Eco-Friendly Digital Marketing Internship

I guess Google was getting so big, so uncontrollable lately, it was only a matter of time before we began hearing words of descent. On July 13th, an unknown poster whose been holding back their frustrations about Google, and SEO in general, spoke out about it.

I stumbled upon an article that was posted on TechCrunch.com about how Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become so unregulated it’s now comparable to “free trade”; with the one controlling all exports and imports being the search engine itself (i.e. Google, Yahoo). The article, which is written by an author who wishes to remain anonymous (for fear of fallout with Google and the SEO industry), makes points about how Google has too much control over search engine results, and the rankings of websites for certain companies and points of interest. This power and control, the author believes, should be regulated by the government and that it’s about time it happens.

“Through an uncontrolled set of factors search engines determine which listings appear at the top and bottom of any individual query,” says the author. “If you happen to own an online business, unless you exist within those top three (search results), the amount of individual traffic you will obtain from organic listings is very, very low.”

He also goes on to explain that these search engines should be required to publicly disclose the rule-based algorithms that determine result sets. This sounds a little like releasing the source code of a program, which would result in Google changing from a unique search engine brand to a common one. His points are interesting and thought provoking, but is government control really the answer?

A blog post has been made in retaliation to the article on Econsultancy.com by Chris Lake, where he declares that Google and SEO should NOT be regulated. He goes on to list 10 points about how this anonymous author is wrong and comes up with some good arguments.

Let’s say the government does decide to get involved with this, especially if this becomes a hot topic. What happens to the digital agency and digital marketing as we know it? It seems like there would be a lot less calls from people who would love to use SEO for their company, especially if search results were completely randomized. I would especially hate to see sites that contain spam and other junk at the top of Google search listings just because they contain a few words from a search query.

I urge you all to read both of these articles and leave a comment on where you stand on this issue.

The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

10 reasons why Google and SEO should NOT be regulated

Michigan State University is now offering, to both undergraduate and graduate students, a new course on social media entitled “New Media Drivers License.”

The New Media Drivers License course, or NMDL for short, provides students with a comprehensive overview of new media and digital marketing, and the relevance and importance of each for today’s businesses.  The course is taught by Ingenex Digital Marketing CEO and MSU alum, Derek Mehraban, as well as professor and Chair of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing at MSU, Dr. Richard Cole.

NMDL shows students how to take social media, like Facebook and Twitter, normally used to communicate with friends, and turn it into a valuable commodity for companies and clients.  In addition to social networks, the course covers the use of blogging, podcasting, search engine optimization, and a number of other digital marketing areas, including the never-ending uses of Google.

Paul Kanan (me), an MSU alum and a passenger on the maiden voyage of the NMDL ship during the 2009 Spring semester, says of the course, “This class rocks!  I recommend it to anyone going into public relations, advertising, or simply wants to have their finger on the pulse of the future.”

This summer marks the second offering of NMDL at MSU with three full sections.  The class meets at the beginning and end of the semester at Walsh College in Novi, MI, with everything in between taking place online.  For more information on the class, the course site can be found at http://newmediadl.com or follow along on Facebook and Twitter.

So that’s the official Eco-Friendly word, but like I said, this class rocks!  And another thing, it’s long overdue, so check it out!

It’s that time of year again – the annual rite of passage when new graduates begin to lose their minds because they’ve entered into one of life’s no-man’s lands – the time between the end of college and the beginning of a career.

This time in one’s life can best be described as being somewhat like purgatory. You know you’re not quite in Hell because you’re relieved from the stresses of finals, proud of yourself for getting that degree, and happy to return back to Ma and Pa’s for a bit once the lease is over to hang with all your leftover high school friends while you search for gainful employment (true story).

But about one month in you realize something isn’t right, you can’t shake this gnawing feeling, and you finally realize what it is – you don’t get to go back to school in the fall.  “There are no more excuses.”  “This is your life.”  “A new chapter is about to begin.” A dozen other clichés. You have no answer for everyone when they ask that unbelievably annoying and patronizing question, “So what’s next?”  It’s even worse when you realize that employers aren’t just going to knock on your door because of your fantastic college resumé and that the job market is way down due to the recession. To be honest, it sorta feels like this:

So what’s a college grad to do, short of searching for Mrs. Robinson?  Well the answer for some may be right in front of them.  Just as graduates are beginning to look for jobs, current college matriculators (is that a word?) are also beginning another rite of passage – the summer internship (or their third or fourth such position for the ambitious).  The internship used to be seen as a way for college students to get experience and credit while employers scout the talent and take advantage of inexpensive labor.

