At first I was really excited about Promoted Tweets and tried to think of which clients we have that could benefit from this. And then it hit me – does anyone actually use the search feature?

I began reading more about how the Promoted Tweets would only show on a search results page and will ultimately disappear if users do not interact with the Tweet.  Interesting concept- but will it work?

(Disclaimer: I don’t research Twitter for a living and I don’t know the stats of who does what when they are Tweeting away – so this is all just my opinion.)

I evaluated how real people actually use Twitter.com (Important to note this was a VERY small audience I evaluated in lieu of timing, mainly myself and a few close Tweeps). I’m 99% positive that in the past year or so that I have had a Twitter account, that I have never used the search future to find information, other than today, which was solely for the purpose of this blog. I have used it however when I want to mention someone I am following in my tweet and I forget what their @ name is. Plus – don’t most people update their Tweets from their phone and third party apps (I personally prefer the Twitter Gadget on my iGoogle-which doesn’t allow you to search)?

So I decided to do a little test and think like a consumer on Twitter. One company that is testing the Promoted Tweets is Starbucks and I know that today they are giving away free coffee to anyone that brings in a reusable mug (go green) for “Tax Day Freebies:”. I know this because I love coffee, I am a fan of them on Facebook and I follow them on Twitter (no judgments necessary).

My Theory:

The common Tweep/Twit/Twitterer/Tweeter/Micro-blogger does not use the Twitter search feature to search for products, etc. So as this “Promoted Tweets” is a good idea – I ultimately think it will fail to bring any actual value to the advertiser.

My Test- Starbucks:

I thought about terms that a consumer of Starbucks and Coffee in general would search for and entered these keywords in the Search bar on my Twitter.com page. Since today is free coffee day my focus is on those types of keywords

Search #1:

I went for the obvious “Starbucks” and discovered my first Promoted Tweet! Wahoo! Success.

Search #2:

My next search was for “Free Coffee.” No Promoted Tweet here- but plenty of free WOM advertising going on! Success? Maybe not for Starbucks – wouldn’t this be opportune time to promote their “Free Coffee” day?

Search #3:

Keyword: “Coffee.” Promoted Tweet- Success, kinda. Most “natural” Tweets were about people spilling their coffee or needing more coffee to get through the day- so Starbucks paying to show up here is a little silly, right?

Search #4”

Keyword: “Coffee Deals,” Promoted Tweet- Success. Again, Why not tailor the message to promote the “Free Coffee” Day?

My Conclusion: Out of the 4 terms I tested the only ones I believe people (if anyone would do a search like this on Twitter) would actually search for are “free coffee” and “coffee deals”- So, Starbucks gets a 50% for the day from me (I’ll ignore the fact that the Promoted Tweets showing failed to mention the “Free coffee”).

The Promoted Tweet thing may work or it may not- only time can tell. In my opinion- it’s a waste of advertising dollars in a space where most of the chatter about your brand is free (and hopefully positive), and if the people really want to know about what you have to say they are:

1. Already following you on Twitter or

2. They will find you in the trending topics along with Justin Bieber and what’s #nowplaying.

Again this is purely my opinion, so what do you think?

Has anyone tested this, got results and it has generated a positive ROI for the advertiser?

I have a couple thousand followers on twitter, which is great! As much as I advocate against attaching your ego to your twitter followers, as my followers grow I take that as a vote that I am putting something of value out there, more followers hopefully means I am doing something to attract and retain followers (since I am not one of those people who follows everyone back).

With that said, I recently had an issue with my blog, & I posted it here:

With 2,000+ followers I honestly expected that I would have 4-5 responses of people who I hopefully help out with my posts, jumping to help me out. NOPE. Crickets, except for 1, luckily that 1 was all I needed!

Jaamit thank you so much, hope all is well with you and the SEO team at Freshegg!

For the record, I may have met Jaamit, but we had never corresponded before and really didn’t know each other.

Darn, I gotta get some more programmers following me!

Thank God one person jumped in to help me out!

The hard facts that I have found from this experience are:

1 – How many people follow you means NOTHING if in your time of need some of them don’t / can’t help you.

