Marketing in the digital age evolves at breakneck speed, and 2011 was no different. So let’s review some of the big events and trends of the year before jumping headfirst into the inevitable social media marketing madness that awaits in 2012.

Google-Plus: The Arrival of Social Media Fatigue

By far and away the biggest story of the year was the launch of Google+, the search behemoth’s no-holds-barred attempt to go toe-to-toe with Facebook. Or, at least, it got the most headlines. Whether or not Google+ will actually matter in the long run depends on if it can back up all the initial buzz. Growth slowed considerably after a blistering start.

Part of this may be due to social media fatigue. The human brain only has so much bandwidth, and social media has not done much in the way of making the earth spin more slowly and add an hour or two to each day. And Silicon Valley seems to produce a new glittering social media tool once a week these days. If a new social media tool can’t quickly and clearly demonstrate how it will make life easier or better for folks, they’re likely to react by deleting the app, pulling out a hardcover book, and tune out the digital age until spring.

The Lesson? Don’t feel pressured to chase each and every “next big thing.” We can help you know when a social media marketing tool becomes worthwhile.

Still, Statistics Show That Social Media Marketing Matters

For example, Facebook topped 700 million users in 2011. Try to wrap your head around that for a bit. And it’s not showing any major signs of slowing down. In fact, if Google-Plus had any landscape-altering effect, it’s that it made Facebook better. A few years ago, Twitter’s emergence led Facebook to introduce the timeline feature. Google-Plus encouraged the site to vastly improve user controls and privacy issues.

The lesson? Social media is getting woven into more and more parts of our lives — especially Facebook — and it’s hard to see that ever changing. Your company’s potential customers and clients are all over social media sites like Facebook. We can help you connect with them.

Especially… “Location, Location, Location”

That social media still matters is especially true for location-based social media marketing, because it’s everything that the glittering, useless social tools that fail are not: It’s so intuitive. So life-enhancing. So easy. And such a natural utilization of the smartphone explosion. It helps you find businesses. It helps you review them. It helps you recommend the good ones to friends. It connects you with everything in your community that you need. Different social media marketing players are still scrambling to figure out how to best capitalize on these new possibilities, and it’s changing the way we think about SEO in Dallas, but the principle is only going to expand.

The Lesson? A mobile web design is an excellent (nay, critical) thing to have when location-based social media marketing leads customers to your business. Our Dallas mobile web design specialists can help.

The first time we talked about Google+ here on the Masterlink blog, it was exploding onto the Internet marketing scene. Just a few weeks later, the bubble seemed to already have popped: overall usage of Google+ dropped by three percent, and time spent on the site dropped 10 percent.

So, nearly three months later, how is it doing now? Well, 40 million people now have Google+ profiles — just a fraction of Facebook’s 800 million users, but a sizable number nonetheless. And, perhaps more relevantly, Google+ for businesses has arrived.

According to the AP:

The expansion, announced on Monday, is the latest feature on Google’s Plus service to imitate what’s already available on Facebook, the leading website for sharing with family, friends and businesses.

Google Inc. unveiled Plus in late June to counter Facebook’s popularity and learn more about people’s interests. It hopes to gain insights that will help its dominant Internet search engine spit out more compelling results that keep people coming back to click on ads.

Until now, Plus was open only to individuals. In addition to companies, celebrities and sports teams will be able to set up Google Plus pages just as they can on Facebook. Google showcased the new Plus feature Monday with pages from 20 business, celebrities and sports teams. The initial list includes Toyota, the Muppets, the Dallas Cowboys, Pepsi and the pop music group Train.

So is Google+ worth becoming part of your Dallas social media marketing efforts? Here are just a handful of reasons to give it a try:

1. Fewer users means less competition as well

Sure, Google+ is still just something like a fox trying to take down the Facebook elephant, but think of it like starting up a business in a small town. There are fewer customers, but less competition as well. And if the town grows (which it’s likely to do), you’ll have a huge head start on the competition that eventually moves in down the block.

2. It’s all about search

Already, if you have a Google account, search results will show you pages that have earned “Plus 1” clicks by connections of yours on Google+. In other words, imagine search engines pointing out Dallas caterers, auto body shops in DFW, or Dallas limos “Liked” by your friends on Facebook every time you go searching for one. Google’s bread and butter is search, and it’s a good bet that they will increasingly use info gleaned from Google+ to improve their search capabilities.

3. It’s easy and free

In other words, give it a try and see what bites you get. If you find yourself connecting with potential customers and clients, stick with it. If not, pull the plug.

To learn more, check out Google’s handy step-by-step tutorial. It’s pretty easy, but if you don’t want to sink a ton of time into maintaining your Google+ page and responding to every post from a reader, our Dallas interactive marketing specialists will be more than happy to do it for you.

