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Corporate social media is a huge buzz phrase. A company’s brand online- through social media reputation and word of mouth marketing is beginning to have more and more weight in today’s marketplace. In the past, the saying used to be that one bad customer could relay the story to ten you never met. In the social media world, one customer can reach thousands they have never met (sometimes millions). Today’s contender for brutality to a companies reputation is “The Worst Company in America Award“, via Digg, Google, and a million online readers.

This years contest winner was Countrywide Home Loans. 123 deals with companies having severe reputation and brand problems online, but Countrywide beats most of them on a scale of how problematic it can be.

I first found out about the tongue-in-cheek contest at Digg. The story had received over 1000 “thumbs up” votes. When an article receives that many votes the information is pushed onto the front page of Digg (which has 230 million+ pageviews/month and 26 million uniques) where it sat for the better part of a day. That roughly equates to about six million page views, along with 161 comments.

Examining the “big picture” of the “Digg Effect” brings in some truly amazing numbers when you search the Digg.com site for other articles including Countrywide. In the past year they have had many articles involving them (all bad) submitted to Digg, with a total of 11,820 votes. Multiply the number of page views by the number of times one of the stories found itself on the homepage and you have a much bigger issue.

Most marketers immediately think that the damage is self-contained to the community users of Digg. Unfortunately Google loves Digg. Stories reaching the front page often emblaze themselves permanently into the search terms for the article. In this case - the term was “Countrywide Home Loans”

Within 24 hours, the Digg story was prominently on the sixth result for Countrywide’s own name- reading ” Digg-Worse Company in America - Countrywide Home Loans”

By the end of the day Google had found the original content for the site running the contest and replaced it with the actual link to the consumerist article.

On the Consumerist site, the two originating articles that ended the contest received 31,000 and 34,000 views, with a total of 266 comments.

Before counting all the social media traffic that read these articles, we can assume that some of the 189 to 236 people a day who search for “Countrywide Home Loans” also read the articles when they see the search result.

How much brand damage does social media expose a company to? I would say a lot. In Countrywide’s case, proudly displaying the “Worse Company in America” title on your own name via Google is costing them millions.

Countrywide Home Loans has also found itself displayed on two other sites: CountrywideHomeLoanSucks.com where a neglected author states “Please take the time to read my story and see how I was ripped off by Countrywide Home Loan.” and Loansafe.org which is a community forum that has 446 conversational threads about Countrywide.

Some other examples of how social media is driving reputation into the ground:

Growing Pains Hit Dell’s Customer Service: In 2004 CNET had a review of Dell’s customer service, garnishing 129 comments. As time went on, customers lovingly began referring to dealing with Dell customer service as “Dell Hell”

Other sites dedicated to promoting company mistakes:

Rip-Off Report: Probably the most well known reputation destroying site, this site ranks in Google’s top ten search results for all sorts of rip-offs and scams, as an example case PepBoys (the auto store chain) has 115 mentions on the site. In the search engine world, Ripoff Report has been reviewed by experts like myself and Rand Fishkin over SEOmoz.org who examined if Rip-Off Report was merely a scam and extortion scheme.

PissedConsumer.com: This site ranks in Google’s top ten search results for companies like Capitol One, featuring a dozen or more reviews of the company that have received three to five thousand readers in the past two months.

If you have stake in a company, take some of the steps required to protect your brand and assets online. I’ve included links below to some of my articles on reputation control and brand protection, in addition to ways you can monitor and leverage different online assets in your favor.

Monitoring the huge trend in corporate social media, executives around the world are testing new ways of sharing information and trying to discard some old school stumbling blocks. Many corporate decision makers are left looking at advanced spreadsheets and blindly take shot after shot in the dark (hoping they hit the mythical beast “the prospect” in the process.)

As our team at 123 is often moving around and speaking to these decision makers, we occasionally like to flex our brains a little and examine a company online. Are they doing it right? Are they doing it wrong? Are they even trying? Most importantly, what type of information is available by spending a few minutes browsing around the net?

One of the companies that caught my attention for reviewing was Intermec. When I first visited the Intermec site I thought “uh oh, another corporate site” and then I noticed they had a few unusual links at the bottom: del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati.

