I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about Social Media and the importance of having a home base which is fully in your control and all your own.
Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Linkedin are all great and have amazing value. They shouldn’t be ignored, but they also shouldn’t be the only place where you cultivate content and audience.
Your Website and blog should be your main spot for posting content and growing a following, a readership and a reputation as a thought leader.
The idea of having a home base is rather simple. You have no control over Social Media sites. They can take your profile and content down when ever they want. They own the platform and have all the control. If you first post on your blog and link to it from your Social Media outposts you remain in control of that content.
Darren Rowse of Problogger has a great video explaining how he uses Social Media. It is very similar to how I use it as well.
I recently read a piece on Search Engine Land about how many companies are faced with a difficult choice this year… budget for Social Media work or concentrate on getting a mobile strategy up and running.
In this article, the author points out some very valuable information that I think is important to keep in mind.
The blurred line between social and mobile may be obvious in the case of mobile social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, but the line applies to social networks with more reach as well.
Consider the following stats about mobile usage from networks that are likely part of your social budget, but may not have been accounted for in mobile:
50% of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience (Twitter CEO Dick Costolo)
200 million of Facebook’s 600 million subscribers access Facebook through their mobile device (Facebook CTO Bret Taylor)
Mobile is Facebook’s top priority in 2011 (Bret Taylor)
[Groupon has] seen significant growth in the last six months in terms of percentage of users who redeem from mobile. (Groupon VP/GM of Mobile, Mihir Shah)
YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, a 3x increase in 2010. (YouTube)
[Facebook mobile users] are more than twice as active as people who use Facebook just on a desktop computer (Bret Taylor)
30% of smartphone owners have accessed social networks via browser (comScore)
Moms are active in mobile social: in terms of demographics, most mobile social network users are female, with the most active age group being 35-54 (Nielsen)
In other words, if you’re running a social media campaign in Facebook or Twitter, it’s very likely that your target is viewing it on a mobile device.
If your target is a Facebook user, it’s likely they’re engaging with your brand twice as much on a mobile device as they would be on a desktop computer.
If your business is doing a Groupon, it’s also likely that a growing number of your customers will never print out the Groupon, but redeem it at the local business with their smartphone.
If you consider yourself a video SEO or video marketer and are actively engaging your target audience in YouTube, your target audience is likely being engaged on their mobile device.
The author is totally correct. By concentrating on Social Media, you are indeed reaching a mobile market. Now this doesn’t mean that you can neglect getting your Website optimized for mobile, but it should help you decide where to put your money first.
Goldstein Media is a full service Web Design and Internet Marketing agency based in the suburbs of Philadelphia. If you have any questions about how we can help you develop both a mobile marketing strategy and a Social Media plan, please give us a call today at 215-352-5216.
A big part of SEO is something so simple but very time consuming… links. The more links you have pointing at your site the more value the search engines will give your site. Directories that are high quality are also a great place to get good links. Some cost money but are well worth it. Watch the video to learn more:
Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below
To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Digg Makes it Easier to Get Dugg – Digg has announced that it is revamping its API so that developers can create more feature-rich applications for the social content-sharing site and write/contribute data using OAuth. The new API will also let developers write tools that give users the ability to Digg, bury or comment on stories.
Google Rolls Out New Format for Image Results – According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog, the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post.
Facebook, Google & Twitter Unite for World AIDS Day Around the Web – Thanks to efforts from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, AIDS is a more visible topic today than perhaps at any other point in the history of World AIDS Day. Read on to see what each site has done and the impact this joint campaign is having on users.
This is the Link Report for November 25th through December 2nd:
Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below
To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Microsoft Launches its own Twitter… in China – Microsoft is making its own Twitter… in China. They are capitalizing on the popularity of their Instant Messenger client in that country.
Facebook’s Road to 350 Million Users – Mark Zuckerberg’s note about Facebook’s latest privacy changes also contained an announcement about another important milestone for Facebook: 350 million users.
Facebook CEO: Prepare for Some Big Privacy Changes – In a rare open letter, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a series of privacy changes, starting with the removal of regional networks.
What Will Comcast-NBC Mean for Hulu? – It looks like Comcast's purchase of 51% of NBC will not kill he online video site Hulu. Though we might be paying for the content in 2010.
Twitter Ads Are Evil: Here’s Why – Advertisers are frustrated. You’re all having direct conversations with friends on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and the rest while totally bypassing the mass mediums they understand. Rather than consuming content all day on TV, in newspapers and on the radio, you’re engaging, one-to-one, with individuals you trust. They can’t get in the middle of that. They hate it.
Google Profiles Turn Into OpenIDs – As part of its push to go more social, Google has been attempting to unify its various account profiles into one Google Profile. And now it’s more useful. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has just tweeted out that Google Profiles can now be used as OpenIDs.
