Evans’ roots in Social Media Marketing stem from his experience working at GSD&M in the advertising department; his goal is to see ads go beyond their current disruptive nature and create a more intimate marketing experience. Evans co-founded Digital Voodoo in 1994 and has worked with clients such as Bengaluru International Airport, Intel, Dell, United Brands, Pepsico, Southwest Airlines, AARP, Wal-Mart and the PGA TOUR.

Evans is best known for his book “Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day” which gives anyone with a marketing background a primer on the social web, how consumers interact with brand and how the purchasing funnel works.

His follow-up book Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation” focuses on how to use social media for consumer relationship management and how to monitor the impact of your social media marketing. All great books and DigitalEYE staff favorites.

Evans’ expertise ultimately comes from being a consumer. His motivation to change current marketing theory reflects his understanding of the consumer as person rather than as a statistic.

If you are interested in finding out about Evans’ strategies or what social media marketing can do for your brand, we encourage you to come to DigitalEYE Media’s event on December 16th which features Evans as the keynote speaker. Currently, there are fewer than 90 tickets available, and space is running out. Cost of admission is only $10 if you book before December 9th and food and beverages will be served during a networking hour with Dave before the presentation. DigitalEYE will also be raffling some impressive door prizes. For more information, visit our event website at Internet Marketing OC. If you are within driving distance, you won’t want to miss this one-time only event!

Copy Blogger

(http://www.copyblogger.com)

Copy Blogger is a great read if you are going to be doing any kind of writing online. Copy Blogger writes great articles and tutorials on how to improve your writing and make blogging, copywriting and writing for search engine optimization fun and effective.

Top 10 SEO Tips

(http://www.top10seotips.com)

Top 10 SEO Tips, maintained by Steve Wiideman, is one of the greatest online search engine
optimization resources online. I work with Steve on a regular basis and his expertise is astounding. He’s great at what he does and regularly blogs about search engine optimization.

Mashable

(http://www.mashable.com)

Mashable is one of the most active and well written social media Blogs out there. It’s constantly updated with tutorials and features a plethora of resources that will help you harness the power of social media. The blog has the latest news in social media allowing you to keep up to date with the newest startups, trends and tools.

Scobleizer

(http://scobleizer.com)

Robert Scoble is one of the most interesting personalities on the Internet. He is most notable for his book “Naked Conversations” which details his work evangelizing Microsoft through blogging. Scoble’s blog is great to read about, well, blogging.

ReadWriteWeb

(http://www.readwriteweb.com)

ReadWriteWeb is another great social media blog that tackles the legality and impact of social media campaigns. They have a small networks of blogs that focus on very specific segments of social media such as cloud computing and the mobile web.

Hopefully these blogs will help you better understand social media. This is just the tip of the iceberg though. Exploring more social networks and blog s related to your niche will help make social media fun and effective.

In today’s world, marketing is easily dismissed if it seems any bit robotic, even if a human did, in fact, create it. Content inundated with jargon is practically useless when you’re attempting to captivate consumers and drive business. Starting a blog for your company or brand gives you a very powerful medium for creating original content and giving your company a personality and voice. A company blog that offers original content gives your brand visibility, creates trust and provides a medium for customer interaction.

Creating Organic Content For Your Brand Creates Visibility

Search engines love organic content. Creating good organic content is important for any good search engine optimization strategy, when you naturally inject keywords into your text, you’re making it easy for any search engine that indexes to pick up data. Search engines recognize this and will suggest your site more and more to consumers. Original content also gives consumers something fresh about your brand to experience and will continue to develop relevancy and new web traffic.

Gives Your Brand Has A Presence Online And Builds Trust

Having a powerful online presence is valuable because you can show your knowledge and authority concerning your industry and build trust. Taking the conversation beyond what your brand is about and writing about you do in your field gives readers and consumers confidence in your product. You wouldn’t trust a mechanic to fix your car if he didn’t know a Lamborghini from a Kia, why would you trust you a salesman to sell you something if he couldn’t tell the difference between his product and that of his competitor? Giving your brand a strong internet presence creates trust with consumers bringing them back time and time again.

