The Ocean Agency

Search engine optimization is extremely important for your business as 95% of all site traffic from search engines comes from page one results (icrossing).

While the importance of being on page one for your business has not changed, social media has shaken up how you get there. As social networking has increased, search engines are forced to pay attention to tweets, (public) facebook updates, forum discussions, Youtube videos etc. The list goes on.

Via

In Today’s web, Social media matters to the search engines,  which makes optimizing your businesses’ social media presence a top priority. Recently, Brian Solis wrote a fascinating article about optimizing your social media presence in order to improve your search engine positioning.

25% of search results, for the world’s top 20 brands link to user generated content (Socialnomics July, 2009).  This number is bound to get higher as social network interaction increases.

Facebook has just surpassed Google as the number one traffic driver on the web.

From these statistics it would be easy to paint a portrait of a world where Facebook could eat the entire web, and SERP is completely determined by social content. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves — Posting items about your business to Facebook and Twitter everyday is not enough to rank well on search engines, or communicate your message to your target audience.

Good content that encourages interaction and sharing is now more important that ever to your search engine ranking position.  Spending time crafting resourceful content that is engaging and shareable, combined with patience, hard work, and clean coding will get you to the top of the search engines.

Curating content, both your own, and content that offers value to your target audience syndicated expertly on social media channels is a necessary addition to any SEO campaign.

How is your business or SEO company integrating social media  to improve your search enginge rankings?

interactive marketing companies are notorious for buzz words.

With the emergence and mass-adoption of social media, marketing buzz words are now on steroids. So, here at the Ocean Agency, we thought we would help out business owners by translating marketing buzz words and break down how they can improve your business, minus the marketing speak.

1) Augmented Reality

Definition: Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.” (Wikipedia)

Our Definition: Mixing technology into physical real-world experiences

Example:

Does augmented reality make sense for you business? Possibly.

Here is one example:

If you’re a restaurant, you could have the food items on the menu reveal themselves in all 3-D glory.

Obviously, augmented reality is expensive to produce, but the future lies in digital experiences mixed in with consumers physical spaces that tell a compelling story, or, more importantly, offer some kind of value.

Biggest take away for your businesses: Incorporate technologies that improve the experience of your customers.

2) Geo-Location

Definition:” Geo-location is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other.” (Wikipedia)

Our Definition: Identifying and targeting  customers based on their location.

Examples: Foursquare location targeted specials and advertisements:

Does geo-location make sense for your business? Probably.

This one is definitely living up to the hype thus far. With the expansion of social networking on mobile devices, people are sharing their location data at an increasing rate. Businesses can create relevant ads on these platforms that aren’t intrusive.

With this data businesses can help consumers make decisions, save money, and build brand loyalty. A win-win for both brands and consumers.

Something to keep in mind:

Recently, Foursquare has partnered with a variety of major media outlets like BravoTV and the New York Times. The only incentive for users from these partnerships?

A Bravo TV or New York Times Olympic Badge.

These are great incentives for Foursquare addicted PR, communication and markerting types, but in order to encourage mainstream adoption the incentives will have to increase.

Biggest take-away for your business: Make your place of businesses a true destination. People share their location to gain incentives and because it says something about them. Ask yourself this question: Would people want to tell the world that they are at your place of business? Why? Why not?

3) Brand Utility:

Definition: “The brand utility method is concerned less with feature sets and more with functionality. How can your products make the lives of consumers better? That is the question that a brand utility advertising campaign seeks to answer.”  (Printing and Advertising)

Our Definition: Improving the lives of your customers to inspire loyalty in your customer base.

Example:

ING Direct.

If ING Direct is a bank, why does it have cafes in major cities in the US?

Brand Utility.

The ING Direct cafe offers free wifi, $1 coffee/tea and $1 pastries, in addition to employees who know all about ING Direct products.

They improve the lives of their customers by offering discounted coffee and food and even give those with an ING direct account free coffe or tea on Fridays. The ING direct cafe concept is a perfect example of brand utility, and it makes incentives offered by other banks look lame/miniscule in comparison.

Biggest take away for your business: If you improve the lives of your customers, they will thank you publicly and keep coming back.

What can you do to improve the lives of your customers in a way that fits with your overall brand message?

Alright, now it’s your turn. Business owners:

Would you use these tools in your marketing plan? Why or why not?

So this week, our Chicago SEO company made a big change. Really, it’s not that big, but it has made a big difference in how we think about writing for SEO and for communities.

Until this week, our department had been using Yahoo! Messenger, which incorporates a lot of features that we didn’t really need (stock ticker, news, Y! Voice) and was invasive to our PCs and workflow.  Our manager Timothy suggested the switch to Yammer, which our department promptly adopted. And… pardon the creative spelling here… we loooooooove it.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it functions similarly to Twitter: you update your own status, and it is shared in a feed. But you must have a company email address to join, and only people from your company are included in your network and can see your updates. Your company’s feed is private. Yammer also has a desktop application, so you can keep it open in a window and view your coworkers’ updates. For us as a company, this is incredibly useful for two major reasons:

Of interest to interactive marketing agencies everywhere, a report was released yesterday which found that only 8% of online teens use Twitter:

What makes this even more interesting is that 93% of teens are online:

These figures illustrate something really important about teenagers: They care about their friends and their actual physical network. Moreover, psychology has taught us that many teenagers) are terrible at planning ahead and thinking about the future. They live in the moment and with the consequences. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that is most involved in future planning and decision making, does not fully develop until your early 20s.

