Nate Alessandro

3 Articles You May Have Missed Last Week

Nate Alessandro — Thu, 27 May 2010 02:07:04 +0000

Which Department Owns Social Media? –In the past, it was easy for businesses or brands to segment different types of outreach or communication into departments.

How Venture Capitalists are Using Social Media for Real Results — VCs and angel investors might be last on your list of usual Twitter suspects. Sure, many of them have social media accounts and they certainly look at and test a lot of social media apps, but aren’t their super-stealthy, no-details-disclosed deals generally kept off the social media radar?

Understanding The Modern Media Consumer [INFOGRAPHIC] — The Internet plays a big part in today’s society. Not only has itchanged the way we communicate, it has also changed the way we consume news.

Social Media Causes You to Lose Your Job (Comic)

Nate Alessandro — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:58:37 +0000

5 Social Media Blogs You Should Be Following

Nate Alessandro — Fri, 14 May 2010 15:22:10 +0000

Upon starting this endeavor to learn almost everything physically possible about SEO, SEM and Social Media the first place I turned to was Blogs. The fastest and easiest way to find the most relevant information, and also prevent a few mistakes. Daily I turn to these blogs to keep me informed on the quickly changing landscape of the web and how to advertise on it. It also keeps me informed of all the cool stuff that is soon coming!

1.Chris Brogan One of the webs most renowned voices on social media and creating a social network. His tips and trick to building your business presence in the social media world are second to none.

2.Mashable Subtitled “The Social Media Guide”, this blog really is a guide to everything social media, and a little bit that isn’t. Its a great way to get news and opinion on everything happening in the electronic and web world.

3. Inside Facebook If you’re not on Facebook, you should be. Inside Facebook has everything you need to know about the most popular social media platform on the planet. Stay up to date with everything that is going on, including developments on its evolution as it takes over the web.

4. Social Media Examiner Its a jungle our there and this is your your guide. Filled with great tips and tricks to keep you on top of your social media strategy and execution.

5. HubSpot Anything and everything relevant to Inbound Marketing.

Foursquare, More than a Kids Game

Nate Alessandro — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:57:56 +0000

What is it?
Foursquare. I know that game. It was one of my favorites when I was a kid. But wait, that’s not the foursquare I’m talking about. Foursquare, and its competitor Gowalla, are known as location based apps. Similar to Loopt, which reports to your friends where you are, Foursquare and Gowalla take the idea a bit further.

As Gowalla put it themselves, “Location without context is dead.” These mobile applications connect you to your friends by doing more than informing them of where you are. These applications inform your friends of where you are, what you’re doing and who you’re with. Why? To add the personal experience to the social web.

That may sound all fine and dandy, but so what if these applications add a social aspect to the web? Well, if you’re involved on Facebook and Twitter, as we are, this matters a lot. By being active on social media websites our strategy is to add a more personal connection with our guests and fans.

As a business you may decide to throw a promotion to your Facebook fans informing them to use Foursquare and Gowalla to get rewards.

How exactly does this all work?
Quite simply really. While Foursquare and Gowalla have slightly different platforms, layouts and rewards, they both do basically the same thing. Whenever you go to your favorite bar, restaurant or beach, you simply “check-in” at that location on the smart-phone of your choice. Checking-in rewards you with points which go towards earning badges and “mayorships” (in Foursquare) or stamps and pins (Gowalla). When paired with your Twitter, Facebook or other social media account, your location can be pushed to your social media account along with a personalized message, if so desired.

These applications were developed as a means of exploring the area you live in that you supposedly know so well. But how often do you really explore new places or bother to notice a new restaurant that has popped up? If you’re one of those that enjoy exploring, you can help promote that location via Foursquare and Gowalla.

As a tourist to an area like Clearwater Beach, you can look up places where people have checked-in in the past. Attached to a few of the check-ins are tips and recommendations of things you should get. For example:

David T. checked-in at Sheraton Sand Key Resort and gave a tip:
“Try to get an upper floor room for the best view.”

An anonymous person checked-in at FiveFiveOne Restaurant and gave a tip:
“Food was decent. Everything else was horrible. No wonder it was empty on a Saturday night.”

Some businesses have taken this a bit further to reward those that frequent their business. By checking in and making recommendations, these visitors are thereby promote their business via these applications. Restaurants are giving away free drinks with a meal, a free side dish or a discount on their check to those that are “Mayor” of their business on Foursquare. Naturally this adds a bit of competition among your patrons and guests. Some may frequent more often to try to become mayor to get their free whatever.

