HTML5 has already come a long way since its relatively recent development, and now many marketers are looking toward its application in a number of different areas. The biggest perk for HTML5 is its use with mobile devices, as it provides a legitimate alternative to Flash. Since Apple decided not to include Flash in its iOS platform, having this alternative is extremely important.

Going along with this, another major benefit for HTML5 is its use in digital signage, whether on mobile or standard devices. Using HTML5, one can much more easily load real-time, dynamic content like weather updates, electronic menu boards, financial information, news headlines, up-to-the-second sports scores, and much more. While we already have technology that allows us to do these things, using HTML5 for digital signage allows it to be accomplished faster and more seamlessly than ever before.

The introduction of HTML5 also makes creating content for the web much easier. As a result, the existing talent pool for web content creation is going to see a significant surge. It will be much easier and cheaper to find someone with working knowledge of HTML5 content rather than someone who works solely on digital signage content. Plus, since there is an existing range of free, open-source JavaScript libraries on the web, it makes it easier for people using HTML5 to get the job done.

Another important benefit of HTML5 with digital signage that cannot be understated is how it allows you to use widgets. These are HTML applications that are embedded into web pages that perform certain tasks for your site. Examples of widgets include Facebook boxes, tag clouds, and Twitter follower boxes. There are nearly limitless widgets floating around on the web, and each performs its own unique and useful task. With HTML5, implementing these widgets becomes easier than ever before.

Perhaps most importantly, having a digital sign that is HTML5-compatible means that you can have all of the same content be displayed on web sites and signage. This synchronization will allow you to save a significant amount of money, as you won’t have to focus on re-writing content for different media.

Do you want to learn more about the benefits of HTML5 and digital signage for your business? We’re here to help. Contact InterKnecht today!

For many people, YouTube has a stigma of being a fun time waster and a means of procrastinating when one should be working, studying, or otherwise occupied. But now, many marketing firms are using the site’s vast popularity to their advantage by integrating it with their existing social media strategies.

Take some of these statistics from Social Technology Review into consideration, and then you’ll see exactly how much power YouTube can hold:

*Every minute there are 400 Tweets containing a YouTube link.
*YouTube is ranked as the #2 search engine on the Internet.
*There is over 150 years worth of video on YouTube, and that number is ever-increasing.
*YouTube gets over 2 billion page views per day.
*Every minute, 24 hours worth of video is uploaded to the site, shared with over 3 million people who connect YouTube with their social networks.

By taking these numbers into account, it’s clear that while many people view YouTube as a time waster, it’s anything but a waste of time for social media strategists.

So what are the best ways of integrating YouTube into your social media strategy?

Sharing YouTube videos is actually quite simple on Twitter and Facebook. On Facebook, you simply post the link to your timeline and the video is embedded onto your profile. On Twitter, a direct link will take the viewer right to the video.

However, sharing random videos can only get you so far. The best way to continue to build your brand is to create a unique YouTube channel for your business. Channels allow you to organize your own videos and create a consistent message. Once you have a channel, other users will be able to subscribe and be automatically updated every time you upload a new video, whether it’s through email or through YouTube notifications. Everything from the content of your videos to the layout of your Channel page allows you to build upon your brand’s image.

YouTube also has built-in tools that allow you to optimize your search rankings, using the tags and description features every time you upload a new video. If you use the proper keywords in your video, your search rankings will be significantly better than leaving the “tags” field blank. A feature called YouTube Suggest uses predictive text to better help you with this process.

If you’re looking for help with integrating YouTube use into your social media campaign, InterKnecht can get you on the right path. Contact us today, and our friendly marketing experts will get your business’s brand pushed into one of the highest-profile social media networks today!

A new social network called Pinterest has created quite a bit of buzz lately in the online community. Over the past several months, the amount of users on the site has quadrupled, going from around a million users to over four million by the beginning of 2012. This extremely quick rate of growth has people wondering whether or not Pinterest can be the next great social network.

The basic idea of Pinterest is that you share and organize images that you enjoy. They might be inspiring, interesting, funny, or something else altogether. These images, once placed on Pinterest, are called Pins, which the user can arrange on their “boards” in whatever manner they desire. All you have to do is drag and drop the image in the location you want. Generally, boards revolve around one particular topic.

