2010 NFL Draft Online : Live Video & TwitterThe 2010 NFL Draft will mark the first time the drafting of college players by NFL teams will be held in Prime Time, and not during the weekend, as the NFL has expanded the event to 3 days, in a similar fashion as they did with the 2009 Probowl, holding it the weekend before the Super Bowl.This year, the 75th NFL Draft will start tonight at 7:30 pm, and is being televised on ESPN and also the NFL network, which will be airing 24 hour NFL Draft coverage. I’m pretty excited to watch the draft on ESPN tonight, to see where this class of intense defensive players and QB’s are picked up, and to see what the Baltimore Ravens (my hometown team) does with their #24 pick. But if you’re like me, your cable provider may not offer the NFL Network, so my 2010 NFL Draft experience will be limited to ESPN. Fortunately, there are alternatives to watching the Draft Live Online, and also following this year’s Draft via different tools and mobile apps. Watch the NFL Draft with Live VideoNFL.com is hosting live streaming video of the NFL draft beginning at 7:30, when the St. Louis Rams will be on the clock with their #1 pick. The live stream will be at NFL.com/draft/2010/live/landing.CBSSports.com is also covering the NFL Draft with video coverage and detailed team and player rankings & information at Inside the Draft. ESPN has Draft coverage on 2010 NFL DraftCast also with Live Video and detailed team information and NFL news. In addition, ESPN has extremely cool integration of Twitter Feed and Facebook conversations around the Draft that even shows your Facebook friends who are watching the NFL Draft on ESPN. Between NFL.com, CBSsports and ESPN, there is no shortage of live streaming video coverage of the 2010 NFL Draft. Follow the NFL Draft on TwitterThe official hashtag for this year’s NFL Draft is #NFLDraft which you can follow on your mobile, PC or favorite Twitter application for updated NFLDraft info, rants and insight … in 120 characters or less. There is also a very good Twitter account worth following called NFLDraftBible and of course you can follow NFL Player reactions on Twitter via their Twitter accounts; here’s a great list from Listorious.In addition, if you want to find friends on Twitter who may also be watching the NFL Draft or follow your favorite players, try the Google Labs Follow Finder. For example, you can check out the followers of Chad Ochocinco or ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. 2010 NFL Draft Online : Live Video & Twitter        Search & Social Awards : Vote Now!The voting for the 2010 Search & Social Awards is now open! Search & Social is holding this contest to introduce the search marketing & social media community to multiple blogs in various different genres and online marketing disciplines. The final tally will be taken on May 1st and then winners will be announced on May 3rd, during an awards ceremony at the Search & Social Spring Summit in Tampa, FL. Not only are these awards fun, but it also gives you a chance to see how readers feel about your blogs. Search & Social encourages all nominees to promote the contest on your blog and to your followers. Search & Social Awards Categories include :
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Search & Social Awards : Vote Now!     
Search by Voice Available Now in Google Maps 4.1 for WinMo and SymbianGoogle just announced that its cool search by voice feature in Google Maps 4.1 is now available for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. This is the same voice activated search feature that BlackBerry and Android phone users have been enjoying for quite some time now.So, if you have any Symbian S60 or Windows Mobile phone, you can now search for anything by simply speaking your search terms instead of typing them. To use this feature, you simply need to open Google Maps on your phone, press the “call” button and speak your search term clearly. This feature works with all kinds of search on Google Maps for mobile such as places, specific businesses, types of businesses and addresses. In addition, this feature also lets you choose your preferred language including accents. To enjoy this feature on your Windows Mobile or Symbian s60 phones, you must download and install the latest Google Maps for mobile 4.1 for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. You can grab the app from m.google.com/maps using your phone’s browser. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Search by Voice Available Now in Google Maps 4.1 for WinMo and Symbian      Google Maps Search Suggest Available in More LanguagesRecently Google put up an experimental search suggest feature for Google Maps to make it faster and more accurate to find places, businesses and points of interest as you type your search. But this was only available for Google Maps in Germany, China, Hong Kong and most recently Taiwan. But now, Google has just made this search suggest feature on Google Maps to 10 more domains and 8 additional languages, including on maps.google.com. Suggest for Google Maps was built on locally relevant stock of knowledge to get the most useful suggestions depending on where you are zoomed into Google Map. In addition, Suggest for Google Maps also give you additional information including business addresses to help you find and select the best and most exact business or location that you may be looking for. If you’re anywhere in these regions - China, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United States, United Kingdom, you can now use the said feature. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Google Maps Search Suggest Available in More Languages      Local Business Marketing – The Known FutureThe Internet has turned into a great local business marketing tool in the past couple of years. While local businesses have not yet adopted these tools into their marketing strategies, the technologies are moving forward with or without them. The convergence of Search, Social Media and Mobile Marketing is bringing business information with products and services into the hands of the local consumers.Having had Internet business experience for the past 16 years, I can tell you that this is probably one of the few times where we can put all the local business marketing puzzle pieces together and see what marketing tools we have available over the next 2 – 3 years. Let’s review each one so we can see how the come together.  Local Business ListingsIn short these are the interactive yellow pages of the Internet. Interactive because as a business owner you can update and manage these listings at search engines, social communities, 411 web sites, GPS/Mapping websites and basic business directories. They are also interactive because consumers can post their experience they had with your business, products or services. In order to get started you need to claim, update, monitor and manage these listings at multiple local listing websites. Don’t have the time resources? Don't worry, there are companies that provide local business listing management services.  Local Business Listing Marketing vs. Data ServicesAs a business you will want to seek out companies that provide the marketing services. The companies that provide basic data services only push your information out, but they do not help you protect your listing from being hijacked or for that matter manage your listings for marketing purposes with various types of content like coupons, events, QR codes, consumer reviews, coupons and citations. The marketing services have a higher cost to them than the data services, because the marketing services are more effective and do more for your business.  Consumer ReviewsThis will be the first time that most local businesses dependent upon the local consumer for their revenue will need to manage their public relations. Consumer Reviews are not just about other consumers seeing the information, but too many negative reviews will adversely impact your website ranking position in search results. This is no longer about just consumers posting their frustrations to a website or blog, but directly into your local listing. As a business you will need to closely monitor these reviews and also begin to engage customers that have positive experiences to post their information as well.  Local Listing Coupons and Mobile CouponsThe Local business listing gives the business the opportunity of posting their coupons, offers, and discounts. They are then available for consumers to find through web searches and through their mobile devices. While this is not available through all local listing websites or available for free, this is in no uncertain terms the demise of the traditional coupons.  Events If you promote your business then you will want to use the Events promotion tool within Local Business Listings. You can include Specials, Events, New Products, general News, pretty much any alert you which to make the local consumers aware of so they can find it through a web search or a mobile search.  QR CodesThese small square bar codes will allow you to program them for consumer to scan using their mobile devices. The code will then do whatever is programmed to them. For example, a coupon, discount, offer, event, website link. You can also use them on business cards, websites, traditional ads, store window, and much more.  CitationsThis tends to add a level of complication for most businesses. If you're familiar with the idea of inbound links, this is very similar only this time is not necessarily just about a link, but your company name, address, city, state, zip, phone and many other aspects that are related to what is known as HCards to include your longitude and latitude of your business address. Because this is a combination of marketing and technical expertise you may wish to get someone to help you with this item.  HyperlocalWebsites that are hyperlocal give a local business the opportunity of highlight targeted advertising and marketing to geography and demographic. While these websites are not as prominent for this purpose yet, this will change and needs to be planned for in 2011 and beyond. Having had Internet business experience for the past 16 years, I can tell you that that geographic marketing is the direction of our immediate future. Hopefully I was able to portray to you some of the known components of local business marketing and how this local business marketing tool can be used to reach the local consumers. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Local Business Marketing – The Known Future      Top Local Business Listing Questions Answered – Interview with Will ScottI have had many opportunities to chat all things local with my good friend Will Scott, and just the other day we were at it again. We were talking about some of the most common questions we are always asked by small business owners in regards to local marketing online. I wanted to take the time and put them down on paper for everyone. I felt this would be a good venue to get the answers out there. Here goes my interview with Will Scott of Search Influence.1. What are the best ways that new to Internet businesses can go about increasing the number (or gaining any at all) citations when it comes to local listings? My number 1 recommendation would be that they make their way over to http://getlisted.org. Get Listed is a really simple tool that checks the major local search engines and tells you if you’re there. If you’re not there you can go submit yourself right from the dashboard. Once you’ve done that, go submit yourself to the major data providers. There’s a shortcut here you can get into those providers data with just 3 sources:
