|
| Recent Articles |
Findory Dumps Google Ads For Amazon
Findory, the personalization startup that remains my favorite news source, has switched its ad system from Google AdSense to Amazon Associates.
Google Adds Recommendation Widget
Google has added a new homepage widget that shows you "Interesting Items" personalized for you based on your search history. The module displays recommended searches, web pages and homepage gadgets Google thinks you'd be interested in.
Make Registration Forms Irresistible With Personality
You can create an irresistible offer by humanizing the registration process. Help your potential registrants know that you are real, caring people behind the scenes.
Portal Personalization Market To Reach $9.9 Billion
The market for enterprise portals is expected to grow from $1.1 billion in 2005 to a whopping $9.9 billion by 2012, as companies look for faster, efficient, and lightweight technology for their mobile work force. Companies are looking for portals that are customizable, as they adapt to the rapid pace of the new business world.
Amazon.com is Watching You
How Real-time Data Mining Can Improve Your Customer Conversion Rate...
Who are You? Yahoo! Mail and Search Engine Results
"Personalization" on the web is becoming very popular. Sites like MySpace and Yahoo! seem to go to great lengths to allow users to create their own "identities..."
Google Radio Ads Could Get Personal
On his way to a hot date, Joe Goodguy flips on his satellite radio. A voice comes over the car speakers, "that's what you're wearing?" Joe eyeballs his...
New Phone Server Features Personalization
These are busy times at VoiceObjects. The company put out four press releases in one day, covering everything from management personnel to corporate partnerships.
Up Close and Personal with Mobile Google
On Monday, the Google Press Center released word of (yet another) new direction for the company.
What Is So Great About An Email Follow Up?
If you are in business, any kind of business then it is
important for you to learn how to...
Web Site Customization and Personalization
To truly get to know your customers and provide the service they are looking for, learn as much as possible...
|
|
10.13.06
Calendar Sharing Becoming New Social Phenomenon
 By Ross Dunn
Online calendars have been available for many years now but the calendar-sharing feature that Google has included in Google Calendar has opened the door to a great a form of social marketing that is bound to make waves and possibly increase your bottom line.
What is Google Calendar?
If you are not a GMail user or even a fan of Google you may not know what I am talking about so here is some background. GMail is Google's free web-based email program, which has many features that has helped it create a significant user base. After the emergence of Google Mail (GMail), Google launched a number of additional free applications for Gmail users, which culminated in a combined solution called Google Apps . One of these applications is Google Calendar, which is the subject of this article.
Google Calendar is similar to popular calendar applications like Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo calendar. Google Calendar (for the sake of brevity lets call it "GC" from now on) allows you to quickly and efficiently create single or recurring events with a click of a mouse. As with most Google applications, this software includes loads of functionality, far more than I can cover in this small article so this is a link to a Tour of GC . The most interesting capability of GC is the ability to share your calendars with the world.
How Calendar Sharing Entered My Life
My fiancée, Sara, has a brutal job that requires her to work obscene hours over strange stretches of time; she is a full-time critical care nurse. As a result, we often find it difficult to schedule time with friends because there is confusion over when she does or does not work. Thankfully, Sara switched to Gmail from Hotmail on the advice of a friend and began using Google Calendar. A short while later I received an invite by email to add her work calendar to my Google Calendar profile. Upon accepting I was delighted to find it allowed me to overlay her work schedule over mine. Voila! I shared my calendar with her and in an instant of googlized technological wonder we were able to coordinate our busy lives.
The point of this story is that within all of this immersion into GC I soon found my marketing brain clicking into overdrive; there is commercial value in this free service! There had to be a way to offer a calendar on a website so that prospective customers could view it. This would be great for event-oriented companies; I had to know more.
Event Publisher Guide
With my commercial nose in high gear, I spent more time reviewing the capabilities of this cool new software, which led me to Google's Event Publisher Guide . Found in the 'About' section of GC, the Event Publisher Guide explains how anyone can offer their calendar publicly on their personal or commercial website. Trust Google to cover all the bases because this useful page provided the tools required to make Google Calendar very commercially viable.
So how does this work and how can it help you? The unfortunate fact is that it may not help all of you but it is likely to help those who need to market events. Here is an example of how this free technology could become an easy and effective method to market your business.
Application Example
Imagine you are the marketing manager of a local playhouse and your job is to get the word out about all of the upcoming plays and concerts. You currently have a website that advertises this information in the form of a schedule but you are always on the lookout for additional ways to keep in the public eye. You also know that your target market will not always remember to check your site for the latest events.
Here is what you need to do to leverage Google Calendar and increase your exposure:
1. Sign up for Google Calendar
2. Create a new calendar and carefully create the title and description of your calendar so that it accurately describes the region and topic of your event listing. This part of the calendar creation requires some basic search engine optimization because once you make your calendar public it will be made available to prospective customers searching for event calendars in your locale.
3. Populate the event calendar with all of the year's upcoming events for your playhouse. In each event, make sure to provide a link directly to the reservation page on your website. If you can, add tracking to the URL so that you can tell the sale came from your shared calendar. When setting up the event in GC provide as much detail as you can within the space provided. After all, like any online resource you want your viewers to find this calendar extremely informative and useful. Once you are complete, set the calendar as public.
4. Follow the instructions on the Event Publisher Guide to find the address that directly links to your new calendar.
Click here to continue reading this article.
|
