1. To Establish A Presence

Approximately 27 million people worldwide have access to the World Wide Web (WWW) and it is estimated that by the end of 1997 36 million will have Web access. No matter what your business is, you can’t ignore 27 million people. To be a part of that community and show that you are interested in serving them, you need to be on the WWW for them. You know your competitors will.

2. To Network

A lot of what passes for business is simply nothing more than making connections with other people. Every smart business person knows, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Passing out your business card is part of every good meeting and every business person can tell more than one story how a chance meeting turned into the big deal. Well, what if you could pass out your business card to thousands, maybe millions of potential clients and partners, saying this is what I do and if you are ever in need of my services, this is how you can reach me. You can, 24 hours a day, inexpensively and simply, on the WWW.

3. To Make Business Information Available

What is basic business information? Think of a Yellow Pages ad. What are your hours? What do you do? How can someone contact you? What methods of payment do you take? Where are you located at? Now think of a Yellow Pages ad where you have instant communication. What is today’s special? Today’s interest rate? Next week’s parking lot sale information? If you could keep your customer informed of every reason why they should do business with you, don’t you think you could do more business? You can on the WWW.

4. To Serve Your Customers

Making business information available is one of the most important ways to serve your customers. But if you look at serving the customer, you’ll find even more ways to use WWW technology. How about making forms available to pre-qualify for loans, or have your staff do a search for that classic jazz record your customer is looking for, without tying up your staff on the phone to take down the information? Allow your customer to punch in sizes and check it against a database that tells him what color of jacket is available in your store? All this can be done, and more, on the WWW.

5. To Heighten Public Interest

You won’t get Newsweek magazine to write up your local store opening, but you might get them to write up your Web Page address if it is something new and interesting. Even if Newsweek would write about your local store opening, you wouldn’t benefit from someone in a distant city reading about it, unless of course, they were coming to your town sometime soon. With Web page information, anybody anywhere who can access the Web and hears about you is a potential visitor to your Web site and a potential customer for your information there.

6. To Release Time Sensitive Materials

What if your materials need to be released no earlier than midnight? The quarterly earnings statement, the grand prize winner, the press kit for the much anticipated film, the merger news? Well, you sent out the materials to the press with the ‘Do not release before such and such time” statement and hope for the best. Now the information can be made available at midnight or any time you specify, with all related materials such as photographs, bios, etc. released at exactly the same time. Imagine the anticipation of “All materials will be made available on our Web site at 12:01 AM”. The scoop goes to those that wait for the information to be posted, not the one who releases your information early.

7. To Sell Things

Many people think that this is the number 1 thing to do with the World Wide Web, but we made it number seven to make it clear that we think you should consider selling things on the Internet and the World Wide Web after you have done all the things above and maybe even after doing quite a few more things from this list. Why? Well, the answer is complex but the best way to put it is, do you consider the telephone the best place to sell things? Probably not. You probably consider the telephone a tool that allows you to communicate with your customer, which in turn helps you sell things. Well, that’s how we think you should consider the WWW. The technology is different, of course, but before people decide to become customers, they want to know about you, what you do and what you can do for them. Which you can do easily and inexpensively on the WWW. When you are ready to sell, make sure you have the information people need to help them decide available on your web site, without paying so much that you won’t make a profit until the next century. That’s smart business.

8. To make pictures, sound and film files available

What if your widget is great, but people would really love it if they could see it in action? The album is great but with no airplay, nobody knows that it sounds great? A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don’t have the space for a thousand words? The WWW allows you to add sound, pictures and short movie files to your company’s info if that will serve your potential customers. No brochure will do that.

9. To reach a highly desirable demographic market

The demographic of the WWW user is probably the highest mass-market demographic available. Usually college-educated or being college educated, making a high salary or soon to make a high salary, it’s no wonder that Wired magazine, the magazine of choice to the Internet community, has no problem getting Lexus and other high-end marketer’s advertising. Even with the addition of the commercial on-line community, the demographic will remain high for many years to come.

10. To Answer Frequently Asked questions

Whoever answers the phones in your organization can tell you, their time is usually spent answering the same questions over and over again. These are the questions customers and potential customers want to know the answer to before they deal with you. Post them on a WWW page and you will have removed another barrier to doing business with you and free up some time for that harried phone operator.

