Yesterday .CO domain names became available to the public and is being marketed by domain name registrars, such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, that .CO could be universally recognized as “company”, “corporation” and “commerce”.

While you might not care what .CO stands for in your organization, it is a good idea to consider registering it to secure these domain names for the sake of domain name defensive registration.  While its hard to predict the true popularity of this new top level domain, we still recommend registering .CO domain names in the near future.

(Photo credit: Stefan)

The small investment made to register these is worth the type of image you want to present to those who may either mistype, or get re-directed from a search engine.

In the legal world, simply protecting your intellectual property, or trademarks, registering any domain names you can with your brand name in it is called defensive registration.

Whether you are a small business owner, or an executive at a large firm, it makes obvious sense that an investment as small as $10 and typically at the most $100 a year for a domain name makes sense. You want potential or current customers to land on your web property if they type in a domain name with your brand name in it.

(Photo credit: annaOMline)

Big things are on the horizon for Keenpath that will allow us to serve you better. Namely opening up our operations in an office location in beautiful downtown Great Falls, Montana.

Our offices (click to jump to map below) will be located upstairs inside our good friends office space over at macjiggy, LLC, a graphic design and boutique company. This will be a wonderful partnership allowing us to offer big agency inbound marketing and social media marketing services, with one-on-one personal touch and niche expertise, along with the resources available for graphic and branding design at hand.

More details to come soon. Although we haven’t moved in yet, we will be soon, so stay updated on the latest announcements by subscribing to our inbound marketing newsletter. (You can also use the form below to sign up)

Our Office

Located upstairs in the macjiggy, LLC office space

21 Second Street South
Great Falls, MT 59401

Street View

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(Photo credit: Wayne Mumford)

Social media, a hot topic across virtually every industry this year has merit, value and has brought to light a new form of telling your story.  The backbone of social media has existed for some time; with blogging and social networks ranging from the earliest Internet forums to chat protocols such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat). One could say that the first social networks were those held around campfires, talking and telling stories. While this may be true, the digitized aspect of social networking now has changed everything.

Over time social media centric networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn began to take us on a roller coaster ride that felt wobbly at the beginning and then we realized that we like it and want to stay on the ride for a while. Some are still debating whether the ride is worth getting on, and some may be getting off, but the smartest know this ride is in it for the long haul.

A typical story told on social media

There are countless social media case studies that show how connecting with their target market, while offering compelling, unique and valuable content whether written, visual or audible, can harvest the ultimate story telling situation, maximize sales, create a community around, and build your brand.

One organization that we worked with, American Red Cross of Montana, found they were able to leverage social media as a way to raise awareness of their mission and day-to-day services.  They are able leverage social media to not only create an awareness around their emergency services, but also around training and volunteer opportunities, creating a community around their mission. During Internet marketing workshops we’ve presented, a theme that shines through is to use an approach that works best for you, that is tailored to your niche and marketplace, after putting thought and research in to what really matters in your overall marketing objective.

What your story should portray about your brand

A great story has a couple of elements worth noting.

• First of all, its memorable. There are many different ways stories are memorable. It can either be outright crazy, funny, sad, weird, and filled with useful information. A great story is worth repeating. If your goal is to create a viral marketing message, then you may consider using out of the ordinary methods to tell your story. It doesn’t have to be a video to “go viral”. It can be a well crafted article or blog post, or podcast. The point is think outside of the box and put yourself in your market’s shoes. What is interesting to them?
• Second, a great story is told with conviction. If someone stands before you, tells a story and is monotone, doesn’t have a sparkle in their eye or seem to care about what they are telling you, do you listen, or at least feel inspired to believe them? No! Why would you? People have big lie detectors ingrained in their brains, and social media amplifies this instinct. If you aren’t genuine and are not sharing what is truly of value to your market, then don’t even try it.

Your story should always portray what the core focus of your organization is all about. If you are a florist that wants your arrangements to spread the message of love and inspiration to the world, tell us about it! If you are a Fortune 500 company that has a goal to sell your product that you are certain will change the world in a positive way, then tell us about it! Don’t hold back, now is the time to tell your story using social media.

Use the inbound marketing tool set for success

After crafting a memorable story filled with conviction, now is the time to share it. There is no better way than to use the tools in the inbound marketing tool chest to do so.

• Blogging
• Social Networking
• Landing Pages
• Email Newsletters
• Well written copy

Now tell your story with social media. It is worth telling, your audience is listening, and the bounce back marketing effect it will have is tangible and increases the awareness of your brand.

Pipl recently released a beta version called Pipl Contacts Search which allows you to search your entire address book and use an address book style interface to see deeper information than you may know such as the various profiles they may have across the Internet, media like images and pictures possibly associated with them, publications whether PDF file or other documents with their name in it, and also of course web pages and blog posts.

