Hyper-Local Article

Listeners of the World,

Today I have decided to post a worth wild article instead of writing my own. The person who sent it to me found it off Time.com. Please take a look at the link below!



Time Article



Let me know what you think, and don't forget about my final part of my social media marketing series that will be coming this Thursday!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

4 Part Social Marketing Series.

Listeners of the World,

Last week we talked about two of the social media giants (Facebook and Twitter) that could help you spread your brand and help create a following. This week I wanted to talk about a site that can not only help in spreading your brand, but also with networking, leads, and much needed tips and advice! A site filled with professionals just like you...........Linkedin.com!

Linkedin.com - Is a great social media site that helps with all aspects of your business. It helps you connect with future customers, competitors, and even maybe future business partners! It is a well build site that helps many marketing professionals stay up with current and new technologies and ideas. The site in short is the real deal!

Tips on how to create and maintain a Linkedin account:

- When you are first starting your account make sure to fill it out as detailed and complete as possible. You want to highlight all of your skills and try to obtain recommendations from friends, employers, and co-workers. The more detailed and complete profile; the more likely you will be to connect with the right people!

- Try and join all the groups that pertain to you and your field of expertise. Once you have joined make sure to participate in the group; not only to just make new connections, but to also learn new tips! Finally try and create a group or your own either for your company or field. This will help with spreading your brand, getting fresh ideas, and helping to find the right people to help your company.

- Connect with as many people as possible! The more people you are connected to the better chance you have of getting introductions to important people in your field. These can help you to reach a deal or partnership that had no way of happening before!

-Take advantage of entering in your business to their business listings, while also posting any job openings on the site. This is a great way to obtain top level employees while letting everyone know the details of your business.

- Lastly we come to their "direct ads" which is advertising directed to the users of your choice on the site. This is a great way to reach business owners, top manage, and even CEO's! It's easy and you can choose your budget!

I hope that you are enjoying this mini-series of marketing so far! I have one last post that will be coming later this week to finish up the series. Please let me know what you think of it so far!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

4 Part Social Marketing Series.

Listeners of the World,

Earlier this week I enlighten everyone with the first part of my Social Marketing Series on how to incorporate Facebook into your business. Today I am going to focus on another social media giant that is Twitter.com!

Twitter - Twitter has become a huge sensation over a very small amount of time compared to Facebook. Many businesses are utilizing this tool to reach all of their customers with a simple tweet instead of mass email, or letter. Others are using it to run different contests and even to answer customer service questions and problems. It has become a necessary tool for many small businesses out there with little to no marketing budgets.

Tips on how to build and maintain a twitter account:

- Make sure to reach out to people who are either interested in your field or business. A lot of people will try to just reach out to everyone, but you want to avoid looking like a spammer or amassing a twitter list of people who don't care about your product.

- Make sure to personalize the tweets and to mix it up! This way you don't sound like a marketing machine instead of an interesting person with a product that might peak their interest. Many mix in "quotes of the day" and trivia to keep a fun balance.

- Always answer direct tweets. You will always want to engage your followers so that they feel if they interact someone will care and answer them. Most businesses will also tweet "thank yous" to loyal customers to make them feel appreciated.

- Tweet just the right amount. You don't want to put out too many tweets about your product or people will become annoyed or put off by it. Also you don't want to tweet to little about your product or they will forget what it even is! I would recommend you tweeting about 5-10 times a day and to only make a few about new products and product updates.

- Take advantage of all the extras! Make sure to give yourself a personal background, etc - use all the options given to you to maximize your customers experience!

- Lastly make sure to tie in all other social accounts together once again. Make sure to have a link to your blog, facebook page, fan page, etc to help expand your brand.

Please make sure to tune in next week when I post the final two parts of this series and also let me know if you have any questions, or comments!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

4 Part Social Marketing Series.

Listeners of the World,

Today I start a 4 part series on how I have used social media marketing to my advantage. I have operated on what is considered a low marketing budget and I have found different ways to help get your name/brand to the masses. Below I will list the different sites and how I've used them to try and spark greatness!

Facebook - Every business small or large should have some type of presence on facebook. It is now the number one visited site and is closing in on about 500 million users. Now there are many different ways you can use facebook. You can create a user account, fan page, group page, or use the API and create different games and applications to be used by facebook users.

