Have you ever heard about cloud link-building? We have trained a team of experts abroad, to focus on doing content spinning, authority sites, RSS feeds, SEO link-building, social media marketing, bookmarking, and much more.
MarCom's team manages building cloud linking around articles for locally based keywords and uses multiple IP addresses for a fast track. These strategies and tactics have been tested using the Caffeine beta since early Fall of 2009, and they are working beautifully with the Beta of Google's new Caffeine, the update to Google's algorithm.
Expanding the MarCom Los Angeles SEO team to other parts of the world allows us to focus on online marketing strategies for our clients, and integrating ways to build their business along with building brands.
Most of our clients are on page one of the search engines as a result of these cloud building and mashing strategies, along with the blogs, online newsletters, bookmarking sites such as DIGG and Delicious, and many other white hat link-building strategies.
Visit www.marcomnewmedia.com for more information and case histories of our client successes.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
Reputation Management is Crisis PR
What is online reputation management? It is what marketers and public relations pros used to call crisis management. Frequently being called "online reputation management" today, MarCom started seeing this challenge back around 2005. It was when many chief executive officers started seeing negative listings, comments or articles about them and/or their company’s products and services on the Internet.
Back then, about ten years ago, marketers spent their time training executives in major corporations on how to handle a crisis, but when the worldwide Web was born,things changed. And today, social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, a crisis can travel at the speed of light, and potentially put a company out of business overnight.
In those days CEOs and many company officers unwittingly responded to people in blogs or news forums and to journalists online – and often times their comments were perceived in a negative way. If anyone anywhere online would say bad things about a CEO or their company and products online, it showed up on page one of the search engines when the CEO's name and his company was searched for online. These kinds of complaints or bad reviews that were showing up in a search meant a loss of revenues, and in some cases, lost businesses period.
These days, most CEOs know better than to say bad things online. The problem being that anything you write on the worldwide Web remains on the worldwide Web. Reputation management services promise to highlight positive pages and bury offending sites deep in search results. Most reputation services work by tracking what's written about a client on the Web, then doing search engine optimization (SEO) and promoting the positive pages, thereby pushing damaging references off the first pages of search results.
Even worse, if you EVER had a bad rap sheet from a prior crime or offence that shows up on the Internet. In one case, a book was written about a group of men that were sent to jail for a crime. That book was reviewed in a national business magazine, and to this day it remains engrained on page one of Google and the Internet, mug shots and all. The bigger the website with a negative listing, the harder it is and longer it takes to remove it.
Today this is known as "reputation management" -- a job that typically falls upon marketing and PR people to make what these CEOs said vanish. Five years ago it only took a couple of months to “bury” negative comments online because Google was less sophisticated and there was less content out there. But then it all depends on the business category. Some categories have more content posted on the Web than others. As just one example, optimizing for "purple hearts" is going to be easier than "wireless technology" becaus therer is less out there about purple hearts.
Therefore, online reputation management was born to deal with a businessman, celebrity, or a politician's negative listings. In addition to using basic public relations strategies, SEO and link building became the way to solve these challenges.
The marketing and SEO firm must determine the new key messages for use online. Then they will use these optimum key words in all written content online and offline. That includes website copy, press materials, and optimized press releases that are posted on electronic wire services; syndicated articles for the Web; blogs and newsletters. And nowadays, we also use Facebook, Twitter and bookmark sites like DIGG, and Stumble Upon, to create links back to the client’s website pages with relevant content.
Within weeks negative listings will start to be pushed back off of Google’s first page, and by three to six months a company’s ranking by the search engines should be showing a significant increase in organic listings based on the key words used, and the negative listings will be pushed down on the pages of the se4arch engines, although they may never be completely gone.
Reputation management services have become mainstream because of the growth online. What took a couple of months to "fix" an issue in years past now takes more time, and a bigger team. We have trained and put people in place globally to assist in this effort. And since we have managed online reputation strategies for other clients too.
Today we use bigger teams to create more links faster, along with newer more sophisticated (and time consuming) tactics like short optimized video postings on YouTube, the syndication of many optimized content articles, and an array of interlinked websites and social media marketing platforms to create RSS mashups, hubspots, and a synergistic approach for moving negative listings back to the back pages on the Web.
