Due to the recent natural disasters and local blood drive cancellations caused by our own weather this winter, the American Red Cross really needs blood donations in order to help those in need. You can do your part by participating in the Red Cross blood drive at the Virginia Beach Resort Hotel & Conference center today, March, 8, 2010 from 1:00PM to 7:00PM. If you’re eligible to give blood, make sure to grab some co-workers from the office and head over during lunch or after work!
To donate, you may make an appointment by logging onto http://www.givelife.org, sponsor code: VBResort, or contact Courtney Jarrett, Director of HR at (757) 481-9000 extension 2033.
This blog is the fifth in a week long experimental blog series. Enjoy. After all is said and done, we’ll let you know how it went.
In case of a zombie outbreak, these are the only tools I have to equip you with to keep you alive: social networking tools.
3. YouTube: Because a zombie apocalypse is definitely meme-worthy.
With 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, you can bet (as long as load/processing times cooperate) that you’ll be able to find a video of someone’s zombie transformation with 80,000 views already within the hour of it occurring. If you happen to be one of the first witnesses, take advantage of YouTube’s current glitch in automatic closed captioning to reach the rest of us and fool any zombies that might be watching.
If you don’t have a high-speed connection, however, maybe it would be best to do your homework in advance and learn these helpful techniques to blending in with the brain-starved undead lurking about. (If you don’t have high-speed internet by this point you may/or may not be a zombie already. Please contact your doctor for more information.)
2. Twitter Local Trends: See how the outbreak spreads
We’ve talked about Trending Topics before – and local trending topics. If there is news of a zombie outbreak, you can be sure to watch the wave of infection spread from coast to coast monitoring different region’s topics. You’ll know them when you see them (#thehorror, #saveusall, #zombieJustinBiebercaneatmybrains, etc.)
1. Foursquare: If the undead are checking in at Panera, you’ll know to stay away.
As the mobile market booms, social networks have grown to go with you when you leave your computer behind. Location-based social sites like Foursquare and Gowalla are meant to go with you and your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Palm as an app to let you check-in with your friends to let them know where you are around town.
Jimmy just became MAYOR of Panera Bread!
The important thing to remember when using location-based social media is to keep these networks limited to people you know and trust, rather than trying to build up followers and friends like other social mediums.
The important thing to remember when using location-based social media during a zombie apocalypse is to stop checking-in.
This blog is the fourth in a week long experimental blog series. Enjoy. After all is said and done, we’ll let you know how it went.
It’s actually even hard to say that social media “infiltrates” pop culture. Social media just is our culture now. Still, a disconnect still often exists between social media and traditional media, such as television. So far we’ve seen a few ways that really do work – and some that just don’t.
Two ‘Do’:
If you’re a fan of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you’ve probably already learned all you need to know about viral video marketing. One character, Dee, has decided that she is going to create viral content on YouTube with any one of her ‘hilarious’ characters, while Charlie believes the key to going viral is unexpected pain or Dee’s pathetic, personal video diary.
SNL also recently did a sketch during “Weekend Update” with their “New Media Correspondent” poking fun at YouTube’s long load times and buffering issues. It might be a good idea here to keep in mind that Hulu was started by NBC. . .
One ‘Don’t’:
While mentioning and parodying social networks on TV seems to be popular, that actually seems to be the limit. Some shows like Fox’s “Fringe” and “Glee” tried to integrate social media by having tweet commentary from the cast members and crew during repeats but in the end, the addition really just aggravated viewers. The feed ended up blocking
We saw during the Olympics that viewers were definitely online tweeting and searching all topics winter-sport-related, but the separation between screens might stick around for a while.
Despite being constantly connected, it seems that sometimes viewers just like to have the option to turn off all the noise and simply enjoy.
This blog is the third in a week long experimental blog series. Enjoy. After all is said and done, we’ll let you know how it went.
if you're going to believe a myth, at least let it be something cool like a unicorn.
While our lives and businesses both continue to revolve more heavily around the web as time and technology allow, there are still a surprising few skeptics out there afraid of search engine optimization. If you have a business, and you have a website, why wouldn’t you want to optimize your position on the web to allow your clients to find you easiest? Below are a few of the myths we tend to hear come up disturbingly often and the realities behind them.
Myth: Ranking high is the most important thing.
