As Blue Fountain Media continues to win awards for making results-driven website designs, our CEO Gabriel Shaoolian has become in high demand as a public speaker. He’s offered his insight as a featured speaker at the Business Design Institute, lecturing at Paper NYC’s classes, and with the NY Entrepreneurs Business Network.  Most recently Gabe was invited to Madison Square Garden as a featured panelist during the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce’s annual Business Expo, where he spoke how social media can make an impact for both established brands and small businesses.

“If you’re not active in social media, and someone will Google your name, chances are whoever wrote something bad about you will come up (instead of you)”, Gabriel Shaoolian told attendees of the New York Business Expo. Their panel discussed variety of issues, especially online business strategy, goal setting and measuring the results of online marketing campaigns.

Participants in the event focused on the strategic opportunities and practical tactics created through social media, especially as they apply to businesses of across every market. In comparison to traditional advertising, Gabriel Shaoolian pointed out the contrast between entrepreneurs and established brands. “If you want to generate brand loyalty online, you’ve got to put content out there that’s useful to your visitors,” he pointed out, answering the audience’s questions about how to best use these new tools to grow their business.

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In his new book Game-Based Marketing, Gabe Zicherman and co-author Joselin Linder explore how businesses can drive revenue and customer loyalty through rewards, challenges, and contests. Before Gabe pointed it out to me, I didn’t quite realize how much game-based marketing had come to dominate so many aspects of marketing. From frequent flier programs to McDonald’s famous Monopoly game, game-based marketing is a huge part of advertising. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s description:
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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.

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Last week one of my colleagues posted an article to BFM’s Business Learning Center entitled “How To Write a Blog That Drives Traffic to Your Website and Revenue to Your Business“. The article is a fantastic guide to creating a great blog for you business. If you still aren’t convinced that your company needs a blog, here are some numbers that should help you make up your mind.

An analysis of 1,531 web-marketing clients showed a huge difference between those who blog and those who do not. Here is the key info:

• 55% More Visitors for Companies That Blog (a measurement of the number of people that visit any page of a company’s site)
• 97% More Inbound Links (other sites linking to any page of a company’s site)
• 434% More Indexed Pages (how many of a company’s pages can be found on Google/Yahoo!/Bing)

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Thousands of Internet Industry leaders and social media experts descended on New York City’s Javits Center last week for the Web 2.0 Expo. With the theme of the Expo being “The Power of Less,” Blue Fountain Media was the one company singled out as the embodiment of the theme.

Here’s how Web 2.0 Expo defined “The Power of Less”:

The theme for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo New York is the Power of Less. The Power of Less doesn’t just mean making do with fewer staff and a smaller budget. It means that constraints drive creativity, whether in business models, design paradigms, or platforms. It means the power of the small screen, the thin client, the streamlined interface. It might mean the power of small teams, or even going solo.

In the official Web 2.0 Expo Blog, Blue Fountain Media Founder and Creative Director Gabriel Shaoolian participated in an extended Q & A.
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The whole idea of social media marketing can be a bit overwhelming. People are connected to each other more than ever on social media platforms, creating conversation about your brand and industry.

There are so many platforms, so many choices and so many misconceptions.

Companies that are smart and disciplined in all other areas of their business sometimes act irrationally due to their lack of expertise in this area.

Common mistakes include:

• Ignoring social media marketing because it is so foreign to them. Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites. On a daily basis, individuals are talking about your brand, so companies better listen.

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There were a few great take-aways from this afternoon’s SMX East session entitled, “Pumping Up YouTube“, which are key to being successful on YouTube, the Internet’s 2nd largest search engine:

1. Know what “success” means.

What are you trying to achieve?

• Video views – Do you just want a lot of people to see your video?
• Conversions – Do you need people to click to another website and take an action?
• Deeper engagement with your brand – Do you need to use video give your potential customers more interaction with your brand?

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I attended a couple of great sessions this morning, most of which were focused on web analytics and how they can provide actionable data. Here are some key takeaways:

1. Keep your enemies closer, but keep your friends close too.

When you start an SEO campaign, the focus is usually on competitor research: what are your competitors optimizing for, where are they getting links, and how can you do a better job at it than them? But through Google Analytics you can also see what sites you are already getting traffic from. Well, a lot of the time, the users that come in through those referring sites ended up there because of a previous search query. Why is the referrer ranking, and what can you do to get your site on that SERP too?

2.  Exploring site search

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Three members from the Blue Fountain Media marketing team, Alhan Keser, Zack Sinkler, and Byrne Hobart attended the first day of the annual Search Engine Marketing Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Monday.
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On Thursday evening the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization‘s (SEMPO) New York working group went on a 3-hour-long boat ride (AKA booze cruise) around the island of Manhattan. The event featured an open bar, dining, and dancing to 90′s classics like Rump Shaker. The Blue Fountain Media team, naturally drawn by the idea of free drinks and talk of search engines, turned out in droves. The event was graciously sponsored by Clickable, Enquisite, and the ladies from Century Interactive who came all the way from Dallas, Texas to attend.

Here are 2 photos of the event, taken from my iPhone:

SEMPO President Sara Holoubek and myself on the boat cruise around Manhattan. We are most likely laughing at something said by Bruce Clay Inc.‘s funny man, Chris Hart.
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