Online Media Magic wishes you and your Families a Happy and Healthy Holiday. Hoping Santa brings you more Customers (wait, that’s our job . Hey, it can’t hurt to ask for more!

It would not be a good year end post if we did not let you know the most searched for topics in the world. Without further ado, here they are Most Searched for Topics.  Next year we will work to get you on that list too.

In the meantime, we want to talk to you as soon as the New Year opens about your online marketing.

Happy New Year! From the Gang at Online Media Magic.

– US shoppers bought 2.5 times more items
via eBay mobile this Black Friday than the 2010
Black Friday.

– Paypal Mobile had a 516% increase in
global mobile payment volume compared
to last year’s Cyber Monday

– GSI Commerce has a 254% increase
in US Mobile Sales this Black Friday
compared to last…

Oh, and let’s not forget one last important
stat:

More than 40% of online conversations
about mobile shopping with the top 35
mobile retailers reflected customer
frustration during the Thanksgiving
weekend.

In other words, even the biggest retailers
in the world are having trouble knowing
what to do to adapt to the mobile
web explosion.

That’s why YOU need to discover the
true mobile marketing secrets and tactics
that your business can use to profit
on these trends…

So what to do? It’s simple.

Contact us today for a mobile marketing
assessment of your business profits.

We helped several businesses including
ours. You need to take the Mobile “Challenge”.

Act fast.

You know the importance of being on Facebook, and you’ve already made—or are in the process of considering—the decision to get your business on Facebook. So what comes next?

After your Facebook Company Page is created, you need to think about how you will build a fan base and interact with this base to generate loyalty and sales for your business. Your goal is to have your fans become involved with your updates, spread the word to their friends and family members, and ultimately become advocates of your company on Facebook.

Check out these 5 quick and easy tips to begin attracting fans to your Company Page!

1. Link your website and online listings to your Facebook Page.
If you have an existing website or directory listings, it’s important to include a prominent link to your Facebook Company Page, which adds credibility to your business and lets visitors know that you’re active in the social space. Your website visitors may choose to “like” your Facebook Page so they can get to know you and take advantage of the special offers you post exclusively on your Page. In their Help Center, Facebook provides information on how to add a link to your Page on your website; there are several options available that you can access by contacting Online Media Magic and we will help you with this.

2. Promote your Facebook Page to your customers.
Most small businesses interact with their customers and benefit greatly from word-of-mouth advertising. To make the most of your Facebook Page, you should take a step back and look at the ways you communicate with customers every day. Your receipts, follow-up or reminder phone calls, after-hours voice-mail messages, special offer emails, and print advertising are just a few of the tools you can use to alert your customers that you have a presence on Facebook—make sure that you use them! Customers that have had a positive experience with your business will want to connect with you on a daily basis. Make it easy for them to find you.

3. Claim your Facebook username.
When your Page is initially set up, the Web address where it is located can be 70+ characters long, depending on the length of your business name. That doesn’t look very good on a business card! For this reason, Facebook has made it possible for businesses to claim their personalized Web address so that you can pass along a Web address to your customers that is easier to remember, such as www.facebook.com/yourbusinessname.  Keep in mind that Facebook may want you to have a minimum of 25 fans to claim your personalized Web address.

4. Advertise your Page in high-traffic areas at your brick-and-mortar business.
We’ve seen it before. Restaurants have a “Like us on Facebook” sign hanging near their menu or set up on their tables, your local retail store has a framed sign that sits near the cash register, or the local furniture store lets you know they want you to be their fan when you walk in the front door. Take a moment to identify a few spots at your business location where you can place a sign or note—you just may learn something new about your customers in the process.

5. Maximize the impact of your Facebook Company Page.
Your Facebook Page has something in common with your business: they both depend on word-of-mouth marketing. And don’t underestimate the power of telling people you have a Facebook Page. By talking about your Page with current and future customers, you’ll help to generate interest in your business. You can also use your Facebook status updates to ask your current fans to refer your business to their friends and family members. You can even structure a contest around fan referrals to generate interest about your online community!

