How To Become A Top Networker

Ilya Pozin, Contributor

I cover entrepreneurship and digital marketing

 

 

 

 

Networking can be intimidating. But it’s an important task for those who want to set up future jobs, business deals, and partnerships. More often than not, it’s not about what you know, but who you know.

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Sure, I had a great mentor who helped me to launch my Web design company, Ciplex, but throughout my career, I saw it was a struggle for any young professional to make the connections they need to succeed. Plenty of people want to move up in their industry or profession, but don’t know how to approach top executives or other industry leaders.

The fact is, networking can be overwhelming and downright intimidating. But throughout our lives, we’ll end up in these situations in which we have the opportunity to build successful professional relationships.

For those aspiring to move up, what’s the best way to network while building credibility? To find out, I spoke to Jim Riley, founder of Kaleio, a company that aims to revolutionize global workforce communication. Here are his tips:

Have a goal. Before going to a networking event or reaching out to a networking contact, it’s important to ask yourself what you want to get out of the interaction. Ask yourself: Do I want to get introduced to a certain person? Do I want advice on reaching a specific business, professional, or personal goal? Or, do I want to offer my skills to a particular professional or company? Approaching a professional with a clear goal in mind will help you to communicate clearly about what it is you need.

Focus on high impact conversations. Develop a 60-second elevator pitch to quickly communicate who you are and what it is you’re looking for. Keep it simple and short, and always ask questions–ask the contact if they have time to chat more over coffee in the future, or if you can elicit some advice. Remember, networking is a two-way, mutually beneficial relationship. If you’re at a networking event, don’t get stuck talking to one person for too long–keep focused on memorable conversations with as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. To gracefully move on to the next conversation ask for their contact information.

Stick to a schedule. Networking is most effective when it’s done for long periods of time–not just once or twice. The best networkers create a schedule and stick to it. Create blocks of time you’ll devote to networking. For instance, commit to three networking events per month, or make it a goal to reach out to one professional a day via LinkedIn or email.

Show enthusiasm. It goes without saying that the best networking professionals are happy in what they do. Show you’re passionate about your industry, and people will notice–they’ll want to engage with you and hear your ideas. Ultimately, this will help you to move forward in your networking goals.

Stick to your word. If you tell a professional you’re going to do something for them, do it–and as quickly as possible! Remember, professionals in any industry are busy people. Show your credibility by following up on your word.

Swap out business cards for email. Instead of collecting business cards, send the professional an email immediately after the networking event. That way, you won’t be just another name on a list–they will have your contact information right when they need it.

Keep a list. Networking means talking to tons of different professionals in a short span of time. Often, this leads to information overload. Organize a list of professionals as you meet them, and include tags or labels that will help you to remember their contact information, the company or industry they represent, their expertise, and notes about your conversation.

Be brave. Being a great networker means not having fear when it comes to approaching others who have achieved great things. When you’re engaging with others, people will recognize that you’re not fearful, and they’ll embrace it. In short: Don’t think you can’t change the world. You just have to get out there and do it.

Networking doesn’t have to be difficult or intimidating. In the end, successful networking can be chalked up to a time commitment and focused energy.

Image courtesy of Victor1558; Flickr

 

 

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Launching a new site: 18 steps to successful metrics & marketing ~Guest post by Rand Fishkin

The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I’ll give my best recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. This won’t just help with search engine optimiztaion but on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site.

Install visitor analytics

1Nothing can be improved that is not tracked. Keeping these immortal words of wisdom in mind, get your pages firing analytics code before your first visitor. Google Analytics is the obvious choice, and customization options abound (for most sites more advanced than a basic blog, I’d highly recommend at least using first-touch attribution).

Google Analytics, or any other package (see some alternatives), needs to be placed on every page of your site and verified. Do yourself a favor and install in a template file you can be sure is on every page (e.g., footer.php). GA’s instructions will indicate that placing the code at the top of the page is key, but I’m generally in favor of leaving it at the bottom to help page load time for visitors (though the new asynchronous GA code is pretty fast).

Set up Google & Bing Webmaster Tools accounts

2Both Google & Bing have webmaster tools programs that monitor data about your site and message it back to you through online interfaces. This is the heartbeat of your site from the search engines’ perspective and for that reason, it’s wise to stay on top of the data they share.

