Social Media Optimization

Douglas Karr is the President and CEO of DK New Media, LLC.  DK New Media services large and medium-sized businesses in online marketing, social media, corporate blogging and search engine strategies.

Folks in the ecommerce business will tell you that sending email is like printing money.  Using an email marketing platform like ExactTarget affords a company a lot of flexibility with respect to integration.  As well, a templated enterprise blogging platform like Compendium is essential.



Utilizing some very cool jQuery tools, we were able to add a simple opt-in field on the Compendium Comments form.  If you fill out your name and email address, then click the checkbox, a job is sent to an external script that opts the person into an email list and sends them a welcome email... automated communications!

What a fantastic way of encouraging additional engagement with a visitor with permission-based marketing.  DK New Media provides integration services online for several platforms and technologies.  Please don't hesitate to give us a call so we can streamline your next efforts.

Carhartt is really at the forefront of leveraging technology.  They recognize that many people are visiting their blogs via search that have never purchase from the company - this is an ideal inbound marketing strategy!

We got a bit of flack when we launched DK New Media as an Internet Marketing Agency, encompassing web design, social media, ecommerce, search engine optimization, online marketing and email marketing.  Most agencies are advised to specialize in one field.  We purposefully don't... and so far it's working well for us.

Baggott Lane has been one of our clients that we've done some comprehensive work for.  They combine search engine optimization and marketing with blogging and ecommerce to drive sales to websites such as Global Toaster.

The company purchased a design through an online crowdsourcing site that provided us a raw Photoshop file.  The file looked great but was a mess to slice and dice for CSS.  We sent the file out to one of our Photoshop gurus, who had it layered and beautiful within an hour or so.

That allowed us to apply the design to two different theming interfaces - the first a Compendium theme utilizing the Yahoo User Interface template and the second was an ecommerce application.

Also integrated in the site is an automated Mailchimp RSS campaign so folks can sign up on the site and receive the blog posts via email.  We also integrated analytics throughout to accurately measure the results of all.  The net result is a beautiful interface that's tightly integrated to drive sales.

 Compendium is a platform leveraging both multiple authors as well as multiple keyword phrases.  Any decent social media consultant would ensure that analytics is properly installed and capable of measuring the impact of the platform.

With advanced analytics applications like Webtrends, Omniture and Coremetrics, monitoring different dimensions of your social media strategy are fairly simple.  However, Google Analytics, it's challenging to measure beyond a single dimension.  Google actually realizes this and advises its users to build multiple accounts when you wish to analyze multiple dimensions.

For Compendium, my advise is to have three accounts:

1. General account
2. Author Tracking account
3. Keyword Tracking account

Compendium's robust templating system allows you to customize your Google Analytics code and you can insert each account independently in the footer.  The code looks like this:

The yellow highlighted code adds pageviews with the 'by/author/authorname' format in the specific account that you apply it to.  Make sure that's not your primary account, though.  If you do that, you'll add pageviews and subsequently reduce your bounce rates because each page that tracks both pageviews means that there's no opportunity for a bounce.

The green highlighted code adds pageviews with the 'by/keyword/mykeyword' format in the specific account you apply it to.  It does this by splitting up the URL structure and pulling the keyword out of the URL.  If Compendium's URL structure changes, this will need to change as well.  Again, you'll want to put this in its own account.

Tracking by author will allow you to track conversions (be sure to multiply your conversion codes for each account as well) by author and keyword - this will provide your team with priceless stats on which of your authors are the highest converters and which keywords are the highest converters!  Concentrating and rewarding your strategy in those areas will help drive a successful inbound marketing strategy!

Scott Whitlock has been a friend and mentor for quite a few years.  His company, Flexware Innovations, is an Indianapolis Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and is a very successful Manufacturing Intelligence Solutions provider.  When Scott contacted me to assist on his new site design, I jumped on the opportunity.

The last site was a Joomla-based site that had run it's course.  It was complex, not too search engine friendly, and was partnered with a WordPress blog that wasn't updated very often.

The goal we set out to help Scott with was to ensure the new site was aesthetically beautiful, simple to navigate, reduced the content and increased the opportunity for conversions.

Scott worked with an Indianapolis brand and graphic design firm, FuelVM, who have built out a number of brands and different themes for content management systems, but never for WordPress.

We utilized a developer version of WooThemes so that we could use the existing framework and jQuery slide integration; however, the theme was probably rewritten about 75% to accommodate all the required features and navigation.

We migrated content from Joomla and brought in Indianapolis content developer Andrea Emerson to work with Scott to both simplify the content and make it much more compelling.  Andrea and Andrew (FuelVM) were fantastic to work with.  We migrated the site and went live tonight.

