In November 2011, Google+ unveiled its brand pages feature to allow businesses to develop a presence on Google’s social media platform. This was an absolutely vital component for Google to implement in order to compete with other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Mashable weighed the pros and cons of the feature and polled small businesses to gather their feedback on the positive attributes and limitations of the Google+ business offering.

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Public Relations is a difficult thing to define – there are so many aspects and components – it’s hard to nail down one single all-encompassing definition, which makes it very difficult to define public relations success.

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In the good old days (and I’m really dating myself here), a full-color one-page print ad required a minimum of two weeks just for production – from typesetting to trimming with an X-acto™ knife to mounting and pasting onto a board to 4/c film separation with real film! This took much, much longer for a multi-page brochure. And God help us if we needed to make a change. 

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If you know Google Analytics, you probably look at your “Average Time on Site,” “Average Position,” etc. It is important to understand why average metrics can be misleading and to look beyond the headlines and delve into the specifics. 

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Social media has recently proven itself as an integral component of an effective communications campaign and is now widely seen as an absolute necessity by many companies and organizations. We at Domus fully understand the importance of social media as it relates to the overall communications mix and have implemented many successful campaigns on behalf of our clients.

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Some of the major stories throughout the past year – whether about politics, business, sports, entertainment or otherwise – share a similar theme:  all have been impacted significantly by the power of social media.

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Today, we find plenty of instances where clients want us to build websites that are highly dynamic in look, but not in functionality, such as animations that make the simple web pages more attractive.

The first thought that comes to mind when considering the addition of embedded videos, games, interactive graphics, etc., into a website, is the use of Adobe Flash or just “Flash” as it is more popularly known. Flash has been around since 1996, and with their popularity, various facilities and friendly plug-ins, Flash improvements have helped developers worldwide build fantastic websites. However, there are some drawbacks to these  Flash improvements that have caused developers to seek new alternatives. Thankfully, a new alternative has come – HTML5. With its open source platform, easy access with mobile phones and other features, HTML5 has gained tremendous popularity in a short period of time. Interestingly, people have started comparing these two technologies, and we are seeing a great deal of discussion about Flash versus HTML5. (continue reading…)

What is Pinterest you ask? Just another social media craze? Craze – yes. Just another – not exactly. For anyone unfamiliar with Pinterest and how it works, it’s basically a virtual list of a user’s favorite things. TechCrunch calls it a “socially curated shopping catalog” and says, “…it is addictive.” And they’re right – it is.

Just yesterday, comScore reported that Pinterest had surpassed the 10 million visitors mark, attracting 11.7  million unique visitors, and has become a top 10 social media site. It received 40 times the number of visits during the week ending December 17 than it had received during any single week in the prior six months. That’s a 4,000 (FOUR THOUSAND!) percent increase, making it the fastest-growing social media site EVER. 

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Just a few short years ago, the effectiveness of a company’s web presence was dictated solely by the strength and prevalence of its website. But as companies across the globe have begun embracing social media, an interesting phenomenon has occurred over the past year. In some cases, company Facebook fan pages have received more unique visitors than the company’s corporate website counterpart. See the specific example from a Webtrends whitepaper titled, “The Effect of Social Networks and the Mobile Web on Website Traffic and the Inevitable Rise of Facebook Commerce”:

[Webtrends] analyzed the website traffic of Fortune 100 websites based on ‘unique visits.’ The study revealed that 68% of the top 100 companies were experiencing a negative growth in unique visits over the past year, with an average drop of 23%.

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Microsoft consistently scores well in its overall internet marketing efforts. It’s regularly has one or two videos in the top-10 viewing lists; it gets wide-ranging online news coverage; and it has large social networking interaction. But a close look at their traditional advertising campaigns shows where they are lacking.

Often, brand management’s marketing intentions are hidden on the internet because there are so many things going on at once and so many of them are outside of the control of them. However, in the offline world, where marketers have total control over their message and its distribution, their strategies and tactics become much more transparent.

And that’s where we see Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses. Let’s look at three of their current campaigns.

• Bing – I actually like this campaign a lot. It stakes out a brand position for Bing vs. Google – Bing is a “Decision Engine”, not a search engine. And it tries to make the claim that there is too much clutter in results pages with search as we know it, but not so with Bing. Microsoft has a number of hurdles to overcome with their product vs. Google and with Google’s overall presence, but at least they have focused their product design and their marketing effort around a grounded brand position.
• Windows 7 – I don’t know what to say about this. What is their brand position? What is their message? People are PCs? People designed Windows 7 while showering? (And of course, who can forget those memorable Windows 7 launch parties that they promoted?) Contrast their ads to Apple’s. Enough said.
• Xbox – For a company locked in a major battle for supremacy in the gaming console business, Microsoft has been relatively quiet on this front. Their gaming division is finally profitable and they have a great product, especially with their Xbox Live service. I would think that now’s the time to ramp up their efforts. No effort is sometimes worse than bad effort.

Domus is a classically trained marketing agency with an innovative and technological focus. For more information, visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.