Previously we have written about protecting the image and reputation of your business. As reported by Bnet, in a world of social media which has led to the blurring of the lines between our personal and professional lives, it has become increasingly important to take steps to protect your personal reputation. It doesn’t take much for a smear campaign against you to quickly spread across the internet which can be seriously damaging to your career.

You can use the following tips for tracking and repairing your online reputation:

Tracking your online reputation

* Make a list of the most likely places your name would appear online to begin monitoring your online reputation. Identify blogs, forums, and social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which anyone within your professional circle may also use. You can even track your company’s corporate site and previous places of employment.

* You can then set up your own individual Google alerts for the sites you want to frequently monitor at www.google.com/alerts. Other monitoring tools include Twinbox, which tracks comments made on Twitter through Microsoft Outlook.

Repairing your online reputation

* Although the above tips are useful, unfortunately they will not prevent online attacks. The first thing to do is examine what has been said about you and whether it is accurate or not. If not, you should correct them immediately. If it is true, you should apologise via the same medium as the message.

* If your professional realm is under attack, consider advising your employer as well as the legal department – especially if the comments made are defamatory.

Other useful information

An important aspect of creating your own personal brand online is to separate your business and personal social networking contacts. For example, you could use Facebook for personal networking and LinkedIn for business networking.

You build and maintain others’ brands every day, why not start doing it for yourself?

Create your own PR that reflects the real you – the professional you. By circulating positivity around your name, the likelihood of negative commentary being regarded is reduced.

As the search and web page design evolve, users expectations are ever increasing. The need to capture attention quickly and demonstrate how you can solve the users specific problem is becoming increasingly important for online success.

This is not new news to most but recently Digital Media reported that the first 7 seconds are critical. This is when web users decide whether or not your website is what they are looking for.

A sophisticated and complex website does not necessarily equal a good impression on site visitors.

There are six main points to remember when trying to capture – and hold your audiences’ attention:

* Your website should communicate clearly what you are trying to say so visitors can determine whether this meets their needs or not.

* Optimising your home page creates several advantages. It will ensure first-time visitors stay and browse, increase the likelihood of their return, and increase the number of areas people interact with on your site.

* Your product, service or feature should be easily visible, either from the home page or menu navigation. Otherwise, visitors will quickly leave if what they are looking isn’t easily accessible. By not displaying the products and services your business offers in a straight forward manner, you may be losing potential customers.

* Your site should regularly present new and up-to-date information. This ensures you are constantly engaging with your audience and encouraging them to return. It also portrays a lively and active site, not one that is dull and uninteresting. A good way to do this is through regular blog posts and updates of a section of your home page.

* The second part of the 7 second rule is to then apply it to all other pages of the site. Lead the visitor towards taking a desired action (making an inquiry, subscription, purchase etc).

* There are usually several people involved in the creation of a website – designers, copywriters etc. They are all contributing different ideas and opinions which can become entangled if not managed properly. Ensure every-one’s input is communicated thoroughly and managed with proper instructions. If the development process has been a long one, consider refreshing content before making live – particularly on the home page.

Connecting Images takes all these factors and much more into consideration when designing or re-designing its clients’ websites. If you are feeling lost in all there is to consider with a new or redeveloped website and want to find out more about our website services, call Cal on (03) 9819 2566 to arrange to come in for a coffee and a chat.

Over the years we’ve built dozens of websites and run hundreds of email marketing campaigns. That equates to thousands of hours of design, coding and user testing. In that time, we’ve learnt a thing or two about getting digital content to appear consistently on different machines with varying screen resolutions, browsers and platforms and with different email applications.

So why do things end up looking different and what does it mean for you as a marketer? There are a myriad of factors that can affect how your recipients view your website or eNewsletters on their computers. We will explain a few of these in this post and what we do to overcome the issue.

Pixel width matters.

Why?
It’s all about screen resolution aka the number of pixels (short for picture elements) available on your users’ screens. Due to the many variants that determine how one views an email campaign, it is difficult to cater for everyone all of the time. So, as a rule we design for the masses.

Who are they?
Resolution                            % of Internet Users
Higher than 1024×768          30%
1024×768                           70%
800×600                              4%
Lower than 800×600          < 1%
Unknown                              3%

Note: These statistics were gathered from visitors to a website dedicated to web technologies, so there may be an over-representation of both higher resolution monitors and lower resolution handheld devices. Updated to January 2009 results.

Look at some of the most visited websites in 2009. What do they have in common?

* facebook.com
* au.yahoo.com
* youtube.com
* ebay.com.au
* ninemsn.com.au
* wikipedia.org
* News.com.au
* realestate.com.au
* commbank.com.au

All have been built with 1024 maximum resolution in mind.

Note: If you are one of the 70% at 1024 resolution the sites will take up all of your screen, here’s what you would see if you had a higher resolution.

What does this mean for my email?

Outlook, Apple Mail, Hotmail, Gmail all fit their various navigation panels and toolbars into the screen real estate. Meaning that at best you’ve got about 600 pixels in width to play with.

OK, so how long should my eNewsletter be?

Our scientific WAG model suggests users fall asleep, or at least lose interest, after 2000 pixels in length (just think “a couple” of scrolls of the mouse wheel).

Still not sure why fonts and layouts aren’t consistent?

The programs your subscribers use to visit webpages and read email can render different results. While standards have been put in place to help reduce the issue, other measures to protect email user privacy, increase security and reduce SPAM completely conflict with what the those standards set out to achieve.

For example, Microsoft Outlook now uses Word to display HTML while webmail solutions like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail all use the web browser but strip out different elements of email template code…and we haven’t even mentioned the version offered by ISPs like BigPond, Optus or iiNet.

What else do I need to think about when creating an email campaign?

* Are you going to print the email?
* What about people with ‘text only’ readers?
* Most email programs block images by default, are you getting your message across if people opt not to download images?

So there you have it, when it comes to creating a successful email campaign there can be a lot to consider. We wouldn’t blame you for thinking it all sounds a bit too hard. After all, that’s why we have a couple of resident geeks!

With these guys on the job, email is still an exceptionally effective way of staying in touch with your customers and prospects on a regular basis.

Connecting Images configures your email campaigns with all of the above considerations in mind to ensure that your digital communication looks great, gets read and achieves results. Give us a call today on (03) 9819 2566 to arrange to come in for a coffee and discuss your digital marketing needs.