Posted on June 8, 2010 by admin
I can honestly say I`ve never been huge into furniture, not until recently anyway. I recently saw the video posted below, I was blown away…by furniture! Resource Furniture makes some of the neatest, most customizable furniture for the modern era….that I`m aware of anyway. Here in Vancouver we`re all pretty much in condos, so this style of furniture really caught my eye. After realizing I just spent 30 minutes studying a product because of that video, I thought it might make an interesting post.
The company has been around since 2000, but there web presence has only recently started building traction. When you have a product that produces content like that, then you`ve got a winner. It`s actually rare I get to work with a site where the product is unique enough to do the link building(gee I wonder why :). This company only needs to create some ripples before they turn into waves. I would try and remind yourself to check back in on this company in 6 months time to see just what leveraging social media has done for their link profile.
This video below came out recently and since then they have seen some great growth. If you`ve got a cool product coming out keep this in mind, learn how it`s done properly and get to it. Once you get that ball rolling, you`ll only have to focus on building your business, and not spending time marketing your brains out.
Posted on May 18, 2010 by admin
Foursquare is going to be the biggest force in the top 10 for businesses within the next year, so get ready for new marketing opportunities. Businesses are already scrambling to work with the Foursquare API, and I’m already seeing local business search domination in play. I wanted to showcase some ways you’ll be able to socially do business, and this is only with Foursquare. Imagine the reach you’ll get by dominating Gowalla as well, but that’s another post coming up within the next week. Foursquare is going to need to attract a lot of developers fast because Facebook is coming out with a location based check-in service, naturally, so time will tell who will dominate.
You can by all means add me as a friend on Foursquare as I`m quite active. I really love promoting my favorite local spots, and if user does it a bit it will all work out for the good. I don`t have any evil marketing intentions for Foursquare, so you`ll just see what I get up to on a daily basis. For the most part, prepare to be bored!
Foursquare has quickly been eating up the local search market, I`m sure you`ve all noticed. There`s no harm in getting your business active, think about this. How easily can you rank your boutique hotel venue listing, or local restaurant or real estate listings on Foursquare?
Foursquare gives you the ability to further brand yourself by linking up with Twitter and Facebook. While you don`t get a link to your homepage (yet), you do get followed links to your Facebook and Twitter page. That`s a plus in my books because that makes those profiles only stronger.
The Bad:
Some of the on-page optimization baffles me with foursquare, especially the URL and title formatting. I`m still not seeing Foursquare showing up very high in Google yet for local venues, perhaps this is why. They certainly have the link authority to rank for just about anything these days. I imagine this will eventually be changed to the slightly more SEO friendly setup, but for now this is what you get;
The Opus Hotel here in Vancouver is the coolest place I`ve had the pleasure of staying, and I never would have gone until I saw them socially online. The Opus Hotel does a damn fine job of not only SEO locally, but how they`ve branded themselves on Twitter, Facebook and of course Foursquare. This is a fine example of how you should be tackling online marketing from all angles. Their business listing on Foursquare is quite active and will most likely never be deindexed, and potentially will rank for some very competitive keywords in the near future.
The Good:
The promotion opportunities here are quite endless. The more check-ins your venue has, the more people will see your business. I`d highly recommend targeting active users within your city to get them involved with your Foursquare account. That`s the beauty of social networking!
Coupon marketing is currently offered for free through your Foursquare venue page. This obviously encourages users to come to your location, and hopefully the rise in business follows. I can tell you this, I routinely try and become mayor at my favorite restaurants just for the coupons and discounts. A local Vancouver restaurant chain called Earls has recently stepped up their Foursquare promotion as well as just Facebook and Twitter. You`d be amazed at what just these three sites can do for your local business. You can even see that I`m mayor of the Kingsway Earls near my condo….I even mustered up the strength to write a tip.
My favorite aspect of the features for businesses right now are the tools to create specials for users. These usually result in free drinks for birthdays, if the venue mayor checks in and really a whole bunch of ideas just waiting to be tried out. I’ve just recently learned that you can get Foursquare venue stickers for businesses to let customers know you’re a Foursquare friendly establishment. If you’re reading this now and own a local business, well then I hope you’re already ordering these as soon as you’re done RT’ing and stumbling this post.
Now I’m sure you’re sweating a little from the amount of new work I just created in your life, but don’t worry. Eventually the marketing will go viral within your local market, and you can as of right now track all sorts of amazing analytics for free. In fact, the developer team has stated they’re just going to make the best analytic software possible for free. I imagine at one point you’ll see some sort advanced, fee based business opportunities but that’s expected.
Here’s currently a chart they provide on their website describing the business analytic features;
What About The API?
