Optima Worldwide

Optima is Expanding! New Office in Lenexa

Kyle Claypool — Tue, 01 May 2012 01:26:34 +0000

Thanks to our wonderful clients and partners (not to mention our talented and hard-working team), we’re growing into a bigger and better office! Here’s a preview of the new space:

Starting May 1, we’re located at 8400 Melrose Dr., Lenexa KS 66214, in the Pine Ridge Business Park:

View Larger Map

We’re looking forward to growing into this space, building a physical presence that matches our web presence. Thanks again to our clients, employees, and families for all the tremendous support! We’ll be sending out an announcement of an open house in the next few weeks to show off the new digs, once the dust settles.

Creative Ways Brands are Using Facebook Timeline

Daniel — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:00:22 +0000

At the beginning of March, Facebook made updating to the new timeline layout mandatory for all brand pages. Some companies have embraced the new layout more than others, and we wanted to highlight some of the most impressive ways we’ve seen Timeline being used by Facebook brand pages to market themselves and gain attention:

Red Bull

One of the most popular Facebook brand pages since Timeline has been Red Bull. When they switched to Timeline, Red Bull created a scavenger hunt where users were given clues and had to find specific things hidden throughout Red Bull’s Timeline. They even gave away prizes!

Old Spice

Going along with their outlandish marketing campaign, Old Spice has a Timeline with visuals that assault the senses. Featuring a tiger’s face engulfed in flames, their banner image lets you know immediately that you aren’t on your average Facebook brand page. Their status updates are consistently ridiculous yet entertaining and they often post other fun content from the web like weird Photoshopped images.

Coldplay

Coldplay has made great use of Timeline’s ability to document history. Coldplay has filled their timeline with fun facts and trivia about their band all the way back to their first release in 1998. Fans looking for info on Coldplay’s history or discography can now go straight to the source instead of searching the web.

Facebook brand pages are beginning to realize just how important it is to adapt to the constantly evolving trends in social media. It’s been fun to see brands go all out to entertain and reward their fans. The Timeline layout allows Facebook brand pages to really gain attention for posting interesting content, which is fantastic for fans and consumers.

Facebook Makes Timelines Mandatory

Daniel — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:45:54 +0000

It’s March 30^th. The day Facebook has decided to make its latest design innovation, the “Timeline” mandatory for all brand pages and public figures, which means that the rest of us are soon to follow. The new Timelines are a pretty drastic change, with some big obvious benefits, but also some features that will take some time to get used to. Let’s explore:

Facebook Timeline

The new Facebook Timelines let people and pages show their full history to the world. You can date your profile back to your birth and upload pictures from when you were three that you can then insert right into the correct place in your timeline.

For a company like Solo Foods, who has a rich history dating back to the 1800s, this is a very cool feature to help visitors better connect with the history of the company. We’re working to add old labels, ads, cookbooks and more as we speak!

From personal experience though, I miss the Facebook Wall immensely. It was so organized and uniform with basic browsing expectations. Everything was there and you knew you weren’t going to miss anything leaf through a person or page’s Wall. The automatic scroll for the Timeline has also seemed a little wonky so far, with the page jumping around a bit more than expected and the dreaded “Show all posts” button making everything an extra step away.

Facebook Cover Photo and Logo Display

In a welcome move that allows for a more personalized feeling page, Facebook now allows “cover” images measuring 851px x 315px. Much bigger than the old profile pictures, the new Facebook cover images gives you more freedom to make a great first impression.

Check out Optima’s new cover photo, highlighting our #1 position on Google for our top search target, web presence management!

Somewhat obscured by the cover image, you can also see a 125px square image on pages that are a great place to place your logo. Overall, I think the changes that timeline brings are a healthy evolution for Facebook.

They managed to make some radical changes to the layout, without forcing everyone to relearn how to do what they want on the social media site. Once your profile is updated, you can take a (very) quick and informative tour of the new features and what you can do with them. The tour highlights the various elements on the new layout providing a brief description of each, and doesn’t even take you away from your page. With no one left resisting the new direction of Facebook, anyone dissatisfied will just have to wait in anticipation for the next inevitable overhaul the Facebook team comes up with.

