Birchwood Kitchen is a gourmet sandwich shop located in Wicker Park. They use their Twitter page to communicate lunch specials and upcoming events . Fans can follow Birchwood Kitchen on Twitter to get these updates and not worry about calling or stopping by to stay in the loop.

Social media is especially powerful if your store is a local favorite. The more attached locals are with your brand, the more likely they are to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook, for example.

Homer’s is a local music store in Nebraska that might benefit from such a strategy. They have a Facebook group page, but not a Twitter page that I’m aware of. At the time of this post, they have over 700 fans on Facebook, which represents a strong local following. By communicating with locals through these social platforms, they strengthen their brand by making their friends and fans feel like part of a community. Not to mention they are able to communicate what’s happening with their store, including special deals and promotions over the holiday season. A great way to prompt an already targeted market.

If you don’t already know what Scribd is, it’s a social site that allows you to upload your documents and share them with others. Scribd has a large community, which makes it an ideal place to have a presence. This allows a company to promote its content and create brand awareness. However, there are SEO benefits, although they may not always be direct.

If you’re seasoned in the SEO biz, you know that a strong content strategy is critical for a long-term campaign to be successful. A content strategy is important because creating great content will eventually result in links back to your site. By sharing your documents on Scribd, you are sharing your knowledge with their growing community. This may lead to members promoting and sharing your content within the Scribd site or on their own Web site.

You don’t have to worry about duplicate content, either because your documents are embedded in such a way that the text cannot be crawled by spiders. Instead, the sharable document is more like a widget that you can paste on your side by copying some available code snippets. I’ve pasted an example below of a b2b article written by my employer, Movéo Integrated Branding.

If you have content to share with the Scribd community, I suggest you get started. It may lead to some links down that never-ending road of link building.

Building B2B Loyalty

What I want to discuss is the unfair standards that Internet banner advertising is held to. Because of technology, we can track how many users view the banner, how many click and how many of the clickers complete a conversion. But just because we can track this doesn’t mean it is the ultimate metric on whether a campaign is successful.

Think about traditional advertising for a minute. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent every month on advertisements that are placed on billboards and in the pages of a magazine. This is brand advertising. Obviously, there is value in these forms of advertising or they wouldn’t be used as often. But advertisers can’t track who bought what from them after seeing a particular billboard or magazine ad.

So why, then, are banner ads held to such a standard that they are only successful based on clicks and conversions? The answer is because we can track them. It’s not because it’s the best solutions, but that it’s available. Online advertisers need to be aware of the brand advantages that banner advertising to the right audience can produce. This is especially true if you can reach a large audience for a small price. Click-throughs and conversions may be low, but think about exposure you will receive. Something to keep in mind when analyzing your campaign.

One way you can be sure to brand your Web pages is through title tags. Append the name of your company/Web site at the end of each page – I prefer to use the pipe, followed by the name of the site for all interior pages: Example article | Jeff Swanson. Having your brand appended to the end of each page’s title tag makes your listing immediately recognizable in search engine results. This will detract users from skipping over your listing, who might have otherwise visited a page on your site. Even if you’re not a well-known brand, this is an effective way to start branding yourself and catching the attention of users.

Aside from branding your Web site online, make sure to have attractive copy that will be inviting for the user. A combination of these two tactics usually means you can sit back and watch the traffic roll in.

Jimmy Johns
I haven’t been a Jimmy John’s patron for long, but the more I go, the more I like going back. They have delicious sandwiches, but so do some competitors, like Subway and Quiznos. So why do I go out of my way to eat there? I could certainly get a better deal at Subway with a $5 Footlong. The reason I keep going back is because of their service, which stands out to me as one of the elite of the fast food industry. A majority of the time, when I enter the store, I am greeted before I make it to the counter (usually depends on how busy they are). The staff is friendly, but they’re also fast. By the time I’m finished paying for my soon-to-be devoured meal, the sandwich is already sitting in front of me and it’s always made correctly. They have created quite an image for themselves in my mind.

