Facebook is showing that money can be made in the web 2.0 world and in the Social Networking arena.  Below is an excerpt from an article in Yahoo Tech news:

Facebook is making enough money to cover its costs and now has 300 million users, the world’s largestsocial networking site said on Tuesday, proving the Internet’s newest star industry can be a viable business.Facebook is now generating enough cash to cover its operating expenses, as well as the capital spending needed to maintain its fast-growing service.Analysts said this shows the financial viability of Facebook, which has faced questions about its underlying business model, despite its popularity, and was a good sign for a potential initial public offering.“It’s certainly meaningful to show that this is absolutely the real deal,” said Broadpoint Amtech analyst Ben Schachter. “They are executing. People are spending money on the site.”Since its creation in a Harvard dorm room five years ago, Facebook has emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular destinations and is increasingly challenging the Web’s established powerhouses likeYahoo Inc and Google Inc.Facebook unveiled a revamped search engine last month and is currently testing an online payment system. Facebook users have tripled from about 100 million a year ago.

Read the full article here.

Search engine optimization or SEO describes the methods and techniques used to ensure a web page shows up correctly in the “organic” (free) listings within search engine results under the correct conditions (i.e. a user is searching for content listed on the web page).  Technically speaking, SEO is a sub-set of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which includes paid or “cost per click” (CPC) advertising as well as un-paid organic listings.  SEO is typically sold as two different services at most agencies (including Cyber-NY) described as project based (one-time service to optimize server side scripting and content) and on-going quarterly or monthly service (includes off-site niche directory placements, in-bound linking, ongoing optimization and evaluation, etc…).  SEO is an important part of web development and an overall online strategy and should be considered carefully while developing your site because simply launching a site is not enough to succeed if potential customers and constituents cannot find you. At Cyber-NY we develop our clients’ websites utilizing our SEO best practices included as part of our development services at no additional charge.  This article provides an introduction to some of these recognized best practices to assist our clients understand the process, but can be of benefit to anyone else interested in SEO and prepared to optimize their website.

First, let’s dispel some search engine optimization myths.

1. Nobody can guarantee a first place or first page ranking for your website within the organic listings.  Think about it…  If they could, everyone would do it and this would cancel out the process. You can however, secure a first place or first page paid ranking if you pay the going rate at Google, Yahoo! or the other leading search directories.
2. There are no long-term “tricks” to getting a web page a top ranking by “gaming” the system.  We do not recommend trying this because the major search directories will penalize or ban your web page if they believe you are trying to spam or game the system.  If your page does not contain relevant content relating to the searchers keywords, it should not and will not show up in a top search ranking.
3. Meta keywords (specialized tags in your pages source code) are not important as they used to be and should not be your primary focus.  Although meta keywords sound like a great idea and are one of the easier aspects of SEO, they have little to no effect on your search rankings unless it is combined with other practices. Please note, this is not the case with other embedded tags such as the title or alt image tags which do play an important part of SEO.
4. Including as many possible search terms (aka: keywords) in a web page is the best way to target as many searchers as possible.  No… this is not true.  It is the opposite of “targeting” and optimization and this shotgun approach will achieve poor results.  Search engines focus on 2 to 3 targeted keywords on any given page.
5. If I launch a search engine optimized web page, I should see great results instantly or within several days!  Once again, no… this is not correct and if it was, we would see radical swings in directory listings on a daily basis.  SEO takes weeks, months or even longer to show results depending on a number of factors including how competitive the segment of keywords you are targeting and the relevance of your page. You should however see improvements to your rankings within weeks.
6. I need to focus on all the search engines… Not really (in our opinion).  Currently, Google provides roughly 75% of all search results and they drive the market.  All other search engines and directories follow the leader.  Also, if you follow honest optimization techniques, the others will list your page as well.  Please note that this applies to free, organic listings. For paid campaigns or registering directly with a search engine, you should include the other top directories (Yahoo!, Ask, Bing, AOL, MSN, Etc…).

