Are you starting up a new business in Oklahoma City? GREAT!! It’s a good time to start a business in OKC.  It’s scary (we know, we are already one year into our big adventure called OMG) and you have to have nerves of steel, but it will be infinitely more rewarding than working for the man.

Right now you are probably doing some research on the marketplace and you may be a more than a little intimidated by the competition. Your competitors have been around longer, got a track record, more customers, more referrals and you’ve got.. well, you’ve got a dream.

But a dream is all we needed at OMG… and little motivation, provided in part by the economy.  Emily and I both worked for a company which became a casualty of the economic downturn of 2009. The stock markets crashed, along with our prospects of being safely employed. Fortunately it was just the motivation we needed to start developing something out of nothing.

Emily and I both were reared in family owned businesses. Emily grew up in front of the camera as the talent-in-residence at Garman Productions, and I was Dad’s number one sales apprentice in the family construction company, CSI Contracting. But just because we inherited the “Family Business Gene” does not mean that it just came easily to us. Far from it. This year has been a year of EXTREME business lessons.

Now Emily is a website design maven and I “bring it” when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, but wow, did we make some mistakes! We took on the wrong jobs at the wrong time, and then, on the rebound, turned away clients. Jeesh, rookie mistake.  But we also had great success. For example we helped build (from scratch) a cool internet start up called “WeGoLook.” And our very first client, G. David Neff, liked our work so much he referred his own dad to us, and now his dad is our client.

We discovered great partners, great ideas and great customers. We also discovered that we LOVE  working for ourselves. Really.. no I mean really. The kind of love that makes you work late and get up early.

So we got the love. How about you? Are you ready to kick the door down in your industry and yell “I’m here!” If so, we can help.

By partnering with OMG you’ll get a logo, a lead generating, search engine optimized website and lots of help, advice and pointers in the right direction. And since OMG is still so new that it hasn’t lost that new car smell, we understand the financial limitations that come with a startup. So if you are in your first year of business, we are going to take $500 off our standard base package AND give you some options on a payment plan AND give you a few hours of our expert time to brainstorm and whiteboard your business.

Need other services as well? The OMG circle of trust includes Lawyers, Accountants, Public Relations, IT professionals, Builders and Lookers.

So just to recap: if you are a new business, we are going to give you a break and do the following:

1. Create a cool logo – Seriously cool logo.
2. Create a smart, beautiful, search engine optimized, lead generating website which works for you 24/7 (like all day.)
3. Whiteboard your business process with two hot chicks.
4. Brainstorm marketing ideas and lead generating tactics with two smart chicks.
5. Take off $500 bucks, so you can buy us lunch when you get your first lead from the web. (It will happen really fast, we can guarantee it.)
6. AND give you a payment plan.
7. AND we will talk about you on our site, on Facebook and Twitter, giving you a kick in the right direction.

So you may be asking yourself, why are we doing all of this? We do it because we love watching things grow and because frankly we are good at it. We are in the “flow” when we deal with first year clients. Just ask Dustin Pyeatt at Pyeatt Public Relations.

We also do it because we believe small things can grow into large investments (we want to get in good with the boss early.).

But since we are reducing our price and throwing in a lot of extras, we can only accept a few first year clients a month. Once we’ve filled the spot, we’ll move on to scheduling for the next month.

Don’t worry about being new around here. We can help. Give us a call right now (405) 445-4442 to reserve your time, or shoot me an email at stacie (at) oklahomamediagroup.com.

Do you know what is the best solution for your online business, whether you’re selling 1 product or 100,000?

It all begins with understanding the process and knowing what questions to ask.

As you may know, you have several fees to pay each time you accept a credit card on your site. You can’t avoid paying the fees all together, but you can find the best solution for your particular situation.

In order to understand this better, let’s step through the process, and see what fees go with what actions that happen after a purchase.

Your Customer comes to the site, decides to make purchase, and goes through checkout.

