The Web Uncovered

So for those of you who have a content-based website that you are marketing, you know that search technologies are important.  Not only are these technologies important to understand, but media consumers are increasingly looking at keyword searches and trends to determine legitimacy.  Showcasing your own searches, or searches for keywords related to your product or service, has been impossible.

Until Now.  Google has released Google Trends Gadget, which is available for free.  Still not sure how cool this is?  Imagine you are selling an over-the-counter flu remedy from your website.  When people visit your website, they can see how the search results have increased for the word “flu” at the beginning of the flu season.  Also, it allows for comparables.  The customizable aspect of the tool makes it easy to implement and use.  

The Takeaway:   In the new epoch of microblogging, the term “now” means less “this year” and more “the next fifteen minutes.”  Harness developing technologies to exploit this trend, especially those involved in search technology.

For those of you who already use Gmail, you can stop reading immediately.  For everyone else, Gmail is revolutionizing email with some very basic technologies.

Archiving:  With over seven gigs of storage, you never have to delete emails, furthermore it works perfecting with Labels.

Labels:   These color-coded tags works the same way as folders, only you can have more than one label on an email.  This allows you to create sub-categories, or criss-cross organize anyway you see fit.

Conversations:  Emails are listed as conversations.  This means that if three people respond to the same email with you cc-ed, it shows up as one tab, with three parts.  For those of you in large organizations, this means instead of finding 45 new emails from lunch break, they are seperated by topic into the six conversations.

Filters:  Whether you want to automatically archive all emails from your mother, or have all your golfing buddies’s emails go into a special label (which then looks like an inbox on the sidebar), filters can save you time.  It takes only a few seconds to set up, and can filter by email address, topic, keyword, or other methods.

Spam:   Google has the best spam guard in the business.  Furthormore, it holds spam emails in a special folder for 30 days, just in case your important contract in an email from an unknown friend’s address ended up there by mistake, you’ll have time to save it.

Apps:   Google has some of the best integrated applications, including calendar, documents, and many more, which can save you lots of time, and are extremely easy to learn and implement.

The Takeaway:

While moving your email could seem like an intense process, it’s easy to sign-up for google, and takes less than a minute to set-up your email so that you can send and receive email from your old address.  Furthermore, you can set it up so that you can send emails from countless addresses and domains.  Test it out, you have little to lose, but it can save you enough time to make it worth the short time it takes to figure it out.

While there are many aspects to running an effective online marketing campaign, including video is seen as imperative, especially if there is an intent for going viral. The billion dollar deal that brought Youtube into the Google fold only reiterates this fact. Before we can appropriately address how to approach the use of video in online marketing, we need to understand why it works with people.

Coming back to Marshall Mcluhan, media is either hot or cold, either interactive or ready-made. The internet transcends these boundaries. I won’t divulge too much here as this is a post of it’s own. However, beyond the fact that humans are visually-based, and that culturally we put a visual emphasis on everything (“’see’ what I mean?”), video has been and will likely be the quintessential example of hot media. Whether it is a cooking recipe, a guitar lesson, or your product commercial, people will choose a video over a typographical description 99 percent of the time.

Another reason for this is that Video is a mixed medium. It can be visual, audio, and typographical at the same time. This solidifies it as a hot medium.

The Takeaway: Taking this all into consideration, your target audience wants to come as close to experience your service, product, etc, as possible within the confines of technological ability. If you don’t have a video showcasing your value-added, your competition will, and likely already has. To have an online presence to be multisensorial in a mixed medium.