Besides bringing wonderful experience and intelligence with her to envisionit, Molly just so happens to be quite funny and fun. It’s win-win!

A bit more about Ms. Hop:

Where are you from?
Holland, Michigan.

What do you do at envisionit?
As the Digital Media Director, I work with the web marketing team to develop strategies to drive traffic, create engagement, and promote the brand communication platform.

Tell us something you’ve enjoyed about working here so far.
I have enjoyed the people since day one. They are smart, friendly, witty, and passionate.

If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?
My choice would be tons of crab legs, a baked potato heaped with butter, and apple pie for dessert. Yum.

What’s a book you could read over and over again?
My three favorite books are East of Eden, Pillars of the Earth, and Are you my Mom?

For example, a jelly bean store might assume that paid search for them means making sure their ads are seen every time someone searches online for “jelly beans.” But that searcher might be wondering how the delightful candy is made or when it was invented. Or they might be looking for t-shirts with jelly bean drawings on them or for online stores that sell and ship jelly beans in bulk. Does this jelly bean store want pay for a click on their ad from one of these online searchers? This is a question the store needs to answer before they spend their money on very broad paid search terms.

With that, here’s the general set of questions and research that needs to be carefully completed before you can find success in paid search engine advertising.

What’s the goal?
You’ve decided to invest in advertising your business online. There must be a reason behind this.

• Was it to drive overall brand awareness?
• Or to gauge interest in a soon-to-be launched product through email signups?
• Or to increase new sales (whatever a “sale” is for you)?

Whatever you answer, you should revisit it at every step along the way of this process to make sure your decisions align with this end goal.

Know who you’re targeting
This should be a pretty simple one, since you know your business best, but it’s not to be taken lightly. This is an important time to get reacquainted with your audience. If your goal was to increase sales for your business, then ask yourself what you know about your typical new prospect:

• What’s their knowledge base at that point, how familiar are they with your brand or your product or service offering before becoming a customer?
• What are the common misconceptions about these things or challenges you typically have to overcome to “sell” your service or product?

With these answers floating in your head, slip out of your mind and into theirs. Become your target prospect, think about how they think and talk–and how they’d likely search online. It’s not necessarily going to be how you or your colleagues talk. It might even include terms that you try to avoid in your branding. But consider all this and file it away.

Keyword Research Time
This is where the harder work begins, but it’s also where the “aha!” moments happen. Using tools like the Adwords keyword tool, start yourself down a path of exploration into the search queries you think your prospects would use to find you. The goal was sales–so think about the dream prospect would search. The highly motivated, perfect fit.

For the jelly bean store, that might be “where to buy jelly beans” or “jelly beans for sale.” From there, you can widen your research and start to identify themes around which you can target your audience. You also might find at this point that a large volume of people search for “buy jelly beans in bulk” or “jelly beans on sale.” Does our jelly bean store sell in bulk? Are they a gourmet candy shop? Then they probably want to set “bulk” and “on sale” as negative keywords, so their ads don’t get displayed for those kinds of searches.

And if they are a gourmet jelly bean store and have been working to elevate the public’s jelly bean image and propel the chewy candy into a more mature category by calling their product “fruit gems” well, guess what…they’re still jelly beans. That’s how the public knows the product, so it’s wise to put ad budget toward that familiar term.

Building a smart ad campaign
This could be a whole separate blog post, but simply put: once you’ve identified your keyword themes, make sure your ads match each of them. This means taking the time to write different sets of ads that speak to each of the different inquiry types and inferred goal of the online searcher. There might end up being overlap, but do the work to determine that. Repeat your keyword in the ad (for the gourmet shop, it might be painful to use “jelly beans” in their ad copy, so they’ll have to get creative…think along the lines of “Not Your Grandma’s Jelly Beans”), highlight a unique selling point for your business, and include a call to action (paid search text ads have very limited space, so do the best you can).  And be sure your landing pages, in turn, match the interest and intent of your users and support the content of the ad.

And about that landing page…
Be sure you’re also paying attention to what happens after you’ve caught a user’s attention and earned their click. That’s where your ultimate goal happens, after all. Test different destinations to gauge the preferred content of each user type and find the page that best drives those increased sales you wanted.

Look for opportunities and risks
Beyond that, you want to closely monitor your continued ad campaign performance, especially watching your query reports to see what specific searches are actually triggering your ads. You’ll find more negative keywords this way and you may find new themes to build new ad groups around. For example, our gourmet jelly bean store might decide they want to try to “convert” discount-shoppers to their product, so they should create a separate ad group for “clearance” and “on sale” keywords, write really clever ad copy that appropriately turns away the right people and intrigues others, and then drive them to a custom landing page explaining why these trendy jelly beans are so much better than any discount bulk option. This will be one to watch very closely, though, and quickly give up on if the sell to bargain hunters is just too tough.

It’s a lot of work, but if you take the time to understand your audience, their intent and needs, build smart campaigns and closely monitor performance, your paid search advertising campaign will pay off.