She places her credit card information into the checkout page, and here’s what happens next:

First, the “payment gateway” takes the consumers’ credit card and verifies that it’s valid by checking the billing address, the security id on the back of the card (CVS) and the available balance.

The “payment gateway” authorizes the card for the purchase and passes the verified credit card and dollar amount to your “merchant account.” The “merchant account” reserves the money on the customer’s card and holds the funds until the order is settled.

The “merchant” (that’s your web site) then tells the “merchant account” that the order has been processed and then, usually overnight, the credit cards are all grouped together and settled in one “batch” fee. (This is ideal and saves you from paying individual fees on each order processed).

Here are the fees typically associated with this above process.

1. Payment gateway fee.
   • Your “discount rate” is calculated based on 1st, 2nd and 3rd “qualified rates.” basically, this has to do with how big your store is and how much revenue you produce.
2. Per Transaction fee
3. Batch fee
4. Annual fee

Stick with me here! Let’s compare typical merchant account fees with some common services you can use to process cards on your site. I’m going to compare PayPal, PayFlow and an Authorize.net payment process with a Merchant Account. This will help you see the differences in the fees among these services.

For this comparison of fees, I used the scenario of 100 orders of $10 each, for a total of $1,000 in sales.

We have a worksheet available for you to use to see which solution will work best for you. Plug in your own numbers to this Excel worksheet, play around with sales and amounts, and see which one will be your best choice.

Paypal Website Payment Pro – A payment gateway and merchant account combined.

• No gateway fee
• 2.9% Discount Rate
• .30 cents per transaction fee
• Batch included in the transaction fee
• $30 monthly fee
• Total Fees for PayPal: $89.00

Payflow – A gateway without a merchant account.

• $59 per month gateway fee.
• .10 cents per transaction fee
• Total Fees for PayFlow: $69.00

Authorize.net: Service with gateway and merchant account included

• $20 per month gateway fee
• 2.19% discount fee for 1st & 2nd qualified rates
• .10 per transaction
• .25 batch fee – happens nightly and it’s a group fee, not a per transaction fee.
• Total Fees for Authorize.net: $59.40

After reviewing Paypal’s offering, I think it’s probably best to go with a merchant + gateway account, such as Authorize.net. Better rates and service, and you only have one account to manage.

Do you still have questions about payment processors? Can we help you set up a payment gateway, or start selling online? We’d love to talk to you.

Contact us if you have any questions about how to setup a merchant account and get started on an Authorize.net payment gateway.

We will show you how to make a web design really work.

This is so exciting for Oklahoma Media Group! We are ecstatic for this opportunity to support the arts in this community, but also to get the chance to promote our mobile site creation capabilities, and demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of this technology for all businesses.

Tune in tonight, and we’ll post it on our blog as soon as we get the footage. Could your business use a mobile web site? Chances are, your existing web site is not mobile device-friendly. Contact us today and we can talk about a cost-effective mobile site that will put your business ahead of your competition, and in the palm of your customers’ hands.

Oklahoma Media Group pitched the Arts Council with the idea of having a mobile web site, specifically optimized for and aimed at mobile devices and users.

The Festival is an event with many performing artists on various stages, multiple opportunities for entertainment and dining. The mobile site provides a way for users to get real-time information while they are on site at the event.

Join us downtown April 20-25, 2010 for the Festival of the Arts!

Here’s the most important distinction that you need to understand. Facebook profiles are for people. Individuals, using the site personally, like you or me (or some people set up profiles for their pets!). If you do business as a person or individual, for example, if you’re a realtor, then it would be appropriate for you to use your Facebook profile for business. But generally, Facebook profiles are for personal use. Facebook profiles ALWAYS have to represent a real person.

Facebook Pages (they refer to them as “fan pages” too) are for organizations, companies and businesses. Facebook’s official definition is:

Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner. Like profiles, they can be enhanced with applications that help the entity communicate with and engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fans’ recommendations to their friends.

