Well for those who didn’t know how this is a quick one picture tutorial on where to look for the button and the different share options you have available.

Want to learn more about using LinkedIn or Social Media in general? You should join our group on Linkedin. It’s called Canadian Social Media Professionals and you’d be amazed at the wide range of skill and knowledge in the group from beginners to guru’s, your questions, ideas and answers will always get the attention they need.

At West17Media, we’ve made it easy to get a phone number for your web site, specialty advertising or call forwarding needs. Get a local number to use for your advertising campaigns both online and offline. With our phone numbers it becomes easy to determine where new clients or prospects are connecting with your brand and services.

• Did that obscure Facebook ad that you cancelled really have 3 conversions worth $9000?
• How about that Google Ad that only had 3 clicks and no ‘online’ conversions? Maybe they were on your website and they called a week later. Isn’t that a conversion due to your website?

Just some of the additional features included beyond the reporting are:

• Simultaneous Callers
• Call forwarding
• Analytics Integration (this one is a little tricky, but we can help you out with it)

With our service you can have local numbers or national (US & Canada-wide) toll-free numbers starting from only $9.99 a month . For $9.99 a month you get a itemized report on when calls were made, which numbers and….

Now I know you are thinking ‘What do I have to install?’ and the answer is NOTHING. No installation and you can turn new numbers on and older numbers off quickly with the click of a button.

Contact us today and learn more about this new service from West17Media can help you with your online marketing efforts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What sort of marketing efforts would you like to use an infographic for? Are you using it for PR, SEO, Social Media, all of the above? There are so many potential applications, so I’d love to read your thoughts in our comments below. Examples (including direct links) are welcome!

At first glance, Twitter might seem like a headache to some. It is a constant stream of status updates in a maximum of 140 characters. This endless flow of chirping birds can be quelled with the help of targeted marketing and proper use of Twitter.

Essentially, Twitter is a social networking platform that has been stripped of everything but simple status updates. It is completely free and user friendly, requiring only an e-mail address, a username of your choice and short and to the point thought. These thoughts can range from what someone is eating, to their most complex thought that they can squeeze into those 140 characters. At Twitter, these are simply called “Tweets.”

Twitter has become such a sensation that even the local and world news will cite the tweets of celebrities, politicians and people who hold relevance to the topic. This phenomenon has made Twitter the go-to for water-cooler discussion, celebrity gossip, world news, promotion, marketing and idle chatter. Social media marketing can be key to making your news and your product a seamless part of this chatter.

Every single one of these tweets is compiled on a massive timeline, which is chronological to the point that the United States Library of Congress has even made comments that they believe it will help write future history books. However, you can narrow this massive timeline to only the tweets of users that you choose to follow. Likewise, users will only see the tweets of users that they themselves are following.

Notice in the following screenshots, these two Twitter users have “Lists” on the right hand of their page. Within these lists they can categorize the users they follow to help target their tweets to the correct audience. @meetroger a Calgary social media marketing specialist even uses his personalized Twitter background to promote his services and expertise.

Through the simple search bar located at the top of every profile and page on Twitter, you can scour the timeline for tweets containing any word or words of your choosing. Through this method you can find users to follow, @reply and in the event of them following you back, you can even directly message (DM) the user.

The @reply and the DM are the indirect and direct messaging systems of the Twitter interface. By typing @ followed directly by a username, you can tweet “@” them to grab their attention or invite a conversation. The @reply received, often referred to as a mention, will be easily accessible to the user through whatever medium they access twitter. Users can even simply RT or “retweet” your own posts by the click of a button, making your post visible to users who follow them, even the ones who don’t follow you.

Another trend that Twitter has inspired is the use of the hash tag. On the front page of Twitter, as well as on the right column of nearly every page, users will see “Trending Topics.” These trending topics are a list of the most tweeted about words or phrases, generally preceded by the “#” character. By clicking on one of these hash tags, users can access recent tweets about the same topic.

Twitter is a public website. There is no age limit or filter as to what content can be posted and the timeline itself is accessible even to visitors without an account. By simply looking up a topic on Google, often times the most recent tweets about that topic will appear at the top of the search results.

