aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

When attending industry events (in this case, #SES2010), folks sporting the “Press” badge may tell you that food is a coveted reward. Our proud mission is to churn out quality coverage in a timely manner, and it’s one we take quite seriously. Sacrifices must be made. Sometimes, that sacrifice is breakfast. Sometimes, lunch. So yes, food can become coveted, almost revered. Free food even more so. Cupcakes? We may as well erect a 50 foot shrine.

Perhaps this is the reason why oodles of live-bloggers (as well as general conf attendees & speakers) packed into Mari Luangrath‘s solo presentation, deliciously titled: Shoes, Cupcakes and Social Media: Building an Army of Brand Ambassadors. Or, perhaps they were just super jazzed to soak up the tactics & takeaways sure to be shared in this hour-long social media marketing case study from planet awesome. When we weren’t drooling over the 7 boxes of cupcakes stacked on stage, aimClear live-tweeted this  session (via @beebow). Full coverage resides below… Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you’ve been holed up in a cave this past weekend (even in Duluth it’s not quite hibernation season…) you’ve surely heard that Facebook recently revamped Groups, nearly beyond recognition. With the revamp, all 500 million registered Facebookers were instantly granted the ability to create their own Groups, to which friends can be added as “members” and then sent updates en masse. Seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. Did we mention these updates are also sent to members’ personal email accounts on an opt-out basis? Or that Group creators don’t need permission to add friends as members? Yeah – Facebook decided to forgo the whole “invitation” process. And lest we forget, the cherry on top – the little box under Privacy setting Facebookers might “check” to block friends from adding them to random Groups… doesn’t… exist… (yet).

Seeing as we frequent the Facebook platform professionally & personally, we wanted to get a deeper understanding of Groups– from the basics of creation to the extent friends’ FB experiences would be impacted as Group members. Moreover, we wanted to affirm our instinctual conclusion… that this overhaul of Groups had essentially birthed the most glaring spam loophole the Facebook platform has seen in quite some time. Read on for a run-through of the experiment along with instructions & illustrations on how to spam the snot out of your FB friends. Read the rest of this entry »

To celebrate the opening of our St. Paul office, we decided it would be super cool to profile local public relations players in our (new) second hometown. After all, we’re neighbors now, and there’s not much more of an Internet fishbowl than the PR community. There will be plenty of time for y’all to get to know aimClear and our services a bit better.  For now, let’s highlight Minneapolis/St. Paul agencies that have bubbled up to prominence from the primordial PR soup.

We understand growing an agency at the intersection of PR, search & social media has its challenges and perks. For one, we get to stick fingers in a variety of exciting and fruitful sects of online marketing and reap dynamic benefits each provides. These days being a   “complete marketer” means integrating all online marketing disciplines, including blended search & social demographic research, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), online reputation management, social media marketing, targeted press release distribution, custom training, SEO analytics monitoring & consulting, copywriting, data-driven community management and more. Skill-sets should not only be offered, but mastered. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve probably caught wind of this thing called “Facebook Places.” In fact, unless your entire last week was consumed by SES San Francisco or Affiliate Summit you may have read, with bated breath,  live blog coverage from Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, CA. It was there CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed a crowded room that, according to Greg Sterling, resembled “a wedding or luau [rather] than a press conference.” Right. That’s creepy-ominous enough.

If by some chance you’re living under a rock and have not heard of Facebook Places, here’s a 140 character summary: Facebook Places allows users to share their location & the location of their friends by “checking in” at places via an iPhone app. To paraphrase general feedback from social circles: “So… basically, it’s just like Foursquare.” Maybe so. Maybe no. Regardless, the unveiling of this possibly game-changing platform certainly warrants a closer look.

In an effort to help provide just that, we compiled a list of 57 recently-published posts about Facebook Places– from launch coverage to field guides, privacy warnings to tactics on how biz owners & marketers can capitalize on the functionality.  Read on for the complete link roundup. Read the rest of this entry »