If you want to understand Local Search, you should start by understanding the importance of standardized core business data. By core business data, we are referring to the business name, address and phone number, which you’ll sometimes see as NAP.

Social media is growing. We all get that. The rate of adoption is often a skewed measure depending on who has been asked. The social media “professional” has the nearly automated response of “Everyone does it! It’s easy! It’s cheap! It’s great!” Someone more firmly rooted in reality will say that many companies are having [...]

How do you convey the value of Web Analytics to an organization that has never used web analytics or has used it but at a very elementary level? This is one of the questions that I constantly get from students of my UBC Web Analytics classes, where I am an online tutor.
My answer to [...]

An interesting article in Entrepreneur magazine shows the value of networking when it comes to getting business. The premise of the piece, argued by Dr. Ivan Misner, is that a greater number of personal contacts can result in sales and leads even when you can’t make a direct correlation between your initial contact and your [...]

I spoke to Sam Ramji a little while back to get an update on Sonoa Systems. Readers will recognize Sam from his previous life as a central figure in Microsoft’s open source strategy team. Sam started the call describing a shift in his work from “open source to open cloud”.
Sam explained that enterprises [...]

Recently I was invited to give a basics webinar on optimizing news content  for search.  The intersection of search and PR/communications are obviously something quite familiar and while I’ve done several such presentations with our client PRWeb, I had not done one with Search Engine Watch before.
The outcome exceeded all expectations thanks to the excellent [...]

Here are several excerpts from an excellent post by Bruce Temkins, It’s Time For Text Analytics:
At the Clarabridge event this week, I got to spend time with many executives from large companies that were thrilled with the results from their text analytics efforts.
While most companies were still in relatively early stages of their deployments, the ROI of their [...]

Bad press and negative publicity can affect businesses in many different ways. In the online world, negative information can be difficult to combat, especially when it ends up adjacent to keyword queries in search engines. In many cases, medium and large companies who find themselves on the wrong side of a search engine will consult [...]

As we move into the next phase of social communication online the idea of outsourcing your social media activity to a PR agency makes less and less sense.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old [...]

Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the details of SEO.
This is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. You got it?
- Bull Durham