A public relations campaign can go a long way toward making a small company look big, agrees Ken Wisnefski, CEO of WebiMax. “The key strategy should be pitching people inside your company as expert sources to the media. Though, it can certainly take a bit of patience and a lot of reading to figure out which publications and authors are putting out stories that intersect with your industry.” Pitching your point of view appropriately is an important skill to develop, says Wisnefski. “Get your point out quickly, and follow it up with why it is compelling and worthy of reporting. Your pitch has to answer the question ‘So what?’ not just for the reporter, but also for the reporter’s audience, so avoid any jargon, and keep it simple.” Once the press mentions your company, leverage that every way you can think of, Wisnefski recommends, “including social media, your website, newsletters and on sales calls.” From identifying their desired brand, to critically evaluating their current brand image, to leveraging the use of a variety of communication and outreach tools to stay consistently and professional in front of their audiences, even the smallest businesses can stack up against the big brands.
At the end of February, Google announced that beginning April 21st, websites that were not ‘Mobile-Friendly’ would go down in Google’s page ranking system for mobile search and subsequently lose significant web traffic. For business execs that count on their website to drive sales, this can have a very real effect on the bottom line. Some have called it the mobile SEO-pocalypse, but what does it mean?
For the uninitiated, Google makes money from advertisers paying to have their ads appear on or near the front page of search results. But people don’t use Google to see those ads, they use it to see the organic search results; the ads are merely ancillary. An organic search result is one that is not sponsored.
Google uses algorithms that it has painstakingly developed over the past 20 years to find the best search results, that is, the search results that appear to directly answer a user’s search query or question, which has been the driving factor behind the popularity of content marketing. Google’s algorithms have changed the shape of the internet and the way we find information, but they are also the reason that 44% of online shopping begins on a search engine and Google controls 65% of the search engine market. Last year Google also commanded 40% of the global $40 billion mobile advertising market.
But lately Google has been feeling the heat from the mobile revolution, particularly from social media and specifically from Facebook. Facebook has spent the better part of the last 5 years trying to improve the user experience of its mobile app, and it has worked. In 2012, Facebook connected more people over its mobile app than its desktop site. Today Facebook has over 1.4 billion users, 900 thousand of them use the social network daily, and 745 thousand of those use Facebook’s mobile app. Facebook carried 18% of the $40 billion global mobile advertising budget last year.
From Google’s perspective, it knows it can’t compete with Facebook on social media with its Google Plus platform, so it is absolutely necessary that Google remains number one in search. It can only do that by keeping up with both the changes in innovation and the way people access the internet itself. Two of the most important facts here are 1. Mobile surpassed the traditional desktop computer as the way most people connect to the internet back in early 2014, and 2. The growth of mobile search has risen to 42% of all organic searches over the last 36 months.
So what is ‘Mobile Friendly’ exactly and what is Google doing? The easiest way to describe what ‘Mobile Friendly’ is, is to first describe what it is not. A non-mobile-friendly site was designed to be viewed on a desktop computer and presents mobile users with things like poorly formatted text and links, slow load times and horizontal scrolling. Not only are these sites difficult to navigate on a mobile device, but they are difficult to even read leaving many users saying, “I will just wait until I get home to do this.” Google’s solution to this problem is to, first, not show people those sites anymore if they are using a mobile device, and second, to find and show people the sites that are designed to be viewed on a mobile device and hence are easier to navigate and use on that device. Google does this by using its algorithms to analyze each site for the proper ‘Mobile Friendly’ criteria, and if a site is found not to contain those elements, then Google will lower its page rank. A site’s Google rank directly correlates to where that site will appear in Google’s search results. It becomes all the more relevant for businesses when you consider the fact that 75% of people never go passed the first page of a Google search according to Net Applications.
Google seemed to be hinting at the fact that this was coming for a little while. Last November, Google released a ‘Mobile Friendly’ tag that would simply let the user know that a site was not optimized to be viewed on their device; however this addition still left it up to the user to choose whether or not to click on a non-mobile-friendly link.
