Yeah, Well, You Know, That's Just Your Opinion, Man

Recently, Oreo has made public their support for gay marriage with a Facebook post and photo of a rainbow stuffed Oreo cookie. The image and post got a huge response from Oreo followers, but not all of it was positive. While some people praised Oreo and Kraft Foods for coming forth and supporting same-sex marriage, others have stated their displeasure in Oreos views, even saying that they will never purchase Oreos again. Oreo isn’t the first company, or the last, I am sure, to make public their standing on same-sex marriage.

JC Penny came under attack back in May for running an ad that featured a lesbian couple with their kids. The attack was lead by the group One Million Moms, an online group dedicated to cleaning up “harmful media” that they feel is having a negative effect on children. OMM didn’t seem to faze JC Penny however, who recently ran a Father's Day campaign featuring a gay sex couple with their two kids.

Other companies such as KY Products and Gap have featured gay couples in their ads as well. Even the Green Lantern, a DC Comics super hero, has been re-released as a gay man. Is all this public support for gay rights good for business? Is that even the point?

During the months leading up to the vote on Amendment One in North Carolina, all of the big NC based firms, like Duke Energy or Bank of America, stayed silent about their views on the issue. It appears this was a good decision. Replacements Limited, a company based in Greensboro made large donations to the same-sex marriage cause, sold shirts in their stores, and sponsored a billboard on an interstate near their headquarters.

The result? Many orders were dropped, and the company received many negative emails, letters, and phone calls. It appears that in North Carolina the issue of same-sex marriage is still a topic that will earn you as many enemies as friends. It may be better to keep out of controversial topics, at least when it comes to increasing the bottom line in North Carolina.

If a company is willing to take losses for standing up for what they believe in, I guess more power to them. What I am more interested in is:

First, is the reaction people would have if Oreo (or some other brand) came out and supported that same sex marriage should remain illegal.

The second is how much a company can lose in supporting a controversial topic.

I am willing to guess that a person is more likely to stop purchasing Oreos because they do not like what Oreo stands for than one is to start purchasing them for the same reason. Those who strongly disagree with the brands views may decide to find a new type of cookie or perhaps start buying the knock off brand. I am certainly not going to start buying Oreos now because Oreos and I share similar views one marriage.

What is your take on a brand showing support for a controversial topic? Should companies make vocal their opinions, or is it better for business if they stay quiet? What would be the response be if Oreo had come out and stated that they didn’t support Gay marriage?

*The opinions of this article do not reflect those of the company, either way.*

Tech Dependence

Last week I tried to bring up an important email on my phone only to find that I couldn’t log into my email. My G-mail account had been hacked recently, forcing me to change my password quickly and without putting much thought into it. I had been using my old password for almost nine years now, a terrible habit, but I had grown comfortable with its familiarity. Now I stood outside my meeting, unable to access this important email, because I was unable to remember my new password.

Sure, I had written it down, but the sticky note on the bottom of my desk was no good to me, as I stood outside the conference, furiously typing in possible combinations of numbers and letters in a desperate attempt to break into my own account. I ended up going into the meeting without the numbers I wanted off my phone, and surprisingly enough the world didn’t end. The situation did get me thinking, however, about how dependent I had become on my computer and phone remembering things for me. I can’t even imagine the kind of wreck I would be if I were to lose my phone or computer and the data on them for good.

As the conveniences of modern technology have grown, my powers as a mental storage machine have begun to regress. Back in middle school, I had many phone numbers of friends and family memorized. Now I sometimes stumble when reciting my own phone number. Why waste brainpower remembering anything these days? Our cellphones save hundreds of contacts and our computers can automatically fill out our log-ins and passwords for us. This system of entering all my information at once and then forgetting about it has been very convenient up until now.

Last week's email debacle opened my eyes to just how easy it would be for me to lose years of collected data. With all the advancements in collecting, storing, and sharing information, how much of this data is going into our long-term memory and not just a bookmark folder on our desktop?

