I have come to the conclusion that doing Search Engine Optimization as a standalone business is not worth the headache.
I figured out how to do SEO for my direct mail business and decided to sell it as a service.
Then I found out I had to become a webmaster. So I became a webmaster. I had a lot of help with the technical end, of setting up a CMS but most web designers really have no clue either how to design or to put it efficiently on the web.
But I put together a team of everything from writers, designer, project managers, analytics, etc (all freelance) and have come to the conclusion that it’s easier to give birth than to raise the dead.
For less effort — and more money — I can start a site from scratch with all the necessary components than trying to tweak a pre-existing site. Maybe take some ideas and content, but much easier to start from scratch.
And best of all, it will be better for the client!
Posted by Daniel on Dec 1, 2009 in
Food for Thought,
Marketing Tips I recently had to do a paper about improving how students percieve Israel on American Campuses, here is my paper.
Executive Summary
Throughout campuses across the United States, Israel has been branded as a military bully that terrorizes their Palestinian neighbors. Israel is often portrayed as the aggressor in the Middle East, and anti-Israel groups are growing in numbers and in influence. Although there are several pro-Israel organizations that deal with college campuses and thousands of committed activists, the fact remains that Israel is still often perceived as the aggressor. In the virtual world that we now live in Israel is often demonized by images, YouTube videos, and blogs that portray them as a militaristic power that ignores the human rights of her Arab neighbors. In today’s world Israel finds itself in a great danger of losing the war of world’s public opinion.
My recommendation would be for Israeli Hasbara to raise awareness to the large number of Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) that are actively helping the African refugees who are in Israel. Currently there are over 10,000 African refugees who have fled their war-torn countries in order to find a better life in Israel. In the US today there are groups across that are actively raising awareness of the human rights violations in Africa. These Save Africa groups are large in numbers and are seen as being leaders in human rights issues. With an effective Hasbara campaign that promotes the work that Israeli NGOs are doing, it will change public perception and Israel would be branded as a country deeply committed to human rights.
Context and Importance of the Problem
The problem for Israel is that they are seen as an uncompassionate militaristic power that denies basic human rights to the Arabs. The root of this problem is that Israel is losing the war in virtual world, and American supporters of Israel are forced to justify images that make Israel look like war hungry monsters.
Until recently Israel has paid little attention to how their own nation branding and how the rest of the world perceives them. This costly mistake has only increased the strength of detractor’s arguments and left Israel supports with very difficult images to explain.
On today’s college campuses the anti-Israel sentiment is growing stronger. There are a large number of professors are critical of Israel and its policies recently two of the most influential academics, John Mearshimer of University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University, wrote a book titled “The Israel Lobby” where they claim that America being an ally of Israel is not in America’s best interest. There are numerous divestment campaigns from campuses ranging from Wayne State University to Duke University to UC Berkeley. Additionally, an anti-Israel group known as the Students for Justice in Palestine has over 40 chapters across the US.
The importance of Israel generating a positive public opinion on college campuses are far reaching. College campuses are where future leaders and policy makers are still forming their viewpoints on several key issues. At such an influential point in someone’s life it is of great importance of the pro-Israel community to help them shape their viewpoint of Israel, instead of trying to influence them once they are already in power.
Also, college campuses are a hotbed of political activism. College students organize rallies and protests that often make the front-page of the news. It is important for Israel for these people to view Israel in a positive light instead of the current situation where they often times carry signs that say “Stop Israeli Apartheid” or “End Israeli Occupation.”
Critique of Policy Options
On US Campuses today there are countless organizations, thousands of students, and millions of dollars which are dedicated to the mission of Hasbara. These student organizations are often times focused on explaining the role of the Middle East through the Israeli perspective, and justifying Israel’s use of force. The problem with this strategy is that they are still focusing on the conflict and they are ignoring all the work that Israel and Israelis do in the name of Tikkum Olom.
As a former student on an American campus that was active in Hasbara, I saw why this strategy was problematic firsthand. Although Israel may be the underdog in the real world battle front, it is extremely difficult to win this argument when one considers the role of the virtual world. In the words of the famous expression a picture is worth a thousand words, and when there is a widespread picture of a young Palestinian boy throwing a rock at an Israeli tank it becomes hard to make the case that Israel is the one fighting for self-survival. Hasbara campaigns would benefit from focusing on Israeli efforts of Tikkum Olom as opposed to trying to repaint the picture of the military conflict.
