A Kickin' Blog

By now you’ve probably seen a computer…. Perhaps you have come across this thing called “the Internet” or as some just call it: “The Google.” If you are truly enlightened, then you have seen the value of trading in your “smoke signals guide book” and your messenger pigeons.

All kidding aside, we have come to rely on technological innovations in our daily lives so much so that we couldn’t do much without them! Have you ever had a computer display the “blue screen of death”, or lost all of your email? Or more commonly, do you feel your network needs a tune up—could be faster, or more reliable? It can do more than just ruin your day; it can almost make you want to watch the Carolina Panthers play another game! And then what if you are a business owner trying to capture the interest of prospective clients online?! I don’t think the blank website is the kind of image you are going for, (unless you are www.nothing.net).

Technology is obviously important, and to run an efficient business—it can be expensive, really expensive, but when you don’t have it, you lose out on connectivity, productivity and profitability. And that can be…expensive!

Have you ever wondered how the Internet works? (http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure5.htm) It’s complex huh? Probably one of the most complex things we’ve built yet—and each day it gets worse. And that is why we have a whole industry devoted to managing it. A Managed Service Provider (MSP) provides delivery and management of network-based services, applications, and equipment to enterprises, residences, or other service providers. These are the folks who will keep you connected to the Internet and your computer humming away, happy and virus-free.

The Charlotte area has one of the best MSP providers, Waypoint Solutions Group (www.waypointsolutionsgroup.com), a Top North Carolina 100 Small Businesses, led by Dan Wilson, and one of the Top 250 Managed Service Providers in the world! You can’t beat that kind of expertise! Unfortunately, there are times when your computer, Internet connection or hand-held technology simply won’t work—and that is when you need it fixed fast.

Mouse and Man has partnered with Waypoint Solutions Group because our services work in tandem. Search Engine Optimization and Managed Services go hand in hand. MSPs help ensure things are running smoothly, so when “the traffic starts a coming” your network can sustain it and it doesn’t implode your site, system, and business!

Remember that everyone always wants to be on top of the Search Engines. And with proper SEO you can capture that top spot, but with an increase in popularity, ranking, and traffic, many new technology challenges are bound to creep up, and you may need help in an array of really complicated and important technology solutions. You may need to upgrade your hosting option (shared vs. dedicated), make changes in your DNS setup, spam/junk mail filtering, and implement Web spam tools— and all these things a Managed Service Provider can oversee for you.

Fred Sexton, of Mouse and Man, interviews Katie Morse of Ripple6. They help run social network platforms for larger companies revolving around affinity based communities…essentially people with similar interests that want to get together online. Think about it like your own company Facebook network times 100. We talk about some successful case studies of these communities and why they are so important. I know many people that say they work in the social media arena but was really impressed with the breadth of information that Katie brought to the interview. Maybe they could create a social network for all the little mice? More on this later…

Fred Sexton, of Mouse and Man, interviews Chris Harkey of Web Entertainment Promotions Inc & Dave Evans of Creative Entertainment Solutions LLC. Both Chris and Dave are pretty big players in the online flash gaming industry, one of the faster growing markets on the web.  The first thing that struck me when I met them was how they viewed online competition. They view their competitors not as someone to battle Google with or try to out rank them but rather as partners working together towards a common goal of increased traffic. If they can trade equal traffic with other sites (same value in as out) then they can really grow their online business through their ad impressions.

Balance Wheel

Success Chart

Fred Sexton, of Mouse and Man, interviews Josh McGlinn, of MCG Studio, about his goal to bring coworking to Charlotte. I first met Josh at Charlotte Barcamp and was intrigued about his idea of coworking, which is a collaborative space where creative types of people can work together on projects. Josh does a much better job of describing what coworking is, so I’ll just leave it up to him.

Stay up date with a sudo-coworking Charlotte group that meets every Monday at http://cltjelly.com/.

More information about the future of coworking in Charlotte can be found at http://www.collectivegiant.com/

Fred Sexton, of Mouse and Man, interviews Roy Morejon, of B2WE, about his social media agency. Only in his mid 20s, Roy has established himself as one of the pioneers in social media marketing and (in my opinion) is known as one of the experts in new media in Charlotte, NC. We talk about Roy’s past and why he does what he does, some of the ways to think about using social media for your business, and close with where this kind of media is going.

Sit back and enjoy the Mouse & Man podast numero two:

If you would like to be considered for the next M&M podcast series, just drop me a line.

squeak, squeak

Fred Sexton, of Mouse and Man, interviews Corey Creed, of Hippo Internet Marketing, about his internet marketing training classes. Corey is quite a remarkable internet marketer, successfully managing multiple different divisions of his current company including e-commerce sites, consulting, training, and now these 1-2 day classes about internet marketing.

In the interview we get into Corey’s classes, the competition out there, social media marketing, and Search Engine Marketing Association of Charlotte

Sit back and enjoy the first EVER Mouse & Man podcast.

more to come later

squeak, squeak

I just posted a video about WolframAlpha. It’s a new kind of engine. It’s not a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN which displays lots of different results. Ideally, it displays the exact answer you are looking. So, what does it mean for me…and why should it matter? Those are good questions and again I don’t know the answer. However, I think you should at least be aware of some of these really incredible technologies out there.
Check it out below.

Also, no making fun of me because this is my first screen cast.

Being in the video mood, here’s a great video about Google Local Business Center. I think it’s very well put together.

So, what the heck happened with American Idol (AI)…and why does it matter, isn’t it just a TV show!?

The Background
The whole time that AI was running we’ve been running an office pool. The goal of the contest every week was to guess the singer who got voted off. A contestant gets voted off by having the fewest amount of votes from people who call in. Just because I’m a nerd I’ve been using as much information as possible to base my decision. And because I’m a SEO nerd I’ve been getting information from Google to help make my decision. Essentially the person with the fewest number of searches per week on the internet should have a positive correlation with the person being voted off each time, right? Well, using this strategy I’ve gotten about half of them right so far. Here’s a chart of 4 weeks before the finale.

The last week all the numbers were overwhelmingly saying Adam Lambert would win. And in case you live in a cave in the Afghanistan (by the way, hi Jerad) Adam lost! See the charts below, they aren’t even close. Based on these numbers, Adam should have won by a landslide.

And here’s the numbers for the greater San Diego area (where Adam is from).

So, what happened?

Apparently, from the chart it looks like that although California physically has much more people living there compared to Arkansas (Kris Allen’s home state who was the winner), Arkansas was much more vigilant in searching for their favorite. Apparently, they are more passionate about voting for him as well. Perhaps all the Californians were busy twittering their friends instead of voting? This is my prediction of what happened…that even though there was more overall interest for Adam that the Arkansasians were much more passionate about their home town favorite. Also, there were a lot of last second searches for Adam Lambert and his sexual preference (see below) that may have skewed the results.

So, I take back all my jokes about Arkansas and think they are definitely the smartest, most intelligent state by far!

So, why does it matter…and how does it apply to me?
You can use these tools for your own benefit. I know that I do these kinds of searches all time to see what people are searching for. This chart below is one of the main reasons that I’m concentrating in SEO more than web design.

I think it’s just good business strategy to deliver what your customers are asking for, right? These tools have never been around in the history of marketing, well at least not to this degree. So, use these tools to find out what your customers are searching for….or to predict the winner of next year’s American Idol!

Memorial Day Recognition
On another note, Happy Memorial Day Weekend to all our veterans. My Dad was in the army for like a jillion years. I’m not sure about why they do this but if you are in the military for long enough they actually force you to retire?! Also, one of my grandfathers flew B-52s in the eastern front in WW II and my other grandfather was a bridge engineer on the western front.

