At our core, EMS is a marketing company. Aside from our design work, we wanted to bring your attention to some of our other important services.

Social Media Marketing Plan Development
This printed and bound marketing plan contains a comprehensive roadmap for using social media for your business.  It is a marketing plan built exclusively for you that contains complete strategy, campaigns, schedules and tracking. This plan is applicable for any company that wants to succeed in social media marketing.

Social Media Account Optimization and Customization
Customize your social media accounts in Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with branded graphics and enhancements. These accounts each offer their own options for customization and optimization to enhance the overall experience under your brand.

Google AdWords
Google AdWords continues to evolve. The current AdWords has functions and options that simply can’t be ignored. If it’s been more than one or two years since you’ve utilized this service, contact us to run a new marketing trial.

Facebook Advertising
Facebook’s advertising programs are producing solid results for many of our clients.  While it may not be a perfect fit for all, it is easy and affordable to perform a proof of concept trial to test the results. The beauty of this advertising is that you can test the waters with a small budget and no long-term commitment.

For more information about these or any of our services, call us today: 888-736-4367 or ask us questions in the comments below!

Merchant Data Systems credit card processing program gives back to women’s charity with each transaction.

Starting this month, a percentage of our credit card processing fees will be donated back to Rising International, a non-profit organization based in Santa Cruz, CA. Based on the home party business model made successful and famous by companies like Tupperware and Mary Kay, Rising International sells craft goods created by women in high-risk, impoverished, and developing countries. By partnering with international organizations such as CARE International and the United States Peace Corps, they are able to purchase products from women in countries such as Afghanistan, Chad, Uganda, and Rwanda which are then sold at Rising International Parties throughout the US. This ultimately offers additional opportunities for women here in the United States to further their well-being during difficult times.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DbufU5CQUc

Leslie Vasquez, owner of the Platinum Lounge in Santa Cruz introduced us to Rising International when she hosted a Rising International Party in October of this year. We were highly impressed with the business model and the cause and wanted to get involved. Thanks to Merchant Data Systems, we’re able to donate a portion of our credit card processing fees every time we run a transaction. Merchant Data Systems, a Florida based company, also helps non-profit organizations to process their donations at lower rates through a partnership with Donor Community.

For more information about each of these programs, you can contact the organizations directly:

Rising International
www.risinginternational.org
www.facebook.com/risinginternational

Merchant Data Systems
www.merchantdatasystems.com
800-249-6377

You may have noticed a change in how Google Analytics is recording and reporting your traffic from Google in the last month; there’s a new keyword in town, and it’s called (not provided). This “keyword” represents any and all keywords used by website readers that found your website through a Google search query while logged into their Google Account.

Google announced this change in their blog on 10/18/2011, stating that “As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.” As internet marketers and website owners, this change has presented us with a new challenge in our quest to determine the health and success of our website in the eyes of the Google.

Do not despair, if you use Google Analytics to regularly monitor the popular keywords that drive traffic to your website, you have another option within Google’s suite of products to help you understand the keywords that are delivering visitors. In Google Webmaster Tools you can find the top 1,000 search queries that have delivered traffic to your website in the last 30 days.

Do you have questions about Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, or how you can use these tools to analyze your website readership? Join us on Twitter or Facebook, or leave a comment here on our blog.

As a social strategist, I help our clients incorporate social media into their marketing plans as well as strengthen and manage their online communities. A big part of my job is to demystify the ever-growing, ever-changing, and all-mighty Social Media. So when I popped open my email a few weeks ago to find an invitation from the most widely used of all social platforms, Facebook, to take a trip to their headquarters, to say that I was excited would be putting it lightly.

As a daily user of Facebook and other social platforms, navigating their constant changes is typically manageable for me…somewhat normal, really. But anytime there is an opportunity to hear the story straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s an opportunity worth taking!

The event that I attended was called Social 4 Local. Facebook invited representatives from small businesses throughout the Bay Area to learn how to best harness the power of the social platform. Going into it, I didn’t have a lot of information about what was going to be covered. I assumed that they would be announcing the same kind of big, sweeping changes that we’ve been seeing within Facebook Profiles.

I’m sure that we all know: Facebook is always changing. The best part is that not only do they admit it, they promise it! All three of the Facebook executives that we heard from that day spoke to one of their mission statements: “We’re only 1% done.”

