Aqua Blue Marketing is pleased to announce the addition of Everett Steele and his wife Allison to its leadership team. Everett Steele is a fourth generation entrepreneur and a former United States Army officer, and Iraq veteran. Allison is an experienced marketer and has worked with brands including Louisville Slugger and the Department of Defense. Many Atlantans know Everett’s father, Ricky Steele, as a serial entrepreneur and guru of networking in the Atlanta tech community. Allison and Everett are both University of Georgia graduates.

Aqua Blue, www.aquablueweb.com, is one of Atlanta’s premier and rapidly growing full service creative development and interactive marketing firms. Aqua Blue has worked with organizations such as the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA), BackChannel Media, and Hunter Technical Resources to enhance their online presence through web design and interactive marketing.  Aqua Blue recently worked with Premier Exhibitions to launch the Titanic Online Store.

Tom Ellis, President and CEO, comments, “Alexa and I are excited to welcome Allison and Everett to Aqua Blue. We are confident their talents will enable Aqua Blue to better serve our clients as we continue to grow our business.” According to Allison Steele, “I'm thrilled to be a part of Aqua Blue. We feel there is a great combination of leadership styles and experience in the company, and the opportunity couldn't be more exciting. Having worked all over the world while working for the Department of Defense, Everett and I are very happy to be able to return to our hometown of Atlanta.”

Contact:
Tom Ellis
tom.ellis@aquabluemarketing.com
2310-C Marietta Blvd
Atlanta, GA 30128

With an influx of interest towards mobile marketing, many companies are wondering why the need to get involved and how they can build a mobile site and apps.  Many people are now asking what is the "ROI" of entering the mobile space.  Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Eastman Kodak Company, asks what is the "ROI (Return on Ignoring)" the need to enter the mobile market.

Below is a short list of benefits of testing out a mobile site or app to promote your brand:

Mobile Websites:

1. Clean mobile websites allow you to reach your audience at the moment of inspiration. You are capable of reaching them as they looking to buy or simply find information. As mobile users seek your company, service or product, a strong mobile site can bring in your audience as they think of you, while away from their computers.
2. The market for mobile users is expansive. There are 75 million mobile users.  It is projected that mobile devices will take over computers in web usage by 2015 (recall a similar situation with mobile phones and land lines—mobile wins).
3. Mobile sites are user friendly. Having a mobile website allows your audience to better see your brand and imaging through their mobile phone. You can interact with mobile apps—Google maps for directions, click to call, mobile contact pages, etc.

Now what about Apps?

1. Apps allow you to fully interact with your audience. Your audience can “play” with your brand and interact with other consumers.
2. Apps can be built for almost any mobile web phone. Blackberry, iPhone, Android,Palm OS and Windows Mobile all allow for fully interactive native applications.
3. Mobile apps allow you to connect with your audience on a personal level.  Nothing is more personal than someone’s PDA or smartphone.  Many people consider their mobile device a part of them and cannot imagine life without it.
4. Mobile apps allow you to grow your brand virally. Users can invite their contacts to your app, see what their friends are doing, and share your brand through other applications and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, email, MMS and more).
5. Mobile apps allow you to build a campaign around your brand to drive traffic and interaction with your website.

Both mobile sites and applications can get your company and brand more exposure as the mobile market continues to grows.  It is important to work with a trusted partner to help develop a strategy and the tools needed to break into the mobile arena.  A solid strategy as well as market testing will help to ensure your overall success.

Coming from a development background, I can attest to the fact that, in general, developers have their own methodologies and do not like to be forced to do things in ways that are not their own. However, when it comes to creating or editing a website, there are certain requirements that you should insist your developer meet.

Although good content is the greatest contributing factor to your website's SEO, there are a number of coding strategies which can also help with your SEO, as I touched on in my last post "Accessibility for Your Users (and Search Engines!)". Valid code is very important to search engines because of the way they parse content. Search engines give greater consideration to well-formatted, standards-compliant websites, since they can understand them more easily. To see whether your site has valid code, run it through the W3 Validator. One or two validation errors generally won't hurt your site and are many times unavoidable, but many websites have hundreds of errors. Some examples of these errors include unclosed, deprecated, or missing tags, among hundreds of others.

