Free Infographic Tools
Attributed to Mark Twain via Benjamin Disraeli The phrase takes a life of its own with Visual Infographics that almost any marketer can use due to the number of tools that are out there in the marketplace today.
I am a fan of a picture tells the story much better than words but this is no more important than when one looks at infographics. My fave Web 2.0 communicator @AmberMac just did a great post on Fast Company on a feature that i would encourage you to bookmark or subscribe to just because of the quality of the content. It discusses Infographics and follows on an interview with Nicholas Felton
AmberMac – Thoughtfullness and Prolific Valuable Content
I don’t miss an item that this prolific author and speaker produces because of the tremendous value she delivers. And delivers, and delivers. She has a bestselling book that came out last summer Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business
If that were not enough you can also find her on Twit.Tv weekly with Sarah Lane on The Social Hour as well as Canadian television show Webnation and a commentator on Canada’s CTV Television network. Add on that she is a mother of a toddler and a sought after consultant with her firm mgimedia.ca and keynote speaker around the world and she is a busy,busy person.
I am an unabashed fanboy but herein I sense is the real magic that I appreciate so much about Amber. She so willingly shares this information to assist others to grow and succeed in all of her forums.
Having just listened to Mitch Joel, on his Six Pixels of Separation podcast with Tim Sanders, author of Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence
Who knows what you might be able to convey using some of the new infographic tools.
Filed under Audio-Visual Presentation, Marketing by 
Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story
Any smart marketer knows that the best way to succeed in their objective is to tell a story that explains the idea better than any set of points could on the merits of the idea. The Hidden Power of Story is the way that we all learned at our Daddy’s knee and it is the way that most of us learned our life lessons all along.
Tell To Win Author Peter Guber
Peter Guber , the author is the former chairman of Sony Pictures and current CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group. Guber illustrates how powerful storytelling—about yourself or your product—can be the ultimate tool to get the meeting, engage the listener, and close the deal. With brisk and readable anecdotes, the author relates what he’s seen and learned in Hollywood, and how his celebrated friends—Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, Arianna Huffington, Nelson Mandela, and Frank Sinatra—impressed upon him the power of a well-crafted story or appeal.
Tell to Win Author Peter Guber
The celebrity name-dropping lends some glitter to Guber’s very reasonable precepts: as he urges the reader to harness the power of metaphor in crafting the core narrative of a pitch or advertising campaign, he refers to how Michael Jackson taught him about drama by making him watch a python slowly stalk a helpless mouse, and how KISS frontman Gene Simmons, son of Holocaust survivors, used his backstory to fuel his ambition and his business strategy. This valuable and inspiring book will help readers deliver an authentic and meaningful story to customers, colleagues, or prospective clients.
Tell to Win Teaches Us How To Spin a Good Tale
Good storytelling begets good understanding as the reader feels the story on an emotional level. I think it is often interesting to look who makes pre-sale comments on new books. I heard about this title from an email from Tony Robbins who told me the story of how Guber had been such an influence on his life, not only as a friend and a mentor .but also from the spinning of great stories which moved Robbins, who is no slouch in the storytelling and personal development world. Guber’s book Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story is available March 1 at online sources and bookstores. If you want to preorder this book, Tell to Win you can do it now at Amazon,Barnes&Noble or many other fine booksellers.
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Rightsleeve Delivers Promotional Design Excellence
Promotional Design and Branding are a key part of any marketing strategy. Who you are and what you do can be expressed by your visual identity and how you brand yourself. It can also be supported by all of your communications channels around your brand as well as by good promotional design with Rightsleeve.
No more are we left to put our brand on promotional pieces and other advertising and marketing giveaways designed in mass by factories in overseas locales. We now have promotional design, the social media channels and YouTube as well as online publications in addition to the older print media campaigns of the past.
Today you can design a complete strategy to support your branding using a wide variety of products. One Canadian company has taken this to an art form. Rightsleeve has taken the best in marketing, just in time manufacturing, and an integrated use of technology to save time,money,overhead and deliver value to customers around the world from a Toronto based centre of operations.
Rightsleeve is Double Award Winner
Winner of a Dell Small Business Excellence award in Canada for innovative technology deployment , Rightsleeve manages their whole global operation online from sourcing,design,online catalogues,customer service ,billing as well as and probably of the greatest value employee engagement. They are not just a source for pens and key-chains like some promotional companies.
Rightsleeve Honoured by Michael Dell in Texas
They are a promotional design agency which uses design,promotional products,rich media and technology to improve a company’s marketing results. Different from a number of their competitors but highly effective at delivering results. They were awarded the 2011 Gold Web award at the largest global promotional Products Conference PPAI in Las Vegas.
Award Winners at PPAI Conference 20111 in Las Vegas
If you want a source of promotional material or “swag” to promote your brand Rightsleeve can get it made for you,delivered on time. I discovered Rightsleeve and its CEO Mark Graham myself with swag I got at the social media and marketing conference “MESH”in Toronto several year ago and have been impressed with their depth of branding tools in their toolbox to deploy for you and your brand . You may want to view Mark’s social media presentations at a recent Promotional Products Industry conference. Mark sets the standard in his industry for his sharing of great content.