Another critique of the current Hasbara system in the US is that there are is little collaboration between the numerous organizations that are all committed to improving Israel’s public image. For example if a student wants to get politically active on their campus they should contact AIPAC in Washington, DC, if a student wants to do an event focusing on social aspects of Israel he should contact StandWithUs located in California, and if a student wants to learn how to articulate Israel’s point of view they should contact the David Project in Boston. With this current system most pro-Israel students involved in Hasbara are not even aware of all the groups that exist, and for the advocates that are aware of these different organizations they often times do not know which one would be the most useful to contact. If these groups were better coordinated they would be better at providing information and training for students who want to implement a Hasbara Campaign on their own campus.
Policy Recommendations
There are several different ways for the pro-Israel community on American campuses to improve the effectiveness of their Hasbara campaign by promoting the work of Israeli NGOs with African Refugees. One idea would be to bring a speaker to their campus who is an African Refugee that is currently living in Israel. This would presumably draw a large crowd of students who are concerned and committed to human rights and they wanted to hear first hand accounts of the horrors of the refugee’s region. The speaker would finish his speech by talking about the reasons he fled to Israel and how the Israeli people have worked with him to help him start a new life.
Another proposal would be for Hasbara groups to do campus-wide fund-raisers for the Israeli NGOs that work with the African refugees. This would be a good opportunity for students from all backgrounds to learn about the work that Israelis are doing with African refugees. Also by having students give money to the cause it will help them identify more with the Israeli NGOs and make them feel like they are taking on an active role in helping these refugees.
An effective Hasbara campaign that promoted the humanitarian work that Israelis would be categorized as Blue Ocean Strategy that used the tool of brotherhood. The horrors of the situation in Africa are well known, but until now no organization or country has been recognized as taking an active role in helping these people. In order to improve the public perception of Israel and the work that Israelis are doing to help the refugees we will promote the slogan of: Israel Where We Mean “Never Again.”
Recommended Sources for Additional Information
Websites for Pro-Israel Organizations in the United States
StandWithUs
David Project
AIPAC Campus Resources
Israel on Campus Coalition
Websites about NGOs for African Refugees in Israel
Fugee Fridays
Arab Refugee Development Center
Big Brother Big Sisters of Israel
Tags: African Refugees, IDC Herzliya, Israel, NGOs
A community is where they know your name and miss you when you are gone, according to Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England.
I like that definition. It’s so personal. It’s a bit like the sitcom “Cheers.”
Is a real community the same as a virtual community? I have been struggling with that question recently.
I have been trying to build on online community for the sole purpose of helping my business grow. I started a blog and joined LinkedIN, though I have not touched Facebook or myspace.
From my perspective, the real advantage of online communities is that space and time are nonfactors. Anyone anyplace in the world can be in my virtual community. I can answer them at my leisure and get responses in my e-mail’s inbox.
If you believe the hype, being part of an online community seems like the fastest way to riches and success. Lots of friends. More business. But is it? What is the purpose of an online community and how can it benefit me?
I am still trying to decide if being active in online communities is for me. Will the more I read and post develop new friends and generate more business? Does the 8th grader featured in today’s Raleigh newspaper really have 1.4 million fans?
Or is being online a huge time sucking trap? It seems that the more online I am, the less time I have to actually run my business or to meet and talk with real people? It seems like I spend too much of my day in front of computer screen already.
I want to explore how a real community, according to my definition, works.
Let me tell you about myself. I am not a very sociable person. Doesn’t mean I don’t like people. It just means I can be content to stay at home and watch TV and not feel obligated to go to parties or other social events just to be doing something.
I am not particularly shy, but I don’t think I am an extrovert, either.
In my definition, my Toastmaster group is a community. People know my name here – and they know when I am not here. As a side benefit, I have developed business relations that have helped my bottom line.
But being a member of a community means accepting obligations – and I think that is the part that many people in today’s society fail to realize.
Paying my dues may make me a club member, but that is not the same as being a being a member of the Talkmaster community.
Having an e-mail address and a password may make me a member of LinkedIn, but is that the same as being in a community?
It’s the difference between involvement and commitment. I often tell the story of the breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken is involved in the breakfast, but the pig was committed.
I am committed to Toastmasters, and especially this club. I understand that my obligation to this club means that I show up on a regular basis, do roles that are assigned to me and support others. In return, I get support for my efforts. I grow and my confidence to handle situations expands.
I am not so sure what my responsibilities and obligations are to my online community. Does my anonymity allow me a free pass? Is anything expected of me?
An ideal community nurtures trust. I trust all of you will make great speeches and have the capacity to learn and grow. You have faith that I will do a decent job – and even applaud me for my efforts!
Being a member of a community takes time and consistency. Everyone wants instant gratification, but it takes time to cultivate relationships. In an online community, it’s too easy to login and make comments – and then leave.
I believe that being a part of a real community is a key to health and happiness. My son, Daniel, took a course on happiness from the Harvard professor who wrote a book about it. It’s not about wealth. Instead, it’s about having an understanding of what makes you tick and the confidence in your own abilities. A good community builds that self-esteem that you have to earn.
