I have young children, so one of the things I have noticed about younger kids is that there is strong marketing that targets them. I am sure I remember having television commercials and radio advertisements aimed at me when I was small, but these days I sit on the parenting side of that coin and watch it all with a business knowledge too. There are products and services that are heavily marketed to kids. Once they become school age, most kids have an allowance, friends who influence them, and personal preferences; a perfect combo for higher end marketing.

The question then becomes whether or not there are avenues to market to this sector online. Mike Sachoff just wrote an article called “UK Kids Ignoring Facebook Age Limits”, in which he reveals that ”a quarter of children in the UK aged 8-12 who use the Internet at home say they have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace, although the minimum age is 13”. We can be sure that if kids of that age group in the UK are on social networking sites, then the kids on this side of the pond will also be there. As well, 21 percent of kids from 8-15 download or watch TV or movies on the Internet. And 18 percent of kids from 8-11 visit blogs.

So, we know that kids are on the internet, but how much are they engaging in social networking sites? Even if 93 percent of the kids on social networking sites are being monitored regularly by their parent, as reported by Mike Sachoff’s article, it doesn’t mean that marketing through these sites is unavailable to them. In fact, there may be evidence to show that this age group is actively engaged in propelling social marketing. Take the case of 16 year old singer Justin Bieber and his increasing fame that is being fed by a mania of tweeting on Twitter. Chris Crum writes about “Twitter Business Lessons from Justin Bieber” and he notes that “Bieber has frequently been a trending topic for over a month straight. The tweets just keep pouring in, and they’re generally not spammy.” Of course, Justin has also been releasing new songs (including one that was for relief efforts in Haiti), made plenty of television appearances, and had a birthday this month. He’s been busy and interesting, so there is lots for his fans to tweet about. And tweet they do! Considering his fan base is primarily young girls, it’s not a big leap to assume they are the ones who are engaging in conversations about him on Twitter.

Knowing that there is a growing presence of kids and preteens on Twitter, Facebook, and more, means that including online engagement as part of your developing marketing plans for products and services for these age groups is becoming even more important.

There is an idea out there among some of us that we need to choose one avenue for a presence on the internet: social media, like Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace; blogging; or a website. Some will say it is overkill to have two or more. Others will talk about the time it takes to keep up with more than one. And still other people believe that the newer technologies are taking over, making a business website or blog obsolete. All of these perspectives are narrow ones.

Although a website is a large undertaking (or can be) when first put up, it really is the face of your business online. So, for convenience and argument’s sake, I am going to take it out of the equation and we will assume that your business has a great website and that it is bringing clients to you. So, you have clients coming in and your website is fantastic…do you need social media and blogging? Or has social media made blogging obsolete?

In his article “Blogging vs. Twitter: It Shouldn’t Be About the Format” Chris Crum argues (and I completely agree with him) that social media and blogging fill different, complementary niches. As Chris says, “Social networks drive traffic to blogs. Blogs drive followers to social profiles. If a reader is interested enough to read your blog on a regular basis, there is a good chance they are interested enough to follow you on Twitter, and likewise if they care enough to follow you on Twitter, they may be interested in what you have to say on your blog.”

And really, that about sums it up: social networking (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise) can drive traffic to your blog. Where Twitter and Facebook allow you small, catchy bylines and quick conversations with people, a blog is a place to flesh out ideas and write out more complex thoughts. To me, it’s a little like the difference between the short answer tests and the essay question tests (if you are interested, yes, I was one of the students who was extremely good at the essay questions).

The best news is that we don’t have to choose one over the other. Social networking can take up time. Blogging takes up more time. And inspiration can be found for both forms, but then recycled into an interest in your presence on the other. For example, I can write a catchy phrase into Twitter about how I am contemplating blogging and it’s relationship to Tweeting. Then I link it to this blog post.

In the end, it’s good business to have all of your online efforts working together.

Sometimes when I read about a new software package or a new electronic device, I think “would I use that” and other times it is “how would I use that”. Today I admit I am just wondering how far social networking will end up taking us. I get Twitter and Facebook and am regularly excited about new social networking possibilities, both socially and professionally. But today I read an article about Apple filing a patent for a system that would allow people in close proximity to “discover each other” via social networking. Which is a compelling thought on one hand, but leaves me envisioning handshakes abandoned and people gathered in a room together chatting on their iPhones and iPads. It’s extreme, I admit, and unlikely to ever come to be quite like that, but it did give me an interesting visual and sometimes I wonder if anyone else has these ideas too.

