Everyone by now has probably heard about the Kanye West / Taylor Swift VMA Award thing, where Kanye West supposedly ‘disrupted’ Taylor Swift’s speech and said that Beyonce’s Video was better. The funny thing is how many people have voiced there own opionion about it. If you search for this on you tube there are litterly thousands of people with a webcam shot video either sharing there side of the story or saying that everyone should stop talking about it, thus making even more chatter about it. It has blown up on Twitter too.

I thought this ‘stunt’ was pretty rubish from MTV but now I changed my mind. If you look at the views some of these webcam videos have got I counted over 1 million views just on one. The amount of web chatter, and buzz this generated surly is beyond was even the event marketing people could have thought.

I guess its a lesson in viral marketing, but with an interesting twist, rather a video that gets shown everywhere, the content keeps getting created by the crowd, by people who have listeners and everyone jumping in on the debate. It is an interesting thought that could this be applied to other types of products. That is the challenge I am trying to take up now, can I think of things like this that grows for my clients.

And now this post has just added another comment on the stunt, so it continues to grow.

Using local search optimization can be a key to most small businesses, still a lot of people never think of it when we first discuss SEO. Using local search makes sure that the people who want to find a company local to them that provide services they need can find your company.

People like not only supporting local business but also like to have contact with businesses and most often do not want to travel far to talk to a business about a service.

Sometimes it can payoff to rank high on a search engine for a local search and not worry about competing for the top place using more generic keywords. The more specific your keyword the higher chance of ranking high for it and the less cost to get a good position. I often have people contact my company who have searched for ‘West Midlands web’ or ‘west midlands web designer’ and this means that if I can rank high for these keywords then I do not have to compete with big companies who are outside of this area, so it becomes easier to rank for this.

Another tactic can be to have a website which offers services in various areas, this means that you can try to rank high for searches in different areas. I am working on a website at the moment that has different physical sites and so want local search terms for each site to take the visitor to the one that they search for.

Other things to do to help your business on the local search is to make sure that you are tagged and have a listing in google maps. Then any local directories that offer a link to your website.

Having a twitter page and facebook are now not just good enough anymore, you need to get people to actually read them!

An article about SEO for facebook and twitter from imediaconnection gives some tips on how to optimize your SEO for the social networking pages. This applies to more than just these two as well. I think that these tips can be used for most social marketing methods.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24335.asp

The highlights are:

• Social media pages are like any other, but with the built-in benefit of residing on a very powerful domain
• Use Facebook’s “about” box for relevant content and keyword-rich descriptions
• The first 40 characters in a tweet are what appears on a search engine; use them wisely
• Create a custom Twitter background showing links to your other social media pages

Ok, so need to get my Twitter sorted out then.

I watched this video called the “100 Famous Rock Guitar Riffs”, the video was made by a guitar teacher and session musician. Not only is it a good watch and as a guitarist I know that trying to remember all that in one take is well hard, but it has had over 340,000 views of the video. Wow! that is a load more than just having a website or even placing an ad somewhere. The youtube page links to his website so people can see about him.

If you have a service or product that you do, it may be something to think about, doing something that is fun but will attract alot of attention. Start thinking about how to promote your service using social video.