Apart from its SEO impacts, valid code also helps prevent breakage (your site not displaying or functioning properly), especially across browsers. When a browser displays a website with invalid code, it has the option to display that site as it chooses, and many browsers display these sites in different ways. This is why some sites look differently in Internet Explorer than in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Even after ensuring that a website meets code validation, your developer should still test your site in every browser which your visitors may use.

Going along with standards compliance is code readability and maintainability. Just as your website should be displayed to your visitor in an understandable way, the code should be written in an understandable way. This means having your developer put logical sections of your website into logical sections of code, using whitespace (newlines and tabs) for readability, and documenting any pieces of code which may be hard to understand. This will save you both time and money when you need to make a change to your site, and will make for a more seamless transition should you need to hire a new developer to work with the existing code.

Of course, since content management systems modularize code for even greater maintainability, the code that gets sent to the browser is, usually, not as readable as the original code. This is because it must be aggregated by the CMS first, but this is not a problem. Another great feature of some content management systems is that they will sanitize code - that is, if invalid code is entered, the CMS will automatically fix it to meet web standards (this feature can usually be turned off if necessary).

There is a law known as Section 508 which requires federal agencies to make their electronic data accessible to people with disabilities. While 508 compliance is of course not required for most websites, it is a good standard to adhere to, for a number of reasons. You always want visitors to your site to be able to find what they need without a problem. And if you want search engines to easily find your content, 508 compliance will improve your SEO as well.

508 compliance focuses on making the site more usable for a visitor viewing the site, such as giving the option to enlarge text or using colors that are easily distinguishable. But it also includes making content easily accessible and understandable to screen readers - for example, giving images "alt" (or tooltip) text which can be read aloud by screen readers.

Even if you don't expect many visitors with disabilities to your site, 508 compliance is still a worthwhile investment, because search engines look at and index content in a manner very similar to screen readers. So any content which a human visitor would not be able to find on your site, a search engine almost definitely will not be able to. For more information, visit the Section 508 website.

One of the latest trends in web development is building online communities rather than non-interactive websites to promote a product or service.  I found this article, "How to Kill a Community in 10 Easy Steps," and its a valuable resource for anyone building a community-based site as a stand-alone site or to promote a product/service.  Sometimes its easier to tell people what NOT to do rather than pointing them in the right direction. Here are the best strategies for building an online community based on what has worked for my clients:

1. Find ten people in your target audience to test who will tell you the truth. Find out what areas they're drawn to, and which areas they're ignoring. Are there bugs in your community you might have missed in the development phase? User testing is a great way to avoid problems down the road.

2. Engage with your users. Great personalities can really help a fledgling community get off the ground, even if you're the one encouraging the interaction. Don't hide your employees' identities; let the audience know they're with your company. Encourage employees with great personalities to use your online community, comment, and spark interaction.

3. Reward interaction. Many sites utilize a points system for interaction (like TagCommunity.org) or they have a profile percent complete (LinkedIn). People are competitive by nature, and giving them a way to measure interaction will help them interact more. You get bonus points for giving users a physical reward based on the points system (free stuff).

4. Recruit charter members. Find members in your target audience (they might be the same people from Step 1) who genuinely want to grow your community. Ask them them to spark meaningful conversations in your online community so new users coming in have real content to engage from. Many people don't like to be the first ones to get their feet wet; have real content waiting for new visitors.

A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet from a Sales Director (Joe Schmo) of a local IT company that said "I'm looking forward to working with Company X." Since I know Joe Schmo and his relationship with Company X, I know the intent of his tweet was to make a few of his competitors that follow him jealous. But does Joe Schmo have prospects or clients who compete with Company X, and did they see his tweet? If so, he may have lost a potential client.

Broadcasting potentially damaging information is a common problem in social media marketing- employees don't always think through the extent of their actions, which is why internal rules should be established. Here are my guidelines for how to establish social media guidelines for your company:

1. Distinguish sensitive, non-sharable information from sharable information.

I share many tools and techniques with my audience on marketing best practices that I think would be helpful. However, I don't share information that would cause me to lose an account because a prospect already knows exactly what I do. We draw the line at Aqua Blue between information that can and can't be shared.