In the meantime there’s nothing wrong with hand submitting to some of the biggies like MerchantCircle, Yellowpages.com, Superpages and InsiderPages. Just be advised, your phone will ring with follow-up telemarketing. Politely decline and stick with the free listing. 2. What would you say to those who worry about receiving negative reviews? Negative reviews are bound to happen. Lots of businesses think they can play Ostrich and solve all their problems. The issue is that even if the business owner isn’t active online their customers are. As with many things the best defense is a good offense. If a business owner is proactively working to get positive reviews it’s a great defense when they find themselves with the inevitable negative. And, I think everyone understands that we can’t please all customers. No matter how hard a business owner tries there will always be that one. Just like in real life, you can’t sweat them all and the most valuable tactic is to offer good customer service so you don’t have to worry about reputation management. 3. What would you say to those who are worried their competitiors are giving them bad reviews? Forget about it see above. Seriously though, you can’t defend against it. Just monitor your reviews and other online mentions and if one crops up which looks suspect, address it head on and report it to whichever service is hosting it. It does no good to share your agitation with the site where a review is posted. Keep it factual and professional and they’ll be much more likely to take it down. We have seen Yelp reviews pulled, but it’s not very common. In the case of Yelp, reviews which don’t pass the sniff-test often face the Yelp Review Filter. 4. What are some of the best places/resources someone who has ran a business for years offline, but never online use to get started? Wow, the list is endless but just for a few:
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Top Local Business Listing Questions Answered – Interview with Will Scott      Mobile SEO Future Planning2010 is the next year that has been talked about year after year as far as mobile online use truly taking off.The iPhone was indeed revolutionary and provided the true smartphone leap forward, that has been followed and in many ways being surpassed by Android, with more and more mainstream users browsing online via mobile devices. How does this impact & affect the SEO that you have already carefully crafted for your sites? Not much…for now. Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated at the 2010 Mobile World Congress their new mantra & current strategy is “Mobile First” thus you can be first by getting ahead of your competition by planting these mobile seeds into your site:
I will detail in next month’s mobile post at Search Engine Journal a key set of code that will give you this mobile search edge. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Mobile SEO Future Planning      Heading for an SEO Interview? A few Ideas to Help You Along…Over at Mediaedge:cia (recently rebranded as MEC), we’ve been in the great situation of recruiting a number of SEO’s over the last few months to join the MEC SEO team. This has meant that I’ve been in the lucky situation to meet and interview so many great SEO’s from around the UK. On the back of all these interviews, I thought what better chance to share a little empathy (considering how tough the interview process can be at times!) and a couple of observations that might help SEO folk prepare for the opportunity of their dreams! So here goes; a few ideas to help get you SEO interview fit…Prepare and plan aheadAn easy area to start the preparation process is by getting a few gazillion responses to typical SEO interview questions – firstly, to highlight academic understanding of the area, and secondly demonstrating technical and experiential understanding. Constructing those thoughts/experiences and putting them in to some sort of order and shape can really help to answer questions comprehensively.I think sometimes SEO’s learn and talk about SEO as if it was a dictionary of industry terminology to be recited at each and every opportunity. Really, it’s about the application of technical and creative ideas. This really shouldn’t be underplayed in my opinion as this is where the true value to your employer and/or clients is derived from. Practice Articulating SEODeveloping the previous point further, try practising explaining previous work and complex areas of SEO. When you know something in your head, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can articulate it in layman’s terms to less knowledgeable – something that SEO’s have to do on occasions when speaking with clients. Taking this further, can you then build on this layman’s explanation and then provide additional higher-level detail? It’s certainly worth practising if you’re not used to doing this already. Maybe even consider chatting those SEO interview questions through with a friend to see how well you can communicate some complex areas in an engaging way.I consider myself fairly competent at talking about SEO, but recently I stumbled over the explanation of the process of