Benjamin Tomes's Blog: Recalcitrance: An Unapologetic Free Thinking Forum, page 22

Sometimes this is best learned the hard way.

Sometimes this is best learned the hard way.

The boy cone not hang. #gangsta

The boy cone not hang. #gangsta

Yay, Amphetamines! Davis saves man, has epic day.

Yay, Amphetamines! Davis saves man, has epic day.:

What the article fails to mention, is that in the three hours that followed, Davis performed on stage with a barbershop quartet in Annapolis,entered and won a Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest, learned to play the bassoon, built a homeless shelter for a small pack of nomads in the Maryland countryside, officiated a gay marriage ceremony on the White House lawn, rebraided Pernell McPhee’s dreadlocks, played 17 rounds of mini-golf, refereed a youth hockey game on-ice in baseball cleats, wrote fan letters to every member of the Zac Brown Band, scaled the Washington Monument, made out with Tara Reid, shot a wild boar with a crudely constructed slingshot assembled from his athletic supporter and built a big-ass birdhouse out of scrap metal and twist-ties.  

Don't Order the Sausage: Employee caught with junk on pizza.

Don't Order the Sausage: Employee caught with junk on pizza.:

This kid is a #gangsta if he did this on a pipin’ hot #PapaMurphys pie. #thuglife

To Look Good is to Be Good: Redesigning a site, inside and out.

Waukesha MMA has been in business for over five years, and has had a website for much of that time.  In our analysis of their website, it was clear that it was not a good representation of the great things that went on within their walls every day.

Their social media presence was strong.  The business had a pair of Facebook accounts; one that was a page, and one functioning as a user profile.  Each one had a solid following, both sporting over 1,000 friends or likes.  The look and content used was okay, but was not utilized frequently enough, nor was it tied to any specific campaign.  It also lacked visual continuity.  

They had a Twitter account, Pinterest page, and Tumblr blog, but they weren’t frequently used.  They also were not written in a manner that was conducive to attract major online attention.  Clearly, this would have to change. None of it would do much without redesigning the company website.

Hence, we made the decision to change just about everything about their anchor site, including the URL, background, content and keywords included within.  The work was extensive.

Ideally, we wanted to obtain the URL of waukeshamma.com.  This was purchased and held by a competitor in Milwaukee, who used it as a redirect to their own site.  We encouraged the owner to attempt to negotiate with the rival owner, but to no avail.  What we found odd was that WMMA’s owner held 3 URL’s that were directly beneficial to the rival business and offered a 3 for 1 trade, but they declined.  We ultimately settled on http://www.mmawaukesha.com.  We used their former one (http://www.trainatwmma.com) as a redirect to the new one.  We used Wix to design and upgrade their site.

Our redesign efforts used a background image of their visually striking facility across the entire site.  

We blurred the image slightly, allowing for easier viewing of the content we had on each page.  In addition, Mark Hannen, one of the students involved in the project, found a work-around within Wix to create a functional landing page.  The landing page helped to build a database of email contacts for visitors of the page.   The process was ingenious; cloning the home page of the site, adding a customized form, and making everything behind it function as a button to take folks to the regular home page.  This prevented visitors from having to enter info to go further.

Additionally, we hid unfinished pages, got rid of several others, and focused on quality as opposed to quantity.  Text on the pages would be edited for content as well as format; color had to be changed and a background included so it could be seen with the new background behind it.

Lastly, we edited the picture and video content we had on-site.  This included changing the file names of every picture on the site to a crucial keyword string.  We did this for video and pictures alike; and used other keyword strings in the captions for the content.  We also coordinated the seldom-used Tumblr blog and had it display as a page on the website.  The tour video was placed as the YouTube page trailer and anchored it to the front page of the website.  We redid the picture galleries and made them look more unique.  Everything was given alt-text with keyword strings included.  

By the end of our work, virtually everything about the previous site version was simplified, rewritten and redone.  Additional work done in this vein is outlined in a blog post from our company site and will be posted soon. 

Goodell Assures Fans He Was Too Busy Dismissing Other Players’ Assaults To Watch Ray Rice Tape

Goodell Assures Fans He Was Too Busy Dismissing Other Players’ Assaults To Watch Ray Rice Tape:

Never, ever, ever let a ginger oversee any sort of fisticuffs.

NEW YORK—In response to allegations that his office had received a copy of the footage months ago showing former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice hitting his then-fiancée, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell assured fans Thursday that he had…

Child Pornagrapher Hires Baby Attorney?

Child Pornagrapher Hires Baby Attorney?:

I think it’s terrible that one of the culprits in this terrible story went straight to the Gerbers Baby Food Company and borrowed an attorney. 

Waukesha MMA: A Digital Marketing Case Study (Full Part 1, Student Work Added)

Waukesha MMA: A Digital Marketing Case Study (Full Part 1, Student Work Added):

Part 1 of a 6 part blog series highlighting students in our WI Digital Marketing program as they apply their SEO training to a real-business.

As discussed in our previous post, here is the first of six posts outlining the work of our outstanding students in our internet marketing training program.  

A) Time to See the Doc: A Free Clinic in Google Docs

Over the last year, I’ve become a huge fan of Google Docs.  Between the cost factor of zero and ease of use, it’s become a staple of the Digital Marketing Program and General Educaton courses I lead at our Wisconsin business college. 

One great aspect of Google Docs (located in Google Drive) is the ability to share a file so that it can be seen or edited by others.  With four of us working on this project, sharing was a big part of it.  To start the project out, I created a spreadsheet and immediately shared it with the others in class.  

