In 2010, Facebook will develop new tools to measure the ROI of marketing and advertising on their platform.

During the first day of Social Media Week 2010, Fabio Freyre (Facebook’s VP of Advertising), hinted that Facebook is currently in advanced stages of “developing additional tools and analytics” to measure online and offline engagement within their own platform. These tools will be stronger and more robust than the tools Facebook has previously made available, which merely poll users about brands.

One of the biggest questions regarding social media and engagement is, “how do we measure this stuff?” There are professional agencies that are dedicated to measuring social awareness, buzz, engagement, and ultimately return on investment (ROI).

Specifically with Facebook, how does one know how much value to place on a “fan” (a person who has attached themselves to the Facebook page of a company, brand, or organization) of a particular brand? How much is that fan worth? What is the scale of engagement that fan has with his “community”?
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Thousands of Internet Industry leaders and social media experts descended on New York City’s Javits Center last week for the Web 2.0 Expo. With the theme of the Expo being “The Power of Less,” Blue Fountain Media was the one company singled out as the embodiment of the theme.

Here’s how Web 2.0 Expo defined “The Power of Less”:

The theme for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo New York is the Power of Less. The Power of Less doesn’t just mean making do with fewer staff and a smaller budget. It means that constraints drive creativity, whether in business models, design paradigms, or platforms. It means the power of the small screen, the thin client, the streamlined interface. It might mean the power of small teams, or even going solo.

In the official Web 2.0 Expo Blog, Blue Fountain Media Founder and Creative Director Gabriel Shaoolian participated in an extended Q & A.
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(source: Laughing Squid)

Web design companies love to tout the awards they’ve won. Many times it is one of their only selling points. Not to say that having an award-winning website under your belt isn’t a nice bragging right to have as a design firm. After all Blue Fountain Media has won its share of awards.  What I would like to emphasize is that winning awards should not be the priority as a design firm.

Blue Fountain Media was founded on the principle that winning an award doesn’t make a website successful.

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R.A.G. website has record-breaking month thanks to our SEO work

New York clothing store, R.A.G. New York continues to see record traffic and sales on their website thanks to the search engine optimization performed by Blue Fountain Media between April and September 2008.  Our client was even mentioned in the NY Daily News thanks to our work.

See Blue Fountain Media in the NY Daily News

Currently, the website is not running any type of marketing program except through its 6 stores in New York City. The month of April broke all preceding records as can be seen in the two line graphs showing total visits and sales to the website since March 2008:

These results are both due to our re-design of the website as well as an extensive search engine optimization campaign which included months of link building, analysis, and a results-oriented team of dedicated individuals.
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Because they work best together.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?
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Because We Customize, Consult, and Measure Results

Blue Fountain Media isn’t a discount web design shop. From the beginning, we’ve offered a premium service, and we’ve charged accordingly. The web design business is unique in that there are many people with the necessary skills to put together a site — and some of them don’t charge much at all.

Although Blue Fountain Media charges far less than the big agencies, we do charge more than some other web design companies. Here’s why:
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Is your website optimized for mobile devices? Even though the latest service providers and phones, like the iPhone, the G1, and the BlackBerry Storm, can handle large amounts of data, images, and even special features like JavaScript and Flash, there are an entirely different set of concerns for mobile devices, and this audience is becoming hard to ignore.

Why should you care?

• The mobile marketplace is still young. Now is the time to get ahead of your competition. Mobile users tend to navigate away from websites that are difficult to use and will go to the competition.
• Mobile web searches shows a desire to take immediate action. That means that your mobile customers are much more valuable. You should not be losing them due to lack of usability.
• You may be sending out emails to people who will be opening your website on their phone. What do you want it to look like?
• The share of your customers searching for your services or viewing your website from their phones is only going to increase in the near future. Currently, 75% of all mobile search is done on iPhones, which only have a 10% market share. This disproportion is likely to correct itself as other phones catch up with the iPhone.

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Last week we attended Search Engine Strategies New York, the online marketing conference and expo, and one theme that kept coming up in various contexts was the concept of real value. Different industries talk about it different way: in economics it’s “utility”, in customer relations it’s “satisfaction”, but the idea is the same: businesses and consumers alike are paying more attention to each dollar that they spend and how it benefits them.

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One of the things that I kept hearing over and over again at SES New York, was that if you are running a social media marketing campaign and it’s not working, just stop it and do something else. If you have a corporate blog and it’s not getting you any attention, start over. If your Facebook page has 10 members, all of whom are part of your extended family, shut down that page. There is no use in sinking time and effort into social media activity that is not delivering results for your company.

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This is a quick post to exemplify why most methods of marketing, especially online, simply do not match the effectiveness and longevity of search engine optimization (SEO). The important factor to remember is that it is measurable, like pay-per-click advertising and banner ads, but unlike these, the effects of SEO last far beyond the length of the campaign and cost-per-conversion plummets with SEO as time goes by.
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