The MGHurston Creative Services, LLC Social Media Intern will provide, but is not limited to, the following high level functions

• Advocate – Gather feedback from online initiatives and communicate back to team
• Evangelist – Promote online initiatives of clients developed by team
• Communicator – Post updates to Blogs, Facebook and Twitter. In addition the Social Media Intern will be responsible for participating in partner site’s Forums
• Moderator – Monitor and assess all conversations related to client accounts via Google Alerts

This position is part time, with expected two hours per day at five days a week and is highly driven by performance. Strong performance will yield increases in hours and responsibilities. Performance is not solely based upon the following: increases in web traffic, search queries, backlinks, alerts and sales increases.

Requirements

• Actively participates in a wide variety of social media activities such as blogging, community development and management, social bookmarking, commenting, etc
• Understanding of popular social networks – design, functionality, users
• Proficiency in social listening tools such as Whos Talking and Social Mention
• Exceptional communication skills
• Very high attention to detail
• Excellent verbal, written, and presentation skills

Example Expected Tasks

• Daily posts social media outlets
• Engage with at least three Twitter users per client account per business day
• Engage with users on client related forums
• Monitor alerts related to client accounts and provide feedback where necessary
• Research additional places to engage users
• Attend weekly meetings via Skype

Compensation
This is a remote position offering $10 per hour for three months with possibility of renewal and increased hours.

How to Apply
Apply by sending a resume, brief resume with a link to at least one of your social media profiles on either Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to the email mgh [at] michaelghurston [dot] com. Applying in comments on this blog with a link to your information is acceptable for this position, but will not be publicly displayed.

Miramar Labs miraDry.com project was a six month timeline from concept to completion to replace their existing investor focused website with a more user friendly site targeting potential patients and physicians interested in learning more about the procedure and the system itself. The site was built with Drupal with some of the latest modules available on a cloud hosting environment. Additional geolocation and automation features are planned for development rollouts over the next six months. While the project’s look and feel was heavily influenced by the internal Marketing team at Miramar Labs, the architecture, development and design was developed by MGHurston Creative Services.

The problem, though, is that social media is truly social in nature, which means that authenticity is key. Businesses who decide to take a shortcut and buy Facebook fans are skipping the social aspect of social media and expecting it to work for them, anyway. It won’t work, though! Here are just a few reasons, why:

You aren’t reaching your target market

Though Facebook fan buying services will claim to give you fans from a target market, they rarely follow through on these promises. The business Southwest Ecommerce decided to try a Facebook fan buying experience just to see what happened, and their review notes that they didn’t even get Facebook fans from the right country, let alone the right target demographic! If you’re looking for a very specific target market through your Facebook page, you’ll get there by running the right kind of marketing that’s tailored to the fans you want, not by paying another business to shovel in some new fans for you.

Your real fans will be able to tell

One of the other issues with buying Facebook fans is that it can be fairly obvious if your new “fans” are really just made up Facebook profiles. For instance, Small Business SEM, shows a screen shot of a business’s Facebook widget. The business has obviously purchased fans, since the profile pictures of several of the fans are the exact same photo! While not everyone notices details like these, some of your real or potential fans will, and this can downgrade your business’s credibility in their eyes.

You could get fans and then lose them

Some Facebook fan buying services will guarantee you a certain number of Likes within a certain time period, but they don’t make guarantees for how long those fans will stick around. Even if the business actually meets the promised quota within the promised time frame, you may lose many of those fans just weeks or months later. Real people who are paid to be Facebook fans are likely to “Unlike” your page because they’re tired of getting updates from you on their news feed.

The fans you buy won’t interact

The main point of a Facebook page for your business isn’t actually to just have a bunch of fans sitting there – it’s to encourage interaction among your fans and between your fans and your business. Facebook fans that you buy are likely to either be completely silent or to write irrelevant comments on your page, which is just kind of annoying. If you want fans who will really interact with one another and your business, you need to earn them the hard way – through social media marketing.