That said, the numbers inside these tools are not perfect and often have serious flaws. The referring keywords and traffic data are, in my experience, far off what analytics tools will report (and in those cases, trust your analytics, not the engines’ tools). Likewise, crawl, spidering and indexation data isn’t always solid, either. Nonetheless, new features and greater accuracy continue to roll out (more of the former than the latter unfortunately) and it’s worth having these both set up.

Run a crawl simulation of your site

3No matter how perfect you or your developers are, there are always problems at launch – broken links, improper redirects, missing titles, pages lacking rel=canonical tags (see more on why we recommend using it and the dangers of implementing improperly), files blocked by robots.txt, etc.

By running a crawl test with a free tool like Xenu or GSiteCrawler, or leveraging a paid tool like Custom Crawl from Labs or the Crawl Service in the Web App (pictured above), you can check your site’s accessibility and insure that visitors and search engines can reach pages successfully in the ways you want. If you launch first, you’ll often find that critical errors are left to rot because the priority list fills up so quickly with other demands on development time. Crawl tests are also a great way to verify contractor or outsourced development work.

Test your design with browser emulators

4In addition to testing for search engine and visitor accessibility, you’ll want to make sure the gorgeous graphics and layout you’ve carefully prepared checks out in a variety of browsers. My rule is to test anything that has higher than 2% market share, which currently means (according to Royal Pingdom): Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
There’s a great list of browser testing options from FreelanceFolder here, so I’ll just add that in-person testing, on your own PCs & Macs, is also a highly recommended use of an hour.

Set up RSS feed analytics

5Virtually every site will have some form of structured data being pushed out through an RSS feed. And, just like visitor analytics, if you want to improve the reach and quality of the feed, you’ll need to leverage data.

Feedburner is the de facto software of choice, and it’s very solid (though, good alternatives do exist). Getting your feed and the analytics to track and measure it is typically a very easy process because there’s nothing to verify – you can create and promote any feed you want with just a few button clicks.
One important recommendation – don’t initially use the counter “chiclet” like:

It has a bad psychological impact to see that no one has subscribed to your new RSS feed. Instead, just provide a standard link or graphic and after you’ve amassed a few hundred or thousand readers, use the numeric readout to provide additional social proof.

Tag the actions that matter

6No matter what your site is, there are actions you’re hoping visitors will take – from tweeting a link to your post to leaving a comment to buying a product or subscribing to an email list. Whatever those actions might be, you need to record the visits that make them through your analytics tool. Casey Henry’s post on Google Analytics’ Event Tracking will provide a thorough walk-through.
Once action tracking is in place, you can segment traffic sources and visit paths by the actions that were taken. If you’re pouring hours each day into Twitter mobile but seeing no actions, you might try a different channel, even if the traffic volume is high.

Conduct an online usability/branding test

7Before a formal launch, it can be extremely helpful to get a sense of what users see, experience and remember when they browse to your site for a few seconds or try to take an action. There’s some fantastic new software to help with this, including Clue App, screenshot below:

Last week, I set up a Clue App test for SEOmoz’s homepage in 30 seconds and tweeted a single link to it, which garnered 158 kind responses with words and concepts people remembered from the visit. This type of raw testing isn’t perfect, but it can give you a great look into the minds of your visitors. If the messages being taken away aren’t the ones you intended, tweaking may be critical.
In addition to Clue, dozens of other easy usability and user-testing apps are now on the market. Conversion Rate Experts has a good list here and Craig Tomlin’s got another excellent one.

Establish a KPI dashboard

8No matter what your website does, you live and die by some key metrics. If you’re starting out as a blogger, your Key Performance Indicators — RSS subscribers, unique visits, page views and key social stats (tweets, links, Facebook shares, etc.) — are your lifeblood. If you’re in e-commerce, it’s all of the above plus # of customers, sales, sales volume, returning vs. new buyers, etc.

Whatever your particular key metrics might be, you need a single place – often just a basic spreadsheet – where these important numbers are tracked on a daily or weekly basis. Setting this up before you launch will save you a ton of pain later on and give you consistent statistics to work back from and identify key trends.