I found this odd, mostly since a good portion of users coming to this site (business decision makers) have little knowledge of what del.icio.us, Digg, or Technorati is.

On a flip side, I would have to assume that no one on del.icio.us, Digg, or Technorati has any clue what Intermec does. (BTW, they are in Seattle and I am one of the rare people who actually knows what Intermec does.)

For those of you who don’t know, “Intermec Inc. (NYSE:IN) is in the business of helping you achieve the most return from your automated information and data capture (AIDC) and mobile computing systems. That means we do more than design and build the industry’s most complete lineup of rugged, reliable and versatile equipment. We also work with you to get inside your challenges, to know your unique situation and then leverage our strong relationships with resellers and industry-leading alliance partners to help you create a total solution that harmonizes with your networks, platforms and processes. Our collaborative, connected approach can ensure a more complete and seamless implementation whether your needs call for our Gen2 RFID, bar code systems, rugged computers or a Cisco WLAN infrastructure.” (Quoted from Intermec site.)

What does that mean? Well… that is the type of stuff you see on many corporate sites these days. It is the officially confusing way to make sure that social media doesn’t work and that the general visitor suffers a quick case of avoidance. If you land on nearly any page of the Intermec site, you discover brochure pages that would be confusing for the general population of a larger social networking site. If you are lucky, they may actually take a second to read the “about us” page and be baffled by the terminology of an industry, or be lost when a company uses acronym descriptors like AIDC, WLAN, or Gen2 RFID.

If you were a user of Intermec’s products or looking for like-minded information, the site design may be presenting the information at the right experience level. However general social media sites are not experienced in the vocabulary of your industry, so examining the actual social networks they are trying to maneuver in reveals some problematic issues:

Technorati has 100 results for the term “Intermec” on various blog posts and articles. I am unfortunately not spotting any official Intermec blog or centralized source of information to harness that exposure. It appears as if all the product reviews and random commentary are either not pointing back at the main Intermec site, or randomly linking to a nestled product page. With the amazing amount of information Intermec releases in newsletters and articles, it is somewhat baffling to find that they are not syndicating the content through a branded blog or properly setup information site.

Digg reveals another unfavorable scenario:

Ouch. Zero results. Perhaps someone working at Intermec should Digg a few results…. or they may have tried doing that a little too often and found themselves removed from the Digg platform for spamming (I didn’t check to see if it was removed for spamming.)

Del.icio.us reveals that while popular is popular, it is also a strange way of losing money.

Del.icio.us has 259 mentions of Intermec. At first glance this would probably mean “success” to most corporate marketers. They have tagged content for words that could produce some relevant traffic for the business. Unfortunately a variety of suppliers (and Google) seem to be buying the traffic via the adwords campaign highlighted in red on the screenshot to the left. Intermec itself is buying the keyword “Intermec” for brand protection, paying $1.75 to $2.90 per visitor.

Rather than receive “free traffic” from a social media site, Intermec is actually losing advertising budget to both del.icio.us and Google. This is a typical Google issue found on many sites that utilize the Adwords system for monetizing traffic, social media transforms from organic traffic to paid traffic.

Moving away from social media sites and looking at Compete.com, we can see that Intermec has been doing a decent job this year for increasing traffic. According to open data sources, traffic is up roughly 160% since last year. The top relevant keywords sending traffic to the site are:

1. intermec
2. intermec technologies
3. rfid tags consumer products
4. rfid chips

These keywords are ultimately one of the “sweet spot” targets for other competitive companies. Collecting the information on five to ten competitive businesses usually reveals the best keyword choices and open targets for driving organic search traffic. Allowing your competitors to do the heavy lifting work of experimenting with keyword phrases is an effective way of reducing the project cost of your own keyword campaigns (either paid or organic.)

Back to my questions from the beginning of the article:

Are they doing it right? Are they doing it wrong? Are they even trying? They are trying, but missing to target the right demographic in social media. This is a general promotion issue in many marketing campaigns: the target is missing the demographic.

