Three reasons why the “experts” are wrong about social media mea There is an argument around the blogosphere that is DRIVING ME CRAZY. When it turns to the topic of measurement and social media marketing, many “authorities” flippantly rely on the “double standard” argument — If you’re trying to measure the value of SM, you might as well measure the value of a cell phone, the company car and the receptionist. One popular blogger and author recently said if your manager asks for the ROI of your social media initiative, you should ask him for the ROI of his pants. Their point is that you just need to accept the social web as something ubiquitous and necessary, so why worry about it? This is lunacy. Here are three reasons why this “no need to measure” view is an irresponsible position: 1) Never get caught with your stats down Let’s examine the argument that you don’t measure the value of a company car, or email so insisting that we measure social media is a double standard. 2) The fallacy of free But just how much money are we talking about?
LinkPopularity.com: The Free Link Popularity Service How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results The Real Results series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies. See how it works here. Social media can be a scary prospect for small businesses; unlike traditional marketing methods, it puts part of the message in the hands of the customers. The most obvious benefits are increased customer loyalty and engagement. We spoke with small business owners and social media managers around the world who have successfully used social media to increase business performance, and we asked them for their stories and their tips. It's About Relationships, Not Pitches The most common advice we received from businesses successfully using social media: Use it to engage your customers in a conversation, not just sell your services. Blatz Market & Liquor's Joe Woelfle employs a similar strategy. Social Media Exposure: Better Than Ads and Cheaper, Too
Search Engine Optimization Training and SEO Services, Ranking, Placement, Tools, Tips, Advice Bruce Clay, Inc.'s search engine optimization tutorial is a step-by-step SEO guide that will teach you how to optimize a website for search, complete with free SEO tools! Are you a website owner concerned that your site doesn't show up in Google? Or are you planning a website and want to make it search-friendly from the ground up? Whatever your situation, this tutorial will teach you all the SEO basics and important SEO tips to help you optimize your web pages to be found in search engines. Our SEO tutorial covers only "white hat" methodology that adheres to search engine guidelines. What Is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science/art of increasing traffic to a website by helping it rank higher in organic (non-paid) search results. How Does a Website Rank? Search engines want to show the "best" results possible — the most relevant, most expert and highest quality web pages that will satisfy the searcher. It is not the job of search engine optimization to make a pig fly.
Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing By Jeremiah Owyang, from Silicon Valley In many respects, Silicon Valley sits atop the world. Its growth and influence has made it the globe’s top location for innovation, STEM jobs, IT patents, venture capital funding, and Internet and software growth, and Unicorn startups galore. And yet there’s also been a shift in the Valley’s culture. One could argue that there’s an emergence of signs that strikingly resemble Detroit in the glory days of the age of transportation. In Detroit’s case, where I visited earlier this week, the Motor City reveled in its dominance in the 1950s, but growing social unrest soon culminated in a massive riot in the late 1960s. Here are four threats, aside from natural disaster, or whole scale physical attack for Silicon Valley today, along with a futuristic probing of their possible conclusions in the coming decades: Threat Two: Lack of Economic Diversity Means FragilityOne industry in a single city is a risk.
Complete SEO toolkit for website promotion in over 400 search engines: SEO PowerSuite SEO PowerSuite makes it easy for you to track your rankings in a search engine of your choice. Besides "standard" Google, Yahoo! and Bing, SEO PowerSuite fully supports a plethora of local engines you can use. Check out the complete list of 326 currently supported search engines below. If your favorite search engine isn't supported yet, just let us know. Chances are, it will be there by the next release! Available search engines Quick country search: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V Z If the search engine you need is not listed above, no worries.
Word of Mouth and Social Media: A Tale of Two Burger Joints | Fo Image by tray via Flickr I moved to the Bay Area from Milwaukee about five months ago. Among the things I miss from my hometown are my two favorite burger restaurants--AJ Bombers and Sobelman's. Both have used Word of Mouth (WOM) to become successful small businesses, but while one built its buzz over 10 years, the other used social media to become a success in just one year. Sobelman's is a little hard to find--it's located in an industrial part of the city rather than in a fashionable neighborhood--but that didn't prevent it from building a broad-based following since opening in 1999. The road to success for AJ Bombers was considerably shorter, although there were plenty of reasons to think the business would fail quickly: It was launched in the middle of the worst recession in generations and was located at an address that had seen at least five businesses fail in recent years. Of course, just like Sobelman's, AJ Bombers' success starts with a great experience and a great product.
3 SEO tools to build for your clients in Data Studio With the wide variety of clients out there, you’re bound to run into the occasional DIY marketer. These marketers prefer that you teach them how to be self-sufficient rather than rely on you for every little question. These clients can be a blessing but can also be dangerous. The challenging aspect of client management is finding the balance between empowering them to get the data they want without feeling like they don’t need you. That’s where Google Data Studio tools come into play. Data Studio is typically used for general reporting. By creating tools for clients, you enable them to do the actual research it takes to accomplish SEO while still providing that much-needed maintenance and guidance that comes with experience. This article illustrates free dashboard templates you can use with your clients. How to change the branding Before we dive into the specifics, you may want to update the branding and logo of your dashboard. Right-click on your logo, and you will see a menu appear. 1. 2.
10 common social media mistakes | Blog Many businesses are increasingly comfortable with social media, and many more have decided that social media is far too important not to experiment with. But the growing level of maturity in the world of social media doesn't mean that mistakes are uncommon. To the contrary: many businesses make the same mistakes over and over again. Here are 10 of the most common. Overfollowing. Using every tool available. Falling off the wagon. Letting the new kid or a low-level employee manage your profiles. Pretending that social media is free. Publishing first, thinking later. Ignoring metrics. Assuming ROI isn't possible to calculate. Expecting the world. Photo credit: David Farrell via Flickr.
Generate Structured Data with JavaScript | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers Modern websites use JavaScript to display lots of dynamic content. There are a few things you need to look out for when using JavaScript to generate structured data on your websites, and this guide covers best practices and implementation strategies. If you're new to structured data, you can learn more about how structured data works. There are different ways to generate structured data with JavaScript, but the most common are: Use Google Tag Manager to generate JSON-LD dynamically Google Tag Manager is a platform that allows you to manage tags on your website without editing the code. Set up and install Google Tag Manager on your site. Using variables in Google Tag Manager Google Tag Manager (GTM) supports variables to use information on the page as part of your structured data. For example, you can dynamically create a Recipe JSON-LD block that uses the page title as the recipe name by creating the following custom variable named recipe_name: function() { return document.title; }
Been told you can’t evaluate social media? Here are 20 (free) wa Like almost every other agency out there in this space, at Rabbit, we use a professional monitoring and sentiment analysis system. Rather than the market leader Radian6, we tested a few and went for ScoutLabs…though I am thinking of giving Sysomos a go… Having said that, the thing about the paid for tools is…they get the job done, but from what we’ve found they are never 100% perfect. Plus sometimes you just want a quick overview rather than an in-depth look via a dashboard. So we tend to use them in combination with other services, which to a large part happen to be free. There are dozens of these free web-based tools around – here’s the 20 we’ve found work for us Rabbit. They all measure slightly different things (though they over-lap), they are generally good for taking snap-shots (as opposed to detailed analysis), and with the ton of Twitter applications and plug-ins out there, there is a bias towards measuring Twitter. 6 – Mention Map: A personal favourite.