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The Happy Friday Series: Amazing Online Friends

05/24/2013 By Jayme Soulati

When I started my social media marketing agency 5 years ago, I did it for a variety of reasons.

I didn’t have a job. I had just been laid off from the magazine that I worked for when a larger publishing company bought it out. They were in OH, I was in NC, we didn’t know each other, and I was easy to cut.
I have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. In early 2000s, I made President’s Club when I was in sales because I was the first to do email blasts. A few years later, I started the concept of selling Webinars to my advertisers at the magazine.
I started my blog in 2003 – I was a “mom” blogger before most moms even had email. I was on LinkedIn the first year; I was on Facebook when there were less than 800,000 people and so on.
I’m BIG on customer service and helping people succeed.
I’m very social. I like to meet people.

One of the BEST parts of social media is getting to know people. I have met some amazing people that I would never have had the opportunity to meet were it not for social media. I met my friend and mentor, Mark Schaefer because of Twitter. I don’t know what tweet it was that he saw, but he reached out to me and offered a half hour of his time to “mentor” me. I was floored and giddy all at the same time. Whether he liked it or not, he had a follower for life. I wouldn’t meet him in real life for at least another year and that was when he came to be the keynote speaker for me at ConvergeSouth. He came to speak because of our relationship that we had built online.

Meet Whom You Tweet

You can build amazing relationships with people online but at some point, you REALLY want to meet them in person. To put a face to a Twitter handle or avatar is the best feeling in the world. That’s why I go to conferences.. it’s not to learn (added bonus if I do!) but rather to MEET WHO I TWEET!

I think it’s so important to find these opportunities to connect in person that I started a group affectionately called the #BWTs.. Broads Who Tweet. My point is getting to meet my online friends makes me happy for days. The energy I get from our BWT weekends will feed my soul for weeks. I just love taking those online relationships to the next level.

BWT is a group of tech-savvy women who I had gotten to know over the course of time and we had built such great online relationships that we wanted to get together in person. We have a hoot when we’re together.. we laugh, we support each other and we talk non-stop. After a few lunches, I thought…Hey! Why don’t we go on a retreat! We can get away from the family for a few days, drink copious amounts of coffee and wine and learn from each other.

And just like that, the #BWT Beach ReTweet was born.

We’ve done two of these retreats, and I’m in the process of planning the third. These relationships began on social media. We’ve carried them into real life and formed real friendships. I know that I can call on any one of these women to help me with something and they will be there in a flash. And they know that they can ask the same of me. It was because of this group that I joined forces with my friend Adrienne and together we created a new, bigger and better social media agency. It doesn’t get much better than that, friends.

You never know where you will find your next friend or your next tribe. Some last, some don’t. I’m grateful that I have them and all of you. Every chance I get to grow my social media circle, I do it because you never know where it may lead.

About The Author

Kristen Daukas is the Director of Social Media for Atlantic Webworks. When she’s not creating magic for clients, she’s busy trying to keep her sanity as she navigates the water of raising three teen and tween daughters. She also enjoys long walks on the beach in the moonlight with her husband. And she thinks she’s really funny. Come share a tweet and circle her at Google+!

Soulati Media On The Street with @Triberr @DinoDogan

04/11/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Dino Dogan owns Triberr shirts in every color; psst, he also owns Triberr.

There was a time when I kvetched and hollered about @ symbols in headlines of blogs. Now that I’m a name dropper and want everyone on the ‘sphere to know this post has video of the Kingpin himself, , founder of , I put a double whammy upstairs.

Call the headline police. I’ll wait.

This post comes to you straight from Knoxville, Tenn., site of the now infamous #SoSlam or Social Slam as it’s known. When I’m not having technical difficulties like this year, I can capture about 9 groovy unsuspecting peeps like I did last year (that’s because I had an iPhone 4S in hand).

Triberr is About Bloggers

Dino loves to talk about Gutenberg, founder of the printing press. Maybe he believes he’s a kindred spirit – you know how Johann changed the world as they knew it with his innovative creativity and launched the world of print journos? Well, I hasten a guess that Dino is bellying up to the bar to tip one with Johann in re his own creativity in creating a platform “for bloggers by bloggers.” Am I right, Dino?

