By Kristen Carter

A few days ago Stephen Chapman wrote a fascinating blog on what he deemed the one mistake CEOs make about search engine optimization. What is that mistake? It’s that many CEOs spend so much time focusing on getting their keywords ranked highly on search engines that they never consider if their SEO strategy is increasing leads or conversion for their business. This is a problem because having a keyword rank highly is only good if it translates to increased ROI. This is particularly an issue when CEOs become attached to specific keywords, and instead of trusting SEO experts, they insist that one word or phrase is vital to their business and MUST be ranked highly.

Chapman points out that of course there is a plethora of search engine optimization agencies who will gladly take your money … Read More »

I didn’t think I was that old…but apparently I injured my back while I was sleeping.  Even though I was in excruciating pain, I chose to drive downtown and do a presentation.  I could have called in and delayed the meeting but it took a month to get the right people in the room and I wasn’t about to throw it back in the rescheduling pool again.

Instead, I decided to play hurt.  Sometimes, you’ve just gotta play hurt.

Sometimes you gotta play hurt from TOM WILLIAMS on Vimeo.

I recently received an email solicitation from a sponsor of an online conference that I attended.  Now I understand that sponsors need to be able to reach out to attendees and try to get a return on their investment.  I’m sure that somewhere in the fine print of my registration I agreed to be contacted by these guys.  No problem.

The email solicitation was actually very well done.  They had an image from a video “commercial” on their email with a big WATCH NOW button.  Good calls to action, guys.  All this was done RIGHT.

The email was so good that I actually clicked on their video commercial to see what it was all about.  I was taken to their website where I prepared to watch the commercial…but the video didn’t play.  Instead a Sign-up form popped up and demanded that I … Read More »

Jeremiah Owyang Meetup and the Power of Twitter from TOM WILLIAMS on Vimeo.

You know the problem with social media?  It can take you down the rabbit hole.  So, why do we shuffle and re-shuffle our work and why do we keep an eye on the social media channels?

Because you never know when lightening may strike.

Lightening struck for me recently.  I happened to be checking my twitter stream…for the 1,000th time, and I saw a tweet from a colleague of mine, Nick Seguin, cofounder of DynamIt to Jeremiah Owyang, Partner at Altimeter Group about Jeremiah being in Columbus.  I immediately scanned Jeremiah’s latest tweets and saw he had indeed come to Columbus for about 24 hours for a client meeting.

Nick and I both reached out to Jeremiah via Twitter’s Direct … Read More »

Today’s Friday Video Blog is about the macro economic difference between Big Companies and Small Business.  Don’t take this the wrong way.  I have nothing against Big Companies – I worked in three multi-billion / multi-national corporations before starting InnoGage.  It’s just that many times the Big dogs forget how important the small businesses are.

http://www.vimeo.com/9583112

Big Companies vs. Small Business – Who really creates the Jobs? from TOM WILLIAMS on Vimeo.

The 2009 TechColumbus Innovation Awards Event was a huge success.  If “Innovation” was the Theme for the award candidates I have to say that “Interaction” was the Theme for the Event.  Check out the video for some of the unique interactive things at the event this year!

TechColumbus Innovation Awards Recap from THOMAS H WILLIAMS on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to co-present at the American Marketing Association Special Interest Group on Social Media (AMA SIG for short).  I worked with Steve Bell, Founder and Principle at Strategic Marketing Innovations Consulting.  It was so much fun working with Steve, who is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met.  Steve’s rich history as an analyst at Forrester gave our presentation a level of depth that would not have been possible otherwise.

Our presentation focused on how Social Media is changing the ways Corporations do business.  We were able to draw parallels to the days of when the Internet first broke onto the business scene.  The similarities to then and now are striking. We also got into organizational structure which included snippets of a video interview I did with Ryan Squire, Director of … Read More »

Hey gang!

I was honored to be recently spotlighted by the eduWEB Conference.  The eduWEB conference is an “annual, internationally recognized event for the higher education community, attracting those who are involved in online strategy, marketing and technology”

I had the privilege of speaking at the conference this past summer in Chicago.  It was at this innovative conference where the InnoGage team joined up with the great folks at Jadu to pioneer a new kind of sponsorship.  Instead of just running a table, we sponsored the social media for the event.  We hired social media consultants who were on the run during the entire conference shooting high quality images and video which were loaded to eduWEB branded Flickr and YouTube pages.  We also ran a live video feed off the … Read More »

There is a new Delicious in town – it’s called Toobla!  Toobla is simply the coolest way to gather and organize content on the Web.  This innovative startup was created by entrepreneur Jake Saxbe.  As web content continued to grow at an exponential rate, Jake realized there should be a better way to organize content across the web – using a rich visual interface instead of just URL links.

What’s really cool about Toobla is that not only can you visually organize web pages, videos, photos…etc. into buckets, but then you can share that entire aggregated bucket with whoever you want!  You can even embed your containers on websites and most blogs via the Toobla embed code.

Check out the InnoGage Toobla channel … Read More »

The New York Times recently published an article about MIT’s student blog program, which they have had amazing success.  Here is a quick breakdown of the key learnings for companies wanting to capitalize on this success.

1. Use of STUDENT bloggers

Note that it’s not the head of the MIT marketing or admissions program who is writing.  It’s not the President or Dean either.  It’s the students.  Companies always say their most valuable resource is their People, yet we rarely see a company who gives their most valuable resource the ability to talk about how great their company is.

2. Lots of Bloggers

MIT uses a good cross section of bloggers to best represent the diverse student body at the University.  A company is composed of many people across many business units, disciplines, areas of expertise…etc.  Don’t relegate the blog effort to … Read More »