While they weren’t especially transparent about any huge, blatant changes to the look and feel of Pages, they did imply an underlying motivation for all of their changes: engagement.

This couldn’t have made me more happy. With all of the fancy custom applications and pages and bells and whistles available on the web within social media platforms and outside of them, it’s easy for businesses to get distracted from the entire underlying purpose of social media. Social media is not meant to serve as a billboard; it is meant to extend your reach to engage more and more people. It’s meant to make business about relationships and to make even the largest of corporations approachable. In social media, all it takes is one person, the right person, to have a profound effect on your business.

I see Facebook’s latest changes to both profiles & Business Pages as a giant leap in the right direction towards making your time on Facebook a more personal experience.

Since leaving the event, I’ve watched as Facebook has implemented subtle, pointed changes to their Pages. Here are the 5 that I think have the most powerful affect on your ability as a business to engage your audience:

Change #1: Get a Better Head Start

It used to be that you could only invite the Friends of your Facebook Profile to like your business page. NOW, you can also invite everyone on your email list. This gives you a bit more of a jumping point for building your base as many of us have bigger email lists than we do friend-counts on Facebook.

Change #2: Shift Focus Back to the Wall

For a long time, we’ve watched Facebook play a mean game of “anything you can do, I can do better.” Yelp excels in reviews….Facebook adds a Reviews Tab. Google+ launches Circles…Facebook unveils Lists. Now, Facebook is (wisely) stepping back and saying, Wait, we already do something really well: it’s called the Facebook Wall.

The fact that 4,000,000,000 (yes, that’s nine zeros, as in Billion!) pieces of information are shared on people’s Walls every single day is nothing to scoff at. As of October 31st, Facebook will be taking away two distractions from the Wall: Reviews & Discussions.

Change #3: Say Goodbye to Automation

This is one of my favorite of all of the changes that we’ve been seeing recently. Moving Facebook Page users away from auto-posting is something that I drive my clients away from doing every single day! This also speaks to the idea that Facebook is NOT supposed to be a billboard. In order to best engage in meaningful conversations and relationships with your online communities, take the time to write a short introduction to any links (or videos, or events, or anything else) that you share on Facebook.

Effective October 31st, the RSS Importer App and autoposting to Notes from your website will also be going away.

Change #4: Increased, More Organized Real Estate with Timeline & Ticker

The Ticker is not a new feature on Facebook Pages, but actually on Personal Profiles. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a condensed version of your News Feed in the upper right hand corner of your profile that shows quick excerpts of what’s happening with your Friends. You can imagine it as the “Twitter” portion of your profile. This has been a very controversial new feature, but whether you like it or not, it has expanded the potential visibility of activity about your business because it shows your friends interactions with other people and all of the Pages that they like.

The Timeline is also slowly rolling out to users. If you haven’t seen what this looks like yet, the image above is a screenshot of what my Timeline looks like. What it does is completely reorganize your entire Facebook life into something of a scrapbook. Featuring bigger images, more “Life Events” to share, and easy access to your past, I believe this is going to resonate more with users and drive more overall engagement with the site which ultimately means, more possibility for engagement with you.

Change #5: “People are Talking About This”

This is one of the great new metrics that Facebook has to offer businesses in their Insights program. This number updates daily based on the last seven days of activity on and about your Page. This activity includes:

•    Liking a Page
•    Posting to a Page’s Wall
•    Liking, commenting on, or sharing a Page post, photo, video, or album
•    Answering a Question
•    RSVPing to an event
•    Mentioning a Page in a post
•    Photo-tagging a Page
•    Liking or sharing a check-in deal
•    Checking in at a Place

This metric is great for users and for businesses!

Businesses can take a closer look at how, when, and what efforts more effective for them. On the flip side, users can see whether or not a business is putting any effort into their Page and/or whether or not people think those efforts are interesting and worth engaging with!

In Closing…

At the end of the day, just remember: you CAN be effective in Facebook as a small business without all of the fancy bells and whistles. All you have to do is be proactive in engaging in conversations and building meaningful, genuine relationships with your audience.

Join our Facebook community to stay up to date with new info on social media marketing!

What questions, comments, concerns, complaints, or rave reviews do you have about the latest Facebook changes?

Start Listening: Steps to Taking Control of Your Reputation Online

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make in managing their reputation online is that they don’t! It’s not because they don’t care; more often than not, it’s because they just don’t know where to start. We’re all busy enough as it is…so where do we squeeze another task into our day?