While sites like Del.isio.us, Technorati, and Digg have massive communities, they may or may not have a niche audience that fits with your overall mission objective. Even if an article or project page was “Dugg to the Top” what results would 500k generic visitors produce? (Probably none)

When corporate social media campaigns are launched, it requires strategic mindset to analyze the available audience and choose an appropriate goal for the business. The steps to examine in launching a promotional effort with social media has a very simple core:

• Needs of the Business
• Budget and resources (labor, talent, available bandwidth, and dollars)
• Competitive Analysis (like minded information, finding sweet spots with maximum ROI)
• Understanding of the available audience
• Conversion goals of the campaign
• Measurement

In Intermec’s case, there could be useful reasons for using Digg, Del.icio.us, or Technorati, but the benefit for a corporation in such an audience would need to focus on relevant campaigns that work within the confines of the audience. There are also additional benefits that may be a step removed, such as promoting an article or whitepaper within a community like Digg to produce a specific search engine result.

If you would like to read another article on other types of information that are readily available online, read my article on Intelius, which includes financial, marketing, and brand impact information results you can find online.

Per Wikipedia “Defibrillation is the definitive treatment for the life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. Defibrillation consists of delivering a therapeutic dose of electrical energy to the affected heart with a device called a defibrillator. This depolarizes a critical mass of the heart muscle, terminates the arrhythmia, and allows normal sinus rhythm to be reestablished by the body’s natural pacemaker, in the sinoatrial node of the heart.”

I was recently thinking on this topic. Why is social media such a hard thing to wrap your business head around? Probably because we use so many terms trying to shorten our ideas and concepts into statements that area not only hard to understand, but as non-sexy as you can get. Like good health, social media tends to push novices into a dark spot where they do not understand the lingo and vocabulary. By pushing them into unfamiliar territory, they retreat and ignore the basics of getting healthy to improve their life.

If you are trying to understand social media, you are probably realizing that it has more in common with our body than you could know. Unfortunately many of us treat our bodies very poorly (FYI- if you want to treat your body better and get healthier, I suggest talking to Jamie and Meagan at Kinetix Living)

Take consistency as a point. Like a strong heart, a social media campaign has a regular beat to it. Unfortunately social media tends to be comparative to sitting in the bleachers of your favorite sports game and being trampled by the star player as they make a dive for the game point. One minute you are at rest, the next minute you are subconsciously dealing with information overload.

Those instant “ups and downs” created by communities reacting to your online presence (or lack there of) can be mitigated by having a healthy check-up and having a regiment of flexing your social media muscles.

Too many companies simply rely on one aspect of an online presence to mitigate one freak instance from doing irreparable damage. Sure you may have a website, but do you YouTube, Linkedin, Twitter, or simply converse with your own clients?

Having a presence on different services may not impact your brand today, but it can help mitigate and defend your brand tomorrow. There are three parts of understanding why having a healthy social media and online brand is good for you:

1. A strong body stays healthier, longer. If you keep fit, your body (aka personal brand) will take care of you in some rather tough situations. You can jump higher, move faster, and manage to turn heads a little more often.
2. Healthy brands, like healthy people, have dedicated friends. While a presence on Twitter or Facebook may not work for every company, having an established group of supporters and evangelists is in your best interests. If you had a heart attack in real life, do you really want to experience it alone… or do you want to be surrounded by a community of trusted supporters who know the right person to call?
3. Knowing the right person. Regardless of how good your personal network is; the “network effect” multiplies the number of people available on a ten-fold level. (I.E. Your 100 contacts give you access to 1000.) Would you rather turn to your immediate personal contacts and rely on one of them to perform open heart surgery on you, or open up the search to a few connections away?

After thinking about it, take a moment to browse the links below and give yourself an education on terms used in social media and steps that will flex your social media brain.

Many clients ask our team exactly “what is 123SocialMedia?” and the answer is longer than a ten second explanation. Our company falls into utilizing online media in coordination with other promotional types to influence different demographic groups.

Adrian Moss has an article over on his blog -New market dynamics – new style PR agency, which defines a lot of what we do in the realm of reputation and social media. There is a lot of material there in terms of how reputation is being influenced online through social media sites.

The problem is that while we “play” in the PR space, social media is not limited to the PR realm. If you compare the media we are working with (search engines, social networking sites, video channels, press release newswires, information syndication services, etc.) there are over a hundred different benefits available to any specific client.