Spring Social Media Icon Sets

Daniel — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:00:17 +0000

Spring is Here! It’s the perfect time to do a little Spring cleaning on your website, to add some fresh looks to it. What better place to start than with your social media icons? It’s a quick and easy change and the icons can really help your site give a strong first impression. Let’s start off with some icons for the biggest Holiday of the season…

‘Easter’ Social Media Icons

‘Pastel’ Social Media Icons

The trees and flowers are coming back! Here’s some icons that will help make your site look like it’s blooming with fresh ideas. Flowers, trees, weather, animals and more! These social icons will satisfy all your nature needs.

‘Leaf’ Social Media Icons

‘Spring’ Social Media Icons

‘Flowers’ Social Media Icons

‘Floral’ Social Media Icons

‘Cute Flowers’ Social Media Icons

‘Grass’ Social Media Icons

‘Green Thumb’ Social Media Icons

‘Nurture’ Social Media Icons

‘Curly’ Social Media Icons

‘Woody’ Social Media Icons

‘Wood’ Social Media Icons

‘Rain’ Social Media Icons

‘Clouds’ Social Media Icons

‘Stars’ Social Media Icons

‘Cute’ Social Media Icons

‘RSS Animals’ Social Media Icons

‘Paws’ Social Media Icons

More than just green coming back into our lives, Spring is a great time to go back outside and have some fun in the nice weather. Here’s some social icons based around different items you can do, eat or wear again comfortably in the Spring.

‘Balloon’ Social Media Icons

‘Badges’ Social Media Icons

‘Shirts’ Social Media Icons

‘Baseball’ Social Media Icons

‘Sweet’ Social Media Icons

‘Candy’ Social Media Icons

How Often Does Google Change Its Algorithm?

Kyle Claypool — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:41:11 +0000

This is a question we hear pretty regularly: How often does Google change its search algorithm? I’ll let Google spokesperson Matt Cutts give you his answer:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In short, Google changes its algorithm more than once a day, on average. Roughly 40 changes were made this past February. Most of these changes relate to the quality of search results (weeding out spam and low quality content), but others relate to display (modifying the 10-pack of local results or adding special markup for recipes) and even social media (+1 buttons, inclusion of authors’ photos, etc.).

Following are a few of the most newsworthy changes to Google’s algorithm and results pages from the past year:

Google Panda Update – Search Quality

Do you run a site that posts a lot of articles that can be found on other websites? What about an e-commerce site whose products (and their descriptions) can all be found on other websites? If so, you’ve probably experienced Google’s wrath with the Panda updates.

Panda punished sites with large amounts of duplicate or low-quality content. If you write great original content, you’ve got nothing to worry about here!

There have now been at least 8 iterations of the Panda update (version 3.3 was current as of this post). Take a look at this infographic about the Panda update, which describes the various updates and shows a few sites that were hit hard by these changes.

Continued Emphasis on Freshness of Results – Search Quality

Back in 2009, Google implemented the Caffeine update. It became apparent that in most cases, to Google, Newer = Better. They doubled down on this philosophy in November 2011 with another change that favored fresher search results. Google announced that this change would impact 35% of search results (only 12% were impacted by Panda!).

The take-away: blogging more is the best thing you can do for your search rankings! Keep your site fresh.

Google Sitelinks – Display Change

You may have noticed that occasionally when you search for something, the first result has multiple links displayed below it. Take the following search result for “Audi,” for example:

In this case, Google decided (correctly) that AudiUSA.com was the most relevant result for my search, and displayed additional links to multiple sections within the site. In some cases, relevant searches can return 12 links to the same site.

This creates some tremendous value for that site – wouldn’t you like to have 12 links to your site appear before any of your competitors’ sites are listed?

Google+ Shows Up in Search – Social Integration

Take a look at the last part of the Audi image above. Note that it’s a link to Audi’s Google+ page, and includes Audi’s logo. By including a Google+ badge on your site linking to your G+ page, you can expand your results like this as well.

