Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. It's guest time, and right now I am very pleased to have as my guest social media consultant Giovanni Gallucci. Giovanni, welcome to The BusinessMakers Show.

Giovanni: Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

Russ: Tell us what you're working on these days.

Giovanni: Basically I do a lot of consulting for tech startups, government, and politicos for the most part, so I spend a lot of time doing stealth marketing in social media and social networks. I do some education. I have a series of classes I do that are one-day workshops, and then I do a lot of speaking, too, which helps keep my ego where it needs to be.

Russ: Great. When you say startups, are you consulting startups on how to use social media as they launch their company?

Giovanni: Not necessarily how to use it. I consult with them, and I develop the plan and do the execution. Part of the reason why I work with startups is, for the most part, I'm unemployable because I can't follow anyone's directions.

Russ: Okay. Well, I think that's true about most entrepreneurs.

Giovanni: Well, yeah, it definitely is. When you get a great job and you spend all of your time fighting the folks above you, then that's one indication that you may want to try to get out and do your own thing. At this point, I do some training with advertising firms and PR firms that are getting up and running on social media. They'll have staffs, they have campaigns going on, mainly up in Dallas because it's my local market. They'll call me in for a few hours once a week to sit down, go over the accounts that they have, talk to their staff, give them ideas, do creative stuff with them, then run away until they call me back. And then I do, for the tech startups that I work with, it is coming in and essentially replacing, in most cases, what they would typically have a traditional public relations firm do. I can fill some of the role, but since my expertise is online and word-of-mouth type of stuff, they have to have that in their DNA already to make it make sense for them to engage with me.

Russ: Okay. So let's roll back a little bit. What did you do before social media was invented?

Giovanni: Actually, I think that in my tech life I've always done what social media was. Fifteen years ago when I started in the technology field, I was building bulletin boards, forums, and search engines. I was building search engines when the Google founders were in high school. They were a little bit more successful than I was at it, but I don't begrudge them that. But, I spend most of my time working for Fortune 100s. I was a consultant, did most of my work in the name of Microsoft, but I was independent, and I would go in and build out communications platforms for large corporations that had disbursed employee staff. So, everything I did was behind the firewall, but it's all basically the same thing, and I fell into the marketing because, during that time that I was doing that work, when ever things would flare up inside of a bulletin board system or a forum or they had issues on search engines, because I was one of the programmers that built the system and also because I had a knack to speak to people that were nontechnical and not use a lot of terminology that trips people up that are nontechnical--

Russ: That's probably pretty unique, to be able to build it and be able to talk to them.

Giovanni: Well, and it was critical for me in the path that I took in my career because, at the time it was an annoyance because I always had to go with the sales team to get the deal done, but obviously looking back on it now, I realize how valuable it is to be able to understand and actually build and be one of the people that don't just look at that technology and kind of get it, I write the code, but then I can sit down and talk to people and sell it and make people feel comfortable with it because I don't try to overwhelm them with technospeak. That overwhelms them. So, I was doing that for a while, and I stumbled across, about 6 years ago, a company called Mien to help them out and do some search engine marketing, and the thing that threw me off at that time is I had no idea that SEO, or search engine marketing, was even an industry. They called me because they were a local firm in Dallas and because I was ranked 1 spot above them in Google for all their key phrases. They thought that I was some kind of SEO rock star when I just had a bulletin board website and kind of tripped in to that spot.

So I get to the interview, within about a half an hour, act like I know what they're talking about, they're talking to me about it-you know you've got to do that as a consultant. You walk in and you typically know about 25% of what they're asking you to do, you claim to know the other 75%, and you learn as they pay you to do it. So, I'm sitting there, I figured out during the first half hour of the interview that these people want to pay me more money to edit title tags and stuff keywords in the copy instead of sitting in a cube, unappreciated, working crazy hours. Okay, well, that sounds like a good deal. I mean, to me it sounded like kind of a sweet ride, and I'll ride it out as long as I can. Well, here I am today still doing it, and for everybody that's kind of overwhelmed with this, it's not rocket science. There's about 10 things you do to get 90% of the juice, and there's all the other stuff that the firms scare clients into getting them to pay monthly retainers to take care of. So, you know, you've got that piece, and now 15 years ago learning group, think learning they psychology of how people operate with each other online, I'm kind of in a honeymoon right now, strictly by accident, but I'm milking it for all I can.

Russ: Congratulations. Now, clearly along the way, Giovanni, there are some steps that happen with blogging and MySpace and Facebook, and each of these must have affected what you do all day long significantly.

