John Raymond

Everyone has commercials they love and hate.  A series of commercials that drove me nuts were the ones for Progressive’s Flo.  It felt like they were on all the time.   In June of last year,  I decided to do some keyword research on Progressive’s spokesperson.  I discovered that there were very high monthly keyword volumes for the phrases “Progressive Flo” and “Progressives Flo.”

After further research I discovered that despite investing time and money into the commercials for Flo, Progressive was not at the top of the Search Engines for those terms.  Neither Progressive’s web site nor the youtube videos were optimized for the most popular terms.  I thought this was odd considering that the natural step for me was to google Flo and find out more about her.  What was even more surprising was that www.progressivesflo.com was available.

As a little SEO experiment, I decided to buy the domain name and set up “the unofficial fan site” of Flo.  What was I going to write about?  I went to the Progressive youtube channel and wrote a blog post about each of the commercials.  I made sure to optimize the posts for search engines.  Since launching in July of 2009, the site has gotten over 4,000 visits and 7,500 page views.  In the last thirty days it’s received over 800 visits.  I haven’t promoted it beyond tweeting it (at launch).

That’s about 500 potential leads a month that are hitting my site all because of search engine optimization.  The next time you plan a marketing campaign you may want to think about how people will search for your campaign on the web.   Will they google the slogan, the character’s name, the celebrity you have starring in the commercial?  These are all opportunities to get visits to your web site.

Recently, Progressive has done a better job in ranking for the high volume terms related to Flo.  They now have two listings on the front page for “Progressive Flo.”   However, with the SEO value of their web site, they could easily dominate the google rankings for these terms if they optimized their web site and social media campaigns for them.

I was browsing status’ on facebook yesterday and saw a really funny response to a status. The status said “I’ll have to take down my Rocky Horror pics because my dad is now on facebook.” The response was simply a link to http://www.sadtrombone.com.   Upon clicking on the link and playing the trumpet sound, I erupted in laughter.  My dog was a bit frightened and disturbed at my outrageous laugh but I was inspired.

Back in the day there was a show on NBC called Blossom.  One of the character’s played by Joey Lawrence had this trademark saying “WHOA!”  I immediately wanted this packaged and at my disposal like sad trumpet.  After a few hours of research, photoshop design, flash work, and html coding I created http://www.joeywhoa.com.  I didn’t want to spend too much time on the design but I wanted to have a little 90’s flare to it.  So I used some old Saved by the Bell promo materials to inspire the logo and background.  I also threw up an old school hit counter for fun.  Check it out and make sure to follow up a outrageous, moronic, or ordinary tweet or fb status with a Joey Whoa.

Today insidefacebook.com had an article about a new flash web site that promotes a new ABC TV show called FlashFoward.  Upon visiting the web site, you are asked to use Facebook Connect.  The application then pulls your data (images, current status, relationship)  and your friend data from facebook and compiles a unique movie with your content.

It’s a very cool interactive application.  The techology itself has all kinds of potential.  I got really excited because I’ve build interactive flash applications that plug in user information and make it completely unique.  I would highly encourage you to check it out.  This combined with learning how to build custom facebook pages leaves all kinds of potential for interactive and customizable contests and trailers even more viral.   In the meantime, check out http://www.flashforwardexperience.com.

Facebook seems to change every single day. Lately I’ve turned my attention to the relatively new facebook fan pages. The facebook fan page is definitely the way to go if you have a business and need a presence on facebook for several reasons. Lately I’ve been experimenting with designing custom facebook fan pages. My inspiration was the Gap Facebook Fan page. I saw that they had all kinds of flash video and a nicely designed custom page. I took to the task of designing one for my uncle’s business Bruening Glass Works.

I just tried to use whatever was on his homepage.  The result is pretty cool.  If you look at the design I’ve added to the post, you can see that I have incorporated his contact us form and also his youtube video.  So if you find him on facebook or just by googling him, you can contact him from facebook. I think the youtube video (which I shot and edited) helps bring out his personality and allows him to demonstrate his expertise.  After all, if you are going to ship him your priceless glass item, you would want to trust him.

A custom facebook fan page can help you stand out among your competitors and impress your customers.  If you would like to know more about the process, please leave a comment or contact me.  In the meantime, I’m looking forward to more expermenting with facebook fan pages.  Please check out the Bruening Glass Facebook Page.