Aside from the data and media, the migration ensured all previous content that was indexed by search engines would still point to relevant pages.  All total, we redirected almost 200 links!  The new format will basically utilize the blog as a press release and company news information.  

As you might recognize, the manufacturing industry isn't quite Web 2.0 ready yet... although Scott has always been way ahead of the industry.  He was blogging years ago and even has a Twitter account.  This site is a beautiful start.  

We're going to continue to enhance the site to optimize inbound marketing leads and gain search engine dominance.  Flexware Innovation is a great site to have in DK New Media's portfolio and a fantastic company to work with.

 Paper-Lite needed a facelift!  Their old website was a static, table-driven site that was doing nothing for their business or customers.

They had a great brand, logo and color combination - but the site was dark, unfriendly, and couldn't be easily edited.  Paper-Lite is a company that's bringing other companies, like law firms, financial companies and healthcare companies into the 21st century - reducing paper and filing costs and implementing paper-lite solutions that meet all regulatory requirements.

DK New Media isn't simply a social media company, we also have talented designers and developers that can deliver a web site that will provide a great return on investment for your company.

Paper-Lite had some objectives:

a. They wanted their website to gain some search engine placement.  The table-driven, poor construction of the original site did not welcome search engines at all... along with poor page construction, it lacked sitemaps, pings, permalinks, or the content to let search engines understand what was important and not important.

b. They wanted their staff to be able to update the site easily.  Learning HTML isn't necessary nowadays with the fantastic selection of content management systems available on the market.  DK New Media converted their graphics, updated the look and feel, and built a custom CMS theme that better represented their brand and now allows Paper-Lite to update their site simply by logging in!

c. They wanted their site to drive sales.  The old site had direct links to tons of resources.  Paper-Lite didn't know who was downloading what... allowing prospects to simply drive through, get what they wanted, and drive off.  Now an integrated contact form system requests registration information and notifies the sales staff each time a download occurs.

d. They wanted a customer resource center for their clients to download and obtain protected content and information.  Now they can register users for the site and an entire menu system appears when a customer is logged in.

Web design is important, but ensuring a return on investment for your site is far more important.  There's no excuse for any small, medium, or large business to be running a static site anymore that requires development resources to execute.  Inbound marketing should be the primary goal of your website, not beautiful design.  

Start with the goal and work back.  If your internet marketing consultants aren't incorporating a great content management system, search engine optimization, Social Media, Blogging, Analytics, Customer Resource strategies, etc. into your online marketing strategy, find a new Internet Marketing Agency!

Applying themes in blogging platforms like Compendium Blogware and developing custom themes for content management systems like WordPress are becoming quite a specialty of DK New Media.

Some themes prove more challenging than others and this Sabrix one was a doozy!  There are layers on layers on layers in this layout.  Moving an image from Photoshop to HTML and CSS - as well as being bound by a complex core theme is quite an exercise in patience.

Thankfully, I've got a number of partners here in the region who assist when things get tough!  James Paden of Vibrant Solutions helped with a CSS positioning issue on the sidebar that was driving us nuts.  Mark Ballard, an Indianapolis graphic artist, helped with a Photoshop question.

Surrounding myself with other Indianapolis web design companies, Indianapolis Online Marketing companies and Indianapolis SEO firms is a huge differentiator for me in the marketplace.  I don't simply tack on SEO or Design to my list of services because I'm the expert... I do it because I've found the experts to help make my clients successful.

Honestly, I'm a bit put off by firms that say that they do everything... design, development, SEO, video, hosting, etc.  I think the average Internet Marketing Agency is great at one thing... that thing that they eat, sleep and breath.  I'm a web marketing consultant that is proficient at many things - but leveraging social media is my bread and butter.  I will deliver on this other work with the help of the experts I've surrounded myself!

Great advice from Intel's Social Media Guidelines:

If you're about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, don't shrug it off and hit 'send.' Take a minute to review these guidelines and try to figure out what's bothering you, then fix it. If you're still unsure, you might want to discuss it with your manager or legal representative. Ultimately, what you publish is yours—as is the responsibility. So be sure.

Many companies try to thwart any participation in social media fearing that they'll lose control of their brand. Employees are threatened rather than encouraged to participate. Reading through Intel's guidelines is refreshing. They encourage their employees to participate but also hold them responsible if things go wrong. It appears that Intel is now following their transparency guidelines by using real employees instead of actors!

On the other hand... after watching the real Intel employee's try to sing, the actors may have been a good move. (kidding)

Nevertheless, Intel's social media guidelines are a great example of how you may wish to craft your company's guidelines for your social media strategy.

