Social Media Marketing Workshop – Sticky Post
Posted by Mitch on Jul 6, 2010
On August 19th, myself and Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus will be putting on a workshop we’ve titled “Make A Splash With Social Media Marketing“, with registration beginning at 8:30 and the presentation going from 9AM to 3PM with a lunch break in the middle. A small portion of this is a beginner’s workshop, which means if people don’t have accounts in some of the social media services we’re talking about we’ll help them set up an account, while some of it will be to explain to possibly some experienced marketers the benefits of social media marketing. I’m doing this through my SEO Xcellence business. We’re inviting everyone to bring their laptops if they need assistance in setting up accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook account, and you’ll know how to set up a YouTube and Constant Contact account.
This is the second workshop. Our first workshop, which was July 22nd, went pretty well, and I ended it with 5 minutes to spare. It turned out that almost everyone had accounts in everything, which means there was little time used in helping people set up new accounts. Also, other things I talked about were fascinating to some of the participants, who hadn’t heard of those applications. Social media marketing is a great way to go for many businesses, and we were ecstatic that the folks there got some very positive things out of our presentation.
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The event is being held at Hope Lake Lodge & Indoor Waterpark, which is a section of Greek Peak Mountain Resort in Cortland, NY; some of you locals might have heard it referred to as Cascades Waterpark. For those who participate in the workshop, there’s a special incentive for them to bring their families along for a day of fun, as well as receive a discount towards any follow up visit for some of their other outdoor attractions. This is important because access to the water park is usually restricted only to people who stay overnight at the lodge. And there’s a special rate for Liverpool Chamber members as well. For more information, please follow this link or download the flyer.
Oh yeah; these are live presentations only; sorry to my internet friends who don’t live in the area. However, we’re ready to take this on the road if the price is right, though I guess we’d have to find something else to entice visitors, since we can’t bring the mountains with us. You can find my contact information above. And for further promotional juice, here’s the video that Renée created to advertise the event.
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Social Media And SEO
Posted by Mitch on Jul 29, 2010
At the workshop I put on last week with my friend Renée, one of the interesting questions that came up was how social media marketing impacted a business website’s SEO (search engine optimization). I thought I’d answer that here as I did last week because if I was asked there, then someone else might want to know that answer as well.
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One of the things you often hear about what helps you rank higher on Google, and I’m not talking page rank here, is getting one directional (I’m debating as to whether it’s “directional” or “direction”; have to think about that more) inbound links. By that, it means you’re getting a free link from someone without necessarily giving one back. Supposedly, search engines love that, because it shows that outside people are giving you love without your asking for it. By the way, that’s also why they hate paid links, even if you use the “rel=nofollow” attribute, because they think those advertisers are trying to game the system, if you will.
So, let’s look at a few of the social media sites where you might do some marketing to see how it all works. If you use Twitter, you have to create a profile, and if you’re smart you’ll put your business link in there. Mine has my business link instead of the link to this blog. Now, the only link I have back to Twitter is to my name on Twitter so people can follow me. I have nothing on my business site that goes to Twitter except for the same thing. Now, every blog post I make pops up on Twitter, which means all of my blogs get immediate link love. If someone clicks on the links, they’ll go to my sites. Even if they don’t, I still get link love, and I get more if someone decides to retweet it. Not a bad deal for a quick post.
LinkedIn and Facebook work in a similar way. When you create your profile, if you pop in a link to your business website, you’ll get the benefit of an inbound link. Both of those websites are pretty prominent, so that benefits your site. But then you go further. On both sites, posts from my business blog show up like they do on Twitter. This means I’m generating one directional links to my blog, which is attached to my website, and thus I’m helping to increase my SEO. Even with my creating a business page on Twitter and linking it to my blogs, like you see there to the right, my SEO is intact because every time I write something on that page, or anyone else does, it gets shared with everyone who’s decided they “like” my page, and if they’re commenting on a link I left, that gets spread around as well. By the way, on Facebook I’ve included links to all of my sites, whereas on LinkedIn I’ve only added links to my two main business sites and my blog.
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The concept pretty much works with all the social media marketing areas you might try. If you create a YouTube account and set it up properly, you’ll get an inbound link. Every email you send where you have a link in your profile you get a little bit of that, but you get more if it goes to a place where someone has to log in online to see their email. If you participate in forums, you should make sure you have a signature file with your link in it.
