Google have just made a massive improvement to their Adwords offering that Internet marketing Tampa businesses need to sit up and pay attention to. If you don’t use internet marketing then now may be a good time to start using internet marketing, Tampa businesses have a lot to gain especially if you have local stores and outlets and a local focus.

Adwords if you haven’t used it before is a way to very specifically target people searching on Google with paid for adverts. This means you can pay to get straight on to the top of Google without having to wait months for an SEO campaign to work.

With Adwords as well as bidding on keywords you can also make sure that your advert only shows in certain locations, until now this has been based on names of towns and cities and sometimes also districts. If you are in a city like Tampa though you may be aiming primarily at one area and so you may be showing your ad to a lot of people from across town who aren’t going to travel to you if, for example, they want their dry cleaning done but have several places that are closer.

To make the most of internet marketing Tampa businesses should use SEO as well but Adwords is a great way to get started and Google have now introduced Zip Code based Adwords so your ad will only show for certain places. You can drill right down if you want and only have your advert shown in very small areas.  As well as areas near to you you may only want your ad to show to people in areas that are, for example, quite affluent: this means you can make massive improvements to your conversions from your internet marketing.

Tampa businesses shouldn’t forget that you often have to pay a lot to get to the top of paid for search results in Google for the best keywords and so being able to improve conversions can mean you can afford to pay more and actually increase the number of customers you get: you will be saving money too by avoiding the wasted clicks aimed at the wrong people in the past.

Adwords can be done by a company offering Internet marketing, Tampa has a few such companies offering either individual services or complete internet marketing services. The main advantage of using a professional service to run your Adwords is they are experts at tuning your campaign and can get rid of under performing keywords to make sure you have the best conversions and make the maximum profit from your budget.

Another great thing with Adwords though is that your budget, per day, per week or per month, can be set with Adwords to ensure you have affordable Internet marketing; Tampa businesses though will often find that once they know that the more they spend on Adwords the more they will make they will be able to invest extra money in it with it being risk free and can reinvest profits too.

SEO Tampa, and affordable SEO company provides SEO, internet marketing and social media marketing services for small businesses in Tampa Florida.

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IBM who are behind the IBM SmartCloud have recently released their findings from a survey they have run. The survey into Cloud deployment found that only 13% of businesses have substantially implemented any cloud based services.

This seems low given the furore around Cloud based computing which is a tool that is meant to be useful for both small and large businesses. The barriers though may in fact be higher for those in larger businesses though they exist in small businesses as well.

The wording of the survey is interesting to start with as substantially suggests that many businesses are likely to have made half-hearted attempts to implement cloud computing with services such as IBM SmartCloud.

In large businesses there may well be training provided to employees to help with the move from traditional desktop PC based applications to collaborative cloud based services. This doesn’t always tackle resistance though from employees that can prevent use becoming widespread when an old system is still available. One solution is rather than running two systems side by side set a deadline for the old one to be physically taken away: the disruption this could cause though could be damaging to a business; instead what is important is to try to make the advantages of a clouds system clear to users.

The main advantages of a cloud system come when everyone uses it and uses all of its features, if a person tries to use a cloud solution such as IBM SmartCloud to collaborate but finds that everyone else is still relying on paper documents and e-mail then Cloud computing in an organization may never get to an all important tipping point where the advantages become obvious.

With simple Cloud options such as Google Apps the advantages are limited to collaboration through the document itself but with a product such as IBM SmartCloud advantages of using the system include social tools and other tools giving a clear advantage instantly that is easy to explain to employees. With IBM’s SmartCloud being based on Lotus products as well those who are used to using Lotus can pick up the system almost instantly and it is intuitive for those new to Lotus office applications and tools.

In small businesses the barriers to using cloud computing are a little different. In highly technical companies with staff proficient in IT or an IT director or executive Cloud computing is likely to get a much higher priority. IBM found in fact that 62% of IT executives compared to only 38% of business executives saw cloud based computing as a high priority for their businesses.

In small businesses with few IT skills then cloud computing is often not understood well enough to comprehend the potential advantages and learning to use a new system will be a steep learning curve with extra training often needed. With a product like IBM’s SmartCloud though as mentioned already it is designed to be intuitive and easy to use for anyone who has used an office suite of products before and the social tools that are included are designed to make collaboration easy to use with similarities to social networking tools online.

Perhaps then it is IBM’s confidence in its own IBM SmartCloud product that leads them to predict that 41% of businesses will have substantial cloud based offering implementation within three years.

