Its been a great week so far!  We found out today that our proposal was accepted by a unamimous vote by the board of The MED Foundation, so we’re very excited to welcome them as Valeo’s newest client.  We are really jazzed about this project becuase we are going to really flex our skills and tie our marketing efforts into their site by producing a highly interactive site that is going to quickly and effectively involve the community, which is just what the doctor ordered (horrible pun intended).

The new MED Foundation site is going to allow us to show off some of our recent progress by developing a site that uses Facebook Connect to truly take advantage of the viral nature of the Internet.  This will tie in perfectly to all of our marketing effforts that will begin once the site is completed.

In other news- I’ve also been voted in to the Board of Directors for the Sales & Marketing Society of the Midsouth to serve as the Director of Social Media.  I’m honored to join this organization in a newly created position to help bring a new viewpoint on how we can reach new and current members through effective and innovative uses of social media.  More to come on this in the coming weeks.  I’ll be working with the other board members to try to define exactly how I can best serve the board and the organization.  I’m sure much of that will be posted here or on Twitter, so I’ll keep you posted.

Where’s the marketing tip in this post?
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to offer a nugget of Internet marketing wisdom! I need to get out of here so I can get some dinner, so I’ll keep this brief:

Stay away from social networks that you’re thinking of joining just because you know someone else on them.  Narrow your focus and make sure you’re not deluting your time with social networks that don’t help you further your goals.  In English:  don’t waste time on MySpace if you’re trying to market your corporate insurance company, etc.

Ok, that’s it for tonight.  Be well!

I’ve been talking to a lot of people in the last few weeks who have a need to develop a more established presence on the web. This is a pretty common question in online marketing: how do I develop a website that produces results?

The answer is different things for different people/businesses, but you can rest assured that higher levels of traffic is practically a sure-fire strategy. So how do you build a following for your site? Blogging is a great way to get involved in the conversation online but that is a difficult for some businesses. First, there is the most obvious problem- the time required to generate unique and interesting content.

A couple of businesses that we talked to this week are either so bogged down in bureaucracies or regulated by compliance issues that blogging in a timely manner isn’t really an option. Sure, they could get 6 months of content together and approved and then roll it out in a phased manner (which is actually one of the strategies we’re suggesting), but let’s assume for the sake of this post that you can’t get your blog on.

A great strategy for developing a following on your site is to build a community around it. This is exactly what Ning was designed for- to allow anyone to build their own social network. Great idea, but I’m not sold on that strategy for most of the people we talk to. Primarily because you still have to rely on building your own following from the ground up. That can take a lot of time and valuable resources that you might otherwise invest differently, given the choice.

Here’s what we’ve been suggesting to a few companies lately: use the tremendous success of Facebook to take advantage of the viral nature of the Internet. FaceBook Connect gives us some amazing things that we can do on YOUR site so that you’re piggy-backing off of the fact that so many people already have FaceBook profiles and lots of friends on those profiles. Why start from scratch when you can just plug into that??

You can find out more about FaceBook Connect here. If you need to develop a following for your site, this is a great place to start! Granted, you will probably have to get some development resources involved to do so, but you’re still going to come out much better in the long-run than by trying to build your own ’siloed’ social network with its own profiles, users, friends, and logins. This is the direction that you’re going ot see social networks moving in the very near future. Its already happening for some of the clients that we’re going to be working with!

To find out more about the future of social networks, check out this presentation on that topic on SlideShare:

If you want to learn more or just want to talk over some ideas, give us a shout! This is interesting stuff, we love hearing new ideas and being able to talk about how we can help push social networking to the next level.

I don’t know if you have ever had any screen capture needs, but Camtasia is the coolest software ever for this. I just recorded a demo of a content management system and I was able to do some callouts and narrate my video with the utmost ease.

Very cool software! You can export to about any format needed- flash, most noteably. Definitely check it out!

This is the presentation that I made to the Sales & Marketing Society yesterday.  I had several people request a copy of the presentation so I wanted to go ahead and get this online.