The article that caused me to ponder how far social networking will go, entitled “Apple files mobile social networking patent request”, gives a few details about the prospective patent. The title of the patent requested is “Group Formation Using Anonymous Broadcast Information” and it gives a description of a system of token exchanges that allows mobile devices that are within a certain range to discover each other and form a group. Apple suggests that these groups could facilitate “at events like concerts, conferences, meetings, rallies and weddings.”

A more complete explanation of Apple’s intent with this patent is that “User interfaces, filters and search engines can be provided to the users to enable users to search and manage groups. The groups can be used with various applications—e.g., calendars, address books, e-mail, instant messaging — to provide additional content and services to the users. If the geographic location of the group at the contact time is known, then members of the group can be targeted to receive location-based services (LBS) and content.”

While my first reaction is an image of extreme isolation in a crowd, as I think about shopping situations, I can see some extremely beneficial uses to a location-based group. Say, like me, you are an avid reader. At some point, you’ll walk into a new bookstore. If you are the owner of the bookstore and know about mobile groups, you can have a group set up for your store, which lists the sales of the week, future book signings and appearances, and even potentially a catalogue of your inventory. As a customer, I can walk into this new store, join the group, and then have a variety of information at my fingertips. It’s a win-win situation for both people in that group: the bookstore sells books by providing me with easy information.

Certainly, using these tools for the benefit of your business will take some thinking and creativity, but if Apple and other social networking sites are finding a market for them, surely we can put them to good use in the business world too.

As you are growing and developing your business, often you’ll only be thinking about one or two steps down the road, even if your five or ten year plan is much more complex than that. When planning your content management system, you can save yourself, your company, and your employees a lot of hassles and headaches if you approach your plans with best practices in mind for international expansion.

Andy Atkins-Krüger covers this topic in his article “My Dream International Content Management System”. I’m going to talk a little bit about these three topics in his article:

- World character sets,
- Managing content across local domains, and
- Translation and SEO workflow.

When it comes to world character sets, remember that there are a wide variety of characters and accents not used in the English language. Instead of getting a translation that gives a question mark or a box in the middle of a word – which is at the very least distracting and also has the potential to cause huge problems with your clients’ ability to understand your content – you want your content to be seamless, no matter what language you are using. Atkins-Krüger recommends using unicode or UTF8 for your online character coding. If you start with this standard, there will be no need to backfit or work out other solutions in the future.

With international expansion comes the issue of managing your content across local domains. Sometimes your company will be able to do this from one main location, but in that case, your resources will need to be shared from site to site. The key to success according to Atkins-Krüger is that “You also want to be able to manage the internal linking of the sites from that single interface and to manage the geo-selection tool which links one domain to all others on one single URL linked to from all pages.”

Of the three topics related to international CMS that we are talking about today, translation and SEO workflow can be the most difficult to navigate. In some cases, your company may need to rethink your online organizational strategy when going into different markets. “The best way to do this is to link it to a keyword map of all pages, so you know what needs to be targeted where and to link those keywords to glossaries to be used by the translators that support your SEO initiatives.” according to Atkins-Krüger’s article. It’s most important to note though that making web pages accessible for clients in other languages does not start and end with translation. Content may need to be different for a new market and your keywords may need to be refined, which can result in a slightly different SEO strategy.

International expansion can be a big project for your company, but if you incorporate some of these ideas into your original content management system, your company can come out ahead of the game when the time comes.

Just this morning I was listening to a radio interview about the change in how the news is done on television. They talked about the fact that many of us no longer watch television in the conventional way – the advent of PVRs and online television have paved the way for changing habits – and how television news sees that there is a change, but it seems no one can quite see what the new landscape will look like for news. It reminded me of the change of business on the internet too.

It’s really not been that long since we’ve been able to buy things online. And less time since social media became a huge consideration. A few years ago, the question was not if you had a website, but how big and splashy was your business website. And yet, changes are happening again, because people like Chris Crum are asking if a business does indeed need a website in his article “Is it Becoming Less Critical For Businesses to Have Websites?”.

Before you start letting your brain go into a tailspin over whether or not your business ought to have a website, know that Chris is not saying you shouldn’t have a website. In fact, he claims “having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control.” He also says, “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion.”

