Yelp.com has just added GPS “check in” functionality and will be a contender with Foursquare. Add them to the previous post as a platform that should be incorporated into social media strategy for restaurants and bars. For more information see Mashable.com.

One of the few positive aspects of a recession is that it creates and motivates entrepreneurs. According to Entrepreneur.com, “Results from Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ job market index revealed that 8.7 percent of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in second quarter 2009–way, way up from the record low of 2.7 percent during the last quarter of 2008.” New businesses create new jobs, which will also help us climb our way out of this recession. Are you an entrepreneur? Have you ever thought of starting your own business? Do you know someone thinking of starting a business? There are a few basics that you will need from a marketing perspective to get you going: a logo, business cards and a website.

We here at Kaleidos Marketing like to think of ourselves as entrepreneurs and aspire to support those like us, and those who have the motivation and creativity to help pull our economy out of this recession. So… Kaleidos Marketing is offering a branding package that includes a logo design, business card design and printing and a basic 4-5 page website designed, programmed and optimized for SEO with a content management system for only $2250. This package retails for more than $5000 and will be available for only $2250 until March 1, 2010 at which time we will consider renewing it based upon its success and positive feedback.

So, what’s the catch? Well there are a couple of limitations, but you can always add to the package. We are happy to provide estimates for any “extras”.

How does it work? You give us your elevator pitch and describe and show us a couple of logos that you like and what you like about them. We’ll take that and come up with two original logo options for you. You can then give us feedback and we’ll make one round of revisions, presenting you with a final professional logo that represents your business. Then, we’ll take the logo and put it into a couple of business card designs. Again, if you have any business cards that you really like, share them with us and what you like about them and we’ll incorporate that into your business card design. You choose the design you like, give us any changes and then we’ll send your final design to print, providing you with a set of 250 business cards that you can be proud to hand out, printed on 14pt CS25 gloss card stock. Then finally we’ll design a 4-5 page website for you and program it into a content management system so that you can change the text on the go. No need to contact us and pay us to change it for you. You have control. Once we have set you up, you will actually enter the content yourself.

This package includes a basic website, which means that it does not include any flash, e-commerce, forms, blogs, photo or video slideshows, domain name registration, hosting, e-mail, etc. You will provide content and photography. If any of these things are important to your web presence we are happy to provide an estimate and you can opt to incorporate it now, or wait until your budget allows.

Oh, and once you have entered your content and the website is ready to go live we will optimize the site for search engines. We will write meta tags for each page of the website and submit it to the larger search engines. Voila.

2009 was the year of the non-profit for Kaleidos Marketing. We had the pleasure of working with three non-profits who contribute to their communities in diverse but important ways. It was truly our pleasure to be able to help them launch new brands to best represent their organizations and services.

Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival

2009 Bravo Brand

As a summer music festival, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival is in a position to launch a new look and feel (or brand) each season. Their logo remains the same as does the product, but the look and feel is unique to the season. The 2009 season collateral was the product of a unique partnership between, Bravo, Glyphics and Kaleidos Marketing. In our possibly biased opinion, the end result was the most beautiful collateral of the past twenty-two years, and a happy client. The 2009 season collateral included a newsletter, ticket brochure, pocket calendar, education brochure, poster, cards, invitations, bookmarks and program book. Both the design and the product (FSC and recycled paper and printing process) represented the Festival’s dedication to the future of our world and the quality for which the Festival is known.

Roundup River Ranch

As we have become more engaged on Twitter over the past couple of months we have seen Twitter work its way up to our top traffic source. Our number of Twitter followers has increased and likely many of them are clicking through to our website link to learn more about us before deciding whether to follow. Also during the past couple of months we have been more dedicated to this new blog and seen it work its way up to the second most visited page of our website. We have posted links on Twitter to our blog posts and likely some of our followers have clicked through to read our posts. Hopefully they have found them informative!

According to Mashable, including a link in your Twitter profile is a “great way to drive traffic back to your destination of choice; although, the link does not provide any offsite reputation – a.k.a. SEO link juice – due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place.”

As an agency sometimes we forget to market ourselves as we market our clients. There are many times in this career where I have quoted the old saying that the cobbler’s son has no shoes. We are proud to say that in this case we are implementing some of the tactics that we encourage for our clients and seeing them work.

What we need to keep in mind both for ourselves, and for our clients, is that while these SEO and social marketing initiatives may help drive traffic and position us as knowledgeable, or maybe even experts if we are successful, it will require a tipping point to actually result in new business.

Social media is evolving at the speed of light. We have only had a glimpse of what potential it may eventually have to marketers and public relations professionals. Twitter just recently added the ability to create lists to organize the torrents of data available. This will have an impact on the industry in ways that we are just coming to understand. We have ourselves implemented lists on our Twitter account in order to organize data and be able to read information by topic rather than when it was posted. In doing so we also discovered that it is a great way to find other relevant people to follow. A recent post at Mashable.com gives you ideas how others are using this new functionality.