Of course, the site goes deeper than simply being a place to discover and share cool pictures. Some people put together online cookbooks using their Pinterest board. It can also be used to create shopping lists, planners, art inspiration, do-it-yourself projects, and much more. There is even the potential that Pinterest could be used in the workplace, as boards are allowed to have more than one contributor, co-workers could collaborate on a project through Pinterest.

Given that Pinterest is a social network, there are other, more social aspects to the site. When you see Pins you like, you can “like” them, comment on them or re-pin them to one of your own boards. When you see boards that you find particularly interesting, you can follow them to receive their updates, or follow the Pinner’s entire series of boards. You do not have to request anyone’s permission to follow their profile or board.

Pins can also be shared on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter to help you expand your Pinterest viewership (and, of course, to give Pinterest some extra publicity). You can also view trends much in the same way you can on Twitter; the “Popular” button allows you to see which pins are trending at any given moment.

Pinterest is still a new service, so many social media experts are still figuring out the best way to use it for promotion. However, if this sounds like an interesting concept to you, head to Pinterest today and start mapping a strategy of your own!

Warren Sapp has been a recognizable face to sports fans for the better part of the past 15 years. As an All-Pro defensive tackle and Super Bowl champion for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in his heyday, Sapp quickly built up Hall of Fame credentials to go along with a tough, intimidating on-field persona. He is one of only eight defensive players in NFL history to make the Pro Bowl, be named the AP Defensive Player of the Year and win a Super Bowl title.

However, it’s a long way from gridiron sensation to social media star. Some of the least-known players on the football field are its most-followed on Twitter, while some of the best known avoid it altogether. While his football fame certainly helped with gaining him Twitter notoriety, it takes some savvy self-marketing for an athlete at a position that receives very little media hype to gain three quarters of a million followers.

So how did he do it? The answer, as is so often the case in social media marketing, is that he extended himself past his comfort zone to reach as wide of an audience as possible.

Sapp’s biggest step toward increasing his mass appeal came in 2008, when he appeared on ABC’s hit television show Dancing With the Stars. He came in second place in the competition, and won over a lot of viewers with his boisterous personality and charm. When the show was over, Sapp had endeared himself to fans of football and television alike.

From there, all Sapp had to do was become proficient with Twitter and the followers would flock to him. This year, Sapp will accent the Gravity Summit Excellence in Social Media Award in the category of “sports,” showing exactly how much influence his Twitter account has.

Business owners everywhere can take a lesson from Sapp. It’s easy to become trapped in the same old marketing habits, particularly with social media. You need to break outside of your typical spheres in order to find new audiences. Once you’ve successfully broadened the scope of your brand, your social media campaign will achieve much greater results.

Of course, this is easier said than done, and that’s where we come in. At InterKnecht, we have marketing professionals ready to overhaul your social media campaigns so that you can achieve Warren Sapp-like results. Contact us today, because you’re just one call away from becoming a social network success.

One of the most important parts of effective Search Engine Optimization practices is choosing the appropriate keywords for your copy. The words you select, as well as how often you use them and where you use them, are quite important in producing the best search results.

However, what some don’t realize is that you can go overboard with the use of your SEO keywords. This practice of trying to force too many keywords into your copy, which is known as “keyword stuffing,” can have exactly the opposite effect that you desire when producing SEO material. All that keyword stuffing accomplishes are grammar or syntax problems in your sentences, which turns the reader off to your copy. Obviously, this is to be avoided.

It’s understandable why so many people would think keyword stuffing is actually helpful. To the inexperienced SEO writer, it would seem logical that more keyword appearances results in better web hits. However, search engines don’t use keyword density as a factor in determining what the search rankings are. All you get out of keyword stuffing is poorly written copy that comes off as robotic and spam-filled, with no measurable return in your search engine rankings.

The key is to find the proper balance when you’re trying to figure out how often to use your keywords. Your content should still be appealing to readers, and the keywords should be more subliminal to human readers. However, these keywords should also still be effective for SEO purposes.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for using keywords:

• Be careful in choosing your topics. You want your topics to closely reflect your keywords, so that it makes more sense to repeat your keywords in the content.
• Bust out your thesaurus. If you feel as though you’re repeating the same word of phrase too many times, don’t be afraid to use synonyms. Search engines will still pick up on related words.
• Subheadings are important. Using bolded subheadings helps SEO and makes it easier to include clunky phrases.

