To follow Cindy’s post yesterday about tips on your advertising message during a recession, I wanted to highlight ways to enhance your web presence on a tighter budget. First things first, I absolutely love www.fora.tv , a video viewing site with a conscience and intelligence, where you can learn about almost anything. Videos are posted by FORA on a range of topics from politics to health to business, and especially interesting for the Ad world, ‘new media.’ 
One jewel I found today presents a timely message with this description: “Two leading practitioners from the online design world present a people-centered approach to finding big answers with small budgets.”
http://fora.tv/2008/06/25/People-Centered_Design_Creating_Web_Sites
These innovative designers make an important point that making your website relevant and engaging all starts with research, and the good news is there are low-budget ways to do research. They also highlight a few examples of ways to engage an audience by making use of social networking where it is applicable to your market/consumers.
If your business is slow due to the economy, you are definitely not alone these days. But this could provide the opportune moment to get into doing some research, while you have the time. Online surveys (when they are well thought out and results are analyzed) are easily created (SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang) and can provide a great snapshot of the landscape of consumer interactions with your brand. Podcasts and blogs can also be the top winners in the consumer interaction game, so your research plan might contain a conversation with your consumers that stems directly from your web site. And of course as mentioned, there is the vast sea of social networking through the usual suspects MySpace and Facebook but also the “create your own” newcomers like NING and CrowdVine. Still feeling overwhelmed by all the choices? For minimal expense, a consultation in order to bounce ideas off an industry professional is one way to help refine your goals and a target, which will provide more efficiency and wise spending choices. This is a time for refining…we will keep looking for the silver lining.
