1. Keep an eye on business where you have applied or plan on applying for a job
2. Monitor the announcements and activities of clients and be better prepared for questions, problems, or new opportunities with them
3. Estimate the grown rate of your competitors by keeping an eye on the pace of their hirings

The new Follow Company feature allows granular control over what information you are notified about.

If you need help with the new feature, check out LinkedIn’s official “company follow” explanation and how-to guide.

Businesses on Facebook will no longer have members who “Become a Fan” but instead simply “Like” their Pages on the site. Additional changes will make it easier for users to share links with their friends and to “Like” their favorite brands, products, and websites. For example: Yelp uses Open Graph to share restaurant reviews from users Facebook friends, and CNN lets users see what news stories their friends have viewed or recommended.

Indeed, Open Graph creates any number of new opportunities for online marketing:

• Incorporating Open Graph API is as easy as dropping a single line of code into a site
• Allows for the integration of features of Facebook into websites
• Sites can add social media functions through Open Graph
• Increasing on-site activity and lowering bounce-rates
• Insights For Your Domain is their new tool for Analytics, making it easy to view the demographics of visitors and track events

IMDB uses the new Social Graph to integrate film "likes" into Facebook

Many websites Blue Fountain Media has designed use Facebook Connect, the product Open Graph is meant to replace. While the Connect platform lowered the sign-up barrier-to-entry on many sites and encouraged users to share links without having to leave the site, Open Graph will expand on that success by seamlessly integrating powerful word-of-mouth marketing features across a giant swath of the web. In some ways Open Graph turns Facebook into a semantic search engine, bringing together the wealth of data generated by Facebook into the rest of the internet to deliver search results and recommendations which best reflect what users are searching for.

Facebook has already become a key component of almost every business’ social media marketing. The addition of Open Graph is poised to make it an even more integral part of online marketing and website design. So we’re looking forward to learning more about how to exploit the opportunities this technology opens up into successful strategies for our clients.

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.

Foursquare Day Specials

While many businesses have special offers for checking in ($1 off at Tasti D-Lite) or being mayor (a free beer everyday at BLT Fish), tomorrow’s Foursquare Day celebration has prompted many one-off special offers to mark the holiday. For example, Blue Fountain Media is offering $200 off any new project if you request a quote tomorrow. Other businesses with special offers include London’s Hummus Bros vegetarian-friendly restaurant chain offering free dessert to anyone who checks in. The posh Conrad Hotel in Miami is offering 50% off all wines and spirits to Foursquare users. Avid Foursquare fans have even put together a website to catalog all the Foursquare Day offers.

Launching Your Own Foursquare Day Offer

It’s not too late! Launching your own Foursquare day offer is easy…

1. Pick an Offer

Come up with a nice incentive for users to visit you on Foursquare Day. There’s little to lose in being experimental–the whole thing is only valid for 24 hours. The best offer is something that can be explained in a short sentence–long, complicated messages are difficult to spread virally over social media services like Twitter (which limit users to 140 character messages).

2. Tell Your Staff

Believe it or not, business-owners frequently implement special promotions or discounts without telling their employees. This can result annoyed or even angry customers. Make sure you tell your staff about the offer. Consider giving your staff a written explanation of the offer, what is is, and why you’re giving it, and how to explain it to customers. That way they can refer to it during the day if they have any questions or forget what the offer details are. If applicable, be sure to explain to your staff how to enter the discount into your POS (cash register) or how to adjust bills to reflect the discount.

3. Tell the World

Spreading the word about your Foursquare Day offer is easy. Here are a few simple places to announce your discount:

• 4sqday.com – Add your offer to the Foursquare Day directory of special offers.
• Twitter – Tweet today and then again once or twice tomorrow. Consider linking to the 4sqday.com page for your offer.
• Facebook – Post the announcement and details to your Facebook fan page. Again, consider linking to the 4sqday.com page.
• Blog – Does your business have a blog? Write up a note about Foursquare Day and your special offer

4. Accepting the Offer

How strictly the offer’s terms and conditions are enforced is up to you. If you want to absolutely require customers to have checked in before they can receive your Foursquare Day offer, simply ask them to show you their phone. Here’s an example of a check-in confirmation screen:

That’s it. Happy Foursquare Day!

