Its that time of the week again, and I wanted to be sure I added some better stuff this week after having to rush out the door last week.  In this week’s column I wanted to address the definition of SEO, what employees need to know about their social media, and a sweet search engine for researching your competition.

The Definition of SEO

I am currently working with a client who is looking to improve her business’s bottom line and we have had some good conversations as to what I do.  A number of my clients have been approached by SEO firms all telling them the same thing, and they want to know how what I do is different from what these companies do.  Bottom line: Dark Horse Communications is a marketing business that uses online mediums to help its clients.  DHC uses SEO as a tactic to help increase traffic to sites, but understands that it is one of a variety of tactics to help improve web results.  SEO is the optimization of a website to be found by search engines for specific items, whether they are keywords, media, etc.  While I think SEO is important, a more important concept is SEM, or search engine marketing.  SEM is the tactic of using search engines to reach your intended audiences through various means.  One use might be through targeting search engines by demographics, another by specific keywords your audience uses.

Let’s create an example.  I would like my website to get traffic for the keyword “Chicago Small Business Marketing.”  Making a page with that specific URL, using the keyword on that page, and including the keyword in the title are all ways to optimize the site.  Finding others relevant keywords, creating owned media for that keyword, and advertising on Chicago Business Search Engines are tactics of search engine marketing.  SEO is internally focused while SEM focuses on the internet around your site.

Who’s Line is it Anyways?

Recently a colleague of mine lost her job, and the incident was notable to me for another reason than she was my girlfriend.  The company she worked for does not have a string social media strategy of any sorts, and before she was terminated they asked her to delete all of her Facebook contacts that were clients at the clinic.  I don’t want to get into particulars, but the event points out the need to have a clear understanding of who the social media belongs to when you work for a company.  In this case Courtney’s page was used to promote services and engage with clients; as an independent contractor she was responsible for her page alone.  When she was signing her termination agreement the company asked that she not make any mentions of her new employment for up to 12 months on any social media channels.  When working for any company or client where there is co-hosted social media marketing like there was in this case, everyone must know who owns what before moving forward.

New Tool of the Week

Blekko.com offers sweet ways to look up your competitors back links and only requires a free e-mail signup.  The best part is the way they score referring sites; instead of a logarithmic page rank scale like Google’s, they score sites on a variety of factors that are more useful for research.  Another cool thing of Blekko.com’s SEO features is that they will look at your “neighborhood” so you can see how you are “living” next to.

That’s all this week.  I won’t be posting next week as I will be home in Kansas City for some political events. Have a good one!

This week we’ve been busy working on news clients plans in Cost Per Click advertising and developing editorial calendars for social media campaigns.  Since we are still working on these campaigns before we head out the door for the weekend, this post is going to be a bit shorter.  I am offering just a couple of tips I’ve come across this week for your use.

Tip #1: YouTube SEO Trick

Double stack your titles in the file name you upload to YouTube.  YouTube takes the file name into consideration for SEO purposes, so it makes sense to title the video appropriately.  As a small business owner, its usually easy to just upload the video straight from the source of a small camera or editing software.  I know because I’ve done this myself.

The second part of this tip is to double stack your keywords in an appropriate manner in both the file name and video title.  For example, instead of using the title “Podiatrist Talks about Foot Problems,” you could title the video “Chicago Podiatrist talks about issues Facing Chicago Podiatrists.”  This helps you in the rankings and lets YouTube and Google really understand what the video is about.

Tip #2 Twitter Research Tools

For those of you who remember an earlier post about Twitter Tactics, I mentioned a tool called klout.com.  I liked the application and the way it provided intelligence on Tweeple out there.  This week I found 4 more I wanted to pass along for use.  They are:

twitterholic.com
tweetstats.com
twittercounter.com
twittergrader.com

Play around with them and see what you like.  The best way to use these in the beginning stages of any listening campaign is to find out who the biggest Twitter celebrities in your locale are, and see which ones might be incorporated into establishing an online campaign.  Offering a heavily followed Twitter user some opportunity to interact with your product is good, but having them mention you in a positive light is even better.