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.

There’s probably nothing new we can say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said. But there are a couple key lessons we can learn from the torrent of praise, followed by torrent of backlash to that praise, followed by a torrent of even-handed looks at what did and did not make the guy successful (dying famous in America ain’t easy). One of the main points goes something like this:

“He wasn’t a techie genius or innovator. He was a marketing genius.” Setting aside debates about Macs vs. PCs, let’s look at this this.

Apple products have never been necessarily the most powerful or packed with possibility. They’re not for everyone, and they’re not for certain high-end industries. But they’ve succeeded because they make you feel like they were designed to make your life just a little bit easier. And in that way, their products were marketing.

Let’s let Steve explain in his own words:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Or (again as Steve put it):

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. We just want to make great products.”

It turns out that a lot of people just want their computer/phone/music gadgets to be helpful, easy, and reliable. They’ll trade high-end computing power for something that doesn’t easily get plagued by viruses and spyware and paper their screen with little warning popups that don’t make any sense.

Apple got that better that most tech companies. They designed their products to appeal to their customers’ (sometimes unexpressed) deeper frustrations and desires. And their marketing strategy simply highlighted those strengths.

So that’s the goal: Listen. Understand. Anticipate. And then infuse what you understand about your customers into both the design of your products and services and into your marketing strategy.

Each aspect of your interactive marketing strategy — from your web content to social media marketing to web design — should seek to achieve that second goal. The beauty of Internet marketing in Dallas is that it’s makes connecting with the community around you and understanding them easier than ever.

10 Million people are now using Foursquare to tell the world about their favorite places to eat, drink, dance, and shop. Let’s take a look at how apps like these can become an important piece of your Dallas Internet marketing strategy:

Foursquare is what’s known as a “location-based service.” When app users go to restaurants, bars, clubs, or stores they like, they can “check in” on their a smartphones. As extra incentive, there’s a game aspect to the app as well, where the people who check in the most times at specific hotspots get crowned “mayor” or other titles—encouraging them to return again and again, and tell all their friends when they do.

It might sound silly—or just one more step on the why-do-I-care-where-you’re-eating-dinner ladder—but 10 million users is impressive, and location-based services do matter. Austin-based Foursquare competitor Gowalla is approaching two million users, Facebook has made checking in easy for the fraction of its 700 million users who use smartphones, and Google Maps has recently added check-ins so users can rate and review locations in real-time. Including geolocation tags with stuff like Twitter updates is also increasingly common.

In other words, more and more people are carrying smartphones around, and more and more of them are using LBS apps to share where they are and what they are doing in real-time. Depending on your clientele, LBS could be a fun, effective part of your Dallas interactive marketing strategy:

According to PCWorld:

The partnerships Foursquare has made with large brands provide an idea of the utility it provides businesses. As a small or medium sized business owner, you have the same access to the technology that’s checking millions of users in to local businesses around the country. Simply set a deal — such as giving a free coffee with the purchase of a pastry to customers who check in on Foursquare — let your staff know, and get the word out. Those who use the service and redeem the deal may enjoy a feeling of exclusivity, and tell their friends.

Foursquare showed how LBS can easily be used for to boost business last year, when McDonald’s gave app users discounts in exchange for check-ins, increasing in-store foot traffic by 33 percent in a single day. Recently, the app announced that it would be pairing deals with the rest of its services more regularly. Facebook has taken a similar approach — “check in” at certain locations, and you get a bargain from the business.

The advantage to businesses is simple: In exchange for the discount, the customer tells all their friends, followers, and Internet stalkers about the business and deal. In exchange for “titles” and other parts of the game, the customer returns again and again. It’s viral marketing made easy.

Pilots don’t ignore their instruments while flying a plane. A baseball coach wouldn’t ignore the stats indicating which of his players are giving him the best chance to win. You wouldn’t run a TV ad without knowing how many folks were expected to tune in to the show, right?

Statistics are the fuel that make mediocre Internet marketing campaigns great, and there’s just no reason to be guessing whether or not your website and interactive marketing efforts are meeting their potential.

So we’re offering a FREE website marketing analysis today through the end of June, because your company deserves better than blind marketing. Our marketing analysis reports can help you identify:

• Which keywords are driving visitors to your site.
• Where you rank in search engine results for different search terms, compared to competitors.
• The value of different keywords, and which need more attention on your site.
• And much more…

Data is one of the wonderful things about the web. Not only can the web make it easy for you to reach more potential customers and clients at much a lower cost, and trumpet your message via multiple forms of communication. But the web also makes it simple to accurately measure how successful those efforts have been, and adjust accordingly on the fly.

