook page that the company was curious about. The first thing they asked him was to explain the religion he had posted on his Facebook profile. Racking his brain, he tried to remember what he had posted on Facebook. It finally dawned on him that he was still listed as a “Follower of the Church of Darrell Williams.” While this may be a funny inside joke among friends, it may not be so funny to potential clients or places of employment. Is there such a thing as a personal Internet identity that is separate from your business identity? As with everything on the Internet, there is no clear-cut yes or no answer, but with a little luck we can wade through the murkiness.

First off, a good rule of thumb to think of when dealing with posting anything on the Internet is that once it’s on the Internet it is there forever. Even if you remove those comments or embarrassing photos, they are most likely still out there somewhere. With websites like archive.org you can bet that there is copy of something you posted 5 years ago.

So does this mean the end of fun on the Internet? Can I post on Facebook, Flicker or MySpace without being scared I could get fired for what I just posted? What this does mean is that you need to think twice about what you post. Students and employees throughout the country have been expelled or fired for photos or comments posted on Facebook and MySpace.

If you want to control what the public can see of your profile on the Internet, make sure to use the security settings on forums and social networks. Make it so only approved friends can view your information. But don’t forget that your friends can download the pictures from your pages and repost them, so this is no guarantee of safety.

The bottom line is the Internet and social networking sites have made the world a much smaller place. While your personal Internet identity and business Internet identity are not one yet, the lines are blurring and the day will come when what you post on the internet can and will come back to haunt you. The Internet is still a playground where you can have fun, but remember the rule of thumb, what is posted on the Internet is there forever.

If you jump on google.com and type in “hosting” you will get 429,000,000 entries. It’s too many for one person to look through to find the right hosting company fit for your website. Some hosting companies are good and many are bad. It takes hard work to find a company to trust with hosting your website.

There are local hosting companies and national hosting companies, but really there is no right or wrong choice between these 2 options. You just have to find the option that suits you best.

With local hosting companies you can easily talk to a person instead of getting stuck in phone option hell. On the flip side, local companies might look for more control over your website than you are willing to give. The best way to find a good local hosting company is to get recommendations from other companies or colleagues.

National hosting companies like godaddy.com have a big customer service staff with more resources at their disposal. Also, national companies have more options and give you complete control over your own website. Usually larger companies have forums or blogs about their services where you can read about consumer complaints or concerns.

When setting up a client with hosting, we present them with 2 options. We recommend bluehost.com or dreamhost.com. Both are great-established companies that focus on customer service and consumer friendly prices.

In the end, make sure you do the legwork when deciding on a hosting company. Don’t blindly pick one. Find out how much control over your server space you get, how much downloading and uploading you get per month, what services are extra, and how often their web servers crash? Choose wisely because there are sharks out there looking to make a quick buck and not take care of their customers.

A problem many companies have when incorporating new technology into their website is they don’t take the time to ask the appropriate questions. People are too busy adding the Internet’s flavor of the month without thinking through the project and the possible consequences or rewards.

The web is littered with forgotten blogs, spam-ridden forums, and irrelevant podcasts. Executed correctly, these things can be powerful tools that can expand your company’s client base and create a good web identity on the Internet. On the flip side, if a venture is just abandoned to the garbage dump without being properly taken care of, the project itself becomes a stigma to your company’s web identity and detracts people from using your services. Before jumping on the bandwagon, make sure you ask these simple questions.

Is this a good fit for our company?
A blog can be a great addition to a website. It can transform a company’s newsletter into a growing 2-way communication. But if you haven’t released a newsletter or update in years this may not be the best fit for you. A blog needs to continually grow with new stories and releases. You can’t do only one post a year or your audience will not pay attention.

Who will maintain it?
Online forums are a great way to get advocates of your company/services working for you. Advocates will talk and explain to people who have questions about your products and services. But a forum is a tool that must be cleaned out everyday. Forums can be an easy target for spam and unless an employee is checking it everyday and removing the spam, your true customers will become frustrated and leave it for dead. It needs to be a part of an employees job to keep up with these projects.

Do we have the resources to execute this properly?
A 2-5-minute video/audio podcast can be an easy way to reach a wide audience. Potential clients don’t have to surf to your site to get the latest podcast; they can find you on iTunes and subscribe to your podcast to automatically get the latest whenever it’s published. But if you’re recording your video with a super8 or getting your audio off a boom box mic people are not going to watch or listen to what you have to say. This avenue takes a little start up to get it going properly, so if you can’t afford the proper equipment you will have to find the best way to make your podcast of a quality people will like and enjoy.

