I try to recycle as much as I can. It’s spring cleaning time here in my office and I found several laser-toner cartridges in a storage cabinet. They were all for printers that I replaced many moons ago. So I called a Cartridge World store in Cleveland, Ohio (Kamm’s Plaza, to be exact) and asked if they would take them.  Katrina, who answered the phone said, sure, they’d take them off my hands.

To make a long story short, after my drop-off today I realized that this Cartridge World location has always given me professional, prompt and friendly service during my visits over the years.

And I’m also reminded that ( no matter how effective a business is at social media and online marketing), particularly for brick-and-mortar retailers dealing face-to-face with customers, success comes down to consistently providing excellent customer service… That’s what customers remember.

Thanks for the reminders, Katrina.

It’s been my pleasure of late to help two Ohio nonprofits get to know their members’ online preferences.  The goal for both highly social groups is to use survey results to know, then serve, their members’ informational and social needs better.

One nonprofit organization is a church in Portage County, near Ravenna; the other a professional association in Cuyahoga County, near Cleveland.  For the church, this is its first online membership survey.  For the professional group, I facilitated surveying its members’ needs for the first time exactly 10 years ago.

Both nonprofits are long overdue for polling their members. Both groups’ leaders are looking forward to their respective survey outcomes. So am I.

Membership surveys are a smart and wonderful way to get to know small-town congregations and big-city professionals better. Survey results sometimes surprise and sometimes confirm… and they’re always beneficial to service organizations.

This past weekend, I planned, hosted and facilitated a writers retreat in Ohio, during which proven, published and polished writers gained a few insights from an unproven, unpublished and unpolished writer.

One of my takeaways:  No matter what your profession is, be supremely confident in your abilities… yet humble enough to learn from others who have less experience than you.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for a website, plus proper nurturing of a client’s social media is like sunshine to an Ohio farmer during a rainy spring.  Both are needed.  In my “field,” the social media-SEO combo can equal Page One results in search engines like Baidu, Bing, Google and Yahoo.

It was my pleasure today to report to one of our Cleveland clients that the site we launched for her has taken two of the top three Page One spots when searching the worldwide web using generic and common keywords for her business.  Two of the top three… out of 71 million organic search results.  I admit I was a bit surprised and posted here today after verifying Google’s rankings first.

As an ex-summer farmhand, I know the fruits of one’s labor don’t come overnight.  So it is with achieving top search engine results.  For nearly a year, I’ve worked the combination of social media, SEO and coaching our client as if they were soil, sun and water.  In my world of social marketing communications they are.

Indeed, spring has arrived here in Ohio for my client and me.