Whether you’re a savvy social marketer, or you’re just learning how to use this powerful tool to communicate with customers, we’re here to help you every step of the way. Our Facebook team helps you navigate the challenges of staying up-to-date on Facebook trends and the various ways that you can promote your unique business online.

Contact us today at 1.408.332.5860 to have a customized Facebook Company Page created and managed for your business!

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately with their timeline change occuring in the next few weeks.  This is a new interface that will convert your business postings into a timeline.  Of course it is more suited to personal profile to be used as somewhat of a scrapbook album. That timeline will have photos, updates, and a new set of apps.  While in the past, you could authorize apps and nothing might happen that you didn’t expect, that’s no longer going to be true.

Much more “passive sharing” will now be possible. Be careful what apps you authorize, because by default, much of what you do on Facebook with apps, or even outside Facebook with Netflix and Spotify, and Facebook’s other integrated partners, will be shared auto-magically. Once you add an app to your timeline, you don’t have to give it permission to add stuff to your feed: “Adding an app to your timeline is like wiring a real-time connection between your app and Facebook…There is no step two,” says Facebook CTO Brett Taylor.

Businesses will be encouraged by the new interface to make Facebook your permanent home on the Internet, which means you get out to the wider world. So if you are a business, and you have a Facebook presence, you are going to need a much broader Facebook marketing strategy in order to find your new customers solely within the Facebook platform.

This could lead to a great deal of inadvertent oversharing, especially if you use Facebook for business, or if you are not a student of how it evolves. It is always evolving into a platform for sharing more of your life, never less. Facebook’s newest idea is to make its platform a 21st century form of scrapbooking, and to help you “scrapbook” your entire life “frictionlessly.” I must say it will be beautiful, compared to the old Facebook. It looks like a Tumblr blog, says Taylor.

The good news is that Facebook’s new design is based on better data visualization. The bad news is that all that data is probably better for Facebook’s advertisers than for you. Remember that as long as you do not pay for Facebook, you are the product, not the customer. So for businesses now that advertise on Facebook, you’ll have quite an advantage if used correctly. You should definitely opt in for our 3 part course on how best to use Facebook for Your Business.

In case you are wondering how fast this will happen, the beta test of Timeline starts today, and with it, the common news apps that you might want to see. You can sign up for it if you are an early adopter. Just click on the Timeline Facebook page. If you don’t want to be rushed into anything, stand back, but watch out–it’s all coming soon to a neighborhood near you in the next few weeks.

The takeaways?

1. Develop a facebook business strategy. Go here => Facebook Business Strategy
2. Carefully explore your privacy settings and make sure you understand them.
3. Incorporate more aspects of your business into social media.

Let us know if you have any questions. Remember, get your Facebook For Business answers here.

Social media and blogs continue to dominate our online time as consumers, on our computers AND phones
Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other site
Women watch more videos, men watch longer videos
70% of social network users shop online
53% of social network users follow brands
Tumblr is a new emerging social network, tripling it’s audience this year
Social network users are more likely than other online consumers to be found at political rallies, sporting events, and at the gym

I would also give close attention to Slide 11 which talks about how active social media users are also influential offline.

View the whole report here and dive into some awesome research.

In the meantime, what are you waiting for get Media Magic Local Today and explode your local ranking, brining in leads and new customers now!

According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project, 71 percent of US Consumers arenow using video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo.  The number jumped 5 percentage points to 71 from 66 percent last year, and continues to grow.  On any given day more than a quarter of us (28%) are visiting online video sharing sites, as opposed to May 2010, when only 23 percent of viewers visited the sites on any given day.  It’s clear that online video viewing is on the rise.

This immediately demonstrates one of the primary characteristics of
online video site users.