To some, using things like Google Docs might seem a bit odd, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Our students take marketing automation courses, but it comes later in the program.  The HubSpot training they receive follows mastery of more basic resources.  I’ve become a fan of this order.  Social media and digital marketing jobs are often directed by automated marketing programs. To be successful in inbound marketing jobs, manual application is crucial.  This allows our students to gain knowledge depth in different platforms during the formative stages of their inbound marketing bootcamp.

As we discuss topics, ideas and information pertaining to the project, it can be entered by any of us in live-time.  Our initial pages in the spreadsheet included Plan, Keyword Searches and Content.  Ultimately, we’d add three more as the project progressed.  (Video, Summary and one for a specific event they were planning.)

Our plan page was a conglomeration of ideas and notes we made during initial discussions.  The keyword searches charted every conceivable combination of words that we felt would be used to find a business such as the one we were helping.  The content tab was used to formulate a definitive plan of specific digital material we would create.  

Part of Our Original Project Doc

This document is the center of our project universe.  The accessibility of it allows our students to contribute to it in class and out, as well as from their mobile devices with ease.  In addition to making this project easier to plan, it also serves as a way for us to delegate work and chart progress.  The ability to do this without email has fostered efficiency and teamwork.

Ben Tomes: Instructor

B) Marketing the Unfamiliar: Look Before You Leap

 While training for a career in the field of new media some of the skills that you learn will help you in the process of researching new customers or employers that are looking to expand their market. One of the challenges with this is that these clients or employers won’t always have a product or service that you would be personally interested in, this can make it a little challenging to write for. As a Digital Marketing or Inbound Marketing specialist it would be up to you to find out all that you can about the business that you will be promoting so that you can find the most effective way to communicate relevant information to potential customers.

Asking as many questions as you can think of will help you get a good understanding of the basics of the product or service that the client is providing. Spending some time with the customer while they are at their work or talking with other employees about what they do on a day to day bases is another way to get to know the business or product. Speak with the owner or management about creating a survey for current customers of their business to find out what it is that they, the customer, values the most about the company’s product or services.

More recently, my classmates and I applied many of these principles to expanding the marketing of WMMA (Waukesha Mixed Martial Arts), a local MMA Gym in Waukesha Wisconsin. Some of the first steps included some basic research of the MMA industry, brainstorming ideas for keywords, conducting an interview with the owner, then visiting the gym to capture photos and video to be used on the website, blog posts and other publications.

These are just a few of the new skills that someone will learn as they work towards a career in the field of new media, developing their social and inbound marketing foot print in WI digital marketing and beyond.

Mark Hannen:  Student

C) Light Bulbs, Heavy Ideas: Generating Ideas for a Marketing Campaign

As a digital marketer, coming up with an idea whether it be about website development, business or even marketing, brainstorming is generally the first thing that has to happen. There are many different forms of brainstorming. Writing it down, creating a vision board, typing it out on a excel spreadsheet (as I just did) are all general ways to brainstorm ideas.

To come up with a good marketing idea, there a few things that you need to do first:

Come up with a product to market. Having a general idea of what it is you want to market, makes promoting for it easier to sell. Examine the social media pages, and look at what works through other marketing ideas.
Know what you’re talking about and use research to find more ways to market your product. When it comes time for marketing there are several approaches to deliver your product to your customer. Some are through digital advertising, flyers, handouts and word of mouth. Once you know what it is you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and why you’re selling it, it makes the product more marketable.
You have to develop a good sense of keywords that are going to get your idea off the ground. Especially in DM, keywords are essential to selling any product and keeping the customer interested. Through social media and other forms of the web, keywords are the hidden foundation of putting your product on the market. If you continue to use keywords in your marketing it makes it simple for customers to find your product through web searches.

Nikeya Brown: Student

D) Storm Warning: Raining Words in a Brain Storm

Once we had our various marketing strategies mapped out, we had to figure out how we were going to put these ideas in action. This is the basis of a career in digital marketing. Initially, we had to put ourselves in the shoes of this specific business’s ideal customer. What was their background? What was their life like? How would they search for something on Google regarding this? We developed a series of keywords that we felt best exemplified these various groups of certain buyers.

By the end of this initial brainstorm, we were left with a list of dozens of various search terms. These were our goals. We wanted the business and web page to be the first option for a user searching for anything related to these. Sure, we were able to input several of these carefully placed throughout the website. But there were other routes left to be explored and apply our seo training. Mainly these were all to be found through blogging and re-blogging. 

We scoured the internet and various other blogs for relevant content that we could link back to our blog. We would utilize Tumblr primarily. Once being featured on the business’s blog, they would then be accompanied by our own original content with keyword strings hidden inside. Which ultimately would lead traffic right to the website. In doing this, we are promoting the field in which the business is active in, while simultaneously generating leads by bringing it back to the website. This allows users to find us without explicitly searching for us, thus being the driving force behind the concept of inbound marketing.  

Jordan Carlson: Student

- See more at: http://blog.bse.edu/digital-marketing-training-project-part1#sthash.ENakJ7X0.dpuf

Who said field trips ended with high school? Best one ever...

Who said field trips ended with high school? Best one ever tonight as @brensteneducation Digital Marketing students got to meet with @brewers Director of New Media Caitlyn Moyer tonight. Awesome experience with an awesome person!

Yeah , she squats. #thuglife

Yeah , she squats. #thuglife