SEO Werkt!

De laatste jaren schieten de mobiele start-ups als paddenstoelen uit de grond. Veel van deze mobiele partijen ontwikkelen een app, waarbij de meesten al snel in de vergetelheid raken. Het Nederlandse Plot pakt de zaken anders aan en biedt een location based marketing tool voor bestaande apps. Hiermee kunnen retailers potentiele klanten bereiken wanneer deze in de buurt komen van één van hun winkels.

Ik interviewde Paul Everts van Plot.
Lees Meer over: Paul Everts (mobile startup Plot): “We brengen de klant weer in de winkel”.

SEO is about your customers not the search engines

Nope, we haven’t gone mad; search engine optimisation really is all about your customers.

Most SEO companies are now playing nicely and not condoning devious techniques such as link buying, hidden text and generally exploiting every loophole and short cut they can find.

Why?

Apart from the fact that they were attracting hefty penalties for their clients, they’ve now realised that search engine marketing is more like social marketing and everything must be centred around the customer not the search engines.To be successful on line today, your strategy must include not only general keyword optimisation for your website’s structure and content, it must also involve social media marketing aimed at your customers.

No, that doesn’t mean sending out a raft of marketing messages every minute in the hope that you’ll wear down your customers and make them buy from you. Instead it’s about engaging with your audience, providing them with useful content and information and optimising your web content to reflect your customers’ needs.

For many start ups all of this can be quite confusing so this 10 minute video by Maile Ohye of Google might help. In 10 minutes she talks you through some basic search engine optimisation techniques for start ups to help you get on the right track.

It’s well worth a watch, so grab a coffee.

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The challenge for VCs is that it is easy to spend a lot of time going nowhere on advised deals. Good advisors know that the way to reach the highest price is to keep investors guessing about whether they are going to win the deal. As a result there is usually at least one VC who invests a lot of resources and then loses. And when you lose a deal as a VC you are left with very little, and often precisely nothing, to show for your efforts.

I am much more excited, however, to see an email from someone I respect who is helping a company because he is on the board or board of advisors. I generally feel that my chances of success are much higher from this kind of introduction because it will be less widely shopped, and, ceteris paribus, it will get more attention than an advised deal.

”

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– Nic Brisbourne, Advisors: they don’t help VCs, but they can help start-ups via The Kernel

Interessante start-ups, websites, projecten, initiatieven… we kunnen er geen genoeg van krijgen. Toch hadden deze nog geen eigen plekje op Marketingfacts. Tot vorige week, want startups en andere leuk initatieven krijgen een eigen rubriek in een Marketingfacts-jasje, onder de simpele doch retro naam: Nieuw! Met vandaag: verandervan.nl. Lees meer over: Nieuw! Verandervan.nl.

Interessante start-ups, websites, projecten, initiatieven… we kunnen er geen genoeg van krijgen. Toch hadden deze nog geen eigen plekje op Marketingfacts. Tot vandaag, want startups en andere leuk initatieven krijgen een eigen rubriek in een marketingfacts-jasje, onder de simpele doch retro naam: nieuw! We trappen deze serie af met VergelijkDeKinderopvang, een website waarop het mogelijk is om verschillende instellingen die gericht zijn op kinderopvang met elkaar te vergelijken. En dan nu het woord aan….Michiel Daalmans. Lees meer over: Nieuw: vergelijk de kinderopvang.

Court documents pertaining to Apple’s upcoming jury trial against Samsung have revealed a number of very early iPad and iPhone design prototypes, some of which bear resemblance to mock-ups of the company’s rumored next-generation handset.

No system is immune to hangs and freeze-ups, and that includes even the most austere Linux desktop. What sets Linux apart is a key that can call out to the core kernel to un-freeze your desktkop, kill memory-hogging services, and cause a clean restart. More »

It was only a few weeks ago that we first heard about Angry Birds coming to Samsung’s Smart TVs, and it would appear that one of the most popular games in the world has now become available on select models.

You see, Angry Birds has been revamped to work with Samsung’s Smart Interaction feature, meaning that the user will sling birds without a remote control or touch interface, as the game is entirely gesture-controlled.

The Angry Birds game will work on Samsung’s 2012 LED 7500 Smart TV and up, along with the Plasma 8000 models.

The company first debuted the game on the 75-inch ES9000 LED Smart 3D TV. As you can expect, this model comes with all of Samsung’s new “smart” additions, such as Smart Interaction, Smart Content and Smart Evolution, which lets you control the TV with your voice or gestures, share content across devices, and upgrade the TV.