Giovanni: Well, what happened with those is, because I had been building search engines, I knew how to gain those platforms very easily, and so these new platforms would come out, and I looked at the platforms, instead of looking at them as a marketer, I looked at them as a technologist and I went I know darn well that Facebook spends its time making it a great community and spends zero time on the search. So I know I can gain that. And for instance, here's a little nugget for your listeners. Everyone talks about how Google is the number one search engine in the world. They absolutely are. Two pieces of information, though. More searches are done on websites than on search engines. Number two, YouTube is the second largest search source in the world. More searches happen on YouTube than on Yahoo. So, when you look at the amount of traffic that comes through YouTube and imagine that YouTube is a video site, Google has not gone in there and replace their search with the Google algorithm. The search engine on YouTube is ridiculously easy to gain, so if you're in business, especially a small business, don't throw trash up but get video up that makes your business look good, and learn a little bit about SEO, and market that stuff on YouTube.

Giovanni: You will get much more success much quicker through YouTube to get people to drive traffic to your site than you will fighting your competition on Google. The nice thing about YouTube is you can put hyperlinks inside those descriptions. I've never heard any of the SEO pros talk about that at conferences, and it's something they don't want anyone to know, so they're keeping it close to the vest or they just don't know it, so I come to the table and I go, I'm doing all this marketing stuff. My goal for the client is to get traffic and to get attention, and I'm a total hack. I don't look at it from the standpoint of I've got to find the right piece of copy. I don't focus-I know that that's the case, I know you've got to have a good title to grab attention, I know the copy's got to be there, I understand the content's got to be there, but I take those as a given. I mean, you should not be in the game if you're not alert to heeding those basics. The next step is, now, how do you get one step ahead of your competition? You go, you find places where people are on the internet where they're doing searches and your competition doesn't understand that they're searching on those sites, and that's where you focus all your energy.

Russ: We're talking with Giovanni Gallucci, social media consultant, and we'll have more with Giovanni after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com, and I'm in a real cool conversation with Giovanni Gallucci who calls himself a social media consultant, but man, oh, man, is he tuned in to the real world these days. In fact, Giovanni, your comment in the last segment about knowing the basics of SEO made me want to ask you what they are, so why don't you just give us a little overview.

Giovanni: Let's pay attention to the basics that any good SEO, and any average SEO, is going to tell you. Title tag is king, so the content or the text that's in the blue bar in Internet Explorer when your site comes up is critical. Don't waste your time putting your company's name in that space. When people come to your site, they know where they are, and you don't need to put company name, about us. You need to put words up there not that you describe your company as but others may describe your products and services as. So tip number 1, title is king, thus going to be a huge thing for you. Number 2, you want to make sure that you go out and your look for the words, and there's tools to do this with in the search engines. Google has a tool called the keyword research tool. You can get to it for free. You type in a word that you think people would use to find you on the internet.

Google will come back and say, ah, not quite, these are the words and these are the phrases that people use that are similar to that one, and here's how many times they searched on them last month. That's a huge eye opener for business people because I'll go into a business and say "give me the words that people search on" and every time, half of the words are internal industry speak that no human being outside those 4 walls would ever use. And so we strip those out, and then we come back with a list of the ones that seem like humans would use, and we give it back to the company and say these are the ones we are going to focus on. And sometimes I get pushed back, sometimes they fight, but after I explain why-- you take this list of words, and you want to go through the content of your website, and you want to have a ratio of about 3% to 7% of the words in your copy be one of those words. In general you use about 3-5 words page you want to focus on, so if you're a bank it may be free checking, but you want words that are similar to free checking to drive people to that content, so it may be no checking fees, it may be free checks, things like that.

Russ: And you're talking about in the copy, just in the copy on the page.

Giovanni: Just in the copy on the page, and this is basic SEO stuff. So those are important. The third important thing with basic SEO is links that go back to your website. Do everything you can to get people to link back to your site with those words that we just talked about, because again, if you're Chase Bank and someone links from Chase Bank, if they've identified you as Chase, who cares? They know how to get to you. You've got to find people in the middle of the sales funnel when they're not quite sure who to go to. So you get links back.

Russ: Describe that more. What do you mean links back?

Giovanni: I mean whenever you go to a website and you're reading the words on the page, every now and then you'll come across the hyperlink of the word that's either blue or it's got an underline that indicates somehow that it's a jump to another website. The jump that someone puts into their website from their site to yours needs to be words that describe your business. I do not want your business name in there. It does you some good, but there is so much more search engine that can be gotten from words that describe your business because you want to get those people that are unsure of the vendor they want to choose when they're in the middle of the sales funnel. So, those are your 3 basic SEO tips. Now let's move over into social media.