Ever had Triberr go down (like it did recently) and did you notice what happened to your blog shares? Yep; nothing. That’s right; we’ve become spoiled with all the cool new gizmos and gadgets and features Triberr is creating for we bloggers. And, others are giving the Triberr team grief for pushing the envelope (see, that’s printed, too).

Without further silly ado…let me introduce Dino Dogan one of social blogging’s great up and comers.

Soulati Media On The Street With @rhogroupee Rosemary O’Neill

04/09/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Rosemary O’Neill flanked by Jeremy Floyd, Eric Pratum and Sean McGinnis

Social Slam 2013 was a huge success, except for also huge technical difficulties which limited the Soulati Media On The Street interviews to a handful…meh.

But, am so pleased to share this really perfect interview (because she was a good sport and permitted me making fun of her Twitter ID) with Rosemary O’Neill, owner of Social Strata where they make the Hoop.La. And, guess where she blogs? Right here…https://rhogroupee.com, and she blames that on her husband; uh-huh.

Permit my introduction of this fun Lady Friend, Rosemary O’Neill! (Oh, and please turn up the volume…the baby mic isn’t working well on YouTube.)

Cyber Security Is The Future

03/28/2013 By Jayme Soulati

All dongles aside, the incident over remarks that included one of those (I had no idea it looked like this for real) by a perky-eared bystander who snapped and posted an image to Twitter of alleged offenders behind her and subsequently jobs were lost over the conundrum (breath), has caused all sorts of crazy cyber-bullying against the female bystander and one of my peers who wrote about the incident.

Still not in the know? You can read all ab out it:

Mark W. Schaefer’s blog post
The letter from Anonymous; however, do not go to its website via Google search as it’s completely full of viruses. (I know, I just tried.)
A wiki, Geek Feminism, with what appears to be a sequential unfolding of the debacle.

And, you know what really sucks? We don’t know the truth; we don’t know who is ultimately responsible — perhaps it’s Anonymous and perhaps not.

Stop Being Naive

What I do know is that we the people can no longer be naive that what we say online is protected and without recourse; that what we do in public surroundings when involving strangers is innocent. It’s not and it’s not.

The scare tactics of hacker groups are real; it is cyber-bullying extraordinaire. Reputations and businesses that don’t play according to cyber rules are being ruined; it’s survival of the fittest and who can survive a cyber attack?

As I was explaining to Amber-Lee Dibble of Pioneer Outfitters on Google+, it’s time to pick the battles, choose carefully how to tread online, know with whom you’re engaging, and throw caution into every word.

Ever wonder how to fight a cyber-attack during which a website crashes and the spam bots destroy the back end with waves of onslaught? I would not have the financial resources or time to devote to managing this type of crisis; in fact, there’s nothing I would be able to do but call in the troops and borrow from the IRA (that’s not the Irish Republican Army).

In a Facebook discussion today, Ms. Kittie Walker, Founder and President of Indigo Girl in London said, “It takes for people to stand up and stand up en masse to fight that kind of bullying. There are plenty of rival sub-culture organizations fighting against Anonymous, but they are employing the same tactics. The global security services and police are fighting Anonymous and they’ve made some inroads, but for every hacker they arrest, a new one pops up.

What’s the likelihood of the masses standing up to them – not big; they are currently seen as modern day Robin Hoods and those that don’t see them that way may take the road that you did when bullied over a review. So whom do you side with? The Government and their agencies that want to restrict the internet in ways that you can’t even imagine (crushing your business just as surely) or the anarchists. Seems to me to be a bit of a loose-loose situation. (Kittie also mentioned she respects Anonymous and I should be prepared to stand by my research.)

Pick your battles carefully – not just the ones that you can win – but where you can make a difference.”

Fighting Cyber Attacks

Pay careful attention to your passwords. The previous school of thought was to do random characters, yet none of us can remember them. The now school of thought is to take a story, the dog ate my homework, and use it as your password e.g. DogAteHomeHah. These resources below are worth a read.

