All the recent buzz about Steve Jobs got me to thinking about some things lately.  I can't say that I have always been an early adopter, but I at least tend to stay near the leading edge of technology.

Hubspot's recent market survey on the state of Inbound Marketing for 2011 reveals some interesting trends in marketing spend validating the importance of inbound marketing as a low cost lead generator.  Consumers are becoming immune to uninvited communications and wish to be left to their own methods when going through the buying decision process.  It's about control, and the consumer is now the one who now has the power of choice in what information is received.

We'll admit it.  We're a small business, just like many of you out there, with the same challenges and daily struggles.  We've got lots of plates in the air, and quite honestly we tend to operate by Tyranny of the Urgent.  In the process, the things that we teach often get overlooked by ourselves - aka the "cobbler's children" syndrome.

We've been struggling (and you have too, we're sure) with an easy way to post blogs that is familiar and un-intimidating. We think we've found a solution, and this email will be a testament to that. Look for more info on this in later posts.

In my consulting endeavors for large companies, I have often observed disdain and sometimes even contention between marketing and IT.  Even though they both support the same common business objectives, it seems that neither one believes that they can be effective partners in the process.  And now with the move toward a higher concentration of digital marketing in the mix, IT believes that it should be the one in the driver's seat.  The real question here is:  who's driving the strategy?  And without a command directive from the supreme leader (i.e. CEO, President, etc.), strategy and tactics will go their own way churning up time, resources, and energy.

"What should I do on my LinkedIn profile?" As people become increasingly aware of the importance of social media and their personal brand, we hear this question more and more often. For businesses and career minded individuals, LinkedIn is often the de facto choice for dipping a toe in the water. As of August, 75+ million professionals have a personal LinkedIn profile (some even have several). How helpful and current their profiles are varies, but many have long since been forgotten. 

We recently finished a project for a company that specializes in loss prevention for restaurants.  Our methods involve getting deeply intimate with our clients business to understand their processes and goals.  Believe me, we got a really good education on what happens behind the scenes to cause profit loss in a restaurant.

We've been "doing" websites for over a decade now, and have seen some pretty interesting changes and advancements along the way.  Personally, I started with Dreamweaver.  Being familiar with page layout programs, I had to really adjust my thinking when it came to the HTML way of life. 

Since the beginning of search, the robots have crawled sites, chewed on links, and carefully digested each page. A page’s historical performance factored heavily in its ranking. Just as important were the inbound links that a page accumulated over time. Over the last year or so, this has all begun to change as the major search engines have experimented with three new factors that will dramatically change how we search (and how we optimize for search).