For those who want to take the route of creating a user account I would suggest the following:

- Update and comment daily on your status and those of your friends. This keeps your brand in their news thread and on their minds.

- Post interesting and meaningful links, events, and pictures that relate to your business or brand. For example I post multiple story links a day that will link my friends to OurTown.com.

- Make a lot of friends, but be choosy! Facebook only allows each user account to have 5,000 friends, so you will want your friend people interested in your field of work/brand.

- Link, link, link! Make sure that you have everything linked to your facebook page: your site, blog, twitter, digg, etc. The more options you give the users, the better of you are!

For those who want to take the route of creating a Fan Page I would suggest the following:

- Get someone tech savvy involved to enhance and spice up the page with some HTML coding. This will help make your page stand out from your competitors.

- Make sure not to update too little or too much. Updating too much will annoy your fans and drive them away, while updating too little will make them forget you even exist. I would recommend about once or twice a week.

- Have friends help you! This is a great time to take in your own friends list and send out your page to your friends. Then ask them to forward it on to their friends and so on. This is a quick and easy way to gather fans in the beginning


For those who want to take the route of using the API for games and apps I would suggest the following:

- Make sure it's fun, easy, and working! Now this kinda hits all types of games and apps you can put on facebook.

- Make sure to update these games and apps on a regular basis to keep the users interested and on their heels.

- Make sure to tie in these apps or games to any user account, fan page, or group page you may have.

Now remember the more you have on facebook the better! I would recommend combining a user account with a group page and applications, while also combining a fan page with a group page and applications. Either of these combination's would help out any business with expanding their client base and brand. Make sure to check back later in the week for my next installment!!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

Blog Talk Radio!

Listeners of the World,

This is a very exciting week for we should start to see a working Beta of the brand new OurTown site! But until we can see that I wanted to talk about Blog Talk Radio. It is a potential brand new feature that we might bring to OurTown.com to help out our local editors.

This is a new site (blogtalkradio.com) that one of our very own local editors found and brought to my attention. This site allows any one to be able to host their very own online talk radio show! It is free to use (unless you want the premium package) as just a listener or a host. It has great tools and features to help you really relate to an audience.

There would be many different ways we could use this on OurTown.com. Each local editor would be able to use this to broadcast various radio shows about their community or town per month. We could also use it for all the local editors to tune into a Home Office broadcast letting everyone know about that latest happenings with OurTown.com. Either way it would be a very useful new feature to add to OurTown.com

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

OurTown Site Update!

Listeners of the World,

It has been a few weeks since I gave an update on our new site. It is now in its 7Th month of production and I finally received good news yesterday! I will have something to show all the local editors and viewers before the end of the month, and by something I mean a new site!!

It has been a long and drawn out process to get to the point we are at now, but I can say that this site will be worth it. The new look alone with help boost viewer appeal right away, not to mention all of the new and overhauled features. The new site will be the way a news site should look, feel, and entertain!

Once they give me the information of how to log on and get to the new site I will post it on here for everyone to take a look at the brand new system. Also it's not to late to comment with different suggestions to make the new site great. So please let me know of your ideas!!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

July 4TH

Listeners of the World,

The 4th of July is coming up very quickly and everyone seems to either be getting ready to set out on their long weekend adventure or is already on their way. You will see most people traveling to lakes, family, or nice vacation spots. Others will be throwing parties and meeting at bars to celebrate this great weekend of Independence. But will anyone be truly celebrating and remembering why this weekend is so great?

Over the years I feel that the American people have lost the true meaning of the 4th of July. Just last week I overheard someone talking to a man from another country telling him to have a great 4th of July! Now something tells me that not too many other countries will be celebrating OUR Independence day.

Now I know that their will be people who are out "celebrating" or partying that will keep the idea of what this is all for in the back of their mind, but will they really do anything patriotic? All I am asking for for each person to just stop and take a second to remember why we celebrate this day and to honor the men and women who made this possible for us.

And if anyone wants to express their feelings on the holiday via an article, song, poem, etc. please send them to Support@OurTown.com and we will post them all!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris