iPhone Controlled LED Suit -- with Arduino

uiproductions: iPhone Controlled LED Suit -- Part 1: "Since I just created this blog a few days ago, I will have to go back in time a few weeks to talk about starting this other project.  T..."

Being lazy this week! Enjoy this "How to Get Re-Tweeted" vimeo, SEO related!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - How to Get Re-Tweeted from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Corporate folks, converge your digital marketing efforts with analytic-friendly SEO now!

To Corporate Folks:

Your brand is your lifeline. Without it, your products and services are just fleshes and bones without soul. Search engines optimization is normally not seen as an effective digital marketing tactic, but having it done well will increase [tremendously] not only your organic web traffics, it can help build a strong digital presence of your brand. A committed SEO pursuit makes your website a great nexus for converging your marketing efforts across all digital channels.

Now search-engines are more aggressive than just taking in deliberately typed-in user search terms and calculating for their best perceived result links, they are used by businesses to push ads and customized search contents to your mobile phones. In other words, they 'find' you, and feed you with the best information as perceived by their algorithms.

We are in a digital marketing game that speaks 'analytic'. And in order to score high in the search-engines arena, in particular, your website or digital channels need to speak analytic too. Among all the SEO exercises your corporate should commit to achieving (which includes directories submission, links building, sitemap building and SEO-savvy web copywriting, et cetera), the holy grail of all is "the promotion of a healthy analytic search-market life cycle of your corporate website": There is no magic; it is the coupling of science and your marketing insights in serious action.

A great SEO consulting firm should be able to help you take care of all the tedious technical details of your SEO commitment, and at the same time knows the nitty-gritty of facilitating your corporate road to information mastery in terms of customer relationship management, brand management, and of course at the end, measuring your ROI the holistic way. That said, SEO by web analytics is the key to open the wide spectrum of digital market opportunities.

SME folks, make SEO your basic business function and grow your digital presence organically.

To SME Folks:

SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises) of different industries have unique innovation potential. They are generally higher in economy adaptability, and agile in developing and implementing new ideas; along with their simpler organizational structure, they are naturally more innovative within the organization and in the external market.

However, their disadvantages are that they financially and technically less resourceful, have weaker external technical networks, limited marketing resources, and lack of management skill. This is why SEO (search engine optimization) is one crucial marketing and digital branding channel SMEs should commit themselves to: It promotes the growth of your search-engine market organically and acts as an ROI-boost factor of your digital marketing efforts by facilitating the optimization the performance of other digital marketing channels.

We know with our guts that in this digital era, all serious business development exercises would need to achieve some sort of market information mastery – SMEs need to take care of both the short head and the long tail markets too. Doing SEO is more than just topping your website hyperlinks on the 1st SERP (search engine result page), it's about better market segmentation in the end.

Just as all crucial business operations, SEO is not a one time process simply because there are always people competing for the same search engine presence as you do. To manage your brand and services across this search engines spaces, you need an analytics-ROI approach of doing SEO.

Agency folks, time to build your SEO business fundamental.

To Agency Folks:

Now advertising agencies all have new tasks to accomplish in order to survive the economy down-turn. The fast-changing business communications paradigm, as empowered by different digital marketing (mobile for sure) and collaboration channels, gives us no choice but to consider building a new business fundamental to cope with marketing needs of your clients.

Among the various powerful digital marketing channels, a business's online or digital presence on a search engine is perceived as more objective as far as human bias is concerned. This is probably the reason why a well search-engine-optimized website can help grow its web traffics naturally, and tremendously. Such practices also help increase the 'Quality Score' of a website in the eyes of those paid-search advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Baidu etc.

Translate SEO-process into business metric, it is a crucial ROI boost-factor for most of the digital marketing channels of your clients (well, probably somewhat important to your agency business-nature too, isn't it?). This suggests the management and promotion of a SEO-centric digital strategy as needed by your clients. To further complicate it, this SEO-centric strategy entails the need of a web-analytics core within your clients' IT and communications infrastructure.

In fact, those who commit themselves to SEO usually care about more than their search-engine ranking but also website engagement, which in turn will help converting their search-engine leads into business opportunities. Again, also as a digital marketing convergence tool, it helps promoting lead conversions with other digital channels.

