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Archive for November, 2011



Aaron

11/29/2011

Black Friday Online Sales Up 26% in 2011
07:20 am by Aaron

Black Friday can be an intimidating experience. Every year the deals get better and the competition for products gets more intense. This past Black Friday even had an incident of a woman pepper-spraying a crowd so she could get to an Xbox. An Xbox, a product that has been around for almost six years!

With many unwilling to fight the crowds or unwilling to get up early on a rare Friday off, more people are choosing to do their Black Friday shopping online. This year, more than $816 million was spent on Black Friday online, a jump of 26% from 2010.

Online shopping becomes more popular as an ever-busy society seeks ways to make life just a little easier — with less traffic, fewer parking hassles and smaller crowds in general.

This consumer urge — is it overstating it to call it ‘consumer demand’ — requires all businesses to provide online options, from catalogs and service lists to full-scale e-commerce sites.

If you doubt that, we suggest you check out your competition … online. If the competition is there, and it’s more than likely it is, you need to be there, too.

It’s not snarky to say you should go where your customers, and your competition, are. And they are online.

As any retailer will tell you, the fun doesn’t stop on Black Friday – it just begins. The same is true for holiday shopping online. Yesterday was Cyber Monday, and you better believe the next month will have tens of millions of shoppers looking to the Internet to help them avoid long lines at the mall.

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Aaron

11/16/2011

Another Facebook Metrics Change
03:26 pm by Aaron

Another day, another Facebook change

Previously, when looking at post-by-post Facebook metrics on your page, you would see “impressions” and a “feedback” percentage. This has now been changed to “people reached” and “people talking about this.”

What does this mean? The old way was both comforting — it was nice to see a post with thousands of impressions — and bleak — feedback  measured in fractions of a percentage point never felt that successful.

The new metrics show the number of unique people who saw the post (one way or another) and the total number of people talking about it, which appears to be the sum of likes, comments and shares.

Is this better or worse than the old metrics? Personally, I think it makes more sense but also tells us what we already knew – just how hard it is to create useful content that fans will share.

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Aaron

11/08/2011

Our First Take on Google+ for Business
02:21 pm by Aaron

Today is an exciting day in the world of social media: Google+ officially launched Pages for Businesses. I went about trying to set up IWS’s Google+ page today and it was a learning experience.

First, I had trouble with our logo. Apparently there are some image restrictions with Google+ pages pictures. While these exist in Facebook as well, there didn’t seem to be a good auto-resize feature yet. I had to crop out “IWS” from our picture, even though I tried to make it smaller and smaller.

Once I got past the profile picture, the rest of the set up went smoothly. I ported over some pictures, info and status updates from Facebook and our infant page was ready to start crawling:

Two features that I liked right off the bat:

  1. I like how a map of IWS’ location is displayed right under the profile picture; this should be a boost for some businesses. I wish there was an option to add more than one location; our poor DC office is left out of the Google Maps fun!
  2. I like the initial circle options for pages. The ability to separate employees, customers, VIPS and other companies you may be following (or any other circle you want to create) has the potential to make the categorization of social information easier than it ever could be on Facebook.

Finally, it took me a while to figure out how to move between my profile and the IWS page. Much like Facebook, you need a profile to create a page.  Unfortunately, at this point, it looks like only a single profile can admin a page. This will have to change if Google+ truly wants to compete with Facebook.

In the meantime, if you are having trouble figuring out how to switch between pages, look no further than right next to your profile picture:

We’re not ready to swap Google+ for Facebook, but we’ll be watching. What are your plans for G+?

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Gabe Rushing

11/02/2011

Safe Water is Saving Lives
08:11 am by Gabe Rushing


Are you aware of how many people go without clean, healthy drinking water?

Over 1.1 billion people and over over 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation, stuff that we take for granted.

A few months ago, Esperança Charities came to us wanting a way to provide clean water to the people who need it the most. The campaign, Safe Water Saves Lives was born. Our goal was to raise $10,000 – which would be matched dollar for dollar.

We’re pleased to announce that $20,000 as been raised and will be put towards providing a safe water source for hundreds of people in the village of El Hormiguero,  in northern Nicaragua.

Thanks to everyone that donated. You truly are changing lives. That fight doesn’t end there, however. You can still donate. Visit safewatersaveslives.com.

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Paul McKay

11/01/2011

Create Chances and Win a Trip of a Lifetime
10:57 am by Paul McKay

There aren’t a lot of true “win-win” scenarios in life, but here is one for you:

Donate $10 to the U.S. Soccer Foundation and win an all expenses paid trip to the 2011 MLS Cup on November 20th.

If you’re a soccer fan, this is a no-brainer. If you aren’t, let me tell you why your donation matters. Your contribution will benefit children by:

  • Help build safe places to play soccer
  • Provide soccer balls and other equipment
  • Teach them how to live a healthy lifestyle
  • Provide mentors that are invested in successful development
  • Help get them off the couch and into an active lifestyle

All this for $10 and a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to the MLS Cup? I would classify this as a “win-win.” The U.S. Soccer Foundation is a client we are very proud to work with, and I encourage you to check out the contest.

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