Following are a few screenshots of what the interface looks like as well as a few comments (click on the image to make it larger):

In this first screen you simply enter email address and then authenticate with your email provider. So far Gmail and Yahoo are verified to work.

After authenticating with your email provider, Pipl begins loading your contacts and then displays this screen while you wait for a few (20 or so) contacts to be processed

Now that some contacts have loaded you can begin click on a contact to load in the right pane a detailed panel of information such as Profiles, Media, Publications and Web Pages about the contact

Whoa nelly, this is crazy!

Privacy advocates may or may not find this new feature interesting, but one thing for sure, it will likely catch their eye.

If you are have questions about how Pipl handles data check out their privacy policy.

If you are interested in removing personal information from the web there is a lengthy Squidoo Lens on How To Remove Your Personal Information from Google and Internet.

What can I use this for?

There are many uses really for a tool and feature like this. There are many positive uses, and to focus on a few:

• Due diligence on a potential business partner
• Find social media profiles that you might not have known for a contact
• Find media and images associated with a person that could be used in research, articles, newsletters

For those that are wanting to monitor their personal brand, try searching your email addresses by uploading into your address book to see if you can find anything unique about your personal brand that you may not have seen before.

Question: What do you think of this new beta feature by Pipl?

Happy Social Media Day!

Come join us for a short lunch celebrating Social Media Day! Let’s chat about what you are getting out of, and putting in to social media.

Time: 1:00 PM, June 30, 2010
Location: Downtown Dog House, 4 5th St S, Great Falls, MT
Link to more info: Official Great Falls Social Media Day Meetup Page

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It happens all too often that the perception of a target market may be the opposite of what affect you wished to have on it.  With inbound marketing, the driving of traffic and converting it into leads and customers, you have the chance to be concise, clear and effective in your message, while affecting the bottom line, while increasing customer and client satisfaction. This happens with the product or service being found by the right target market and their perception being more qualified, or in line with your desired result. Both sides find success.

There are a few key differentiators from an effective message and an ineffective one:

1. Unclear value – Can the reader, viewer, listener understand the core value that your product or service offers?
2. Difficult to follow calls to action – Some calls to action are utterly miserable and are difficult to follow for the “end user”
3. Boring - Keep it lively. People interact better when the message being relayed to them isn’t dull and stiff, even if the subject is

By combining the natural desire you have to promote your brand in a vein of positive light, be authentic with the message and by using smart inbound marketing techniques your Internet marketing and social media marketing campaigns will have natural success.

(Photo credit: Sameer Vasta)

We’ve built a viable brand around Keenpath, however are contemplating other names to see if it better describes our core service of inbound marketing.

What better way to pick the name that best fits us than to turn to you?!

Please consider taking the poll:

Online marketing isn’t about shooting rubber bands back and forth at your potential clients and customers. Even if you write a compelling message on the band before whirling it across the room (think global), they are going to shoot it right back at you, empty handed, or worse yet, it might end up in the wrong direction. Think pain in the eye, not fun.

When attending parades as a kid, I always looked forward to being on the receiving end of the candy throwers. You know, the red convertible carrying the mayor, while his assistants would whirl tasty candy in the direction of the excited youth.

I found it even more fulfilling when I was on the candy throwing end a few times. While walking with some non-profits that were getting out the message, we threw out candy with messages attached. You could call this lead generation, and hey the advertising was cheap.

The idea of bounce back marketing isn’t new. Online and digital marketing changed the game years ago, and continues to hype it up. Your best bet is to continue working hard to tell a story your customers will repeat.

(Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

Don’t get me wrong, some information is worth spreading and can “go viral”, however, it happens all to often by aspiring, and also well accomplished blog authors that they repeat the same content.

While thinking about this I thought of cover bands. Its nice, sometimes, to go to a wedding or local downtown celebration event and hear some familiar songs by a cover band. You might even get lucky and make a request that the band knows! Rock on!  But tell me if I’m wrong, there is something about the original band getting up on the stage and ripping through an original song that they wrote, and that you’ve been listening to over and over on your favorite album. The intensity of knowing the audible sounds that are gracing your ears were created by the ones standing on the stage and performing.

This is similar with content. Content is such a vague term that it almost sounds cheesy and overused.  What I am referring to is the story you are telling, whether its written, in video form, or audio.

Get out there and tell a story, grab the microphone and rock it up, but try not to be like Adam Sandler in the Wedding Singer, at his lowest moment.

(I have to credit Drew Schug for inspiration for the title of this post during a conversation we had on Twitter on this topic)