Videos add an eye catching and interactive element to your website. Not only do web videos engage, they educate and entertain potential customers or business contacts.

Web videos also encourage visitors to spend longer on your site. Even time waiting for the video to load increase your content’s exposure. Curiosity is on your side. Skimming headlines or looking at emphasized phrases are instantaneously gratifying and, typically, less successful. Consider news websites. Video links are just as, if not more, noticeable than headlines and extensive articles. If you can’t present a product or service to someone face-to-face, a video might just be the next best step.

However, keep in mind, not all videos are great. Some of them are just annoying, extensive, or just downright annoying. Here are a couple things to keep in mind when choosing your video:
– Quality: keep your video informative, entertaining, and worth watching.
– Relevance: kittens chasing themselves in mirrors are cute, but worthless to a website selling
audio equipment.
– Length: your video should not be more than a minute; longer than that and your audiences will
care less and less … think diminishing returns.
– Optional: personally, I hate when music is prompted to begin right when I enter a website, or
when an ad video plays in the side bar of a site. Let your audiences choose to watch the video;
I’m pretty sure they will appreciate it … as would I.

So. Web videos seem like a beneficial idea. Need help getting started? Here are a couple of suggestions:
– Demonstrative: show audiences what your product or service does.
– Testimonial: let others tell audiences how great your product or service is.

5 Tips for Running an Online Contest!

Twitter? Facebook? Google+? We know virtually everyone is on that right now. Ignoring the elephant in the room is impossible at this point. No, the elephant in the room is not the person next to you whose eyes are glued to their smart phone. It’s you and your business not utilizing social media. Let me shed some light on the exponentially growing influence of social media with some facts (credits to online schools).

-       With over 500 MILLION users, 1 in every 13 people on earth now uses Facebook.

-       250 million of them (over 50%) log in every day.

Wait, there’s more.

-       48% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up.

-       28% check before getting out of bed.

-       The 35+ demographic is growing rapidly, now with over 30% of the entire Facebook user base.

Your jaw hit the floor yet?

-       In just 20 minutes over 1 million links are shared.

-    There are 206.2 million internet users in the U.S. That means 71.2% of the U.S. web audience is on Facebook.

Close the books, there’s no turning back!

-       57% of people talk to people more online than they do in real life.

-       48% of young Americans find out about the news through Facebook.

Take note. These facts do not include Twitter and Google+.  Imagine the number of all the social media clients as a whole. Frightening..

You will be doing a disservice to your company by not running contests on these social media channels. There are no get rich quick schemes to transforming your company Twitter or Facebook page into mammoth proportions even if you do photoshop Ewoks into every picture to prove they’re real, but running contests through them can absolutely help.

Here are 5 tips to running an online contest.

1. Have people link to your site from their Tweet/Facebook post/Google+ post.

- Have them copy & paste text that mention the company twitter account and given URL (your contest landing page) in their tweet to enter.

**This will get you on Google’s radar with some social links to your site. WIN!**

2. Design a landing page from your site, which includes all the contest information and also be the page that applicants link to.

**This page and your site will benefit from any web links / social links acquired during the contest. WIN!**

WARNING: Do not 301 redirect the site to a commercial landing page. You will lose some trust points. Be ethical!

3. Choose a relevant name for the contest for your anchor text on the shortened URLs.

**Links to your site will have relevant keywords, which will help your SEO. WIN!**

4. Search for Twitter users that may be interested in your promotion or contest.

- You can search for people by interest on Twitter. All you have to do is type a phrase into search, then click on the ‘people’ tab.
**Create a buzz in the social media community. WIN!**

WARNING: Do not spam! This will absolutely hurt your brand.

5. After the contest, analyze the people who entered and look for any relationships that could be strengthened.

Hint: Look for the people who are influential in their niche, or people who just have a great following.

**You foster a relationship with them and create positive brand awareness. WIN!**

Don’t forget to have fun with your contests! These types of giveaways and contests, if done correctly, can have an immense impact on your business. I hope while reading this, you started or finished creating an account. If not, I failed in accomplishing my goal here with this post. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity!

