BizHive

Google Analytics Changes Reporting Format

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:50:00 -0400

Google Analytics Version Update

Google is discontinuing its existing platform for your Google Analytics account. This account tracks the important activity on your website and/or blog and then reports back to you through its web interface at www.Google.com/Analytics.

Here is what Google has to say:

It’s time to update your Google Analytics scheduled email reports and move them to the new version of Google Analytics. As of June we will no longer be supporting the old emailer and your currently scheduled email reports will stop mailing.

How Google’s Changes Affect You

What this change means to your account is that the reports that you normally receive need to be re-programmed under Google’s new platform. Examples of the types of reports that can be programmed are:

Keyword Reports
Visitor Reports
Geographical Reports
Company Name Reports
Most Popular Content Reports
Email and Text Message Alerts
And more…

How We Can Help You

If you are interested in maintaining continuity with your Google Analytics tracking and reporting, the team at BizHive is ready to assist your organization.

We encourage you to send us an email, call us, or contact us and let us know that you are want us to “UPDATE ANALYTICS” for your account and we will be more than happy to assist you.

Looming Sale Talks for AT&T Yellow Pages

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:03:00 -0400

AT&T Inc. (T) is in talks to sell a majority stake in its Yellow Pages unit to Cerberus Capital Management LP in a transaction that values the entire business at about $1.5 billion, said two people familiar with the matter.

AT&T would retain a substantial minority stake in the division, and a deal could be reached this month, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations are private. Dallas-based AT&T, which is being advised by Citigroup Inc. (CITI) and Bank of America Corp., has held talks with several buyout firms on the unit, one of the people said. A final agreement hasn’t been reached and talks could fall apart, the people said.

AT&T Said to Hold Talks With Cerberus on Sale of Yellow Page

Tim Boyle/Bloomberg

Sales at AT&T’s directory business, which includes Yellow Pages, fell 16 percent last year to $3.29 billion.

Sales at AT&T’s directory business, which includes Yellow Pages, fell 16 percent last year to $3.29 billion.

The sale would allow AT&T, which hung on to its Yellow Pages division as competitors fled the business, to reduce its exposure to a unit facing increasing competition from online rivals Google Inc., Groupon Inc. (GRPN) and Yelp Inc. To boost sales, AT&T, the biggest U.S. phone company, is focusing on its mobile- service unit, a business where it trails Verizon Wireless.

“There is no real market for yellow pages businesses anymore,” said Craig Moffett, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst in New York, who rates the stock “market perform.” AT&T “wants to shed the businesses that are shrinking the fastest to boost its overall growth rate.”

Fort Worth, Texas-based TPG Capital was among buyout firms that looked at the business, though the firm’s interest waned in recent days, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Spokesmen for AT&T, Cerberus and TPG declined to comment, as did those for Citigroup and Bank of America.

Slumping Sales

Sales at AT&T’s directory business, which includes Yellow Pages, fell 16 percent last year to $3.29 billion. The company’s website says it’s the biggest Yellow Pages publisher in the world by revenue, with more than 1,250 titles published in 22 states. The company recorded 48 cents a share in asset impairments on the directory operations in the fourth quarter, when it reported a loss of $1.12 a share.

The directory businesses “are in a fairly steady decline,” AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said in a March 1 investor meeting. “We’re obviously going to have to look at areas -- look at options in terms of what we do with those assets.”

Beyond Turning Around

AT&T rose 0.4 percent to $31 at the close in New York.

The deal under discussion would value the AT&T business at about 1.5 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, Moffett said. Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) exited its yellow-pages business at 6 times Ebitda about six years ago, he said.

“The window has long since closed for divesting yellow- pages businesses for a meaningful price,” Moffett said.

Because the business is in irreversible decline, a buyer will just seek to earn a return that exceeds the purchase price before closing it down, he said.

“For a business like this, you can value it relatively straightforwardly as the present value of the remaining cash flows before the business is entirely gone,” Moffett said. “They’re not forecasting a particularly long life.”

To persuade local businesses to stay with its service and compete with the Web rivals’ various offerings, AT&T’s YP.com last year started offering daily deals to consumers.

Cerberus, based in New York, has been raising money, including a $4 billion flagship private-equity fund. Recent investments include the $1.02 billion acquisition with Chatham Lodging Trust of 64 hotels from Innkeepers USA Trust in October.

Private-equity firms have made several investments in Yellow Pages businesses in the past decade, drawn by the traditionally steady cash flow. KKR & Co. bought France Telecom SA’s PagesJaunes SA in 2006, while Hicks Muse Tate & Furst Inc. and Apax Partners LLP agreed to buy BT Group Plc’s Yellow Pages unit in 2001.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cristina Alesci in New York at calesci2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Katherine Snyder at ksnyder@bloomberg.net; Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net

AT&T May Sell Off Many DSL Markets

We recently noted how AT&T's U-Verse expansion is essentially over, and if you haven't seen your market upgraded yet you probably aren't going to. So what happens to a little less than half of their current customers still on older DSL technology? Like Verizon -- who offloaded millions of users in somewhat ugly deals with Frontier and Fairpoint, it appears that AT&T is looking to sell off many DSL markets and keep their focus on wireless.