Through Twitter you can advertise to the nearly 200 million users. Every single tweet is an opportunity to inspire new followers. Every new follower can be a new customer.

Below are some meaningful ways to use Twitter for business marketing.

1. Sell directly to people who reveal themselves to be in your market.

Monitoring Twitter responses for tweets about problems or buyer direction that your company can solve is a way to grab customers in real time. When you find someone who needs what you have not-now-but-right-now, consider offering them a discount for acting immediately OR just be a friendly neighbor and talk with them about their problem, maybe even try find solutions that aren’t perfect, but are free. Nothing builds trust in a conversation where you are trying to build rapport like a business person that isn’t instantly reaching into your back pocket.

2. Use social reconnaissance (‘spying’ on competitors) to understand where your niche is.

Simply monitoring conversations about customer complaints related to competitors can give you real time knowledge about what people need, for example in Calgary I monitory my peers in social media marketing to learn what they are doing, how they are doing and who they are speaking with. Drop in and save the day OR just be aware of important ‘micro-trends’ that could or is impacting your business today.

*Social Mention is a great (free) tool for this if you are on a budget or just getting started.

3. Use it for faster customer service.

Twitter is where people go when they have a problem immediately. Proactively seek out good or bad blood on Twitter about your business or services and contribute to the conversation in a constructive manner. Have your customer service reps monitor it as well as take phone calls. Remember one negative comment is work nearly 10 good comments!

4. Curate information.

If you are known as the expert in your field, new customers will naturally (want to) flock to you. Use Twitter to “curate” links to great content both from your website and those of other ‘greats’ and aggregate that knowledge into your Twitter ‘channel’. In this way, you leverage both your leadership and the leadership of your peers to generate an audience that is interested, active and ready to buy when the need occurs within their business.

We wanted to a 5th point, but we thought we would leave it up to you. The best 5th point, will get put into this article and you will get referenced! So, what do you think should be our 5th point should be?

*Also for those interested in more tips from a B2B perspective, we have a presentation “Social Media B2B Marketing” you can watch. It’s about 30-45min long.

We hope you enjoyed the article. Please feel free to review our services and consider West17Media for your next Social Media Marketing project.

Linkbuilding is an essential aspect of any good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques online, but many webmasters are unaware of  easy todo methods to increase web traffic. In today’s article, we will review ten techniques that are valuable to your customers and increase your visibility to searchers and open up new sales opportunities online.

Here are ten important facts and ideas necessary to improve the traffic to your website. All may not suit your needs, but majority of these tips are great for making a lasting impression on prospective customers.

Must-Haves for Successful Linkbuilding Online:

1. Write engaging articles or blog posts with internal links to other pages on your site.
2. Place links in professional profiles on social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
3. Provide free e-tutorials with an option to email, repost, and share with friends via social sites. *Social links are increasingly important to Google’s ranking algorithm.
4. Offer giveaways on content, services, or goods for referring (via links) friends to your website.
5. Submit your website links to paid and unpaid directories. *Be careful here, paid directories, can run afoul of Google.
6. Contact webmasters and/or bloggers build a relationship with them, maybe you can get a link, maybe there is a chance to guest post, maybe they want something you have on offer. Friends help friends after all.
7. Conduct quality control sessions by searching, updating, and removing links from spam sites. *Yes not technically a linkbuilding tip, but a wise decision all the same.
8. Create free informational products e.g. infographics and ebooks to name the most prominent types in 2011, and place your link in the text referring to your website.

Plus one bonus, tip that doesn’t have to do with linkbuilding, but will help you generate more conversions.

• Design a mobile landing page or website and create a free quick response (QR) code for Android and iPhone users to visit your site from their smart phones.

Pick and choose which fit into your budget, traffic expectations, resources (human and automated), and integrate them into your linkbuilding seo marketing strategies online. Mastering these techniques require some form of experience in the field and there are professionals available to help secure traffic for your site. At West17Media, we provide SEO marketing campaigns that can transition your site into an authoritative hotspot for qualified and valued consumers and businesses. Your clients will be able to find you through our strategic and integrated approach to SEO that contains, but does not exclusively rely upon linkbuilding for search relevance and ranking.