Yesterday I saw a tweet about this awesome youtube wedding dance video (watch it below). Yesterday afternoon it had about 300,000 views; today and it had over a million and the couple was on the Today Show. It’s amazing the power of the internet and the viral video. Ironically enough, I think the person who could benefit the most out of this is Chris Brown. Most of you know about the horrible and disturbing encounter between Chris and Rihanna last year that sent Rihanna to the hospital. I was so sickened that I couldn’t bare to listen to Brown’s hit song “Forever.”

However, because of the youtube wedding dance video, the song makes me think of this great dance and the amazing things that come with marriage and love. It makes me wonder if the millions of other people who have viewed the video feel the same way. In a time where Brown has attempted to rebuild his career by publicly apologizing, this could potentially help him out tremendously.

Given that, will we see this tactic used by marketers in the future trying to rebuild a client’s reputation? Do you think this helps or hurts Chris Brown?

UPDATE:
As of the last few days, the song “Forever” has been in the 10 ten on the itunes top songs. Before the video came out, it was nowhere to be found in the top 100. You now wonder if it becomes a staple song at weddings going forward along with the Electric Slide, YMCA, and Shout.

Wondering who the top PR firms on twitter are? It’s a great question to ask. Why would people be searching this online? More and more people are researching PR firms on the internet. Companies and organizations are turning to internet marketing to help achieve their business goals and are turning to PR firms to help understand social media and apply it to their business. So the debate goes on as to who are the top PR firms on twitter are.

There are many resources you can look at when trying to evaluate who the top PR firms on twitter are. Here are a few tips on evaluating PR firms:

• Check out their web site. See if they have a blog and if they publish it regularly.
• View their youtube, twitter and facebook accounts to see how active they are.
• Give them a call and talk to them about how they can help you with your twitter account.
• Your twitter activity should be an extension of your overall marketing strategy. So take that into account as well.
• Start up a twitter account. Get an understanding of how it works before you talk to the pr firm.

Overall, twitter can be a great asset to your marketing strategy. Social media marketing should be apart in your overall marketing strategy and finding out who the top PR Firms on twitter are is important. And of course I may be biased but I highly recommend Cement Marketing.

I’ve been so busy lately but I wanted to pass along an update. I had a pretty productive weekend and am working on building a number of web sites for myself. They are all experiments in SEO. Here’s a list of them:

• http://www.couponland.org – formerly carlscoupondiscounts.com
• http://www.athensohiohotels.net
• http://www.progressivesflo.com
• http://www.wordpresshosting1.com
• Bowling Green Ohio Hotels

They are all in production so please don’t judge them too harshly. I’m showing them not only to you but also to google (so google will start indexing them). I’ll have more for you soon. Feel free to contact me with questions.

Yesterday, facebook came out with this breathtaking widget release called “Facebook Live Stream.” It’s extremely easy to use and allows the people who visit your site to communicate with each other and send out the word on facebook. They used it during the Obama inauguration and for the NBA All Star Game.

Here’s the link to the blog post about it – http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=258. I’m actually testing it out in this post: see below and feel free to roast me .

I’ve been doing a lot of pro bono work on brueninglass.com. My uncle, Marc Konys has had a lot of success getting business from his web site through search engine marketing. I brought my laptop over to his shop to shoot a short video. I edited it using iMovie and have posted it to YouTube and on his site. You can see that I’m trying to optimize the video for certain keywords in the title, description, and tags. For organizations and individuals, producing videos for youtube can help you quickly get to the top of google. Why? Well YouTube is one of the most linked to sites on the internet and google will rank content on it higher because it is such a popular site. Experiment and see where you wind up in the search engines.

Here’s the video:

Well it’s been a month since my last post…I know such a slacker. Actually I’ve been too busy to write but have been learning all kinds of great things in the last month. Here are a few things I’m planning on covering in future blog posts:

• The importance of google local listings
• How to set up a blog under your own domain name
• Newspapers and the internet
• Setting up a forum on your web site

Look for video to accompany my web site posts. You also may have noticed a redesign of my web site. Since I’m planning on blogging more, I wanted to change up the look so that my posts are more readable.

Thanks!

I was at a Cinco De Mayo networking party the other day and had a great conversation with Ryan Squire and Gary Moneysmith about Twitter. Being internet marketing professionals, people often ask us about twitter.

