Many people do not realize this, but Tracy Fortin does: even the finest among us, beyond reproach in any way, can be challenged to maintain our reputation online. There are spam complaint blogs with no conscience ( a machine or robot does not have morals) that are used to conquest peoples names and reputations to extort money from them. They put Google ads on them to generate money for themselves and Google, damaging good peoples reputations!
If you are in business, or, as in Tracy’s case, are furthering a nonprofit cause, with fans and enemies, this can happen to you: so that when you type your name, or your company name, or the name of your cause into Google, as people often do these days before doing business or donating, as in Tracy Fortin’s case, you can be accused of something you did not do, and even after you have been cleared, an article can remain on the organic search results damaging your reputation and your cause or business.
Now the good news: this can be easily corrected my anyone who has more powerfull properties online, and completely prevented before the fact with social media marketing techniques, as we are doing here.
More on Reputation Management like we are doing for Tracy Fortin is here:
-
Tracy Fortin | Facebook
Tracy Fortin is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with Tracy Fortin and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the …
www.facebook.com/people/Tracy-Fortin/518501804 - -
tracy fortin – Directory | LinkedIn
View the profiles of professionals named tracy fortin on LinkedIn. There are 4 professionals named tracy fortin who use LinkedIn to exchange information, …
www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/tracy/fortin/ - -
Tracy Fortin – LinkedIn
View Tracy Fortin’s professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world’s largest business network, helping professionals like Tracy Fortin discover …
www.linkedin.com/in/tracyfortin –
Tracy Fortin – all about Tracy Fortin!
Tracy Fortin tracy.fortin@gmail.com
tracy fortin | ideapals.org
Well, they are mixed, aren’t they? Can we separate business, banking, anything completely from the government that makes it all possible? Here are a few more questions (not answers) that you may want to consider:
- How many businesses can you name that the government regulates which have not ended up needing to be bailed out?
- Would you do business (buy Real Estate from) people who agree with your ideas, politics, religion, favorite music?
- How personal is your message?
Now, without hearing any opinions from me: let me create a scenario:
Imagine yourself in this familiar situation: you are at a social gathering or business mixer. You know ahead of time that there a few very influential and well healed individuals you would like to meet here; but you do not know them personally yet, and everyone wants to meet them.
You are concerned because the mixer is only going to last 1 1/2 to 2 hours: you must attempt to connect to the right people, avoid spending time with the others: but all you can see is how people look, their clothes. Hmmm.
IdeaPals offers two $50,000 prizes for Beta Testers
IdeaPals is the evolution of an inspiration transforming into a thought, then an idea into a reality. It is about users, and content, and websites, and humans, and machines. It is about collaboration, in person, remotely, and from across the world.
The inspiration for Ideapals.org sprouted from IdeaBlob and Bloblive. IdeaBlob and Bloblive were social networking sites, basically a blog for business ideas. They were sponsored by a east-coast based bank called Advanta, that wanted to issue credit cards to entrepreneurs and small businesses, so Bloblive was born, with cameras, live feeds, local media representatives, and an uncanny ability to get on the front page of Twitter every time. The idea was that the press and other online and media exposure would cause ideas to get funded. Unfortunately, Advanta went bankrupt and the very popular Bloblive could not adjust to a user-paid revenue model quickly enough, so it failed.
Solomon, CEO of MoviePals and IdeaPals, developed an open-source type model for film-making, while utilizing advances in bandwidth and storage technology to make it possible for novices and professional all over the world to collaborate and make films.
Together, Solomon and Brian Bentow founded Moviepals Entertainment – based on the press and notoriety Solomon had gained from his low-cost film-making ventures and the extensive press and buzz created for that aspect of the business by Bloblive, including write-ups in the Los Angeles Times, and a host of others, including National Public Radio (NPR). MoviePals.org recieves over 1,000 unique visitors a day and this is only the beginning.
