In an effort to spruce up the language on my resume, I did a LinkedIn people search for “SEO” and “social media” to get some ideas. What I found, however, didn’t lead me to update my resume. Instead, it made me question HR professionals utilizing LinkedIn as search engine for potential candidates.
It’s time to make some updates to your search algorithm, LinkedIn.
Before I share why, I’d like to better explain the ethical dilemma behind the tactics used in the LinkedIn profiles I found that led me to write this post.
Using Google as an example, the Google Webspam team makes frequent anti-webspam updates to its search algorithm, to ensure that Internet surfers find the most relevant content when searching for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. The updates that Google makes to their algorithm penalizes webspammers that utilize unethical (aka black hat) SEO tactics and makes sure that “good” results are ranked above them. In other words, Google does a good job to make sure that those who play by the rules reap the benefits, rightfully earning their place at the top of the search results. Continue reading →
What’s the best advice you can get from a twenty-something entrepreneur who has traveled the world and co-owns an up-and-coming company in New York City?
“Do something disruptive.”
Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Howe of Escape the City, a start-up that was born in London, England and has since opened an office in New York City.
Initially launched by Dom Jackson and Rob Symington, Escape the City aims to help corporate professionals who are currently dissatisfied with their current jobs by connecting them with people and opportunities to help them find exciting, more fulfulling alternatives.
To date, Escape the City has over 79,000 members signed up looking to “do something different” and discover what work they are most passionate about. Continue reading →
Last Friday, I had the amazing opportunity to take part in an unique social media event: hanging out with the President of the Cleveland Indians, Mark Shapiro, for a “town hall” luncheon at the Terrace Club at Progressive Field.
Me, Mark Shapiro and my friend & coworker Alison
With great charisma, a surprisingly witty Shapiro took the stage while some of Cleveland’s top marketing professionals, sports bloggers and social media aficionados enjoyed a catered lunch. For an hour and a half, Shapiro answered the audience’s top Tribe questions, poking fun at the idea of bringing Manny Ramirez back and his portrayal in the movie Moneyball (which, he says, was based very loosely upon a true story). So no, the real Mark Shapiro doesn’t make quick-and-dirty trades that happen in a couple phone calls and under five minutes. Continue reading →
On June 16, 3 of my friends (including Clinton Dugan) and I will travel to Indiana to test our endurance and raise money for charity by completeing a 12 mile course with 25 army obstacles designed by British Special Forces. Call me crazy, but I’m ecstatic.
You know a social media website has caught on when…
Your grandmother is chatting about her latest “pins” over Easter dinner.
With little surprise, Experian’s 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report found that Pinterest is now the third most popular social network in the United States, based on number of visits, right behind Facebook and Twitter.
Now that the site has captured the (p)interest of consumers and brands alike, a number of tools have come onto the market to help us manage and measure our activity on the site. Continue reading →
The 4th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report from the Social Media Examiner is out for 2012. With a goal of learning and understanding how marketers are using social media to grow their business, the study surveyed over 3,800 marketers worldwide. Packed with interesting statistics and charts, the study provides great insight for both rookie and veteran marketers.
Here are my top 6 takeaways:
1.) Social media is still vital to marketing professionals.
83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business. Although this is a 7% drop from 2011, social media still proves to be of large significance to marketing professionals.
2.) How to calculate the ROI of social media is still a mystery to most marketers.
The one question that marketers want answered most is how to track the ROI of social media. According to the report, this has been the number one question for 3 years in a row. We know that social media works (if done correctly), but because the return is usually qualitative, it is hard to measure the economic benefits of social media.
3.) Social media has a wide array of benefits.
The top 3 benefits of social media marketing include increasing exposure, increasing traffic and providing marketplace insight. The study found that 85% of marketers indicated increased exposure as a result of their social media efforts.
4.) Social media marketers plan to increase video marketing efforts.
76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing in the future. After witnessing the viral success of the Dollar Shave Club and Kony 2012 videos, I would be planning on ramping up my video marketing as well.
5.) You don’t need to spend hours a day to generate a lead from social media.
The study showed that 61% of marketers saw lead generation benefits with social media by spending as little as 6 hours per week – which is a significant increase from last year’s finding.
6.) SEO and event marketing are used most with experienced social media marketers.
The top 3 other types of marketing social media marketers said they were participating in included email marketing, search engine optimization and event marketing. The social media marketers with 3+ years of experience were more likely to participate in search engine optimization and event marketing than others.
Each week, almost every person types a word or phrase into their favorite search engine – Google, Bing, or Yahoo (to name a few). In mere fractions of a second, the information that person was seeking is neatly arranged on his or her computer screen, with the most helpful or popular websites appearing on the first page.
The Internet has billions, if not trillions of documents of information at our disposal. And in milliseconds, the search engine determines what we want and need to find, based on that very keyword or phrase we type in.
However, out of everyone who uses a search engine, not many know how a search engine operates.
The World Wide Web is composed of websites and multiple types of files. Each day, automated robots known as ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ examine the code from these websites and files and stores the information in a datacenter. For the big search engines, like Google, there are hundreds of datacenters all over the world containing information.
When a person types in a keyword or phrase (known as a query) into the search bar, the search engine goes through the billions of documents they have stored in the databases looking for relevant material to that query.
There are many factors that go into determining what makes a website relevant. One of the most important is popularity. Popularity is determined by carefully crafted algorithms. Algorithms are made up of countless components. Each search engine has a different algorithm for calculating popularity. This means, that optimizing your website for Yahoo can be slightly different than optimizing it for Google, since different there are varying influential factors.
As a social media manager, the beginning of my mornings are spent reading the latest in social media news. I find great material every day, but this morning, I found an something that really caught my eye.
Today on Mashable, an info-graphic designed by Emily Caulfield was published. Check it out below to see a Visual History of Twitter, the most-followed Twitter accounts, and some fun facts.
Earlier today I showed you what the new Facebook Timeline, now I’d like to teach you how to enable it yourself.
It only takes a couple of minutes, and hopefully you can get through the process easily with these steps:
1.Go to Facebook.com and type “developer” into the Facebook search bar at the top of the page.
2. Click the + Create New App button located in the top right corner.
3. This box will pop up:
Enter an App Display Name, I chose Sarah’s Timeline.
Enter an App Nameplace (which you can update later if you choose to do so), I chose sarah_tharp.
Agree to the Platform Privacy Policy and click continue
4. After you fill out the required Security Check and hit submit, you will be at your new application’s page. Click Open Graph on the left side of the page.
5. Since you will be the only one using your app, the actions and objects you insert are not of great importance. I put “People can read a book” and clicked Get Started. If you’d like to learn more about open graphs, you can visit https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/opengraph/. Again, no one will see what you inserted except for you!
6. Next, you will see the screen below. The only thing that you need to do it scroll down and click the Save Changes and Next button.
7. You will have to repeat step 6 for What are Action Objects and What are Timeline Aggregations . Just scroll down, and click the Saves Changes and Next button (for the last page the button will say Save and Finish).
8. Go back to your Facebook home page. You should see a large invite at the top of the page that says Enable Timeline. This sometimes takes a few minutes!
9. Click on Get It Now, and you will be introduced to your new Facebook Timeline.
A couple of days ago, I enabled the Facebook Timeline for my profile and thus far, am a huge fan! For me, the Timeline essentially organized my Facebook history and provided me with day-by-day documentation. It was like I was presented an online diary of the past 5 or so years of my life.
For those of you who have yet to enable the Timeline, or are just waiting until Facebook makes the change in early October, here is what to expect your new profile to look like:
