York Restoration Corporation

York Restoration Corporation is an established company that restores buildings for some of New York’s top real estate companies. Although they have a long history in their expertise—they had no website. Read the rest of this entry »

Social Media has opened the door to a host of new marketing opportunities. Where major advertisers like Unilever were once limited to print, radio, television, direct mail and billboard advertising, the internet has opened up a host of new promotional opportunities for brands large and small.

Unilever, you may know, is the company behind such iconic ice cream brands as Breyer’s, Good Humor and Klondike Bars. They have long been ahead of the curve when it comes to advertising and marketing (“What would you do for a Klondike Bar?”).

It shouldn’t be surprising that Unilever understands new media as well as they do old media. They are now reaching out to influential bloggers, offering them free tastes of some of their classic products. Today, a virtual cornucopia of ice cream products arrived at the offices of Blue Fountain Media. When the feeding frenzy was done, the ice cream was gone, but the good will remains.

Does this kind of marketing work? The fact that you are reading this should provide the answer.

As marketing specialists, we at Blue Fountain Media appreciate creative work done by others. Our hats are off to Unilever for their blogger outreach!

We regularly counsel clients on how to leverage social media to enhance their marketing efforts. We help our clients with blogger outreach, Twitter and Facebook promotions and dozens of other social media platforms. If you are looking for help with social media outreach, online marketing or any web-related project, please give us a call at 212.260.1978.

Again Unilever, well done!

Blue Fountain Media’s Founder and CEO, Gabriel Shaoolian, was interviewed by Crain’s Business to Business on the subject of online reputation management. The interview first appeared online on March 10, 2010.

Here’s an excerpt:

HOS: What should companies do about negative comments?

Shaoolian: If there is controversy about your company on the Internet, deal with it head-on. Everyone makes mistakes. How you deal with the mistakes can make all the difference in the world.

If you know the identity of the persons making the complaints or criticisms, try to personally engage them. Get to the root of the problem—be candid, open and apologetic. If you’re at fault, fix the problem. People really do appreciate when a brand is responsive.

If there has been a major problem with an entire product line, then keep people informed about the steps being taken to fix the problem and how affected customers will be treated. This is a great opportunity to include a “Message From Our Chairman/CEO” landing page, where the negatives can be turned into positives.

In the past few weeks, senior BFM executives have also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney and Crain’s New York Business.

To read the full interview, go here.

Gabriel Shaoolian, BFM’s Founder and CEO was interviewed by Crain’s New York Business (March 8-14 edition) and the interview can be found online here.

With BFM experiencing explosive growth, Shaoolian provided his keys to making great hires… and avoiding bad ones.

Here’s an excerpt:

Vague responses or yes-or-no answers weed out about half of the applicants, he says. “I want people who are passionate and articulate,” Mr. Shaoolian notes. “If people can’t communicate a clear vision of what they can contribute, I don’t want them talking to clients.”

For those who pass that first screening, Mr. Shaoolian has devised further tests. He asks designers, for instance, to explain how they would improve a given Web site.

“We want people who understand that the point is to grow the client’s business, not just to look prettier,” he says.

Shaoolian has also recently been featured as an expert columnist on YoungEntrepreneur.com.

I headed over to the Sun Microsystems office at 101 Park Ave last night to take part in an exciting event for entrepreneurs, the Ultra Light Startups Entrepreneurs Forum, where startups come to pitch their innovative ideas and have a chance to network and find service providers.

What I found really invigorating about the event was the format:

Each entrepreneur has 1 minute to pitch their startup in front of the room of 100+ entrepreneurs, with their website projected on the wall behind them. They say what their startup is all about, what their business model is, and take 2-3 questions from the audience. Service providers (such as myself) were present to give suggestions and offer help.

Here are the startups who presented last night. If any entrepreneur who is listed here would like to add something, please feel free to comment on this post – and feel free to link here as well

Yipit

http://yipit.com | @yipit

(founder: Vinicius Vacanti – twitter: @vacantif | facebook.com/vacanti)

An aggregate of all online deals – like Kayak in way – including Groupons.

Sourcepad

http://sourcepad.com/beta

(founded by Joe Chin – LinkedIn )

Need to outsource design or development work? SourcePad makes that easy by providing you with top-notch talent and the ability to communicate with those you hire overseas via video.

Cityryde

http://www.cityryde.com | @cityryde

(founded by Timothy Ericson – twitter: @tjericson | mtjericson@cityryde.com)

You may know about bike-sharing in Paris (Velib’) and other European cities. Well here it come to U.S. shores. Cityride, out of Phili, are hoping to take the concept and make it happen right here. You can even earn karma credit for riding your bike around town. According to CEO, Timothy J. Ericson, there is a multi-billion karma market out there.
Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Fountain Media’s Director of Marketing, Alhan Keser, was just featured in the Wall Street Journal and Smart Money’s SMSmallBiz.com in a story covering Pay-Per-Click advertisements. In an extended interview, Keser helped explain why paid advertisements resulted in higher conversion rates–the ratio of users who actually make a purchase–when compared to the organic, unpaid search results.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

The reason for the differential: Conversion rates tend to improve as shoppers progress through the buying cycle, says Alhan Keser, an SEM specialist at Blue Fountain Media, a boutique web site development and online marketing firm in New York. Although search engine users typically troll organic results to conduct online research, they start favoring sponsored links when they’re ready to buy, he says. “Most people who click on ads are ready to be sold to; they are at the buying stage,” Keser says.

Keser is a certified SEO and SEM expert, meaning he is well versed in all aspects of marketing through search engines–both improving organic results and paid results. Keser has previosuly been featured on Entrepreneur.com, in the Google section of About.com and is a guest expert for Ultra Light Startups–a forum for technology entrepreneurs.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which allows anyone to send messages directly to a pre-determined list of users. (For more info about what email marketing is, check out this post, “11 Reasons to Use Email Marketing”)

Not all email delivery methods are created equal.

Everyone with an email account knows how to send an email. Most of us send out dozens every day. When it comes to sending out bulk emails, though, you are far wiser to rely on a professional email marketing service.

Using a consumer- or business-grade email account to send out your marketing emails can lead to big problems. Systems like Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. are simply not equipped to send out bulk emails and lack the features necessary to execute a successful email marketing campaign.

Read the rest of this entry »

What is Email Marketing?

If you have an email address, you’ve seen plenty of examples of email marketing. A clothing store might tell you about some new styles, a car dealership might let you know about a special financing deal, a local restaurant might let you know about new menu items.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which allows anyone to send messages directly to a pre-determined list of users. These messages can be anything from simple, plain text to rich, graphic-laden pages (similar to normal websites). Email marketing messages are delivered right to the recipient’s inbox, just like normal email.

Read the rest of this entry »

YoungEntrepreneur.com has chosen Blue Fountain Media Founder and CEO Gabriel Shaoolian as an expert contributing columnist on their blog. Today marks Shaoolian’s first article, Online Reputation Management: 6 Steps to a Rock Solid Online Reputation.

Check back twice each month for the latest installment of Gabriel’s YoungEntrepreneur articles. He will be covering a range of topics relevant to doing business on the web, including web design, e-commerce, online advertising and search engine optimization.

Every website design guide will tell you that large blocks of text will be ignored. However, it’s not every day that this is so clearly illustrated.

On Wednesday, a website called ReadWriteWeb.com inadvertently proved that a certain segment of users will completely ignore all text except for the exact phrase they are looking for.

ReadWriteWeb published an article called Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. Google picked up that post and presented it a news result for the search “facebook login”, which meant that (at least for a few hours) it came up above the normal Google results for “facebook login”.

Read the rest of this entry »