Social Media (SM) is an important tool in marketing any business when it's done right. And, SM is here to stay so this is the first post in an ongoing series of SM. SM can go wrong is you are not careful. In the paper today there's a story of a news station that asked viewers to tweet what they are glad is over in 2014, since today is the last day of the year. It backfired. Viewers ended up mocking the station and the news casters too. ( read story ). What is Social Media (aka social networks) There are a slew of social media providers. The top ones in USA are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.  Those four are also free to use. There are many social networks that started free but now you must pay. For example Ning.com; however, there are no ads in that one like you see in Facebook or Linkedin. Click here to view an entire list of social media sites in Wikipedia. How Does Social Media Work? The old school  term is networking. Nowadays, it depends o...

Social Media (SM) is an important tool in marketing any business when it's done right. And, SM is here to stay so this is the first post in an ongoing series of SM. SM can go wrong is you are not careful. In the paper today there's a story of a news station that asked viewers to tweet what they are glad is over in 2014, since today is the last day of the year. It backfired. Viewers ended up mocking the station and the news casters too. ( read story ). What is Social Media (aka social networks) There are a slew of social media providers. The top ones in USA are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.  Those four are also free to use. There are many social networks that started free but now you must pay. For example Ning.com; however, there are no ads in that one like you see in Facebook or Linkedin. Click here to view an entire list of social media sites in Wikipedia. How Does Social Media Work? The old school  term is networking. Nowadays, it depends on what SM t...

PageRank (PR) is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It's one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. PR can impact your SEO and SEM, depending how you structure your web content . Today, PR is used as the gold standard for measuring the quality of a web site or blog.  The history of PageRank (PR) PR was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. At the time that Page and Brin met, search engines typically linked to pages that had the highest keyword density, which meant people could game the system by repeating the same phrase over and over to attract higher search page results.  PR is patented by Stanford, and the name PageRank comes from Larry Page .  What does PR accomplish? PR is a Standard that measures a web page's importance using baseline values inherent to the software code of PR. Page and Brin's theory is that the mos...

Video: Five studies prove why you need it to improve your online presence We live in a digital age where people are more accustomed to viewing than reading.  Put that to your advantage with a video that highlights your produces or services.   The positive influence of a 90 second video is proven to be a lasting and  powerful impact to connecting with new potential customers. 1. A recent study found that 52% of consumers said that watching product videos made them more confident in their online purchase decisions. ( study ) 2. In a recent survey 60% of people said they prefer watching video over reading text. ( study ) 3. Visitors to your blog or web site will stay longer watching video that text. That translated into a lower bounce rate because your viewers are engaged longer in your content. ( study ) 4. You want people to remember you. A recent report informs us that people are more apt to recall a video than text. ( study ) 5. Placing your video in...