Not anymore, my friends.  The internship is now for everyone.  With the current job market as tight as it is, an internship can be the cure for the occupational blues.  For current students, it’s still the tried and true way to get a leg up on your peers while putting to use what you’re learning in the classroom.  For the newly graduated, it provides a plethora of positives.  For starters, it’s a morale boost for those who haven’t yet found the career their looking for.  It’s also another notch on the resumé belt and an opportunity to show your stuff to an employer for when they eventually (and hopefully) resume the hiring process.  And, perhaps most importantly, it can serve as a bridge over troubled water stirred up by the recession.

An especially beneficial opportunity is that of the digital internship. The digital internship (especially the Eco-Friendly Internship – no hyperlink necessary.  You’re already here!) combines the best of traditional internships past and the necessary skills of the future (which is really now).  With the digital internship, you still head down to the office once in awhile, so your office social skills remain primed, but a lot of what you do can be virtually accomplished (and you save gas, which is Eco-Friendly).

In a digital internship (yes, I realize I’ve said “digital internship” quite a bit, but it’s important) (and I’ve used an abundance of parentheses, but I like them) you learn the crafts of blogging, social media as a business tool, podcasting, Google, and the innumerable other spheres of the Internet that are being introduced to the lexicon of businesses on a daily basis.  Becoming versed in these techniques will give you a leg up on the competition for jobs over those who don’t possess the requisite technical abilities of the future.  Not to mention you can deepen your writing and communications skills, which has been a growing complaint of employers regarding the lack thereof amongst college students and recent graduates.  Oh and so as not to end this paragraph on a boring note like writing skills, digital internships are super cool and fun.

The bottom line? Digital internships are where it’s at!  Fun times, job skills, way of the future, resume placeholder, occupational peace of mind…whatever you’re looking for, they fit the bill.  So quit sitting on the couch, playing PS3 and Wii (guilty) or acting like mowing the lawn is grounds for a successful day (again, guilty), and start scouring the Internet for one.  Oh yeah, and as this blog entry began, a regular internship is cool too…just not as cool.

Last Wednesday the interns and Derek dedicated the day to analyze Google Adwords possibilities. Setting a Google Adwords account is really easy but getting the most out of it may not be so easy. The following recommendations will help you with setting up your account.

The first steps after signing up for your Google Adwords account is setting a monthly budget (of at least $50, anything under that does not really show at all) and determining where your ads are going to appear. If you are starting and your business is mostly local, it will probably be a good idea for you to keep your adwords campaign also local. Another option is to set the maximum cost per click (CPC). If your keywords are very competitive, you may want to set up a high maximum CPC. Otherwise Google can set your bids in order to optimize the results.

Make sure that you get the most of the 95 characters available per ad (25 for the title and 35 for each line). While writing your ad there are some considerations to keep in mind. The first one is how accurate is your ad. If a potential customer clicks in your ad, which reads “professional photographic equipment”, and you are only selling disposable cameras that person not only is not going to buy from you, but is also going to cost you money since he/she is clicking in your ad. It is very important that your ad include the benefits of your product and/or service and some of your keywords. You can find the keywords that relate to your site by using the Google Adwords tool. Once you do this, you can see the relevance and how competitive are these words, and choose according to your site content and budget. The best idea is to combine some competitive keywords with some other more specific to your site. Being specific will attract potential customers to your site. If you are local and you only offer your product/service locally you will most likely improve your results by including your location in your Adwords ad. Also do not forget to push your customer, including phrases like order now or limited supplies will make your ad more successful.

These are some very basic guidelines for starting your Adwords campaign. If you want to learn more about Adwords and how to use it in your business you should rely on experienced professionals and contact Ingenex Digital Marketing, I’m sure they will find the most suitable digital marketing solution for your business.

