Read between the lines.
I stumbled into the quote above for the first time and it resonated with me. The original quote seems to be credited to a William G.T. Shedd in the 1800s, but a couple poets seem to have taken his saying and turned it into the anchor points of their poems.
Today we have the pleasure of hearing from Jayvee Saldana of The CEO Magazine, a business magazine aimed at the high level executive. Enjoy the article and let you hands on an online copy now.
Marketing to today’s customers is all about interaction. Thanks to the Internet and constant access to information, people want to feel connected to both their friends and their businesses. As a busy CEO or top executive, you might not think you have the time to develop a proper digital marketing department and instead waste time with traditional marketing routes like print and radio ads. While those are still viable options for smaller markets, as a company you should be thinking globally. Building a brand involves utilizing the latest technology to reach a vast audience, and digital marketing can help you achieve that goal. The following offers a few ways to maximize your digital marketing strategies.
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Over the past few years I’ve focused my attention on marketing and the business of attracting attention. I obsessed over the things I could do to build exposure across blogs, Facebook, and across the web. Before long I realized that unless the thing I’m marketing delivers a wow moment for the consumer, then my work is wasted. That’s when I started focusing on engineering, on-site optimization, user experience, and design.
I’m at that stage where I’m reading about process and taking things in piece by piece. If I want to master this arena though, I’m going to need to dig into the details and put more of these principles into action. Today I stumbled into a post by Paul Stamatiou. Paul offers a crash course on design. The short reads he mentions in his article are listed below:
Designing the Web by Mark Boulton
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
0to255 – Awesome tool for
Tileables – Patterns
I plan to read each of these, as well as the list of longer reads he includes at the bottom of his post. As I sift through each resource and apply what I’ve learned to create better online experiences I’ll be in touch.
In social media, brands have been using the hashtag to launch competitions, weigh in on important subjects, increase brand visibility, build audiences, engage audiences, and demonstrate expertise. Many business owners have often wondered, “What can a hashtag do for my brand?” Here are some examples of how the hashtag can be used to promote and build a brand..
A hashtag can lay the foundation for a brand to be viewed as an expert in a certain area. The hashtag can be used when content is posted that serves an educational purpose. For example, a business that desires to have a brand image of being an expert in accounting would create content using certain types of hashtags related to finance and similar topics..
In customer service, a brand can use a particular hashtag to keep its clients abreast of any technical difficulties a brand may be trying to resolve. Telecommunications brands often use the hashtag as a reputation management tool and may post updates on a widespread problem by adopting a tag. This allows them to field complaints, answer concerns, and update customers on the status of the problem.
Like most people who live and create on the web, I’m constantly taking screenshots. I’m in love with the way the Mac lets you capture your entire window floating ever so gracefully over a subtle shadow, but with all the instant filter and photo editing apps out there I’m wondering why no one has taken the screenshot a step further.
When I say further, I’m not talking annotations and add-ons. I know those apps already exist (and I use them quite often). What I want is a solution that lets you snap a picture and (depending on size) instantly drop it into an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. Point, snap, select and BAM, you’ve got yourself a beautifully framed browser window sitting in your computer of choice.
Of course it’s already possible to do this in Photoshop, but it takes a bit of effort. As a culture of creators constantly searching for optimization across every facet of our lives, I’m surprised this doesn’t already exist. Or maybe it does and I have yet to come across it.
If you make this app, already know of something like this that exists, or want to partner up and build this together, (drop me a tweet]http://twitter.com/laurenproctor32 and we’ll change screenshots forever.
Mailbox earns its edge with snazzy gesturing (think the Clear to do app) and what is essentially a simplistic (but incredibly well thought out) folder system. When emails arrive you can choose to archive, delete, or file them away in what is essentially a to do list or or a ‘hit me with this email later” option.
After using Sublime for almost a year, I thought it was time to add some tools to the ole’ productivity suite that is my favorite text editor. Interested in snazzing up the look, feel and functionality of your Sublime Text 2 as well? You can do so with plugins, and this guide will get you up and running in minutes.
It’s possible to install plugins via Github and other sources, but the easiest route for managing your plugins is via Sublime Package Control. This open source package controller is (in my experience), the simplest way to install and manage packages for Sublime Text 2. Benefits include auto updates and instant availability (you don’t have to restart Sublime Text 2 to get a plugin running).
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A year or so ago you couldn’t attend a digital marketing conference without hearing about the supposed rise of QR codes. Everyone was talking about how these codes would cover our world in a connected layer of digital information. Someone in a social media Google+ Group I’m in asked how the QR code was doing so I thought I’d revisit the topic to see how ‘the next big thing’ is holding up. The resulting post is one part QR code trends and statistics, another part rambling in how I look at trends overall.
When I want to to get a general sense of how something is performing in the world, I almost always turn to Google Trends. Sure it’s inexact, but it’s a nice, easy to understand, proxy for trends over time.