A couple weeks ago, we mentioned that Google got 2012 rolling with a big splash by introducing its new “Search Plus Your World.” Now, when you search for something while signed into a Google account (which you likely are automatically if signed into something like Gmail), results will include little bits of “recommendations” by your Google contacts sprinkled in.



Cool, right? No? Hate it? Have no desire at all to know what your friends recommend every time you search for a Dallas auto-mechanic? Annoyed that Google incorporates Google+ results for companies, even if you’ve never use Google+?



Don’t worry — a small-time Silicon Valley programmer named Mark Zuckerberg has your back.



In an unusual twist, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace (still around, apparently) have publicly teamed up and introduced a “bookmarklet” that allows you to return social search results based on relevancy from across the web and not solely, as Google would have it, from their own network, enabling social results to populate in three areas on Google — “People and Pages,” organic results and the results typeahead.


So why would a couple tech rivals publicly describe what they think “Google should be?” And why does it matter to your company?



Myspace would probably team up with anyone who could help return them to relevance at this point, so there’s no reason to put much stock in their involvement. But Facebook and Twitter openly teaming up to do something like this (and bragging about it) is definitely noteworthy. Most likely, Facebook is doing this because they’re just a teensy-weensy bit threatened by Google’s move into the social media arena. While Google has dominated search, Facebook has been steadily stockpiling the kinds of personal information that Google is now integrating into search. If Facebook didn’t have personalized search plans of its own, it wouldn’t care so much what Google does. But apparently they both have similar big ideas for personalized search — here’s why:



Social changing the way people and businesses, do, well, seemingly everything. Eat. Drink. Shop. Watch TV. Listen to music. All of it can be social, and much of it can be enhanced by social media. It’s useful for friends and families, of course, but also for big-spending American businesses. Building the platform that can harness and search through everything that social media adds to the web, therefore, is enormously lucrative and what this battle of digital age titans is all about. 



In other words, personalized search is a high-stakes game for a reason. And that’s why this heavyweight fight matters in the Dallas social media marketing ring as well — they’re battling to come up with the best way to help businesses like yours connect with an unprecedented number of potential customers and clients.



Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists can help your company craft a customized social media marketing strategy that harnesses these ever-evolving new powers and open up new channels to connect with folks out there who are looking for a company exactly like yours.

From an SEO perspective, 2011 was filled with no shortage of tweaks, twists and turns. But a core tenant of our strategy for search engine optimization in Dallas is identifying sustainable long-term strategies that will withstand the whims of the major search engines and satisfy the search engines’ own goals and interests.

So as SEO continued to evolve at a torrid pace this year, one timeless trend continued to prove true: content is still king.

The goal of the search engines is to deliver the best, most relevant information possible every time someone goes looking for it. So no amount of SEO tricks can replace solid, relevant, compelling web content.  Here at Masterlink, we can help you make high-quality content a central feature of your websites (and mobile website) in two main ways:

Web Content

First and foremost, web content is one of the most valuable parts of your website. It’s your message. It’s your first impression. It’s the handshake of potential customers and clients who visit your site.

While there’s a relatively small amount of content on most websites — and therefore relatively few opportunities to seamlessly work in valuable keywords for SEO purposes — your core web content carries the most potential to leave a lasting impression. Memorable, high-quality sites are the ones that are visited widely and linked to on other sites. The search engines reward this.

Blogs

Search engines also love fresh content, and reward sites that find ways to continually add new (and valuable) content. After investing in finely tuned core web content, you probably won’t want to just redo it week after week for the sake of keeping it fresh. Instead, the best way to add regular injections of fresh, conversational content is a company blog.

Blogs are ideal for reaching out to customers and posting news updates or compelling information that doesn’t have a natural place anywhere else on the website. Comment sections give customers a chance to be heard. And, most importantly for SEO purposes, compelling, keyword-rich blog posts often get shared around on other sites. Links to your site are SEO gold.

