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.

With interactive marketing, what’s most important: How frequently you connect with potential customers and clients? Or how valuable you make each connection?

My own social media habits show how it’s not quite one or the other. For example, a quick survey of my own Twitter habit reveals this statistical tidbit:

• 13 percent of accounts I follow are family and friends.
• 87 percent are bloggers, news outlets, reporters, celebrities and other people I’ve never actually met.

Furthermore, the majority of friends I follow are living overseas, doing something unique, or consistently tweet out information I find either valuable or humorous. Why? I love my friends and family, but unless their tweets add something valuable, illuminating or entertaining, they don’t get a spot. The chronological nature of Twitter makes it too difficult to consistently read valuable tweeters if my stream is clogged with minutia.

Inversely, while I’ll happily follow everyone I’ve ever met on Facebook, I only use the platform to keep tabs on a handful of businesses, reporters, or celebrities. In fact, I enjoy catching up on the minutia of people’s daily lives. The value of the content they post on Facebook is less important to me than the chance to just connect and catch up.

Three conclusions:

1. Content is King (Sometimes)

On Twitter, content matters (for me). My time and mental bandwidth are limited, and I’m loathe to waste either on frivolous information. If I followed everyone I know on Twitter, I’d miss information from people on Twitter who I want to hear from. Content is king.

2. Connecting is King (Other Times)

On Facebook, relationships matter (for me). I just want to connect with people, see what music they like, what photos they’ve posted, what events they’re attending, and what local businesses they recommend. Connecting is king.

3.  Social Media is Inexact and Always Shifting

How people use social media changes from person to person. And as new platforms come and go, how each person uses social media likely changes as well. The key, then, is to focus on both connecting with potential customers and clients and providing them with valuable information — on the multiple platforms across the social media spectrum. Explore all your social media options to figure out what’s most worthwhile for your company.

Sound like too much to keep up with? Our devoted Dallas social media marketing experts can make it easy for you. Contact us for more information.

If you want to understand how web giants like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon should influence the long-term vision for your business, it’s a good idea to spend some time exploring their long-term visions.

This is especially true if:

• If you’re overwhelmed by how quickly what matters on the web changes
• If you get the feeling what’s happening on the web matters, but you just don’t have the time to keep up with it all
• If you don’t think the web can play much a role in your business or industry
• If you’d love to see the big picture, but the forest keeps getting obscured by the hype involved with each tree

Look long-term. Get an idea of where these guys want to take your business. Understand the road the web is trying to travel, and it’ll be a whole lot easier to keep up with each twist and turn.

For example, Fast Company Magazine took a long, but illuminating at look each of the major web giants. Step one is to understand that while Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple all might seem to be competing in separate spheres, in many ways they’re all trying to climb the same peak.

According to the article:

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack.

Everyone reading this article is a customer of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google, and most probably count on all four. This passion for the Fab Four of business is reflected in the blogosphere’s panting coverage of their every move. ExxonMobil may sometimes be the world’s most valuable company, but can you name its CEO? Do you scour the Internet for rumors about its next product? As the four companies encroach further and further into one another’s space, consumers look forward to cooler and cooler products. The coming years will be fascinating to watch because this is a competition that might reinvent our daily lives even more than the four have changed our habits in the past decade. And that, dear reader, is why you need a program guide to the battle ahead.

Here’s why understanding this major trend toward both convergence and real-world diversification matters: These companies aren’t just building products like an excellent search engine, a cool phone, a convenient shopping marketplace, or a social network. They’re building platforms for making multiple areas of life easier, from shopping to communicating to connecting to doing business and beyond.

That’s the race — who can come up with the best, most comprehensive tool for making the web improve the most possible areas of life for the most people. Understand that, and you’ll be more likely spot opportunities for your company on these platforms when they open up.

Anyway, it’s a long, but fascinating look at where the worlds of search, social, and online shopping are all going (and where they’ll converge). Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists are here to help you stay up with what matters.

With 1.3 million friends like these, who needs voters?

News broke yesterday that presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had possibly… well… overstated his popularity a bit. Without getting into politics, Newt’s nefarious Twitter strategy is a useful example of how your company should — and should not — approach social media marketing.

According to Gawker:

Gingrich currently boasts 1,325,842 followers, whereas competitors Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann have yet to crack 100,000. [...]

About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various “follow agencies,” another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt’s profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn’t follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated.

