Alex Macksoud is an Advertising major at Central Michigan University. He was one of five Blue Wheel Media summer interns. Upon completing his semester as a digital marketing intern, we asked Alex to sum up his experience in a blog post.
The performance of “A Whole New World” was his idea. Continue reading →

Elise Sabak is an English major at Wayne State University in Detroit. She was one of five Blue Wheel Media summer interns. Upon completing her semester as a digital marketing intern, we asked Elise to sum up her experience in a blog post. Continue reading →

While the battle between iPhone and Android still continues, it seems that users of both are now focusing almost all of their attention on e-commerce sites that function well on smartphones. While utilizing the technology of new phones to showcase a product or service is nothing new, many companies will be forced to change their perspective on the way they incorporate this new approach to smartphone marketing into their business plan. Continue reading →

This past spring, Twitter founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams and staffer Jason Goldman announced they would be reigniting the flame under their tech incubator, Obvious Corp. With one wildly popular social media site under their belts, the Obvious Corp. team was already running at full speed out of the gate when they announced the launch of Medium, a brand new publishing platform. While the site is built from scratch, Medium takes on some obvious (no pun intended) cues from other social networks. Continue reading →

When it comes to creating a Google+ page for your business, many business owners are content to use the social network to simply ensure that their contact info and hours are represented. While this is essential to the success of your business, Google+ started out with an immense opportunity to be just as important as Facebook. Yet, when looking at statistics recently culled by Umpf, a social media company from the United Kingdom, the current level of engagement on many companies’ Google+ pages pale in comparison to just about every other major social network. Continue reading →

With the launch of another version of Digg, the popular social bookmarking site has once again divided the social media community into two categories; Pro-Digg and Anti-Digg. This first version of the new Digg site looks fantastic and parallels the visual aspect of Pinterest, but when digging just under the surface, the social bookmarking forum does a disservice to seasoned veterans and new users. Is Digg dead? Not yet, but read on to learn more about the ups and downs of one the new Digg.
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With the news breaking that HootSuite will now include Google+ pages in their social media management system, it might lead to some questions from users who are still new to the service. With this handy HootSuite help, you’ll be sure to have your company’s social media presence on the rise in no time.
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We’ve long extolled the virtues of Pinterest, the social photo sharing website that has seemingly taken over the world in 2012. According to comScore, a digital analytics group, the social media giant had well over 30 million unique visitors from around the world in May of this year alone. This week, Pinterest has announced that it is beefing up on their efforts to control spam. With hopes of blocking out companies that are attempting to prey on its users, Pinterest has explained some of its moves and how you can create a Pinterest business model that won’t be marked as spam.
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When running your own small business, it’s important to do whatever you can to keep your business afloat while also bringing new customers in. While the social network LinkedIn has often been considered the best way of promoting yourself when looking for a new job, the web site also offers numerous chances to create new business opportunities. Read on to learn how the creation of a LinkedIn business profile will expose your to a whole new side of your industry.
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When tasked with creating daily content for a blog, it can become complicated to come up with fresh material every single day. When reaching out for content from other resources (aside from what your client provides you, or your own brain), it’s extremely easy to pull ideas from the words of other parties. By conducting blog interviews, writers can question experts both within and outside of the company, brand advocates and even customers to gain access to insights and information that can be instantly developed into content.
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In the new age of the internet where Pinterest rules the roost of social photo sharing sites, some users may have wondered if the site was even having an effect on their business. After all, you’ve taken the time to pick beautiful images to post to the social photo sharing giant, written short keyword-laden descriptions for each photo and optimized the names of your boards. Phew, Pinterest can make the hours fly by. But thanks to the advent of Pinerly and Pinreach, users can wonder no more.
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On Monday, Facebook announced it was doling out a reported $100 million to purchase Face.com, the company responsible for the Facebook facial recognition technology that matches a user’s photo uploads with the faces of people on their friends list. Though Facebook facial recognition acquisition will likely mean enhancements in one of the social network’s most popular and effective features – the sharing of photos – some wonder how the deal will affect user privacy.
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Earlier this week several high profile publications were banned for Reddit spam on the popular link sharing website. While the website understandably has some spam regulations, it’s impossible to consider everything shared by the offending parties as spam. How will the new Reddit spam movement affect the way you post your business content on the site? It could change everything.
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While Google Places may have been the way you promoted your business in the past, the search giant has now replaced the location based search results with Google+ Local. This new use of a Google+ Local directory will ensure that those who once used Google Places will now be forced to interact with the search giant’s social media platform, Google+. What does all of this mean for your small business? How can you benefit from the Google+ Local Directory? Read to learn how to use this new system to your advantage.
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Whether or not you like your social media visually dominant, get used to it. There is nowhere to turn now that the need to create a Pinterest for small business becomes more essential to brands. With many businesses already looking to capitalize on the popular content sharing service, the recent data that more Pinterest users follow retailers than on any other social network have marketing directors everywhere salivating.
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You may recall a couple weeks ago when we discussed a feature in beta testing that would make paying for posts on Facebook the new frontier for monetizing the massive social network. Well, last week a very similar feature, called Facebook Promoted Posts, officially went live for admins of pages with 500 fans or more.

With Facebook Promoted Posts, over a three-day period brands can now pay to expand the reach of a featured post. Where a typical post once reached only about 17% of a page’s fans, admins can now boost their audiences by paying for posts on Facebook on payment tiers that span $5 to $300, depending on fan count. These Facebook Promoted Posts will look the same as normal posts, except they will be marked as “Sponsored” when appearing in the newsfeed. Real-time analytics including Reach, Uniques, and a Metrics Summary will also be visible to admins under the post itself and in the admin panel. Continue reading →

Google recently unveiled a new way of displaying search queries, called The Google Knowledge Graph. But what is the Google Knowledge graph and how will it affect SEO? These are both important things to consider for businesses that rely on SEO to generate leads.
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From east coast to west coast, Backstage.com is known for being the primary source for all things actors and entertainment. Actorfest, the largest nationwide convention for aspiring actors, worldwide producers and directors, and film industry vendors, came to Detroit this past weekend. Backstage.com plans to expand its Actorfest from just LA and NYC to six cities, Detroit included. Long story short, it was a huge success.
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Google is the pervasive presence on the Internet. From e-mail clients, web browsers, and search engines, to ad networks, data mining and social networks, Google is everywhere. However, by ignoring social behemoths like Facebook and Twitter in an effort to push its own social network, Google+, did Google miss a golden opportunity? And more interestingly, is the Bing social search capitalizing on this by picking up Google’s slack?
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As Facebook continues to expand on its user experience, the site recently began testing a new feature that will give users the ability to reach more people with their posts and status updates. Currently being tested in New Zealand, Facebook’s new “Highlight” feature would allow users to post status updates that would be visible to their entire friends list… for a price tag of two dollars.
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It’s 2012. Personal branding has never been so important. As the ever-expanding digital landscape continues to make your world seem smaller and your competition seem bigger, we’ve developed this useful guide to help you get ahead in your industry and stand out for that potential job position. Behold: Blue Wheel Media’s GET List.
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Meet Mr. Blue. You might think, “Oh, he’s cute and friendly,” but what you may not know is that he is much more than just a blue stick figure with a killer top hat. Mr. Blue is Blue Wheel Media’s way of saying, “Yes, digital is complicated, but we are here to make it simple.”
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Late last week, the House of Representatives shot down a proposed amendment to H.R. 3309, the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, that would have had a big impact on the landscape of social media, with implications for basically anyone with a Facebook profile. The legislation, submitted by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, proposed new restrictions to FCC rules that sought to prohibit employers from demanding social network usernames and passwords from their employees. With a final vote (essentially drawn down party lines, 236-184) against the amendment, your employer can still request access to your social accounts. And he’s still well within his rights. Continue reading →

With this month’s mandatory change-over to Timeline for all Facebook brand pages, and this week’s Simply Measured study, which declared huge boosts in fan engagement for brands embracing Timeline, the internet’s abuzz with both glaring concerns and glowing testimonials for the social network behemoth’s latest redesign roll-out. Regardless of which side of the Timeline you stand on, one thing is certain: As of tomorrow, all Facebook fan pages will be sporting the new layout. So here are a couple Facebook Timeline brand page tips to ease the transition into the next phase of Facebook. Continue reading →

One of the most difficult aspects of blogging is trying to find websites that will allow guest contributors. You want to remain in your niche as much as possible, and you generally want to target authoritative sites. If you are blogging as a part of a company’s SEO department, you have to make sure that the website allows backlinks. If the website uses a static author box and does not allow links within the copy of the post, you can really only contribute to that site once from an SEO perspective. After a while, the sites available to contribute guest articles will begin to dwindle.

As a full-time blogger, I have found this to be a huge stress. There was a time when I would spend hours just trying to create a list of sites (the right sites) that would allow me to guest post. Fortunately, I have discovered a few ways to make this process much easier and more effective than blindly searching the Internet:

Top 5 Ways to Find a Website That Allows Guest Articles Continue reading →

I woke up this morning, blurry eyed. First thing I check naturally is twitter and first thing I saw was a tweet from Swedish House Mafia’s twitter. I put a lot of trust in Swedish House Mafia because I am very passionate about their music. It was 5:43am and little did I know I was about to watch a 29 minute video that would hit me hard from so many angles. Continue reading →

Hiring that first executive is always tricky. You have to ask them questions to determine if they are knowledgeable in their field and can lead a department in your company. But what if you yourself do not have that knowledge? After all, you’re hiring them so that they can determine who is really an expert in the field and so that they can create a team of experts to help grow your company. However, the hiring must start somewhere, and it always starts with the business owner. No matter what your background or area of expertise, you have to have to hire that department head. Continue reading →

At Blue Wheel Media, we may not have written the book on content marketing strategies, but we definitely read it cover-to-cover more than a few times. We scrawled our fair share of expert analysis in the margins, too.
As Trevor outlined in a recent blog, content is the key to successful multi-channel marketing in today’s digital age. Filtered through a strategic SEO lens, well-crafted content is the cornerstone of what we do for our clients on a daily basis. Today, we’re offering a look behind the curtain of our proven content marketing strategies.
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This is less of an Android vs. iPhone comparison, and more of a look at why why I’ll stay loyal to Apple and never buy an Android. Here is the problem:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has many variables that need nurturing. SEO is both important to the search engines and the end user. In this blog post, I will discuss the importance of the Title Tag and what can happen with a simple SEO mistake.
Blue Wheel Media team member, Zach Riegle was messing around with some recent Google searching. After querying the keyword phrase “Google Keyword Tool”, he was shocked to find the result in the below attached picture.

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