AT&T's recently on record stating that they can't find an "economically viable" way to upgrade these users, despite a looming increase in faster and less expensive last mile DSL technologies. The company's also recently on record stating that they believe DSL is "obsolete" -- a troubling claim since that's their primary product. According to the latest DSLPrime newsletter from Dave Burstein, all signs point to the fact that AT&T's gunning to sell many DSL markets off, provided they can find a buyer.

That’s essentially all of AT&T not reached by U-Verse. Stankey is “doing a rapid tech evaluation” of whether they can upgrade their DSL + wireless to “a competitive broadband product.” But Randall “doesn’t see a solution.” If that’s confirmed, “we’re looking for others who might want the properties.” Stankey’s competent. Looking at bonded/vectored DSL he may change the company’s plans. Randall’s mantra, however, is "We are a wireless company." It's unclear if any of the “rural carriers” – Century, Frontier, Windstream – have the financial ability to make an attractive offer. If operators can’t raise the money, T would need to make a financial transaction. A complicated spinoff retaining the growing parts of the company is one possibility. There’s probably an interesting way to lose pension and deferred tax liabilities if they make that choice. All the big private equity firms are looking at bids.

The sale could involve anywhere between 10 and 25 million DSL lines. AT&T would then follow Verizon's lead and focus on selling capped, expensive LTE service to many more rural users, who primarily have the choice of slow, overpriced satellite, or slow, over-priced DSL (both, if they're "lucky"). The complete lack of interest in upgrading DSL lines in more than half of the United States is great news for cable companies, who'll be able to jack up rates for a decade as the only ISPs in many markets capable of anything close to next-gen speeds.

AT&T: The U-Verse Build is Over

Like FiOS, If You Didn't Get it Already, You Probably Won't

In May of last year AT&T confirmed that at the end of 2011 they'd effectively be stopping their deployment of U-Verse upgrades, with 30 million homes passed (not necessarily served), leaving about 40-45% of their footprint on older, slower technologies. On their recent earnings call AT&T again confirmed that the U-Verse build is "largely complete," and the focus now is on ramping up adoption in deployed areas. As we recently noted, Verizon has also frozen any additional FiOS expansion outside of large city franchise agreements, leaving roughly 40% of their customers without upgrades.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, who last year insisted that DSL was "obsolete" (a problem since that's all AT&T offers) also touched on the plight of the rural user during the recent call. In short, AT&T claims that despite consistent, healthly profits and recently having started charging data overages, they just can't find a financially appealing way to upgrade millions of users, and won't anytime soon:

"Our U-verse build is now largely complete, so we have in place an IP video and broadband platform that reaches 30 million customer locations, which gives us significant headroom now to drive penetration," Stephenson said. "We have been apprehensive on moving, doing anything on rural access lines because the issue here is, do you have a broadband product for rural America? And we’ve all been trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America and we’re not finding one to be quite candid."

Forgotten is the fact that AT&T ~~and Verizon~~ (see update) played major roles in passing state laws that ban many of these communities from wiring themselves -- even if the telcos won't. Unlike smaller telcos, it's not that AT&T doesn't have the resources or funds to upgrade more users to VDSL or FTTH, they simply lack the long-term patience for serious network reinvestment. Quarterly returns and executive compensation trump network health, customer satisfaction, and product quality. Like Verizon, AT&T's solution for many of these rural customers will be for them to sign up for expensive (up to $10 per gigabyte in overages) LTE service, assuming it's available.

While the big loser here is consumers, the big winner is the cable industry, who doesn't have to worry about any real competition from faster speeds in a significant chunk of their markets. In more than half of their markets companies like Time Warner Cable get to "compete" with sluggish DSL (in many cases still topped out at 3 Mbps) for the next decade. The lack of telco upgrades for millions of users has meant huge subscriber gains for cable, whose executives should be thanking phone company executives for treating telco network reinvestment like a diabolical cancer -- despite their core product being broadband.

Updated 2/22 to note Verizon informs us they no longer lobby for state level anti-municipal bills.

8 Policy Changes at Google That Impact Your Business

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Tue, 7 Feb 2012 11:42:00 -0500

Google recently made an announcement of its plans to change 60 of its online user policies that will be designed to take effect on March 1, 2012. As a business owner you may be concerned about the impact these new policy changes may have on your online marketing strategy.