Being one of the agency folks, you know better than anyone else that you and your clients need to master such digital communications edge; it's time to either: 1) build your own SEO team, 2) transform the account services team to be SEO-literate, 3) hire a third party SEO consultant, or 4) start doing all three of these at the same time.

This is your first step. A big and important step!

Web Analysts Needed!

Finally get a look at the new war gamer tracking device prototype, pretty cool, but need refinement.

Now can get back to my SEO and web analytics works. Still heavily tagging along with Google technologies; difference is that I have moved from using MathLab to Mathematica for data analysis, loving it. Mathematica's Notebook facilitates my stylish report generation.

Wonder how many web analysts in Hong kong are using Mathematica.

Back to Google. My loyalty to it is really more than the 'technologies' it offers me, but the philosophy of the business behind the corporate. For instance, the Google web search takes content relevance so serious that once you really pay attention to your web copywriting and do honest and professional SEO from back to front, you website (or blog such as this) will really grow in popularity organically.

I agree with the motto of the upcoming website of MRM Worldwide stating "In an evolving digital landscape, useful is the new clever".

If you are a web analyst located in Hong Kong and find my blog by searching keywords such as "SEO consultant in Hong Kong", "Hong Kong SEO company", "SEM consultant in Hong Kong", "SEM company Hong Kong", "Web Analytics consultant in Hong Kong", "Web Analytics Company" or "Web Analyst in Hong Kong", drop me a message please, I have a few projects to outsource.

Wolfram Alpha is coming! I am in a jovial mood already.

Finally, the first product of its kind that goes public. For those who have been following the NKS (the New Kind of Science) since its released in 2002, I believe this must be something to you. I am already in a jovial mood and is ready to make use of this turn-of-the-era knowledge computing tool.

If you don't know what's really special about it, may be it's time to try understanding Mr. Stephen Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence. Of course, his hardcover NKS book should become one of your handy books on the bookshelf.

Time travel forward to May 2009 if I could :-) Can't wait!

http://www.wolframalpha.com

Committing SEO - Make A Transformational Move, No Better Time than Now!

Now your marketing budget goes even much spare, and the board throttles you with fear-driven performance requests. You know digital marketing will be the next call and more powerful weapon, but you and your team are still offline-creatures when it comes to the idea of digital marketing transformation.

So how to best shift your marketing mix to these more cost efficient channels, namely search and mobile channels, here's some data and findings you might want to know first before following your instinctive priori:

• Study by Forrester earlier this year find that 72 percent of interactive marketers would like to maintain or increase their digital marketing budgets; it was a survey done with 300 interactive marketers at companies with 200+ employees.
• Google spokespersons have been suggesting that they’ll weather the economy storm well. They believe (so does Microsoft & Yahoo) that the nature of this digital ad auction system, with the myriad of granular businesses bidding on millions of keywords in an ROI-measured business framework, are relatively immune to this gloomy economy outlook. Certainly, this is a biased view from the big market players, and you might not share the same perspective. If so, do you own homework to discover this marketing paradigm shift yourself.
• Mobile Internet devices (MID) including Internet-enabled mobile phones, WiFi-enabled laptops and of course netbooks are all important touch points for marketers to deliver ad messages. Just look around, you don't need data from research groups to realize this.

Whether you are demanded to deliver high acquisition performance with your marketing maneuver, or is supported by top management to tactically implement smart P.I.E marketing strategy in hope of achieving great behavioral targeting in this highly fragmented marketplace, the most important thing you need to do for your business is 'to analyze', or build an efficient digital system to analyze. The trio here: SEO, SEM and Web Analytics.

Are you getting it?

Yes, you need to put great effort exercising SEO to capture both the less random markets as well as the highly randomized ones. That is, you need a powerful web analytics system and make use of digital marketing tool such as SEM platforms, and social networking technologies. Of course, ideally speaking, you shall aim for total information mastery by integrating your web front with the sales end. All these assume that you also dare to suggest to the top management the reshaping of your business development core, alongside any new market realization.

And right, now you also remember there are all these CRM systems such as Salesforce, Oracle, FrontRange and Sage. We will come to it in another blog.

And my advise here: Build the structure first, and fight through for growth and market reaches second. With the current economy, there is no other time you can make yourself more dumb by naively thinking that you can do the same old to secure or create any kind of marketing results. Move on and be transformational!

