I love dogs, and there’s this amazing dog park down the street from my apartment. The other day I saw this Beagle (okay, not this Beagle, but I didn’t have my camera with me at the time).

This guy was running around, tail straight up in the air, just like that. He sniffed. He challenged a much bigger dog. He greeted everyone there. He did his own thing. And you know, what? He got tons of attention.

Internet Marketing is kinda like that.

Online Marketing Lessons from a Beagle

Are you off doing your own business thing and not spending much time greeting your customers, sniffing out new opportunities, or challenging competitors? You might be missing out on some real opportunities.

The thing about having a strong online presence, is that it makes people notice you. It puts you at the top of people’s minds, and believe me, with as much competition as there is out there for what you do, you want to figure out how to cut through the noise.

You’ve probably heard about blogging, Facebook for business, and Twitter. Perhaps you even tried them for a while. My question for you is this – were you really alll that engaged? Did you make a few Internet friends?

In April I worked with my biggest client ever because a guy I knew from Twitter referred me. We’ve never met in real life.

Since March I’ve been working on recurring consulting gigs (that’s multiple – with an ’s’) with another company because of a referral from someone that I met in real life, but here’s the kicker – I found out about the opportunity because she posted it on Twitter, and I was the only person that responded to the gig.

Recently a high school friend contacted me on Facebook to help her company with their online marketing. We’re in negotiations right now to work out a long term engagement.

All I did to get this business was stay in touch with people that I find interesting, send cool content from the Web out to my network, and help them out when they asked questions. It’s so easy that I’m a little surprised when people say that social media doesn’t generate revenue.

One way to be Awesome? Be as engaged online as that Beagle was at the park – people will notice.

Sometimes in my consulting work I partner with copy writers. Most copy writers are very good at writing, but don’t know a ton about SEO, so they ask me to help them know how to incorporate keywords into their articles. As part of that, here’s a run-down of what the difference between Title, h1, and h2 tags are.

Title, h1 and h2 tags make your article

H1 and h2 tags are, for all intents and purposes, the sub-headings of articles. h1 and h2 are how computers label the sub-headings for the search engine robots, so that the robots know what the article is about in a quick, efficient manner.

So, in a well-constructed article, you have three kinds of ‘tags:’

Title – The title of the article. This should include keywords, but should also be written so that people will find it interesting.
h1 – The first sub-heading. This is often just a repeat of the title, with perhaps a slightly different way of saying it.
h2, h3, h4, etc – The second and subsequent sub-headings. These headings also include the keywords that you are trying to target, but are usually written as a heading to a section of the article. It’s usually not helpful to go beyond an h2 or h3.

You can see an example of what I mean here:

http://www.theabundantartist.com/confidence-key-to-selling-art/

In this article, the title has the word confidence, as do the two sub-titles. If you bring up the page and look at the code (CTRL + U in Firefox), you’ll see the following tags:

<title>Confidence: The Key to Selling Art (or Anything Else) — The Abundant Artist </title>

You’ll notice that this is what shows up at the top of the web browser.

<h1 class="entry-title">Confidence: The Key to Selling Art (or Anything Else)</h1>

This is the title of the article itself, and leaves off the the title of the website. This is the standard practice.

<h2>Confidence Opens Doors</h2>

This is the sub-title about halfway down the article. The word confidence is still there.

You’ll  notice that this article shows up #2 in a Google Search “confidence in selling art.” I didn’t do anything with this article besides write some strong title tags – no sneaky SEO tricks, no link-building – just carefully worded title and sub-titles.

Title, h1 and h2 won’t rank for everything

As a side note, I should mention that while Title tags, h1, and h2 tags will help you a lot, they’re just one element of SEO. While that article does rank for “confidence in selling art,” there is very little search volume for a phrase like that. It’s easy to rank for – more competitive terms require a lot more effort.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Finally, those Anthropology/Theatre/History degrees are really going to start paying off!

The AimClear blog just posted a theoretical job description of what will be the next round of really interesting jobs. Since I’m right in the middle of publishing a series on how to introduce social media into your organization, I thought that posting my thoughts on this position would be highly appropriate.

I met Marty Weintraub at Searchfest in early 2010. He’s a really sharp guy and his post explains pretty clearly a thing that I’ve been telling people for a while – creative thinkers with really strong soft skills are the new hot commodity. Sure a basic level of technical knowledge is necessary to play with HTML, CSS, and various graphic software, but the thing that corporations are going to have to start paying for…that’s the soft skills (no less than Seth Godin agrees with me – check out his latest book, Linchpin).

As commenter John K points out, this is going to be a position that will have to report directly to the C-Suite. No interns or entry level employees. Got to have someone smart, with some serious marketing experience.

While John makes a serious point about a spokesperson being able to seriously affect a company’s stock and brand, it’s a position that large companies can’t afford to not have. As people become more comfortable doing their due diligence online, companies that don’t have people managing their community will be in serious trouble.

The thing that I find really challenging from the corporation’s standpoint, is what happens to the networks these people build up when they leave a company? People who are good at this kind of job are going to get lots of offers for consulting gigs, other companies are going to try to lure them away, and when they leave, they will take at least a portion of their network with them. The age of personal branding is here. It’ll be interesting to see how companies balance the need for this position with the reality that they can’t build walls around their networks.

In the last blog post I discussed why you need social media in your business and provided tons of references that show value.

Now I want to talk about how to pitch social media to the people in your business that make the decisions. If you’re the owner of the business, then skip this part and go to “How to Pitch Social Media to Your Employees.”

Pitching Social Media to the Boss.

