A list of companies that were blind-sided by social media

CNN falls for rumor –sinking Apple stock
A rumor created by community created news site iReport that falsified CEO Steve Jobs having a heart attack spread to mainstream media website CNN, and caused a dip in stock price. User generated content will always have the risk of falsified content.

Exxon Mobil Brandjacked in Twitter
The twitter community (myself included) was eager to embrace “Janet” a no holds barred up front in your face corporate representative that was ready to tackle the hard issues –sometimes without grace. Unfortunately, to the Twittersphere’s surprise and Exxon, Janet, is not an official company representative she claimed to be. Read the story to unravel the multiple angles to this unique case.

JC Penney brandjacked by fake “sex” Ad
We’re seeing more ads being created. In this case a ‘third party vendor’ (agency, I think) created this and submitted it to Cannes. JC Penney wasn’t happy and had it removed from YouTube. Unfortunately, blogs picked it up and it will never go away, video is here, I know you want to click.

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Applecore Interactive participates in the 2008 Run for a Cure

Applecore Interactive participated in the 2008 Run for a Cure contributing to a total of $28 million raised nationwide.

An amazing stats based video on the information age

http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=x7aVOMrlfkkijQwcLllwk6WjB5JE0zrF

Social Media Numbers

Did you know?
Revenue in the social networking sector has grown 191 percent in the past year. *

Did you know?
Facebook is the 4th most-trafficked Website in the world with more than 100 million active users. **

Did you know?
Two-thirds of companies see improved customer satisfaction from the adoption of social media and 64 percent report an improved reputation in the marketplace.***

Did you know?
Eighty-four percent of companies headquartered in North America believe as we enter a possible economic downturn we need to focus on new ways of communicating with customers which add real value and 80 percent agree that social media will allow us to add value to our customer interaction.***

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* This information was found on www.destinationcrm.com

** This information was found on www.facebook.com

*** This information is from a study conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in May 2008 on behalf of Avanade which included 541 phone interviews with top executives at the top 500 companies in Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada, United States, Australia, Japan, and Singapore.

Linking out: Often it's just appying common sense

Creating outbound links on your site, or "linking out", is our topic for Day 3 of Links Week. Linking out happens naturally, and for most webmasters, it's not something you have to worry about. Nonetheless, in case you're interested about an otherwise simple topic that's fundamental to the web, here's the good, the bad, and answers to more advanced questions asked by our fellow webmasters. First, let's start with the good...

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Importance of link architecture

In Day 2 of links week, we'd like to discuss the importance of link architecture and answer more advanced questions on the topic. Link architecture—the method of internal linking on your site—is a crucial step in site design if you want your site indexed by search engines. It plays a critical role in Googlebot's ability to find your site's pages and ensures that your visitors can navigate and enjoy your site.

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Links information straight from the source

We hope that you're able to focus on helping users (and improving the web) by creating great content or providing a great service on your site. In between creating content and working on your site, you may have read some of the (often conflicting) link discussions circling the web. If you're asking, "What's going on -- what do I need to know about links?" then welcome to the first day of links week!

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Supercharge Your Web Site with Video

All smart entrepreneurs know that in order to compete today you need a robust Web presence. But not everyone has yet embraced online video, which (according to many Web gurus) can increase your site's traffic and boost your sales. To learn more, I talked to Benjamin Wayne, president and CEO of Fliqz.com, a company that helps small and mid-sized businesses integrate video on their Web sites.

Rieva Lesonsky: It's quickly becoming a YouTube world. How can adding video to their sites better help entrepreneurs compete and grow?

Benjamin Wayne: Video can help businesses in three ways: drive increased traffic, drive more interactivity and page views, and drive increased [sales] conversion.

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5 People and Things That Will Recession-Proof Your Small Business

1) The people you know now.

What professional communities, networks, and social groups are you part of?

2) The people you knew in the past.

Dredge up old clients, leads, colleagues, schoolmates, and other contacts you haven’t talked to in a while. Send them a brief hello and blurb about .

3) The strangers you don’t know yet.

Do you blog, Twitter, podcast, or use any other form of media to broadcast the contents of your brain into the vast world of the Web?

4) The things you need.

Are you connected in any way to products that people need, no matter what?

5) The things that hurt.

What is your client’s “pain,” and how do you address it?

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Applecore Interactive builds attractive, accessible standards – compliant websites

Applecore Interactive follows the three pillars of web standards to achieve attractive, accessible standards – compliant websites:

• Structure: using semantically correct structural (x)HTML for a documents structure
• Presentation: for all presentation and layout we use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) a language appropriate for implementing a web page’s presentational affects.
• Behaviour: the appropriate server-side or client-side scripting language to bring in dynamic behaviour and business logic

Ensuring the separation of these three pillars and bringing them together in a modern web development process we are able to ensure accessibility to the people who browse the web in alternative ways including portable devices and screen readers. The separation of structure and presentation delivers web content to people with physical and visual impairments in a structured way that allows them to browse a webpage with tools that are best suited to their needs.

This structured delivery also remains accessible to non-human internet users most importantly search engines.

The presentational aspects are more tightly controlled through one technology and therefore will work in all modern browsers and can be customized to work in non-standard and legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and below.

Working with the three pillars is future compliant.

Interactive marketing plays cupid as brands court king consumer

BANGALORE: As young consumers grow in influence, the use of interactive and experiential marketing is becoming mainstream, transforming from idea which brands just used to dabble in. Consumers, especially the youth, are no longer just a 'target audience', but partners that brands must connect with.

Take for example India's largest watchmaker Titan, which tied up with Radio One for a week, renaming the station Fast Track 94.3 FM, for their brand's 'Move on' campaign. Listeners were asked to come up with different ways to use the tagline, generating over 5,000 SMSes and 3,000 calls.

"Our interactive marketing budget will touch 20% soon," said Fast Track's marketing head Simeran Bhasin.

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As digit marketing booms, remember the basics

As the digital age takes further hold over the industry, John Sawyer's advice is to stick with the basics - and no matter how cool the technology, it's still the message that matters.

Quite often clients are so taken by emerging interactive marketing techniques and technology that they ignore that first they need a strong marketing and branding strategy. Then they can identify the tool that works best for their company and brand.

"This enthusiasm about this new technology gets them going in a certain direction, and we find out later it wasn't the right use of their resources," said Sawyer, the chief strategy officer at the Grey Matter Group in Grand Rapids.

"They forget about their objectives or their marketing strategy."

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Understanding Web Readers (and Non-Readers) − Creating Usable and Effective Web Content

Click here to view presentation

Microsoft CRM 3.0: Lemonade Stand

Newspapers need to reinvent themselves

It’s no secret that the rise of the Internet has hit the newspaper industry hard. A recent survey by Pew Research Center illuminates this fact, revealing that more than 50% of 259 papers surveyed reported significant layoffs of newsroom staff.

To combat this attrition, newspapers are fighting back by creating blogs and microsites that allow readers to focus their attention on specific topics, and journalists are being trained to create and upload video content for the Web. Niche online ad networks are also gaining popularity, whereby newspapers band together to sell ads online. Industry observers are suggesting that newspaper publishers should publish digital editions for PDAs and cell phones and also publish more Web-only content.

Source: Mediaweek

TV and Internet ads go hand-in-hand

According to the president of CBS’ research unit, the Internet enhances TV advertising. David Poltrack points out that while the Internet is an efficient medium for turning consumers into purchasers, it’s useful only if the consumers are already aware of the products. Simply put, consumers turn to the Internet to learn about products that they are already aware of.

That is where television advertising plays a key role. It is Poltrack’s opinion that, as a medium, TV is still unrivalled when it comes to developing awareness of a product, service or product feature. To leverage this connection between television-based awareness and internet-based information gathering, marketers need to coordinate the TV and Internet components of their ad campaigns.

Source: Advertising Age

Worldwide Online Ad Spending

Reaching for a bigger slice of the total ad pie

Several recent worldwide online ad spending projections indicate that the medium still has a lot of room for growth.

Worldwide online ad spending will reach $65.2 billion in 2008, according to IDC's "Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast." The research company predicted 15% to 20% annual growth through 2011, when spending would hit $106.6 billion.

IDC said that online ads would account for nearly 10% of all ad spending across all media in 2008, rising to 13.6% by 2011. Nearly one-fifth of Western European ad spending will be online by that time.

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2007 Canadian Online Advertising Revenue Climbs To $1.2 Billion

Online Ad Revenue Grows 38% Over 2006 levels, Quadruples Over Just 5 Years

The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (IAB) today announced that 2007 Canadian Online Advertising Revenues climbed to just over $1.2 billion for the year -- a 38% increase over 2006 actuals.

Publisher revenue from Online advertising in Canada has more than quadrupled over the past five years -- building from $237 million in 2003, to the $1.2 billion mark in 2007 -- and is quickly closing in on more established mediums.

Of the $1.2 billion, approximately $260 million or 21 percent of ad revenue was received by French Canadian Online properties, representing year-over-year growth consistent with the rest of the Canadian market.

In response to a variety of shifts in the industry (including a high level of merger and acquisition activity in the Canadian media market, and the continued penetration of Online Ad Networks into the Canadian Online advertising space), IAB Canada's 2007 Revenue Survey process was revisited, with the objective of assuring the elimination of any past and ongoing duplication of ad revenue from these sources.

Canadian Online Publishers obviously had no difficulty in adjusting to the revised ask, as IAB Canada's 2007 Canadian Online Advertising Survey garnered a response rate of over 90% for companies with anticipated revenue of over $5 million. "The industry can feel confident about all past and present numbers," says Martin Lundie, Partner, Technology, Communications and Entertainment Assurance and Advisory Business Services for Ernst & Young LLP (who analyzes IAB Canada's Survey data), "Firstly, because the factors we adjusted for in the 2007 Survey were not present prior to 2006; and secondly, because of the extremely high response rate. Surveys with a high response rate from respondents with the most significant size, provide a very high degree of accuracy and reliability."

Publishers applied the improved methodology to both 2006 and 2007 numbers, and as a result, the actual Canadian Online Advertising Revenue for 2006 has been revised from $1.0 billion to $900 million, with all segments revised accordingly below.

In actual millions of dollars, 2007 vs. 2006 Canadian Online Ad Revenue by Advertising Vehicle, breaks down as follows:

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Should Links Open in New Windows?

At first glance the decision to open links in new windows or not depends on the given site and the preferences of its visitors. Visitors of the sites with heavy linking are more willing to have links opened in new windows than open dozens of links in new windows manually. Visitors of less-heavy-linkage-sites are more likely to open some specific link in new window to remain on the site and continue to browse through it afterwards. However, this is not true.

Users also don’t like to deal with dozens of opened tabs and some visitors tend to quickly become angry with the disabled back-button. Furthermore, some visitors may not even realize that a new window was opened and hit the back-button mercilessly — without any result. That’s not user-friendly and that’s not a good user experience we, web designers, strive for.

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Few Shops Practice Paid Search Skills

Using paid search to market brands is so fundamental that it's self-evident. However, that's not necessarily the case when it comes to building agency brands.

Adweek found that few of the 56 agencies assessed in this year's Report Card evaluation have bought sponsored links tied to their names on Google. In fact, just five-- AKQA, Campbell-Ewald, DraftFCB, iCrossing and JWT -- have sponsored links on Google. The rest have no such links, though their Web addresses generally appeared at or near the top of each search.

Adweek also found evidence of smaller specialty shops "punching up" by piggybacking on the names of larger rivals to gain attention. For example, sponsored links for business-to-business specialists such as Stein Rogan + Partners and PJA Advertising + Marketing popped up after typing the names of better-known players such as Arnold, DDB, Young & Rubicam and OgilvyInteractive.

"Why not put ourselves out there as a viable alternative?" said Tom Stein, president and CEO of Stein Rogan + Partners, a 40-person shop in New York with a dozen clients. "It's a little bit of counter-marketing."

Of course, little guys have to do more to generate buzz, and typically on a shoestring budget. So, not unlike Alltel tweaking Verizon and AT&T in a TV spot, some smaller shops use the glare of bigger agency brands to raise their profiles. Within the sample, however, such a scrappy move was rare compared to a swath of inactivity. It's yet another example of agencies not always practicing what they preach to clients, despite the relatively low cost of buying search terms.

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Applecore Interactive is hiring!

Content Development Specialist

AppleCore Interactive is an award-winning interactive marketing communications agency known for its fresh approach. Its commitment to excellence and superior relationships with its clients has been fundamental to its success.

AppleCore is currently accepting resumes for a Content Development Specialist position.

Job Purpose:

The Content Development Specialist will make a valuable contribution to our Internet Marketing team by researching, writing and editing content for the web and interactive media (optimized for search engines). It will also require research and copy writing for printed media, such as promotional material and annual reports. Providing quality and relevant content is paramount to the overall success of a client’s website or marketing campaign. Clients vary, so candidates must be able to write according to the “language” of different industries. Attention has to be given to usability of online content, keeping in mind user psychology, structure and placement of information.

Duties and Responsibilities:

The Content Development Specialist performs a wide range of duties including:

• Researching, writing, editing and proofing web content for client websitesportals from scratch.
• Writing, editing and proof reading copy for client websites, marketing materials etc. based on existing written materials supplied by clients.
• Proof reading, editing and writing content on a regular basis for ongoing maintenance of websites and other collateral material.
• Final review and check of web page content before publishing.
• Writing content for online newsletters, blogs, brochures, magazine articles etc.
• Inserting keywords and hyperlinks throughout copy as appropriate.
• Provide input into the development of client websites to ensure search engine optimization.
• An effective writing style that is fresh, consistent and user friendly.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree or post-secondary education in marketing, communications, public relations, journalism or English; or relevant degree or certification
• Technical degree and/or MBA are a plus.

Experience:

• Two or more years writing experience would be considered an asset.
• Ability to write in a variety of formats and styles for multiple audiences.

AppleCore’s founding principle is to be a good place to work and a good place to do business. If you excel in a team-based environment, have a passion for excellence in interactive communications, have superior written and oral communication skills, strong internal motivation and project management skills, this may be the position for you.

Send your electronic resume to careers@applecore.ca

Applecore Interactive's continous strive for new heights and reaching the top!

Applecore Interactive is a proud sponsor of adventurer and Everest climber TA Loeffler and she has in turn carried AppleCore’s flag to many heights.

Here is a photograph of Applecore’s latest height: Mount Kilimanjaro – the highest peak in Africa.

In addition, the flag has been to the summit of Mount Denali (highest in North America); Aconcagua (highest in South America), Elbrust (highest in Europe) – close to summit, and Everest (camp 2).

Next year the flag will make another attempt to reach to top of Mount Everest.

The flag is a symbol of Applecore’s continuous quest to strive for new heights and reaching the top!

Applecore Interactive wins two IABC Pinnacle Awards in Electronic/Audio Visual/Interactive Communications

Local business communicators honoured at annual IABC Pinnacle Awards gala

ST. JOHN’S, NL - Local business communicators have once again honoured their own at the 6th Annual Pinnacle Awards. The Pinnacle Awards program was developed by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) - Newfoundland and Labrador Chapter to recognize excellence in business communications throughout the province. A total of 17 awards were presented at the awards gala on June 5, 2008, with winners receiving awards of excellence and merit.