Here’s how to get started:

Step #1: Figure out where your business is listed online.

Start with the just Key Players!

Google – When it comes to reputation management, Google has three key components to take notice of:

Local Listings – Is your business listed?
Social – Google+ is already clocking in over a billion pieces of information being shared daily. Look around, are they talking about your business?
Shopping – Are there reviews about your products in Google Shopping?

Facebook – At over 4,000,000,000 shares a day, clearly, Facebook is where people are most comfortable sharing information. Make sure you know if “they” are sharing information about you!

Yelp – Whether you’ve listed your business in Yelp or not, Yelp may have listed it for you!

As you may know, there are about a billion and one places where people can chatter online. You of course have your Facebooks and your Yelps, your Trip Advisors and Googles. There are also many more industry-specific third party review sites and business listings that you’ll want to be aware of whether you’re in hospitality or you’re a lawyer or a chiropractor or an online merchant.

TIP: Let Google do the work! Set up Google Alerts. This tells Google that you want to receive regular updates about a particular search term. For the purposes of Reputation Management, you will want this term to be “Your Name” and/or “Your Business Name.” Set it up and you will receive alerts when new information is posted about you

Step #2: Take Control of your Listings

• Keep control of your branding
• Optimize for search friendliness
• Show people that you care & you pay attention

Don’t leave it up to all of these random sites and review platforms to determine important information about your business. Anywhere that allows you to Claim your listing, CLAIM IT! Claim them all. Be vigilant about it.

Step #3: Write the Script

Unfortunately, you can’t control what people say about you and your business.
Fortunately, what you can do is carefully craft how you RESPOND.

Looking at what people say about you can be nerve-racking. It is a very personal experience to read these reviews about your life’s work. If you just roll up your sleeves and dive in head first, all emotionally, to responding to some of these reviews, you’re going to end up sticking your foot in your mouth. Or, you’ll put things off and put things off until the damage has already been done. Once the damage is done, it’s hard to go back; it takes time to heal.  Being prepared with “stock” answers will help you take out the emotion and streamline your time.

More good news: there are only three steps to writing any response! Whether you’re responding to a great review, a horrible review, or an “eh” review, make sure that your response includes ALL THREE of these components:

1. Acknowledgement – Let people know that they’re being heard! Whether they’re satisfied with your company, product, service, etc. or they’re not, acknowledge your reviewer and acknowledge the things about your business that they point out in their review.

2. Thank You – Be a good host! Thank people for their reviews. Again, whether the review is fabulous or it’s not-so-fabulous, thank your reviewer for giving you valuable feedback about your business and for taking the time to do so.

3. Invitation – Always, always, always encourage people to come back to your business to have another experience.

Step #4: Establish Your Routine

Set a schedule, and stick to it. – everyone’s schedule is going to be different. If you’re a business that sees a lot of foot traffic every day, you’re going to want to seek out new discussions and posts more often than businesses and professionals who have projects with longer durations.

Pick one day (or seven) that you sit down for 15 minutes, check all of your listings, and respond where  necessary.

Step #5: Start Responding!

For a lot of businesses who haven’t confronted this previously, there will be some catch-up, and that’s okay. This is your opportunity to hit the reset button and start fresh.

—–

Do you respond to reviews about your business? What’s the hardest part?

Do You Love Cookies? We Sure Do!

The Pacific Cookie Company has been baking delicious cookies in downtown Santa Cruz for over 30 years. All of us here at Equity Marketing Solutions have been enjoying their cookies for just about as long! We feel fortunate enough to live just within miles of their fresh-baked-goodness and we want to share these cookies with you!

We’re offering our first ever Sweepstakes to give away a $25 gift certificate to the Pacific Cookie Company to one lucky winner!

All you need to do to enter is head over to our Facebook Page, click “LIKE” and fill out the form.

You can enter once a day between now and October 2, 2011. One winner will be chosen at random on October 3, 2011. The winner will be notified via email and announced on Facebook. If you win, you will be able to choose from a gift certificate that you can use for their online store -or- a gift certificate that you can use in their Pacific Avenue retail store in Downtown Santa Cruz.

So if you like Equity Marketing Solutions AND you crave Pacific Cookie Company cookies, Like us on Facebook, enter to win, and don’t forget to share with your friends!

