If anyone ever asks what version of blah blah blah you are running, just log onto this site and it will give you details. May not work on all machine, but it is pretty neat.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

But this also has profound shifts for the ways both groups have traditionally operated. Gone are the days when meta tag keywords and a smattering of comments on competitive blogs would boost search rankings. Social media is old-style communication newly applied to online spaces. It is conversation. The term Social SEO demonstrates the complementary nature of traditional SEO and social media. When you have a solid Social SEO strategy, you will see uplift in awareness, in conversation and in social engagement. The common thread is to get conversations moving about your company, your product, your service. That is a powerful tool that yields results. A positive conversation can deliver many conversions.

4 QUESTIONS FOR DIAGNOSIS

To ensure the right conversations are taking place, businesses can use a set of key questions to determine their social SEO readiness and then apply proven principles for executing the best fit SEO strategy. Here are four questions you can use to check your social awareness pulse:

1. Are You On Message?

The question for your Marketing and Communications departments is how are they enabling everyone in the organization to be on-message? This is not a command and control task. The pro-active delivery of business critical content to employees and partners is an important process. Are your systems passive? Do you enable employee and partner engagement on and about those topics? Do your systems facilitate those ad hoc conversations?

2. Are You Synchronized?

The question for your intranet team is how are they ensuring that everyone across the organization is synchronized? This means that sales, support, consulting and R&D/Manufacturing teams all know that new campaigns are kicking off. Those campaigns, or special deals or new product launches are likely to drive demand and raise questions. Everyone doesn’t need the details but they should be ready to answer questions, address concerns and point customers in the right direction. You can bet the SEO team has thought long and hard about the keywords, buzz-spots and behavioral triggers that will likely trigger a response to that campaign. Do others know how to spot those keywords when they come up in conversation? The worst thing for a sales rep is to be caught unaware by a customer talking about that new 20% off deal they just got through a Klout promotion, email campaign or PPC coupon. Kudos to the marketing and SEO teams for landing that prospect but it leaves the rep flat-footed. That makes the company look bad.

3. Are You Converting Your Existing Social Media Leads?

One of the worst things you can do is pretend that social media matters for your business then ignore sales and marketing leads coming in from social sources. So the question for your sales team is how are they incorporating leads from non-traditional sources into their workflow? Do you even know when you get a lead from a social source? Do you know what to do with it? How to qualify it? How to route it to the most qualified rep to take it from there? When the SEO team is effective one result is greater participation in the social engagement spaces the social media team manages. But if you are not converting friends, fans and followers into customers and evangelists, you are on a very friendly path to fail-town.

4. How do individual contributors answer social requests? Because everyone is potentially on the front lines of customer engagement, how are you equipping individual contributors to deal with the heightened awareness and interaction that successful SEO drives? How are your line workers, back office admins, and other staff connecting the casually interested with the appropriate experts inside your organization who can take that interest to the next level?

Business has always been social. The difference is that now others can tell if that social environment is inviting or off-putting. Technology is what now enables engagement in ways and at scales never before possible.

Get the Whitepaper

In the whitepaper, Social SEO & Cross Channel Marketing, Billy Cripe of BloomThink and Gary Sirek of Squirrelworx discuss the impact that social media is having on the discipline of SEO. They discuss the SEO principles that drive awareness and attention that can benefit social media practice. They outline the key concepts that practitioners and managers from each discipline need to know about the other and they propose a model for bringing these teams together to boost business.

Download the Social SEO and Cross Channel Marketing whitepaper. There’s a link on the right.

1. Create Simple Goals - Think about the things that you want to do more of, the things you know your business needs, the things your competitors are doing well, and write it down!!!
2. Use a Worksheet - The below picture is an clipout from a marketing plan template that I use with all my clients. It helps you see all the various things you could, should and would be doing if you had enough time and an adequate budget.
3. Create Themes - This could be a mantra, a campaign idea, a hot trend, or some message you wish to communicate to your market. Themes help you stay consistent and focused.
4. Populate - Use the worksheet to fill in the things you would like to do and the measureable results of that activity. Most marketing is effective if it can be measured.
5. Prioritize - The Worksheet is a framework and so highlight the priorities within each section. This will drive out an effective budget and a realistic delivery schedule.
6. Find Resources - Even the greatest of plans can fail if you don't have the right resources to execute the plan. Anyone can do marketing, marketing specialists like the Squirrelworx team can do effective marketing.
7. Share - If everyone in the company knows what activity is the priority, others can possibly contribute and add energy to create a more successful Marketing Plan.

Now, Get Going in 2011 and market you company the way it deserves to be marketed. Call us, we can help.

If you think about the things you have to accomplish each day, week, month, and year - you typically can put things into three categories:

1. WORK - the things we have to do to bring in income, whether it is running your own business, working in a corporation, or anywhere in between.
2. FAMILY - the variety of responsibilities we all have around taking care of the people, community around us, and the physical possessions we require to live. 
3. PERSONAL - even though they sometimes take lower priority, there are things that you need to do each day to maintain YOU. Dont forget to relax for 5 minutes too.  

The 100 Pound Pack is a concept around the fact that most humans (and yes we are all only human) can carry about 100 pounds each day. That 100 pound pack consists of a blend of the above categories. When you take on too much of one category, the others suffer. When you take on too much of all categories, our packs are too full, and stuff falls out.

An example:

After my coffee, I sit down and think about the things I have to get done today. Frantically I start making a list (and I know I am not the only one making lists - some of the most effective and efficient people make lists mentally, electronically, or even on a post it).

That list is enormous. Each of the items is a ROCK. Each ROCK belongs to one of the three categories and weighs something. Knowing that my back and brain can only take on 100 pounds. I start prioritizing the rocks:

1. TODO - things I have to do today. No exceptions. These are priority and hopefully are not equal to more than 100 pounds or it will be a very challenging day.
2. NEXT - these are rocks that I might be able to add to my pack if I am productive or someone can help me carry my a rock from my pack.
3. WAIT - making mental notes of other lower priority things that need to get done is ok, just dont let them enter the 100 pound pack for today.

Then I set up my ROCK LIST - what rocks do I want to carry in my 100 pound pack for the day. If I have too many Work Rocks, my pack may be unbalanced and I may miss little Jimmy's soccer game. If I have too many Family Rocks, my employer may not be too happy with me. And if I spend too much time on myself, I never get anywhere in life.

My objective it to MOVE ROCKS out of my pack, lighten the load and get things done. It is simple is principle and complex in execution. The key to success is knowing yourself and knowing what 100 pounds feels like. Somedays you have 10 hours, somedays you have 4 hours. One size does not fit all. Some people work swiftly, some people don't. Some people prefer to take long walks after work, some people prefer to grab their laptop and surf.

Bottom line - to be successful and truly have a balanced productivity pack, it takes practice, discipline and some coaching. At Squirrelworx, we have the tools and techniques to teach you how. We are here to help - let's move some rocks together.

1. SMART - start simple and make them something that is specific, measureable and attainable.
2. WRITE IT - instead of just thinking about it - write it down and make it real.
3. RIGHT IT - determine if the item is a bad habit. If it is, replace it with a good habit.
4. SHARE - tell someone and hopefully go as far as creating accountability.
5. BE STRONG - be determined and wake up each day with purpose and focus on change.
6. ELIMINATE - get rid of indecision and other factors that limit your ability to change.
7. RESET - sometimes things change for you, you may need a quarterly reset to continue progress.
8. CELEBRATE - even small steps are considered progress. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Go for it!

The game has changed and search giants like Google and Bing have become the source for most people to search for businesses. There are a lot of internet marketing businesses today that are providing SEO services but making it simple and cost effective for you is key. Getting noticed can be more simple than you think. Its like creating a good soup.

Ingredients:

• Clear Site Title
• Simple Description
• Effective Keywords
• Specific Content
• Clean Links
• Integrated Social Media
• Search Engine Submission
• Search Engine Tools

Recipe for Success

1. SET GOALS - Start with the end in mind. Set goals for your business and yourself. SEO isnt a destination, it is a continual evolution. The search engines and your customers continually change the game.
2. PLAN - Work with an SEO specialist or leverage some of the do-it-yourself tools on the market to correctly prepare the ingredients above. Your site title, description, keywords, and content matter the most. 
3. REFRESH - Dust off your website and put together a simple plan to refresh content, rebuild or redesign your website. With the dominance of iPads in the market, build your site in HTML rather than Flash. Using tools like Squarespace makes it easy.
4. ADD LINKS - There are several service providers you can use to build organic links that will keep you in a favorable position with Google and Bing, and improve where you rank.
5. ADD TOOLS - Leverage the free and low cost tools on the market to help you better understand your website ranking, traffic patterns, visitor base and improvement opportunities.
6. MAINTAIN - Keep the content fresh and updated at least on a monthly basis by posting new information, news, blog material, and other key updates.
7. ENJOY - Create your own testimonial.   

Proof is in the Soup:

A Human Resources Firm from Minneapolis that was fairly hidden on the web wanted to leverage SEO to gain additional sales leads and contacts. After spending 10 hours refreshing the website (focusing on organizing and preparing the ingredients above), the next step was to build a few organic links and some fresh content. The final step was to submit to teh search engines and then watch it go.

"Within 15 days of making our changes, I searched Minneapolis Human Resources, and WOW, my company showed up on PAGE 1!!! Better yet, I received an email from an owner of a business asking form more information about my business. I called him back and he said that he did a Google search for HR consultants and my company came up on the first page. Then he chuckled and said you must be doing something right on the SEO side of your site since you were right there."

Anyone for some SEO Soup?