To paraphrase the immortal movie icon, Ferris Bueller, "The Internet moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

That seems to be the case with many digital marketing practices, particularly in the realm of advertising versus marketing. Oddly enough, it wasn't too long ago that I was preaching the reverse; advertising and marketing were completely different disciplines that should be handled separately for best results. Things have changed. In 2014, the holistic digital marketing approach seems to be the best way to go (by far) and integrating advertising into the mix will allow the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Here's what I mean:

Search Marketing and Advertising

For years, SEO was completely independent from PPC and other forms of paid search advertising. My former company didn't even offer PPC because of the differences and we were able to demonstrate that those PPC companies that were offering SEO as an add-on were really just padding their bottom line with low-cost efforts and ambiguous results. That was 2010-2012 with 2013 showing the first real signs of dual specialization rather than singular specialization as the right way to go.

Notice something in that last statement - "dual specialization". There's a huge difference between having a company that offers PPC solutions and also has an SEO service and a company that truly integrates the two to allow one to guide the efforts of the other. An easy way to see this in action is in selective bidding. For example, allowing the organic rankings influence the bidding levels from a paid perspective can assist in maximizing ROI. If the organic rank for an important keyword is low, then the PPC can be bumped up until the organic rankings take over. If the results are strong enough for both paid and organic and the conversion rates (both click-thru rates as well as conversion rates on the site itself) are high, then it might make sense to own top spots organically as well as through paid.

They can work together to go after different search types as well. For example, a paid ad might be titled "2014 Ford Fusion Lease Specials" while the corresponding organically-ranked page might be titled, "2014 Ford Fusion Best Prices in Chicago".

While it's hard to find specialists that operate properly in both realms, the better tradeoff is to shoot for a search engine optimization service that offers search advertising rather than a PPC company that offers SEO. The gap between good and bad optimization is much larger than the gap between good and bad PPC.

Social Marketing and Advertising

The good ol' days of "free social media love" are behind us. Sure, you can still have a strong Twitter presence without paid ads and Google+ hasn't exactly pushed out their paid platform in full force, but Facebook marketing without Facebook advertising is pretty much worthless. This has been the case for over a year but companies are only now starting to realize it.

It's okay. Compared to other forms of advertising, social media advertising is much cheaper and has the greatest level of targeting known to humankind. There's a caveat, and it's the reason that marketing and advertising not only have to go hand-in-hand, they must be handled professionally. This is the hardest part; I've heard bad practices being preached by many, even people at the social media sites themselves who for some reason aren't quite understanding how to maximize performance on their own platforms.

It's not like search. If you mess up on search advertising, you're okay. If you mess up on SEO, you can recover. With social media, if you mess up on either the marketing aspect or the advertising aspect, the repercussions can be long-lasting and devastating. There's a reason that we do not offer one without the other - you have to advertise if you want us to manage your accounts and you have to let us manage your accounts if you want us to help with advertising. That's not to say that we don't partner with our clients, but the possibilities for poor performance based upon a single misstep are too high to leave to chance.

Website Marketing and Banner Advertising

There has always been a relationship between banner advertising and website marketing in the form of landing pages. The best practice has always been to build a killer landing page and then send traffic to that page with killer banner ads. Things are different now thanks to two major changes in the last couple of years: speed of the internet and access via mobile devices.

Landing pages are no longer the end result. It's funny because they were named properly all this time but didn't really represent what their name implied until recently. Before, landing pages were often the key lead generators. Today, they're literally landing pages - pages upon which visitors land when they click on the ad. More than ever, people are not acting upon the first page they hit. It's for this reason that the relationship between paid ads and website marketing, UI, and flow work properly to generate the leads and sales.

A perfect example of this is in inventory ads. There are some innovative techniques to draw people from websites across the internet directly to inventory pages, but once you have them there, it's important that your website is able to handle the various types of visitors. Assuming that they're targeted visits, giving them quick and easy access to additional inventory as well as other shopping tools is imperative. While the technology improves to drive the traffic, the marketing on the websites themselves must keep pace.