These are just a few of the questions you need to ask before implementing a new tool into your website or web presence. You can’t go half-hearted into these projects or your clients and potential clients will move on. Remember your web identity is like going to that first interview for a job, you have to give the best impression of yourself immediately or you’re already working uphill.

Advertising products or services has become trickery in the new millennium. People can use TiVo to remove TV commercials and you can use Zinio.com to view magazines without the ads in them. So how do people reach a big audience without being filtered out? A simple answer is social media.

A great example of corporations taking advantage of social media is Burger King with their recently launched Facebook application Whopper Sacrifice. It’s a simple idea to drive people to the Burger King website and restaurants. You delete 10 friends off of Facebook and get a free Whopper.

This is a great idea to get people involved in the campaign. It’s not a stagnant commercial or ad in a magazine. It’s a living breathing advertisement people can interact with and get rewarded for taking part. And for Burger King, Whopper Sacrifice takes very little time or money to keep it running after the initial cost of building the application.

This is just one example of using social media for advertising. There are many more out there from the “Will it Blend Series” on YouTube featuring a high-end blender destroying ordinary objects to the OK Go Videos that brought the band to the main stream. It’s all about breaking the mold we have been trained to follow and discovering a new way to promote our product or services. And usually when we can do this, the outcome is cheaper and more successful than traditional advertising.

Just like the rest of the business world, company newsletters need to evolve and change. No longer can you send out a monthly snail mail newsletter or email blast to get people’s attention. Snail mail newsletters take too long to build and are either thrown out by the person receiving it or already out of date. And junk filters catch email blasts more often than not. There is a smarter way. Switch to a blog that is hosted on your website.

As I mentioned before, junk mail is trashed right away while email blasts are caught by spam filters. The great thing about blogs is they are usually accompanied with RSS feeds. When a user signs up for your blog’s RSS feed, it will automatically update whenever a new article/entry is posted. Also, the users want to receive the information this way so you don’t have to worry about the spam filter blocking you or being trashed.

A blog also breaks the mold of the once-a-month mentality of a newsletter. When you send out a newsletter, you have about one week to capitalize on the momentum the newsletter has generated with potential clients or the opportunity is lost. With a blog you should be adding articles weekly or even daily. This creates a constant buzz about your business or product.

Building your newsletter into a blog has great benefits for your website, especially with SEO. As a blog, search engines will index your articles (Yahoo, Google, Ask) and they will see your site growing with more relevant information. This is a good building block to help crack that top 20 for search results. Remember, the majority of people searching for products or services never get past the first 20 results, so this can be huge in helping you reach that goal.

The last great thing about using a blog to replace your traditional newsletter is it can be a conversation starter with potential clients. Potential clients can leave comments on your site about a recent article, opening up the chance for a dialog. With that, a relationship can be formed to create a customer for life.

While traditional newsletters are by no means dead, their role has changed. Not everyone uses the web for all his or her information. So if you still need to produce a traditional newsletter, use it in conjunction with your blog. A possibility is to continually post your articles in the blog and instead of sending out a paper newsletter monthly send it out quarterly highlighting the most popular entries in the blog. The same can be done with email blasts.

Well not really, but many people paint Flash as the death of a website. In reality, if used correctly, Flash can add an entirely new level of interactivity or entertainment to a website.

The first thing to remember when using Flash is that it is a tool to be utilized in a website. Like most new or fun tools on the web, it gets abused and splattered everywhere it doesn’t belong. Flash is a great tool to load video into a site, create an animation, or developing a dynamic photo gallery. The thing to remember is that most people are still not on high speed connections, so any site that has an abundance of Flash will take more then 5 minutes to load on a slow connection. Honestly, who waits that long for a site to load?

The next thing to remember about Flash and why it shouldn’t control your site is that not all Flash is SEO friendly. Google is beginning to test how to index Flash files but it isn’t perfected yet and only works on simple Flash pieces. So if your site has a lot of complicated scripting in the Flash file, most search engines like Google will not be able to index your site for people to find it through their search engine.

Just remember a lot of fun and cool things can be done with Flash, but it is a tool meant to be utilized with your website, not to overtake your website. No one will wait 5 minutes for a site to load and if people can’t find your site on a search engine (i.e. Yahoo, Google, Ask) they won’t know it exists.