Good luck!

What is Reputation Management & Why is it Important?

The definition of reputation management is simply: listening and responding to information (feedback, comments, complaints, praise, etc) about your business online. Sounds simple enough, right?

Social media has created an entirely new landscape for how people can find and share information. Facebook’s Founder & CEO, Mark Zuckerberg recently reported that on Facebook alone, there are 4 BILLION pieces of information shared every single day. 4,000,000,000 – that is a lot of zeros! This makes chances almost certain that one of the billions of pieces of information being passed around every day is something about you or your business.

Obviously, sharing is not a new concept. Back in the olden days, before Facebook and Twitter and Yelp took over the world, people still shared information about their life experiences with others. This information simply wasn’t necessarily broadcast worldwide, nor did it come along with a permanent digital record. But your reputation has always mattered.

There is an old saying that we all have a circle of influence of about 10 people. When something happens to you, good or bad, you share your experience with at least 10 people whose decisions may be influenced by your experience. Now, everyone in your little 10 person circle comes with an average of 130 Facebook Friends.

But managing your reputation online is about much more than being popular:

• Search Engine Visibility – Google cares if and what people are saying about your business. Ratings and reviews now play a role in where your website will show up in search engine results.
• Trust & Credibility – Not only do reviews help you build credibility with the search engines, they help you build credibility with your target audience.
• Feedback – Understand what you’re doing well so you can keep on doing it, understand what you’re not doing so well so that you can change things for the better.

Reputation Management matters because all it can take is one person, saying one good or bad thing about your business to have a profound rippling effect on your reputation.

And it matters because in this new social-landscape, consumers don’t just like to, they expect to be able to communicate with and about your business online.

In Part II of this discussion, I’ll cover the steps you’ll need to take to get started!

What are you doing to protect your business’ reputation online? What questions do you have?

Today, we launched a new website that we designed and built for Everyday Gourmet Vegan Bakery in Sodus, New York. Using the WordPress platform and Thesis theme, we created a completely custom, eCommerce, social media integrated website using the Shopp plugin.

Here’s what Melissa Smith of Equity Marketing Solutions has to say about using Thesis to build websites: “We love building WordPress websites using Thesis. Thesis is highly customizable and has SEO capabilities built in, eliminating the need for a plethora of plugins. Customization is kept separate from the core files, which allows for easy updating.”
If you ask our web designers and developers how they feel about Thesis, they’ll say things like, “Every single time I work on a thesis site, I’m grateful for what Chris Pearson built.”

This website includes an eCommerce shopping cart, Shopp, so that Everyday Gourmet can sell and ship their sweet treats all across the country. After testing different shopping carts for WordPress, we’ve decided that Shopp is the one that we like the best.  We prefer Shopp over other eCommerce plugins for its quality coding and and versatility in function and design. When compared with other plugins, Shopp leads the pack with clear instructions, good community support, and available customer service. Plus, much like Thesis, updating is a breeze.

All-in-all, this has been a very fun and rewarding project! Hard to complain when you’re working with a great platform and delicious desserts!

Note: This article presumes you have successfully installed Google Analytics in your website.

In order to get the most out of your online marketing, you need to have the ability to track the effectiveness of your efforts. A critical tool in your arsenal is a comprehensive statistics program like Google Analytics. One of the most valuable pieces of information Google Analytics provides is a breakdown of how readers find your website.

To learn more about the traffic to your website, sign in to your Google Analytics account and navigate to the account for your website by clicking on the “View Report” link. You are now looking at the Google Analytics Dashboard. Click Traffic Sources on the left side of the page. A menu will open up beneath Traffic Sources that will allow you to look at detailed information about 3 different type of traffic source:

Direct Traffic – people who typed your URL directly into the address bar of their browser. These people may have been to your website before, or may have learned about your website from another source such as your business cards or other terrestrial marketing collateral.

Referring Sites – With the explosion of social media, this category is broader than ever before. If you are marketing your business through other channels, you will find them here. Depending on what additional marketing you have undertaken, this may include third party review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, Daily Deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, or membership-based websites like your local Chamber of Commerce. If you have a blog and publish interesting and unique content, you may find that other bloggers link to you from their blog entries or blogrolls. If you are actively using Social Media to promote your business, you should find traffic coming from sources including Facebook and Twitter. You may also find spikes of traffic from user-generated news sources such as Digg & Reddit, especially if you publish relevant & timely content on a regular basis.