Here are some highlights and things to consider from our review of the new policy announcement:

The sharing of documents and information will become more streamlined to help increase the share value of information and the contributions of other online users. (For the business owner, this means defining what information should get released versus kept confidential is now more important than ever). What is your company social media policy?
The interests you have identified in your Google+, GMAIL, and YouTube profiles can now be tailored to fit your search results. (For the business owner, this means that the more accurate and optimized your data is, the better it will be found by visitors truly seeking the services and products you offer). How well is your company presence search engine optimized?
Your location data such as latitude and longitude can be shared directly with Google to identify your physical location. (For the business owner, if you have concerns about security, then ensuring that your locator options on your devices and accounts are accurate may be important).
Google does have a liability policy. (For the business owner, a loss equates to Google being liable for the amount you paid them to use their services, or, the amount supplied to providing you the services again).
Google respects copyright laws and has a process for removing users that infringe upon copy written materials. (For the business owner, this means that if you believe your copyright is being infringed upon, there is a process to file a grievance for removal of the infringing party). Is this happening to your company? Consider Monitoring Your Online Content.
Governments request information from Google on certain topics and users. See the list here: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/
Meta data of your photos may be shared throughout Google. (For the business owner, this means the description of your photos is your responsibility to edit and manage BEFORE uploading the content to Google).
Short Message Service (SMS) or email related information may be kept by Google to enhance user experience and deliver more relevant results. (For the business owner, this means deciding what information should be disseminated across Google’s platform and what information should be kept confidential such as agreements and contracts may be important).

For more information about Google's new policy and how it may affect the online aspect of your business, the team at BizHive encourages you to contact us.

Crushing The Online Competition

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:24:00 -0500

Crushing The Online Competition has never become more important than right now. As a business owner, having a strategic competitive advantage over the local competition can be one of the strongest secrets closely held by a business.

Let's take a look at the main components of a strong online marketing strategy that can help to Crush The Competition:

Rank Higher in Google for keywords that matter.
Know how the competition is getting their customers.
When and how to utilize your email addresses for new business development.
How to convert more website visitor into qualified leads.
How to best protect your online corporate reputation.

Free Online Marketing Strategy Downloads

Download The Competition Crusher Assessment

Download our guide on How To Remove Negative Comments From Search Engines

Request your sample Online Reputation Report

Google + 1 and How Search is Going Social

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:11:00 -0500

Social Search and Google + 1

Search is becoming social with Google + 1. The major focus of the world’s largest search engine is to use their new social platform to help you promote your business and attract attention from online consumers.

Examples of these upgrades are the inclusion of Google + 1 results in Google’s advertisement platform called Google AdWords and in local Google search recommendations and reviews.

Statistics about Consumers Online

97% of consumers research products & services online before conducting a purchase.

Consumers trust people they know: 90% of consumers online trust recommendations provided by people that they know.

71% say reviews from family members or friends influence their purchasing decisions and patterns.

What Google Says

According to Google the methods used today to share content, information, and recommendations have a tendency to get lost in activity streams of social networks and email inboxes.

You can anticipate that Google +1 will start showing up in social searches and even in paid advertising environments such as AdWords. For example, you may see a +1 icon when conducting a search. This would mean that someone you know recommends the search result that you see.

How much more likely would you be to visit that particular website, blog, or news site because it was recommended by someone you know?

Lastly, Google has also stated that +1 will soon start to affect the organic or earned search engine rankings of websites, blogs and more.

Top Recommendations

For a business, a top priority would be to become familiar with Google + 1 and also achieve the following tasks:

Formal account registration and claiming of your corporate name (learn more)

Placement of a share button on your important corporate assets such as a website or blog.

Monitoring of comments, feedback, and recommendation made on behalf of your company and its likeness or brand.

To learn more about how the tools at Google can help to enhance your online brand and the results you are expecting from an online marketing campaign, please contact the experts at BizHive.

Online Reputation Awareness Day

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:22:00 -0400

July 20, 2011 will be celebrated by The Online Body Guard with a seminar at its headquarters in Troy, Michigan for Online Reputation Awareness Day. The invitation-only seminar will address the following key areas:

The differences between online reputation monitoring, management, and repair.
How to identify some of the warning signs of an online reputation problem.
How companies and individuals are monitoring their reputations online.
The important aspects of an online reputation that should be monitored.
The top online sources that we recommend monitoring…immediately.
The top pitfalls and mistakes that we commonly see when people attempt to monitoring their online reputation.
A customized sample Online Reputation Report for the company or personal of your request.
And much more…

For more information or to confirm a reservation for the event please contact 248-662-5323 or visit www.TheOnlineBodyGuard.com.

Intel Defends It's Online Reputation

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sun, 1 May 2011 19:23:00 -0400

Smartblogs.com recently launched an excellent article about how Intel defended it's online corporate reputation from a Facebook attack. Below is an excerpt from the article on the top 7 things your firm should consider regarding its Facebook reputation:

Read The Entire Article

Realize that attacks can come from anywhere. Negative posts are a fact of life for prominent brands using social media platforms — and they don’t necessarily have to come from your own fan community. Intel faced a crisis last year when it drew the ire of groups that opposed the use of minerals mined in the Congo. Attack posts can increase the likelihood of your post turning up in a user’s Facebook feed, which can cause the conflict to affect your regular fans as well.