Compare that to say, a handful of billboards on I-75. You can measure how many cars drive by, but you can’t measure how many of those drivers come to your store or website as direct result of the billboards. You can track just how much sales have increased since the billboards went up, but you can’t determine exactly how much the billboards have helped, or which billboard is most successful.

Our website marketing analysis lets you know how many customers are finding you, where they’re finding you, and what about your website is pulling them in — as well as where you rank in, say, search results compared to your competitors. Not only can we provide a mountain of information, but we’ll also organize it in a way that leads to actionable steps based on the intelligence provided.

Contact one of our Dallas Internet marketing specialists for more information, or fill out the free, no-obligation form to get started.

The Internet has flipped all sorts of industries on their heads, and it’s not always easy for companies to figure out how to thrive in this new lightening-pace, rapid-fire, blink-and-get-left-behind environment.  But one Brooklyn musician, at least, has shown just how much possibility the web holds if you can harness its strengths for your advantage.

According to Planet Money:

Jonathan Coulton’s songs almost never get played on the radio. He doesn’t have a contract with a music label. Yet he’s a one man counterargument to the idea that musicians can’t make money making music.

In 2010, Coulton’s music brought in about $500,000 in revenue. And since his overhead costs are very low, most of that money went straight to him. [...]

So how did Jonathan Couton take this song, and another 97 like it, and — without the aid of a record label, or any outside support really — turn them into half a million in annual revenue?

The Internet, of course.

Coulton’s big break came when he wrote a song called “Code Monkey” about the lonely, aching life of an under-appreciated web coder:

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew.
Code Monkey very simple man
With big warm fuzzy secret heart:
Code Monkey like you.

The song got posted on Slashdot—a wildly popular “News for nerds” tech forum—and exploded. Soon, with a loyal, enthusiastic fan base and some smart Internet marketing strategies, Coulton has found himself making upward of $500,000 per year — hardly the haul of a starving Internet artist.

So what can we learn from Coulton?

1. Internet Marketing Connects

Let’s say Coulton tried the normal route to rock stardom: Start playing local clubs. Hope a few folks in the audience dig the music and tell their friends about it. Hope that audience grows to the point where a music label picks up the music and takes over promotion. Maybe Coulton would’ve gotten lucky and played to a crowd with a couple lonely coders in it one night. Maybe they’d tell their lonely coder friends. Maybe one of them would be the editor of Coder Magazine. Maybe he’d mention the music in the magazine, and a handful of coders would go look for the album at their local record store.

Maybe.

Instead, thanks to Internet marketing, Coulton’s music quickly found its intended audience. And the web made it easy for them to listen to, download, and share Coulton’s music on other coder sites and blogs.

Dallas Internet marketing connects you with targeted audiences (whether customers, clients, or fans) who are more likely to respond to your message and offerings. Through local search engine marketing, a tire company can more easily connect with folks in need of new tires. Through social media marketing, a Thai food restaurant can more easily offer discounts to folks who love green curry.

2. Good Content Will Get Shared

Coulton didn’t just benefit from the fact that he got his music in front of a crowd who was more likely to enjoy it than the average nightclub crowd. He benefited from the fact that the Slashdot crowd did like it, and eagerly spread the word about Code Monkey.

It’s similar to how the band OK Go become enormously popular (and financially independent) thanks to pair of catchy Youtube videos that went “viral,” and had a bigger marketing effect than traditional nightclub/radio/record store promotions ever could.

In both cases, it was the quality of the content itself that made the content spread like wildfire. The web just lowered production costs, made it easier to target specific audiences, and made it easy for people to share what they love.

In other words, Internet marketing allows your fans and customers to help do some of your marketing for you. And search engines love, love, love content that gets shared. They can’t get enough of it.

Obviously, great music is more likely to get shared around than most “content” created by businesses. But the principles still apply:

Invest in great web content, a compelling blog, and — of course — products or services that people love. Invest in Interactive marketing strategies that can put that content in front of folks who are more likely to be excited about it. See how quickly it all can grow.

Curious about exactly how much traffic high search engine rankings can drive to your site? To better understand why search engine optimization matters, let’s take a look how much traffic can be lost by doing it poorly.

A couple months ago, we talked about how “content farms” — websites like eHow.com that clog up the search results rankings with mass-produced, SEO-heavy articles — had caught the wrathful gaze of some of the search engines. In other words, if you build your entire interactive marketing strategy around gaming Google, you’re going to get burned.

Sure enough, Google wasn’t messing around. According to Forbes:

Here’s some plain, easy-to-understand proof that Google’s recent algorithm overhaul is doing exactly what it was meant to do: Traffic from the search engine to websites operated by content farms is way, way down.