Common questions we are asked are: Why should I be on twitter? What’s the big deal? What do I tweet about? There are several uses for twitter for both individuals and organizations and I thought I’d outline them with showing you how Frank the Tank, the infamous character from the movie Old School could have used it.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the movie is about three guys(Mitch, Beanie, and Frank) in their 30’s who start a fraternity comprised of college students, middle aged men and early retirees.

Frank is a key leader in organizing fraternity functions (like Blue’s birthday party), promoting and marketing the frat (through his dj gig), and disciplining the pledges (”drop down and give me ten”).

Given that, there are a lot of ways Frank the Tank could use twitter. Here are a few that I came up with:

1. Branding/ Marketing

Frank can use twitter to market himself to the potential pledges and others and as a representative of this fraternity. His goals would be to drive up membership and attendance at parties. On an ongoing basis, he would highlight fraternity activities, discuss planning for upcoming events, and possibly tweet about current members of the frat. He could post links to things potential pledges may be interested in such as the latest and greatest beers or the top 10 streaking techniques. The goal would be to posting things that your audience would be interested in.

2. Education

Twitter can be a great resource for people trying to learn. I pay close attention to about 5-10 who I follow. I feel that this keeps me up to speed with the always changing internet marketing world. Frank could use twitter to follow other fraternity leaders at other campus’s across the country to see what types of functions/events that they are having. He can also use it to follow rival fraternity members on campus to track what they do. If you have a lot of followers, programs like TweetDeck, can help you organize your tweets so you can more easily pay attention to the people you feel are more important.

3. Communication

Twitter is a great way to get feedback from people interested in you or your organization. Frank could easily use Twitter to see what his followers thought of a party that they had the previous weekend or get feedback from people on what major recording artist they should bring in for Mitch-a-palooza 2. He could have contests to see what followers could re-tweet or pass along the link to a upcoming party. The point is to try and interact and connect with people and it will hopefully make either yourself or your organization better.

4. Networking

People will often re-tweet other people’s tweets for various reasons. Browsing the profiles of people whom your peers re-tweet could lead to networking. For Frank, it could lead recruiting friends of his followers as potential pledges. Also you can meet people through things you are mutually interested in. For instance if Frank visits the KFC twitter page, he could share memories with someone who is also a late night craver of fried chicken.

5. Research

There are various tools that allow you to search twitter for keywords. Frank could use search.twitter.com to search for what people are saying about his fraternity or even the fraternity’s parties. By monitoring this, you can both get an understanding about the online vibe of your brand online. You can also target the people who are talking about you and see if they would be a good candidate to pledge. If someone is saying something negative about you, you have the opportunity to message them to address the issue.

My recommendations for Frank aim to help you figure out how to best use twitter for your organization or even yourself. Hopefully your twitter strategy brainstorming will not throw off your lovely Saturday plans to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond or Home Depot.

I’m writing this post because I’m seeing a lot of people have tweeted lately about this new interactive campaign by Chipotle – http://www.mychipotle.com. The purpose of the post is to stimulate some good conversation from both the consumer and marketer perspective. So by all means please comment.

Being an internet marketer, I highly enjoy a good viral video campaign or contest (did my first in 2006). Viral Video contests have been done quite a bit in the last few years. In order to get the greatest potential response and reaction from visitors, you have to go the extra mile. So when I see these types of campaigns I try to break it down and analyze the structure of it and see if it will work.

I looked over the site and found plenty of room for improvement with this contest. Here are a few observations from dissecting the contest site and strategy:

1. Search Engines Still Count - With a viral campaign, the goal is to get someone forwarding it onto a friend. However, you still need to consider search engines when building the site. When you click on a video right now it pops up movie player. Why not structure the site to where you add a new page every time someone submits a video? If you add a new page to the site with a unique page title, google will see that you are adding content and reward you for that. So as it stands right now, google sees one page with 50 videos on it. If you follow the “Sammon Method” (humor me), google will index 50 unique pages. Which will give people more opportunities to find your web site.

2. Visitor Interaction- Web sites are no longer a one way communication stream. You want to engage and allow your users to interact with your site. Why not give people the ability to comment on each individual video? Half the time the best part about youtube videos are the comments made for the videos. This is also a reason for the visitor to come back to the site.