Plan for the worst. The key to responding effectively to negative publicity is having a response plan in place internally and a comments policy clearly posted to your Facebook page. Intel’s policy is to respond to “the good, the bad, but not the ugly,” said Walter — meaning they’re fine with negative comments on their Facebook page, but won’t tolerate disrespectful attack tactics that violate their comment standards. Having clear standards in place removes ambiguity from the situation and allows your staff to react quickly and calmly, she says. Make sure your comment standards are written in plain language and specify that things such as inappropriate language and off-topic posts will be removed, she adds.

Watch for warning signs. Do use social media monitoring tools to help keep an eye on your brand’s social presence — but don’t neglect to put someone experienced at the helm. An intern simply won’t do, said Walter. You need someone who knows the community, and understands what their typical behaviors are, so that abnormal posts draw a red flag quickly and can be given an appropriate response.

Have a fire drill. Try setting up a dummy page on your internal network and practice responding to difficult questions and controversial posts. Experience will make everyone more confident and more likely to respond quickly, the panel noted.

Know when to escalate. Don’t move directly from open communication to an emergency lockdown, says Walter. During Intel’s recent attack, Walter says she started off by removing offensive posts and posts that repeated the same message over and over. When the attacks kept coming, she encouraged visitors to move the conversation over to a post on the company blog that addressed their issues. Only when every other option had been exhausted did she shut down the comments feature.

Your fans are your best defense. True fans can provide you with the most convincing, authentic response to an attack by arguing on your behalf. But your community won’t always respond to an attack, she notes. If your fans don’t respond on their own, it’s unlikely that any sort of rallying cry will change their mind, she adds.

Take it seriously. Respond to legitimate concerns as much as you can, says Walter. Listen to your commenters and then go out of your way to over-communicate the company’s response. Don’t leave anything open to chance or interpretation, she said. “If [online activists] can overthrow the Egyptian and Libyan governments, they can overthrow your company,” said Buddy Media’s Michael Lazerow.

About BizHive

BizHive is a highly referred Troy, MI Online Marketing Agency that specializes in delivering measurable results from its custom online marketing campaigns.

If your firm is concerned about managing it's online reputation, we encourage you to request an Online Reputation Report from The Online Body Guard.

More information can be found at www.biz-hive.com or contacting a member of our team directly at 248-662-(LEAD) 5323.

How To Detect A Corporate Reputation Problem

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sun, 9 Jan 2011 16:51:00 -0500

Reputation Awareness

How concerned are you that your company may have a real reputation problem?

Some leaders mistake their companies for having a reputation problem with poor market conditions, new competitors entering their industry, or a slow news day if bad press has been reported about their firm.

The Warning Signs

Below are a few warning signs (that we have learned from our clients) to be aware of that indicate a reputation problem may exist with your organization:

Negative commentary appears about you or your company online.

New business prospects quietly disappear into the arms of your competitors.

Existing clientele begin to unexpectedly challenge and question the value of your products or services.

Phone calls, text messages, emails, and other methods of contact go unreturned from trusted sources and contacts.

What to Do About It

Once a reputation problem has been identified with your company, the next step is to contact a specialist in corporate reputation repair. By using The Online Body Guard™, BizHive is able to effectively monitor and repair your corporate reputation so that your corporate brand regains its positive momentum.

Google Instant Search: An In-Depth Look

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 07:28:00 -0500

Below are only a few of the questions that business and website owners have been asking about the display changes of the Google search engine and how it is affecting the rankings of their websites.

If I am paying for clicks, how will the changes at Google affect my website?

You can expect the price per click to increase over time for a few reasons. First, companies that cannot or do not want to pursue organic optimization will choose to pay per click instead. This trend may cause your competitor pool to increase, thus driving prices higher. Second, Google tells us that users of the search engine are focusing on the top 3-5 placements in a search result. This means that there is a greater likelihood of a user click on your advertisement if it is on the first page of a search result. This too increases the demand for first page placement and the price per click.

What does it mean if I cannot even find my website in Google?

It may be that your website has been banned due to a violation of Google’s Quality Guidelines. The team at BizHive can repair your website and get it back into the Google index. Learn more by contacting us to schedule a complimentary website and search engine consultation.

I consistently see my competitor’s websites ranking high for relevant keywords. How are they doing it?

The recent changes at Google now place a tremendous importance on selecting the appropriate keywords for your website. If you find your competitors websites showing up for keywords that you are expecting to win, it may be that your website needs to undergo a keyword evaluation. The team at BizHive provides complimentary website keyword reviews as a part of our auditing process. Learn more by contacting us today.

About BizHive

Do you have a question about the “new” Google? Contact us today to speak with an online marketing specialist.

BizHive is an Internet Marketing agency based in Troy, Michigan that specializes in creating record-setting results for businesses through customized online marketing campaigns.

For more information please contact us at 248-662-LEAD (5323).

The New Google?

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 20:15:00 -0500

The Buzz

Over the past few months the Google search engine has been experimenting with an Instant Search feature that automatically suggests search results based on keywords that are entered in by a user.

