In today's tech-savvy marketing community, SEO, PPC and Social Media are common buzz words in the industry. There are endless blog posts, articles and webinars on maximizing your ROI and perfecting these areas of business, but for those who are completely new to the Web Marketing arena, we want to provide a quick and easy guide to get you started.

1.     Why should you consider web marketing?

After you put your time, effort and money into creating or redesigning a website - it is likely that getting potential clients and customers to your site is important to you. Instead of waiting for customers to find you, web marketing will help you find them when they are in the buying mindset. The costs of web marketing are much lower than traditional advertising and there are more measurable results. For example, a Google AdWords advertisement can cost as little as $0.25; once placed, you can determine how many people viewed and acted on your ad.

2.     What is web marketing?

Search Engine Optimization: Often called "organic" or "SEO," this type of web marketing is represented in the listings that appear on the left hand side of Google, outside of the yellow Sponsored Ads box. The position that your company holds is dependent on 100+ factors; your goal is to optimize your website to satisfy as many of those factors as possible to boost your organic ranking. This can be done through selecting keywords and using them in web copy, increasing credible inbound links, submitting sites to search engines and ensuring that back end items like ALT tags and H1 headers are optimized. Not only does a higher ranking give you credibility, but once you secure a comfortable ranking it takes a long time lose it. With SEO, potential customers are actively looking for your product or service and you have the ability to be at the top of the list when they search.

Pay Per Click Marketing: PPC is often considered the opposite of SEO. It is represented in the yellow Sponsored Ads box at the top of the page, and down the right hand column. You select the keywords you want to advertise your company on, and ads only appear when that keyword is entered into the search engine. When your ad does appear, you only pay when someone clicks on it. Your advertisement position depends on your bid and past click through history, so it is important to choose relevant keywords and ad copy. Companies like PPC because it is a quick way to advertise on the web, it offers good visibility and there is complete control over advertising costs when you set budgets for your campaigns. After setting up your account on Google, Bing or Yahoo! (which will soon merge with Bing) you can select keywords and write ad copy. As you move forward and tweak your campaign, you should shoot for a position between 1-3.9 and pay attention to click through rates.

Social Media: Social Media is essentially a variety of websites and tools that allow you to share information, connect with other users, and increase brand awareness. Some common avenues of social media are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Blogging. The benefits of social media include the ability to communicate with existing or potential customers, develop your brand, and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Getting started it easy, just sign up for accounts with a consistent username, determine your goals, create a strategy and begin publishing content that is consistent with your strategy and meaningful to followers. It is important to interact with others through various methods on each site. On Facebook you can "like" companies and post on user's profile walls. On Twitter you can reply, retweet and use hash tags (#) to engage in conversations. On LinkedIn, you can follow companies and respond to posted questions. You should continually monitor what is being said about your brand, and engage in discussions with people who are talking about your company, or the industry it is in.

3.     How do I begin web marketing?

There are a few strategies for beginning web marketing. Companies can choose to do all work internally, hire an agency to do the work for them, or a combination of the two. We recommend the combination, especially when it comes to social media. The people representing your brand should have an in depth knowledge of your organization, which only comes from being immersed in it. In order to determine what is right for your company, ask yourself:

• How much time do we have?

Typically social media is the most time consuming avenue of web marketing, with SEO close behind. PPC Advertising requires the least amount of time because once it is set up, only minor maintenance is required.

• How much money do we have?

In general, you will find that PPC Advertising is the most expensive, since you pay for every click on one of your ads. You can always set budgets, however, to control these costs. SEO requires ongoing maintenance, which can introduce costs for items like directory submissions. Social media is likely to be the least expensive option, as networking sites are free to use.

• How soon do we need results?

The quickest option to get results from your web marketing efforts will be PPC Advertising. To set up an account and post ads, you only need a couple hours to start receiving leads. Social media demands more time to build a following and establish your company as a leader. SEO efforts need to be spread out over a longer period of time so search engines don't perceive the website as spam. In order to increase your organic ranking, a few changes should be made each month, rather than all at once.  

With this brief overview of web marketing, you now have the ability to select what areas you would be most beneficial for your company. All industries, companies and customers have different needs, and they like to be communicated with in different ways. Make sure you have a firm understanding of these things before diving in to any of these web marketing tactics.

Since the breakout of Foursquare at South by Southwest Interactive conference in March, people have been talking and blogging about location-based social media. For many people, however, foursquare is just a game they used to play – trying to become “king.” I have gathered some of the most important things to know about location-based applications in general, and Foursquare in particular.

1.    What is Foursquare?

Foursquare Business Development Director, Tristan Walker, describes Foursquare as, “part friend finder, part city guide. Essentially, we’re in the business of making cities easier to use.” At the most basic, Foursquare is a service that recognizes your geographic location and uses it to make geographically relevant posts to your Foursquare friends.  After downloading the Foursquare app to your smartphone, you can ‘check-in’ and ‘shout’ based on where you are at that time. For example, when you go to a bar downtown for happy hour after work, you can check-in (your phone will automatically recognize where you are and suggest the name of the bar) and post about the great drink specials of the hour. In addition, you can see if any of your other friends are at the same place or at a nearby establishment.

