WalkerTek Blog

It used to be that a new company could get online with a few page website and it was good enough. Not anymore. With the popularity of social media, content marketing, and inbound marketing, you need to make sure that your web site is flexible enough to grow with your company and provide value to your potential customers.

Let’s take a look at minimum things that are needed for a small business website.

Domain Name
First things first, you need to make sure you have your own domain name. Your domain name will be uniquely yours and you will be able to use it in all of your marketing.

Email
Nothing says “small business” like a gmail, Yahoo, or AOL email account on your business card. In order to look professional, your email address should be at your domain. If it doesn’t potential customers are likely to think you’re not serious, you’re “running your business out of your home,” or what you’re doing is just a part-time side thing.

Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (for a B2B business) are what you should focus on to start with. Deciding how to use them best is a topic for a separate article, however, having them integrated into your website is important. It lets visitors know that you are active and current and more importantly, allows them to connect with you on the platform they prefer.

Blog
Having a blog on your website is a huge benefit for a small company. Blogs allow you to showcase your expertise, they allow you to write content that is relevant to your customers, and they can help position you as an expert in your field. They are also excellent for search engines. Search engines index blogs on a regular basis and can help you generate additional interest and exposure for your business.

While we’re talking about blogs, it is important to consider putting a blog on your own domain, not on one of the free blogging sites. When you spend the time to write content and develop a following, you want the benefit of that effort to be additional traffic your website, not someone else’s.

Video
Something else you may want to consider for your website is video. Having the capability to integrate regular video updates can allow you to build an archive of content that is valuable for your customers. Videos can be easily created with simple Flip cameras or can be more elaborate productions if you like.

Content Management
There are several options for content management. A content management system will allow you to make easy changes to your website through any web browser, without the need for any technical expertise. Making minor changes to the site yourself is a great way to save money and keep your site up to date.

There is a lot to consider when you are building a website, whether you’re starting from scratch or updating an existing website, you should make sure that whatever you do is flexible enough to grow with your company and satisfy the demands of your online marketing goals.

There are several services out there to help you out. Companies like BlackBoxSites.com will design and develop a site for you, using a content management system and is a perfect solution for people that don’t have the technical expertise or the design skills needed to put together a professional website.

If you are technical and understand how to build a website, configure your email, setup a blog and integrate your social media profiles, there are do-it-yourself solutions by companies like Intuit and GoDaddy.

Whichever solution you choose, it is important to keep in mind that your site needs to be a lot more flexible now than it did 10 or 15 years ago.

We recently had a client ask that we support mobile platforms with the video content on their Website. They don’t have a lot, but we needed to come up with a solution that would allow us to provide the videos in multiple formats, without distracting the visitors with other information, like ads.

There are a lot of ways to share video for free; YouTube, Vimeo, and others. But when you are trying to use video for a commercial application and support mobile platforms, you need to do it yourself. If you use YouTube, you get ads. If you use Vimeo, you don’t get good mobile support.

YouTube.com – It is a great service, but if you upload videos and embed them on your web page, a visitor might get ads for a competitor on your website! Also, at the end of the video, a visitor might see videos for competitors or other products that may distract a customer from what you have to offer. On the plus side, they offer good support for mobile platforms.

Vimeo.com – With a modest subscription price, you avoid the advertising issues, but their support for mobile is lacking. While they offer mobile versions of the videos, the script for embedding video is Flash based, which will not work on most mobile devices.

HTML5 – This will be a good option going forward, but support for it right now isn’t at a level where we’re comfortable using it on production sites where some visitors are still coming in on IE 6.

We decided to come up with our own system. We created 2 versions of the videos, one Flash and one 3GP to support mobile devices. We use javascript code to detect the visitors platform and display the appropriate file. It’s a little more work on our end, but it allows us to showcase the client’s videos, without distracting the visitors.

The latest jobs number came out this morning and it was pretty rough. This is not good for the recovery or business. I think a few issues with public policy are causing a lot of uncertainty. While the earnings of many business seem to be pretty good they will not stay that way if the uncertainty remains. We are at a crucial point where we need to ensure small business projects don’t evaporate to ensure a robust recovery.