Inc. Magazine on Fighting Hacking

Wired Magazine on Passwords/Hacking

Inc. Magazine: Cyberrisk Insurance

Books on Cybersecurity You May Want To Read

By Jayme Soulati

Why Social Media May Not Earn SEO Benefit

03/19/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Whoever thought that social media is the sole solution for a failing SEO campaign is bound to face more disappointments. Although social media is highly recommended and lauded by SEOs and marketing experts, it is not an SEO tool that will immediately function with just one click, producing concrete results a few seconds later. The benefits that some websites have indeed experienced did not appear overnight.

Although the majority will still say that social media is useful for SEO, and for sure you yourself believe it to be true, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the flaws of social media so that you and your SEO company can do something to circumvent them.

Flaws in Twitter

Social marketing experts favor Twitter because it seems to be the most effective in influencing the SERPs and getting a newly published page indexed by Google. This is true to, as proven in so many experiments. However, there is a clincher: In most of the experiments conducted to test Twitter’s influence in Google SERPs (including one conducted by the SEO giant SEOMOZ) the tester requested people to retweet a link for an experiment. People complied and within hours, the links have been retweeted hundreds of times. Within hours as well, the links were later found on the first or second spot in the SERPs.

This tells us two things: one, Twitter can do your website a lot of good, and two, you need to have the cooperation of your Twitter contacts and the public in general.

There’s actually a third lesson here too: Twitter activity is only significant if Google uses its direct, real-time data. When Google turned off the Twitter Firehose in 2011, the massive amount of activities that went on there went largely unnoticed by the search engine.

So, how do you deal with this flaw? The first thing obviously is to use Twitter more as an engagement tool than an SEO one. Second, when you compose a tweet, leave enough space for Re-tweeting.

Flaws in Facebook

Considering that Facebook has the most number of members, you’d think that it will have a wealth of information sitting in its archives waiting for users to have access to them. It’s actually false on the first, and a “we’ll see” on the second.

The content posted in Facebook is very limited; you’d be hard-pressed to find valuable information from its users. Actually, at present it’s quite impossible to search for valuable content in Facebook. The search bar on top will only conduct search matches for user accounts, not content posted on timelines and shared among users.

Besides, active users socialize in this website. That includes companies, websites, and blogs that have Facebook accounts. If ever they do post significant content, they can only do so by posting links to articles and web pages outside of Facebook. The site is also riddled with privacy settings, and they can meddle with your search queries.

The most you can benefit from Facebook search is if the search is an exact match with your account name or your About page.

Facebook intends to level-up its search feature and is set to introduce its Graph Search (which is powered by its partner, Bing). The Graph Search will not function like a regular search engine like Google. Rather, it will consider social signals in generating search results.

It will only post results that are popular within your community and the groups that you belong to. Many recognize this as similar to what Google+ was first meant to do: incorporate social signals into your search results by virtue of the +1 function.

The Graph Search is yet to be launched though, and while that may be an improvement for an SEO-minded Facebook user, the totality of its benefits are yet to be seen.

Flaws in Google+

As mentioned above, Google+ is the social arm of the search engine. It is supposed to be the provider of social signals so that Google will be able to present users with more personalized results. There are two problems here though:

First, there are too few Google+ users compared to the numbers present in Facebook and Twitter. It needs to grow more in order to be a reliable measure for social signals for websites vying to rank first in the SERPs.

Second, the social integration of search results will only work if the user has a Google account, and if he/she is currently logged in to it when he conducts his search. While there are advantages in getting personalized searches, many users still prefer to see actual, organic search results.

Having said that, with Google giving weight to authorship by displaying pictures of authors next to their post (if they have set up rel=author), and talk about author rank becoming a crucial ranking factor in 2013, it looks like Google+ may become more powerful as an SEO tool.

So, if you have a blog on the web, it will be a prudent move to set up your authorship profile to make the most of Google+.

About The Author

Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media Inc, a Vancouver company that provides SEO services to businesses across North America.