July 2009

by Andrew Begnoche

Join the Conversation

Twitter and YouTube dominated most of the discussion at HOLDCOM’s first monthly Social Media Mixer on June 25th, 2009 here at our Glen Rock offices. The 60-minute meeting brought together staff, clients, partners and vendors of HOLDCOM to discuss the benefits of Social Media.

“This hands-on workshop style approach is aimed at discussing and developing Social Media skills and knowledge to generate leads/sales as well as improve customer service. Our focus is on networking with like-minded individuals to help expand ideas and personal networks. The opportunity to meet face to face and work side by side, really adds to the quality of each meeting,” said Andy Begnoche`, Director of Operations at HOLDCOM and the driving force behind the monthly meetings. “We’ve been exploring Social Media for the past 15 months, but have not dedicated enough time and resources to it. Committing to monthly meetings and opening it up to our clients, vendors, and partners will help us vet this and uncover Social Media’s real value from the business side as well as a Customer Service tool,” Begnoche added.

If you would like to learn more about this group or attend our monthly meetings, contact Andy Begnoche` at 800-666-6465 or email him andyb@holdcom.com. If you would like to receive a copy of the PowerPoint presentation for June’s meeting, please email socialmedia@holdcom.com and include your contact information.

Have a LinkedIn account or thinking about setting one up? Join us this July 23rd at 12:30 pm, as our topic will be focused leveraging LinkedIn as a Social Media tool. If you have information you’d like to contribute or would like to attend, email socialmedia@holdcom.com.

HOLDCOM is proud to feature a veteran voice talent – Gary, on our roster with 30 years of Voice Over experience. The Holdcom Voice is equally as proud to feature Gary in our July 2009 edition.

Gary began Voice Over work when he was in high school. His sister worked at a radio station in Chicago, where he would record the PSA’s.

After so many years in the business, we asked Gary if he still found things interesting or exciting about his chosen profession. He replied, “I love that I’m talking directly to the consumer and making a difference in their attitude toward the company I’m representing.”

Gary grew up on stage in Chicago and gradually shifted toward Voice Over, film, and television work. “I’ve had the privilege of working with the likes of Tim Conway, Mel Tillis, and my personal friend, Tom Lester, who played “Eb” on the Green Acres series,” says Gary.

Be sure to sample Gary’s voice and get his experience for your next project at www.holdcom.com/voices.

by Aaron Kamphuis

Last month's Tech Talk article was about Search Engine Optimization. This month I'm going to expand on that by getting into Google's Webmaster Tools.

The Google Webmaster Toolkit is a Google site where a site owner can register their site to enhance and increase site traffic, connect with visitors, and analyze your web traffic. Most any site host offers free tools for viewing your site's traffic and hits, but more often than not they are just raw log files. With Google's Webmaster Tools, you can see nicely laid out and easily interpretable data about how your site is accessed, which search queries find your site, your site's current PageRank, and errors encountered by Google while indexing your page.

The first step is to register your site and verify ownership. Site ownership can be verified either by generating a special HTML page and placing it on your site, or adding a specially generated META tag to the header of your page. After the site is verified, Google indexes the site and it appears in your Webmaster Dashboard. The Webmaster Dashboard lists your index crawls (how many times Google has indexed your page), crawler errors, if you have uploaded a sitemap, and what queries reach your page.

Another great tool is that you can generate a sitemap. A sitemap is an XML file that is a listing of all the pages on your site and how they are linked together. It makes sure that you don't have any pages that would be unaccessible by a web surfer. Webmaster Central has a tool for generating a sitemap, and then you upload it to their service.

Google has several ways that it indexes your page and measures its relevancy, particularly the number of other sites that link back to your site. The best way to do this is to promote your website! Also, the frequency of your page updates figures into this as well. The more often your site is updated, the more often Googlebot has to crawl the site again. One of the best ways to frequently update your site is something I will continue with next month: Blogs!