Yes, you need to pitch the idea. No, you shouldn’t just do it and then show them what you did. You’re messing with the company’s brand without them knowing. People don’t like that, even if it goes well. If it doesn’t go well, you can pretty much go pack your desk.

Also, if you are several levels below top management, you need to understand that this has to go in front of the executives. For small businesses, this is going to be the owner. For bigger companies, it might be a Corporate Marketing Officer or the head of a division.

Get the initial buy-in for a presentation. You need to get some time with the top brass. I would never recommend presenting to your immediate supervisor and then letting them take it to the boss. Give them an overview of what you’re going to present, but save the big presentation for the Boss.

Focus on the Goal. The goal of every business is, at least in part, to make money. Your pitch should revolve around making money in social media. How does it help the business do that better than what you’re already doing? (Hints: bringing in leads, generating attention, closing sales, building a list, generating good will, product research, customer service)

Cover the key steps to any successful social media campaign. I like the way that Groundswell defines them. Listen to what’s being said. Engage with your customers and potential customers. Empower your fans to talk about you more. Measure the results constantly & respond to what the numbers are telling you.

Think of possible objections. You know your organization. What are their limitations on listening to customers? Does the company have a culture of openness? Are they cutting edge in their marketing tactics? Do they openly talk about numbers and accountability to those numbers in business? Make a list of all the objections you can think of and then figure out ways to proactively suggest solutions to these objections inside of your presentation.

Take what you can get. Many times you can lay out a grand plan for a social media campaign and the Boss will only take part of it. That’s okay. Prove the value of an exploratory plan and you’ll get more.

Pitching Social Media to Your Employees

Obviously you can just lay down the law and tell your employees to start ‘doing’ social media. But you wouldn’t do that without a little understanding first, right?

Talk to your employees. Find out who is using Facebook, Twitter, or other social media already. If that person is someone with some marketing expertise, then you’re in luck. That person should head up your social media efforts.

If your person with social media person is someone outside of marketing, then a good strategy is to pair them with someone in your marketing or PR departments and have them work together. Jack Welch, CEO of GE, famously ordered 600 managers to find people further down the ranks to mentor them on current trends.

If you don’t have anyone on staff who is already an enthusiastic social media user then you’ll have to educate your team on the value of social media a little bit and figure out best practices. This might be a good time to bring in a professional. DON’T just hire a young intern to do your social media. You’re talking about your reputation here – and you want that overseen by someone you trust.

In the next post, I’ll go into more detail about who should be involved in social media in your company – and who you might need to bring in from the outside.

If I hear one more story about how a business owner thinks that they aren’t sure of whether or not social media is important, I think I might quit, move back to my hometown, and get a job at the Purple Turtle. If I hear one more story about a social media ‘expert’ who tries to help a client ‘do’ social media, only to screw it up and end up getting the company Punk’d (thank you @aplusk), I might decide to start pulling some pranks of my own.

Social Media Experts (I’m coming for you!)

At this point plenty of people have weighed in on the fact that there are no social media experts. There are some people who are very, very good. Some people who are seen as leading voices. The problem, of course, is that there are hundreds of business owners who are like, “Crap! This social media thing is huge! What do I do?” They need help. That’s Okay. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to share how I would start in social media if I had to start over. I’ve gone through this process a couple of times with different companies and it has worked out (so far).

First Up: “Doing” Social Media

First of all, the term ‘doing social media’ has got to go. That’s not what you’re doing. It’s what you’re using. What you’re doing is engaging with customers, listening to people, learning to communicate better – you’re learning the building blocks for better marketing.

You need your customers to like you.

The first step in bringing social media into your company is knowing why you need it. This has been covered by dozens of experts. If you need an infographic or a video to demonstrate why you need social media, go ahead and go find them. I’ll wait while you spend hours doing more research.

Done? Good.

What it really comes down to is this:

The web has made it so easy to get a recommendation from a friend that all that matters is that there’s someone (hopefully lots of someones) who is talking nice about you on the Web.

This is why Yelp has surpassed 30 Million unique visits per month. It’s why Facebook sends more news traffic than Google News. Lest you think Search is king, consider this: Google incorporates results from your social circle into the bottom of your search results, and real-time Tweets and news stories right in the search results for certain topics.

What’s more, it’s only going to get bigger. With the advent of the Facebook Like button, there are now 450 million (and counting) ‘Likers‘ running around the Web recommending people’s content.

So, if you are thinking of ‘doing’ social media, then please don’t delay. You’re already behind.

Next post, I’ll talk about how to pitch social media to your CEO/Business Owner/Boss. Of course, if you’re the business owner, you’ll be interested in knowing how to pitch social media to your staff – and see who on your staff needs to be involved!

Fast Company has this new article on Content Strategists. The basic gist is that companies who aren’t aware of the link economy or how content marketing works, then they are going to be hurting themselves, big time.

While working this morning I was talking to a chap at the local coffee shop who mentioned that his company, a very large manufacturing and textiles corporation, is hurting quite a lot. Their marketing hasn’t changed in ten years. They keep doing the same stuff over and over. They need a content strategist.

Companies that can’t be nimble, quick to push out fresh, interesting, and relevant content about themselves, their products, or their people are going to continue to bleed mindshare and market share to smaller companies that understand the new paradigm that is our world. These small companies act as content strategists.

I won’t even call it Web 2.0 or New Media anymore. It’s just the way that things are. The fact that companies need someone who can tell them how to publish content is such a neat opportunity for people like myself (a content strategist), and other web-savvy marketers content strategists.

The thing is, it’s not all that difficult to do – companies are just scared to do it. They’re scared they’ll say the wrong thing, scared they’ll make themselves look bad, scared they won’t have control. