This is a great visual model of the conduits to conversation. As marketers, we should be aware that our clients are engaging with all of these tools on and offline to communicate with friends, research products and services and much more. These tools shape the way we interact, how we interact with others and how new information is organized. Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks, explain he’s map like this “The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.”

Marcos J. Menendez
President
www.loopconsulting.com

A breakfast meeting, designed as a “get in, get out” mini-seminar on what every online marketing and communications manager should know. We will talk about the tools and tactics currently in use, and their performance for online marketing and communications.

Topics:

Search Engine Optimization: What are the 3 things you should do to make sure your website is found by search engines. The top 5 SEO
myths and how to avoid them.

Mobile Marketing: The do’s and don’ts of mobile. How to use and integrate the mobile channel. How to design a successful (SMS) text campaign.

Video: How to best use video? What does it cost to produce? What kind of results tracking can I expect?

Social Marketing: What are the benefits to the brand? How to get started? How to monitor your reputation? What to do right and what to avoid?

The promise: In a little over an hour, you will get an overall understating of which online marketing tools are delivering good results. It will be quick, fun, and informative, and will provide you with actionable ideas you can implement yourself.

Speaker: Marcos Menendez, President Loop Consulting Group
Date: Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Where: Amadeus Salon, Ritz Carlton Hotel- Coconut Grove- Map
Time: 8:30 am Breakfast; 9:00am to 11:00am
Cost: Complimentary RSVP A Must: Cinthya M. Longarte, clongarte (at) loopconsulting (dot) com or 305.271.9915

Cuil pronounced “cool” (use a heavy Irish accent) is the creation of ex-Google brain Anna Patterson who said to CNN that her new search engine offers “better ways to search”.

I’m always interested in better ways to find what I’m looking for, so I visited www.cuil.com to give it a test:

What I liked:

1. Simple home page, ala Google

2. Suggestive search box (based on what you type, it suggests words)

3. Folder style tabs recommending additional content sections (nice, requires less thinking, I think)

4. More visually appealing than Google

What I didn’t like:

1. Results seemed scattered on the page, but this probably because I’m used to scanning the page from top-to-bottom and Cuil presents results in a three column format.

2. Some results seemed a little confusing since they appeared with images along side and the image may not be relevant to the content.

Even though Cuil has $33M in venture funding and it’s just a couple of days old, I’m not sure if it’s unique enough to make a dent in Google’s armor. What I do like is that fact that people are trying to improve on the standards and even change them and this is how we all win.

But the ultimate judge of performance is you, www.cuil.com

Google engineer Matt Cutts, who’s quite popular with the techies, offered some simple yet great advice on how to make your website easier to find by your prospective customers.

Here’s a quick summary of what he says to USA Today in his interview:

1. Add “keywords” to your site’s content; keywords are the words you think people will use to find your site when they use a search engine. The more keywords you use in your content, the easier your site will be to find.

2. Title Tags and Description Tags are the information Google displays about your website in the results page.

3. The more people that link to your website the better. People will link to your content if it’s interesting and of value. (By the way, please link to me!)

4. Advertising on Google does not get you preferred treatment. You will not rank higher in the free results because you advertise.

5. Normally, Google refreshes its entire inventory once a month. This means that Google may visit your site to look for new content every 30 days. However, don’t wait a month for Google to visit your site; submit your site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.

I’m not the best person to summarize interviews, but if you liked the tips above, I’d recommend taking time to watch the five-minute video interview and hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.