Social Media & Viral PR Generate $1 Million in Sales Leads for New Condo Project

Jennings Public Relations & Advertising (JPRA) recently generated $1 million in online sales leads using social media and viral public relations tactics for the Metropolitan, a new downtown Kansas City condo development.

According to Phillip Gesue, director of acquisitions and development of Time Equities, Inc., an online initiative was a critical component of the Metropolitan's overall marketing strategy. "We wanted to drive online traffic to the Web site and increase search engine rankings to ensure that potential buyers discovered the Metropolitan and all of its amenities," said Gesue.

JPRA, a public relations and social media firm, created a series of three campaigns with compelling human interest stories, featuring current condo residents and illustrated the luxuries of living and working downtown. Valerie Jennings, CEO and president of JPRA, explained that the success of the campaigns was a result of solid content, Web 2.0 technology and search engine optimization. "We researched the market and online community, listened to current and new buyers and created a series of stories. True social media is not about companies, it is about consumers. That is why this content resonated with prospective buyers," said Jennings.

Watch Jennings speak about the future of social media and viral PR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2S_8Z4ET0 .
Results from the campaigns were measured via an online sales form, requesting how consumers found the Metropolitan's Web site or online press content. Most of the inquiries were for one and two bedroom condos ranging in price from $81,900 to $145,900. Currently, the campaigns are still generating sales leads for the luxury high-rise building.

Jennings Public Relations & Advertising is a traditional public relations and social media relations firm and is one of the first PR firms in the U.S. to generate B-to-B and B-to-C sales leads utilizing social media and viral PR tactics, via the Internet. By leveraging traditional public relations and dynamic Web 2.0 technology, the firm captures the attention of mainstream, virtual and industry-related press and prospects. For more information

Time Equities, Inc., based in New York City, is a full-service global real estate company. For more information

Social Media Marketing and Link Building

Intensive workshops provide necessary skills, tools needed to take search engine marketing to new level

Two of the many Search Engine Strategies (SES) Training Workshops throughout 2008 will take place Thursday, February 7, at the Hilton San Francisco from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. These workshops give attendees a leg up on the practices, applications, and hands-on exposure needed to become -- and remain -- a top performer in the search engine marketing and search engine optimization fields. Those who sit in on these sessions will walk away with the knowledge and skills needed to be a successful search engine marketer and will be armed with the basics to jump-start a career in search marketing.

The SES Training Workshops will be led by Debra O'Neil-Mastaler, president of Alliance-Link, and Liana "Li" Evans, director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance. Li Evans, leading "How to Effectively Use Social Media for Search Marketing Campaigns", will help beginners and experienced search marketers alike to understand more about using social media effectively. This session will show the entire realm of social media and how to use it effectively as part of a holistic marketing campaign. While many people think of Digg as the big player that they need to be working with, Digg is just one of many facets of social media. From social communities to photo sharing, blogging and forums, the Internet offers a world of opportunity waiting to be explored.

Debra O'Neil-Mastaler will spearhead "Link Building Tactics, Tools and & Techniques", which will help marketers understand and manage their link building campaigns by providing the knowledge to create a proven, practical and creative link marketing campaign. Attendees in this session will walk away understanding why they need certain links, how to find them, and how to effectively use links to promote brands and increase search engine rankings.

The SES Training Workshops take place in a small class setting, allowing instructors to be readily accessible for informal one-on-one or small group discussions. Consultants, site designers, website owners, and in-house marketing professionals cannot afford to miss this opportunity to experience firsthand the latest developments in search engine strategy.

The cost for a full day pass is $1,345. Seats are limited in order to provide personal training, so interested parties should register soon to ensure that spots are reserved.

About Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC -- A Division of Incisive Media PLC

Incisive Media PLC is a specialist business information provider, based in the UK with offices in North America, Hong Kong, India and Mainland China. The company's activities are currently built around ten core industry sectors - mortgages; marketing services; financial technology; retail investment; capital markets; risk management; insurance; legal services; private equity and photography. Information is provided via a wide range of channels--in print, in person and online. Funds advised by Apax Partners, a leading global private equity group, recently completed the successful de-listing of Incisive Media from the London Stock Exchange alongside the existing management.

Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC is the marketing services division of the company and incorporates leading websites Search Engine Watch, the ClickZ Network and their associated events series including Search Engine Strategies. These properties were acquired in 2005.

