Word-of-Mouth Goes Virtual
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 24, 2009
A few days ago we wrote about some of the advantages of adopting a social media outlet that is oriented toward building business contacts. (LinkedIn was our example back then.) This week, we’d like to reexamine social media in its natural mode — as a top purveyor of viral marketing.
Remember playing “Broken Telephone” when you were a kid? (Maybe you called it something different, like “Operator” or “Pass it Down”, but please indulge us for just a couple more sentences….) Well, online social media can be understood more or less as a giant, worldwide game of “Broken Telephone”, except that each player can whisper in multiple directions simultaneously, and the telephone isn’t really all that broken since the smartest phone technicians in the neighborhood are constantly doing maintenance on it.
So…. Come to think of it, maybe that analogy falls a little bit flat, but don’t stop indulging us quite yet. The modern social networking website — Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces — is undeniably the fastest and, by now, the most far-reaching tool for transmitting word-of-mouth buzz. If you want to spread the news about yourself and your company quickly, your best bet is to complement a traditional business marketing campaign with a healthy dose of social media outreach. Actually, sending out mass e-mails through personal information managers like Outlook or through POP3/IMAP webmail services such as Gmail can leave you wallowing in the spammer boxes of most of your contacts without even realizing it. Besides, these e-mail applications all present rather severe restrictions on how many contacts you can send your message to in the first place. There are no such restrictions in most social networking sites, and when restrictions do exist, they are much more lax and forgiving than your typical e-mail application’s. (So choose your online friends carefully! They will be able to message you at will.)
For the second week in a row, our own Raphi Salem can serve as an exemplar of the savvy social media user. With close to 700 friends on Facebook, all gradually amassed through personal and business connections, Raphi is much better off sending one general Facebook message that will reach all his friends rather than making targeted phone calls or winnowing down select e-mail addresses for a mass message. Social networking is instantaneous and direct, and better yet, since participation in social media is consensual on the part of both sender and receiver, it’s an unobtrusive way of getting the word across.
People Capital Joins Up with SalemGlobal
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 20, 2009
SalemGlobal welcomes a new client, People Capital, a national leader in peer-to-peer lending (aka p2p or social lending). People Capital uses cutting-edge strategies to help students find their perfect college funding sources — be they individual investors, philanthropic/affinity groups or financial institutions. People Capital has a patent-pending Human Capital Score, which underwrites students without consulting their credit history, FICO scores or co-signers, but instead by projecting individual income levels and ability to pay indebtedness by analyzing the students’ GPAs, standardized test scores, choice of college and Major, etc. to provide a true and unbiased, data-driven measure of the economic value of an education. People Capital’s peer-to-peer loans are packaged in a fully legally compliant way, including all the rights and benefits of traditional “private student loans”, but at more affordable rates. Students no longer need to rely on stiff corporate policies when it comes to financing their education. Visit the People Capital homepage, www.People2Capital.com, to learn more about this revolutionary new way of financing your education.
5th Avenue Eye Center Signs up with SG
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 19, 2009
SalemGlobal is delighted to announce that the 5th Avenue Eye Center, New York’s premier provider of LASIK treatment and other vision correction procedures, has signed up with SalemGlobal as a client. The Center is headed by Dr. Ilan Cohen, a nationally recognized eye surgeon with years of experience performing an impressive range of vision correction procedures, from LASIK laser treatments to cataract surgery. Dr. Cohen and his staff at the 5th Avenue Eye Center rely on the latest in lens and surgical technology to make sure that their customers receive the safest and most accurate vision correction procedures around. Though LASIK surgery has become extremely popular nationwide, the experts at 5th Avenue Eye Center follow a strict policy of evaluating LASIK surgery candidates on a case-by-case basis. LASIK is not for everyone, and unlike other LASIK providers, the 5th Avenue Eye Center will not make you undergo (and pay for) a procedure you may not need. Please visit the 5th Avenue Eye Center website, www.WorldClassLASIK, to learn more about the Center’s services or to schedule an appointment with Dr. Cohen.
SalemGlobal Welcomes New Client, World Hyundai Matteson
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 19, 2009
SalemGlobal is happy to welcome World Hyundai Matteson, a top-rated Chicago Hyundai dealer, as its new client. World Hyundai in Matteson is the Midwest’s top provider of Hyundai vehicles and accessories. World Hyundai offers its customers the widest variety of new and pre-owned Hyundais at prices that are simply unbeatable. Though it’s the new kid on the block, World Hyundai has not shied away from offering the the most competitive prices and the most uncompromising service in the Chicago area. The experts at World Hyundai Matteson will not rest until their customers get a fair deal on their vehicle of choice. World Hyundai prides itself on its friendly customer service and knowledgeable staff; this surely explains its motto: “World Hyundai Matteson — where the right people make all the difference in the world!” Visit the World Hyundai homepage, www.WorldHyundaiMatteson.com, to learn more about the many great offers and services available at this elite car dealership.