Ever wonder exactly how much a Twitter follower is worth to businesses? Thanks to an unusual lawsuit, we might be getting a rare glimpse:

A technology Web site, PhoneDog.com, and one of its former chief editors, Noah Kravitz, are embroiled in a legal battle that could have fascinating repercussions for social networks. Kravitz is suing PhoneDog over contractual issues, but it’s the counter-suit that really has my attention. PhoneDog is suing Kravitz over the use of his Twitter handle. They claim that he improperly kept the Twitter name after he left the company, and that he owes them damages of $2.50 for each Twitter follower he took with him, for each month he held them after he left. At 17,000 followers when he left, and 8 months since then, that starts damages at $370,000. So, that’s not even the full value PhoneDog puts on the Twitter account, but rather the value that Kravitz took with him when he left. PhoneDog essentially believes a key Twitter account is worth half a million dollars per year.

Hmm. It’s interesting, but the statistics provided by the lawsuit are less than scientific. What a court decides is not the same thing as what market forces decide. And, more importantly, Twitter followers will be worth different amounts to different businesses, depending on their approach to the tool and overall social media marketing strategy.

First of all, what you do with your Twitter followers matters significantly. Do you actually engage with your followers, developing ongoing conversations and responding directly to them when they ask you a question or comment on something you’ve tweeted out? Have you developed any sort of online relationship with your Twitter followers? Do you recognize several of their Twitter handles, and actively pay attention to how they respond to your posts, Tweets, questions, and comments? As we’ve mentioned in the past, one experiment showed how sprinkling in a handful of non-business tweets each day (stuff about you, fun office happenings, or entirely unrelated material) can humanize your Twitter presence and brand and make followers more likely to read and respond.

Or do you simply tweet out links to new blog posts or product and service announcements? Is your Twitter base just a stat — another metric for gauging brand awareness and understanding how many people are paying attention to your company?

If you fall into the latter camp, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Twitter isn’t for every company, and there’s value just in having people read what you tweet. But you’ll still be missing out on easy benefits if you don’t engage. A Twitter follower who you engage with is probably far more likely to buy your products or services, and is therefore worth far more than just a casual follower.

Of course, building this sort of Dallas social media marketing strategy takes no small amount of time and energy. We’re happy to help, and can make it easy for you to develop a robust Dallas Internet marketing presence without taking time and energy away from what your company does best.

Potential customers and clients are everywhere out on the web, waiting to meet you. Contact us. Our Dallas interactive marketing specialists can make it easy for you to say hello, and figure out how much Twitter is worth to your company.

Think of web content like your grocery store’s produce aisle: Even the tastiest, most colorful, most well-positioned fruits and veggies still need to be replaced from time to time.

Last week, we talked a bit about how content still often matters as much or more as connecting — even in the world of social media marketing. To review: In many ways, customers are simply craving connections with the small businesses in their communities, and tools like Dallas social media marketing and Dallas internet marketing make this easier to do than ever. But what you’re saying once you have a customer’s attention still matters, so it’s important to invest in valuable content for your web

Here’s one more element to consider: Freshness.

In other words, your company should be using web-based marketing to connect, to provide valuable content — and to do it quickly.

According to Web Pro News, while search engines like Google still place the most value on how relevant content produced by websites is, they’re placing more and more of an emphasis on how new content is as well:

A few days ago, Google confirmed that it launched a new algorithm update with freshness in mind. The update is built “upon the momentum” of Caffeine, the infrastructure update Google completed last year, designed to index fresher content more quickly.

This new update, the company says, impacts roughly 35% of searches. It’s designed to show more high quality pages that are only minutes old for queries related to recent events or hot topics.

Without specifying with keywords that you want the most recent event in a series of recurring events, you’re supposed to see the fresh ones – whether that be sports scores, earnings reports, TV shows, or other events.

You should also notice a difference in getting more frequently updated info on things where info changes frequently, even when it’s not a hot topic or recurring event. Google uses the examples of “best sir cameras” or ‘subaru impreza reviews”. Google tries to give you the latest info when it thinks it’s relevant.

Search engines love finding fresh content on any part of your website, but if you’ve invested in finely tuned message that’s both appealing to customer concerns and desires as well as appealing to keyword-hungry search engines, you might not want to mess with that too often by redoing your whole page once a month. The goal of your primary web content should be to connect with potential customers and clients ahead of connecting with search engines. Such valuable content is highly likely to be shared and linked around the web, which is more valuable to search engines anyway.