What Google Says

“Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.”

Top 3 Things to Know

The changes with how Google displays its search results are having the following affects on visitors that use the search engine:

The time it takes for a user to identify and select a website from the search results has decreased by 2 to 5 seconds.

The way that Google ranks websites organically appears to have remained the same.

Research from Google has shown that users are clicking on the top three to five listings in a search result because they are perceived to be the most relevant.

About BizHive

BizHive is a Troy, Michigan Internet Marketing Firm that specializes in creating record-setting results for businesses through customized online marketing campaigns.

For more information, or to speak with an online marketing specialist at BizHive, please contact us at 248-662-LEAD (5323).

Online Marketing Results Disguised

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 12:12:00 -0400

Most website statistics tools offer good baseline information regarding visitor activity and trends. However, with all good data collection tools there is a hidden layer of information that reveals key data that offers a competitive edge. Below are only a few items that you may want to consider adding to your website or blog tracking and evaluation:

Industry Benchmarking

When properly registering a Google Analytics account, you are offered the option to allow Google to privately collect and compare your analytics data. This option allows you to find out whether your site usage metrics underperform or outperform those of your industry. Opt-in benchmarking compares your key metrics against aggregate performance metrics while preserving the confidentiality of your data.

Visitor Funnels

Creating visitor funnels in Google Analytics allows you to visualize your visitor conversion funnel and fix leaks by seeing which pages result in lost opportunities and where your would-be customers go.

Social Media Tracking

Having the ability track the inbound social media visitor activity to your website or blog is extremely important because doing so accounts for how visitors truly search for your business, products, or services. By tracking this activity, you will be able to determine the social media posts and website landing pages that visitors find most and least interesting.

Geo Targeting

Now, more than ever, location has become a top factor in how website owners view the success of their website and online marketing campaigns. Specifically, Google Analytics offers an inside view regarding the geographic location of visitors that can be cross analyzed by keyword search, landing pages visited, and much more. If it is becoming increasingly important for your organization to capture the attention of a local audience, then this reporting segment is a must.

About BizHive

BizHive is an Internet Marketing firm that specializes in creating record-setting results for businesses through customized online marketing campaigns. For more information, or to speak with an online marketing specialist at BizHive, please contact us at 248-662-LEAD (5323) or Text "4NewBiz" to 41411.

Online Marketing Check Up

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:29:00 -0400

When was the last time your online marketing campaign had a check up?

Companies have a tendency to review certain policies and programs on an annual basis. For example, a group health care or benefits policy may undergo review annually to determine of the best possible coverage is being extended to an organization.

Why then shouldn’t the company online marketing strategy be reviewed as well?

Check List For Your Check Up

When you conduct an online marketing check up for your organization, consider evaluating the following items and measure their individual performances against your expectations, goals, and benchmarks:

How our website ranks in major search engines for the keywords we want to win. Achieving first page rankings in major search engines, such as Google, provide a tremendous competitive advantage because users searching for your company products or services will trust relevant earned search engine rankings over paid search engine advertisements.

Defining our Social Media Score. Being able to quantify the results of your social media marketing activities is extremely important. As your organization determines its social media strategy, consider measuring your activity with the following four categories: Strength, Passion, Reach, and Sentiment. Check out a sample social media sentiment report.

Content Development. Communicating the right message to your company clientele and followers is extremely important. However, most organizations struggle with developing quality content that ranks high in search engines like Google. Two great tools to help in selecting and developing good content are the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Analytics Keyword report. The Google Keyword Tool offers insightful information on the total number of people searching globally and within the United States for any keyword imaginable. The Google Analytics Keyword report displays the keywords that your website visitors have used to find your website. In a way, this report lets your visitors tell you what is important to them and serves as an insider secret for great content development.

Are We Listening? Imaging having access to an online tool that would allow you to view what people on the Internet are saying about your company? Monitoring the sentiment and commentary about your organization in social networks, search engines, forums, and more is extremely important to brand sustainability. Here are some key areas to monitor for your company or personal brand:

Company name, subsidiaries, website domains, blog domains, and social network domains.
Relevant product and / or service related keywords.
Competitor Company names, subsidiaries, website domains, blog domains, and social network domains.
Keywords that begin with “buy”, “purchase”, “evaluate”, “shop”, or “find”.
Keywords that include a geographic reference to the markets that your company can services, for example “Detroit”, “San Francisco”, or “Washington”.

About BizHive

BizHive Client Increases Social Media Score by 4200%

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Fri, 6 Aug 2010 09:04:00 -0400

Who is looking out for your Social Media Score?

Recently, a BizHive client in the coaching industry increased their Social Media Score by 4200% in 45 days. In addition, the client also increased the likely hood of others sharing positive content about the company by 500%.

How is all of this possible in such a short time frame?