Search engine marketing has 4 distinct categories - with strategies associated with each:

1. The platform that presents your content to search engines.  Everyone will tell you that the utilization of an effective platform makes the effort to improve search engine optimization much easier.  
2. The content presented to search engines.  How keywords are researched and utilized in that content.
3. The popularity of that content, as measured through backlinks.  Keywords and content will get you categorized popularity, but backlinks are the currency of the Internet!
4. Paid search, also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).  An effective SEM strategy can almost always include an effective pay-per-click campaign.

Search Engine Marketing, Indianapolis, has some incredible resources for each of these strategies - and together they prove to be a power-house team for advancing companies' online presence and ability to attract inbound leads.

I'm proud to be a partner with some other companies that assist in this arena, and will soon begin executing parallel strategies with a first shared customer with Slingshot SEO and EverEffect.  Tonight, we spent several hours learning each others' approaches and discussing the exponential advantages of working together.

Most Internet Marketing Consultants fight over the pie and who can steal or get the most from one another.  This is not in the best interest of the client.  Balancing a clients' budget and effectively platform leveraging will yield the most results.



I'm looking forward to working with these folks on many, many engagements!  And it was an incredible surprise to find DK New Media listed on the new home page of Slingshot SEO!

Facebook, Twitter, Blogging... it's all simple right?  Why would you need business blog consulting, a web marketing consultant or SEO Marketing Firm?  Here's my response...

Did you watch Roger Federer this week?  He did the unbelievable shot - running away from the net, he caught the ball on a bounce, hit it between his legs across the court and won the point.  It was breathtaking... the equivalent of a hole in one in golf.

Roger Federer is a tennis champion.  He's won 15 straight tennis championships, and was ranked the #1 tennis player in the world for 237 consecutive weeks.  He's been playing tennis since he was age 6.

In his continued career, Federer has surrounded himself with coaches, trainers, agents and other supporters.  Why in the world would the #1 player in the world need a coach and a trainer?  He's the best in the world, right?

Roger Federer understands that he alone can't be champion - it requires that he surrounds himself with other people who live and breath within their field of expertise.  It requires that he surrounds himself with others who's sole responsibility is to help him WIN.

I can pick up a tennis racket and push a ball to the other side of the court... but it doesn't mean I know how to play tennis.  I know how to score and understand the rules of tennis... but it doesn't mean I can win at tennis.  In fact... I can be the greatest tennis player in the world - but it doesn't mean I'm going to be a tennis champion.

Subscribing to a coaching relationship with a Social Media Marketing Agency provides you with a coach, a trainer, and the support that you need to win.  It's not about playing the game online, it's about platform leveraging and optimization to WIN.

These are the services we provide our clients.  Working closely with Compendium Blogware, we can develop your blogging strategy, your website, integrate your email marketing, automate your calls-to-action, optimize your landing pages, help you develop great content... all the strategies you need to WIN.  

Going it alone will get you in the game, but you're probably not going to win.  Call me at 317.456.2564 when you're ready to begin winning. Winning rank, winning traffic, winning qualified leads and winning your online marketing strategy.

"All coaching is, is taking a player where they can’t take themselves." - Bill McCartney

There are a lot of tools on the market for monitoring your ranking.  As part of our offerings, our SEO Marketing Firm builds spreadsheets for our clients that provide them with the net improvement in keyword ranking they have month to month.

Utilizing a tool like SEMRush helps significantly because it outputs your keyword ranking in Excel.  Month to month, you can simply add the data as a new tab.  To show, for example, September versus August stats, I simply insert a column on September's data - then insert the following equation and drag it down:

=VLOOKUP(B2,August!A:B,2,TRUE)-C2  

What this does is looks up the exact keyword from one tab, column B, to the next (August tab), and then pulls the rank number and subtracts it from the September rank number (in the second column on August, in "C" on September).  If you're going to improve search engine optimization, validating and monitoring your keyword ranking is imperative.

Search engine traffic can rise and fall, so it's essential that you monitor ranking to know whether or not your program is working.  In this case, our client improved 11 terms by a ranking of 1 in the last month... no terms dropped ranking.  However, their search engine traffic did drop a little.  

When the traffic comes back, though, their new ranking will really pay off!

Fantastic video shared by @chantellef. Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics:

I think it's a pretty good time to be dedicating myself full time as a Social Media Consultant, don't you?  Thankfully, the 20 years of experience in both traditional and digital marketing technologies has provided me the distinct advantage of helping companies make the shift.