Back then, about ten years ago, marketers spent their time training executives in major corporations on how to handle a crisis, but when the worldwide Web was born,things changed. And today, social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, a crisis can travel at the speed of light, and potentially put a company out of business overnight.
In those days CEOs and many company officers unwittingly responded to people in blogs or news forums and to journalists online – and often times their comments were perceived in a negative way. If anyone anywhere online would say bad things about a CEO or their company and products online, it showed up on page one of the search engines when the CEO's name and his company was searched for online. These kinds of complaints or bad reviews that were showing up in a search meant a loss of revenues, and in some cases, lost businesses period.
These days, most CEOs know better than to say bad things online. The problem being that anything you write on the worldwide Web remains on the worldwide Web. Reputation management services promise to highlight positive pages and bury offending sites deep in search results. Most reputation services work by tracking what's written about a client on the Web, then doing search engine optimization (SEO) and promoting the positive pages, thereby pushing damaging references off the first pages of search results.
Even worse, if you EVER had a bad rap sheet from a prior crime or offence that shows up on the Internet. In one case, a book was written about a group of men that were sent to jail for a crime. That book was reviewed in a national business magazine, and to this day it remains engrained on page one of Google and the Internet, mug shots and all. The bigger the website with a negative listing, the harder it is and longer it takes to remove it.
Today this is known as "reputation management" -- a job that typically falls upon marketing and PR people to make what these CEOs said vanish. Five years ago it only took a couple of months to “bury” negative comments online because Google was less sophisticated and there was less content out there. But then it all depends on the business category. Some categories have more content posted on the Web than others. As just one example, optimizing for "purple hearts" is going to be easier than "wireless technology" becaus therer is less out there about purple hearts.
Therefore, online reputation management was born to deal with a businessman, celebrity, or a politician's negative listings. In addition to using basic public relations strategies, SEO and link building became the way to solve these challenges.
The marketing and SEO firm must determine the new key messages for use online. Then they will use these optimum key words in all written content online and offline. That includes website copy, press materials, and optimized press releases that are posted on electronic wire services; syndicated articles for the Web; blogs and newsletters. And nowadays, we also use Facebook, Twitter and bookmark sites like DIGG, and Stumble Upon, to create links back to the client’s website pages with relevant content.
Within weeks negative listings will start to be pushed back off of Google’s first page, and by three to six months a company’s ranking by the search engines should be showing a significant increase in organic listings based on the key words used, and the negative listings will be pushed down on the pages of the se4arch engines, although they may never be completely gone.
Reputation management services have become mainstream because of the growth online. What took a couple of months to "fix" an issue in years past now takes more time, and a bigger team. We have trained and put people in place globally to assist in this effort. And since we have managed online reputation strategies for other clients too.
Today we use bigger teams to create more links faster, along with newer more sophisticated (and time consuming) tactics like short optimized video postings on YouTube, the syndication of many optimized content articles, and an array of interlinked websites and social media marketing platforms to create RSS mashups, hubspots, and a synergistic approach for moving negative listings back to the back pages on the Web.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Best Online Marketing Practices and a Case History
Today's marketers are asking about the value of social media marketing. As a Los Angeles social media marketing agency, we have researched this topic, and here are their top three questions:
1) Tell me what are the best practices of social media marketing?
2) What are the time management considerations with social media?
3) How can marketers measure the return on investment of social media marketing?
MarCom New Media has been doing social media networking since the beginning about six years ago. We believe that blogs and You Tube are the best practices thus far, although we are seeing pretty good results for corporate Facebook fan pages when done in conjunction with Pay per Click (PPC) ads on Facebook.
If you are still having a hard time believing that Twitter has much value other than for link-buliding links back to websites, join the club. However we do know for the food wagons, the construction workers who use it among their teams, and for crisis management, it works, oh and also for the emdia, and celebrities in the entertainment world. For many other businesses, maybe not.
Social media marketing is time consuming - period. This is where you need good writers, skilled at posting to the various social mediums. Social media may be best served when done by more junior staff members, so that senior management can take on strategies, marketing planning, meetings, and stressing about how we should be measuring it.
