seobridges.com

#social#media #SMM

Recently, someone told me they wanted SEO Bridges to do for them what they could not do for themselves.  That would be like taking your car to the mechanic and asking them if they could make your car run in such a way that would be impossible for you to do.

Technically, just as you can learn how to clean and modify your engine, buy the parts and solutions to clean and modify your engine, and clean and modify your engine, there is nothing SEO Bridges or any other service like ours can do for you that you cannot do for yourselves.

Now, there is another type of client we work with, and that is the client who gets involved in the process.  That is that client who wants us to make them an administrator on their Facebook fan page.  That is the client who tweets.  That is the client who understands the importance of engaging with their customer base.

We write Web content and engage in social media marketing.  We consult with our clients, we help them get started, we blog for them, and we do various other things.  But we encourage and even expect our clients to engage with their customer base.

When you work with us, we’re entering into a business partnership based on collaborative efforts, in which we will listen your needs and design a solution to alleviate those needs.  But the solutions we design for our clients involve them interacting with their customer base.  SEO Bridges is selling a service to you.  And we’d be doing you a disservice if we didn’t partner with you to design a lasting solution for you.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#Panera #brandidentity #socialmedia #businessmodel #marketing

Yesterday, I went to Panera Bread in Vista, CA. I’ve only been to about half a dozen of Panera’s 1300 US locations, but their Vista location is my favorite. I’ve also been to the original Panera in Boston, which is much more compact.

Every once in a while, I like to explore new places and find quaint coffee houses or cafés where I can sit and write, read, or just relax. For me, the quieter and roomier, allowing me to spread out my work, the better.

San Diegans are a laid back, casual group. When we go to Padres games, we don’t go expecting them to win the world series.  We go because Petco Park is one of the nicest baseball parks in the US, and it’s an enjoyable place to spend time with friends and family.  Likewise, when we go out to coffee, we go to relax.

I am not going to say Bostonians are not a laid back casual people, but Boston is a subways culture and San Diego is a beach culture.  That culture reflects well in the Panera Bread at Boston’s Coolidge Corner. That location, like many Boston cafés and coffee houses, is much more compact.

I prefer the more spacious Panera’s, cafés, and coffee houses of San Diego.  That’s probably because I’m a San Diegan. People who live in subway cultures, and are used to rubbing shoulders with other train riders, probably enjoy bumping elbows and getting into conversations with new friends at cafés and coffeehouses that cram as many tables and chairs into their establishment as possible.

When you’re writing content for your website or working on your company’s social media marketing plan, consider your audience. Sure, your clientele may consist of people from beach cultures, subway cultures, and various other subcultures, but they all have one thing in common—You.  And how you brand yourself and/or your business matters.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#Goodreads #Writing #SocialMedia #Writers

If you’re a writer, you should set up a profile on Goodreads (GR), so you can spin an attractive writer’s web. 26.21% of unique visitors to GR come from Google, so you want to fill your GR account with attractive keywords. Begin spinning your web with these high impact keywords:

Books:

The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
The Hunger Games
Never Let Me Go
Water for Elephants
Twilght 5 (Not Midnight Sun)
Eat, pray, Love

People:

Marilyn Monroe
Audrey Hepburn
John Lennon
James Patterson
Dr. Seuss
Bob Marley
Chuck Palahniuk
Lady Gaga
Charlaine Harris
Eckhart Tolle
Pema Chodron
Paulo Coelho
Stephenie Meyer
Justin Bieber

* This list of words is based upon Alexa.com, current as of the original date of this blog, and will change.

After you attract people, you want to know where your audience might go from GR. The same four sites send each other the most amount of traffic, thus allowing you to create an attractive writer’s web.

From Goodreads:

22.67% go to Google, 12.17% go to Facebook, and 4.43% go to Yahoo.

From Google:

4.15% go to Facebook, 2.34% go to Yahoo, and 2.17% go to Youtube.

From Facebook:

7.86% go to Google, 5.36% go to Youtube, and 4.24% go to Yahoo.

From Yahoo:

8.44% go to Facebook, 7.62% go to Google, and 2.29% go to Youtube.

From Youtube:

13.52% go to Facebook, 9.98% go to Google, and 3.02% go to yahoo.

Also, consider writing reviews on Amazon. Based on studies of overall increases of traffic to Facebook the average amount of traffic to Facebook increases by about .936% . Aside from that, after Yahoo, GR sends the next most amount of traffic to Amazon (3.42%).

So, to spin a Writer’s web, set up an account on Goodreads using the above keywords to attract Google and Yahoo, stay active or set up an account on Facebook, post videos on Youtube, and write reviews on Amazon.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

If you want to go to John Grisham’s site, you can go to Jgrisham.com (JG) or Johngrishamonline.com (JGO). If you peruse those sites, you’ll probably notice the latter is the more up-to-date and well kept. Though, JG receives more traffic. Here’s the breakdown of where visitors to JG come from, according to Alexa:

Google: 59.26%
Facebook: 18.52%
Alexa: 11.11%
Yahoo!: 11.11%

Here’s the breakdown of where visitors to JGO come from, according to Alexa:

Amazon: 100%

Of course, visitors from elsewhere may go to those sites. Though, a major reason JG receives more visitors is because of links. Until a website links to another website, it remains an island.

There is a second, more obscure, lesson we can learn. RandomHouse owns JG, but a small company owns JGO. The company that designed JGO started a Twitter page for Grisham, which consists of more than 2,500 followers (a dismal amount compared to other best-selling authors), and they last Tweeted on that account on 3/31/2010. All in all, it appears the company that designed JGO put it up and let it go.

