This weekend the Kent County Sheriff Department posted a recruitment video to their Facebook page. The video was supposed to be a 20 second clip inviting people to apply for 911 openings. Kate, the woman in the video, became a little camera shy and the recording session had almost an hour worth of footage and bloopers. Joel, their savvy social media guy, decided to create a video that blended Kate's professional footage and some of her mistakes. While the department's overall engagement is ... Read More
Learn WordPress With These 20+ Training Courses and Resources
When I picked up my new SUV last summer, the dealership tried to give me a quick overview of the dashboard and options available. They had me for the first five minutes and then I completely lost interest and just wanted to drive off into the sunset with my fancy new ride. Sadly that training failure isn’t an isolated experience for me or anyone else. For training to work well, the trainer needs to be knowledgeable, structured, patient, and have the ability to apply their skills to ... Read More
Digging Deeper Into WordPress SEO Tools
A few weeks ago I published an article about maximizing SEO efforts in WordPress. I had promised a follow up post to cover additional features like automatically populating meta titles and descriptions, configuring the permalink structure, integrating Webmaster Tools, and creating XML sitemaps. Today we're digging deeper into WordPress SEO tools and covering all those additional SEO goodies. Don't worry, I won't go so far into each topic that I lose you. We'll go just deep enough to get your ... Read More
Friday’s Marketing Roundup: Good Reads for March 14th
Happy Friday! We're back again with a quick update on this week's interesting articles on WordPress, SEO, social media, and usability. It's been a bit of an action packed week, so I have a few more links that normal. The WPwatercooler continued to mix up education and entertainment for online viewers on Monday and two days later Sucuri further educated and protected the world of CMS with an excellent article on recent brute force attacks. On Thursday Carrie Dils launched out a new Genesis ... Read More
Social Media Best Practices
Social media best practices simply equate to playing by the rules, believing in social karma, making nice with those around you. In a way, it’s kind of like preschool meets high school. You need to listen and learn the rules before you can be one of the popular kids. Our Top Social Media Best Practices Friday Follow (#FF) Twitter users that you respect and value as leaders or friends Do not misuse Twitter hashtags or you'll use not only lose followers, you could be booted from ... Read More
Social Media Mistakes: Don’t Be “That Guy”
Social media mistakes are unintentional blunders that are typically made by very well intentioned people. Even with all the free information on the internet, a large number of people jump into social media without knowing the basic rules of engagement. In some cases, these mistakes are made by people who claim to be social media experts. For those of us who have who live and breath social media every day, it is painful to watch and even more painful to see unsuspecting companies pay for ... Read More
Rocking the Music World with WordPress Websites
The music industry was once a place of creativity and expression. This world of pitch, rhythm, and sound has morphed into a world of independence where artists can produce music without labels and where marketing and self-promotion is within the reach of every artist. Artists are now free to boycott major brands, interact with fans via Twitter, and promote their gigs via Facebook. The negative side of this new found independence is the old misperception of “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”. ... Read More
Social Media Isn’t Just a Buzz Word
For the last few years social media has been the talk of the internet. Websites like Quora and Pinterest have become the Cinderella stories of the tech world. What originally started out as a novelty, has now become an integral part of SEO and content marketing tactics. Everyone wants to be seen on these social networking websites or be heard talking about how cool they are to use for marketing. My Travels Within the World of Social Media My social media experience started with Facebook. ... Read More
Social Media is About the Shoes
Social media is everywhere and everyone thinks that he/she is an expert. The local dry cleaner, your lawyer or dentist, even the defunct SEO agency. These days everyone is into social media. Even my mother-in-law. But Are All These People Really Experts and Can They Truly Execute a Social Media Campaign? Well I think many agencies and people are just natural social media experts. Take my client Detroit Garden Works for example. Deborah, the owner, is a self-taught blogger and she is great at ... Read More
The Magic Formula of Great SEO
This weekend I looked back at SEO related statistics for a B2B website I launched in November of 2009. A full year has passed and I wanted to see the progress this company made over a twelve-month period. After launching the new WordPress website, the client retained me to work on their internet marketing efforts. It helped free up time for the client, it gave their internet marketing a cohesiveness it would not have had otherwise, and it gave me time to nurture my new baby. I believe it was ... Read More
Detroit 2020 Uses Social Media to Unify, Inspire, and Act
Last night WXYZ-TV launched a new initiative called Detroit 2020. The tag line is “Unify Inspire Act”. It is a news program and Internet marketing campaign designed to capture the public’s attention and focus it on the positive aspects of Detroit and the future of Southeastern Michigan. More specifically, where we will be in the year 2020. I cannot tell you how this news series and their social media outreach have touched me and so many other people in the metro Detroit area. I was privileged ... Read More
Do Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers Really Matter?
