SEO Mentor

I had the best time with my Monday Interview Podcast with Dave Snyder aka the cry baby! Take a listen above or read the transcript below to get total access to Dave admitting that he cries, a lot!

Garrett: Hello everyone. This is Garrett Pierson, YourSEOMentor. I’m here with Dave Snyder of Snydeysense.com, and SearchandSocial.com. How are you Dave?

Dave: I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Garrett: I’m good. It’s great to have you here, I’m excited. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about yourself, for those who might not know you; a little bit of your background in SEO, online marketing, social media, your family; anything you want to talk about?

Dave: I used to be a teacher for three years, when I first got out of school. I actually played music for a year when I first got out of school and just hung out. I didn’t know what to do with myself so I became a teacher. I’d always wanted to be a writer. My love for writing, and my huge love for sports, led me to start working for some content sites. They were a lot of fantasy football and basketball sites.

From that writing I started my own site and got into affiliate marketing just to keep the revenue up, to actually have the site pay for itself. I then got into SEO and all kinds of things. From there I decided that maybe the Web was the place for me to go. I really just wanted to start off as a content writer and editor. I ended up looking into SEO and getting more into it. I took a job in the agency world.

From there I worked with an agency for a while and I toiled in an agency in an online marketing manager. We all know how agency work can go. It can be pretty grueling sometimes. I learned a lot; mostly from just being thrown into the fire.

Now I’m the search and social media strategist for JRDunn.com. We’re the world’s largest designer jewelry store. I’m also the cofounder of SearchandSocial.com, with Jordan Kasteler. We’re a SEO and social media consultancy. We also do our own online media.

(more…)

With the rise of Social Media and the ability to converse real time with people you have never met before, it seems that things are changing almost daily for both the good and the bad. Lets focus on the bad for just a bit and then end with the good.

BAD:

Before social media the only area people in the industry would interact was maybe a couple times a year at conferences and the majority of this was when they were at the bar and totally relaxed. Now we have the opportunity to talk all day long via micro-blogging, live online TV, etc. We never had to interact in this setting before, we now know exactly what each other is doing not only on a daily basis but on a second by second basis (e.g. Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, etc.).

So you are asking, “Garrett what is the problem with this and why would this be bad?” Well it is simple, have you ever had a best friend that you loved to be around and then you moved into a apartment together and wanted to kill each other after a couple weeks. Well I see the same thing happening online these days, if you haven’t noticed lately there has been a lot more back and forth. In my opinion this is due to Social Media. Now you can argue my opinion all you want and that is fine really it is just an observation that a good friend of mine had and I happen to totally agree. So that wasn’t so bad lets get to the good!

GOOD:

Well the good items list is endless but here are just a couple of things that I think are totally awesome due to Social Media.

• Making new friends you would have never met any other way
• Building Relationships of trust
• Networking B2B and B2C
• Building Social Equity
• Instantly Communicating to Clients and/or Customers
• Reputation Management
• Being engaged in something (I see people being less depressed)
• Introverts becoming extroverts
• Conquering Social Fears
• Giving Value faster & more efficiently
• Building Brand Awareness
• Free marketing (if you do it right and give valuable content)
• Search engine rankings (Just search “SEO Mentor” and you will see what I mean)
• Last of all FUN FUN FUN

Again the list could go on and on and if you want to add to it simply comment below. Over all I think the Good wins over the Bad but I think we need to be aware and careful as we all share our lives online and talk about others. It all comes back to the ethic of reciprocity or the Golden Rule,“treat others as you would like to be treated.”

Sorry about the audio didn’t record well but you can watch Pre-Recorded video at YourSEOMentor.TV
Here it is my first weekly Social Media News Podcast episode #1. Today I talked about the following items:

Dave Taylor’s Twitter poll:

You can also follow Dave Taylor at his Tech Support Questions Blog!

Next I talked about how Americans Watched 12 Billion Videos Online in May and of those 12 billion, “Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property that month with 4.2 billion videos viewed (representing a 35 percent share of all videos viewed). YouTube.com accounted for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property…”

I also talked about the big hype of Twitter Aquiring Summize and also the latest talk about how supposely Twitter is going to die and Plurk & FriendFeed are going to take over, I gave my insight on this and also read my buddy Alejandro Reyes‘ take on the whole issue at his blog post FriendFeed vs. Twitter - Is That Really The Point?!

Remember everyone to stay tuned to  my next Monday Interview with Cheri Pierson of ScrapbookTalkRadio.com where we will be talking about what SEO is (p.s. she has no idea)!

Technorati Tags: Twitter, FriendFeed, Social Media

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-dde8a25dca46e08767037783de74a2f2}

If you are not using FriendFeed you are missing out on a great tool that helps you add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and many more. Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing in one place, think of it as a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.

Here is what Crunchbase.com is saying about what FriendFeed is:

“FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the facebook news feed. It’s an idea that isn’t too difficult or bothersome for social network users to adopt.

Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes your data feed with info from each of the sites.

Other companies, such as Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand and the more recent Fuser, are trying to help you organize your online social identity as well, all in different ways.”

So I joined FriendFeed a while back and have found that it is another great tool that helps me keep up on what all my social friends are doing online one of those being Dave Harry of Huomah.com. Not only do I love to follow everything that Dave is talking about online (because it is usually entertaining and intellectual) but what I really wanted to let everyone know about was the public rooms he has created on FriendFeed:

• the SEM Room
• the Learn SEO Room
• the SphinnZone Room

Here are some other people that I follow on FriendFeed and really I try and follow them everywhere:

Ann Smarty
David Wallace
Kristen Munson - Social Media Mom
Danny Sullivan
Shana Albert - theNanny
Jason Calacanis
SpostareDuro - Kimberly Bock
Bill Slawski