The Social U is Born - A Letter From The Editor

Hi and welcome to our new project, The Social U!

First off, thanks for visiting. We’ve been working on this for a while now, and it’s almost surreal to see our project finally come to life. Our story began in June, when Gerald and I began entertaining the idea about starting a website/blog together. At the time, we were both working summer internships pretty far away from each other (I was in San Francisco, Gerald was in Barcelona), so we spoke only when we could. Obviously, we knew what our project was going to be about: social media, of course! Then, we hit a wall. There are so many social media blogs out there, how on Earth were we going to stand out, let alone get people to read it?

Yes, we were both doing some pretty cool social media stuff in our respective internships, but we were (are) still college students. Who would want to hear what two college students have to say, especially when there are so many professionals out there already blogging about Social Media? There had to be some way. There had to be something we either knew or had that they didn’t. But, what was it? The biggest difference between them and us was that, well, we’re still in college. Weeks went by, and then we finally realized that the answer was in that very difference.

Gerald and I both had our social profiles be a big part of our summer hires. First we thought ‘Awesome, let’s start a blog about how we did it so other college students can learn’, but we soon realized we had to go further. The Social U isn’t a blog about us; it’s a blog about social media for college students, by college students.

We will be publishing material that college students can not only relate to, but also learn from. The tabs above, from Social Media 101 to Your Major on Social Media, are aimed to be a resource to you, the college student, because we probably spend more time on social media than we do sleeping.

via aliveandtweeting.com

That snapshot is from my first blog post introducing our idea back in August. Gerald followed up with a post on his blog, Ideas With Action.

So, The Social U stands for two objectives:

  1. To inform college students about what they do not know about social media and how to best use it so they don’t kill their careers before starting their job search
  2. To teach college students how to use social media to their advantage and get ahead of the game in their industry of interest and their professional networking

So, that’s it. This is The Social U. This is our project. We hope you like it and, most importantly, we hope that you find it useful, because jobs aren’t as easy to come by nowadays. We’re here for you, and we’d like you to contribute, too. So, fill out that contact form and contribute for us!

Sincerely,

Álvaro J. Soltero

Co-Founder, Editor

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This piece was originally written for The Social U. You can find more of my articles for The Social U here.

A little about The Social U: A Social Media Project by Álvaro J. Soltero & Gerald Kierce

A little over a week ago, I started a Twitter account (@The_SocialU) and wrote on the bio that it was a ‘top-secret social media project’. The project hasn’t launched yet and will not launch until September, but people have been asking and it is time we open the curtains:

Social Media is here to stay is the Future 

Indeed it is. Every generation after mine will grow up with social media by their side, and the implications of this are endless. There will now be a physical you and a digital you, should you choose to engage in social media (and in many cases, it’s even not up to you). This applies to companies and individuals equally, which is why we should all get educated on both the benefits and dangers of digitally socializing.

College students were once the backbone of success behind what was once THE Social Network, Facebook. Social media has now expanded to include everyone except infant children. Adults and tweens alike have adopted it, albeit with different purposes. In my opinion, however, college students still stand as the group to most gain –and lose– from social media. And that is where The Social U comes in. 

OK, so what is The Social U?

The Social U is a website/blog about social media, specifically catered towards college students. Why? Because social media has become as much a part of college as the parties and the sleepless nights. Socializing is enormously important during college years, and social networks actually make keeping track of friends –both in college and from high school– so much easier. This doesn’t only mean friend requests, it also means status updates, photos, and yes, tagging. Oh tagging, a college student’s best friend and worst enemy…

The Social U has two objectives:

1.    To inform college students about what they do not know about social media and how to best use it so they don’t kill their careers before starting their job search

2.    To teach college students how to use social media to their advantage and get ahead of the game in their industry of interest and their professional networking

Gerald Kierce is one of my longtime best friends and is the person who introduced me to Twitter and all of its marvels. We are both college students headed into our senior year, and we have both seen the benefits of our social presence through our professional involvement with social media. Ok fine, we are pretty much social media nerds. This is what we’re passionate about and we wish to share it with our peers so they too can get ahead of the game using social media.

If you wish to stay updated on this project, please follow @The_SocialU on Twitter to keep up with us on our venture. If you wish to give feedback, tips, participate or just say hi, you can find us both on Twitter (obviously) as: @ajsoltero and @gkierce.

  

Do you have any comments, feedback, ideas, tips, or anything you think we should know or want to hear? Please leave us a comment below!

#AdventuresinSF: Sunsets from the Marina

This adventure was more of a discovery, and one I have to accredit to my good friend and fellow tech/social media geek, Lexi Nicholas. If you live in San Francisco, you have to check this out. On the Golden Gate Promenade on the other side of the Crissy Field Marsh, you can sit on the beach and watch the sun set right behind the Golden Gate Bridge. This was definitely my favorite sunset in SF (not that I saw that many, but you get the point). 

#AdventuresinSF: Ferry rides to Larkspur

 I took the ferry from the Ferry building at the end of Market street over to Larkspur twice during my stay in San Francisco, and both times I was amazed and very entertained. Why? Well, first of all: wind surfers. Both times I saw some real gutsy wind surfers not only sailing in the unforgiving bay, but also riding the ferry’s wake and racing each other against the ferry. That water must be extremely cold and the current is known to be violent, so these people were either seasoned windsurfers or just plain crazy, or both. The other reason I enjoyed this short-but-awesome ferry ride was because of the fog. Yes, the infamous Bay Area fog. From the sea, there’s no other way to describe it other than that it looks like a soft comfy blanket, so check out the pictures.

SEO On The Fly: Argopoint’s Story

If your company isn’t doing something about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) right now, you’re falling behind. It doesn’t matter if you are B2B or B2C, there are people out there searching for the services or products you offer on Google and if your company isn’t on the first page, you are literally mailing a neatly gift-wrapped package filled with pre-qualified leads to your more Internet-savvy competitors every day. Let’s be honest, how many times do you go past the first results page in any search engine? The algorithms in search engines present results to you in order of website relevance, and relevance means SEO. This is especially important if you operate within a small, niche market, as people looking for you will be typing very industry-specific keywords into whatever search engine they are using. Many companies have realized the importance of SEO and are scrambling to get the most out of specific organic search. Such is the case of Argopoint, a small, boutique-style legal management consulting firm based in Boston, MA.

             Argopoint focuses on helping Fortune 500 companies overcome the challenges of managing corporate legal departments efficiently. Argopoint fills the profile of a very successful company within their industry who realized that, when searching for the specific services they offer, they weren’t coming up on Google’s first results page. Search engines aren’t smart enough to know how good your company’s services and products actually are in relation to your competitors, at least not yet. So, when Argopoint realized that they were giving up valuable results-page real estate to their competitors, they went straight to the root of the problem to fix it.

            “I was literally handed a book called SEO for Dummies and told to read it and implement.” These were the words from a good friend of mine from Tufts, Josh Youner, who had just gotten a summer internship at Argopoint and was immediately assigned the task of boosting their website’s SEO, along with another intern. Youner and his team were put in charge of improving SEO from scratch, a pretty daunting challenge for anyone, intern or not. No pressure, guys! No pressure whatsoever. So when I recently spoke to Youner about his work at Argopoint, I was impressed with the work they had done and how much they had learned in so little time.

            Youner and his team are still hard at work improving and implementing Argopoint’s SEO strategy, but they have made significant progress. They started out by focusing on keywords, title tags, and meta descriptions. They quickly realized the site was not optimized for any keywords besides the firm’s name, so keyword density was put as one of the top priorities. In order to change this, the intern team went through the front end of the site and eliminated superfluous language and inserted hard-hitting keywords. They found significant progress in their Services section, where they get the most hits. According to Youner, the page that benefited the most was their High Impact Legal Benchmarking page, which prior to their work had very little focus in the content. By focusing on keywords such as ‘legal’, ‘benchmarking’, and ‘corporate legal departments’, they optimized the page’s content and now have keyword densities of 3-6% across the site, according to their Google Analytics.

            URL names were also a priority. They realized they had many random URLs, since the platform the company was using to create URLs created them based directly from the page names they used to edit the site. As such, they had URLs called /Services-2.html and /Benchmarking.html. These URLs helped them figure out what each page was, but did not help when someone was searching for them. To fix this, they inserted keywords into their URLs and made them more intuitive. For example, now their URLs include:

http://argopoint.com/legal_management_consultants/OurExpertise/Services/LegalServicesStrategicSourcing.html

This was a simple fix with a significant impact. In combination with other strategies, this moved the site up from the bottom of page 3 to the middle of page 2 on Google when searching for ‘legal management consulting’. A page and a half? That’s one big jump in SEO.

            Of course, I cannot publish the entirety of Argopoint’s SEO strategy, but this is a small sample of the work they are currently doing to optimize their website. When asked for tips his team would give to someone new to search engine optimization, however, Youner did give me some advice that I’m sure many would appreciate. “The most important thing is to be tenacious. There are so many ways to improve your site’s SEO, it’s just about finding out how to do this and implementing the right changes”, he said. One of their biggest roadblocks was agreeing on which keywords to optimize for and editing the site page-by page, one at a time, which is definitely not an easy task. Another important piece of advice the Argopoint SEO team told me was to be wary about buying services that claim to improve SEO. Based on their research, most of these are apparently scams. Youner said it takes intimate knowledge of the firm and its services to vastly improve SEO, particularly for a boutique firm in a niche market like Argopoint, so you are probably best suited doing it yourself.

            Argopoint is a great example of a company implementing SEO on the fly, and although their work is not done, they are an exemplar to follow for those companies who have yet to realize the potential of SEO. It’s definitely a race to the top (of Google’s search results, that is), and the earlier you start, the greater advantage you will have. You can check out more information on Argopoint and the services they offer at their website below:

http://www.argopoint.com/