live to give baby

· SSocial Network Presence

o Established Presence on Twitter, constantly seeking followers and submitting press releases now via Tweets

o Facebook – Migrated to new “Page” During this process Facebook updated its business pages, used this to our advantage and implemented new features and took advantage of new stream feature. I also made sure to have our other members all parse their URL’s the same to increase SEO. I added all of our Foundation’s photos to my Facebook profile and had the other team members do this as well.

o MySpace– Created brand new page on MySpace, I am not really a fan of MySpace but the exposure is huge so I decided to leverage this

o LinkedIn – Created a group for our foundation and began to advertise the group on my LinkedIn profile

o YouTube – Created FanPage to distribute our videos. Made sure to tag them carefully to enhance SEO

· OOnline Presence

o I made sure to use consistent titling throughout our Social Network profiles so that we could jump higher in the google searches for related keywords

o As a result of this, we jumped drastically in the search results in a variety of keywords. In particular, we jumped to #1 after the search of live to give foundation, we weren’t even on the results prior to this

o I interlinked all of our web pages. I did this to increase our inbound links for all pages. I made sure to link them all with the same titles as well in the anchors of the links.

o Completely redesigned our website. I had previously started working on this page before the class started but made some drastic changes as I learned more about WordPress. I designed the page as a blog to increase communication between our leadership team, our donators, and our families. A big part of our cause is adding a personal touch and I chose to keep comment permissions in certain areas of the site for people to give feedback on.

o I created a Flickr account to store all of our albums. I thought that this was a good idea in addition to our Facebook albums because Flickr is completely public, I felt that the UI was easy to use for our audience that wasn’t very tech inclined.

o Set up account on 888pressrelase and PR.com for future press releases.

so long farewell

Wow time flies when you’re having fun, and when you only meet twice during the semester. Although I came into this class with an abundance of prior knowledge in social media platforms, I learned a lot of stuff about a couple new platforms that I had yet to use, and further gained experience and expertise in the ones I already used. For my presentation I’m going to obviously outline the weekly topics, but I want to focus my presentation on a few key points that I felt were the most important parts of this class.
• Twitter – This new method of communication is the way of the future. With the ability to find out what consumers are saying about your product at a given moment, and the instant communication across huge amounts of followers and folowees, twitter is a bright star in the future of social media.
• SEO – Pretty soon every aspect of our lives will be intertwined with search engines. With the sheer amount of information that accumulates daily on the internet, search engines especially Google will be vital to organizing and accessing data.
• LinkedIn – Facebook is great sure, but its not something that I would want to show off to my prospective employer. Linkedin is going to grow and become my number one online identity. I think the only thing that is holding it back right now is its UI is very clunky, but this can be improved
• Personas – Social networking sites are personal, so businesses need adapt to become transparent and assume the identity of someone that is persona, not a far off distant business entity. By assuming a similar persona to that of the target audience, the business will be better able to empathize.
Im looking forward to reading Presentation Zen on my cruise, Garry’s credentials as a design professional are unparalleled. I am looking forward to giving my first presentation under the influence of Zen

Digital PR

I’ve been on a roll here with my books this semester. First I read Small Giants and now David Meerman Scott’s New Rules for Marketing & PR. Scott has an undertone to his writing that gives off the aura of a blog. For this assisgment I submitted Scott’s website to PR.com because I figured it only made sense to use the best service available. I also used digg, twitter, stumble, and delicious to spread the word of Scott’s books. Do yourself a favor and check out his site, the guys got a great blog.

Practical Knowledge

The digital world is moving at the speed of light, and you need to stay on top of it. MSU’s New Media Drivers License course helps you keep up by creating an online community for students and challenging them with practical and engaging content. I took this class to satisfy my degree requirements and what I walked away with was so much more. The class only meets twice during the semester and you submit all of your assignments online, this allows you to work when time is best for you and you can really put some time and passion into your assignments. The course is taught by entrepenuer and dgital marketing genius Derek Mehraban, CEO of Ingenx Digital Marketing.

