Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

CalMU Small Business Spotlight: SanDiego.com

May 2nd, 2012 No comments

As you may have heard, recent studies have come out revealing that when kids have questions they need answered, a majority turn to Google over their parents. While this is definitely intriguing, it is at the end of the day quite expected from our younger generations. But what happens when you take our current dependence on search engines and narrow its scope, say, to one geographic location? Well my friends, you’ve got SanDiego.com, of course!

SanDiego.com is a one-stop destination and search engine for everything you need to know about San Diego, including how to get in, places to go, people to see, concerts to hear, restaurants to try – you name it! Started in 1994, it is a high ranked website visited by hundred of thousands of people each month and its operations encapsulate what we try to instill in our students as one of the top online MBA programs in San Diego.

One of its cardinal strengths? President John Ferry’s pride and passion for America’s Finest City, and his determination to spread that to people all over the world. You see, not only is SanDiego.com a perfect for residents to go to find new things to do around town; it is also ideal for both domestic and international tourists wanting to come in and enjoy the full San Diego experience – whatever that might be for them – because travel information and search options are available rightat their fingertips to make the entire process easier and more efficient. And with news and information that encompasses all domains of the area, anyone can find anything that suits them the best.

One of my favorite things about SanDiego.com? The coupons! With an eye-popping abundance of discounts, promotions, promo codes, deals, codes, coupon offers and even buying/shopping advice, they really turn San Diego into a shopping haven. Not only does this help us consumers, but it also helps local businesses reach out to us, find their target audience and ultimately increase their sales and expand their business.

A prime example of very smart affiliate marketing for students in our business management programs, SanDiego.com’s business model is noteworthy. This is also one of reasons they were awarded the 2011 Small Business Award for the Most Innovative Marketing Campaign. Their social media marketing and networking is excellent (I frequent their Facebook page for San Diego events and post many links from their website to ours) and all in all, they are one of the many reasons why San Diego is one of the happiest places on Earth!

Categories: Business Buzz Tags: , , , , ,

Secrets to Optimize Yelp.com Video Clip from Secrets and Strategies for Successful Social Media Marketing

February 6th, 2012 No comments

Hey everyone,

Here is another video from the lecture I gave back on October 26 on social media marketing. The first video I posted was all about Google Love, and this one provides insights on how to optimize Yelp for your business.

Not only is Yelp a great place to find reviews about companies (and competitors) – it’s also a great way to market your business and build your brand with search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing all hold Yelp in high regard and so it’s very important to encourage your customers to post positive review sites.

One tip for doing this: make it as easy for them to do as possible. Give them links via e-mails/pamphlets/whatever and tell them exactly how to do it. The easier it is for them to review you, the more likely they will (and the more likely you’ll get MORE reviews).

I hope you enjoy this video. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions in the Comments section below.

Best,

Ilana Herring

Transcript of the Lesson

Okay, strategy number seven, optimizing for Yelp. I’m not going to tell my anecdote to explain how you learn from this cool Yelp news, but I’ll just say that when I put up the press release about this event, people, someone from Yelp saw it and called. And Yelp is really interesting, like I shared about with your question, you know the reviews. You want people to write your reviews who are already active.

Now what you should think about is you might have customers who are active who you don’t ask to write a review. You should go to Yelp, if you’ve never done this, and see what’s already there. Okay. Then you should claim your business if you haven’t already done this. Go to Yelp for Business Owners; that’s going to get me there.

Okay. This is a screenshot of actually my dentist, of his Yelp page. Now he hates Yelp, he ignores it. He happens to be an amazing dentist, so I will show you on the next page all his reviews are stellar. His photos were put up by patients. Okay, most of us do not have the luxury of this. If you do, you should really be proud of yourself. I think that we should all think of our social media as both coming and going. We participate, we claim our business, we put up material and we hope our customers reply and our future prospects engage with us.

