Dragonfly Media Curacao

Last week Lisa Barone attended Ad:Tech San Francisco and blogged about it on bruceclay.com. I think their blog is a must-read for anyone who’s serious about search, but that’s another story. One of the sessions she blogs about is the one entitled “The Next Big Thing: Is Advertising Really The Solution?“. The main focus of this session was community and user engagement and how companies should deal with these concepts. There are two reasons why I think this is particularly relevant for us.

Number one is the fact that here on Curacao most of the companies (99.9%) are afraid to let the consumer talk freely and it is a small personal crusade of ours to get CEO’s to change their mind about this. At the Ad:Tech session Tip Rose of Resource Interactive gave the perfect reason why you should empower consumers to talk freely about your product: “Consumers are already talking about you whether you’re facilitating the conversation or not. You may as well join the conversation that’s already in progress and take in the insights”.

The second reason is one of blatant self-promotion (and promotion of a fellow blogger). This week an article of ours will be featured on a blog about small market marketing. This article is about how the internet has put small market marketing in the world market through the use of social media.

Anyway; read Lisa Barone’s post. It’s good.

To keep ourselves informed of everything that is new in internet marketing, we read a lot at Dragonfly Media. Every morning we browse the web for new information and we test that information, we do not just accept that it is true.
It amazes me each day how much information is shared through the World Wide Web.

This morning I noticed an article that takes us back to the basics: Why Is Internet Marketing Important?

Internet marketing is a business imperative because the Internet is an irrevocable and unstoppable trend.
Even if you have a traditional “brick-and-mortar” business, you’ll lose valuable customers without an online presence. People routinely search for goods and services with their computers instead of picking up the yellow pages. If your business isn’t on the Web, customers will likely choose another company to do business with. (more…)

Every now and then we run into an article that confirms just that what we tell our clients.
Not because we want to sell something but we strongly believe in keeping our clients informed of what is new and what works in internet marketing. Whether your company sells cars, windows and doors, or roomnights, your clients want to feel comfortable:
The Importance of Credentials on the Web By Mike Clowe, Research Analyst, Marketing Experiments

How important is it to provide credentials on the Web? The Web is an essentially anonymous media. Businesses claim to be whatever they want, many times without any proof at all. (more…)

Almost all SEO projects we do start with onsite SEO. The reason for this being that a website should be set up correctly before you should start with offsite SEO (who wants to link to or recommend a website that’s no good?). So, what are the basic first steps of onsite SEO? (more…)

When you’re writing copy for a website you can basically write for three different ‘groups’. These groups are your prospective clients, the search engines and yourself. If you want to sell a product or a service you should, of course, write for people that might be willing to buy from you. But then again, if you want to rank high in Google and the likes shouldn’t you write for them? And you probably also want to put something of yourself, something specifically you, in your copy.

So, who do you write for and who should you write for? (more…)

When you’re working on (the popularity of) a website there are a few moments that make you feel that all the work is worth it. One of these moments is when Google assigns the first pagerank to your website. It’s like seeing your kid walk for the first time!
If you don’t know what google pagerank is: follow this link to Google.

This weekend I was checking out some of the stuff we did for our clients and I also went by ekvandoorne.com. We have been doing off-site search engine optimization and analysis for them for some time and we are preparing on-site search engine optimization now as well. So, I thought I’d check out the current status of the website.

I always keep an eye on my search status plugin in FireFox so I glanced at it this time as well and got me a very pleasant surprise. Ekvandoorne.com jumped from an unassigned pagerank of 0 to the very decent pagerank of 4! This is the first we saw such a jump on one of the websites we maintain or made so you can imagine we’re very proud right now.

No matter how you engage with customers–-face-to-face or online, through the mail or over the phone–your brand is an essential element that differentiates your company from your competitors. A well-defined brand tells customers and prospects who you are and what you stand for.

Elements of a brand include many things. At the most basic level, brand is represented through the company logo, the colors used and tag lines employed, if any, that evoke the company’s essence. Consistent use of these elements helps build a strong brand image. For example, the “swoosh” check-mark style of the Nike mark with the accompanying tag line “Just Do It” is one of the best-recognized brands worldwide. (more…)

One of the main concepts of web 2.0 is the fact that the internet is/can be a platform just like windows/mac/linux are. Many sites/companies are very much in line with this concept when they create the tools you can find, and use, on-line. Just to clarify here: I’m not talking about the fact that you can (illegally) download software, music and all sorts of other stuff. I’m talking about tools like Google’s webmaster tools, personalised homepages and the likes.

To make our work a lot easier we use a lot of these tools to a) help our clients with the SEO of their website and b) to help us work more efficient. In this post I would like to share some of the tools we’re using and why we’re using them. (more…)

According to a new report from JupiterResearch many search marketers are satisfied with the return on investment from Search Engine Marketing (SEM). As a result they are willing to spend more on SEM this year.

Apparently 65 percent of advertisers expect to spend more this year, 7 percent want to spend less and the rest does not plan to do either. The two major concerns for marketers appear to be rising prices for keywords and measuring the offline impact of Search Engine Marketing.

For a more comprehensive article about this trend visit searchenginewatch or you can buy the report at JupiterResearch.

Our own expectation for Curacao is roughly the same as the conclusions in this US report. (more…)

Source: hotelmarketing.com

NEARLY every morning, over his second cup of coffee, Tom Brady, general manager at the Affinia Chicago, logs onto his computer and surfs over to TripAdvisor.com to see if there are any new postings about his hotel.

“It’s an obsession,” he said. If the review is positive he moves on. If it’s unfavorable — like the complaint posted in March from a guest who had received a $90 parking ticket because of a valet’s error — he’s on it immediately. In that case, he marched straight out to the valet to find out what had happened. After identifying the guest, he made sure that the company issued an apology and a reimbursement for the ticket.
“This is all over the world,” he said, describing his concern about any negative comment on TripAdvisor. “Everyone is looking at this. I’ve got to make sure it’s solved quickly, so God forbid someone else doesn’t have the same problem.” (more…)