The challenge is to be part of community where people share the same goals – and the goals are positive. My definition of a community also describes a criminal gang. And not every member of a community may share your goals. Bernie Madoff was certainly an outstanding member of the Jewish community – until he was found out to be running a huge Ponzi scheme.
So, I come back to my original question – can an online community replace a real community? It certainly can in expanding my horizons and contacts. Will it increase my business by being active? Possibly. Is it worth the time and effort? The jury, for me, is still out.
However, only a real community made up of actual people can help me in terms of personal growth and satisfaction. It takes effort and commitment, but it is certainly worth the effort.
Tags: competitive advantage, Toastmasters
Yesterday, I attended another “Meet the New Media” event. It was about how to use and measure social media.
The event is sponsored by Rebecca Antonelli. I have know Rebecca for years and, in fact, hired her for a brief period in the 1990s to help promote my business.
However, the real reason I went was to hear Mark Schurtman talk about analytics. Mark works with me on a freelance basis helping my clients understand their analytics. I was hoping that I could pick up a few leads from going to the event — although I had to leave early.
I don’t pretend to understand social media. I started a blog last year to promote my direct mail and search engine optimization business. I am on LinkedIN, but have not made any effort to really work it. However, I did have a recent pleasant experience trying to get information for my son about starting a Toastmaster’s club in Israel.
I am not on Facebook, I do not own a digital camera, I do not know how to use my cell phone except to make calls. Twitter makes no sense to me.
I remember manual typewriters and lead type. Maybe I am a dinosaur, but I have learned to embrace disruptive technology and have become an expert in search engine optimization and now creating websites.
But the question I had after listening to the presentations yesterday- Is it worth the effort? When I started the blog I was hoping to create a dialog about marketing and build my reputation as an expert in the field. I have been in business on my own for over 20 years and feel that I have something to contribute to the would-be entrepreneur.
The talk is about “community.” The chief rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, wrote that a community is where they know your name and miss you when you are gone. I am active in the community here in Raleigh and know lots of people. I know people through Toastmasters, the Jewish Community, bicycling, business, etc. The advantage of being self-employed is that I can associate with who I want to associate with. If I didn’t want to be part of the network, I wouldn’t do it.
But is being part of inside919 or any of the other “virtual communities” going to help me get new business? That’s my bottom line — what can I take to the bank to pay my bills?
As luck would have it, one of the newsletters I subscribe to had an article about large companies banning social media in the workplace. Too much of a distraction.
Long ago I gave up networking as a way to build my business. Everybody trying to sell me things — and very few had the contacts I needed for my business success. I kept seeing the same people over and over again and could never figure out how they made a living. On the other hand, my clients were too busy actually running a business to take the time.
I served in the Israeli army many years. There was a saying, “They can’t hassle you more than 24 hours a day! After that, it’s a new day!” Is social media something I need to embrace to get more business or is it just a way to waste time and energy?
Maybe I don’t know how to set up my blog correctly to take advantage of the possibilities. Would like some comments, which you can do by clicking on the headline. Haven’t quite figured out all the settings WordPress. I have comments so I can filter them before they become public to avoid span.
Look forward to starting the dialog.
One week from today, I will get on a plane and go to Israel. I enjoy the full rights of a United States Citizen and I am going to Promised Land as a Jew. I have two countries to call home. Israel is now seen as the Promised Land to millions of Africans who are fleeing their war-torn countries in search of a better life. While living in Israel for me is the dream of my forefathers, living in Israel for these refugees is a means of survival.
Refugees come from all over Africa including Ertieria, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and several others. In order for them to arrive in Israel they need to go through Egypt, which was often the most dangerous part of their journey. In Egypt they have Bedouins who will kidnap refugees and allow the rest of his family to go to Israel and make some money and send it back to the Bedouins in order for them to release the family member. Also, the Egyptian army would shoot anyone they saw trying to cross the border from Egypt into Israel. One of the children we play with had his brother and his father killed as they tried to escape Egypt into Israel.
These refugees come to the land of Israel because Israel is the one country where they do not need to fear for their lives on a daily basis. However, the situation in Israel is far from ideal. The Israeli government’s official position is to keep out the refugees, and any that are found once they do cross over are immediately sent to detention facilities. After the refugees are released they generally move to Tel Aviv. The government has a policy that the refugees should not live in the center of the country, but until recently this policy had been ignored.
For Israel this is a very complicated situation. On one hand as the Jewish homeland we feel that we have an obligation to help an oppressed people who are being persecuted in their own countries, but on the other side there is no way that Israel can absorb the huge economic, social, and security burden that these people bring with them. I have heard as many as 14,000 refugees are already in Israel, but the potential lies for millions to cross in if Israel opens its border. This would pose a huge security risk and lead Jews to be a minority in our own country.
