Our group spent 6 days in Muhuru Bay dodging cows, malaria, and Piki’s (motorcycle taxis), and spent 4 solid days and nights teaching classes ranging from Entrepreneurship Concepts, Sales, and Marketing,  to Communications, Resume Writing, Interviewing skills and Personal & Business Finance.  The classes we’re very well received and in the end, I must say, I cannot wait to return to teach again.  To learn more about our day-to-day experiences, refer to: http://educateagirl.blogspot.com (this blog was written and maintained by my friend Melissa Katz, a J&J PR Pro that joined us for the trip and spearheaded the Communications, Interview, and Resume classes).

At Turbo, we pride ourselves in giving back, and plan on doing all we can to continue educating and helping out with the WISER School. If you’re interested in learning more, give me a call or send me an email –matt@turbosocialmedia.com.  Enjoy the pictures from my trip below:

Thank you to Alma Lasers, ReachLocal and LocBox. We appreciate your support and everything that you do to help our clients success with their marketing. Here’s to a joyous Holiday season and an even better 2013!

If you’re interested in partnering with Turbo Social Media, we’d love to hear from you. Just drop us a note here and we’ll get back to you shortly. Enjoy the Holiday weekend!

According to Google Trends, Americans are completely uniformed. No, I’m not suggesting they’re uniformed about the specific policies of Barak Obama vs. Mitt Romney. I’m saying that many Americans didn’t even know who was running for president, ON THE DAY OF THE ELECTION!

Check out the massive spike in the graph below for the search phrase “who is running for president.” That big spike at the end was on November 6, 2012, election day. This is not a promising trend among Americans.

Exact-match domains utilize a specific keyword phrase in the domain itself. Ideally, this keyword phrase is one that is heavily searched for only. A good example is “how to make money online.” Ideally, you’d want to own the domain name howtomakemoneyfast.com to have a good shot at ranking highly for that specific phrase.

Google is not penalizing all exact-match domains, they’re simply targeting low-quality exact-match domains. This obviously begs the question, what does Google consider to be low-quality? The answer won’t surprise you, as it’s not anything new. You website should avoid having:

• duplicate content
• a minimal number of pages
• no fresh content
• many low quality backlinks

This is nothing new, but it seems that exact-match domains have been able to slide under the radar a bit. Not any more. You need to be blogging consistently with quality, original content. You need to be active on social media, and encourage people to interact with your blog articles. You also need to focus on growing high quality backlinks to your website and blog.

There is no secret formula to great optimization. I still believe that exact match domains are favored by Google, but this is their attempt to level the playing field. If you have a quality website you have nothing to worry about.

If you have any questions about developing a high-quality website or need help analyzing your existing web efforts, talk to Turbo today. You can either leave us a message here or call us directly at 877-673-7096 x2.

The replay, which the referees reviewed to confirm the touchdown, clearly shows that the receiver not only pushed off, but more importantly, didn’t come down with the ball. While the push off is a subjective, non-challengeable call, possession of the football is certainly challengeable, and something the refs review on any scoring situation. In this case, the refs got it wrong. Again.

The blown call at the end of Monday’s game immediately sparked a firestorm of Twitter comments, and none of them were positive. NBA star LeBron James tweeted: “I simply just LOVE the NFL to much to see these mistakes. I’m sick like I just played for the Packers.” Even President Obama got into the mix, postying this tweet on Tuesday, “NFL fans on both sides of the aisle hope the refs’ lockout is settled soon.”

Some of the tweets from the Green Bay Packer’s players, the losing team, were understandably a bit more critical. Perhaps the most popular tweet, and certainly the most re-tweeted message, was from lineman T.J. Lang.

The players are fed up with the replacement officials. It’s been reported that even even a player on a rival team of Green Bay’s, in the NFC North, texted that the call was “the worst call in nfl history.” Even Marshawn Lynch, running back for Seattle, was shocked by the outcome.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has certainly been hearing it all week from players and fans. The question is, will it matter? Is this embarrassing enough for the NFL to get a deal done with the locked-out referees?

If we were in this same situation 15-20 years ago, before the Internet and social media “blew up,” then I think the chances of a deal getting done would be more bleak. With social media everyone has a voice. The question then becomes, does NFL commissioner Roger Goodell care about these voices? I think he does, but like any other business, the NFL is about ratings. Ratings drive advertisers, which in turn bring in more revenue. If you can cut costs, albeit with a weaker product, without a hit in demand, or revenue, then why make a change?

Regardless of the supply/demand situation, any business owner knows that some things matter more than profit. In this case, the issue is integrity. How long can Roger Goodell continue to take repetitive blows to his integrity?

I’m not implying the referees that are locked out have no blame in this situation (I’ll steer clear of the employee pension argument). However, Goodell holds all the power; too much power in some people’s minds. If he really cares about the integrity of the NFL, by far the most popular and largest professional sports league in the US, then he’ll swallow his pride, compromise on a deal with the locked-out refs and and fix this problem. After all, that’s what leaders do.