Those benefits however, are not going to be used by all clients or businesses. Company A may choose to use advanced search engine optimization techniques to garnish higher conversions on a marketing project, Company B may use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to get the right whitepaper in front of the right decision maker, or Company C may use competitive analysis to compile a list of business prospects from a social networking site.

Adrian’s article is a good recap of the change occurring in PR and media, as investors are starting to look at companies like 123SocialMedia and they are trying to understand an industry that is evolving at an amazing rate. Every single week creates a new opportunity for exposure, which can be the building blocks and foundation of any communication strategy.

In Adrian’s words:

What will a PR2.0 agency offer?
* Online reputation monitoring and alert service
* Reputation analysis, tracking and reporting
* ‘Firestorm’ crisis management and leveraged opportunity service
* Strategic planning and implementation services for social media and online media campaigns
* Blogging, audio and video podcasting project development and management
* Campaign micro-site development and support
* Online community development
* Identification and relationship building with key online influencers
* Building and delivering online PR campaigns including to online media and journalists

Perhaps those bullet points define a PR 2.0 Agency, but is that really a PR Agency? Are we shifting more and more away from separate Marketing, PR, and Advertising agencies into a unified Communications Agency?

With Adrian’s description, we fall into his PR Agency 2.0 mold:

The new agency model – Digital Reputation Management

A gap exists in the market for a highly focussed, technically competent agency who really understands the challenges and opportunities of online communities and social media.

The agency will be technically savvy with highly developed SEO and data search and analysis skills. This has to be coupled with creative digital skills and communication skills.

We do offer reputation management, as well as provide many articles and how-to guides to understanding online brand and reputation.

• Online Reputation Control: Google Alerts, Google Everything
• Online Reputation Control, Branding, Insurance, or Blind-Luck?
• Social Media Measurement and Brand Control

Technically, our industry is different that the old-school version of Public Relations that we occasionally bump into. Our projects interact with technology that is shifting daily. For example: In order to control a brand issue on a YouTube video: we may use other videos, encourage community users to flag the video,
or create brand sites to drive popularity to other positive sites and bury the video in search results. What works one day for us is almost guaranteed to not work the next, and our very business model becomes a form of intelligence vs counter-intelligence war that is fought on thousands of different battle fronts.

The question surrounding this change in the Public Relations and Communications world is whether or not existing agencies try to understand this radical change or if they decide to outsource it to specialized groups like 123SocialMedia.

What is your opinion on where communication pieces are going? Is it all breaking apart or coming together?

On the web, your name can (and is) your reality. However naming yourself online isn’t that simple. Choosing a domain name for a business web presence is one of the most critical items in your promotional venture: your domain name will be the nexus of your business for months, years, or even decades.

There are a list of things you should consider before embarking down your online venture:

• 1) Define your brand. It is more than words, but will be flavored by them. Your business brand is an image of who you are. Ask your friends, family, and peers what your ideas inspire when the words are read.
• 2) The idea of a business brand is to be memorable, yet effective in communicating the purpose of your business. It is usually more effective to focus on communicating your purpose, rather than just developing your widget as a term.
• 3) If you can’t get a .com, choose again. There are plenty of other extension like .net and .info, but whatever case that is: you will need to also have the .com extension or risk losing your brand before it has ever been established. (Businesses should register the .com, .net, .info extensions for a business)
• 4) If you think of related names in the process, register them today. $10 today is a lot cheaper than the impossibility of getting it tomorrow. In the case of 123socialmedia.com, we registered 100+ domains with the term “social media” in it.
• 5) Keep it short. A good domain name should be one to three words long. It should not include hyphens or any other characters that are out of place. Shorter domains are generally better for two basic reasons: they are easier to spell and remember.
• 6) Don’t be scared of going long. Yes, I just said “keep it short”, but having a long domain name has the benefit of saying exactly what you do. Long domains also pull some weight in keyword search results, so having “social media” in the 123socialmedia.com domain helps a site rank for those terms.
• 7) Multiple Domains are Okay! So many businesses lock on to the idea of having one site to send readers to. While having focus is good, multiple domains and sites allows a company to have different presentations for different audiences. Multiple domains and sites can also allow a single business to have multiple results in search engines, which allows them to conquest the first page of search results on terms that drive results.
• 8 ) Recognize how you can misspell your own domain. If you have any words that do not carry clearly when spoken or are easy to misspell, register the misspelled version of the keywords. $10 for a misspelled version of your own site name is a very affordable way of preventing client loss or competitive problems in the future.
• 9) Buy alternate domain names today. At less that $10 a piece, alternate domain names can provide a very reliable way to promote your business and help protect your reputation. If you have any public figures in the business, make sure to spend the $10 to buy personal name domains (www.firstnamelastname.com) and any slogans or catch phrases.
• 10) Realize that your domains are being promoted to both humans and search robots. They each like slightly different things and you should create a strategy for having multiple domains and how they coordinate relevant traffic to your business.