Focusing on the quality of your product is important for obvious reasons. However, there’s no point in having a high-quality product if nobody knows about it. For this reason, it’s extremely important to hone your content marketing skills so that when your business puts out a new product or service, it will make an instant splash.

Here are some steps that you can take to improve your content marketing and create awareness of and excitement about all of your latest offerings:

• Set your goals. This should be the first step to any marketing campaign. What are you trying to accomplish? What steps can you take to accomplish it? Before you even determine the content of your ads, you need to take these thoughts into consideration.
• Find your target audience. Research everything you can about your primary demographic. Ask them questions, find out what they like, etc. Any information you can gather will help.
• Create your message. What one key point do you want people who view your advertisements to remember? This point should set you apart from all of your competitors so that you stick in the minds of the reader/viewer.
• Choose your advertising form. Do you want a short term or long term campaign? Do you want a blog post, article, television ad, graphic or something completely different? Perhaps your entire campaign will be conducted via social media. Your advertising form will probably depend on your target demographic.
• Create your content. You may have to make several drafts of your content to be sure it will be as effective as possible. Make sure it focuses on your key message and differentiates you from the competition.
• Communicate. Communication is particularly important with your target demographic. Connect with them via social networks, conduct surveys and more to find out how effective your marketing is and what you can do differently to garner more interest. Communication will help you with measuring the effectiveness of your campaign and improving your future results.
• Don’t settle. You should always be open to change. If you notice that something isn’t working, fix it. If you notice that a plan that was once effective is starting to taper off, make the necessary adjustments.

Over the past couple years, the smart phone platform war has really heated up. There are more producers focusing on mobile apps than ever before, and this has created some heavy competition. It has gotten to the point now where businesses that don’t take advantage of cross-platform mobile apps are falling behind the technological curve.

For that reason and many others, it’s time for your business to take a step in the right direction. Even if you already have created mobile apps, you can benefit from making them accessible over more than one platform. Here are some of the benefits of developing cross-platform mobile apps for your business:

• Access. Even if one operating system has a hold on a vast majority of the market, you still can see some improvement by catering to the minority groups as well. Cross-platform development allows you to develop on additional platforms for almost no additional cost, so the benefits far outweigh the costs.
• Time. Because you want your apps to be developed and ready for use as quickly as possible, you can save a lot of time by writing code on a cross-platform framework rather than having to code for each individual operating system. All you have to do is write once and have the framework generate the code for the other platforms. It’s remarkably simple.
• Synced data. Every smart phone is only as good as its ability to process multiple different forms of data. Synced data gives you the ability to create mobile apps that can be linked to backend applications. This increases the performance of any app or mobile device that is synced.
• You’re covering your bases. You might begin developing an app for one operating system, but it turns out that the demographics of a different system wind up being a better fit for the app. You’d never find this out without making it cross-platform.
• Integration. Creating cross-platform apps allows you access to native device functions on every major platform. This will aid you in making your apps much more user-friendly.

Adobe Flash has been one of the most commonly used technologies on the web for years, but no longer. Say goodbye to Flash, and hello to HTML5, a new technology that will become the driving force behind many upcoming mobile video efforts.

Of course, there are still those who believe that Flash will continue to be used, and it will. Adobe says they are merely putting a temporary halt on development of mobile browser Flash in favor of HTML5, but reading between the lines, it’s easy to see that Flash is becoming a thing of the past.

One of the biggest reasons for this is the fact that Adobe doesn’t believe Flash will ever make it to iPads or iPhones. Because Apple has such a major hold on the tablet and mobile market, this has a major effect on how Adobe will choose to do business. If the company cannot offer Flash to one of the world’s leading mobile developers, then it needs to do something better.