Creates A Medium To Interact With Consumers

Visibility and trust are vital to creating a strong web presence but you need to have interaction with your blog; it’s a conversation between your and your consumer. Blogging transcends the traditional advertising experience which ends shortly after an image is abruptly flashed in front of you. A blog is the followup between you and every client that has bought your product and everyone who is interested in what you’re selling. Consumers view your company blog as the voice of your brand, they’ll listen and they’ll actively seek it out. If you’ve got their ears, you better something interesting interesting to say.

Having a company blog is vital for creating organic content for your brand which generates excellent visibility. It gives you a method for communicating with consumers to build trust. If your company doesn’t have a blogger or company blog, DigitalEYE Media has a skilled team of writers that can bond with your brand to give it the voice and online presence it deserves.

The Power Of Twitter In A Live Event

Twitter is best known for delivering instant updates. Before we arrived at the US Food Show, we wanted to provide something powerful yet useful. Twitter gave us everything necessary to get in touch with vendors and attendees.

When Live Tweeting, Plan Ahead

Before the event, we got in touch with US Food Show to promote the use of a single hash tag attendees and vendors could Tweet with. Throughout the show, we used #USfoodshow which became a local topic everyone at the event could use and communicate with each other. Other vendors used the same hash tag and a stream of Tweets related to the convention were created. The event planners sifted through this stream to instantly gauge attendee reactions and displayed Tweets on several large screens in the event hall.

Mobile Devices Make Live Tweeting Easier

One of the best tools we had at our disposal were mobile devices. In between Blogging and Facebook fan interactions, I was Tweeting directly from my iPad using a Twitter client. The tablet’s built in 3G connection and extremely long battery life made it extremely easy to Tweet from Digital Eye’s booth and Tweet from other vendor’s booths. This effectively extended the entire event experience to Digital Eye’s followers, my followers and those interested in the event. If you’re thinking of doing live Tweeting, make sure you’re using a good Twitter client on your phone or tablet instead of just using a cellular card with your laptop. While laptops and net books are portable, they’re often cumbersome to carry around and Tweet in a live event. Using something like a Smartphone allows you to take pictures and Tweet them instantly

Making Tweets Meaningful

Besides being at the epicenter of a live event and having the opportunity to Tweet it, the most important thing is making your Tweets meaningful. I talked about using hash tags to categorize your Tweets but you’ll want to add some more content. For example, Jamie, Gary and I geotagged all of our Tweets using GPS coordinates from our phones (any modern Twitter client and the web interface will support this feature). This allowed anyone searching for local Tweets through a Twitter client, Yelp or Foursquare to see our Tweets about the event. This gave attendees another option to search for our coverage beyond hash tags.

We also added media such as pictures of vendors and us working diligently on our presentations at booth 123. To add to our event coverage, I along with Jamie, talked to different vendors and tried some samples and Retweet them with a short review.

What Are Twitter Lists?

Lists allows users to add other Twitter profiles to a centralized location for quick, easy access. You can use this in conduction with your Social media strategy to instantly add more value to your Twitter profile and establish yourself an expert on who’s who in your industry.

Twitter lists are so much more than a simple place to add your favorite followers. Anyone visiting your profile will instantly see which lists you have created and who you would recommend they follow. The great thing about these lists is that they are real, active links that anyone can copy and paste to share outside of Twitter.

Twitter Lists In Action

You’ll need to make Twitter lists public if you really want to take advantage of the feature. A private list is beneficial if you want to follow your family or friends who are wary of being exposed to your list of followers but beyond that, Google will do not index your list which makes using a private list a bad idea.

It’s important you be picky when creating your lists. Just because you’re looking for Twitter profiles on photography doesn’t mean you should add anyone with a camera. Use variety when choosing people to follow. Pick people who take great product shots and some who have an eye for nature. not just photographers who focus on photo-journalism (although including a few of those in your Twitter profile would be great as well). Think of your lists as the cream of the crop when choosing professionals in a given area.