According to Google’s most recent search index updates, high quality content sites are taking a stronger position and content ‘farms’ are in decline as a value proposition. Your business deserves better and working with West17Media’s SEO Marketing team, your business will definitely see results.

Consider the possibilities available from using these ten techniques plus the experience, knowledge, and success of Calgary SEO Marketing to ensure more traffic converts to more sales for your business.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“With +1, Google is going to add another social layer to SEO?”
- Paul Ricard

Google started rolling out this new feature called Google +1, it’s Google’s most ambitious attempt to get into the social network game and at the same time decrease spam within it’s own listings. By the way don’t bother searching for it, it’s nearly impossible to find, since +1 means (to Google’s search engine) to search for exactly 1, so looking directly for it you are unlikely to be successful. Kind of like a blackhole, you can only see it, by how everything reacts around it.

So without further delay, here are some thoughts on how Search Marketing and more specifically SEO Marketing practice will be impacted by this new development.

Google Personalization

First off did you know Google has been personalizing your results for the last several years? If you haven’t heard about Google personalization, here is a quick and easy way to understand it. Scenario: you ask your Mom to search for something, “Mom, can’t you see it? It’s the 3rd result on the homepage,” Mom replies “No I can’t see it”, and then you may have given up, possibly in frustration. Well the reason is personalization. Your Mom doesn’t get the same search results, she see’s potatoes and you see tomatoes and that is personalization at work. She doesn’t see the same thing for many reasons though, here are a few: geography – she lives in Montreal and you live in Calgary, time of day, language – she speaks and searches in French, you speak and search in English and so on.

With Google +1, personalization and SEO have become more intertwined.

+1 as adoption grows will likely have a huge impact on SEO and personalization. Currently on a macro scale, Google’s personalization doesn’t disrupt traditional SEO, in fact it is rather subtle still, but with +1, this could all change. A result might move up and down a place or two, but not from the top of page 1 to the middle of page 2, however, with Google +1 we (SEO Marketing community) are all talking about HOW MUCH this will change.

Will this new social signal signify a significant shift from Google? What do you think?

Weighting is an issue too

Of course there is also the ‘weight’ issue. How will your +1 impact current SEO? Will it be less democratic? AJ, made this very point specifically and I think it’s a valid consideration. Not only is this a tactic for Google to improve it’s perceived relevance, but it also means that the powerful entities on the web, massive bloggers e.g. Robert Scoble or media/brands e.g. Coke, TechCrunch, are likely to grow more powerful and the ‘poor’ 2nd or 3rd (read low-class) users will be pushed to the fringes.

Will SEO Marketing be affected by weighting?

Well accounding to Danny Sullivan it’s going to a huge factor:

“In short, +1 becomes the new PageRank.”
- Danny Sullivan

You can’t make a stronger statement to SEO specialists than having one of the industries biggest celebs telling you it’s going to be the new PageRank. That is huge and it means change for all of us, in a huge new way.

Consider this, getting a link now from a blog in India that has a relatively strong following on say Kitchen wares e.g. artisan knives, plates, etc, but no one in your personal audience or your area (say Calgary for example) in general knows of or has ever ‘ranked’ (clicked Google +1 on the site from your area) this site as relevant. So what is the value of that link? Historically (traditional SEO), if there was alignment between your product/service e.g. you sharpen knives, then this would be a link that Google would stamp (unofficially) as valid and relevant for keywords.

Spammers beware!

Remember that ‘Panda’ update for Google’s search algorithms earlier this year? If not, then know Panda was a defensive update targeted at ‘content farms’ – places that produce tons of budget (read: cheap and barely indistinguishable) content and link back to client websites for relevant search terms. Until Panda this was a thriving practice. Now it still works, but it’s been negatively affected as many clients are finding their rankings have crumbled since and with that their willingness to accept that standard of work from their agencies.

