One of the newer aspects of social media that is gaining traction is social shopping with sites like Groupon. These group deal websites offer discount coupons for goods or services to businesses in medium to large metro areas across the United States. In some cases, these offers have been extremely popular with customers and helped […]
When we think of social media, the image that comes to mind is remote workers scattered in coffee shops across the world, working for virtual corporations — the last place that comes to mind is probably a dairy farm in Ohio. Earlier this year, social platforms became the tool in a public relations war between […]
While Social Media is definitely the hot topic of conversation this year, most of the tools focus on consumer centric business, and improving communication. If you provide B2B consulting, services or products, your options for social media are fairly limited, let’s be honest you probably won’t find many fans for your Facebook Legal Incorporation Services […]
Businesses or consultants who work in the social media space know that one of the difficulties is keeping up with all of the new tools and websites and deciding whether it’s worth investing time and energy into using them. In this column, I’m going to take a look at Foursquare and some of the tools […]
In December of 2009, the new FTC policy on blog disclosure went into effect. Here we are well into 2010, and nothing much has changed. In fact, even the FTC has said it is unsure how it will actually enforce the new policy. Is this something publishers, bloggers, or social media consultants need to worry about, […]
Whenever I talk with new clients about social media initiatives, one of the key points is having a social media plan or strategy. Social media is a time and resource intensive effort, and if you spend the time up front developing a plan, you can distribute the work and make the overall project more effective […]
As we are on the verge of the fourth quarter, a make or break time for many merchants and retailers, I decided to take a look at how some large and small merchants and retailers are using twitter. BestBuy BestBuy has a multi-pronged approach, the main account @BestBuy provides interaction for BestBuy’s employees. A secondary […]
When working with different clients on social media related projects, one of the interesting aspects to look at is whether or not their industry embraced Twitter, and how well are the industry as a whole is using it. In some cases there is little to no engagement, in other cases the industry has embraced the […]
While Twitter is getting the lion’s share of all the social media and micro-blogging sites from the press and the blogosphere, there are other alternatives. I’m going to take you through 5 different micro-blogging platforms, pointing out the good, bad, and sometimes ugly. I’ll also point out some suggestions on how you can integrate them […]
One of the most interesting aspects of social media is the fact that there really aren’t any rules, anyone can use the platform however they want. When it comes to Twitter, a lot of organizations that aren’t associated with cutting edge marketing tactics are using some creative, outside of the box thinking. In fact, some […]
As businesses become more virtual in organization and structure, and more workers become digital nomads, the question of whether having a physical, real-world address on your website will have any effect on your rankings becomes more important. In this article I’ll take a look how a real world address can have some impact on your […]
Most people in the industry look at contests and incentives as branding and marketing tools. However if you are willing to get creative, you can turn a contest into a powerful link building tool that will, over time, help your organic rankings. When most marketing and advertising teams look at a contest they are looking […]
Most SEOs will agree that the title element is your strongest on-page element, and optimizing the title is critical for rankings and traffic. However when the keyword or phrase you are targeting has both a singular and plural version, many people have a difficult time optimizing for both. Novices decide to create a page for […]
Over the past few years, all of the search engines have made tremendous strides in trying to discover different parts of the web, find deep content and understand complex URL structures better. The first big stride came when each of the search engines adopted the XML Sitemap protocol. Website owners now had the ability to […]
Article directories and article syndication websites are one the earliest forms internet marketing, but do they still work and are they worth the effort? The main problem with syndicated articles is that they will most likely be seen as duplicate content, which Google claims will be filtered out of organic SERP’s. Article directory owners tell […]
Most clients I work with understand the importance of link building and the effect it has on organic rankings and traffic. However, many clients, for a variety of reasons, aren’t willing to consider social media as link building tactic. They feel that it’s not worth the time investment, and the quantity and quality of links […]
As a consultant who specializes in social media, I’ve learned one of the most powerful tools in gaining readers is the title or headline of your stories. Crafting a title that grabs someone’s eye, gets them to stop scanning and pay attention to your story rather than reading another one is a critical first step. […]