So any organization–a football team, animal shelter, restaurant, dry cleaner’s, etc.–should always have a Facebook PAGE. (You can create a Facebook page here)

But you’ve all seen profiles that represent businesses and organizations! Well, these are in violation of Facebook’s policies. If Facebook identifies these profiles, they can and will remove them from the site.

Facebook makes it a little more difficult to set up a profile if you’re a business or company, because it requires you to have something that it recognizes as a “name,” and it requires you to select a gender.  For example, if my business is called “Emily’s Oklahoma City Lakeside Cafe” it would not recognize this as a “name” and it would not let me create a profile. So I’d have to modify my name a bit…for example, here’s one of my favorite restaurants on Facebook. It refers to the restaurant as “she” because the person setting up the site chose “female” as a gender, and had to have something that Facebook recognized as a “name,” meaning a first and last name, so she had to condense it to “MamaRoja Mexicankitchen.” So if I were still trying to set up a profile for my restaurant, I’d have to be “EmilysOklahomaCity LakesideCafe” or something clumsy like that.

These should be flags or deterrents to setting up a profile instead of a page, but people still do it.

Don’t do it. Play by the rules. It’s not worth getting your profile deleted!

The main differences between pages and profiles:

• On a profile, someone is your “friend.” On a page, someone is your “fan.”
• With a profile, you can send messages to one or more friends, that go directly to their inbox on Facebook. As a page, you can’t do this–you can only send updates (which not as many people see).
• Pages and Profiles can both post status updates, links, photos, etc. that appear in their fans’/friends’ news feeds.
• Pages cannot “add” people as friends. However, your fans can suggest your page to their own friends to become a fan.

So, where do Groups fit into all this? Groups allow for more interaction between members, sort of like a forum or message board (BBS) system. Here’s what Facebook has to say about Groups:

Groups and Pages serve different purposes on Facebook. Groups are meant to foster group discussion around a particular topic area while Pages allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans. Only the authorized representative of the entity can run a Page.

So one of your employees might set up a “group” for your organization, and that would be fine. But only an official representative of an organization can set up the official Page for that organization (or at least someone who is willing to say that they are an official rep!).

So for example, for our client the Central Oklahoma Humane Society, we have set up a Page that is their official presence on Facebook. We post events, updates and other news. But we also have groups for specific volunteers within the organization, like Trap/Neuter/Return volunteers, clinic volunteers, foster parents, etc. That way those people can talk about subjects that are specific to their areas of interest.

Ready to create a page? Click here to get started.

So what the heck is a Community Page?

This is something Facebook has just rolled out. If you’ve spent much time on Facebook, you have seen lots of “unofficial” pages. These can be for celebrities, like unofficial fan pages for the Twilight movies, or for beers or sodas or sneakers or whatever. There are also funny groups like Tim Tebow Crying (sorry, Florida fans..this is just one of my favorites) or “Can this dung beetle get more fans than Glenn Beck?“(also a favorite).

These pages are becoming really popular, some having hundreds of thousands of fans. So now you have the option to choose to be a “community page” if you are creating a new page on Facebook. Now, if you’re making a page for your organization or business or brand, there is no reason to select a community page. Your page still definitely qualifies as a regular Facebook page.

What is kind of cool about the Community Page idea, though, is that Facebook says “If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.” What that means is that it will become basically the same thing as a Wiki. A Wiki is a web site or page that allows anyone to contribute content, much like Wikipedia. So if you create a community page that goes extremely viral, then it could evolve into something completely new on Facebook!

Again, for your purposes with your company or organization, you don’t really need to worry about Community Pages. Hopefully this has helped you understand the differences among the different ways you can represent yourself on Facebook. What other questions do you have about Facebook that we can answer? We can help you craft a social media strategy that will bring you business!

All these animals take quite a journey, and we thought it would be neat to theme the annual report around a few of those stories. The organization itself is on quite a journey as well, so all in all it made for a really nice package, we think. We plan to enter this in the 2010 Addy competition to be held next winter (Feb. 2011).

