Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Suzanne McGann,
Voyageur I.T.:
651.292.8838
su*****@********it.net
www.voyageurit.com
WEB 1.0 and its one-way information feed – think brochure-ware of 1999 – is so yesterday.
Today’s Web 2.0 applications such as podcasts, videos, social media and rich graphical presentations help level the playing field for the growing enterprise. These tools are inexpensive and easy to implement. They bring fresh content to Web sites, which is critical to staying visible in today’s search-reliant world.
Rev up your online presence with richer, more interactive applications that drive traffic to your site. Assuming you already have a Web presence, consider these ways to take your business to the next level with Web 2.0 tools.
1. Cleaner, cooler and faster. Advances in technologies are helping to simplify the end user experience and your Web site needs to reflect that. Whether your markets are consumer or business-to-business, it’s all about creating a positive user experience.
Marketing needs to drive your online initiatives; avoid simply assigning a Web project to IT. At its core, though, your Web and information technology infrastructure needs to be robust to support content-rich applications. For instance, strong database follow-through is required to avoid redundancy in filling out forms, supplying credit card information, etc.
Customers need to find you quickly. This means forming a Web team that understands the intricacies of the major search engines. Build your site with maximum natural (unpaid) search capability and test your results on a regular basis. This is a big factor when you start dealing with databases. Dynamic pages are hard to index, as you can’t code a dynamic page for search.
2. RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed technology offers summaries of Web content pulled from sites and aggregated into lists. RSS feeds automatically check subscribed feeds for updates to retrieve new content and present it to the user.
RSS helps you cut through in-box clutter via a program called a news reader or aggregator: a great way to pull in the news and information you need to keep up on your markets. You subscribe to a feed by entering its link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. If your browser doesn’t have a built-in feed reader, you can subscribe to news regarding your designated keywords through any number of readers such as NewsGator (Windows, integrates with Outlook) or Google Reader (Web-based).
RSS is a great way to push out your content to interested recipients, whether blogs, news headlines or podcasts. Consider setting up an RSS feed at your site especially if you operate within an information-rich industry. Both RSS and blogs are cheap to run outside of the additional effort required to create content.
In addition to posting at your Web site, news releases can be submitted to distribution sites like PR Web which allows you to add social media tags and stream your release to the appropriate RSS subscribers.
Another RSS payoff: Sites that use RSS, as a general rule, produce higher search engine results than sites without such feeds.
3. Blogs. Blogs are easy to create and automatically inject fresh content to your site, which in turn feeds search engines. According to comScore Networks, blogs or Web logs are read by more than one-third of all U.S. Internet users. Technorati currently tracks more than 86 million blogs, up from a reported 35 million blogs in 2006 when it estimated that only about 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly. The moral of the story? Keep your blog fresh, relevant and geared toward a fairly narrow topic that you are passionate about.
You can establish your own company blog and even encourage your customers to post their feedback. And don’t forget to offer an RSS feed at your Web site of your blog posts so subscribers can pick up updates. If your blog is an open one, you’ll need some form of human moderation to avoid any compromise of your reputation. Providers like eModeration.com also help automate the moderation process.
You can sign up for Google’s free Alert program at www.google.com/alerts to receive notices when your company or product is mentioned on blogs, among other forms of online content. This is an excellent way to keep up on your industry as well. You can also periodically query blog search engines such as those by Google, IceRocket or Technorati.
4. Podcasts and videocasts. Podcasts help meld customers to your site. Are your products known for innovation in a niche? Do your services come with a learning curve? Use podcasts to create audio news in a fun or interesting way. Podcasting programs automatically transfer new broadcasts to a subscriber’s PC or even deliver the files to MP3 and other digital players.
A Web team can create a speaking strategy for your podcasts and provide an appropriate audio set-up that works from your desk for in-house podcasts at a minimal cost of about $200 in equipment. The raw audio file is then edited by the Web team to include elements such as additions of music and deletions of “ums” before loading onto your site.
In some cases, we hire a professional sound studio and a more rehearsed interview format to get the perfect presentation. A studio rental cost, including editing, runs about $2,000 a day. One benefit is multiple podcasts can be produced in one day for periodic uploading to your site.
Videocasts, also known as vodcasts, are another excellent media for customer testimonials, product tutorials and other informative programming. Videocasts are short movies that are uploaded to the Web where they can be downloaded or automatically sent to portable video players. YouTube and Google Video are among the popular Web sites that encourage the free uploading of videocasts.
Videocasts should be professionally done from hair and make-up to scripting and video recording quality. Videos need to be edited or enhanced to best suit the Web site and user audience. For a few short professionally produced videocasts, expect to pay at least $3,000 or more.
The affordable, flexible tools of Web 2.0 hold abundant opportunity to increase your exposure online to the right audiences, grow your sales channels and ultimately drive revenue. Make sure they’re in your Web strategy toolkit.