It’s not that difficult to get real Facebook friends for free

Let’s say you’re starting out your small business and want to begin using social media marketing to get things going. So you use one of your small business credit cards to charge the fee for the Facebook fan buying service. You pay $500 on your credit card, and get a thousand fans within a few weeks. Everything seems great, but then you don’t get any interaction on your page or start dropping fans quickly after a few months. Meanwhile, your business isn’t taking off quickly, so you’re still paying off that credit card charge. In the long run, you end up with a bunch of debt and not many good Facebook interactions with your fans.

If you really want to get Facebook fans, it’s not that difficult to get them the old-fashioned way. Start with your friends and family members. Ask them to like your page and post some comments. If you make it a point to stay active on Facebook, the likes will keep coming. It may take some time, but in the long run, you’ll get more fans without spending money.

When buying Facebook fans might be okay

Some businesses do advocate for buying Facebook fans at the very outset of your Facebook page. These businesses note that there’s something in human psychology that makes us want to jump on a big old bandwagon. If five people like your page, new visitors are less likely to do so just because it doesn’t seem very popular. (They won’t think about the fact that your page is all of six hours old!) But if a thousand people like your page, it will seem cool to like it, as well.

So, if you’re just starting out, maybe you want to consider buying Facebook fans from a reputable service that can give you fans in your general geographic area. However, it’s best to do this in cash if at all possible, or to have a solid plan for paying off a business credit card charge if you decide to charge it. You’ll probably end up paying upwards of $1 a fan, so this can get quite expensive!

With about 73% of Americans and a huge portion of individuals from other countries on Facebook, according to comScore, you can build your Facebook fan page the right way. Users are spending more time than ever on Facebook, so putting together a solid social media marketing plan that lets you reach potential customers directly is much more effective than buying Facebook fans for your business page.

Daniela Baker is a social media advocate at CreditDonkey, where she helps entrepreneurs compare small business credit card deals.  For more information, visit http://www.creditdonkey.com/business.html

Create a Digital Marketing Plan

First things first, you have to have a roadmap to know where you’re going. Create some goals and a plan on how to achieve them.

A Digital Marketing Plan should consist of:

• Define Objectives – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time
• Asses Current Environment
• Business & Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity and Threats or Customer, Company, Competitors and Change
• Tactics to be used
• Budget & Variables
• Measuring ROI
• Conclusion

Analytics

Analytics are not just important for tracking your progress, but essential to knowing how people view and find your website. Without this information you may not know what is hurting or helping your brand.

Suggested tools:

• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Quantcast
• Alexa

Suggested Practices:

• Setup your analytics accounts
• Establish conversion goals & funnels
• Annotate important events in Google Analytics
• Create custom dashboard reports
• Discover under-performing areas of your site

Organic Search (SEO/SEM)

Improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) will increase the amount of organic traffic that comes to your site. Organic being that when someone is searching for a solution that you offer, your page should be one of the first to come up.

Suggested Tools

• Google SEO Starter Guide

Suggested Practices:

• Setup webmaster tools
• Architect your site for search
• Track your search rankings on a monthly basis
• Build quality backlinks to your website through PR efforts or community sites
• Research and define your core organic words – if you want people to find your website with a certain term or phrase, make sure to use that term/phrase in your website’s content!

Social Media Marketing

Social Media is the new “Word of Mouth”, but people online don’t like ads, so make sure your interactions with your audience are human and talk to their interests instead of just directly trying to sell them your products.

Suggested Tools

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• SocialOomph
• Twitalyzer
• TweetReach
• FriendorFollow
• WeFollow
• Twellow

Suggested Practices

• Claim your brand name on social sites regardless if you’ll plan to use them or not
• Seed Fans/Followers (25)
• Have something to say, consistently
• Speak to the interests of your audience, do not just try to sell your product
• Create a Viral Contest
• Include social media information on all marketing collateral
• Make sure people can “Like” or “Tweet” your web pages
• Interact with like-minded and influential people on Twitter or Facebook

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

If your website is new or hasn’t been SEO’d, a well-funded PPC campaign can direct a significant increase in web traffic to you.