To answer your first question: Yes, there are ways to do this. There’s no need to get into the details now, but anytime a new marketing medium like Internet marketing emerges, people are going to figure out how to game the system.

To answer your second question: No, you shouldn’t do this. And no, your competitors won’t gain much of an edge if they do.

As we discussed a year ago when Texas gubernatorial candidate Kay Baily Hutchison’s campaign was caught using “blackhat SEO tactics”— in her case, loading her website with random, invisible keywords like “Cooper Tire Texarkana” that had nothing to do with her campaign in order to boost traffic — shady SEO or Internet marketing techniques just have a way of coming back to bite you.

Beyond the political realm, we’ve seen several companies build elaborate, but fragile SEO schemes in order to improve their position in search results. And then we’ve seen how even a small algorithm tweak by Google sends the whole SEO house of cards crashing down.

Instead, companies who use social media’s enormous power to engage with their customers, to listen to their concerns and requests, and to add a humanizing voice to their communications strategy build organic, lasting followings.

So let’s be fair and hear Newt’s response. According to his campaign:

“[I]t’s his personal touch: He tweets and manages his Twitter feed himself, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO. All told, he has tweeted 2,611 times in the 29 months since he joined the site.”
It might seem implausible, but that is basically the strategy we recommend with interactive marketing tools like Twitter and Facebook. Be prolific. Be engaging. And most importantly — be personal. Give potential customers and clients the chance to know a different, more human side of your company — and give them a chance to connect and be heard. Your numbers will see a more sustainable rise.

For Newt, in all likelihood, there was probably a mix of both strategies. He should’ve just stuck with the latter.

There’s been some concern lately about whether or not shortened URLs can undermine a company’s search engine optimization efforts.

Let’s review what this means:

URL Shorteners

The shortened URLs were developed in response to Twitter, where messages must be limited to 140 characters or less. Even simple links (http://www.masterlink.com) can take up an unhealthy chunk of that space, and long, messy links (http://www.masterlink.com/blog/index.php/smartphones-to-surpass-computers-and-other-mobile-trends-for-2011/) can be utterly unusable.

So, in a stroke of the sort of innovation that makes us love the digital age, several tools (bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com) soon popped up to shorten those long URLs and make them more Twitter-friendly. Web heavyweights like Google and the New York Times have also recently developed their own shorteners.

Why Links to Your Site Matter

Search engines take into account the number and value of links out across the web that point toward your website. When other websites link to your site, it signals to the search engines that your site is valued by others. Search engines try to promote valued sites in their search results rankings.

Make sense?

When someone clicks on the shortened URL, it takes them (briefly) to that actual URL, before quickly redirecting them to their intended destination. So this begs the question—do shortened links that don’t go directly to a company’s website still benefit their search engine optimization?

According to Google SEO anxiety whisperer Matt Cutts:

“Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects,” he explains. “If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners (like bit.ly or goo.gl) will do, if we see that 301 then that will pass PageRank to the final destination. So in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO,” he continues. “The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

Got it? In plain speak, Matt’s basically saying: “Keep calm and carry on.”

Basically, the same algorithm that Google uses to “crawl” the web and follow links around is smart enough to follow the path all the way to the intended destination, and not get stuck in that shortened URL netherworld in between. In other words, you’ll still get SEO credit whether a link to your site is 10 characters long or 50.

If these sorts of twists and turns in the SEO world concern you, consider letting our Dallas interactive marketing specialists do the worrying for you. We’ll make sure your company pops up when a searcher goes looking for you.

Kady Bentley: Hey everyone, my name is Kady, SEO Specialist and Project Manager here at Masterlink Interactive. Today my goal is to convey the importance of mobile websites and why they should be a part of your business marketing plan. We’re living in a world where we fly by the seat of our pants. We try to keep up with our day to day tasks and anything that makes it more convenient less time consuming is always a bonus and tools that do that are definitely worth your investment. Mobile websites are one of those tools that your customers will find useful in order ti find out your business information. Basically at Masterlink, we try to focus on different key features for mobile websites, but a few of them in particular I’d like to highlight are that it’s essential on a mobile website to feature your contact information and your driving directions so customers can find your information easily, they don’t have to search through your website so they can get to you sooner.

Displaying this information in large fonts that are easy to read is also a benefit instead of having to scroll, like on an iPhone where you can maximize font size, but if you already have it portrayed larger, it’s easier for the customer to see what they’re looking for and get to you.

