As the color suggests, gray hat SEO is defined as white hat tactics plus a few tactics that bend the search engines’ rules a bit. Some SEO professionals believe that there is actually no such thing as 100% pure white hat SEO, but instead only gray and black hat. Gray hat SEO’s main benefit is… More »
White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO: 6 Ways to Keep Your Site from Being Blacklisted
First of all, SEO professionals do not wear colored hats. The term’s origins come from the Westerns, in which the hero wears a white hat and the villain wears a black hat. The term “hat” is used in both the SEO industry and hacker community. In the SEO industry hat refers to the types of… More »
Heartbleed: ThinkResults Clients are Safe and How to Protect Yourself as a Consumer
Internet security breaches are never fun, but this latest one, Heartbleed, is particularly troublesome. This information is being updated in real time as I am writing this but latest estimates show that upwards of 66% of sites across the internet are affected, including popular sites such as Yahoo, EventBrite and OKCupid. This bug, introduced over… More »
April Fool’s Day Fun: A Spoof on Advertising Videos
Happy April Fool’s Day! In honor of today’s silliness, we’ll share a fantastic spoof on the now classic advertising video. Oh, it hurts to say that we’ve been guilty of pulling many of these stock images to represent certain ideas, concepts or evoke certain feelings. But we have, and I know every marketer has at… More »
The Journey Is the Destination: A Case Study of a “Typical” Design Process
The design process is capricious. One of our latest projects is a classic example of this. Here’s how it’s gone so far: We promise the client two designs for the project. Round 1: We bring three designs to the client (after about seven went through internal review and four failed …). Client can’t decide between… More »
Are Tradeshows Still Valid? 22 Ways to Make Sure Your Next One Is
A client recently asked me a great question: “Are tradeshows still valid anymore?” When clients ask questions like this, it shows me they are open to the possibility that marketing tactics have changed (yes) and that some of the oldies still work (yes). Despite the general mood, tradeshows and other event marketing tactics are still… More »
Technology and Wisdom: Where and How Do They Intersect in Life, Work and Play? (Part 2)
Following up to last week’s post, here’s the second half of what I learned at Wisdom 2.0, a technology and wisdom conference I attended Feb. 14-17 in San Francisco. As I mentioned last week, the conference was about exploring the intersection between technology and wisdom, with leaders from Google, Facebook, Linked In and other tech… More »
Technology and Wisdom: Where and How Do They Intersect in Life, Work and Play? (Part 1)
Taking a break from my usual marketing-specific topics to do a review of a technology and wisdom conference I attended Feb. 14-17 called Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco. The conference was about exploring the intersection between technology and wisdom, with leaders from Google, Facebook, Linked In and other tech companies with mindfulness leaders such as… More »
Using Logo Design as a Strategic Communication Tool to Drive Results
Logo design needs to drive results. The logo is an integral part of the brand. It is the public face of the brand every minute of every day. It needs to be working hard every minute to support your overall communication objectives and support the message you want in the marketplace. There are tons of… More »
Top 5 Web Design Trends for 2014
It’s that time of year. Prediction articles abound. Saw one set of web design predictions recently that I really liked because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how web design is changing. Again. Here are my top five predictions for what I think are the most important web design trends, and how I see… More »
Six Essential Questions to Ask When Naming a New Initiative
One of the first steps toward launching a new initiative is to figure out a name. This can be a daunting task as there are many horror stories of naming or renaming initiatives gone wrong. In June 2011, for example, Overstock.com renamed itself as O.co. According to www.ragan.com, “Only three months later the company returned… More »
How to Launch a Logo Design Right: Take a Cue from Cadillac
Cadillac launched its new logo design at the 2014 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), the first new logo in 14 years. They dropped the “crest” as it had “become dated.” The new logo is describe by Cadillac as having a “jewel-like” quality to it and a sleeker, more modern edge to it. Not only… More »
Google Acquisition of Nest: Stepping into the Smart Home Revolution
Google has just acquired Nest for $3.2B. That’s a lot of cash for a smart thermostat company, even if it may be an entry into the growing smart home market. I first heard about Nest, when I talked with Trae Vasallo earlier this year. They have been doing an absolutely fantastic job with their design… More »
Target Data Breach: A Lesson in Crisis Communication
The recent data breach by Target, the second largest in retail history, offers some very important lessons in how to do and how not to do crisis communication. Let’s review the message that was issued December 20, 2013, a day after the massive data breach that affected 40 million consumers between Nov. 27 and December… More »
Twelve Days of Social Media: The ThinkResults Cheat Sheet
In the spirit of the upcoming holidays, we offer this gift to you. This is the cheat sheet we use when posting social media material to make sure we’ve covered everything in those 140-character to 2000-character posts. We thought it might be helpful for you as well. Also be sure to check out the social… More »
Seven Tips and Tools to Make Corporate Blogging Easy and Effective
Everyone knows how important blogging is these days and if you have a corporate blog, you know it’s a hungry bird that needs a lot of filling. You also know how important it is to have that content be optimized so search engines will find your great content. So what’s your corporate blogging plan? Here… More »
Full of Gratitude: The ThinkResults Community Celebrates Our 10th Anniversary
What a magical morning we had at the ThinkResults 10th Anniversary at Quadrus Conference Center on October 24. A fantastic group of clients, supporters and members of the ThinkResults team came together to celebrate our 10th Anniversary and be inspired by our speaker, Kate Purmal. Even though it was very early in the morning (dark… More »
Why Content Marketing Is Like an Oatmeal Cookie Recipe, Part II
The Silicon Valley Brand Forum (led by our very own Kevin Heney) was held October 22, 2013 at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA. The theme of this Forum was Aligning Content Strategy with Brand Strategy, a very hot topic right now. In the prior post, I talked about how Quaker oats and other consumer… More »