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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Facebook has long allowed users to “fan” or “like” the pages of companies and brands. Now LinkedIn has announced a similar feature. LinkedIn users can “follow” a company to keep abreast of key developments, potential business opportunities, and job leads. While Facebook “fan” and “like” features help users keep a casual connection to pages, the new LinkedIn feature has some real practical uses. Here are three great ways to use it: (more…)

During last week’s F8 Developer’s Conference, Facebook announced its new Open Graph platform, which will connect the world’s largest social network to the rest of the internet. Using this new platform websites will be able to incorporate information from Facebook, making it easy to tailor content to user’s interests. In short, Open Graph will make it easier using Facebook… even when they’re not on Facebook’s website!

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Tomorrow, 4/16, marks what is sure to become an annual celebration of social media: Foursquare Day.

What is Foursquare?

Foursquare is an app (available for most modern smart phones) that encourages users to “check in” when they’re out and about. Bars and restaurants are the most common places–anywhere that you might hang out for a while. Checking in sends a ping to your friends so they know where you are. The app also allows users to share tips and compete to earn virtual badges of honor for completing certain tasks (e.g. “School Night” for checking in somewhere after 4am Monday-Friday). The most frequent visitor to each venue is crowned the “mayor” of the venue. While it was released at Austin’s SXSW festival in 2009, Foursquare has gained tracking in recent months, having added nearly 1 million users since the start of 2010. (more…)

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!

In 2010, Facebook will develop new tools to measure the ROI of marketing and advertising on their platform.

During the first day of Social Media Week 2010, Fabio Freyre (Facebook’s VP of Advertising), hinted that Facebook is currently in advanced stages of “developing additional tools and analytics” to measure online and offline engagement within their own platform. These tools will be stronger and more robust than the tools Facebook has previously made available, which merely poll users about brands.

One of the biggest questions regarding social media and engagement is, “how do we measure this stuff?” There are professional agencies that are dedicated to measuring social awareness, buzz, engagement, and ultimately return on investment (ROI).

Specifically with Facebook, how does one know how much value to place on a “fan” (a person who has attached themselves to the Facebook page of a company, brand, or organization) of a particular brand? How much is that fan worth? What is the scale of engagement that fan has with his “community”?
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It seems like everyone is talking about “real time” these days. But how is that affecting search? Our friends over at SEMPO New York seek to explore the answer to that question at an event they’re hosting as part of Social Media Week NY 2010.

Sounds like a great event and we look forward to attending.

From the event’s MeetUp page:

Please join us as we kick of 2010 in conjunction with Social Media Week.

This month we are joined by Trendrr, StockTwits, Sawhorse Media and Invoke Media/Hootsuite to address the concept of “real time,” from real time publishing, to real time analytics to real time decision-making. And of course, we will discuss the role search plays in the real time world we now live in.

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If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that Blue Fountain Media is a leader in web design and development (even Google says so). You probably know that online marketing—including search engine optimization and social media marketing—is the fastest-growing part of the company.

What you might not know is that everyone in the marketing department, from analysts and copywriters to project managers and the department directory, started out as an intern. We’re actively hiring interns for 2010.

Are you ready?

We’re looking for enough skills to contribute from day one, plus the potential to join our team full-time. We have some exciting new projects coming up in 2010, and we’re getting ready to take them on.

If you’re interested, you should have all of the following skills and characteristics:

• An interest in online media and online marketing.
• A blog, Twitter, podcast, Youtube channel—something that shows that you’re active on the Internet.
• Good writing skills (you should be able to inform, convince—and effortlessly sprinkle your prose with high-value keywords).

You should also be able to do at least one of the following:

• Code in HTML.
• Code in PHP.
• Design in Photoshop.
• Create the kind of attention-grabbing content that finds its way to the homepage of Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.

The internship starts in January. Internships typically last for six months, after which they generally lead to a full-time offer. After the first few weeks, we’ll help you specialize in one of the major components of SEO: on-site analysis, link-building, social media, or copywriting. The compensation for this internship is $500 per month, with frequent raises for interns who demonstrate skills.

To apply, send a cover letter, resume, and a writing sample (e.g. a blog post, school essay—anything over 500 words) to careers@bluefountainmedia.com.

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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The success stories keep pouring in at Blue Fountain Media

Today, we feature our marketing efforts for Powder Room Graffiti, a new site that’s already generating great buzz.

We have been using a number of marketing tools to bring traffic to their site including search engine optimization, new content elements and a variety of social media tools.

This week, simply by posting some of the terrific Powder Room Graffiti content on the social media site reddit.com and linking back to the Powder Room Graffiti site, we were able to drive more traffic in one day than the site had received in the previous month.

This is just the beginning of what we’re going to be able accomplish.

“It’s really all about doing your research,” one of our social media experts- Joe- explained to me. “Find the right content, make sure it has a compelling headline, and place in on a site that fits your client’s demographic. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of hard work that goes into it.”

Looking for similar results for your website? Give us a call at 212.260.1978.