The 2012 Career and Technical Education Awards Luncheon will take place Tuesday, April 10, 2012, at the Sheraton Waikiki, and features high school students from around the state.  Together, they have worked many hours to carefully construct and submit business plan ideas for new businesses.  There are three stated goals for this competition that can be found on the organization’s website here.

1. Get business leaders involved as coaches to build a support network for entrepreneurship that includes entrepreneurs, seasoned managers, professionals and investors;
2. Create new companies each year by encouraging students with business ideas to more them from concept to action and implementation
3. Help companies to start and grow businesses here and to attract and retain the talented people who are the backbone of an entrepreneurial economy.

Our Chief Strategist Rob Bertholf was fortunate enough  to receive an invitation to judge these plans.  We’re very excited to take part in it and we hope to see you there!

ClearlyM is honored to be featured in this month’s (March 2012) issue of Hawaii Business Magazine through its feature (seen here) on our Chief Strategist, Rob Bertholf.  The article, titled “Drawing in Clients Online”, discussed the benefits of Search Engine Optimization on both websites and businesses as a whole, and emphasized the necessity of having a steady, obvious, online presence for any business hoping to flourish in the 21st century.

Specifically, it focused heavily on Rob’s insight as one of the leaders of SEO and how his strategies have paid dividends for our clients (Island Insurance was mentioned specifically here).    At ClearlyM, we feel that an effective SEO strategy is limitless in terms of the visibility, traffic and business it can bring and are committed to remain on the cutting edge to deliver results for our clients.

Facebook is rolling out a dramatic change to the layout of its Fan and Business Pages that will have a drastic effect. The new layout change, called Timeline, was originally applied only to personal profiles but will automatically be applied to Fan and Business Pages beginning on March 30th as well

Background of Timeline

The idea behind Timeline is to better tell the story of your business through dates and milestones, highlighting important events and posts. One of its biggest benefits is that it allows your fans to send messages directly to you instead of posting onto the wall. This will afford you more privacy when it comes to responding to negative comments.

Negatives of the Timeline
Unfortunately, the launch of the timeline now means you will be unable to display discounts/price or purchase information, contact information (which should go in your “About” section), references or pointing to Facebook actions such as “Like” or “Share,” or calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.”

Customizing the Timeline
There are now only two main customizable aspects on your Fan Page, the two image areas.  The large image area is called a Cover Photo, which should be engaging and express your Page’s identity.  The Profile Picture is the small image to the left where you can put your logo.  This will also appear as a thumbnail image on other parts of Facebook and next to your Page’s updates in the news feed.  This is small logo is the most important part of your fan page because it will be the thing that people will see when you comment throughout Facebook.

Alternative Resources

1. Here’s an article with a two minute overview summarizing the major changes. Read article…
2. If you have 20 minutes, here’s Facebook’s video tutorial on how to setup and manage your Page.  Click here for Facebook Pages video tutorial…
3. If you need help learning how to utilize Facebook or other social media tools to meet your business objectives, call us for a quote today.

Google has been tweaking it’s search algorithms for years to both improve search results for it’s users as well as to outsmart people trying to game their system.  Venice, however,  is its biggest change to date.  A few weeks ago Google published the 40 significant changes they made listed here…  However, reading through this is about as fascinating as reading the dictionary, so we’ll just highlight the main point that we feel will likely affect your search rankings the most.

Among these changes is their launch codenamed “Venice” which places a greater emphasis on local search results then ever.  Prior to Venice, if you wanted a local search result you’d need to append an appropriate local term to your keyword (the city, state, etc.). Now, however, Google has been changed to automatically includes 3-4 local search results in every keyword search that you make.  The stated purpose of this,  is to help provide what Google hopes will be more relevant search results for all of its users.

Prior to Venice, typing “best restaurants” into Google would give you the highest rated “best restaurant” sites across the U.S.  Now, however, typing in “best restaurants” will give you a mixture of national sites, as well as some related specifically to your area (for me, “Hawaii’s Best Restaurants” came up as the #1 organic search result.)

So what does this all mean?  A local website no longer needs to have the best ranking in the nation to be on the first page of the search results, they simply need to have the best ranking for their particular locale.  On the flip side, national brands need to re-evaluate their sites content and page structure to ensure they are not left out of the party.

If you are one of our SEO clients, do not fear!  We have already developed a location-specific plan for these changes and have begun to apply them to your keywords.  If you’re not currently a client but are still very concerned, feel free to read some more about the change here, or you contact us for help.

We Practice What We Teach

The foundation of our business at ClearlyM is built upon the same concepts we teach in our classes.   Although they are held every quarter, no two classes are exactly the same.  As technology rapidly changes, we adapt our practice and classes to keep pace with new methods and tools.

Our mission is to educate our clients and the community.  ClearlyM is about transparency.  Our industry has a reputation for confusing customers with technical jargon.  We want to empower clients with the knowledge to make educated decisions about their online marketing.

Rob’s PNM Classes

Search Engine Optimzation:  Thursday 6 PM – 9 PM: Search Engine Optimization. $50
This class helps students gain a foundation knowledge to “effectively market to search engines by exploring how SEO, Paid Search Marketing and Social Media Marketing tie together.  It also ties in how various Analytics and research tools aid in expanding the effect of your SEO efforts.