For what would cost millions only few years ago, IdeaPals.org, the website that offers jobs, networking and even hosting social events, was built by Solomon Rothman and Brian Bentow in two months, due to modern day technology and collaboration.
Join Ideapals.org, for free social networking and free project management. We are now cooperating with MoviePals.org, a collaborative video platorm.
Ideapals also has social network integration; you can now sync your Facebook profile or your Twitter account with IdeaPals and it’s all free!
IdeaPals.org combines the best features from Linked-In, Meetup, Basecamp, Ning, Facebook, Digg, Associated Content, Activerain, E-Lance, Rent-a-Coder. IdeaPals.org has unique features, such as a social network to encourage ideas to become reality through various project management tools. Best of all? This is all free of charge!
Bringing passionate people together to collaborate, innovate, and make money doing what they love at IdeaPals.org!
On IdeaPals, nearly everything you do earns NODs (Natural Overtures of Distinction), our currency. Whenever you have an idea, an opinion, a comment, a friend, or what we call a ’spark’, and you share it: you get paid in NODs! With NODs, you can win a website worth $50,000, earn prestige, and recieve free marketing and promotion.
You could win a $50,000 marketing campaign and Modern Social Website for your business for just for signing up here for free!
Here is what we will give away in less than one year
Watch the clock ticking down at the left of every page at Ideapals.org!• Completely FREE Acquia Drupal elaborate, custom website
• Complete with Branding, Graphics, Custom Functions
• A Viral, Guerilla Marketing Public Relations Campaign
• A Video in HD and Web-ready formats to promote the project, distributed to the world on multiple video sharing sites
• SEO (search engine optimization) SEM (search engine marketing)
• Premium, Dedicated, Unlimited Usage Hosting for one year on our server
• Link building and other advertising including a premium video advertisement added at the end of every episode the 56 week Crowd-Driven Series we are about to Release
• A banner and ad showing your progress as the first year winner on Ideapals.org for the next year!
There two ways to win this $50,000 Website and Marketing Campaign
1st WAY TO WIN: (Luck) BE one of the FIRST 5000 people to sign up here: Ideapals.org
Sign up and be lucky!2ND WAY TO WIN: PARTICIPATION: (Merit) Whoever has the most *NODs wins an additional $50,000 Campaign identical to the one above!
Everything you do at IdeaPals, you will also be compensated in NODs.
*What is a NOD? It is our currency of participation and innovation: Everything you do at IdeaPals.org or MoviePals.org earns Natural Overtures of Distinction; NODs for short.
Actions you get NODs for
1. Authoring the best reply – 5 NODs
2. Commenting on Sparks (ideas), IdeaPals groups, – 5 NODs
3. Invite other people – 5 NODs each
4. When invited user registers – 50 NODs each
5. When you register if you were invited – 50 NODs
6. Moderation – Approve – 1 NOD
7. Moderation – Delete – 1 NOD
8. Moderation Response -5 NODs
9. Viewing IdeaPals Group, Spark – 1 NOD 1
10. Registering – 25 NODs
11. Posting an IdeaPals Free Group – 50 NODs
12. Posting a Spark (idea) – 10 NODs
13. Moderating a comment – 1 NOD
14. Posting a picture – 10 NODs
15. Voting up or down – 1 NOD
16. Flagging – 1 NOD
• Free websites
• Free hosting
• Free upgrades
• Free advertising
• Free video production
• Free project management
• Free cross-group marketing and many other incentives just for participating, collaborating
User-generated, User-filtered content is the name of the game now: without it you will not compete is this quickly changing environment.
photo credit: Skype Nomad
I here it almost everyday:
“Must I post, can’t you just make me rank on Google search without me having to do anything?”
The answer is yes, and not.
What good will it do you? Even if i know some ways to fool somebody into coming to your worthless, page, what would be the point?
Very soon (and is some ways already) it will only be the value of your site to your visitors, and how long they spend there that determines your rankings; the tips and tricks of Gurus like me will not help you, if Google knows that people do not stay on your site; and Google already knows everything.