The things I think that will help remove a lot of uncertainty include:

1. Stop talking about raising taxes, whether it be a tax on the “wealthy” or an energy tax. Taxes can only do one thing, reduce growth. They divert money from efficient investment to less efficient uses. No country has ever taxed its way into prosperity. If it was possible everyone would be doing it.

2. Cut government budgets. We need to reduce government deficit by cutting budgets, not by increasing taxes. Take a look at what Christie is doing in NJ, while it may not be popular, it is the necessary medicine. I understand that this will reduce government employment, but the private sector increases will make up for these losses.

3. Stop attacking wealth. The only place jobs can truly be created is in the private sector. Who creates these jobs? It is not the person who can not find a job and is on welfare, it is the person with capital who is now willing to use that money for investment. If the government takes away any advantage gained by doing that investment that investment does not happen. Thus less jobs and more unemployment.

With the current programs it is not the wealthy that are feeling the pain, it is the middle class. Without investment there are less projects, with less projects there are less successful small businesses (or smaller small businesses) and with less small businesses there are less jobs. This effects everything from the ability of the government to collect revenue to the lowest wage workers ability to find work.

I have no illusions that these policies are popular in the current administration, but until we move in this direction the uncertainty will continue.

We have been programming web sites and web applications for a long time. We have used almost every language to develop sites and we feel that Ruby and Rails is a wonderful combination for web application development. With several applications under our belt in Rails we’ve decided to attend RailsConf 2010 to keep up with the latest developments in the community and ensure we can provide the best application development available.

When we first started developing web applications we used Perl. Perl is a great language that is very flexible. The issues we always ran into with Perl applications is consistency in style. This makes jumping into an already developed application more time consuming. Perl also lacks object oriented programming at its core, so sometimes you end up in a functional style, sometimes in an object oriented style. It was the best choice 10 – 12 years ago, but I don’t feel it is any longer.

We’ve used .NET for occasional projects. While it is a decent platform, most of the projects that we’ve taken over have been terribly programmed and that is never fun. We also tend to prefer open source languages so that we can look into and patch any issues we run into. We use PHP for a lot of projects because some of the best content management systems are in PHP.

If a project is going to require significant programming we will develop it in Rails. Some of the advantages we see in Rails include development consistency, a great programming language and community, speed of development, ability to focus on unique functionality instead of boiler plate code and it is a joy to develop in. If the project is going to be a standard content management based site we will use PHP and one of the outstanding content management systems available.

We’re really looking forward to a great conference, learning a lot and meeting great people. If you see us, say hi! If you have an application you would like developed let us know, we love to discuss it with you.

WalkerTek was recently featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal… here is an excerpt…

The Office Brawl? Dealing with Feuding Employees
Article from The Wall Street Journal
May 6, 2010, 11:15 A.M. ET

Last year, a shouting match erupted between two employees at WalkerTek Interactive Marketing Inc. in Fairfield, N.J. Today, neither one works at the small Web-development company.

Co-owner Mike Walker says the fracas was the culmination of six months of bickering among the staffers despite attempts he and his business partner made to resolve things. In the end, one was fired and the other quit. “By trying to keep both of them happy, we ended up losing both,” he says.

Playing referee among feuding employees is no easy task for small-business owners. Unlike their large-company counterparts, entrepreneurs typically don’t have the option of separating quarrelsome workers by relocating one to another office or department.

Continue Reading Article at The Wall Street Journal »

It seems like a week is a quick time frame to run a promotional contest, but it’s amazing how much we were able to learn in such a short amount of time. Before I get into the details, let me give you some background…

WalkerTek Interactive Marketing is a small business in northern New Jersey. We provide online marketing services from Web design and development and maintenance to search marketing and email broadcasting. When the iPad was officially launched, we thought it would be a good product to use for a promotion – the price point is good, the hype is good, and it would be attractive to our audience which consists of mainly marketing professionals.

