Protecting Yourself and Your Brand on Social Media

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, SPOKE News  
social media best practices des moines iowa

Do you know how to protect your brand on social media? In a recent Lunch-n-Learn for The Clarke County Development Corporation (CCDC), SPOKE Communications was honored to guide a very engaging group through some of the ups and downs of protecting information and the development of business best practices for social media marketing (2nd session in the interactive marketing series for CCDC).  The group consisted of independent entrepreneurs looking to find their bearings in the world of social media marketing to financial institutions looking to protect their brands, their employees, and their families from the risks associated with social media.

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10.5 Tips: Social Media Etiquette

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Interactive Media, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy  

Blogs, microblogs, social networks like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn are popping up daily.  Their availability to the masses is exciting and fun, even educational and inspirational.  Never before has it been easier to share knowledge, express creativity, build personal and business brands, and connect with others in your industry and around the globe. Because these social media channels are still fairly new to most, guidance and best practices are often shorted – to the detriment to the users as well as those within their network. So as a “Public Service” of sorts, I’ve put together a quick, 10.5

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Beware The Social Media Spell

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Technology  

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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Five Web Marketing Questions You Need to Be Asking

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy  

Okay, this set of five questions starts with one MAJOR Web marketing discovery question: “How successful is your Web site at accomplishing your marketing goals?” If you don’t know the answer, you need to stop reading now and set proper goals goals.  Only through goal-setting and tracking will you know if you have an effective strategy in place. Once you have that established, work through the following five simple questions to gauge the effectiveness of your Web marketing efforts. When your visitors see your site (and your business) as value-added then doing business with you is an opportunity, not a

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Happy GOOGLE Mobile-Friendly Day!

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Design, Education and Training, Industry News, Interactive Media, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, SPOKE News, Strategy, Technology  
rank for mobile search des moines

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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3 Simple Tips for Making Your Email Marketing Campaigns Better

By on   /   Blog, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, Strategy  

‘Tis the season for pointless Email … Email Marketing! Email, email everywhere, but not a click to link… Okay that sounded better in my head… We have a love/hate relationship with email. Marketers love it for it’s economy, it’s simplicity and it’s tracking potential. Consumers love it for about a day and then get irritated when their in-boxes are swamped with “Awesome Offers” and “Amazing Deals!”  Marketers and business owners also wring their hands and fret over each and every email they send, wondering, “What do I write about next?” or “Does it say the right thing,” or “…make the

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Website Redesign – Finding Opportunities Where You Least Expect Them

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Design, Interactive Media, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, SPOKE News, Spoke Portfolio, Strategy  
website redesign west des moines

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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Website Security Updates – An Open Letter To Spoke Clients

By on   /   Blog, Education and Training, Industry News, Interactive Media, Spoke Portfolio, Technology  

Website security is no small part of providing great web development for clients. As a service to our customers, Spoke Communications is constantly striving to protect not only the aesthetic integrity of your Websites, your communications and connectivity, but the data therein. In recent months, the “hacking world” has become very aggressive with attempts on accessing the servers, Content Management Systems (CMS), and data within Websites around the Internet. These attacks have caused immeasurable amounts of damage to websites all over the World, and in turn the ability for companies or individuals to be effectively, efficiently, and economically represented online.

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4 Simple Tips For Better Email Marketing

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Interactive Media, 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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Weibo: The Biggest Unknown Social Media Platform

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Social Media Marketing  

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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