If you have a domain name registered with GoDaddy that uses its nameservers and DNS records your website could have been, or still is, down. This is regardless if your host your site elsewhere.

Evidently, credit was taken for the “attack” on Twitter by Anonymous Own3r. GoDaddy issued its own tweet saying that they’re working on getting things fixed. It was also reported, by Hacker News, that GoDaddy’s phone support is down.

The first thing people notice about Timeline is the cover photo. At 851 pixels by 315 pixels, you can’t miss it! Before you decide what you’d like to go in your cover photo, you need to review the restrictions that Facebook has established:

1) No ‘call to action’: Your cover photo cannot contain any type of call to action.  You can’t even urge page viewers to “like” your page, “spread the word” about your page, or otherwise interact with or promote your page.

2) No contact information: Anything that belongs in your About section (email, phone number, address, etc.) must stay out of your cover photo.

3) No interface or app references: You are not allowed to allude to any Facebook user interface features (such as “like” or “share,” for example). You also cannot allude to any applications or even have an arrow pointing to the “like” button.

4) No pricing or transaction information: Your cover image cannot contain any information in regards to the purchase of your product or service.  Displaying prices, discount advertisements, or instructions to order are strictly forbidden.

5) No lies: You cannot be deceptive or misleading with anything in your cover photo.

Seems like Facebook is getting strict! If you’re looking to enhance your Facebook Fan page with a cover photo we can help! Simply leave Turbo a message here or call us at 877-673-7096 x2.

After HootSuite, the next biggest winners were TweetDeck (with 16), SocialEngage (with 9) and Virtue (with 4). Other software’s included in the list were SocialFlow and Sprinklr (both with 3), as well as Sprout Social, Spredfast, Context Optional, Seesmic, Involver, Astute Social, Buddy Media, SocialOomph, Socialware, Crowdbooster, Twitterfeed and several others all had less than 3 accounts.

It’s important to note that while the study focused on Twitter messages to determine the origin of the message, it did not delve into the software these companies are using to monitor activity, engage non-Fans/Followers and analyze social media efforts.

I find the results interesting in part because of the many companies using TweetDeck. One of the drawbacks to TweetDeck a few years ago was its inability to schedule out future messages. During this time, we at Turbo would simply use SocialOomph to do this for us. Then we stumbled upon HootSuite and we’ve been using it ever since. How about you? Which tool do you use?

If you’d like to learn more about social media tools or how to manage your efforts, please leave Turbo a message here or call us directly at 877-673-7096 x2.

On July 20, James Holmes went on a shooting spree in a Aurora, Colorado movie theater that resulted in 12 deaths. It was a terrible tragedy that shook our entire country. On top of the 12 deaths there were 58 injured. Unfortunately, some of these people do not have health insurance.

One such victim, Farrah, has a donation page online, and as of last Thursday morning she had reached only $37K of the likely $100K she needed to raise for her hospital stay, multiple surgeries, recovery, etc. Then the story of this young girl was posted on The Chive.

If you’re not familiar with The Chive, it is a very popular website (10 million unique visitors per month) that posts articles that usually involve funny photos & videos or scantily clad women. However, in this case, they posted the story of this young girl and the money that she needed to raise.

Within one hour donations totaled $74K, and in an hour and a half the donations surpassed $100K! By the end of the day there was over $140K total donations, and $100K can be directly related to The Chive posting this story and encouraging people to donate. If you’d like to donate to Farrah, click here.

This is the real power of social media. Bringing people together to help someone in need. If you have any similar stories about a cause or charity that has benefited from the word-of-mouth visibility of social media, we’d love to hear about it.

Apple, who failed to reach sales estimates in large part because buyers are holding out for the yet-to-be-released iPhone 5, will likely see it’s stock rebound strongly after the third quarter. Zynga has had low expectations since it’s IPO, and those expectations only continue to drop.

Zynga announced on Wednesday that it lost $22.3 million in the second quarter. The well-known Facebook provider of games such as “FarmVille” and “CityVille” has not only seen delays in new game creation, its also seen its total number of users decline. On top of that, the company has reported that recent updates to the Facebook platform have made it a ”more challenging environment.”

What’s interesting with Zynga’s is its connection with Facebook. We’re very aware that the reason Zynga exists today is because of Facebook (they generate nearly all of their revenue from games played on Facebook). However, some are even speculating that Zynga’s troubles may rub off on Facebook.

Facebook’s stock declined after the quarterly statements were announced by Zynga. Despite posting its first-ever earnings as a public company, Facebook’s stock fell nearly 9%, to $26.80. How closely this decline is tied to Zynga’s troubles is tough to say.

Will all of this negativity around Zynga, it’s easy to overlook the fact that they grew by 19% in the second quarter. Still, earnings were below expectations, and that’s a big reason why their stock fell. While the third quarter will be big for Zynga, CEO Mark Pincus doesn’t expect to launch any “real money games” in markets outside of the US until 2013.

Is anyone really surprised about Zynga’s decline? Do you ever see it catching fire again? We’d love to hear your thoughts.