SEO Consultants in Hong Kong

Looking for SEO consultant in Hong Kong? Clooth Digital Marketing provides you with professional SEO services, web analytics consulting and help make your web copy search-friendly.

Below are a few keyword phrases I would like to optimize for with this simple blog article:

• Search Expert (experts) in Hong Kong
  
• Search Specialist (specialists) in Hong Kong
  
• SEO company
• Hong Kong SEO consultant
• Hong Kong SEO experts or expert
  
• SEM company and consultant
• Web Analytics Worldwide
• Web Analytics Company
• Web Analyst in Hong Kong
• Search Marketing Worldwide
• Search Marketing Hong Kong
• Digital Marketing in Hong Kong

SEO & Google Analytics - More Insights

Google Search Friendliness - by Maile Ohye

See what laptop Maile is using?

This is a great sharing on SEO, by Google Search Friendly Development team. So now, you want to hire a search specialist in Hong Kong, or to consult a web analytics specialist? You've got to the right place here. Give us a call or email us at clooth@gmail.com.

Preview: Is Search Engine Marketing Worth doing?

Is search engine marketing worth doing? Or more specifically, is paid-search campaign such as Google AdWords campaign a waste of money? Can a good search engine optimization exercised on one's website replace the need for paid-search campaign?

Experts out there have opinions running in striking parallels. Clients and newcomers are bewildered!

Next blog will address these issues. But before that, I would like to use the space here to do a SEO exercise for my own blog... See if you know why I do so as below.

[BUZZ Profile]

Walter Cheng, a Hong Kong citizen, holds the unusual distinction of being an authorized Google Adwords individual. The coffee loving genius behind Buzz's many online and search marketing campaigns, Walter gets as excited about search engine optimization as he does about his adorable baby, a sweet little MacBook Air. "Elegance" is his keyword. Just as he believes that the business elegance of digital marketing is best brewed from fine web analytics beans. Before pursuing his own digital marketing business endeavor, he was the Digital Director of Buzz Communications, an award-winning 4As-calibre integrated advertising agency in Hong Kong.

[Web Analytics Association Profile]

Being a member of Web Analytics Association since 2006, Walter is a propeller of Google Analytics, who lives in Hong Kong. A self-trained web analytics specialist, Walter is good at both quantitative and qualitative analysis owing both to his Mathematics academic background (from University of Waterloo) and his disciplinary skill-set on interactive multimedia design gained during the past 10 years. Understanding the limitation of statistics and also being very discreet about designing sharp analytic perspectives, Mr. Cheng appreciates and always bear in mind the great sharing of such powerful scientific proposition as discussed in the book "A New Kind of Science" written by Stephen Wolfram. Walter believes that a great web analytics system will help his clients to do effective online (offline or thru-the-line also) market segmentation. And with a tight integration with powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as Salesforce.com SaaS solution, marketing-critical ROI formulation for business optimization strategy become feasible.

[SEO & SEM - An Authentic Qualified Google Advertising Professional Profile]

When it comes to discussing about search engine optimization and search-engine marketing, Walter Cheng sees things from the lens of our entire cultural landscape of SEARCH. No wonder he is an hard-core propeller of Google's technology. If you really want to have your website optimized for the search-engine world, give him a shout at walter.cheng@clooth.hk

Being Google-Savvy, Or Not?

Google AdWords is, by far, the most well-featured and user-friendly SEM platform. Many industry competitors are following its business model yet still being lagger (as of Nov 2007). Google Analytics is an amazing web analytics tool which can compare to other well-established enterprise solutions; and it is free! Of course, there is this Google's newly graduated mobile platform, called Android. With this free mobile platform (a software stack), the mobile industry is going to be much more interesting than ever before. Indeed, I would like to dedicate a new blog to talk about Google Android at http://mobile-friendly.blogspot.com!

But this blog is about being Google-savvy (or not) and search engine-friendliness!

I will say YES if you were to become a search-engine expert, in particular, simply because Google is relatively much liberal to the users and developers of its search-related technologies (and more). Even more thrilling is that these technologies are elegantly designed or packaged. They are not cheesy-technologies.