We’re very excited to announce a new EIM partner—Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet. Kalamazoo is a local Chicago company that makes hand-crafted gourmet outdoor kitchens of uncompromising quality. Gourmet, outdoor, grilling … well, you can see why we’re so excited!

Kalamazoo makes some amazing products. At the center of their suite of outdoor kitchen equipment is the Hybrid Fire Grill—you can cook with gas, charcoal, wood or any combination of the three. It’s this unrivaled innovation that Kalamazoo wants to share with discerning home chefs everywhere, so they can reach their full culinary potential.

So far, our target market is generating buzz about the new site, and Kalamazoo’s superior products. We’re looking forward to driving more big results for Kalamazoo and, as we’re virtually neighbors, we’ll be looking forward to grilling up some delicious summer creations together, too!

The kerning is unpleasant and it’s obvious. Kerning, the spacing between letters, is normally judged by your eye rather than mechanically. The negative space in between the letters should be relatively even. This reads “g-lee.” As minor as some might find this to be, I cannot stand it!

It is very difficult to watch for the two seconds the Glee logo appears on screen and I know I’m not the only Gleek who feels this way…

The kerning on the Glee logo makes me angry.

— Gavin Weir (@GavWeir) September 22, 2011

The kerning on the Glee logo really bothers me for some reason.

— David Schulenburg (@stldave2) September 18, 2011

That’s three.

Perhaps this was purposefully done and I’m sure there was a motive, but it has brought discomfort and grief to my Tuesday evenings. So please, Ryan Murphy and Co., take the time to kern your letters! There are only four of them.

The site features information about the Mini-Medical School, the American Osteopathic Association and a cartoon host guiding you through six interactive activities. These activities span a variety of games including a bone health drag-and-drop skeleton, medical instrument matching, hygiene and germs multiple choice, complete the organ sentence, nutritional food group identification and an exercise-focused word search.

Those interested in building their health and fitness knowledge can enjoy the Mini-Medical School website at home or on the go, as all of the games are iPad compatible. The experience should prove to be a fun and engaging way for both parents and teachers to educate kids on a very important topic. There may even be a few valuable refreshers in there for adults, too!

Benefits of Google Analytics Premium:

• More processing power without limits
• Advanced analysis
• More custom variables
• 24/7 customer support

Below is a table of condensed differences between the Standard and Premium version at this point in time. This list may change with version upgrades.

The Google advertising team hit the nail on the head by stating Google Analytics Premium is an Enterprise solution. Small and mid-size organizations do not produce enough data to meet Google Premium data processing standards. Small and mid-size organizations are not always utilizing custom variables. Small and mid-size businesses are not necessarily implementing any attribution modeling as their marketing channels tend to be small in volume and channels.

The only item that Google Analytics Premium can offer non-enterprise businesses is the 24/7 support. For the most part, all the information to solve issues with Google Analytics is freely available on the internet if you “Google it.” Spend some time searching, you will find your solution. Everyone can agree that Google Analytics Premium is really cool, but if your website is not processing near the Premium data limits, the cost benefit analysis may lead you to stay with the Standard version.

EIM Analytics Wishlist for Google Premium:

I want to highlight a few wishlist items that would really help make Google Analytics Premium more valuable for all organizations.

1. Connect to DoubleClick data. Similar to the Google Analytics linking with your AdWords account, Google Analytics Premium would connect with your DoubleClick account. The data from DoubleClick would be imported into your Google Analytics Premium account for valuable insights into your search and display campaigns.
2. Real-Time conversion. Current Real-Time is providing Locations, Traffic Sources and Content. It would be ideal to see conversions as they happen when major campaigns are launched.
3. Ability to import or connect your CRM data into Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides a really easy segmentation tool. Making the connection to your CRM system will allow for added insight and value for your business.

The Webby Award signifies our ability to deliver first-class web design while accomplishing all the clients’ goals and objectives. Roots achieved its goal to break through the heavy competition in the Chicago pizza scene and deliver a website that rivals the nation’s top pizza restaurants.

Congrats to everyone at EIM who worked on Roots this past year, and congrats to our friends at Roots Handmade Pizza. The collaborative effort helped us to achieve this award.

With Instagram having been named Apple’s App of the year for 2011, then acquired by Facebook (there may be some big integration plans in the future), and the new addition of the Android app that is continuing to massively boost their user base, it’s important to understand how to utilize the app in intelligent and creative ways to help boost your brand’s relationship with its consumers.  Take a look at these 4 tips that can help get your brand on the way to building a strong Instagram community!

1.  Post engaging content & know your audience

Instagram revolves around one main concept, and one thing that makes it such a huge success: the pictures! People love looking at different photos, and it requires minimal effort to analyze an image (as opposed to reading a body of text).  With over 250 million photos posted a day, it’s important that when posting images to Instagram you are selecting ones that are visually stunning, original, and most importantly ones that your consumer base can relate to in some shape or form. When using Instagram you want your users to react to your image (whether they like or comment on your image) to help spread your photo and build your Instagram network. Red Bull does a great job of posting relevant and engaging content on their feed frequently.