Social network web design:  for many web marketers this is two separate areas; many businesses even silo their expertise in social media and web design separately and don’t actively encourage communication between the two. This approach is wasteful though and increasingly the websites with the best ROI and the lowest CPA are those that use different types of social media in their sites.

Using social media on websites is something that a lot of businesses are afraid of, they only use Social Media at all often as they feel they have to and because some customers seem to insist on communicating that way. For many businesses then the last thing they want is to encourage other customers to interact through social media and having the tools right there on their website is just going to encourage them.

This fear comes down to the fact that a lot of businesses worry about what customers might say about them and discuss with them and this is missing the point. The value that having positive comments and positive discussion about your brand right there on your website for everyone to see is lost on many and even with a negative comment dealing efficiently with that comment can actually be a positive.

There is often a problem for purely online businesses with offering customer service but Social Media such as Twitter is now giving those willing to embrace Social Media, and especially those with Social  Network Web Design,  a chance to actually do a better job than they could offline. For a start replies to enquiries through Twitter, Facebook and others are there for everyone to see, those who don’t want to go to the effort of using customer services, even with an enquiry that could lead to new business, can still often get the answers they are looking for.

By having a Social Network Web Design, businesses can have integration with social media sites so that enquiries and replies are there on the website for everyone to see including those who aren’t au fait with Social Media or who are comparing sites and products and trying to take everything in quickly, reading through social media may be enough to sway them.

There are also market research advantages to using Social Network Web Design, once someone on your site logs in to comment or to interact you know who they are and can find out a lot more about them. This gives you a much better idea of who your customers are so you can tailor to them. By linking people’s Social Media accounts with user accounts on your website you can also target market them a lot more efficiently. You can if you have a Social Network Web Design site for example segment your e-mail campaign based on where people are from, what age they are and many other demographics that you can get from social media. If you are selling high ticket items or B2B services it may also of course be well worth the effort of individually researching, understanding and targeting existing or potential customers who have used your site.

An IBM 60 Second Social story on how Newly Weds Foods, a worldwide supplier of food ingredients, cooks up a competitive edge by connecting its operations socially.

Social media and social networking should have already made a big impact on how you communicate with suppliers and customers, how about internal communication and collaboration though?  If you use a product like Lotus notes or other cloud services such as Window’s Office cloud offering or Google Apps you should already be collaborating through the cloud but this is limited in its effectiveness without robust communications.

IBM’s Lotus Notes product is now about to integrate with Social Media tools though to allow communication within organizations whether they are spread over multiple offices, on one site or offices across multiple sites and even multiple countries and including tele-commuters as well of course. Add in to that the ability to bring in clients and suppliers to use the same systems and you have a perfect collaborative environment where you don’t simply have to guess what changes have been made and why or even interpret people’s notes but can communicate in real time including discussion, giving advice, feedback and even training.

Web based IBM connections or server based Lotus Connections will work with e-mail, contacts, content management and calendar software while providing collaboration tools in the form of wikis, forums blogs and shared libraries.

While a blog especially may seem like a distraction for employees: blogs kept by key members of staff, often those with an overview of several teams, can help people within the organization understand better what is going on in the organization as a whole and how they are a part of that.

These developments coincide with the switch to IBM’s Smartcloud Infrastructure and the renaming of the LotusLive hosting service to SmartCloud Social Business. Some might accuse IBM of putting together a product with buzzwords such as social media to please managers desperate to keep up to date but without any clue why:  but the tools that have been added can be useful, if the right training and guidelines are given of course. Since the earliest collaborative software with dozens or hundreds of people collaborating on projects and documents best practice and procedures have been important to keep things running smoothly, hopefully with Lotus allowing communication in real time anyone who is unsure will be able to get answers quickly: this in turn means less doubling up on work and less waiting around for someone to check their e-mails and get back to you: especially when they are out of the office.

Wikis allow people to contribute their knowledge and experience to come up with what is like a huge user generated manual for an organization, this often cuts down time finding the right person to ask by being able to find the information in one central location. As for Forums of course these are ideal places for general discussions, that can be more social than business in some cases allowing a community to grow even over multiple sites; in some cases forums threads though can be highly technical and specialist as well: in either case everyone gets a chance to contribute no matter where they are and what their time zone and you have a record of discussions, and information used, afterwards.