I am living proof that most of you would rather buy sweet lies than hear the truth. But the truth is still the truth. It is all about the value of the resources you provide now.
Stop buying sweet lies. You need video, interaction, and real content to compete online in 2010: and the best way to get these things on a scale that will scale, is user-generated, user-filtered content. The way to get that, is with a social media enabled site.
I Would Want to Have a Relaxing Massage in Hollywood from Someone with This Kind of Attention to Detail!
The front page reads:
“If you’re looking for ultimate relaxation and a healthier you – you’ve come to the right place. The specialized massage therapists at Relax, It’s Just Massage are committed to your comfort and satisfaction.Massage has been found to improve circulation, joint range-of-motion and flexibility. It can reduce many common ailments such as stress, muscle tightness, aches and pains – even anxiety and depression.This is your time to relax and escape.Choose from a variety of services:Swedish Massage Deep Tissue Massage Hot Stone Massage Sports Massage Prenatal Massage Seated Chair Massage Out-call Massage to your home. Not sure what treatment is right for you? Our knowledgeable staff can assess your needs and help you choose. Book an appointment online:”
I have never seen a more well laid-out website for a Massage place, and they have taken over their own website, after suffering the ‘disappearing webmaster syndrome’. This is WordPress, with Suffusion theme completely redesigned by the massage professionals themselves: they have followed every instruction:
They have written great articles all about every different type of massage, with pictures to go with the detailed explanations of all the services they provide.
They have completely redesigned their own look for the site, using the customizable theme.
These are not your average massage therapists: their credentials for Sweedish deep tissue massage, sports therapists massage, relaxing massage, ..
Relax, it is just Massage in Hollywood California, 90069
Believe me, I have had a good massage, and I have had a bad one: and you want these amazing therapists with this kind of attention to detail and this wonderful facility in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard taking care of you!
Let us just examine our own logic for a moment:
If an advertising agency is compensated based on a percentage (it is usually 15%) of what I spend, what incentive do they have to find for me innexpensive, effective, leveraged advertising that is cumulative and gets me more and more business with less and less expenditure like any effective campaign should?
The obvious answer is: none at all! The fact is that there is a built-in conflict of interest in the way that advertising companies are compensated: it is not in the ad-agency’s best interrest to do a good job:
In this alrtice in Adweek by Brian Morrissey:
“I think traditional ad agencies have very little contribution to make,” Bryan Simkins, a marketing specialist at FedEx, told TNS:
“They are mostly driven by their compensation models which are made for closed media. Those models don’t apply in open media.”
Meetup.com just keeps getting better: for $20 per month, you can host up to three meet-up groups of your choosing and design. You can customize and brand your meet-up group (no that there is anything wrong about the standard interface), and the RSVP and sponsorship functions are awesome for building an affinity group of any kind. Whether your target clientele is as narrow as gay female liberals, or inclusive as everyone who drinks coffee, you can be instantly exposed to everyone in your area (probably thousands) who have indicated an interest in such new meet-up groups by key words and geographical radius.
I highly recomend this format for community building, which can integrated in on the wbpage level into any existing website, or even function as a solution of it’s own.
Learn more by joining and filling out a profile for free: http://meetup.com
When I reserved Socialmediasystems.com three years ago for $8.75 my ex-partner (a programmer) laughed at me.
My, my what a great deal has changed since then. In an effort to keep up, here are some current trends:
Because of my reach as an author on the topic of Social Media Marketing, I recieved this email today:
“Dear Israeli,
The power of social search will flex its muscles on this historic day as Barack Obama becomes President.
WebMynd, a nifty company that embeds social search within Google, today released a handy OneRiot extension for Firefox that brings the real-time pulse of the web straight to Google: http://www.webmynd.com/html/oneriot.html.
In addition to OneRiot, the WebMynd extension also comes packaged with other social sits like Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube. Once downloading the WebMynd extension, folks searching for news and events surrounding today’s inauguration (and other news) will see the real-time pulse of the web from OneRiot and the other social sites right alongside their Googlies. Very cool!”
