GTC News | Global Technologies Corporation

Your Online Marketing Plan Isn't Cutting It -- Now What?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:26:10 -0500

Get a comprehensive assessment of your online marketing strategy from a consultant that has a strong track record with open standards computing and web services.

Whenever I'm out and meeting new people, I usually ask - How's your business doing with it's online marketing?

In almost every case, the response is negative; it seems that small businesses (for the most part) have been left out of the movement to upgrade their sites to embrace web services and Web 2.0.

This isn't that surprising; web services and upgrades to your website to support XML and other technically challenging publishing models is not easy nor is it inexpensive. Larger firms have not experienced technology stagnation as much as smaller companies because they depend more on on partners and vendors who have pushed for deeper value chain integration. This has caused entire industries to keep pace with XML and open source standards.

Small businesses are typically under no such pressure so they stagnate. Another cause for technology stagnation in small businesses is the belief that since they built their own site with HTML, they shouldn't have any trouble re-building with more HTML. This is a fallacy for many reasons - a big reason is that search engines don't index just HTML - they also love XML, a different publishing format that provides the ability to add meaning to content, not just the content itself. Since search recommendations depend on deriving meaning from content resources, we can expect the demand for XML in addition to (and sometimes instead of) HTML.

Small business consultants are partly to blame as well; few have XML knowledge or the capacity to help their clients embrace these technologies, so they stick with vanilla HTML because well, it works, the small business person thinks it works, and everyone is happy. This is an incomplete version of reality. The bottom line -

"If your business content isn't being published in XML, you are risking becoming invisible to customers online."

My interest in this problem has been ongoing for almost a decade (XML 1.0 became a global standard exactly 10 years ago his week). How do small companies stay abreast with technologies that are relatively complex and sustain rapid changes to meet competitive threats and open doors to new sales opportunities?

Get a comprehensive assessment of your online marketing strategy from a consultant that has a strong track record with open standards computing and web services. You can usually know if this is the case by asking them for specific blog posts about XML and web services. If they've never written about these subjects, they probably can't help transition into the present - a web where integration, XML, and agility play a huge role.

Synchronizing Twitter Clients Across Multiple Desktops

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:45:17 -0500

This is a huge inconvenience - Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck should maintain configuration settings in the cloud.

This problem is significant - you setup your Twitter client on your Mac, define groups, filters, and lots of business intelligence in a manner that provides productivity. But over on your PC, you must repeat this process; what a pain!

I finally found a way to overcome this issue using DropBox and some clever file synching. Don't jump for joy just yet, this is stilla kludge - Twitter client vendors should endear their customers by providing web services that eliminate the need for semi-complex kludges.

Take a read - Christian Mohn provides the details to this solution.

My Favorite iPhone Apps

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:12:33 -0500

Here's a short list of the iPhone apps I cannot live without.

Google (you name it)
Ted (insight)
TwitterFon (monitoring/tweeting)
tv.com (procrastination)
X-Plane (for when tv.com has nothing cool to watch)
RDP (remote desktop)
Stitcher (pod-masher)
iThoughts (mind mapping)
reQall (notes/todo/GTD)
Evernote (capture/store/retrieve)
Nomina (DNS/trademark search)
Fring (MSN Messenger on the road)
Soonr (email/documents/Outlook remote - this is the one app I cannot function without - document sharing and collaboration is just too important [for my work])
Yammer (corporate Twitter)
X10 (my home remotely controlled)
Ambiance (soothing sounds to help me forget that I own an iPhone)

GTC News | Global Technologies Corporation

Your Online Marketing Plan Isn't Cutting It -- Now What?

Synchronizing Twitter Clients Across Multiple Desktops

See Also

My Favorite iPhone Apps