Media Services

You are currently browsing the archive for the Media Services category.

Google Is Up, Up and Away

September 25, 2008 in Media Services by Kathy at Omni | No comments

Google Increasing Market Share TrendGoogle’s share of U.S. web searches increased to 63% for the month of August 2008, obliterating the nearest competition from Yahoo! at 19.6% and Microsoft at 8.3%. 63% is a pretty big lead, that’s almost two-thirds of all searches performed.  Wouldn’t you like to have 63% market share and this kind of domination in your industry?  Will this upwards trend continue for Google?  Only time will tell, but it’s safe to say for search engine advertising strategy and search engine optimization that Google cannot be ignored.  In fact, it’s priority #1 by a long shot.

 

 

  • Share/Bookmark

SOS for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

September 9, 2008 in Marketing, Media Services by Kathy at Omni | 2 comments

SOS for SEO, Search Engine Optimization      You’ve finally embraced the new millennium and developed a website for your business along with the rest of the world, but the phrase “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply to your current website traffic.  Just creating a beautiful and functional website isn’t enough to generate additional revenue and profits or build your brand; there is hard work involved to bring your website to the attention of potential customers.  Search engine optimization is necessary, and there are simple strategies you can employ to help increase your website’s search engine rankings and traffic.

 

     Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of designing a website to be more “search engine friendly” and to drive a larger amount of qualified traffic to the website from higher rankings on various search engines like Google and Yahoo.  The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank your website on the first page of search results generated for any relevant keyword search, because any results after the first page are likely to be viewed less frequently or possibly ignored completely.  The purpose of SEO is to make a website “readable” by search engine crawlers (also known as bots, robots spiders); these crawlers are simply programs used by various search engines to continuously explore the World Wide Web and catalog and classify websites based on each site’s content. 

 

     SEO techniques include careful consideration of a website’s content, basic graphic design elements, and linking strategies.  Any SEO plan should take into consideration the following elements to increase a website’s search engine rankings:

·        Keywords

·        Meta Tags

·        Content

·        Website Design

·        Links

·        Time

Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark

Product Placement as a Marketing Tool

August 7, 2008 in Creative Services, Marketing, Media Services by Jill at Omni | No comments

Reese's Pieces made it big after There is an old (really old) saying in PR that “any PR is good – even bad PR.”

Recently I saw a movie that had the now-usual product placement for a certain American brand of beer. While their brand name was visible in an enviable percentage of the movie, the result of the character’s ‘enjoyment’ of said product was someone whose life was a mess. Numerous depictions of drunkenness, inability to hold a job or properly parent their child, and disinterest in anything more than the next beer were the benefits of his imbibing. His life turned around when he chose to not partake of said product.

I am all for creative marketing and applaud those companies who figured out that product placement in movies was a goldmine, but I question the judgment of placing your client’s product where its use is portrayed negatively.  While no product or service is 100% perfect, (sorry, it’s true) the role of a marketer is to highlight those attributes that are positive, and to try not to bring too much attention to the negative attributes. 

On the other hand, maybe I am just too critical and the fact that the beer name was shown not-so-subliminally hundreds of times is enough to overcome any negative perception. Either way, it’s food for thought.

  • Share/Bookmark

Reality TV Parallels New Media Trend

June 17, 2008 in Media Services by Jill at Omni | No comments

Reality TV Parallels New Media TrendConfession: I am among the 10 or 11 people in the country who failed to watch ALL the American Idol shows this season. But I did get caught up in the finale episode excitement nonetheless! It got me thinking about how traditional all these ‘new’ reality shows are now. Compared to TV dramas and sitcoms, they are relatively easy to produce, inexpensive, and yet still command pretty impressive media dollars for advertisers.

I am convinced that the public’s need for more reality TV runs parallel to the phenomenal explosion of new media and social networking – it’s the reality without the TV. And, even then, the ease of uploading videos makes it basically, well, reality TV on your computer.

As a member of the ‘older than a Gen Y, WAY OLDER than a Gen X’ group, I find it fascinating how these trends seem to quickly become a way of life, but are eclipsed by newer, better, uber trends in a matter of months. Popular business editors are now commenting that MySpace is pretty much ‘old school’. Wow. 

It is fun to observe all this from a marketer’s viewpoint – trying to figure out all the new possibilities for promotions and strategies for clients. While some bemoan the changes in our traditional media – TV, print, radio – the truth is the media and marketing universe just keeps getting bigger. You just have to know how to zero in on the ones that work for you and your client.

Now for my secret for any of you reading this that are ‘of a certain age’:  The key to being successful at navigating the new media when you are NOT part of that super-cool generation (I guess “COOL” really dates me!) is what I do – hire and work with talented ‘super-cool’ people! 

