Testimonials

“Rocket fuel for the technophobe. I have four websites, two blogs, and am now lecturing on new media—all this from someone who has trouble getting a snack out of a vending machine. Thanks, Peter.”

Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Author, The Hand of Buddha and Best Places Northern California, 4th ed.

www.lwmcferrin.com

“Peter Lang’s expertise and guidance has dramatically improved our company’s public relations, sales, and marketing capabilities as well as energizing our staff and helping us regain control of our message. His fast-moving, no-nonsense approach to problem solving has turned us from techno-phobes into social media enthusiasts. In one month, our followers have grown by the hundreds and we are creating a rapport with our patrons that we have not seen since our earliest years in this business.

The design Peter created for our new website is eye-catching yet logical and we are now able to make changes immediately — with no middle man. The new site can be constantly updated and coordinated with our social media pages as well as accommodating our ever-changing projects.

Peter has been extremely accessible throughout the process and has a gift for explaining difficult concepts simply. He is totally professional yet works with a high level of enjoyment and excitement that is contagious.

We are delighted with what Peter has accomplished in a short time on our behalf and look forward to continuing under his knowledgeable guidance. It has been a pleasure!”

Laurie Pessano
Vice President
Good Company Players

Top reasons why you NEED a social marketing strategy to take you to the top in 2010

1. Your customers are using social media

(though participation my be indirect)

A frequent statement is “well, my customers are non-technical” -wrong, social media is growing and is impacting their decisions. Not only does it impact customers, but everyday, we see it impacting traditional media. Television, radio, and newspapers are catching on to the fact that twitter is faster than the AP newswire.

2. Your competition is doing it.

A great way to find your competition online is when they start popping up for your best converting searches. Why are your competitors using social media? Easy, they are leveraging social media in order to create a global link through popularity and increase the awareness of the brand. By implementing social media your competitors are decreasing their overhead and creating a relationship with the customers.

3. Your vendors and partners are using it

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find someone who’s not using facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit, myspace, stumbleupon, and other large traffic social networks.

Has your site been on the homepage of digg or reddit? Has your site been stumbled? Do you know what it is? Do you think your no overhead web based competition from the Silicon Valley knows what it is?

4. More Social = more Search.

More Search = More Customers.

More customers = More business.

Obviously. The small town business globally is my coined expression for web. Each of us start with a Google search, then we use comments and reviews to find likeminded individuals. The ideal customer is one that is passionate and wants to have a conversation about you, your product, or something related (news, pictures, whatever). You need to be there to have the conversation WITH your customers. Otherwise, they will have it behind your back. You might not be able to rank right away on search engines anymore, but you can get to the top of a news or industry specific site for a few days with good content. By monitoring the content you are able to control your brand.

5. Paid search prices are rising.

PPC consulting is still a great solution to improving your ROI, and decreasing your CPC – but ease of this plan is becoming more challenging. It is great to be able to buy your keyword phrase to your targeted audience – but everyone is becoming wise to that fact. Those awesome high conversion, high profit keywords are slowly having the ROI sucked out of them by rising click prices. This makes organic search an essential long term strategy. Has your self-respecting search marketer told you about the need for natural links? And do you know where the best place for natural links are? I’ll save you the Google search -Social media link-baiting.

6. SEO isn’t easy anymore.

Man do I miss the days of buying run of site text links and ranking top for any search term. Like Jim, I would never buy links anymore (okay, maybe I’d TRADE for them if it was SUPER relevant). The days of the little guys ranking well in Google is slowly coming to an end, and a glorious era will go down in history. Pretty soon, however, it will be big business as usual. Those same big businesses have a while to catch on to social media FOR SEO, but they’ll do that eventually too. Personalized search is the next big thing (and yes it’s now REALLY almost here). You need lots of people coming to your site, staying on your site, and bookmarking your site for later to prove that you deserve to be on top of the search results.

7. Your website is only a billboard

So many out there are spending money in order to create the most beautiful website in the world. Yet, with this wonderful website comes empty traffic. All of the large corporations who’ve built wonderful sites and forgot about hiring a SEO know what I’m talking about.

You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. Just ask all those big corporations who paid millions to have their beautiful flash sites built, and forgot to hire a SEO. You launched your site, and now you need traffic, or it’s been there for a long time, and you need MORE traffic and exposure. You listened to the search engines, and created great content! (after all, content is king!) But you still don’t seem to have much traction, and only your Aunt Frita, Uncle Merv, and 6 other people are visiting your site every day.

8. Great ROI on the Marketing Budget

With the DIY route and use of social tools, social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of the web. Social media is building future communication empires like that of facebook, digg, reddit, delicious, as the distribution points for web communication. They are the portals that every dot-bust era wanted to be. Social media is separating the old from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embrace the technology. Do you?

Lets give you one last reason.

9. It’s a distribution point.