If you already own one of the LED 7500 (or ups) or the Plasma 8000, the Angry Birds app is available as a free download from Samsung’s Smart Hub. If, for some reason, you’re interested in the 75-inch ES9000 LED Smart 3D TV that Samsung’s just recently debuted, which packs Angry Birds right on the device, it’s expected to hit shelves in August starting $9,999.

[via Big Picture Big Sound]

Startups like Cater2.me, Eat Club, and ZeroCater are trying to deliver a better food experience at work, but right now, they’re mostly limited to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, however, Cater2.me is announcing its expansion into New York.

Cater2.me co-founder Zach Yungst says the company has now served more than 800,000 meals to companies like Apple, Dropbox, and Square. It matches up small food vendors with companies in need of catering — workers get varied, (hopefully) tasty meals delivered to their offices with a minimum of hassle, and food carts, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and other small vendors can reach a new audience. (TechCrunch HQ gets its lunches from ZeroCater, which offers a similar service.)

The downside, of course, is that Cater2.me has build up a new network of food vendors and customers in each geography. And in New York, there are some unique intricacies to the geographic landscape — co-founder Zach Yungst says that many of the potential customers are in Manhattan, while most of the vendors are in Brooklyn.

At the same time, Yungst says Cater2.me brings some advantages to the New York market. There’s the fact that he and his co-founder Alex Lorton both worked in Manhattan, and still have ties to the financial community there. Plus, there’s a growing tech community and food scene. Cater2.me now has a team of five in New York, including Lorton, and has enlisted 30 food vendors. It’s now taking sign-ups for a limited number of New York companies, with plans for a full roll-out soon.

A guest post by Clare Evans of Bird and Co.

Though most social media failures may not be as spectacular as Kenneth Cole’s error—the clothing company infamously jumped on a hashtag bandwagon in 2011 and things went spectacularly wrong—social media can prove damaging for your reputation if you get it wrong.

In recent months, we’ve seen just how quickly your company’s failure can go viral. Overnight, the once respected health and wellness chain LA Fitness went from hero to zero, thanks to the power of Twitter. The story spread quickly and left some serious stains on the company’s good name. You can spend years building up a solid reputation for your business, but it only takes one rogue tweet to ruin everything.

Social media isn’t just about the potential harm to your brand’s good name, however. Social media is also a great way to monitor what people say about your business.

1. Respond to Brand Mentions

Dashboard applications, such as HootSuite and TweetDeck, are great tools for managing your social media and monitoring your reputation. Those applications let you set up custom fields that alert you every time your brand name is mentioned—whether folks use your Twitter or Facebook handle or not.

That means you can respond to all brand mentions, tweets of your posts, and negative comments. By responding quickly and doing your upmost to resolve the issue, you can preserve your company’s good name.

By responding to positive mentions, you can cement a reputation for excellence. You can prove that customer satisfaction is important to you, and you can show a more human side to your business. That will encourage people to use your services or to buy from you again.

2. Have a Social Media Crisis Plan

Even if you sensibly use social media, you should develop a crisis plan. If the worst does happen, you need to be quick to act to salvage your reputation. Whether the crisis is a rogue tweet or a negative brand mention, you need to know how to act in that situation.

If someone posts something potentially damaging about your company, don’t jump in and react rashly and rudely. Instead, message the person, ask what the issue is, and how you can help resolve it. Often, people don’t expect a reply; they will calm down if the issue is at least partly resolved.

Similarly, make sure you have a course of action to take should you receive some negative PR. Use your social media platforms to restore faith in your brand. But be careful not to actively shift the blame, especially if you are actually in the wrong.

3. Use Social Media Best Practices

To prevent a social media slip-up, you should outline social media best practices for your business. They don’t have to be strict guidelines but a general agreement about what content should (and shouldn’t) be posted. It may be advisable to stick to posting your work, relevant posts from your industry, images you’ve taken yourself, and a few human elements to your company.

Posts can be taken the wrong way over social media, especially as people can’t tell your tone of voice. Therefore, it is important to remain professional but show a little personality. At least this way, you are more approachable to your clients.

Your online reputation is often the difference between your making a sale or your losing one. The Internet has made it very easy for customers to research what real people are saying about you before they buy.

Clare Evans is a copywriter at Bird and Co.

(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Gossip)