11. To Stay In Contact With Salespeople

Your employees on the road may need up-to-the-minute information that will help them make the sale or pull together the deal. If you know what that information is, you can keep it posted in complete privacy on the WWW. A quick local phone call can keep your staff supplied with the most detailed information, without long distance phone bills and tying up the staff at the home office.

12. To Open International Markets

You may not be able to make sense of the mail, phone and regulation systems in all your potential international markets, but with a Web page, you can open up a dialogue with international markets as easily as with the company across the street. As a matter-of-fact, before you go onto the Web, you should decide how you want to handle the international business that will come your way, because your postings are certain to bring international opportunities your way, whether it is part of your plan or not. Another added benefit; if your company has offices overseas, they can access the home offices information for the price of a local phone call. Plus, you can find out how many international customers can access you that could never reach you before at a reasonable cost.

13. To Create a 24 Hour Service

If you’ve ever remembered too late or too early to call the opposite coast, you know the hassle. We’re not all on the same schedule. Business is worldwide but your office hours aren’t. Trying to reach Asia or Europe is even more frustrating. But Web pages serve the client, customer and partner 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No overtime either. It can customize information to match needs and collect important information that will put you ahead of the competition, even before they get into the office.

14. To Make Changing Information Available Quickly

Sometimes, information changes before it gets off the press. Now you have a pile of expensive, worthless paper. Electronic publishing changes with your needs. No paper, no ink, no printer’s bill. You can even attach your web page to a database which customizes the page’s output to a specific need or customer, and you can change as many times in a day as you need. No printed piece can match that flexibility.

15. To Allow Feedback From Customers

You pass out the brochure, the catalog, the booklet. But it doesn’t work. No sales, no calls, no leads. What went wrong? Wrong color, wrong price, wrong market? Keep testing, the marketing books say, and you’ll eventually find out went wrong. That’s great for the big boys with deep pockets, but who is paying the bills? You are and you don’t have the time nor the money to wait for the answer. With a Web page, you can ask for feedback and get it instantaneously with no extra cost. An instant e-mail response can be built into Web pages and can get the answer while its fresh in your customers mind, without the cost and lack of response of business reply mail.

16. To Test Market New Services and Products

Tied into the reason above, we all know the cost of rolling out a new product. Advertising, advertising, advertising, PR and advertising. Expensive, expensive, expensive. Once you have been on the Web and know what to expect from those who are seeing your page, they are the least expensive market for you to reach. They will also let you know what they think of your product faster, easier and much less expensively than any other market you may reach. For the cost of a page or two of Web programming, you can have a crystal ball into where to position your product or service in the marketplace. Amazing.

17. To Reach The Media

Every kind of business needs the exposure that the media can bring, as we touched on in reason #5 “To Heighten Public Interest”, but what if your business is reaching the media, as a newswire, a publicist or a public policy group. The media is the most wired profession today, since their main product is information and they can get it more quickly, cheaply and easily on-line. On-line press kits are becoming more and more common, since they work with the digital environment of more and more pressrooms. Digital images can be put in place without the stripping and shooting of the old pressrooms and digital text can be edited and output on tight deadlines. All the these can be made available on a Web page.

18. To Reach The Education and Youth Market

If your market is education, consider that most universities already offer Internet access to their students and most K-12’s will be on the Internet within the next few years. Books, athletic shoes, study courses, youth fashion and anything else that would want to reach these overlapping markets needs to be on the Web. Even with the coming of the commercial on-line services and their somewhat older populations there will be nothing but growth in the percentage of the under 25 market that will be on-line.

19. To Reach The Specialized Market

Selling a very specialized product? You may think that the Internet is not a good place to be. Well, think again. The Internet isn’t just computer science students anymore. With the 27 million and growing users of the WWW, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers. Since the Web has several very good search programs, your interest group will be able to find you, or your competitors.