SMO is a method to optimize your site

Every other day we come across various changes in technology with latest and updated techniques. Social media optimization is a development process to optimize a website so that it amalgamates with an online community or to a community website easily. Well, it can also be said that it is a method of modifying a website so that the promotion of website gets easily done through social mediums or through online communities. The users or the visitors do help in making the business popular. The web users or visitors visit the website and come to know about its relevance and its use for themselves. In this way the website gets promoted by an easily and effective medium and many people get connected through this social medium. The optimization of website is also done due to the high demand in the market. The web owner modifies in the site to make itself much familiar and useful for the online visitors.

Social media optimization serves as a marketing tool for any business whether it is a new business or an old one. You must design your website keeping in mind the importance and meaning of your business. This will definitely help you to get a fast growth in your business. Today the web has huge response and it can easily reach anyone and anywhere around the world. The success behind social media optimization is that it caters to many users needs. People visit such websites and become member of social media websites to get connected to millions of people globally. And in other way the business promotion also gets executed through social media optimization. Online marketing methods have become so easier that many businesses are tempting towards it.

The icons or the links on a social media site are the perfect example of social media optimization that comes across to the online users. The web visitors click on the link or icons if they feel it will be helpful for them. This concept is sprouting with a fast pace ever since it came into being and many business is getting towards. It has really made many business or firm quite popular. The internet marketers are looking for the many other social media tactics to influence with pioneering ideas and concepts for its clients and businesses. You get so much affected by the social website that you feel something missing if you are not able to visit the social site. Here you find many of your relatives and friends staying in any corner of globe.

This has happened due to globalization which had made everything easily accessible and in everyone’s reach. Use of latest and highly advanced technology has made everything in our reach. So you need to make such strategies that makes your business truly successful. Along with this you have to make your site link available on other reputed websites where you can expect maximum viewing. You can also exchange links with other websites so that you are not left with any option to make your business popular.

Social media websites are quite popular among many users and many other are joining the community everday.Social media optimization serves an effective business tool that can make your business boom with such techniques.

Increasing Online Traffic Through Social Media Marketing

So what do we mean by social media? As the Internet has evolved increasing numbers of people have taken to sharing ideas, opinions and experiences through a combination of text, blogs, audio, video and message boards etc. More recently RSS and podcasts have also captured the imagination of many in their lust to get their message out to a wide audience. Social media has lead to a revolution in the way many people now interact and learn about world events. The repercussions are that the views of media giants are no longer taken for granted. Now almost anyone can put forward their perspective on any issue they wish. Some organisations have been quick to catch on and realise how their products or services can be promoted by this phenomenon, a kind of social marketing mix unlike anything which as gone before.

One of the simplest ways to begin social media marketing is by creating your own MySpace page. MySpace offers anyone the option to build a free web page where you can share your ideas or express your views in a particular topic. By inviting friends who share similar interests it's possible to quickly build a cult like community while covertly linking them to your own website.

The social web revolves around sharing opinions…..be they good or bad. With this in mind, websites that are packed full of content can lever recommendations from readers in the form of bookmarking. Bookmarking has become popular with some web users who'll share their lists with others who have a common interest. Assuming your website has some decent content, bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Reddit provide downloadable code and links etc that'll soon get you stated. A wise alternative is to link up to AddThis.com, which will then save you alienating those with a bookmarking preference by giving access to numerous bookmarking sites in one go.

A great method of keeping users up to date with your content is to set up a RSS feed. Otherwise known as Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, RSS provides a notification to users that new content has been added to your site thereby keeping your visitors up to speed with new developments or product launches and so on.

Enabling people to communicate directly through your website is at the core of social media and forums can be a great way of providing just that. The best forums are well managed but not overly censored. Both good and bad comments should be encouraged. While it's easy to assume that bad comments are best filtered out, leaving them in gives the forum greater credibility. A well managed forum provides an excellent, not to mention free, means of gathering customer feedback and carrying out market research etc. To give a forum momentum you may need to regularly stimulate discussion by starting new topics and by spending some regular time weeding out the spam and nonsense.

Showing your expertise through video is a clever way of grabbing an audience. Sometimes the only real way to demonstrate something is in a visual form. If you are dealing with something computerised it could be worth considering using screen capture software where you can easily take people through a lifelike demo. Video can be downloaded from your own website or posted on sites like YouTube for instance. Its always good to stamp your video with you website address so people know where it originated from. If your video impresses people they may want to seek you out. In much the same way still photographs, graphics and audio can be posted to websites; again not forgetting some kind of link back to your own website.

Lastly but by no means least you can get social media savvy by creating a blog. In essence blogs are little more than short articles often centred on current affairs, similar to writing a column for a newspaper. If you set up a blog it requires regular updating. Much like running a forum people expect blogs to evolve preferably on a daily basis. The biggest no no is to be lame on updates as any audience you've gained will soon be lost.