There was a more obvious indicator that Google was planning to use its ‘Mobile-Friendly’ criteria as a ranking signal to take away that choice. The same press release that announced the ‘Mobile-Friendly’ tags also included a link to a tool that could tell web masters and site owners whether or not their site was in fact ‘Mobile Friendly’. I suggest that any person or business possessing a web site take a close look at it.
So what do you do if your site is not Mobile-Friendly? If by using the tool provided by Google you have determined that your site is not ‘Mobile-Friendly’, then unfortunately you will probably need a complete site redesign in order to stay visible on Google and for all intents and purposes, on the web. Web developers generally have two options when redesigning sites to be mobile, and those are to use either responsive or adaptive design methods.
Responsive Web Design is driven by a set of rules based primarily upon screen size and percentages. For example, a web-developer would program rules to stipulate that one element will take up 30% of the screen, another one will take up 20% and yet another will take up 50%. Additional rules would say things like these things should line up from left to right, be a certain height, include certain styles and content etc… By laying a foundation based upon percentages, the website will be able to dynamically adjust to the screen size that it is being viewed on.
Adaptive Web Design is a bit more rigid in how it is presented. The principals of conforming to the screen size are similar; however instead of a website dynamically growing or shrinking to conform to a screen’s size like in Responsive, Adaptive uses predefined trigger points to detect the size of a screen and uses that data to display whole alternate website layouts.
Right now I would recommend responsive web design, because by making everything dynamic, you are taking into account devices and screen sizes that do not even exist yet. This becomes a significant factor in light of wearable technology innovations, e.g., Apple’s Watch, that are starting to peak consumer interest.
In summary, the popularity shift from desktop and laptop computers to mobile devices has happened extremely fast, and so not all businesses have had the opportunity to incorporate a mobile responsive design into their digital marketing plan or budget. Many companies are so severely under-invested in mobile that the gap between them and their Mobile-Friendly competitors is becoming insurmountable. In light of this upcoming change from Google, the importance of mobile responsive web design really cannot be overstated.
The program’s success underscored how YouTube has become a viable platform to promote messaging, because its videos are shared frequently and users can go back and view them at their convenience, said Ken Wisnefski, founder-CEO of WebiMax.
According to social media expert Ken Wisnefski, traffic to the news sites may decrease, but consumption of stories in the newsfeed will increase and of course, revenue from the deal and ads that run alongside the content are a possibility.
“The worry for publishers is that Facebook has the power to decide what shows up inside people’s feed and can simply tweak an algorithm and a site can get significantly less traffic,” Ken says. ”From Facebook’s angle, there’s no incentive to show stories that take people away from Facebook.”
“I think it’s feasible that this model could move to other social media networks,” Ken adds. “But between Facebook’s massive user base of 1.4 billion people, its knowledge about all those users, and its easy to use, easy to share format and the widest demographic, Facebook definitely has an advantage.”
The sudden rise in use of mobile technology and the innovation in that technology is opening up new opportunities for small businesses to increase their foot traffic and sales. Next time you’re in a public space look around and you will see a lot of people on their mobile devices, and chances are those folks are either checking their social media profiles, i.e., Facebook, or conducting a local search.
Luckily, Facebook has provided a way to for your company to reach out to those people that are near your business while at the same time targeting folks that are interested in the types of products that your business carries. This is something Facebook calls Local Awareness ads, and you can easily get started using them for as little as $5 a day.
By using Local Awareness ads, you can set the radius around your business that you want Facebook to push the ad out to. Facebook also has a lot of options to target the right people based on their interests, purchasing behavior, even job title. Facebook also just purchased the ecommerce search engine “The Find” last weekend, which should make Facebook’s already stellar targeting even more so.
“Everything Facebook is doing right now is significant because they are completely overshadowing Google as becoming the most vital aspect for advertisers and marketers,” said Ken Wisnefski, founder-CEO of WebiMax.
“By originating that influential content on Facebook itself, the social platform eliminates, by some degree, the need for its users to go searching anywhere else for content,” he explained. “I doubt that true influencers will ignore other valuable information sources, however many casual Facebook users may not find it as necessary to venture off into the internet as often if this is done well; it will be interesting to see what the effect of the latter will be.”