What does this have to do with “public” information sharing, like Twitter or blogging?

1) In order to blog or tweet, you inherently have to believe that you have something remotely valuable to say. This requires both a sense of personal identity and self-esteem, both of which are developing during the teen years.

2) Tweeting and blogging are linked to “personal branding” more than anything else. Personal branding requires foresight, introspection and networking with people who aren’t your “real” friends. If teens are deeply focused on physical friendship and developing a personal identity, the link between Twitter, blogs and personal branding might be seen as “lame” or inauthentic.

If teens don’t tweet or blog, how do you target teens with an interactive marketing campaign?

At our Chicago SEO company, we content developers spend hours struggling over the perfect words for the homepage of websites we create. Organization and layout are crucial, and we consider every possible connotation of each selected word. To put an exclamation point or not can be a serious point (pun intended) of contention! And all this careful attention pays off– we nail down the message in just a few sentences right there on the first page that the average visitor sees.

But what about the inside pages? As a content developer or business owner working on a site, do you still consider every word carefully? Do you monitor the consistency of tone and message closely? As views of a page decrease, does your attention to its content, too? It shouldn’t.

A complete website will have finely-tuned content on every page. Here’s why: SEO companies know that usable, optimized content drives an SEO campaign and that users, like Google, recognize quality content.

Social media, and Twitter in particular, are big here in Chicago.

According to HubSpot’s “Top Twitter Cities” Chicago is number 3 in the world, behind London and Los Angeles.

Now, this Hubspot grade is not about the number of Twitter users, but based on the the number of “elite” Twitter users in an area.

What does this mean for your Chicago business? Connecting with those in the Chicago social media world is a great way to generate word of mouth about your business or product. Investing time in social networking is more and more important as social networking activity continues to grow. It has recently overtaken porn as the 1 activity for people on the web.

When you look at the top 50 Chicago Twitter users you see that they are not just marketers, PR people, or advertisers. They are the folks that are innovators,  journalists, publications, and brands that truly have a pulse on the City.

No longer is social media some new or experimental format, it is the media.

As business in Chicago, social media presents itself as a giant opportunity to expand your business. With an accurate plan and measurable objectives the time to act is now.

As a small to medium sized interactive marketing agency in Chicago,we have an advantage over larger firms: Our internal communication.

Interns can talk directly with the principals, a link building specialist can work directly with a coder. As someone who focuses on social media, I can work directly with our design team to make sure that social applications are built into the initial design.

We are always looking to improve our internal as well as external communication, and here some new(ish) social media tools that will help:

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great way to keep track of inspiration, everywhere you go. At work, we are constantly interrupted and lose our train of thought easily, never forget that website you meant to blog about or that snipet of code ever again.

2) Group Posterous/Tumblr

People respond to humor and creativity. Setting up group Posterous and Tumblr accounts are great ways to encourage creative interaction among employees, and  show some personality. Showing  personality is one of the first steps to building online engagement with potential customers.

3) Teambox

Like Google Wave, Teambox has set out to improve the way we collaborate. Unlike Google Wave it isn’t creepy. Teambox is great for assigning tasks, organizing information, and for group collaboration without any of the clutter. Also, all of your information is stored securely in the “cloud” so you don’t have to worry about jump drives etc.

What online tools do you use to improve your internal communcation?

We give interactive marketing advice to companies in Chicago and all over the country. Of course, the Ocean Agency is more than happy to help with interactive marketing strategy, social media guidelines, and with social business design. This is an example of where we get our inspiration from:

Today, Cisco has released findings from its latest study about how business use social media to colloberate and interact with customers.

What is so special about this study?

1) The process:

The study utilized qualitative and not just quantitative methods. By using in depth interviews by graduate students and professors from universities all over the world, the data is espcially robust and reliable.

2) The findings:

Companies need to integrate their new media efforts with internal IT professionals, and that internal social media use needs to be more effectively organized and regulated.

IT professionals? Regulation of social media efforts? What does this mean for your business?

If you’re a business owner, social media is tantalizing. For free, you can set up a profile on a variety of different networks and have your products reach a larger customer base than ever before. All you have to do is make something viral, talk to the right influencers, and watch your sales time go through the roof!

While social media experts and consultants may tell you to “crush it” , become a “trust agent” or harness the power of the “groundswell” they generally underestimate  the time, investment, and strategy that goes into effective social media marketing, PR, and branding.

This post is inspired by an experiment by @VanessaMiemis, author of the emergent by design blog. She asked her followers to write a post, entitled What I’ve Learned About Twitter, and then create a discussion around it. This is my contribution.

I’ll break this post down into three sections: What I’ve learned about individual Twitter use, What I’ve learned about using Twitter for small business, and what I’ve learned about using Twitter for larger corporations and well known brands.