Foursquare provides API access and it has already spawned some really interesting apps for both the user and businesses. So you can either code up something 3rd party to interact directly with your business and the Foursquare interface, or take advantage of other available apps. Within a year from now, there will be so many apps it will overload any businesses brand, no matter how large you are.
This also brings up another interesting question from the angle of a marketer. Which of my current social networks that I’m on are going to integrate with Foursquare? How many new niche business directories are we going to see implement Foursquare data? Who knows at this point, but this is something you’re going to want to keep in the back of your mind
Interesting Foursquare Apps:
Foursquare has recently redesigned their application directory so it’s easy to find all sorts of readily available tools to use. I’ve been digging around all evening, taking a look at what I thought would make for a great example of what’s possible with Foursquare applications. My favorite thing is dining out, I’m a little bit of a food nut, so let’s take a look at Snacksquare.
Local restaurants who take advantage of local coupon and discount sites like this will surely make a name for themselves. Snacksquare lets you find all the latest and greatest food and snack deals that are closest to you, brilliant! This app not only provides a method of free marketing for businesses, it provides a useful money saving device right at the tip of the consumers fingers.
4Squareoffers.com:
4squareoffers.com does pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It works in a similar fashion to Snacksquare except you can find deals on any type of product, not just food. It works with a simple to use Google Maps feature and you’ll have no problem finding local deals. Businesses will automatically get their data pulled as long as you’re marketing properly on Foursquare.
Love A Local Business:
The fine folks at Intuit coded up this neat little Foursquare and Facebook powered application for business all over the world. Basically it lets users vote and spread social love which in return should act exactly as an online, real time word of mouth marketing platform. I tried using the site a little more but sadly on the latest Firefox and Windows it would always hang my browser. Let me know if anyone else experiences this problem on a different platform as I don’t put much faith into Microsoft’s programming.
Wrapping Things Up:
I could go on and on about the 500+ other apps already out there right now, but I’ll spare you and I any more reading or writing here. The Foursquare train isn’t slowing down any time soon and has already dipped into Alexa’s top 1000 websites. I hope all of you learned something from this and take it and apply it to your business. If you’re looking for help in your local search marketing you can of course get in touch with me. We can kick start you local search marketing efforts with a bang.
Posted on May 18, 2010 by admin
I just watched this video presentation about Social Whale for your mobile phone. This app was started in 2009 by a few people in Greece, and has been in alpha testing stages to this day it seems. Twitter has created so many unique ways of communicating that the people at Social Whale decided to put something together. Watch this video to see what I mean.
Our idea is simple at its base. We create a clone of twitter’s API and then extend it, so that it has more features. This way twitter can continue being as simple as it is now, but advanced users can use our implementation in order to have the features we offer. Developers can easily update their applications to work with our extended API using the same requests in our domain (instead of twitter’s) and get the same data, enriched with the extra information that we provide. This way we actually have created an extension of twitter itself.
Posted on May 14, 2010 by admin
So the New York Times has announced that it will be charging for content on their website, a last ditch effort to make some money perhaps. The NYT does do pretty much all of its reporting, so you can see why they might be wanting to try this effort out. I for one, think it`s going to flop like just about every other attempt like this attempted. What is different however, is that the NYTimes.com website been seeing a lot of growth in the past 5 months, and hopefully this doesn`t hurt that effort. With a lot more popular content going away from the Google Index, I wonder if they`ll still manage to keep organic traffic up.
I think this is a great opportunity from a marketing and SEO perspective because we can monitor any changes, without footing the bill of course. I`m also wondering about how much organic and social media traffic they`ll lose to those big stories. I`ve seen other paid newspapers have there paid content landing pages rank well in Google, and that pissed me off quite a bit, so hopefully we don`t see that here.
What are your thoughts?
Posted on April 23, 2010 by admin
picture courtesy(Mashable)
I just read about how Conan O Brian dropped in on the Twitter HQ’s in San Francisco earlier this morning, and it got me thinking. Can you imagine if you had access to this kind of viral marketing? I’m going to be watching closely what impact this has on not only Mashable, but Twitter link wise. I’m really interested to see how many links this will net them in a 24-48 hour period, what do you folks think? I would be a happy man to not have to worry about link building with this kind of networking going on, so is this making any of you think?
I imagine if you’re in the local search market, even a little interview with a local celebrity would go a long way in your linking efforts. This is the type of marketing I like to see happen for a few reasons. This isn’t costing them any money, your users do the link building for you and you’ll even enjoy some branding in the process. Last but not least, you’re also doing something your competitors most likely cannot copy. That marketing, and those links will be a wicked asset to your online ranking efforts and keep the competitor’s in your dust.