Russ: Okay.

Giovanni: If you're not familiar with Twitter, Twitter is the flavor of the month right now, everyone's all "aTwitter" about it, and you know, in a year from now it may be something like Jordache jeans, you never want to admit that you wore them or it still may be very hot. But right now, it's where it's at, and you want to go and find some tools that will allow you to search on stuff on Twitter, and Guy Kawasaki talked about this, it's critical. Don't go out there and be so terribly concerned about who's following you. Go out there and find conversations about things that are similar to what you're trying to promote, and then you reach out and communicate to those people. So that's number one. The easiest place you can go to, go to your web browser and go to search.twitter.com, type in a keyword, and you'll get a list of everyone talking about that, and if you're shy, get over it. Get out there and just get busy. So that's number one. Number 2, when we talked about links earlier, Google and the other search engines treat hyperlinks from one website to another the same way that academic institutions or publishers treat citations in books.

I mean, that's the way, as a writer, that you really get a lot of credibility in your profession, by being cited by others whenever they write, so thinking about that, number one. Number two, Google will go around and look at different websites and give each website a ranking, loose term, of how credible it is. So, foxnews.com is going to be more credible than kron.com in Google's eyes. So, thinking about that, search engines look at social networks being amazingly authoritative because so many people use them, number one. Number two, social media sites, a lot of them will let you put hyperlinks in the content you put on the web. So if you go to YouTube, as I mentioned earlier, go to Flickr the photo sharing site, put pictures up on Flickr, put content as description and put a hyperlink from your content back to your website, Google is going to see that link on Flickr and go, wow, Flickr thinks that this site is kind of important.

Giovanni: Go out there and find social networks where they will allow you to put links from your site into your profile, and you will start getting much quicker authority in Google's eyes than you would normally, and it's a much faster path than going in begging hat in hand asking people to link to your sites. And that goes for commenting systems, things like that. Now people that do search engine optimization for a living, the first thing they'll say whenever I mention that is that there's a thing on the internet called a no-follow tag, and it's a direction that websites give to search engines. It's exactly what it sounds like. When a search engine comes to a website and sees one of those hyperlinks or those jumps to your site, some of them will have a tag next to that link that says no follow. You can't read it on the page but the search engines see it. So the search engines, Yahoo and Google, will not give you credit for that. Okay, so it sounds like everything I just said was a bunch of business, but it's not because the different big search engines and small ones share their databases with each other. So you still go and do that because MSN, Microsoft search engine, will come in and crawl that link and put it in their catalog, and then guess what? They share the database with Yahoo who shares the database with Google.

Russ: Okay.

Giovanni: So your content ends up being inside of Google, and that's one thing that your competitors won't be doing because their SEOs are not wasting their time on sites with no follows, and they don't realize that it's not a waste of time.

Russ: Okay.

Giovanni: There are some that you can jump on.

Russ: Yeah, no, I think we're learning some cool stuff here, some nontraditional SEO, because the non-follow rule is designed to discourage but yet still has huge value.

Giovanni: Many people will say that's a technique that allows people to spam systems and I, you know, I get grief for some of the things that I do. I put the capabilities of what I learned that search engines can do from a technical perspective in front of clients, I tell them what the "community" may think of them, and I let them make their business decision. For me, it's an exercise in, you know, I've been building this stuff longer than most of these people have had a computer, and that sounds arrogant, but it's just kind of like, you know, there's so many more things in life that are so much more important than whether or not you can game a no-follow tag. I tend to focus my blood, sweat, and tears on stuff when it really matters and my energy on stuff that's a little bit more important than whether or not I can game a no-follow tag.

Russ: Okay, two questions before I let you go. Number one, did you ever wear Jordache jeans?

Giovanni: I did have Sassoon and a Members Only-I've got some sweet pictures from high school, I'll tell you what.

Russ: And last question, say somebody wants to get in touch with you, how do they find you?

Giovanni: Gallucci.net, rolls right off the tongue. That's my personal website. It's gallucci.net. I've also got those one-day workshops which are extremesocialmartketing.com. we're doing our first one up in Dallas in the beginning of March. We were planning to do Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa at this point.

Russ: Great. I really appreciate you sharing some time with us.

Giovanni: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Russ: You bet. We've been talking with Giovanni Gallucci, and you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.