In its simplest practice for instance, when attempting to make your website listed on the first search result page (SRP), Google suggests you to make your website more keyword- and content-relevant besides offering you free tool such as Google Sitemap. And while you are making use of this tool, you will further acquire a lot of other useful search engine optimization (SEO) knowledge such as integrating Google Analytics codes into your web pages and applying "robots" file to safe-guard those web server files from search-engines reach.

A case to share in here! It was in March of 2007 when I was doing a website for Buzz Communications Limited, an integrated award-winning advertising agency based in Hong Kong. The website is Flash-based, and as many of you might have known, a Flash-based website is not SEO-friendly. No matter how rich and relevant the web contents are, they all suddenly got sucked into the unsearchable void. Sounds disastrous when you realize how useful are search engines in marketing nowadays.

There is a good work-around trick, however. By tweaking the source codes of the web pages to work with the renowned SWFObject snippet, and at the same time writing relevant HTML-based contents for the search engines to crawl along, it makes the website much SEO-compliant. I then submit the website to Google Sitemap. Of course, I have also submitted the website to other search engines such as Yahoo Search soon after! But then again, the Google mechanism is much transparent to the users among other competitors. This means you can learn faster about SEO the Google way.

And what about doing web analytics to see how your website is helping your business? As mentioned above, I was lucky to realize that Google Analytics is available to the public for free by then. I gave it a try right away, and after a month of drilling into its features I am loving it till now. There is a major upgrade to the system in May 2007 and it is supposedly to be more user-friendly. I would like to share with you my personal comments on this web analytic platform in another blog later on.

Knowing that Google Analytics will allow only a record of 5 million "Pageviews" (quite a lot already for those companies which do focus on online marketing) without linking it with an AdWords account, this proactive Hong Kong advertising agency Buzz Communications Limited thus opened an active AdWords account and linked it to their Google Analytics platform. We then marched out this SEO, SEM and web analytics maneuver together.

After a mere 4-month of research and experiment and a 2-month of intensive business preparation, we have successfully taken major accounts away from some 4As firms. These are certainly thrilling experience. There are however many unseen business issues when running a full-fledged SEO, SEM and web analytics business; and without a good plan to manage these issues, it will end up exhausting your company resources before getting a reasonable business return. Again, I will try to share this experience with you all in the coming blogs.

With Google's technologies as the starter kit of my SEO, SEM and web analytics pursuit, it becomes much easy for me to tame all other platforms as available in the markets including Yahoo's Search and MSN's Live Search.

Clooth Search Consulting

Being Search Engine Friendly - For Better Customer Relationship Management

Corporations which have been doing serious online marketing exercises for a few years will understand by heart that doing good online customer relationship management (CRM) is more than just acquiring or building a CRM system.

Given the search market has become another serious market segment a company has to master with in order to convert the search-individuals into customer, suddenly all business IT functions have to be search engine-friendly. At the core of the core, it is about information competency; and search marketing information has to be integrated with one's corporate CRM system.

How then? Search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), web analytics, ad campaign management system (APM) and enterprise-level CRM system are the keys, some experts said.

But how to do it well? Back to square one. Marketing veterans know that it is more that the sum of these campaign and customer relationship management IT platforms; the less experienced marketers however might already be distracted from the main question by these search engine-related IT buzzwords.

As a web analytics and search marketing consultant, I always keep asking myself 2 questions. First, what are the business metrics? Second, are they up-to-date enough to reflect the search market activities?

Making use of these 2 simple questions as the center pillars of your business and marketing strategy planning, you might naturally ask yourself at one point that if all your marketing efforts can be translated into such metrics. If not, why?

Different businesses have different set of metrics given their different corporate missions, visions and values. Their space-times of ROI are different. Sometimes it is a matter of tweaking one's analytic perspective, and thus a restructuring of business activities as well as redesigning of marketing campaigns. But other times, it is a rebuilding of one's business and marketing system from ground up.

To give a perspective to my 2 questions: Better ROI formulation from the marketing perspective cannot be achieved without an aim for better "behavioral targeting". It's both the starting and end point of CRM -- it's the ultimate. Google, Yahoo, MSN are the big international names while Baidu and Sohu are no doubt for the China businesses fanatics. Keep close eyes on them and see how your customers spend their lives on these search worlds.

I will share with you some noteworthy cases later on. Stay tuned!

Clooth Digital Marketing