The growing world of online social networking has left some traditional marketers coughing in the dust. However, the advantages of jumping on the bandwagon greatly outnumber the downsides, and Twitter is one of the most practical and commonly used applications out there.

It’s free, simple, and available to everyone. Because of that, Twitter has between 100 and 200 million users. That generates a lot of Internet noise!

If you’re like most modern companies, you have a Twitter account, you use it (sometimes), and you want your business to stand out on this website. It’s about communicating with clients or customers in a conversational and interactive way, and doing so often.

One of the most productive ways in which to use Twitter is to prepare a series of Tweets to release to your followers over a span of time. A Twitter tool like Buffer will spread your tweets out over a given day, to prevent a tweet flood.

And for every Tweet that gets “Buffered,” you are given a statistics report about clicks and retweets, making it easier to know more about what aspects of your Twitter activity followers are enjoying—and which of those they are less excited about. Of course, it’s important to manually check in with your Twitter account from time to time, to respond to those followers who have replied to your posts. While applications like Buffer are helpful on a daily basis, we cannot forget that social media is, fundamentally, a two-way street.

Every step of Facebook’s evolution has brought challenges for companies, who use the Internet – and specifically social media – to get exposure and draw new clients or customers.

When comparing Facebook to its former competitor, MySpace, it can be said that Facebook’s design is plain, and offers little opportunity for customization of profiles or pages. But one of the latest updates from Mark Zuckerberg’s company has made it possible for you, as a business, to use your Facebook fan pages in a unique way—updating and emphasizing your brand.

Facebook pages can be customized using a number of techniques:

First, your profile picture can be adjusted. As the image representing your business throughout the Facebook world, your profile picture is one of the most important elements of your business/company’s presence on Facebook. Giving this image a white or transparent background color – so that it fades into the standard white Facebook surroundings – makes the icon pop and stand out from other business logos.

Additionally, an iframe mini website can be added to your Facebook page, to act as a site-within-a-site—linking Facebook fans to your company’s direct website. You can create this application yourself, or use a free Facebook application, such as “iFrames for Pages.”

Finally, the page can be customized through the use of the new picture banner feature at the top of each Facebook page. It can be adjusted to reveal a specific set of five photos (although in a random order), chosen by your company to best represent the photographs in which you are tagged. As a business, be sure to use all of these updates to your advantage, in order to keep up with today’s digital marketplace.

Cloud computing is the process behind which already existed years before with popular search engines like Google and Hotmail, Gmail, etc. How does it work? All of these have shared servers contained in huge data centers than to be stored in personal drives. Unlike these web contents that use cloud technology, Apple created its own software divergence. Cloud computing for Apple isn’t in terms of software replacement but it’s a process of augmentation.

There’s no need to do back-up for contents can be accessed anywhere once it has been transferred. Microsoft tried to implement the slogan “Software plus Service” but didn’t seem to succeed on it. With Apple’s cloud service of software augmentation, interactive browsing and storage are a few clicks away.
Apple is a visionary with its iCloud technology being an alternative to that of Google’s. It is created to provide an environment where it is built to be user-friendly and at the same time is rich with its diverse features.

This Minneapolis Web Design company lastly reported that it took ten years for Microsoft to create similar technology. In the meantime, Apple also tried. For them, failure is part of the challenge before they discovered iCloud and finally succeeded.

HTML5 is changing the way we interact with the Internet.  Rocket 55 explains how:

• Videos can easily be embedded on websites.  Instead of needing to download a new plug-in or application to embed videos, you can write the video into the code.
• A new coding feature is the canvas, which allows web designers to create 2-D drawings on entire pages, not just in a tiny box.
• New local storage capabilities
• Drag and drop capabilities, which makes copying text a lot easier.
• An improvement on cross document messaging, safer than inline scripts and more widely available than IFRAME elements

Right now, there are only a few browsers that support HTML5 coding, which is the only real issue with the new code at this point.  However, since HTML5 is how most people are designing applications these days for phones, computers, and other Internet devices, it is pretty safe to say more browsers will be picking the code up.