2 – Sometimes, when you have a real issue you may have to post it 3-4 times (not more than once a day) to ensure that a larger percentage of your followers will see it, we all miss a TON of good tweets, even from our friends (this is what I think happened in my case).

3 – Growing followers is important because you can’t expect everyone you follow to know the answer to your questions, so growing your count is important and follower diversity is important.

4 – Answering people’s questions (especially those with some reach and well ranking blogs) is a GREAT way to build high quality links, they often link out and share the love, heck it worked for Jaamit he’s linked above, and he never asked for a thing, he just was willing to help a link back is my way of saying thanks!

The moral of this story is summed up in point 5.

5 – If you have the time, using search.twitter.com for commonly searched phrases in your industry. Then see if people are having problems with something you can EASILY help them out with. Answer their questions, is a great way to build quality followers and potentially links. I mentioned that way back in my link building with twitter post.

Easy enough, next time you are stumped in your linkbuilding strategy, think about going to Twitter search and seeing who is asking questions you can answer (in a non-salesly way)

Take a second marketing managers, if you are hiring a social media consultant, the more time they spend @’ing people all day, talking to their tweeps, going to tweetups, etc the LESS time they are spending growing your brand and monitoring your brand – a balance should be struck. I track my time like a banshee and personally monitor my non-SEO efforts so I know when I get out of balance

So I decided to give you some tools to do some investigative checking on your social media consultants with some tips on how to interpret what you find from these tools.

Problem #1 – Your Social Media Consultant is a groupie and not a strategist

How does your social media consultant becoming a groupie of people like Gary V, Chris Brogan, Geoff Livingston, Mari Smith, etc help YOU, yeah you, you know the person that pays for them to monitor your brand online? Following is fine, mutual professional respect is great too, but being a groupie to anyone who puts their pants on one leg at a time is crazy.

You think you’ve got a social media groupie? Here’s some things to do to find out.

Drop their name into Google Image Search & Flickr search. If most pictures of them are with other people, drinking at parties, cheesing for the camera with any web celebrity and showing other groupie behavior, you might want to think twice.

I took a big name person (who will remain nameless) who is doing social media for some big brands and 50% of his/her pictures were of this person acting very groupie like – If I need to trust my social media budget, I’d prefer the quiet strategic type vs the “look how popular I am type” anyday.

One person who breaks the heck out of this rule is Tamar Weinberg, lots of pics but she’s a superstar in her own right, so a lot of people want to take pictures WITH her, its the price of stardom but she’s not seeking it.

Problem #2 – Identifying a Chatty Cathy social media consultant?

Remember Chatty Cathy? Twitter has sprouted a whole new army of them!

Lets use Brian Chappell as an example of how to use twittercounter to uncover the traits of a social media consultant who gets strategy. A social media consultant who actually has a job can’t tweet all the time, sure we all get a little Chatty Cathy once in a while but real consultants do work at some point, and using twittercounter and selecting the “updates” option will show you that there are times when your potential social media consultant won’t update for a day or two, and that is a good thing, why? Because they are busy working on strategies to help their clients, again shocking!

Does it mean they need to have zero updates some days??

Not at all but if they usually post 10 times a day, there have to be some days that only get one or two.

Lets anonymously use a social media consultant with thousands of followers (who follows a couple hundred people). See this chart below. This person has over 50 tweets in a day about 10 times in 30 days. I think that is a bit excessive, especially since most of what they post is kinda useless for followers interested in social media.

Again its OK to be a little chatty once in awhile, but if you see this kind of activity, YOU should go investigate, some acceptable reasons to see a lot of tweets per day are:

Handling a customer service issue

Live tweeting from a conference

Having a baby / Getting Married

Posting hashtags to keep people abreast of a seminar

Getting a new job

All those are perfectly good reasons for a social media consultant to have a big spike in twitter activity, but you should investigate the source of consistent tweet spikes before hiring them to make sure spikes in tweets are relevant.

Very often people’s spikes in twitter posts come from bickering and pissing contests. Take note, how often do they get involved with arguments that cause them to post 60 times in a day 10 times a month? Even if the tweets are small, it takes time to write that tweet and squeeze the thought into 140 characters, it could be a minute per tweet at least. Over the course of a day that’s an hour or more. An hour they could have spent helping you instead of arguing over who’s right and whose wrong.

