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Trends in Digital Media Strategy

Posted by Brusca under Social Networking, digital marketing strategy, social media

Merely having an online presence is not enough for even strictly bricks and mortar companies. With the Internet having proliferated into the medium that provides the most impressions, a good digital media strategy is crucial to online and offline business success. A good digital media plan will be comprehensive, including not only one but several of the important components of online marketing mentioned below. Without further ado, we'll move on to reviewing the top trends in digital media strategy.

Search Engine Optimization                                                                                           

Can this really be considered a trend? Most businesses that have Web sites already know that without being optimized for search engines, their sites are unlikely to ever be found by their target customer. Since target keywords are always changing and SEO is relatively inexpensive to implement, a constant refinement of SEO is the order of the day.

Social Digital Strategy

Social networking and social commerce features are components of this important trend. Representing your products and services and promoting them through social networking sites (and yes, even blogs) is crucial to maintaining open communication with your customers. Social commerce features that allow customers to rate you are rated as being very important to today's Web savvy consumer.

Smartphone Applications

Investing in the creation of a customized application for the Blackberry or iPhone that allows customers access to your products and services is relatively inexpensive and puts you literally at the touch of their fingers.

Cross-sell, Cross-sell, Cross-sell

Once target customers have arrived at your site, you must engage them and ultimately close the sale (or make the conversion). Increasing the amount of touch points throughout various portions of a site and via links and “recommended products” sidebars is an easy and effective way to expose the customer to more of what you have to offer.

Value-Added Email Strategies

Email campaigns are becoming increasingly difficult to maximize due to spam filters, opt-outs and customer desensitization in general. In spite of these challenges, businesses can keep their products and services in front of potential customers by adding value to their message.

Rich Media Advertising

In the past, online marketers have been reluctant to engage in rich media advertising due to fears of alienating dial-up or slow bandwidth users. Consumers themselves, however, are showing more interest in rich media messages such as those contained in animation, audio, video and gaming.

A Multi-pronged Approach

Now that you're a bit more familiar with some of the trends in digital marketing strategy, your head might be swimming with ideas on how to implement one or more of the ideas contained herein. Before jumping into anything, make sure to check out how others are putting these strategies to use. Note successes and mistakes so you can have a good idea of what works and what does it. Don't forget that a good online marketing program is a comprehensive one that employs not only one but several of the techniques mentioned above. Most importantly, remember to measure your results.

Don't miss out on a new trend, out of home advertising. Out of home media can promote your business to new heights.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Amy_Nutt
http://EzineArticles.com/?Trends-in-Digital-Media-Strategy&id=2460172

The Dreamhost with the MOST

Posted by Brusca under Hosting, Social Networking

Well I’m in my 10th year with DreamHost and during that 10 years they have been nothing short of an amazing service. Sure like everybody they have had their fair share of hard times. But what I love is the transparency they have with every aspect of their business. When things (inevitably they do) go wrong, they communicate it and as soon as that is fixed they make light of the situation (“perhaps we shouldn’t have pressed that button”). I love the way the Dreamhost team connect with their clients and I’ve always felt comfortable with Dreamhost and can’t see myself changing anytime soon.

Recently they had to switch my account to a new server. This was slightly worrying as I have a lot going on with my setup and client websites. Once the switch happened though everything seemed to be 100% as normal. But I did stumble upon a small issue with an RSS feed I had written, so I logged into my trusty control panel and decided to use the LIVE CHAT support, I was happily greeted within 1 minute and had what could have been a serious issue solved within 5 minutes.

Here is a slightly adjusted transcript for obvious reasons…

DH: Thanks for using LiveChat, how can I help you?
Bruce: Hi, My websites were changed to a new server this week
Bruce: everything seems to be fine except one thing
Bruce: I have 3 RSS feeds on iTunes (video podcasts). Suddenly they are not validating since the change
Bruce: www.twendy.tv/episodes/twendybusiness.xml
Bruce: Is one feed as an example
Bruce: I can only put it down to the php config differences
Bruce: on the new server
Bruce: Are you able to assist with that?
DH: Hmm, I don’t see anything right off the bat
Bruce: One error is “Feeds should not be served with the “application/x-httpd-php” media type” is this a setting in the php cnfig?
DH: Looks like it’s trying to download the file rather than view it
Bruce: Yes that’s right. A classic symptom of the config not setup correctly to handle these files
Bruce: these were validating perfectly before the server change
DH: Give me just a moment while I look into this
DH: Okay try now
Bruce: The feeds aren’t coming up with the http error, still not quite validating, I could fix that though
DH: Is www.twendy.tv/episodes/twendybusiness.xml loading correctly now?
Bruce: Excellent. Site is loading and feed is loading with one or two fixable errors.
DH: Great to hear!
Bruce: Thank you! You are a champion
DH: I’m glad we got it working again for you
DH: Have a wonderful weekend
Bruce: you too
Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

So if you are getting into websites and need a host, check out my good friends at Dreamhost. Sign up for Dreamhost today. Enter the promo code BRUSCA and get yourself an extra lifetime domain for FREE.