I couldn’t be happier to know that my Dads gave so much for the freedoms that I take for granted every day. As I sit in the back of the car next to my sleeping 13 month old little girl and lovely wife (thanks for driving honey ) it’s so nice to know that I am safe and to know my family helped in part for this feeling.

So, how do you market/spin the current hot news story, Swine Flu. First off, some may question the ethicalness of doing so… but any news is good news, isn’t it?

Well, if you were a company that offers a (free) way for people to connect for meetings over the internet, perhaps you would view this as an opportunity. This is what Mikogo did.

So, let’s evaluate what they are doing and how it could perhaps be improved.

Mikogo just released a blog post and accompanying press release.
As well they are tweeting about what they do…but not really about this swine flu opportunity.

But what if people are searching for what they can personally do to prevent the spread of the virus. Well, ideally anyone who does a google search on swine flu prevention, the mikogo site would come up. To do this, they would need to employ a better SEO strategy. For instance, the <title tag> for their blog post does have the keywords ‘Swine Flu’ in it. But they have the word infection and not keywords related to ‘prevention’ (which I believe it what they really want). And keywords are at the end of the title tag. Ideally your keywords should be at the beginning of the title tag. Also, with the PR they did use the keywords “Swine Flu Prevention” but again the keywords are at the end and only one result comes up when you Google News search for them.

So, yes they could do a better job with onsite SEO, however they’ve really not done anything to build external links to their site/post.  I’d recommend getting backlinks to their this specific post from other blogs. They currently don’t have any inbound links regarding swine flu. Here are a couple places that I’d look at for getting backlinks:

• Tecnorati search for swine flu prevention
• Blog search for swine flu prevention
• Blog search for swine flu prevention
• Blog search for swine flu prevention
• Delicious search for swine flu prevention

Also, I’d recommend a Twitter Search for people tweeting about swine flu prevention. You can even setup a RSS feed for this specific search and automatically get notified when someone tweets about this keyword. To even take it to the next level, you can setup a program to auto-tweet anyone who tweets about your targeted keyword.

On a personal level, I love using Mikogo and use it almost daily. I wonder how they stay in business though…does not look they make any money. Anyone have insight into this?

Just looking over the executive summary of the latest Ecommerce Benchmark Report from www.marketingsherpa.com. Great stuff here. This reports summarizes the findings and information from 1,481 ecommerce marketers.

Some interesting statistics were as follows:

• Q4 2007 – 46% of respondents said total orders rose by more than 20%
• Q4 2008 – Only 9% of respondents said total orders rose by more than 20%
• Compared with 2007 numbers (which had 0% of total orders decreasing) 2008 had 35% of total orders decreasing

I really liked this chart they created as well. Looks like SEO is still king (yeah for me).

SEO Still King

I wonder if they are categorizing paid search in with SEO? Surprising to see that Email Marketing still was ranking so well. So, conclusion that I took from this is that social media marketing is on the radar but the farmer hasn’t really started harvesting yet. I am predicting though that social will have better numbers in the next survey.

Looks like 3rd best category was Partner Links. Friendly reminder to continue to request links from your friends and build your link infrastructure. Speaking of, is your site linking to mine?

Social Media Tactics

Here is a nice chart of the social media strategies by category. Looks like Viral Video would have the highest return. However, creating the video is one thing and getting it viral is a completely different ballgame. Interesting to see Twitter on there…but where’s the rest of the circle? Funny that Twitter is the lowest in time required (that’s because they didn’t input my data correctly).

Interesting to see the descrepancy between House Email in the first chart and RSS Feeds in this chart. I thought there would be atleast some correlation between them because they essentially do the same thing. So, looks like RSS feeds really aren’t catching on in the mainstream. I wonder where RSS was in effectiveness on this chart the last time the report was published.

Profiles on Social Sites was surprising to see with a better response rating than House Blogs. So, reminder to everyone to always link out from your social media profiles. I’d recommend linking to your website, blog, and twitter account (but this will probably change next week).