Nicholas Cifuentes

Blogs. 

As an Internet strategist - my life daily is consumed with social media feeds, blog alerts, feedburner stats, google alert updates, monitoring, strategizing, execution - all of these overused terms and time consuming tactics certainly take a toll on you.  

But one thing I do often, as I do for all my clients, is research - taking notice of the growing digital space around me - thinking of ideas to implement innovative strategies among the community and with my clients.  

One of those key strategies that are a must in today’s Internet spectrum is a blog.  A blog is key in driving not only traffic, but interest to your brand, product, or company.  Blogs help you appear authoritative in your industry - allowing you to give views on the latest events in your trade, offer reviews, insights, and so on.  

This expands into relationship building tools, as you are able to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style, as compared to how you direct the voice on your main website.  Through the blog channel, they are more likely to trust you, and then all the more likely to visit your main website and then click your links and possibly purchase your product.   

It also offers insight for your customers, and allows them to leave comments and ’speak’ to you on a key level. In addition, blogs are extremely search engine friendly - through thousands of possible keywords and fresh, updated content on a regular basis - blogs are simply great facets to have on your website today.  Your simply misguided if you think otherwise.

*Read More for a detailed blog breakdown of the popular clothing line Free People.

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Porn. It is and always will be a key element of the Internet – with it accounting for almost 10 percent of all Web searches, according to Hitwise.  

But at one point many, many years ago (exactly 10) – a massive 20 percent of all Internet Web searches accounted for porn. However, thanks to sites like Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites, porn on the Internet is not as popular as it used to be – simply put.  

Hitwise researchers said that surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago – the sites that grab all the searches now are the social networking sites.  

The research said that visits to porn sites have decreased, and social networking traffic as increased. 

Now, I don’t entirely believe this – to think people are so busy with MySpace that they don’t have time to look at porn.  I believe that web growth ‘overall’ has lended mostly to this result, and other changes in the way people utitlize the Internet - that is the true difference.

Point is, the Internet is bigger then ever, and much more people are using it than ever before.  And more kids then ever are involved online – so it makes sense that fewer users are looking at porn.

Another point – you can look at Facebook at work, more than you can look at porn. And if your working – chances are your using the web at work, more than you were 10 years ago – before social media websites existed.

Enough said.

In a recent survey done by Careerbuilder.com, an increasing number of employers are taking a look at staff’s social networking profiles before hiring a candidate.

The survey found that 20 percent of companies admitted to checking out the profile pages of potential employees on social-networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace before deciding to hire them. Another 9 percent said that they would begin to review potential employees social-networking websites in the future.

The research also revealed that while 24 percent of employers had hired a member of the staff based on their social-networking profile, 33 percent had decided NOT to make a job offer after reviewing certain content on a profile.  Use of drugs, alcohol and posting of photographs that seemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘provocative’ were identified as the most popular reasons why employers eliminated a candidate after reviewing their social-networking profile.

Should you be scared of this?

Yes.  You absolutely should.  If you dragged yourself out for a Saturday night pub crawl, blacked out at some point and the next day arrives with you not remembering what happened - be worried. In today’s world - transitioning from school to a professional career can be a lot of work, but just be careful with what you do on your social-networking profiles.  You don’t want to have last week’s party to be the reason you don’t get hired for that job you’ve always you wanted.  These pictures work great in college, and globally acceptable among that crowd - but the professional world is a much different story. Pictures and comments your friends might leave about you could become a liability in the workplace.  

First, privacy settings are your friend - use them.  You can set websites like Facebook and MySpace to allow only your friends to view pictures or profile specifics.  Blogs can be a huge risk too - so unless you are blogging about things like what I am talking about - keep it clean and remember, people can find what you are reading easily - so use those privacy settings. And even if you do have a job - remember that people get fired for unauthorized blogging all the time now - so BE CAREFUL!

Are you that person that Google’s themselves all the time?  You should be.  You have to keep up with what people might be saying about you on Yahoo! and Google. Or, if you are really curious, give Pipl.com, a “people search engine” a try.  What you see here is the same thing a possible hiring manager is seeing - be careful!

And another thing to be careful of - don’t befriend people who you don’t know.  You just don’t know if it will come back to bite you later.  Keep your friend list to ‘friends’ and associates in both personal and professional social networks.  

Case Study.

A bank intern, in 2007, was caught through Facebook lying to his boss about a family emergency, when he actually just wanted to ‘party it up’ on Halloween instead.

