We’ve seen waves of change around how organizations manage their internal brands. Early movie producers refused to even credit their stars, with concerns that they would receive too much fame and ask for more money.
The world’s first movie star, before known as ‘the Biograph girl’ and later as Florence Lawrence, made waves as the star with the first screen credit – followed by decades of branding shifts in the movie world, resulting in hyper-managed brands like Rock Hudson whose every public move (name, appearance, dating status, etc.) was strategically concocted by managers.
Who are your internal stars? Are you giving them the room to grow and develop their talents fully? Does your organization provide a personal brand support structure that helps both their brand and your bottom line?
Profiting from Personal Brands
We’ve been honored to experience some real bottom line impact resulting from growing our employee brands
Do you consciously share some things on Twitter that you don’t share on Facebook? Do you select the people who’ll see certain things you post on Facebook? Then the answer to the question is ‘yes.’
Count yourself among the many social media users who actively limit the information they post on social networks to just a few personal connections. Fortunately, the push for more human-centered design features has lead sites like Facebook to heed your quiet demands by adapting to your behavior.
How social networks are responding to your behavior
First it was Facebook who noticed that while you’re happy to have a ton of “friends,” you don’t necessarily want to share the news of t your recent cosmetic surgery with all of them. Enter Facebook Groups, a feature on the site that lets users share certain content with select friends.
The New York Times reports that last month about 50 million groups were created on Facebook, and each group typically had about eight members. Which brings to mind the TV show Friends. Humans are social creatures, but our day-to-day interaction happens consistently with a small number of people — eight seems about right.
Who else is paying attention to your affinity for small groups?
If you’ve ever BBM’d, Ping’d, or KIK’d one of your friends, then you know who’s paying attention.
BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) is a mobile instant messaging system by Research in Motion, or RIM, the makers of the Blackberry Software.
Kik Messenger is a similar to BBM, but it works on all smartphones. (Except BlackBerry who won’t play nicely and insists on keeping Blackberry users strictly on BBM.)
Finally, Ping is Apple’s social network that allows users of iTunes to share their music interests. Unfortunately for Apple, the noisiest complaint about Ping is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook. Neither do the previous tools, but it doesn’t seem BBM and KIK users expect a Facebook integration.
Small group tools that integrate with other social media platforms
The whole point of streamlining is taking all of something and slimming into one functional thing. So here a few highlighted in the NYT article that “mimic offline social relationships”:
Path – iPhone app that lets you share your life with 50 people or fewer.
Shizzlr – iPhone and Android app that shows what’s going on and lets users discuss plans with up to 20 friends.
Planely – Does one thing: Tells you who else is on your flight AND on Planely. You can connect with it through Facebook and the rest falls into place.
Gowalla – Location-based social network. Shared updates through Facebook and Twitter are optional. You can have as many or as few friends to trade objects, leave tips and share photos. (Foursquare, too. But Gowalla is cuter.)
Me, at the so called "Center of the Univserse" in Seattle
You’ve heard it before: Location, Location, Location. Just as in the brick and mortar world, Location matters in Search Engine Optimization as well. And this trend is not one to be ignored.
Think of it this way: Google is in the business of providing the best answer for people’s questions (questions otherwise known as search queries). Your business may not be the best answer for “coffee” or even “coffee shop,” but “houston coffee shop” or “the woodlands coffee shop”? Now the field is narrowing to just your customers, and your business is rising above the pack.
Be sure your site is optimized for the geography of your customers.
How?
Top 5 Tips: How to optimize your site for Location
1. Claim your Google Places Listing
You may have noticed that when you do a search, you often see more than just the traditional 10 organic Search Results. Sometimes you see images, sometimes video, and often Red Pins and a map with a list of businesses based on their relevance to your search and proximity to you.
These pins represent Google Places Pages. If Google is aware of your business, they have already made a Place Page for you. Now it’s your opportunity to claim the listing and add as much relevant information about your business as possible. To get started, look for the link at the top right labeled “Business Owner?” and click.
If your business is not listed, go to google.com/places to get started.
