So you’ve published your blog.  Hopefully, you’ve used all the basic “on-page” SEO strategies to help build readership and following for your blog as you developed it —  providing detailed quality content, adding compelling and keyword friendly titles, leveraging anchor text and paying close attention to your URL structure and descriptions.  But you’re only half finished with your SEO plan if you haven’t considered the “off-page” SEO strategies that encourage link building.

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…and has been for the last 16 months or so — but that’s not what I’m talking about.  Now, more than ever, it’s time to crunch the analytics of your next marketing campaign.  If you do it properly, you’ll satisfy the abacus-wielding bean counters in your office, you’ll know where you went wrong and where you scored, and your next campaign will be better off for it.

Of course, it’s a little dicey trying to track your successes in traditional advertising — television, radio, print and outdoor.  Other than using different phone numbers for each media vehicle, or sending people to different microsites (use Wordpress and save some money), the only sure-fired way to measure traditional success is to select one medium and promote it full tilt.  Unfortunately, that’s not the right way to purchase media – because the mix is essential to the media plan’s integrity.

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Another year is quickly coming to a close, which means it’s a perfect time to peek around the corner to see what the new year has in store for web graphic design.

1.  Typography is king. There is a trend towards jumbo headlines, mixing contrasting fonts, and finding other ways to break up the monotony of type-heavy websites and add beauty to pages so that images are no longer mandatory. http://www.leemunroe.com/typography-inspired-websites/

2.   Control freaks, unite. Speaking of type, Kernest offers free and commercial fonts to embed into your website to move beyond the plain and well-worn handful of safe fonts that designers have grown to loathe.  The only downside to Kernest is a brief change in font rendering when the page is first opened.  There’s always a catch, but this is big news and a leap in the right direction. http://www.kernest.com/

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It’s no secret that, in the United States, women make the majority of brand purchases — including big-ticket, high-tech purchases — with the Internet being their primary research tool. But recent research indicates that specifically focusing on moms, and those who use social media, is producing gains for a wide variety of industries, from health care and automobiles to stereo equipment, produce and retail.

Mothers’ use of social media is skyrocketing. Recent market research indicates a 462 percent surge in usage among mothers since 2006. Of those women, 44 percent use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products. A primary channel for those product recommendations tends to be online communities that offer parenting or health advice.

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Does your business correspondence get typed on a plain white sheet of paper and mailed in a plain white envelope? Of course not. Anything sent from your office goes out on letterhead identifying you and your company. It usually has a logo, mailing address, and phone number, so the recipient of the letter knows exactly who you are, whom you represent, and how to contact you.

Fast forward to today’s technology —  most of your business correspondence is probably done via email. Question is — are you and your company as well represented in that email signature as you are on official company letterhead? More importantly — are you providing them with ways to interact with you beyond email? If not, you should be.

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TMA+Peritus is building a series of consumer panels — what we call our PopVox Panels — to help us identify key trends in specific category segments. The people selected to become part of PopVox will be invited to provide their insights in activities like short surveys, quick telephone interviews, Web-based focus groups, and brief responses to email exercises.

PopVox Panel members will be required to provide us with their contact information — email address, telephone number and mailing address — to enable us to interact with them in a variety of ways. This information will not be shared with any other organization or entity and will remain confidential to the TMA+Peritus PopVox manager.

Panel members who complete assigned activities will be invited to choose from a variety of online gift cards as a thank you for their input. You can opt out of Panel activity at any time.

We are currently recruiting two groups of members:

1) Consumers aged 18 – 35 who use financial services
2) Consumers of all ages who are members of a credit union

If you are interested in becoming a PopVox Panel member, please email abrown@tmaperitus.com or call toll free (877) 296-7114 by TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10 .

If you call, please tell the operator that you’re calling about becoming a PopVox member.

We hope you’ll join us!

Alvin Lustig.  Right.  Wait – Alvin who?  While his name may not come up in most water cooler conversations, Alvin Lustig was one of the greatest designers who ever lived.  He studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and like Wright, he was also a master of many design trades — graphic design, architectural design, type design, furniture design, interior design, industrial design, and textile design. And he did them all very well.

Lustig believed that good design in all facets of life could lead to better living. He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking book jacket designs of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as his work for the magazines Look and Fortune. His print design was heavily influenced by avant-garde abstract painting, and his designs helped to move the field away from the tame home-and-hearth postwar era and into the modern jet age.

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It’s your blog. About your business. So you might be tempted to think of it as your own little kingdom where you get to project your expertise, talk up your business, and bask in the positive feedback, free from dissent by what former Vice President Spiro Agnew called “the nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Think again. A blog by its very nature is about opinion, and sooner or later a few of those opinions are going to be unflattering, unfair, insulting or worse. It’s natural to want to control every aspect of your company’s message and image. But in the blogosphere everyone gets to weigh in. Even stupid people. That’s what makes a blog so dynamic.
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