Next, Familiarize Yourself with Key Search Engine Optimization Terms and Concepts:

•  Keyword:  Also knows as or related to search term, keyword phrase or search phrases, a keyword is the primary unit or most basic component of search engine optimization.  A keyword is a word that a searcher will use in a search to find the information or resources they are looking for.  Example:  If I am selling car stereos from a web page, my keywords would include the kinds of terms my potential customers would use to search online including the obvious “car stereo” as a top keyword as well as all the brand names I carry and key factors for why customers would choose my service.  Maybe I have the guaranteed lowest prices on Pioneer car stereos online and can install for free at my store in Orlando Florida.  My Keywords would need to include: Pioneer, car stereo, lowest prices, free installation, Orlando, Florida.  I may also choose to target some competitive brands or other key aspects.  Since I can only use 2 or 3 keywords per web page, I will need to spread some of these out across several linked landing pages.  Since I sell online to anyone regardless of location, car stereo, lowest prices may be my primary keywords for the home page and Free installation in Orlando Florida, will need to be a separate landing page linked from the home page.
• Meta tag:  Also known as Meta data or elements - provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
• Title Tag: The HTML title tag isn’t really a meta tag, but it’s worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> portions as shown in the example) will appear in the title bar of the browser whenever anyone views the web page.  Title tags are very important to SEO and should be unique to each page of your website.  Utilize your primary keyword phrase or description for the page or service as the title.  Limit the title tag to 70 characters and avoid generic title tags such as your company name repeated on each page or “About Us” or “Home” to describe those pages.
• Meta Description Tag: The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your web page in search engines that support this tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the “content=” portion of the tag.  Limit your description text to 200 to 250 characters, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. Search engines limit the amount of characters that can be recognized within the description tag.

How To Get Started:

Search engine optimization requires getting into the mindset of your customers or audience.  Before you can optimize a site, you need to do some planning and a bit of research and come up with an overall strategy and realistic goals.  How do prospective customers find websites such as yours?  What are the search terms they use?  What influences their decision making once they are on a website?  The answers to these questions can be found a number of different ways.  Your experience in an industry may answer some of these questions or searching online may lead you to some relevant research data that can be obtained for free, a small fee or through a subscription service.  One of the best ways to get started is to do a competitive analysis on the major search directories to assess the leaders in your segment.  Take note of the keywords and methods the leaders are using.  Start a spread sheet listing out all the possible search keywords and phrases that potential searchers may use to find your product, service or information.  Once you have a list of potential keywords and have assessed the competitive landscape on Google, Yahoo, Ask & Bing, we will be ready to take the next step.

To be continued…

Article written by Mike Brown
www.cyber-ny.com

With so many marketing channels available to today’s brands, deciphering which one works best can often be difficult. Over the last 10 years, it’s become increasingly apparent that moms want personalized messages that speak directly to their needs. They want to trust who is sending the information and know that content is relevant to their needs. We’ve discovered, through our online community of more than 3 million moms, that a sure-fire channel to engage, enlighten and drive action is with subscriber-based electronic newsletters. But just because you have their ear once (or, in this case, their inbox), it doesn’t mean you have their long-standing loyalty. Below are valuable tips to finding marketing-mom success with e-newsletters:

Knowing the Pulse of Your Consumer
Feeling and understanding the pulse of your consumer base are crucial as you work towards building a relationship between your brand and an influential audience like moms. One way to effectively gain insights into their behavior is by building a life-stage, consumer-based newsletter that allows brands to connect directly with an important and vibrant demographic. It invites audiences to participate in branded communities by sharing key research and other findings.

Establishing trust is critical to your outreach. Once a trust level is recognized, moms will tell you more than you bargained for! In general, women are information facilitators and multi-tasking communicators. If they like what you have to offer, inevitably they share it with their friends, family and peers. If they don’t, they will certainly let you know.

The brands that interest moms most are the ones that directly impact their children and families. With that in mind, the segment of the market that includes children 0 to 5 years of age is not only an important one but one that fills the weekly family basket. Advertisers seeking to capture new consumers who are breaking into this space have an opportunity to influence the decisions they make: what car they drive, what is served for dinner, what diapers they buy and overall spending habits.

Speak to Specific Needs
Segmented and targeted newsletters serve as an engaging tool and link between marketers and their audience. The ability to leverage consumers who are already listening to you and are engaged in your content is vital to producing a relevant sample size and reliable data points.

These newsletters can be geared towards various stages of motherhood:

• Pregnant, “soon to be” mom: Targeted newsletters allow you to collect data upfront on their due date. With this information, you can send them weekly communications on what to expect each week of their pregnancy.

• Young moms: Collect the names and birth dates of the young mom’s children. Engage them by sending monthly topical newsletters that address the specific needs of a growing family. From potty training to temper tantrums to learning ABCs, the content is relevant to the child and, therefore, strikes the right cord with the mother.

• Family help: Help moms manage the demands of their households by offering simple ways to get the most for their family while saving money and having fun. More than ever, families are looking for ways they can cut back and save money.

Loyalty that Lasts
Building a loyal, viral and active consumer database happens over time. While brands expect instant results from a newsletter campaign, establishing trust with your consumers happens gradually. Consumers, especially moms, are wary of providing details about their lives (and, especially, those of their children) unless they see a true value to the content that they are receiving and have built up a trust level with the site or brand.