Last, many marketers are having a difficult time measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media marketing. In fact, nearly 61 percent of marketers surveyed said their organizations' ROI measurement practices are poor, and 34 percent stated they are "very poor."
It seems that historically, PR has also always had a reputation for been difficult to measure. PR professionals have used the number of press articles (quantitative) and the messages that were written up (qualitative) as methods of measurement in the past, and the reality is that now PR can be measured through onine tools as well.
We will soon start seeing improved measurement capabilities built right into the tools, as search and social media tools are now being improved radically. However, MarCom did a year-end report for one medical devices client in January of 2010 after a big six month push with online marketing. We used many of the measurement tools in the social media services that we have been using use. Here's a sample of what we accomplished during that six month period:
The Value of Social Media Marketing (SMM)
4,803 Links.
63+ blog posts; 90 videos.
20+ Articles each spun over 30 times and syndicated on Web.
10 press releases; 3 consumer, 1 doctor; 1 pharmacist newsletter.
210 Twitter followers; 140 Twitter posts; 2,275 links
114 Facebook friends; 100 posts; Facebook ad ¡V $200 per mo. = average 384 visitors to website. Average cost per month $224. Average cost per visit 60 cents (which is cheap for PPC).
20 Diggs; 20 del.icio.us and many more.
Resulting in over 75,000 measurable, trackable views and visits at a cost of $1.66 (our fees). This compares most favorably with the cost of pay per click at $2.00 per visit, minimum. This is a savings to Wiley of over $25,000 for the six month period July 1-Dec 25, or $4,250 in savings per month.
Increase of 49,000 website visitors in 2009
Additional 11,500 visitors to videos in 2009
Additional 6,000 plus visitors to press releases
Additional 25,000 visitors to blog in 2009
6,412 additional visitors to articles in 2009
Additional 6 to 8,000 visitors to press releases in 2009
ADDITIONAL VISITORS 2009 vs. 2008: 105,912
1) Tell me what are the best practices of social media marketing?
2) What are the time management considerations with social media?
3) How can marketers measure the return on investment of social media marketing?
MarCom New Media has been doing social media networking since the beginning about six years ago. We believe that blogs and You Tube are the best practices thus far, although we are seeing pretty good results for corporate Facebook fan pages when done in conjunction with Pay per Click (PPC) ads on Facebook.
If you are still having a hard time believing that Twitter has much value other than for link-buliding links back to websites, join the club. However we do know for the food wagons, the construction workers who use it among their teams, and for crisis management, it works, oh and also for the emdia, and celebrities in the entertainment world. For many other businesses, maybe not.
Social media marketing is time consuming - period. This is where you need good writers, skilled at posting to the various social mediums. Social media may be best served when done by more junior staff members, so that senior management can take on strategies, marketing planning, meetings, and stressing about how we should be measuring it.
Last, many marketers are having a difficult time measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media marketing. In fact, nearly 61 percent of marketers surveyed said their organizations' ROI measurement practices are poor, and 34 percent stated they are "very poor."
It seems that historically, PR has also always had a reputation for been difficult to measure. PR professionals have used the number of press articles (quantitative) and the messages that were written up (qualitative) as methods of measurement in the past, and the reality is that now PR can be measured through onine tools as well.
We will soon start seeing improved measurement capabilities built right into the tools, as search and social media tools are now being improved radically. However, MarCom did a year-end report for one medical devices client in January of 2010 after a big six month push with online marketing. We used many of the measurement tools in the social media services that we have been using use. Here's a sample of what we accomplished during that six month period:
The Value of Social Media Marketing (SMM)
4,803 Links.
63+ blog posts; 90 videos.
20+ Articles each spun over 30 times and syndicated on Web.
10 press releases; 3 consumer, 1 doctor; 1 pharmacist newsletter.
210 Twitter followers; 140 Twitter posts; 2,275 links
114 Facebook friends; 100 posts; Facebook ad ¡V $200 per mo. = average 384 visitors to website. Average cost per month $224. Average cost per visit 60 cents (which is cheap for PPC).
