Just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.

Community: an interactive group of people connected by a common interest.

Marketer’s Sins
* Thinking that you know it all already - Tropicana changed their ‘look’ and didn’t think that they needed to consult with online communities. Result: online backlash.
* Wanting to be something you’re not - Pepperidge Farm tried creating their own online community rather than joining an existing one, but Pepperidge Farm isn’t an online community like FaceBook or MySpace.
* Thinking you’re done once its built - successful communities must by nurtured like a successful cocktail party.
* Assuming more is better - Moms Miami site: there is no common interest so it isn’t sticky for anyone.
* Not planning for anger or responding to it - Motrin example: moms got angry at their ad campaign so Motrin took their site down and went back up with a message saying that they were pulling the ad - did Motrin overreact?
* Wanting what the other guy has - Zune is trying to have what iPod has.
* Wanting it all…and all your way - General Mills’ My Blog Spark asked people not to post anything negative; this was greedy, they wanted to control the message.

51% of online adults are willing to participate in a company’s online community.
Adults across generations will engage in online company forums - they want to be a part of all stages of the marketing mix.

Understand who social media is for: brand enthusiasts who have passion (positive or negative). Get them to market the message for you and make them into brand advocates.

Have a clear objective for your community. Types of objectives include:
* Listening - good for direct customer insight, new product ideas and beta testing.
* Speaking - create an emotional attachment, advertising based on network.
* Energizing - excite your biggest fans, word of mouth.
* Supporting - peer to peer support.
* Embracing - members become contributors, extended workforce.

Focus on customer problems, not your products. Use the community as a way to help members solve their problems. The Axe community helps members solve how to get the girl. This gives Axe insight into their customers to use for more relative marketing.

Ensure the community is ‘heard’ inside of your company; it’s about managing your company to take advantage of what the community can do. Create a process for reporting what you learn from the community.

What keeps members coming back and participating? Hint: it’s not the technology.

Vibrant communities need:
* Sense of ownership
* Shared passions/needs
* Opportunities for self-expression in a variety of ways
* Active facilitation
* A company that demonstrates listening
* Fresh, engaging content

Best practices for creating your own online community
1. Listen - what are your customers saying? Where? Use Google Analytics.
2. Choose - What do you want to use the social community for? Customer research? Sales? Product Innovation?
3. Include - get legal/compliance on board early and often; get them to help you build a social policy.
4. Join - sign up for communities where your customers are (but learn the etiquette first).
5. Engage - thank your customers for telling you what they think; in plain English; ask more questions.
6. Build - if you’ve gotten good at #1-4 consider creating your own community.

Get the full webinar and presentation slides.
Note: You’ll have to give your name, email address and company information to access the video and slides.

Location
McEnery Convention Ctr
150 West San Carlos St.
San Jose, CA
August 10 -14, 2009

Cost
The conference runs August 11 - 13. August 10 and 14 are training days. A three-day pass for August 11 -13 costs $1995 - save $200 when you register before July 24.

Why Should You Go?
  1) It’s more and more important to know how to get your site to rank on the first page of search results. Less than 70% of users look past the first page.

  3) Search is very competitive and difficult to do right. The conference will demystify how search engines work and give you tools so that you can rank higher than your competitors.

  3) It isn’t enough to just do SEO. The conference will help you develop a search marketing and optimization strategy to increase your site traffic and measure results.

For full details visit the SES San Jose site.

Register here.

Still unsure if this conference is for you? Check out Search Engine Strategies’ Free Webcasts and Webinars to get a taste of what you’ll learn at the conference.

New to SES San Jose? Check out searchenginewatch.com’s article, SES San Jose Offers Conference Sessions for First Time Attendees

If you’re a publisher who’s ready to implement a digital strategy and want more information on digital formats, distribution, and digital rights management, SFU’s Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers workshop is a great opportunity to learn the steps to digitization.

Put on by SFU’s Summer Publishing Workshops, the workshop runs July 23 - 24 at SFU Harbourcentre.

The cost for both days is $275.

From the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop website:

This workshop will provide answers and prompt questions to get the information you need to create your own digital roadmap. If you are not doing something, you may find you will soon be playing catch up. By the end of the two days you will understand the phrases and definitions and identify what kinds of formats best suit your needs. Some key points you will learn:

* Determine which formats can best deliver your content
* Determine business objectives for an initial foray into digital publishing
* Determine your requirements from third party service providers
* Understand XML
* Discuss the pros and cons of DRM
* Hear what the future of publishing may look like

For full details visit the Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers page.

Download the registration form here.

There are two trends in search:
1) It’s getting more and more competitive to get to the top of search rankings.
2) If you’re not on the first page, you’re invisible - as of a 2008 study, 68% of web users never get past the first page.

5 SEO Factors You Must Get Right

1) Keywords
* They should be short and concise.
* Scour competitive sites for keywords that would bring in a lot of potential traffic.