Small Businesses Look to E-Mail and Social Media – eMarketer – Three-quarters of small businesses will increase their spending on e-mail marketing in 2010, while nearly seven in 10 will put more dollars toward social media, according to VerticalResponse data.
If you’ve been in the working world for more than a few years you’ve probably come across one of them. They are cocky and like to boast about how they can magically make your dreams come true. That’s right, the snake oil salesmen.
Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, salesmen used to travel across the country selling all kinds of potions and contraptions. These salesmen would make wild claims that their wares would cure everything from a constantly icky toe to the measles. Often times, like today, when a customer bought these items they did far less than what was promised.
Fast forward more than a century and you’ll find that not much has changed. Their are still people hocking their wares, claiming to be able to solve all of life’s mysteries. Now, you’re probably asking yourself what does this have to do with Web design or Internet marketing. Sadly, the Internet trades are not immune to these slithery, slimy characters. If anything, the Internet is the new frontier, where these vermin thrive.
Recently, I was courting a client for a Website design. Like most of my customers they were interested in being found on Google and the other search engines. They already had a site made for them by one of the ma-bell outfits. They didn’t know much about the Web, but did they know that things as they weren’t working. So like many brave business owners they ventured out into the frontier of the Web and began talking to Web designers and Internet marketers to see what options they had to offer.
This is when we first met.
We met at a local cafe and I explained to them my philosophy of design and development: Clean, schematic, and readable sites that promote natural rankings in the search engines. They looked at me dumb founded. “Naturally?” they asked. Apparently they were led to believe that somehow a Website and Search Engine Marketing (pay-per-click) were one in the same — you couldn’t do one without the other.
I explained to them that even though they were in a competitive keyword and market they could still rank high in the natural listings. They were shocked and felt betrayed by the other designers and salesmen who steered them wrong.
When I first heard what they were being told, my blood boiled. Yes, there is a place for PPC in every Web design and Internet marketing strategy. PPC isn’t always a waste of money, if it’s done correctly. But it certainly isn’t the be-all-end-all.
I explained to them that I could do a number of things for them. Besides building them a custom site, coded correctly, I could get them ranked for keywords that were being searched for regularly and without PPC and in the end these prospective customers became clients.
A few tips for going at search engines naturally
Going after a competitive keyword like, let’s say, Pizza Shop, you are competing with more than 36.6 million other listings. Remember that a broad search term like this is pulling up listings from all over.
What you can do is go for Pizza Shop Philadelphia or Pizza Shop Yardley. The first one might still be hard to break into, due to the fact that others have been there much longer and the fact that Philadelphia is a large area, but the second one is definitely attainable.
If you have a small company that is regional or even local, don’t go after the broad key terms. You’ll never be able to compete with the giants in that space. Go after your surrounding zip codes and local towns.
If you have a regional or even national company, you can go after the broader key terms, but be prepared to spend lots of money and time getting there without any guarantee of success. What you can do though is go into the more regional or local spaces and compete on those levels for those key terms. It might be more work, but you’ll have a better chance of ranking.
The moral of the story beware of the low hanging fruit and those snakes that tell you to eat the apple. Do your homework and be an educated consumer. If something sounds way too good to be true it probably is and sometimes doing a little extra work pays off in dividends later on.
This is the Link Report for November 8th through November 12th:
Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below
To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at What the duck? Aflac gets quackin’ on Facebook | Social Business | ZDNet.com – Whether or not you are an Aflac customer, you’ve at least once tried to mimic the Aflac duck’s quacking of “Aflac” at the end of its commercials. After its commercial success, Aflac has taken to Facebook with a two-fold approach: increase its brand awareness through a fan page for the famous Aflac Duck and through a presence in the “Causes” application on Facebook for the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the same city in which the company is headquartered.
The Do’s And Don’ts Of Creating Original Video | paidContent – Just a few years ago, web video was the great unknown. Media and tech companies agreed that it was the next big thing, but no one knew what kind of content actually worked on the web. Early adopters watched music videos online, but the average consumer wasn’t ready to reach for the computer instead of the TV remote. Content owners and creators, meanwhile, either clung for dear life to traditional development and distribution models, or threw ideas against a wall to see what would stick.
The fall of the Berlin wall in digital media | Media | guardian.co.uk – Digital media are playing an important role in today's celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall. It is interesting that much of the mainstream press have left their historical medium behind for their online coverage, as each have chosen the format which is best for a story. For example, the Guardian has put some impressive films online in which Berliners describe how the city was divided while, readers of the New York Times submitted magnificent photos and memories of the wall and the BBC has displayed in a map how far pieces of the former wall have spread around the globe. In addition to an interactive mainstream coverage, there are several social media projects worth looking at.
LinkedIn and Twitter link up | Technology | Reuters – LinkedIn and Twitter have linked up. Starting immediately, users of LinkedIn and Twitter can cross-file to each other's services, by checking a box on either Twitter or LinkedIn.