A New Twend

Posted by Brusca under Animation, Design, Entertainment, Film making, Internet TV, Nikon D90, Portfolio, Social Networking, TwendyTV, Video, flickr

You have to love the freedom of creating on the interwebs people. From interviewing successful business owners to animating lego or geeks talking about… what geeks talk about. I give you TwendyTV. I with the help of some pretty amazing friends hope to grow TwendyTV into a hip little internet TV network of shows that will one day also integrate into the TV network as seamlessly as switching between cable TV channels. So look out ABC’s of the world, look out NBC, CBS and all the big boys… ha ha… baby steps, ease up Bruce.

Why Twendy?
When I was traveling around Tanzania in June 2009 there was one Swahili word that really stood out, Twende (Let’s Go). After arriving back I felt inspired to start working on an idea for a travel blog called Twende, but this soon turned into grander ideas of creating multiple shows and an internet TV network. One thing lead to another, a tweak of the word to accommodate a grander theme and voila, TwendyTV. If anything it’s a bit of a play on the word Trendy, but the W I feel also gives it a slight TWITTER slang. I have felt for a long time that TV networks and internet content will eventually merge into a seamless experience, so why not start something now before it the BIG BANG happens. What I also love about this project is that there are no boundaries, no limits, this is completely open to the world. Hopefully our regular TV shows will end up the same way, being released to the world instead of restricted to one country then filtering out in time to other countries. Fat chance of that happening right now, but you never know.

www.twendy.tv

TwendyTV Channels
Initially we were to launch with 4 shows, but could only manage 3 to start on the current time restraints. We are currently working on the before mentioned travel show and also a conservation style show called Evergreen.

Current Channels

• Twendy Town
• Twendy Business
• The Geek That Was

Most Popular Episodes

• Brad Sugars of Action Coach
• Hamish Edwards of Xero
• Zombie Apocalypse
• LOST in Twendy Town

While we have launched and everything is GO, there is still plenty of work and progress to be made. I do hope you enjoy what we have to offer and there is plenty more to come. We also have some behind the scenes photos and footage, enjoy! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and or facebook.

365 Days – May

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my May photos.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for May is

365 Days – April

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Apple, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my April photos.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for April is

365 Days – March

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my March photos. You can check out January here and February here.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for March is

Location, location… location

Posted by Brusca under Location Software, Social Networking, Software

OK the location war is on in earnest and Gowalla and Foursquare seem to be at the top of the heap in terms of popularity and fighting the battle to be at the top. This though is only the beginning of location centric applications, and I’m not going to speculate on who is the best (cough Gowalla!) here.

http://www.foursquare.com

http://www.gowalla.com

My belief is that location centric applications are going to be the next big wave (trust me it’s a small wave right now). The idea of checking into a location through a mobile phone opens up so many doors, too many to describe in one post.

The first awesome opportunity that comes to mind is when a business can tap into the Gowalla and or Foursquare data or API (or both) and push through deals and or specials to the application interfaces, so that when a user checks into the pub, restaurant or whatever the location is, they simply receive a push notification or an SMS of a special deal for checking in their, like a free beer, or half price meal that the user can then claim for checking in. Or perhaps another alternative is within the interface of the chosen location software, the user can browse through nearby specials within a given radius, from 100m to 1km.

I love the countless opportunities this opens itself up for. Oh the above idea is mine, get your own :0) HA HA!

SXSW Interactive Checkin Visualization from SimpleGeo Inc. on Vimeo.

This is the data SimpleGeo collected from the eight geolocated data providers (FourSquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr, Bump, Brightkite, BlockChalk, and Fwix) during the South by SouthWest Interactive Festival. The live datastream was available on http://austin.vicarious.ly, but we thought people might enjoy a conference retrospective in data. If you’d like to have access to this data and more, and/or outsource your entire geolocation infrastructure to the experts in massive geodatasets, check out http://simplegeo.com; we’re in Beta right now, with a full launch at the end of March!

Created with Processing (http://processing.org/ ).

Maps from the OpenStreetMap project (http://www.openstreetmap.org ).

Music: “Pocket Tanks,” Eliran Ben-Ishai (DNA-Groove).

Motivational Video

Posted by Brusca under Nikon D90, Photography, Social Networking, Video

If you’re struggling for a bit of motivation or recently experienced a failure, then this video will surely get you back on your feet. Just goes to show, even the best fail before they succeed. If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived. Life = Risk.