Final Warning

This is NOT an endorsement for mega-vendors and marketing firms that offer 55 different services. My experience with the companies that can do everything is that they do nothing really, really well. Nimble, aggressive, results-driven companies are still the best when it comes to digital advertising and marketing in 2014. However, the super-tight niche companies must learn to embrace both sides of the ball if they're going to keep up with the trends.

Online reputation has been a hot topic for a couple of years now. As solutions continue to emerge and the business of reputation management as a service expands, there's a dangerous trend that should be addressed.

Reputation management isn't about sending an email. It's not about filtering results by checking their sentiment first before directing them to the review sites. It's not even about trying to identify any challenges that they had with their experience. It's about making their experience strong from the start and learning from the challenges some customers pointed out.

First and foremost, stop blaming the customer. If they leave a bad review, it's not because they were just trolling. It's not because they get a kick out of burning businesses on Yelp, Google Local, or DealerRater. It's not even about them thinking they should have received a better deal than they got even if you gave it away. They were unhappy with the experience and there was something you could have done differently to prevent them from leaving a bad review. Learn from it.

Once you get the customer-is-to-blame mentality out of your head, it's time to figure out how to collect and address the feedback. Yes, emails help here. They're not the cure, but they're a good thermometer. While there are plenty of filtering services out there that send a "survey" first before asking for feedback, these are dangerous and will someday be shot down as the devious technique that they are.

In case you're not familiar with them, here's how they work:

1. Customer receives a survey in their email asking about their experience
2. Their replies are collected by the reputation management system and sorted between positive and negative sentiment
3. If the sentiment was positive, they are sent an email asking them to share their experience on review sites like Yelp
4. If the sentiment is negative, they're sent an apology email with a link to give direct feedback to the owner or general manager

This all seems like a good process until you realize that the review sites don't like this. They rightfully believe that it's manipulation of reviews and it's one of the primary culprits in their war on "fake" reviews. According to Yelp:

"No, you shouldn’t ask your customers to post reviews on Yelp. For one thing, most businesses tend to ask their happiest customers to write reviews, not the unhappy ones."

They are correct and it's the main reason that so many businesses work hard (or pay good money) only to find that their Yelp reviews disappeared. It's simply not a good practice to find out whether or not your customers are going to burn you before asking them to write a review for you.

The most important thing that any business can do to improve their reputation is to accept the feedback, positive or negative, and apply a two-step process. First, share the feedback with employees. If it's good, let them know as much about the situation as possible and why it turned into a positive review. If it's bad, do the same thing but offer suggestions that could have prevented the negative feedback from happening. This is important whether the feedback comes directly to the company or if it's posted online.

Second, you'll want to reply to reviews. Every review. EVERY review. Positive, negative, indifferent - if someone takes the time to give you feedback about your business whether it's on a public site or directly to you, it is your responsibility to reply. If it's positive, humility and appreciation are in order. They're your customers - the lifeblood of your business. If it's negative, professionalism and empathy must apply. Remember, how you reply to negative feedback is often the most important aspect of reputation management. People don't expect any business to be perfect. You can go a long way towards impressing people with how you handle the bad situations as much if not more than the benefits of getting good reviews.

Reputation isn't a star rating. Reputation management isn't an email. In this golden age of digital, you have at your fingertips the ability to learn how to improve your business practices from the very people that do business with you. Are you listening to them?

Article originally posted on Business2Community.

As I've said on many occasions, there are only a handful of social media websites that you need to focus on at your dealership. Despite claims that you need to be on dozens of them, the real ones that are making an impact today and in the near future are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest with Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, and LinkedIn sitting comfortably in the mix without being essential. Thankfully, here's an infographic with all of the sizes that you need to know other than Tumblr (which has different size requirements depending on your theme) and Foursquare (which doesn't really need design work).

It comes to us from Tent Social. For those who do not like long graphics or want to print it out in chunks rather than one infographic, I broke it down into individual graphics on my site.