HTML5 is a language that presents content for the web, and is still currently under development. When it’s complete, it will offer many new syntactical features that Flash and previous versions of HTML do not have, including <video>, <audio>, <header> and <canvas>. These features will make it much easier to put multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to use installed plug-ins and APIs, like Flash. Obviously this makes it extremely convenient, so it’s not overly surprising that it would push those plug-ins out the door upon its entrance to the web market.

However, while Adobe is likely to cease pushing Flash in itself, that doesn’t mean its saying goodbye to the elements that made it such a success. Adobe wants to bring all of what made Flash great and implement it into HTML5. Adobe programmers will still be able to use all of their software development tools, it’s just that now the end result is going to be HTML5 video, not Flash.

Web developers are eagerly anticipating the release of HTML5. If you’re still unaware of how it will benefit you and your business’s website, there’s still plenty of time to catch up. Contact InterKnecht, and we’ll fill you in with all the details.

There are estimates out there that say that by the end of 2012, there will be more than a billion people using Facebook. A billion people! That’s an absolutely staggering figure, and means that one out of every seven people on earth is involved with the web’s biggest social network.

Of course, as more people come into the network, more social media trends will emerge. It will be important for your business to keep up to date with these trends so that you can adjust any social media marketing plans accordingly.

Here are some of the Facebook/social media trends that may emerge in 2012:

• Social TV Convergence. People are becoming more engrossed in media than ever before, to the point where many people are now exposed to two screens at the same time when consuming media (TV and laptop, laptop and smartphone, etc). In the next year, expect to see the lines blurred between the Internet and television. For example, you might see more opportunities to interact with television shows by use of the Internet.
• The takeoff of social commerce. There has been a lot of talk about how brands are starting to make their presence felt on social networks, but 2012 will be the year where it basically becomes standard. You can expect to fall behind quickly if you don’t engage your audience through social media.
• Search improvements. Right now, one of the week spots of social media is the search features on the networks. The search feature on Facebook is clunky and ineffective, and we’ll likely see a major revamp of it within the next year.
• More branded content. Many businesses have seen great success in marketing across many different forms of media. This is going to become standard with the help of Facebook. Expect to see more video, audio, graphics, blogs, games and more come to the forefront to help push the identity of brands.
• Increased power. Simply put, Facebook is only just getting started. It will become increasingly hard to avoid its sway as it creeps into smart phones and becomes a force that touches your daily life in many different ways. No longer will it be considered a website that you log in to—rather, it’ll be an application that logs into you.

While going to the store is still the primary shopping method for most Americans, the online shopping industry is quickly growing, especially around the holiday season. It’s easy to see why—you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home, you don’t have to deal with all of the holiday shopping crowds and you can find just as many great deals.

Obviously, you want your business to be able to take advantage of the online shopping boom. However, you can’t just expect that putting up great deals and changing your website to a holiday theme will earn you extra business. You need to be able to effectively advertise your online sales.

There are a few best practices that can help you to get the most out of your online sales this holiday season:

Boost schedules
Consumer spending trends always have an element of unpredictability, but you can base your schedule on what happened in the previous year’s holiday season. If you use revenue-per-click trends, you will be able to analyze when online shoppers are most likely to buy products. This allows you to develop a “boost schedule,” which helps you to determine exactly when and how much you need to increase your keywords and SEO to bring in those online shoppers. You’ll see higher traffic-to-customer conversion rates during these periods if you use this practice effectively.

Monitor you inventory closely
Times are tough in the economy, and many retailers have been forced to trim their inventories in an effort to save money. If you find your count of a certain item to be quickly shrinking, be sure to put a hold on any relevant keywords that might help online shoppers find that item. The last thing you want is to be out of stock when people try to order an item, as it leaves the customer frustrated and unlikely to purchase from you again. This means that you lose clicks and conversions, which not only affect you during the holiday shopping season, but also down the road.

Go mobile
A recent study by Google estimates that nearly half of all last-minute gift searches will be done online from mobile devices. Therefore, it’s extremely important to have a mobile facet to your online marketing strategy. Keep in mind that ad position is much more important in mobile marketing, as browsers are seeing fewer ads and search results at once than they would on a regular computer.

Time is running out for this holiday shopping season, but it’s not too late to increase your online advertising. InterKnecht can help you devise a strategy to give you increased conversion and sales rates this holiday season and beyond. Contact us today!