By Josh Cline

In a prior post entitled “You’re on the First Page of Google – Now What,” we warned traditional and online marketers not to think of search-engine optimization (SEO) and search-engine marketing (SEM) as digital Holy Grails that will magically bring profits. The same is true for social-media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (despite the doubling of the latter’s stock price after its recent IPO).

Just as owning a website was not enough to survive the dot-com boom (does anyone remember Pets.com?), so does the use of search-engine keywords or a Facebook page by itself not guarantee instant success today. Quality marketing has always involved – and always will involve – the use of different methods for different purposes.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

In social media, there is no such thing as “off the record.” And General Electric may have discovered this rule — but much too late.

On March 24, the New York Times published an article stating that GE had not paid U.S. federal taxes on the $5.1 billion in profit last year from its domestic operations. In response, the company’s PR account on Twitter started tweeting about the alleged inaccuracies in the story. (Interestingly enough, all of the tweets that day were on other topics even though the NYT story had just broke. The article was not mentioned by GE until their first tweet of the following day.)  Read more...

By Josh Cline

In today’s environment, entrepreneurship within the start-up community is booming. High-tech, mobile, clean-tech, and bio-tech firms are showing enormous growth in ideas, products, and solutions that will make a different in today and tomorrow. Unlike the good ol’ days of the late ’90s or the better days of the mid-2000s, the ability to launch ideas is facing new hurdles. In the Israeli start-up community, the problem is that pre-seed and seed money is as dry as the desert, and only a few will find drinking water.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

As online marketing continues to integrate with traditional practices, it is easy for newcomers to fall into a common trap: believing that reaching the first page – or even the top search-result – of Google will guarantee success. But the search engine is not a digital version of a Golden Ticket.

After months of grueling work, your keyword research, on-site optimization, and search-engine marketing have paid off, and you are now near the top of Google’s search-results — congratulations! Your website’s traffic should start to skyrocket. But do not break out the champagne just yet. Executives and managers who are just starting to understand and incorporate so-called “inbound-marketing” techniques often — and understandably — confuse the means with the ends.  Read more...

For the past 12+ years, I have preached and stuck to the laurels that strategic marketing and communications is the foundation of any marketing plan. Over the past five years, the word “strategic” has dropped out of the marketing lingo and many companies have just been ad hoc and makeshift, lacking firm direction. During the past few years, during the new media era, I never believed in the hype that digital media will take over public relations and marketing. Endless debates and arguments that all marketing initiatives are driven by a strategic-integrated marketing plan that maps to a companies or organization business objectives have occurred. Many of the kings in the marketing industry has jumped on the bandwagon, claiming that PR is dead, but today, the same people are saying PR is alive and social media is a part of PR.  Read more...

What attracts Google’s crawler (also Yahoo’s and Bing’s, but let’s focus on Google right now) is commotion. Fresh, interesting and catchy articles and conversations that shake up the web.

Here’s the equation:

On the one hand you have “Social Media,” which is where the discussions and conversations take place. What people talk about matters. On the other hand, you have quality links to pages. Good links from various sources attract search crawlers. If you combine social media attention with the right link-building layout, your page gets to the top of the search engine results page (SERPs) quickly.  Read more...