Google “Social Search”

Just like contextual advertising, Google Social Search makes your search experience contextual to you and your friends.  Cool.

I’m not immediately seeing the business application of this and I’m not excited about seeing what my friends have written on a subject.  I have many friends that write blogs.  I aggregate them on my Google Home Page.  I pretty much know what my friends are doing, what their opinions are, and what they are writing about.  I can’t see myself Googling a search to find out what my friends are thinking. (more…)

Learn How To Write A Successful Press Release

The Eight Things You Need To Know About…
How to write a successful Press Release is a question I get asked often. Like anything else, once you know the guidelines, it’s really easy to write an effective press release. You’ll find it has one of the highest R.O.I. of anything you can do for your company.
1 . Format: Follow the standard format! Everyone who receives press releases expects to see the same format right down to the “# # #” at the end of the release (the “# # #” is from the old days of the teletype where it meant end of transmission.) Look at the partial example below and go to www.LonSafko.com, Articles (top right) to download the entire example; (more…)

Fusion Is What Comes After Social Media

It’s Fusion Marketing…

As many of you know, I am the author of the bestselling book, The Social Media Bible, and my newest bestseller is called The Fusion Marketing Bible. Fusion Marketing is about “What’s next”, it’s what comes after social media. Fusion Marketing is actually an entirely new form of marketing.

I discovered Fusion Marketing as a result of constantly being asked in interviews “So, what comes after social media?” I would think to myself, “Social media has change the way the world markets, sells, and communicates forever. And, it has caused us to change at speeds we have never seen before with technology” and you want to know what’s next? (more…)

Fusion Marketing – 2020 Marketing

As many of you know, I am the author of the bestselling book, The Social Media Bible, (http://www.TheSocialMediaBible.com) published by John WIley & Sons.  My newest bestseller is called The Fusion Marketing Bible (http://www.TheFusionMarketingBible.com), published by McGraw Hill.  Fusion Marketing is about “What’s next”, what comes after social media.  Fusion Marketing is actually an entirely new form of marketing.

I discovered Fusion Marketing as a result of constantly being asked in interviews “So, what comes after social media?”  Social media has change the way the world markets, sells, and communicates forever.  And, it has caused us to change at speeds we have never seen before with technology and I think, you want to know what’s next? (more…)

Building Your Fusion Marketing Plan From The Start

Developing a strategy for your Fusion Marketing Plan begins with understanding which metric you want to measure on your path toward success. Say for example, you’re an author and your bottom line metric is “sell more books;” how will you get there? My plan involves the Five Ws that you may have learned in high school.

The Five Ws are: the who, what, where, when and why (or how) you will accomplish a task. The Five Ws were used heavily by reporters back in the 1890s because if a cub reporter could gather the information for those five questions, a story could be written.

In my example, “sell more books” (of if your example is to obtain more coaching clients, or bring in more patients, substitute your metric here) here are my Five Ws: (more…)

I Find Facebook Offensive

If there is a God… We’re not his best work.

I only write content about business. My articles are always self-help educational content about innovation, creativity, social media, advanced marketing, and Fusion Marketing. I’ve never written an article about politics, religion, the “news” to be trendy, or any social issues. I am all business, all the time; however… There is one question that I would really like to hear your opinion on, below. (more…)

Top 25 Facebook Best Practices, Cheat-Sheet

Recently, I was asked to compile a list of what I thought were the top best practices, a blueprint, a cheat sheet, take-away for a conference I was speaking at, on how to succeed at Facebook marketing.  The reviews were good so I wanted to share them with you. (more…)

Control May Be An Illusion, But Chaos Is Real

Whenever I speak with a government agency or often with larger, Fortune 500 corporation I hear “Oh, we don’t allow social media in or organization…”  Ah, yeah…

I was working as a nuclear engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state when email first hit the scene and we were told ‘We will never allow email at any of our facilities because people could just email top secret information outside and even to the Russians”.  When cell phone first became popular, they were outlawed also because they didn’t have control over their use either.  Then it was the Internet and now it’s the dreaded “social media”… (more…)

10 SEO Secrets To Rank Your Blogs Higher

Google set the stage by changing the way your web / blog site shows up on the SERP’s, (Search Engine Result Pages), when they changed from their complex algorithm to mostly ranking based on the amount of content you have. Google called these massive changes “Panda”, “Penguin”, and “Hummingbird”. Quickly after Google changed the way analyzed their search all of the other search engines follow suite.

These changes took web pages that have been performing in the top one, two or three listings on Google and sent them to the search engine Siberia; the 20th page or worse! This really ticked off a lot of SEO people and web site owners who spent years and thousands of dollars optimizing their pages to meet Google’s requirements. (more…)

Social Media Is Dead…

Recently, Jeff Elder wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal “Social Media Fail to Live Up to Early Marketing Hype”, (http://on.wsj.com/1rHYi30), which was based on a survey done by Gallup the long standing polling company, saying that Social Media hasn’t performed as anticipated (http://on.wsj.com/1izsMUu).

The article and survey lead with “62% of people participating in social networks say that those networks have no influence on their buying decisions at all.”

I read the WSJ article and the Gallup poll, and at first I was astonished as most of the WSJ’s readers probably were.  Especially all of the social media managers and V.P.’s of Social Media in Fortune 500 companies throughout the U.S.  I seriously considered that if these two bastions of business information and integrity said this, it might actually be true, but I instinctually knew better. (more…)