So how can you add fresh content, then?

The best way is a company blog, similar to this one. A corporate blog or company blog is simply a great place to add fresh content month after month or week after week (or as often as you’d like). Beyond SEO purposes, a blog is also an excellent place to post updates about products or services, post announcements about sales, specials or new products, or to post more in-depth information about your products or services that wouldn’t normally have a natural place on your regular website.

And, of course, if you generate an active readership that comment on blog posts, a blog can be an excellent place to — yep — connect with potential customers and clients. It’s simply a great idea.

If you simply don’t have much time to spend writing a blog several times a month, our professional copywriters can do it for you. Contact one of our Dallas interactive marketing experts for more information.

A few weeks ago, we mentioned a study that quantified just much how good Yelp reviews are helping businesses (as well as how bad poor reviews can hurt). Apparently, this idea struck a chord.

A flurry of new statistics on the subject soon followed. According to Good Magazine, for example, a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a five to nine percent increase in revenue — for independent restaurants. Interestingly, there is no Yelp effect for chain restaurants.

In other words, for mom and pop joints, online reputation management matters. Significantly. That extra little half a star isn’t just vanity — it likely means profits as well. This is likely the same story for other digital status symbols (we’ll call it “digital currency”) like the number of Facebook friends or fans your business might have.

But let’s go back to the indie/chain distinction. It’s something, I think, that highlights one of the big potential advantages of interactive marketing strategies like social media marketing and online reputation management.

According to the Restaurant Finance Monitor:
Consumers go to chains in the first place because they know what they’re going to get. After all, nothing is worse than a disappointing visit to a restaurant. But consumers prefer going to independent restaurants, so positive Yelp ratings remove the uncertainty about an eatery’s quality, making the dining decision less of a gamble. It’s not difficult to imagine a well-reviewed independent getting more business.

Indeed, the study found that ratings have no impact on a chain restaurant’s sales. If anything, Yelp reviews take that business away.

Makes sense. When a friend recommends a local business in person, you’re much more likely to visit, right? The same is true online — hence why Facebook friends matter. And as these studies have shown, the digital opinions of strangers on sites like Yelp also help lessen risky unfamiliarity associated with a place. That fact that chains are relatively unaffected by review sites highlight just how much it matters for non-chains.

So how do you gain digital friends and improve your reputation on sites like Yelp?

The first step, of course, is to put out a killer product or service. Thankfully, this business fundamental has not changed. But the next step is to engage. Respond. Listen, and make the customer feel listened to and appreciated.

For example, studies show that people are less likely to shoplift from a store if they make eye contact with a friendly employee. I imagine that the same is true for negative reviews — it’s much easier to grind an axe behind the mask of internet anonymity. But customers are much more likely to be forgiving of little imperfections when they see the person who will be affected by their digital insults.

Here at Masterlink, many of the products and services we offer are designed to make your digital relationships with potential customers and clients as human as possible. And, increasingly, we’re seeing just how much humanity matters to business’s bottom lines.

Here at Masterlink Interactive, we eagerly encourage all of our clients to integrate a regularly-updated blog into their Internet marketing strategy.

Think of it like a fountain of information targeted at your clients and customers. Basically, your blog should just be a section of your website devoted to regularly updated posts of information (like, of course, the one you’re reading right now) like advice, announcements, and updates. A company blog is a great place for all sorts of information, including:

• News announcements
• Promotions and discounts
• Product launches
• Educational spotlights for products and services
• Tutorials, how-tos, and FAQs
• Any other timely or relevant info that doesn’t have a natural place anywhere else on your site.

It’s simply an ideal platform to communicate the messages you want to spread. So—especially in this modern digital marketing age—a corporate blog is a smart investment for two primary reasons:

Client and Customer Connections

A blog can help cultivate lasting relationships with your customers in several ways:

• Adds a human face—or multiple human faces, if you make blogging a company-wide team effort—which humanizes your brand, and lets customers and clients connect in a little deeper way.

• Gives your customers a chance to respond to posts with questions and complaints, or join the discussion. This makes them feel valued and validated, and makes it easier for you to develop a nuanced understanding of customer/client concerns and needs.