Also, having simple navigation is very key. Since 3G is fast, but not super fast, if you have a navigation that is condensed and only focusing on the main things you’d like to highlight, it will make speed times faster and people will be able to find your information quicker.

If you’d like to learn more about mobile websites and how they can help your business, we are definitely here to help you contact Masterlink and we’d be happy to get you to the next level of marketing.

Kimber Cook: Hi, I’m Kimber, Internet Marketing Specialists at Masterlink Interactive. I’m going to talk to you today about email marketing. Specifically, we want to answer the question with the rise of social media popularity, does email marketing still matter?

The fact is, yes email marketing does still matter, it’s very important, email is not dead. Even with the rise of social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Though Facebook and Twitter have experienced so much growth lately, that we tend to talk a lot about social media. The fact is that everyone still uses email. Facebook, one of the most popular social media sites currently has over 500 million active users and that’s a big number. The number of worldwide email accounts is projected to increase from over 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014 and that’s a lot more users that you could be reaching. 75% of all email accounts belong to consumers. These are your customers and they need to be reached. Email has a phenomenal reach. Even if I check my Facebook account every day, if your company’s message is not in my new stream at the moment I log on, I’m going to miss it. But I see every unread email in my email box even if I don’t log into my email every day. With the rise in popularity of smartphones, email marketing can become even more popular. Personally, my phone alerts me every time I get an email message. Now that’s pretty powerful.

If you’d like to talk about email marketing or if you have any questions for us know, we’re here to help. Thanks.

New year. New possibilities. A fresh look for your company might just be a great way to start 2011 off on the right foot.

Let’s review for a bit what’s possible, what’s emerging, and what you should demand from your company’s web design:

Catchy, Competent Content and Design

We use flash animation to grab attention. We build attractive sites that accurately reflect your company’s capability, history, and service to society. We use compelling web content to inform visitors, pique their curiosity, pull them further into the site, answer their questions, and satisfy what it is they came to find. We design our sites to be intuitive and easily navigable, based on user-tested navigation patterns. And we employ a host of cutting-edge e-commerce applications that make it easy to get on with the actual business of doing business.

Cutting Edge SEO

Search engine optimization, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the process of making a website rank high in the search results for certain relevant term. For example, if you own a auto body shop in Dallas, you’ll probably want to see your site at the top of the results page when someone searches for “Dallas auto body shop.” In other words, you’ll want to be there when customers come looking for you.

It’s a tricky process, however, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) are constantly tweaking their search algorithms to perfect their own functionality goals—and they’re not exactly eager to tell everyone what they change and when they do it.

The last thing most business owners we work with want to do is spend their days tracking these endless, minute changes and figuring out how to stay atop a search results page. But at Masterlink, we’re a little bit obsessed with it, because we understand just how important a healthy search ranking is for our clients. And we employ a multi-pronged approach to optimized web design, seamlessly integrating into our clients’ sites (and updating) all the elements that search engines love.

Mobile Websites

We talk about it all the time here on the Masterlink blog, but mobile websites simply matter. Increasingly. Smartphone usage has caught fire, and with each passing year, more and more people expect to be able to surf the web and find the information they need (from companies like yours) while out and about.

At Masterlink, we design mobile versions of websites that are uniquely tailored to the needs and expectations of smartphone users—and these days, we offer iPad and tablet-friendly web designs as well.  This means simplified sites featuring larger text, fewer graphics, easy access to information like phone numbers, maps, and driving directions, and easy opt-outs to the regular, more detailed sites. And we design these sites without sacrificing your company’s well-crafted marketing angles that shrewdly pull visitors further into your site.

Check out our online web design portfolio, or contact our Dallas web design gurus for more information. Let’s make it a great year.

Facebook Marketing Fun

More than any other social media marketing technology out there, Facebook is making connection and engagement with fans and customers deeper, easier, and more creative than ever before. The opportunities to creatively connect and sell are everywhere.

For example, back in August, Baskin Robbins began offering free ice cream to those who would follow the company on Facebook and encourage others to follow as well. Called Group Scoop, groups of Facebook members who could grow to 31 (like flavors—get it?) people would all be rewarded with coupons for free treats. It was sort of like one of those “bring three friends and get a free cone” type campaigns of old, but all done online where the news—and marketing success—can spread much more quickly.

In October, Walmart took this approach a step further, developing its own application to harness the marketing and customer-engagement possibilities of social media. Called Crowdsaver, the app basically lets customers (technically, those who are “Fans” of the company on Facebook) vote on which deals the retail giant should offer. The app meets customer desires for choice, control, and interaction, and keeps customers coming back to the site over and over again to check for new deals.

Both of these campaigns gave customers incentive to “spread the word” about the companies, rewarded those who were active in following the companies on Facebook, and gave customers a feeling of control over the chance to save money.

Location Mattered

Thanks to the rapid rise of smartphones (and the IT infrastructure to support them), location matters more than ever in Internet marketing.

For example, apps like FourSquare and Gowalla—those “check in” apps you probably see on Twitter streams and Facebook walls everywhere—sort of make a game out location-based web usage. The apps allow users to “check in” and comment on wherever they’re proud to be, and rewards them with virtual badges and titles (and the social utility of having everyone they know online know exactly where they are anytime they go out to eat). They create incentive to, say, share where they’re shopping and eating. You can imagine why that might matter to stores and restaurants.

Back in April, McDonalds showed just how easily you can capitalize on those incentives. The ubiquitous fast food chain gave away gift cards for people checking in at McDonald’s. The result was a 33 percent increase in foot traffic, and more than 50 media stories about the campaign, generating enormous additional publicity. 600,000 people began following the company online.

Google, Facebook, and just about all the other social media and search heavyweights are beginning to dip a few big fat toes into the LBS game as well, which just means… location matters. Increasingly. Keep an eye out for creative ways to capitalize.

New numbers compiled from The Week (with the help of a Pew study) show just how quickly Twitter is becoming an integral part of American Internet usage.  If your clientele falls somewhere into these demographics, you might want to consider making Twitter a larger part of your Internet marketing strategy—although its importance is still up in the air.

Let’s take a look at who’s tweeting, reading, and ignoring that vast majority of it all together:

8 percent of all Internet users are signed up for Twitter. Which means…

6 percent of the total U.S. adult population use Twitter (nearly 74 percent of American adults use the Internet)

2 percent of Internet users say they are “extremely active” on Twitter and use the service daily.

24 percent of Twitter users say they check their Twitter streams several times a day.

71 percent of tweets are ignored. Think about that.

50 percent of Twitter users tweet (send out a message) daily.

Between the ages of 18-29 is where most Twitter users reside. 14 percent of those in this bracket use Twitter. Only 4 percent of people older than 65 do.

10 percent of female Internet users use Twitter. Just 7 percent of males have embraced the service.

18 percent of Hispanic Internet users and 13 percent of Black Internet users can be found on Twitter. Just 5 percent of white users have signed up. Minority Internet users are twice as likely to use the service as non-minorities.

175 million users are registered on Twitter worldwide. About 370,000 new Twitter users are added each day.
So how can your small business exploit these trends? To understand the emerging marketing opportunities, let’s take a look at the way casual users utilize Twitter.

Unfortunately, while few people have primary email accounts that they rarely or never check, the opposite is true with Twitter—as shown by the fact that a full 71 percent of tweets are simply ignored. In other words, it seems like more often than not, people will sign up for Twitter and then rarely or never use it. This is because the information getting broadcasted out is not usually essential or personal.

For example, even with my own Twitter stream, I’ll read every single Twitter message sent directly to me (called a “direct message” or “DM”) and every Twitter message that mentions me (a tweet with @myname in it)—the Twitter home page allows you to track both of these. These serve the same basic, essential/personal-info functions as email. But if I get busy or start traveling, I’ll pretty quickly quit paying attention to everything else that people I follow on Twitter are saying. The quickest way to get burnt out on information overload is to try to read every single thing people (even people you respect and want to listen to) are saying on the Internet.

So take sweeping claims of Twitter’s inexorable growth with a bit of salt.

But also realize that the millions of folks who are active on Twitter tend to be highly active (with the number growing by leaps and bounds each day). And with this group, enormous marketing opportunities exist. For example:

• Active Twitter users who go to the trouble of “following” your Twitter stream are likely to read the majority of what you tweet out. You’ll have a captive audience.

• Active Twitter users are likely to respond directly to you with complaints or questions, so opportunities to engage directly with costumers abound.

• Active Twitter users will often use the service for for breaking news, rumors, and… deals. You can build a captive audience by regularly announcing discounts and deals on Twitter first, creating an incentive for customers to pay attention to what you’re saying.

Contact our Dallas social media marketing experts for more information (or, of course, follow us on Twitter).