Given Apple’s track record of successful products, it is not really surprising that the iPad dominates the tablet market. What’s even more interesting is that it also dominates the advertising market for tablets.
Ace Metrix, a company that measures television advertising effectiveness, released a report that found Apple to be the overall winner of the most effective ad campaign this year. Jack McKee, Ace Metrix’s head of marketing, told us that the other tablet makers put forth a very strong effort, but that it still wasn’t enough to beat Apple.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 1st, 2011. 
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) rolled out changes to domain names earlier this summer. There are currently around 20 generic top-level domains (gTLD) including .com, .net, and .org. However, this historic decision will allow companies and individuals to purchase their own gTLD.
Advertisers strongly oppose this move since they believe ICANN is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. WebProNews spoke with Doug Wood, the General Counsel for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), who told us that these changes could harm both brands and consumers. According to him, not only could brands become susceptible to cyber squatting and phishing attacks as a result, but the changes could also cause confusion among consumers.
“The idea of this being successful and delivering the competition or the innovation that they are speculating on is clearly questionable,” he said.
The ANA, along with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Direct Marketing Association, and more, are rallying to get ICANN to overturn their changes.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 2nd, 2011.
A common hurdle to effective inbound marketing is time. Whether it’s creating an enticing call-to-action, email blast, or lead nurturing campaign – the common denominator for all of these is time. Blogging regularly, as an example, is an effective yet time consuming way to increase your website traffic. To that end, here are some tips that have worked for me in creating valuable yet efficient blogs:
- Write In Your Head First - use your time driving to work, waiting in line at Chipotle for lunch, or maybe even while you exercise, to develop a structure and key points for your blog post. Figuring out the structure and planning the writing before you actually sit down to put fingers to keyboard is a key time saver.
- Beginning, Middle, End – as you write in your head, determine the beginning, middle, and end of your post. Naturally, you’ll have an introductory paragraph that sets context and a closing paragraph that asks questions or provides a summary. The meat of your post – whether it’s data or recommendations or analysis - should be focused in the middle of your article.
- Finishing Touches - is your goal to spur discussion, gain conversions, or take a position? Drive that point home by asking questions or asking for feedback on a particular position. Have a catchy graphic and, per the first point, think about the graphic you’ll need before you write. For example I’ve used Compfight to search for a graphic for this post.
What helps you write an effective and efficient blog post? Do you write during a certain time of the day? How do you blog ideas come to you?
Full disclosure here: this blog post took me 38 minutes to write. Biggest time suck? Finding a graphic. It look me probably 5 more minutes than I anticipating to find the right graphics. Any tips on that? Let us know.
pic
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 2nd, 2011.
Does finding ways to do things faster always make them better?
We’ve all seen the ads, emails, Tweets: “Learn to write faster!” “Learn to read faster!” “Learn to [do anything] faster!” While efficiency is a much-lauded ability, one must question whether or not doing our work (or anything, really) faster always makes it better.
Remember in elementary school when the teacher said you could have play time after you finished your work? You, of course, took your time, making sure your cursive letters were perfect and double-checking your math problems. Still, you saw the kids who rushed through their work quickly, slamming their pencils down and running off to play. Likewise, you saw those same kids in high school, flying through their work so that they could sit and talk with their friends — regardless of what kind of distraction it caused the students who were still working, taking care that every last detail was in place.
These days, we see someone fly past us on the highway, weaving in and out of traffic, blowing the horn at anyone in the way. We say things like, “Wow, what an idiot. He’s going to get someone killed! Wonder why he’s in such a big rush?”
People get divorced and you hear them say things like, “We rushed into a relationship, rushed that part, and then we rushed into marriage too.”
You get the idea. Wanting to do everything faster so that we can move on to the next (and often better) thing is a learned behavior. It’s been ingrained in us since we were young children. My personal downfall was cleaning my room. I’d rush through it, only to have my mother make me go back again and again until I had picked everything up in order to dust below it.
The idea that we should rush through our work is bad enough. Don’t we value quality over quantity? Sure, many of us are overloaded on the job, and that makes it difficult to find time to be completely thorough in our work, but is hurrying our way through a task just to check it off the best motivation we’ve got?
I am really not a fast anything, and by that, I mean that I don’t rush. I love to read and have been an avid reader for my entire life, but I’m also one of the slowest readers you’ll ever meet. Why? Because I mull over the details. Some of my classmates would skim through reading assignments with varying degrees of comprehension. By fifth grade, I was reading at an 11th grade level, well ahead of most others, owed almost entirely to the time I took to really read and think. I want to understand what I’m reading. The book is a journey, not a destination.
Similarly, I’m not a terribly fast writer, and I don’t care to be. I stop, re-read, tweak, edit, move things around, and think of other things I want to add or take away. By the time this post publishes, I will have inspected the preview no fewer than three times, giving myself a little space in between. I’m not a one-and-done kind of writer.
And maybe that’s why the “Learn to write faster!” ads really bother me above all else. Good writing is such a crucial skill. Try as I might, I can’t think of any scenario in which hurrying one’s writing creates a more enjoyable reading experience for someone else — especially not when that writing is done for work. When someone is paying you to turn in high quality writing, you owe it to them to not try to write it so quickly that the quality suffers.
Is faster writing what we’re really looking for? What about better writing?
The writing process is just that: a process. While there are many useful tools out there to help streamline our work, we shouldn’t rely solely upon them for quality. How many times has spell check or grammar check failed you? These tools aren’t meant to replace the process. They’re meant to help it.
And beyond writing, so many aspects of our lives and work require a process of some sort. Faster might work sometimes, but there’s no substitute for taking the appropriate time, enjoying the ride, and producing quality material with quality results.
Image Source: Flickr (by Eyesplash)
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 3rd, 2011.
Social media is making its way into just about every industry, and the healthcare industry is no exception. Healthcare is a very regulated industry, but it is still finding ways to incorporate social media. Although it’s a slow process, it is still progress.
Websites such as CaringBridge has helped this development by creating an outlet for family and friends to stay up to date on a loved one’s condition. As these types of support groups have expanded online, patients often go to them for information instead of going to a healthcare professional.
For this reason, Sona Mehring, the CEO and Founder of CaringBridge, told us that social media has changed the healthcare industry for the better. She believes that patients have more support, which helps them to heal more quickly.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 4th, 2011.
