Ashton Kutcher becomes the “First Millionaire” on Twitter and Domino’s Pizza loses millions in brand equity

Ashton Kutcher was the first person to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. He broke followers record and made history becoming first person to achieve this goal.

Yesterday was actually a big day for a lot of people to understand (or not) what is going on nowadays. Demi Moore’s husband showcased his victory on live on Ustream and post a video on YouTube, where he says he can’t follow himself, he is following us. Was funny to Kutcher saying that while he was reading a script. Even more when you realize that from more than 1,122,000 followers, he only follows 80 back. Is he really following us? Does he really care about the conversation? Or he is just surrounded by a very competent team?

Below, in this Ashton Kutcher’s video, you can see why the discussion just got started.

On the other hand, a multi million dollars brand lost equity by the use of New Media. We learned about the Domino’s Pizza incident from Gary Vaynerchuk’s video blog. Finally happened: somebody from inside a big corporation made a nasty video to and really committed the image of the brand.

Two employees appear in the video below sneezing over the food and putting pieces inside the nose. What to think after this? For the good and for the bad, everybody is using Social Media for branding their reputation.

From fast food workers to celebrities, be aware: the revolution is here.

Tips for branding your business, products and services online using Social Media

Nowadays, with such demanding consumers, when you think about starting a business you must think about branding it as well. But what is branding?

Branding is creating a whole experience and a strong idea around your products or services. The colors, the logo, the bags, the employees  uniforms, the stores: everything is part of what you are selling. Back in the days, a few visionaries started to create and identity to their companies, and that is what makes a Mc Donald’s burger different than any other burger in the world. Whether you like the Mc Donald’s burgers or not, you still are well familiar with their brand and you know it is a single experience.

We asked this question to Duncan Alney, at the last edition of the Search Engine Strategies New York 2009. In the video below he is giving a couple advices about how-to brand using Social Media and Web 2.0.

Branding using Social Media is something that everybody is talking about. New Media such as Blogs, Social Networks, Bookmarks, Podcasting, Video and Photo Sharing made branding something much more cheaper than it use to be. The fact of being more accessible doesn’t mean it is low quality or unprofessional. You can actually find and reach possible costumer in a more precise way, according to what they are looking for. You are also able to listen better and find a bigger number of small audiences that are looking for you and what your company has to offer.

Here are a few tips about how you can use Social Media tools and websites to promote your business online:

1. Create accounts in Social Networks and sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious and Digg. Use always the same user name and share your logo with the world. The more complete your profiles are the better, so everybody can learn more about your business. Don’t forget to manage your account often and interact to people related to your interests;
2. Take pictures and make movies about your business, services, products, employees, stores, costumer service, EVERYTHING, and upload them to your page on you YouTube or any other site where you can share videos and photos. You will be actually creating commercials about your brand and developing a Marketing campaigns online;
3. Create a RSS (Real Simple Sindication) feed and incentive your visitors to subscribe to your content. This way they will receive your content in their reader everytime you uptade your blog. It is much nicer way than send invasive e-mails everytime you post, and it’s also a good termomether to know how much people are wiling to commit to your company;
4. Visit, read and comment in sites related to your business blog. That is a good way to understand your marketing, know about what costumers are looking for and also become part of the community. You can also create quality links posting discussions, joining forums and getting envolved in the conversation;
5. Be a real person! When it comes to Social Media, it’s not about creating a bunch of accounts and being on the top of all new tools or techologies. It’s about the way you use all those tools to build your brand reputation. If in the past companies had to spend millons of dollars in Marketing to actually hide and fake their weeknesses, the Marketing of the future is all about truthfully, autenticy and exposing. Puting your brand into Social Media is also a good way to deal with crisis reputation and problems with your services. On the other hand, if you don’t CARE about people or just can’t see your business as part of a context, probably Social Media is not a good place for you!

Using free stat tracking tools to help you see your efforts

If you blog with passion you need to be tracking your efforts online. Today there are many tools that can help you to gain more insight into what readers are reading and how they find your links online.

First we all blog because we can, want and are able to do so with ease, but have you ever wondered if people are reading. One thing about blogging is that you can not track your online success by looking at comments until big traffic hits.

You should first install these following free analytic tools that work well in giving you some direction when it comes to SEO.

1) Woopra is a way cool tracking tool that gives live real time results on your traffic. You can see from where you traffic came from, where they arrived in your page, how long they staid and weather or not it came from organic search or sponsored links.

2) Lijit sends a weekly report on traffic and other important stats that can help shape your efforts. Lijit is also a search box widget you can add to your blog. This will allow readers to search keywords for posts you may have done. It will pull post from your blog’s archive. Lijit also shows others all your profiles on all your social networks by hitting buttons inside this widget.

Listen to Bloggers School interview with Lijit, to learn more about this tool.

3) Feedjit is the first tracking widget I ever used on my blogs. It is simple and tells the story you need to know about your visitors. Shows searches and links to Google pages and other search engines, showing how the search was performed. One thing is the location finder is good but not very precise. Sometimes it will show a visitor from somewhere they are not in. Two ways to test this are:

• While traveling view check the Feedjit in your blog, but be sure and set the widget settings to stop ignoring your browser. This tool is able to track our not your IP address, so you can ignore your visits to your site and get true results.

• Have a friend from another town, city, state or country go to your blog so you can compar the location you see to the location this person really is.

Learning how your readers are coming to you, how they are searching and what keywords they are using will help you to make adjustments to your content. One of the best things of blogs is that everything is easily editable and updatable.  Take advantage of it and optimize your content. However, never forget you are writing and talking to people, not to search engines. Test, test, test! Ask people’s opinion, compare and mesure.

Google Analytics is very powerful tool, but their reports are not very precise when it comes to blogs.

Tips to create great product reviews

Product reviews are both fun, profitable and worth the time. Here are some tips we picked up along the way.

1) Always link the product you are reviewing from good anchor links on your blog, with the name of the product you are reviewing. Link the product you are reviewing directly to its specific page, not the product’s heme page only;

2) Always provide a clean review and be honest. You do not have to take the side of those who give you products your way;

3) Do good product reviews and add affiliate links to that product to help monetize your blog;

4) Always disclose that you are doing a review.

Here are one of our reviews of the Flip Mino Camcorder. This review was made when a plane engine exploded in Flushing, NY. We posted in our Street’s Journalism.

New Media vs Mainstream Media: Greg Jarboe explains how they are teaching each other

Bloggers are breaking news and dozens of traditional mainstream media newspapers are closing down. This was one of the topics from the “News Search SEO” panel, at the Search Engine Strategies New York 2009 event.

The fact that now more and more people are able to shoot videos or pictures from cell phones changed the concept of news. Regular people are now on the scene, registering and publishing facts. When news becomes at the same time very personal but not necessarily unprofessional, everybody has to be their own PR.

The video below was taken at the latest edition of the SES-NY. Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR speaking exclusively with Bloggers School about how the New Media and the Mainstream Nedia need each other.

Greg Jarboe is a successful online marketing guru, and his company combines and makes cleaver uses of Press Releases and Search Engine Optimization. He is also the news search, blog search and PR correspondent for the Search Engine Watch Blog.

We found great info at this session about the ways the New and Traditional Media are coming together. It is so exciting to be part of something that so fresh and current.