The focus of the class is a blog that you update once a week with a broad range of topics from running Google AdWord campaigns, to SEO, and creating your online persona through a variety of different web platforms. So far, everything I have learned I have already put into practice in not only my professional life, but in my personal life as well. This class also adds an independent study as a separate course credit. For mine i chose to increase my non-profit’s online presence by creating a new viral marketing campaign. I cannot say enough how much I have enjoyed this class, the topics are current and relevant and the sense of community between instructors and students is unparalleled. I urge you all to check this class out.

keywords keywords keywords

i absolutely loved this assignment. i felt that it was the first assignment that started getting a little deeper into the actual operations and syntax aspect of social media and SEO. I think the greatest part of doing SEO related things is that not only does it make it easier for engines to crawl your page, but i think it makes your webpage easier for a user to browse as well. by using structured hierecrchy with directories and root pages, you can make it a lot easier for a user to use a sitemap to cruise your site. I think that SEO is a very interesting topic because it is not down to an exact science yet. there are still lots of diferent ways taht differnt people and companies use to SEO your site, from interlinking, to using good meta destricptions, to using concise titles and clear directory structures.

I really like the concept of Social Harbor as well. I think it is a great way to make your self seen on the internet to eliminate the guess work and mystery of a potential employer. I really like delicious and digg but i have to say i am a little biased to stumbleupon. im interested to see if the new media blog actually makes the front page of delicious or digg, i think itd be pretty funny if one of my friends stumbledupon my class website.

live to give

so here is a little update on how my independent study is coming. for my topic selection i chose to make a new online marketing campaign for my charity, Live to Give. To start with, i am just putting the finishing touches on the website that i designed. This took a SIGNIFICANT amount of time to do. I am also in the process of migrating the facebook group into the more robust facebook page application for businesses, this will make it much easier to communicate with our donators and families. AFter all that is said and done I am going to start a viral distrubiton of all of our videos, through email contacts in gmail, then through youube and facebook to help bring about awarenss!

social networking

http://www.linkedin.com/in/m4doyle

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=12100666&ref=profile

http://twitter.com/b00ly

I really love the concept of twitter, its just a shame that not many of my friends use it.  I use a very simmilar tool at work called Yammer. Linkedin is GREAT and I am looking forward to actually spending a few hours and making it shine. Facebook is…. well its facebook ive always used it and its my favorite social networking tool. For my independent study I am overhauling my charity’s facebook group into a facebook page to spread awareness as well as share our media which is the heart of our foundation.

adword up

So for this week’s assignment we were tasked with setting up our very own Google AdWords campaign. This is a particular tool-set of Google’s that i have had absolutely zero hands on experience with but I was a little bit familiar with the concept. There is some controversy over the AdWords campaign scheme due to some critics believing that it has a monopoly over the entire online advertising industry, I disagree with this but at the same time in many ways it’s true.

I started out by doing the starter edition of AdWords and made my first ad. I used some of my own keywords but also used a lot of the category keywords that google provides during the setup. i found the AdWord keyword search/generator extremely helpful. I typed in the URL of my blog and it pulled up all of the relating keywords on the site in addition to suggesting some ones similar to mine. I can see how helpful this would be for commerical and e-commerce websites on the web. This experience with AdWords is really going to help with my online marketing campaign for my charity as to raise awareness not only within the state of michigan, but outside of it as well!.

i just got a virus

so i tried out google blog search for the first time and decided that I would do some digging on the subject of viral marketing. this is a very interesting topic because it isnt per say new but it is exploding with the networking capabilities that the internet provides. i learned that viral marketing can be anything, a game, a video, a good word passed between friends. i learned about this really cool company that specialized exclusivley in WOM campagns, and the results it promises are staggering. I am looking forward to seeing more types of marketing like this

sharing is caring

so for this weeks assignment I had to choose a google application that I dont normally use and analyze it.  i chose the google calendar. i already knew a bit about it but I found it very interesting that it integrates with gmail and recognize emails that contain events and automatically adds it to your calendar. i like it because as all things google, it is very user firendly and straight forward. I dont like that it seems rather hard to automatically integrate with windows calendar. i think its best feature is the sharing ability, its nice to be able to share you schedule and collaborate with others on a similar project.  I doubt that ill continue to use it because of its lack of integration with windows calendar, I keep it synced between my phone and my laptop already, no reason to have to do it by hand fom google as well.