With SmartCloud for Social Business tools will be accessible immediately on Windows Phones and Blackberrys with other phone and tablet types likely to follow. Longterm IBM plan to integrate LotusLive with more of the applications and infrastructure services already available on IBM’s Smartcloud servers.

The video from the Social App Throwdown at Lotusphere 2012 has been posted

No doubt Lotus Notes email lost the battle to others very unfortunately (intentionally not mentioning the competitor names) for being the most popular email system. Perhaps this is the best what can be done in the current situation, start slowly changing yellow colors  to some other colors (I wish it was not black though) which will not be associated with Lotus Notes nor Domino.

I really hope it will help to market the Domino/Notes application server platform to customers that have already moved off Notes platform and may reconsider it under the different packaging colors. I am and optimist and I hope it will help.

Picture credit: IBM

It is a long time since Lotus Software, owned by IBM since 1995, dominated a market, their Lotus 123 product though was a great spreadsheet package that led to a step change in spreadsheet software and Lotus Notes later did the same. Lotus missed out though when Microsoft Office came along and dominated a market that could have been Lotus’. Lotus and IBM may now though have the chance to steal a march on rivals as cloud computing takes off.

LotusLive is in with a chance of becoming the standard for Cloud hosted office software suites if its starting point is anything to go by. Lotus have since the 90s quietly been providing through IBM client hosted software primarily on IBM machines, software that is loved by most who use it. The design of these has continued into what is available now: LotusLive a complete suite of programs that can be easily set up for cloud hosting and which significantly will integrate with various other apps and services.

LotusLive is able to integrate with services such as LinkedIn, Skype and Salesforce, key for its CMS system which is among the best in the business. A CMS that integrates properly, effectively and, even more importantly, usefully with Social Media is the future but currently anything but common. File sharing, instant messaging and managing multi company projects is also possible through the CMS part of LotusLive: known as Connections.

With people on the move more and more and with communications coming in from a dozen sources rather than just phone and e-mail this kind of solution makes a lot of sense and is overdue. LotusLive predict that most businesses will between 2011 and 2015 be switching to a Cloud solution as the benefit becomes more obvious, including the price benefit.

Even with the best product Lotus will have stiff competition from Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 and pricing will be vital. LotusLive is charged for on a pay as go system making it instantly attractive as an alternative to client hosted or desktop software with expensive one off licenses and expensive upgrades. Most modules will be charged for per user per month, this will also encourage people to try the whole offering and then stick with those parts that are most useful to them.

Lotus’s existing brand will be important as well, though Lotus Live is relatively new the Lotus brand is still associated with good quality professional software and a lot of people ended up with Office as a bundled package and though the learning curve might be a hurdle some people wouldn’t miss Office having been stuck with it as the only viable option for years. As for Google Apps it has a lot of potential but as yet it doesn’t feel as professional as LotusLive and isn’t as heavily featured.

After years being behind it seems Lotus with LotusLive may have a real opportunity to catch up wirth the competition: for this though getting LotusLive as the product of choice for consumers as well as businesses may be necessary too.

The IBM XWork server is an IBM Lotus Domino 8.5x server with an entirely different license approach, different packaging, and different branding (installer).

If it’s basically the renamed IBM Domino server  then why should small and medium size businesses look into the XWork server solution?

• First and foremost ,the IBM XWork server is IBM software which means quality and great customer support.
• Secondary, the IBM XWork server is based on the Lotus Domino technology and therefore Notes and web applications can be easily ported to the server.  Also, rapid application development now can be utilized on the XWork server as it runs any web based applications written in Lotus Notes XPages, LotusScript and @ Functions.
•  The IBM XWork server license is only around $2,000 per server installation which should make this product attractive for not only medium size but also for small size businesses.
• The IBM XWorks server licensing permits unlimited web users. The restriction of license is that every XWork Server may have maximum 4 applications installed. Where applications are defined as a grouping of 1 to 4 databases so, an XWork Server set up may have up 16 databases, not including system databases – 4 applications and if you need further than 4 applications, you can get license a 2nd install of the IBM XWork Server.
• XWorsk server is not tied to email system and don’t require the Lotus Notes email. This should make the server a transparent solution to allow this product to be utilized by companies using different email systems.

Picture credit: FBI

Seizure orders have been executed against 150 domain names of commercial websites engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works as part of Operation In Our Sites. The seized domains are in the custody of the federal government. Visitors to the sites will now find a seizure banner that notifies them that the domain name has been seized by federal authorities and educates them that willful copyright infringement is a federal crime.

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