• Creates space to address customer concerns in advance, that wouldn’t otherwise have a natural place on your website. Customers appreciate this intuition.

• Creates incentive for customers and clients to return to your website. When regularly updated, your customers and clients will know to check in for information they care about. In fact, if your blog develops a reputation among your customers as a place to get discounts, it will give them an incentive to check back over and over again. This increases exposure to all your other products and services, and gives a chance to connect with them in other ways via the blog.

• Highlights your company as flexible and responsive to the ever-evolving worlds of your customers.

Search Engine Success

Search engines simply love small business blogs. The blogs build links (when another site posts a link to an excellent post you wrote, the search engines take that as a sign that your blog is respectable, and worthy of a prominent spot in the search results). They’re loaded with keywords and phrases (the terms that the searchers are using in Google, Bing, or Yahoo to find your site). And they keep your site fresh (search engines appreciate active sites more than stale sites)

The need for search engine optimization is a frustrating reality for many businesses, who don’t want to spend time focusing on it. Blogging is a great, fun way to feed the search engines, without sacrificing quality or alienating your customers with awkward, clunky search engine-oriented content.

How often you update the blog is, of course, up to you. But we recommend to all of our clients that they update at least once a month, and regularly, to keep site visitors checking in. Give one of our Dallas Internet marketing experts a call. We can help you develop a blog that works.

1. Set Goals

It won’t hurt your company if your blog is filled with random announcements and ramblings about, say, middle relief needs for the Texas Rangers. In fact, it’d still probably even help give your company a human face. But you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you plan ahead and tailor your blog around specific topics—especially ones that customers and clients will be eager to read about, and ones you’re pushing as part of your search engine optimization and Internet marketing strategy.

This matters for two reasons:

1. Customers will be much more likely to check in repeatedly if they know they’ll find relevant, compelling topics — instead of what you had for lunch each day last week.

2. Furthermore, if you know in advance in which search results you’re trying to gain a foothold, you can work relevant terms and links into the posts week after week after week.

2. Set a schedule

While even your most devoted customers and clients probably aren’t going to be setting alarms reminding themselves to check in on your company’s blog, regularity still matters to your customers and clients. Your most faithful readers are probably people who are simply happy to know that there will be new relevant, intuitive, useful information for them every week or month. But if you, say, produce a flurry of posts one month, and then none for the next three, customers and clients will probably stop checking in.

Furthermore, if you set a schedule well in advance, you can time blog posts with the releases of new products and services, boosting your overall marketing and promotional efforts. For example, if your company is releasing a new line of snow tires, write a series of blog posts explaining the benefits and uses of said snow tires.

3. Don’t Treat Readers Like Algorithms

It may sound obvious, but in the age of SEO and search engine marketing, there’s simply nothing worse than a blog that was clearly written for Google, Bing or Yahoo. In other words, you wouldn’t talk to your customers as if they were an algorithm (Hi Joe! Can I interest you in some snow tires, winter tires, snow-proof tires, winter-proof tires, tires for snow, or winterized tires?).

So even if the maximum benefit you get from your blog is the way it boosts your search engine rankings (among other valuable benefits), the maximum risk comes from how it could turn off your customers. In other words, if your search engine blogging strategy works well enough to get them through the door only to see them turn around and quickly leave again (never to return, most likely), the SEO blogging was nothing more than time and money wasted.

Focus on your customer first—good, knowledgeable writing backed by intuitive, compelling ideas that truly seeks to be of value to customers will prove to be far more valuable than something written for a search engine. If a customer really likes something you wrote, there’s a good chance they’ll link to it on their own blog, which boosts search rankings more than keyword shenanigans would anyway.

Furthermore, don’t neglect to ask questions and encourage response and engagement from your customers. Even if you’ve never gotten a single comment from customers, don’t assume they aren’t reading.

4. Make blogging collaborative

Blogging is a great way to incorporate your entire team and boost participation. Giving employees a chance to add their two cents engages them in the company-wide mission (rather than only their small role within it), and lets them add value in a visible way.

Furthermore, team blogging engages your customers beyond just the brand level. It humanizes your brand, making it much more likely that your customers will develop that critical level of respect and affection that can develop into a long-term business relationship.

