Student Job & Internship Fair
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
4:30pm – 7:30PM
Huntington Hilton, Melville
For more information please visit the Long Ilsland Works website at http://liworks.org/displayarticle.cfm?id=169
Pepsi will not advertise its drinks in next year’s Super Bowl, ending a 23-year run so the company can focus on a new marketing effort that will appear mostly online. The nation’s second-biggest soft drink maker is plowing marketing dollars into its “Pepsi Refresh Project” starting next month as its main vehicle for Pepsi. The project will pay at least $20 million for projects people create to “refresh” communities.
A Web site will go live Jan. 13 where people can list their projects, which could range from helping to feed people to teaching children to read. People can vote starting Feb. 1 to determine which projects receive money. Pepsi estimates the effort will fund thousands of projects and says other businesses will pledge money, too.
Read the full article here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hcYLM-TBUMyfMu1WGv7-SRe7LTzQD9CLA76G0
Photo courtesy of NewYork Daily News
Desktop Solutions is proud to congratulate our client, New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, on this incredible story. This “Christmas miracle” cites a case of Dr. C. Michael Samson. He, his fellow Dr. Vincente Diaz, and their surgical team recently restored the vision of a 36-year-old mother from Brooklyn who was blind due to uveitis. After the bandages came off, the Brooklyn woman blinded two years ago was thrilled by the gift of a lifetime – the sight of her two daughters’ beaming faces.
Learn more at http://nyee.edu/highlights-2009hh-christmas-miracle.html
Toys of Hope provides toys, books, clothing, activities and other items to needy and homeless Long Island children and their families. The guiding principal behind the Toys of Hope mission is that all children, regardless of financial status, race, religion or nationality, are deserving of those things which can help give them a happier and more fulfilling life. Toys of Hope also provides essential items to needy families so that they can become more self sufficient and in turn help to improve their children’s lives.
Toys of Hope operates all year round and relies solely on volunteers to accomplish its mission. There are no paid employees and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of all funds contributed goes towards helping needy and homeless children and their families.
To see how you can help please visit their site at http://www.toysofhope.org/
Thanks so much for making 2009 a wonderful year. Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2010.
What exactly is a blog? A blog (weblog) is a type of website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are typically displayed in reverse-chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.
Why should you consider having one for your business? Simply put, it’s a powerful and cost effective way to communicate regularly with your clients and prospects, without a heavy sales pitch. Businesses that have embarked on blogs report positive reviews of both the blogging process and the results of their business blog. We’ve compiled a list of ten advantages of establishing and maintaining a business blog.
A blog is simple to use even for the technologically challenged. Blog software itself is free, and setting up a blog is relatively simple. In the worst case scenario you’ll have to install blogging software on your web site and tinker with a few settings.
The only word more popular than quick and easy is inexpensive. To integrate a blog into the page of your site costs little. In some cases, someone within your organization may be able to do it. If that’s not possible outsourcing the task is very reasonable. A blog could become one of the most powerful weapons you have in your arsenal and the money you spend might just pay a salesperson for one day’s work.
The more a customer hears the name of your company the greater the chance of remembering it. It takes, on average, around seven items of direct communication between you and your customers to make a sale. A blog with many posts gives you the opportunity to mention your company name and ensure that your readers think of you next time they’re looking for a particular product or service.
Blogs also give you an opportunity to link to pages on your main web site to promote other products and services. Promoting your blog via email and social networking sites also helps extend your reach to new potential customers.
A business blog can be written in one of numerous styles, or a combination of these. One huge benefit is the ability to inform your customers about new products, benefits, latest offers and much more. Providing your audience with compelling content on a regular basis can help you grow a list of potential market leads.
In the past, companies have used newsletter and e-newsletters to offer this kind of regular contact. Using a blog is easier and it can be updated more regularly than a weekly or monthly newsletter.
Blogs allow you to give your views on the latest events in your industry, offer reviews of related items and comparisons of several items, and providing helpful information on topics important to your industry. In short, a carefully crafted campaign can give you the appearance of authority. Customers will be much more likely to use your service or purchase your goods if they see you as an authority on a particular subject.
Another difficult aspect of building a relationship with your customers online is building a rapport with them. A blog enables you to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style than your Web site does, and your readers will soon feel like they know you. The more they know, like and trust you the more likely they are to visit your main site, click your links and purchase your product.