Here's what Tent Social put together:

Facebook Dimensions

• Facebook Cover photo: 851 x 315
• Facebook Profile photo: 180 x 180

Twitter Dimensions

• Twitter Header image: 520 x 260
• Twitter Profile image: 81 x 81

Google+ Dimensions [updated 05.15.13]

• Google+ Cover photo: 2120 x 1192
• Google+ Profile photo: 270 x 270

LinkedIN Dimensions

• LinkedIN Cover photo: 646 x 220
• LinkedIN Profile photo: 100 x 60

Pinterest Dimensions

• Pinterest Profile Photo: 160 x 165

Instagram Dimensions

• Instagram Profile Photo: 110 x 110

YouTube Dimensions [updated 05.15.13] 

• YouTube Cover Art: 2560 x 1440 
• YouTube Cover Art Safe Area: 1546 x 423

Here's the graphic itself:

I was going through the profiles of some businesses that I follow on social media when I noticed something that was highly discouraging. Some had statements on their Twitter pages that read something to the effect of “a retweet does not mean we endorse it.” On Facebook, there were disclaimers added to the about section that read “liked, commented on, or shared content does not constitute an endorsement by XXXXXXX of the content or companies engaged.”

Wrong. That’s incorrect. You could put whatever disclaimers you want on your business social profiles and it won’t change the fact that if you retweet something, you’re endorsing it. Legalizing the wording in your Facebook or Google+ description does not take away responsibility if your page comments on a some other company’s post or shares an offensive image on the feed.

This is a business. Any public interactions are your responsibility and disclaimers like these do more harm than good. The harm is in the message that it sends to people visiting your business profiles: “There’s a possibility that we or the company that’s running our social media might be careless and like the wrong thing so we are not responsible for this representation of our company.”

Every like, retweet, share, +1, repin, or any other social engagement IS a representation of your company’s opinions and should be construed as an endorsement, period. The only exception is a comment made by the business on someone’s post. Depending on the demeanor and tone of the comment, it does not necessarily mean an endorsement. If you’re offering an alternative viewpoint to the post, that’s obviously not an endorsement.

How employees representing the company through social media handle their accounts does fall into some gray area. I have nothing against employees, managers, and even some executives (other than the president, chairperson, or CEO) can make a disclaimer that says the opinions shared on social media are their personal opinions and do not represent the company. However, it does reflect on the company regardless of any disclaimer and all employees must be made aware in the form of a social media policy that they might not be representing, but they are a reflection.

While I’m not big on social media policies that prohibit or restrain employees from using social media how they see fit, they must also be made aware that their actions on public social media forums are equivalent to their actions in real life in regards to their employment. Just as a company would fire a driver for getting a DUI, they could also be fired if a picture is posted of them drinking and driving even if they did not get pulled over.

Businesses need to handle their social media with care. That does not mean that they have to be too careful about their social media. Bland and generic do not work, but careless can be even worse.

“Endorsement” image courtesy of Shutterstock. Article originally published on Techi.

I'm not a big fan of redundancy, especially on social media. Under normal circumstances, if you have good plugins and widgets properly placed on your blog, there's no reason to have others. If you want to annoy me with a blog post, put an inline plugin, a floating plugin, and another one at the bottom. Oh, and throw in a "Share It" widget just in case three ways to share weren't enough.

After years of fighting, I'm actually going to make an exception to the one-place-to-share-them-all rule. I have two Pinterest plugins on my blogs now and they're both useful. I have, of course, the standard inline plugin. Some like the floating plugin and that makes sense, but it slows the page down a bit too much for my liking and it often isn't visible on all devices even if your blog is responsive. I follow the unspoken rule of 5, 5, or 5 sharing options (no more, no less) and I prefer the big-5 for my particular blog (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn) but there are variations to this rule that replace LinkedIn with Tumblr if there's no business-reason to share your site. Reddit is an obscure option of you have truly viral content of general interest or if you're the mast of a popular niche.

I recently added the jQuery Pin It Button For Images. I have held off for a long time because I'm not crazy about it graying out the images upon hover and I don't like that it's an overlay, but I relented and haven't looked back since. It works. People are pinning more. More importantly, they're pinning the right link rather than pulling it from an archive or pinning the individual image itself. It's light on the load and does have a nice little protection of not allowing your images to be right-clicked and saved.

One might ask why I wouldn't eliminate Pinterest from the standard sharing section. The image button does not have a count and is only visible if people hover. Some people like doing all of their sharing from the same basic area, so they both stay up. Most importantly, it doesn't work on all mobile devices.