Really? You’d rather show up #1 or #2 on Google than actually see improved traffic, conversions, or bounce rate? There’s no point in ranking at the top if every time someone clicks on your site, they immediately click away, like someone walking into a storefront and walking right back out before that little bell on the door has a chance to stop jingling. SEO is about more than just rankings – it’s a marketing tool aimed at helping your business actually succeed, not just look successful.
Myth: I would have to spend a lot of money on PPC to improve my organic rankings.
Untrue. PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns and organic optimization are very separate. PPC will not bring your organic rankings up, nor will it degrade your reputation at all. A vast majority of clicks happen in that upper-left hand corner of the search engine result pages, so there’s no harm in increasing your visibility by having both sponsored listings and natural listings.
Myth: Keyword density is a big factor.
Reality: If you focus on keyword density, chances are you’re going to start looking spammy really quick. Repeating keywords unnecessarily is called “keyword stuffing,” and you’d do a lot better for yourself simply adding more qualified content and work on link building than going to the trouble of having a heavy keyword density. However, this doesn’t mean keywords don’t matter at all. SEOmoz has a great article on keyword best practices from a while back.
Myth: I have to buy a domain for every keyword I want to target and put the same content on all of them.
Please don’t. There are a lot of reasons actually why that is exactly the opposite of what will help you improve your rankings. Search engines like fresh content and links, and won’t likely index your pages if you’ve created a substantial amount of duplicate content. Focusing on one domain (or even a few) will narrow down your link-building campaigns, and your efforts will be more productive. This is one of those cases where it’s OK to put all of your eggs in one basket.
This blog is the second in a week long experimental blog series. Enjoy. After all is said and done, we’ll let you know how it went.
When it comes to understanding the fundamentals of search engine optimization and search engine marketing, there’s nothing more helpful than some great infographics. From keywords to tweets, the following images may help to shed some light on some SEO basics.
While tons of local businesses would love to rank for a keyword like “shoes,” or “real estate,” or “accounting,” those goals definitely aren’t always practical or even close to attainable. Long tail keywords typically consist of 3 to 6 descriptive words that will help funnel qualified traffic to your site. The more specific you are, the lower the cost, and the higher probability of conversion. It’s a win-win.
Articles = links. Links = search engines smiling upon you. Not only can you get some great inbound links, but reinforcing your business’ website with so much quality content can help you climb those rankings as well.
Speaking of content and links, connecting your website with content on blogging and social media sites will grant you both. Not only will creating profiles on these websites help your clients find you, but the inbound links from these sites will boost both your credibility and authority online.
While we’ve said before that implementing social media for your business without a plan won’t generate the results you’re looking for, I figured we might as well give a helpful hint about how to plan. Activity online, especially on social networks like Twitter, fluctuates throughout the day, and knowing what times your audience is going to actually be listening can be a big help at getting heard.
Knowing your audience as a whole is also crucial. You know who your clients are, what demographics you’re trying to reach, but are you utilizing the right social networks for your particular business’ targeted demographic? The age ranges below might be surprising if you (like a lot of others out there) assumed that most of the users on Facebook or Twitter are college-age and younger.
Equipped with any new SEO or SMM understandings? Any basics you’d like explained? Leave them in the comments below!
This blog is the first in a week long experimental blog series. Enjoy. After all is said and done, we’ll let you know how it went.
Forget about social media and business for a minute. Forget ROI, branding, and reputation for a minute, because when it comes down to it, we (at least most of us) don’t use social networks for professional reasons exclusively: it is a part of how we carry out our relationships with others day-to-day. Social networking changes the way we communicate with each other as humans, and if you think about it, it also has the potential to just ruin civilization as a whole.
“civ·i·li·za·tion
1 a: a relatively high level of cultural and technological development; specifically: the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained b: the culture characteristic of a particular time or place
2: the process of becoming civilized
3 a: refinement of thought, manners, or taste b: a situation of urban comfort”
1. Trending Topics Predict the Spiral Downward into Dark Ages v2.0
OK, cool. According to definition 1 a up there, we’re basically at the peak of civilization. Not only can we consider ourselves at a point of cultural and technological advancement, but written record wise, it’s all taken care of. Thanks to the web, to social networks, and to real-time results, everything we say is dutifully recorded and more often than not, completely inerasable. You post something online and chances are, not matter how you try to delete it, someone will be able to find it again. This is where it gets scary.