Bonus point: If you are trying to use a new domain for competitive search engine ranking, register the domain for five years. Search engines give credit to the length of a registration to help identify if a new site is a spam site being used to manipulate the search results. By committing to a longer stay, you help establish your virtual reputation in the eyes of engines like Google and Yahoo.

Do not jump the gun! Remember that a domain choice has many different angles to it. It can easily be compared to choosing a real world location for your business: where will it be? what does the neighborhood say? who will see it? how long will you be using it?

If you are a small business, then $50 to $100 to secure a domain name for a few years may seem like a major investment. For larger companies, spending $500 to $1000 for a larger competitive search optimization and brand protection effort is a good investment (for instance, do you own www.yoursitesucks.com?)

Understanding that a good domain may mean the difference between five visitors a month or five thousand, greatly changes how your business functions online. With a well organized strategy behind multiple domains, different niche streams of visitors become easier to reach and increase the chance that they will convert into business results.

There are a lot of things to think about when building a new company, and a variety of implications to choosing both unique or common phrases to define who, what, where, and why your business is. What does your name say… and who does it say it to?

Michael McDerment from Freshbooks wrote an excellent and detailed post last year that deserves honorable mention about how to define your company name. “When you start a company, eventually you are going to have to choose a company name. You may not take the decision that seriously - but trust me, a great name can make all the difference. As the online marketplace becomes increasingly cluttered it is more important than ever to be memorable and to stand out. […]“

I couldn’t agree more.

The “home turf” of 123SocialMedia is amazingly populated by a huge variety of start-ups, you can check-out the Seattle Start-up Index to see a great list. Literally hundreds of naming projects in action: from business success to dismal failure.

“When you start a company, eventually you are going to have to choose a company name. You may not take the decision that seriously - but trust me, a great name can make all the difference.”

As an online promotion company, we spend a lot of time looking at names from different viewpoint than most: will the name drive traffic? does it differentiate from competitors? is it link-friendly?

Some of those types of questions are addressed in this article: Business Social Media - A Domain Name Guide

Moving into more of a reputation/brand mindset: what types of promotion does a brand name control online? For younger companies brand names can stifle business growth as budget is spent on establishing buzz. For established companies brand names can create value in the entity, rather than the service or product they offer.

When looking at the Seattle business start-up scene, we take a quick look at how a few different levels of business are using names and brand. We also bring in a unique grade: search brand ownership. Search Brand Ownership: is a pretty basic concept. When searching the first page of Google for your brand name, how many positive, neutral, and negative results are present on the first ten results. In order to be good / bad, it must be owned by the company directly, have entirely positive/negative statements, or be completely for / against the business.

Zingbars.com - is a yummy nutrition bar company, Angel funded, started by a few Seattle nutritionists to create the ultimate healthy (and good tasting) bar.

Commentary: Zingbars as a name is “half trendy, half product” and talks to the consumer space they moving into, however the market is crowded by many other players in the snack bar space and brand is very important in the mindset of the consumers market they are dealing with.

Site Stats: Alexa Rating: 3,701,378 Compete: N/A Google Pagerank: 2
Favorable 1st Page Mention: 3
Neutral 1st Page Mention: 6
Negative 1st Page Mention: 1 (an entry for a company site problem)

Biznik.com - Biznik is a business networking community for people who independent professionals. When I last wrote a Biznik review, it was at 9,000 members strong (as of July 18 - 14,000 strong.) It is friends and family funded, driving revenue from a membership model @ $10 to $24 a month.

Commentary: Biznik has been doing fairly well in its space to coordinate members and generate articles for the site. Traffic and time on site is down for the past few months, but membership up.

