One tool that can help is from Social Mention (see socialmention.com). This will give you a scorecard of your current position across a big selection of social media sites and tools. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

You can submit a query on the web page and also ask for daily reports to be emailed.

In Praeparo’s terms this is a must have in your marketing toolset and part of your brand monitoring efforts within your internet marketing strategy.

Praeparo located between Berkhamsted and Aylesbury on the Bucks and Herts border, specialises in creating and marketing unique, exciting and accessible web pages that really allow your business to succeed on the web. Whether you want your website to showcase your business, to sell products online, or to be dynamic database driven, our web designers can provide carefully tailored solutions for each of these. Once you have an exciting website our hosting services ensure it is always available and our marketeers can provide a digital marketing strategy and search engine optimisation service that will ensure you are found within the search engines.

Our SEO Services Guide or Online Marketing Guide below gives details an ideas about what you must be considering in any digital marketing strategy:

Praeparo Online Marketing Services Guide

Praeparo believes one size does NOT fit all so just pick up the phone (01296 320005) and have a chat about your requirements!

If you think about reality TV programmes it is all about the programme makers seeding enough information to gain momentum outside of the programme. Each programme wants people to spend the week promoting an act or contestant on the programmes behalf and even better if they then say bad things about the competition.

So when looking at marketing we want to seed just enough about our brand, services or products to get “a community” discussing it on our behalf. This means the community is defining our brand and obviously this does bring advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is that if people recommend then it is well known that people respect personal recommendations but and it is a big but you need to manage those that don’t like the brand. If done well then those that like will help with those that don’t.

In summary we can learn a lot from this with social marketing.  For some companies it is critical to identify “a community”  to market a brand and/or product marketing and along with that the importance of making sure your are monitoring your brand.

Often this is because any new visitor will want to gain confidence that the organisation behind the website is real and not too risky to do business with. In the offline world you automatically evaluate a company based on physical details like premises, staff politeness, packaging etc. Website visitors need to do the same but they don’t have the physical aspects at hand. Some of the items they look for and thus you need to plan into your website design are:

• High quality website design.
• Website always available (good hosting).
• Postal address clearly displayed (not a PO Box).
• Real phone number (not just a mobile).
• Secure website (SSL – https) when entering any personal details.
• Privacy policy.
• Terms and conditions.
• Guarantees/refund policies.
• Customer list or portfolio.
• Trade body memberships.
• Fresh content.
• External recommendations or reviews.

If a website is not managed correctly with respect to the above list it can damage a brand that has been heavily invested in offline or traditional marketing. In all cases a brand must be protected at all costs.

Take a step back and have a look at your website and measure against your competitors. Ask the question – would I do business with these people?

Praeparo have long been designing and marketing websites and can provide a free evaluation of your current website – click here!

The first step is consider what type of online presence you want, these fall roughly into 5 categories although a number of websites do offer more than one.

1. e-commerce:
   provision of products available to purchase online.
2. information:
   typically help to generate offline sales of services by providing information.
3. brand:
   focus is to support your brand.
4. portal:
   provision of news and information around a range of topics.
5. social networks or community:
   enables community interactions between different consumers.

All these categories influence in slightly different ways when it comes to website design, development, website launch, operational ongoing costs and marketing. For example, a brand building site needs less monthly work than an e-commerce or portal site which depend on fresh updated information.