Search engine optimization is a particularly beneficial form of online marketing. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your Web site for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords. Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis. Most blog software systems have built-in tools for search engine optimization, keyword tagging, and viral marketing.
It doesn’t matter whether you are not, but you and your company will appear to be more accessible especially if you allow freedom for all your visitors to post comments. Accessibility is often a stumbling block for many potential customers that still prefer to deal with companies offline. A blog makes you more approachable and so alleviates this concern.
A business blog enables you to gain insight into your customers. It does this in several ways. Predominantly, by allowing your customers to leave comments on your posts, you get a sense of how they react to what you say. You can also track which posts are being read more often and which generate a greater number of clicks, emails, and much more. As far as market and customer research goes this is important information.
You can use a blog to pre-empt questions that customers might have. By sending readers to your blog you can gain all of the above benefits and you may reduce the amount of niggling questions that you get asked by customers.
Maintaining A Successful Business Blog While there are free blogging services available they generally offer ad-supported blogs with a restricted amount of templates and options. To truly take advantage with a business blog your best bet is to install an application on your existing site. This will enable you to integrate the blog into your own domain incorporating your own design. This ensures that you offer the full benefit to site visitors while making it easier to point blog visitors toward the appropriate pages of your site.
Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors. Every blog demands different content and by producing the right content on a regular basis it will pay dividends.
For more information about how to create and maintain a blog, please contact Lyn Nielsen at lynn@desktopsolutions.com.
A programming overhaul of the White House’s website has set the tech world abuzz. The online-savvy administration on Saturday switched to open-source code for www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit.
Under the open-source model, thousands of people pick it apart simultaneously and increase security. It gives programmers around the world a chance to offer upgrades, additions or tweaks to existing programs that the White House could — or could not — include in daily updates.
More info here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-10-26-white-house-open-source_N.htm?csp=34
Today Google rolled out a new Social Search within the Google Labs site. To try it out, click the button on the Google Labs page to ‘Join this experiment’. Now, when you visit the main Google search page you’ll get a special Google Experimental Labs logo to let you know you are using the cutting edge Social Search capabilities.
As far as Google Social Search is concerned, your ‘social circle’ is defined by the contacts you have built up in Gmail and the sites that you have linked to in your Google profile. Social Search can incorporate people you’re connected with in Twitter, FriendFeed, or LinkedIn, but only if you have established those connections within your Google profile. Read more here:
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091027/tc_pcworld/googlesocialsearchunveiledsansfacebook
http://www.pcworld.com/article/174390/google_social_search_a_first_look.html
Looking for a great activity this weekend? Stop by the 26th annual Oyster Festival In Oyster Bay. Great food, spectacular music, arts & crafts, tall ships…even pirates!
For most companies, the web has become much more than an online brochure. It has become a communication vehicle that helps you develop and maintain relationships with your customers. Whether the perception of your company is positive or negative can be greatly influenced by the content and features users experience on your site, vs. that of your competition.
If your competitors’ sites have high-end features that make it easier to do business with them, you could be losing customers. A great way to determine how you rate is to do an audit of three of your major competitors. Take a look a their sites vs. yours and ask yourself the following 10 questions to see how you stack up:
1. Is your site designed for your target audience?
2. Does the design support your overall branding message?
3. Does the home page have short cuts to popular pages within the site?
4. Do you have interesting, up-to-date content that your audience will find helpful?
5. Does it have handy tools like searches, product selectors, and sorting capabilities to help users find the product or service that best suits their needs?
6. Can customers find detailed product info and supporting docs like warranties, schematics, and instruction sheets quickly and easily?
7. Does it support a 24 x 7 customer service model by providing self-service information like past orders and shipping status?
8. Does your site have a forum, blog or survey so customers can give you feedback?
9. Does it have a mechanism for your customers to receive regular updates from you?
10. Does it have links to connect with or follow you on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook?
If you answered no to more than three of these questions, you may be losing your edge! It’s time for a serious review of your site and how it fits into your sales and marketing strategies.
For more information or a free consultation, please contact Lyn Nielsen at 631.428.4654 or lynn@desktopsolutions.com.
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