Beware The Social Media Spell

Unfortunately, this is Social Media Marketing for many: Look deeply into my eyes… you are feeling veeeery sleepy… sleeeeepy… deeeeper… deeeeeeeeper… relax and let the social media mystique take you to a happier place. Deeeeper… Dee… Yeah, sometimes I feel like social media has cast some kind of spell over businesses, specifically throughout the marketing departments of some companies. It’s easy to be seduced. It’s easy to be swayed by viral videos, tweets, and blogs with thousands of readers. It’s easy to think that social media can be the magic pill to fix marketing mishaps. But in our passionate pursuit

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The Entrepreneur Brand

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I had the honor of heading down to southern Iowa last night to talk to the Entrepreneurship students at South West Iowa Community College (SWiCC). My charge was easy enough; explain the steps I’d taken through entrepreneurship and how branding affected my decisions and the development of my business. But then I thought a bright-eyed group of burgeoning entrepreneurs deserved more than my typical “TRUE Branding 101” spiel. This presentation required a little “from the heart?” A little “I’ve been in your shoes?” Maybe this needed to be a little more personal. Of course, branding for entrepreneurs is paramount. “Without

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Happy GOOGLE Mobile-Friendly Day!

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Mobile-friendly? What, you say? Yes, over night, the powers at Google changed their algorithms for search to require all sties to be “Mobile-friendly” or be excluded from mobile search. You can read more about their changes here: http://cre8wow.me/1yLU6XM This change is a great advantage to you and all of those that keep their sites current with search compatibility best practices. As Google enacts these changes, sites NOT mobile-friendly will no longer be indexed for mobile search results. Yes, you heard right… NON MOBILE-FRIENDLY SITES WILL NOT SHOW UP IN MOBILE SEARCHES AFTER TODAY! While standard desktop search will not be

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Website Redesign – Finding Opportunities Where You Least Expect Them

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We normally don’t feature client work in the blog, but we’re really excited for the Website redesign we just finished, and we consider the process we took for this client one of the most important learning experiences we’ve had in a long time.  When it comes to Website Design, you may find opportunities where you least expected. {The Client} hadn’t asked for the site updates nor did we expect to just walk in with a project and have the client say “Sure, we’ll spend some money with you! What the hell?” Canine Craze Performance Center, a professional dog training and

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4 Simple Tips For Better Email Marketing

With the the latest changes in SEO algorithms, Google, Bing and Yahoo are FINALLY catching on to ever-evolving black hat “questionable” SEO tactics. With that, “Content Marketing”  (some prefer to call blogging) is becoming less effective and harder to measure success. So what is a digital marketer supposed to do? Email Marketing is a tried and true way to reach your target audience, drive traffic to your website and grow brand, authority and  market share for your company. In this still young digital age, email, just a spry 20-something, still has it’s grip on businesses and consumers alike. What do

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#6SecondMarketing – Vine 002 – Basic Web Marketing

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Vine Marketing – #6SecondMarketing by The Brand Chef. Vine-002 – Basic Web Marketing To play the video with sound, hover over the upper left corner and turn it on. 😉 If you have to be reminded to have a PHONE NUMBER on the front page of your website, you might need something more than just marketing help. We just earned a client because of that reason (as well as being generally awesome). The client actually said, “We had 4 marketing companies we wanted to call this week and yours was the only one with the phone number readily available on

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Interview: Our Communications Future

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Interview: Our Communications Future I’m at “that age” now. I can see into the Communications Future! (for what it’s worth) Yep. My eldest daughter is in college, and I’m THAT parent. The parent that the Coe College freshman communications class turns to for “Industry Insight.” While I’m somewhat honored, It’s really making me feel my age. I’ve spent 25 years in the communications industry, 25 years as a communications “Professional.” HA…  While I would never consider myself an “Expert,” I s’pose I could call myself “Professional” at this stage in the game. 🙂 When I started, back in the early

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Midwest Marketer’s Birthday – With Cattle?

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Midwest Marketer or not, what do most of you do for your birthday? Party? Sure. Gather with friends and celebrate another successful year of living? Of course! But how many of you get to walk the beautiful fields of Iowa shooting video of Corriente cattle? Just us select few Midwest marketers, that’s who! Birthday’s aside, I was so impressed with the Yoke S Ranch’s facilities and their cattle, I wanted to make a quick video about it. If you’re looking for outstanding flavor and nutrition in your beef as well having the advantage of being grass fed and antibiotic-free; the

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Weibo: The Biggest Unknown Social Media Platform

Weibo. Unless you’ve lived in China for some period of time, I’d wager that this is an unfamiliar term for you, yet as a business professional, it’s time you two become acquainted. Weibo (微薄) is the stylized Mandarin term for “microblog”, a service native to China that in recent years has ignited like a wildfire across mainland netizens, akin to how Twitter has become so common-place in the United States. By “wildfire,” I mean the most popular Weibo platform, Sina Weibo (www.weibo.com), sees over 100 million posts per day (with 503 million registered users). Since 2009, most “Western” social media

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