A blog, adored by the search engines for its frequent and ever-changing content and loved equally by readers for the same reason, is a must have for any individual and business. With that said, most small businesses push their blog to the bottom of their to-do list.

We just stumbled across this awesome interview of Seth Godin and Tom Peters on blogging and why you–yes, you–should be blogging even if no one is reading.

If you’re ready to start blogging but aren’t sure how start with WordPress.com. The blogging platform is entirely free and be sure to visit the WordPress support forums if you have any questions or issues. You can also contact Cement Marketing, we specialize in WordPress and develop all of our websites in WordPress.

So much so, that we now communicate with each other at lightening speed and in ways we wouldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. We are searching and socializing amidst a sea of information. For individuals it’s entertaining and exciting but for brands and marketers, the new Internet can be an overwhelming space. The questions are many, one of which is, “How will my customers find me in this sea of information, how can I rise to the top? And when they do find me, how can I make a connection?”

The answers aren’t easy and there is no quick mix. But with a little bit of research and the right guidance, you’ll find yours.

——

Come to Wild Goose Creative on Wednesday, June 30th at 6:00 pm to hear Cement Marketing’s Alaina Sheer speak on Finding Your Virtual Mix.  The event is free and open to the public. And the drinks are on us!

Our attendees walked away armed with new Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and guidance on exactly how to execute a social media campaign and a little extra sway in their steps.

Testimonials coming soon, but until then check out our photos on Flickr.

There are still a few seats left for the Sway Search Engine Optimization Workshop. During the SEO Workshop attendees will be shown the ins and outs of search marketing, from keyword research to launching a search marketing  campaign.

Register for the Sway Search Marketing Workshop now.

After day two wraps up all of the Sway graduates will be heading upstairs from Wild Goose Creative to the Cement Marketing offices for a Happy Hour. We’d love to see you there.

What: Sway Social Workshop Happy Hour
Who: Everyone and anyone
When: Friday, April 23rd – 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Directions: Click here for directions to the Cement Marketing offices.

The new site successfully organizes the massive amount of content in a compelling way, leading the user through the story of organ and tissue donation from why, who and how the issue touches so many thousands of lives here in Ohio. Built entirely in WordPress, the site also boasts complete social media integration, from social sharing features to dynamic featured blog post generation and a Twitter stream – the client can update every area of the site with ease.

In just the first week, the new Lifeline of Ohio site has seen over 80 comments from active readers. And an early look at Lifeline of Ohio’s analytics already show dramatic improvements in user experience. On average visitors are spending more time on the site, viewing three times as many pages, and thanks to initial social media efforts by Lifeline of Ohio on Facebook and Twitter, the number of unique visitors has jumped by 30%.

We expect that number to grow as Cement Marketing continues playing an advisory and strategic role in Lifeline of Ohio’s social media efforts.

Please explore the new Lifeline of Ohio website and Facebook fan page and please, register to become an organ and tissue donor.

]]> http://cementmarketing.com/social-media-case-study/feed/ 1 http://cementmarketing.com/spring-speaking-engagements/ http://cementmarketing.com/spring-speaking-engagements/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:30:17 +0000 alaina http://www.cementmarketing.com/?p=337 By Alaina Sheer
Chief Content Strategist

Whether I am speaking one-on-one with a potential client, typically a marketing manager or business owner, or to a larger audience, typically a room filled with the latter, I use the experience to improve my translation skills. [Hint: kicking up your shoes and letting the sun shine in always make this process a less painful.]

Boots aside, making sense of all of this “search and social stuff” isn’t for the faint of heart.

But, invariably, after a little bit of on-the-spot investigation into keywords or competitor strategies, I figure it out. I have solved a riddle and found an avenue where social or search marketing could transform their bottom line.

When I relay the idea or my discovery their faces light up. There’s a visible click and it hits them; any remaining skepticism washing away. That’s the moment I love the most, the moment when the translation succeeds and my audience (small or large) begins to see things clearly.

But first, I have to convince them that this isn’t just a waste of time or space. Instead it’s the most effective, most powerful and most targeted form or marketing we have ever seen. That’s when I turn to talking about measurement. Showing them analytics reports, actual results for actual websites.

“Sometimes I feel like a social or search marketing detective,” I said to an audience of two during a meeting last week. Twenty minutes into our meeting, I had determined that they should be targeting an entirely different audience with their search marketing – an audience they hadn’t previously considered.