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!

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”?

Back in September 2009, Facebook—the reining king of social media, with over 400M users—teamed up with Neilsen to launch a new advertising platform, ‘Brand Lift‘. This is part of Facebook’s strategy to give advertisers something they’ve never been able to achieve with other mediums: instant feedback. Brand Lift allows advertisers to conduct polls among Facebook’s 350 Million+ users, segmenting them by all sorts of metrics, including those who have and haven’t been exposed to the ad. Brand Lift was a big advance in giving advertisers insight of their ROI through online ads and social media. But it’s not enough, and Facebook knows that.

Freyre went on to say, “Have we made progress over the past year? Yes. Are we where we want to be? No.”

He also indicated that Facebook is trying to figure out how to measure the exact value of a fan offline. Measuring offline (‘real world) brand engagement and conversations are the missing metric. Once businesses can figure out just how much they’re getting out of social media, they will know how much effort they should be putting in.

I look forward to finding out more about these tools and how brands will use them in the future.

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.

• Assuming social media is a cheap and fast “miracle pill.” Entrepreneurs want everything (brand awareness, recall, more word of mouth, more business) and they want it fast. Digital market takes patience and timing. You can’t join an online social network and derive any value from it unless you take the time to meet the right people, connect, share, build, and grow.

• Assuming that any kid who grew up with the Internet is capable of devising, executing and maintaining a social media campaign. It’s not about technology or if you grew up in the digital age (even though you may have an upper-hand) but about effective strategy. There is no one size fits all, and ultimately it’s not about “What are we doing in XXX social media network?” but about why should you be in that social media network. It’s about choosing YouTube over Facebook or focusing on a blog instead of Twitter. It’s about adding value to your consumer and where they “reside” digitally.

The fact of the matter is, social media marketing works and it can work very effectively if done strategically. Virtually every major corporation is devoting significant resources to creating and monitoring social media campaigns for opportunities and what individuals say about their brand.

Smaller businesses and start-up businesses are also jumping on the wagon.

Social media campaigns improve your standing on search engines like Google, they enhance your brand, they sell your products, they drive traffic to your website and they can help you gain new customers and serve current customers.

A good social media campaign will cost you time, money and effort. It can take months, even a year for a campaign to pay off… but the payoffs are usually worth the wait.

Forrester Research did some research and have come up with figures that indicate that not only is it working for companies, but there will be explosive growth in the use of social media marketing in the next five years:

What Forrester is saying is that businesses are expected to spend 3.1 billion in social media marketing in 2014 and another $3.16 billion on search engine marketing.

Before embarking on a social media marketing plan, it is important to ask a number of key questions. Some of the questions you’ll be able to answer for yourself, others you’ll need the guidance of social media experts.

1. Is social media marketing right for my business?

1. Is my target audience using social media? If so, where?

2. Will I get a better ROI (return on investment) from social media and internet marketing, rather than traditional advertising and other marketing platforms?

2. What are your social media marketing goals?

1. Businesses often make the mistake of diving into their social media campaigns without sufficient thought or planning. Make a list of what you want to accomplish:

1. More sales leads
2. More direct sales (for e-commerce sites)
3. Greater brand awareness
4. Brand engagement

3. Which social media platforms are best suited for achieving my business’ goals?

1. Blogs

1. Can I create valuable insightful content to potential and current customers about my business/services/products/industry that can delivered in blog format?

2. News and Content

1. Once I’ve created compelling content, how can I distribute it to the world?

An easy way to distribute your ideas is through social news sites where the content speaks for itself. Users are given the opportunity to vote on news stories, links, and content:

1. Digg.com
2. Reddit.com
3. Stumbleupon.com
4. Propeller.com
5. Delicious.com

3. Review sites

1. Am I so confident in my products and services that I want to promote them to sites that publish independently written user reviews?

1. Yelp.com
2. Epinions.com

4. Networking sites

1. The great social communities of the web present remarkable opportunities to market, promote and even create direct sales for your company.

1. Linkedin.com
2. Twitter.com
3. Facebook.com

4. Do you fully understand the “social” aspects of social marketing?

1. There is a reason they call it social media marketing. When you enter this world, you are entering a very real community. Unlike advertising, which is a one-way-street method (push marketing) of delivering your message, social media demands that you enter into a conversation with your current and potential clients and customers (push and pull marketing).