With a Little Help from Your Friends
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 17, 2009
Today we live in a media savvy world. Blogs, personal profiles, online videos — we willfully inundate ourselves with the piles of information that stream constantly, endlessly, out of the gaping maw that is Web 2.0. Today, even baby boomers are getting hip to social media in its many manifestations, and horrifying their children with requests to become “friends” on Facebook or MySpace. Yet, by joining the social media revolution, these post-grad professionals and business owners aren’t just looking for an easier or faster to keep in touch with their loved ones, though that is one of social media’s best and most obvious perks. Importantly, today, social media has pushed the personal business network into space — virtual space, that is — and made it practically limitless.
The repercussions are clear: today, you should be extra careful and extra diligent when it comes to choosing your social media outlets. Again, it’s worth emphasizing the distinction between social media that are put primarily to personal use — Facebook and MySpace being the two most popular outlets in this case — and social media that are put to networking and contact-building use — LinkedIn being a good example here. A person interested in optimizing their presence online should opt for both kinds of social media. For an illustration, check out the personal profiles established by SalemGlobal’s own Raphi Salem — here is his Facebook profile (don’t even ask us about the Trump-do), and here is his LinkedIn profile. Note that, unlike his Facebook profile, Raphi’s LinkedIn profile has an option to display outgoing links to Raphi’s relevant webpages, which is great for SEO. Additionally, Raphi’s LinkedIn profile gives precedence to Raphi’s professional background and allows him to list the industry he works in. Both his Facebook and his LinkIn profiles are publicly available, but the LinkedIn profile is simply better geared toward not only establishing a business persona, but toward conveniently directing potential contacts toward Raphi’s business.
So, the moral of the story goes something like this: if you’re going to be social, you might as well be REALLY social, and sign up for different social media outlets that will enable you to achieve both personal and business objectives. Because of Web 2.0, today, making new friends online can also mean making more money at home.
A Real Optimized Valentine’s….
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 11, 2009
Chocolates, love poems, flowers, stuffed animals, romantic dinners, and… affiliate marketing! Doesn’t seem to add up? You’d be surprised. Check out these great SalemGlobal affiliate partners, the true match-making, love-finding, relationship-building gurus:
Of course, SalemGlobal isn’t just a match-maker. Our real passions are website marketing and search engine optimization. We count among our affiliate partners such companies as WebCEO and ConstantContact. Visit our Affiliate Marketing page to learn more about our well-known partners.
Meta Questions
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 9, 2009
Here’s a question we get all the time — “What is metadata, exactly?” The answer is surprisingly intuitive. By definition, metadata is not something that you will find on the frontend of a website. A good way to think of metadata is as “data about data,” hidden information that organizes, summarizes and contextualizes the content of a given webpage. A website’s metadata is commonly likened to an invisible library catalog that provides a brief and structured synopsis of a book: one column has the author name, another has a one-liner about the plot, another has the genre of the work, etc.
But remember, just because you can’t see a site’s metadata, at least directly, doesn’t mean it isn’t important! Search engines care about your site’s metadata a whole lot, and your ranking for relevant search terms is determined to a great degree by how consistent your metadata really is. As an experiment, go to a website that you visit often and view the source of the page. (To view the page source, go to the “View” menu option in your browser and select “page source”, or else just press control+U simultaneously.) You’ll most likely see at the very top of the page a list of meta tags containing information about the site: “content type”, “author”, “robots” and others.
Now, as a student of SEO, there are three main meta properties that you should worry about, namely, keywords, page description and page title. You already have the heads up on keywords (see our Key to Keyword Research), but what about the page description and page title? Well, these meta tags are about as straightforward as they sound. For the page description, you should provide a sentence or two that give a very general summary of your company services and/or a short account of the content of the specific page. Try to keep your page descriptions to less than 70 characters — more characters and your description will get caught off by the search engines, potentially leaving out important keywords. The page title should be even shorter — just a handful of words, a kind of textual banner ad for the page. Some good examples might be “basketball camp in new york”, “space age toaster ovens”, “best wine in county x”…. Finally, make sure each of your webpages contains a consistent amount of metadata. Your visitors won’t see the metadata, but you will see the difference once your website starts shooting up the search engine rankings.
The Key to Keyword Research
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Feb 4, 2009
A useful excerpt from this week’s SalemGlobal Newsletter:
“Everyone could use a few easy pointers when it comes to website marketing, SEO, and online promotion. SalemGlobal now introduces the SEO Tip of the Week, some words of advice on how to gain higher search results rankings in Google and other search engines. Today’s tip concerns researching keywords. Of course, when it comes to choosing good keywords, your industry knowledge is invaluable. No one knows your company’s services and capabilities better than you. After you’ve done some thinking, the next step is to research your competition. Simply search for those keywords and keyword phrases you’re interested in in Google and click on the first organic result. View the page source of that website; pay attention to page titles and descriptions. Repeat this process for the first two to three ranked results and you should gradually develop a complete list of keywords for your own website. Of course, organic research has its limitations, and there are fancy softwares that can help you isolate especially appropriate and relevant keywords (SalemGlobal uses one of the best, WebCEO), but nothing beats the old-fashioned organic effort, at least for starters. Questions? You can call Raphi Salem at 212-993-5828 or email him at raphis@salemglobal.com.”
To sign up to the newsletter, visit the SalemGlobal homepage and submit your e-mail in the Newsletter Sign up form. Sign up today and get the scoop on SEO, New York networking events, online marketing news and so much more.