20 Diggs; 20 del.icio.us and many more.
Resulting in over 75,000 measurable, trackable views and visits at a cost of $1.66 (our fees). This compares most favorably with the cost of pay per click at $2.00 per visit, minimum. This is a savings to Wiley of over $25,000 for the six month period July 1-Dec 25, or $4,250 in savings per month.
Increase of 49,000 website visitors in 2009
Additional 11,500 visitors to videos in 2009
Additional 6,000 plus visitors to press releases
Additional 25,000 visitors to blog in 2009
6,412 additional visitors to articles in 2009
Additional 6 to 8,000 visitors to press releases in 2009
ADDITIONAL VISITORS 2009 vs. 2008: 105,912
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Has Social Media Marketing Replaced Public Relations?
We have entered a new era of what has been called public relations over the years. I remember when PR became corporate communications, then marketing communications, and now many are saying that they believe PR has become social media.
I believe that PR is here to stay - although it is not the old school publicist in a telephone booth dialing the media to share the latest news tip on the street. It has changed from one way publishing and broadcasting to two way conversations.
Over the last year and a half, more than 300 newspapers have folded. Around eight magazines with a circulation of 1 million or more stopped their presses, while more than magazines completely shut down. 600 top-tier publishing employees were laid off. In the radio business alone, more than 10,000 jobs were lost. Bankruptcies have overtaken 100 plus television stations after their parent companies filed Chapter 11 bankrupsy.
It is no surprise. 2010 started out as the year of transformation. Whether it is due to the economy, in part, or just a social uprising - we are in early stages of a re-engineering of business as we know it, driven by social networking which has almost replaced the traditional media. (Source: Vocus Media Research Group.)
Today, people interact online in real-time dialogues with each other. Businesses now speak to customers with the hopes of influencing them. And people listen watch and read what other peoople have to say about products and services. Full disclosure. No longer can companies hide behind brand messaging.
However, marketing and public relations do go hand in hand with online strategies today, helping to launch and maintain social media campaigns. As a Los Angeles public relations agency, MarCom will always believe in synergistic campaigns and using the foundation built by yesterday’s public relations strategies.
As of today, 65 percent of marketers have only been involved with social media marketing for a few months or less.; 56 percent, are using social media for six plus hours every week; and only one in three – do social media for more than 11 hours per week. 85 percent of marketers indicated that the number-one advantage of social media marketing is generating exposure for their business.
For more information on MarCom's social media marketing services, call 323.650.2838.
I believe that PR is here to stay - although it is not the old school publicist in a telephone booth dialing the media to share the latest news tip on the street. It has changed from one way publishing and broadcasting to two way conversations.
Over the last year and a half, more than 300 newspapers have folded. Around eight magazines with a circulation of 1 million or more stopped their presses, while more than magazines completely shut down. 600 top-tier publishing employees were laid off. In the radio business alone, more than 10,000 jobs were lost. Bankruptcies have overtaken 100 plus television stations after their parent companies filed Chapter 11 bankrupsy.
It is no surprise. 2010 started out as the year of transformation. Whether it is due to the economy, in part, or just a social uprising - we are in early stages of a re-engineering of business as we know it, driven by social networking which has almost replaced the traditional media. (Source: Vocus Media Research Group.)
Today, people interact online in real-time dialogues with each other. Businesses now speak to customers with the hopes of influencing them. And people listen watch and read what other peoople have to say about products and services. Full disclosure. No longer can companies hide behind brand messaging.
However, marketing and public relations do go hand in hand with online strategies today, helping to launch and maintain social media campaigns. As a Los Angeles public relations agency, MarCom will always believe in synergistic campaigns and using the foundation built by yesterday’s public relations strategies.
As of today, 65 percent of marketers have only been involved with social media marketing for a few months or less.; 56 percent, are using social media for six plus hours every week; and only one in three – do social media for more than 11 hours per week. 85 percent of marketers indicated that the number-one advantage of social media marketing is generating exposure for their business.
