The Morrison Agency. Atlanta Advertising + Digital Agency

A client of ours in a large corporation recently ran into a problem when submitting a request to purchase new Macs for their in-house design team, IT told them that the request was denied and that the company would no longer support the Mac platform.

As you can imagine, our client was dumbfounded by the response by IT. We were asked by her to help build a case for Macs. While Macs are cool and “creative,” this is not enough of a reason to justify a Mac or pay the Mac premium. Rather, we felt there were some very logical reasons for Macs having a home in client-side marketing departments:

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You’ve no doubt interacted with a QR code at some point in the last few months. While they’ve been fairly common in Japan for nearly two decades, QR codes seem to have only taken hold in the US within the past year or so.

Readable by mobile apps using the phone’s camera and Internet connection, QR codes are typically used due to their ability to improve calls-to-action in all types of marketing.

Here are just a few successful & inspiring implementations:

Starbucks and Lady Gaga built an elaborate interactive digital scavenger hunt with QR Codes at various Starbucks locations as one of many promotions leading up to the release of her current album.
Source: Mashable.com

Tissot printed a variety of QR Codes on trade show displays and models that linked viewers to exclusive videos and music that could be viewed and purchased.
Source: TappIn YouTube Channel

Delta Airlines use QR Codes for their eBoarding pass allowing customers to receive a code on their smart phones to board their flight.
Source: Delta Marketing Group

Orville Redenbacher and other companies include them in their direct mail pieces providing coupons and other promotions.
Source: Blurring Edges

QR codes have rapidly changed how people socially interact with marketing – and we seem to just be seeing the beginning of it. How are you using or going to use them in your marketing? What’s your take on the QR craze?

The other day, I was on the phone with a client, and the question was asked: “we get that social media is important, however we can’t figure out how you actually go about monetizing it!”

Good question. Tricky answer.

I tend to follow the belief that social media works in three forms:

1. Socially – friend to friend
2. Promotionally -as a tool, in conjunction with an overarching promotional campaign
3. Proactively – a way to reach out, and build your brand

Let’s take a minute and go through each one of these, albeit at a high level.
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As you might assume, I spend a good bit of my time developing, managing, and reviewing internet marketing and advertising campaigns for our clients. In most cases, these clients have a solid grasp on the world – and metrics – of these programs. You know the ones I’m talking about, the one’s with cool abbreviations like: CPC, CTR, Conv, Impr, and others. We talk about the performance of these ads or programs, based on the number of users who click our add, complete our predefined goals, the total number of visitors to the campaign site, or whether or not they flow through the funnel we set up for them. 

Or maybe we’re talking about social media campaigns, and worrying about the number of friends, or followers of our associated Twitter profiles, Facebook Fan pages, etc. We get so caught up in these numbers, that we forget one simple thing…

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October 6, 2009 is the end of the meta-keywords era, as Yahoo! – the last major search engine to support the tag – has finally announced they’ve dropped all support for it. The announcement was made during the “Ask The Search Engines” session at SMX East in New York, wherein Yahoo! stated they actually phased out support in their algorithm a month ago.

What does this mean to you?

It means that those fancy little meta-keywords you’ve used to increase search traffic and page rank is all for naught (officially). With Yahoo! throwing in the towel, none of the major search engines – such as Google, Bing, Ask, and Yahoo! – provide support for the tag anymore. Sites that have relied on meta-keywords, will in fact notice a slight drop in page rank, and perhaps a drop in new traffic from search engines. Since this has been a long-coming phase-out, the change shouldn’t be that dramatic. However, many firms that claim to provide SEO services, do in fact leverage this method more than any other.

How can you adapt?

Search engines use deep, ominous, unknown algorithms to determine what sites they’ll serve up when a query has been made by a user. While we don’t know all that they look for, we do know things they like. Some things you should start considering are:

• Site content: is the content on your site relevant to users? Is it rich in keywords, like the ones you would hope would display your site in search queries?
• Code/mark-up: is your site using clean, standards compliant code?
• Title tags: do the title tags on your site’s pages adequately explain what is on the page?
• Site maps: have you taken the time to submit XML site maps to all major search engines?
• URL’s: do the URL’s on your site contain unintelligible naming conventions, or are you using keyword-rich permalinks? Such as using www.yourdomain.com/who-we-are/our-team rather than www.yourdomain.com/services/?p=123

This should be a quick hit-list you can use to call up your current SEO firm and see exactly how adequately their search services are, and take necessary steps to rectify any potential issue you may encounter with these new changes. Of course there are many many other ways to improve SEO performance, however the bottom line in SEO is about text, links, popularity and reputation.