Problem #3 They are “Talkin Loud and ain’t Sayin Nothin’”

Ahh James Brown Said it best!

Evaluating a social media consultant? Read their twitter stream, are they posting resources or opinions? A good social media consultant knows that there is a balance between personal, fun, opinion, type posts and ones that show that they “get it”. Use tools like Twitter grader and look at their cloud – take a look at Brian Chappell’s cloud is not the kind of guy to be running around drinking a ton taking photos with everyone, he analyzes and strategizes. That’s why I like him.

I see minimal @’s and nothing inappropriate or groupie like. I like what I see – a cloud filled with @’s and inappropriate words tells you what this person talks about most of the time.

Too many @’s tells me you like to make your conversations public, for the same reason why I don’t want to hear my neighbors argue, outside, I don’t need to see what should be a private conversation happening in public…your social media consultant should know when a conversation is public and when it should be taken private. If they keep their arguments public all the time, how are they going to ask you to respond to a customer complaint, call them stupid or an idiot on a public forum?

Problem #4 – They follow everyone who follows them.

This is a touchy one, but here goes. A strategic social media consultant (or anyone who values true networking) understands VALUABLE connections, and understands that not all followers are created equal and realizes that they probably shouldn’t follow everyone (this does not apply for social media consultants who sell software or authors who are trying to sell books). The groupie social media consultants follow almost everyone back, why? Because they have attached their self worth, ego, and popularity to how many followers they can get. The more people that follow me the more popular I am, right? Is their mantra. There are exceptions to this rule, but not too many.

Run Twitterholic.com

Run this tool I used Tamar Weinberg’s twitterholic report as an example.

Shocker, Tamar doesn’t follow everyone back, and she actually does have a book out there on social media, so you’d think she’d start following more people to maybe sell more books. Nope.

More importantly, you’ll see lately she’s been trimming back who she follows even as her follower count grows! I’d love to know why, but I can imagine that people that value connections realize that at times they need to trim some back when it just becomes too much.

Don Crowther another person I respect breaks this rule and is still a great consultant, so don’t use any of my ideas as absolutes, ok? There are quality people who do break some (but not all) of these rules.

Problem #5 – Their profile refers to themselves as a speaker, thought leader, expert, guru, or ninja.

Nothing says I drink the cool aid like I’m a social media ninja! If their goal is to get speaking gigs what does that do for YOU? I speak at a ton of events myself, but I’d never promote myself as a speaker if I only had 140 characters to talk about myself. Look at the twitter profile for someone I consider to be an expert, Beth Harte or at Chris Winfield and his profile on twitter. I tend to like people who are good at what they do and show some humility, so I can’t say that without mentioning Dave Snyder, Jordan Kasteler, and Loren Baker, just good guys too.

Why does this matter? The minute you start thinking of yourself as a “guru” you spend more time maintaining your status and not on hustling and being the best you can be at your craft. Getting selected as a speaker for some consultants plays into their ego in a way that says “look at all these people who come see me speak because I know so much more than they do” – thats whack!

Don again, breaks this rule, so it gives me an opportunity to again say – do NOT use any of these as absolutes? Don please don’t break any more of these rules or you are going to kill my post.

So those are my thoughts, this post has been bubbling up in me for a while, glad I finally got to write it. I know there are more folks who do social whom I didn’t get to mention here, its cause I am saving your samples for part II. Thanks to Gloria Bell, a Philadelphia Based Social Media Consultant who helped me spark this idea!

Every time you mention “I need one more follower to get to X followers” you should lose followers not gain them.

That kind of neediness shows that you know nothing about social media (if that is what it is being called this week)! Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the number of followers you have as some kind of validation that you are good at what you do / know what you are doing. Stop it. OK. Just stop it. We all get followed by fake profiles, right? Will that follower ever be able to help you? NO! Then who care that they are following you, even though they add to your numbers, right!

Who you follow, and who follows you, should be more of a function of your propensity to HELP people and their propensity to help you. Until I can ask a question and get inundated by quality answers I do not have the right followers.

The number of people who find you interesting is not nearly as important as the number of people who are willing to help you when you tweet a problem you are having.