That’s all for this week.  By this time next week the Cubs will be in Spring training, and spring will be on its way

WHAT EVERY FACEBOOK PAGE SHOULD HAVE

Businesses need to have a Facebook page for several obvious reasons, but it’s easy for owners and marketers at small businesses to neglect these pages. Sure, you can be posting relevant content, asking questions to heavy users, and sharing other stuff along, but small businesses have a good way of pulling us away from social media tasks and into other important jobs.  It’s important to communicate with your fans through multiple mediums since they might miss something in one place but find it in another.  While Facebook still has 450 million DAILY users, many more use e-mail and use it on a daily basis.  In 2009, there were 1.4 BILLION e-mail users alone.

What does this mean? Your business needs to have an e-mail capture system on its Facebook page, and preferably as the landing tab to increase e-mail acquisitions.  But how do you do this?

That’s where the free tip comes in today.  AWeber is an e-mail management system that has a Facebook App that allows you to create a capture form for e-mails and add it to a list.  In addition to that, you can also grab other information and add it to intelligence projects.  For example, I created a form on the Dark Horse Facebook page that includes 2 drop down boxes that record user ratings on different service aspects.  This form allows me to not only grab e-mails, but also gather customer comments at the same time!

The monthly fee for AWeber is $19 per month for up to 500 users.  This is well worth the investment.  As for other services, I do not know if they have Facebook Apps but I am sure they are out there,  For anyone wanting to incorporate my suggestions, there are several online tutorials from the AWeber folks themselves that will walk you through them without issue.

The other thing I wanted to talk a bit about today was the continuing importance of multimedia across social media channels and promotions.  For a small business, pictures are an easy of showing your true product, service, culture, etc. while giving your fans the tools to help spread the word.  Evergreen social media marketing always considers the next emerging site and/or technology, and the more I pay attention, the more new sites that seem to cater to multimedia pop up.  Tout offers 15 second videos while several other microblog sites are designed solely for pictures; the trend is towards multimedia and away from text.  Twitter itself is changing towards this trend.

Which leads me back to my latest purchase.  Best Buy tempted me again, and this time I splurged on digital camera and memory card. $300, and the ability to hold over 5k pictures, later I can help owners with events by taping and taking HD pics and vids.  This a second camera that I use, and now offers me a chance to take second perspective pictures.  If it gives me the chance to have 300 unique back links that help drive traffic and community, cool.

All right, Im dozing off here, so it’s off to bed.  Have a good one and enjoy the weekend!

Today’s post is one I have been wanting to write for a long time but because I of what I was doing workwise and because I wanted to see it play out a bit, I held off on writing until a good time.  Today I want to talk about intelligence, and it feels like everything has come together on this.

Thanks to my experiences with First Health Associates, I have a better appreciation for not only establishing clearer marketing goals in campaigns but truly understanding what your product offers.  Without the right intelligence that provides clear understanding on what you offer and where you need to go, developing a successful campaign is harder and less likely to provide the results you are looking for.

Product intelligence is essential because you have to not only understand what you are selling, but what the consumers think you are selling.  Offering the world’s best gazpacho is no treat for someone who only thinks you sell salsa.  To continue to tell that person how great the soup is only makes it worse; asking instead about what kind of tomato dishes they might be interested in and how daring they are in new cuisine is a better way to create a fan.

Perception is also a key ingredient of intelligence and if a customer perceives your product to be for something other than what you say it’s for you will again find resistance to your pitch.  If your gazpacho is perceived as a health oriented product, it will not do as well as one that is gourmet that is also healthy.  The difference is small but important.

Intelligence is also something that you need when responding to outside forces that may or may not affect your brand.  During the fall a politician from my home state of Kansas made the mistake of singling out a teenager for a disparaging comment made on Twitter (Full Disclosure: Governor Sam Brownback beat my father in 2010 for his seat).  The comment itself wasn’t worth the effort, but the response from his office took on a life of its own and caused a bigger incident than I’m sure anyone in the office meant for it to be.

Reacting without some knowledge or intelligence is a good way to find yourself in a similar situation, and as a gesture to those of you who have made it this far I wanted to talk a bit about Klout.  Klout is an online tool that measures the online activity of one’s social media influence.  For an example you can see mine here: http://klout.com/#/gthomasholland.

Had the staff of the Governor used Klout before forming a response to the situation, they would have seen that this was a High School Senior who was barely active on Twitter and not worth the effort.  Operating with a bit of intelligence about the situation before hand would have saved that office some work.