In addition to the fun of meeting up with friends, Foursquare also provides game-like features. Each time you check-in somewhere, you earn points (additional points awarded adventurous users!)  With those points, you can earn badges that serve as fun rewards for being a regular Foursquare user. Some badges include the “Newbie,” which is awarded the first time you check in somewhere and the “Adventurer,” when you have checked in 10 places. There are also fun and playful badges like “Far Far Away” and “School Night.”

What might be the most exciting honor is becoming the “Mayor” of a certain location. If you check-in at one location more than any other user, you become the mayor of that location. The perks that come along with being mayor are just one of the reasons why people enjoy using Foursquare.

2.    Why use it?

So what does they mayor get? It varies. Depending on the establishment and the involvement that each vanue has with the Foursquare community, you might get anything from a free drink to a free hotel stay, but those perks only last as long as you are mayor. Other users who have not reached mayor status also have the opportunity for benefits as they check-in across town. Some restaurants may offer discounts or deals to people who have checked in and posted tips. Tips allow you to inform your friends and the public about key things related to venues where you check in. You can let people know that a particular coffee shop has the best cookies in the world, and they can add visiting that shop for a cookie to their ‘to-do’ list.

In addition to these monetary advantages, Foursquare offers a new way to connect with local friends and local businesses in a way that wasn’t possible before. Businesses have begun tapping into Foursquare check-ins as a way to encourage discussion around their establishment and easily reward loyal customers for continuing to support their business. As the popularity of Foursquare continues to increase, the Foursquare team is working on additional ways for venues to reward checked-in customers.

3.    Best Practices

Though it is still in its early stages, some businesses have already figured out how to handle the Foursquare crowds. At a San Francisco café, signs have been posted offering unlimited free drinks to the mayor of that establishment. This encourages competition among Foursquare users to check-in more frequently in the quest of mayorship. This increases the amount of check-ins and the number of mentions of that particular café on online networks.

Check-in for Charity was a fundraising effort for Save the Children. The effort encouraged individuals to check in to Foursquare in Austin during the South by Southwest conference. For every check-in, $0.25 was donated to the Save the Children cause and raised the $15,000 maximum gift in just 48 hours and logged over 135,000 check-ins.

As the service takes on more momentum, businesses are guaranteed to increase their offerings with Foursquare, otherwise users will opt for establishments with better check-in deals nearby.

4.    Other location-based applications

While Foursquare may be the most talked about location-based service right now, it wasn’t the first. Brightkite was the first company to combine location sharing, friend connections, and status updates. The service created a photo and status update feed for the user’s check-in history and the location. Somehow all of these features proved to be too much, and it faded out quickly. In addition, the Loopt iPhone app became popular and satisfied many users but was missing “the real secret sauce” according to Mashable.com. The other location-based service that is receiving mention right now is Gowalla, which also features the check-in, share, reward model. In Gowalla, you receive “pins” rather than “badges,” but other than that the services are extremely comparable – the determining factor will most likely be what catches on with the public and businesses more quickly.

These four items will easily make you conversant on the topic of location-based applications and Foursquare, but the best way to learn the technology is by using it. If you have a smartphone, you can quickly download the app and begin checking in. Otherwise, you can set up an account online and check in at different venues by texting your location to “50500” and using the @ sign before your location. To view an introduction video and get started, visit http://foursquare.com/

A lot of people have been talking about the newest form of social media, Google Buzz. In the first week after Google released its new venture into the social networking world, nobody would stop commenting on it, however, the comments weren’t all positive. Many users were concerned with the fact that they were automatically connected to people they sent and received the greatest amount of email on their Gmail account. Understandable, considering people don’t post their email correspondence or contact lists for all to see.

Google quickly took note of their error, and after four days the Google team posted an article on their Official Gmail Blog addressing each of the issues. They informed readers that the option to display the user’s following list has been made more prominent and “instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we’re moving to an auto-suggest model.” In addition, Google added a ‘Buzz’ tab in the Gmail settings, allowing users to change their settings, or hide Buzz completely from their Gmail inbox.

So, why wouldn’t everyone immediately head to their settings and disable this new feature? What is all the buzz about when there are already so many social networking sites that are already in existence and heavily trafficked?

Here is a quick rundown on the features, and how you can start to familiarize yourself with such a new tool. At this point, Google Buzz has unlimited potential for success… and failure, but it is best to be well equipped for either possibility.  

Buzz is built directly into Gmail, so anyone with a Google or Gmail Account has nothing to set up – everything is integrated right into the platform people are familiar with. The goal of Buzz is to make the sharing experience that people are already participating in on sites like Picasa, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter a more rich in-line experience. When you open a photo or video, they are viewed in the way they were meant to be seen – big and in full resolution. Rather than navigating away from the site you are at, you can view YouTube videos right in your Buzz window. By connecting other sites you are already active in, you have everything in one place where you can choose to share with the world or to a private network of friends.

