How Web Designers Can Adopt a Global Mindset Globalization is one of the biggest business buzzwords in the 21st century. The rise of the internet as the world’s dominant medium is largely responsible for the onset of this global mindset, as businesses of all sizes realize the potential of tapping into new or emerging markets afforded by the World Wide Web. So what can the web designers of the world do to help the global cause? How can developers ensure that their work is accessible and appealing to as diverse an international audience as possible? The key is to think "international" from the outset. So even if you’re building a website intended only for English-speaking countries, there are measures you can put in place to ensure it’s as easy as possible to adapt later in the process. And even if you have developed a culturally-flexible website, it may be helpful to know how you can make it as visible as possible to each of your target markets. So where to start? Working with Unicode Culture and Symbolism Culture and Colors
5 Tips for Marketing Online to an International Audience The International Business Series is brought to you by UPS. Discover the new logistics. It levels playing fields and lets you act locally or globally. It's for the individual entrepreneur, the small business, or the large company. Put the new logistics to work for you. Expanding your marketing efforts to an international audience can be a great opportunity to grow your company and reach potential customers that may not otherwise discover your brand, products or services. Before kicking off your international digital marketing strategy, consider the following five tips on how to successfully market to an international audience. If your business has already begun to optimize your online presence for a global community, add your own tips for online international marketing in the comments below. 1. Having your site translated into other languages is a huge advantage to marketing to an international audience, but having a deep understanding of your own and other's cultures is also important.
Tips to Consider Before You Take Your Business Global - Instabill Blog Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License Owning a small, local business is nice. You don’t have to worry about shipping through customs or dealing with multiple currencies. But what if you want to take your business global? Where do you start and what should you consider? There are numerous aspects of your business to consider when deciding to take your business global, but here are our top five features for you to use as a starting point. 1. When you take your small, local business international, the first thing you need to consider is your target market. Don’t spin a globe with your eyes closed and sell to wherever your finger lands. 2. Now that you’ve decided on a target market, you need to know your competition. Here’s some food for thought: In the past several weeks, I’ve seen dozens of news articles talking about South Africa’s e-commerce economy, how it’s growing, and how research trends predict that it will continue to grow. 3. 4. 5.
International SEO Best Practices & Tips | FRUITION Foreign SEO has its own set of best practices as each country has widely different regulations. If your business expands beyond the borders of the USA, there are special considerations you should take to ensure International SEO success. 1) Buy the domain that is native to the countries you are targeting. For example, if you want German visitors, buy the www.website.de as most German residents search on their local search engine. 2) Host your foreign domain in country if possible so you will have a local IP address. 3) Establish a physical location/mailing address in each country if possible 4) Set Google Webmaster Tools to reflect each country you are targeting. 5) Translate several pages of your site into the language(s) most used in the countries where you do business.
Advanced Marketing Institute - Marketing Education & Research Facebook To Publicize News Feed Algorithm Changes, Starting With New “Story Bumping” 700 million people use the Facebook News Feed every day but many don’t understand how it decides what appears, so Facebook announced today it will start publishing blog updates on how the feed algorithm is changing similar to how Google does. Facebook’s first post will be about “Story Bumping”, which pushes stories you haven’t seen above ones you have. The News Feed team’s Lars Backstrom says that “News feed is one of only places where Facebook is doing things on the scale of complexity of what Google is doing or Bing is doing in search.” But in some ways its a harder problem because relevance is subjective. In its early days, the News Feed “algorithm” was really just VP of Product Chris Cox and Director of Engineering Boz “twiddling knobs” says Cox. Facebook’s Lars Backstrom and a photo of the News Feed team Mishaps did occasionally occur from this informal process, says Cox. But since then, “content production has exploded. What’s New In The Feed Demystifying News Feed
Social Marketing Blog / @flowtown This post was written by Jenny Urbano, our Social Media Manager. Here at Demandforce, we love seeing and celebrating your ideas! And more than that, we love to hear from YOU. We want to bridge the gap between us and you, so that’s why we’re offering a once in a lifetime opportunity to win a trip to San Francisco, sightsee in this amazing city, visit Demandforce headquarters and share your ideas with us! 6 winners, and a guest of their choice will be flown out to San Francisco, California on March 12-14th, 2014, where they will stay in Union Square, spend a day at Demandforce, have dinner with the team, and explore the lovely City by the Bay! For contest rules, and how to enter, please visit our post in the Generation Demandforce Community here. Good luck!
Society for New Communications Research Topics Main Overview Among all adults, the most closely followed local topics are weather, breaking news, politics and crime, all followed by a solid majority of two thirds or more. Slightly less popular topics but still with a fairly good following of about half or more are arts and culture, local businesses, schools and education, community and neighborhood events, restaurants, taxes and traffic. Fewer survey respondents follow local news about housing, local government activity, job openings, social services, or zoning. Roughly four in 10 adults or fewer follow these local topics. Both local news enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts follow a wide variety of topics Local news enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts both follow a wide variety of local topics. The handful of local topics which local news enthusiasts as a whole are much more likely than other adults to follow therefore stand out. Yet again, among local news followers there are significant differences by age.
Developing personas for marketing strategy Personas are an extremely valuable tool for marketers in any field. If you're not familiar with the term, personas are representations of your target audience based on research and interviews. From PR to digital to advertising, any marketing team or agency can benefit from developing client- and/or brand-specific personas. As an example, let's say one of your target audience types is a 18-21 year old male who likes emo music, skateboarding and high-end electronics. Why personas are important: Personas put a face on the customer. How people screw them up: Personas take time and research to get right. How you can avoid screwing them up: Get data. A great sample model. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. *Diagram developed by Lene Nielsen of Snitker & Co. More quality persona resources: So what else do you do when planning personas? Technorati Tags:David Armano, marketing, Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer, usability, user experience design, UXD, Jared Spool
Types of Social Media Content to Boost SEO I’ve written often about the benefits of going viral in both content and marketing strategies. Increasingly, however, social media content (a.k.a. viral content) does more than increase brand recognition and site traffic: it can also boost your SEO signals. As search engines pay more and more attention to social signals, going viral is rapidly becoming one of the best ways to build links, attract attention, and establish authority and legitimacy in your field. How Social & SEO Are Linked Let’s start with the obvious: social media builds links. If one site is getting thousands of social shares, it sends three clear messages about your site to search engines: Your site is activeYour site is currentYour site is invested in the needs of your audience Search engines boil down to one basic concept: helping users find what they’re looking for. Viral content is like the mass endorsement of the public; a giant thumbs-up formed from thousands of hands. Viral Content = Valuable Content 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.)
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