Gary Vay*ner*chuk is an owner of a successful Wine store in New York that has experienced explosive growth and leveraged the Internet to increase sales. Gary has also become an Internet phenomenon through his new media efforts like the successful Wine Library TV podcast and inviting users to discuss “anything” with him via IM, Twitter and other Social Networks. This use of Web 2.0 technologies has created a demand for Gary at Web Conferences.
In this video Gary discussed his philosophy of building on the small successes. This is extremely applicable to a Small Business’s website strategy and is worth a listen. Enjoy.
Every summer my wife volunteers at American Diabetes Association Camp Colorado as a medical counselor. This camp is a great opportunity for kids with Diabetes to have a fun week outdoors.
Divinia volunteered a website, hosting and graphic design efforts. Like many Small Businesses or Non-Profits, getting control of content is the number one request. We used WordPress, a Blog, YouTube video cllps and PDF/MS Word downloads to deliver information to parents and campers. We also used Google Analytics to monitor web traffic. The week of camp traffic spiked to several hundred unique visits!
YouTube announced the release of YouTube Insight on their blog today. YouTube Insight provides analytics about how your videos are being viewed (which countries, per day, per month, etc). The blog post promises more tools to come.
As the blog post discusses, this is great news because you can use YouTube Insight’s analytics about your videos for many of the same reasons as you use Google Analytics to measure your website traffic. Understanding your traffic and interest in what you are putting out there on the web helps you shape your message and strategy.
We are fans of a series of videos from CommonCraft that explains new technologies in a simple way. This video describes a social networking website called twitter. Twitter is great for small businesses and nonprofits, not necessarily to generate sales, but more as a networking and idea generating tool.
As more companies and non-profits begin to blog and truly build an audience for their website with relevant content they are able to leverage their website to do new things.
A great example of this is the blog post “We’re Hiring” on the Union Square Ventures website. Union Square is a Venture Capital firm that invests in many tech companies….this blog post is how they posted their latest job opening for a new Analyst. The cool thing about this approach is that no resumes were accepted, applicants were asked to comment on the blog post and list their social networking profile (facebook, myspace, linkedin, etc).
It will be interesting to see if more and more companies begin using this type of approach as a mechanism for filtering their applicants.