  • Share/Bookmark

Google Analytics Tool For Website SEO

May 20, 2008 in Media Services by Kathy at Omni | No comments

 Google Analytics Free SEO Tool     Google offers a free tool to track and analyze information about your website called Google Analytics.  The information that can be generated from this tool is very helpful for search engine marketing efforts.  If you have some very basic web skills, you can sign up for Google Analytics and begin monitoring and tracking information about your website.  Access Google Analytics here, enter your Google account email and password, or sign up for a free Google account here.  Then you will be given a piece of html code that you’ll need to add to the html code for each page of your website.  This may sound difficult, but it’s actually pretty easy, even for those who may be technologically impaired. 

      Don’t worry, you won’t see any website design changes to your website pages once you add this little bit of html code.  But this code will allow Google to track visitors and their patterns while visiting your website.  Once Google Analytics has a little time to track and process statistics (a few months or more should give you some pretty reliable trends), you will get a wealth of information about visitors to your website, all which will be helpful for future search engine marketing.  Here are some of the statistics that Google Analytics will generate for you, and all will be generated over any period of time you wish to analyze, from a single day to a month, quarter or year.

  •  Site Visitors:  total visitors, unique visitors, pageviews, average pageviews per visitor, average amount of time spent by each visitor, browsers your visitors are using, internet connection speed your visitors are using, geographic location of your visitors
  • Traffic sources (where visitors are coming from):  direct traffic (typing in your URL), referrals from other website links (websites noted), or from search engines (search engines and keywords noted)
  • Content:  which pages are being viewed and how many times, top landing pages, top exit pages, where are visitors navigating to and from between pages

     You can use the information generated from Google Analytics any way you want: just as general information on how your website is used, to help optimize your website for higher organic search engine rankings, or to launch your own search engine advertising campaign.  Good luck!

  • Share/Bookmark

Yahoo! and Direct Mail

May 7, 2008 in Media Services by Kathy at Omni | 1 comment

Yahoo Direct Mail 1Yahoo Direct Mail 2Omni received a direct mail piece from Yahoo! Search Marketing recently.  It’s a pretty slick piece encouraging advertising agencies to sign up and use Yahoo! and their team of experts for online marketing strategies.  The fun part is the push-button included in the piece that delivers the Yahoo! jingle, you know the yodel “YAHOOOOOOOO”.  Yahoo Direct Mail 3My co-workers love it when I continue to push the Yahoo button and that annoying, LOUD yodel reverberates through the entire workspace for all to hear (I can’t help myself, it’s too fun!).  I found it interesting to see new media (Yahoo!) utilizing traditional media (direct mail) to promote their services from business to business.  Even Yahoo! knows that traditional media is not dead, as many internet marketers would like to claim, but is still a viable option to reach the target audience. 

 

I also know that both traditional and newer media can be effective in communicating our clients’ messages, and we work to develop strategies using all different kinds and combinations of media that will be effective based on the marketing goals, target audience and client budget.   The only fault I find with this Yahoo! direct mailing is that we already utilize Yahoo! Search Marketing.  This direct mail piece probably cost quite a bit to produce and mail, and Omni already knows the potential and benefits of search engine marketing as part of an overall campaign strategy.  So maybe a little bit of Yahoo’s direct mail budget was wasted?

  • Share/Bookmark

Tracking Blog Topics with Technorati and Google Alerts

April 30, 2008 in Media Services by Kathy at Omni | No comments

blogosphereBlogs are a form of social media gaining speed and popularity; more and more people are using blogs to research and find information from peers rather than directly from businesses.  The reputation of a business, service or product can be made or broken based upon blog chatter.  Are you monitoring the blogosphere to see what is being said about your business or product?  If a business is on top of what is being said, then that business can respond professionally and quickly to stop any negative publicity that might be building before any serious or permanent damage is done.  Staying on top of your blog reputation and responding quickly and professionally to problems or negative comments will always help to make a business look smart and attuned to their current and potential customers.

 

There are many tools available to help monitor blog topics and stay ahead of the public relations curveball.  Technorati is an excellent blog search engine.  Once registered for an account at Technorati, you can sign up to receive information on any blog subject or topic of your choice through the extras section of your account with watchlists. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for your watchlists to have information downloaded to your computer as it becomes available.  Google Alerts is another great way to stay up-to-date on any information that pops up on the internet.  Through Google Alerts, you can sign up to receive emails about any subject matter you want to monitor.  Just be careful with both of these services to specify exactly what kind of information you want to receive.  If you choose to receive information for the general topic carpet cleaning, you may receive more information than you can possible process.  But if you subscribe to receive information about “Domingo Carpet Cleaning” and include quotations around your subject matter, you should receive only information that contains those exact words in that particular order, which should weed out a lot of unnecessary information.

 

Check it out, it’s a wise investment of your time and energy for the benefit of your business.

  • Share/Bookmark

Newer entries »