Like Chris, I think that it is interesting to discuss how other opportunities online may make a website a little less critical – and thus opening up the possibility for including changes in the internet landscape into your business plan – and other options a little more feasible for building your business. Here are the two main ideas from his article:

- Facebook: Are you surprised? Facebook is a great way to increase your web presence. Some data shows that Facebook can be a bigger traffic source than Google, and Facebook does not demand that you have your own website. Plus, often Facebook pages are found on search engines and rank in the top results. Facebook may be a great place to start gathering a web presence or to enhance your company’s current presence.
- Google’s Place Pages: lists local business results at the top of a search page, making it a great place for your clients to find your business. With increasing functionality for mobility devices, making sure your business is listed in Place Pages is a good bet.

Although you could provide a web presence for your business through these methods and others, without having your own website, the key point to note is that these methods are changing the way we look for information. Clients may not find you just by finding your website, so including the other potential electronic avenues in your business plan is a wise choice for savvy businesses.

It’s true that when most of us search for something online, be it through Google, Yahoo or Bing, we’ll investigate the top few search results, start our search over again with new keywords, and abandon it from there. Since becoming involved in SEO, I admit I have become the rare person who will look onto page two or three if it is something I am interested in and the search results of the first page don’t satisfy me. And I am persistent, so I will try different keywords repeatedly. However, I am the minority.
The race for top internet rankings is a fierce one, and one that garners a lot of attention in SEO circles. Many different theories have been tested. Some of them get short term results, which may last or not. Some get long term results. Still others get no discernable results. With that in mind, might I suggest going back to the tried and true with organic search. If it works (and it does), then perhaps it is wise to use the simplest and most reliable methods to ensure your company is on the top of your client’s search results.

An article by the title of “Organic Search Still Reigns” confirms the importance of organic search. The article compares the results of Google, Yahoo and Bing and discovers that organic search results still get the top rankings “across the big three search engines, with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search”. With numbers like these, it is no wonder that organic search and search optimization efforts remain on the top of the lists of recommendations from online marketing experts.

Instead of spending time, money, and effort on complex marketing strategies or paid advertisements, it is much more cost effective to go back to simple search engine optimization tactics. And this common sense tactic is being used by professional marketers who “recognize the importance of investment in search optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits. The Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) found that search optimization was the third priority of senior marketers worldwide, after social networking and improving digital infrastructure.”

In spite of my own extensive browsing of search engine results, the numbers clearly show that your clients are most likely to not go beyond that first page, so this is a case where instead of marching to your own drummer your seo company should follow current online marketing trends. It’s hard to argue with the solid results achieved by organic search.

It seems easy to let your online time take over your entire life, be it business or personal online time. There is so much we can do now online, from keeping up with our friends to watching television to marketing our businesses, and it seems like the list of things to do in order to accomplish these online tasks is endless. And it can be. However, as Kim Albee of Genoo told Webpro News, it can be “broken into bite sized chunks” and made more manageable.

So just what are small and medium sized businesses managing these days? Social media, websites, search engine rankings, and lead capturing are four of their top issues. In larger companies, there can be several people or a whole team to manage these projects, but smaller companies often have one person doing it all or several people adding portions of these activities onto their already full workload. While accomplishing these tasks is important to the overall health of the company, managing them well is also key.

Depending on which online tools and features your company uses, your efforts can be focused to produce excellent results in a minimum time frame. Let’s think about social media sites: it’s easy to get swept away in all of the possibilities of your social media. On Facebook alone, you can have online chats with your friends, play games, schedule activities, become a fan of different groups and businesses, post your own updates, and read the updates of all of your friends. A person could potentially spend an entire day navigating Facebook.

In Chris Crum’s article “Look for Ways to Manage Your Social Media Time Better” he lists a few great ways to cut down on the noise crowding out your online time, including

- Use the list features for Facebook and Twitter to organize the feeds you are getting and view from a single group of people at a time, rather than wading through all of the feeds from everyone on your list.
- Use browser plug-ins to make your online tasks smoother. This may take up a bit of time to research and implement in the beginning, but that time and more will be recovered in the long run by using the right tools for your browsing habits.
- Organize your news feeds too.
- Use down time, like when “waiting for your food to arrive at a restaurant, waiting at the dentist’s office” to check on your social media through your mobile devices.

However you manage your online time, be sure to do it mindfully to ensure that the internet is working for you, rather than allowing yourself to get swallowed by internet activities. For small and medium sized businesses, where managing tasks is even more crucial, these recommendations can be the line between success and failure.