No doubt, SEO experts, for good or bad will find a way to work just as effectively with Panda as with other updates, but jumping back to Google +1, we must consider this, how easy will it be to game Google once it knows your social graph to respond to your ‘cheats’? Won’t Google notice that 50 or 100 or 1000 Google Profiles all come from the same IP address in the same city? Or that those same X profiles all like the same things, at nearly the same time? What about if those same 50 profiles Like (Google +1) lots of cooking sites one week and then the next all one window replacement company? Will Google not find it easier to target these ‘spammers’ and devalue their work? Maybe, maybe not, but it’ll definitely present a challenge for the bad guys in the industry and sadly some challenges for the good guys too.

All we can do is hope good content continues to make up the majority, that personalization doesn’t lead to homoginizaton of our societies and that people can find our clients products when they want they and at a price that they can afford. That is all we can hope for.

A couple great links to read more on this issue:

• Meet +1 Google’s Answer to the Facebook Like Button
• Google +1 Analysis

What do you think of Google +1?

What does a domain look like with or without a hyphen?

A domain with a hyphen is typically something like this “calgary-seo-experts.com” and a domain without is calgaryseoexperts.com. The latter is typical and the former is atypical, but has been growing in popularity.

Why do digital marketing or SEO pro’s buy or encourage customers to buy hyphen’d domains?

1. It says what it is in the title. Hey let’s be honest when you search for an SEO expert in calgary or indeed anywhere, doesn’t it help when the domain indicates the service you are looking for? I know I’d be more likely to click on it. SEO specialists and indeed digital marketing pros’ all recognize nothing is better than when dealing with a small brand than immediately communicating a core service offering.
2. It’s easy to read. Never underestimate the value of simple. If you search for us e.g. West17Media, and we come up, it’s not immediately obvious that we perform SEO EVEN if we came up number 1 under Google for that term, so marketers are drawn to that immediate sales pitch and alignment with your search.
3. Google indicates (indirectly as they always do) that a ‘readable url’ e.g. google’s content guidelines is a positive user experience. If you review Google’s position on PPC (Paid per Click advertising) Quality Score, it’s not really surprising that this would be seen as positive. However, keep in mind long URLS with lots of keywords, will still be frowned upon as they always have. Google’s standard algorithm should automatically punish those stuffing URLs the same as those stuffing web pages or titles with keywords.

What is the downside of hyphen-based URLs?

Well like all things, there are a few downsides, but the one that is most noteworthy has absolutely nothing to do with Google and that is hyphen-based URLs are uncommon in the eyes of the user and the bottom-line is users may forget the hyphens e.g. your ad says “calgary-seo-expert.com”, but everyone still types in calgaryseoexpert.com. This is a legitimate risk and this means in your planning for how to leverage a hyphen domain needs to consider this risk.

Is your site getting traffic from referrer’s? Is it a content site for your industry that people are finding via search? These are good, if not great uses of this domain, but as a corporate brand, be aware this could have a dramatic impact on traffic once people leave your webinar, your meetings, your presentations and type in the URL manually. ‘Beating’ it into your audience will be key to your success.

Quora a very popular Q&A site that we love! Recently there was a discussion on exactly this topic. If you are interested to hear what others (who are most likely respected SEO leaders too) have said on this issue, check out: Does a hyphen in a domain name hurt ranking in search results.

These old ideas are integrated communication, measurement, and segmentation. There I said it the same old stuff your university professor spouted in university but was typically rather elusive due to cost, technology or in some cases the pervasive use of dumb digital or non-digital platforms.

Today I want to help you with a problem, the problem is ‘spend’ (how your marketing dollars are utilized online); how to effectively spend it and what you can do to improve your spending habits. We believe this to be a universal problem and one that really causes pain for businesses when it’s done right and your marketing inefficiencies are exposed. It hurts us everyday and when we launch our new website the pain for us will peak, but thankfully decline soon afterwards as we get our technology working for us too and not just you guys.

First off today we want to offer some strategies on how you can set your marketing budget. This is a simple process, BUT it requires taking a step back from your day-to-day and seeing the forest not just the trees.

1. Think about what your business from the basics. What does your business do? How does it compete in the market? Is it local, regional or national?

2. What goals did you develop for your business when you started it? Are they the same today? If not please review them because those goals are critical and they must be current. I always say it’s nice to have a compass (Google Analytics) but without a map (goals) it’s a challenge to get where you want or need to go.

