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The Internet has become a wonderful tool for learning more about your customers, your competition and what is happening in your marketplace. With more and more companies using the Internet as a primary communication channel, you have an almost unlimited amount of access to information that had difficult to obtain. The keys are to find the right sources, identify what information is important and then assimilate what it means.
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Welcome back! I say that because portions of this site, and other sites of mine, have been down for about three days! All because of the incompetent handling of a systems upgrade/server migration done to some servers at iPower Web.

I’ve been with iPower for a long time and can honestly say I have never had it this bad before but this was totally unacceptable. The first day I noticed the problem I gave them the benefit of the doubt to let them get it fixed. The next day I am told “24 more hours please”, and still another 24 hours passes on top of that. Continue »

Staying in contact with customers and prospects helps generate new business and new customers. Many organizations, from office supply companies to book stores to banks use newsletters as a reason and a means to communicate with these groups. If you watch your mailbox, you will probably find several newsletters from your vendors and those that want to be your vendors. Here are some ideas to help you evaluate whether a newsletter should be part of your marketing strategy. Continue »

Allocating your marketing efforts between acquiring new customers and getting additional business from existing customers can be a challenging decision. Businesses that can sell additional products or services to existing customers can have a built in advantage. Here are some ideas to help strengthen your existing customer relationships and perhaps get some new customers along the way.

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The Associated Press is reporting on a startup business, YuMe Networks Inc., in Redwood City California. They are releasing an ad campaign that allows the customization of video ads for some television shows that are downloaded from a Web site.

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Has web accessibility crept into your development process for your web sites? It seems to be one of the “in things” at the moment. People tout their expertise in accessibility and table-less CSS design. Both are great and I make attempts at both. But should we just be making attempts at accessibility?

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Businesses are flocking to market themselves in virtual worlds. I think it’s too soon to tell what to expect from these game-like and usually three-dimensional online universes, but one can feel the trend.

According to the article: “We’re pretty much where the Internet was in the mid-90s,” said Steve Prentice, a vice president at technology research group Gartner Inc. That sentiment is echoed by others as well. Joe Laszlo, analyst at JupiterKagan Inc., said the virtual worlds are “like the early days of the Victoria’s Secret Webcast, where it was crappy, but hot, so everybody went.”

There are definitely many opportunities for companies to get their branding seen. In one of MTV’s virtual worlds they’ve sold 11,402 virtual cans of Pepsi. You can’t drink it - but it’s certainly brand awareness.

Read more about this budding phenomenon…

Announced today on Yodel, Yahoo! Mail will be giving unlimited email storage to everyone in May 2007.

“As Yahoo! Mail approaches its 10-year anniversary, I’m the lucky one who gets to announce that we will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. To mark the occasion, I checked in with David Nakayama, our group vice president of engineering, for some perspective on this milestone. In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the developer of RocketMail, one of the world’s first webmail products, which Yahoo! acquired and relaunched as Yahoo! Mail in 1997.”

In the article David coments on how at it’s inception they were considering 2MB storage for users and the possibility of getting radical and doubling the storage to 4MB! Ooo, that’s nutty. My how things have progressed.

Read the whole story…

Look around and you’ll find plenty around - I’m talking about bad web sites. And there are plenty of other web sites dedicated to pointing out these bad sites so I’m not gonna do that. But I do want to talk about some of the bad habits that these sites sometimes employ that have become pet peeves of mine.

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We seem to be in the midst of it now, Web 2.0 that is. Is it panning out to be what everyone said it would be? Here’s a quote from a Businessweek article written in late 2005:

“The Web isn’t so much a place anymore,” explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It’s more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, “They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.”

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