612 - 208 - 6584

Yeah, I'm social...

February 2012 SearchFest Conference in Portland

December 27th, 2011

12/29/2011 Update: Attendees using the promo code MnSEARCH receive a 10% discount per the event below.

Over the years, search marketing and social media conferences have grown in both number and price. You want to make them whether it’s for learning or networking purposes, albeit hopefully for both.

There’s one in Portland, Oregon that has piqued my interest. If you’re in search, you may have heard of the February 2012 SearchFest conference by now. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I hope to for at least a couple reasons.

The first reason is price. For $299 (if you register by December 31) you can’t beat it.

And…

It’s a one-day conference, but it’s one, full, packed day with trusted in-the-field presenters including:

Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz
Marty Weintraub – aimClear
Rhea Drysdale – Outspoken Media
Greg Sterling – Sterling Market Intelligence
Countless others

Here’s the full agenda.

If you’re on even more of a budget, good news. Flights to Portland (from Minneapolis anyway) are currently inexpensive if you’re willing to have a layover.

Portland hotels are also reasonable, especially if you choose to stay near the airport. Why would you stay by the airport? The Max Light Rail can take you from the airport area right by the conference located at the Governor Hotel. If you have an Expedia account, check out “Flight + Hotel” options from 2/23/12 – 2/25/12. You may find a gem.

Here are a few inexpensive motels close to the Red Line and airport, all apparently includes Wifi and appear to have Expedia discounts:

Todd Mintz, David Mihm, Chris Lister, let me know if I’m incorrect in the above.

I’m a fan of mass transit, and all of this combined can probably be achieved at 1/4 of the price of other conferences.

The second reason I’m intrigued is because of the format. It looks like the presenters are mostly folks who get their hands dirty and implement what they preach.

This occurs at other conferences too, but there was a recent one that had a lot to do with big-box companies and how they sell their newer search marketing services. This is all fine and would be interested if I was in sales. However, I’ve personally seen the differences between big-box sales pitches vs. what they actually deliver.

I have a couple friends and acquaintances in PDX who will be attending this as a local event. How about you? Are you interested in making the trip to Portland? I’ve been there around five times and it’s a beautiful city.

Tags: "searchfest"
Posted in Search Marketing, Social Media | 6 Comments »

Localmn and Snap Communications Search and Social Seminars – Coming to You in 2012

December 20th, 2011

Jan 3 Update: We have a potential initial event venue at the Minneapolis Marriott West. We’ll also be contacting a few trusted people if case you want to side-volunteer with the return of promoting your niche local web/social business. If you receive a humble Twitter mention from us, that’s why. More on this below and the event date(s) are TBD.

————————————————————————-

Not new news, but over the past few years local and social search has made an overdue mainstream surge for local businesses. With that said, there’s still a void. At the very basic level we see lots of this:

And not always a lot of this:

Notice the difference?

Claiming your Google Places page is just one, free, tiny example of what local companies can do to boost their visibility and it’s also arguably the first things recommended.

So, in 2012 Barb from Snap Communications and myself will be offering local search seminars in the Minneapolis-St. Paul areas for interested companies, groups and industries.

We’re not just talking about Google Places. The seminars will include both local strategies and tactics for the following:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Local Listings (Google Places, etc.)
Web Analytics (Google Analytics)
Social Aspects (Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.)
Online Reputation Management

We intend for these seminars to be fairly similar to the wonderful and low-cost LocalU local search format, meaning they’re more for educational purposes and less about sales pitches. We also intend to customize these seminars to audience industry.

These could be anything from attorneys to restaurant owners to specific professional groups or associations. We’re seasoned (old) and have seen it all.

Interested? Great! Just contact us per the phone number up top or at pjahn @ localmn.com.

OK, back to the good stuff.

One thing we will be doing for each seminar is pre-selecting an attendee to come on up live to fill out and claim their full Google Places profile. It’s one thing to talk about how important this is, but showing and going through the exact process and hiccups (yep, there are a few) is something we really hope resonates with attendees.

Here’s just a partial image of the Localmn Google Places page:

Regarding the seminars, we highly encourage attendees to bring a laptop and/or tablet. We want you to take notes for things you can do on your own. Smartphones are also encouraged as we’ll be having Twitter hashtags, plus we encourage attendees to take pictures of slides or anything else they see interesting.

Another thing we’ll be doing is showing real-life examples of how local companies are using social media to help boost their brands, and eventually, sales.

The half-day seminars would include our 2-ish hour seminar of local online marketing concepts you can do on your own. For the next two hours, we’re planning for us and other niche consultants to hang around to help your online presence on-the-spot. Niche consultants could provide information about:

Foursquare
Websites built on WordPress
Responsive web design
More to come

We have a few people in mind for the above niches and will be contacting them soon. With that said, if you’re a expert in a particular niche and would like to volunteer, just let us know.

There will be nominal attendance prices TBD as we plan to keep these more educational oriented and less of sales pitches. We will be giving our awesome niche volunteers subtle pitches as they would be helping out of the goodness of their own hearts.

Are you part of an industry that would like to learn more about all of the above? Just let us know.

Are you a local venue that would like us to pay you money to host these events? Just let us know. If you have free wifi and enough AC outlets or extension cords for attendees to bring their laptops to plug in, especially let us know!

We haven’t come up with a creative Twitter hashtag for these events yet. Have one for us? Again, just let us know. We’ll give you all the credit in the world.

More to come and locally yours,

Barb and Paul

Tags: "barb prindle" "paul jahn"
Posted in Local Search, Minnesota Business, Search Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Google Places is Getting Social – “Descriptive Terms” Now Showing in Local Results

June 14th, 2011

Last week, quite a few Minnesotans went out to Seattle’s SMX Advanced conference and I had a message for two of them:

The biggest thing everyone came back with was to really engage, be social and be transparent. They all stressed that search engines are going to be using social more in their data and factors – not huge news and there’s a lot more, but not for this post.

So, Google is indeed partially doing this. Yesterday, their Places team announced they are now using descriptive terms in local search results. I really like the hyper-local potential. More on that below.

This means they are now including terms that appear to be words others use to describe businesses on different local and social sites.

Here’s a Google Places screenshot for the standard “pizza” keyword. The area was for north downtown/St. Anthony Main/UofM in Minneapolis.

Here’s the hyper-local and conversion potential that I love. If you’re in the area, you already know that Pizza Nea uses unique ingredients like sea salt and prosciutto, Mesa Pizza has popular vegetarian and mac and cheese options and Punch is known for their wood fired ovens and basil for their Margherita pies.

Visitors to the area can now see this before they get there. and this is hyper-local at its finest.

There are many more examples. This one is for the phrase “music school” near downtown Minneapolis.

If you’re in music education, you know that Suzuki is a method of musical training for kids as young as preschool age. If someone is specifically looking for this, this is a great chance for a conversion.

Loosely related, here’s an example of what shows up for a south Minneapolis search for “piano lessons”.

Guess what type of music classes they specialize in? Early childhood.

How about a bike rental in Minneapolis?

It’s well-known that for a couple years, Minneapolis has had a slick public bicycle rental system that you can use with a credit card. Bixi is the bicycle solution behind the system. Visitors can now know this.

How about a diner? There’s a well-known one in St. Paul.

Mickey’s Diner happens to be known for their Mulligan Stew and Potatoes O’Brien. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and was used in scenes from the movie “Mighty Ducks”.

Here’s a diner in Rochester and it’s my favorite example.

See the “hole in the wall” description? This place is indeed a hole in the wall and in the very best way possible. Locals already know this and visitors can read their ratings and reviews. This place is really hard to beat!

These descriptive terms aren’t always as relevant as the above. Here’s one for a St. Paul attorney.

Gonzaga University? Seems like an irrelevant descriptive term. Although, according to Avvo he graduated from the Gonzaga University School of Law in 1978.

Side note, Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA is pretty.

I tried a slightly longer search in “personal injury lawyer”. It didn’t show any descriptive terms. It did show the category of “personal injury attorney”. Note, your category and descriptive terms can both show. It just doesn’t in this example and many long-tail searches.

This new feature is brand new and I really hope it stays. I’ve read a couple posts that have showed flaws in these descriptions. I hope these are the extreme exceptions. Google has something really good here.

Enough about my thoughts. What are yours? Are you a local business owner or manager? If so, Google your company name and see how accurate these descriptions are for you. Let us know what you think.

Tags: "descriptive terms" "hyper local" "hyperlocal" "ward tongen" "thinksem"
Posted in Google, Local Search, Minnesota Business, Social Media, User-Generated Media | No Comments »

Local and Social Search: Just Create Something Awesome

June 6th, 2011

In the SEO world, I agree with the concept that attaining quality inbound links includes creating content so awesome that people will naturally link to it. Something similar can apply to local/social search. Just create something awesome and people may naturally gravitate to it.

I really hope the following is an example:

Enter Heather. I’ve known her since around 2003 – first as a snowboarding comrade, then as the president of a Minneapolis IT consulting firm, and now for a side project she created. It’s pretty awesome. Here it is:

It’s tasty. More on that below.

For local, there’s no Google Places page because she doesn’t have a store front. The only Places page is for her IT firm in uptown Minneapolis.

Instead, she got local and social by contacting upscale grocers like Kowalski’s Markets who decided to distribute her seasoning.

After a huge amount of creating, tasting, testing, a slick design by her boyfriend Rhett, Dirty Good landed on Kowalski’s shelves May 28th.