I for one don’t just follow people who follow me, I tend to follow people who are into HELPING people, very often helping others comes in the form of a DM which I can’t see, but my litmus test is simple – links in your Twitter stream (especially in replies) shows me that you are trying to get answers out to other people or post things that your followers might find helpful.

As I mentioned in my presentation at the Affiliate Summit in Vegas (recap here), one of the easiest ways to build links is seek out people you can help, in real life, in charities, on twitter, you name it. I talked about this not groundbreaking idea in my blog post titled the three link building tactics NO one talks about the first one is just simply helping people.

Twitter can be your water cooler, heck its mine too, but I do try to cheer friends up that are having bad days, and answer questions for people who are seeking to answers on things I may know. That is how you build quality Twitter followers, stop tweeting about your number of followers and GO HELP someone.

I recently got followed by someone – yes +1 followers on my tally. You know how I got followed by him.

I did a search one day when I was bored on an area where I might know a thing or two, SEO:

Sometimes I do searches for terms like:
Google penalty
SEO Help
Looking tool

And many other searches will show you tons of people like this tweet here from @brandonburke

Its only 140 characters people, so it isn’t a MAJOR time commitment to help, as a result of this tweet I got one follower and its OK to me to build my followers one at a time by helping rather than gimmicks.

So in a Friday at 3:00 after a Cuban lunch and mojitos with the team

I realized that in about 6 hours I would be touching down at O Hare armed with urbanspoon and yelp iphone apps, a flight ticket, a hotel, and my companion.

Crap, login to my account it’s time to send a tweet, I have no idea what I’ll be doing!

Within 3 minutes Grey Hoy, who works for the balleriffic happycog design crew recommended MK Restaurant. His exact response was MK RESTAURANT…NUFF SAID.

After seeing Greg get bumped to first class on the worst flight ever

I said you know what…when this guy says NUFF said, given his travels I believe it.

MK booked Saturday night! I then referred it to Lauralane whom I work with and somewhow also decided to go to Chicago on the same weekend!

I made it to MK (barely after an amazing Phillies win!)

Nice, 1 of my 3 dinners is decided.

Within 20 minutes of my tweet Jeannine Crooks a good pal from the affiliate side of the world recommended Berghoffs in Chicago for good German Beers.

I didn’t make it, sorry, but next time!

Then out of nowhere I got a tweet from this person, obviously a Chicago lover

Her recommendation for Wilde was spot on

She took her love for a city and just spread a little more love my way, much thanks.
She also recommended Tango Sur, an Argentenian BYOB which is right up my alley – meat!!!

Again, kudos!
This person’s recommendations were so spot on that on my last night I sent an emergency tweet asking what to do next!

I also got a tweet from ltrosien who had
recommended the Bongo Room for brunch

So that’s where I wanted to go next…oh darn 45 minute wait for brunch, maybe next time!

Check out this tweet, that is some dedication!

BrentDpayne, Chicago SEO pro, also within about an hour or so recommended a few night spots.

Some of which have attractive ladies, and are open until 5am! Umm I brought my attractive lady but your recommendations did not fall on deaf ears, I almost made it to Boss bar but at least my pal lauralane was able to go to boss, and liked it.

None of these people needed to reach out, but by them doing so they really made my experience in Chicago THAT much more richer and that much less “touristy” I hope.

As such I was able to plan out my weekend trip in less than 4 hours due to 2 people I know (hoyboy & Jeannine_crooks) 2 people I never even heard of (ltrosien and thelocaltourist) and 1 person I had heard of but never met (BrentDPayne).

I might try this on my next trip to Denver, hope I get some more mile high followers.

Thanks to all of you and thanks to the twitter crew for making this possible. I will be back to hit some more of these places on my next trip to Chicago!

It was a blast!

For you SEO folks who are saying..where’s the SEO tip here? Well its simple, by helping others you will gain links, remember I just talked about that!

My new house has some electrical problems, Yeah!!!

I did research on local electricians in the Philadelphia area, obviously I am typical of most people…If you don’t already have a recommendation you usually go with a search engine!

I remember seeing vans and BMW Mini’s from some company all over the city.