2. Decide whether or not its okay to talk about your customers.

Because many businesses rely on web traffic for a large part of their revenue, search engine optimization is still a hot topic in the IT industry, and probably will be for years to come. SEO is a complex beast with many ins and outs - one important piece of SEO is search engine friendly URLs (SEF). SEF URLs are those which are easily human-readable, and do not contain querystrings with variables (i.e. http://aquabluemarketing.com/marketing-20-blog instead of http://aquabluemarketing.com/index.php?section=marketing-20-blog). Many search engines do not like webpages with querystrings as much as SEF URLs - and you want Google to like your webpage!

Content management systems like Joomla make it easy to create SEF links. Instead of custom programming for each of your website's pages, you are simply required to turn on an SEF setting and voila! Instant Google-friendly links. If you don't like the link created for you by default, you can customize the url through the Joomla interface. So as I've explained, the default Joomla installation ships with pretty good SEO and SEF capabilities out of the box. However, here is one SEF technique the Joomla developers have not implemented yet.

If you allow frontend users to login to your Joomla site, you probably link to the login page or display the login module, or both. From these, you may have noticed that links to "Forgot your password?" and "Forgot your username?" show nice links like "/component/user/reset" and "/component/user/remind". But the default register link is different - it looks like "/component/user/?task=register". Functionally, this is not a problem - your register page will work as it should. However, your register page will have a hard time getting picked up by search engines, because the link ends in a querystring. If you want to change this, here's how:

if you are using a non-default template, and the template defines the following files, modify them:
TEMPLATE_DIR/html/com_user/login/default_login.php (for the page)
TEMPLATE_DIR/html/mod_login/default.php (for the module)

otherwise, modify these default template files:
components/com_user/views/login/tmpl/default_login.php
modules/mod_login/tmpl/default.php

With the growing number of websites available that allow us to engage with others online, a very common question is: "which social network should my company be on?" Some people will make generalizations such as "LinkedIn is great, Twitter is too cluttered," or "Facebook is great, don't waste your time on MySpace." However, there is no one right answer for everyone (if only it were that easy!): you must first assess your goals and target audience. Here is a guideline for choosing the best social networks to get started on:

 1. Who is your target audience? You need to know their age, gender, income level, and industry (if B2B audience). Once you know your target audience, find out where they go online.  If you have a B2B company targeting managers in IT departments, LinkedIn and Twitter will be your best tools. If you have a B2C company targeting teens, go to Facebook and MySpace (for now- but usage of this network is clearly on the decline).  Forget LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendFeed and even Twitter- teens aren't on these networks. If you need help with this step, I'm always open for questions :)

2. What are your goals? Are you looking to boost your search engine rankings and presence? Find new leads? Brand your company? Engage with consumers? Some social networks help more with certain goals. For example, if your goal is SEO, fill out a profile on every social network, social bookmarking site, and media sharing site. Link to your website, have an optimized profile name, and use anchored text wherever possible. Link profiles to one another. If your goal is branding, stick to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Post content often. Your goals are just as important as your target audience is for determining where you should be online.

3. How much can you afford to put into social media marketing? Do you have an entire marketing department, or is it just you? While it would be great to have a strong presence on every social network fitting your goals and target demographic, realistically this isn't always possible.  Don't be afraid to focus your time on just one or two social networks when you don't have time for more. I'm a fan of focusing on one or two places to social network and checking the others a few times a week if you're short on resources.

4. Test and measure. Still not sure if you're on the right social networks? The numbers don't lie. To find out if your social media marketing efforts are working, look at how many friends you have, how many leads you've gotten, how many more hits you have on your website, number of positive responses, etc.

The easiest way to explain website copywriting is to point out what it is not: brochure copywriting. Your website copy should not resemble what you'd write on a brochure (or anything else) for two major reasons:

1. Website copy should be full of commonly searched terms so it is search engine optimized. In normal copywriting, your goal is literally the opposite of this: to avoid common industry jargon. Thus, website copywriting presents a unique challenge in that you must write effectively while still using commonly searched terms.

2. If someone is taking the time to read your brochure, you already have their attention. You can take more time explaining what your company does and how many services it offers. Website copy is completely different: you have less than one second to tell your visitor what you company does and to convince them to stay on your website. If you can't do this, you'll notice that you have a high bounce rate on your analytics report.

 Now that we've explained the differences between website copywriting and brochure copywriting, let me give you the steps for developing successful website copywriting.

1. Conduct a thorough analysis of your keywords. Find out exactly how often which keywords are being searched, and then find out how much competition there is on these terms. If you're unable to do this in-house, hire a contractor to do this before moving to Step 2.