Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benmurray/4346823749/

Though NetStrategies is located in northern Virginia, in the midst of the blizzard, Internet marketing services for our customers marched forward uninterrupted. Our team members telecommuted from home, managing PPC campaigns, updating customer sites for search engine optimization, implementing Web development changes, and more.

Today’s technology is an amazing thing! It surprised a few customers to hear our voices when they telephoned that week for help. We communicated through instant messaging, telephone, and email…with no break in service…pretty cool.

If you have a D.C. Blizzard story to share, please add your comments!

Last week while visiting my grandpa in Panama City, Fla., I accompanied him on his daily ritual — the errand run.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ooohoooh/

That day I was overwhelmed with southern hospitality. It made me consider how fantastic it would be if social media, or as I prefer to call it, online relationship building, followed the lesson of the simple errand run.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — and a thousand other similar applications are merely tools. The challenge for us all is to use these tools effectively.

1. Engage people often.
2. Learn about them.
3. Laugh with them.
4. Look out for others.
5. Share your good energy.

And remember as grandpa told me years ago, “You can’t email a handshake.”

I welcome you to share your favorite customer service experience!

I recently read Adam Ostrow’s Mashable blog entitled, “Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant” and wondered how my Northern Virginia team at NetStrategies would react to that headline. Keep in mind, our area of expertise is helping businesses optimize their Web sites! So I asked my team for a rebuttal and here is their take:

NetStrategies President Rodney Loges comments, “My abbreviated two cents is as follows — social media must play a role in the building of a successful online presence but should not be the only endeavor. To me SM sites are just another channel to reach clients when and where they are online. The basics of marketing apply even in the world of social media. Do you know your customer? Are you solving their problem? What action do you want them to take and is the customer rewarded for doing such? You have to build your foundation etc. before you can install the interior decorations.”

Our vice president and Web development expert John Schultz explains, “The bottom line is that social media is an important communication channel with prospects and customers, but the corporate Web site is still the core of how companies engage customers online. (Adam Ostrow’s) example uses a consumer product where the company is trying to generate buzz online — most of our customers are people who do real transactions or lead development online. The corporate Web site is still the core of customer engagement, and social media is just a touch point or spoke in the wheel that can help the company broaden its reach online.

Another point is that “fans” on Facebook don’t necessarily drive their KPIs. 250,000 fans don’t mean that a company will sell more. It’s a valuable communication channel and an impressive number, but the critical piece of this is how a company uses that channel to drive sales.

You could contrast consumer products (Coke, Pepsi, Vitamin Water) with the real business of generating leads and sales online. Branding is a whole different effort than lead generation and in the B2B world the approach has to be different.”

Robert Moses is the director of operations at NetStrategies. “Corporate Web sites are now and will still be the authoratative source for a company. When a social media user hears about his or her favorite company on Facebook he/she will need to reach the corporate Web site to read the official press release, announcement, opt-in to a spcial offer, or complete an online transaction.”

Stevan Loges is our analytics and Pay Per Click expert. “To me social media is really an extension of a corporate site and involves meeting your customers where they are.

While it seems like everyone is on Facebook, etc. there are still demographics who are not or who are overwhelmed by the majority of applications/requests they receive on a daily basis. There needs to be an alternative for those other users.

Just some ideas, but I agree with the consensus that a social media site could/should never completely take the place of a corporate Web site.”

Steve Reali produces our video and tackles other multi-media projects as well. “Social media CAN be an excellent way to reach a broad audience. Sites like YouTube or MySpace or Facebook allow people with certain needs to find businesses/info they are looking for; however, eventually they will need to come to/interact with the company itself. This is where having the Web site and phone number of the actual company will become a necessity.”

As social media and content marketing manager for the company I believe social media continues to grow in its importance to organizations of all kinds. Will SM ever take the place of a corporate Web site? When it comes to the Internet and how rapidly it is changing, nothing would surprise me.

(Twitter bird compliments of Productive Dreams.)

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Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Unlike most Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) analysts, I have a background as an editor and proofreader — I don’t have a marketing or technical background.

I think of a Web site as a book. Each book is made up of pages of words – words that the search engines need to see and words that will get you what you want, whether it’s buyers, members, or subscriptions. Sure, there are pictures in the book, but what makes or breaks your site is the words, and I LOVE words.

Editors look at the world differently. I find some perverse pleasure in finding typos in articles in The Washington Post. It secretly delights me to give a red-marked page to a coworker. When I drive past the tire place that offers “wheel alinement,” I imagine dropping a friendly note in the mail.

I spent the first 10 years of my professional career editing and proofreading. The work varied, from the National Captioning Institute, where I transcribed and edited prerecorded video to a particular “words-per-minute” rate, to Elias, Matz, Tiernan, & Herrick, a corporate law firm that demanded accuracy in every number within hundred-page financial documents.

After a stint in central Virginia, where, as an artist, I ran my own business web site, my park ranger husband moved us back to Northern Virginia, and, after settling in at Mason Neck State Park in Lorton, I decided to try something different. I joined NetStrategies.

With the experience I had running my own web site and seeing how small changes make big differences, something just clicked in my head with SEO and usability. After discussing my interest with Company President Rodney Loges, I began working with the marketing department putting together suggestions for customer sites.

Early in my SEO work, I had a conversation with NetStrategies’ Director of Technology, Robert Moses. As we analyzed a customer’s site and shared insight on the best strategies to optimize that site, I commented that, “It all seems like common sense!” Robert agreed but pointed out you “have to be able to think that way to get it right.”

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a Web site to increase the number of qualified visitors from search engine organic results. That’s how I see it – get those qualified visitors to your site, so they buy, join, or subscribe.

I absolutely love the process of search engine optimization – to see what happens when we help a customer with their site. Yes, their site usually comes up higher in the rankings, but more importantly, they see an increase in their customers, members, or subscriptions. They get measurable results from their investment in Internet marketing.

With our phenomenal tech, marketing, and customer service departments, we optimize each site as a team. Working with NetStrategies doesn’t just get you an outsourced SEOer. It also gets you an analytics specialist, a technical specialist, and a PPC specialist. Our team members don’t plug away to kill eight hours. We love what we do, and that makes a difference in our performance.

I still take regular training, am a certified eMarketer, and read countless books and blogs on SEO. I’ve learned a lot in my tenure as an SEOer. Join me as I share tips, tools, and books to help you in your own SEO efforts. I look at SEO from a different angle than a tech or marketing person, but that angle is a good angle. I’m Stacey Morgan Smith, the Director of Search Engine Optimization for NetStrategies, and I may be an editor by training, but I’m an SEOer at heart.

NetStrategies is an Internet marketing optimization company. Their performance command center is the first of its kind in the industry. This fully integrated approach uses a unified marketing dashboard that incorporates best-of-class Internet marketing tools, certified expert marketers, and real-time monitoring of opportunities and threats to each customer’s Internet marketing efforts.