In January, Google took it a step further with what they call Search + Your World. Suddenly, Google+ became a major factor in search results. This made Twitter nervous. Others in the industry complained about sacrifices to relevancy.

The take-away: Google wants to encourage the use of Google products. This means there are major benefits to using Google+ for your business. So, if you haven’t already, set up a profile and start using it!

Want More?

If you’re looking for more information about how Google tests and rolls out algorithm changes, check out this video from Google:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

St. Patrick’s Day Social Media Icon Sets

Daniel — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:00:05 +0000

Enhance your web presence this St. Patrick’s Day. Inspired by some wonderful St. Patrick’s Day badges by Kristina Lim, we made a couple new St.Patrick’s Day Social Media Icon Sets that are freely available for download!

Download

Here’s some other great, free social media icons we found around the web that are perfect for St. Patrick’s Day!

‘Clover’ Social Media Icons

‘Green’ Social Media Icons

‘Green Thumb’ Social Media Icons

‘Green Jelly’ Social Media Icons

‘Glossy Green’ Social Media Icons

‘Green Grass’ Social Media Icons

‘Green Lime’ Social Media Icons

‘Green Grunge’ Social Media Icons

‘Grungy Green’ Social Media Icons

‘Greens’ Social Media Icons

The Internet is Huge

Kyle Claypool — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:29:23 +0000

That statement should come as no surprise. What is surprising, though, is just how much content is created and consumed every single day. Kudos to MBA Online for visualizing that data in the graphic below:

Overland Park Social Media Workshop

Kyle Claypool — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:53:03 +0000

The following information is based on a social media workshop I’ll be presenting for some local business groups on the subject of social media. If you’re interested in hosting a similar workshop, contact me on one of my social media accounts listed here!

Getting Started

We recommend having a website with a blog (posting weekly) before moving to social media
Try out a tool like HootSuite (free) to post to all of your accounts at once
Don’t just advertise – interact. Sales messages should be limited to about 20% of your posts
Choose where to spend your time – better to use 1 social network well than to use 4 poorly.

Facebook (Our FB page)

Create a Page (not just a personal profile): www.facebook.com/pages
Link it to your blog: https://apps.facebook.com/social-rss
Create a branded landing page using an app like www.pagemodo.com
Run a contest using an app like www.offerpop.com to encourage Likes. See a contest we just launched for www.facebook.com/solofoods
Try Facebook advertising to get some attention – it’s cheap! See our recent post about Facebook demographic targeting.

Twitter (My Twitter Profile)

Create a branded profile background – logo, photo, website, brief call to action should all appear on the left portion of the image.
Use relevant #hashtags and @usernames in your tweets. Example: “Hosting social media workshop for #TMBC at @mimis_cafe in #OP #KS this morning!” – Search Twitter for #TMBC or #Olathe to see how people track tags to stay on top of trends.
Use Hootsuite and Twitter search to find people to follow, retweet, etc. – save a search for “need accountant”
Follow people who follow your partners, clients, or competitors.
More basic info about Twitter, including a list of KC-specific hashtags.

LinkedIn (My LinkedIn Profile)

Studies show LinkedIn has best ROI for B2B professional service providers
Join relevant groups. I’m in Greater Kansas City Connected, Linked to KC, Principal Connections KC, and “On Startups – The Community for Entrepreneurs.” Answer relevant questions and interact.
From your profile, click “Ask for recommendations.”
Look someone up every time you receive a business card. Invite them to connect.

Also check out Google+ and Pinterest – both fairly new, and growing in very different audiences. Google+ is fairly heavily male dominated, with a strong base of tech geeks, VC investors, and photographers. Pinterest is a female-dominated network that emphasizes creativity, fashion, crafts, and recipes.

47 Full Screen Photography Portfolio WordPress Themes

Kyle Claypool — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:03:21 +0000

Every photographer, artist, and graphic designer wants to showcase his work in a beautiful portfolio. Why not try out one of these WordPress themes? You could have a beautiful full-screen portfolio up and running in under an hour!