Win #1 – Your branding was memorable, your logo, your BMW mini, etc made you look hip – it doesn’t say you are good though

So I do a search for Philadelphia electricians because I never remembered who had those flashy cars with the nice logo.
Here’s what I find:

Win #2 – You are showing up tops in Google Local

Google is also showing that you have 16 reviews combined, the next closest local company has 1, then all the rest have zero

So of course I click on the reviews to see what people are saying

Win #3 – People sound fanatical about your company, WOW!!! Great reviews!!

So I go to the site…

Win #4 – This site has better calls to action and usability than many e-commerce sites that live and die by conversions.

Does this site look like the website of an electrician?
They get my call

They come fix my problem in NO TIME, the guy even vacuumed up every speck of dust he left, and I mean EVERY spec.

Win #5 – I am a fan, I am a loudmouth, I tell everyone I know how great these guys are!

This is the trifecta people of all SEO (local and national)
1 – They were well ranked in local maps which show up above the organic results
2 – They have GREAT reviews and have encouraged people with a great experience to write about it
3 – They practice what they preach, they could have been all flashy and all ranked well, but if they weren’t awesome, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Last but not least, I just got a LinkedIn request from one of the two partners…HA you found me…now you can create an ongoing dialogue with one of your clients by finding them on LinkedIn…smart!!!!!

Social Media & Customer Service Lessons from the Cable Giant

Prior to joining SEER, I spent almost six years working for Comcast. The instant anyone found that out, I would be bombarded with questions and (too often) complaints about the service they’d received previously. To this day, I still get calls from friends asking why their DVR no longer records their favorite program. People just want to know that someone’s listening.

When I read about a Comcast employee reaching out to fellow blogger Michael Arrington over the weekend, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. For anyone not familiar with the story, Michael had an outage and started posting about it on Twitter, just to rant about the problems he was dealing with. Imagine his surprise when Comcast actually called him twenty minutes later to help fix the problem he was having. It turns out a manager at Comcast, Frank Eliason aka @comcastcares, has taken to monitoring mentions of Comcast on Twitter and has slowly and quietly been responding to people for the past six months – a revolutionary idea and a brilliant way to actively connect with customers. This was picked up all over the blogosphere, and was even written about in one of my favorite sites – The Consumerist.

I spoke to Frank about the work he was doing and how he was changing the customer service industry. The most amazing thing for me to hear is that he’s manually tracking, reading, and responding to these Twitters on his own, as Comcast didn’t expect this service to become public knowledge for some time. Frank explained that “the challenge to the publicity is that we must be seen, when in the past we were a little more quiet reaching out when we could. We know we need to improve, and this is a small part of that effort.”

So what can you, as a company owner, learn from Comcast’s example?

• Create a Twitter account – Not only can you connect with people quickly, but you may have access to people in your industry that you never expected to get to communicate with.
• Set up Twitter tracking – This can be done in several ways. Through your Twitter account, you can set up tracking on IM or SMS with a simple “track @rachael823” command. You can also use sites like http://www.tweetscan.com to show you history of the term you’re searching for.
• Smart business owners would track their personal name, company name, domains, competitors’ names, and even top keywords for their industry to see who’s talking about anything related to them.
• Do this across all social media sites and blogs.
• Set up Google Alerts to notify you when any of these terms come up.
• If anyone is talking about you, positive or negative, it’s such an easy task to reach out to them, especially on Twitter. How long does it take you to type 140 characters? The effect that effort has on the recipient is well worth it.

Media Bullseye had a great question: Where is everyone else? Is anyone out there already taking action to monitor their reputation online through social media channels?

STOP being lemmings!!! For you who select SEO companies to work with, please don’t fall for the client list! It matters less than you think! Putting a client on your client list doesn’t mean you did a real project for the company listed.

Being invited to speak at a company does NOT make them an SEO client, nor does doing a 5 hour engagement (in my opinion). If a company has impressive client roster, pick the references! Having worked for someone and having a GOOD relationship with them are two different things.

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – Choose your references

While any SEO company will have some references all ready for you, you should ask for at least a couple that YOU PICK from their client list.

The SEO company should say “NO PROBLEM” when it comes to connecting you to at least half of the client you requested, asking for more than 3 references is just weird though so don’t ask for the whole client roster to be a reference. Keep in mind some clients just aren’t into doing the reference thing sometimes and as a result SEO’s may not be able to easily get them, that is why I say half is a good figure to shoot for.

