Posts Tagged ‘humor’

Protect yourself with a strong website disclaimer

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

In Internet marketing, your website can be your first and best defense against lawsuits or it can be a huge liability. It depends on how strong your disclaimers are and how carefully you check to make sure your statements are all factual and ethical.

Zombie warning sign

I bring this up because I just read an eye-opening article on InfoWeek’s website, entitled “Website disclaimers – yes, they do work.” In that piece, author Guy Burgess describes a recent case in New Zealand where an ecommerce website had given customers the wrong impression about the soundness of some of the companies it advertised.

A customer sued the website owners when he received the short end of the stick on a deal with one of the companies the website advertised. But a judge ruled in favor of the owners because they had included a provision on their website to protect themselves. The judge found the owners to be both negligent in their faulty information and protected by their admission that their site didn’t have all the information customers would want to make a final decision.

We all make mistakes, and it’s unfortunate when others are negatively affected by our errors. If we want strong relationships with our customers, we have to make sure our ecommerce websites are accurate and that our products or services are as good as we say they are.

You can read the rest of this blog entry in the Submit Solution Website Design Services Blog. The photo of the zombie warning sign is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of rchurch74.

Is Twitter overhyped?

Friday, July 17th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

I read an interesting discussion on Reddit with the heading, “Anyone else think media exaggerates the usefulness of Twitter?” The author makes a strong argument that Twitter is not as effective as many say it is. He starts his diatribe by saying,

Everywhere I look, it’s Twitter this, Twitter that. I feel that Twitter, although a nifty little social networking tool, is simply the medium of choice for the “old” and “non-tech savvy” to try and relate to the younger technical audience.

How Twitter took over the worldThis person goes on to compare Twitter to other social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and find it wanting. This discussion caught my eye because I have been hearing nothing but good things about Twitter, so it was refreshing to hear a different take on the subject.

Twitter is well-known as a way for people to talk about mundane, everyday tasks they are currently doing. Remember the time traveler describing Twitter to people in the past? In that light, it seems like a silly waste of time. But others tout it as a great way to stay in constant contact with clients. For instance, Twitter is an excellent way to talk about new product releases, special deals, real-estate listings and other marketing information.

You can build a network of like-minded businesspeople and customers interested in your products or services, without the usual cost of traditional advertising and marketing.

But Twitter’s usefulness is limited. It might be good for instantly delivering news, but the credibility of anything reported on that site is extremely low. Twitter can easily be used to spread false ideas and unfair rumors. I have to take many things I read there with a grain of salt because there is no quality control or other way to make sure what is said is true without outside verification.

I’m not sure if I totally agree with the author of the discussion on Reddit, but I appreciate his courage in bringing some debate to the idea of social media.

I’ve been covering a lot of stories on social media and Facebook and Twitter, in particular, this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed my discussion on these important Internet marketing tools. We’ve got plenty more ecommerce topics to talk about in the eHarbor Blog, so keep coming back.

The photo of “How Twitter took over the world” is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of renaissancechambara.

eHarbor June MVP returns to work after breaking her neck

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Each month, eHarbor, Inc. singles out one of its employees as the Most Valuable Player or employee of the month. They announce the winner at a company lunch on the first business day of each month. The MVP is someone who has done extraordinary work, going above and beyond his or her duties to help the company succeed. On July 1, Alisha Walton was named MVP for her exceptional actions in June.

eHarbor June MVP: Alisha Walton

It takes an amazing kind of person to come back to work so soon after enduring a terrible car collision, a month-long hospital stay and several surgeries. Alisha is definitely an amazing person.

She was riding a motorcycle in May when a car came and hit her at full speed, knocking her to the ground and breaking her neck. Thankfully, Alisha’s neck injury did not paralyze her. She spent a month in the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo, Utah. You can read a quote from her about her experience in a Daily Herald article, entitled “UVRMC trauma team: Life in the balance.”