For me, it appears that most of what I think I know is reliant on a fully functioning phone or computer. Often, I find myself saving online news articles to read at a later date, only to delete them the next time I clean out my bookmark folder, the articles still unread. Technology has made it so easy to find and store information that I fear we spend more time searching than we do absorbing what we find.

Everyday we are bombarded with emails, text messages, conversations, commercials, television shows, new acquaintances, and news stories. All this information is coming at us in a constant torrent throughout the day, and we are expected to take it all, process it, store what we find important, and quickly move on to the next item of business. We have become so greedy by the stimulation of new information that we now even create and horde daily happenings on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. It is no wonder I can’t remember a password I made up with only a day ago; it is buried under a pile of never ending information. I have grown too accustomed to having all this information and technology saved for me, data that I can lose with a simple hard drive crash or stolen phone. How easy it would be for me to lose all my music, emails, contacts, bookmarks, and passwords in an instant. Yes, I have everything saved on a back up drive, and cloud sharing systems are making this less of an issue, but just the thought of all the reliance I have put into technology is a little frightening. My inability to access my email, it seems, has shaken me awake from this digital dream, opened my eyes to just how much I could lose if something happened to my computer or phone.

Our ability to find and share information will only continue to improve in the years to come. Unfortunately, the unaltered human system cannot hope to contain all the data that we are able to access. It's important for us to develop ways to filter the constant stream of garbage that is thrown at us each and every day, storing it not only in our electronic devices, but also in our memory. I am not saying down with the machines, throw down your web-enabled devices, and go back to living in the woods; I just think it is a good idea for us all to slow down once in a while from our constant hording of information and actually absorb some knowledge.

By: Embra King

Creative Marketing is Effective Marketing

I recall reading an article about word-of-mouth marketing used in California. Movie studios were hiring attractive people and models to stand in public areas and crowds and discuss movies and how much they liked them. This marketing strategy works on many levels. For the point of this article it is both creative and effective because it is a fresh approach to breaking down the barriers of immunity to marketing that customers inherently have.

This form of marketing uses attractive people, as others will better value their opinion by wanting to associate with them as successful looking people. It is just a fact that the messages of good-looking people or people with power are more appealing and likely to take root. This was just a small aspect of the approach but worth mentioning.

The true power of this approach is what I am writing about here and the most effective part of this approach. By using this creative undercover marketing approach and having the message seem unintentional, the message takes deeper root. When you think the idea to listen to their conversation was yours, you better value the message. You may even find yourself repeating the message. You may later say to a friend, “I heard that movie was cool”, or “I heard the ending was amazing”. There is a good chance you don’t even mention or recall where you heard this fact, but you did. If this had been a radio ad or web ad, you would never repeat it. You just made this viral because you trusted the source. You trusted the source because you thought it to be a candid and honest conversation.

Would you have thought of this type of approach or calculated how its effect could go viral, due to the source being trusted over traditional advertising methods? All this leads back to why you need a creative and inventive approach to marketing. Working for CGR Creative, I have been exposed to many professionals with diverse backgrounds and real hands-on experience in trying what works and learning what doesn’t on our own time. You can be sure that you will be presented with ideas and approaches you would never have thought of. The marketing ideas you are handed will be tested and have a plan as to why they will outperform the traditional methods your competition is using.

My personal background is in SEO and online marketing. I didn’t attend a seminar or a 2 day course, I spent 9 years building websites for affiliate programs, ranking sites that depended on ranking to make an income stream. I spent 9 years needing to be successful to eat and pay the bills. I was constantly under fire to produce creative approaches to selling traditional products.

Now working with the staff at CGR with award winning graphic designers and community leaders in social and business circles, I am part of a team of like-minded, outside-the-box producers. CGR is a design team focusing on many fields and many different cultural target consumers. CGR's experience with their customers has led to one-of-a-kind creative marketing approaches for each and every project we undertake. A client needs a new approach to their marketing to accompany the traditional methods they expect. Use our graphic, print, media, and online approaches but, at the same time, let us bring your social and online PR presence up to modern standards with ideas your competition has never thought of.