One thing to expect is that a lot of SEO companies don’t work direct with their clients, and often are private labeled, so they may not have direct connections with each client.

The agency that brought them in should easily be able to vouch for their work though. Some SEO companies private label, so you may see some big names that are brought to them by an agency, you should speak with the agency in these instances.

There will always be minor reasons why someone can’t connect you with every requested reference, the bigger issue is how they react to being asked this question. Their gut reaction should be like “no problem”, if they gut reaction is “why” or “ummm, well, err, my contact left there” or some other excuse, be wary and do deeper digging before selecting them.

Again people, stop falling for the client list and big client names, get the details.

Even SEER has to clean up our list a bit, as a smaller search company that knows we can compete with the big boys, we fell into the trap of listing our most recognizable brands only, that will change with our impending re-launch.

SEO Company lie #2 – Their Staff

If you feel more comfortable with a certain size SEO company, that’s fine. I am not here to change your mind, but to help you do a little due diligence and make sure they really have that many people. After seeing an SEO company totally rip off a prospect and just flat out lie about their staff of 25 people I was pissed and thought…

“how can I help people figure out how to catch these liars…I got one way…”

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – USE search engines!!

Of course there are always special relationships, virtual CFO / COO types work with multiple companies, billing people, exec assistants, etc. But when it comes to the core SEO/SEM team, you should be finding members of your SEO/SEM team on LinkedIn, Digg, Del.ico.us, Zoominfo, Sphinn, etc. Hint: search for the company name in addition to the individual’s name, also search for the persons name as one word too, see what I find when I search for dannysullivan vs. Danny Sullivan again, if someone uses their real name, run the search on that too.

Now of course many will have aliases (sugarrae, greywolf, oilman) so they won’t be easy to find, and to be honest you don’t really need to. I have another way if the search engines come up a bit lame.

Use Linkedin (most business people are here)
Here’s my quick check, a few of ANYONE’s search team should be on LinkedIn, if a company says they have a search team of 10 people it is not crazy to think that by typing in the name of the company in LinkedIn and see 4 or 5 of them, right?

Go search for the company name, what comes back?

I think small good companies have no problem saying, “We’re small, and we’re GOOD”. If what makes a company good is their size then they’ve got problems, and now you do too!

SEO Company lie #3 – I know (insert celebrity here) Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, Todd Malicoat, Greywolf, etc… knowing them and THEM KNOWING YOU are TWO different things.

Accepting someone on LinkedIn doesn’t mean you are friends!

Sure this adds credibility, but come on people, when someone says they know someone, I would expect that to be a reciprocal relationship. These SEO celebrities probably get 1000+ cards a year from a ton of people and may even have e-mailed some, chatted a bit, but that doesn’t a relationship make.

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – This doesn’t matter!!

To be honest, knowing these guys shouldn’t really mean much for you as a purchaser of SEO services. Why would your SEO team need to know Matt Cutts? I’d like to think that Matt has heard of me or seen my SEO videos – A guy can dream right?

If for some reason who an SEO knows means something to your in your selection process, you are focusing on the wrong things!

LEE Odden did a great piece on the Fallacy of the SEO celebrity.

SEO Company lie #4 – We do social media

Because social media is hot right now, I think everyone says they do linkbaiting / social media, which is fine, we all gotta start somewhere. But here’s how you can decipher one from the next: (Tamar, thanks for the help on this one & please never go back to full time server admin work, LOL!)

Ask your social media strategist for their URLs on:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Digg
• Del.ic.ous
• Stumbleupon
• LinkedIn
• Twitter (which I hate but recently fell victim to)

If they have accounts for most of these consider them a beginner that has at least done the basics (which is OK, this is a new area and you shouldn’t expect them to have 3-4 years experience in this area).

The question is do they actually have activity and friends and are adding to these profiles with plugins, groups, etc? You really have to be active on these communities to understand the nuances of how they work. Each one is slightly different.

Mid level social media folks should be very active on many of these above, not all but many. Additionally, some of these would be a waste for marketing, but at least a mid level person is involved enough in the community to stay on top of marketing opportunities if they exist.