How many times a day do you use Google to search for something, entering a particular word or combination of words to get the results that you want? In digital marketing, search-engine optimization (SEO) allows marketers to get their message to those people searching for information relevant to their product, reaching a larger audience and hopefully gaining some of that audience as new clients.

Part of search-engine optimization is using a unique phrase that you and you alone can claim as yours. Due to intense competition for the top spots, it isn’t uncommon to see millions of results when searching for a particular phrase (try googling Britney Spears if you don’t believe me). The goal of SEO is making sure that when a phrase is searched, your phrase is one of the top results.

Last week at Ingenex Digital Marketing we decided to conduct a small experiment and see if each of us could dominate the number one spot on Google. We each chose a phrase that we felt represented ourselves and our internships, and used that in our individual blogs, as well as using the phrases to link to each others’ blogs. My phrase of choice is ‘Digital Eco Fusion‘ and I believe that it truly does define both my internship and who I would like to be upon completing my internship. You can see a snapshot of the Google search results for ‘Digital Eco Fusion’ below; this is before I wrote using the term.

Before Experiment

Once we wrote our blog posts, making sure to link back to each other, you can see the effect it had on my popularity:

After Experiment

Pretty cool right? Nice to see that SEO really works! This experiment has shown me that successful digital marketing requires both innovation and cooperation, and that I too can be as cool as Britney.

I wrote a post with this same title in my personal blog last weekend. The purpose of it was exclusively to prove that following some very easy instructions, we could make it to the top of the Google Search Results within days. So a little collective effort in tagging, categorizing, cross-linking and repeating certain terms in our posts has just been proved very successful. Now, when you google “Experimental Marketing Michigan”, the three words I choosed for my post, there are links to my post in the two first Google Search results and my post and my fellow interns’ posts are in that same first page of the search results.

I am certainly impressed with the results, especially when looking at the screen capture I made last Saturday right after I wrote my post. I look forward to tomorrow’s meeting at Ingenex for discussing the results with Derek and the rest of the interns.

This week we set out to “own” a set of personalized keywords using search engine optimization. The goal was to try to get my blog to appear very high up in a Google search of certain keywords. I used the terms “Online Publishing Marketing” on my Digital Marketing Blog. I chose these terms because of my goal of combining web publishing (both journalism and creative writing) with digital marketing. I took a snapshot of the Google search at the beginning of the experiment, and set up a Google Alert for the three keywords. Then I blogged about it using the terms in the title, as well as the beginning and end of the blog post.

As you can see in the enlarged second image, the search terms “online publishing marketing” now bring up my WordPress blog tags fairly high in a Google search.

The other Eco-Friendly Interns and Ingenex CEO Derek Mehraban will be doing the same, and then cross-linking between our posts. Amanda Marandola posted on “Marketing an Eco-friendly Expansion.” Katie Hyzy posted on “Eco-Savvy Marketing Ann Arbor.” Pedro Martin posted on “Experimental Marketing Michigan.” Jennifer Harrison posted on “Digital Eco Fusion.” Derek Mehraban posted on “Digital Marketing Education.”

In my short time here at Ingenex I have already learned a great deal about the digital marketing world. It all started with self-branding. What is that you ask? Self-branding in the digital world is basically just getting your name out there, creating an online presence. There are many ways to do this, starting with avenues such as LinkedIn and AboutUs, you can create professional profiles. These new pages on the internet are searchable in all major search engines, letting you control what potential clients/leads may read about you.

Another very useful tool Derek has taught us is the manner of linking, or intertwining, these new pages. Once there are credible links going in and out of your pages, you have now become even more easily searchable on the vast web. If you do a good enough job optimizing the words on your page, even Google will recognize it with their Page Rank system. Keep things concise and professional, but be informative as possible.

Creating profiles on the two pages listed above, as well as starting (and maintaing) a blog, is a great beginning to your new digital presence. Try WordPress to get your blog going, and be sure to link all of these new sites together (insert a link to your new blog and AboutUs page in your LinkedIn profile, etc.).

You’ve just got your feet wet in the exciting world of Social Media Marketing (SMM), a form of internet marketing used to achieve branding (you are self-branding) through participation in social media networks. Don’t stop there! Continue to build out your pages, and explore additional channels for you to gain more recognition on the internet.