Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

During the workday today I noticed a post by GadgetVirtuoso speaking to GM’s hybrid initiatives:

Normally, this would be nothing to report. Within a few minutes though, GM was on top of this response:

A sincere and earnest inquiry into his original post. Not lashing out against what he had said. Not trying to correct him with some marketing speak. Just trying to get to the heart of the matter and better understand why he had posted that and how they could help. Normally, I’m all for bashing the industry which has caused so much pain in my home state of Michigan, however, this time, I’d like to applaud GM and their pro-active online actions.

And for anyone who is questioning the validity of social media marketing and interaction, here’s a great example of how it can help prevent small fires from burning out of control online. It just takes someone listening and a few seconds to respond. Here’s some tools to help you with that:

• 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
• 5 Online Reputation/PR Management Tools
• Twitter alerts or Twitter Search
• Radian6 (Not Free, but very good)

So while the majority of the nation was watching the Inauguration today, the White House web team quietly transitioned over the old WhiteHouse.gov to a new, slick content management based website. It’s got the same look and feel as many of the websites created during (now) President Obama’s run for the presidency.

One of the many cool features, besides being mostly CSS based, having a modern web aesthetic, and looking much more SEO friendly (title tags, page titles, CSS menus, using H2 and H4 tags, alt tags for images, very little flash, etc.) – it’s also got an email subscription feature right at the top and several blog feeds. Here are all the links to the blogs currently on the site:

• White House.gov Main Blog Feed
• White House.gov Agenda Articles Feed
• White House.gov Press Office Feed
• White House.gov OMB News Article Feed
• White House.gov Photo Gallery Feed
• White House.gov Video Feed

Just a heads up, the only link with any content is the “Main Blog Feed”, but the others will hopefully be populated soon after all the content generated today. Looking forward to seeing how often content is pushed out of here. Truly a historic day for our country, both online and off.

UPDATE: The White House is also on Twitter: @whitehouse_gov

Just a quick post saying that I just got my ticket for BlogWell Chicago on Jan. 22nd. It’s going to be a fun afternoon talking about some great social media case studies. If you’re headed, let me know and we can meet up. I just found out that Amber Naslund, now of Radian6 will be there as well.

Oh, and for my loyal readers, I got a discount code for you. Just enter “thanksjeff” when you regsiter for 15% off the registration price. Not too shabby.

Hey Readers – Sorry I’ve been M.I.A. for a while. I was in Europe for a few weeks and after an eight hour flight, I now have a bit of a head cold.

Regardless, this post is to let you all know that along with blogging here and at my company blog, I’ll also be writing for the Chicago Tech Report. If you weren’t aware of it before, Chicago Tech Report provides a forum for all things technology related happening in Chicago. So if you know of technology events that you’d like covered or business that are doing interesting things in the Chicago area, please let us know. Happy New Year All!