Build an email list of friends & business contacts for launch

9It’s shocking how a friendly email blast to just a few dozen of your close contacts can help set the stage for a much more successful launch. Start by building a list of the people who owe you favors, have helped out and who you can always rely on. If you’re feeling a bit more aggressive in your marketing, you can go one circle beyond that to casual business partners and acquaintances.
Once you have the list, you’ll need to craft an email. I highly recommend being transparent, requesting feedback and offering to return the favor. You should also use the BCC field and make yourself the recipient. No one wants to be on a huge, visible email list to folks they may not know (and get the resulting reply-all messages).

Create your Google alerts

10The Alerts Service from Google certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s free, ubiquitous and can give you the heads up on some of the sites and pages that mention your brand or link to you in a timely fashion.

Unfortunately, the service sends through a lot of false positives – spam, scraper sites and low-quality junk. It also tends to miss a lot of good, relevant mentions and links, which is why the next recommendation is on the list.

Bookmark brand tracking queries

11To keep track of your progress and identify the sites and pages that mention or link to your new site, you’ll want to set up a series of queries that can run on a regular basis (or automated if you’ve got a good system for grabbing the data and putting it into a tracking application). These include a number of searches at Google, Twitter and BackType:

The queries should use your brand name in combination with specific searches, like the example below (using “seomoz” and “seomoz.org”):

• Google Blog Search mentions
• Google Blog Search links
• Google Web mentions (past 24 hours)
• Google News mentions
• Twitter Search
• BackType Search

You can add more to this list if you find them valuable, but these basics should take you most of the way on knowing where your site has been mentioned or referenced on the Web.

Make email sign-up/subscription available

12Capturing the email addresses of your potential customers/audience can be a huge win for the influence you’re able to wield later to promote new content, products or offerings. Before you launch, you’ll want to carefully consider how and where you can offer something in exchange for permission to build an email list.
One of the most common ways to build good lists is to offer whitepaper, e-book, video or other exclusive content piece for download/access to those who enter an email address. You can also collect emails from comment registration (which tend to be lower overall quality), through an email newsletter subscription offering (which tend to be very high quality) or via a straight RSS subscription (but you’ll need to self-manage if you want to have full access to those emails). Services like MailChimp, ExactTarget, Constant Contact and iContact are all options for this type of list building and management.

Create your site/brand’s social accounts

13Social media has become popular and powerful enough that any new site should be taking advantage of it. At a minimum, I’d recommend creating accounts on the following networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google Profiles
• YouTube (if you have or will have any video content)
• Flickr (if you have any graphics or images content)

And if you have more time or energy to devote, I’d also invest in these:

• Quora
• Slideshare (if you have any presentations)
• Scribd (if you have any document content)
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Any industry specific social portals (e.g. in software, this might include places like StackOverflow, Github and Hacker News)

Setting up these accounts diligently is important – don’t just reuse the same short bio or snippet over and over. Spend the time to build fleshed-out profiles that have comprehensive information and interact with peers and those with similar interests to help build up reputation on the site. The effort is worth the reward – empty, unloved social accounts do virtually nothing but active ones can drive traffic, citations, awareness and value.
BTW – Depending on the size and structure of your site, you may also want to consider creating a Facebook Page, a LinkedIn Company Page and profiles on company tracking sites like Crunchbase, BusinessWeek and the Google Local Business Center.

Connect your social accounts

14If you’ve just set up your social account, you’ve likely added your new site as a reference point already, but if not, you should take the time to visit your various social profiles and make sure they link back to the site you’re launching.

Not all of these links will provide direct SEO value (as many of them are “nofollowed“), but the references and clicks you earn from those investigating your profiles based on your participation may prove invaluable. It’s also a great way to leverage your existing branding and participation to help the traffic of your new site.

Form a list of target press, blogger & industry people for outreach

15Depending on your niche, you may have traditional media outlets, bloggers, industry luminaries, academics, Twitter personalities, powerful offline sources or others that could provide your new site with visibility and value. Don’t just hope that these folks find you – create a targeted list of the sites, accounts and individuals you want to connect with and form a strategy to reach the low-hanging fruit first.
The list should include as much contact information as you can gather about each target – including Twitter account name, email (if you can find it), and even a physical mailing address. You can leverage all of these to reach out to these folks at launch (or have your PR company do it if you have one). If you tell the right story and have a compelling site, chances are good you’ll get at list a few of your targets to help promote, or, at the least visit and be aware of you.