2.  Give consumers an “inside look” at your brand

When looking for engaging content to post on your Instagram feed, you may want to consider giving your user base an inside look at what goes on behind the scenes of your brand. This not only creates engaging content that your consumers may be interested in, but also creates a type of intimacy and relationship with your brand and your consumer. Marc Jacobs  gives his followers an inside look of his brand with pictures of him with celebs and behind-the-scenes looks at runway shows and photo shoots.

3. Post regularly

Because Instagram operates in as a linear stream, it is very important that you not only post engaging content, but post frequently as well. If you post a picture, it can easily get lost in the stream if your users are following a large amount of people (which they more than likely are).  Think of your Instagram stream as Twitter on steroids–it is much easier to post a steady stream of posts without coming off as spam.

4.  Use #hashtags and push posts to facebook and twitter

Instagram has adopted the hashtag feature from Twitter, so it is very important that you utilize this feature when posting any images to your Instagram feed. This will allow users to search for relevant photos by using the #hashtag feature of the app. Also, if you forget to hashtag your post or think of a relevant tag later, you can always go back and add the hash tag to the comments below your image to increase the reach of your image.

Within the app you also have the opportunity to post your photos to Twitter and Facebook all in one click of a button. This can be a good strategy to create awareness around your Instagram account among your followers on the other social networks. Also, when you @mention and #hashtag in your posts that go to Twitter, it translates right through, so the viral benefits easily grow. Just make sure that if you’re posting a large quantity of photos to Instagram you only post a select few to Facebook and Twitter (so users don’t think you’re spamming them).

Those are 4 smart, simple tips for integrating Instagram into your web marketing strategy. Following them can help create an intimacy with your consumer that can elevate your brand in a big way.

Do you have any other strategies or tactics that have been successful on Instagram? Share them in the comments area!

But hold your questions for a minute. Is an FAQ really a necessary part of your site?

An FAQ section is necessary if it:

• Educates users about service or product
• Keeps users engaged with site
• Gages effectiveness of content

An FAQ section isn’t necessary if it:

• Act as a substitute for clear, useful content
• Doesn’t add value because questions aren’t real or aren’t asked

If content clearly tells users everything they need to know, an FAQ doesn’t need to happen. If your organization is asked the same questions over and over—it might be a sign to adjust your site content, not add to your list of frequently asked questions.

I have had a certain product break on me four times in the past three months. Each time I didn’t complain, just filled out the warranty, sent the product in and got a new one. Now the fourth time the product broke, I decided to take to social media because, quite frankly, I felt people should know about this and along with that, I really did want to see how they would respond if I posted negatively on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I started by posting a long message on the brand’s Facebook wall, explaining all of the brand’s faults and how ridiculous of a situation I had been put through with their product.  I posted this around 9:00 A.M. with hopes that they would respond quickly (negatively or positively) so I could either make a Facebook scene or in fact escalate this situation to someone at the company who could help me quickly. After posting on their Facebook wall, I took to Twitter and posted a couple of tweets on how bad their product is and the predicament I was in with the product breaking four times on me. I made sure to use @ mentions and keep a period in front so everyone who doesn’t follow both the brand and I could see it.

The following is how the brand handled the situation and what they did wrong/right:

The Good:

The brand crafted a great Facebook response, being extremely apologetic, actually stating the failure rate of the product (only 4.6 out of 100 these products fail at all, but yet I had 4 break in three months) and directing me to email them instead of continuing the conversation on Facebook (smart tactic).

The team also noticed that I had already filed three warranty claims on my prior product issues, so they didn’t require me to fill out a new one. Now, they didn’t tell me this originally which led to some confusion, but still it’s great that they looked into the system and noticed I have had issues with their products in the past.

Another strategy that their team used was road blocking. They posted positive, what looked like Facebook posts on top of my post, pushing my story down the page out of the sight of most consumers.

The Bad:

It took the brand four hours to either craft a social media strategy or four hours for them to notice my Facebook rant. This is not good and should have been handled in a much quicker fashion. If I had wanted to cause more of a stink, I could have and most people do.  Almost everything in social is public; they should have responded much quicker.

The brand also never noticed my tweets and never responded. Again this was all public on Twitter and I could have caused a bigger scene, but for some reason they avoided me here. If I just had in fact ranted on Twitter and they didn’t respond, I would have caused a bigger scene to see how long it took them to react.

After taking the conversation offline and having me respond to a few things, it took them 14 hours to respond to a specific email that required a reply from them. Again, if I had wanted to I could have gone back to social media and made a scene about how they don’t care.

Social media is a 24 hour beast that can rear its head at any time. I am in fact impressed with how this brand handled the situation. The responses could have been quicker and more efficient, but they did the right thing by taking the conversation offline and essentially offering me an incentive to make me happy and stop posting about their brand. Remember, always be monitoring your social media outlets and be ready to respond to anything!