October 25th, 2008 by Richard Lee
Online Branding 101 at BizTechDay
Use LinkedIn/Facebook/Yelp to Create Your Web Presence + 20 More Sites
Nicole Nicolay, Effektive Solutions
Rick Rochon, AdSymetrix.com
Rick Rochon:
Social Marketing Puzzle
- Web 2.0 Terms
- Creating a Web presence
- Blogging for business
- Social Networking
- Social Media
- Taking online … offline
- Monitoring what others are saying
Social Marketing Puzzle:
- Your Business -> $$$
- Your Content -> www, video, blog
- Their Content -> content around your content -> consumer opinion, blogs and websites, Favorites
How we used to Market: (Print, Broadcast, Mail)
How we can market now?
Don’t stop offline areas, instead add new things to the Mix
Nicole Nicolay:
Web2.0 – Online interaction
- Social Networks
- Social Media / New Media (Video, podcasts, blogs, comments, twitter, etc.)
- Blog vs. Website (one s static, and one is updated frequently)
- RSS -> Really Simple Syndication – Flow of information (TV, Newspaper, etc. now online feeds, subscribe to websites and blogs)
- SEO -> optimize website get on search engines
- Blogging for Business
Why blog?
- Enhance your online presence
- Build a community
- Share your knowledge
- Enhance your credibility
- SEO, Search Engine Optimization
- Turn blog traffic into business
State of the Blogosphere: (Technorati):
- 1.5 M blogs created in last 7 days
- 77% of internet users read blogs
- Over 184 million blogs have been created since 2002
Blog’s: Easily consumable, easily digestible by Search Engines.
Some Syndication Tools:
zecoda and feed blitz = blog tools to syndicate content
Offer freebies, advice, to collect users
5 Steps to Create your Blog
- Go to WordPress
- Sign up for account
- Choose your domain & blog name
- Activate account
- Start blogging
Things to Keep in Mind for a Blog
- Target Your Audience
- Grow You Readership
- Write good content with your keywords (Natural… not stuffing!)
- Post frequently 3-5x a week
- Encourage readers to subs to your newsletter (freebie)
- Submit your blg to directories: google, yahoo, dmoz, blogged, etc.
- Foster community with commenting your and others
- Link to others within content or blogroll (related, higher rank)
- Employ backlink strategies (beg, borrow and make badges)
- Spread the love and good content w/guest posting
- Tag your posts
- Aggregate your blog content on your social profiles
- Cross promotions (online/offline)
Misc Tips:
- Don’t make it a mystery for users to get a hold of you or buy
- Analyzing your readers:
Click Analytics: getclicky.com and google.com/analytics - Don’t cut marketing
The most successful companies
Facebook:
- Over 110 million active users
- 4th most trafficked social media site in the world
- Over 55K regional, work related, collegiate, and high school networks
- More than 30M photos uploaded
- Over 24,000 applications
Linked In:
- Profile oriented for professionals
- Asking questions, answering questions, join groups
Flickr:
- For your photos/images
- Social network around your photos
- Groups
Throw events, give cards out
ITunes for podcasts:
- Hardware Mic: Snowball
- Software: audacity
- or use…Blog talk radio
Flip TheFlip.com ($179) (minnow) – one click to YouTube
- Create 1 best video
- Creating your own Ads
- Automatically upload to YouTube
Other misc:
- SpotMixer.com
- Animoto.com
Taking Online … Offline
- Eventbrite.com (workshop, seminar, etc. for knowledge expert on topic)
- Meetup.com
Web Monitoring:
- Yelp.com
- Google.com/alerts
Plan, Place, Perfect – Create your web presence plan
- blogging
- commenting
- social networking
- social media: pictures, podcast, video
Q & A:
Handling a Negative review on Yelp:
- Read the Yelp business rules
- Don’t call the user directly or their boss, that violates the Yelp business rules
- Contact yelp customer service / legal
Other
Recommended length of a podcast = 1 Min. for initial one. Then create a longer one for a deeper one for those users interested.
TBD.com is the social network aimed toward the older generation