For more information on MarCom's social media marketing services, call 323.650.2838.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Los Angeles SEO Company Goes Local
If you want to get a good grasp of where search engine optimization is going in 2010 think like a realtor. Location, location, location. Our Los Angeles search engine marketing guru Mike Keesling has been tracking the just-this-week-launched Google Caffeine algorithm. And due to the work we started doing with the Beta back in the Fall - all of our clients are being ranked high up in page one of Google.
Mike says this year search engine marketing will become increasingly more important as far as Google is concerned. That is why, in both the second and third option of Maintenance SEO, we make provisions for building cloud linking around articles for locally based keywords.
Hidden in the discussion of what the Caffeine update to the Google algorithm means is that location is going to be a huge factor in terms of what results get returned on searches. Here's why.
All search engines are becoming more and more personalized. What that means is that if you live in Los Angeles and are searching for a hair salon (for instance) you will start seeing more and more Los Angeles based hair salons in the search results as we move into the New Year.
What this affords for the Los Angeles SEO companies like MarCom New Media is a tremendous opportunity by using Google Map API's and other localized search optimization tactics to totally dominate the results for your main keyword phrase (Los Angeles social media marketing in our example) for anyone searching for social media marketing firms who work from the Los Angeles area, as well as for anyone outside of Los Angeles searching for the phrase "Los Angeles Social media marketing firm."
This may be the last time there is a level playing field between small business and big business to dominate search rankings.
Mike says this year search engine marketing will become increasingly more important as far as Google is concerned. That is why, in both the second and third option of Maintenance SEO, we make provisions for building cloud linking around articles for locally based keywords.
Hidden in the discussion of what the Caffeine update to the Google algorithm means is that location is going to be a huge factor in terms of what results get returned on searches. Here's why.
All search engines are becoming more and more personalized. What that means is that if you live in Los Angeles and are searching for a hair salon (for instance) you will start seeing more and more Los Angeles based hair salons in the search results as we move into the New Year.
What this affords for the Los Angeles SEO companies like MarCom New Media is a tremendous opportunity by using Google Map API's and other localized search optimization tactics to totally dominate the results for your main keyword phrase (Los Angeles social media marketing in our example) for anyone searching for social media marketing firms who work from the Los Angeles area, as well as for anyone outside of Los Angeles searching for the phrase "Los Angeles Social media marketing firm."
This may be the last time there is a level playing field between small business and big business to dominate search rankings.
Monday, November 30, 2009
The Paradign Shift in Online Marketing
We are in the earliest stages of a massive paradigm shift among the corporate world and our institutions - and it is all being driven by social media marketing and the Web.
Ie seems like social networking has been tagged as a better way to work. Many experts agree it will become an essential utility to do business, so the faster businesses use social media tools, the better they will do in the New Year. But if your website isn't optimized properly for the search engines, it won't help you on your Google rankings.
In the past, we didn't necessarily think that Twitter was a great of a corporate tool as other networks like Facebook. But now we can see, that both have their places - especially with re-Tweeting capabilities, and tiny urls which fit the 140 character format. We have set up corporate accounts and ghostblog, ghostTwitter, and have corporate fan pages for all of our clients. We also do corporate social bookmarking of content that we write and post all over the Web in spots like DIGG, StumbleUpon, and others.
Our clients' YouTube videos are a smashing success. Check out www.YouTube.com/Bioidenticals where we have more than 90 videos for client T.S. Wiley, who sells the Wiley Protocol bioidenticals. The fact is, all of these online social media marketing tools are great for content building and linking back to websites, which ultimately gives you first page results in the search engines. But you must know how to link properly.
The 2010 New Year - some time in January with a national roll-out - is when Caffeine launches, a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. So far we are seeing great results for our clients rankings with the Beta version.
What's more, Google's Social Search is a new program that integrates content from a user’s social network into their search results so they can easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other information from within their own social networking groups.
If there's relevant web content written by people in your circle when you sign into Google, it will show up at the bottom of your search results under an area called "Results from people in your social circle." This means that search marketing is going to become more targeted to individuals, as people seriously organize into groups and communities on the Web. It is also becomming more localized.
Overall, today people just want direct communication with the brands, products and services they like and uchoose to use. People want messages that address their individual needs, even if it is only 140 characters in Twitter.
