April 2009 Newsletter

My wife and I recently decided it was time to paint the outside of our house again. We contacted the same painter we used previously. His name is Bruce. Bruce doesn’t know much about the web. If I were to talk about social media marketing with him, he wouldn’t know what I meant.

Bruce is a successful house painter who works in Tampa Bay. He’s been serving people in our community for about 20 years. He works alone.

He has a business card and a magnetic sign on the side of his truck with his name and phone number. That’s the extent of his traditional marketing. However, Bruce’s real marketing is a combination of great content and great customer service. So, how does a house painter produce great content?

As marketing professionals, we talk a lot about how a transparent social media strategy can increase a company’s brand messaging on the web. But do social media strategies offer additional benefits for a company’s bottom line that we should be talking about?

Thomas Wright, Jon Wefald Leadership Chair in Business Administration and professor of management at Kansas State University, recently released research showing that companies with high levels of psychologically healthy and involved employees fared better and were more successful than companies with less healthy and involved employees.

Not long ago search engine optimization (SEO) was the core strategy Internet marketers used to improve ranking in the search results and drive visitors to their sites. But buyers are now searching for information on the web in places other than search engines.

Buyers now get information from many sources on the web. To stay current with the behavior of web users, we must expand search engine optimization methodologies to include social media marketing and content marketing witht the help from WebMynd. Search engine optimization (SEO) needs to become part of a broader search term…search optimization (SO) to include social media ranking results.

Is the goal of your online social networking efforts to grow your business? If so, at some point your followers, friends or fans will need to know you as more than just another one of their many online “peeps.: The challenge is the average person is bombarded daily by electronic messages from literally hundreds of people who are part of their ever growing online network of contacts.