The Twitter Powerhouse

         Most everyone in modern society has heard of Twitter.  This simple program is making waves in the marketing world by its simple power to create communities around your product.  With today's society gaining a shorter and shorter attention span, Twitter hits a strong point by limiting their messages to 140 characters.  This is a good way for customers to offer quick suggestions and requests as well as convenient for the company to give fast and individual responses.  In Dan Zarella's book about social media, he states thats its good for a company to follow those that follow you otherwise you are distancing yourself and appear aloof.  Twitter also offers ways to conveniently find trends that are happening right now.  They have an algorithm that tracks mentions of words and phrases up to three words long and can highlight those most talked about in a certain timeframe.  This is useful to marketers to try and focus their Tweets on current topics in order to gain a stronger following.  Twitter also gives the top trending topics right on the main Twitter interface. 

         By now we've seen that utilizing a blog is an excellent way to promote your company and create value for your customers.  Microblogging, as with Twitter, is a fast and simple way to get noticed. Mary Lou Roberts book, Internet Marketing, discusses how creating value in your product can greatly help your company grow. With blogging and Twitter, you allow customers to put their ideas out there for the company consider.  The company also is able to respond back and let them know their thoughts and daily activities.  At the same time companies need to take steps to not divulge too much company information that their competitors might use.  A healthy balance must be maintained between public and private information. 

Spirit Mountain... Local and fun..

Spirit Mountain is the local Duluth,MN ski area that is working on becoming a success year round.  From their summer slide coaster to their winter skiing activites, this place is making a comeback.  They also have a new website redesign as well as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube feeds to get viewers into their site.  On their landing page they have a survey box that is most likely used by marketing.  The time I visited the site the survey ask a pretty generic question about what you were looking towards most for the upcoming winter and there were three options:

sleeping in

not mowing the lawn

skiing and snowboarding...

I do not believe the data received from this survey helps marketing with any statistics with the actual data but it does enhance customer value.  According to Roberts book Internet Marketing, anything that can enhance customer value is a plus.  This survey causes the individual to stay and interact with the site.  The more time they interact, the better.

I like the simplicity of the site and the easy navigation.  They have good graphics and minimal scrolling which is positive for them.  In the book SEO Made Simple, Fleischner expands on the benefits of linking your site to other sites to increase search engine hits.  Spirit Mountain could link with local sports stores, the tourism bureau, lodging facilities which would all boost each others online presence.  Spirit could also use a blog with daily updates to activity on the mountain and weather conditions.  It would be beneficial for them to offer a place for users to upload photos of their time on the hill.  These suggestions are of minimal cost but can draw in a stonger tourism dollar.

Charging for news...

I wanted to post some comments about newspapers around the country and their lack of website design as well as their choice to have subscriptions to view online content.  Many papers from around the US are just sadly designed with an utter clutter of annoying advertising.  Yes, papers themselves have advertising but I do not believe that it is as bad as their corrosponding websites.  The design is a ring of medium sized advertising with the actual content of the page centered amid the ads.  I would like to see the research that went into the layout for these pages as well as the charge structure for the advertising.  Even considering Google heatmaps, I have to assume that any of the ads above, below and to the right of the articles are most likely not even glanced at.  I understand papers all over the world are having a tough time competing with online content but I believe they are making choices that are not helping them recoup any losses.  By charging to view online content they are forcing would be customers to seek their news from the unlimited free sources the net has to offer.  Even local news and updates can be found on individual blogs such as this, free of charge!  And you are also allowed to feed your news back on here as well, for free!  Thank you for your time, I just had to get that off my chest...

Gotta get exposure....

I would like to do my part in boosing the internet traffic to a developing and interesting company, the Colorad Yurt Company.  While still a small company, they are doing the right steps to create a strong online product that supports their base product.  The website has a clean and easy to use design with images of the product and contact information on every page. The have thier own blog as well which helps for boosting their company during searches. It would help to duplicate their description tag withing the page construction.  According to Michael Fleischner in SEO Made Simple, by duplicating your description tag in a website it has a direct impact with MSN search engines.  They also need to add a keyword tag to thier source code inorder to educate search engines of thier website.  Finally one more code that would be a useful addition to the site is a robot tag with an "all" indication to push web spiders to read through the entire site while seaching.  I approve of their site design yet they have a multitude of options to increase thier exposure.  Many like Facebook are free or cheap to join and are well connected!

The ONION.com, an excellent source for news..

Ok.. I understand that the Onion isn't really an actual source for real news but it is a good site of respite from the daily grind of factual news.  The Onion is an interesting site which has updated content throughout the week.  It is a good place to go for laughs no matter what your views.  The site is laid out with headlines of imaginary stories and humorous photos.  The have a blog, you can follow them on Twitter and it hits on most every positive aspect listed on Websitegrader.com.  One spot they did get negative marks on was for having too many images, but that is part of the product so we will ignore that. Yet the still achieve a grade of 98.   They also get a good ranking from Google's pagerank checker placing them at 8 out of 10.  There are 5,750 pages out there with links to the Onion site as well, which shows that they are getting thier name out there.  The domain has been around for 17 years and that has to help with recognition of the name. 

The design of the site could use a revamping.  After you scroll down from the initial few headlines you see a good mess of thumbnail articles.  These could be inserted into drop down tabs from the topic tabs at the top of the page.  Saving people from scrolling down the page is good to keep their customers reading and good for their business. 

Their income comes from a good majority of advertising which is one reason that the frontpage requires scrolling.  All along the righthand side of the page are advertisements.  When I was on the site the ads were for Google TV.  Although I did not click through the links, I am interested to learn more about this product.  The other source of income is through products and subscriptions to a print edition.  You should check out their products page, the have some pretty amusing things.

Over all I feel that the site is well construction and is continually updated with laughable content.  Plus their roots are from the upper Midwest over in Madison! Keep up the good work Onion!

websitegrader.com doesn't even get top score!

I just find it interesting that the site used to grade other websites cannot get a 99 to 100 rating!  All they need to do is enter their name into the search box and then follow the suggestions that follow. While they have a 95 rating that still is no excuse why they cannot make a good example.  They do not have a twitter account or thier own blog are the first two things that come to mind.  Both are good ways of cheap yet relevant and productive methods for marketing. This site has been around for 3 years 11 months and 1 week.. according to the infomation page after grading their site.  You would think within that time someone involved in the marketing of the site would have followed through with this and covered thier bases. They also only have three images listed on the site.  Images are good to have on sites as well.  I do approve of the site design and usability, but I agree with thier rating suggestions as well.  These are simple yet effective suggestions to help build thier success on the web!

Dealsea.com

I have some design recommendations for dealsea.com. I suggest creating more of a branded website.  Currently the site is just a basic colorless site that only really presents sales from other sites and that's it on the basic level.  It could use a branded color and logo scheme that draws the eyes into the sales area. Secondly it would benefit to make the site more of a user experience. By making their blog and product reviews more interactive and creative the company would grow their value for the customer.  On an interactive point, the site could allow customers to hunt and post good deals.  If the posting is approved they could gain a credit towards future purchases of items found on the site. They might also, and finally, track the user experience prior to changes and after so that they may be able to see areas that were strengthened after the changes.  Although dealsea recieves a high mark on websitegrader.com, these changes would allow for the company to gain more value for their customers.