I am a part of a grassroots volunteer organization known as Fugee Fridays. Every Friday we would pick up food from the food market in Tel Aviv and have drivers take the food twenty minutes and distribute it to three shelters for African refugees. Our usual routine is to have some of the volunteers go around and ask approximately sixty vendors for any extra food. We collect all types of food ranging from beets, to pita, to watermelon. We bring all the food to one spot and sort which food is good and into different baskets for each of the shelters. We load the baskets in cars and than we have people drive the food to the shelters. After we dropped off the food, we would go play with the neighborhood children for about an hour.
The government does not provide any significant government aid programs so volunteer organizations such as ours are needed to help these people adjust to their new lives.
I take pride in being one of the volunteers in Fugee Fridays. We are not there to make a political statement or in order to impress others. Rather we are just trying to help a group of people who are less fortunate. In March of 2008, four of my close friends saw that there was lots of food being thrown away at the market every week and there were lots of hungry refugees just minutes away. One week they showed up to the market and loaded a car with food, and they have done so ever since.
Every Friday evening we are running around with the kids and chasing them. I like to think of myself as one of the children’s favorite and they all call me “HaShamen” which means fatso in Hebrew. I run around with the children and usually have one on my shoulders while another one of the children is hitting me. One of my proudest accomplishments is that I thought one of the children how to say “What you talking about Willis.”
These children are really remarkable. They are a group of 20 children who live in the same cramped shelter with their mothers. The shelter is directly across from a brothel. These children have grown up with very little stability in their lives. There is a bond and friendship between all these children that it is obvious they are extremely loyal and worried about one another.
It was not until volunteering for about three months did I really understand the significance of what we were doing. I was delivering the food into one of the refugee’s home and I was invited in to have a cup of tea with the patriarch of the family. He was from the country of Chad and he told me about his personal narrative. He told me about the hardships he had gone through including his escape into Israel. However, his overall message was that he felt so blessed to live in a country that has security and where he was able to work even if it was only as a pool boy at the Hilton. He expressed to me how grateful he was for the weekly food that we provided with him and his family. Before that I was just viewing our work as giving food to people in need, but after walking away I realized that the real importance of the work we do is letting these people know we care about them. His entire life he had to fear for his life because of his race, but here are a group of strangers who dedicate their own time to show him we do care about him.
For me it is an incredible experience to be a 22-year-old Jewish American from Raleigh and to feel that I am having a positive influence on a 8-year-old Eriterian who has experienced hardships worse than I ever could imagine. For all the amount of time that me and the other volunteers have contributed to the refugees, I know that our impact will last much longer than the food.
Posted by Daniel on Apr 22, 2009 in
Food for Thought Over the past several months, I have become a regular at Fugee Fridays, a grassroots organization that brings donated food from the vegetable market in Tel Aviv to three different shelters for African refugees every Friday afternoon. I have grown to feel a part of a community of volunteers and enjoy playing with the children who live in one of the shelters as they playfully call me hashamen, which means fatty in English.
Last week I delivered a box of food to the home of a woman who is nine months pregnant. When I arrived at her home, her husband invited me in for tea. I had the privilege of sitting down and having a cup of tea with him while he told me about his story. He escaped Chad in 1991, and he described to me the difficult journey that he experienced as he traveled through Libya and Egypt until finally reaching Israel. He told me that the United Nations had not granted him refugee status, and he said, “You see your parents get killed in front of your own eyes and you run away, and this is still not good enough for the UN to give you refugee status.”
He spoke to me about how happy he is to be able to have a job working at the pool at a Tel Aviv hotel, which allows him to support his family. He also discussed the feelings of uncertainty he feels living in Israel, since he has not officially been granted the status of a refugee, and how difficult it is for his child and the rest of the neighborhood children to receive an education.
I have developed a close relationship with the neighborhood children, but this was the first time I was able to speak with one of the adults in the community about their own personal narrative. It was a truly enlightening experience hearing first-hand about this man’s experience, his hardships along the way and how he was happy to have food to eat, a roof over his head and order in the streets.
Fugee Fridays has given me the ultimate reward of knowing that I am doing some good in this world. Steven Fox, one of the founders of Fugee Fridays, told me yesterday that our friendships with these children constitute a positive influence for a group of kids who have been through a lot and face an uncertain future. Perhaps the most important part of Fugee Fridays is the fact that we are sending a message to these people that we care about them and that we want to help.
The work that we are doing with the refugees is basic and direct. But, as my conversation on Friday made me understand, if we are able to continue to send a message of human solidarity and caring to this community, then our impact will last much longer than a basket of food.
Tags: Darfur Refugees, Fugee Fridays, Tel Aviv