Cook Wheelwright Groups August Social Media Promotion

Christian Bale Listens to the Social Cry – The Power of Social Media

Social media can be very influential in both positive and negative fashions. Think about it, how else can you potentially reach and rally 800 million people with one post? Most recently we have seen the power of social media in the news with the unfortunate tragedy that occurred in Colorado. Following the shooting an online campaign was started urging the Batman movie superstar Christian Bale to go and visit those who were wounded in the hospital in attempt to raise their spirits and give hope to those who have lost faith.

 The Facebook post was started by a girl named Emily Sanchez who was simply reaching out to her friends stating “They need to know that heroes can be real too, not just the bad guys” and asking for their support to try and influence the actor to visit the victims proving heroes do exist. Since then her post went viral with a Change.org petition then leading to Twitter followers urging the actor to put on his costume and jump on the next plane. The Change.org petition has 186 signatures as of this evening, however the post reached hundreds of thousands.

 Here is the Facebook post that started it all:

 

Here are a few of the Twitter comments:

“What a great idea. Christian Bale, are you listening?”

“It would be awesome if Christian Bale visited the victims of the Aurora shooting. I hope he does it.”

“Be a hero, Christian! These victims are fighting for survival and [you are] the only one that can save them.”

Who knows if he or his PR people had already thought about doing this, but the cries of the public were obviously heard as the actor appeared at the hospital and memorial on Tuesday spending a few hours with the victims, families, medical staff and first responders. Reports say that Bale was there on behalf of himself and not Warner Brothers

After the visit, the news that he followed through went viral as well with pictures of he and his wife, as well as pictures of him with the victims all the while the community is shouting “we did it guys” and “we can make a difference, one post at a time.”

Whether or not you feel this post was in good taste or bad, the proof is in the pudding. Social media can make an impact.

Warning: Search Engine Optimization is Not for the Faint of Heart

Ok so maybe I am being a little dramatic, but the fact of the matter is that SEO is a strategy, it is a process and there is the ability to see true data and analyze your users interaction in order to market to them based on their own behavior. You should not expect to have front page results and increased conversion immediately with SEO, if that is what you are looking for we have other alternative digital marketing strategies in mind, just ask. SEO on the other hand is a long term marketing solution that requires dedication, patience and constant attention. The rewards are worth the struggles, not unlike building your brand, it takes heart.

There are basic things you need to have in order to have a fully optimized website. Some ask what a fully optimized website is exactly, and the best way for me to describe my thinking when I say a site is 100% SEO friendly is by thinking of a report card. Think of search engine ranking like scholastic measurements. If you get straight A’s you make the Deans list and eventually the Presidents list. Search engine bots give you a grade based on certain criteria. If you get an A in more subjects so to speak than your competitor, you end up with higher rankings. The trick is knowing what the Professor (Google, Yahoo, Bing) is looking for to get that A grade.

How do you achieve those A grades? We the first step is looking at the websites underlying coding. Google isn’t equipped with artificial intelligence (yet), so their bots are programmed to take certain actions based on the way the developer’s code talks to it and guides it through the site. If the code is not written in a way that it tells the Google .bot to continue to read it gets confused and leaves the site and moves on to the next one.

If this little “bot” does not crawl the entire page and take a snap shot of it for its virtual photo gallery filing cabinet, then your site does not get “cached” (not cash) and that particular page does not become “indexed” for search results. No index, no rankings, no rankings, no views, no views, no conversions, and you know the rest.

So there is my first lesson on how to make your website SEO friendly. Make sure your code is written in a language that tells the search engine “bots” to continue to read throughout the page and then move on to the next one. Keep the search “bots” on your site as long as possible and the more likely one of your website pages will come up in a search result.

The next thing you do is optimize each page with keywords without going directly against those with higher budgets, but still attracting a large percentage of the market share. But that is another story for another day.

Are you looking to put a little “heart” into your website marketing? Give us a call at 480-779-8001 or click here to contact us! Thanks for taking a few minutes to read what we have to say!

Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups – Which One is Right For You?

Do you understand the difference between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups?

The great thing about Facebook is that businesses and organizations can utilize this free tool for multiple purposes within the company and the benefits are vast. So what do you use for your social media marketing? Should you create a page or a group? Here is some quick information from the Social Media Consultants at Cook Wheelwright Group that may help you decide.

Facebook Profiles are personal profiles that we use in order to “get social” and reach out to the world. The Facebook Profile should not be used to brand a business as there are limitations that a Facebook Profile has which would not be beneficial for the purposes of brand marketing.

Facebook Pages are or at least should be used to brand a company, individual, event or idea online. With a Facebook page the user has to like your page in order to follow the conversations or posts that happen on your page. Typically conversations do not happen between the brand organization and the user other than a few comments. The purpose of a Facebook Brand Page is to deliver messages to the public. Now the public has the option to choose to add your posts to their feed so the messages have to be interesting enough for the users to follow what you have to say.

Often Facebook Pages are gone to for information about a company, person or event. Companies are offering their Facebook Page as the go to location on their advertising campaigns because it is the easiest and fastest way to keep up-to-date information fed to their fans.

Facebook Groups on the other hand are intended for a more interpersonal relationship with the user base. Groups are the place for small group communication and for people to share their common views, interests or to express their opinion. Groups can be made to share and support other local businesses like the Small Business Facebook Group which is intended to bring small businesses together under a group setting where they can communicate with each other and share in order to help each other develop and grow their small businesses.

Groups can also be for members of a church where the members require administrator approval in order to keep it congregation members only. The same can be done for an athletic team or a team of employees who may be scattered amongst different states or they may be used as a support method for groups of individuals struggling with the same ailments.

What ever the purpose, Facebook has made it easy to find a reason to get social. Just remember to think through the purpose of your social campaign before you create the page. Contact Cook Wheelwright Group, Inc. if you need suggestions on what to do or require assistance!

Is SEO Really Dying?

Recently Forbes published an article titled “The Death of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content” quoting Adam Torkildson, one of the top SEO consultants in Utah and one of the best in the country stating that Search Engine Optimization as we know it will be dead in two years.

This theory has been slowly coming to fruition after the Panda update first, and then the most recent Penguin update. Basically what happened is that Google was not providing results that the users wanted. The search engines were in fact being manipulated by “black hat” digital marketing techniques allowing those with the largest pocketbook, and most back links, to be pushed to the top of the search rankings, rather than those with the most valuable information.

Of course, every small business owner believes their product is the best and should be on page one, but there are over 800 billion websites out in the world wide web right now, therefore serving up what the USER is looking for has become more and more difficult. Thus, Google decided it was time to put the “smack down” so to speak on those who were manipulating the algorithms, violating the Google terms and conditions.

Lets start with a little background on the Google Penguin update…Penguin was officially announced on May 26, 3012 and Google described the Penguin update as an algorithm change that’s aimed at webspam and, more specifically, “sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines.” With this Google penalized any and all sites that they felt violated those terms, as well as others which proved to be “false positives” leaving many small businesses scared and unsure of what to do next.

The Search Engine Journal published an article back in June stating:

“Penguin places more of an emphasis on the reputation and quality of a site that’s linking to your specific domain rather than the sheer number of links that point in your direction. Basically, this means that SEO technicians won’t be rewarded anymore for taking shortcuts when it comes to link building. Those $10/mth for 2000 back link offers are now not only pointless, but they’re also quite dangerous.”

So with all these changes, is SEO in fact dead? Our opinion at Cook Wheelwright Group is that SEO is dead in its current form, however is being reborn through quality content and proper social media management. This is a theory we have believed in for over a year now, even before the Penguin update.

We still believe that both on page and off page SEO are important, it just needs to be done in a tasteful way that compliments the algorithm rather than attempting to manipulate it with paid backlinks. So, again, how does a small business compete with those who can afford to have a full-time staff writing quality content, consistently updating social media posts, commenting on other blog posts and keeping up with all the different review sites for reputation management? Again we refer back to our blog regarding Sabermetrics:

By using statistical data available to us, and focusing on the marketing version of moving runners around the bases (customer behavior patterns on the website) we can effectively determine the best methods for progressing the sale. Analytics tools allow us to not only track, but predict customer behavior online which helps us to revise and model websites based off the data. Bounce rates, keywords, and onsite navigation patterns all factor in to delivering the best marketing experience. All of this data can be leveraged to improve the ultimate measurement of your marketing, the ROI.

In blogs to come we will expand on the importance of social media and quality content to replace the previous form of SEO. We will teach you what we look for when doing a digital marketing audit as well as a few tips and tricks that you can do to help your online marketing campaigns.

Of course you can always reach out and ask questions or schedule a complimentary review with one of our strategic marketing specialists. Follow this link to our website or call us anytime at 480-779-8001!