The top folks at least know of these & what kind of content plays best on these:
• Sk-rt
• Hugg
• Mixx
• Reddit
• Yahoo Answers
• Ballhype

Be careful here, the key is ACTIVITY not just an account. If they were not active recently, maybe it is because they have not found a lot of value there, but at some point there should have been some serious activity.

And yes, the key is activity, but if you’d want to emphasize anything, don’t spread yourself too thin (by using all these services). Do a little and get good at one or two social media sites.

SEO Company lie #5 – We can guarantee XXXXX or we’ll get you XXXX links per month sales pitches

If the guarantee is for keywords, or #1 rankings, or page 1 rankings, NONE can be guaranteed! This is the easiest issue of the 5, but after having been asked in a room of hundreds of people about the effectiveness of a 20 THOUSAND keywords meta tag at a recent affiliate summit, I think basics are still important and worth discussing.

Ok, here’s a simple rule…if you got cold called, DO NOT work with that company. Sure some of you may have exceptions, but this is simple, no cold calls, no marketing e-mails!

No company can guarantee an actual ranking, or an actual number of terms on page one. If you do have a company that gives you a guarantee, ask them if you can select the terms that count, make sure all are two the word phrases and watch them squirm! The issue with guaranteeing page ones is that the SEO company is likely to include some softballs in there to make sure they hit their “guarantee”.

Any company that tells you how many links they expect to get you monthly is the wrong company to work with. Do you really care that they get you 3, 30, or 300 links per month? NO you shouldn’t, it should be about maximizing rankings to maximize leads / sales for keywords that are applicable to your business.

Links are a byproduct, not to mention, getting 3 good strong hard to get links could be worth 10x more than 30 or 300 in terms of how they help you rank.

Disclaimer:
We do have a guarantee though

It is simple. We feel that if by 6 months we don’t have a certain percentage of terms on the first 2 pages of Google / Yahoo / MSN and the client account is in good standing, then we pause payment until we do. We do this because we just don’t feel right taking people’s money if for some reason 6 months in we are not performing.

Don’t fall for other SEO Lies, if you have more please let me know, I plan on developing am ongoing checklist of things to look for when selecting an SEO firm and obviously I am missing a bunch!

- Have you created an online donation page?

Besides the firm dedication a non-profit needs to function, all non-profits know that funding keeps an organization thriving. Every non-profit should have an online donation page which is secure and easy to use. There are many creative avenues to request funding from your supporters. For example, an Online Volunteer for UNICEF can design a personal donation page with information about their chosen cause, set a fundraising goal and then invite everyone they know to visit their page and donate to UNICEF. Volunteers can also form teams and recruit others to help spread the word.

You don’t have to be an international and well established organization to do this. JustGiving.com is a site that allows charities to create donation pages for free (but charges a small transaction fee on donations). Another site, FirstGiving.com offers the same service but provides you with additional web tools such as a fundraising widget that you can include on social media sites.

Change.org is a free service that allows non-profits to add their group to general causes such as Ending Poverty or Universal Health Care. Visitors can then donate to your specific organization or donate evenly to all groups within one cause.

-Have you applied for a Google AdWords Grant?

Under the Google Grants Program, non-profits can receive up to $10,000 worth of clicks in the AdWords program. Any non-profit organization without political or religious affiliation and a 501(c)(3) status may apply. The application seems to be competitive based on the high number of applicants but having someone on your team with AdWords experience may better your chances of being approved. Also, seeking out a specialist in the PPC field to help manage the campaign is highly recommended. Ten grand a month can have a large impact if used strategically.

-Are you requesting links from supporters?

In SEO, we have this little thing called “link juice.” Actually, it’s a big thing! The number of sites that link to yours influences the site’s importance in the search engines. Requesting that visitors link to your site from their personal websites and blogs can increase your prominence in search results and drive traffic.

End Poverty International has partnered with several sponsors who have pledged to donate a certain amount for every person who links to Endpovertyinternational.org from their .edu page. I’ve never seen this done before and it doesn’t seem to be encouraging a lot of .edu links but I like the idea! The benefit is two fold—link juice and money!

-Are you socializing?