Kevin Colvin (pictured below) was an intern at Anglo Irish Bank’s North American arm, was busted by his manager Paul Davis after Kevin told Paul that he had to miss work because of a family emergency.  His boss then turned up this photo of Colvin on his Facebook profile from a Halloween party he apparently missed work to attend, and attached it to his reply, copying the rest of the office as he did it.

Below is the short email exchange and incriminating photo.

You figured it would happen at some point - social networking sites are popping up for conceivably every market demographic - and now a social networking site for babies has made its way to the market.  

Totspot.

This amazing feat of success has brought Totspot into a place where they might find a profitable niche.  

The service that is built on Ruby on Rails, just went through a private beta test and is now open to all parents and babies to take part in.  This Facebook for children platform allows babies (probably their parents) to enter their favorite nickname, book, food, etc…

Totspot, which as accumulated 15,000 users, is part of an social movement into the ‘newborn’ realm of social networking.  Odadeo, Lil’ Grams and Kidmondo are also some growing social networking sites for parents to spread updates of their newborn babies.  

For quite a while, Facebook, and photo websites like Flickr and Photobucket, among others, have been popular places to track a baby’s progress - things such as a first step, first pictures and video at the zoo, first time eating an oreo cookie, and so on.

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NetSuite.

OK, I am not one that is normally critical of certain software or CMS programs – as all have their positives & negatives – but I have to stress the limitations of NetSuite and its astounding ability to ‘frustrate’ the creative design and marketing process of brand marketing.

If you are not familiar with NetSuite, it is an all-in-one set of online business software programs that include accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, e-commerce and website development.

NetSuite can be broken down into four main types of accounts:

1. NetSuite (Standard: Comprehensive Web-based solution for midsize businesses that integrates Accounting/ERP, CRM, Ecommerce and partner collaboration capabilities.
   
2. NetSuite (Small Business): One complete Web-based application for smaller businesses that integrates the front and back office, managing sales, service, accounting and Web presence.
   
3. NetSuite CRM: NetSuite CRM offers a Web-based CRM solution that gives your company all the traditional CRM capabilities you need to manage marketing through customer acquisition.
   
4. NetSuite CRM+: Total Customer Relationship Management CRM solution for businesses large and small with customer-centric view to manage initial and on-going relationships over the phone, in person, or on the Web.
   

What is NetSuite Good For?

NetSuite is ideal for businesses of various sizes – mainly small to mid-businesses, providing integrated accounting, CRM, online marketing, web management, inventory, and sales management, as well as vendor and manufacturer relationship management.  NetSuite keeps track of all product information, web pages, customer login information, vendor/manufacturer details, stock/shipping details, auto-responder and customer emails, SEO and ad tracking/web metrics information, online marketplace, as well as accounting/ERP details.

Otherwise, it makes the job easier for sales, accounting, and other internal groups within a business – providing a ‘streamline’ system that (doesn’t) always work.

The Various Troubles of NetSuite.

NetSuite has fixed a number of issues since its release in 2002, but many still remain. There is a plethora of issues that still remain when it comes to transferring a website to the NetSuite platform; such as setting up proper page redirects, setting up dynamic links, changing content, images and other aspects of the website – it often takes much time and calls to customer support to fix.  And when it comes to making changes to the website once things are setup  - it could take a few hours or sometimes even an entire day to show up on the website.

And sometimes smaller issues such as creating new items, losing customer order history, and more – although these problems seem minuscule, with NetSuite they take HOURS of extra work to fix, and can cost companies thousands of dollars in extra work and time wasted that could have gone into adding new products to the website or improving marketing and management systems.

The NetSuite Now.

Although NetSuite has grown to the point of debuting its own IPO, and grow exponentially, NetSuite is still only geared toward the small to mid-size business.  And at a price and support-process that seems very high and overrated respectively - you have to be careful when deciding to use NetSuite.

I am not here to ‘bash’ NetSuite – I think their software is wonderful for its all-in-one features and growing application development.  But, I also think that it really depends what type of ‘brand’ you are – whether you want to invest the time, effort, and often-headaches into the software system.

If you are an ecommerce brand that wants to just ‘sell’ your products and see a return – NetSuite is great.  But I will say this, if you are a ‘creative’ brand that really wants to stretch the wall with what you might have going on within the brand, from an internal and external marketing point – referring to design, development, UI functionality, internal marketing (NetSuite is good at), and external marketing such as social media and other ‘new media’ marketing tactics – you are limited.  Very limited.

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