Not everybody can lay claim to waking up every day and making a successful living doing something they love.
If creating and sharing culinary creations is what your Carlsbad small business is all about, you already understand the tremendous value provided in nurturing and cultivating the online review.
From five-star foo foo joint to back alley eco-friendly food truck, people talk about their culinary experiences. (more…)
In the race to acquire your small business advertising and digital marketing dollars, the winner doesn’t seem so clear-cut. At least when we take some geographical or demographic information into consideration.
Sure, the local phone book publisher has most likely seen a cataclysmic drop in ad revenue over the past few years. And certainly this must be directly correlated to the rise in online searches, increase in mobile internet accessibility, availability of improving technology, and the overall topsy-turvy world of defining consumer habits.
According to research from the Local Search Association (formerly the Yellow Pages Association) conducted by Burke, search has taken over as the top way to find local businesses for most demographics1.
Interesting that the Local Search Association was formerly the Yellow Pages Association, but maybe that’s another blog post. As a Carlsbad small business owner the challenge becomes how to best leverage each (and every) communication medium available to increase local sales and improve customer retention.
And of course how to weed through all of this digital chatter to identify those opportunities.
According to this recent article on the Google+ social networking move, the average U.S. visitor spent 375 minutes per month on Facebook in May, compared with 231 minutes for Google.
How many minutes are there in a month?
We can bet our mobile carriers can tell us. But are we getting our moneys worth for those minutes?
Moreover, how many minutes do we spend actually thumbing through the phone book?
We’ll reserve judgment on the blog posts…and promise to only take our finger-pointing to a whole new level via Twitter!
Although this is quite the contentious subject amongst some marketers, small business owners need not let emotion dictate the best communication tools for use in driving more local sales.
Hashtag AT&T are you listening?
What do ‘the phone book’ and MySpace have in common?
Hint: MySpace reportedly sold today for a whopping $35 million…it was acquired 6 years ago for $580 million…
Everything. Or nothing.
OK now go retweet this, then be sure to like, share, and recommend this article – and associated website, blog, newsletter, e-book, and business – on Facebook. And if you would be so kind as to Digg it, and help us StumbleUpon some additional readership by broadcasting the message to your virtual social Rolodex, we’d certainly be obliged to Sphinn some local good will your way.
Enter Google’s new +1 social sharing search functionality.
Google is the 500 pound gorilla, or elephant in the room, or whatever other images conjure up thoughts of BIG.
We know you know that they know you know they want you to know that we know this.
The question everyone is asking is how effective Google’s new +1 social sharing functionality will be for local Carlsbad small businesses?
OK, maybe it’s just us two staffers sitting around the office on Wednesday afternoon wonking away another meaningless blog post after a long Memorial Day weekend.
Timelines aside, the answers can range from unbelievably successful, to not a damn thing done changed.
The big reason (we surmise) will be participation.
Will we become more inclined to all go run out and pimp our Google Profiles in order to more accurately communicate our likes according to Google?
Be sure to check out the upcoming release of 1LocalBusiness’s opus, The World According to Google. Or you can watch their video below, but we’ll bet you dollars to VGs Donuts our production quality is far superior.
Not to answer a question with a question or anything…but how will you apply Google’s new +1 functionality toward your overall small business digital marketing plan?
That’s the more telling question that will save you heaps of time in reaching an answer to determine effectiveness.
If you’re not going to incorporate the +1 button into your Carlsbad digital marketing scheme then you can rest assured nothing will happen.
Inaction begets nothing. Or is nothingness the result of inaction…is this all this sarcasm too philosophically confusing?
+1s and digital marketing.
What’s it all for anyway, who cares…how does that really affect our local Carlsbad small businesses?
Watch the 1:30 Google +1 Video on YouTube
We’ll promise to be more analytical and informative with more +1 news in the future. Things are just starting to roll out of the Google garage in their efforts to socially compete with Facebook, for right now at least we’ll try to reserve judgment and just present the facts as they pertain to our local Carlsbad small businesses.
And we’ll keep it simple.
Or stupid.
Too bad they don’t have a -1 button huh?