The move by Facebook, Wisnefski reasons, has a lot of potential here to change the shape of a lot of things, the news media, the way people find information, and ultimately, the internet.
“The reality is, if you look at a reputation or crisis management plan, you need to have it customized to meet your needs and you need to understand the depth of your problems,” said Ken Wisnefski, founder and CEO of ORM provider WebiMax.
“A lot of times, people think something’s a big deal when it’s really not that difficult to fix, while some clients may spend thousands of dollars to fix something,” he added.
To ensure that you get the best reputation management service while still acting fast, Wisnefski advised customers to have their potential providers provide them with some sort of analysis related to their current online sentiment. Then, he said, “really dig into how they plan on addressing that problem — if they’ve got a scripted approach, it’s probably not going to be what you need.”
Wisnefski also noted that it’s sometimes easier to handle a crisis situation if you’ve already been working with a reputation management service, since it means you can monitor your online reputation and act fast when the situation arises.
“Facebook has become a place to see and discover interesting things via our peers. However, those interesting things have always had to originate from somewhere outside of the Facebook environment” said Ken Wisnefski, CEO of the internet marketer, WebiMax. “By originating that influential content on Facebook itself, the social platform eliminates, by some degree, the need for its users to go searching anywhere else for content.”
“If you neither email people with any new or interesting information nor any promotions of any real value, then what are you emailing them?” asks Ken Wisnefski, CEO, WebiMax, an Internet marketing company. “People are busy and they get a lot of email. If you want people to stay subscribed, and open your email, there has to be something in it for them, otherwise you are wasting their time, and they will unsubscribe.”
“This is an interesting move because it clearly shows Facebook is becoming more interested in selling products via their platform,” said Ken Wisnefski, founder/CEO of WebiMax, Camden, NJ. “Which is a bit of a deviation from where they positioned themselves in the past.
“The fact mobile purchasing is on such a growth curve, integrating features such as this in to Facebook give the platform even more mobile purchasing prominence,” he said.
“They can tie in what they searched for and display a wide range of those potential products,” Mr. Wisnefski said. “It’s an interesting angle.”
“Though Lyft’s 2.5 Billion valuation appears to pale in comparison to Uber’s $41 Billion, transportation network company supremacy is still anybody’s game,” said Ken Wisnefski, founder and CEO of leading internet marketer, WebiMax. “The mobile app transportation industry is still a fledgling industry–and while Uber is certainly the larger of the two companies operating in 55 countries, they are paving the way for the eventual competition from Lyft in those markets.”
Marketers for the new film Ex Machina, about a robot wanting to know what it’s like to be human, created a fake Tinder profile/bot after the film’s lead robot character and proceeded to first flirt then lure SXSW attendees to look at promotions for the film.
“While this was a great ploy to get people to view the ad for the premiere, it clearly would leave people irritated that they fell for that sort of trickery,” said Ken Wisnefski, CEO of WebiMax, a social media-marketing firm. “Honestly, if that was me who fell for that, I’d feel somewhat embarrassed and would in no way have any interest in going to the movie premiere because I would be irritated the marketing toyed with me.”
Below is a translation of an article that appeared in America Latina Business Review:
According to Ken:
Mobile tech is here to stay – streamlining once mundane tasks with ease. Nowhere is this movement more evident than in marketing. Today the trend seems to be hyper-local advertising, and brick and mortar retailers seem to be the big winners here. Where it used to be common to hear predictions of the end to brick and mortar at the hands of e-commerce, now we hear the call of hyper-local advertising promising more foot traffic to local retailers. Innovation in this movement has made it more possible for marketers to create almost a concierge aspect to local retail.
Google’s local inventory ad product is one aspect of hyper-local advertising that gives Google users the ability to see what retailers near them have the products that they are searching for actually in-stock. However, news broke last Wednesday that the largest retailer in the world, Wal-Mart, had pulled out of a deal to utilize Google’s local inventory ads. The reason being, that Wal-Mart would have to disclose daily updates on inventory (duh), and pricing data that could be used to understand how Wal-Mart does what it does to be the most successful retailer of them all. While there is a point to be made about the sensitivity of inventory data, it is inventory transparency that will allow a consumer to know that a trip to one particular store will not be in vain and that also cues that consumer to choose one retailer over another.
