If there’s one major flaw with the way that many businesses use automation tools, it’s that they’re not able to properly control the flow of content from its longest form down to it’s shortest form. This is unfortunate because using RSS feeds to post to Facebook and Twitter from a blog, for example, doesn’t save much time at all but minimizes the effectiveness of the networks. It’s all about flow. It’s about taking advantage of the strengths of the various networks will not falling into the traps that each allows. Let’s take a look at an example of content flow. In this case, we’re going to work it down from a standard piece of website content rather than a blog post or YouTube video. Those are easier. If you can master the creative elements of promoting standard website content, the other types of content will be a piece of cake. Original content This is where it all starts. Here, we see a sales special. It’s not th...Read post

Remember five years ago when it was rare to have a dedicated employee who managed the website? As the environment changed the internal roles also shifted. These roles are continuing to shift and now this person is evolving into a marketing all-star. Read post

Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters, Justin Bieber has his Beliebers, Kiss has their Kiss Army, and your dealership has ______? Where are your fans? Musicians focus their marketingon connecting with fans, that’s nothing new, but that approach is grounded in solid business sense. A 2010 Satmetrix study found that evangelists or fans, spend 13% more than the average customer, and they refer business equal to 45% of the money they spend.   How can your dealership think like a rock star?   Work to better understand your advocates. This will also help you determine the context of your relationship. Give your fans the tools and the ability to "share the love."   There's an old marketing adage: Sell the benefit, not the product. Remember that your fans typically love your brand for many reasons other than just the product itself. Think about how your fans use your product and what's important to them.   Seek wa...Read post

There are two frames of mind amongst search marketing professionals when it comes to major updates such as the Google Penguin update last year and the upcoming Penguin 2.0 algorithm update. Some start to panic as they’ve seen these algorithm updates force companies to make major changes. In some cases, companies have had to close down because adjusting was just too much to bare. The other perspective is that these changes bring the game of optimization more in line with quality over quantity, strategy over brute force, and perhaps most importantly, art over science. That’s what’s expected with the upcoming update based upon a mixture of common sense and some pointed Tweets by Google’s spam czar, Matt Cutts. The pursuit of quality links instead of having a large inbound link portfolio has been the focus of Google (and Bing) for over a year now and the coming update will likely be more of the same. The art aspect of it all comes down to getting more value ou...Read post

Our business culture has always been to let the customer have the last word, they are always right after all and although some of this way of doing business can still work; it doesn’t on Facebook. Customer service has advanced due to the easier ways of communicating with businesses through social media platforms.  Customers or potential customers are no longer lingering in cyberspace; instead, they are actively looking to interact with your brand. Facebook has become the hub for such interactions as their pages platform have made contacting and connecting with a business the easiest. Through having the ability to comment on shared content, chat via a private message or even leave positive or negative feedback via the resistant recommendations feature. No matter how a person contacts your Business on Facebook, your need to respond is a necessity. However, not only do you respond but now we have finally advanced enough for your business to have the last word.   At ...Read post

We live in the age of instant gratification. (Admit it...you’re irritated when a Web page takes longer than two seconds to load.) Sixty-nine percent of respondents even said that a quick response was important for a positive customer service experience (Dimensional Research). Everyone wants answers right here, right now, including car shoppers. And if you can’t give them, you’ll “lose the race,” as Chris Hill, E-Commerce Director for Bill Jacobs Auto Group, states.Read post

By now you've heard Yahoo announced they plan on aquiring micro-blogging platform Tumblr for $1 Billion. The news made CEO David Karp a very wealthy 26 year old, it scared off a few die-hard Tumblr fans and probably makes Yahoo shareholders a little nervous. Read post

The KBG. Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti. The Committee for State Security for the former Soviet Union was one of the most feared agencies in history. Thankfully, this post isn’t about them. Here, we’re going to talk about a different type of KGB, the type that is plaguing social media on pages across the internet, hurting businesses and striking fear into the hearts of knowledgeable internet marketing professionals around the world. It’s the type of bad posts that were once thought to be effective but that have been debunked time and time again, yet so many businesses (and even vendors) continue to post them. Today’s social media KBG is this: Kitties Games/Giveaways Bogus Questions If you or your vendor are still using these things, stop immediately. They aren’t helping. In fact, they are hurting the cause of using social media as a proper advertising venue through which to increase business. Here’s why:   Kitties Don&rsq...Read post