Now, I have to say this one thing, and it’s important. Just getting links means nothing. If your website isn’t optimized correctly, those links aren’t going to help you one bit. If you don’t have any real content, the search engines still won’t know what you do, and neither will people who eventually might come to your site. So, you have to have a well rounded SEO program going for any of this to help your site and your business.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
A Syracuse Wiki?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 28, 2010
Some weeks ago, I was doing some research online and I happened upon the wiki page of a small town I’d never heard about in this state. It got me to thinking about my own home area and whether we had a wiki page or not.
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Turns out we did, but in my opinion it’s not very good. It looks nothing like a wiki page, based on what I saw on the other page and of course the big Wikipedia site. I started wondering what it might take to have a better one for this area.
Then I was at the health club and one of the guys I know from Twitter, Keith, who also does computer stuff, showed up. I broached the subject with him and he mentioned that when he lived in Rochester, NY, that they’d had a wiki page and he loved it. I took a look at that page, and though it’s kind of plain, it worked much better than the one for Syracuse.
I started thinking that maybe we needed to build a brand new page to get it right. However, I knew it would be a major undertaking, and I decided I wanted to put together a dream team of sorts to discuss the issue. Besides me and Keith, there’s Josh, Patrick, and Chris (only first names because I can’t spell Patrick’s last name, and I’d probably get Chris’ last name wrong as well). We all met at a Chinese buffet on Erie Blvd near Thompson Rd (the local folks will know it) to talk about it.
The main discussion fell into two categories. One, whether locally people would care all that much, and then whether they’d want to try to build up the one that’s not great (that is if we can find the originator of the site, because we’d like to really dig into it) or go about creating our own from scratch. I purchased one of the domain names to protect it, but I’m willing to share it with everyone else, and Chris has server space he’s willing to donate so there won’t be any other costs associated with it.
What we all agreed upon is that we would put out a survey and ask Syracuse folks if they’d complete it and give us our opinion. The link is on Survey Monkey, and it’s 3 simple questions. It should prove to be interesting, no matter the outcome. And who knows; this post might get some of the rest of you who aren’t in Syracuse to think about one for your area. I’m definitely no community organizer, but this will be my entry into the market, and probably my only one.
Where Would You Go In A Disaster?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 27, 2010
Today I got a CPAP machine, and that will be a story for another time once I start using the thing. Instead, I want to talk about one of the questions that I was asked that came from left field.
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The question was “where would you go in a disaster?” I found the question stunning, so much so that I was lost for words for about 15 seconds, which doesn’t happen often for me. I said it was an intriguing question, and asked why they would ask me that. She said because the CPAP machine needs electricity, and that many people, once they start using it, find they never want to sleep without it again, and thus if the power went out where would they go to still be able to use their machine.
Of course, me being me, my mind had gone elsewhere. I’ve always had the scenario in my mind that if I heard about something happening like we were being targeted by a nuclear bomb that I would just hop in the car and drive as far west as I possibly could to try to outrun it, since we’d have some notice that something was coming. And I live within 35 miles of a nuclear plant, but it’s recommended to be safe trying to be 45 miles away, so I always figured I’d hop in the car and head south if I knew something had happened there.
Yet, when all is said and done, how many of us have thought long term about where we’d go if a disaster struck? For that matter, wouldn’t your believe be like mine, that it would depend on what the disaster was? For instance, since my house is a mixture of gas and electricity, if the electricity went out I could stay in the house, keep warm, and eat just fine. But if it was a flood obviously I’d have to get away, but where?
Have you given this one much thought? By the way, I answered eventually that I would probably go to one of the local hotels about 2 miles away, hope they had power, and get a Jacuzzi room and just chill for a few nights if I needed to. That made them happy, and all was right with the world. Weird, right?
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Domain Name Scams
Posted by Mitch on Jul 26, 2010
Last week I got an email from a company that said it was in Hong Kong. They said someone had bid on my business domain name, yet they saw that I owned it and wanted to verify that I did still indeed own it and the rights to it. I wrote back saying yes.
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Then I got a second email thanking me for the first one, and then it stated that the bidder for the domain name was also bidding on all the other extensions of my business name, as in .net, .biz, etc. It also said that they were bidding on the keyword of the business name as well.