So, she did put together a Yahoo website and started doing the local/social thing we’re all supposed to do like starting small Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Every once in a while she’ll even send out a tweet from her ODG account:

These social outlets will most likely grow to speak for themselves. She is a social person by nature and wants you to be as well via her packaging by sharing Dirty Good recipes. What do I mean by this?

That’s what I mean.

Since this is supposed to be good on anything, I thought I’d try my own recipe using deviled eggs. Being a Minnesotan, I did want to somehow infuse bacon flavor. I’ve tried the Baconnaise thing before and it’s definitely tasty, but a bit overkill for this.

Luckily, Kowalski’s sells an alternative. It is absolutely perfect.

As a result, here is my visual deviled eggs recipe by using Dirty Good. Season to taste.

These are easily the best deviled eggs I have ever tasted. Tell me Heather, does this rock or suck? I vote for rock.

As marketers, sometimes we may focus a bit heavy on Google Places pages and how many Twitter followers we have. Does it really have to be that way? Maybe we should just create something awesome.

A year from now, I hope to look back at this and see success from both a local and social level. Everything above has nothing to do with being an expert in local/social, it’s about making something awesome and letting the local (and hopefully regional/national) and social search naturally kick in.

If you’re not in the Twin Cities area and want to buy some dirty goodness, you can easily purchase online.

Any similar success stories you want to share? We want to hear them.

Tags: "dirty good" "heather manley" "deviled eggs"
Posted in Local Search, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Sun Country Airlines Promotion Taking the MN Out of LocalMN

August 18th, 2010

The title of this post looks negative at first. It’s not. It’s awesome!

Thank you, Sun Country and your Fall Free for All promotion for allowing me to take five straight weekend trips for not a lot of money. This way, I get to visit new destinations, meet people through social media connections, interact with businesses all while being in Minnesota during the work week.

So glad I saw this Twitter message:

When I visit local places, I plan to be social not just in person but online as well. Businesses who treat me well deserve to be mentioned on sites like Google Maps, Citysearch, Yelp, Twitter, Flickr and this blog.

Note – aside from the print yellow pages industry, I almost solely have positive things to say about businesses.

I’ll also be looking for hotels to stay. I’m not too picky. Fancy hotels are great although my needs are basically room Internet access and a bed.

Nonetheless, ten hotel stays in just over a month adds up. I would love it if a hotel chain (or any other business) would help sponsor this experiment in some sort of way. So far, I just followed a few hotels on Twitter, including:

Hilton and their brands
DoubleTree Hotels
Best Western and their 4100 locations
Marriott and their brands
InterContinental Hotels Group and their brands

I’ll try to follow a few more, too. Now, most marketing departments in the hospitality field will have some type of online reputation management program, which hopefully means they’ll see this blog post + notice that I follow them on Twitter.

So, wonderful hospitality industry folks. Please consider sponsoring this experiment in some sort of way. We all know that Word-of-Web marketing is like Word-of-Mouth except when online you’re telling everybody. I want to say nice things about you!

I have decided on four weekend places to visit: San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Boston. The other place or two will be decided later.

The plan will be to arrive at my destinations Friday evenings and find an event/attraction/anything blog worthy that night or Saturday. Then, I’ll make sure to use Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, local review sites and this blog to mention what hopes to be fun experiences. Sundays will mostly be returning to Minnesota.

I’m really looking forward to this and hope to showcase many worthy businesses across the country.

Tags: hotels
Posted in Social Media | 5 Comments »

Twin Cities Human Social Scavenger Hunt is Back!

April 24th, 2010

I’m so glad. This is what made me join Twitter in the first place around 3 years ago. Today was the first 2010 Twin Cities human scavenger hunt from the Least Dangerous Game.

This is cool for many reasons. You learn new things about your area, you meet new people, and local businesses get both exposure and revenue!

@ldg left a couple initial Twitter clues which I didn’t quite get, then headed to Calhoun Square once I saw this Tweet:

Dump Updale

Turns out when Calhoun Square was built, there was a big opposition because they thought it would suburbanize such an urban area. I did not know of this.

Anyway, I found Aric for the initial clue. He gave me a word puzzle which led me to Galactic Pizza to get a picture taken with one of their super-heros:

Galactic Pizza

Another thing I didn’t know – their super-heros are the delivery folks. How did I not know this? This is awesome.

Then, they gave me this clue for the next stop:

What the...

I met another hunter and together took a 10-minute penalty to get the business name. Turns out if you switch the letters and numbers around, it says 2648 Lyn (short for Lyndale) which takes you to Robot Love.

Robot Love

I’ve driven past this place many times having no idea what was inside. They basically sell designer toys, books, clothing, etc. I’ll be back as a holiday or birthday shopper.

Then, the puzzle.