Similar to Twitter, you can follow certain individuals whose posts you want to see and Buzz will help you out by recommending posts you might find interesting, or collapsing posts they know you won’t. As you spend more time on Buzz, the recommendations offered will become more accurate, providing you with only the best suggestions.

As your Buzz stream begins to grow (as it most likely will) you can manage your buzzes by “muting” them or changing your notification settings. After posting your own buzz, you have the opportunity to mute it a well, edit the content, delete some comments or delete the buzz all together. In order to make posting buzzes easier, you can create contact lists to post to – similar to groups in Facebook.

After you integrate your other social media sites, all of your posts (microblogging, photos and otherwise) will be compiled in Buzz. You can also choose to update your Buzz posts by email by sending a message to buzz@gmail.com, just make sure you have specified your email privacy settings ahead of time! Some other tricks of the trade include adding *asterisks*, _underscores_ or –dashes- to your text will turn it into bold, italic, and struckthrough text.

Okay, so now you’re on Buzz (maybe not by choice) and you know how to handle all of the settings and options. What should you be doing on there?

First, start sharing on Buzz. Post comments, links, videos, photos – anything that you would normally put on Twitter or Facebook. Next, start reading on Buzz. See what the people you are following are posting about and comment accordingly. Whenever someone comments, that post will bounce back to the top of your Buzz Stream – so everyone will see the most recent content posted. As with any social networking site, interacting is the most important feature. To grab someone’s attention, use the @ symbol before someone’s name that you have in your contact list or in the status bar. The person will then be notified via email that you directly replied to them. Last, but not least, search on Buzz. See what people are talking about, and whether or not it applies to you. You can filter by source, author, commenter and if the post has a link, video or image attached to it.

For those looking for the business uses of Buzz, a co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, has already found it to be a valuable business tool, leading the company to plan a release of an enterprise version of Buzz. Brin commented that when he was writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times, he found sharing and gathering feedback from one person at a time very frustrating. The solution is to solicit comments and feedback from 50 people at once and see where that takes you.

At such an early stage in the game, it is difficult to say whether Google Buzz will survive the initial outrage (and possible lawsuits) regarding privacy issues and become part of mainstream social media use. With the “Buzz it” logo showing up on so many sites alongside the ‘retweet’ and ‘share’ options for Twitter and Facebook, it appears that Google is ready to enter the world of social media in a big way after their failed attempts with Orkut and OpenSocial. Only time will tell if the buzz will die down or quickly grow into a roaring worldwide conversation.

To keep up with the latest Buzz news, check out our Google Buzz posts follow @wris_oh on Twitter and become a fan of WRIS on Facebook!

I ran across this article recently.  It’s from January and talks about how Facebook is Beta testing an application to allow advertisers to poll users on the site: 

Advertisers clamoring for deeper engagement with Facebook's 150 million members will soon have the ability simply to ask them what they are thinking, and then display the results for all to see -- or even better, comment on.

The social network this week will begin beta testing ads that allow marketers to poll Facebook members. The new units are the latest example of Facebook Engagement Ads, a program launched in August to more closely integrate advertisers into the fabric of the site.  

This confused me because Facebook already had this service over 2 years ago!  At that time, anyone could set up a poll to query a selected user base.  The cost was minimal (something like $25) but it worked pretty well.

 Back then I was working for an IT support company catering to higher ed.  A Facebook poll was a quick and easy way to query the student population at a certain college about how effective our services on campus were.

 I thought students might find it intrusive and not want to participate.  It was just the opposite – I often got all the responses I needed well before the close of the poll.

 Afterwards you could segment your results by gender, age, etc.  It wasn’t Google Analytics quality insight but it was interesting nevertheless.

 I poked around on Facebook site trying to find info on the polling feature as it was 2 years ago, or the new version as mentioned in the article, but couldn’t find anything.  Hopefully, they will be rolling this feature out to the masses soon.

 Obviously, if you are looking for a scientific results running a Facebook poll isn’t going to cut it.  However, if you are interested in getting broad insights into what people are thinking it might be the way to go.

TrueHero.org, which was designed and developed by WRIS, was recently featured in Crain’s Cleveland Business (subscription required):

The former CEO of Royal Appliance Manufacturing Co. and Lamson & Sessions Co. [Mike Merriman] earlier this year quietly launched a nonprofit called True Hero, which only now is getting a formal unveiling. The web-based organization, at www.truehero.org, will award a total of $20,000 to 12 public service projects carried out by high school and college students and non-school groups consisting primarily of participants 23 years old and younger.

In a reflection of True Hero's launch in the Facebook/social media age, the content of the web site is almost totally generated by users.
Student groups submit descriptions of their projects, and monetary awards are made based on projects that receive the most votes. (The site's technology prevents people from voting for a particular project more than once, though users can cast votes for up to five projects.)

We've enjoyed working with Mike on this very cool venture.  Go vote for one of the 50+ service projects vying for prize money!