Review Sites Creating A Problem

The good news is that review websites have provided a forum for customers and businesses to exchange and discuss their sales history working together. The bad news is that the intended use for review websites has completely failed. Review websites, like Google reviews, Yahoo, Yelp, YP, Mechantcircle, Superpages, YP, and others, may have had good intentions but have created a mess for small business.

I am certain the true intention of these review pages was the bottom lines of the sites that host them. If you can create an excuse to have a separate page for every single business on earth, you have just justified 1 billion new ads displaying revenue-generating pages for the review sites.

It may be argued that this is a win-win situation, since the reviews sites, like Yelp.com and YP, get to make huge gains in pages to display ads while businesses get free publicity. This would be nice if it was true.

The review sites have turned into a free for all of fake positive reviews and malicious competition targeting bad reviews. Here in Charlotte, we can easily point out examples of local businesses and services that spend hours every week attacking their competition with negative reviews. These review sites require nothing other than an email account to allow you to post high-ranking, anonymous attacks on your competition. The review sites themselves have no vested interest or financial connection to the validity of the reviews. Ad-displaying pages make the same revenue for these sites with accurate or fake reviews; there is no motivation for these sites to try and insure integrity.

The down side is that the only way this sort of phenomenon resolves itself is through becoming obsolete. Until these sites see less users counting on them and the revenue impacted, they will not change policies to protect businesses. Until that time comes, many of these have become an easily accessible medium for slandering competition and misleading customers. ME

Exact Match Domain is King?

So any SEO worth their paycheck knows that exact match domains are a big part of the SEO game and the top search results, but what exactly is the science behind that?

If Google has the advertised 200 factors being considered when coming up with 100% of the final figure that determines the order in the SERPS, how much of that is exact matching a domain?

An exact match domain is basically the domain name for your exact search.

If you are a customer searching for the finest Charlotte web design company, you may type in “Charlotte web design”. This is a high volume, high competition and high skill level search result. You will find here companies making a living putting good, usable content. But, as in most searches, you will also find the guy who used the incredible skill of “buying the name first”.

Why would this be such a heavily weighted factor in Google’s quest for the most relevant and fresh quality content?

Google beats us over the head with their message of “content is king” and telling us to “write good usable content for you customers not for search engines". Google then goes out spidering sites and gives perhaps 10%? 20% consideration to the guy with the domain name purchased fastest?

Remember 20 years ago when anyone that was selling car insurance could easily be found by customers under their OTHER name “AAAAAInsurance”?

SEO of 20 years ago consisted of putting a lot of AAAA’s before you company name to appear first in the phone book. The phone book had an algorithm of exactly one factor, Alphabetical.

Now 2 decades later we have the world’s most advanced search technology yet it still seems to decide contextual relevance by the name you put on it. If I write “War and Peace” on the front of a phone book does that make it an award winning novel?
Todd Kron

Online PR Company Approach

So what do you mean when you say online PR?

Had the pleasure of meeting one of new clients last night at the 2012 Vision Award in Charlotte put on by the Center City Partners, and the title above is a question I got.

What exactly is online public relations and what do you do for me?

If you know me you know I absolutely love SEO, Marketing, selling online and watching SERPS and the trends online. I am very analytical and would really do this for free or on my day off.

I answered this with a lot of overlap from Defensive SEO and strong dash of social media.

“Public relations” is defined as the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by an organization or a famous person. PR is the state of the relationship between the public and a company or other organization or a famous person.

Online we must often be reactive in a practice sort of way. We do not always get to “wag the dog” when dealing with the world of searchable content. Very often a customer will search for what they want when they want to. In other forms of PR and marketing people like me take pride in telling people what they want and doing it in a way where they don’t know why they wanted it.

Does anyone really remember what was so great about Cabbage Patch kids or Teddy Ruxpin?

Now we can track customers and searchers to within a micrometer of what they are thinking and this is almost as good as telling them what they want. With Google analytics and other social media tracking tools like Pagelever allow us to know what works and doesn’t work in real time.