This seems like a great idea to me, the ability to provide current breaking news ‘pulse’ to add to a portal or website ’stickyness’ and increase both the value of the website to it’s affinity group visitors, and conversion for the website owner.
Perhaps this is a good time to point out, at this turning point in our history (I will elaborate in a spicy way later in this post) and to share the value of this kind of blogging – siezing an opportunity to comment on current events to:
On may 29th, 2007 I published this article about 15 Top Social Media Marketing Resources which was picked up by Web-Pro news and got a lot of traffic and buzz: that was right after I reserved socialmediasystems.com (it was available then for under 9 dollars!) and formed Social Media Systems LLC in March of 2006.
Now, as is usually the case with me, there are a million copy cats out there claiming to be experts in ’social media marketing’, as traditional SEO becomes outdated (related article: see The slow death of SEO).
Now, since things have changed so much again, that it is time to update the list: 50 Social Media Marketing Resources you cannot be without:
Nobody is more of an advocate for a modern, content rich, growing website with video and lead capture and search engine rankings, and a budget for marketing than us: but this article is about the most underutilized opportunity there is for instant lead generation from search engine rankings for free: Social Media Publishing.
Building and maintaining rankings on your target domain is a task and takes time and an every growing website, and you should do it: but don’t overlook the opportunity to have instant rankings on Google and others by publishing directly to existing niche sites, and to sites that are aggregators of content.
photo credit: bjornfalkevik
You may have noticed lately the video megatrend that is taking place: Gone are the static brochure websites and in are interactive communities with video and Web 2.0 features. You can still find plenty of static, dead websites; but they become less relevant by the day. Viral videos, even amateur videos, routinely rack up millions of views on the video sharing sites, creating an opportunity for companies that want to advertise in this medium a chance to reach an incredible audience.
Think Video in 2009! Google has built huge server farms all over the world and video has taken over as a viral content distribution method. There is no better way to get links and subscriptions, resulting in search placement and traffic, than to blog a combination of text, video, and if possible, profiles with bookmarks and favorites.
The Social Media Marketing plan for 2009 must include:
- Syndicated RSS feeds
- Video and other graphic content
- Profiles on major highly traveled sites (My Space, Digg, Facebook etc.)
- Opt-in subscriptions, groups, feeds, email – mybloglog.com is a good place to start building an affinity group
- User-generated, user filtered content – the amount of content needed to rank now is more than you will consistently generate on your own – and you must have an automated way for the content producers, contributors to police themselves with user-ratings
- Social Bookmarking (you must stumbleupon.com your content, bookmark with delicious, netscape.com, etc.)
- You must ping the world and tell them when there is new content to keep the robots crawling your site more and more regularly
- All these things must be optimized properly
If you think that our bundled sevices price ($489.00 down, $379.00 per month) seems high, consider the budget without us: heck go get a few bids on this list!
photo credit: John Pastor
Believe it or not there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Most wordpress blog templates use the content tag on the main index page, meaning it shows full posts unless you use a more tag. If you use a more tag it will truncate the post at that tag and give you a link to read the full article.
Now you can have an E-Book marketing system blog by purchasing our amazing power immediately for $299, or complete with hosting for one year, your own domain, strategic posting and promotion, and ongoing training, promotion and support for as little as $479.00.
Why have a website that nobody sees? We promise traffic and functionality that puts you in control of your own destiny.
The best things on the web are either free or so inexpensive that anybody can get in the game – it is consistent performance and success resulting form the expertise to make it al work together that are hard to find!
Now that race includes video, and another new trend: with more and more websites coming online, branding is taking back over, and small websites are seen less and less. We go to Expedia to buy Airline tickets, for instance, and now cheap Tickets.
The window for SEO supremacy is closing, as more and more mainstream companies embrace the emerging technology, the market will shift back 180 degrees to value the information itself over that way it is formatted, which is becoming more and more standardized.