Should this cause any concern for Google, or for other retailers either utilizing or looking to utilize Local Inventory Ads? – In my humble opinion, not at all. People being able to see whether or not a product is available before they leave the house is such an advantage to brick and mortar retail, that Wal-Mart’s exit from the program shouldn’t be alarming, but may even bolster other retailers decision to get in. And while the loss of big clients like Wal-Mart certainly has an effect on Google, people need to remember that, there is Wal-Mart, and then there is every other retailer. Wal-Mart can afford (for now) to jump out of that relationship.
According to Google, their local inventory platform is quickly growing to include other big retailers like Macy’s, Recreational Equipment and Office Depot. And if Wal-Mart’s move to pull out did in fact prove to be infectious among larger retailers, as ridiculous as it might sound, it could be smaller businesses that step in to fill that void. Google is an aggregator among businesses, but it is also quite simply the glue that holds our mobile world together at this moment. I would even venture to say that if current trends in location based tech in mobile advertising indicate anything, it’s that Wal-Mart may come back to the program at a later time.
“The kind of inventory-related information that connects people to the products they are looking for before they leave the house is such an advantage to brick-and-mortar retail at this stage that Wal-Mart’s exit from the program should not be too alarming,” Ken Wisnefski, founder and CEO of the internet marketing firm WebiMax, told Retail Dive.
“Wal-Mart, of course, being the largest and most profitable retailer the world has ever seen, can afford (for now) to jump out of that relationship,” he says. “I would venture to say that if current trends in location-based tech in mobile advertising indicate anything, Wal-Mart may be back at a later time.”
I wanted to comment on a letter to the editor that stated that businesses should give back to Camden as part of the process of moving their companies there.
As the founder and CEO of WebiMax, I absolutely agree with that statement and agree that our company, located on the waterfront, is absolutely a part of Camden.
As per the article “Workers adjust to Camden” (C-P, Feb. 22),” our employees went from being concerned about moving to Camden to truly embracing our move.
For the past 10 years, I have had two businesses that operated out of Mount Laurel. While the location was great and we enjoyed our time there, I never felt that we were part of the community or connected to any sort of cause. We had lucrative offers to move our offices outside of New Jersey but we chose to come to Camden because we felt it enabled us to help improve Camden and be part of the solution that fueled the renaissance of the city itself.
In our short time in Camden thus far, we have taken part in a program aimed at teaching youths about career paths in website design and online marketing that was organized by the Rev. Floyd White and the Woodland Community Development Corporation.
In addition, all of our employees contributed to a successful food drive coordinated by the Food Bank of South Jersey, where a group of WebiMax employees also volunteered packaging food that was provided to residents of Camden.
We are also in the process of assisting Mayor Dana Redd with a website designed to show Camden’s progress and attract new businesses to the city. We have plans to get more involved in the community and help however we can.
I was inspired at an event hosted by the New Jersey Alliance for Action in December at which the mayor, Freeholder Director Louis Cappelli and Congressman Donald Norcross all spoke about the plans for the future of Camden and how much they want to improve the community for the people who live there.
While I certainly miss aspects of Mount Laurel, I am confident I speak for my entire company when I say coming to Camden and being part of the plans for change was one of the best decisions we have ever made.
Ken Wisnefski is founder and CEO of WebiMax.
“I would specifically feel the impact will not be all that dramatic except down the line with the fact premium based services may change, which would alter how some marketers display their messages,” said Ken Wisnefski, founder/CEO of WebiMax, Mount Laurel, NJ. “I am still a bit unclear though of the range of impact.”
“The rules of the internet and mobile are just evolving,” Mr. Wisnefski said. “The FCC realizes that is somewhat the Wild West and they need to spend more time evaluating it to have more restrictions.
“So the potential [exists] for better ability to view mobile-fed content,” Mr. Wisnefski said.
“I think that the government beginning to focus more heavily on the internet is interesting, as they have been very slow to adapt to what is going on with the internet,” Mr. Wisnefski said. “Many laws are severely outdated as people have progressed from typewriters to smartphones, and the ability to have an audience and platform is open to anyone.