Efficiently communicating to a mobile, remote workforce is an issue for many companies in today’s business environment.  This employee connection hurdle faced Mulzer Crushed Stone, Inc., a company headquartered in Evansville, Indiana.

Mulzer is faced with a need to cultivate the “community” of their widespread, regionally deployed workforce.

For a solution, Mulzer partnered with NPS to leverage the power Social Networking. We created a complete social toolset for Mulzer to enhance their employee connections and better distribute news, events, and other company information.

Blog
The Mulzer Blog is the first layer in the Mulzer social landscape.  Utilizing the Blog gives Mulzer a vehicle to easily administer communications. Additionally, RSS and integration with other Social Networking tools streamlines their communication channels to automatically update with content from the Blog.  This successfully reduced the content administration to one universal location.

Facebook
Facebook is being used to create an online community for the employees to come together and share information.  Their Blog is also integrates with Facebook so that each new blog post is written on the Wall of the Mulzer Facebook fan page.  This effort allows Mulzer to syndicate the information from the Blog to other networks.

YouTube
Mulzer also creates company videos to share corporate and event information.  NPS integrated a YouTube Channel (link) with the Blog to have new videos from posted on YouTube update on the Blog.

RSS
Our utilization of the Mulzer Blog RSS feed enabled us to syndicate content from the Blog to their Facebook fan page and www.mulzer.com. RSS is also provided as a way for users to subscribe to the Blog’s feed to receive the latest updates via their feed reader.  This effort essentially creates an “opt in” list for users to receive updates from Mulzer.

Share
In addition to the above methods, NPS included share functionality in the footer of each blog post. Sharing allows blog readers to distribute a link to the blog post across additional social networks that they may be a part of, empowering readers to advertise for them.

A recent labs feature release for Google Webmaster Tools removed the PageRank metric for your site.  Google's stance on PageRank and Search Engine Optimization has been long been to not put too much emphasis on the PageRank metric and to focus your efforts on content.

The removal of this metric from the Webmaster Tools interface reinforces Google's stance on the misconception of what PageRank means in SEO.  PageRank doesn't equal Search Engine rankings.

Susan Moskwa, a Googler, stated in a Webmaster Central forum "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."