tokenising a web page by search engines. I could visualisation what it might look like and explain the process in detail but not summarise it at an entry-level SEO training session. I was, however, kindly helped by a non-SEO colleague who reiterated my stumbling explanation with the anecdote that it could be that a search engine captures the key elements of the page / meaning of a page in the Times newspaper and condenses it down to a column or headline in the Sun newspaper…a clear, succinct explanation that people can relate to. One of the things that we encourage across the SEO team at MEC is that all team members must regularly run training sessions for other members of the Interaction team. This, we have found, has really helped their confidence in clearly communicating complex issues in SEO and search marketing in general. Read the latestThere is nothing worse than someone saying that great SEO consulting requires keeping up-to-date with the latest SEO news and developments, and then not be able to demonstrate that they, the interviewee, do this themselves. Nothing worse than shooting yourself in the foot now is there?!!When reading though, don’t simply passively read – test and apply what you are reading – where are the opportunities? Remember the 5 bums on rugby posts image (5 W’s sat on a big H) which stand for: what, why, when, who, where and how? As a result, this should give you a much rounded and analysed opinion around these topics, provide you with a stronger view of what you are reading, who’s writing it, where it can be applied to your websites, etc, etc… Company’s blogWhen preparing for an SEO job interview, a little understanding of what’s big on the agenda for the company in question, and where you might fit in could be a great start. Asking a few questions about the history of activity and upcoming marketing plans for the company or clients might be great area to cover off too. That said, there are a whole lot of questions to ask to see whether the role would be suitable to you…Show an interest: prepare some questionsI’d expect a whole lot of information to be shared by the interviewer themselves, but asking questions helps to show real interest in the role, and the potential for you to confirm that the role is indeed right for you. As SEO activities by teams around the UK are likely to differ quite wildly, it’s certainly a great opportunity to learn about the team, how broad or clearly defined their roles are, and of course how you might fit to what currently exists.If asked a question on current SEO affairs, then to turn it around and ask the interview for their opinion too – this can be a great way to provide more of a two-way conversational format to the process, and get a feel for their thinking too. After all, you don’t want to be stuck in a new role thinking what ridiculous procedures and management are in place now do you?! Every SEO is uniquePeople interviewing SEO’s in the UK are quite likely to meet a huge diversity of people with different experiences and stories to tell, so make sure you make clear where you can add your own areas of expertise.So for instance, have you got experience in the sector that you’ll be working in? Do you have your own blogs, affiliate sites, highly sociable online? What can you bring to the role from a previous career (e.g. PR, offline marketing, IT, etc)? Put all these areas to the top of your mind before meeting your interviewer, and make sure you show them all off! Wild CardOne of my favourite questions that I like to ask candidates, which has given me some great answers previously, is asking whether there is anything that the candidate has prepared for the interview that they haven’t had a chance to cover off from the areas covered in the interview.The idea behind this question is that SEO candidates aren’t like typical marketing role candidates or IT candidates. The SEO industry has such a diverse range of entry points so that in itself means that people’s experiences and talents are going to be far more diverse. As such, this should help to capture some of these extra little bits. Different rolesPrepare appropriately to demonstrate the competencies that you can apply to the role! Of course preparing for an SEO job interview can vary quite a lot if you are going for a graduate role, an SEO Exec role to a more managerial role. Again they can differ depending on whether the role is more focused on analytics, link-building or account management? Unsure about the role, give them a call in advance of the interview – a great way to show confidence and initiative in the role you are interested in.Tips for SEO interviews, feel free to leave a comment! :) Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Heading for an SEO Interview? A few Ideas to Help You Along…      The Three Best Digg Extensions for Google ChromeGoogle Chrome is getting more SEO- and social-media-friendly browser day by day. Today I am sharing three Google Chrome extension for active Digg users:1. Digg for ChromeDigg for Chrome is the official Digg extension for Chrome that works similar to the Diggbar allowing you to:
 2. Social CounterSocial Counter adds a tiny button that displays the overall number of votes across social media sites:
 3. The Digg ReaderThe Digg Reader lets you easily check top, front page, and upcoming stories from Digg without having to visit the page:
  Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. The Three Best Digg Extensions for Google Chrome      More Recent Articles |
Friday, April 23, 2010
Local Business Marketing – The Known Future
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