Ella Bee Social Media & PR

I know, I know, I know…I’m a HUGE social media nerd (life is just like high school) but I recently discovered a cool news-sharing site (thanks to Laermer). The concept is simple. The sharing site Paper.Li basically turns your tweets and links into a daily newspaper. I think this is genius because we basically get most of our news stories from Twitter anyways (sorry Facebook-you’re too slow nowadays).

Anyhow, check it out, create your own newspaper and let me know what you think. I promise if you’re a media junkie like me, you’ll LOVE it! This site could probably also increase your online presence. I know my clients will be using.

Happy sharing.

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER- New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.
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Please forgive me for being an SEO and Google nerd today. I’ve been experimenting with submiting my site to Google and it took me the longest to figure it out. I blame it on the long work hours and trying to learn about site verification while watching Gossip Girl and Heroes online.

So today, I finally verified my site and decided to play around with keywords to find my business. If you don’t do this for your company please proceed to your nearest search engine Google, Bing or Yahoo!. I accidentally found my company by using keywords that I want to be listed for. Surprisingly, I found out I was number one on Google Maps for my area, Atlanta!

Get your company listed on Google Maps too!

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Today, I participated in my first speaking engagement teaching a group of real estate agents on how they can use social media for their business. My speaking engagement became more of a discussion and I quickly realized I had to start from the beginning. I called my presentation, “The Power of Social Media Networking.”

Before I could begin my discussion, a few members started talking about a new movie released today titled, “Precious.” One of them had never even heard of the movie. Since my presentation was more of a freestyle, I quickly pulled up YouTube and showed the trailer for the movie. Interestingly, it led right into my presentation. In just a few moments of watching the trailer, the young lady who had never even heard of the movie, was eager to go see it tonight! That’s how easily, social media can translate into dollars. It was a great segue into my presentation.

Real estate, like most businesses and industries today, need a new way to market their products and/or services to new consumers or a larger demographic. While I wanted to highlight using popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) easily became the highlight of the discussion. I was able to connect the PC to a larger screen and I showed the audience real-time conversations about home buying on Twitter, quick searches on Google, home tours on YouTube and even found groups and relevant profiles on Facebook.

I am coming to realize that everything boils down to SEO. Whether it is Bing search, Search.Twitter or using a search engine on a blog or website, are you using the proper keywords and phrases to help others find you? Are you using highly searched keywords on your LinkedIn profile or tagging the necessary keywords on your professional or personal blog so your target audience will be able to view your posts?

Watch this video explaining simple SEO services that can help your business grow:

Finally, your web site is complete. It looks great, the content is appealing, but web traffic is not where you want it to be. There may be a problem that you have not considered: search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO.

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of driving traffic to a website by weighting algorithmic search results in a site’s favor. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Hire an SEO expert
If you haven’t completely exhausted your online budget on the web build or online media and can carve a bit more room in the budget for assistance with SEO, by all means do so. It is not nor is it ever too late to hire an agency, consultant or in-house expert to assist you with getting your website up to par and ready for indexing with the search engines. In fact, there are certain barriers that your newly designed website may have that can be overcome swiftly with a bit of hired help. In the long run, this can be worth the additional investment for your website.

Consider the following when deciding whether or not to hire yet another vendor or outside consultant to assist you with the next phase of your website’s development as recommended from SEOChat.com:
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The Problem
180 Urban Design is an architecture and design firm that specializes in New Urbanism design. The principal architects wanted to be recognized as leaders in New Urbanism, form-based codes, and LEED regulations. The company was having issues with low Google rankings which hurts business because people can’t find the company online. 180 wanted city planners and developers to know that they were building communities across the country. Awareness to the company’s projects were to be promoted through a podcasting blog.

The Strategy
As account manager, I developed a strategy that would position 180 as industry leaders by tagging search engine optimized (SEO) keywords to their blog posts, posting relevant articles from other industry leaders, promote the blog through other online communities, and pitch the blog to traditional and new media outlets. I knew podcasting would be great for other architects, but it takes grassroots marketing to promote a blog. You can’t just let it sit there in cyberspace, you have to interact with people who might be interested in your blog and find new and creative ways to not only get them to the blog, but make them stay there. I was determined to get the bounce rate under 50%. It was one of my secret goals. The bounce rate is when a user presses the back button-the lower the better. 180 Urban Design would become the go-to source for New Urbanism design.

The Tactics
Referring sites helped bring visitors to the blog. I registered the blog on Alltop, a blog search directory-one listing under architecture and another under design. I also posted relevant comments to other blogs and online articles like the New York Times Green Inc. blog, Facebook‘s New Urbanism groups, and Huffington Post’s Green section. When posting comments on these blogs, you shouldn’t just state, “Great post/article.” You have to share insight, ask questions, provide solutions, then the magic trick, leave your blog’s link. I also shared the podcasts on sites like Digg and Technorati. One of the main referring links came from Twitter. The Twitter profile 180Degree attracted more than 1,100 profiles in just two months. I had to search for not only architecture and design profiles, but for green profiles too. New Urbanism is all about green, walkable communities. Eventually, I started to attract my client’s target audience, city planners. Again, I listed the Twitter profile under a Twitter search directory, We Follow. I listed the 180Degree profile under architecture, design and urbanism. I posted tweets linking to the blog’s articles, other New Urbanism news stories, and other prominent architecture and design blogs.

In three short months, the New Urbanism Blog attracted more than 2,500 site visitors, from more than 50 countries from around the world. The client was very impressed by the blog’s appeal to the global architecture community. The client stated if I ever got a blog hit from Belize, please let him know; he would have to make a special vacation/trip to the country (smile).The average site visitor viewed the blog for approximately 2:05 minutes (think about how long you stay on a web page).The blog received 75 online subscribers and more than 300 comments. The page views were more than 4,550 with the average page views at 1.95 page views per visitor- that’s nearly two page views per site visitor. The top landing page was the blog’s front page so site visitors could read more than five posts. I was impressed with this data. Most visitors were looking deep into the site by searching under the categories listed, visiting the “About 180″ and “About New Urbanism” page, and going to older pages of blog posts.

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