MH1 Web Design Blog

by Mike Hallaron

Your company could benefit from a business blog. Daily output of internal company news and other boring minutiae is not necessary. As few as 3-4 regular monthly articles or “posts” could kickstart your sluggish marketing effort. Your content should be useful and relevant to your business to see positive results.

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by Mike Hallaron

As Web developers, we use WordPress almost exclusively when creating business blogs. With its clean php scripting and code, wealth of plugin options, quick, easy installation, and almost endless selection of templates and themes, using WordPress is a no-brainer. We love it. Although it seems there is always more to learn.

At the recent Optimization Summit in Dallas, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing confirmed his fondness for the WordPress platform. Not intending to offend any web designers present (none taken John!), he asked why more businesses don’t use this flexible, scalable platform as the backbone of their business websites.

Flexibility of Content Management is the Key

At its core, WordPress is simply a content management system surrounded by easy to add and manage website features. The client is able to login as the “admin” and access a Dashboard to add new articles, photos, videos and more. No special training in php or html is necessary but some basic knowledge makes customization much easier. Familiarity with your hosting interface is helpful as you will need to set up a database to store articles and other page content.

Think WordPress might be the way to go? Consider these Blogs we have built recently:

Outdoor Obsessions

Vine and Fig Garden

Hallaron Public Relations

Check out these amazing WordPress themes:  www.themelayout.com

by Brenna Ehrlich on www.mashable.com

Despite Facebook privacy changes and serious cases of Twitter Fail Whale, social media use has increased astronomically since this time last year: During December 2009, global users spent an average of five hours on social networking sites, up from three hours in December 2008. That’s an 82% increase.

Nielsen just released a report on its blog detailing increased social media use, and the results are impressive, while not exactly shocking. Some highlights:

- Social networking sites are the most popular online destinations globally (based on the amount of time people spent there in December), with games and instant messaging coming in second and third, respectively. (Side note: As gaming becomes more popular on sites like Facebook, it will be interesting to see how this affects time spent.)

- In December, Facebook was the most popular social networking site globally, with 67% of social media fans logging in. In addition, time spent on Facebook has been on the rise; globally, people spend close to six hours per month on the network.

- In the U.S., people continue to spend more time on social networks, but year-over-year growth for Facebook and Twitter individually outpaced overall growth for the category at large.

- Twitter was the fastest-growing social networking site in December 2009, during which it had 18.1 million unique visitors. That’s up from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008. Still, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%, lending credence to the notion that the microblogging site’s popularity may be flatlining.

Here are some charts from Nielsen showing social media’s ascent:

So what does all this mean? Basically what we and a bevy of social media experts have been saying for months now: Social networking is a force to reckoned with.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are getting the most eyeballs, which means we have to figure out how to use them to their maximum potential — whether it be by optimizing ROI or attempting to mine them for journalistic purposes.

Southwest Airlines has been an early adopter of Social Media with a great corporate blog, Nuts About Southwest, and investment in the voice of the customer. They have actually listened to customers through their blog, Twitter, Facebook and other communities online and improved their service because of it.

Many of our small business customers have yet to try Twitter. Although this micro-blogging technology offers some useful tools for companies of all sizes,  some stay away because of the strange, silly name or because they just can not find the time to learn more. There are benefits for small business to reap with Twitter. Not all companies use it the same way. Let’s see what it offers small biz — one-man shows to companies too small to carry a marketing director or department.

Once you sign up for your free Twitter account (using your business name), you create a profile with links to your company website, description, and contact information. You can search other businesses or people across the Internet who are also using Twitter. You can follow them — meaning you receive every tweet they send on your Twitter home page or your mobile phone. Follow the Wall Street Journal, your home town Chamber of Commerce, competitors, partners, your vendors, manufacturers and other business professionals.. almost anything you can imagine. Conversely, people interested in you and your business will click to follow you and your regular posts. Twitter quickly creates a community related to your business. Here are our four reasons we believe you should consider adding Twitter to your array of small business communication tools.

1. Push your message — Companies can use Twitter to publish timely company news and important announcements. You are limited in your posts, called “tweets”, to only 140 characters, so these are short, simple, brief messages or you can post links to longer articles or news items from your company blog, Facebook business account or any other website. Linking to a longer article on another site is called a “retweet”. Cute but easy to figure out in short order. This is a great way to expand your brand presence online as other people follow you. Use Twitter to manage your company brand and reputation online. Think of it as PR on a small business budget. If using Twitter for business, be careful to avoid letting your personal life get in the way. Business associates might not care that you shot a 76 on the golf course Saturday or that your four-year-old lost a tooth. There is place for personal info among family and friends, but your Twitter business account is not it.

2. Information collection — as I said above, Twitter can serve as a one-stop clearing house for all of your incoming business information. You do not have to write articles and participate in tweets. Some companies are active “listeners”. They keep track of trends in their industry and among other industry organizations, or companies.You can use your Twitter business account to receive updates from the various websites and news sources you follow regularly. You can even receive tweets on your mobile phone. With less than 10% of us using RSS aggregators, Twitter has become a faster, easier alternative for small business types short on time and patience.

3. Customer support — in August our web hosting server was hacked and it took my support team 30 hours to reload software and reinstall customer accounts from backups. During this harrowing experience, we had 100+ customers without their business email. What was wrong? When will it be fixed, damnit?! Patience was short for some and communication on the latest developments were extremely difficult.

That’s when I realized that if more clients were using Twitter and following  www.MH1webdesign.com, they could have been updated on the latest progress. No email necessary. Now the task of informing our small business clients about Twitter begins. If they see value in it, they will come along for the ride.

Futher Reading

Twitter’s take on business use

16 examples of huge brands using Twitter

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business