A recent study tells us that employers place more value on social media skills than traditional public relations skills. According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, a study produced by iPressroom, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA, public relations leads marketing in the management of social media communications channels whereas marketing leads in managing e-mail marketing and SEO. Most social media activities revolve around communicating with audiences, producing content, and serving as a spokesperson for an organization, as do public relations activities, So this makes sense to us. It is and will continue to be very important for public relations and marketing professionals to hone their social media skills and knowledge.

As we have only seen a glimpse of the potential gains, we have also only seen a glimpse of the potential pitfalls and dangers of social media. It is important for companies and marketing and PR professionals to educate themselves about social media and to strategize and experiment as their budgets and time constraints allow for both of these reasons.

Though social media has revolutionized available communications channels, we believe that it will remain one of many marketing channels available to business and one that needs to be seamlessly integrated with the others.

There are a lot of resources out on the web and it takes some time to sort through them all and decide which are most relevant to your business. We have a few websites that we follow for professional reasons and thought that we’d share these.

For Social Media

Mashable: This is a great site for quick overviews of anything going on related to social media. It contains short articles with tips for using social media channels and more.

For Public Relations

Help a Reporter Out: As a PR professional you can sign up to receive leads from reporters looking for sources. It is a lot to sort through, so for business may be best left to your PR agency, but interesting none the less.

Pitch Engine: This is a great site for getting your press releases out to bloggers.

For Marketing

Seth Godin’s Blog: These are Seth Godin’s thoughts on marketing related topics. We find it interesting and relevant.

For Article Publication:

Ezine Articles: This is a good site for publishing articles. We write articles and then submit them here for both our business and our clients’ businesses.

For E-Mail Marketing

iContact: We like iContact for e-mail marketing because it is affordable and offers the ability for us to design and program branded templates for our customers. They can then manage their e-mail marketing campaigns once we set up their template.

For Short URLs
bit.ly: If you use Twitter, you know you need to shorten websites urls when positing links. This is our favorite though there are several others with similar capabilities.

Enjoy!

There are many reasons for companies to consider adding a bog to their website. These reasons may include encouraging conversations with customers, positioning yourself as an expert in your field, a way to drive more traffic to your website, and for search engine optimization purposes. A blog must be authentic and provide useful information, and most importantly it must be updated regularly. This is where many companies fail at blogs. Kaleidos Marketing manages several business and personal blogs and provides blog writing services for clients. Our expertise is in the area of travel, tourism, children, business and more. Our services start as low as $40 per post for a 100-250 word article depending on the contracted number of posts. Do you have something to communicate to your clients but need help in putting it into words, or keeping up with it? Contact us at info@kaleidosmarketing.com for help.

Looking for more tips on writing a better blog yourself, check out this recent article at mashable.com.

Internet users continue to spend a majority of their time with Content sites, up from 34 percent of total time spent in 2003 to 42 percent in 2009, a 24 percent increase, according to the Online Publishers Association (OPA). While it is important to keep abreast of online trends, having a site with quality content has always been and will continue to be very important. Quality content that is regularly updated and expanded upon can help in search engine results and communications. This study also shows that people are spending less time searching, so being at the top of search engine results and other communications is more important than ever.

View the Online Publishers Association Internet Activity Index

When we build a website we look at it as a whole:

• Graphic Design: Is it appealing visually?
• Site Architecture: Is it easy to navigate and makes sense to the end user?
• Content: Is your content valuable to your end user?
• Programming: Does the programming infrastructure meet the client’s needs? Do they need to be able to update content themselves, or does a static site work?
• Search Engine Optimization: Have we included a site map? If we incorporate flash for visual reasons, is the content in html? Does each page have the appropriate meta tags?

To build a website that meets clients’ goals and is effective for their business it is best to address each of these things, including search engine optimization up front in the planning stage. Here is a basic check list of what should be incorporated into a website for the beginning for search optimization:

• Flash should only be used to showcase photos or graphics. All content should be contained in the html for search engine readability.
• Meta tags for title, description and keywords should be unique and relevant to each page.
• Include a site map, particularly if your site is run from any kind of a database.
• Add a blog to which you regularly make relevant posts.
• Add a tracking software such as Google Analytics so that you can measure the usage your website is getting, as well as the keywords being searched to find it.
• Add your website to any appropriate directories and ask clients and vendors to link to your site.
• Make sure that the content on your site is relevant and useful to customers and prospective customers.
• Submit your website to all of the major search engines to make sure that it is found and indexed.

For questions or a consultation please feel free to contact us at info@kaleidosmarketing.com.