Okay, there’s other review sites as well that might be relevant. If you’re in the travel industry, TripAdvisor.com; definitely check out MerchantCircle.com, I recommend that as well. And when you claim your business you’re basically just going to be putting this information in, putting in some photos, and putting in your marker if you’re not on a map. So check it out, it’s a Google map. If you did your Google Places it’s probably already there, and it’s probably already right.

Okay. secrets for optimizing Yelp. Claim your page. So again, if you didn’t do that already, this is where you claim your business. So go to Yelp.com and look at the upper right hand corner for ‘Business Owners’.

Add in information about your business, your hours of operation, photos, et cetera. If you are a home based business and don’t have a street address that you want to advertise, you can just use your city and zip code. That’s really nice,that’s 2:09 for Yelp. I don’t think that applies for all social media, so embrace Yelp if you’re a home based business.

Understand the Yelp review filter. We already spoke about that. If you want to understand it more,Google, I hate the Yelp review filter – just Google “Yelp review filter” and you’ll find a video on it.

Okay this is cool. So back here where there’s photos; you can put up a photo about anything that is relevant to your business. One secret strategy you can use is you can make a coupon – 25% off, 10% off, whatever your coupon is – save it as a photo, as a .jpeg, and upload it as a photo. So now you’ve used that photo place to make a coupon.

Video Transcription by GMR Transcription

Categories: MBA Mondays Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Strategy #1: Google Love Video Clip from Secrets and Strategies for Successful Social Media Marketing

December 19th, 2011 No comments

On October 26 I held a workshop, “Secrets and Strategies for Successful Social Media Marketing”, and it was a huge success. A lot of people came out and we engaged in discussion, which is what is at the heart of SMM. Here is the first video that I will be releasing from the workshop, which is all about showin’ Google some love.

Let me know what you think, if you have any questions, and if you have any thoughts/strategies/ideas of your own. What have you done that works? Because social media is still relatively new, we’re all learning together. So let’s harness the interaction ethos of social media and help each other out.

What have you done that you have found beneficial? What hasn’t worked for you? Let’s discuss!

Best,
Ilana Herring

Transcript of the Lesson

Okay, strategy number 1 is Google Love. We want to create Google Love. It’s a term David Carlton, who’s a marketer in San Diego, coined early, so I learned it from him.

Basically, Google, which is where most people are searching for things – most people are going into Google and typing in “car repair” – Google’s new algorithm called Panda, was designed to say, “we care about social media, we care about what your connections are doing.” And the algorithm actually will show you different results based on who your connections are and what your connections say and do.

So the more connections you have, or whatever connections you have, the more likely some of that material will show up in your results. So what that means is if each of us went home to our home computers and typed in “car repair”, we all know Google knows – well hopefully most of us know – Google knows where you are. It knows from your IP address and the research you’ve done – you’re in San Diego or Miramar or Poway. But all of our results are still going to be slightly different based on the fact that we’re logged into something like Facebook, or we’re logged into our Gmail, or logged into anything; it knows that my best friend just wrote a review – or maybe not my best friend, maybe a colleague or maybe someone I met at an event once – wrote review for a “car repair” and I might see that. And not only will I see that, but that might come up higher.

So if you do social media for no other reason – no one ever comments on your Facebook posts and you feel like no one cares – know that the material you’re feeding to Facebook actually affects search engine results. So that’s enough of a reason to do it. Because we all want to do things that affect search engines results. When you’re doing things on the Facebook you want to use your niche terms, your brand keywords. Your keywords might be “hypnosis”, but a better keyword is, ”hypnosis to solve (or to stop) smoking”, or “solutions to stop smoking”.

Does that make sense? Please stop me at any point if there’s questions.

You want to use that material and you want to feed the search engines in all of your social media content with your keywords. If you forget everything else tonight, just remember that: know your keywords and use them when you doing social media.

Video Transcription by GMR Transcription

Categories: MBA Mondays Tags: , , , , , , ,