The tipping point of growth for your consumer database can be the breaking point if you are not cognizant of the risks associated with breaking trust levels or “selling out” your audience database for a brand associated promotion.

Guidelines to Mom-Marketing Success
The communications and research you gather via newsletter outreach help develop effective and targeted marketing, sales and messaging strategies across all media channels that drive consumer behavior and retail activation. Today’s mom needs valuable information that helps her take care of her family’s health, growth and financial well-being. By putting mom in the driver’s seat, you’ll gain valuable insights into her habits while placing your brand in the discussion.

Keep these tips in mind:

1) Consumer trust takes time. Build a plan, execute, listen, and revise. Repeat often.

2) Map newsletter messaging to a theme or life stage to better target your core consumer.

3) Put mom in the driver’s seat — ask her to share data with her friends and be willing to “hear” the feedback.

4) Continue one-on-one conversations with moms to ensure relevant messages and continued trust.

5) Make sure all branded promotions speak to your moms to keep them coming back for more.

Editor’s note: If you’d like to contribute to this newsletter, contact Nina Lentini.

 Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people’s social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you’ll need to take into consideration in the coming year:      

1. It’s About People - We’re moving away from “users,” “customers,” and “shoppers”: social media is bringing back the human element to all digital interaction. People now deliberately seek meaningful connection, self-expression, and a relevant and receptive community. Forrester’s Social Technographicresearch and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell represent a huge step towards a new kind of behavior-driven segmentation, but companies that want to succeed will need to take it further and tap into people’s evolving needs, using the social media context as the new baseline.

2. Creating Meaning and Value - Social media will no longer be about features and applications. These have become a dime a dozen. People will be looking to get tangible and relevant value out of their social experience; they’ll be looking for meaning and for order. “Social media online is no different from social media offline,” said Brent Csutoras at a recent Social Media Club event. People will be looking for ways to keep their networks going regardless of device or platform. They will connect around meaningful topics and have live and simultaneous conversations within parameters they themselves define, which will bring relevance back to their interaction with others.

3. Enabling Convergence - FriendFeed – now both a destination and an API — is growing rapidly, despite a miserable wiki-like interface and interactive experience. That’s because people are at a loss when it comes to pulling their conversations together from various sources and assigning meaning to them. Companies that deliver beautifully designed, easy-to-use, searchable, flexible, aggregating platforms will become more important than any social media tool by itself. Deb Schultz, a San Francisco-based web strategist, compares social media to an art exhibit and says people will “curate their live presence through the web ecosystem as needed.” Noovo and Zannel are examples of early attempts to enable this.

4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience - The iPhone experience has changed the playing field for users, companies, and developers. In Q1 of 2009 alone, Apple sold 4.4 million iPhones, and Google’s Android and the new Palm continue to build on the cross-platform, application- and service-driven model. In the new landscape of social media, people are seeking solutions that seamlessly cut across mobile, web, and live interaction, hopping on and off them like double-decker buses, all with the same pass.

5. Creating Relevant Social Networks - People will create, join, and seek social networks that enable them to have meaningful and relevant experiences with each other. They will measure their return on investment (time spent, level of disclosure, etc.) in replies, comments, their ability to influence, and the value of their learning. Rachel Masters, VP of Strategic Relationships at Ning – a social network that grew a massive 388% in 2008 — says, “the Internet is confusing because it can be used to replicate almost any previous medium. Ning addresses this by delivering social networks that allow people to connect around the things they love.”

6. Innovating in the Advertising Space - Ad publishers and the attached ecosystem will continue to lose revenue until they realign their understanding of what appeals to people who are conversing, connecting, and expressing. The next phase of social media is a gold mine of targeted niche demographics. Nuconomy, an Israeli startup, experiments in creating and delivering highly targeted, dynamic display advertising. Shahar Nechmad, Nuconomy’s co-founder and CEO, says that, on average, Nucomony customers see six to nine times higher click-through rates on targeted ads than on non-targeted ones. “People do click on ads and buy things in the same session,” says Nechmad. Ad agencies and publishers that are able to quickly realign their thinking and create an innovative and relevant product discovery experience will gain significant competitive advantage.7. Helping People Organize their “Old” Social Ecosystem - As aggregating platforms enter the field, people will seek to bring order to the endless bits of information available to them. Video tagging, conversation archiving, taking cloud computing to the next stage, and making search more relevant are some of the new baseline requirements. These represent a significant opportunity for companies willing to undertake this massive endeavor.