2) Content
* Place keywords strategically within the content on your site
* You need 100 - 500 pages of content on your site to rank at the top (this is why blogs rank high).

3) Meta Content
* This is what Google sees; it is the code behind each of your pages.
* Titles and meta-descriptions (what searchers see on Google) are what matter.
* Page Titles: Don’t put the company name first, your site is already ranking high on your company name so you’re wasting ‘juice’.
* Use two key phrases in the first two positions in the page title. Use a word separator between keywords like a bar, dash or comma. Don’t use ‘&‘, use ‘and’.
* Descriptions: It’s important to have unique meta descriptions on every page. It’s what searchers see on Google so it needs to be compelling

4) URLs
* You need your keywords in the urls of your pages.
* Keywords should be separated with a dash.

5) Inbound Links
* Often called ‘link juice’.
* These are one-way links from other highly regarded, relevant sites linking to you.
* It’s good to have inbound links coming from highly regarded blogs, articles, press releases, forms and directories.
* You need a certain number of links linking to all of your pages - not just your homepage.
* The clickable link and the descriptive text surrounding the link (anchor text) should contain your keywords.

For more information watch the full web clinic video.

Looking for related information? Check out Stickyeyes.com’s SEO Tips for 2007. This is a great article with excellent, easy to follow tips that still apply in 2009.

The workshop runs August 4 - 6 at SFU Harbourcentre. The cost for all three days is $500.

From the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop website:
“We’ll introduce you to web content management tools and what they offer. We’ll talk about book content, magazine copy, marketing messages, images and other media, and of course the web itself and the audience connections it makes possible. We’ll cover software and techniques; when it’s appropriate to manage content yourself and when it’s appropriate to contract an external Digital Asset Manager. Most importantly, we’ll focus on how to do all of this without breaking the bank.“

Monique will be on the panel along with Haig Armen, creative director of LiFT Studios; Geoff D’Auria site manager for The Tyee; Kim Elliott publisher of rabble.ca; Joy Gugeler publisher and editor-in-chief of orato.com; Brian Lamb manager of emerging technologies and digital content with the office of learning technology at UBC; Boris Mann entrepreneur and web strategist; and John Maxwell assistant professor in the Master of Publishing Program at SFU.

For full details go to the Web Content Management workshop page.

Download the PDF registration form here.

Earlier this year Facebook changed the way that businesses can network in this social space. They upgraded the Pages functionality to better house business profiles. Pages are not identical to Personal Profiles, but they do give a business more leverage than a Group.

With a Page, people interested in following your organization can become fans of your Page. On your Page, you can host photos, videos, RSS feeds, and custom applications.

Creating a Page
A Page needs to be administered by a person so start by creating a Personal Profile (for a real person because fake accounts are removed by Facebook). The Personal Profile should be of someone in your company who is going to stick around for awhile. Then follow the links to create a Page. You can change and add administrators to your Page after it is set up.

You will be asked to select what type of Page. Choose wisely because you can not change it afterward. By choosing the type of Page, you are choosing a default set of fields to complete. For example, choosing Band gives you opportunities to bring in a playlist. Choosing Public Figure - Government Official asks for your date in office.

Adding Stuff to Your Page
A Page can have all sorts of tabs, including Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions, Events, YouTube, Notes, Boxes.

Wall is where your status feed aggregates. Info is what you want to tell the world about your organization. Photos are, well, photos. Discussions are discussion forums where you can start a topic and have fans discuss it. Events is an aggregated listing of events you are hosting. YouTube is your YouTube channel. You enter your YouTube details and your videos are automatically pulled into Facebook, which is nice because it eliminates the redundancies of uploading videos to two places. Notes is for mini-blog posts or links to things you like. And Boxes is a crazy place where all sorts of things can be pulled into one spot, like videos, RSS feeds, photos, etc.

Editing Stuff on Your Page
Here is another opportunity to lose your mind. To edit most applications (Discussions, YouTube, Notes), you go to the Wall of your Personal Profile and click the “Edit Page” link on the top left. From here, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the application box to edit and change its settings.

You can move application boxes to your Wall or to your Boxes tab by clicking on the pencil icon next to the Application name. Applications can be either on your Wall or in your Boxes tab, but cannot be in both places at once.

To move applications around in the Boxes tab, just drag them. That is the easiest part of this whole admin experience.

Claim Your Facebook Username
Visit http://www.facebook.com/username to claim a shortcut name to your Page. Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation was temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 that have more than 100 fans can now claim a username.
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

Help Us Get 100 Fans so we can learn how to do more things on Facebook.
Please Become a Fan of Boxcar Marketing.

The ExpressionEngine Roadshow 2009 will be held in Seattle, WA, on October 2nd.

The EE Roadshow brings ExpressionEngine users and developers together in real life to share what they know about this incredible web publishing system.

We’re looking for volunteers to speak on panels, moderate sessions or give presentations. If you’re an ExpressionEngine developer with some great insights to share with the community about building sites with EE, add-on development, dev approaches, or anything else you think other EE developers would love to learn or hear about, we want you to speak at the Roadshow.

