How to Claim Your Business on Foursquare

August 24, 2010 – 8:07 am

Though the social location field is crowded with a number of contenders, Foursquare seems to stand out in the crowd at the moment, particularly when it comes to connecting users with local businesses, building customer loyalty, and pitching offers to attract new customers. Therefore, if you own or manage a local business, it’s crucial for you to claim and control your venue listing there.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Go to http://foursquare.com and search for your business, using the search window to the upper right.
  2. Click the orange button labeled “Do you manage this venue? Claim here.”

  3. Follow the directions there to confirm your business information. That’s it!

Once you’ve claimed your business venue, you can create various “specials” to attract new customers who find your business on Foursquare.

  • Mayor Specials can be claimed by the “mayor” of your venue (the user who has checked in most in the last 60 days). This should be something above and beyond what you offer in your other specials. This encourages frequent re-visits to your location, as others try to steal the now-coveted mayor title.
  • Count-based Specials are activated when a user has checked in to your venue a certain number of times.
  • Frequency-based Specials activate every-so-many check-ins (such as every 5th).
  • Wildcard Specials require some special verification buy your staff (such as purchase of an entree, or showing the staff member your check-in).
By Mark Traphagen | Posted in branding, foursquare, internet marketing, location-based marketing, mobile marketing | Comments (0)

Claim Your Facebook Place Now!

August 20, 2010 – 10:38 am

Facebook for iPhoneBy now you must know that social media behemoth Facebook has thrown itself into the fast-growing location marketplace with its Places product. Places allows smart phone users (for now, just iPhone or phones with a mobile browser via touch.facebook.com) to “check in” at businesses and other locations and share their location with their friends on Facebook.

If you own a local business with a physical presence, there is an obvious benefit to having your location associated with Facebook Place check-ins. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Check whether your place exists. Attempt a check in via the updated Facebook for iPhone app (or through touch.facebook.com in your smart phone’s browser). If you don’t see your business, search for it, and you can add it.
  2. Log in to Facebook and find your Place. If you see your check in on your wall, just click the place name. Otherwise, use Facebook search.
  3. Once on the newly-created Place page for your business, click the “Is this your business?” link at the bottom of the page. If Facebook found a phone number for your business, click “Call me now” and follow up from there with the verification process. If no phone number is found, Facebook will require you to upload an e-version of one of several different documents verifying your ownership.

Once you’ve claimed your Places page, you’ll want to merge it with your existing Facebook Page. Once you’ve claimed your place, you should receive a prompt at your Place page to merge with your business’s Page.

More detailed explanations are in the official Facebook guide embedded below:

Facebook Places for Advertisers

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in branding, buzz, facebook, iPhone, internet marketing, location-based marketing, mobile marketing, public relations, publicity, reputation, social media, social web marketing | Comments (0)

Google: Agencies Must Provide More Transparency

August 16, 2010 – 8:48 am

Google‘s AdWords advertising division has announced that it will be tightening up reporting requirements for “partners” (i.e., third-party agencies that manage AdWords accounts for their clients) beginning February 2011. The new requirements will obligate agencies to report the number of clicks, impressions, and actual ad spend to their clients, in addition to whatever metrics the agency already includes in reports.

The main intention of Google behind this seems to be to increase retention of advertisers who may have dropped out of the program because they believed AdWords was ineffective, when in truth the lack of effectiveness may have been the result of how little of the money they were turning over to their agencies was actually going into ads.

Is your current agency providing those metrics in your reports? If not, why not? Virante‘s paid search division has always included full disclosure of clicks, impressions, and actual ad spend, along with a host of other important metrics and KPI‘s.

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in KPI, adwords, adwords agency accountability, cpc, google, internet marketing, metrics, ppc | Comments (1)

Apture Makes Linking Easy and Interactive

August 13, 2010 – 8:05 am

Apture is a free* plugin for your blog or site that lets you build links to external sources with one click. More importantly, it allows visitors to view the content of those links without leaving your page, increasing reader time-on-site and enhancing visitor experience.

