Managed Designs Blog

It’s important for small business owners to stay up to date with the latest trends of online marketing and internet use in general. Today, three very interesting news announcements from Techcrunch showed some surprising trends. All three stories report on new ways people are using the web, but each may effect your marketing strategy differently depending on how your core audience uses the web. The first story is relevant to any business with a blog. Every business can benefit from a blog as it provides your visitors with a source of valuable content above and beyond the standard brochure fare. When updated regularly, a blog also provides visitors with a reason to come back to your site again and again. Techcrunch themselves are early adopters of a new way for visitors to interact with your content – ECHO.

ECHO aggregates ALL of the conversations people are having about your content into one place. Whether your users are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN or are only engaging with your blog, any discussion of your content which includes a link will be syndicated in your blog’s comments. Even better, visitors to your blog can login and discuss your entries on any of the above platforms directly from your site. Initial metrics from the first beta test show a 10% increase in time spent on site! Currently ECHO is in private beta, but I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed and included a link to their site. I’ll update on this as the project moves forward.

Another interesting change in how the web is being used comes from the browser world. The two biggest players in the game are currently Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Safari, Opera and Chrome are all big names too. Firefox announced today that around 3:45 AM EST tomorrow they will have reached 1 Billion downloads, giving them a market share of roughly 30%. Why is this important? Depending on how your site is coded it may appear differently in some browsers. Different browsers interpret HTML differently, and some older browsers (namely, IE6) don’t render modern HTML and CSS according to web standards. Internet Explorer comes standard on any Windows computer sold in the US, so corporate users are generally using IE6, IE7 or IE8. While some businesses use Firefox as their standard IT supported browser, the vast majority of FF users are home users. Depending on your market, you may be wise to view your site using a tool like Browsershots to see how it renders in different browsers. If you want truly stay ahead of the game, ask your designer about the new features that Firefox 3.5 brings to the web.

The final story I’d like to discuss today is about a new way of using social media. Two of the biggest types of social media today are the status update and video. The online network 12seconds is combining the two providing you with an easy way to connect with your visitors through two of the most valuable channels on the web today. If you have a new iPhone 3G S, 12seconds announced today its new iPhone application built for fast and easy updates. You can record 12 seconds of video and directly upload a link to your video along with a brief tweet. (Yes, the system uses Twitter for status updates.) I’ll be trying it out, so check out my Twitter page to see how it works. If you’re audience is mainly young B2B companies, you’ll find that 12seconds is a great addition to any of your social media campaigns.

Everyday the internet evolves faster than before making it hard to keep up with everything. Keep checking back here for the latest news on how the internet is evolving, plus tips and trick for using these technologies for your business.