Search Engines – The primary search engines that will drive traffic to your website are currently Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In this category you may also see traffic from sources such as Ask, AOL, Search, and others. Companies that offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialize in helping your business rank highly in the search engines for keywords & phrases that are important to your business.

The information you learn from monitoring your Google Analytics is valuable in that it helps you to understand both what you are doing right in marketing your business online, and where you have room for improvement.

An in-depth look at how the use of Facebook Causes can transform your fundraising efforts.

In March of 2011, our Capitola neighbors were devastated by the flooding that stemmed from an old, dilapidated culvert buckling under the pressure of a heavy rainy season. Homes and businesses were destroyed, displacing families and businesses; some temporarily and sadly, some permanently.

Immediately, the Capitola-Soquel Chamber of Commerce searched for ways to get support from the community. They contacted us, Equity Marketing Solutions, to see if there was a way to develop a simple website to link to a PayPal Account where people could make donations. Because time was of the essence, and we only had 36 hours to get something launched, we advised them that the fastest way to get the word out was to tie their fundraising efforts directly to their Facebook account.

The steps that we took were to create the custom welcome tab on their Facebook page to alert their Facebook following and any new visitors of the disaster and ways that people could help spread the word. We then used the Facebook Causes Application to enable people to donate money, time, and tell their friends about the different ways that Capitola could be supported. We advised the Chamber to support the Capitola Flood Relief Cause with public relations and to include it in any other Chamber correspondence related to the disaster. Although it was just one small piece of a much larger puzzle, in a very short time, the Cause rose to 157 members.

“It did help spread the word about the disaster, people did join the Cause and share it with friends… and we (The Chamber) would do it again,” said Carrie Arnone, Member Services Director of the Capitola-Soquel Chamber of Commerce. “The problem was that some people were apprehensive about giving money through the Causes application because they were unfamiliar with the technology.” She went on to say that several people did call the Chamber to tell her that they had joined the Cause but would be waiting to provide their donation at one of the formal fundraising events to follow.

Tips we learned about using Facebook Causes during a crisis:

* Make sure that all staff knows about what you’re doing and can speak to it in an educated manner to press, coworkers and customers
* Integrate links to your Facebook Cause in all of your public relations efforts
* Create a custom tab for your Facebook Page
* Embed links to the cause in prominent areas of your website
* Embed a link to your Cause in your email signatures
* Share the Cause on your Facebook page and all other active social media outlets throughout the day
* Ask your friends, family, and followers to join the Cause
* Utilize your email list to send out a dedicated blast about the Cause
* Make the use of this technology newsworthy to your local press

When using Causes, it’s important to examine more than just the dollars and cents – it’s about increasing visibility and awareness. In the case of the Cause for Capitola Flood Relief , the total number of members may seem low at 157, but you have to consider that the message also passed through the news feeds of the people who are connected to those 157 members. A conservative estimate is that the Cause reached over 5000 people over a one week period.

We were quite pleased with our inaugural use of Causes and the response that it generated in a short amount of time even in a small community like Capitola.

Have you participated in a Facebook Cause? What did you like or not like about it?

Do you feel comfortable donating money through this Facebook application?

Rae Hoffman-Dolan recently reached out and offered to guest-write for the blogs of her online community. We asked Rae a series of questions about current trends in SEO, Social Media, PPC, and Linking Strategies. We’d like to thank Rae for her thoughtful answers, and invite our readers to add their thoughts in the comments below.

Question 1. With social media on the rise in usage and the validation of blogs in search engines, how important is a traditional links procurement strategy to a web site and do links from blogs count equally as links from standard web sites?

Rae: I think everyone needs to have a balanced and in depth link building strategy. There’s definitely still value in your more traditional, standard links – like directories and other low hanging fruit. But obviously, the rise of social media has added additional avenues of opportunities, like links from various social media profiles and then those profiles give you the opportunities to get even more links (think Twitter and then Twellow for an example.) As far as blog links vs. links from standard websites… If the link is in content, the platform of the site (WordPress, static HTML, ExpressionEngine, custom build CMS, whatever the case may be) doesn’t really matter. What you need to be concerned with – what makes a difference – is the authority of the linking site. That stands for in content links. As far as say, blog comment links vs. standard links, no, I don’t think they count the same. I think in very small or low competition niches, you might see them “having an impact” much more often than in your more competitive and mainstream industries. I think folks looking for link build advice will find some in depth advice in my latest edition of Link Building Pros, a yearly interview I’ve been doing for the last few years with some of the most respected link building voices in the industry.