They tend to be people who jump from one video to the next, endlessly
following links to watch video after video. In short, they are not natural
buyers because they do not visit YouTube to find a product or service.
Instead, they use sites like this to be entertained.

This is a fact that you cannot afford to ignore. Finding buyers on a video
site is the classic ‘needle in the haystack’ job.

It does not however mean that it is impossible or even difficult to make
money using video marketing. On the contrary, as long as you know
what you are doing, it is relatively easy and straightforward.

One video published on one site might send visitors to your site or offer
sales page. If however you have a hundred videos on a hundred video
hosting sites, you naturally multiply your visitor numbers exponentially.
This simple fact is extremely important to absorb.

Far too many would-be video marketers make the mistake of publishing
a single video before sitting back to see how much money they make
from it. This is the wrong approach and not a trap that you should fall
into.

Instead, once you know how to create effective marketing videos and
how to use them to make money, you must create and publish as many
videos as you can.

It is also why the majority of would-be video marketers who fail do so.
They create one video and sit back to admire it, knowing that the world
will flock to watch their ‘masterpiece’.

This is good news because it means that even though you do have to
use video in your small business, it’s quite easy to do so effectively
enough to make highly effective videos very quickly.

Contact Your Online Media Magic Biz Peep (Business Marketing Consultant)
and get started today with capturing consumers and more business from video marketing.

OnlineMediaMagic.com                       FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

111 North Market Street #300

San Jose, CA 95113

Contact:  Lisa Schwartz

Title:    Channel Director

Phone:    408-332-5860

email:    lisa@onlinemediamagic.com

FREE BUSINESS MARKETING SEMINAR REVEALS 12 SECRETS TO INTERNET CASH

Presented By The San Jose Chamber of Commerce and Online Media Magic

CITY, ST, JUNE 29, 2011 – The City of San Jose Chamber of Commerce and Online Media Magic announce their partnership in bringing “Local Guerilla Marketing: A Hands-on Workshop Revealing 12+ Ways to Get Customers Online”.

Studies have shown that small businesses have the potential to get 10-20 online visitors per day.   In this workshop, Lisa Schwartz*, MBA with 20 years of Product Marketing & Internet Experience will show attendees a complete walk through of which business types have it easy and which ones need to work harder to fit into the local online marketing landscape.  Without this knowledge, one’s competitors are easily getting one’s prospects.

The event is scheduled to be held July 14^th, 2011 from 11:30 am – 1:30 pm.  It will be held at the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce building which is located at 101 West Santa Clara Street, San Jose.  The event will cost $10 for Chamber members and $25 for non-members.

Presenter Mrs. Schwartz is a published author and principal at Online Media Magic (OMM) which is located in downtown San Jose, CA. OMM has clients not only in the Bay area, but throughout the United States. The broad expertise that Lisa brings and that is provided by Online Media Magic allows her and her Team to provide small and medium sized companies with specialized direct response lead generation marketing results and Internet Business Strategy, to enhance profitability while reducing costs.

The workshop promises to deliver 12+ weapons to grow one’s online business, attract more customers and drive profits.

For more information, check out the website here at http://go.onlinemediamagic.com/sjc101-blog

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Our response has always been, “talk your accountant”. Seriously. And if you don’t have one,we can refer you to an accountant who is our customer or someone we know in the local Chamber. Because it’s less of a marketing decision really, it’s just a financial decision, cash upfront, discount later. You have to do the math.

Of course we do have some opinions about the long term effects of offering discounts and the audience this attracts and whether or not this is a healthy marketing strategy for your business. This needs to be weighed into the overall decision after you financially determine the offer is feasible.

We came across an articles worthwhile reading if you are planning on working with groupon or the like.

This first one discusses why using Groupon could lead to a quick downfall for the business:

The second one, walks through the “catches” of the Groupon marketing agreement that businesses have to sign (including how much risk is placed on the business with no guarantee the promo will even be ran!).

Have a read and feel free to comment below with your thoughts! Call us with any questions on your marketing strategies going forward.