Now the shift is back to the actual content production as having the journalistic value that creates the marketplace. While it still requires technical expertise beyond the novice, that gap will continue to close.
This means that conventional SEO companies and many web design companies need to completely re-think their strategies.
Not so long ago (I started my first company this industry in 2001) there was a race on to get to the top of the list – it was a wide open free-for-all with everyone shuffling to grab a huge emerging market: the need for search engine rankings and online PR of all kinds.
As SEO techniques become more and more defined as a distribution commodity, bought from Indian contractors, perhaps looked after very soon by major advertising agencies who used to control print budgets, this market is changing.
In the reality of this, my own company (SocialMediaSystems.com) is completely changing it’s definition to be involved with the creation and distribution of the content, rather than the formatting, and reformatting of canvas which is seen less and less:
Henceforth our emphasis will be on the creation and distribution of the content, rather than it’s formatting, which is quickly becoming standard.
We will move on to content creation and distribution – which is much more interesting anyway!
Who will control the first page of Google in the future? Why the best sources, of course.
Israel Rothman is the CEO of Socialmediasystems.com LLC. To learn more about social media marketing, visit http://socialmediasystems.com.
In logging, there is a saying:
“When the water is low, the stumps will show”
It refers to the cylclicle nature of the industry, and how only the toughest survive when things are hard.
Recently I heard it said another way referring to the real estate industry in last year’s Leadership conference:
“When the water is low, you can see who has been swimming around naked!”
So true! It is the toughest of times that determine the real winners in any industry: success in Real Estate, IT, or any business requires endurance: but not just financial endurance, sometimes it is merely the attitude of the survivors that brings them through.
I once worked for an auto dealership that had six franchises until it started shutting them down one my one then went bankrupt. As salespeople, nobody knew exactly when to bail, or if there would be new opportunities with new ownership. As all the best used car inventory started disappearing off the lot to pay bills, the prospects became more and more bleak as a salesperson. With a family to support, I was one of the first to bail. But I never forgot the fact that those who stayed were so busy that they made a ton of money in the last few weeks, as bargain hunters hit the lot looking for fire sales, and bonuses where paid in cash to retain a sales force.
People who are truly fearless can sometimes benefit from everyone elses panic.
The water is low right now, for many of us, but tomorrow will come.
Here is the paradox: you must reach your market with a message that will generate leads to feed your business.
You must also reach the geeks and journalists who may republish and link to your articles, creating traffic and search engine rankings.
For Social Media Marketing purposes, you are really writing for two completely different audiences:
Example:
We are published here at http://WebProNews.com, amongst other ientry publications (http://ientry.com) who reach over 4,000,000 opt-in subscribers.
These are mostly techies and website developers, who are not our target market: some of them are even direct competitors: yet we intentionally write informative articles for this market, not so much to sell our services, but instead to be branded as an authority for our topics, which in turn ranks us for searches like ’social media marketing services’, on Google, Yahoo and MSN in the first page organic results.
This is because the most powerful link to your site for this purpose is for someone inside your industry to link to and consume your content: Google and the other search engines follow the trail back to the source of the information, making you the ‘authority source’ for your topic, and /or Geographic location.
However, this will not necessarily sell product for you. Once someone actually finds your website by way of a key word search as a result of your status as an authority and your relevant rankings, you also need to write content, like this article, which, while it will never be republished by my competitors, nor in any technical authority publication, it does help to explain to you (my target audience) exactly what I do, and how it may benefit you.
Likewise, you must reach consumers, and, one way to do that is to be an authority who is quoted about your profession, and/or location so that you can achieve organic rankings for those words.
Have you typed your name into Google lately? What do people find when they do?
photo credit: Nils Geylen
Your reputation can be intentionally managed:
Our new version of MUWordpress combined with BBPress and a few tweaks turns wordpress into a social media community. Imagine the value for a Real Estate brokerage with hundreds of agents launching a community site: see :
We will be rolling out many such community sites.
The templates continue to improve.
Recent Comments