Online reputation management (ORM) is about monitoring and improving how your business is viewed online. It means looking and analyzing what a potential customer, reporter, or partner will discover about your brand, your people, or your product/service when they perform a Google search. Before they ever land on your website or pick up the phone to call you — what will they find when they look for you? And will they like it? Said simpler: Is your online presence working for or against you? This is the idea behind online…

We like to think that there are phases to SEO. Phase 1 is an often overlooked but critical component of SEO: technical SEO. This is not on-page or off-page, but almost “in-page”, including a lot of sitemaps, source code, crawling, indexing, mobile load times, and more. The purpose of this phase is to make sure that Google can find your pages, crawl them, render them quickly, and render them as a mobile device would. Other things like site architecture and scripts can also be meaningful in this phase of technical…

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Digital Marketing/E-Commerce MBA students from the College of St Rose about marketing and design. Professor Braathe asked me to prepare an assignment for the students to tackle. With the oversaturation of tweets, blog posts, and podcast about how to market to millennials, I thought it might be fun to flip the script and have them research and write up the top 10 ways to reach GenX in today’s media climate. Below you’ll find the students thoughts and insights on reaching GenX. 10…

So you’re considering hiring a marketing agency, but you’re not sure what to look for or how to make sure you’re picking the RIGHT agency. You’ve come to the right place. As a marketing professional who not only works at an agency (so I understand the ins and outs), but who has also done corporate and small business marketing and hired agencies (both good and bad), I’m here to help you save yourself the time, money, and headache of picking the wrong agency. We’ll take it step by step: Selecting…

PRSA Boston puts together a Social Media Summit every Spring that provides actionable insights for Social Media Strategists and Public Relations professionals. This year, I was lucky enough to attend and learn from folks who are encountering the joys and challenges of working in the ever-changing world of social media. This year’s theme, Breaking Barriers, is particularly apt, as algorithms continue to change, privacy concerns rule the conversation, and the toxicity of some channels lead us to consider how best to use the different platforms that are available. Read on…

2017 was a great year for our agency. We strengthened our leadership with the appointment of a COO and CMO We signed exciting new clients, in a variety of industries and verticals (and have become obsessed with them) We wrote, designed and produced award-winning creative that was engaging, purposeful, and downright beautiful We helped our clients grow their businesses and see great success We hosted amazing events like TEDxAlbany in our liveroom We received a visit from Tri-City ValleyCat’s Southpaw We were named a Best Place to Work to work…

If you’re an email marketer, you’ve probably been hearing “GDPR” thrown around a lot lately, it stands for the General Data Protection Regulation. If you haven’t already, you need to start preparing for it, especially if you’re doing any business internationally or collecting personal information from citizens of Europe. This new European legislation can and will affect the way you collect, manage, and send to email contacts in your database. Starting May 25, 2018, this legislation will become enforceable internationally. *As a general rule of thumb, even if you do…

If you’re here with us in Vegas, I hope you survived lunch because now it’s time to dig into data and analytics. Guiding us on this journey are Annie Cushing and Cynthia Johnson. This promises to be good. Up first is Annie Cushing.  She says her Annielytics brand started as a joke on Twitter. She bought the domain before a skeevy marketer would and it grew from there. That sounds about right. ; She’s going to do a deep dive into Google Analytics dashboards. She says she doesn’t work for Google…

Chatting this morning we have Bruce Clay, Greg Gifford, and Kevin Lee. Three guys who know what they’re doing, and one guy is responsible for hiring me 11 years ago and gave me my start in marketing (hi, Bruce). Bruce is up first to rattle off 41 Signals & Ranking Factors for Local Search. He says his presentation is twice as long as he has time for. He’s publishing a blog post this week to go with it. He says to get it for free. Google Local Google is in…

From an Iron Man Breakfast straight into our morning keynote! I’m pretty excited about this. Keynoting this morning is Lee Odden of Top Rank Marketing. Lee is the ultimate gentlemen of marketing and of my favorite friendly faces. I’m excited to see him on stage and hear what he has to say. Lee says he has history with Pubcon. He shows pictures from the old days which show he’s been here for awhile. He happens to include a phot of the two of us from way back at SES New…