Obama transformed campaigning and politics through his use of the Internet as a campaign tool.

He did not stop with a simple website, as many candidates have posted in the past, or a simple money raising campaign as Howard Dean and Ron Paul effectively ran.

Obama created a complete internet package for his political campaign that took full advantage of the new medium in ways that had not been fully imagined before.

Remember his videos – which he compared to Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” — on YouTube? Those were viewed millions of times — for a total of 14.5 million hours. How much would Obama have had to pay for 14.5 million hours of television advertising time? According to the New York Times, $47 million.

And with the YouTube videos and internet messages, Obama was able to get his own message out, the way he wanted it told and as long as he wanted it to be. He wasn’t constrained by 30 or 60 second advertising spots, and he wasn’t filtered and quoted by journalists.

His message was framed, produced and presented entirely according to his own standards and what he wanted to accomplish. Best of all in a political campaign, the cost was negligible to reach those hundreds of thousands of potential supporters.

For politicians, this internet opportunity is the merging of all the best possible factors for campaigning: unfiltered messages going directly to supporters, low cost, wide accessibility, and good credibility as a source of information – great messages for individuals and businesses to keep in mind as well.

The buzz isn’t about great styling, open source systems, or amazing features. It’s about the price. At $85, it’s definitely a “value” based computer with some basic features.

Coby focuses on portability and small LCD televisions at value prices, so moving into the netbook market wasn’t a huge stretch.

The 7″ screen displays a Windows CE operating system, running with a 624 MHz Marvell PXA303 processor.

The memory is strictly flash, and it’s limited — only 2 GB. For those who know the technology, the Wi Fi is 802.11 b/g not 802.11n. Still, the WiFi is built in and ready to go. For internet browsing and other limited applications, it could be useful.

Whether or not the Coby smartbook works for you, (there are some mixed reviews on the quality of Coby’s “value” products) it can be seen as a preview into the future of mobile computing.

Prices will continue to go down as technology improves, and that means more people in the market.

Parents may spring for the under-$100 netbook for younger and younger children, opening the mobile kids game market even wider. People who won’t spring for the $300 or $400 smartphone will perhaps go in the $85 for a simple smartbook.

Bottom line — more people with access to your website more often. Make your site appealing, and make it work on mobile platforms.

We’d suggest testing out your site with a mobile device and see how your different page elements load, and make any adjustments that you need. Ask us for some help arranging your web page for the burgeoning mobile market.

In today’s business world, however, a having a web presence is a primary consideration for any business of any size, and should be a top priority.

Cost Effective Advertising

By using good search engine optimized copy and a great graphic design, you can attract people to your site, and keep them there. If you have an informative, useful site, other sites will link to it, giving you more free advertising. You can utilize a variety of different online tools such as videos, graphics, interactive games, calculators and photo collections that will help your customers and those who happen upon your site get to know your company and your products.

Building Community Connections

An effective website will help you make connections, both in your online business community and your offline community. When people can find your site easily, quickly learn about your company and what you do, and find a way to contact you, you have made great strides toward becoming integrated into the lives and lifestyle of virtual and actual neighborhoods.

New Means of Communicating with Customers

With a website, you have a simple way to gather information about your clients, such as their email address. Through utilizing this resource, you can direct promotional emails to your clients, run “web only” sales, and send them informational e-newsletters that provide information and promote your products.

Control Over the Message

With a website, you are in complete control over what image your business presents. Particularly for online businesses, you are able to create and preserve and image of your own making in a way that is difficult to do with traditional print advertising. A traditional brick and mortar business can use a website to extend and expand the business image they have tried to form in their store. The consistency will attract and keep customers.

If you aren’t satisfied with your business’s online presence, contact Webdatamation for ideas to fully utilize the online advantage of a business website.

For businesses that consider their website and their customers who contact them online to be an integral part of their business, using a content management system is only logical. It will allow those businesses to provide a seamless, high quality online experience that open source or low-end solutions simply can’t provide.

For many of our customers, their website is a strategic part of their business. The added security and performance features of a CMS allow these businesses to focus the website and the usability features that make the customer experience truly superior.

By giving developers and content providers a simple to use and intuitive system, a CMS allows the marketing department or the sales department to create website content and design elements of the site. These professionals understand the customers and their needs better than developers or IT departments. With a CMS, the control goes to the people with the ideas, not only to the people with the programming expertise

The easy integration with business applications also provides a great opportunity for businesses to provide a better integration of Customer Relationship Management software and Enterprise Resource Planning software, as well as any analytics tools.

Because you, the company, are in control of the content and the programs and tools that you use on your site, you are able to better tailor your customers’ experience on your website, offer them seamless integration of eCommerce products and Web 2.0 feature, and fully optimize your site for search engines, so current and new customers can find you easily.

With so many advantages for developers and for the end customers, its easy to see why Content Management Systems are increasingly popular.

We think we offer you the best possible CMS with Sitecore. While there are still features they can improve, as we’ve mentioned here before, overall they provide a powerful program that is fully scalable so it can grow with your company. It’s also easy to use and forward thinking, constantly updating the product and forecasting the next trend, then responding to it.

Their “Gold” partner status with Microsoft ensures continuing support for all its best features.

If you haven’t utilized the power of a great CMS to provide your customer with the best possible experience online, I’d suggest giving it a try today.

Just remember that every other business and individual is also feeling the pinch. They want to find the right items to fill their needs without wasting money or time on irrelevant or non-vital products or services.

In order to survive and even thrive in this economy, a business needs to become essential to its customers. Small businesses have the advantage of being able to change course quickly to adapt to changing circumstances, where large businesses may take a long period of time to implement any reasonable change. So are there ways your business needs to adjust?

Examine the services and products that you offer. Can they be adjusted or improved to appeal to those on a tight budget? Can you offer an introductory value service to let people see what you have to offer? Do you cater to a specific niche or to a well-off audience? In that case, you may not feel the same pinch that other businesses do.

No matter what product or service you offer, you’ll need to get the word out to potential customers. Wise marketing is one important key to differentiating yourself from the crowd. While other businesses are pulling back from marketing efforts, you can step in to fill that gap.

Use SEO – search engine optimization – online advertising for a relatively inexpensive, organic marketing method, giving you value for your dollar and introducing potential customers to your products and services. SEO marketing through techniques such as article placement, directories, social networking links, and refreshing your website with fresh, SEO copy will raise your placement on SERPs – Search Engine Return Pages – and send more customers to your website.

Once customers reach your website, be sure you provide excellent, persuasive reasons for them to use your product or service. Let them see why they need what you have to offer, and you’ll find the way to thrive despite the tough economy.

Sitecore recently identified the three key web content management trends for 2009 – do any of these sound like goals for your company this year? If so, let us help you implement them using the seamless integration tools Sitecore provides.

The first trend is the growth of ecommerce elements. Companies want to integrate more and more ecommerce tools into their websites. One of the most popular tools for businesses to implement is InSite Commerce, a program that integrates ecommerce solutions. It allows a business to manage multiple websites and allows a great deal of flexibility for customers.

The other top ecommerce solution used by businesses is Microsoft Commerce Server, which offers intuitive tools for integrating ecommerce solutions including an out of the box shopping solution.

The second major trend for web content management is integrating portals into public websites. Microsoft’s SharePoint was the most frequently used type of portal. Using portals on a public website allows a company to provide the customers with quick, easy access to important information. These portals can be customized according to the needs of your customers and your business.

The final trend for 2009 in web content management is increased implementation of Web 2.0 functionalities. Sitecore’s content management system is uniquely situated to effortlessly add applications like wikis, blogs, forums, and surveys to a website. While Web 2.0 is an ongoing topic of conversation, Sitecore found that companies have increased integration of Web 2.0 functionalities at a rate that is 250 percent higher than last year, so the pace of Web 2.0 integration is growing rapidly.

Other trends that are continuing from 2008 are continuing compatibility with the .NET network and making websites compatible with mobile computing.

With Sitecore, Webdatamation can keep your website ahead of the curve in implementing and integrating any elements you’d like into your company website.

Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?

Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:

The software is installed on your own server and your sensitive corporate data prevented from being exposed to third party websites
Provides a more professional look and feel, does not have to connect to a third party site for analytics
More manageable and maintainable

Piwik is one such software that not only promises, but also delivers. Being an excellent alternative to Google analytics, Piwik is unique and stands out the rest. Here is a list of features that would make you pick Piwik:

If you are a developer, you can build your own plugins with Piwik! It allows you to add and remove features. Yes, Piwik’s features are coded inside plugins!
You can publish your data in a number of formats including the most popular ones: xml, json, php, csv, etc.
The user interface of Piwik is fully customizable. Creating a report in Piwik is as easy as dragging and dropping widgets into their respective placeholders.
Easily embed graphs and charts in your website dashboard or blog
The graphs are interactive and you can view brief stats just by rolling your mouse over them!