As you or your business pursues building authority via social media services, I'd recommend you develop a strategy akin to Brian Tracy's 7 P's of Marketing.  After all, establishing your social media strategy IS marketing.

1. Product - who are you and why are you there? Let everyone know every opportunity you get and make sure you focus on that messaging.  Don't stray... don't spread your message too thin.
2. Price, more over value. A social media strategy is all about ensuring that the value of your products or services exceeds the cost.
3. Placement of your messaging where your prospects are.  If I'm going to speak to Indianapolis social media, inbound marketing indianapolis and Indianapolis web design to establish myself as an Indianapolis Online Marketing firm, I need to be establish those messages where the people are that matters!  In local social networks, local networking events, on local blogs, etc.
4. Promotion... everywhere!  Don't just promote yourself, let your customers promote you!
5. Packaging.  Web marketing consultants will always reinforce that a well-packaged image will sell better.  Ensure your pages, your blog, your themes, and your images are all well-designed.
6. Positioning.  Establish yourself as a leader in your field.  This is a competition, and people follow leaders, not just anyone.  If you are winning the race, be sure everyone realizes you're winning the race.  It's not bragging... it's establishing your position relative to the competition.
7. People matter.  This isn't a one-sided conversation.  This is you participating in the conversation, responding to positive and negative criticism, and always being transparent, honest, and available. 
   
   If I were going to add an 8th P, it would be permission:
    
8. Permission is critical.  Don't SPAM!  Utilize double opt-in on messaging.  Request friendships or follow.  Take the time to provide people with the information they need to make a decision, not simply ram your sales pitch down their throat.

I've been taking an incredible online teleseminar course that provides me access to some of the greatest business visionaries in the world and the "7 P's of marketing is superb.  If you're interested in subscribing to the course, send me a note and I'll introduce you to the series.

Every business application has strengths, that, when aligned with business results will propel that business forward.  When I do business blog consulting, I'm very careful to listen to clients to find out what their goals and focus are.  This is key to their success... the typical business marketing agency doesn't listen - they just push companies in the direction the internet marketing consultant wants them to go.  This is a recipe for disaster.

So where does a corporate blogging application like Compendium Blogware fit?

• If you're a business or individual looking to acquire leads online, the platform is awesome.
• If you're a business with minimal resources, are willing to blog every day, and have a product or service that will generate tens of thousands of dollars per acquisition, having a business like DK New Media behind you is perfect on a platform like Compendium.
• If you're an enterprise business with more than a dozen bloggers, there is no other platform on the market that will enable your business blogging strategy.
• When your enterprise marketing strategy is so advanced that integration services online are leveraged throughout everything you do, Compendium has a fantastic API and integration model that can incorporate virtually any opportunity.

When would I not recommend Compendium?

• When your company has the internal IT and search engine optimization expertise.  I mean expertise, though, not some guy that reads an SEO blog.  They know how to improve search engine optimization and have proven their expertise.
• When your company isn't willing to invest in publishing content daily... either through external blogging resources like interns, content writers, or ghost bloggers.  If you can't make this program a priority, don't do it.
• When you don't see a $10k+ investment worthwhile with a program that will generate a positive return on investment over the long-term, with coaching assistance and continuous improvement.

As an agency partner with Compendium Blogware, I am one of a few Indianapolis SEO firms prepared to leverage blogging and SEO and integrate it with your other online marketing efforts.  I don't want your business if it's not right for my company - so I'd only encourage you to call if you fit in any of the recommended items and none of the unrecommended items.

If you'd like to chat more on whether or not this is a strategy for your firm, please give me a call at 317.456.2564.

Understanding how to leverage each platform is key to being a social media consultant.  Utilizing your blog effectively to bring inbound marketing leads is an effective search marketing strategy.  Extending your blog into your social networks is also effective!

In this video, I wanted to share how to extend your blog's reach to Twitter.  If you have a lot of folks following you on Twitter, why not provide them with links to your posts?  You can do this automatically using tools like Hootsuite.


The Indianapolis social media space has room to grow - so educate your clients how to automate and integrate tools like Hootsuite to fully leverage blogging and social media!

A few weeks ago, DK New Media started working with Paula Henry from Red Door Real Estate as her SEO optimization firm.  Paula has several websites that focus on the Indianapolis Real Estate Market and she does a fantastic job of leveraging online marketing to grow her Indianapolis real estate business.


One initial issue we noticed with the site was that it had a great 3-column layout, but the HTML was written in order of the column divs... 1, 2, 3.  That means that the left column may have been treated more important than the center column (2) which is the most important content!  

That's a no-no. 

