It’s well-known that websites appearing in the top search engine results get noticed. According to the latest research, more than 75 percent of people won’t scroll past the first page in a Google search. Search engine optimization (SEO), the process of optimizing your website to gain traffic from the search engine results page, remains one of the most important activities to ensuring your website’s performance.How can you optimize your website for search engine performance? Whi...

Facebook is making changes – again – but this time it’s a Business Page update. If your company has a presence on Facebook, you should pay attention to these upcoming changes, so you don’t lose information on your site. The changes will occur starting August 1 in your Page information section.The sections that Facebook will remove from the Business Page descriptions include Mission, Company Overview, Biography, Affiliation and Personal Interests. Facebook will prompt that...

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a somewhat time-consuming regulation that we all should be complying with by now. In short, it’s a European Union (EU) law on data protection and privacy for all citizens of the EU and the European Economic Area. By this time, you should have taken steps to ensure that your marketing is not going to EU individuals without the proper permission. After all, the law did go into effect in May 2018. With the constraints this can place on everyda...

Whether you work for a non-profit, volunteer with one, or sit on a board of directors, obtaining funding is always key to organizational success. Although there are numerous community, corporate, government and even educational grants available, many people pass on the opportunity because they don’t know how to navigate the grant process.  Following is a primer to help your organization get organized and start taking advantage of the grand funding out there.Finding opportunitiesThe fi...

You’ve been tasked with making a presentation on some important business figures – financial updates, results of marketing efforts or other key data – and rather than create text-heavy slides with lists of numbers, you know that putting the data into a graphical format will be more interesting and visually appealing to your audience. When used properly, charts and graphs are a very effective way to communicate data. However, simple missteps in design can muddle your data, weake...

I recently attended a webinar covering the subject of asking powerful sales questions. The topic is timely, as current business thinking teaches that every team member is in sales, no matter the person’s job description or title. An example I often hear comes from managers at construction firms who explain their customers keep coming back because of a certain project manager or foreman they can trust to get the job done. Every person who comes into contact with customers represents the bes...

I recently attended a seminar on knowledge management. The session started with the trainer asking us to identify what we know that others may not within our organization.  Interesting question. She went on to share that the old paradigm was to hoard power. Those who had knowledge, had the power. But, that mindset has shifted. In today’s society, the way to gain power (or customers, members, market share, followers and loyalty/trust) is to share knowledge. So what is knowledge ma...

I recently sat in on a webinar that was advertised as a crash course in how to calculate the business value of an online community. Although the webinar ended up being an over-the-top pitch for a software company, I did glean the following stats from my time staring at my computer screen: 92% of community leaders believe their online communities have an impact on their business. 35% lack meaningful metrics to report success in business terms. 85% of companies struggle to make decisions because t...

A positive and welcoming culture can mean the difference between an organization that is engaged and growing and one that is stagnant and not succeeding. In a Columbia Business School survey, nearly 2,000 CEOs and CFOs revealed that culture affects profitability, decision-making and even ethical behavior by employees. It's clear that the culture, or values, of your organization can have either a positive or negative impact. But how can you increase the positivity of your culture? Here are so...

Instagram was once considered the place where kids shared funny photos and to others it was thought of as that illusive “other” social media. The image-based social network can be intimidating to those who are used to text-heavy Facebook, but it is a mainstream network with many advantages. From a marketing standpoint, Instagram offers organizations a unique opportunity to diversify the ways in which prospective and current customers or members view a product. The popularity and adva...