Facebook likes and Twitter followers do not equal success. If you are a fly-by-night, wannabee internet marketing consultant, then yes, by all means, use Facebook likes and Twitter followers to measure the success of your online marketing efforts. Otherwise, dig deeper to see if your social media efforts are worth the time and money spent. Social media is about engaging with your audience, increasing brand awareness, and providing value to the visitors who land upon your Facebook page or ... Read More
For Detroit, Social Media Empowers Us
I’m sitting at the #140Conf Detroit conference at the Filmore in downtown Detroit. I’m a geek who lives in the burbs amongst subdivisions so coming to busy Detroit always pushes me outside my comfort zone. I was just in Detroit just last month for TEDxDetroit, so Woodward Avenue should not freak me out. Yet no matter how cool my GPS lady is, driving around unknown streets in rush hour traffic does make me uneasy. But then I arrive and as soon as I’m at the venue and I sit, I am at ease. I ... Read More
Ten Steps to Quality Link Building and Strong Organic SEO
Whenever I create a new website for a client, I always tell them the website is only the core foundation of strong SEO. Strong SEO requires a solid, well planned, and long-term link building campaign. Interestingly enough, as I prepare for a live Q&A sessions for my friends over at JuJuQ on the subject, I found myself an email to a client nagging him about building inbound links for a brand new website we launched last Wednesday. Inbound links are a huge part of SEO and since I’m an ... Read More
When the Secret Service Goes After Social Media Misfits
Social media is not for everyone and the events of the last few days are a classic example of why this statement is true. Over the weekend a poll was released on Facebook that questioned the public’s desire to have someone kill President Obama. Yes, as amazing as it is, this story is true. Facebook responded quickly and shutdown both the poll and the third party application used to generate it. While some may dismiss this as just pure silliness, it is not. It is not only a very sad display of ... Read More
9/11 Remembered Through the Eyes of Social Media
I was sitting by my computer when the phone rang. My sister was calling my office in the middle of a workday, which was very odd. Did you hear was all I remember her saying and then silence – utter silence. I had not heard about the 9/11 attacks and quite frankly I almost did not believe her. I tried to access CNN’s website, but our Internet lines were jammed with activity and my screen stood in an abyss of grayness. I was completely cut off from the world or at least this is how I felt. I ... Read More
MySpace Proposes to iLike
Prior to launching my own Internet marketing company, I worked for an ERP software developer for almost a decade. I loved the company and the people, but was amazed at the industry. I watched in disbelief as Y2K came and went, and countless ERP software vendors evaporated through my ten year stint. As I transferred myself fulltime into search engine optimization, social media, and web design, I thought this would change. I thought these acquisition crazy companies were just ERP software ... Read More
Facebook Agrees to Acquire FriendFeed
The world of social media is a buzz today as social networking giant Facebook announces the acquisition of FriendFeed. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams. "Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our ... Read More
Users Revolt in Response to Recent DDoD Attacks
Last week was a rough week for the world of social media. Social networking sites from Twitter to Facebook were sluggish or taken down due to a denial of service attach, also know as DDoS. While some may dismiss these short-term issues, others are taking a closer look on the public’s reaction. While this last week put strain on the social media giants, it was a blessing in disguise for us Internet marketing consultants. As the world reacted to the momentary lose of Facebook and Twitter ... Read More
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