Author Archive

Case Study: Hermitage Hotel

Challenge The Hermitage Hotel, a five-star property in Nashville, was interested in driving more qualified traffic to their website by promoting special monthly offers. Solution Using a conversion-based Pay-Per-Click campaign, we focused on the monthly hotel promotions as well as highlighting the upscale hotel property and amenities. Results Increased online brand awareness Improved website leads […]

Times Dissects Facebook’s Privacy Options and it Isn’t Pretty

The New York Times has published a fantastic infographic laying out all the different types of personal information available from your Facebook profile.  Facebook has a history of underhanded policies meant to allow any third party to access a lot of personal information without a user’s knowledge.  There was the whole “Beacon” debacle where things […]

From the Obvious Dept: Inbound Marketing Costs Less

It should come as no big shock that a study has been released that illustrates the cost-effectiveness of inbound marketing channels.  What may not be immediately obvious: Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click advertising are only half the story – social media and blogs are the other two.  That makes it easy to determine […]

Twitter Finally Reveals Advertising Model

Twitter has finally announced how it plans to make money.  It seems to be in the form of paid ads that exist at the top of Twitter search results.  Only one ad will be displayed per search, and not 10 like on Google and Yahoo search result pages.  It’s called Promoted Tweets.  There’s a nice […]

Apple’s Push to Redefine Mobile Advertising – The iPad and iAd Cometh

Amidst the noise about a certain new device from Apple, you may have missed another bit of fruit-related news: iAd.  Apple is apparently going to be releasing a mobile advertising platform, most likely the results of its acquisition of Quattro Wireless (after a failed attempt at AdMob).  There aren’t many details known but some are […]

Insurance Agents Get Results on Facebook – What Every Company Can Learn

State Farm agents have been using and testing Facebook for over a year now. They’re gotten to where they now understand the most effective ways to engage their audience on that platform and rolled out Facebook training throughout their whole organization. What did they learn and are now asking all of their agents to apply? […]

Even Google Needs Search Engine Optimization

Google officially acknowledged the relevancy (pun intended) of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, last year and now Google has gone and audited itself.  Google has made its “SEO Report Card” available to the public.  It appears to have only evaluated itself on some basic criteria, but it’s fascinating how poorly they score in several key […]

Google Changes the Rules: PageRank Sculpting

A fairly accepted advanced practice within the SEO community called PageRank Sculpting has been undone by Google.  I won’t get into all of the details but the important thing to remember is that if your site was making use of PageRank Sculpting (or your SEO experts said they were) then you better find out how […]

Google Gives Chairman Mau the Bird

As posted in a lot of other places, Google has very publicly announced that it is no longer censoring Google searches in China and is prepared to leave the country if the Chinese government doesn’t like it. Most people in the US seem to be hailing the move as a victory in human rights in […]

DARPA, Twitter, Facebook and a Bunch of Balloons

DARPA placed 10 red balloons randomly throughout the US and issued a challenge: find them using the Internet. A team of MIT researchers used a custom-built social media platform that integrated info from Facebook and Twitter to find them. How long did it take? Only 8 hours. Here’s an interview with one of the MIT […]