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building a website marketing plan

Posted by simon ashwin On Tuesday 19 Feb 08

Once you’ve invested and built a website, do you have a plan to keep it fresh? To continue its development to the company’s goals?

A website marketing plan is your roadmap to long-term success. It’s a highly detailed, well-researched document that sets goals, provides directions, and defines the website’s strategy over time.

A Website Marketing Plan should dovetail into a company’s overall marketing plan. Online marketing is most effective when it operates in concert with offline marketing. Voice, look & feel,and message should be consistent across all media.
As part of the whole, the Website Marketing Plan has a narrower focus. It is concerned with developing strategies and tactics related to 3 major objectives:

1. Define and Meet Company Goals for the Website.
The website is a tool that can answer any number of needs. These need to be distinctly called out. For example, the website should provide current information on products and services to existing clients. It should provide the arena for sweepstakes or raffles in partnership with overall brand advertising campaigns. Perhaps it should also be a point of sale for certain items. Or it should generate sales leads, build demographic information on customers, etc.

2. Identify Website Marketing Strategies.
This breaks down into two ways. The first is in promotion of the site to the Internet at large. How will the website’s existence and advantages be communicated to customers? This should include details about Pay Per Click (PPC) and SEO strategies and other marketing avenues. What are...

facebook and opensocial

Posted by simon ashwin On Monday 11 Feb 08

Wondering if you should use your Facebook Application on Google’s OpenSocial? With OpenSocial being used by Myspace, Bebo and Yahoo, many are wondering if the same applications should be leveraged on both.

The answer is a qualified yes.

The audiences of Facebook and OpenSocial have core similarities. This means that the application that was developed for the Facebook population may find some success in OpenSocial.

But it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. The two platforms attract similar demographics, yes. But ones with different affinities. Digging under the surface to understand these differences will pay dividends at the back end.

For example, regular Facebook users are most likely to use Twitter, buy clothing online at cause-related sites like ThreadlessNoMore, and tend not to branch out onto other social networks. OpenSocial users, on the other hand, trend more towards using Skype and Meebo, buy clothing online at upscale retailers like Abercrombie, and use multiple applications to provide personalized profile information.

Launching an application built for Facebook and the Facebook community onto the OpenSocial platform shouldn’t be done cold. To build success, take the time to work with the development team to consider the different audiences and technical structures. A few minor tweaks may be all that’s needed to rocket the application into a whole second universe.

why travel mash-ups are important

Posted by simon ashwin On Saturday 02 Feb 08

As much as the Online Tracel Agencies (OTAs) may position themselves as a one-stop shops for travel planning and booking, the reality is that no single site can make this claim. With the introduction of over 30+ travel sites over the past 2 years, travel content on the Web has never been more fragmented. Sites that provide travel blogs, itinerary sharing and rating systems abound.

The future of destination content should include a mash-up of multiple sites such as the recent by American Express regarding their travel mash-up of Travel & Leisure, American Express Publishing and Lonely Planet. In my view consumers would flock to mash-up sites that combine multiple reviews from Trip Advisor, IGOUGO and others, organized around a single hotel search.

Obviously copyright issues may be an obstacle, but if the review sites benefit financially through referral income, they may be willing to provide the individual ratings. The same needs to be true for itinerary sharing sites, multiple samples from Realtravel and Gusto! would be beneficial. Mash-ups are here to stay and will continue to play a major role in online travel.

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