Suggested Tools

• Google AdWords
• Microsoft AdCenter

Suggested Practices

• Create Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter accounts
• Send traffic to landing pages
• One landing page per ad group
• Monitor and improve keyword usage on a monthly or quarterly basis

Content Marketing

Content is king on the internet, the more content you have about yourself or company online the better and more likely people will know and trust you.

Suggested Tools

• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo Answers
• Quora

Suggested Practices

• Start a corporate blog
• Submit blog content to aggregators/social hubs
• Bookmark your website’s content on social bookmarking services
• Create an editorial calendar
• Write guest posts for other blogs
• Write about others to build relationships

Email Marketing

Email is the easiest way to keep in touch with your customers and inform them of new products or solutions for their needs as well as any special promotions you’re offering. However, be cautious you don’t send too much email, or emails that aren’t relevant to your customers as this could drive them to unsubscribe from you.

Suggested Practices

• Choose an online email provider
• Create a branded email template
• Segment your email lists
• Do not send too many emails, but don’t send too few, find your balance
• Do not use your companies email server to mass email

Lead Generation

Every company has a lead generation practice that works best for them based on their market, but there are a few key things to think about to improve the amount of leads you gain.

Suggested Practices

• Track submissions
• Gather submissions for product launches
• Give something away in exchange for customer information
• Answer questions on LinkedIn, Quora or Yahoo Answers

Conversion Optimization

After you’ve increased awareness to your site through digital marketing you’ll now want to gather your data and begin planning on how to optimize your initiatives.

Suggested Practices

• Test your landing pages
• Gather feedback from site visitors
• Try a 5 second test – can someone find X in 5 seconds of coming to your page for the first time?

Other Activities to Consider

Create a Benchmark

Take a look at your competition or businesses that are similar to yours and see what they are doing that works well. While you never want to copy others, you can get ideas that will benefit you with your competition’s successes or failures.

Things to consider:

• What social media outlets do they use? Which ones seem to have the highest engagement?
• How much traffic do they have? Estimate using tools like Quantcast and Alexa.
• What is their demographic? Use above mentioned tools.
• Do they use a unique web service that may work for you as well? This could be unique community sites such as RealSelf.com or Yelp.com

Website Makeover

Thinking of having a website makeover? Make sure you do your due diligence and come up with a project scope and timeline and stick to the plan. Also, now is a good time to really evaluate your website’s content and messaging focus.

A project scope should include:

• Project Overview
• Project Approach
• Project Schedule
• Hosting Overview
• Project Approval Requirements

I don’t mind coordinating goals with friends in games, but often with strangers I find only extremes. In my experience Pick-Up-Groups (PUGs) go either very well or very disastrous and when disaster strikes it’s not just the failure of the game challenge that gets me down, but a feeling that I just wasted an hour, or more, of my time when I could have been doing something fun.

In 2004 World of Warcraft popped up and while I hadn’t played any of the Warcraft games my friends were excited about it and as a result I started my adventures with them on day one. World of Warcraft received its success because it targeted a demographic no other MMO had ever thought to consider, the casual player. For the first time in an MMO you could solo your way through quest after quest, level after level, achieve max level and still have things to do. It was great. I didn’t have to rely on five other people who didn’t want to do what I did and each had an agenda, but I could choose when I wanted to interact with others I got along with.

