In the third screencast of our web strategy podcast we so you how to build real-time social media press releases with FriendFeed, WordPress, and lots of good content.

Real-Time Social Media Press Release

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A couple of weeks ago Doug and I recorded one of our best internet business podcasts yet – “The Best PayPerClick and AdWords Podcast You’ll Ever Hear”. Listen in as we talk about the best practices for researching and managing a campaign with Kaldenberg Consulting’s Brian Kaldenberg.

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I’ve started writing regularly on all things web strategy again over at Web Strategy Workshop. Today we created a quick Bing Website Optimization Guide as well as offered 5 Bing SEO tips.

Why? Well as the data junkies we are at 48Web we saw a trend in traffic – specifically coming from Bing – and decided to take measures to optimize traffic generation from it. These trends include a jump in organic search traffic and high rankings on targeted keywords.

Afterall – it’s currently the #13 most visited site on the web. People are using Bing. It’s okay – I was hoping to ignore it too.

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Over at the Web Strategy Blog we covered two WordPress ReTweet plugins today. This is a great way to drive Twitter traffic to your WordPress blog.

We cover TweetMeme’s ReTweet Plugin and BackType TweetCounter plugin.

In case you are wondering – we are using TweetMeme’s button here and BackType’s button over at Web Strategy Workshop. Which is better? We are leaning towards BackTypes…

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I recently decided to try MySpace myAds platform for a targeted advertising campaign. I also wanted to compare click through and conversion rates with Facebook. And with a $75 MySpace MyAds coupon from ShoeMoney it was a no brainer. Who doesn’t like free advertising?

Well after waiting approximately 6 days for my ad to go through the approval process – my ad was declined.

The advertisement in your campaign for account abrudtkuhl was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: No twitter ads.

There are two problems here – the amount of time it took to get the ad approved (6 days – seriously?) and the unknown editorial guidelines that caused my ad to get rejected.

So far – disappointed with the MyAds platform.

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Google Local is one of the first things we recommend when beginning a Search Engine Marketing campaign – and Google just made it a lot easier while adding analytics…

via Webware

Google is giving local merchants the ability to access data about how Web surfers arrive at a local listing in Google Maps, in hopes of figuring out why so many people in a particular neighborhood are searching for pizza.

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Even if you aren’t as high profile as Microsoft be sure to learn a lesson from their launch of Bing.com… If you are launching a new product and starting a PR or social media campaign be sure the landing page you are sending the traffic has something on it to drive conversions.

You see – Microsoft made a huge mistake in their latest product launch. A week before Microsoft was to launch their latest attempt at a search engine they sent out a press release and CEO Steve Ballmer gave a speech about the new search engine – Bing.com. But if you tried to go to Bing.com after the press release was sent out – it was a blank page.

If this doesn’t raise the “duh” flag for you let’s look at some numbers, via AdAge…

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Bing, his company’s new search engine, last week, it was greeted with the kind of press coverage most internet upstarts can only dream of. Bing was the subject of 1,500 news stories, spent almost a full day on Twitter’s trending-topics list and, per Nielsen Online, accounted for 0.23% of all blog conversations that day (by comparison, the news that Time Warner was officially shedding AOL accounted for 0.05%).

Microsoft quickly took care of the blank page instead creating a well designed landing page that said “Coming Soon” and featured a teaser video. Even that, though, was stupid because it was doing absolutely nothing with the enormous amounts of incoming traffic. According to Compete, last week when the product was announced traffic to Bing accounted for 1.7% of all internet traffic. At least drop a “Notify me when this is availble” email form to start building a list for when you actually do launch. Instead Microsoft sqaundered millions of page views of traffic with a preview video that provided absolutely no engagement or community interaction.

Here’s your lesson. If you are launching a new product and have an accompanying PR or social media campaign – make sure your landing page includes a method of conversion. Include an opt-in email form, a “Twitter this” link, a “follow us” link, a trial evaluation signup – anything to capitalize on the publicity you are creating. If you do nothing with the traffic … what’s the point of your campaign?

Don’t worry though – Microsoft is tossing a $100 million ad campaign for Bing… Do you have that amount of cash to compensate for your PR blunder?

More on Microsoft’s Bing Buzz failure over at AdAge

What do you think? Besides actually having the product ready, how could Microsoft have taken advantage of the gobs of traffic it was getting? Let us know in the comments…

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Did you know you can embed video in email newsletters? It’s not a fully functional video player but the appearance of one can increase your click thru rates up to 3x.

via ManagingTheEdge.com

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In the latest episode of our internet business podcast we discuss something that was finding it’s way into the comments of one of our recent posts – ROI.

What’s the Return On Investment (ROI) of your web strategy? Is it worth it to spend all this time with internet marketing, social media engagement, content distribution, etc, etc? Well if you don’t want to listen, the answer is yes. :-) But you really should tune in!

[audio:http://managingtheedge.com/podpress_trac/web/37/0/EdgeCast004.mp3]

Subscribe in iTunes! (link opens iTunes)

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Episode 004 – Back to Business

Managing the Edge is an internet business podcast brought to you by Andy Brudtkuhl, Chief Web Guru and web strategist at 48Web; and Doug Mitchell, Chief Deliverer of Results at CreateWowMedia. The podcast is recorded at Impromptu Studio in Des Moines, IA.

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Some killer advice (as usual) from Gary Vaynerchuck.

Some Notes

• Swing for the fence
• “If you aren’t vanity searching blogs and twitter you are a fundamental clown”
• Monetize through building brand equity
• “The newspaper industry is going to get its face beat in”
• When you care, you win
• Go direct to the consumer

[audio:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/geekcast/podcast/~5/523483921/asw09-garyvee-keynote.mp3]

Link

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