Posts tagged as:

Social Media

How Facebook Got 6 Million Free Workers

by Eric Miltsch on 06/15/2009 · Comments

Give it up for Facebook and their latest marketing stunt: Vanity URL’s.

Within hours, Facebook wrangled about 6 million people to convert their profile URL from,

this: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1128085240
to this: www.facebook.com/ericmiltsch

Does this help you? Sure, maybe you feel better now that your name isn’t a number. Personally, I haven’t seen my Facebook profile move up in the search results.

Who does this help? Facebook. They’re hoping everyone forwards their address to everyone not on Facebook. Imagine if half of those 6 million people sends their new URL to 25 Facebook noobs. That’s 75,000,000 new, warm referrals. Imagine if your business got 75mm warm leads. For free.

Want to beat Facebook at their own game? Here’s two ways to make either your personal, or professional brand, just a little different from everyone else. And that little bit can go a long way.

Collateral full movie Shorten your URL using any site that shrinks URL’s with the ability to customize and provide tracking. Several sites will do the trick – for this example I’ll show you what I did using BudURL.com’s service a few months ago.

Radio Flyer divx I changed my original long URL to this: http://budurl.com/fbem. The last four characters signify ‘Facebook Eric Miltsch’

Other examples follow the same naming convention for consistency:

budurl.com/dgem | Digg

budurl.com/dlem | Delicious

budurl.com/viem | Vimeo

budurl.com/twem | Twitter

budurl.com/suem | Stumbleupon

Another easy way is to purchase your own custom domain name and simply forward it to your social profile site, such as: EricMiltschOnFacebook.com or some other variation.

You need to do everything possible to promote your personal or professional brand – put your name(s) first.

We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when Facebook Pages can get their Vanity URL’s as well.

{ Comments }

4 Ways to Create A Successful Online Presence

by Eric Miltsch on 06/07/2009 · Comments

I recently had the honor of presenting a case study to the executive management team from Wegmans. For those not familiar, Wegmans is the pinnacle of grocery shopping, having created a shopping experience unlike any other.

People leaving the Rochester area actually include Wegmans as a must-have when deciding where to move.

Cherish download

The case study presented include some of the online technology solutions and social media guidelines I created for Auction Direct USA. Regardless of the market segment, basic underlying tenets can be applied to creating and managing a successful online campaign.

Create A Unique Online Experience

Does the design stand out above your competitors?
Is your website memorable?
Are key items easily called out and identifiable?
Can visitors provide instant feedback?
Are you leveraging social channels and tools to extend your online reach?

Create a Continuous Improvement Process

Are you actually listening to your visitors feedback and comments?
Are you gaining real-time feedback with questions and polls via blogs and micr-blogging platforms?
Who will manage customer feedback; is there an escalation process?
Is the feedback directed to the appropriate contacts and departments?
Is your online brand being managed (ie: Brand mentions, keywords and competitors?)

Create Metrics to Measure Performance & Ensure Growth

Have you implemented a management process to measure past performance, marketing results and benchmarks for your segment?
Are you measuring traffic performance with items such as visitor locations, exit/entry locations and bounce rates?
Are you monitoring analytics to ensure efficient web activity? (ie: Key sections, effective ad channels, conversions)

Create a Social Media Presence with Specific Objectives

Activities on the major networks are a must: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter & YouTube
Communicate the overall plans with your internal staff; be sure everyone is on the same page
Keep the message congruent between online & offline channels – consistency is so important
Emphasize your visitors – not you or your company; create authority, build confidence and earn their trust
Develop specific objectives and measure them. (ie: New sign-ups, leads, appointments, revenue, etc.)

What has helped improve your online presence?

{ Comments }

7 Great Places To Post Your Content

by Eric Miltsch on 04/07/2009 · Comments

Building great content is one of the foundations for building your online presence. More content creates linking opportunities; more links will improve your search engine rankings.

Here’s 7 sites that are easy to set up, easy to use and best of all, the search engines play nice with them:

Google Knol.
Arranged psp

Assault on Precinct 13 buy

(short for knowledge) Create a bio and simply share your knowledge. About anything. This a great place to create an expanded profile and link to your sites.
Live Journal. This is one of the Internet’s original blogging/journal sites (dating back to 1999) Simple control features, nice templates to customize your appearance and its social networking features make this is a long-standing favorite. Originally created by Brad Fitzpatrick.
Ning. Ning is the most expansive on the list as its actually a community platform – you can easily design and create your own social network using Ning’s template driven platform. Netscape founder Marc Andreesen started Ning to let users create their own networks based around specific interests.
Squidoo. This is a fun, easy to use, interactive set of pages called lenses. Squidoo gets a lot of traffic and plenty of features for users to enjoy: RSS feeds, images, videos, links – plus you can even earn $$ for your content and/or contribute to charity. Another great contribution from Seth Godin.
Tumblr. One of my personal favorites. David Karp whipped up this micro-blogging platform in 2007. Use the stock designs or add your own custom themes; use it for blogging, pics, videos, links and audio files. Follow others & people can follow your tumbleblog to build your own community.
PitchEngine. Perfect for your press release content. Created by Jason Kintzler as a new school method of publishing Social Media Releases. (press releases on steroids.) Add links, tags, images and videos to build a powerful press release.
PollDaddy. High Anxiety film Supercross rip Not necessarily creating new content, rather, letting the new content come to you in the form of online polls. Great for feedback and learning more about – well, anything. Especially useful for creating new content based on poll results.