To see Apture in action, hover your mouse over the icons that appear next to the two linked words in the first paragraph above. The first is a simple link preview. It displays the Apture home page in a popup box. The second demos an embedded video link. The reader can view the complete video without leaving your page!

Once you’ve signed up and installed the plugin, be sure to check out the advanced settings. They allow you to activate the search bar you now see when you scroll this blog page. In addition to its convenient share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and email, the search bar allows your visitors to search any topic and see results from your own site, Google, and from Apture’s over 20 rich media partner sites, again without leaving your page.

But there’s one more incredibly powerful feature: readers can highlight any word or phrase on your page and search it through Apture! Try it out with any word in this post.

*Apture is free for sites with less than 5 million page views per month.

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in facebook, site enhancements, site search, tools, twitter | Comments (0)

Twylah Turns Your Twitter into a Blog

August 12, 2010 – 1:50 pm

Twylah may be the best yet online upgrade to the default twitter.com interface, particularly if you’re desiring to build interactivity with your account and the brand it represents.

Twylah automatically collects all your tweets on a nicely-branded, blog-like page. When you send out a tweet via Twylah, the program automatically appends a bit.ly link to the end of the tweet that brings the clicker to your personal Twylah page (which has a Twitter-style URL, e.g., http://twylah.com/virante). And this is where Twylah starts to beat out the Twitter home page in a number of interesting ways.

  • Twylah presents your twitter stream, with a column to the right that displays the content of any link in the highlighted Tweet. Visitors get a chance to preview the content before clicking through.
  • More importantly, every clicker is exposed to all of your recent content.
  • More importantly to that, Twylah automatically creates a series of tabs above the stream that contain the main keywords you use in your tweets. Clicking one of those tabs reveals all your tweets on that subject. Automatic indexing of your Twitter feed!
  • Twylah threads conversations generated from your tweets.
  • Twylah offers four different views of your feed:
    • Home shows your tweet stream alongside the stream of your followers.
    • My Twylah Blog shows your tweets with any conversations (in threaded form) they generated right along side.
    • My Stream shows your followers’ tweets, with a handy reply box for whichever one you highlight
    • My Mentions shows any tweets that mention your twitter name, again with a reply box right at hand.
  • For the latter two views, Twylah’s indexing tabs change to your followers most-used keywords, a very useful “listening” tool.

Any or Twylah’s views of your Twitter streams can be further filtered to show only tweets with conversations, or tweets with articles or videos attached.

The video below gives a nice overview of Twylah’s features and what the pages actually look like.

Meet Twylah – She creates a blog out of your tweets from krystlecho on Vimeo.

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in branding, internet marketing, keywords, public relations, reputation, social media, social web marketing, tools, tracking, twitter | Comments (0)

Lowering the Barrier to Video in Your Social Media

August 10, 2010 – 1:18 pm
Music video shot and edited on an iPhone

R Vaughn's music video was shot & edited on an iPhone 4. Click to watch the video.

It’s a no-brainer that including media brings life to any campaign. This is especially true in the hyperactive world of social media, where a constant barrage of posts vies for the attention of potential fans and followers.

Of course, when it comes to attention-grabbing, a picture is (perhaps literally) worth a thousand words. And a video…well, a video may not be worth a thousand pictures, but it certainly beats a still pic by a good margin!

Even today, though, many managing social media campaigns probably shy away from using original video due to perceptions of high production cost and the belief that only highly-trained professionals with expensive equipment can produce worthwhile videos.

CCEF Food Tour Video

Click to watch video

So not true. Here’s one example. A non-profit I consult for is changing the location of its annual conference for the first time ever, away from their headquarters city. They were a little nervous about attracting people so used to going to one place year-after-year to a new, but more exciting, venue (Virginia Beach). The solution: send a vivacious young couple with a handheld camera down to the Virginia Beach boardwalk to check out the varied eateries and film one minute “reviews.” Slap on some fun music and a few titles, release one a week, and you’ve sent a message. The new conference spot is going to be a fun getaway!

