The Big Omaha conference on May 7th and 8th in Nebraska was a great 2 day collection of events and speakers in web, business and creative.  While many conferences in the web design world deal with “how-to” and strategy, I found Big Omaha to push theories and lines of thinking.

The line-up of speakers featured some great Internet minds.  Kicking off Friday morning was Jason Fried of 37signals.

Jason stressed getting away from failure (it’s not cool), the value in eliminating interruption, focusing on the  day at hand and not a 2 year or 5 year plan, putting the most effort into the things that don’t change in your business (service, process), and the value of your by-product.  I had a ton of interest in finding the by-product of your business, not just the specific service you offer, but the knowledge in the process of it.  This can translate into books, speaking events and more.

Another speaker I really enjoyed was Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless Tees.  His time on stage focuses on transparency and accessibility.  He outlined how these things contribute to success of his company.  Jeffrey hit upon the message of spending time with your community of customers/users and listening to them, reacting to them and acting on the right moves.

Gary Vaynerchuk closed out the presentations with his “loud” presentation (loud in a good way).  His passion for getting people to hustle, work hard, build a brand and deliver your expertise in any way possible is a great message.  Gary definitely let his feelings be known on how the Internet will squash everything … newspapers, TV and possibly high education. Gary also did some great Q & A with the crowd as well.

Other attendees recapped the conference as well, so check out Shane Adam’s blog, Read Write Web and Silicon Florist.  Check out Managing The Edge, it has a decent video segment of interviews from the conference as well.

It was a well put together conference, crazy successful for a first time conference.  I was encouraged by the fact I hold some of the same value in transparency and making things happen.  I also picked up some great ideas on other theories and ideas to strengthen the Five brand and business of web design.

In such an evolving industry it’s great to listen to great Internet minds and also interact with others fighting the good fight daily.  Overall, I give Big Omaha an A- and look forward to next year.

Two things happened last week that had me thinking about Internet marketing and the opportunity for success a business has with it. It also made me think about why companies seem to be held back from exploiting the benefits of marketing online.

Number One: Who’s The Crazy One?
The first was reading a great Internet marketing article from Andrew Eklund on MinnesotaBusiness.com.  The article easily outlined why Internet marketing is a dream (and reality) for any marketing team/person.  Eklund had some great points that anyone could understand and my biggest takeaways were:

1.  Reworking old and tired traditional marketing is not the answer.

2.  Ignoring the medium (Internet) where prospects are, customers are and that allows for complete tracking of your marketing to sale process is plain crazy.

3.  Internet marketing is not risky, not marketing online is risky.

Give the article a read and you’ll hopefully find a spark to push yourself into investing more time and strategy into leveraging the great benefits of Internet marketing. You’re crazy not too.

Number Two: Ignorance Is Bliss? No.
The second thing that happened was a scenario that unfolded in my email inbox.  I received an email from a business development person I know that contained their newsletter in a PDF attachment.  I froze.  They had a great email subject headline on a topic that I wanted information on but … they would never know that.

I couldn’t believe that the company would ignore the fantastic benefits of email marketing after all that hard work.  They put together a well designed PDF, it had compelling and educating content … yet it was only doing half of its job.  It wasn’t going to clue the business in on its relevance, performance and its outcome.

If they had sent this information via an email marketing program they would have gained these valuable marketing benefits:

1.  Who opened their email newsletter

1b.  Better yet, they would have reduced effort (clicks & time) to get to the goods

2.  What links users clicked on to get more info or take action

3.  The ability to fully track users from email to website to conversion

4.  They can still include the PDF version AND see who downloaded that

This marketing campaign could have been so much more.  Don’t just go half way, take advantage of the simple opportunity to get everything you want from your marketing efforts.

So to get to my title question, what is holding your company back from Internet marketing?  As Ecklund’s article pointed out, it offers accountability, sustained progress, sales, leads, return-on-investment, and deep business intelligence.  Let’s add to that affordability too.  Email marketing is an extremely low cost.  Consider though, at any price, the ability to track and measure makes any number realistic when you know what it produced.

So get rid of your fear (or ignorance), make the move, take the right steps, ask questions, get answers and find the ways Internet marketing can improve your business.  There are many.

I was very fortunate to get to speak at the Buffalo, MN Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Luncheon today.  I presented on some ideas to help a small business website succeed, search engine optimization (SEO) and web analytics. I think I only put one person to sleep and the group had a lot of great Internet marketing questions in the follow-up.

There were some great Buffalo and Wright County businesses / organizations in attendance and I enjoyed the 45 minute presentation. Getting to share my knowledge and passion for the web is one of the best things I get to do at Five. Thank you to the Chamber for the invite to speak and present!

Speaking of presentations, we will be announcing a business blogging seminar soon for late May.  We should be getting the details out next week.

Thanks to Five web programmer @travisneids for taking the photos.

Our last post looked at the new Google search features incorporating local search results into regular search queries.  For many search terms you no longer need to apply a city and state to get local results.

A New Top Keyword
I thought I would update that post with how this new Google search feature has effected our search engine traffic.  Prior to this local feature, our top terms of referral traffic were our company name and then “web design MN”, “Minnesota web design” and other variations.

In the past week we have a new top term for bringing traffic to our website, “web design”.  Prior to the Google change, we would have never even dreamt of competing for the term of web design without a location or another term attached. In doing just some minor research, we appear in the local search results for 11 different zip codes.  With our office being rurally located, we bleed into other areas results from as far as 20 miles away.  If we were right in Minneapolis this wouldn’t be the case, but the search volume for “web design” would be much higher.  Not too bad of a trade off.

This new local search feature creates a lot of opportunity for small businesses to attract more buisness from Google.  It also shines a much brighter light on local search, a focus we will see increase in the coming months for sure.

On visiting ESPN.com the other night the main homepage ad caught my eye more than normal. How couldn’t it? The rich media ad for the iPod Touch made the ESPN website explode.

As a recent Washington Post article pointed out, online advertisers are hoping that bigger and bolder ads can save display and banner advertising. There was no doubt I couldn’t miss the Apple ad as the iPod Touch device jumped out of the ad frame and exploded the ESPN main navigation bar into pieces. In fact I refreshed it twice just to see it again. Mission accomplished for Apple this time.

Brands are working hard these days to get noticed online and also putting some new twists out there as well. Obviously the Skittles social media twist gained big attention and buzz over the past few weeks. It will also be interesting to see how far new, edgy and different can go before pushing users away too.

Let me know if you have seen an ad or concept online lately that jumps from the norm, looking to grab more attention.