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Catherine Parker

Catherine Parker is a social media and search consultant and web copywriter. Via her first love, copywriting, she fell into the search engine marketing industry, working at Quirk eMarketing in Cape Town, followed by Greenlight Marketing in London, and then iProspect in San Francisco. Most recently, she headed the in-house SEO team at online content network CBS Interactive (formerly CNET) in San Francisco. First exposed to social media as part of SEO strategy, she’s since recognised its value to businesses in its own right. Now based in Cape Town, Catherine runs Rank&Copy, which helps businesses grow their brand online through paid and organic search, social media campaigns, and sparkling web copy. Her book, “301 Ways to Use Social Media Now in Your Marketing”, is due out in September 2010.

RECENT POSTS

• Samasource CEO on bridging the digital divide and creating a global meritocracy

  While aid programs in developing countries are ubiquitous, precious few empower the people they’re trying to help on a sustainable, ongoing basis. One that bucks this trend is Samasource, a non-profit based in San Francisco that distributes digital work from large US multinationals in manageable chunks to poor but educated workers in developing countries such as Kenya, Uganda, India, Pakistan and Haiti.Samasource workers do basic digital work required by US companies that American workers wouldn’t necessarily be willing to ...

• Lead developers from web giants share their insights at Tech4Africa conference

  A Question and Answer session at Johannesburg's first Tech4Africa conference featured developers from some of the world’s best known tech companies, and revealed insights on everything from startups vs corporations, San Francisco’s tech community, mobile/web development to making browser upgrades a global warming issue.The panel was chaired by Andy Budd, UI guru and MD of Clearleft, who posed questions to Dustin Diaz, a Twitter user interface engineer, Joe Stump, the SimpleGEO founder and former Digg lead architect, John Resig, who ...

• How to use Flickr to grow your brand – Part 2

  In last week’s article, I gave a background to using Flickr, Yahoo!'s photography-sharing site, as a place to increase exposure for your brand and business online. Once you’ve set up your Flickr profile and begun uploading photos to your account, you're ready to begin extracting real value from the site.The best way to do this is to add value to the Flickr community, rather than just seeing Flickr as a traffic driver to your blog or website.  Although this shift ...

• How to use Flickr to grow your brand

  Besides the usual social media suspects like Facebook and Twitter, there are many other tools worth considering when it comes to promoting your business online. One of these is Flickr, the Yahoo!-owned photography sharing site. When used correctly, Flickr is an extremely effective way of engaging with your target market -- provided they use the site, and provided your business lends itself to having photographs uploaded and shared with the Flickr community.Before starting with Flickr, it's a good idea to ...

• Five easy ways to cross promote your social media content

  If you’re using multiple social media platforms to promote your business, it makes sense to cross promote the media you generate through the various channels available, and try to play to the inherent strengths of each of the platforms.Doing this increases your content's exposure to a larger audience, which means you have more people engaging with your brand.For example, if you’ve already built up a healthy fan base on Facebook, but have only just started  to engage on Twitter or ...

• Five ways to integrate social media into your overall marketing mix

  Although social media can give you good returns for a fraction of the monetary cost of a traditional marketing campaign, you should still think of it as just one element of your overall marketing mix.Social media marketing does occupy a useful place, but it is still best used in conjunction with other marketing, rather than as a single magical cure-all that exists in isolation. One important reason for this is that the audience engaging with you over social media channels is ...

• 5 ways to leverage LinkedIn beyond finding a job

  The advantages of using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool have already been widely written about. Through its online CV format and “friend of a friend” introduction system, LinkedIn uses social media to allow you to tap into networking circles in order to find a new job, research the job market, or network with others in your industry.Beyond just its recruitment capabilities though, as business owners and entrepreneurs, you can use LinkedIn to increase your company’s exposure to the LinkedIn community, ...

• Six important steps before you launch a social media campaign

  Although the way your social media campaign is run is critical to its success, equally important is the preparation you do for it before it even launches.By first setting out parameters for your campaign such as its strategy, goals and success metrics, as well as being sure of your brand's marketing positioning and target market, you’ll increase the value social media can add to your business. Whether you’re using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare - or all of them - below are ...

• Four alternatives to YouTube for video marketing

  When it comes to video marketing, YouTube is usually the first video-sharing site that people think of when considering where to submit their video content. This isn’t surprising as YouTube is the undisputed leader in terms of audience reach, market share, and the volume of video content that is uploaded to it everyday.Ironically though, the site’s phenomenal success means that it is becoming increasingly hard to make your content stand out due to the large volumes of other content on ...

• Five ways to leverage Twitter without tweeting

  As everyone’s favorite micro-blogging platform, Twitter’s high rate of adoption by businesses isn’t surprising. Among other reasons, Twitter’s large user base, especially in countries like the US, means it is an effective way to extend your brand’s reach to large groups of people at a low cost, as well as to interact with your past, present and future customers.Besides Twitter’s core functionality of sharing short updates of text, video, pictures or files with a group of followers, you can also ...

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