The site features e-commerce, testimonial submission forms and product downloads, as well as an extensive bibliography of resources and articles that utilize or reference the Scale.

I originally filed a support ticket in December. I am currently using @newmediaemily as my handle. I wanted to use @thesocialanimal because I operate a business under this name and have a pending Trademark with the US Patent Office. I contacted the person who uses @thesocialanimal, who no longer uses Twitter, and she allowed me to take the name.

She deleted her Twitter account, and we both thought I could just claim the user name.

This did not work, so I initially filed a support ticket with Twitter asking how to go about getting the handle. I got  a response saying that the original user needed to change her user name to something different, such as @thesocialanimal1, and then I could claim @thesocialanimal.

Well, this was not possible, because she deleted her account. She could not log in and change her name. I replied back to the support ticket, but it had already been closed. I opened a new one and did not get a response.

I opened another ticket, and it too was closed, without any response.

I opened another ticket, this time under the trademark infringement category. This was ticket #815850. I got a response from @coati on 1/29/10 instructing me to respond with a whole bunch of information about myself, my use of this name and my Trademark. I responded back with all the requested information that very same day.

I responded to the email I was sent. I waited about 4 days and checked; it appeared that my ticket had been switched to “closed” status, but I never received any word, nor was my user name reassigned. The message from @coati said that even though there was not a clear indication of trademark violation, since this Twitter user account had not been active in more than 6 months, you would be able to transfer the account to me. This was not done.

Now the issue is that I cannot access the Twitter help page to file a ticket. I have tried to access this on a Mac intel laptop, a Mac G5 power PC, and a Windows laptop. I have tried Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. I have cleared my cache entirely, I have rebooted the computers, logged in, logged out, nothing works.

Here is what happens.

I go to the twitter home page. I log out. I am redirected to the home page/login page. I enter my user name (@newmediaemily) and password . I am now logged in and I go to my home page where I see my feed.

I click on “help” and am directed to the standard Twitter help page: http://twitter.com/help/start.

I click on “check existing tickets” and here is where it gets weird.

I am redirected to my home page (twitter feed) again, and this is what appears in the URL address bar:

http://twitter.com/?message=Failed+to+update+user+with+new+properties%3A+Email+has+already+been+taken&kind=error

I don’t know what this means, but maybe it means something to you.

No matter what I do, I cannot access my old tickets to check status, and I can’t file a new support ticket either. It always redirects me to my home page with that error message in the address bar.

I am just at a loss and need to know what I can do. If I could just file a support ticket, I’d be glad to do that. I have spent so much time trying to resolve this issue. I know you Twitter support people face many, many requests each day, but I am asking you to please stick with me and help me figure this out.

Thank you so much!

Emily Garman
405-290-8723
emily@thesocialanimal.com

I like to think I can see things from the perspective of a service provider–a company that provides similar services to those provided by Saxum–and also from the viewpoint of the customer. I am also a consumer; I don’t like being cheated or charged more than a service or product is worth.

Setting up a Twitter account is free. Yes, it’s free and it takes 5 minutes to do. It’s also really simple…it consists of entering your email address and choosing a user name, basically.

But Saxum did more for ODOT than just set up the account. They apparently provided 10 days worth of consulting and training to the staff at ODOT. Okay, so that works out to $750  per day, if they charged them nothing to set up the account. Figure they sent out one or two staff people to the ODOT offices to do this, that works out to $375 per person per day, or about $9 an hour…and I KNOW those Saxum folks make more than that.

They also created a custom Twitter “look” for the ODOT page. So throw in a few hours of time from a graphic artist, who also makes considerably more than $9 an hour.

So say $250 to set up the Twitter account, $300 for the graphic artist, that leaves you about $700 a day for training. $700 a day for training for a group of employees is incredibly reasonable.