Build a list of keywords to target in search engines

16This is SEO basics 101, but every new site should keep in mind that search engines get lots of queries for virtually everything under the sun. If there are keywords and phrases you know you want to rank for, these should be in a list that you can measure and work toward. Chances are that at launch you won’t even be targeting many of these searches with specific pages, but if you build the list now, you’ll have the goal to create these pages and work on ranking for those terms.
As you’re doing this, don’t just choose the highest traffic keywords possible – go for those that are balanced: moderate to high in volume, highly relevant in terms of what the searcher wants vs. what your page/site offers and relatively low in difficulty.
See this post for more tips: Choosing the Right Key Phrases.

Set targets for the next 12 months

17Without goals and targets, there’s no way to know whether you’re meeting, beating or failing against expectations – and every endeavor, from running a marathon to cooking a meal to building a company or just launching a personal blog, will fail if there aren’t clear expectations set at the start. If you’re relatively small and just starting out, I’d set goals for the following metrics:

• Average weekly visits (via analytics)
• Average page views (via analytics)
• Number of new posts/pages/content pieces produced per month
• Number of target contacts (from item #15) that you’ve reached
• Social media metrics (depending on your most frequently used platform)
• Any of the key items from #8 on this list (your KPI dashboard)

And each of these should have 3, 6 and 12 month targets. Don’t be too aggressive as you’ll find yourself discouraged or, worse, not taking your own targets seriously. Likewise, don’t cut yourself short by setting goals that you can easily achieve – stretch at least a little.
Every 3-6 months, you should re-evaluate these and create new goals, possibly adding new metrics if you’ve taken new paths (RSS subscribers, views of your videos, emails collected, etc.)

Plug in the SEOmoz Web App

18I know this one’s a bit self-serving, but I’d like to think I’d add it here even if my company didn’t create it (I recently set up my own personal blog and found the crawling, rank tracking and new GA integration features pretty awesome for monitoring the growth of a new site).

The SEOmoz Web App has a number of cool tracking and monitoring features, as well as recommendations for optimizing pages targeting keywords, that make it valuable for new sites that are launching. The crawl system can serve to help with #3 on this list at the outset, but ongoing, it continues to crawl pages and show you your site’s growth and any errors or missed opportunities. Tracking rankings can let you follow progress against item #16, even if that progress is moving from ranking in the 40s to the 20s (where very little search traffic will be coming in, even if you’re making progress). And the new Google Analytics integration features show the quantity of pages, keywords and visits from search engines to track progress from an SEO standpoint.
Using this list, you should be able to set up a new site for launch and feel confident that your marketing and metrics priorities are in place. Please feel free to share other suggestions for pre- and post-launch tactics to help get a new site on its feet.
What other recommendations do you have?


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Why Facebook should stop charging to increase the reach of page posts.

                                         Photo courtesy of Justin Sullivan via Getty Images




Reevaluating Facebook’s monetization strategy

    Facebook pages are increasingly becoming an invaluable part of companies’ day-to-day marketing activities, but during last year’s Facebook Marketing Conference, Facebook announced to businesses that their page updates were seen by an average of only 16 percent of their fans through the news feed.
This caused quite a shock among companies. They weren’t entirely sure how Facebook’s news feed algorithm, EdgeRank, really worked or how much visibility they were actually getting but they were positive that it was higher than 16 percent.
Also beginning last year, Facebook introduced a way for page administrators to pay to promote posts to a wider audience.
Despite allegations that Facebook is now trying to force page owners to pay for reach by using promoted posts — see the flood of complaints from small business owners — the company has been aggressively fighting such reports. Facebook argues that the reason for the limit is not a shakedown but to avoid spam and make sure that Facebook’s news feed provides people with more of the content that they want to receive rather than content supplied by certain spammy brand pages.
So pages are now competing for a smaller share of users’ news feeds, and in order to gain significant exposure, they needed to invest money into promoting themselves. This all translates into spending a substantial budget on advertising.
Now it’s completely understandable that as a public company Facebook needs to make money for its shareholders, and advertising is the most direct path to revenue. While the company’s stock has rebounded in recent weeks, limiting the exposure of pages to such a low percentage of their members is, to my mind, a mistake.

Retention of fans has been a key part of Facebook’s appeal

Once a TV ad campaign is done, it’s done. But Facebook has always enabled brands to continue connecting with fans for free.