The era of mo more mass marketing is over.
Call Los Angeles SEO company, MarCom New Media at 323.650.2838 for more information on how we can help your business.
Ie seems like social networking has been tagged as a better way to work. Many experts agree it will become an essential utility to do business, so the faster businesses use social media tools, the better they will do in the New Year. But if your website isn't optimized properly for the search engines, it won't help you on your Google rankings.
In the past, we didn't necessarily think that Twitter was a great of a corporate tool as other networks like Facebook. But now we can see, that both have their places - especially with re-Tweeting capabilities, and tiny urls which fit the 140 character format. We have set up corporate accounts and ghostblog, ghostTwitter, and have corporate fan pages for all of our clients. We also do corporate social bookmarking of content that we write and post all over the Web in spots like DIGG, StumbleUpon, and others.
Our clients' YouTube videos are a smashing success. Check out www.YouTube.com/Bioidenticals where we have more than 90 videos for client T.S. Wiley, who sells the Wiley Protocol bioidenticals. The fact is, all of these online social media marketing tools are great for content building and linking back to websites, which ultimately gives you first page results in the search engines. But you must know how to link properly.
The 2010 New Year - some time in January with a national roll-out - is when Caffeine launches, a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. So far we are seeing great results for our clients rankings with the Beta version.
What's more, Google's Social Search is a new program that integrates content from a user’s social network into their search results so they can easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other information from within their own social networking groups.
If there's relevant web content written by people in your circle when you sign into Google, it will show up at the bottom of your search results under an area called "Results from people in your social circle." This means that search marketing is going to become more targeted to individuals, as people seriously organize into groups and communities on the Web. It is also becomming more localized.
Overall, today people just want direct communication with the brands, products and services they like and uchoose to use. People want messages that address their individual needs, even if it is only 140 characters in Twitter.
The era of mo more mass marketing is over.
Call Los Angeles SEO company, MarCom New Media at 323.650.2838 for more information on how we can help your business.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Is Your Website Optimized for the Search Engines?
Our resident SEO expert Mike Keesling was doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when Pacific Islands Reservations had one website in 1996. With 12 websites today, we have helped them maintain a top ten ranking in Google, MSN and Yahoo since.
If you are a small business you need a website with interactive content that will attract your customers while they are online seeking what they want. When your potential customers type in the key words or phrases associated with your products and services, MarCom will help get your site ranked to come up within the first page of the results in Google or Yahoo.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how people will find your website and it's also a way to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your site. When people use search engines to find what they are looking for they type in key words or phrases. MarCom uses a custom analysis will tell us which keywords your customers use, plus those that your competitors have used.
Most web designers do not install Meta, Title or Alt tags properly. This is critical to the search engines and your customers finding your website. One example is that sites with flash pages are not able to be read by Google, so avoiud them. You can use embedded flash, but make sure there's text on each page of your site. Content is king for the search engines.
Optimized tags and content with the proper key words we will make sure every page on your website is optimized properly. More subject-specific content means better qualified traffic. This text is optimized if the search engines can find it via keyword-density.
For more information on search engine optimization, contact MarCom at 323.650.2838 or go to http://www.marcomnewmedia.com/
If you are a small business you need a website with interactive content that will attract your customers while they are online seeking what they want. When your potential customers type in the key words or phrases associated with your products and services, MarCom will help get your site ranked to come up within the first page of the results in Google or Yahoo.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how people will find your website and it's also a way to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your site. When people use search engines to find what they are looking for they type in key words or phrases. MarCom uses a custom analysis will tell us which keywords your customers use, plus those that your competitors have used.
Most web designers do not install Meta, Title or Alt tags properly. This is critical to the search engines and your customers finding your website. One example is that sites with flash pages are not able to be read by Google, so avoiud them. You can use embedded flash, but make sure there's text on each page of your site. Content is king for the search engines.
Optimized tags and content with the proper key words we will make sure every page on your website is optimized properly. More subject-specific content means better qualified traffic. This text is optimized if the search engines can find it via keyword-density.
For more information on search engine optimization, contact MarCom at 323.650.2838 or go to http://www.marcomnewmedia.com/
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