Nonogram

I was in the store with @MSPdude (Eric) and (I think) @Ry4an (Ryan) with his daughter in stroll. They were both figuring out the final nonogram clue while I was trying to figure out what the hell a nonogram was on my iThing.

Ryan solved it first, and 5 minutes later I conceded with this Tweet:

I Concede

Got to my car, and saw Eric walking behind and into the Sauce Spirits and Soundsbar! Turns out my car was parked right at the final destination so I followed him in. I already conceded but it was fun to meet and enjoy food/drink with the participants. This pizza was really tasty, although I’m a spice wuss and just had a few bites.

Pizza at Sauce

Our server was nice enough to take our picture. I’ll be back. Sauce is a very cool place!

Myself, Aric, Eric

I really hope events like this flourish. Everyone wins including local businesses who take part. It’s also a great example on how to use social media tools like Twitter.

Thanks to Aric and all the local businesses to make this happen.

Tags: least dangerous game
Posted in Social Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »

NYC Dream Theater Ticket Giveaway – Human Scavenger Hunt Style

April 8th, 2010

In July, I’m going to New York City with two tickets to see Dream Theater (DT) and will be giving away the other ticket randomly through a Manhattan human scavenger hunt. Why do such a thing?

A few reasons actually. One, I take Dream Theater for granted. They’re not huge in the US and seem to play select cities. Well, Minneapolis is almost always on their list. I buy tickets online, walk the 7 or 8 blocks to the Orpheum or State Theatre and am home 20 minutes after the show. It’s time for me to man-up and travel to a DT show.

Another reason is simple. I’ve never been to New York and this is a perfect reason to go.

The third is to do good with social media. We’ve all seen tweets about what people are currently eating or what book they’re currently reading and have probably been guilty myself.

I want to meet people, use different tools such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter to showcase these interactions. So, I’ll be doing a human scavenger hunt in Matthattan either July 10th or 11th giving Twitter clues to my whereabouts. The first to find me wins the extra ticket.

Plus, although DT isn’t huge in the US, we fans are loyal! The lucky winner will hopefully be more than excited to win one of these two tickets: (the other’s for me)

DT and Iron Maiden in Madison Square Garden

Yep, the tickets say Iron Maiden. DT is the opening act. Maiden should be fun, too. Haven’t really heard of them since high school.

The seats – Section 331, Row 1. Not bad. 3rd level near stage looking right down at Dream Theater!

Decent Seats

Hopefully, news can spread and potential sponsors get interested such as NYC radio stations or stores that sell DT merchandise. That would sweeten the pot for the lucky winner. There is an upcoming blog for this, and a YouTube, Flickr and brand, new Twitter account (@DTinNYC) for those who want to follow along. You in the New York area and want a chance for the ticket? Just follow the above DTinNYC Twitter account.

Here’s to NY and here’s to the lucky winner in July!!

Update: There will be a separate blog for this DT scavenger hunt coming and will then be displayed in the Twitter account.

Tags: dream theater, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

Giving Away Powerball Love

March 17th, 2010

OK, it’s time for a giveaway. I have ten $10 coupons to redeem for Powerball tickets. Here they are – all $100 worth.

Powerball Coupons

These will be given away to a Minnesotan as the coupon specifically says they can be redeemed wherever Minnesota State Lottery tickets are sold.

I don’t know how the giveaway will be done yet but updates will mostly be given through Twitter and this blog. You do not have to follow me on Twitter to win. I really only want followers who are truly interested in my updates. You will however need to know the Twitter hashtag which will be mentioned here TBD.

How did I get these and why am I giving these away? I was at a Wild game on Singles Awareness Day (Feb. 14). The announcer called our row, and everyone in it won the same prize. Plus, I just want to do something nice for a random local.

So far I’ve received a couple of good recommendations. @JasonDouglas on Twitter suggested a Twitter auction. That does sound like fun and proceeds could go to the winner’s favorite charity.

@JasonDouglas Suggestion

@PGSCarol brought some humor and suggested I just give them all away at the office.

@PGSCarol Suggestion

How about you? Any suggestions you think would work well for a giveaway?

The initial thought I had was actually the reason I joined Twitter 3 years ago. Basically, it was for a human scavenger hunt. Here’s more about that:

Twitter user @ldg has a site called the Least Dangerous Game. The site’s stagnant right now, but he would hide somewhere in the Twin Cities area, give out Twitter Clues to his whereabouts and would give a small prize to the first person who found him. It was a lot of fun actually and I remember learning some cool things about the area I previously didn’t.

Again, that was my initial thought, other suggestions are great and more are indeed welcome! What do you think would be a good idea for a giveaway?

If you’re a local business, would you be interested in teaming up? That would be wonderful and hopefully provide fun exposure.

Tags: powerball
Posted in Minnesota Business, Social Media | 3 Comments »