Let’s think for a moment: Why are brands and marketers on Facebook to begin with? Yes, there are over a billion people on Facebook and it’s an amazing platform to reach the masses. Yet at the same time, TV is still one of the most popular media platforms in the world, and while Facebook is the most visited site on the Web, other sites still get a lot of traffic, too. Google advertising is everywhere, and hundreds of millions of newspapers are sold every day. The truth is that Facebook’s value as a marketing tool is due not only to size or penetration but its most valuable asset: retention.
Unlike any other advertising tool, Facebook always gave brands the power to connect with audiences that responded to their advertising efforts, for free, even after the campaign was over. This was truly unique. Once a TV ad campaign is done, it’s done, and the only way to connect to that audience again is to buy more ad time and spend more money. This retention of fans is why Facebook has always been so appealing to marketers: It enabled them to forge a long-term connection with their community and not a quick one-off type of relationship.

Facebook’s other options for increasing revenue

Once Facebook started chewing away at the freemium part of that model, it lost that unique edge over other marketing tools. I’ve heard from a few different companies that they felt “cheated” by the world’s largest social network, as they had worked so hard to grow a substantial, lively community and now Facebook was substantially limiting the number of members they could actually reach with their content.
To me, decreasing the exposure of pages in order to gain more money from advertising seems almost too obvious of a path when Facebook has so many other ways it could monetize. I’ve always expected Facebook to be a pioneer in its tactics and I expect the same in this case. What if Facebook increased page reach and added some other, more creative monetization tactics to the mix?
What are some other ways Facebook could make money?

1. Business page fees: Regardless of the exact amount of reach, businesses are gaining a great deal of value from Facebook pages. Facebook could ask for a small subscription fee from businesses to maintain a page on its platform. This will put marketers at ease, since they know that for a set fee, they can reach and connect with most of their audience.
2. Increase of friendship limit: I know many people (including myself) who would pay a small monthly fee to be able to connect to more than 5,000 friends. Again, Facebook would be monetizing its user base, but not in a “must have” sort of way but rather in an optional way for receiving a premium feature.
3. Phone calls: Just like Skype, Facebook could let users call their friends’ cell phones even when they’re not online for a small fee, using Facebook Messenger’s VoIP functionality.
4. Facebook Offers: A few companies have complained about the fact that unlike other online coupon systems, Facebook Offers doesn’t require the customer to do anything other than click them, thus reducing conversion and ultimately revenue. If Facebook restructures its Offers to work more like other online coupons, it can make it a better sales tool and also take a little off the top. Beyond this being an obvious revenue channel, Facebook can also bring in a great deal more ad revenue from advertisers that want to use a more sales-oriented approach.
5. Real-time insights: Currently one annoying aspect in managing Facebook pages is that Page Insights take two days to update. For a small fee Facebook could create “Premium Pages” that receive insights in real time — an invaluable tool for any big brand, especially during a campaign (either on or off Facebook).

There are many ways that Facebook could monetize itself without chasing away marketers and brands. It would seem that keeping page reach higher while adding other forms of monetization to the mix would be more in line with Facebook’s values of keeping us all connected to the people and brands that we like and enjoy.
Facebook proclaims on its home page: “Sign up. It’s free and always will be.” However, to continue being a free platform for users, Facebook must find ways to survive. We shouldn’t be angry about the need of this enormous ecosystem to sustain itself. We should be happy to have a platform that enables us to communicate, engage and develop together as a human race more effectively and regularly than ever before. I expect there’s some sort of price to be paid for that. The question is how much are we willing to pay, and for what?

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The Impact Of No More Third-Party Cookie Targeting In Firefox

By John Ebbert

Mozilla's move to stop third-party cookie tracking in the latest version of its Firefox browser - echoing Apple's Safari browser attributes - has attracted wide attention across the advertising industry. And no wonder - Mozilla's Firefox has about a 23% share among consumers in the browser market.
AdExchanger reached out to a selection of executives in the industry and asked the following question:

With Mozilla shutting off third party cookie targeting, what will be the impact on online ad buyers?

