In this case study I’ll highlight one strategy you can use to promote your startup on a bootstrapped budget. When running a competition, you can leverage the networks of the competition’s participants. With the advent of ego-boosting social networks, your participants will love to spread the word, providing them with a platform to talk about themselves.

What you’ll need:
A self-hosted and properly configured WordPress blog

For this case study, let’s take a look at an essay competition. One of our clients is in the process of publishing a book. The client was interested in not only garnering some pre-publication attention but also involving their community in the authoring of the book itself. The winning author’s essay would be included as a chapter in the new book. The actual competition had already begun on the client’s main site, but we were about to add a new layer to the process.

The client had previously created a page on their website to announce the essay writing competition. Through some simple social media promotion and email newsletters, the competition had received approximately 2,200 essays from over 88 countries. Now that we had a list of participant email addresses, we sent out an email asking them to submit a 250 word excerpt from their essay to the book’s new WordPress website. Their new usernames and passwords would be emailed to them and they could login and publish their excerpt. They were informed that their excerpt’s page was going to contain social buttons e.g. Twitter, Facebook share, and Google buzz. Each participant was encouraged to promote their excerpt within their networks. The participant who brought in the most traffic to their excerpt by the deadline would be guaranteed an opportunity to work with the editors to shape his or her essay for inclusion in the book manuscript.

We used a WordPress plugin called Dagon Design Import Users, which allows one to register WordPress users en masse. We set all the new user accounts to ‘Contributor’ (we wanted to be able to approve the new posts before publication) and the new usernames and passwords were emailed to the participants automatically. We ran the WordPress based competition for about a month. In that time, we received over 185 excerpt submissions and approximately 10,800 visitors to the site. Facebook accounted for 56% of referral traffic. We also set up a Twitter account for the competition and used the WP to Twitter plugin so that every time an excerpt was published, it would be automatically tweeted.

This competition was very cost effective, easy to implement, and yielded a high return. The book received some great press and we now have a significant and targeted user base. Additionally, this connected platform will be a great resource to announce the book’s publication and initiate sales.

The competition’s basic structure can be copied for just about any product or cause. Keep in mind however that the competition’s award will be a key factor in how much interest and engagement you receive. I’ve seen other companies do this on a rolling basis with things such as iTunes gift certificates or laptop giveaways. Also, if your company is philanthropically focused, people love to be given the opportunity to talk about their involvement in your cause. Think of ways in which your startup can provide your audience with a platform and promotion will surely follow.

If you’re interested in adding this data to your business website but aren’t too familiar with the markup, microformats.org has made it really easy for everyone with their free hCard Creator.

Google has a nice guide here on how to configure the markup for your business. Note how Google states that the name formatting should use both fn/org. the hCard Creator just uses org so you might want to add-in the fn. It also has a field for ‘tags’ which it seems to be using Technorati for.

UPDATE: TMZ is credited with first publishing Jackson’s death Thursday, June 25 at 5:20 PM

Yes Twitter is indeed becoming mainstream, so much so that Pepsi has added their twitter address to their cans, Dell ( @DellOutlet ) had made over $2 mil in revenue from their Twitter account alone selling discounted or outlet priced computers. A cat has over 600,000 followers. Celebrity Ashton Kutcher has 2.1 million followers, the most out of anyone ever. Someone started a Twitter petition that went viral, attempting to get at&t to “offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices”. Businesses, celebrities, authors, individuals are all using Twitter is some way. You get it… the list goes on.

With that said, what would YOU call the ‘New Web’? Scoble wants to call it ‘Web 2010’. Some are calling it ‘Web 3.0’. Personally I think ‘Web RT’ not only touches on what’s happening now but also rolls off the tongue pretty nicely. Add your suggestion in the comments below and later we can put together a poll to figure out the best phrase for this movement.  Maybe your suggestion touches more on the mobile aspect of our time with the advent of the iPhone or maybe it’s about a loss of privacy. Let us know your thoughts.

There are hundreds of thousands of legal practices out there, all of which have a website and some of which engage in online marketing. Some firms are exceptional at this and in some cases; creep into black hat marketing tactics, while other firms have an utterly dismal online presence, having last updated their website years ago. What some firms may or may not know is that kicking your website into gear to be more interactive, more search friendly, and more indexable isn’t that difficult. Making small improvements to your site can really help and potentially lead to new business. The following are five simple ways in which you can bolster your firm’s online presence.

Create a Blog
Adding a blog to your site is a sure fire way to increase indexation. By blogging you’ll not only be adding new and legal related content to your site but you’ll also give your readers a way to subscribe to your content in their feed reader via your blog’s RSS feed. You can also sync your blog’s feed to your Facebook account or fanpage and your Twitter account so that both places will publish your content the moment it’s published on your blog. Additionally, services like Feedburner and Feedblitz can automatically capture email addresses and email your subscribers your blog’s latest post to their email inbox. Globally, WordPress is the blogging CMS of choice which is free to download and install. There are thousands of free themes out there that you can choose from and later customize to match the look and feel of your existing site. Blogging will ultimately increase your indexation, traffic, and potentially bring in new business if you’re blogging about legal issues and answering common legal questions your readers may have.

