Dream Systems Media Blog

If you’re like me you like watching and learning from the best. I love being a part of social media campaigns and reading about the successes. I want to know what companies are doing innovative work and what works. I love what Sharpie has done in social media.

When I was new to social media or any form of internet marketing I craved having a mentor. The best part of social media is the visiblity – you can see what the best in the industry are doing and connect to them.

Just making friends with someone who has influence in social media can get you great traffic and links. That’s how I know Mat. It’s pretty normal for us to ask each other to push out each other’s blog posts or stories. In fact, I don’t do it enough.

5 Tools to Help you Find and Follow the Social Media Elite:

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We decided to move the corporate office to the Mountain Point Office Plaza at Thanksgiving Point. We love visitors so please stop in and see us at:

Mountain Point Office Plaza
2940 W. Maple Loop Suite 201
Lehi, UT 84043

For our clients outside of the Salt Lake City area, here are a few pictures of the new office space:

Outside shot of Dream Systems Media Offices

This is David Mink's office.

Credentials are on the wall!

Gorgeous mountain views from the second story offices.

The Dream Systems Media conference room.

The Chief Kahuna himself, Andy Melchior, sits here.

View from the office.

More amazing views from the office.

General Dream Systems Media, Mountain Point Office Plaza

Will Scott, Search Influence

Every once in a while I have the good fortune of meeting someone that turns out to be a pretty good friend, and during SMX West 2009 I had the opportunity of meeting Will Scott (Search Influence), an amazing individual who I now consider a great friend!

Will and I talked about a number of things related to Internet marketing and life, and we soon found out that we had a lot in common.  At one point we had such an interesting chat about Press and SEO that it made me want to interview him, and share it with all.  What an amazing industry that allows us to meet so many interesting people from all over!  I really hope my readers will take just as much away from this info as I did.  Sometimes I often overlook the power of press, and Will did a great job bringing it back up to one of the most important categories of marketing for me!

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People You Need To Follow On Twitter

I love getting feedback from my readers. I especially love getting questions; and do my best to help at any opportunity.  The other day I received a question from “Lise” about using Twitter.  She had some valid questions and points of concern regarding Twitter that I wanted to address in a blog post.  To do that, I thought I would bring in some Twitter “gurus” to help me answer this question.

I really appreciate these amazing Internet marketers taking the time out of their very busy days to answer these questions.  I really think this can benefit a lot of people and hope you will feel its worth the read!

Here is the comment & question that “Lise” asked me:

So Mat. I am really enjoying your blog and have started following you – with thanks to Gerald. But I have a challenge that no one seems to be able to help me with – perhaps you can.

General, Matt Siltala, SMX aaron wall, Alysson Fergison, andy beal, ann smarty, Cameron Olthius, Dave Wallace, mat siltala, Michael Gray, Nate Moller, Twitter

You know me, I am a sucker for businesses that take care of me, and I can’t seem to stop blogging about them either. The latest comes after I tried (and failed) to buy my brother an 60 inch Sony WEGA HDTV as a wedding gift.

Best Deal In Town, Temple Arizona

I asked my brother where he wanted me to get it from, and he said he knew this place that had the best deals anywhere in town – Ironically enough called Best Deal In Town. So we headed down to this place and I found an amazing 60 inch Sony Wega DLP that he had knocked down to $699 (originally $850) but gave me a deal cause I talked to him about it being my brothers wedding and all. I purchase it, take it to his house and go to hook it up and it no longer works as it did in the store – since this is a wholesale place and often times you are buying display (fully tested from factory) models I guess things like this happen.

General best deal in town, customer service, tempe arizona

Local Search Marketing Tactics – Local search doesn’t only happen in relation what’s on a map. This

Local Search Marketing Panel

session looks at a variety of local search tactics that are not necessarily tied to your physical location’s listing.

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speakers:
Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow, Inc.
Matt McGee, Assignment Editor, Search Engine Land
William Scott, President, Search Influence
Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzLocal LLC

NOTES

Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow, Inc.
Topic: Tracking and Measuring Online/In-Store Shoppers

Local search is by def: a multi-channel opp.  Search online and buy in store.  There is a 9 to 1 ratio of people wanting to buy in store due to urgency.  So the questions is how do you track traffic to convertion when they are finding you online, yet buying in your store.

Solutions:

General, Local Marketing, SEO, SMX SMX, SMX West

Sprint Nextel announced today that they will be cutting 8,000 jobs during this first quarter in an effort to eliminate costs of $1.2 billion (yes that is with a “b”).  That’s an average salary for those 8,000 employees being cut of $150,000.  That seems like a pretty high figure to me as I’m assuming many of these cuts will have to come from their production and administrative side as Sprint Nextel stated they are not expecting to see many cuts from the customer service and network quality divisions as customer service is a priority to them; yeah right, customer service a priority for a phone company, don’t make me laugh.  This cut totals about 14% of the company workforce.  CEO Dan Hesse had the following to say regarding this recent news:

“Labor reductions are always the most difficult action to take, but many companies are finding it necessary in this environment.  Our commitment to quality will not change.”

General Sprint Nextel

In an economy such as today’s, many tech companies are hurting and looking for ways to cut costs to maintain profits.  Microsoft, Intel, and EBay all announced sad news today.  You can find a quick summary below with links to the full stories.

Microsoft
Microsoft announced today that they will be cutting 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months.  This cut accounts for more than 5% of their workforce.  Microsoft has been in business for over 30 years now and has never had a layoff during that time.

Microsoft’s shares also fell 8% today as they announced that their second-quarter profits dropped by 11%.  Among this news, Microsoft also stated they will no longer be able to provide revenue and EPS forecasts:

Due to the volatility of market conditions going forward, Microsoft is no longer able to offer quantitative revenue and EPS guidance for the balance of this fiscal year.

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Just wanted to make things right and give credit to the original author and editor of the articles my ex-content writer stole.  Again, I thank Joe for pointing this out to me and teaching me a great lesson!  Here are the articles.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/smallbusiness/0901/gallery.smallbiz2009.smb/index.html

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/moneymag/0901/gallery.entrepreneur_handbook.moneymag/index.html

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I’m so annoyed right now – I HAD a content writer, notice emphasis on “had” that I was testing out and gave me a couple articles that I tweaked and posted, but I admit that I did not do my due dilligence to make sure they were original – sadly, they were not.  I got called out on that tonight and I would like to thank the guy but he didn’t leave a legit email address.  I took the articles down immediatly, fired this person and I have learned a great lesson here.  Bottom line I should have done a better job checking out the content, but the writer came with such high recommendations.  That is not going to happen again – I promise you that!

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