Your success in social media will depend on your ability to make valuable engaging contributions, beyond simply promoting your brand, to a community which may be challenging, questioning or even hostile towards your brand.
1. Do you have the time, resources and confidence to enter into such a conversation?

5. Time and personnel commitment

1. The company must commit to training an individual or team who will have personal responsibility for maintaining social media channels. It can’t be considered an add-on. Take the time devoted to social media as seriously as the time devoted to any other kind of project. In other words, do it well or don’t do it at all.

6. Cross-Pollination

1. Are your social media effort integrated and designed to support each channel’s efforts? What will you use to drive people to your Twitter account? Your Blog? Your Facebook fan page?

7. Budgeting for the long haul

1. Social media campaign results rarely happen overnight. Have you thought about your budget going forward? Will this work be handled in-house or will you outsource this to a company with social media experience and expertise?

8. Metrics

1. How will you measure the success of your overall social media campaign and the individual elements? What are the key milestones you are looking for?

9. Triage

1. Marketing budgets are finite. The money invested in social media campaigns must come from somewhere. Where are the sacrifices to be made?

Unless you are a social media expert, you will not immediately have the answers to all of these questions. You need to find to find experts who will discuss your current business, your business goals, and your current marketing and advertising efforts. Until a company understands all of these aspects of your business, they will be in no position to map out a social media marketing campaign that’s exactly right for you and your business.

Blue Fountain Media counsels clients on a daily basis on how to use social media marketing to achieve their business goals. We offer a wide variety of services including consulting, online campaign architecture and ongoing social media campaign maintenance plans.

If you are interested in learning more, please give us a call at 212.260.1978 so we get can you on the road to social media success.

(photo source: Nima Badiey)

Mistakes are bound to happen! We all make them – but in life we try to avoid them. Sigmund Freud was once quoted:

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”

But when businesses are hard-pressed for time and money, mistakes are not an option. Even if you are a Fortune 50 company, you may be in greater danger to succumbing to SEO ignorance. Upper-level management may not understand what it is or why it’s even important. Here are five common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

1. Self-centered Marketing

Just because a landing page looks nice and has a lot of content doesn’t mean that it has any relevance. If your homepage is full of your “company”, chances are that relevance for your consumers as well as search engines is lost. Many companies make the mistake of adding too much of themselves on a landing page, without explaining to the user what they do, and how that will help the user. Make content relevant and straight-forward.

2. URL Structure

A lot of website have URL problems, but one mistake that has to be avoided at all times is long and irrelevant URL structures. Why are you making it harder for crawlers and users to see your information? Recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. So by sticking to short URLs you get both better rankings and better click-through. Avoid underscores, capital letters, spam words, and digits. Use static URLs, and 301 redirects for permanently moved pages.

(photo source: frankfarm)

3. Lack of Substance

Create meaningful content and deliver it in a way that people can find it. Remember that Google’s job is to get meaningful content to their users, and the best way to do that is to produce and deliver meaningful content. Adding a few “well-placed”  keywords is not going to do that. Remember to update your blog frequently with well-written content that display thought-leadership! Keep in mind to write for a human audience, not Googlebot. Keyword-heavy content might have produced results in the past, but will definitely not work for the long-term. The priority shouldn’t just be making your site #1 on Google, but to get people to engage with your company through your website. Keep in mind that an interactive experience that is boring, frustrating and inhuman will drive your potential customers away and will hurt your search results in the long run.

4. Links for Their Own Sake

Just because you have a lot inbound links doesn’t mean that they are relevant. Since Google is trying to provide the best information available for their users, having too many links for questionable sources, especially if they’re acquired in a short period of time, can get your site “penalized” by Google.

5.  Ignoring Social Media

Social media is not optional–integrating RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace to your consumers. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to attract links for improved SEO. Staying relevant in consumers’ minds and creating a conversation is key.

With all the hype surrounding social media, it’s easy to forget that the big money has been made selling social media sites, not selling things through social media. For example, over a year and a half period, Dell got 0.0011% of its sales ($1 million divided by about $90 billion) through Twitter — and all they had to do was offer extra discounts! (During that time, Twitter raised $20 million from investors — and they weren’t exactly offering discounts on their stock).

