When I present my seminars on Social Media Branding and Marketing, one question keeps coming up from the audience. “Can we weave all the Social Media, Blog feeds together with my current website?” My answer: Absolutely! Your website still is the welcome or landing page for most of your visitors.

Website and Social Media Integration for Optimization

If you have a Word Press Blog, Facebook fan page, a Twitter profile, YouTube Channel, Flickr account you want all that feeds flow back into your visitor’s welcome page so you can serve them with most current information. The Social Media Integration also makes your website very dynamic with updates fed from various Social Media sites. This creates a key marketing strategy building heavy duty Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

RockStarsRock.com – A Website & Social Media Integration Success Story

Aly & Andrea are identical twins, motivational speakers, and strength-focused leadership coaches with an emphasis on live-event presentations that inspire, educate, lead, and empower audiences to not only survive adversity, but to thrive in it. And you will get the change you are looking for because they don’t just deliver the message– they LIVE it.

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Rock Star U‘s entire business branding, marketing and growth is Social Media centric. Aly and Andrea are exceptional bloggers and very active on Social Media. Hence, they have a critical need to integrate Social Media into their business Website. When we were approached for the Website redesign service (we actually design and maintain all their websites and blogs) we also included this aspect to bring in their Social Media feeds in real time. Now, their website serves their Company profile, Services and also latest feeds from their Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Blog sites.

What Aly and Andrea are saying?

Aly Calvo
Aly & Andrea– Rock Star U

Siva at ITVibes is fabulous! Nothing gives peace of mind like knowing that our online presence and our brand is being cared for by a true expert who genuinely cares about building a great product to uphold the branding of our business! Our vision is his vision, which makes for a great working team. And. whenever we need to take care of website updates, content changes, or even back-end adjustments, Siva is just a phone call or an e-mail away! Thank you!

Andrea Kulberg
Aly & Andrea– Rock Star U

We are just done presenting a mega-seminar that’s hosted by Lone Star SBDC and SCORE. The seminar is on EMAIL MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SMALL BUSINESS. It was co-presented by Amy Tinsley, Regional Development Director from Constant Contact. Amy presented on “The Power of Email Marketing for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs” while we presented on “Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses”. It was a great feeling to present to such an enthusiastic and interactive audience. The seminar was attended by about 100 small business owners around Houston, The Woodlands, Tomball, Kingwood, Spring areas.

Here are the Presentation details:

Introduction

Social Media networking is quickly becoming a powerful Marketing & Branding strategy for all businesses around the globe. Companies are using Social Media to create awareness to their services, products and publish company updates simultaneously receiving feed backs to improve their offerings. Small businesses are embarking into implementing Social Media to streamline their Sales, Marketing, Public Relations, and Customer Service and to energize their Business’ online presence.

Topics covered

• Social Media Strategy: It’s all about connecting
• Facebook: Build loyalty with Fan or Business pages
• Twitter: Stay connected with Twitter
• LinkedIn: Grow connections and build exposure with LinkedIn
• YouTube: Create powerful video marketing
• Blogs: Create dynamic content and viewership with Blogs
• Integration: Connect Website, Email Marketing with Social Media
• Best practices & etiquette

Audience’s response

• That was an awesome presentation Siva! – James Wroten, Houston Data Safe
• So informative and entertaining! Great job! Thank you! – Karen Sharp, Lone Star SBDC
• You had us all lapping it all up. I learned a lot. Thanks so much – Claire Gunnels, Lone Star College
• It was an awesome presentation! Great job Siva! – Ketki Shah, Krisbi Travel
• Your session was outstanding – Noble Gulledge, SCORE.ORG
• I got some valuable takeaways from the social media presentation yesterday. Thank you – Kelley Smith, FortBendJobs.com
• Your presentation was quite interesting and informative – Marcela Anderson, LoneStar Elder Care, LLC

This is a continuation to blog post ‘Have you spread the word out?‘.

Social Media is the new wave of networking. Understand, Strategize, and Build your Social Media presence to take advantage of the effectiveness in reaching out to real people. Companies are using Social Media to create awareness to their services, products, to publish company updates and simultaneously to receive feedback to improve their offerings. Small businesses are embarking into implementing Social Media to streamline their Sales, Marketing, Public Relations, and Customer Service and to energize their Business’ online presence.