For those looking for more of an end-game challenge, forty-person raids were available. Groups participating in these raids, such as the original Blackrock Spires and Molten Core were tough for my Warlock to get into. It took a lot of convincing, I had to install Teamspeak and Ventrilo, purchase a headset and learn to coordinate with others who often had very different goals than me. These goals mostly focused on loot dispersal issues and the complaints from others as well as myself on progression versus favoritism versus DKP (Dragon Killing Points). The game eventually lost its fun factor for me at this time and I canceled my subscription.

However, Blizzard did some studying and found that only a very small percentage of their players were participating in this epic raid content. This caused them to consider the logistics and time consumption that went into organizing a forty-person raid and by the release of Burning Crusade raid content was reduced to ten and twenty-five person instances which still allowed challenges for players, but with much less hassle. I came back to WoW at this point, said goodbye to my Undead Warlock and began a new as a Blood Elf Paladin. This was also the first time our guild of friends began to successfully run our own raids, with no outsiders, and eventually things became farm status for us and I was in love with the game.

Due to work and moving states I took another break, but returned in Wrath of the Lich King. At this point many had started to become burned out on WoW and as a result I began taking part in my first PUGs. For me this was a bit rough as once again I had to spend time organizing others with different goals to cooperate together. Fortunately Blizzard introduced a thing called the Looking for Group tool, which evolved into the current Dungeon Finder Tool that by Cataclysm was perfected into a great way to skip the often time consuming logistics of organizing a group, go to specific dungeons and ultimately keep me playing the game rather than trying to micromanage other players. The other element of this tool meant that if my PUG experience was anything less than favorable I had the option of leaving and joining another group quickly. I was hooked to WoW.

At some point, and I’m not entirely sure when, I gave City of Heroes and later on City of Villains a try. A fun game with a great character generator, but it didn’t feel like a finished game and I never subscribed to it after my initial free play period.

Shortly after Cataclysm I decided to try out other MMOs. It seemed as if a plethora of MMO titles were coming out and while I loved the game of WoW, the world and lore have never interested me. I can honestly tell you after seven years of playing WoW I don’t know or care to understand the relationship between the Horde and Alliance, I’m not sure who Arthas is other than I killed him sort of, Sylvanas is this sexy chick who I think may be undead and the last thing I did in the game was essentially a genocide of many Egyptian looking creatures which I’m not sure why other than their names were red and someone wanted them dead.

So I left and began a journey through what I call MMOlandia. As someone who ran pen and paper role playing games in high school, and eventually created their own D20 based game, I was very excited to try DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online. While I fortunately missed its subscription based release it’s Free-to-Play incarnation was entertaining for about a month. I quickly found myself stuck in a city with everyone else who after finishing the quests then did the same quests but with more difficulty, then again with higher difficulty, then again and again. My Cleric could only kill so many Rats and Gnolls on difficult before I just got tired of the repetition.

A friend of mine then talked me into LOTRO, Lord of the Rings Online. I had been a fan of the books as well as the movies so what wasn’t too like? While I admit my Hobbit Minstrel was an interesting class to play, the game made me think of WoW rather than Lord of the Rings, though a game not as polished as WoW.

Then Rift came along and everything changed for me. The class diversity, the auto-grouping, outdoor raid system, and multiple paths for loot progression – I was in love. I felt like all my favorite things from WoW had been improved and put into this game. It was fantastic. Unfortunately I couldn’t convince any of my friends and guild mates to make the jump to Rift. To them it wasn’t that the game wasn’t better, it was simply that so much time had been invested in WoW that to leave or even try another fantasy based MMO just didn’t make sense to them. To a guild of friends who had spent seven years of their life together online, WoW was essentially our own version of Facebook where we could chat and catch up regardless of where our real lives had taken us.

So with Rift out of the way I decided to check out space. Star Trek Online came out and as a fan of the Original Series and Next Generation, and with a two hundred dollar lifetime subscription offer, I gave it a shot. It reminded me of City of Heroes. I liked it, but there wasn’t enough going on in the game to get me to keep playing. Two years later it’s a much more polished game, but it’s still lacking content to the point where I’m glad it’s going Free-to-Play and I’ll be getting an allowance to buy fluff things in the game and not have to spend real money.