2. If possible, include your address in the sidebar or footer on every page
This is dual purpose – for visitors and for Google. You don’t want site visitors (potential customers) to have to search all over for your phone number and address. This is also helpful for Google because it reinforces your address and city name on every page Google indexes.
In the SEO world these references are known as “Citations” – anytime your business name and phone number or address appear together on the web, even if there is no link to your site. This adds validity to the address on your Google Places listing and tell Google you are relevant (similar to link backs).
For some sites, you just can’t add every location to the footer because there are too many. Consider text like “serving XYZ geography” with a link to you locations page.
3. If you have multiple locations, create separate pages on your site for each
If you have multiple locations, consider creating separate pages for each. Each page can stand on its own for the keywords related to that city or neighborhood. Be sure that every page has unique content, or you may get dinged by Google for having duplicate content.
Ideas for content: an embedded Google map showing the locations, text directions from at least two points of interest in the city, a paragraph of text on what that location specializes in, photos of the locations, information about the Staff, etc. etc.
Don't Stop at the homepage, optimize interior pages as well
4. Make sure city information is in title tag, meta description on interior pages
Don’t stop at the homepage, make sure geography terms are sprinkled in throughout the entire site. Add your city or state (or neighborhood) where it makes sense in your page’s content, title tag, and meta data. Consider every page of your site, as each page will stand alone in its specific keywords.
5. Submit to applicable directories
Tackled all of the above and looking for more? Consider submitting your site to directories. To find applicable Directories, follow SEOMoz’s advice on finding linkbacks for your business advice and do a search for Cityname + Business Type + Listings/Businesses/Results. You will get a list of links to various directories that catalog your type of business.
Want More SEO Tips from the Schipul Team?
Check out blog posts from the Schipul Search Engine Marketing Team over at TheSEMBlog.com and follow us on twitter @SEMBlog.
Global Youth Service Day is an annual event that brings together organizations and volunteers to take part in projects that will better their community. While it’s officially called a “day”; youth service projects are so vast and varied that the event actually spans a full weekend. This year, the event was held April 15-17, and Schipul client Amigos de las Americas was out in force all across the country, with youth volunteers taking part in trainings and group projects.
Decked out in their blue (Schipul-sponsored!) event t-shirts, the Houston Amigos group created a trail for blind people to enjoy in the Houston Arboretum. Locally in the Bay Area, the Amigos group met in Oakland to take part in hands-on training. I visited the site and listened in as the students formed groups and role-played their interactions, practicing the Spanish words and phrases they would need when working in the community. The day was a great way for the students to train with each other and develop their leadership skills. And not a bad day to spend in a park, either!
Right now, the Amigos group is in the running for the Chase Giving Contest on Facebook – your vote today could help them win $25,000 for the nonprofit! I know they’d appreciate your support there, and keep an eye out for their awesome new website launching soon!
Want to win tickets to Houston International Festival’s Silk Road Journey?
The Schipul headquarters (in our beloved Houston, TX) is one of the greatest melting pot cities in the United States. This multi-cultural experience is only amplified by (client) Houston iFest‘s annual event that highlights a different geographic location every year.
This year’s iFest theme is The Silk Road: Journey Across Asia which brings a rainbow of traditional garb, delicious food vendors, international musicians and dance troupes.
Leave a comment on your favorite travel destination to win!
This year’s Houston iFest festivities continue to run this weekend (May 7th – May 8th) and we want to send YOU!
Leave a comment on this blog post telling us about your favorite (or dream) travel destination for a chance to win!
We’ll pick 2 random winners that will each receive iFest passport – good for 4 tickets and parking for the iFest on Friday (May 6th) 12pm CDT. Bon voyage!
Congrats to winners Denise and Sara – enjoy the iFest magic!
An aural highlight of the festival was a great performance by the Rootz Underground, a reggae band that had the crowd dancing and singing the entire set. The night got a little more Cajun-y with a stop at the Joel Jesse CCR release party at a venue called Antlers.
The Schipul and Tony C’s team closed the night grooving to Texas native Cedric Watson – a multiple Grammy award nominee and fantastic performer. Many thanks to Tony Chachere’s, who truly make the best Cajun hosts any Texans could ever ask for!