The topic submission form is here:
http://www.eeroadshow.com/2009/submit/

EE Roadshow is organized by Boxcar Marketing, Hop Studios, Factory Interactive
http://www.eeroadshow.com

Content

There’s a content tradeoff. You can either make an informative video with lots of information for the viewer or an entertaining video that catches viewers’ attention and has the potential to go viral.

Short is sweet. Focus on the first ten seconds of your video and try to do something shocking or entertaining to rope people in.

Use an outline, not a full script. You’ll be much more engaging.

Test your video on friends and coworkers and edit it according to their responses. If they don’t find your joke funny, chances are your online audience won’t either.

Optimization

Publish and promote everywhere. You want your video found!

If you upload your video to either Visible Measures or Tubemogul , they’ll upload it to all of the different video sharing sites for you and provide you with analytics, too.

You need to decide if are you going to optimize your video for SEO (by using straight-forward keywords) or for viral (by using enticing keywords). Tip: start with a viral title to make the video popular and then change it to a more keyword-rich title to make use of its long tail potential.

Post your video on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and your blog. Encourage co-workers and friends to post it on their blogs too.

SEO

YouTube

* Use keywords in your title and description. Include a link to your website in the first couple of lines of the description so that viewers see it when the description is collapsed.

* Tags are important. Although they’re not visible on the public video page, they govern what videos your video shows up.

* Encourage people to rate and comment on your video. Controversial content is one way to spark discussion.

iTunes

* Make sure that the title, artist and description are keyword-rich.

* Use an appealing image to stand out on the search page.

* Ask viewers to review your video to increase its popularity.

Analyze

Analytics are crucial! Why make a video if you don’t measure and track its success?

Use YouTube Insights or Blip.tv Stats to see who’s watching your video and what they’re finding engaging about it. You can also use Visible Measures or Tubemogul, to see your analytics across multiple video sites.

For more information watch the full webinar and download the slides.

Looking for related information? Check out Steven Witten’s article Six Degrees of YouTube, a case study of online competitive video dynamics, which looks at how YouTube’s ‘related videos’ list gets built and the effect this list has on a video’s popularity.

A recap of the session is available on TechVibes (text version).

About the Video
riiPlay.tv, a Vancouver-based video and web production company, filmed the Internet Marketing Conference held in Vancouver last year, and they have kindly sent me the video embed code for my session on Writing for the Web.

Have you ever missed an event and wished you could attend?
Have you ever held an event and wished that someone was filming it?
Have you ever attended an event and wished that you could send your co-workers links to watch the “best of” clips?

riiPlay.tv is answering this by providing the filming of live events, the production of watchable video segments, and the hosting and delivery of those videos online through free or pay-per-view means.

Website: http://www.riiplay.tv
Twitter: http://twitter.com/riiplaytv
Blog: http://www.fundfindr.tv and http://www.fundfindr.com

About IMC
Corey Rollins and I live blogged the Vancouver Internet Marketing Conference (September 11 and 12, 2008) for TechVibes. Links to our posts by subject category are here ...

Many of the presentations at the Internet Marketing Conference highlighted tactics for Search Marketing. A round-up of presenters and helpful docs are here ...

Myth #1: Social media is a marketing strategy.

Social media is not a marketing function; it’s an overall high-level business strategy that supports your organization’s goals.

Myth #2: It’s all about the online tools.

Social media is not about sending out electronic press releases or setting up a Facebook page. It’s about how we can use the tools to engage with our community. For example, how can we use electronic press releases to capture the attention of a new audience or how we can use Facebook to encourage social interactions that build loyalty and connections to the company and between community members.

Myth #3: Building online communities requires tight control and management.

Nope. You always have people out there talking about you; it’s called word of mouth. In traditional approaches, we make sure that people have a positive experience with us at all levels, from the person who answers the phone to the customer service to the follow-up afterwards.

The same is true with social media strategies. Relinquishing control does not mean abdicating responsibility; it means that you control the things within your control. You set the stage and the conditions that allow for your organization and community members to thrive. That way, people have good things
to say.

Myth #4: Social media is time consuming.

The key here is practice. The first time you do something it takes time. The first press release you ever wrote, the first job description for a new hire, the first report, whatever it was, you were doing something new and you needed to be slow and methodical in your approach. But as you gained experience, things got faster and easier. The same is true with the web. It’s just practice.

Myth #5: Your audience isn’t online.

The average Canadian spends close to 43 hours per month online. And it isn’t just young people who are spending time online. The latest Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada report (PDF) showed that in May 2007: 29% of age 50+ web users visited a social media site in the last month versus just 8% in September 2006; 72% of 20-29 year olds had visited a social networking website, up from 44% in September 2006.

For more information

Read the Harvard Business Review article Getting Brand Communities Right by Susan Fournier and Lara Lee. The site also includes a great quiz to help you determine if your business is social media ready.