Online marketing has rapidly become one of the most important ways for businesses to promote their offerings and keep their customers informed, as more and more of us use the web to research before we buy.

Just about every business has a website and an email newsletter and right now we’re seeing a huge amount of activity as companies around the world add social media strategies to their online marketing mix with tools like blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

So what about here in Hawke’s Bay?

• Are Hawke’s Bay businesses embracing this global shift away from traditional marketing?
• How are Hawke’s Bay businesses taking advantage of the new marketing opportunities available to them online?

At Mogul, our aim is simple: to help Hawke’s Bay businesses to be smarter than other regions in their online marketing activities e.g. our Google Places initiative, so the next step is to conduct an online marketing survey to:

• Gather relevant local information to share with local businesses.
• Identify which online marketing channels Hawke’s Bay businesses are using and how.
• Analyse what sort of results they’re getting.
• Establish where your business fits in with the rest of Hawke’s Bay.

We’re putting up a nice shiny Apple iPad 16GB 3G (worth $1000.00) as a draw prize* for completing the survey and we will present the findings to participating businesses**.

Once the results have been analysed, you’ll be invited to attend an interactive workshop where Mogul will provide expert online marketing tips and advice that will apply to you and your business, and will help you to get your business up to speed online.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/online-marketing-survey

And tell your friends and colleagues!

*Prize will be drawn on the 17th September 2010.
**The identity of all respondents will remain confidential in accordance with the ESOMAR Code of Conduct.

I presented to a room full of like-minded WordPress evangelists like ourselves on the topic of “Customising WordPress”.  I covered picking existing plugins from the WordPress Codex, a brief look into making plugins then leveraging and managing custom fields and content types.  From my side of the desk it was kind of a big deal – presenting to a room of 30-40 strangers (and a couple of cheerleaders in the front row) was a pretty full on experience, but I’ve already had some good feedback already via Twitter.

We’ve picked up some great information during the weekend so far, specifically in regards to custom content types, using BuddyPress to create social networks and had a great session on HTML5 & CSS3.  It’s been an incredibly worthwhile experience already!

Here’s a couple of pics of me doing my thing.

Looking forward to seeing Matt profiling Fruitbowl tomorrow.

We were a bit nervous about the job because they had just axed their developers for under-performing but Andrew was open to suggestions and was happy to take advice on what would work and what wouldn’t – so it made for a great project.

Andrew has really enjoyed updating the site and with no training and just the manual has totally nailed it!

This weekend in Auckland it’s WordCamp NZ 2010. Wordcamp is an international event which brings together people who work with and love WordPress.

In case you didn’t know, WordPress is the blog platform on which Fruitbowl is built.

Three of us from Mogul are heading up to Auckland tomorrow to attend Wordcamp. I’ve got a speaking slot at the conference – and I thought it would be a great chance to showcase our little community blog so I’m going to speak about Fruitbowl.

You can find out more about Wordcamp here: http://wordcamp.org.nz/mogul-time/

I’ll post photos and feedback from the conference when we get back.

It was important that the photos were the star of the show and that the user could find the information they required quickly and easily.

Almost all of the site is editable by the client (including the homepage sliders) and Sandy has taken to it like a duck to water!

Now without sounding completely like a broken record it should be pointed out that we at Mogul are complete WordPress evangelists.  We don’t just build WordPress, we live and breathe it.  So given the opportunity to give 3.0 a test drive we were chomping at the bit.  And we can tell you now that it delivers.

So what’s new?

There’s a whole new raft of “out of the box” features that WordPress 3.0 provides users and developers alike.  Here’s what really excites us:

• Custom content types – previously limited to posts for a blog or pages for the rest of the site, WordPress steps up into the realm of true CMS by allowing the creation of any post type imaginable.   Product catalog, anyone?  Real Estate listings? Employee list?
• Custom Taxonomies – for those familiar with WordPress you’ll know about categories and tags – custom taxonomies allow us to create limitless ways to include meta data about your content.
• Integrated Mutli-user – Need multiple blogs? Previously a separate project, WordPress now comes with WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) completely integrated.  With the addition of the BuddyPress plugin it’s now even possible to develop your own social network.
• Custom menus – it’s now possible to add almost any type of content to a single navigation menu

If you’re anything like me, reading about it isn’t really learning about it.  So here’s the official WordPress propaganda:

I’m so glad you’re excited about it, Mogul, but…

…what does it all mean?  Well, from our point of view it feels that the somewhat rigid structure of the already brilliant WordPress has just taken a turn for the better, sleeker and more flexible.  This means we can now develop an even more fluid and extensible site that better suits your requirements.  There’s also a number of improved backend processes that make managing your site almost even easier than before.

How we’re using it

We’ve upgraded a number of sites to WordPress 3.0 already and we’ve even built one site from the ground up using WordPress 3.0 as a base.  Before we really got our teeth sunk into a feature packed 3.0 site though we wanted to make sure that this new version still catered to the basic needs of our clients.  And it does.  Amazingly well, as always.

We’ve got a few great 3.0 sites in the pipeline already, so watch this space.  However, if you have a project that needs that extra level of customisation then you need to talk to us now!

It was important that the members had a decent piece of ‘real estate’ in the site and that they could really show off their business. So the listing pages were designed to maximise products and services but also to give basic contact details.