Question 2. I realize this would differ from industry to industry and company to company, but when creating an emarketing plan, what is the current average ratio of importance between social media to SEO and pay per click advertising?

Rae: I don’t think there’s a canned answer or even close to a canned answer for that. The need for one can change based on your effectiveness with the others. I.e. a site that has strong ranks with organic SEO may not find PPC to be heavily important where as a site without those strong organic ranks may find it absolutely imperative. Social media, in my eyes, plays a strong importance in terms of branding and send signals that will help you rank better in the engines. I think a comprehensive strategy will contain all three. I totally admit to not being a PPC aficionado, so all of my affiliate sites depend strongly on organic SEO and social media efforts. And they obviously do amazingly well. It doesn’t mean they might not do even better with PPC at play – but I’ve usually stayed focused on what I have specific talent at and haven’t explored that avenue. However, recently I bought into a LLC formation service which is a true business and not an affiliate website. On that site, I definitely recognize the need for PPC to be part of its online marketing plan. So I’ve contracted my husband (a Houston PPC consultant) to do the PPC campaigns for that company (again, I stick with my specialities and hire out for whatever I need not within them.) I’d do my best to make all three a part of your strategy – and adjust the ratio of time spent on them based on the return they bring you (and or your company.)

Question 3. For companies who cannot jump in all at once, what is most important in emarketing today? If they had to choose to start one step at a time, is it social media, SEO, or pay per click?

Rae: It depends on the budget. In most cases, I would say SEO – but given as I mentioned above that it’s my area of strength – I may be biased. SEO (especially the DIY kind if you’re a small business) is cheap, but it takes a while. PPC can be expensive, especially if you don’t know your conversion rate, cost per customer and the other metrics imperative to PPC success and have to pay to learn them. But PPC is also nearly instant. I don’t think social would ever be my “all my eggs in that basket for the first few weeks” approach. But if I were? I’d be sure to check out these reports on how social media meets public relations in the new age. I think you need a balance between all aspects of your online marketing strategy. Even SEO, PPC and social doesn’t cover it all – then you have guest posting, cross promotion techniques, press releases, optimizing for local business networks (like Yelp and Google Places), CPM advertising and various other avenues you can use to promote your site.

Question 4. The rise of social media has given new life to many SEO marketers. Where to do you think social media and SEO is headed?

Rae: Well, I think if an SEO needed social media to bring “life” to their SEO work, they may not have been doing it right. LOL. SEO used to be an essential blanket word for doing what it took for your website to be found online – in the days when the only way to be found online was via search engines. I think SEO has absolutely evolved and there are so many facets to being “found” online now – SEO is merely one part of it. The focus of SEO is to make your site as friendly to the search engines as possible. I do a lot of SEO audits and the core focus of them is making sure a site is using technical SEO (on page optimization, site structure, internal linking, site indexing methods – quite a bit more) to the best of their ability. Link development is now its own division in an online marketing plan in my eyes. Social media is slowly morphing into the new PR and as a “backup signal” reinforcing the efforts you implement with proper technical SEO and a proper marketing (AKA link building) campaign and proper PR efforts.

Question 5. What up and coming individuals should one be keeping an eye on for future Social Media development ideas?

Rae: Lee Odden is a definite one who “gets” SEO and the overall online marketing picture while being more of a PR and social media guy. Kristy Bolsinger is someone else I see sharing a lot of tactical and valuable information in the social media space. I’m sure there are others, but Lee and Kristy immediately pop into my head upon reading that question. I totally admit to being overly skeptical regarding “social media experts” because I think too many people claim the title with little more knowledge than how to build a Twitter account.

Question 6. Do you know the correlation that Google takes into account between likes and shares when it comes to social media optimization? Can you discuss social media optimization versus search engine optimization?

Rae: No one can definitely answer that question unless they’re a Google engineer. Just like SEO, the “secret sauce” regarding exactly how social media popularity impacts your search engine rankings is an educated guessing game. Some people will emerge with big time talent in the department of bring right (as with traditional SEO.) The posts on the topic have already started – you just need to test the theories and find out what works.