20. To Serve Your Local Market

We’ve talked about the power to serve the world with a Web page. How about your neighborhood? If you are located in San Francisco Bay Area, the Raleigh NC area, Boston or New York, there is probably enough local customers with Web access to make it worth your while to consider Web marketing. A local Palo Alto, CA restaurant even takes lunch orders through the Internet! But no matter where you are, if the big client has Web access, you should be there too. You can make the Web a part of your sales team no matter where your market is.

Today social networking, like many aspects of our lives, is primarily online. Many sites provide us a way to communicate and share information. In today’s technological age, we can all be schmoozers. Social network sites, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, are connecting millions of people together providing them a way to connect with their intimate friends and also a way to connect with larger communities. Other sites like, LinkedIn, are connecting businesses for professional networking. Organic marketing allows one to attract people to your business who are interested in what you have to offer without having to pay for the traffic. Like organic foods, organic marketing is good for a company to grow and unlike organic food, it cost you nothing. Social networking and organic marketing go hand in hand.

Social networking is important in today’s age for many reasons. In the business world, it is beneficial to have the right connections to ensure success. Businesses can connect with customers, potential customers, potential partners and people who can provide feedback of the service or product provided. With the internet as an avenue, the possibility of going global is feasible. Your ability to connect with people increases tenfold. The use of social networking keeps your business out of obscurity and places it in the public eye.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, focuses on social epidemics. The book explains how word of mouth and connectors create the changes we see in fashion, crime trends or product popularity. The “tipping point” is the heightened point when the idea, trend, or phenomenon becomes mainstream and a part of everyday life. Social networking helps take the tipping point to the next level by decreasing the time frame for the idea to spread and allowing the reach to hit monumental levels at a faster rate. It is seen when something has gone viral.

Organic marketing and social networking are essential for today’s businesses. It creates a presence for your business away from its physical location. It promotes your public image. It connects you to other businesses and expands your contact base. It comes at no cost to the business and attracts prospective consumers and clients. The main attraction for many businesses when joining social network sites, aside from the cost, is the ability to reach niche audiences and have the ability to communicate to them in the way they find most effective.

Posted on: January 2, 2010 at 8:40 pm by Hassan Bawab

TORONTO — Welcome to the new frontier of social networking, which asks for your credit card number, banking information and any online shopping passwords you’ve accumulated.

It’s called Blippy and, after a much-hyped beta-testing period, the website went live to the world Thursday, offering to broadcast all your purchases for everyone to see.

Call it conspicuous consumption for the social media age.

After users submit their credit card or debit card number, Blippy automatically posts transaction data, which can also be cross-posted to Twitter.

Each post lists the business where a purchase was made and how much was spent. More detail can be shared in a comment area.

One of the trail-blazing Canadians on Blippy posted a $9.02 purchase from HomeSense and then elaborated that the item was a wine decanter. The $2.25 he spent at Laura Secord was for a chocolate apple, $16.94 at Toys Toys Toys was for a teddy bear, and he spent $20.62 at a Korean restaurant on New Year’s Day.

Despite the eyebrow-raising concept, thousands of users have signed up, the website says, and Twitter CEO Evan Williams is reportedly among the investors who have bought into the idea. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based site’s owners insist their high-tech encryption will protect data from being stolen or reused.

“In theory I would suggest people wouldn’t be comfortable with it … but the weird part about it is (Blippy) had an enormous interest in their beta and I’m not sure how to read that,” said Mark Evans, a Toronto-based social media strategist.

“The only way to explain it is that we’re living in this kind of share everything, everything-is-public age, and people are just riding on the bandwagon.

“Internet users on the leading or bleeding edge are … always out for something new, they’re never satisfied with what they got. They’re always expecting something better and shinier around the corner, and I think Blippy falls in that category.”

Evans said Blippy may be another example of how social media is exposing a major generation gap in how privacy is defined.

“Maybe I’m old school, maybe these services aren’t aimed at my demographic, maybe I just don’t buy into the fact that my private life is public,” he said.

“One argument is that privacy is dead, and that may be overly dramatic … but I think we’re living at a time when having a very public life is becoming kind of the norm for many, many, many people, especially young people who have never really had private lives. … They don’t know a world without Facebook.”

Eighteen-year-old Internet entrepreneur Brian Wong personifies the privacy-is-dead argument. He didn’t flinch at entering his data into Blippy on Thursday and was already a user of a similar Vancouver-based website Justbought.it.