On those others not only didn’t I care, but I didn’t believe it either. Those other extensions have been out there for 8 years, and why someone would try to scarf them up now would be beyond me. But this thing about the keyword confused me. I hadn’t ever heard of any such thing, and before I dismissed it, I wanted to see if any of my tekkie friends had either.
I picked up the phone and called my friend Josh to see if he’d ever heard of any such thing. He said he hadn’t, and that the whole thing sounded like a scam to him. I said I was beginning to think it was a scam as well.
Still, I did write one more email to these people saying that I could care less if someone else decided they wanted to purchase all the other domain names, and that I was secure enough in my SEO abilities that my main site wouldn’t be affected by anyone else purchasing them, or deciding to pay for keywords for my business domain name.
Of course, at this juncture I believe it’s all a lot of nonsense, and yet it needs to be written about because if it’s something that made me think, and I’ve been doing this a long time now, it might make someone without a lot of computer knowledge go off and spend a lot of money trying to protect something that doesn’t need protecting.
Here’s the thing. It’s often recommended that when you buy a certain domain name that you should buy all the rest of the extensions at the same time. Thing is, that can be expensive, and it’s definitely overkill. At best all you’re going to do is forward all those other iterations of your business name to your main one, because it wouldn’t make sense to put up a separate website for each domain. Now, if you’re a large company like Sony, that makes sense; for the rest of us, save your money.
Smart Mug, Translucent Blue
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Sunday Question – Should We Reward Egregiously Bad Behavior?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 25, 2010
Two weeks ago I was having a brief yet interesting conversation with someone on Twitter. He asked if people enjoyed Mel Gibson movies less these days because of some of the bad behavior that’s been attributed to him. I said I can’t get myself to watch anything with him in it; the other guy believed people should separate the private person from the works that person has done.
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This post is based on that conversation. It’s a hard topic to think about because we all not only have different thoughts on it, but it depends on what we perceive as “egregious” at the time.
For instance, there were a lot of people who turned against Michael Jackson during his trial, though I wasn’t one of them. Many people had already decided his guilt because they didn’t like his personal behavior otherwise. I don’t think you judge the quality of someone’s work because you don’t like their personal behavior. After all, Robert Downey, Jr has been to jail and rehab, what, 20 times (okay, exaggerating a bit), but he’s on top of the world, puts out great stuff, and, well, he’s just the most likable guy. No harm to anyone but himself.
Then we have Mel Gibson. I’ve tried to go out of my way not to hear any of these tapes that supposedly have him calling his ex-girlfriend all sorts of names and saying a lot of intolerant and racist things, but unless you turn off your TV or radio it’s going to get through, and I did eventually hear one thing; man, it sounds like him. He sounds drunk as well, and based on his past behavior with the police, it seems to be a pattern. The difference here, at least to me, is that he’s projected himself to be this super-Christian, even building his own church, has 9 kids and projected himself as the ultimate family man. Talented or not, I feel like I was sucked in only to be let down.
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Of course he’s not the only one. I’m sure y’all remember Jeffrey Jones from many movies including Ferris Bueller, Amadeus & Beetlejuice, who’s now a convicted sex offender. Then there’s R Kelly, who luckily got off from his underage sex trial and immediately prompted this response from a radio DJ (and who can blame him; it was R Kelly’s house, and the guy in the video ‘in his house’ urinated on a little girl who may or may not have been 18; he also married Alliyah when she was 15, so there’s a pattern. But I digress…). And, whether or not you believe OJ did it, does that demean his being a super talented athlete, which also goes for Lawrence Taylor, Ty Cobb, and Pete Rose? Politicians get forgiven by the masses many times over (Robert Byrd and, being fair, I have to include Nelson Mandela here).
This isn’t a new subject, but the way. Richard Wagner wrote some incredible music, and I’m almost ashamed to say that I love a lot of it. That’s because he was an avowed bigot in his hatred of Jewish people, and never tried to hide it either. Even today, there are symphonies that won’t play any of his music because of it. And while we’re on it, are we ever going to forgive Chris Brown for beating up Rihanna? Does he deserve it, being a kid of sorts when he did it?
In this day of sex tapes and, because of 24/7 media slips of the tongue, how much should we tolerate and support and forgive? Does it matter whether it’s a violation of a person harming themselves or someone else? What say you? Are there people you’ve kind of forgiven or people you won’t forgive?