Piwik may be a new kid on the block, but is gaining instant popularity. The official blog is updated on a regular basis and the Piwik team is trying hard to come up with more new exciting features.

I would pick Piwik for now. At 1.9 MB, what more can I ask for? You have any questions?

There are a number of strategies through which one can optimize their own website. Of these, the one that is worth mentioning is the “Cloud”. Many of you might have this question in your mind as to, “what is a cloud?” and “what does a cloud has to do in SEO?” Well, let me throw some light on this. Clouds can be of many types, such as, profile clouds, link clouds, content clouds and so on. However, the most commonly, or rather the only form of cloud used or discussed in the SEO works is the tag cloud. When you are looking in some website page, you must have come across a section headed “Tags”. Under this head you will see a bunch of words, placed one after another, some appearing small in size, whereas, some big and bold. The difference in the size is dependent on the number of times each word or tag has been associated with an item. This whole section is called ‘word cloud’ or sometimes called ‘tag cloud’. In general, the tag cloud helps a visitor to have an idea about the well-liked tags that are present in that particular site. The individual word or tag is actually linked to a page where you will get contents related to the tag you clicked.

This has been a very useful tool for search engine optimization and is gaining widespread acceptance by websites who want to optimize their keywords for search engines. Actually, the whole idea behind a tag cloud is to help you “visualize” content that is most relevant to a websites based on certain keywords or the keywords you searched for.

However, I am sure, you might have come across a funny situation where you have seen a website having certain keywords in its tag cloud in the boldest forms and yet it does not contain any content related to that keyword! For those of you, who have not, watch out!

The most popular search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript or images, just as they read and process plain text. However since having a tag cloud requires some logistic optimizations on keyword history, such clouds are represented by either using JavaScript code or images. This accounts for a cloud that contains misleading tags. The answer to this problem is simple; pictures alone DO NOT best define your website. No, they are not at all friendly to search engines. They may be professional enough to attract the solitary attention of a friendly customer but they are like alien material for crawlers and spiders!

The best practice is to make good use of the “alt” and “title” tags for your images. This will allow the web spiders to crawl your web page in the most efficient manner and mine information from the content of your website. Identify your perception of the tag cloud; for example, which keywords should be bolder, and then compare it with the actual results. Modify or edit the “alt” or “title” tags accordingly.

If you spend some time on this, you will soon come up with satisfying results. Yes, “Tag” is the new SEO language that is creating waves, why shouldn’t you capitalize?

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There are a number of misconceptions in selecting the right and relevant keywords, which, if not checked, can ruin the entire optimization process. Among the various misconceptions, the most common one is that bigger keywords are better. However, this is not true always. Suppose you are a life coach and you are trying to optimize your personal life-coaching website. Therefore, in this case, you can use “life coach” as the appropriate keyword for the site, which is small yet carries a lot of meaning to it.

Keywords should be very specific and should flawlessly relate to the products or the services that are being offered. One can even use keywords in phrases, but the phrases should be in small meaningful sentence format. Moreover, keywords should be such that have high frequency demands and low competition. High keyword frequency can also be defined as those, which are entered in the search bar while searching in any search engine and can draw high traffic. On the other hand, low keyword competition indicates lower number of websites using the same keywords to draw visitors.

Apart from these facts about getting the right keywords, let me share some basic tips that would definitely help you to select the perfect set of keywords for your website. The foremost thing is that you will have to learn to think like a nonprofessional. You might have a thorough knowledge about your industry, but this might not be the case with everyone around. So, while framing the keywords, try to use those words or phrases that a nonprofessional would use who knows nothing about this industry. At the same time, you need to think in an expert’s point of view as well! The product or the service you are offering might need the use of some specific keywords, which the layman would definitely not know. Therefore, it is better to have a balanced perception of both.

So, whenever you are optimizing your website, always remember to pay extra heed to keyword selection, as you certainly know by now, that it is a very important part of this whole optimization process. If you use some rational steps, keeping in mind some basic facts, success might take some time to come. However once it is there, it’s going to be a long lasting one for sure.