The best part of the button on the image is that it acts as a good reminder to visitors. On a desktop, it whites out the image and displays the Pin It button when they hover over any image with their mouse. This is a prompt, a call to action, and it actually works very nicely.

Pinterest is quickly becoming one of the most important social networks when it comes to search. Some would say that the inclusion in Bing image results was the last surge of importance necessary to put it over Twitter on the effectiveness scale. Regardless of where you place it exactly on the social signal list, it's definitely in the top 4. It helps with search engine optimization, period.

The traffic that can come from it can be pretty useless if you're not selling items to a wide audience, but it's still a good bulk play. Depending on the topic, it can be the second best traffic-driving social network showing up on analytics.

Nobody knows exactly where Pinterest will go and how long it will stay so important in the whole scheme of things for both search and social, but for now, you might as well take advantage of it while the ride is still hot. This plugin is an easy win.

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Originally published on Soshable.

What? WHAT!?!? There have to be required fields on contact forms, right? There have been required fields on contact forms for two decades. Nothing could have changed so quickly that they have become unnecessary, right?

Actually, they're no longer necessary. In fact, they're a hindrance. Here's why:

People aren't stupid

Seriously, they're not. This isn't the dawning of the age of the internet. There are adult buyers today who have been on the internet for longer than they've been out of diapers. They have likely filled out hundreds, even thousands of contact forms in their life. Is there a chance that someone might fill out a form with their first name only or even a fake name in order to see what the price was on the other side of the form? Sure. Thankfully, they are few and far between. There's a right way and a wrong way to make a landing page contact form.

Treat people as if they know what they're doing.

Different contact strokes for different folks

Believe it or not, there are people that never speak on the phone unless they absolutely must. There are people who might go a few days without checking for the mailbox. There are those who don't trust email anymore because 70% of it is spam. There are those who want to be reached through (gulp) social media rather than other methods.

Give them options. Allow them to select their preference. The form above is a price quote request. Are you going to be mailing them the quote? If not, why would you require their address? They are trying to do business with you. They wouldn't be on the page if they weren't.

The NSA killed data collection for many

The conspiracy theorists and paranoid freaks from a couple of years ago now seem like the wisely cautious today. Yes, governments, businesses, and organizations of nefarious inclinations are willing to do anything they can to get a hold of your personal data and many people are concerned. Some refuse to leave a good chunk of their information on any format online. Physical address is one of the concerns for many.

Why require them to do something that they simply don't want to do in order to do something simple like find out of the price of your merchandise?

It's an intro, not an interrogation

Keep it simple. Get whatever information they're willing to leave. If they want to be contacted, they'll leave some form of contact information. If they don't want to be contacted, they won't be filling out contact forms now will they?

You will need more information from them eventually in order to perform the transaction, but this is just the first step. This is a sign of willingness to start the engagement process. Just as you wouldn't expect a car salesman to ask you for your address the moment you walk onto the lot, you shouldn't expect the website to do it, either.

If you're going to pay for people to visit your site through PPC or other means, make sure you don't do the things that prevent them from allowing you to contact them.

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Article originally published on Techi.

The next age of advertising is right around the corner. With Google's announcement of +Post ads, we now have a venue through which to advertise and garner true interaction from people as they surf the web. Think of it like Facebook advertising that reaches beyond Facebook - WAY beyond Facebook. With millions of websites out there that display Google ads, this expands the business footprint of Google's social network in ways that Facebook will likely never be able to touch.

+Post ads take Google+ posts and display them on various websites. The example they use from their pilot programs is Toyota who used these ads to promote the launch of their Corolla earlier this year. They took Google+ posts and put them as ads on automotive sites like Autotrader as well as non-automotive sites that likely had a demographic or retargeted preference towards Toyota specifically or automotive in general.

Rather than just a plain banner that took people to the Toyota website or a landing page, the ads were interactive from the websites themselves on which they were found. If someone wanted to interact with the ad or Toyota in some way, they didn't have to leave their website. They could comment on, +1, or share the post directly from the website without having to go to Google+.

