QR Codes???

Ever wanted to have your own bar code to do things with? They are limited to a certain number of numerical digits and don't do a lot more than inventory control. I have been hearing talk about QR Codes here lately and have been seeing some interesting uses for them.

What is a QR Code you may be asking? Well, here is one.



One of the uses of QR Codes is with smart phones and allow you to quickly point to a bit of information based on the code. It can be a phone number, SMS, or web address coded in the blob of squares.

There could be a lot of cool uses for this. Imagine having the code on a product package and have it take you to more information on the product or even suggested uses.

How about putting the code on the back of your business card and have it linked to your LinkedIn Profile, your website or portfolio.

Are you doing a trade show? How about putting on in your booth that take a visitor to your contact us page specifically setup for the show to capture date in to Sales Force?

Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to speak to a group about LinkedIn, I am going to put a small sign up that point to my contact page and see what happens. Or maybe I should do my LinkedIn profile.

Do you want to generate one? Check out Kaywa's website and have fun...

Then load up your smart phone with one of the free apps to scan your new QR Code.

Leave us a comment, tell me how you are using a QR Code.

DFW SEO - Presentation Notes

Tonight I had the opportunity to present to the Dallas Interactive Marketing & Internet SEO SEM Meetup.

As a independent consultant that provides SEO and Social Media Marketing, I am looking for ways to quantify my results with clients. Everyone wants to be at the top of the search results but can't truly afford the time and effort that it takes to increase the SEO value and increase the results on Google and Bing.

The first tool that I use to quantify SEO value and effectiveness is Web Site Grader. With Web Site Grader, I am able to have a grade value of the site, all on a scale of 100. Not only does this site give the grade, it also gives suggestions on things that need to be improved. Image Alt Tags, Meta tags, age of domain and inbound links are taken into consideration.

Second, I showed the web site SpyFu.com, SpyFu is great for looking at the competition and what they are doing with PPC (Pay Per Click). I can see what campaigns they ran and get an overall impression of how they have been marketing them selves.

The third tool is a plug-in for FireFox called SEOQuake This tool allows me to look at the keywords and density of any page on the internet. This allows me to get a good over view of a competitors site and develop a list of keywords to start the process of SEO.

So what I am looking at with these tools is to evaluate the competition. Ultimately, we are wanting to one up our competitors and have more SEO Value that them. Look at there keywords, there current CPC campaigns and look at their scores. From there I will go into action to increase my clients SEO presence and have tools to see the effectiveness of my efforts.

Blue Knot Luncheon Presentation Notes

Today I had the opportunity to present to the Blue Knot group which is the technical group of the Jewish Federation.

While we were hoping for a bigger group, we did have just under 40 in attendance. There were a number of other events that were taking place at the same time so it did have the attendance a little low.

Social Media

I started with a video from YouTube entitled "Social Media ROI: Socialnomics"

Social Media is not a in your face sales tool. You want to talk about relevant information to your audience. Talking about going to Starbucks to get another double whatchamacallit coffee thing is not a productive topic of interest to most people.

Facebook is a massive social site that appears to be morphing into a new game platform with the craze of Farmville, Mafia Wars and Fishville. With the demographics information available from the profiles for all the users, you can do some very detailed marketing.

One option that is a growing trend is the creation of "Fan Pages" on Facebook. These pages allow you to have "fans" and be able to talk to them and make offers that they would be interested.

Twitter, is another tool that has a growing market for companies to have a presence to provide a face for a company. A lot of companies are creating a presence to do customer service and insure that a good reputation is being maintained.

I gave an example of a Professional Blogger in California that had an issue with their internet service. A phone call to customer service rendered a time frame of 2 days before the issue would be resolved. A quick tweet on their cell generated a personal call from a VP and their internet service was back up in a couple of hours.

Follow or stalk people that are saying meaningful things. Things that are of interest to you.
Post message about things to add value to your products or services.
Repost or retweet, message and links that are good info to share.

All of the social media sites can be a big consumer of your time. There are a number of tools that can help you streamline your posting activities.

SocialOomph.com - This is a free tool that allows you to schedule your messages to your social sites. Example, on Monday morning take 30 minutes and setup 20 tweets or so that will communicate to your audience at various times through out the week. When would your audience be looking?