3. Incentives – Why should I make a commercial for you if you aren’t giving me anything. There are a million online contests a year and people want incentives. As easy as making a short video is these days, people won’t participate unless you give them a reason to.

4. Voting – They should implement some kind of voting incentive on the site for visitors and for contestants. It could be something like the video that gets the most votes will win Chipotle for a year. Something like that. But you also have to give voter incentive too (it’s also a good opportunity to ask they for their email address). There’s nothing like a overall leaderboard to get one hungry contestant to email every person they’ve ever met to vote for them so they can be at the top of the leaderboard. It’s amazing how people get into these contests.

5. Embrace Social Media -The very basic goal is to have someone forward the site or the video to a friend. That functionality is not included here. What would be even better is if you hired a programmer guru to wire up your web-site to interact with facebook/twitter. So that when someone could post notice that they were in the contest to their facebook wall or twitter page. The number one referrer to the Cambria Suites Polaris contest, a viral contest for a hotel chain in Columbus, was facebook.

I don’t mean to roast the campaign because they may plan to add more features as time goes on. As with future posts, i’m trying to stimulate conversation among the community of online marketers. What are you thoughts?

Wordpress plugins are very powerful add-ons to the wordpress bloging software. If you’ve heard of them and aren’t sure what they are read my previous post about Wordpress Plugins.

Gistinfo.org uses a few of my favorite plugins including the event calendar and photo gallery plugins

It’s amazing to me what extra functionality you can add to your wordpress web site instantly. Here are a few of my favorite plugins:

Contact Form 7

This plug-in instantly set up forms on your web site without knowing html.  It also allows you to place the forms anywhere on your web site/blog including on the side bar.  It’s very easy to set up and implement.

NextGen Gallery

This is a photo gallery plugin that will allow you organize and display photos on your web site.  The plugin uses lightbox as well.  It also allows you to add images to a sidebar on your page

Events Calendar

Instantly implement a calendar to your site.   I’ve mostly used it to highlight upcoming events for different clients.  You can also list your next 5 upcoming events on the sidebar of your site as well.  When you add an event, you have the option of creating a post for it as well.  This will help with search engines and giving more details on the event.

All in one SEO

Getting people to your site is key.  This plugin allows you to control the meta data information for each page and post on your website.

IntenseDebate

This is a plugin that I’m going to test very soon.  I’ve seen it on other blogs and I like that it visually shows the reply from the author back.  Again, I haven’t had a chance to really play around with it, so if you have some feedback on this, it would be great

tweetmeme or tweetsuite

Essential functionality that records a visitors comment and allows them to tweet about your blog post to their friends and followers on twitter.  I highly recommend this one.

I’ve used most of them on this web site: http://www.gistinfo.org.

Check it out and let me know what your favorite wordpress plugins are.

I’ve been working more and more with wordpress lately. Wordpress is open source software, meaning that the software and the code to the software are available for free. Because of this, it has a community of programmers around the world developing plugins or add-ons to the basic software. Most are available for free. I’ve been building out blogs and web sites using wordpress for several reason, one of them being the plugins available.

Wordpress plugins are extra features that you can install to supplement the base software. You can find a whole library of them here or by googling wordpress plugins. There are plugins you can instantly implement that took weeks and months to develop 7 years ago. Read about a few of my favorite wordpress plugins so you can get a better understanding of the power of wordpress.

I’m looking forward to presenting at Virginia Marti College of Art and Design in Cleveland, Ohio this Friday. I’ll be giving a seminar to the students and faculty about how to set up a blog and the importance of having one if you are a college student. I will discuss my approach when I started  job searching at the end of grad school last year. I treated myself as a product. Since I did a bunch of different things (not just designing web sites), I needed some way to break down and document all the different things that I was working on.

I used a blog (different than this one) to showcase the projects I was working on in school. At the time I was working on a number of school projects that included a variety of things such as search engine optimization, css, and iMovie and Final Cut Pro. I made each project a post and talked about my role on each project. 

The result gave potential employers more information on each project (more than just a picture of what I had done) and actually drove more traffic to my site (because of the way I had utilized the blog and keywords.  For current students, they could talk about each class or a specific project in each class that they worked on and talk about what they had learned from it.

This approach applies to pretty much everyone. Whether you are a business or a college student, structuring your blog appropriately, may help you achieve your goal.