Still in this situation we don’t know when the trend will change until it does. The solution to this is often preparing ahead of time with defensive SEO, a tsunami of online press and covering every page a person may find in conjunction with a clients name.

We want to do all of the basic things like create a great Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Linkedin presence of course. We want to make all of those pages tempting to join with motivational calls to action for any visitor. Our thinking here is that when we do all this work to get a searcher to your page we don’t want them leaving empty handed.

I want your social media presence to be like the candy in the checkout aisle. Who can say no to “free newsletter, EBooks and updates only takes one click on my LIKE BUTTON?”

Not really PR, but the residual PR you get from having an active relationship with thousands of fans and followers is he most effective part. When someone sees you r message on your wall it means only so much, but when they se your message on their best friends wall who is your follower….means much more.

Searchers are not on Facebook searching though; they are on Google, Bing or Yahoo. And when they enter you name what do they see? The searchers can often end a search for your service on just the snippets Google provides. If I search for CGR Creative where I work as Online Marketing Director I see nothing but the great things we do for our community. I see Press releases covering our activity in the community and I see rave reviews from valued clients past.

In a past article I point out how over 80% of searchers do not go past page one in their searches, but that doesn’t apply to reputation defense when I do it.

If I am searching for a web design firm in Charlotte I likely won’t go past page one if I am a casual searcher. But now I have picked CGR for example and am considering the phone call tomorrow to them. My next step is to search them specifically and in this scenario most searchers will go 2,3 or 4 pages deep. Searchers curious about your business reputation are not looking for top 10 or the Google chosen “best”, they are looking for the bad news. Searchers looking for bad news tend to go much deeper into the results.

When’s the last time you search some old friend or enemy just for fun? How many pages deep did you go? Enough said.

Now go search CGR Creative Charlotte and go back to page 4, this is what I can do for clients.

We make sure you have a good reputation online which gets you a much higher conversion rate on raw leads who are kicking tires online. You have spent so much time building your name up with positive public relations; one single bad piece of news that is accessible to the world on Google 24/7 will lose all that faith in your next perspective client.

We build content and press for you through 40+ Press websites, cover all review websites including industry specific ones and local search results, respond to anything negative and work to minimize or remove it. We will make sure you perspective clients hear nothing but positive things and build faith in your business that they will turn around and pass on to their friend with confidence. Word of mouth and what people see what their own eyes is very effective in selling your brand long term.

Todd Kron
Online Marketing Director
CGR Creative Design - Charlotte, NC

Types of SEO Agencies and Approaches

Had an interesting discussion today with Jason Ramsey of CGR over lunch. We were discussing a long list of experienced Charlotte SEO ’s we have come into contact, with a few varying philosophies of how SEO for your website gets done. I am the Online Marketing Director for CGR Creative in Charlotte with a decade of experience in SEO, affiliate marketing, and Adwords PPC management and have met many SEO's and their company's models as well.

We were not coming to any conclusion about what is right or wrong for everyone. Clearly every project has different demands and ratios of on-page and off-page needs, depending on where it is in the SEO life-cycle, so no right or wrong fits all. We did agree the situation of being a complete marketing firm and design agency with it's own SEO and PR team provides unmatched flexibility to the clients of CGR.

For those starting at square one on this article, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the art or skill of designing, structuring, and interlinking a website on the web so that it best represents the keywords you covet in the eyes of search engines. An easier way to say this same thing is that SEO is everything that goes behind making your company show up first in Google searches (no offense Y and B).

Basically, Google has about 200 factors they observe when judging which sites to rank first and establishing the order of results. This is beyond important to businesses that exist from web traffic because it decides who grows and excels and who goes out of business.

So, with the 101 stuff out of the way, the discussion was about the best way for a company to approach this need in business. If you are at the point of knowing what it is, why it is important, and choosing how to go forward, here are a few observations from two experienced experts in Search Marketing and Web design respectively.

