One of the things I like about VisionPoint Marketing is our complete and total commitment to the community. Our clients range from pillars of the North Carolina business and education communities to small to medium sized businesses with savvy owners who want to work with us to design amazing websites, create memorable brands and create successful online marketing, paid search and SEO campaigns.

Being a local online marketing agency that focuses its business in the Triangle and greater North Carolina area, we have a lot of experience with local SEO and I’ve collected some great tips about writing creative content with a local flavor.

Twitter's just launched Blackbird Pie. This cool service will allow you to take a unique Twitter URL and generate some very cool code to embed in your blog. One of the cool things about this is that if you're quoted via a Twitter source on another blog, your Twitter name will be linked to via a very clean, very SEO friendly link. 

Hooray! You've joined social media, you have a smart phone and your social media apps. You look at the numbers and see that 40 bajillion people are on Twitter and 100 gazillion are on Facebook. You order your web design firm or your fun-loving social media marketing manager to set up some profiles and start "getting in on the conversation". 

Yesterday at Facebook’s f8 conference Mark Zuckerberg talked about the new direction that Facebook will be taking. The announcements revolve primarily around data portability and security.

First, let me give you a quick explanation of data portability. When you create a Facebook profile, you give your name, gender, email, phone number, location, interests and a host of other data points that fill out your demographic and psychographic profile. Secondly, as you participate in Facebook, someone may leave a link about the new Windows 7 phone that you may like, so you click the “like” button. That interaction is also saved as a part of your personal data.

Reading today's e-marketer article about the spread, usage and change in habits of media usage is interesting, but not surprising. In 2008, people spent an average of 14 hours per day consuming and interacting with various forms of media. In 2009, that number shrunk by 17% to consuming 12 hours per day.

Pay Per Click marketing, also called PPC or CPC, is one of the best ways to deliver quick traffic and conversion results to your business. There's no question about that. However, one of the more overlooked aspect to paid search marketing is day-parting. Now, once you've got your keyword research done, you've set up your campaigns in contextual categories and you've created a bunch of ads to be displayed you're almost ready to go.

It's long been suspected and anectodally confirmed that the speed of the site loading is a factor when Google determines the ranking of the site for keywords. Simply put, if your site is slow to load, it will have less of a chance to rank than a site that loads quickly. Just recently, Googleand Matt Cutts, the leader of Google's webspam team, have confirmed that the speed of the site loading is in fact, a factor in determining ranking.

In the last post about ethical search engine reputation management, or SERM, the point was to make you aware that somewhere, people are talking about you. People are posting their opinions, both good and bad about your products, your services, your employees and your marketing. With a host of new social networking sites based around product, service and business discovery, Yelp being the relative new-comer and CitySearch.com being the more established network, people have been expressing their opinions for many years now.

For techno-geeks like me, I took a short break out of my work day to watch the live-blog of Apple’s announcements for the iPhone’s new OS 4.0.  To translate, Apple is upgrading the technology and capabilities of the iPhone to support some new and interesting capabilities.

Online reputation management used to be critical to any business that advertised online and had a website. Yet, for better or worse, even though you may not have a website, even though you may get all your business leads from traditional sources, the web has changed the landscape of your business without the common courtesy of letting you know.

From the user’s perspective, finding something from a search engine is easy. All the user really need to do is search for something and filter the results according to your needs. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you go back to the search engine and refine your search with modifiers until you find exactly what you’re looking for.

For businesses that want to be found online, the over-arching goal should be to make the customer’s life a little bit easier.