Strategic Internet Marketing for Small Businesses
The Internet is obviously, a vital part of almost all business. So why aren’t more people, especially in smaller businesses, getting more out of it? We’ll ask a few questions over the next week to find out. For today the question is simple:
What is your biggest road block to getting better results from your company?
How many unread emails do you have in your in-box and what was your reason for ignoring them? Has your mother been emailing about how you don’t call enough? Are you ignoring online bills? Are you being solicited by men who need you to wire them $100,000 because they have been unjustly exiled from their home country?
Many recipients either unsubscribe or simply stop reading emails from online marketers. Year-after-year, in-box clutter has been the number one reason people resist emails, but this year, things have been turned on their head. A 2008 study from Marketingsherpa’s email summit in Miami has determined that in-box clutter is not the biggest problem – the problem is relevance.
Internet Explorer, long the bane of Web site developers everywhere, is being given the old heave-ho by many users.
In my weekly look at browser statistics (thank you, StatCounter), I was pleased to see that the combination of IE 8 and Firefox’s growth has finally taken over Internet Explorer 7′s dominance. As of today, June 15, 2009, at 11:20 a.m. EST, Firefox 3.0 has 32.09% of the browser market, with IE 7, for the first time ever, dipping below Firefox ever so slightly and coming in at 32.05%. These numbers are for the North American marketplace.
UPDATE: I was wrong. Well, only partially. At the time I wrote this post Firefox 3.0 hadn’t surpassed IE7. But that’s because it was still morning. However, it is worth noting that Firefox is VERY close. See the graph after the jump to see what the day of deliverance will look like.
Sorry for the false excitement!
Well, it’s no secret to those who know me that I am not a fan of most of Microsoft’s products (though some cool things are happening with the XBOX 360 if this is its future). But this week Microsoft launched Bing, a new search engine aimed at finally procuring a serious portion of the search-engine market.
I’ve played around with it a bit, watching its video tutorials (probably the weakest part of the launch, actually), and searching, you know, for things. I have to admit, it’s pretty cool. I’ll write more after more testing, and figuring out how it’s going to shake up the online marketing world. But in the meantime, here’s something that can’t be ignored: Bing has overtaken Yahoo! and holds more of the market than MSN and Windows Live did, combined. Pretty impressive.
Have you tried it? What do you think?
We first heard about Wolfram Alpha – a new “computational knowledge engine” – in an article on CNN.com about a new era of Internet search that we may be entering. The article lists sites like Twine and hakia – among others with unique qualities – which try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. But Wolfram Alpha piqued our interest for two reasons: 1) we haven’t come across a search engine as comprehensively computational as Wolfram Alpha, and 2) we have a love-hate relationship with long division. Math is our nemesis.
Not everyone is singing Wolfram Alpha’s praises, however. This article on PCWorld.com by 49.96-year-old writer David Coursey, posted earlier today – when Wolfram Alpha officially launched – suggests that the engine may not be the “cyber wonderbrain” some might have expected.
Still, it’s pretty remarkable. And unless you have a tiny clone of Albert Einstein tucked away in your pocket protector, it will likely be useful at one point or another.
As an example, we’re picked a random date in time – June 17, 1984. When we entered that date into Wolfram Alpha, this is what we got:
Continue reading ‘Wolfram Alpha: Like Meth to a Mathematician’
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