Site Stats: Alexa Rating: 55,965 Compete: 55,864 Google Pagerank: 5
Favorable 1st Page Mention: 4
Neutral 1st Page Mention: 5
Negative 1st Page Mention:1 (Another community site rank on a community sites name isn’t good - Squidoo, even if it is a Biznik entry.)

Earth Class Mail - Have you ever wanted to check your real world mail from your laptop? Then you probably need Earth Class Mail. Earth Class Mail is funded by $13.3 million.

Commentary: EarthClassMail is a cool concept, the question is simply whether or not they can convince enough people to use the service. I for one, would love to see the end of my junk-mail killing millions of trees.

Site Stats: Alexa Rating: 68,920 Compete: 54,924 Google Pagerank: 5
Favorable 1st Page Mention: 1
Neutral 1st Page Mention: 9
Negative 1st Page Mention: 0

Zillow.com- The Seattle company raised a hefty $87 million in total funding, putting it in an area of lofty goals and deep pockets. They easily have the biggest budget to establish an online presence and a large bank-roll to mitigate the online realm.

Commentary: Zillow has managed offend and befriend almost everyone at some point or another. Sometimes praised as being better than sliced bread, and sometimes being held responsible for housing crash. In either case they know how to generate and ride buzz.

Site Stats: Alexa Rating: 1,466 Compete: 477 Google Pagerank: 7
Favorable 1st Page Mention: 3
Neutral 1st Page Mention: 6
Negative 1st Page Mention: 3 (bad reviews and ratings, one competitive)

Conclusion:

It doesn’t appear that budget level means much in terms of brand ownership on first page results. The mightier and “big budget” Zillow actually has the highest number of bad entries on its own brand. It is almost ironic that the company with the most online traffic going directly to its name (Zillow) is also exposing its brand value to potential attack.

As a company develops through online growth stages, it is far easier to protect brand by establishing a healthy foundation of positive information that supports the overall goal. Knowing what information your name is related to needs to be constantly reviewed and double-checked.

What is your professional or business brand value grade?

Darren Rowse of Problogger fame has an excellent guest post by Dustin M Wax regarding “Nine Signs of an Effective Blog Post“. Many good writers fail to realize some of the subtle nuances in writing online (such as for blogs or online communities) and this piece by Dustin breaks down some exceptional points. For additional pieces like it here, you can also read Effective Social Media Writing and Blogging Like a Kid.

“You sweat blood all night, hunched over your keyboard, typing away at your blog’s next masterpiece. Finally, you click “Publish”, the post flies into the ether, and then, you wait.”

The following nine points are all well defined in Dustin’s article, but I also think there is some wonderful knowledge trapped in the basic essence of his nine points:

1. The headline draws the reader in.
2. A concrete detail or visual illustrates the benefit promised in the headline.
3. The lead expands the theme of the heading
4. The layout is clear and skimmable.
5. The post covers the topic in a logical sequence.
6. The post is persuasive.
7. The post is interesting to read.
8. The post is believable.
9. The post asks for some action.

These points are a good resource for any writer trying to grab a hold of the ideas behind social media and blogging. On a more technical level of moving readers into a post, I would also point out that writers looking to harness the promotional and viral aspects of blogging go through some additional steps before posting an article:

• Analyze Your Keywords - This article on social media keyword tools shows you how to look at keywords and phrases that will help draw relevant traffic to your article.
• Have a Traffic Strategy - while browsing through social media keywords, think about the bigger picture of who and why you are reaching readers. If you are reaching journalists, your information should be provided in a more concise format for reprint. If you are reaching consumers, tone your message to the audience appropriately. In either case, realize that monetizing your traffic may have a delay depending on the length of your sales cycle and the information you are presenting.
• Ask Readers to Subscribe- this may sound simple, but check the bottom of this article and look at the “if you like this article, why not subscribe?” button. Selling your services and keeping your readers informed are often the same thing when it comes to social media. Provide useful information on a consistent basis and you will develop a longterm audience that provides a healthy marketing channel over time.
• Link to the post to your other articles- Once you have someone on your site and they are reading your information, encourage them to stay around a little and read more information. By directing readers to other helpful information you can increase your traffic and develop stronger relationships with your readers.
• Keep Your Articles Focused - if you are trying to develop a readership, try to keep on-target with your core articles. This also applies to the technical side of search engine optimization for your articles, if you are trying to rank for competitive keywords you may need to produce 3 to 10 articles that revolve around the same relevant keywords.
  
