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As part of our weekly strategy session this week, Anne Swanson—client, collaborator, and sister—and I watched a streaming video recording of the keynote address of the 2011 Social Media Success Summit. SMSS is an online conference that’s billed as benefitting small-business owners, corporate marketers, and social-media users who want to use social media to take their businesses to “a whole new level.”
 Last night’s keynote, “The Future of Social Media: A Forecast Based on Research,” featured Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang. The presentation seemed to be slanted toward the stakeholders responsible for social media activity in corporate environments, but Owyang’s message contained some useful strategies for small businesses, social-media consultants, and nonprofits as well. His main message contrasted two possible paths for social-media efforts—getting caught in a reactive “social media help desk” scenario or implementing a proactive approach he called “achieving escape velocity.”
To reach escape velocity …[more]
Internet marketing experts say that a significant chunk of web searches contain “local intent.” I’ve found figures ranging from 20 to 40 percent. In other words, lots of people are going to Google looking for products, services, and experiences in their geographical vicinity.
Starfall Graphics’ local-search listing
The big search engines know this, and in their competition to provide the highest-quality search results, they’ve created systems to provide highly relevant results to people searching with local intent. They’ve set up localized directories and made their own sites location-aware. That means that when you visit search engines, they check your IP address to get an idea where you are in order to tailor search results …[more]
 Like most designers who migrated from print media to the web, I’ve always found it frustrating that the selection of fonts available for use on web sites is limited by what the site visitor has installed on his computer. The 20 or so “browser-safe” font options are a dreary collection of faces that either come preloaded in some form on Mac and Windows computers or get added by various Microsoft product installers. Until fairly recently, if you wanted to display text in beautiful fonts, the best option was to create headlines and other display text as images. But images are roadblocks to effective search engine indexing, so designers have had to learn “image replacement” tricks to preserve searchable text for headings …[more]
 Getlisted.org is a portal that aggregates several leading local-search sites into one convenient interface. Plug in the name of your business and your ZIP code, and Getlisted.org will check the status of your listings on Google, Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, and Best of the Web and give you a score for completeness. It also supplies links you can follow to add your business listing to those sites’ local directories or to edit your existing listings.
You can register with Getlisted.org to get a user account …[more]
 Local.com is a company that specializes in local search. The company maintains a central site and 700 regional sites aimed at providing users with targeted, relevant local-search results. It provides free directory listings, paid premium listings, paid advertising, product and service reviews, special offers from local businesses, and more. If you’re just starting out in your efforts to build local-search rankings, Local.com is a quick and easy starting point.
To register your business in the directory, start by visiting Local.com and searching for your business …[more]
There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about “free as a business model”—the idea put forth by Chris Anderson in a 2008 Wired magazine cover story that you can build a successful business around a product or service that you give away for free. Bill Gurley presents a nice overview of the development of the idea. One of my favorite books about the Internet economy is What Would Google Do?, in which Jeff Jarvis talks about how Google has exploited the power of free services to make piles of money.
 Yesterday I went looking for an image to illustrate a blog post, and I stumbled across an exciting application of “free as a business model” at FreeDigitalPhotos.net. This stock photography site offers web-resolution versions of all of its images for free on one condition: the user must acknowledge the photographer and FreeDigitalPhotos.net …[more]
 Anyone who’s been online for more than a few weeks is likely to be familiar with YouTube. The enormously popular video sharing web site got its start in early 2005, and within a year of its official launch, was receiving a hundred million video views per day. The company was purchased by Google in late 2006.
YouTube permits registered users to post an unlimited number of videos and to share, rate, and comment on other users’ videos. Unregistered users can watch and share videos. The ease of sharing has turned some YouTube offerings into “viral” videos—clips that spread around the Internet like wildfire (see Evolution of Dance, for example)—and has made some obscure producers into Internet celebrities.
As a registered user, you can also set up a “channel,” a user page that organizes your own videos and others that you’d like to feature. If you’re producing video content, YouTube can be a great way to find an audience and to lead them to other elements of your online presence. Google also offers the option of designating your content as a Promoted Video. Promoted Videos are a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system for driving viewers to your channel.
Your channel can contain a photo or logo image, information about your business or organization, and a link to your web site, blog, or Facebook fan page. The channel can be customized to coordinate with other branding efforts. For example, we’ve configured the font and color scheme of The Clutter Fairy’s YouTube channel to match the client’s web site:
 YouTube channel
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 Web site
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About Community & Conversation Community & Conversation is the communication strategy blog of Edward F. Gumnick, a writer, consultant, and designer based in Houston, Texas.
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