Of course, we’d be more than happy to do the heavy lifting behind this for you.  Contact one of our Dallas corporate blogging specialists for more information.

Behind the whirlwind of emerging technologies and latest, greatest social media trends, nothing is more important for your small business than an effective, catchy, pull-em-into-the-store-like-a-five-pound-bass web design. But web design itself is a field that’s also perpetually free-wheeling—yesterday’s hottest trend is today’s Sega Dreamcast (did anyone, anywhere actually own one of those?).

But every year still brings with it a handful of new web design techniques and elements that permanently alter the web design landscape—and 2010 was no different.

Let’s review just two of the most important web design trends that truly gained steam this year:

1. Mobile-Ready Website Design

Mobile websites were hardly new this year, but with the introduction of two related technologies, the need and demand for mobile-friendly and tablet-compatible websites soared:

1) Tablet computers like the iPad. Smartphones have for a couple years now shed the “early adopters only” tag, but the percentage of web usage done on devices like the iPhone and Droid truly went mainstream this year. The introduction of the iPad just confirmed how the web landscape has changed for good, by making more general web-usage easier to do while out and about. Simplified websites that are highly compatible with smartphones or tablets are becoming the norm—without one, and with only a more cumbersome regular site ready for users searching for quick information on-the-go—your company might just get left behind.

2) Location-based searches. With more and more and more people surfing the web via smartphones, what users expect from the web (and, therefore, from the websites of companies like yours) has therefore changed. Users search for products and services based on their current location. If they’re looking for a tire shop, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and just about anyone else in the search engine game can provide for them the closest tire shops to where they’re stuck with a flat on the side of the road.

Mobile sites are preferred on smartphones because they make essential information about your company much more quickly accessible. Make sure you have a site that rapidly gives them the information they’re looking for, where they’re looking for it.

2. SEO Blogs

A company blog integrated into your web design makes it easy to connect (and hear from) your customers, provides an effective on-website platform for announcements like discounts and product launches, and increases the amount of dynamic content on your site, giving visitors a reason to return over and over again. In other words, they’re cool.

But perhaps more than anything else, search engines love them. They build links. They’re loaded with keywords and phrases. And they keep your site fresh. At Masterlink, we highly recommend integrating a regularly-updated blog into your social media marketing strategy, and can help you do just that.

The market for paid blogging has been receiving much attention recently. Services like PayPerPost have created an unprecedented business model which connects advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers gain publicity and traffic while improving their rankings with the search engines. Bloggers also receive an opportunity to generate revenue from their Web site.

Paid blogging delivers online word of mouth marketing, brand awareness and traffic leads for the advertiser. Companies like PayPerPost provide advertisers with a way to promote their Web site, products, services or company through a network of independent bloggers. Companies can team up with bloggers to generate buzz, build traffic, and receive product feedback, as well as gain links, syndicate content and much more all in an effort to improve their internet marketing plan.

In a staff opinion issued by the Federal Trade Commission, the consumer protection agency discussed the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on paid blogging, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

The FTC proposed that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

I can’t seem to wrap my head around that line of thinking. Why should bloggers be required to disclose whether they have been paid to post about the company or not?

When we see the contestants on Survivor winning rewards such as a cold Mountain Dew or a Pontiac Aztec, do we assume it’s because Mark Burnett actually prefers Mountain Dew over Coca-Cola and Pontiacs over Fords? When Red Beard at Lone Star 92.5 radio suggests drinking an ice cold Coors Light, do we assume he personally prefers Coors Light over say a Heineken or Shiner Bock? Not I. I know that this is product placement and they are being compensated by those companies to have their products shown or spoken of without them having to tell me so.

Even if paid bloggers must include a disclosure, I see paid blogging from an advertisers stand point to be a wonderful internet marketing solution. You can determine how much you are willing to pay, how many different posts you want as well as requiring the blogger to link to your Web site using your chosen keywords.

When comparing paid blogging to something like Yahoo’s Directory listing which costs $299 to submit and $299 annually I find paid blogging to not only be a bargain, but much more beneficial to the advertiser as well.

~Kimber