Social Media Marketing: Thursday 6 PM – 9 PM: Social Media Marketing: Developing an Effective Strategy. $50
This class helps students craft a “results-driven” social media strategy for their business or organization.   You’ll learn the appropriate social networks and sites for reaching your target audience and strategies to increase conversion.

Website Analytics: Thursday 6 PM – 9 PM: Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization. $50
As important as it is to generate traffic to your website, converting that traffic to a lead, sale or other desired action is critical.  Learn how to maximize the effectiveness of your website, identify the traffic sources that provide the most value, evaluate visitor preferences and more.  You’ll gain a thorough understanding of how to utilize Google Analytics and other tools, and how website design, layout and content affect conversion.

WordPress: Thursday 6 PM – 9 PM: Practical WordPress: Beyond the Basics. $70
WordPress has become one of the most powerful, user friendly content management tools available today.  Not for the novice, this class is geared toward users familiar with the WordPress dashboard and architecture and fundamentals of web publishing.  Learn best practices for building and customizing self-hosted WordPress websites, installing plugins and configurations to add functionality like e-Commerce solutions, paid membership and supporting multiple languages.

View the entire schedule of all the PNM classes here.

Our infographic Integrated into the City's website! If you can't tell, that is our logo on the bottom right hand corner of the picture.

The entire development process took about a month and began innocently enough.  Rob teaches a three hour class at the University of Hawaii on a variety of topics (WordPress, Social Networking, Search Engine Optimization,  you can go here: http://www.outreach.hawaii.edu/pnm/programs/PNMWorkshopListings.a if you’re interested in finding out more, or taking a class.)  It was during one of these classes that he was fortunate enough to meet Gail Haraguchi, Director of Customer Service for the City and County of Honolulu.  He must have done something right, because immediately after the completion of the class, Gail invited him to join the City and County’s team working to develop a social media strategy for the upcoming APEC forum meetings here in Hawaii.

Our initial sessions were based on some simple social media foundations.  Who was our target audience?  And how would we best reach them? To this end we came up with 4 categorical classifications: Community Lifestyle, Public Interests, Public Impact and the Visitor Industry.  We felt that any relevant APEC information would fit into one of these 4 channels.  Next we determined that there would likely be two sources of information,one from official channels (like the JIC or the MAC) and one from the community at large (through twitter, facebook, blog updates etc.)  The problem then became, how would we filter the information so that the people who were consuming it would not be inundated with incorrect, inaccurate, or overly voluminous data?

To resolve this problem, we decided to reach out to people that we termed “assets”, individuals identified as deeply invested in both social media (through Twitter, Facebook etc.) and in at least one of the specific categories we’d named previously.  It would be up to these individuals to filter all the information coming in, and disseminate only what was both useful and accurate.  We felt that each of these individual assets had enough clout within social media circles that we could be confident that any information they pushed out would reach just about everyone who wanted to see it.  Was this a huge undertaking in a short amount of time? Absolutely.  But we thought we could get it done.

The graph below is how we initially visualized the information filtration process would work.

Original Concept

Then, others were brought in.  Doug Chin, the managing director of the city, Forest Frizzell, the deputy director of the DIT (Department of Information Technology), and Kainani Kraut, the deputy director of DTS (Department of Transportation Services).  And, after a few more discussions, we decided to take a more streamlined approach with our strategy.  Rather than bring in outside assets to filter the information, we felt it more prudent to leverage the existing mechanisms already in place.  Thus, the four category plan was scrapped and remodeled.  Instead of focusing our efforts broadly on 4 categories with individual assets, we intended to narrow down our focus considerably.

This meant instead of starting something essentially from scratch, we could simply take advantage of the City and County’s pre-existing resources.  That meant focusing our campaign on the 4 twitter accounts owned by the City and County for City Information, Traffic, Trash, and Emergency Management (@hnl_info, @hnldts, @hnl_env, and @hnl_dem respectively.)  It also meant no longer needing to utilize and bring in outside assets to help control the flow of information.  All we had to do now was get each of the different departments on board with our plan.

After briefing the various directors’ on our intention, we needed to figure out a way to present the plan to the public at large.  Enter the infographic, pictured directly below, which Rob developed as a way to present all the information needed in a complete, concise way.

Final APEC Infographic

This was the end result of our collaboration.  After a few final tweaks, it was adopted and integrated into the front page of the City and County’s website on 11/1/2011.

Thank You Tweet from Forest to Rob

Overall this process was a great experience for us.  Not only did we get to meet, and work with, an amazing group of people, but also got to do work that benefited the community at large.

Miscellaneous Links:

KITV Morning News:

http://www.kitv.com/video/29685092/detail.html (Our Infographic appears first at 1:35 with Doug Chin as he talks about where to go for information during APEC. Great job Doug!)

City and County Website:

http://www.honolulu.gov/government/ (Our Infographic is displayed on the right-hand side of the site, under APEC Information.  If you look very closely you can even see the ClearlyM logo!)