The news and events section will be updated regularly so people will be able to use it as a resource for upcoming events and to read up on any other exciting Havelock North news.

We’re working with the Havelock North Business Association (HNBA) members to give Havelock North a regional ‘digital advantage’ ahead of big events like the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and to provide visitors with information they may require, such as businesses’ opening hours and location.

We have contracted EIT student Damian to get out and about in the streets of Havelock North, creating and verifying Google Places listings in an effort to make Havelock North the most ‘Google-y’ place in New Zealand!

Visitors coming to Hawke’s Bay might be looking for a dentist, tyre stockist, food market or a babysitter. We want to ensure when they are searching online, using a computer or their smartphone, that Havelock North businesses are as easy to find as possible.

According to the official Google Blog, over 4 million businesses around-the-world have claimed their Google Places listings since its launch in September 2009. The listings connect people to relevant information such as hours of operation, vouchers, and product offerings, but also offer photos and video uploads. We want to ensure Havelock North is capitalising on the service.

It’s estimated that around 20% of all searches on Google are related to location. Google Places is a fantastic free service that enables businesses to raise their digital profile and promote their goods and services to people searching the Web.

Another great benefit of Google Places for businesses is that it provides valuable insights into how many people are clicking to their listings, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people travelled from to get to the business. All this can really help a business fine tune their offer or expand into other markets.

Havelock North Business Association President, Adrienne Pierce is excited to see Mogul embrace the tool. “We’re very grateful to Mogul who are willing to invest their own time, for free, for the collective good of Havelock North businesses. The Association is working towards providing Havelock North Village with wi-fi access, so Mogul’s initiative works in really well with our strategy. We live in a digitally mobile society, so Havelock North will be in a powerful position to communicate and direct visitors to the town through their computers and smartphones.”

Anyone can create their own Google Places listing but not everyone is sure how to go about it. If there are any other Havelock North business’ wishing Mogul to volunteer their services to help with their Google Places listing, please contact me (Georgina Miller) at Mogul on 06 877 7478 or email george@mogul.co.nz

So I got one anyway.

And here are my thoughts on it…

The iPad is like an iPod Touch on steroids. It’s about the size of a paperback novel and has a touch screen.
It has 32GB of memory, so plenty of room for music, photos and videos, and Wi-Fi connectivity so you can surf the web, check out Facebook and Twitter, and read your emails.

The touch screen and tilt action makes it much more intuitive than a keyboard and mouse. The games are very cheap. Some really good ones are free or only cost about $3. If you have kids, they will love it, especially the excellent educational games and Angry Birds, a cult classic in which you destroy pigs sheltering in elaborate fortifications by launching birds at them with a catapult.

My mother-in-law loves playing scrabble on it – she’s a teacher so she loves the chance to exercise her vast vocabulary.

The iPad’s niche seems to be couch computer – you can play on it while watching TV or lying in bed – or spending time in your “office”, as the Fonz would call it. Computer is not really the right word for this thing, perhaps it should simply be called a tablet device. After surfing the web for a few minutes with its beautiful high-resolution touch screen, a laptop seems as antiquated as a typewriter.

I’ve already noticed some changes in my behaviour. I’ve never been unable to sit passively watching TV – my attention span is far too short. I need to read the newspaper or a magazine or change the channel every 15 seconds.
The iPad has made watching live sport a much more interactive and enjoyable activity. I watched the World Cup match between the USA and Ghana while following Google’s new real-time Twitter feed and it was like watching the game at a pub catching snippets of hundreds of random conversations. Some of the tweets were funny, like listening to Beavis and Butthead passing snide comments. When the USA lost, I actually felt sorry for some the fans, even though I really wanted Ghana to win. The iPad gave a real sense of community.

We’ve been using it as an iPod to play music through the stereo in the office. It makes it so easy for downloading music, and it’s cheap too ($13 for an album). We’ve downloaded more music in 3 weeks than we have in the least 3 years.

Things to be aware of before you get one:

• It doesn’t have a camera, and it doesn’t have a USB port so you can’t plug anything into it.
• The battery doesn’t seem to charge up from a PC, only from a Mac. If you haven’t got a Mac, you’ll need to charge it up from the wall instead.
• It doesn’t support Flash, but YouTube still works.
• It doesn’t have a phone, but it’s too big to use as a mobile phone anyway. However, it has a microphone so you can use it for Skype calls.
• It’s Wi-fi only so you can’t connect to the Internet outside of Wireless hotspots, although 3G iPads are now available.
• It seems a bit slippery and fragile, and until I got a folder for it, I was always scared of dropping it on the hard floor.

So the big question is “Should you get one?” Hmmmm… The iPad is very, very cool but it feels like it could be better. I would probably wait a while and see what improvements Apple makes to it and then see what else appears on the market. Most of the other manufacturers have devices in the works and some of them look pretty good.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/9-upcoming-tablet-alternatives-to-the-apple-ipad/

Rumour has it that Microsoft’s rumoured tablet device has been cancelled:
http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project

And Cisco has recently announced a tablet device aimed at business customers:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11156/index.html

If anyone wants to have a play with the iPad, I’ve got it here at the Mogul office most days. Come and check it out!