"Every 60 Seconds on the web over 695,000 Facebook Status Updates are posted online." 

The scalability of online interaction has grown incredibly over the past year of 2011, it's almost unmanageable—almost.

With this infographic from Go-Globe.com finding its way to the top of my LinkedIn feed two weeks ago (via BusinessInsider), I had to ask myself: What are we doing at Dogs of Design Studios to ensure that we're getting enough exposure on the web?

More importantly: What are we doing to ensure we're in front of a targeted audience?

In order to tackle these questions, I sat down and brainstormed the importance of our online interactions with some of my colleagues here at the office. 

4 Questions. 5 Resolutions. 10 Actionable Steps.

4 Questions

1. What are we doing at Dogs of Design Studios to ensure that we're getting enough exposure on the web?
2. What are we doing to ensure that we are getting in front of our target audience?
3. What's the value or importance of each of these other online activities that we're currently not engaged in?
4. What are 10 immediately actionable steps that we can take to better our offering online and expand our online presence and better target our potential customers?

5 Resolutions for the New Year

1. We stick to the social networks that we frequent personally.  There is nothing more wasteful than creating a profile on a social network that is going to end up neglected; where other users/consumers/fans won't be engaged. It's a waste of time to start it, and it's a waste of time to hobble our employee's To-Do lists with social tasks that they don't particularly care for—successful online social encounters will spring from a happy disposition and frequent nurturing of online presence.

2. We must never forget that while we promote others, we must continue to promote ourselves. Also, while we can never have enough exposure, but we have a limit on how much we can promote ourselves.  In the end, it comes down to what we can afford. We try to let our work speak for itself, but it takes a lot of time, money, and energy in order to get our portfolio up to date and appropriately shared across the web.  In 2011 we have put some nifty automated solutions in place to make this job easier—launching our new website has been instrumental in keeping our portfolio more up to date, but we're still backlogged on a good number of projects. (Look forward to seeing many more in the future!)

3. We invest in systems that do the work for us.  At Dogs of Design I have personally built a few useful automated systems for ourselves and our clients that make updating our social network profiles a snap.  The benefits of an automated RSS feed from our website drives users on Facebook directly to fresh content.

4. We invest in striking, fresh content that will capture the attention of the type of clients that we want to work with.  We don't want to create content that isn't engaging, unique, or compelling.  That's a waste of both our time, our customer's time who follow us, and our potential customer's time.  Instead we focus on putting out less content throughout the year, and ensuring a higher quality standard with greater innovative and artistic insight into the field of advertising and marketing.

5. The value of the social networks that we're not engaged in is $0—they don't matter until we have a system, budget, and designated employee to manage them.  Expanding Dogs of Design out as active members of Answers.com or Yahoo! Answers or Quora are only going to be successfully if we set up guidelines for engagement.  Being proactive and signing up for a new social network, but not following through, will eventually drain our team of it's focus and produce too much entropy in the work place.  At the end of the day, we have to make sure we stay on message and committed to the individuals we have already engaged on Facebook, LinkedIn, and our website.

10 Actionable Steps

1. Cover all of your bases—review the first of the big three: Your Website. Make sure that all of your content on your website is complete with images, headers, and well constructed titles. Nothing sticks out like a sore thumb more than gaps in your offering.
2. Cover all of your bases—review the second of the big three: Facebook.  Analyze the following: How is our fanbase? Are we publishing often enough? Do we need to create a marketing campaign for ourselves in order to better manage our own brand?
3. Cover all of your bases—review the third of the big three: Google Search.  Check out Google Analytics. What happened in the last year? Create an annual Event Report. Make sure you know not just what happened on your website, but why it happened. Knowing the causation of fluctuations in traffic and measuring them can help you reproduce success over and over.
4. Complete your listings. Make sure that all of your online profiles have up to date information on contacting our studio. Company logo, phone numbers, website address, general information e-mail address—overlook nothing.
5. Evaluate new online social markets. What is a good fit for your company? Is there something that you can easily expand into with relative ease? Analyze the possibilities, pick one, and roll out a 30 day trial to maintain an online presence.
6. Make sure you know what voodoo magic Google is working on. With Google+ Business Pages being rolled out into search results, it's important to maintain that social profile listing to get the best results for your company.
7. Setup a plan for building new content.  Brainstorm a list of potential content ideas that you can execute throughout the year.  You need to know what kinds of content you'll be working on (or having done for you), whether it's an article, digital photography series, video, or an infographic—planning ahead will make the difference between fanfare and heckling.  While planning a schedule, it's important to realize that things do come up, and items will be shelved and reinstated from time-to-time.
8. Evaluate your niche in the marketspace of the upcoming year.  Whether evaluating within the industry, or within the advertising space as a whole, it's important to stick to your guns.  If a lot of your competitors move into a new advertising segment, you will want to maintain a presence, but don't get too far off the beaten path in terms of keeping up with your scheduled content for the new year.  Being true to your offering and the culture and vision of your company is just as powerful as ensuring you have an equal amount of advertising spend as your largest competitor.
9. Evaluate what makes your product or service unique.  In the time frame of 2012, how is your product going to size up to the expectations of consumers? Will you be as dependable as your advertising says you ought to be? Do you need to spend more on the image of your professionalism?  A well crafted, unique offering from your company can make the difference between a boom year and a bust. You need to make sure that the content that you roll out in the upcoming year reflects this unique offering and is true to the culture and vision of your company in 2012.  Don't simply rehash what has already been done before.
10. Pick one of these and follow it all the way through. We know that even just 9 things to do is too much for most small businesses. It's a good idea to simply pick one and carry it out with abandon.

And I'll get right on these too, just as soon as you do… Which is right when March rolls around, I'm sure.

Jordan Ryan is the Senior Drupal Developer here at the Studio. He is also our Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing Specialist.