There were some great questions during the presentation, and I’m glad that everyone was so interested in the topic – we had a great turnout!  The subject matter definitely has more to do with that than the presenter, but I tried to at lesat make the first 4 minutes interesting by throwing in a bunch of fun facts that I collected from the web, YouTube, and some other presentations that I’ve seen out on Slideshare.  Speaking of which- if you’re not familiar with SlideShare then go check it out!  That is an amazing site that is full of great information.  You can find a presentation on just about any thing that you can imagine.

Alright- that is it!  I’ll get back on the blog and try to start feeding you more info on how to start actually using your site to drive growth for your organization.  I think that the success of this presentation illustrates the need for me to talk more on this topic!   Who couldn’t use some top-line growth from their site, know what I mean?

I’ve been a busy bee!

Wow, I didn’t realize how much of a slacker I’ve been at getting something out here lately.  With everything else going on lately, the blog has definitely fallen down on the list of priorities.

To recap:  we’ve had some smashing victories in February.  Valeo inked our deal with Boom, LLC and have begun production on a new LMS system that is going to be revolutionary.  We’re all very excited about this, becuase it represents some of the most cutting edge work that we’ve ever been able to take on.   I have to imagine that any of our (at least local) competitors would be crushed by a project of this magnitude- 2000 hours of development time to be delivered for an August 1 go-live (that’s a 6 month turnaround!).   The ideas are flying like crazy around the office, and working on the UI/UX (user interface/user experience) for this project has everyone here really excited!  More to come on that down the road.  As soon as we get past the initial UI designs we’ll begin work on the demo commercial that will be showcased on the site and in our other marketing efforts.  This project is going to be the JAM!

We’ve also had some victories internally on completing some processes that were long overdue, and we’ve had a promotion!  Matt Mauck has been promoted to his new position that is going to give him more responsibility and will put him in a role that entails more client/dev team interaction.  Its time for me to step into a more passive project management role as I’ve been busy on my own.

I had several proposals for some meaty projects to get out this week, so that has been a struggle to fit into the schedule along with my presentation that I had to get done for the Sales & Marketing Society on ROI Marketing for your business:  driving top-line growth through your website. As soon as I can, I’ll get that up on here since I know several of you who attended were requesting a copy of the PowerPoint.

That lecture was also a success – I had a lot of fun with it, and have subsequently been asked to join the Sales & Marketing Society as a board member to fill a position that is being created for me: director of social media.  I’m thrilled to be asked to join this organization and I’m excited about what I can bring to the board in the coming year.   In similar news, I was accepted as a Fellow into the 2009/2010 class of the Leadership Academy.  This is an amazing opportunity and I’m so honored to be chosen.  I think that is going to teach me a lot about being a leader in our organization, as well as in the community.

Some of you may be aware, but community support is very dear to me- which is why I founded the MemphisCares.US program.  Unfortunately, running a business and trying to get a community support program off the ground at the same time in a down economy has been difficult, but I refuse to give up because I believe that we have a responsibility to give back.  I hope to learn how to more effectively do that through the Leadership Academy.

I’ve been talking to some people about getting a new marketing/PR person to come into the organization and help us continue to grow, and I think that the time for that is drawing near.  Hopefully sooner than later- I need a break and some help would hopefully do that for me!  If you’re a local and you know of anyone who would be a good fit for what we do then please contact us!

I will get back to the blog soon, I promise.  I have scores of great content that I want to get out to you- just finding the time is tough sometimes. I know every person reading this can relate!  For the moment- this is my blog post, read me search engines.  I think I used a keyword or two in here =)

For those of you who are using Dreamweaver on a daily basis, you may have  run into this problem.   You try to open a file in Dreamweaver from a site you have been working on and Dreamweaver mysteriously locks up.    Weird, huh???   Apparently,  Dreamweaver crashes in Windows if you make an edit to a CSS file that changes the size of the file to exactly 8191 bytes or an increment of 8191 bytes. In addition, Dreamweaver won’t restart unless you change the size of the CSS file.

http://blog.zoblue.com/2008/04/06/dreamweaver-cs3-and-css-file-size