An In-House SEO Position refers to a company hiring a skilled internet marketer to work from their office with the single goal of working on their behalf. This type of SEO position is considered by many to be the “holy grail” of SEO jobs from the search marketer’s position. This type is very appealing to experienced, independent SEOs like me. My experience being from many affiliate programs and generating traffic for income or referral income means a lot of changing markets. This is a great way to learn every niche and all things that work but the comfort of a single focus and single project is appealing to many SEO’s. The in-house jobs are often the best pay and benefits as well since the company covets your skills as the only person tasked with a lot of jobs related to the website.

When I say Agency SEO, I mean an SEO who is also you web designer. This sounds like a bad idea to those who know SEO, but there are more coming. 

Any SEO’s worth their weight know that a person who does web design then sells you SEO as a way to get residual income and an afterthought may not be the best choice, but that’s not the person I refer to here. In agency, I mean the design agency that has an in-house SEO staff. This is what I would see as an ideal situation for both the SEO who is job-seeking and ideal for the clients and web designers as well. Here you get the smaller number of clients, which the SEO likes; you also get the chance for more complete SEO.

An in-house SEO has the advantage of working directly with designers which makes it possible to be part of the site, structure, and construction process. A large part of the battle later on will be the way you decide to map out a site, the folder structure, and the URL structure. An in-house with the agency SEO works alongside the designers. This situation makes on-site changes, pre-design brainstorming, and creative updates or changes much easier to implement.

The last type of SEO is what I have heard referred to as “the grinder”. The pure SEO agency is often the lowest paying and highest volume workplace for the SEO looking for work. This situation generally has about 6-8 project managers perhaps, based off the Charlotte SEO grinder agency I am thinking of. Each of these account managers may have 8-10 accounts they are responsible for and doing SEO is all they do. This will encompass PPC, social, and both on and off page work. Now, let’s look at the problems with working with a pure SEO agency as opposed to a design firm that has its own SEO department, like CGR Creative. 

#1 problem with SEO only companies : Competing clients

Bet you didn’t know there are SEO agencies that only do a single field of SEO? Check out Surgeons Adviser. This is a Miami area SEO firm that does SEO only for surgeons and plastic surgeons. Now if you read through their client list, you will see overlapping areas of coverage. Also, a Charlotte Plastic surgeon of worth, like Dr. Hunsted, draws in clients from 2000 miles around. If your SEO agency has clients in the same field as you (which they do), then how can they be doing the absolute best on both of your behalf? This also happens a lot with Real Estate specialists in SEO. Real estate does require a skilled SEO with real estate experience, as it means a lot of smart IDX Integration. Perhaps David Kyle in Charlotte for that kind of specific background. But if you choose an industry specific SEO agency, ask to see their client list and decide for yourself if you are comfortable with the amount or lack of overlapping markets.

#2 problem with SEO only companies : No access to the original design of the site

I covered this above when pointing out the strengths of choosing a firm like CGR Creative that has a department for SEO and is a web design agency first. If you bring a site that is complete to a SEO only agency there will be limitations to what on page SEO they can perform.

Now there are people who will deny this and say they have plenty of design experience to implement any changes they may need. This assertion is generally true, but they also work on hours per month schedules and the changes they make will come out of your time. Also, no matter what kind of remodeling you do there are always limitations to what can be change after the fact.

#3 problem with SEO only companies: Lack of desire to build more

Now here is another up for opinion. An SEO only may also be thinking SEO only. Part of SEO is growing the presence and not just streamlining the presence you already have. A firm that has a design relationship with you has the ability to pitch new site ideas and new websites you may want to build to compliment what you have.

If you have an informative website that isn’t designed with clear call to actions or to convert leads well, you may need a separate one with that separate goal in mind.

A design agency that has daily conferences with the SEO department like we do at CGR has a place where one person can dream up what is best in theory and one department that can put that plan in action from scratch.

All your eggs in one basket is finally good advice when you need to make sure the eggs are done correctly from start to finish. Changing who is handling the development of your online strategy midstream is not worth the risk. CGR has attacked this problem by offering a full service web design and marketing agency with it’s own in house department dedicated solely to SEO and internet marketing like social media management and PPC.

Todd Kron

Online Marketing Director

CGR Creative, LLC