We were originally going to run the promotion prior to the iPad coming out, but we wanted to make sure we had one available and that we could ship it right away, so we decided to wait a week.

The length of the promotion was selected for several reasons, primarily due to the work required to process the results from all three platforms. Since we were running the contest on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter at the same time, we needed to make sure all the entries were collected and entered. All three sites limit the number of “calls” you can make to them with the API, so we had to run a process each night to collect the entries. As such, we limited the promotion to a week.

This post has a lot of information in it regarding the promotion, broken into the following sections:

Lessons Learned
Results
Recommendations

Lessons Learned

• When people reposted the URL including the quotes, it messed up the link on Facebook. We updated the messages so the URL’s weren’t near the end of the post where the quotes were.
• Some people needed my email address to connect with me on LinkedIn. We added it to the contest rules page. Not the best thing to do from a spam perspective, but since it’s a short promotion, hopefully it won’t be too bad.
• There seemed to be some confusion on Facebook where people would post the status message on our Facebook page as opposed to their own. Since this doesn’t really achieve the viral effect we’re looking for, we needed to let everyone know that they needed to post the message on their Facebook wall.This could be due to a couple of things, either confusion on the entrants part, thinking they were on their own page, or lack of clarity in the rules.
• We noticed that once one person did it, several others followed, so it is something we needed to keep an eye on. We addressed it with a simple message on our wall reminding people that they needed to update their own walls with the appropriate message.
• Facebook doesn’t like you running contests on their site. Unless it’s a simple “become a fan” contest, you need to get their approval and make sure you follow their guidelines. Information is available on their site at: http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php#!/promotions_guidelines.php
• This is more of an assumption than a lesson, but it seems like twitter works better with more frequent posts. If we posted as much to Facebook as we did to Twitter, I think it would become annoying for people, but since there is a lot of “noise” on twitter, people are more accepting.
• People use you. It was pretty funny, as soon as we announced the winner, we lost 4 facebook followers. Not a big deal or that surprising, just funny People are not connecting to you because they like the company or have a specific interest in you, they are interested in the prize. It is your responsibility to keep them engaged after the promotion.
• When scheduling tweets, make sure they are different than the previous tweet you sent, otherwise twitter will not accept it.

Results

The promotion took a lot of time to manage, because we were doing it on all three platforms. This was made a little easier with our use of HootSuite.com, however, it still required a minimum of a couple of hours a day to promote, respond, and track.

We were quite happy with the response, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. We received numerous comments about people who appreciated the contest, people who thought it was a good idea and even people who were going to steal the idea for their own companies. (Hopefully this blog proves useful for anyone else looking to do this).

The increase in followers is only part of the benefit of the contest. We increased our overall following by 145.37% from 335 followers to 822 followers. We saw the largest increase in number of followers on Twitter from 107 to 347, however, Facebook followers increased by the largest percent (423%) to 272 followers. See charts below.

In addition to the increases above, the overall traffic to the Web site increased significantly during the promotion. We typically get 30 to 40 visitors to our site per day. During the promotion, we got as high as 351 visitors to the site in one day.

The Google Analytics chart above shows the overall traffic to the site during the promotion from April 12th to the 16th, plus the following weekend and the Monday we announced the results. Obviously, less people were interested in the results than entering the contest

While we were promoting the site on all three platforms, it is interesting to see that we received more traffic from Google than we did from Facebook or LinkedIn. I was cockily thinking this was from these blog posts (as they do get indexed by Google very quickly) but upon further investigation, the links were mainly going to the iPad Giveaway page. It seems as though the Latest Results Twitter search on Google’s main page was responsible for driving a decent amount of traffic to our site. Google doesn’t show the Latest Results for every search, but I guess since the iPad had a lot of buzz, they decided to display it which helped to drive traffic to our site.

So what do all these numbers mean in terms of real business? Nothing.

Yet!

We didn’t get any inquiries for new work from the promotion itself, however, we didn’t really expect to. We are hoping that this behind the scenes proves interesting to other marketing people and would encourage them to contact us. In addition, it puts us in a much stronger position to discuss Social Media Promotions with the ability to show real results and talk about real experience.