Social Media Branding

Here are few sites that have changed the Social Media scene completely:

1. Build loyalty platform: Business owners and professionals have realized the power in business networking on Facebook. Business pages also called as Fan pages are used to create branding awareness and also to connect with customers on a regular basis. Businesses started taking advantage in posting their product information, service promises, new releases or company updates in these pages. This became more valuable when Google and Bing announced they would be indexing Facebook fan pages in search results.
2. Reach them repeatedly. Reach them fast. Twitter is the new way of faster communication. It is a micro-blogging service that changed the entire way the people on internet could interact. Now businesses have quickly adopted this to gain followers, and to publish quick products, services and information regarding their companies and commitments. Few businesses extensively use this tool for customer support, marketing and promotions. With as less as 140 character updates, you can make a very big impact quickly and particularly the updates are indexed by Google and Bing.
3. Professional to Professional: LinkedIn is a peer-to-peer, professional networking site. This is a great networking place for many professionals to stay connected with other professionals in the same line, and to share information over the areas of interest. LinkedIn is becoming the new job marketing place, with more and more companies looking to recruit employees or consultants based on their profile and involvement in here. The connections, groups, recommendations, and activities define your professional and work ethics.
4. Blogging to the top! Blogs have become powerful content publishing mediums, to connect with visitors, and to interact with networks. Blogs are becoming back bones to business websites to create a high profile, dynamic and bolder web presence. When you are online, it is all about the content that helps in great organic optimization for greater search results. Blogs integrate all the Social Media feeds to create one dynamic content ground for businesses.
5. Get Viral: If you are in marketing world you know what this means. YouTube is a free video service that lets you upload videos and reuse them on your website, blog, or other social media sites. YouTube has become the source for businesses to show case and to self broadcast information, capabilities, and strategies. This is also taking the blogging world into a new level of video blogging which is also called Vlogging.

Integrating all these Social Media feeds into your Website, Blog, and vice versa is the new Branding and Social Media Marketing. This helps to keep your visitors, clients and prospects in loop and eventually creates a powerful online branding.

Project EdieMcRae.com

Edie McRae is a Social Media Networking Specialist. We initially worked on her Millionaire Moms Inc. blog migration and maintenance. When Edie wanted to grow into a new identity and branding we worked together to brand her as new “Edie McRae”. And of course, it’s just the new looks, but she is still her!

Edie’s statement about her business and services: “Are You Missing the Social Media Revolution? If you are an entrepreneur, solo-professional, business owner, franchisee, marketing director, work-at-home-mom or a direct sales professional who would like to learn more about how social media networking can work for you, your brand and your business…then you’re in the right place! My philosophy is this: it is NOT about marketing…it’s about CONNECTING. ”. So TRUE!

To create a new design branding we created a landing page for the website and integrated the blog as the back end. We like to really call this design as “Blogsite”, a hybrid between a Website and a Blog. The landing page serves as the Welcome page to give quick introduction about the business, mission statement, services and also makes it dynamic with feed from blog on a real time.

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Work Involved

• Blog & Profile Design
• Graphics Design
• Business Branding
• Real time blog feed
• WordPress Setup
• Online Contact Form
• Twitter, Facebook feeds
• Hosting and Maintenance
• Feedburner, Bookmarks, Tweet MeMe, Sociable, Siggy, Captcha, Akismet plugins
• Friend Connect, Text, Archives, Comments, Newsletter Widgets

Self-hosted on WordPress

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Hear what Edie McRae thinks of our work

Read Edie’s blog and her testimonial about the branding and new look.

Technology Used

WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, SSL, XHTML, MYSQL

Analysts predict that in 2010 25% of small businesses will be profitable. Is your business one of them? It’s time to reevaluate your New Year resolutions for your business to realign to your business goals to achieve pin pointed results.

Everybody’s talking about how 2010 will be big for their business. It’s time you take control of the direction and approach to take advantage of the market’s comeback. We all waited too long to get back into the success path. Now, the time is here. Is your business ready? It’s never too late to make necessary changes to be ready and spread the word about your business. Here are few ways to make sure you are ready.

1. Build Content: Content is Information. Information is power. Power is success.

With businesses gaining maximum online presence, finding information is critical. Information builds trust, response and growth. Content creates information to create search engine optimization, means your consumers can find you and your services easily than your competition. It builds loyal connection between you and your customers. You can create those connections if you follow these simple ways.