This opens up doors for businesses to be able to truly interact with people much in the same way they're doing on Facebook right now. The difference is, of course, that it's not a walled garden. People will see the ads on many of the websites they visit and be able to engage with companies directly rather than having to click thru or visit the social network itself.

The possibilities are limitless. The potential is high. If Google stays true to this direction (and there's no reason to believe that they'd make a fatal pivot) then this is going to be one of the most powerful forms of advertising that businesses can use. Small, localized businesses will gain the most benefit if they handle it properly, but big brands will be able to get traction with their own launches and offerings as well.

We will keep you updated. In the meantime, it's time to get your Google+ pages in order, active, and worth your customers' attention. Here's the video describing Toyota's trial:

There was a cry that was heard amongst many in the search engine optimization world on April 24th, 2012, as if thousands of SEOs suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. It was the day that Google Penguin broke link-building...

...or at least that's what many thought. Some of us, the ones who were focused on quality rather than quantity, the ones who would work a couple of hours to get one strong, contextual, organic link rather than building tens of thousands of bulk links in the same period of time - we came out better off than we were before the algorithm change.

Google reiterated the importance of inbound links at this year's SXSW convention and those who survived the SEOpocalypse have found that the right types of links are more powerful than they ever were in the past. Link-building has, in many ways, been replaced by link-earning. You don't generate links anymore. You generate and expose the content that is worthy of being linked to by other websites (not to mention being shared by individuals, but that's an entirely other body part to discuss later).

If we're going to treat search, social, and content marketing strategy as a living organism, then inbound links would be the food that fuels the body. From a purely SEO perspective, it's what generates the authority that Google and Bing holds so high on their ranking algorithms. As long as it's done organically and there are no nefarious tactics used in the process, there's very little risk involved. The upside is huge.

From a social perspective, links can drive the traffic that is necessary to get people in front of your content. Assuming the content is good enough to get links, it's probably deserving of social media shares as well. Those shares continue to help with search engine rankings but they also help with the purely social marketing area as well.

Last but not least, it does give your website credibility in the eyes of consumers. When your website is featured in a respected website, your potential customers who see the link will be impressed. It's subtle, but it's also very powerful.

In the near future, I'll be going over each of the other parts of the marketing body. In the meantime, take a look at your content and inbound link "earning" strategy and ask yourself a question:

"If I were a website visitor and came across this content, is it valuable enough for me to want to link to it from my site?"

The merging of search, social, and content marketing into a single digital marketing strategy has been happening for years. Intuitively, many of us have been guided by this fact to create the type of strategies that bring the disciplines together appropriately. As the evolution of the three reach a tipping point that is breaking down a good chunk of the practices of the past, it has become paramount to gain an understanding of how everything works together and why the flow of data between each has such a tremendous effect on digital marketing as a whole.

To do this properly, it's becoming necessary to break it all down into units. The easiest way to understand this is to compare digital marketing strategy to a living organism. Every action has an effect of some sort on all of the parts. With this comprehension, you'll be better equipped to make decisions about how to craft the overarching strategy as well as how to organize the individual actions.

A Quick Breakdown

If the model to make this work is like a living, breathing organism, then understanding what the different units are can help you grasp how it all plays together. We're going to be breaking them down individually then bringing them together as a whole. In preparation, here's a partial list of the individual units that we'll be covering.

• Inbound Links
• Business Content
• Useful Content
• Company Blog
• Site UI and Navigation
• Social Media Profiles
• Social Media Shares
• Customers and Visitors

Over the next few weeks we will be breaking down how each of these works individually to support the whole. In the meantime, start thinking along the lines of holistic processes rather than individual tasks. While the tasks themselves are important, how they affect the entire body of marketing processes is the key to finding success.

Statistics can be a wonderful thing. They can show us information that can guide our decisions and bring us to see things in better focus. They can distract us, taking us down an incorrect path based upon lack of understanding. They can entertain us.

This infographic from Yoda London can likely do any of the three. As with any set of numbers, if you torture them long enough, you can make them say anything. For example, seeing that 93% of online experiences begin with search engines can be useful in that it highlights the importance of SEO. It could also be detrimental if misunderstood as “online experiences” could mean just about anything. It entertains (if you’re a search geek like me, at least).

Check out the graphic:

(Originally Published on Soshable)