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We’re all familiar with the situation: your marketing directive needs some hands-on support – NOW – and your IT department can only make a couple of things top priority (maybe a few, if they’re superhuman), ESPECIALLY NOW. The scenario skirts around a “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots” style conflagration – with both departments seemingly at risk of having a block knocked off.

But the situation doesn’t have to be like this. Much like David Carradine’s “Caine” (AKA “Grasshopper”), whose sole directive was to make peace and satisfy everyone (that was his sole purpose, wasn’t it?)  – calmly, effectively and, above all, with his own kung fu – these calamities can be handled, neutralized, even fruitful with the right tools and directions.

Register for this insightful webinar and join us as we pass on some collaborative kung fu – and show you how iAPPS can help enhance its effectiveness – to help you make sure your web technology fully supports your marketing strategy. Once adopted, these practices – and the right tools – will result in not only a much more smoothly run, effective and engaging website, but a few less bruises to boot.

Webinar Title: 10 Tips to Make Sure Your Web Technology Supports Your Marketing Strategy

Format: Free Webinar

Hosts: Bridgeline Digital

• Brett Zucker, Chief Technology Officer

• Becki Dilworth, Vice President of Digital Strategy

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am MST  (12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST)

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Photo by BasicGov; Creative Commons share-alike license

The differences are far simpler, and way more important, than you probably think.

Sometimes the best laid marketing plans end up biting back, and in some truly surprising ways. While most cases of this sort of slip up – either positive or negative – can be chalked up to a failure to get the right message across, not many can be attributed to getting a message across a little too well.

Such is the case for the apparent confusion about the differences between “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS). As the digital marketing world is clamoring to get you to “move everything to the cloud” before the next guy, it’s become critical to offer clarification to help you make sure you know what you’re signing up for. Put simply, and in strictly logical terms, while all SaaS environments are by default denizens of the cloud, not all cloud environments are necessarily SaaS.

Cloud environments deliver the use of common applications that are served from the internet and are designed to deliver computing and interaction as a utility – Facebook, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are popular examples. SaaS, by comparison, uses specific software and customized architecture to provide services – primarily to enterprise customers (but certainly not exclusively) – based on specific needs. Bridgeline’s iAPPS Product Suite, for instance, is designed specifically to run as optimally in SaaS as it does in a dedicated server environment using a perpetual license. (more…)

Keeping even your most fickle customers can be easy, if you provide the right experience.

Even the most savvy internet marketers among us usually agree: online sales are most often lost at the checkout. And why would we not believe that, when you consider the fact that 51% of all shopping carts end up abandoned? A commonly accepted reason for this are that onerous shipping charges prompt shoppers in this direction – if it’s not free, or at least damned cheap, they drop the cart altogether.

That belief, it turns out, is a little off the mark. In fact, it’s simply untrue, according to Bridgeline’s latest eBook, “Web Experience Management: Secrets to Closing the Sale Before the Customer Checks Out of Your Website.”

The truth is that sales are lost long before your customer reaches the checkout phase. According to the eBook, “Somewhere in the web experience, the customer lost faith in the product, the company or the website – maybe even all three.” It’s an overall lack of a satisfying shopping experience, says Bridgeline, that  ultimately kills sales – in the same way a badly written plot leaves a film with no definable aftertaste, and therefore makes it merely forgettable. (more…)

Your CMS should bring your content creation and editing processes into the 21st century. (Photo: Creative Commons License)

If your company is in the market to upgrade their CMS platform to a shiny, new model, or just beginning to research options, it’s important to compare all the bells and whistles you’ll need to keep  your web experience management (WEM) capabilities strong, relevant and fresh. There are many newer features out there you may not have even thought were available, and some that will quickly turn into favorites making you wonder how you ever survived without. Take some time here – and over the next few posts – to familiarize yourself with some of the coolest features built into the iAPPS Product Suite, and then imagine these capabilities as an intrinsic part of your content management process. Chances are that much of the intuitive basic functionality built into iAPPS holds what you’re looking for – whether you know it yet, or not.

To effectively research a solution, step away from the processes and environments you’ve become accustomed to and really look to identify the goals you’re trying to accomplish – on a daily, weekly and seasonal basis. Then, ask how your CMS can help you to achieve those goals. Too often, users take current processes – frequently and unnecessarily complex – completely for granted. This narrow view makes it hard to be fully aware of any potential new functionality that may be available that can actually make a difference. As you vet all the possibilities, be sure you’re not missing the chance to solve many of your problems with the right CMS by identifying all the options available to you. (more…)

Make your content work for you over and over - re-imagine, don't just recycle. (Photo: apSos.de)

This past week, My good friend Ann Handley and I participated in a Webinar about re-imagining your content. The main takeaway:

Don’t just re-purpose your content. Look at it and figure out ways to present it to new audiences, in new formats and with differing end-goals. Re-imagine, don’t recycle.

In a nutshell:  Build out a plan – by quarter, by year, by season – with focus on each section on a single theme. Next, build one major piece around that theme that covers all you want visitors, customers and readers to take away from your business. You’re the expert, and here is where you prove it. It can be in the form of a seminar or presentation, a white paper or eBook, or some other weighty item – as long as it’s both focused on the current  theme, and complete enough that it covers many angles.

Next, use that larger piece to make smaller, bite-size, well-timed, targeted chunks that you can use to spread the word out over time, assert your industry expertise across a few different channels and keep interest in the theme high – all of which will consequently keep visitors coming to your site for more.

Sounds simple? In essence it is – but it’s hard work, as Ann and I discussed. (more…)

Identifying robots more effectively - even indirectly enlisting their help - will distill your results, and solidify your site's relevancy.

In a recent post, I spent some time exposing what we’ve since been calling the “bot quandary,” which, put simply, is the tendency for a sites’ analytics to become skewed – sometimes significantly – because indexing visits from bots and spiders are counted by search engines. In this post, I will spend some time on a few things that can be done to help reduce that skew in order to clarify your site’s actual relevancy.

Take aim and select your target, then execute

As I pointed out in my prior post, these spider visits affect site analytics, often significantly. In order to get a more accurate picture of your site’s true relevancy, it’s necessary to remove them from the count. But – and this is important – you don’t want to block the bots completely, or you’ll stop being indexed altogether. Of course, this can be a much worse fate than some fairly skewed numbers. (more…)