3. Now this next step really relies a lot on your historical data collection and the accessibility off that data, because what you need to do is determine the lifetime value of a client. A psychologist prospect once told me his clients were typically with him for x number (average) of appointments at $x per hour and from there we figured their lifetime value. Now this issue can be much more complicated by considering situations such as how many clients return again in the future, but since most companies do the basics let’s just focus on that as that in itself will release lots of value by directly impacting business decisions like marketing budgets.

4. Now this one varies lots from industry-to-industry and product-to-product and that is, creating a marketing budget. As 2000 to 2010 saw some of the largest wealth created in history, many companies that had a good idea and even some with not such great ideas have largely survived on or organic decision making that is based on near-term goal posts e.g we need sales up 10% this year so let’s spend another $10k on marketing over last year or hire another sales guy. Am I right?

24hrs earlier I had submitted a bid for some specialised landing pages to a client and I was excited, they were excited and everything looked good. Then the next day I went back to the online service provider we had chosen to work with for the landing page marketing project and their prices had been adjusted upwards quite radically. Skyrocketed may have been an appropriate expression in fact.

Well I was stunned initially and then worried about the consequences. Thankfully, I spoke with their team and in the end they accommodated me, but it really made me think a little more about how I approach the newest of startups in the saas game.

These rapid price changes are part of a new trend with startups taking ‘real-time’ business to a whole new level affecting wild changes in pricing and positioning as they work out the kinks in their product positioning. Often these companies are true innovators with few or no peers to measure their value against and these wild fluctuations are the resulting fallout.

What we learned from this situation and would like to pass along to our peers is:

• insist of each other (your team) that have in place a or have built a tighter relationship other than just testing out the service.
• don’t let your excitement for a new (and innovative) service overwhelm your ‘old school’ sensibilities of picking up the phone and having a one-to-one chat BEFORE moving forward and speaking to clients
• and finally get a pricing agreement in place and a process for handling increases if they occur, that way if they happen 12 months down the road your agency can already have a plan how to handle the client.

I hope this helps others.

What has been your experiences? Anything further you can add would be great!

First some background and for those who haven’t seen the commercials, scroll down a bit I included one of his most popular ones. Also at the end I included some stats on the ROI successes Old Spice has found through this campaign.

Some background, these commercials started back in February and as the months went by and Old Spices commitment to the campaign grew they went from funny, cheeky videos that broadcasted to their followers to social reactions to real non-Old Spice events and people. For example Mr Old Spice (aka Isaiah Mustafa) started responding to key influencers on the web and on Twitter. In one YouTube video he responded to Kevin Rose of Digg fame and a very networked guy saying he hoped he got well soon. Apparently Kevin had posted a status message on Twitter saying he was feeling ill.

So you want to know just how successful they were?

Well in non-ROI terms over two days in July over 180+ video’s were made about their campaign, 5.9 million views of their videos occurred and 22,500 comments (according to Visible Measures).

In terms of ROI, the official numbers are that their body wash has seen sales surge 107% in July and 55% over the entire campaign period. Considering their body wash is nothing new, nothing special (per say) and hasn’t seen any official discounting during the campaign that is an amazing number.

Apparently Adweek was told the Old Spice videos have reached an audience the size of 110 million. That’s the same amount of people as live in all of Canada, Australia, and the UK combined.

Has social media marketing impacted your business? Are you considering it for future campaigns?

So that means one out of every hundred people or less are using any location-based service. If for example you look at a mid-sized city like Calgary that means only 11,000-12,000 people (maximum) check-in just once a week or just 52 times a year.

Is this a big enough market for your business to spend time and money cultivating? If so why and how has been successful for you?

Data courtesy of Mashable.

Looking at ‘Entertainment Sites’ on the graphic I am struck by one thought. If YouTube (the second largest search engine in the world) were to allow people to sign in with Facebook, how would that change both the Entertainment sites section and the ‘across all sites’ section.

I would speculate that it may be quite dramatic. Is YouTube keeping Google more relevant on the social web, than if YouTube didn’t exist? I do wonder. What are your thoughts?

Have you heard of Community Pages? Have you used them? What has your experience been?

What to see more slides on this topic, check out ReadWriteWeb’s article on the topic