Not just content to help you promote your brand ,almost all of their own promotion is done online and through social media channels like Facebook.Twitter,You Tube and Linked-In serving Fortune 500 companies,advertising agencies, small business and organizations who want sharp branding and excellence in their promotions.
Rightsleeve Delivers Marketing Results
Technology is certainly a differentiator today in a number of industries. The judicious and careful use of it can produce extraordinary results for your promotions. Smart marketers have to get it working for them to get results they deserve. I am not an affiliate or promoter for these guys, they are just damn good at what they do. I like Rightsleeve and their results for clients. You should too.
Filed under Brand Building, Marketing, social media marketing by
Get Your Universal Business Listing
List Your Business Once. Be Found Everywhere!!!
It is time to move from traditional white pages listing of your business by someone else to a full online profile that you can control. The Universal Business Listing (UBL) – is a tool used by Local Search Marketing and Yellow Pages Representatives which is now available to be used by any business.
The Universal Business Listing gives your business the ability to list your business profile one time, and UBL will then submit your business listing information to various local search engines such as Yahoo! Local, YellowPages, Super Pages, Google Places, in fact all the major online directories, search portals, data aggregators, and to the national 411 database. Unlike traditional business listings that require a business phone line, UBL let’s you list your part-time or Internet business, your cell phone, your website and email. UBL is all you need to get your business visible on the internet.
Google Places
This is truly a time saver and a way for you to make sure your enhanced business information is published the way you want it.
UBL is the fast, easy and inexpensive way to get businesses and their ever-changing profiles listed everywhere. For less then dinner for two , you get the knowledge that your business is profiled and ready to be found in different types of online and mobile local search. Universal Business Listing will also allow you to track your submission to the different sites to report back to you that it has been submitted.
Universal Business Listing Increases Exposure
With this distribution you will be able to get the best possible exposure for your company’s public business information and contact points. This includes full product & service description, locations, web site URL, email contacts, certifications & awards. UBL is perfect for those:
That want the easy way to manage all of their listings
Need to have mobile phones listed in local and national 411 Directory Assistance
Don’t want to spend all of their time registering their info with Search Engines, Portals and Online Yellow
Pages but want the best possible exposure for all of their public information and contact points at an affordable
price.
Unlike the traditional print Yellow Pages where businesses are restricted in the type of information they can submit and in turn how they can be found (Business name, address, telephone number, fax number, URL and category). Success in online local search requires that more robust information be provided.
* Secondary Categories
* Brands Carried
* Products &Services
* Hours of Operation
* Logo
* Video & social Network Links
* Amenities
* Photos
* Specialties
This is especially important when you consider how online and mobile users are searching for local information and how the local search algorithms work on the search engines as well as the information that tools like Yelp and GigPark,Zagats and other location based systems are using.
UBL distributes your batch client listings to all the major Search and Directory outlets – hundreds in total.
* These include: Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing
* Online Yellow Pages such as Superpages, Yellowpages.com
* Social Networks such as Yelp
* Portals and Guides such as AOL, CitySearch
* Cell Phones and Mobile devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone
* 411 Directory Assistance
* In-Car GPS Navigation
* Telematics such as OnStar
Universal Business Listing
Universal Business Listing Maximizes Your SEO Returns
The faster you get started, the quicker your company’s search results are everywhere!
For businesses in the USA click on Universal Business Listings USA
For Canadian Businesses click on Universal Business Listing Canada
For United Kingdom Businesses click on Universal Business Listing U.K.
It is a wise move to have the listing contents EXACTLY the same everywhere as you have in your Google Places (Maps) Listing and UBL Listing for consistency in spelling, punctuation in Universal Business Listing as your linking and ability to be found improve dramatically, especially for citations in local search which tend to let you rank higher, the more citations and customer testimonials and comments you have.
Filed under Local Search Marketing, Marketing by
Social Media is a great tool to use
for community involvement and access to a wide variety of people locally and around the world. I came across this example: the 10to20 project from Queens, a large rural municipality on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia Canada .
They are using a social media campaign on Facebook to reinforce the buying of goods in their communities during the holiday season.
Social media spreads the word not ony to the residents of Queens and Nova Scotia but globally. Their mission is kind of simple:
“If everyone in Queens spent 10% of their income here at home, we would pout $20 million into the local economy! We know you aren’t going to spend it all here, but just spend that little bit more. 10cents per dollar makes a huge difference!”
The project is locally based by the South Queens Chamber of Commerce and the North Queens Board of Trade and the Municipality of Queens.
Social Media Tools
They are using Social Media tools such as Facebook and Twitter in this effort to reinforce their message on their website.
Social Media for Communities
Here is a link to a TV interview about buying local with CTV Atlantic’s Live at 5 program.
I want to thank my Facebook friend Monica Howard for bringing this social media tidbit to my attention. You may also want to like them on Facebook or friend on Twitter.
Filed under Marketing, social media marketing by