EVE was my next adventure into space and a game I really wanted to like. The ships are beautiful, space feels very much like how I imagine space and ship logistics feel very plausible. While I’ve always played WoW on a PVP server and enjoy Battlegrounds in games that have them, I’m not a hardcore competitive gamer. EVE has some PVE elements to it, but the game quickly lets you know it’s all about PVP. Never trust anyone, fire first and don’t fly anything you can’t afford to lose. It’s a well made game, but not a game I could support or get any of my friends to support. These days I much prefer the likes of LoL, League of Legends, for my competitive game play as it’s quick and fast and doesn’t cost me a subscription.

Things then went in an entirely different direction for me and I began to try numerous F2P games from Perfect World. Jade Dynasty was very pretty and I like the feeling of playing in a world that reminds me of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but the game also had a lot of elements that just didn’t provide me with any fun factor after a while. Monsters never attacking me, quests that just focused on me killing ten, then ten more, then yet another ten more of whatever creature was in the zone got boring fast. I jumped to Forsaken World and found myself loving the look of my huge tits anime chick as she punched creatures in the face with a cross in her skimpy armor. However, like much of my feelings with many anime it’s only entertaining the first couple panty shots then I want to watch something else. Rusty Hearts was installed on my system and then deleted.

Finally, this winter Star Wars came out and as I’ve already written on I find it to be a great game. It’s missing a few key pieces, such as a Dungeon Finder, or should I say Flashpoint Finder tool, but based on the developer blog posts they’ll be patching in many new goodies over the next few months. But the real reason for my excitement with this game is that our WoW guild has taken interest and we have many of our key players setting aside their Fireland epics to pick up blasters and lightsabers.

So what will come with the rest of 2012 and beyond? I don’t know.

What I can tell you is that while I, and probably many of you out there are feeling burned out on the MMO genre in general, I don’t know if we MMO addicts will ever really stop playing the MMO’s we like. I can honestly say I’ll probably pick up my WOW subscription for a little while when I can kill Panda players. I don’t really want to, but I will, log into EVE for the next two months to train skills because I paid forty dollars for a six month subscription that doesn’t end until March. I will probably log into Star Trek Online every few months to see what ship costumes I can buy. While I should probably support great game design companies like Trion Worlds, I probably won’t go back to Rift except for free weekends and instead I’ll continue to play Star Wars the Old Republic as long as my guild mates are playing.

Want to know more about my explorations in these worlds? Check out my reviews and articles on MMOSite and Examiner.

Stanford University’s Residential & Dining Enterprises’ projects was focused around migrating existing website content from their six university websites into Drupal and utilize the university’s newly developed Stanford Modern Theme. The fourteen month project began with discussions around developing new content and imagery versus relying on existing materials. Three web contractors including myself were involved with the project along with a project manager and each division’s director dedicated a project champion for their site’s migration plan.

Team San Jose’s project involved developing a new site from the ground up; built on Drupal; Thoughtmatrix was brought in to develop a custom theme for the site, while Cintara handled much of the User Interface Design. For this six month project I was originally brought in to project manage the development, setup the hosting environment on Amazon’s EC2, later on Rackspace, and facilitate content production and management for the site. After launch I took on site management for the following nine months.

The Americans for the Arts is an organization that meets yearly within the San Jose area. As a preferred customer to Team San Jose we were tasked with creating a landing page for the group profile local art and cultural entertainment venues in the city. The landing page was created within a week from request along with an in-house graphic designer.

The National Forum for Black Public Administrators is an organization that meets yearly within the San Jose area. As a preferred customer to Team San Jose we were tasked with creating a landing page for the group that would carry on their existing site’s theme, though profile local businesses and events related to the group’s interests. The landing page was created within a week from request along with an in-house graphic designer.