So how do we help clients use Twitter without being used by discount-hungry fans and attention-craving social media mavens?

Our social media marketing strategies focus on three areas where social media has an edge:

1. Real-time research. If we want to know what people will search for after they watch the news tonight, or read the paper tomorrow, there’s no better tool than social media.
2. Instant feedback. It can take months of on-site testing to see if a product is better positioned than, say, a quick low-cost solution or a high-value, long-term decision. But social media can get the answer faster.
3. Deeper analytics. We use software tools to algorithmically guess what people are searching for. By participating in the same communities as our target audience, we find out what they’re really saying — and what we can say to appeal to them.

For now, social media marketing strategies don’t create much value working alone. However, as part of an integrated strategy like Blue Fountain Media’s proprietary i-SEO, social media can raise the ROI of other kinds of marketing.

Peter Shankman suggests avoiding social media “experts” who are pushing fairly conventional social strategies. We’d like to suggest that you also avoid social media “experts” pushing new, creative ways to get the same lackluster results. Social media marketing has potential as a source of research, even inspiration — but as a direct sales tool, it has a long way to go.

In this economy, one of the best investments anyone can make is in saving money. At Blue Fountain Media, we’re finding more and more ecommerce web design clients are focused on giving their customers a chance to lower their utilities bills (and do something good for the environment). SolarTown (last mentioned on the blog pre-launch) doesn’t just help visitors make smart choices about solar power — it also helps dozens of suppliers sell their products to consumers around the country.

SolarTown Category Page

SolarTown Product Page

The Challenge

Create a huge, functional website — that has several very different functions. SolarTown is a site for customers interested in buying solar equipment, for hobbyists interested in discussing it, for suppliers interested in selling it, and for anyone interested in learning more.

The Work

We built a fully customized CMS, which allows dozens of suppliers to interact with the system — without exposing information to the wrong parties.

The Result

A site that does the right thing, from every angle: visitors get information, customers get the products they want, and suppliers get access to a large and receptive market.

What’s Cool

It’s a great site for good old-fashioned exploring! It’s a nice resource for people dipping into the solar marketing, but it also gives thorough specs and ordering information for anyone ready to make a purchase.

Many of our customers have learned to rely on the steady traffic growth our high-ROI SEO can bring. Others are interested in using social media marketing to increase brand awareness and really get in touch with their customers. At Blue Fountain Media, we don’t just offer best-of-breed SEO and SMM solutions — we design our campaigns to take advantage of how both kinds of marketing can work together.

The strength of SEO

SEO is simply the most effective, highest-ROI method for delivering traffic and converting users. Our SEO clients range from startups to small businesses to large companies and even charities — in every case, we’ve been able to beat both offline advertising and standard paid search advertising.

Why is search engine optimization so lucrative? It all boils down to the numbers: most pay-per-click advertisers do reasonably well when they buy ads on Google. But the vast majority of Google visitors click on standard search results: some studies claim that organic results get about 90% of search engine clicks compared to exactly the same site displayed as an ad. Paid search results are slightly more likely to turn a visitor into a customer, but even making some generous assumptions about the high value of PPC clicks, at least 80% of a site’s eventual customers will get there without ever clicking an ad.

At the same time, almost 90% of search marketing spending goes to pay-per-click ads instead of organic search. This makes SEO a fantastic investment.

The power of social media

Advertising might be one way to get people interested in a product, but people find one-on-one conversations much more convincing than one-to-many ads. Social media marketing lets companies get involved in the conversation, in a way that’s targeted and effective.

But social media isn’t just about talking: it’s about listening. An ad can’t find out what’s on a customer’s mind, or what objections they have to the product. It’s a great way to figure out what to do next.

The combination is unbeatable

How can you use them together? Simple. Social media marketing tells you what people are saying, which is a good way to figure out what they’re searching for. If you know what they’re searching for, you know what to optimize for. It’s the most effective, in-depth way to get new ideas for how to market your site.

At Blue Fountain Media, we’re always finding new ways to get the most out of our different services. Whether it’s combining SEO and SMM or combining marketing and design, we’re always ready to give our clients a great return on their investment.