8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World - With some exceptions, today’s active social media users are early adopters. In the next one to two years, the benefits of social media will cross the chasm and reach the mainstream, not only in the US but around the world — especially in community-driven regions like Southeast Asia andcountries like Brazil, Russia, and Germany. Companies will need to understand the explicit and implicit differences between adoption patterns in different countries and adjust their products to meet these different needs.

9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs - It has been a harsh year for marketing firms. Companies are looking to divert marketing dollars to more targeted social media destinations. And this is just the beginning. David Spark, founder ofSpark Media Solutions, says that businesses will need to go beyond paying people to Tweet or put up a Facebook page. Social media’s new job descriptions will call on subject-matter experts who can plan for relevant interaction within networks and aggregating platforms and bring together products, services, and people.

10. Making Money - The next phase of social media will bring plenty of lucrative opportunities. With the rise of aggregating platforms, social networks, and new mobile and location-based features, we’re bound to see an increase in targeted and personalized ads, “freemium” packaging, revenue sharing between strategic partners, and a flow from the offline world to online social engagement (such as when real goods complement virtual ones).

On December 1st, 2008 the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group comprised of 7 leading economist, announced that the U.S. economy had been in retreat for nearly 12 months.  For anyone living in a cave for the last year, this may have come as a great surprise but for the rest of us, the recession had finally been made official.

At Cyber-NY, we began hearing concerns over the slowing economy from many of our clients as far back as October of 2007.   In the media, we observed economic indicators and news stories in the fall that would lead to a near panic as 2008 came to a close. For many, the new year began in retail paralysis. Nobody is spending, and most businesses are suffering declines.

There is no doubt that this is a time to cut back and make sure your business is in order and as efficient as possible.  No matter what category of business, be it retail, b2b, entertainment, professional services, etc… it is a tough environment to find new customers and grow existing sales. If you are in this situation, you have to spend less and make the most of what resources you have.  But remember, cut backs and budget reductions are a necessary measure but will not restore or increase business.  They are survival tactics but must be accompanied by additional measures to bring in new businesses.

For my business, I will cut back to reduce my expenditures until I adjust to current conditions.  But I will increase spending and dedicate resources in other areas that will help counteract the slowing economy.  For example, I have increased my online advertising for business development and am increasing online outreach, social networking, online communication and improving my website.

Why Put a Stronger Focus on the Internet?  For the same reason, many other businesses are.

1. Search Engine Marketing (a.k.a. PPC, Contextual, Google AdWords, etc…) can produce immediate, mesurable results and I can adjust or suspend the budget almost immediately.  I can optimize to adjust to changing conditions as needed.

2. Social networking and online outreach are a cost effective ways to stay in front of existing customers and find new ones.  It can also improve your search engine optimization through inbound linking.  We make sure our clients are utilizing Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other appropriate methods to cost effectively stay in front of new and potential customers.  Remember, these forms of soft marketing should be a two-way street.  You can learn from and promote your customers as well.

3. Increase online communication efforts.  Utilize email newsletters to build and strengthen tour customer base.  Reach out to new customers through a blog or video.

4. Make sure your website is up to date with fresh content and an effective design.  Have a strong call-to-action on the site geared towards your key objectives.  Gather email addresses, direct customers to the phone or make sales directly online.

5. Sell Online.  If you are not selling directly online, now is the time to begin.  Ecommerce will allow you to effectively sell on a larger scale.  You will also find that it will improve your local sales even if you have a retail presence in the community.  If you require assistance with Ecommerce, shopping cart integration or credit card processing, Cyber-NY can help.

There are many more reasons but each business has its unique set of requirements.  The most compelling reasons for focusing efforts online are that it is cost-effective and will give you the quickest results at a time when changes are required in a time efficient manner.  Many of these strategies can be implemented in-house or internally by individuals with online experience.  Other services may require assistance from a consultant or agency… but with current economic conditions, you will be able to negotiate a better rate in 2009 than you may have received in previous years.  I have a feeling no reasonable offers will be turned down in the near term so, the best gains will be made by the bold marketers and business owners with a budget left to take advantage of current opportunities.

With every downturn, there is an upside for those that see the opportunity and take advantage in a prudent, and well thought out course.  Good luck and let me know if you need any help!  As I said, no reasonable offers will be refused as we continue to build successful online businesses.

Article Posted by Mike Brown
Cyber-NY Interactive
212-475-2721

www.cyber-ny.com

Across most industries, the formal document for requesting an estimate for services is called a Request for Proposal or RFP. An RFP enables the individual or company to present a uniform overview and define requirements for a project simultaneously to multiple vendors in a professional and effective manner. Because my experience is predominantly within web services and online marketing, this article is focused on developing RFPs for website development or internet related services but the principals hold true for most other types of RFPs in other industries.
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