Recommendations

We learned a lot and had fun running the contests, but, what would we do differently going forward?

I think the biggest thing we would do is separate promotions per site. Having the promotion be acros multiple platforms is probably not the best solution for several reasons.

LinkedIn doesn’t really lend itself to these types of promotions. They only show the most current three status updates from your connections and some people didn’t know how or that they could update their profiles with a status update.

Facebook has rules and regulations regarding the running of promotions, which frown on how we started running the promotion. I think a better route with a Facebook promotion (at least on a smaller budget) would be to set a contest where when you get to a certain number of fans, you would award the prize at random to one of your fans. This would also fit within their promotional guidelines. In addition, there seems to be more of a connection with your Facebook Fans than with Twitter followers. You can typically learn more about them and since conversations are threaded and easily viewable by all the other fans, it makes the experience more fun than on Twitter.

Twitter as a platform is great for running these types of promotions. However, on Twitter, people are dealing with a lot more “noise” (meaning there are a lot of messages that don’t really pertain to them, or that they have no interest in). As such, you can get away with promoting the contest more frequently, however, there is a lot less commitment on the part of the participant. I think this also dilutes the value of a Twitter follower, since the more followers they have, the more difficult it is going to be for you to get in front of them when you want to.

Finally, the simpler you can keep the contest the better it is going to perform. We had fairly straight forward instructions for entry on our site and we sill received some questions about how to enter, if people were entered correctly, people posting to the wrong places, and some questions on how to use the various sites themselves. In order to reduce the administrative time, keep it simple.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest and everyone who followed along!

If you have any questions or want to know any more information, just ask…

Construction Executive recently published an article I wrote on Web Marketing covering topics such as Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, and more.

Read the full article in Construction Executive.

Thank you to everyone who entered! This was a fun contest and we may be doing it again in the future. We selected one random winner from all of the qualified entries on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

And the iPad goes to…

Lucretia M. Pruitt

Lucretia blogs at thesocialjoint.com, can be found on twitter as @lucretiapruitt, and was formerly known as @geekmommy – a social media devotee and long-time geek.

Congratulations Lucretia!!! Enjoy it!!!

This is it… we’re down to the last day of the promotion and we feel like it has been quite successful. We will post a summary of the promotion next week, but all-in-all, it was a great experience.

We did some more active promotion of the contest yesterday, on all the platforms, using an “only 2 days left” tact. It seemed to work pretty well. Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned throughout this whole promotion was that you do need to stay on top of it, throughout the promotion. It helps to not only respond to people, but engage them to make the contest more interesting.

Our Facebook page includes images of the iPad as well as some conversations around the contest and the prize.

Today we have a series of status updates scheduled through HootSuite.com, which will count down the end of the contest every hour or so.

Numbers continue to increase, twitter and facebook have seen the largest increase…

Well… so much for advertising on Facebook… we got the following message saying that the ad was disapproved…

“The content advertised by this ad is restricted. Per section 5 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, this content is prohibited from being advertised on Facebook. We reserve the right to determine what advertising we accept, and will not allow the creation of any further Facebook Ads for this product. Ads for this product, service or site should not be resubmitted. We appreciate your cooperation with this policy.”

Section 5.d.vii of their advertising guidelines require you to get Facebooks permission to run a contest or sweepstakes. I’m assuming that’s what this is referring to. Good to know!

Also, part of their promotional guidelines include that you don’t require anyone to update their status in order to enter the contest. As such, we have modified our rules page to just require that people become a fan of WalkerTek in order to be eligible for the contest, and we recommend that they update their status message.

We did a quick check on LinkedIn and didn’t see any rules as mentioned above, so we are going to leave that piece as-is.

In addition to the changes above, we updated the messages that we are having people post to include a more SEO specific phrase… “NJ Website Design Company”. Since this message is getting posted in several spots, it should help in our SEO efforts.

Twitter and Facebook continue to perform well, without much additional promotion.