Six days after her June 3 release from the hospital, Alisha returned to work while still wearing her halo and being confined to a wheelchair. Amazingly, she got right back into her job, despite the pain and struggle she faced. She has a great sense of humor about her situation. For instance, she said her hobbies include photography, reading, surfing and now wheelchair racing. Her spirit is truly indomitable.

I’ll keep you updated on MVP winners each month from now on. We have quite a few exceptional workers at eHarbor, so it will be great to give them the recognition they deserve. By the way, I was also named the MVP for June along with Alisha, but I prefer not to call attention to myself. It’s nice to be noticed for my hard work on the blog and other projects, though.

Be sure to enjoy our great blog posts on ecommerce and search engines next week in the eHarbor Blog!

Social media doesn’t equal SEO

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Social media is a great tool for businesses to communicate with customers. It gives marketers an opportunity to establish close contact with people in ways seemingly unthinkable until just a few years ago.

Winnie the Pooh and tiger too

Despite social media’s strengths, it should not be considered an end unto itself. Without other marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization, advertising, etc. a company’s efforts in social media could fall flat. A Brafton article entitled “Does social media increase SEO?” caught my interest and inspired this blog entry.

This is not the first time I’ve talked about social media and its effects on ecommerce in the eHarbor Blog. In one of my blog entries, I noted companies are increasing their spending on search engine marketing, despite the recession. In another, I point out companies are also reducing their social media spending slightly this year, after greatly expanding it over the last few years.

It seems like many businesses have learned the virtues of social media, but they are also prudent in their decisions to try to maximize return on investment. By getting to the top of search engines, companies can reach a wider number of Internet users than by using social media. Both are useful tools and should not be considered superior to the other. But it appears businesses are choosing the broader tool than the more personal one to help them through this recession.

In the Brafton article I mentioned above, Warren Cohen, CEO of SEO-focused Greenlight, said social media would probably not have a noticeable effect on SEO for a company’s website. SEO is built slowly by creating a search engine-friendly website, populating it with relevant content and building connections with similar websites.

A presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites is great and it can add to search-engine rankings, but it probably won’t have a significant impact.

Tried-and-true principles are your best options for getting to the top of Google, MSN and Yahoo. If you would like a more in-depth explanation of SEO and how to use it to your advantage, check out my blog entry “Search engine optimization at the drugstore” or my seven-part series on SEO tactics.

The photo of Winnie the Pooh and “Tigger” is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of JoshMcConnell.

Strong sales attract retailers to ecommerce

Friday, May 8th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Let’s face it, consumers have cut back tremendously on their spending. Profits are down for many companies, and it doesn’t look like things are improving swiftly.

Water drop flips imageUnemployment is expected to keep increasing, even after the overall economy improves. We shouldn’t expect people to make a whole lot of purchases when they’re not sure if they’ll have enough income to pay for them.

Now is a good time to change our thinking on how to market to our customers.

I read an article on ZDNet, entitled “Forrester: e-commerce ‘better suited to withstand economic downturn’,” which gives some exciting information about the growth in the ecommerce industry, thanks, in part, to the economic downturn.

Ecommerce is a less-expensive way to do business because it doesn’t involve most of the usual costs of doing business in a mall or other shopping center. Plus, it’s cheaper to advertise online than in traditional media, as newspapers have painfully learned.

Most of their online spending is on email campaigns. Social media is also becoming a popular avenue for businesses, although search engine optimization is another way to reach targeted audiences. We had a seven-part series on search engine optimization that might be helpful in successfully implementing it on your website.

This topic is building on ideas I introduced back in March when I wrote back-to-back blog entries on the ecommerce industry: one about how retailers are investing in ecommerce and Web advertising, and the other on how consumers are spending more online.

In the second blog post, I pointed out that ecommerce sales will likely dip slightly in 2009 before increasing again in 2010. However, in the ZDNet article, the author says they might grow by 11 percent to $156.1 billion. Whichever study you look at, it appears ecommerce is outperforming nearly every other retail industry.