More likely than not, there are tons of people surfing the web who would love to support your cause. But if you don’t have at least an active MySpace or Facebook account, how will you find them? Using social media sites is an excellent way to stay communicated with your supporters and keeps them up-to-date on your organization’s news and events. It is much more interactive than a static website and people won’t have to remember to visit your site—they’ll just log into their MySpace or Facebook accounts. And best of all, it’s free!

For example, this is the official MySpace page for the Susan G. Koman Organization. Friends can read the stories of others as well as share their own personal stories. You can also create a MySpace group like this one which discusses homelessness and creates awareness. Even enhance your page with features such as a fundraising widget from ChipIn.

I’m amazed at the amount of resources out there for non-profits. I would love to hear from non-profits who have used SEO and SEM tactics that have been successful.

]]> http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/seosem-checklist-for-non-profits/2007/11/04/feed/ 4 http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/don%e2%80%99t-delete-your-myspace-account-%e2%80%93-sell-it-part-two/2007/02/15/ http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/don%e2%80%99t-delete-your-myspace-account-%e2%80%93-sell-it-part-two/2007/02/15/#comments Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:52:15 +0000 SEER http://www.thinkseer.com/blog/don%e2%80%99t-delete-your-myspace-account-%e2%80%93-sell-it-part-two/2007/02/15/ How a deal might be struck (continued from part one)
Assuming there is a certain level of trust between the buyer and seller, there are a few ways a deal can be made and a few questions to be addressed before the transfer is made. Will the buyer maintain the seller’s identity after purchase? To what extent is the buyer allowed to act as the seller when they acquire the account? Consider:

• Display name
• Personal pictures
• Existing blogs
• Existing comments
• A list of friends exempt of being solicited personally

An agreement between a buyer and seller can be structured in any way. The possibilities are really up to the parties’ imaginations. Here are some other facts and ideas to be kept in mind when arriving at an agreement.

1. Keeping a seller’s pictures up can help to ensure that friends don’t delete the account after the transfer. It is common behavior to aggregate existing friends and not pay much attention to minor profile changes when the potential “deleter” has a long friend list and only interacts with a few people with regularity. As a buyer, don’t raise any flags by putting up an unlikely photo or doing anything else that might be suspect behavior, like bulletin spam.

2. The seller can change their account email address. They’ll no longer be found if someone searches based on email. It may, however, take weeks for the email to be removed from the search results.

3. One can enable an away message thus disabling new incoming messages if desired.

4. One can require a last name to add you as a friend (which can be changed to something not obviously guessable) if the seller does not want new real life friends finding this profile and becoming a friend.

5. A buyer may want to require comment approval. If the account purchase is publicized, it should not be made known on your page. If people know that a profile is being used for marketing purposes they’re less likely to keep it as a friend.

Finally, I have listed some scenarios where a buyer and seller may have their biggest concerns.

Selling scenarios:
1. The seller agrees to maintain the account with links / ad space and retains the password.

2. The seller gives up the password and the profile retains the seller’s identity. The seller agrees to give free reign to the buyer to solicit any of their friends and pose as them to any extent.

3. The seller gives up the password and the profile retains the seller’s identity. The buyer agrees to restrictions on what photos will remain, what type of new photos are acceptable, and limitations in blog posts, etc.; after all, the profile will be played as if it were still the seller. Of course the seller may have some interest in keeping their name clean!

4. The seller changes their identity completely and then sells with the password. This may not be as attractive to the buyer because there is a greater chance that profile friends will delete this mysterious new person they are friends with, but the seller can rest assured that the marketing efforts are not coming from their face & name directly. Remember, my hypothesis that people with tons of friends don’t regularly interact with them, thus keeping the friend retention of this type of purchased profile higher than what may be expected.

When is this going to hit?
By now, we should all be aware of pay-per-post bloggers that receive compensation for reviewing or mentioning products or services. I will agree that selling a myspace account is very similar in concept, but there are clearly some great advantages to myspace over a blog in this case – you can see your target audience.

I really think that the sellers need to create the online marketplace for these transactions to take place. No one would be happy knowing Wawa is seeking to purchase myspace accounts openly. It would all work better if there were some type of brokerage or means for a buyer to purchase privately.

So… does anyone want to buy a relatively small profile with a friend id in the 50,000 range?