• Use Related Keywords - Before publishing articles on your site, try to plan a few articles in advance so that you can coordinate keywords between them. As good example is for real estate terms, if you want to rank for the phrase “seattle real estate” then you could produce several articles on other local terms such as “Bellevue Real Estate” or “Bothell Real Estate”

If you have ever been searching online, you have probably been on Google looking for something. If you are like most people- for hundreds or thousands of things on Google. Oddly enough, I have a question: do you have any idea what other services Google offers for free?

Over the years Google has taken an incredible mission to buy, conquer, and dominate hundreds of smaller tech companies. As the dominion of the Google empire has grown, the entity known as Google has become far more than “just a search engine” and has brought on dozens of lesser known features that each have amazingly useful services. Google officially runs many projects under the umbrella Google Labs, and as they prosper or die those projects evolve into entirely new services.

Rather than write some lengthy description of every service Google offers, I am just going to recommend you spend five minutes reading through SOME of the services Google hides on sub-pages of the site. Depending on your business and exact usage, some of these services may be incredibly useful or completely worthless. Out of 50+ services however, there is a golden nugget of wisdom waiting for everyone.

Search

Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice

Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics

Book Search Search the full text of books

Checkout Complete online purchases more quickly and securely

Desktop Search and personalize your computer

Earth Explore the world from your computer

Finance Business info, news, and interactive charts

GOOG-411 Find and connect with businesses from your phone, for free

Google HealthNew! Organize your medical records online

iGoogle Add news, games and more to the Google homepage

Images Search for images on the web

Maps View maps and directions

News - now with archive search Search thousands of news stories

Notebook Clip and collect information as you surf the web

Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents

Product Search Search for stuff to buy

Scholar Search scholarly papers

Special Searches Search within specific topics

Toolbar Add a search box to your browser

Video Search for videos on Google Video and YouTube

Web Search Search over billions of web pages

Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books, and more

Explore and innovate

Code Download APIs and open source code

Custom SearchNew! Create a customized search experience for your community

Labs Explore Google’s technology playground

Communicate, show & share

Blogger Share your life online with a blog — it’s fast, easy, and free

Calendar Organize your schedule and share events with friends

Docs Create and share your online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets

Gmail Fast, searchable email with less spam

Groups Create mailing lists and discussion groups

Orkut Meet new people and stay in touch with friends

Picasa Find, edit and share your photos

Reader Get all your blogs and news feeds fast

Sites Create websites and secure group wikis

SketchUp Build 3D models quickly and easily

Talk IM and call your friends through your computer

Translate View web pages in other languages

YouTube Watch, upload and share videos

Go mobile

Maps for mobile View maps and get directions on your phone

Mobile Use Google on your mobile phone

SMS Use text messaging for quick info

Make your computer work better

Pack A free collection of essential software

Web Accelerator Speed up the web

Google Labs

	Experimental Search Check out Google’s latest ideas 05/16/07 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Code Search Search public source code 10/05/06 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Accessible Search Web search for the visually impaired 7/19/06 - Give us feedback
	Google Extensions for Firefox (Google Browser Sync now available) Add powerful new tools to your Mozilla Firefox browser 6/7/06 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Trends See what the world is searching for 5/10/06 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Mars View some of the most detailed maps of Mars created by NASA scientists 3/13/06 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Page Creator Create your own web pages, quickly and easily 2/23/06 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Dashboard Widgets for Mac Quickly access Google products from within Dashboard 2/23/06 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Ride Finder Find a taxi, limousine or shuttle using real time position of vehicles 3/30/05 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Google Suggest As you type your search, Google offers keyword suggestions in real time 12/9/04 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others
	Product Search for Mobile (US) | Product Search for Mobile (UK) Improved! Search for products from your mobile phone using Product Search 2/24/04 - Give us feedback
	Google Sets Automatically create sets of items from a few examples 5/20/02 - Give us feedback - Discuss with others