Increasing a Social Media Score of a company or individual in such a short time frame is very possible. Along with an incredible amount of work, the proper tools need to be in place to measure the progress of any such social media campaign. Thus, the criterion for a Social Media Score need to be very well defined. Here are the four major categories that BizHive uses to measure the increase or decrease in a Social Media Score:

Strength - Strength is the likely hood that your company brand is being discussed in social media by others.
Passion - Passion is the measure of the likely hood that users who are talking about your brand will continue to do so.
Reach - Reach is the measure of the range of influence that your brand possesses.
Sentiment - Sentiment is the ratio of mentions in the social media space that are generally positive to those that are generally negative.

In order to achieve the good increases and good decreases in these categories BizHive employs a strict methodology of creating and publishing relevant, engaging, and highly optimized content in the social media and search spaces.

BizHive specializes in creating record-setting results for businesses through customized online marketing campaigns. For more information, or to speak with an online marketing specialist at BizHive, please contact us at 248-662-LEAD (5323).

Your Solution For Bad Customer Service

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:16:00 -0400

Ever been slapped in the face with bad customer service?

Quite often, technology companies that do not have a formal customer service process get accused of providing poor customer service to their clients and rarely choose to ever do anything about it.

If you have been a victim of this situation we want you to know that we have finally found your solution...his name is John Henderson (see below).

BizHive provides to its clients a professional customer service update every day, and, a detailed project action plan every 7 days to ensure that you receive the best possible customer service and results from your online marketing campaign.

Never Get Stung By A Lack Of Sales.

BizHive Helps Client Pack Rock Financial Showplace

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 5 Jul 2010 16:09:00 -0400

The Rock Financial Showplace Was Packed On July 1

The team at BizHive helped a michigan job website client to fill the Rock Financial Showplace in Novi last week to help michigan job seekers acquire new Michigan Jobs.

Here are some statistics and feedback regarding the 3000 new jobs that were brought to the career expo:

75% of candidates interviewed were invited back by the employer for a second interview.
Thousands of job seekers visited the company website to register early for the career expo and to search for available positions.
A 100% satisfaction rating was achieved with the career fair employers who all indicated that they would participate in future career expo's.

The company is now offering signing bonuses for job seekers that acquire a position through using their website. For more information on how to get a job in michigan, please visit their website.

BizHive Creates Beach Money For Local Dentist

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 20:31:00 -0400

Local Dentist Makes Beach Money After Working With BizHive

The online marketing experts at BizHive have recently created record-breaking results for a local cosmetic dentist in Southfield, Michigan.

Prior to working with BizHive, the client had several out-dated and fragmented websites with unknown visitor statistics and revenue volumes.

After working with BizHive for 4 months, the client has achieved the following results from a customized online marketing campaign:

A 4,600% increase in visitor volume compared to all of 2009.
The highest new patient volume to the practice since 2008.
A net increase in revenue of over $350,000.00.

The online marketing experts at BizHive provide relevant, measurable new business results through social media, blogging, and search engine marketing. If you find your company, or an organization that you know and care about, is struggling with what to do next about their next sale reach out and contact us today.

BizHive Celebrates 9 Year Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:12:00 -0400

BizHive is Celebrating its 9 Year Anniversary!

Our entire team sincerely appreciates the continued support and business that we receive from our clientele, resellers, contacts, friends and followers.

As our company has continued to grow over the past few years, we have expanded the team at BizHive to accommodate both the needs of our clientele and the demand for an online marketing leader in the business community.

In addition, we have launched a new product called The Online Body Guard™ that allows companies to listen, monitor, and engage their social media marketing opportunities.

It is the launch of innovations like The Online Body Guard™ at BizHive that gives our company the confidence and ability to maintain a leading edge of the online marketing industry.

If we can be of service to your organization, please reach out and contact us, or follow us on FaceBook to receive timely updates from our team.

The Fear of FaceBook

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:03:00 -0400

Hijacking, theft, and slander.

These are things that you would typically expect to read in a very intense novel, or perhaps on a television thriller.

However, with the growing popularity of FaceBook (approaching 500 million users) so has the incidence of account hijacking where users steal access to a FaceBook account and then take over the posting of content within that account.

If you are concerned about the vulnerability of your FaceBook account, here are 10 recommendations that you can implement now that will help to ease your concerns:

10 Tips for Better FaceBook Security

Lie about your birth date when registering an account.
Use a separate email account just for FaceBook.
Create a very complex password when registering an account that is different from the other passwords that you may use.
You don’t need to use every possible app or widget that is offered.
Don’t share your login information with anyone else.
If logging into FaceBook on a public computer, make sure the login and password you are using are not saved by the browser.
Adjust the privacy settings in your account according to your comfort level of allowing other users to see your information.
If you are going away on vacation, or for any other reason, don’t make a public announcement on FaceBook.
Avoid posting pictures or videos of your family members and children.
Don’t use your home address when registering an account.

The social media marketing team at BizHive provides relevant, measurable new business results through social media marketing. If you find your company, or an organization that you know and care about, struggling with what to do next about social media reach out and contact us today.