Ping.fm - Provides a tool to tweet once and hit all the social sites.

Extra Tip: Setup several Google Alerts to monitor your name, your business and/or your products. This will allow you to keep tabs of what is being said.

pipl.com - I mentioned this as a tool to see what is publicly known about you. It is an aggregation
of public records (phone, birth, death, etc.) a little freaky to see what you can find.

If I can answer any questions about my presentation to day please feel free to post a comment.

Where is Waldo... I mean John...

Well, it has been a few months since I have written a new blog post. So I thought I would take a few minutes to crank out a quick post.

First and foremost, business has picked up and the weather has increased to a much more desirable temperature. The past several weeks have been a flurry of meetings and putting together proposals for a number of potential clients. All a great thing since as many of you know, I am doing my own start-up and making a go of it on my own. Just for grins, here is a partial list of some of my new clients. OK, this is also a shameless plug and a attempt to increase the off page SEO value of my clients sites.

DentSquadUSA • P+D Solutions • dZignPak • WhiteShield • Virtech Paralegal • The Solar Group • RDH Vending • Pacific Church of God • It's Rocket Science • Heritage Vistas • Calahan Design Solutions

The services that I am providing for these clients varies from client to client. Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, web site design and maintenance. I am totally having a great time working with these clients.

Hands on with the iPad

If you have not had the opportunity to have a little hands on time with the new iPad from Apple, you will find yourself,or at least I did, start thinking of ways to justify spending the money to buy one.

My first impressions was great, I was impressed with the screen, the size and the applications were beautiful.

The physical device felt a bit thicker than I was expecting. The edges of the body were smooth much like the newest generation of the MacBook Pro screen. The screen was larger than I imagined and was crisp and clean. Clicking or tapping icons was a little more pronounced than I expected. Several times while I was testing the unit, i tapped an icon and nothing happened. I had to slowly and intentionally tap the icon to get it to register the selection.

The software was very iPhone like and the same gestures allowed me to quickly pick it up and start flipping screens left and right. I also found it very responsive to the orientation of the iPad and flipped as needed.

Using the keyboard was pretty easy I did find the vertical keyboard a bit cramped to type with both hands as a keyboard. Flipping it horizontal was a much easier typing experience. However, I was unsure where my fingers were since I did not have a bump on the "f" and "j" keys.

The e-mail application was much richer than the iPhone version of the app. It was more like the Mail app on the Mac OS which allowed you to see your folders and accounts I like that added functionality.

The Calendar would allow you to flip to a horizontal version and gave a much richer look and feel with having a column on the left to see your calendars. I really liked the fact that each event in the calendar had a colored bullet with black text unlike the Mac OS Calendar where all the text for an event is color. That might be a preference but did not take the time to look.

iPhoto was very much like the iPhoto on the Mac. It allowed you to double tap a photo thumbnail and open the image to full screen. Flipping a finger left and right was smooth to navigate between images. Using the thumb and index finger would allow me to rotate images effortlessly. You could also setup slide shows by accessing a menu and defining time and transition.

The iBook app was nice. There were all the expected functionality that I would guess would be available with other eBook Readers. This included the control of brightness, text size and bookmarking. I really enjoyed the page turning animation. It was very intuitive to allow the 3D representation of turning a real books page. I also loved how you could run your finger back and forth to control the animation. Several of the books that I looked at also included illustrations and looked great.

The web (Safari) looked great. I looked at a couple of my sites and a few others to get an idea of the format. My sites generally are 955 wide and looked great in both orientations.

I also looked at a couple of YouTube videos and they were a bit chunky but would not slow me down from watching old StarTrek content. I viewed a HD video and it looked amazing.

Summary, I would love to have one of these now, but I am not at a point where luxuries are allowed :-(. I could see that this could easily replace a computer for my kids since all that they do is surf the web and do e-mail. As a student I can see the iPad quickly becoming a norm on campuses with the availability of the books in the iBook format. Adding the iWork tools allows you to word process, presentation creation and many of the other standards.

If you dare, go check it out at the Apple Store and see what you think. Oh by the way, you might want to leave your wallet at home, since the $499 starting price is pretty tempting.