The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave – Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
This is the Link Report for November 5th through November 7th:
Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below
To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Change the Windows 7 Taskbar to Work Like Vista :: the How-To Geek – While many think the new taskbar feature in Windows 7 is a great improvement, others may not want to use it. Today we take a look at how to get the Vista style taskbar back on Windows 7.
Security Fix – Poking at Google’s new privacy Dashboard – Google this week unveiled a new feature called Dashboard, intended to give users a way to view — and in modest ways limit — the breadth of information the search giant collects about our online lives.
Social Media, Meet Search – ClickZ – We knew it was going to happen eventually, but many digital marketers were taken somewhat by surprise when it happened all at once. Seemingly overnight, the era of social search dawned. Bing just started to incorporate tweets into search results, with Google right on its heels.
Social Status Generator – Choose a keyword from the tag coud, and the generator will automatically give you a message you can add to Twitter, Facebook, Friendster, …
Google Dashboard: Now You Know What Google Knows About You – There’s no two ways about it: if you use a lot of Google services, then Google knows a lot about you. Google has received a solid amount of criticism because of this, and they’ve decided to alleviate the issue by launching Privacy Dashboard; a one-stop-shop with all the information that Google knows about you and your online habits collected in one place.
Google Dashboard: A Closer Look – PC World – Google showed Thursday it's getting more serious about privacy when it launched a tool called Google Dashboard that aims to give you more control over your personal data stored on Google's servers. From your Google Dashboard you can view the company's privacy policies, easily access your most recent activity for each Google service you use, and manage settings for those services. My initial impression is that Dashboard is a quick and easy way to get greater control over your Google Account activity, and even clean up any services you may have forgotten about.
YouTube Gives Partners More Control Over Video Blocking – Basically, there are two new buttons in the interface for partners. One says ‘Block by Country’ and provides content partners with the ability to geo-block a single video rather than an entire account, an oft-requested feature that allows partners to restrict the geographical rights for specific videos.
Do Follow – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Most blogs are "No Follow" meaning no link juice is passed from the blog to the linked site. But some blogs are "Do Follow" read more to find out more.
This is the Link Report for October 31st through November 2nd:
Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below
To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell – These games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience.
Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years – Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
Video SEO Tips – Getting Started – Online Marketing Blog – If you’re attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it’s no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing video SEO principles.
This is the Link Report for September 30th through October 29th:
Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below
To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Facebook Revamps its Privacy Policy – Earlier this year, Facebook was hammered for changes it made to its Terms of Service. The result was an uproar that eventually led to the Facebook Democracy, an initiative by Facebook to let users vote and comment on its governing documents.
Rand Fishkin: SEO, Mentors & What Pisses Him Off » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – Rand Fishkin is a singular personality and, to those in the SEO industry, needs little introduction. Having “started playing” with Microsoft FrontPage WYSIWYG web page software in 1993 as a high school student, he’s grown his company SEOmoz to take its place amongst the most recognized brands in search.
iMedia Connection: How to be a good social media listener – At this point, most digital marketers understand why they need to monitor the conversations that are happening on the social web. But in doing so, are they really listening? It's one thing to know what is being said about your brand on social networks. But it's quite another to draw actionable insights around which future campaigns and communications can be crafted.
Mobile And Social Platforms Want To Be The King Of Local Search – The study shows that the web generally, but in particular mobile and social network search, are increasingly factors fueling growth in the overall search market. This grew to 21.9 billion total US searches in June 2009, a year-on-year increase of 31%.
10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips – Begin by outlining clear goals for your social media marketing efforts and figuring out how you’ll measure success. Once you’ve outlined your goals, let’s look at 10 great ways you can begin to leverage social media for your marketing efforts.
How to Earn Respect in Social Media – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Just because you sell a product or a service that is the top selling or highest rated in the industry doesn't mean people will listen to you when you arrive. Announcing your arrival doesn't gain you immediate respect. You won't suddenly have a band of followers once you strike up a conversation or answer a question or two on a topic.
Facebook’s ‘Reconnect’ Strategy is Brilliant – Recently, in addition to giving you suggestions to which friends you might add to your profile, Facebook also started enticing users to reconnect and engage less active users. The campaign has partly backfired, as some of the recommendations were dead people and ex-lovers, but I still think it’s brilliant, and a good sign that Facebook has a clear strategy laid out for the future.
Initially rolled out for select images only, the capability is now being rolled out for what seems to be the majority of images in Google image search. This is particularly useful when search terms include homonyms, we think; and we applaud Google for removing a major pain point in our searches for pics of Tesla the band as opposed to Tesla the scientist or Tesla the automotive brand.
BuddyPress.org – BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.
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I recently read a piece on 
If you’ve been in the working world for more than a few years you’ve probably come across one of them. They are cocky and like to boast about how they can magically make your dreams come true. That’s right, the snake oil salesmen.
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