As a hotel, you may already use a rewards program for frequent visitors. What about visitors whom live in the community and frequent your outlets or visitors staying at another hotel looking for a unique restaurant? With recommendations from Foursquare and Gowalla, you may be able to attract business through user recommendations.

Do I need to use this now?
That is up to you. The reality of it is these mobile apps are very new. Foursquare has only 750,000 users. That is less than .2% of the US population. But these applications are growing fast. That means these are something you need to keep on your radar. Monitor their developments and their growth, they will develop and grow quickly. Especially after a report by Morgan Stanley that the mobile web will dominate by 2015! These applications aren’t going away anytime soon.

3 Tips for Better Search Rankings

Nate Alessandro — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:41:00 +0000

Getting started on SEO can seem like a daunting task, and you would be right if that’s how you’re feeling. Simply having a website is no longer good enough, there are a multitude of things that need to be taken into consideration when planning your SEO strategy.

Look at your competition

You may be saying, “Well Duh!” But what you may not realize is you competition has stumbled upon keywords that you may have never thought to use. You may qualify yourself as a resort, not a hotel. But your competition, equally qualified as a resort, IS using the keyword hotel in its website and thereby is receiving more traffic by using another seemingly interchangeable keyword. Plus you may find that you competition is showing up on first page of searches where you’re showing up on page two, meaning you need to up the ante with the quantity of keywords.

Link Building

Most importantly, inbound link building. This will help your search engine ranking exponentially since when a search engine ranks a websites, it puts the most emphasis on the amount of inbound links as opposed to relevant keywords. Why? Because a link is similar to a reference. If you have been to a great restaurant, you’re gonna tell a couple people about it, and thereby the restaurant benefits by word of mouth. Same concept on the internet, if someone finds your site useful, chances are they are going to link to it somehow, thereby building your online credibility and improving your search rankings.

Blog, Blog, Blog
Statistics show that more and more people are on the internet to find useful content. Where does most of this content come from? News articles, newspapers and BLOGS! Most, if not all, journalists now have blogs on their publisher’s webpages. They are writing opinions, drafts of their stories and so forth. “But I’m not a journalist, I’m a hotelier.” Thats fine, but if you’ve been in business more than ten minutes, there’s probably something you can write about that will be content rich and useful to people. Whether its an opinion, a mistake you’ve made of an epiphany you’ve had. Just be sure to link your blog back to your webpage.

Social Media Cheat Sheet

Nate Alessandro — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:29:00 +0000

This was given to me sometime a couple months ago from a colleague that works at a marketing firm in Tampa. As I have explored and learned how certain sites and media outlets work and effect SEO, this chart helped sum up most of it and even explain some things that I didn’t know. When I first started all this Social Media and SEO mumbo jumbo I was a little overwhelmed at all the outlets that I thought I HAD to use in order to be doing it correctly, this chart allowed me to customize the online marketing plan for our resort.

Download a copy here.

New Beginnings

Nate Alessandro — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:13:00 +0000

A mere couple of years ago, the thought of using social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter as marketing outlets was unheard of. As a test subject on the original Facebook design, I can remember when only United States college students were allowed to have an account, and even at that not all colleges were part of the network. Now Facebook has now grown to over 350 million daily active users WORLDWIDE, and still growing and shows no sign of slowing down in the near future. At first, I myself was a little reluctant to use Facebook as a marketing medium, but the time for second guessing has come and gone. Now its do or get left behind.

I myself hardly claim to be a marketing expert. I’ve only just begun to explore and understand how social media and search engine optimization are vitally important to businesses. As a graduate from Stetson University in Deland, FL, my business degree didn’t even think of SEO, SEM or social media as a blip on the map.

I currently work at a Resort Hotel in Clearwater Beach, Florida. Originally brought in as an Activities Coordinator, my true talents are in the digital world. At a time when we were rebuilding our website, I was asked to develop new content. Having built websites many times in the past, the thought of doing just content seemed a little mundane.

With the content writing came the research of using keywords within your content instead of just your meta data to gain search engine rankings. With the research of SEO came other inbound marketing outlets such as AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blogging as ways to drive traffic to your website and improve your overall web presence. Oh now did I realize how little our tiny resort was doing to get our name out there.

I am in constant research of how the ever changing web can come up with new ways to market brands, ideas and products to people. I can say as of right now, we (the resort I work for) do not practice a lot of what should probably be done to optimize our online footprint. This isn’t for a lack of trying, there are several hurdles to get through before anything can be implemented. One of them would be our GM, currently there for 35 years, this hotel is his baby and the face of advertising has changed a lot since the mid 70’s, so it’s not a surprise that some of this he just doesn’t understand.

Questions are welcome, and tips from those more experienced than myself are highly encouraged.