Klout is also great because it shows the activity style of the person you are researching.  I can look up a reporter on Twitter, plug them in on Klout and see some information about how they act online, how effective they are and what kind of audience they reach.  This helps in determining how influential someone is and what kind of effort I should look at using.

That’s it for today.  I am getting back to writing the new e-book and bracing for the Chicago snow storm we are supposed to see today.  Lake effect snow is my word of the month.

For some back ground research, one of my projects is working with the great ladies at Salon Blush.  I was thinking about how sometimes you have dropped appointments or last minute cancellations. It’s going to happen sometimes in any business, and the key to not letting this affect you is quickly letting people know you have free time and can accept a new appointment.  Enter Twitter.

If a business has a developed Twitter following, they can simply tweet out that they have free time, and that anyone responding to the Tweet will get a 5% discount for filling the time slot.  This provides incentives for your customers for following you on Twitter while allowing your business flexibility in communicating.  It also has the added benefit of marketing your business to the general public if done correctly using hashtags.

When you are logged into Twitter, there is a list of trending topics of the day.  A great way to start getting your name out there is to make a humorous play on one of the hash tags and include your business’s link.  For example, one trending topic in Chicago today is #worstfeeling.  An example for a Salon’s tweet could be:

#worstfeeling … Going out on a first date without getting your hair done.  http://salonblush.net.

This can help get followers, expose the brand, and help fill in appointment times.  Not bad for a free service that you can spend 10 minutes a day on and have a positive impact.

I’m not trashing his opinions of cinema in this case, but questioning his motives for a tweet that caught some serious hell this week. For those of you who don’t know Ebert pissed some people off this week after tweeting following the death of Jackass star Ryan Dunn.

Dunn died following a car wreck in Pennsylvania on Monday, and Ebert tweeted shortly thereafter that “Friends should not let Jackasses drink and drive.” A large number of followers called Ebert out, and even his Facebook page was taken down for a bit following the ruckus. Ebert goofed up in this situation, and I wanted to give my take for your future reference.

The biggest question I would ask is “Why does Ebert get to give an opinion here?”

If Ebert was the spokesperson for MADD, or a charity that dealt with drunk driving, his 2 cents would be appropriate but maybe still a bit too soon. Ebert is not though. Ebert simply tweeted something that he felt from his heart without understanding the need to divide his public self from his personal self.

And that’s why he got himself into trouble. Ebert didn’t realize that there are some people who would take offense to what he was going to say. Ebert was basically what EVERYONE was going to say in the aftermath of Dunn’s death. Who was going to say the opposite? No one.

Ebert’s mistake was tweeting something that was not his business. Because it was too soon, because he was not someone not normally commenting in the drunken driving prevention space, because it was so soon after the passing, Ebert caught hell. In my mind he deserved it.

Anyone I work with would be told to not comment or tweet anything other than a quick message of sympathy. There is something to be said for commenting on, forwarding or tweeting on current material. That material can always be a double edged sword and the down side is you want really know if you’ve crossed a line until you hear about it later.

I remember working for an ad agency during 9/11. I watched the second tower fall at work, and during the entire day we had not idea what was going on, and much less how we would move forward. At about 3 pm that day, we saw a press release that went out using the attack as an excuse to be life insurance. Not only was the release in bad taste, but plenty of colleagues attacked the people that sent it out.

Which brings us back to Ebert. Whether or not he has learned something from this episode remains to be seen; the bright side is that this study does provide you an example of when holding back on a current event outside of your space is the right move.

The page is at http://www.darkhorsecomms.com/resources and I recommend you check it out on a continuing basis as I want to add to it as I move along.

**UPDATE**

I have been working on the video part of a campaign lately, and have figured out what I think is the best strategy for video SEO. Provided you don’t get hit by YouTube for using “spammy” words in your campaign (Make and Money are to never be used. At all.), it is the best service to start off with.

I am still testing on this with some other services, and the biggest thing I can tell you is that unless you have a campaign with less than 50 videos, posting times need to be dragged out as long as possible. Uploading massive amounts at once will get noticed at MetaCafe and banned very quickly. Daily Motion does allow for some big uploads, and besides YouTube they are good at dealing with a large amount of content.