The update, nicknamed Panda, was meant to prevent publishers that mass-produce shoddy, shallow articles from driving them to the top of Google search results using the tricks of search engine optimization (SEO). Sistrix, an SEO consultancy, has already determined that Panda stripped leading content farms of their high rankings in many keyword searches.

Statistics showed that Google-driven traffic for Demand’s sites had plummeted nearly 40 percent since the beginning of 2011, when the algorithm change kicked in. Answerbag.com led the way with an 80 percent drop in traffic. eHow.com lost nearly 29 percent of its traffic.

It’s an important lesson to learn about search engine optimization, and a guiding philosophy that our Dallas SEO specialists stick to here at Masterlink Interactive. Our approach to organic SEO is comprehensive, not gimmicky and vulnerable to devastating tweaks in search engine algorithms. We build websites that appeal to both site visitors and search engines — not just the latter, while effectively communicating your company’s strengths and capabilities to potential customers and clients.

Because the primary goal of all the search engines is to connect searchers with high quality websites and companies like your own. We just want to help you highlight what makes your company matter to your customers.

This includes elements like:

• An engaging, link-building company blog.

• Catchy, compelling web design and content that’s backed by thorough keyword research, and seamlessly integrates such keywords and phrases into the content.

• A commitment to local search optimization, and carving out a permanent presence in the spots (Google Maps and Places, Yelp, etc.) where potential smartphone-toting customers will look for you.

And since the ever-evolving ins and outs of search engine optimization still matter, we’ll track and make tweaks based on the day-to-day minutiae for you (let’s be honest—you probably have better things to do with your time).

So this is what happens when the main gatekeeper of the world’s information gets annoyed.

Google made a long-speculated major adjustment to their search algorithm—the way they calculate which websites get lucky enough to come up first from different search queries.

The search giant actually does this all the time, constantly making tweaks in order to (in the company’s words) “give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.”

The difference this time is that nearly 12 percent of all search queries will be effected by the change.

Think about that — of the billions and billions of Google searches made each and every day, an 11.8-percent swath (that adds up to, well, really high) now produce different search results than just last week.

The reason most likely stems from a mushrooming amount of engine-clogging “bad” content, most coming from what are nicknamed as “content farms”—sites like Demand Media and Huffington Post that dominate search results with thousands upon thousands of highly-optimized, questionable-quality articles (from sites like eHow.com). By at least one unique metric, the change works. Google just recently launched a “Personal Blocklist Chrome Extension” that allows web users to block unwanted search results, and the algorithm change has so far affected nearly 84 percent of the most-blocked sites.

According to CNN, the move has produce no shortage of hand-wringing from websites affected:

Many webmasters complained that traffic to their sites dropped dramatically overnight, and others expressed concern that they can’t adapt quickly enough to Google’s changes to its algorithm.

“Why is it that every single time the search engine result page starts to stabilize and sales return, Google has to throw a monkey wrench in the system again?” asked commenter backdraft7. “Hey Google, this is not fun anymore – YOU’RE KILLING OUR BUSINESSES!”

“My God. I just lost 40% of my traffic from Google today,” said commenter DickBaker. “Referrals from Yahoo, Bing, direct sources, and other sources are the same, but Google dropped like a rock.”

There are many legitimate ways content creators optimize their sites to rise to the top of Google’s results. But Google has been cracking down on what it regards as inappropriate attempts to do so: The company recently penalized Overstock.com and JC Penney in its search results after the companies were found to have set up fake websites that linked to their own, causing Google’s algorithm to rank them higher.

We’ve been talking about this a lot recently on the Masterlink blog. But the new confirmed Google algorithm change makes it worth driving the point home — fragile, gimmicky search engine optimization and Internet marketing strategies eventually fail more often than not, and aren’t worth the money you’d be investing in them.

Our more steady, comprehensive approach to SEO happens in two ways:

1. Because a high search engine ranking can, in fact, make a big difference for your bottom line, we’ll keep up with all the nips, tweaks, and changes in SEO. Your time is probably better spent running your core business than slavishly tracking the nitty gritty details of SEO.
2. We’ll employ a strategy that isn’t vulnerable to minor (yet devastating) Google tweaks. We’ll help you implement well-rounded SEO-boosting elements like a corporate blog. And we know which phrases and keywords searchers are looking for, and know how to fit them seamlessly into catchy, compelling content that highlights that valuable, customer-satisfying company you already run.

In other words, our SEO strategy is to highlight your top-notch products and services. Make sense?

Google values websites that customers value, and all these tweaks are really about is pushing the best, most valued websites and companies to the top of the search results, making it easy for potential clients and customers to find them.

Contact our teams of Dallas web design and SEO specialists for more information.