For the third year in a row, the staff of conversion-driven marketing agency 90octane donated over 150 hours of time volunteering for The Denver Santa Claus Shop — a charitable organization, which in its 79th year has helped nearly 1 million children by distributing free toys to those who might not otherwise have a toy to open at Christmas.

With The Denver Santa Claus Shop’s mission “A Christmas Toy For Every Girl and Boy” over 17,000 children received presents in 2008.  Denver-area families with children up to age 11 were invited through local social service and welfare agencies, as well as charitable and religious organizations, to receive new and gently used toys. 90octane’s employees assisted with distributing toys as well as worked to keep shelves stocked and orderly during the temporary toy store’s busiest hours.

90octane employees Meg Archer, Sean Brunner & Susan Smith ready to hand out toys at this year’s event.

In their second-annual food drive for the Food Bank of the Rockies, conversion-driven marketing agency 90octane collected 1,427lbs of food. Each staff member brought in an average of 40lbs of non-perishable items to provide for Rocky Mountain families in need.

Check out these Food Bank stats:

• 1 in 8 Coloradoans is struggling to meet basic food needs.
• 23% of households have at least one household member in poor health
• 17% of the members of households served by FBR are children age 0 to 5 years
• 48% had to choose between paying for food and paying their rent or mortgage bill
• 12% of households in Colorado are food insecure, or food insecure with hunger

Food donations are needed year round!  Learn how you can help the Food Bank of the Rockies.

Posted by: Kristi Jackson, Marketing Coordinator

As Social media continues to grow and become an important factor within the B2B industry, companies are beginning to realize the importance of claiming their space through tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to reach their consumers. However, most companies are not utilizing these tools to their full potential.

Companies often forget the lead generating opportunities that social media tools like Facebook have to offer. One things that B2B companies should keep in mind to increase lead generation on Facebook is to be sure to have links to the company resources that they already have such as email subscriptions, newsletters, white papers, brochures, etc. on their fan page. By placing registration behind these links, companies can start generating leads from their Facebook consumers. Additionally, tracking URL’s can be placed on these links to easily measure leads generated from Facebook.

Because we know that consumers who are coming to a company’s Facebook fan page are typically already interested in the company’s offerings and are looking for more information, it is important to include content that is unique to Facebook and will give these users a reason to continue to come back. One way that this can be done is by providing a special offer to these consumers that they cannot get by going to your corporate website.

Utilizing these ideas for a B2B Facebook page will not only benefit companies by creating another channel for lead generation, but it will also continue to enhance their users experience on Facebook.

Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

As one of the newest kids on the block, Bing is already making great strides in becoming a major player in the search engine world, frequently launching new features. Some of the newest include:

• Task-Focused Homepage allows users to select to search from various categories such as Shopping or Travel.
• Instant Answer returns the least expensive times to fly when users enter their travel specifications.
• Preview Feature has been made more visible and comprehensive than before.
• Event Search shows a summary of events in each city and can be filtered by category.
• Sharing Feature allows users to share their gift wishlists through Facebook and Twitter as well as email.
• Health, Medication and Hospital Results organizes information on health conditions, medications and hospitals to make it easier to find relevant results.

What do these advancements mean for your search engine marketing programs? Search is becoming increasingly personalized within Bing returning more relevant results to its users. Continuing to target your strategy and make use of these new features will definitely pay-off in this search engine. Other search engines, such as Google, appear to be increasing their emphasis on providing more relevant search results too.

Posted by: Susan Smith, Marketing Coordinator

Now that Google and Bing are displaying Twitter tweets in organic search results alongside other social media, tweets should be optimized just as a website would be.  There are multiple ways to increase the relevancy of your tweets and have them indexed by the search engines:

• Get more followers, each follower is considered an incoming link
• Get relevant followers, keywords in their bios relate to your relevancy
• Get tagged in lists that relate to your industry
• Have your tweets retweeted
• Tweet relevant, keyword rich content utilizing active lingo and buzzwords
• Choose a username that is short, easy to remember, and relevant to your brand or industry
• Stick to one handle/username for consistent indexing
• Choose an account name that reflects and promotes your brand
• Utilize the 160 characters available for a bio to insert key words and phrases
• Place a call to action on your website to gain Twitter followers
• Embed your Twitter URL in the footer of your website
• Occasionally tweet a link to your website to drive traffic
• Place your most important keywords at the beginning of your tweet as that is what shows up in Google

As Twitter continues to gain popularity and people begin seeking out real time updates, optimizing tweets will become vital to keeping your company at the top of the search results.