The ODOT staff are presumably tweeting now, thanks to their training. But they had to get some followers. To get 500 Twitter followers within a couple of days of launching your account is pretty darn good (think Ellen Degeneres and Oprah Winfrey). Saxum undoubtedly did some footwork to gather followers quickly for ODOT.

So to say that ODOT was charged $7500 for a “free service” is really not accurate. Yes, a Twitter account is free…but they got a lot more than a Twitter account.

Saxum is doing all of us in this industry a favor. They have set a price tag for service and expertise that is consistently undermined and undervalued.

“Anyone can make a web site!” “Anyone can write a press release!” “My nephew can shoot that video, he has a Mac!” How many times have we heard this!?

Yes, anyone with a camera can shoot a video. Yes, you can get “web site tonight” for $10 on Godaddy and probably get a web page set up. Will it be effective? Will it do the job you want it to do for your business? Will it convert customers? Will you be able to get any information from it on how it’s performing? The answer is unequivocally NO.

It’s almost always true that “you get what you pay for.” ODOT needed a turnkey solution rolled out in a very short time frame. Saxum delivered.

By the way, Oklahoma Media Group provides these services too…but we don’t have the overhead Saxum does. We can help your business engage consumers and gain new customers. Let’s talk about how Twitter (and Facebook, and other social media, and an effective web presence) can help your business.

You have to consider whether the terms/keywords that you are competing for are competitive. You could probably spend $10,000 a month on search terms related like “work at home opportunity” and not even crack the top 5 pages on Google.  But if you’re hoping to capitalize on visitors looking for “Boston Terrier rescue in Oklahoma” then you won’t have nearly as much competition for search terms related to that concept.  If you are targeting very competitive words, there is honestly nothing you can do–even paying thousands of dollars in Google Adwords campaigns–that will catapult you to the top of the rankings overnight. You can definitely find companies that will promise you “#1 Google Rankings in 1 week!” but it just doesn’t work that way. There is no magic bullet! The only thing that can make that happen is traffic; it’s a double-edge sword of sorts. Traffic begets traffic. You have to have traffic in order to get more traffic.

That being said, any good search engine optimization service (again, we always do this for our customers) will help you figure out what keywords to target. We can do a lot of research to help you figure out what keywords you can target that might help you get the same kind of traffic, but cost you a lot less. Instead of targeting “Work at home opportunity,” for example, you might target “work at home beauty” or something very specific to your business. There are ways to save money and still get great results! At Oklahoma Media Group, our goal is to get you the most bang for your buck, and never EVER waste your money.

There are other things, though, that have to be done on a consistent basis. These are things that YOU have to do–YOU, the business owner. YOU, the subject matter expert.

You need to write regular blog posts, and they should have original, valuable content (preferably with lots of links). This means you writing content–not just copying and pasting content from somewhere else. Search engines value original content, and they won’t rank your site as highly if you use recycled content.

You need to read and comment on other blogs. And not just with links back to your site–you need to comment with valuable info (the blog will link your comment back to your site anyway).

Your site needs links to and from other web sites. So you need to have lists of links to other relevant sites (web sites that would be helpful to your visitors, and interesting to you), and you need to put links into your blog posts as well.  Google sees other sites linking to your site as an indication that your site has quality content, and it will rank it higher.

How are you making use of social media? Maybe you’re on Twitter and Facebook, but are you using them to promote your business? If you have a Facebook fan page for your business, you can use that as a traffic driver to your site, and a great place to create some links back to your site and generate interest.

Basically, the process of getting good positioning in search engines is an ongoing process. There is no magic bullet that will get you to number 1 on Google. Truly, the success you have with Google and your search engine rankings largely depends on you and how much time and effort you devote to developing relationships on line (through social media, through commenting on other blogs, developing reciprocal backlinks with other sites). In short, it takes time and effort! What we do when we create your web site gives you the best possible start…now it’s up to you, as the expert, to develop the content that your visitors (and thereby Google) will see as a valuable resource.