“You are!” they both chimed in, “This is incredible.”

If you want a one-on-one visit with your personal social and search marketing detective – give me a call at 614-754-8228 or e-mail cementmarketing@gmail.com. Better yet, come and find me at one of the following public speaking engagements coming up this Spring. (And yes, I’ll probably be wearing my cowboy boots).

Ohio Wesleyan Center Lecture

“We can measure that! The metrics behind social media strategy”
March 25, 2010 – 3:10 pm
Bayley Room
Beeghly Library, 43 Rowland Ave, Ohio Wesleyan University
Free and open to the public or LIVE Webcast

Association of Fundraising Professionals Monthly Luncheon

“Measuring social media.”
April 13, 2010, noon – 1:30 pm
Grange Insurance Audubon Center
$20 for members; $30 for guests

Sway Social Workshop

April 22 – 23, 2010 – 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Wild Goose Creative
See website for rates. Early bird expires March 12th and there are only a few seats left!

A blog post is the most valuable catch of all for social marketers and public relations professionals.

But so few of them know how to actually reach out to bloggers. In fact, out of the hundreds of e-mails I’ve received from marketers as a blogger very, very few have hit the mark and moved me to action.

Unfortunately, most of the e-mails and the thousands of marketing dollars behind them are a waste of time and Inbox space. Like this post-Superbowl e-mail I received from “Brian” at Dove.

The e-mail asks me, the blogger, to share details of the new Dove Men + Care body wash launch with my readers.

In exchange they would love to send me free samples for my readers and I. He also offers me a free behind the scenes look at the Superbowl commercial filming.

I don’t expect you or anyone else to read the entire e-mail but I’m posting it here because I wanted you to take a look at the sheer length of this thing.

I loved the kicker at the end mentioning a “Maximum donation of $500,000. No purchase necessary.”  I immediately sent this one to the trash then went on about my virtual day.

To avoid landing in my trash bin, here are a few tips on how to best reach out to bloggers via e-mail:

1.  Give us a URL to click. Somewhere in your e-mail – you must, must, must include a link to a Web page, a video or a social media page. Ideally the link is custom designed just for us and details your offer. How easy would it have been for Dove to embed the video of their behind the scenes footage into that e-mail? Then, with the video at my fingertips I would have taken a second to watch and then maybe shared it with my Twitter followers, or better yet, my readers.

2.  It better be good. If I do open your e-mail you should be offering my readers and I something other than a free body wash set. To find out what is of value to bloggers – just ask us. Use Twitter to hold an impromptu focus group or have your social media firm do some digging by asking their blogger friends.

3. Be completely transparent. Drop the corporate speak and be yourself. The most effective e-mails I receive from marketers are 100% authentic in that the marketer outs him or herself as working for Agency X and then lays the offer on the table. Everything else goes into the spam pile.

4. Be brief. Our time is precious, make the best of it by investing in a copywriter who can keep your e-mail down to 200 words or less.

Speaking of brief… that’s it for now. More tips as they come to mind and as more examples land in my Inbox. Or for immediate tips contact Cement Marketing to run your next blogger outreach campaign.

My personal blog reaches thousands of readers every month.

And while the rewards of blogging are too many to list here, one of my favorite treats is the mystery of my Inbox. I never know what e-mails I’ll find.  Like one today from a reader in the United Arab Emirates who wears the necklace we all designed together every day hidden under her abaya.

Others are from marketers (more on those later this week) and then there are the random oddities like an e-mail from a guy named Josh in California.

Josh had been hunting, to no avail, for a life-size E.T. doll for weeks. Then, after he Googled the term, “lifesize ET doll” Josh found this picture I had posted on my blog in August last year.

And that’s when – unable to find the doll anywhere else – Josh sent me an e-mail.

The doll you got for your kid is pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. Can you give me any information on this doll? (manufacturer, details on the tag or anything else you think may aid me in my search for this illusive collectible?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Josh

After a few e-mails Josh revealed that he wanted E.T. to join him on the front of his bike for a ride in California benefiting the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. After a chat with E.T.’s owner, my son Benjamin, we decided to lend Josh the E.T. doll. I figured packing E.T. up for a trip across the country would serve as an awesome lesson for Benjamin in geography, sharing and being altruistic.