Click below or scroll down for more:

• Aaron Bell, CEO, AdRoll
• Sam Barnett, CEO, Struq
• Jonathan Mendez, CEO, Yieldbot
• Dax Hamman, CRO/CSO, Chango
• Eric Bosco, CEO, ChoiceStream

Aaron Bell, CEO, AdRoll

"The Internet is great because it allows ideas and content to flow freely. You can hop from your custom radio station, to your bottomless Gmail account, to a friend's Twitter feed, to a foreign newspaper, to a game of Scrabble with your mom. We’ve come to rely on these services and expect to access them for free, without paywalls or contracts.
Display ads make this possible. They are the lifeblood of the Internet. The only form of display with a reliable return on investment for advertisers is audience-based targeting. And that’s the reason just about every product or service brand now uses these techniques.
The internet economy has matured to depend so heavily on this type of advertising, parties on either side must not act unilaterally with crude changes, or else privacy could devolve into a cat-and-mouse game. Browsers will add obstructions, advertisers will find new workarounds, and with no standards, ultimately the users will be the ones left behind. While early AdChoices and Do Not Track are not perfect, they are coordinated steps towards a thriving internet in which users have more transparency and control."

Sam Barnett, CEO, Struq

"The implications of these changes are bad for business, bad for the Internet, and bad for users. The first result will be that websites and publishers will see an immediate reduction in their revenues, as non-personalised ad targeting commands onlymmerce, a small fraction of the CPMs that targetable impressions are able to command. The changes will also have a direct, detrimental impact on ecommerce businesses, many of whom rely on cookie-based performance marketing to bolster their sales.
This seems a strange move at a time when the industry has taken great strides to collectively self-regulate with a focus on giving consumers choice. This removes that choice when consumers have consistently indicated that they would prefer fewer, more-relevant ads."

Jonathan Mendez, CEO, YieldBot

"Privacy in general online is a slow roll but it is inextricably being driven by consumer sentiment and heavy lobbying in DC to eliminate the use of 3rd party data. For some ad tech players it's obvious eliminating 3rd party data will kill their business.
For consumers the effects will be negligible. Over the past decade 3rd party data has done little to make advertising more relevant. This is the root of the entire issue. If consumers experienced benefits from this data use and thus advertisers, there would be no issue with its use.
For publishers it will drive CPMs higher. Considering the largest publishers on the web are Google, Facebook and Yahoo that should be a good thing for the digital ecosystem. Publisher 1st party data is better data for advertisers anyway. Performance will improve for advertisers and in the end the irony will be that more ad dollars will flow to digital because of eliminating 3^rd party data (and moving towards 1st party data) than came to digital from having it."

Dax Hamman, CRO/CSO, Chango

"Like many in the industry, including the IAB, we would prefer this move was not occurring, but at the same time, don't expect revenue impact from it.
The decision to include this functionality activated by default will lessen the consumer experience by removing relevancy (and not just in advertising), remove their choice (because many won't know this is occurring) and set a precedence that fails to balance the needs of the consumer and the marketing industry. For small publishers, the decision is worse; such organizations will loose the ability to generate revenue from advertising, and may therefore disappear.
While this move alone won't have huge ramifications, we could see new behaviors occurring in the future, such as publishers not allowing visitors access to their content with certain browser types. After all, as an individual on Facebook you are not the consumer, you are the product, and you cease to have value, Facebook may cease to let you in."

Eric Bosco, COO, ChoiceStream

"Mozilla’s default third party cookie setting will cause the percent of users opted out of tracking to jump from 1% to about 20%, which will be significant for the first time. Programmatic media buyers with accurate targeting needs will avoid Firefox inventory. The general inventory reduction will have an impact on prices. Loss of an entire audience segment will have an unknown but potentially bigger impact.
In the short term, Firefox 10 users will have a less relevant and more annoying ad experience. Without tracking from impression to conversion, the majority of display campaigns on Firefox will likely be low cost CPC campaigns such as tooth whitening products, supplemental diet pills, etc. This is a terrible outcome for the industry, which has been evolving beyond the click and will be forced to step backward.
Longer term, the publishing and ad industries will change business models and technology. The lower advertising value of a Firefox user will accelerate the trend towards pay walls. Advertisers will find work-arounds such as browser envelope profiling (see https://panopticlick.eff.org/), Flash cookie persistency, or yet to be engineered alternatives. These work-arounds will reduce transparency to consumers compared to the existing, self-regulated methods of the IAB and NAI."