Another example is the music video linked through the image at the top of this post. According to this story on CNN.com, this very professional-looking video was shot, edited, and uploaded to YouTube and the singer’s web site using only an iPhone 4 and the $4.95 iMovie app. That’s within anybody’s budget. (Tip: While it’s cool that the video was edited in a phone app, most users recommend downloading the finished phone cam video to a computer and doing the editing there, where you’ll have much more flexibility and options to choose from.)

What’s stopping you from getting video into you social media campaigns?

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in branding, buzz, facebook, internet marketing, public relations, publicity, social media, social web marketing, tools, video, youtube | Comments (0)

Understanding New Adwords Modified Broad Match Keywords

August 2, 2010 – 7:29 am

On July 14, Google AdWords announced a global rollout of a new broad match keyword modifier feature. This new feature is supposed to create keywords with “greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.”

Simply put, modified broad match keywords lets you make selected words within your broad match keyword phrase “sticky.” In other words, properly marked words within the broad match keyword must be present in the search match, while all other words are matched more loosely, according to the established parameters for broad match. To mark a word within a broad match keyword as “sticky,” just add a plus sign (+) in front of the word.

EXAMPLE: A keyword of “+key +west resorts” could yield “key west hotels” or “resorts in key west” or “key west oceanfront rentals,” but would never yield “florida resorts.”

The advantages of modified broad match keywords will be most keenly felt by those who have campaigns that are tightly restricted to phrase- and exact-match keywords. Modified broad match has the potential to open up new possibilities of capturing formerly missed click and conversion opportunities, without the danger of opening things up so broadly that money is being thrown away.

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in adwords, cpc, google, keywords, ppc | Comments (0)

FriendFeed Is Your SEO Friend

July 28, 2010 – 12:53 pm

Just thought I’d pass along something I noticed since Caffeine (Google’s new search ranking algorithm) kicked in. I’m wondering if anyone else has seen this? The meat of what I’m going to share: feeding your site updates to FriendFeed may bring great (and fast!) SEO blessings.

I have a personal blog (the League of Inveterate Poets) that has accumulated a Google Page Rank of 5 (pretty good for a personal blog). I rank pretty well for the keywords I blog about most. And since the advent of Caffeine, for those keywords my new posts usually appear on the first two pages within an hour or two of their going live.

But I also write posts that are outside my top keywords. These posts, of course, usually are lower in the page rankings, and they seem to take longer to show up at all. Except…

I’ve noticed that my automated FriendFeed listing of any of my posts gets indexed very quickly by Google, and almost always shows up on the front page for the posts main keywords, no matter how those keywords normally perform for me organically. I don’t know if there is something special about my FriendFeed account. I do have a lot of followers there, and I wonder if that influences Google at all. That’s why I’d be interested in hearing if any of you have noticed this. If you don’t have a FriendFeed account (or don’t feed your blog to it), perhaps you might want to set that up, let it run for a while, and see if you see the same effect.

UPDATE 7/29/2010: According to this site, unique entries in FriendFeed show up in Google searches in as little as 13 seconds!

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in friendfeed, google, keywords, optimization, pagerank, ranking, seo, social media | Comments (0)

AdWords Peel & Stick Keywords: The Importance of Negative Sculpting

June 28, 2010 – 8:51 am

If you’ve spent any time doing pay-per-click advertising, you’re probably familiar with the technique known as “peel and stick,” popularized by AdWords guru Perry Marshall. If not (or if you need a refresher), read the blue paragraph below. If you feel you’re pretty “up” on peel and stick, skip the blue paragraph to get to the meat of this post.

Peel and stick is a technique to optimize the keywords that seem to have the best potential in your various ad groups. In an ad group with many keywords, watch for one or two that seem to attract more clicks, but could be doing better. Perhaps their CTR (Click-Through Rate) and/or Quality Score are not very high. Pull these keywords out and place each in its own ad group with ads very specific to the intent of the keyword, preferably including the keyword in the ad. HINT: It is best to do this in the AdWords Editor application, by dragging and dropping the keyword into the new ad group. This will preserve its history, important to building Quality Score and thus lower CPC. HINT #2: My experience is that you’ll see the biggest “bang” for peel and stick keywords when they are exact match.