IABC presented two prestigious individual awards. Caron Hawco, ABC of Caron Hawco Communications, received the 2008 Communications Professional Award of Excellence. This award recognizes a communicator who practices exemplary communications and encourages communication excellence in the activities and initiatives in which they are involved. This award acknowledges Hawco for her leadership, professional accomplishments and outstanding efforts to improve business communication in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Award of Excellence for Organizational Leader was presented to Frank Fagan, CEO of Bell-Aliant. The Organizational Leader is a prestigious award that recognizes an individual who is not an IABC member or communications professional, but who has demonstrated leadership, vision and commitment to excellent communications. Whether involved in private, public, not-for-profit sectors, the recipient of this award will have made contributions to business communications by initiating, supporting, and/or participating in effective, successful communications programs.

Sponsors of the 2008 Pinnacle Awards include: Presenting Sponsor – m5pr, Platinum Sponsor – Steele Communications, Silver Sponsor – CNW Group, and Bronze Sponsors – Fortis Properties, Johnson Insurance, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Mount St. Vincent University, Newfoundland Power and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation.

A complete list of award winners is attached

For more information contact:
Kathy Dicks-Peyton, ABC
2008 Pinnacle Chair
709-689-9279

IABC Newfoundland & Labrador 2008 Pinnacle Awards Recipients

Employee/Internal Communications
Award of Merit

Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association
Eastern Health

Issues Management/Crisis Communication
Award of Excellence

Newfoundland and Labrador Nurses’ Union

Brand Communication
Award of Excellence

m5pr

Media Relations
Award of Excellence

Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association

Brochures/Special Publications
Award of Merit

Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association

Newsletters (print)
Award of Excellence

Memorial University
College of the North Atlantic

Award of Merit
Eastern Health

Electronic/Audio Visual/Interactive Communications
Award of Merit - two awards presented to:

Applecore Interactive

Writing
Award of Excellence
Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association

Graphic Design
Award of Merit

Eastern Health

Advertising (Traditional Media)
Award of Excellence

Memorial University
m5pr

2008 Organizational Leader
Frank Fagan, CEO of Bell-Aliant

2008 Communications Professional Award of Excellence
Caron Hawco, Caron Hawco Communications
-30-

For more information contact:

Kathy Dicks-Peyton, ABC
2008 Pinnacle Awards Chair
(709) 689-9279

21 Factors that Influence the First Impression of Your Website’s Visitors

When a new visitor comes to your website for the first time an initial impression will be formed pretty quickly. A good first impression will drastically increase the chances of that visitor returning again, and a bad first impression will be difficult to overcome.

This list looks at 21 factors that will influence your visitor’s impression within moments of arriving at your site. These are just some of the factors, not a comprehensive list. Feel free to list some others in the comments that you think should be included. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Load Time – Most of us are very impatient and slow loading pages will not make us want to return. On the other hand, pages that load quickly will encourage visitors to navigate through your site knowing that they won’t have to wait very long for each page to load.

2. Error Messages – If new visitors to your site are getting error messages and are unable to access your site, they’re not going to be impressed and they won’t be back. There are a number of different errors that can occur. BlogStorm recently published an article Why Businesses Need a Website that Works, which takes a look at one unsuccessful website with an obvious problem.

3. Colors – The look of your site will obviously be a factor in your visitors’ first impressions. The colors of your website can have a huge impact on the overall attractiveness of the site. Choosing the right color combinations can be difficult, but fortunately there are a number of online tools that can help. For a list of resources and links to some articles on the psychology of colors, see Find the Perfect Colors for Your Website.

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Choosing the Right Colors for Your Web Site

Do colors influence web site visitors? Several years ago, having a web page (as a business or as an individual), was an indicator of prosperity, and required a certain amount of financial power. Nowadays, almost everybody has one. They are easy to create (thanks to instant web page generators), even if they are not always works of art.

The main problem resides primarily in choosing the right colors for the web site. It is not always easy to properly assort the background color with the text color. The readability of a page can be influenced negatively if the color contrast is badly chosen. The background of web pages is white by default, like a sheet of paper.

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