Author Archives: Mark Traphagen

Mark TraphagenMark Traphagen
Mark is Director of Social Media Marketing for Virante. Adept at uses of all forms of social media for marketing effectiveness, Mark has gained a special reputation as an expert on Google+. He has worked directly in Internet marketing since 2005, but has been involved in social media and online community formation since the mid 1990s. When not helping Virante clients improve their online presence, Mark participates in competitive storytelling, plays with a Dixieland street band, and (surprise) spends more time on the web.
Mark’s Google Profile+ | Mark on Twitter

How to Add Administrators to Your Google+ Business Page

Google now allows multiple administrators for Google+ business pages. If you have created a page in the past, here’s how to add others to help manage the page: 1. Go to any page you administer by clicking the down Pages link under your name on your home page. 2. Click the gear icon at upper [...]

Rapportive Makes Gmail Social

Rapportive is a browser extension that displays your social web connections in your Gmail inbox. After adding the Rapportive browser extension (currently available for Firefox, Safari, Mailplane and Chrome), opening any email in Gmail will display information similar to the example at right in the right-hand margin of the inbox. Rapportive displays (as available), the [...]

ShareThis Introduces Social Quality Index for Publishers and Advertisers

Social sharing facilitator ShareThis today announced a new service to be fully unveiled early in 2012: Social Quality Index (SQI). According to the company blog, ShareThis SQI will provide a quantifiable index of the social effectiveness of individual content pieces on a publisher’s site. They are calling the new metric “transformative,” and they just might be [...]

How to Verify Your Google+ Brand Page with Google

Anyone building a brand or business page on Google+ quickly comes to a rather unsettling realization: at no point in the process does Google do anything to check that you have any real connection to the brand name on your page. So it would seem that you are left relying on searchers’ detective abilities to [...]

Coming Soon to Google+: Multi-Admin Brand Pages, AdWords and More

On Google+ marketer Carter Gibson posted bullet point highlights from a talk by Google staffer Tae E. Kim at the CrushIQ conference in Washington DC. You can read his whole post here, but I want to pick up a few points that caught my attention. Mutiple adminstrators for brand pages coming…in first quarter of 2012. This is [...]

The Social Value of Google+ Ripples

One of the many interesting features Google has added to Google+ in recent weeks is Ripples. If you’re not familiar, Ripples allows you to play a timeline that shows you the spread of a viral post across Google+. You access it by clicking the little down arrow to the right of a post. Aside from [...]

Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Development

Yesterday Virante’s CTO Russ Jones (Twitter: @rjonesx) spoke at PubCon in Las Vegas on the topic “Low Risk, High Reward Link Development.” Virante Director of Customer Relations Jacob Bobhall (Twitter: @jakebohall) live tweeted the talk. The following is an aggregation of his tweets (with hashtags & a few other references removed): SEO Misconception: paid links are [...]

Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Google+ Brand Page

In my last post (“Google+ Pages for Brands Are Here NOW! Why You Must Get One“), I gave reasons why I think it is essential that your business claim a Google+ Page for Brands. Now that you’ve got your Page, what do you do with it? Optimizing Your Google+ Page for SEO I would say [...]

Google+ Pages for Brands Are Here! Why You MUST Get One

Google announced today the long-awaited introduction of Google+ profiles for brands, businesses, and organizations, calling them Google+ Pages. The new Pages look very much like personal Google+ profiles, with a few additions: +1 Button: People viewing a brand’s page can “+1″ it, which will cause it to show up as a recommendation when that person’s friends [...]

AdWords Switches Side Ads to Bottom (Sometimes)

As if the world of paid search advertising management wasn’t filled with enough variables…let’s throw in AdWords making changes to how they display ads! On November 2, 2011, AdWords announced that “ads that have previously shown to the side of the [search] results may in some cases appear below them.” When and why will the [...]