“I’m a huge online guy, my entire life is online,” said Wong, who created the Twitter spinoff Followformation.com and was recently hired to work for Digg.com in San Francisco.

“I feel secure (using Blippy) because if something really gets screwed up with my credit cards (the issuers) have been really good about telling me it’s been compromised. And I’m not the type of guy that likes to lock down all my information,” he added.

“I’m that generation that just doesn’t care about my privacy. My life is super online and I really don’t feel (nervous) to put my credit card information into Blippy.”

Wong said he thinks Blippy could still use some tweaks but he envisions it evolving into a useful mobile app that would give users information about the prices of products in their area.

“Say someone just bought something in the area and I think that’s a really good deal – bam, I’m going to go buy that now,” he said.

“The thing about making purchases social is it also allows recommendations that allow further purchases to be made, and that’s valuable for me. If I buy something, someone may come along and say, ‘Hey check this out too because this is also good.’ ”

If Blippy really makes sense for anyone it’s for marketers and advertisers who will gain access to detailed consumer data, Evans said. Blippy’s terms of use acknowledge that purchasing data may be used to display targeted ads on people’s accounts, and all their purchasing details could also be made available to third parties.

“For marketers and retailers it’s fantastic because it gives them even more intelligence so they can target consumers, Evans said.

Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Drupal is easily the most functional open source CMS available today. It allows for the editing of content directly on the page, and is easily extended through the use of modules. Themes can be developed easily with CSS and though it has a few issues, it is the least frustrating CMS of any available. Drupal

2. Wordpress

Wordpress began as a simple blogging system but has grown into one of the most powerful CMS’s on the Internet. The administration interface which has become so easy to use for millions of bloggers translates over to extended versions of Wordpress.

As developers have realized its potential to act as a user friendly CMS, many plugins and extensions have been produced. With the release of BuddyPress for Wordpress MU, it matches most other open source systems available in functionality and far surpasses them in user friendliness. Wordpress

3. Radiant CMS

A simple CMS powered by Ruby on Rails. It’s simplistic design and method of content management makes editing content easy. The focus of this CMS is to offer minimum functionality for small development teams, which allows those who know how to write Ruby on Rails to easily customize their own systems. Radiant CMS

4. Magento

An especially effective e-commerce content management system. Offers features above and beyond normal e-commerce systems such as virtue-cart. A must have for online stores. Magento

5. Silverstripe

A simplistic CMS, with a growing community. Easy to customize and change. Shows potential to match other systems such as Drupal, but not quite there yet. Great user interface. Silverstripe

Avoid Joomla

Joomla is evil. That’s all there is too it. The only way to get the functionality you would ever really need beyond basic content management is to pay large sums of money for commercial modules. The community is huge in the worst possible way. There are a million modules for one problem and it is near impossible to find the right one.

The interface is deplorable. None of the methods of content management make any sense, and it is obviously not meant to be user friendly considering the top dollar training offered for the system. If there were ever a CMS to avoid, this would be it.

That’s the end of the list. If you know to avoid Joomla! you’ll know how to avoid anything else that might hinder your experience creating and managing a website. Whew! There! Joomla!

Summary

Always remember to research a CMS before investing time in it. Never forget that the main purpose of a CMS is to make creating and editing content simple and easy. Never sacrifice the user experience for functionality. Remember these things and it will drastically improve your experience with Content Management Systems.

Written exclusively for WDD by Jason Mosley. The article reflects his opinion only and doesn’t necessarily reflect WDD’s position on the subject.

Not only have we grown as a company, our JOI to the World campaign has been on the expansion route as well. Last year, we managed to fill 350 gift filled shoeboxes and this year with a goal of 1000 boxes, we came close and hit the 900 mark, a success in our eyes.

With the New Year right around the corner, we here at JOI Media cannot wait to see what is in store. We are excited at the thought of challenges that will present themselves and thrive in situations where adapting to various circumstances are part of the environment.

Thank you to all of our clients as well as everyone who helped us not only grow our company, but also make our charity campaign a success this year.

Happy New Year from all of us at JOI Media!