In an effort to keep up with HTML5, just like Vimeo, YouTube has started to implement <iframe>s for their <embed> codes as a means of displaying their videos. By doing so, it allows a wider variety of devices to view an embedded YouTube (or Vimeo) video.
However, for all you developers out there, this means the old-school way of fixing a CSS-only drop-down menu from going behind an embed code no longer works. Previously (and this still works with the old code), you had to use z-index and wmode=”transparent” to make sure your menus show in front of the video.
Emphasis added. What is in red above was necessary to put CSS menu drop-downs in front of the YouTube player.
The New Way
To get your videos behind the menu as they’re meant to be, the “wmode” is now part of the query string added to the end of the source of the YouTube video:
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fDX7tevXO1E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This will fix your issue.
It should also be noted that, so far, this has only been noticed in Chrome and IE. Firefox appears to behave as normal.
Last night the Houston Zoo invited the Flock, the zoo’s group of young supporters, to visit the giraffe house at the new African Forest exhibit.
More than 100 visitors arrived to the after hours event and got an up-close encounter with eight Masai giraffes housed at the zoo. Guests were taken in groups to a barn where they were able to stand on an elevated platform to feed, pet and play with the long-necked, spotted herbivores. As it turns out, giraffes are wildly social and curious. Without much prodding they walked right up to the visitors to nibble from their hands, pose for photos and take a lick at guests’ toes.
The giraffes are just one area of the zoo’s African Forest exhibit, which opened late last year. The 6.5-acre habitat is home to a colony of chimps, white rhinos, and antelope. While guests didn’t get up close and personal with the rhinos, keepers brought a few animals to the party including Olivia, one of the guinea hogs, and Ernie, the North American porcupine.
We’ve attended several Flock events, and applaud the group whose mission is to inspire a new generation of zoo supporters. Flock is underwritten by Momentum Audi and the evening’s event was sponsored by Freebirds, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Yelp of Houston. For more information on joining the Flock, visit www.houstonzoo.org/flock.
It’s no secret how crazy we are about our Schipul employees – and our Houston office family is expanding! We are hiring smart and nerdy Web marketers, project managers, executive assistants and more!
Love to read, grow your brain and give great customer service to amazing clients? Click through the available Web Marketing job openings below for more details:
Back already? You’re fast! If you think you’ve found the job of your dreams, follow the application submission instructions on the job listing and wait to hear back from our team!
Last week SugarCon 2011 was held in San Francisco, and Schipul was out in full force! SugarCRM is the customer relationship management system that Schipul uses to track all of our client activity. If you’ve ever talked with us or have a site with us right now, we’ve got you “in the system” where we can keep tabs on all the projects going on and make sure you’re getting the client love! SugarCon is a great way for us to interact with others using the system and learn about the cool things they’ve done, as well as learn about new enhancements for the system and hear from technology partners. It also gave the crew some time to hang out with me!
I asked everyone for their thoughts on what was their favorite part of the conference, and two common threads emerged – one, we all loved hearing from HubSpot’s Brian Halligan and Capgemini’s Laurence Buchanan on “Marketing in the Age of Social“. It may be the only time that Comic Sans actually worked for a slide presentation. Additionally, it was exciting to see how different users and companies are customizing the software and expanding the functionality. Here at Schipul, we’ve worked with our SugarCRM provider Epicom to create some custom reports and functionality, like our client portal – but we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of all that is possible. One of the great things about SugarCRM is that as an open-source solution it can be extremely powerful as folks create new mods and plugins, versus trying to bend a rigid system to do what they want. A lot of “a-ha” moments were reported by the group. As geeks we are totally fascinated by tech and code!
Michael from Epicom meets John-Michael from Schipul
We were also treated to a special private performance of Beach Blanket Babylon, which is the longest running musical revue in history! Pretty cool to get an intimate performance by the cast, and even more cool was the custom songs they created for the Sugar crowd! The cast came out as everyone from Snow White to Elvis Presley, and had the vocals to match. We sat up front to be close to the action and took as many photos as we could until Aaron’s cell phone died. (Then we moved on to mine)
All in all it was an educational and fun week for the group, and was a nice visit with the folks back home for me. Y’all come back soon now, ya hear?
