SEO Mentor

Ideas by Garrett Pierson and Illustration by Mike Dyson

With the growing phenomenon of Social Media, there seems to be a disconnect between how much is too much. I myself spend hours daily on Plurking (Plurk.com), Tweeting (Twitter.com), Friend Feeding (FriendFeed.com), Digging (Digg.com), Tagging (Technorati.com), Stumbling (Stumbleupon.com), Bookmarking (Google Bookmarks), Reading (Reddit.com), Facebooking (Facebook.com), Favoring (Faves.com), Propelling (Propeller.com), Hellotxting (HelloTXT.com), Mixing (Mixx.com), Eating (Del.icio.us), and that is just the beginning.

With all of this crowding the mind and giving us all Socialitis we need to put on our project managers hats to bring us back to reality so that we can keep our heads on straight. Yes this is all a lot to work with, but Social Media Marketing is totally changing the dynamics of how we market and network online but we need to remember that social media is not just another direct marketing channel. Social media marketing makes it possible to construct brand awareness and create customer loyalty, as long as you go about it the right way and get organized.

With this all in mind here are 10 tips, tools, and suggestions to get the most out of your social marketing campaign and to not go crazy:
(more…)

With the influx of new Web 2.0 sites online there is a growing concern with businesses both online and offline and how to benefit from Social Networking and Media sites that are currently rocking the online world.

The president of the company I used to work for asked me the following,

“How can Social Media help my company and why should I waste time with it.”

I went through a couple examples of how social marketing would help his business grow and showed him a couple of sites that I thought he should check out like Facebook.com, Squidoo.com, Twitter.com, and Stumbleupon.com just to name a few. Once I said ‘Facebook’ his eyes lit up and he said how fun he has had on Facebook and how he has come across old friends that he hasn’t talked to for years. I then saw a light go on in his head realizing the power of Social Media and Social Networking sites.

A recent article called “Why is Social Media So Hard For Businesses?” by Mark Collier of SearchEngineGuide.com stated:

“More businesses than ever are exploring the possibility of using social media tools and sites to help grow their business. But many of these efforts aren’t very effective, and I think that is due to many businesses simply misunderstanding what social media is, and why it’s so important.

First, what exactly IS social media? Asking 10 people might result in 10 different answers, but for simplicity sake, lets say that social media is a group of tools and sites that let you easily create and share content online. Blogs, social networks, and podcasts are the common forms of social media that most of us are at least somewhat familiar with.

The problem that I think many businesses have, is how they view social media. I believe many businesses (of all sizes) see social media sites and tools as new channels to publish content into. In order words, they view social media as being marketing channels.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Notice in the above definition of social media, I said that these sites and tools are ways to create and share content. Why use the word ’share’ instead of ‘publish’ or ‘distribute’?”

I totally agree with Mark and believe that not only businesses but in general people are misunderstanding the purpose of these social media sites that are now getting more pageviews than even the major search engines. Think of a search engine as a quick search for something and then leave. With these social media sites people are not only viewing more pages on the sites but they are also staying on these sites up to 5 times longer than they stay in the search engines, meaning you as a business owner now have five times as long to catch your viewers attention. THIS IS POWERFUL!!!

(more…)

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is relatively a new concept in online marketing, even though it has been there in our society for quite some time now. People like hanging out with like-minded people in a closely-knit group, and a similar strategy is employed when it comes to the online world.

Even a few years back, webmasters used different SEO techniques holding high ranks in search engines, which would ensure greater visibility for the surfing audience, and thus lead to monetary gains. With Social Media Optimization, one can reach out to many more individuals across the globe both as an individual, as well as an employee on behalf of his company.

Facebook.com, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, Twitter and a few other social networking websites enable us to promote and market our business to innumerable individuals, who are members of the websites and social communities mentioned above. These websites thus help organizations to cater to the diverse demands of the public on a large scale.

These websites also encourage professional and cultural exchange, which enable learning individuals to pick up valuable tips from experts in their respective fields. Not only do people with similar interests get to flock together, they can also access easy solutions to their problems by posting them for the experts to answer.

Social Media Optimization also helps organizations and individuals to reach out to the global market with their products and services. The business owners also benefit largely by developing their client base on a reference basis. Not only does it allow a beneficiary give-and-take policy to thrive, but also helps in developing personal relations.

With this kind of an evolution taking place, the world is now just a click away for individuals. The biggest attraction of SMO is perhaps the fact that it allows individuals and organization to venture out on projects with little or no capital expenditure at all.

Most people do business with people they know and trust. So, the best way to get more business is to meet more people and the best and easiest way to meet more people is to use the great new social networking sites. These sites empower you to easily create a page all about your business for free!

(more…)

So I was doing some research on Facebook.com for some clients that I mentor for Social Marketing. Through my research I found the following articles below that helped me understand a little better what Facebook.com is really all about:

Facebook - Wikipedia

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while still a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students but was expanded to the Ivy League. The website has more than 69 million active users worldwide. According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007.

Facebook - The Complete Biography

Facebook is the second largest social network on the web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. Primarily focused on high school to college students, Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user …

Find Cheap Gas on Facebook

Then you should try the cheap gas application on facebook. The app simply takes your Zip Code that you have registered and automatically shows you the locations & prices for the cheapest gas. It breaks these down by regular unleaded and …

Facebook in Reality

To give you a sense of how ridiculous some aspects of Facebook are, idiotsofants.com have produced a video called Facebook in Reality. It is currently running at 460000 views and comes up first when you type Facebook into YouTube. …

Using Facebook for business (part 2): making it sustainable

If we’re not careful, we can end up with blogs that never have posts added, or Facebook pages that are little more than a few fan photos. This is why I spent a lot of time evaluating Facebook before getting our company into it. …

So if you were ever wanting to learn a little bit more about Facebook.com then I hope this quick post and resources helped.