When I told Josh the news he picked up the phone and called me, “I was going to e-mail you but then I thought, well, I’ll just call her. This is so cool! Thank you!”

And it was. So cool. Social media is more than just a way to communicate, it’s a way to connect – to make the world so much smaller.

A few nights after we hatched the plan and after a few poses in the Cement Marketing office

Benjamin and I brought E.T. to the nearest FedEx store and said our good-byes.

Before packing him up

and shipping him off to a far away place called California.

Stay tuned for pictures of E.T. and Josh (his temporary owner) as they make their way across California for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Until then, here are some more pictures of E.T.s departure in the Cement Marketing Flickr stream.

In the meantime, ask yourself this – where did your brand go today? How are you encouraging your clients or consumers to interact with your brand using the tools that have become a part of their lives?

Fortune 500 companies are about to eat your lunch. Unless, of course, you grab a sling shot.

If your website is less than a decade old, has less than 100,000 inbound links, or less than 10,000 indexed pages, then enjoy the year or so. Relish the traffic you are getting from search engines. Stew in the delight of ranking high for some pretty common search terms. Because that’s all about to end.

Why is your site about to go ten pages deep?

Because huge companies with massive budgets are watching what us smaller websites and SEO firms are doing and oogling at our ROI.

Fortune 500 companies that are slow and unwieldy have stayed out of the search engine optimization game so far. But now that they are seeing the importance of organic traffic, they are going to systematize and dominate. They have the money, brand and influence to absolutely destroy any websites that stand in their path.

Do you really think you can rank for “Big Red Wagon” when Target, Walmart, Walgreens, and other huge companies with established domains, inbound links, and a team of SEO’s are working for the same thing? Not likely.

Do you really think that your keyword research tools can stand up to something that a genius programmer could design for GE and sell for millions or dollars? I doubt it.

So what does this mean for us smaller, freelance, or one-man webmasters? Is this the end of the line? Are we going to look back on 1995-2009 as the glory days of SEO before the “Big Guys” got involved?

Maybe.

But there IS a way to stay in the game when the big guys enter. And it won’t have anything to do with getting a few links here and there or having a flawless site structure. In the future, as Cement Marketing practices, every site will be built to be fully optimized for search engines. Our SEO practices, while cutting edge now, stand to become industry standard.

So how will smaller websites stay competitive?

Easy. The same way brands and small businesses have always put themselves on the map – with a clear and compelling message that everyone wants to share.  Be unique. Be edgy. Be smart. Be linkworthy. And above all create something memorable.

Fortune 500 companies have Legal Departments and they have Branding, Office Politics and 1985-MBA-Weilding Bosses, and they have writers whose creativity has been sapped by talk about American Idol around the watercooler and endless meetings. My God, The Meetings.

You, on the other hand, have coffee shops, and late-night brainstorming mixed with loud music and screaming kids and thunderstorms and the absolute ability to publish and create whatever you want without worrying about what your boss will think, how the shareholders will react, or what the legal department thinks.

People don’t want to link to corporate legalese. They don’t want to read boring content. And they aren’t going to remember a watered-down sales pitch. Us smaller guys, the Davids, will trump the Goliaths because we are far more interesting and we always will be. If your business has employees, if you have people with smiling faces ready to service or help your customers – than you are more interesting than a dry, corporate website.

Use your employees and customers are your muse. What do they need? What do they inspire in you? In your brand? Maybe it’s a viral application, a widget, a quiz or a compelling Twitter account. Whatever it may be, chances are yours will be more interesting than the same thing created by a giant corporation.

So what do you do now to prepare for the SEO future?

First and foremost, be sure all of your SEO ducks are in a row and that your site is fully optimized and then stop and think about what you are doing today and what you can be doing tomorrow to spread your brand message virtally.

At Cement Marketing we believe that the future of SEO will depend on the quality of your content which will be judged, not just by search rankings, but by the amount of chatter your brand or website is receiving across all social network platforms. That’s why we offer both SEO and SEM capabilities. It’s what sets us apart and what will ultimately set your brand apart in what is about to become a very competitive marketplace.

Break the mold of what your competitors are doing and create something unique, something people will want or something they will use. Don’t worry about tips and tricks, soon those will be commonplace. Start thinking big before the big guys do.

Read Brad’s SEO & WordPress Consulting blog
Follow Brad on Twitter