The more I look at the video space though the more I realize that YouTube should really be your first and only stop for now. Every company should have 5 videos about themselves online at the least, and then targeted term videos can fill in after that. Chances are that is all you need to do (If you don’t believe me, YouTube your biggest competitor … told you.), but if they are active with video that’s when you start utilizing multiple sites.

On a related note, I was at Netroots Nation during the Update, and most of the panels I was in on suggested that while online video is a great tool, it is not ready to be a stand alone content type. They suggested using video as either a primary reference source or as a supplement to content.

Now as someone who preaches the use of a blog CMS as the way to host your business website, I really need to practice what I preach. Blogging is a great way to connect with your customers, and it also does wonders for your SEO. It should be no secret as to why I title each of my posts as I do, but the real key in getting traffic is 1) having enough content to be recognized by the search engines as a legitimate resource and 2) actually being a legitimate resource of information to your customers and/or fans. If I wanted to have 100 posts all titled the same thing with no pertinent content (or even worse, duplicate content) I’m not doing anyone any favors, either for my business of yours. Blogging must be consistent and worthwhile.

Here are some nuggets though from the past week.

As I have noted before, mobile telephony is going to be huge. Smart phones are getting smarter, and websites have to adapt. I am doing a project for a local pizza company and was doing some basic research this past week, and I was amazed at the number of websites that did not have mobile friendly versions. Worse yet, many had .pdf copies of their menu which are almost impossible and impractical for mobile usage. If over 50% of the people my age (18-35) use a smart phone, why would you take the time to order from someone who didn’t take the time to market to your usage?

This past week Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked a little about Google’s reaction with mobile, and it’s telling to hear the boss of Google say that Google’s estimates were on the low side. You can read more here: http://mashable.com/2011/02/28/schmidt-mobile-growth/

The Oscars were last night, and some enterprising folks took a look at what social media saw with usage during the show and general themes all around. There are some interesting numbers (Oprah’s presentation of best documentary drew 11,000 tweets; in the 24 hours after the Oscars, over 1 million people included “Oscar” in their status update). It’s an interesting but light read if you’ve got some time to kill: http://mashable.com/2011/02/28/oscars-by-the-numbers/.

That’s all for now. I don’t have an idea yet for tomorrow’s post but since I am fully committed to blogging 5 days a week, we will persevere and figure something out.

I said I would have tried out the free commerce WordPress plugin.

I said I would have some new WordPress themes out.

It’s been a busy week.  So I lied.

This week has seen a new project come up as well as some consulting for a completely different industry.  Some people I know were looking at buying a restaurant, and I was brought in to help determine what the project looked like.  As such, I was not able to get what I wanted.

But, such is life, and that’s not to say I haven’t been thinking about some links I wanted to share this week.

The first is a list of augmented reality apps for Android phones.  Augmented reality is going to be a major player in search on mobile devices but it is stay in its infancy.  I would even suggest its in its gestation but whatever.  The point is, there are apps on phones now that act like a search engine through what you see.  You want to learn about a store on your way to work?  You can use Google Goggles to search it by taking a picture.  Better apps include Layar which project links and info over the screen your phone presents to you.  You can read more here: http://compixels.com/441/top-5-augmented-reality-apps-for-android.  Which just means it is important to have all of your basic webpages made and current.  By this I mean Facebook, Google, Bing, Twitter and YouTube as a lot of these apps are pulling there basic info from 3rd party sites and not yours.

If you were watching Jimmy Fallon late this week, you might have seen him hold up a QR code to help promote a new band that was performing on his show that night.  That little code box led viewers directly to the band’s website.  If you still don’t know what a QR code is, it is important you get familiar.  These are basically 2D barcodes that are very useful on Smart Phones.  You can see the clip from Mashable’s writeup here: http://mashable.com/2011/02/18/jimmy-fallon-qr-code/.

I want to talk about QR codes in a way that rang true to me from my days in retail.  Imagine having a store where the independent shopper, the one who doesn’t need help, is allowed to find information out about any product simply by using their phone to use a QR code which brings information back directly either from your staff or the manufacturer.  This means shoppers are allowed to browse at their own pace without staff assistance if necessary.  If you operate a food service operation, imagine placing a QR code in your front window which takes customers to a page describing your daily special.

And lastly, just in case you were wondering, Facebook isn’t going any where.

Happy weekend!  I’m off to enjoy this weather!