Twitter Launches "Promoted Tweets"

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:04:00 -0400

Twitter has finally unveiled its business model in the form of "Promoted Tweets". The company refers to this as a "non-traditional" and "easy" strategy that "makes a ton of sense for Twitter." Promoted Tweets are described as ordinary tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

Promoted tweets are clearly labeled as "promoted" when they are paid for by advertisers. However, in many cases, they will simply begin as regular tweets that are organically sent to the timelines of those who follow the account. When a tweet is promoted, it will still have the functionality of any other tweet, such as replying, re-tweeting, etc.

To start out, Promoted tweets are appearing in Twitter search results. Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone says the company wants to make sure they're useful to users so they'll attempt to measure whether they "resonate" with users. Indications of resonation include engagement activities like replying, retweeting, and favoriting. If a promoted tweet doesn't resonate, they'll stop showing it.

Stone calls the launch the "first phase" of the Promoted Tweets platform, indicating that there will be improvements made as time goes on (and more partners added). So far, Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America are using Promoted Tweets.

"Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value," says Stone. "Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you."

"Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single "ad" in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn't already an organic part of Twitter," says Stone. "This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment." Courtesy of: Chris Crum

The social media marketing team at BizHive provides relevant, measurable new business results through social media marketing. If you find your company, or an organization that you know and care about, struggling with what to do next about social media reach out and contact us today.

Penalized By Search Engines?

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:35:00 -0400

Duplicate Content

If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content the website search engine rankings may be penalized from by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Rules To Follow Direct From Google

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

Use 301s: If you've restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don't link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.

Avoid publishing stubs: Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don't publish pages for which you don't yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.

Understand your content management system: Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

The search engine optimization team at BizHive has a solution for websites that may be losing valuable search engine rankings due to the publication of duplicate content. If you find your company, or an organization that you know and care about, struggling with what to do next reach out and contact us today.

Changes Coming For Blogger - Are You Ready?

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:48:00 -0400

Blogger, a very popular blog platform, will be changing the way that they allow blog files to be uploaded...for certain users.

Is Your Organization Ready For This Change?

Here is what the team at Blogger has to say:

"FTP [publishing] remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched custom domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible.

While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way."

The business blogging team at BizHive has a solution for the changes that were recently announced by Blogger. If you find your company, or an organization that you know and care about, struggling with what to do next as a user of Blogger; reach out and contact us today.

FaceBook Testing New Promotion Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sat, 6 Mar 2010 15:15:00 -0500

Facebook appears to either be rolling out or testing a feature that lets Facebook Page owners promote specific, individual posts within their accounts. When an updated is made a link that says, "Promote" can be found by the links for "Comment" and "Like".

Once the Promote link is clicked, it brings up a dialogue box, that offers the opportunity to create an advertisement, with targeting descriptions, the ad duration, and the maximum price of "Up to $50.00 USD".

Interestingly enough, this feature comes after discussions last week about how account owners have to have promotions approved by a Facebook account representative, which would reportedly cost about $10k. This would appear to eliminate that notion.

The feature appears to only be available for some administrators of some pages. However Facebook has confirmed that the feature is indeed only a test. "The "Promote" feature is just a test and is unrelated to our Promotions Guidelines," the company says. They did not give any specifics about a possible full launch.

Special Thank You to Chris Crum for sharing this information with us.

BizHive specializes in creating online marketing strategies that include how to leverage social media marketing, search engine marketing, and business blogging specifically to generate new sales.

Yahoo and Twitter Integrate Platforms

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Mon, 1 Mar 2010 15:00:00 -0500

Digital services giant Yahoo announced an agreement with Twitter to integrate the microblogging phenom's social experiences across its global network. Per terms of the deal, users can now access their personal Twitter feeds via multiple Yahoo properties including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports--in addition, they can update and share their status and content from Yahoo in their Twitter stream.

According to Yahoo, the deal--which follows on the heels of a similar agreement with social networking kingpin Facebook--represents the latest step in its efforts to create more customizable, social experiences. It adds the new partnership includes access to the complete Twitter public data stream, which Yahoo will use to enhance the relevance and freshness of content across its properties and drive more profound user engagement, promising new opportunities for developers, advertisers and publishers.

Earlier this week, Twitter reported users are now tweeting 50 million times each day, translating to an average of 600 tweets per second. By comparison, users were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007, 300,000 times a day in 2008 and 35 million times a day a year ago.

Read more: http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/yahoo-inks-deal-integrate-twitter-content/2010-02-24#ixzz0gxOfCC6w

BizHive specializes in creating online marketing strategies that include how to leverage social media marketing, search engine marketing, and business blogging specifically to generate new sales.

Yahoo and Microsft To Merge Ad Platforms

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:22:00 -0500

U.S. and European regulators have cleared the long-discussed Internet search partnership between Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., enabling the rivals to form a tag team as they try to mount a more serious challenge to Google Inc.

