Foursquare has quietly been making moves that will have a major impact on local businesses and local internet marketing. The service is already used to check in at a variety of places, and now their reach will be expanding.

The first new feature is the explore option for non-registered users, and the attached ratings update. Explore lets users search for specific kinds of businesses and deals and gives them recommendations. With the new ratings update, users will see a rank from 1-10 next to the location name.

This is important for businesses because Foursquare is promising more accurate ratings than the usual customer review system. They are basing their rankings off of tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, loyalty, and check ins. As more users are attracted to the service, businesses will have to pay attention to exactly how the algorithm is functioning and be sure to keep their review scores high.

The second new feature is an expanded Facebook check in. With the new update, users can check in friends who aren’t Foursquare users. They simply click the “add a friend” icon when they’re checking in and select them off the list. Their friend will be tagged and Facebook will mark it on both of their walls.

This is good for businesses because it’s another way that you can land in peoples’ news feeds. The more times people see your name, the better. This is especially true when they know their friends are already customers. Being able to tag non-users will encourage people to tag more, so you’ll land on more news feeds.

Original article about Foursquare updates posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title New Set Of Updates For Foursquare.

Facebook is aggressively pursuing its goal of being completely ubiquitous. Every time it seems that they have started to plateau, they find a new spire to climb. The social network’s newest stunt is their most interesting yet, with wide-ranging implications for the future of public internet access, and for businesses social media marketing.

The project, called Facebook Wi-Fi, offers a free wireless internet and router to businesses in their area. The only catch is that when a customer goes to use the Wi-Fi, they’re stopped at a login screen. To progress to the internet, they need to check-in at the location through their Facebook account. If they want to keep their location private, they can assign the check-in’s audience setting to be “only me”.

Once the user checks in, they are dropped on the businesses Facebook page. From there, the owner of the business can add an additional layer. In the current test run, most businesses elect to add a survey that must be completed before the full internet access is granted.

Right now the Wi-Fi program is only available in the area near Facebook HQ, but if the testing goes well, it will soon be available nationwide.

This program could prove to be a welcome addition to the landscape, for both the businesses and the customers. Customers get the Wi-Fi at no cost, just the short hassle of dealing with some advertisements. Businesses get a free way to provide Wi-Fi, a commodity that is expected more every day. Additionally, businesses get the benefit of every one of the customers Facebook friends seeing their name on the wall.

Again, it’s still in the test phase, but if Facebook decides to roll it out on a larger scale, it could have a lasting impact on the way we connect to the internet while we’re out in the world.

Original article about Facebook Wi-Fi posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Facebook’s New Wi-Fi Program.

Itʼs pretty much a universally known fact in the industry that blogging is a vital part of any search engine optimization strategy. Everyone understands you need a blog, the trouble comes from figuring out just who exactly is going to write it. Should you handle it in-house or should you have it ghostwritten? There are ups and downs to both sides.

If you can, writing it in-house should always be your first choice. If you have a talented writer who can produce consistent content without detracting from their full-time job, then youʼre one of the lucky ones! Just be sure that whoever is doing the writing is sticking to a schedule and not phoning it in. This works great because anyone you already employ will inherently understand your business and be able to write relevant material.

If you donʼt have the time or the talent available, ghostwriting can be a great alternative. Finding someone with experience in your industry is a bonus, but really it all comes down to talent. Youʼll find cheap options from overseas, but do you really want your blog written by a non-native speaker? Usually the prose will come out stilted and it will be obvious that the writer isnʼt you.

When hiring a ghostwriter, be sure to obtain a few writing samples first. If they wonʼt provide any, then move on. This content is going to be representing you, so make sure that the quality is up to your standards.

Original article about ghostwriting posted on Wikimotive's blog under thew title Should You Hire A Ghostwriter?

Well, it looks like Mitt Romney wasn’t able to knock out the incumbent Barack Obama. Whether this news makes you celebrate or despair, there are lessons to be learned from how both sides managed their internet marketing during the campaign. I’ve covered a few of them during the race, and now I’d like to cover the most recent digital gaffe.

This one, not surprisingly, is on the Romney campaign. They’ve come a long way, but the GOP still lags behind the Democrats when it comes to social media and internet marketing savvy.