We have all this real-time knowledge available to us now due to Google’s real-time search results (whether we like them or not), Twitter Trending Topics, and Facebook feeds. And how do we use this mind-blowing tool? Shamefully. Right now, Justin Bieber’s birthday is trending higher than Chile on Twitter. Never mind that there was a 8.8 magnitude earthquake there this weekend – there are more Twitter users worldwide considered with this kid’s birthday. Yikes, world. Yikes. (By the way, here is a list of places you can donate if you are interested in being a part of Chile relief efforts).
one twitter user sees the danger here. . .
When our civilization as a whole has crumbled and fallen and ages from now these sorts of documents are discovered and translated by scientists, they probably won’t be surprised we didn’t last much longer.
2. FarmVille
Definition 3 a: refinement of thought, manners, or taste. 81,125,786 users a month are active on FarmVille as of February 21, 2010. If you’ve missed this online treasure, it’s a Facebook game where users must recruit their friends as ‘neighbors’ in the game to access particular plants/animals/barns/anything they might want to put on their farm. I couldn’t even see anything ‘important’ on my news feed (before blocking FarmVille) because my family’s dog that passed away 6 months ago was spamming the whole thing with all of his FarmVille ribbons and events. No, you read that right. Yes, it’s an account for my family’s dog, and yes, someone in my family is using his account to further themselves in this game. Maybe that’s bad taste. Maybe not. I’ll let you judge.
This is disturbing to me (Chewie was our dog).
Either way, this whole demographic of FarmVille players is getting blamed for general internet shenanigans all-around. If you follow ReadWriteWeb regularly, you might have witnessed the creation of a meme caused by an SEO miracle. A RWW blog post had the words “Facebook” and “Login” in the title, and we all learned from the wild comments on that post that for some reason people search on Google for “Facebook login” instead of typing in the URL; furthermore, we learned that they don’t read what they click on, don’t read the headings of a page . . . they don’t read. They just don’t read. You need to see this for yourself. It could be enough to cause our great civilization to crash.
3. Tribes: Break Down to Build Up
In this ever-growing social web, it seems that the more ‘open’ the internet attempts to become, the more closed off we really are. Google’s social search results aim at giving you blogs and pictures from people in your network that you already trust and listen to; however, when we search, sometimes don’t we need an outside opinion. Of course that hasn’t been eliminated in any way, but the increasingly social nature of search and information gathering has actually taken us back to a different level of communication. According to Seth Godin, entrepreneur, blogger, and speaker at TED in 2009, we’re closing on the era of web mass marketing and are reviving a ‘human social unit’ – tribes.
Instead of sitting and listening to information and advertisements being told to us, we’re becoming a part of it and mobilizing groups of people nationally and internationally in ways that wouldn’t have been possible geographically without these networks. “It’s tribes – not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics,” Godin said in his TED speech last year. “What we do for a living now,” he continued, “all of us I think, is find something worth changing and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea and it becomes something far bigger than ourselves – it becomes a movement.”
In this way we can see a definite possibility for a change in civilization. By grouping together as people with specific goals and interests, by using the wealth of information available, and the freedom with which we can communicate now, we can break away from ‘civilization’ as we have known it, or our ‘urban comfort,’ and create a new kind of community.
That is, after we attain the level of Farming Wizard in FarmVille.
Customer Magnetism is sponsoring Media Fest tomorrow, Feb. 25th, from 5 – 9 p.m. at the Sheraton Waterside Norfolk Hotel. This is a great opportunity for local business owners to learn some unique approaches to Internet marketing and traditional advertising while networking with other Hampton Roads entrepreneurs.
There will be two seminars geared toward successful advertising. “The Power of Email Marketing, Online Survey and Event Marketing for Retail Businesses” starts at 5:30 p.m. “Social Media Boot Camp” starts at 7.
The event was organized by the Retail Alliance, a group of local retailers. Tickets are $15.
For more information about Media Fest 2010, visit www.retail-alliance.com.
If you are going to be there, stop by the Customer Magnetism booth and say hello. We would love to meet you.
Customer Magnetism is sponsoring Media Fest tomorrow, Feb. 25th, from 5 – 9 p.m. at the Sheraton Waterside Norfolk Hotel. This is a great opportunity for local business owners to learn some unique approaches to 