The government approvals announced Thursday anointed an alliance that Microsoft and Yahoo proposed nearly seven months ago after years of flirtation and often contentious negotiations.

Microsoft first approached Yahoo about working together in late 2006 and again in 2007. In 2008, Microsoft launched a hostile bid to buy Yahoo in its entirety, only to withdraw the $47.5 billion offer in exasperation.

Yahoo now plans to rely on Microsoft's search technology in an attempt to boost its sagging profits. Yahoo's stock has been slumping since Microsoft took away its last offer of $33 per share in May 2008. The stock ended up 10 cents at $15.54 Thursday.

Microsoft is counting on the 10-year deal with Yahoo to provide more muscle as it tries to counter Google's domination of the lucrative Internet search market. The companies make money by charging advertisers to pay to have their links appear when people search for certain terms.

While gaining access to Yahoo's Internet search audience and advertisers is bound to help, it could still prove to be too little, too late.

The U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission had no problems with Microsoft and Yahoo working together largely because Google is so far ahead of them in the lucrative Internet search market.

Allowing Microsoft and Yahoo to join forces should spur "greater competitive pressures in the marketplace," the Justice Department predicted in a statement.

Google processes two-thirds of the world's search requests, followed by Yahoo with 7.4 percent, China's Baidu.com at 7 percent and Microsoft at just 3.2 percent, according to Internet research firm comScore Inc.

Microsoft has been making some minor strides in the United States since it overhauled its search engine and renamed it Bing last summer. But the progress has primarily come at Yahoo's expense.

It's going to take a while before all the pieces of the complex Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be in place. The companies hope Microsoft's technology will be ready to start processing search requests that people enter on Yahoo's U.S. site by the end of this year. But getting everything ready around the rest of the world is expected to take until 2012.

Yahoo figures to make more money from the deal because it allows the company to keep 88 percent of the revenue from search ads on its Web site during the first five years, while Microsoft absorbs most of the expenses. Yahoo estimates the partnership eventually could boost its annual operating profit by $500 million. The financial gains aren't expected to start flowing to Yahoo until next year.

To start, Yahoo will get $150 million from Microsoft to help offset its expenses for the transition to a new technology. The payments will be made in installments, with the first checks due before April.

Microsoft will also take on about 400 of Yahoo's 13,900 employees, with the first transfers expected to take place this year.

"Although we are just at the beginning of this process, we have reached an exciting milestone," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. "I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to advertisers and publishers."

Even though Microsoft's technology will be steering things, Yahoo insists its search results and advertising won't be identical to what's served up on Bing. Yahoo can still shape the presentation of the results.

"This breakthrough search alliance means Yahoo can focus even more on our own innovative search experience," said CEO Carol Bartz.

Yahoo finally cozied up to Microsoft after Bartz replaced company co-founder Jerry Yang early last year. The company was reeling at the time because a proposed search partnership with Google had just unraveled after the Justice Department threatened to sue to block the deal on antitrust grounds. Yahoo wanted to fight regulators, but Google didn't.

Microsoft helped persuade the Justice Department to oppose the proposed Yahoo-Google deal. Google didn't object to Microsoft teaming up with Yahoo.

"There has always been robust competition in our industry, which keeps us on our toes and benefits users," Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said.

AP Technology Writer Joelle Tessler in Washington contributed to this report. Source Yahoo.

BizHive specializes in creating online marketing strategies that include how to leverage social media marketing, search engine marketing, and blogging specifically to generate new sales.

Gearing Up For 2010

noreply@blogger.com (BizHive) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:50:00 -0500

2010 is right around the corner, and for most business owners this time of the year allows for reflection on what has occurred during the previous months in their business.

But now what?

Many experts are predicting that next year will be an extremely tight credit market for small businesses with credit cards and boot-strapping being the most effective forms of small business financing.

Other experts are claiming that the recession will last well into 2011 with only moderate gains in the financial market.

There is only so much "positive" news about the economy and financial markets that you can endure as a business owner. Instead, BizHive would like you to consider 2010 to be the year where you regain the power of choice for your organization.

What does that mean?

Imagine what it would do for your business if you were in well in control of how your company were going to generate new sales, and where those new sales were going to come from.

Further, imagine your business reducing its dependency on credit in order to operate, and instead growing towards financial stability through new sales generation.

What if you could choose these kind of results for your business instead of reading about them?

How Other Businesses Are Going To Do It

Social Media has become a real game-changing solution for small businesses to complete on the large stage of the internet. The diagram to the left outlines how businesses in the fourth quarter of this year were using social media to accomplish important tasks such as: increasing website visitors, generating new leads, and increasing sales.

Reports from several sources including Emarketer.com provide concrete data that show businesses in a variety of sectors plan on increasing spending for social media marketing as much as 79%.

With 2010 being the Year of Choice for your organization, the opportunity is now directly in front of you. Do you embrace social media as a viable channel for new business development? Or, do you wait?

Can you?

BizHive specializes in creating online marketing strategies that include how to leverage social media specifically to generate new sales.