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Why Businesses Should Be On Twitter
Posted by Mitch on Jul 23, 2010
In deference to my online buddy Mike CJ, he wrote a post earlier in the week which he titled Why Businesses Shouldn’t Be On Twitter. His main point was that instead of businesses being on Twitter, they should have individuals representing the business on Twitter so that they can show some personality and communicate directly with people.
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Whereas I agree with the last point, I disagree with the initial statement. In my opinion, businesses definitely need to be on Twitter, and for multiple reasons. Let’s take a look at some of these.
1. Branding. Businesses having a Twitter account get to make sure their logo is out there front and center whenever something is being written for the company. One should never overlook the importance of branding.
2. Customer Service. Last week I had an issue with one of my affiliates not paying me so I kind of called that company out by name on Twitter. Within 5 minutes I was being contacted by the company, or whomever was representing the company account on that day, and we got my issue resolved. I’ve talked in the past about other companies responding to the same type of thing, and last week my friend Josh Shear brought it home again.
3. Protection of name. If a company doesn’t sign up for their name, you can bet that at some point someone else will sign up and start using it, and unless they abuse it there will be nothing the company can do about it.
4. Marketing. Yeah, we all say we hate seeing marketing on Twitter, but what we really mean is we hate seeing someone pounding marketing message after message. If Sony had a Twitter account and suddenly announced that they were having a special one day sale where their 50″ HD TV’s were going on sale for $200, who wouldn’t want to know about that? Okay, I’ll admit that’s one of my special pipe dreams. 
I agree with Mike that Twitter users should have personality. I’ve written about that often enough as well, how I’m looking for more “social” than “selling”. But I think any major business that doesn’t have a Twitter account is allowing their competition to get the leg up on them, and allowing those few people who might complain about them to get the message out without having the chance to offer any assistance and hopefully stem a bad situation.
SMM Workshop D-Day – The Outline
Posted by Mitch on Jul 22, 2010
By the time you see this post I should have been delivering information on social media marketing for about 2 hours. If you’re on Twitter early this afternoon, you might even see me throwing out a general hello to show the people there how it all works, and hopefully you’ll say hello to the group so they can be royally impressed by how friendly people who I’m connected with there can be.
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Since you’re reading this, it means you’re not at the event. I thought, therefore, that I would just throw out some of the highlights I’m talking about based on my outline. No big details here; that’s because I’m still doing the next workshop in August. But this is the direction I’m going in today.
I’m starting out talking about general concepts of social media marketing; what it is, how it can help one’s business, etc. I’m going to talk about social media in general, the past and the present, not so much the future because there’s things that show up on a weekly basis that just amaze me. I will be talking about the concept of social media 3.0, however, which I have to admit is somewhat scary to me in many ways, being a distrusting baby boomer. I’m going to throw in some statistics that I hope will blow people’s minds, such as YouTube averaging 123 million views a day.
Then I’m going to talk about some components of social media marketing, of which I came up with 9, though if someone else was doing this I’m sure they’d come up with more. My components are: publicity; outreach; branding; cause marketing; marketing & sales; public relations; search engine optimization; reputation management and communicating with customers. I will give an example for each of these to help highlight my points. Then I’m going to talk about the positives and negatives of social media marketing; trust me, there are plenty of each.
Finally I’m going to get into more meat on specific things, starting with LinkedIn, which, as you know from a couple of days ago, I feel is the most important thing for business people to get into. I’ll follow that up with email marketing, Twitter, blogging, audio and visual media, which was yesterday’s topic, YouTube and finally Facebook. Then I’ll have some closing comments on it all.
If all goes well, this presentation will go between 5 and 5 1/2 hours, and everyone will have a good idea of how to begin setting up their own social media marketing system. Some people, if they remember to bring their laptops, will end the day with accounts set up in at least half of the things I’m going to talk about; after all, why set someone up on YouTube if they don’t have a video to upload, right? And I hope to make it fun while making it educational. I was going to throw my parrot pictures into the mix and tell jokes, but Renée asked me not to do it, so I won’t. Okay, that’s a lie; she didn’t ask me not do, and I figure if I need ice breakers along the way I’ll just toss them in there.
Now you know what you’re missing, and if you’re local, hopefully you’ll be able to make the August 22nd workshop. If not, well, maybe one of these days we’ll record some aspects of this, or we’ll put it down in a book and sell it somewhere. I can’t see me doing 5 hours online; I think I’d go nuts. Wish me luck; oh yeah, too late for that.
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