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Linked Social Media Accounts May Be Hurting Your Business~by EPR Contributor

     Once upon a time, marketing was about designing informative business cards, ordering a bold banner and having pamphlets printed up to deliver to mailboxes. Today, it’s about interacting with 3,000 people on Facebook; utilizing the right hashtags on Twitter and Instagram; coming up with clever names for Pinterest boards; and staying on top of ever-changing Google algorithms. Without social media, Internet marketing simply doesn’t work. How can various profiles and platforms be successfully juggled, though?

Be Wary of Linking Profiles

It’s possible to set up social media accounts so that every time a post goes up on one, it also automatically posts to six other profiles. For example, a photo can be simultaneously uploaded to Instagram and immediately posted it to Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. Or, Facebook friends can see a user’s Pinterest activity without actually having to visit their virtual pin board.

What Works for One Doesn’t Work for Another

To a certain extent, this is helpful. Instagram and Twitter operate in similar ways, using photos and hashtags to their advantage, which means an Instagram post can also go far on Twitter. However, if Instagram-only hashtags are used, like #InstaGood or #IGERS (short for Instagrammers), it’s not helping out a Twitter account.

Information That Has to Span All Accounts

Another seemingly helpful perk of linked profiles is that if there’s important information to be shared, it should be shared everywhere. While that’s absolutely correct, different social media profiles are maximized in their own unique ways. Photos work well on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, and they can also hold their own on Tumblr and Twitter. Look at these differences, though:

• Facebook photos don’t link to external web pages. Links don’t do well on Facebook, so a photo should be accompanied by nothing or just a short caption.
• Instagram is primarily used on cell phones, so linking to web pages isn’t all that useful. Instagram-friendly hashtags make it easy for users to find a profile’s photos, though, which can help increase views.
• Pinterest photos link directly to web pages and SEO as well as hashtags can be used in the image’s description.
• Tumblr is extremely easy to upload photos to and tags can be used to help users find images, but it’s not as great a platform as other social media sites.
• Pictures on Twitter do just fine and hashtags are used the most on this site. Plus, promotional Tweets and external links do well on Twitter.

So, What’s the Answer?

Keep social media networks separate whenever possible. Otherwise, every single Pin, Tweet and Facebook post is going to show up on your other profiles. This is bad because, as we know, posts have to be written in different ways for different social media profiles.
Also, differentiating posts means that to fully keep up with your business, people have to be looking at each of your profiles. It gives consumers a reason to explore and feel like they’re always finding something new. For example:

• Facebook can share really great photos and the latest company news, along with specials and discounts that customers will benefit from.
• Twitter can be used to link to external sites and for hardcore business promotion.
• LinkedIn is ideal for networking with other industry professionals and posting information that your contacts will find interesting.
• Pinterest is one of the best websites for businesses that sell visually appealing products, like clothing or jewelry. Create different boards and Pin all of your new products over the weekend.

Think of it this way: If you can find everything on a business’ Facebook page, then why head over to their Twitter at all? People sign onto one social media platform to find out what’s happening there. When they want something different, they head to another website. Give them something different everywhere they go and they’ll keep returning to see what’s new.


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Guess Who Daniel and MWD Bony Meet?~ By Kevin Hanrahan

Just a little change of pace today from the usual business news...I hope you enjoy it and learn how our hard working four legged support team help our men and women in uniform.

Once outcast and shunned from the military dog community, U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Sandoval had gotten a second chance.

He was accepted into Fort Bragg’s dog kennels unconditionally. When his newborn son Carter was born with meconium in his lungs making the baby’s oxygen level very low just weeks before Daniel and Military Working Dog Bony were supposed to attend certification, Daniel was given no choice.
His leadership ordered him to the Neo-Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the hospital to be with his family.
Team certification and his deployment could wait.
But now it was a two months later, Carter was doing well, and his wife Sabrina had a handle on things on the home front.
Well, the truth was that she was surviving alone with three kids, but he knew she was proud of him. They both knew that deploying to a combat zone as a dog handler was something that Daniel needed to do.
It was a personal journey to redeem his honor.
Bony yawned and shook the plastic Vari-kennel as he tried to stretch his 100-pound body in the cramped space.
Lucky for Daniel he was paired with the Bony, The Grey Wolf.