Many online explanations of peel and stick technique leave out a further step that can turbo-boost the effectiveness of the technique. I call it negative sculpting. A problem with peel and stick is that inevitably some of the traffic that should be funneled to the new ad group will still be grabbed by the old ad group (assuming that there are broad or phrase matched keywords in the old group that could trigger an impression for the keyword). You don’t want necessarily to turn off the broad or phrase matches in the old group, as they will generate potentially valuable matches that the exact keyword in the new group will not catch.  But inevitably, they are also robbing some impressions that you want to go only to the new group (because it should gain a lower CPC over time).

In the negative sculpting technique, you simply add the keyword of the new group as an exact match negative keyword in the old group. So if the keyword in your new group is [get rich quick] you’d add -[get rich quick] to the old group, the one with more and broader keywords. In the online AdWords interface, simply find the Negative Keywords link at the bottom of the ad group, and add [get rich quick] (no minus sign needed).

Using negative sculpting will make sure that AdWords impressions are driven to your most profitable ad groups, the highly-targeted, exact match groups.

By Mark Traphagen | Posted in adwords, cpc, ctr, google, internet marketing, keywords, negative keywords, optimization, peel and stick, perry marshall, ppc, quality score | Comments (0)

Facebook Community Pages Suck

May 14, 2010 – 11:24 am

If you’re a Facebook user, you were recently forced to either allow Facebook to turn all the keywords in your profile’s Info tab into active connections to “Community Pages” or have them removed. Entirely removed. No middle ground.

That sucked. But it wasn’t even half the suck.

I had reluctantly said yes to community pages, not wanting the alternative of a blank profile. My naive assumption at the time was that Facebook was at least attempting to connect my listed bands, TV shows, movies, place of employment, schools, etc. to existing Fan Pages (or what used to be known as Fan Pages, but now you “like” instead of “become a fan.” Whatever.)

Today I saw a notice in my newsfeed that a co-worker at my company had “added Virante Online Marketing” to her employers. I clicked on “Virante Online Marketing” and was disturbed to see this:

Facebook's auto-created Virante "Community Page"

….instead of the actual Virante Page that we had created, carefully branded, populated with regular content, and begun to build up a fan base.

Apparently Facebook has taken the millions of keywords posted by users on their profiles and turned them into a whole new set of anonymous, blank “Community Pages.” Where in the world is the value in that? There is a link on our unasked-for Community Page inviting me to sign up to “help” with the community page if I “have a passion for Virante, Inc.” Yes, I have a passion…for the actual page I spent a lot of time creating and nurturing, the page that actually has something to do with Virante, Inc.! The invitation tells me that Facebook will “let [me] know when [they're] ready for my help.” I can only hope that when they are ready, the first thing they’ll let me do is post a redirect on this fake page to our real one.

It gets worse. Each slight variation of the name of a company, band, etc. entered by anyone in their profile results in the generation of yet another Community Page. So far we have “Virante, Inc.” and “Virante Online Marketing” both out there because those are the wordings used by employees in their profiles. And sometimes the results are humorously ludicrous. One of my friends had listed his employer as “The Man.” So of course, Facebook blindly created a Community Page called “The Man“, which I notice pulls into its wall any post by anyone on Facebook that had the phrase “the man” in it. So useful!

I used to promote Facebook as a viable, indeed nearly necessary, marketing presence for companies or organizations. I am less and less sure of that. From the lack of flexibility in customizing your company’s Page to this current Community Page circus of a debacle of a travesty, I’m going to hold on that recommendation. But first I’m going to go change my Facebook hometown to “Life, the Universe, and Everything” so I’ll be “connected” to, well, everything. Doesn’t get more social than that.

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By Mark Traphagen | Posted in facebook, internet marketing, keywords, public relations, rants, social media, social web marketing, user interface | Comments (9)