Profit attracts competition, so be mindful of how you enter into this market. Be sure to put your best foot forward by using eHarbor, Inc.’s affiliates to guide you through your website design and other important steps.

The photo of the water drop is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Gaetan Lee.

Too much information is bad for you

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

In the digital age, information is not only plentiful, it’s downright endemic. We have Web analytics tools that can glean information on people who visit our websites.

Fat cat lies comfortably on chair

I will compare information gathering to eating. The more food we eat, the more weight we are likely to gain. If we eat everything we find, we’re not living a healthy lifestyle. It takes discipline and wisdom to choose the foods that our bodies need the most and then eat appropriate servings of them. A little variety doesn’t hurt either.

If we constantly eat and never do anything with that energy, even if the food we eat is good for us, we’ll probably become obese. People who become obese have a greater chance of premature death, just as ecommerce companies that become saturated with information and don’t do anything with it can die prematurely, as well. Not to mention suffer indigestion.

Information is a great thing, just like food. But we must use it wisely. We should gather information pertinent to our needs and then put it to good use in our online marketing decisions, product pricing, customer service, etc.

By the way, I got the idea for this blog entry from an article in Ecommerce Times, entitled, “Drowning in Data: Web Analytics and Information Overload.” That article has lots of insights into information gathering, and I took a piece and ran with it.

This leads me to some things I learned at a recent Webinar by Hubspot and Brent Leary, entitled “How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers.” I promised I would talk more about this Webinar in my blog entry on Facebook, and I’ll keep my word now.

I highly recommend clicking on the Webinar link above to watch the hour-long presentation. You can also download the presentation slides in a PDF file to save time.

In the Webinar, I learned about websites I can use to both gather and organize information from social-media sites like Twitter. Here are the ones Leary mentioned:

- TubeMogul – distribute online videos and analyze viewers and impact.

- CoTweet – organize your conversations in Twitter.

- Salesforce – measure results in Twitter, Google and other online media.

- Bit.ly – shorten links and keep track of who clicks them.

- Favotter – another Twitter measurement site.

- Twitalyzer – in-depth information on your Twitter account.

I find these sites helpful in my efforts to focus the social-media exposure of eHarbor, Inc. and its affiliates. In fact, eHarbor’s affiliates help not only to create a website for you, but track and gain more visitors through search engine optimization and other strategies.

These companies include: Magellan Commerce, Real Estate Promoter, Submit Solution, and Direct Home Find.

Remember, you are what you eat – but it’s what you do with your time and energy that truly defines you.

The photo of the fat cat is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of brokinhrt2.

What Google might have been

Monday, April 20th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

This photo of a Google postcard just tickled my funny bone, so I have to share it.

Google search on a postcard

After my seven-part series on search engine optimization tactics to get to the top of Google searches, I think my readers have become fairly knowledgeable about the complexities of search engines.

This fun photo gives us a chance to stand back and smile at how Google might have started out if it had existed in the 1980s or earlier.

The photo is the copyright of dullhunk on Flickr.

The world still hasn’t ended

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

By Robert Lockard

So far, it appears the Conficker C virus is not doing much damage, as many had predicted it would. The Washington Post published a satiric blog post on April 1, entitled “Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In,” describing all of the damage being done by the virus. Then, at the end, the author included a note saying, “Just kidding - April fools!”

Cat and dog sitting together

This keeps happening: the Cold War, Comet Hale-Bopp, Y2K – all of these events were supposed to bring about the end of the world, or at least a fundamental change in it. But they failed to live up to expectations. The world hardly changed at all as a result of these events. Yes, I know the Soviet Union fell apart at the end of the Cold War, and that was a pretty big change. But look at Russia today and you’ll see they haven’t really changed that much. President Obama just met with the Russian president to talk about nuclear disarmament. Sound familiar?