The Romney campaign tried to get into pay-per-click ads specifically focusing on the terms “mom”, “mother”, and “grandmother”. The problem? They forgot to set negative match settings. Negative match settings are Google’s way of tuning a campaign’s language, making sure offensive searches don’t yield pay-per-click results.

During the campaign, searches for “loving mom” and “mother gifts” would yield results for mittromney.com. Unfortunately, because the campaign didn’t use negative match settings, pornographic searches containing variations of “mom” (use your imagination) ALSO yielded mittromney.com.

It would be extreme to say that this cost Romney many votes, but the fact remains that Mitt’s website was being prominently displayed near vulgar terms. What this shows is a fundamental lack of understanding of the ins and outs of Google’s mysterious ways. So while it might not directly cost votes, think of all the votes he could have gained if he was truly using SEO to it’s fullest?

By the way, you have your negative match settings up to snuff…right?

Original article about the Romney campaign negative match mistake posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Politics and Negative Matching.

How does your company handle the social media accounts of employees? In the past, it wasn’t really an issue, but every day it becomes more of a problem. Employers want to know about their employees, and employees want their personal lives to stay private. How do you navigate these muddy waters? It’s truly a challenge, one that is only going to become more arduous as time rolls on.

SilkRoad has released a great data-set that covers most aspects of HR and social media colliding. It details the common pitfalls like companies asking for passwords, companies restricting social access, and even companies who fear espionage! Whether you’re an employee or employer, you absolutely need to be informed about how social media relates to employment.

The infographic below details the findings of SilkRoad’s study. Original article about SilkRoad's social media study posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Social Media and The Workplace.

People often times ask if they should schedule their social content posting when marketing with Twitter and Facebook. The short answer is yes, you should certainly schedule. For every industry, including automotive, there are times of day that see more activity than others, and scheduling ensures you hit those times of day. There are a myriad of services that offer post scheduling to every major social network and you should absolutely be taking advantage of those (just do a Google search to find one that fits your needs).

Now are you ready for the long answer?

Scheduling is dangerous, especially on social media. As anyone who works in the industry will tell you, “setting” is all too often followed by “forgetting” and forgetting your social presence is the worst thing you can do. If you start to become an automaton, your friends, fans and followers will notice and they’ll stop interacting.

Does this mean you shouldn’t schedule? Of course not, you just have to be vigilant.

Social media isn’t a television ad. It’s less about direct sales and more about reputation. You spent the time building up this great community on these social media sites, and it would be a shame to ignore them.

So yes, please schedule your social media postings. It will ensure you don’t forget, guarantee you hit the busiest times or day, and let you build up a good lead so you get some more free time. Just be sure you check your networks once a day, whenever you get the chance, and interact with your community. Answer questions, join in making jokes, and above all: BE PRESENT!

Original article about scheduling social media posting was published on Wikimotive's blog under the title Should You Schedule Posts?

No matter how hard you try you can’t control who is going to link to your website. Every site out there is going to have a few unsavory links that they want to get rid of, it’s a reality of building a website. Since Google came out with their Penguin update people have been scrambling to try to clean up their link profiles and many are resorting to some pretty desperate measures. There are even stories of sites charging to remove their links in this link un-building panic. When combined with equal panic over negative SEO (building bad links to a competitors site to hurt their ranking) it’s easy to understand why Search Engine Optimization sounds a little scary these days.

I recently wrote a story about Google’s new disavow links tool and as you might imagine site owners everywhere were overcome with joy. The idea of being able to tell Google that a link to your site is unwanted and that you don’t want it considered as part of your ranking sounds amazing. This tool should be a savior for your website, and specifically your SEO efforts then right? Well, not so fast. Let’s take a step back for a moment.

The disavow links tool is not intended to be a cure-all for your link profile. I’m sure many of you out there were thinking you could use it to essentially reset, and start over from scratch. In Google’s blog post about the new tool they explicitly said “We don’t recommend using this tool unless you are sure that you need to disavow some links to your site and you know exactly what you’re doing.” The idea is that disavowing links is supposed to be a last resort, not a quick-fix or an easy way out.

You also have to realize that the disavow tool is only a suggestion to Google, so just because you disavow some links from a certain domain doesn’t necessarily mean they will be ignored. Google also points out that it’s likely to take several weeks for a disavow request to take effect.