The Grey Wolf scopes out the ladies.

A pretty, petite female Airman walked by as Bony nosed his snout through the mesh door and let out a short whine.
She stopped, the scowl on her face replaced by a smile as she said, “Oh, look a puppy. Can I pat him?”
Daniel’s buddy SGT James “JB” Bethea looked at him, then stroked MWD Jetta’s square head and chuckled.
Daniel had warned James during their flight over here.
Friggin’ Bony man, he could be a mean son of a bitch, but for some reason he loved the ladies.
Too bad he hadn’t had Bony as a partner when he was a young single guy.
Daniel obliged the Airman’s request and he watched her eyes light up when she looked at the dog. He opened up the kennel, snapped a six-foot leash on Bony’s harness, and—before he could even give the Grey Wolf a command to come—the big dog was snuggled up to the Airman’s leg relishing her attention.
JB just smiled at him and was probably thinking the same thing: this 10-year-old greying shepherd knew how to get what he wanted.
They were at Bagram Airbase, the largest point of arrival for U.S. service members in Afghanistan.
There were throngs of Service Members on the street between the Bagram Airbase terminal and the Pat Tillman USO as Daniel stared out toward the horizon and the mountainous territory surrounding the largest U.S. Airbase in the country.
The jagged light brown mountains seemed to rise up and disappear into the clouds. It was anabsolutely spectacular site, even if it was in Afghanistan.
He knew it was the most densely populated base in Afghanistan. It was also home to the Combined Joint Special Operations Forces Military Working Dog Kennel.

Combined Joint Special Operations Forces Military Working Dog Kennel, Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan

This is where Daniel and Bony would become acclimated to Afghanistan, conduct theater specific training, and imprint Bony with the explosive scents commonly found in Afghanistan.
These non-traditional homemade explosives (HME) were virtually impossible to secure in the states for training. Because HME was the number one explosive used by the Taliban, it was critical that Bony be trained on detecting it.
A bright red pickup truck approached and Dan’s heart start to thump when he saw “Danger Military Working Dog” in black lettering on the side of the truck.
“We have to go,” Daniel told the Airman as he nodded at the red truck. Two soldiers stepped out of the truck and approached them.
Bony had whined when his new girlfriend had walked away and had already retreated into his Vari-kennel. Most dogs hated the kennel, but for some reason The Grey Wolf loved to lounge around in his kennel.
He and JB loaded up the dogs and their gear and they headed down Disney Boulevard, the main drag of Bagram Airbase. There was construction everywhere. Troops and civilians flooded the sidewalk on the street. Daniel looked out in wonder.
This was his first combat deployment and he was going to do it with a Special Forces units. He knew there would be a steep learning curve.
The next morning Daniel walked to the kennel in order to check on Bony. The Grey Wolf needed to be tended to before he got himself some chow.
Outside the kennel Daniel saw a tall, wiry soldier with a large yellow Labrador Retriever on a retractable 26-foot leash. The soldier’s uniform was faded, his face was deeply tan, and his “special forces” beard grew from his chin.
“Hey, man, you new?” asked the soldier.
“Just got here last night,” Dan started to say. Before he could finish his sentence, the 90-pound yellow Labrador leaped up with his massive paws, planting them on his chest, and caused Daniel’s body to jolt backwards.
He steadied himself and looked at the handler whose name tag he could now read. It said Nolan.
“Cool, man. I’m John Nolan and this knucklehead is Honza.”

John Nolan, Specialized Search Dog Honza “Bear” and their new French friend!

“Honza Bear.”
John pulled at the leash, freeing Daniel’s torso of the powerful dog’s paws. Honza Bear whined, but then began sniffing Daniel’s boots.
Daniel slid his hand down and rubbed the dog’s square head.
“You guys go get some chow. We have training to do today,” Sergeant First Class Jenkins, his new kennel master, called out.
“No rest for the wicked,” Johns said as he smiled and shook his head.
Sergeant Daniel Sandoval had arrived. But he knew he was no longer in Afghanistan for redemption.
Daniel was now in Afghanistan to keep himself and his fellow service members alive.
How does Bony respond to Afghanistan and the HME scents?
What mischief does John Nolan lead Daniel into?
Where is Daniel heading to next in Afghanistan?
Stay tuned for the next chapter in this true story

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