Chipotle
I’m a hardcore Chipotle fan. You get me in front of chicken burrito with some hot salsa and it’s on. I suppose I’d still frequent this establishment even if I weren’t so impressed with their brand, but it certainly helps. The staff is fast and attentive. Even when there are large lines separating me from the cash register, it moves along quickly. And when it’s time to pay, the transaction is over in seconds after a quick swipe of my debit card. I’m not sure why their credit card machine is so much faster than every other one on the planet, but it’s something that stands out to me as upgrading service for my convenience.

It seems that no matter which location I visit, their is a consistency. So, next time you go out for lunch, try one of them out and see what I mean. Or, compare your experience to what I’ve described. I’d love to hear some examples.

When someone is searching for a generic term, often they are looking for information, or in the research phase. Let’s take a look at the keyword phrase “jumper cables,” for example. If your site contains a page that sells jumper cables, this term may seem attractive because it receives a hefty amount of traffic. Here are some of the results I received when researching this phrase on Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool:

jumper cables – 27,100
battery jumper cables – 1,900
jumper cable – 12,100
heavy duty jumper cables – 1,000
buy jumper cables – 210

Now, if you ran a PPC campaign in for these exact phrases, I would almost guarantee that “buy jumper cables” would be your best converting keyword. When a user types this phrase into a search engine, we know exactly what they are looking for. If your page is properly optimized, you’ll have a shot at ranking well in the SERP’s.

Aside from the relevancy, generic terms are more often than not more expensive than long-tail keywords. Users searching for “jumper cables” could be looking for information on how to use them, or just browsing brands as they are in the research phase. It might be worth bidding on this term for branding purposes, if you can get it for a reasonable price, but don’t expect a high click-through-rate or conversion rate. As far as optimizing your page, make sure not to waste your time optimizing it around ambiguous keywords.

The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine, is about how our culture has changed its habits by demanding niche products. I’ll save the rest of it for you.

Jeff-ometer rating: 5 out of 5

When you interact with others on social sites such as MySpace and Facebook, it’s for all the world to see. Some of these sites protect your ramblings by allowing invites only, but it’s important to be aware of what others can and cannot associate with you.

So, for all of you business college students out there, keep things reasonable and try not to exploit your latest Spring Break photos with the rest of humanity. It might be deciding factor in a second interview.

The November issue of Wired Magazine featured an article about the conception of Hulu.com (read the article online: Free, Legal and Online: Why Hulu is the New Way to Watch TV).

I am an avid user of Hulu. In fact, I watched the entire first season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia last week. My digital cable package only has the most recent episodes archived and I didn’t feel like trekking to the nearest Best Buy to spend money in the cold when I could instead pay by having to wait through a few commercials, which I’d have to do on TV anyway.

The site makes tens-of-millions in advertising each year (although the article claims that 70% is paid back for content), so it has a sufficient revenue stream to survive. More importantly, however, is the image that this has cast on me of Fox and NBC. They decided to not whine about how the Internet is pirating their shows and instead became a part of the online community. It gives them a hip, savvy image that I think users of Hulu appreciate. Welcome to web 2.0.

Branding v. Conversions

When you are running a paid search campaign, it is important to define anything that can be broken down. Make sure to break your keywords down into buckets and to be aware of what type of strategy you want to implement.

I was reading an article in today in the print version of Website Magazine. The article was titled “Developing the Right PPC Bidding Strategy” and I’ll share with you a few of key components, which I deeply agree with.

There are basically three paid search strategies that you should be aware of: Branding, Conversion and Sales Cycle. Sales Cycle is simply a combination of the first two, so we’ll discuss those.

A branding strategy would include gaining as much exposure in your market as possible by bidding on a large number of keywords (general and long-tail). It’s important not to rely on conversions when using this strategy, rather getting your name out there and embedding into the heads of potential targets. This strategy is ideal for new companies and web sites.

The second strategy is focused on conversion and would likely pertain to an established company or web site. Using this strategy in your paid search campaign involves bidding long-tail keywords that are proven to give you a solid ROI.

Of course, you can always run a campaign that integrates both strategies, but it’s vital to be aware of what type of campaign you’re running.