Before you get disavow-happy and try to clear your entire link profile take a step back and really ask yourself if removing those links is necessary. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and start removing links that may actually be helping your site. Make sure you are only removing links that you know, for certain, are hurting you. If you’re even a little unsure as to the quality of a link to your site it’s best not to mess with it, the last thing you want to do is sabotage your own SEO.

The disavow tool is great as a last resort for those site that have exhausted all other options and still can’t get rid of those negative links that are brining down their profile, and it is especially great for anyone who may be the target of a negative SEO campaign. However, for anyone else, I suggest using it with caution.

Original article about Google's disavow tool posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Google’s Disavow Tool Not A Cure-All.

There’s something to be said for getting in on a trend when it’s hot, social media marketing at it’s core is all about trends. When that great, roaring and rushing storm of interest starts to brew, it pays to be right in the eye of that sucker…unless the storm in question is a LITERAL one, of course.

American Apparel found that out the hard way when they tried to capitalize on hurricane Sandy’s arrival on the east coast. They sent out a mass-email Monday night (during peak storm hours) offering 20% off to customers who were in the danger zone. All you had to do was be in the right state and enter SANDYSALE at checkout.

This didn’t go over so well.

People took to social media in droves, complaining about the clothing company. Here are a couple recent replies:

–“American apparel just sent me a hurricane sandy 20% off sale alert to my email. I want to throw up again. Wtf is wrong with people!!???!!??”

–”Another tasteless marketing campaign by American Apparel. Why am I not surprised.”

The majority of the press has been negative, but maybe that’s the way they want it? These days, it can be pretty hard to tell the difference between a faux pas and genius marketing. This little “gaffe” landed American Apparel in many major news sources and got a lot of people talking about their brand, all for the low low price of an email.

Certainly, the press is negative, but IS there such a thing as bad publicity? What do you think, did they do it on purpose or was it an honest mistake?

Original article about American Apparel's marketing was posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title American Apparel and Sandy

Twitter is planning to get rid of their favorite button in favor of something a little more Facebook-y. They want to actually add a tool similar to Facebook’s ‘Like’ tool, which may be use the terms ‘like’ or ‘star’. The company is saying they want to change the wording just to make it seem “lighter weight” but it could still have an impact on Twitter marketing.

Twitter’s chief executive Dick Costolo confirmed their intention to make the change, stating that it should offer a more lightweight way to highlight tweets making it easier for companies marketing through Twitter to gain more traction. “We’re testing some alternative terms for favourite. Favourite feels a little bit too heavy weight so we’re testing some lighter weight terms,” Costolo said. “Engagement begets engagement. The lighter weight and more frictionless you make it to engage, the more engagement you’ll get.”

Costolo also didn’t miss the chance to point out that Twitter is now serving up half a billion tweets a day from their 140 million active users. During the first presidential debate, tweets peaked at around 8,000 tweets per second.

Original article about Twitter changing their favorite button posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Twitter May Be Changing The Favorite Button.

You’ve probably heard of Reddit.com. It’s a social news website where users can submit links. These links are voted on, either up or down, so that quality posts move towards the first page and other posts fade into obscurity. Usually, Reddit is talked about as a great place to find interesting content, but the site offers more than that. It can be a great asset for marketing and SEO.

Subreddits are custom-made sub-forums on Reddit.com. They can be reached by appending the URL with /r/subredditname. These subreddits cover everything from funny pictures to very specific fields of study. No matter what kind of interests you have, Reddit has a place, and a community, to talk about it.

As an example, lets take search engine optimization. If you’re reading this blog, then you must have at least a peripheral interest in SEO. At Reddit.com/r/SEO, you’ll find an entire community devoted to discussing the ins and outs of the field. For instance, on the front page now are posts like “Fixing URL canonicalization issues” and “Keyword Cannibalism vs. Long Tail Keywords.”

If you’re worried about being a little new, you shouldn’t be. Reddit is a pretty friendly place. Just create a username (it’s stupid simple) and ask a question if you have one. As long as it’s not something that you could have answered yourself with a minute on Google, you’ll find the community is more than willing to help you out.

Reddit works on a system called karma. These are the points you get as your posts are voted up or down. Don’t worry too much about it, but be aware that many Reddit users will check your post history, so don’t just ask. If you’re capable, get out there and answer questions others may have too!

Original article Checking Out Subreddits posted at Wikimotive.net.