Get Rid of Flash
There are so many sites out there that are entirely built on flash. Get rid of it! It may look pretty but it’s usually not helping. Are you interested in giving a prospective client a bouquet of daisies or providing the helpful information they seek? Your audience is looking for counsel and information on legal matters. Delivering the answers they seek quickly without being superfluous is more likely to gain new clients. Additionally and perhaps more importantly, flash can’t be parsed/read by search engine bots. The more your site is built on flash, the less readable and indexable it will be. Some flash is ok in small doses but do avoid building your entire site in flash.

Local Search Campaigning
Most legal practices are locally based and if this is the case for you then you should really be hitting the pavement with local search. Make sure your locality is represented in your title tags and or descriptions. For instance your title tag may look like:

Mesothelioma, Accident Attorney & Medical Malpractice Attorney, Boston MA | Bob Loblaw PPC

And you’ll want to be sure to canvas the local directories with you business information. Here are some places to get you started:

Best ROI:
Google Local Business
Yelp
Citysearch
Yahoo Local
Judy’s Book

Others to consider:
Local
Insider Pages
True Local
Super Pages
Dex Knows
Localeze
Yellowbot
Grayboxx

Editing Your Meta Data
Making sure your title tags and description tags are keyword laden and different on every page is an SEO 101 update that you can easily make. If you know what type of client you want and what they’d probably search for, take these keyword phrases and pump them into a keyword research tool like Wordtracker (paid) or Google Keyword Tool (free). Once you have a short list of targeted keyword phrases, add these to your title tags where appropriate. Make sure the title tags speak to the content contained on the page you’re editing the title tag for. You’ll want the description to be similar in that it contains some keywords and is relevant to the content on its respective page.

Answer Legal Questions
Establishing yourself online as an expert in your field can be done overtime by leveraging the following services. You’ll also want to consider using Twitter and the Twitter search site to find people who may have legal questions in your area. You can search geographically within Twitter under the advanced search option.

Best ROI
Twitter
Yahoo Answers
LinkedIn

Other Places to Consider:
Maholo Answers
Wiki Answers
Answer Bag
Yedda
Fluther
Wondir

Should your firm need a new, robust website or search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, please feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to discuss your online marketing plans with you.

You can contact Brendan here

There are tons of clever and creative ways to build a good email list of devoted followers and fans. I’m not going to go into the many different ways in which this could be done but I would like to point out one method that caught my attention during lunch today.

There’s a brand of chips out there called Zapp’s out of Gramercy, Louisiana. These folks make one of my favorite chip flavors, Spicy Creole Tomato spiked with Tabasco sauce. I have a penchant for spicy foods, especially Creole cuisine.

So I wanted to get the above picture into the blog post and I definitely thought twice before scanning an open and empty bag of potato chips but I luckily managed to do it without getting crap all over my scanner. On the back of the bag it says you can go to www.Zapps.com where you can register for their daily drawing and if you get picked, you win a free Zapp’s/TABASCO T-shirt! Running this on a daily basis is a very low cost, fun, and efficient way to build a targeted opt-in email list. However, when I visit the Zapp’s site, I don’t see anything about TABASCO, this limited edition flavor, the email registration, or any Zapp’s/TABASCO T-shirts. Has the T-shirt daily drawings ended? I’m sure they simply ran out of T-shirts but still had loads of this limited edition product to sell with the daily drawing info printed on the back.

Think they monitor their brand online? I wonder… hey Zapp’s, TABASCO, I have a proposition for ya. If you can find this post and send me a size L T-shirt (use the contact form to get my address) I’ll take a picture of myself wearing it and post it here on the Squareoak blog. I’ll also spread the post online, building brand awareness for Zapp’s and TABASCO over all of my social media accounts. This offer applies to both Zapp’s and TABASCO.

You have until April 10th to acknowledge you’ve seen this post in the comments section below. The promotional service offer will end after this date.

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A common urban sight like the above wouldn’t seem to conjure up much thought but to me, this image says many things. These bundles of Verizon Yellow and White Pages get dumped in my Brooklyn neighborhood seemly per quarter. They get left on the curb and just as effortlessly ignored as they make a b-line towards business model extinction. I’m trying to figure out why Verizon still publishes these. I guess in a neighborhood as diversified as mine, there are plenty of people who still rely on printed directories. For the most part it seems like these directories end up ignored as they eternally lie in apartment complex hallways or eventually in a landfill.

So my questions are:

• How much money is spent organizing, formatting, printing, and delivering these things?
• How is advertising within these sold to the advertiser?
• Just how effective is the advertising?
• What’s the carbon footprint of their production?
• If only 20% (based on how many copies visibly remain) of a community uses these, could this be considered littering?
• Are the chemicals used in the paper and ink environmentally toxic?

This not only seems like a dead and fruitless business model but also environmentally irresponsible. I would be willing to guess that:

• A lot of time, money, and effort is placed in production and delivery.
• The adverting is sold as part of a larger marketing package.
• The effectiveness of the advertising is near zero.
• The carbon footprint is extremely high.
• If these are as useless as they seem, the amount of litter would be astronomical.
• The chemicals used in production could be harmful in large quantities/concentrations.