m2h blogs by Marcia Hansen

Yesterday, I was at the Round Lake Classic Car Fest for a LIVE video shoot for Vehicle Vibes. I’ve been doing more of these for Allstate social media this summer. I really enjoy talking with people who attend; however, I’ve also learned there are challenges to doing a live shoot in addition to memorizing questions [...]

Someone asked me the other day the difference between link baiting, link building, and link or comment spam. Trying to keep it simple, here is what I said: Link baiting: is a philosophy that places importance on creating useful, remarkable content that people will, just as a matter of course, want to share with their [...]

In my previous post, Video is Queen, I wrote about why video is queen (if content is king) and that video has the potential to strengthen endorsements and brand recommendations. It’s no secret that one of the values for brands is when multiple viewers click through in a timely manner to purchase based on a [...]

If content is king, video is queen. YouTube is now the second most popular search engine. People are creating and watching more and more video these days. Textual content is still strong and has it’s uses, but video captures our attention in more and more ways. Video is queen because: 1. Video is fun and [...]

My newest social media project at Allstate is FrienderBenders.com. We wanted to create a site that shows how bad driving habits can contribute to accidents, but in a fun and engaging way — without preaching at people. Who wants more preaching? Not me! So here’s the promotional video. The video outtakes are funny. If you [...]

Tara Hunt‘s presentation at Web 2.0 was really fantastic. I love the presos that have just a few words per slide followed with pictures to illustrate concepts. Tara used that technique to her advantage as she spoke to a packed room — not only were all of the seats full, but people stood or sat [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to explain what is happening with social media to people who don’t know much about it. Social media are blogs, videos, podcasts, forums, and all the social networking sites. But, it’s more than just the specific product that’s produced. It’s people having conversations about their interests. It’s [...]

I noticed that RealGames has partnered with Beliefnet to provide games that “stimulate the mind, challenge the spirit, and soothe the soul.” It’s heavy on the marketing language, but I did click over to play their memory game. The non-digital version (back in the old days) — was it called concentration?? Where do I look [...]

I’ve recently received The Age of Conversation: 100 voices 1 conversation. Each of the pieces in the text are similar to blog posts and take up just one page in the text. As I work my way through the text, I thought I’d post bits and pieces for you here (and in so doing, add [...]