Thanks to cascading style sheets, I was able to tweak it so the HTML loads 2, 1, 3 but the page looks exactly the same!  This is platform leveraging! This modification should help place relevant content in a more dominant positioning on every page.  We worked throughout all of her page themes on a number of other issues as well.

If you're a do-it-yourself outfit, you can find tips like this in my Blogging for SEO e-Book: 25 Steps to Success - Search Engine Optimization and Blogging.

Red Door Real Estate signed on with an annual agreement for advanced search engine optimization with DK New Media.  That's where we review the page placement on her blogs each month and modify the content to increase ranking and overall traffic.  This allows Paula to continue to write compelling, relevant content... but we can modify page titles and meta descriptions to optimize older content that has moderate placement.

Welcome Aboard Paula!  We'll work hard to exceed your expectations!

When companies improve search engine optimization on their websites and blogs, they see significant growth in getting leads through the web. This is called inbound marketing. Indianapolis has a fantastic company with a lot of expertise in this area, Right On Interactive.

Right On Interactive is a marketing automation software company. They built 5Buckets, an on‐demand software service that engages prospective and existing customers throughout the customer lifecycle – from initial contact to brand loyalty. Using these tools, marketers are able to increase their return on marketing investment and maximize customer lifetime value. The good folks over at ROI recently released a new Action Guide for Lead Management Success.  It's a comprehensive guide to building a successful inbound marketing strategy.  The steps they go through are:

1. Clean and Append Audience Data
2. Establish a Lead Scoring Methodology
3. Map Audience Segments to Relevant Messaging
4. Nurture Buyer Relationships
5. Follow‐up Immediately
6. Reclaim Abandoned Sales Leads
7. Measure the Right Things
8. Automate the Lead Management Process

When you're looking for automated communications and integrated services online, firms like DK New Media combined with solutions like Compendium Blogware, well-performing calls-to-action, high-performing landing pages and a great lead management strategy like 5 Buckets can automate and streamline your inbound marketing process.

Forrester released The Broad Reach of Social Technologies today.  It's a very impressive, consolidated look at 3 years of behavior on the web.  Forrester's take away is that the growth of social networks, especially with consumers, ages 35 and up, has skyrocketed from 24% in 2007, to 34% in 2008, to a projection of 50% in 2009.

That's an impressive story, though I'd challenge that this means all companies should be dumping all their marketing resources in Social Media services.  Having a presence is important, but the intent of consumers in social networks, such as Facebook, is still not primarily to research and do business.

More importantly, Spectator activities are up significantly:

• Read customer ratings/reviews of products or services up from 25% to 48%.
• Watch video from other users up from 29% to 55%.
• Read blogs up from 25% to 39%.

Other activities like contributing and reading forums, wikis and discussion groups are flat or down year over year.


This data coincides with the Hype Cycle, and provides us with incredible insight that the demand for companies to have a corporate blog are on the rise.  If you've not but together a social media strategy yet, find yourself a business blog consulting firm (we'd be happy to be your blog coach) and get an effective strategy in place that will grow your business.

Consumers are researching the web, looking to do business with companies like you.  Are you there yet?

I've been a web marketing consultant for quite some time and recognize that implementing an affordable web design can have a huge impact on a business.  We were recently hired by Craft Test Dummies, an Ohio arts and crafts blog, to transform their blog.  They have a great following, but the theme was lacking! 

Here's a screenshot of their original theme:

To keep costs down, we purchased a development version of a WooThemes theme, and then customized it to accomodate the Craft Test Dummies logo (which is really cool!).  As a plus, we upgraded all the plugins and the core blog software as well as cleaning up the theme to impove search engine optimization.

Being an online marketing consultant while Social Media is taking off is a dream come true.  Back in the old days of direct mail and database marketing, we would send out samplings, measure their impact, refine the message, send them out again, refine the message... each time taking weeks to hear back.

Old database marketers like me love social media and all the different mediums available to online marketing agencies for their clients - as well as the integrations services online to synchronize and automate communications.

Social media has brought problems, too... mostly the dreaded Social Media Expert.  I've been evangelizing to many businesses in the region that I work with that there are two questions that will separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to developing a successful social media strategy:

1. Provide me with a list of references of companies that you've developed and executed social media strategies for - along with the results of those strategies.
2. Provide me with how you've measured the return on investment of social media for your clients and how you'll measure the success of the strategies you'll help our company develop.

That's it!  That's all it takes!  There are a ton of folks out there that call themselves experts because they're understand the platforms inside and out... but many don't understand how to leverage each medium independently and in combined strategies to generate business for a corporation.

If you're an enterprise corporation... I would push for some insight into working with those clients as well!