According to Compete, JGO only received 1,150 visitors in December (.0012% of Amazon’s 92,531,925) compared to 19,118 visitors to JG. Chances are unless you’re John Grisham or someone of his caliber, RandomHouse won’t design a website for you. But you want to do business with a company that will pay attention to your needs, rather than just putting up a Twitter page, work on it for a while, and let it go.

Johngrishamonline.com’s presence compared to that of Jgrisham.com, or any other best-selling author’s site, is dismal. You make of it what you want, but I propose RandomHouse uses a strategy that works, whereas this other company either had no strategy or listened to an ominous voice that said, “If you build it, they will come.”  My advice—stop listening to ominous voices from 80′s Kevin Costner movies, and listen to the experts.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

The new year is less than a week away, and with it will come new challenges.  Today and tomorrow I will tell you about a couple of the time management tools I use.

Today, let’s look at Lifeio.com.  This is a social media aggregator, personal calendar, multi e-mail client, shopping wizard, and more.  Here’s a look at some of the things you can do with this online time management tool:

Now

This tab shows a screen with a set of boxes that display upcoming events on your calendar and current events of interest.

Mail

Add your Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Pop, and/or IMAP e-mail accounts to one place.  Just hover over it, and a box will open to display it.

Calendar

Schedule daily to-do lists and upcoming events.  You can upload your iCal calendar or a CSV file.

Contacts

Upload contacts via a CSV file, and then create and set them in categories.

Feeds

As news comes up in this preset list of feeds, or whichever feeds you want to follow, a constant stream of information from those news sources appears in the upper right hand corner of this website.

Shopping

Set up your search with Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Craiglist, and Fandango.  Lifeio will scour those sources for the information you want.  Once you find the information you want, you can save it as a Note, todo, or event.

There is so much more you can do with Lifeio, but I am going to let you explore. If you need some extra help honing in on your time management skills, click on any of the books below.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Yesterday, I suggested the return on traditional markets levels off and becomes predictable, whereas the return on social media markets is fickle because people are fickle.  Both markets require people, and since people are fickle there are margins of changeability within the predictability of both markets.  However, there is more room for changeability within the predictability of social media markets because there is a lower threshold to cross and commitment to keep.

If a company wants to go public and enter the market, they must cross financial and even legal thresholds.  A person can’t just open Joe’s Garage on Monday and go public on Wednesday.  People also have a financial threshold to cross in order to become shareholders.  Companies and people who want to take their social media public have a much lower threshold to cross.

As with traditional markets, those who play the social media market must observe social patterns and adjust their social media marketing efforts according to those social patterns. Those similar social patterns within one’s audience determine the common denominator of one’s audience that should be the focus of one’s social media marketing plan.

Rules of playing the social media market:

1. Engage your audience. Three Rules of Social Media Marketing.
2. Not all social media has longevity. My blog on FourSquare.
3. Not all social media is for everyone. Don’t use Twitter just because everyone else is.
4. Don’t follow people just because they follow you.
5. The best social media marketing is niche social media marketing.
6. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are good for finding your audience and determining how to engage them best.
7. The best social media marketing is followed up by meeting your most devoted Facebook friends and Twitter followers in person.
8. Unless your famous, start out with a regular Facebook profile.  Don’t expect people to want to become your fan when they don’t know who you are.
9. Develop a social media marketing plan.
10. Include social media monitoring in your social media marketing plan.

Speaking of social media monitoring, here are three more sites for you to check out.

SociafyQ

• An open-source social media monitoring platform that offers free and reasonably priced services
• You can add a SociafyQ widget to your desktop or iGoogle account
• You can choose which social networking sites you want SociafyQ to track

I cannot locate any videos for SociafyQ

Actionly

• Monitor Twitter tag clouds and top tags
• Monitor keywords on Twitter, Facebook (public) status updates, blogs, Flickr, Youtube, news, and Google Buzz.
• Monitor key Twitter metrics, including number of followers, retweets, and mentions.

No videos for Actionly either

PeopleBrowsr

• Identify your advocates, critics, and opinion leaders
• Research reports analyze the whys and how of traffic spikes, sentiment trends, brand engagement, customer loyalty, and more
• Monitor global and U.S. Tweet distribution

Thanks to everyone for reading my series on social media monitoring.  Come by tomorrow for a special ‘This week in social media monitoring.’

Stay social,

Erick

Let’s face it!  social media marketing is fun.  The success stories of how people have used social media to find jobs, boost their careers or sales, find true love, or achieve other goals are endless.

So, what’s the secret?  How do some people use social media so effectively that they achieve such lucrative results?  They realize the quintessential purpose of social media marketing is social.

If you have hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, yet don’t know any of those people in reality, you’re going about your social media marketing all wrong.

You don’t have to know everyone you’ve connected with personally, but the end result of your social media strategy should be social.  If you just use social media to post your blog and products online without attempting to get to know people (at least online), people will view your social media strategy as the Web 2.0 version of cold calling.

Here’s some quick tips:

1. Include your goal(s) and type of people you want to connect with to achieve your goal(s) in your social media strategy.
2. Connect with those people who could help you achieve your goals, whether directly or indirectly.
3. Find out what organizations those people in your area you connect with belong to and/or events they go to.
4. Get involved with those organizations, go to those events, and meet those people.
5. Host an event and invite those people you want to connect with to that event.

How do you use it to connect with people?  I’d love to hear your comments.

Stay social,

Erick