• Website: Websites are no more just ‘online catalogues’ or static profiles of your business. They have grown to become powerful representation of your company, services and your customer promise. They are the entry points to most of the visitors that could help convert them into leads. On an average a visitor stays about less than 30 seconds on new websites. What does that mean? Means they are gone somewhere and giving business to your competition. This is measured by the bounce rate on your web stats. Do you really need that? I guess not. Hence, build easy to navigate website, with rich content, and good interactive design. Build your website as your first marketing tool than just an online profile.
• Blog: A company blog is such an essential tool for businesses as they share information regularly about their company updates, services, news and their growth forecasts. Blog energizes business by building dynamic content enabling users to get connected with you and company on a personal level. It’s like your high energy website letting your visitors interact, leave feedback, subscribe, exchange information.
• Social Branding: You probably heard or somehow already using it. Social Media has made internet very interactive taking the web to the next version. Social media is emerging as a new branding, networking and marketing tool. It has now quickly become one of the major elements of the internet DNA. Facebook business pages, Twitter lists & status updates, YouTube channel, LinkedIn profile & connections, Meetup, Eventbrite etc. help grow organic optimization that leads to better search engine ranking and authority over your competition. Social media helps growing your brand’s loyalty through networks, friends, connections, followers, fans, subscribers etc. You know the effect of ‘word-of-mouth’. Social media networking is an online simulation of the same. The information has ripple effect as the network shares it with their networks. Social media now dictates a portion of marketing budget for most of the successful companies.

Customer Centric Marketing Circle

2. Build Productivity and Reach ability: “Spend a dime today, to make a dollar tomorrow”

A dollar saved is two dollars earned. Always look to improve efficiency and productivity to save time, and as time is money, save money. Try to take advantage of online tools that reduce time and increase effectiveness in finishing daily mundane tasks improving your overall deliver-ability. This reduces lot of duplication and frustration that releases time to focus more on growing business and gaining more customers.

• Customer Manager: CRM is a customer resource manager that helps sales by tracking customers, leads, prospects and their interactions. It acts as an online repository to save and search for contacts’ information on demand. It helps integrate and share all sales efforts with your team. The information can be accessed anywhere and anytime.
• Online Campaigns: Campaigns energize your marketing strategy. Reaching customers repeatedly with information and updates creates loyal connection and understanding with your clients. Online campaigns tool creates simple steps to send email updates, follow ups to all or groups of your customers from CRM. It integrates sales with marketing.
• Newsletters:Online ONewsletters are periodicals with company updates, company offers and coupons sent to subscribers. It is an opt-in service that lets your visitors sign up from your website or blog. The users also have option to safely unsubscribe, or manage their subscription. Newsletter sign up boxes on your website or blog are search engine friendly (you know what that means, right?).

3. Build better Customer Service

You know your business better than anyone. Customers come to us for help with their work with a trust that the work can be done much efficiently and cost effectively.

• Listen first, help later: Understand your customer’s business problems and needs before suggesting them with a solution. Try to customize the services’ package that directly helps them solve their needs.
• Offer extra: Always offer “extra” in the form of ideas, information, or strategy or even services. This gives clients much needed comfort that leads to long term relationship.
• Be flexible: Customers are your biggest assets in business. Do anything to help them out, and keep the long term relationship. Remember the hard work you put together and the time spent to gain them in first place.
• Be accessible: Give them easy ways to get to you all the time. When they need you it’s very comforting to them to know you are accessible through multiple ways. Always publish your contact information and any help desk tools you use so they can find you easily.
• Provide referrals: Like the client trusts your services, understand and trust your client’s services. Find opportunities to refer your customers to your network of connections. I guarantee, the favor will be returned.

Now, are you ready to make necessary changes to take on 2010? Remember, this is YOUR year, and is BIG for your business. Best wishes.



Project MillionaireMomsInc.com

Edie at Millionaire Moms Media guides small businesses through the ins and outs of online social networking. Edie’s passion is empowering others to find and foster connections themselves through proper use of social media outlets. She is fun, energetic & outgoing! She loves to help people and is a very loyal friend. Edie gained this unique experience through personally tapping into social media networks specific to women and mothers in order to build a large direct sales business without prior experience. She believes that if she can do it, SO can YOU! Connect, engage and IGNITE your business today with Edie.

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Work Involved

• Blog & Profile Design
• Graphics Design
• Branding
• WordPress Setup
• Plugins customization
• Widgets customization
• Online Contact Form
• Hosting and Maintenance
• RSS Feeds, Bookmarks, Retweet, Captcha, Akismet plugins
• Twitter, Facebook, Friend Connect, Text, Archives, Comments, Newsletter Widgets

Self-hosted on WordPress

Visit site | View Preview

Technology Used

WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, SSL, XHTML, MYSQL

Hear what Edie McRae thinks of our work

Edie McRae
Millionaire Moms Media