Pranks like Conficker C, which don’t deliver on their promises, might actually do a great deal of damage by leading people to lower their guard or simply not care about actual crises that come later on. I never try to fake people out so I can laugh at them and say, “Made you look!” because that damages credibility and makes people constantly on edge and less eager to trust others. That’s not what I want.

This discussion reminds me: Last week, eHarbor, Inc. treated its employees to a showing of the movie “Knowing.” The movie had a lot of good moments, and I especially enjoyed it because the filmmakers actually had the courage to *SPOILER ALERT* blow up the world. No sugarcoating, no simple solution, no endless number of countdowns to avert destruction, like in “Armageddon” (a movie that utterly failed to live up to its title) – just the whole world on fire. Now that’s a way to deliver on catastrophic promises.

Mind you, I don’t want the world to be destroyed and, after seeing the movie “Knowing”, I felt a little depressed. But I do like seeing promises fulfilled when someone bothers to make them. Heck, even “Back to the Future Part II” promised the universe, or at least our galaxy, would be destroyed by a time paradox – but that didn’t really happen. All I’m saying is I hope someday people who promise something earth-shattering will actually follow through with it. Until then, I won’t hold my breath.

By the way, eHarbor and its affiliates (Magellan Commerce, Real Estate Promoter and Submit Solution) have good news on the horizon that I can’t wait to discuss. We’re growing a lot and we hope to share the positive ecommerce news soon as new products are released and updates are added to our websites.

The photo of the cat and dog sitting together is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of MïK.

Good news: Ecommerce to grow through 2013

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Going along with my last eHarbor blog entry on the increase in spending on search engine optimization, this blog entry is on the positive future of the ecommerce industry.

Dog squished into car seat

According to an article from eMarketer, entitled “eMarketer Revises E-Commerce Forecast,” total sales of products online in the United States, excluding travel, totaled $133.6 billion in 2008. That was a 4.6-percent increase from 2007, despite the economic downturn plaguing most industries.

In 2009, when most people are worried about serious contractions because of low demand from consumers, ecommerce sales are expected to hold steady, dipping just 0.4 percent to $133.1 billion.

Even better, total ecommerce spending will grow about 10 percent or more from 2010 to 2013, possibly reaching $203.5 billion in 2013. That is definitely worth celebrating.

As more companies jump into the world of SEO and strive to position themselves online, the ecommerce industry is going to keep expanding. Plus, with consumers looking for deals and convenience in a tight marketplace, many are turning to online sources for goods they used to purchase at malls or regular retail stores.

This is a great time to jump online. I recommend checking out eHarbor, Inc.’s affiliates for help in designing and optimizing your website. These affiliates include: Submit Solution, Magellan Commerce and Real Estate Promoter.

The photo of the dog in the car seat is from Flickr and it is the copyright of exfordy.

Bucking recession, ecommerce keeps growing

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Great news! The ecommerce industry isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. It’s actually growing in strength, despite the recession. What a pleasant surprise!

Surprised kittens

According to an article in Practical Ecommerce, entitled “Chart of the Week: Search Engine Marketing to Increase,” marketers in the United States are expected to spend $14.1 billion on search engine marketing in 2009. That’s a 16-percent increase from 2008’s $12.2 billion. If it continues to grow at this rate, the amount spent on search engine marketing in the United States could reach $23 billion in 2013.

Search engine marketing is made up of paid-search advertising, contextual advertising, paid inclusion, and search engine optimization. We just finished a series on SEO strategies. I recommend reading those blog entries, if you’d like more information.

You might remember my blog entry on the success of eHarbor, Inc. not long ago. I’m pleased to note this is not just an isolated incident, but an industry-wide one. As the economy sours, businesses are turning more to the Internet for new customers, and getting high placement on search engines, like Google, MSN and Yahoo, is a great way to get their attention.

Be sure to check out eHarbor, Inc.’s affiliates for help in designing and optimizing your websites. These affiliates include: Submit Solution, Magellan Commerce and Real Estate Promoter.

The photo of the surprised kittens is from Flickr and it is the copyright of telachhe.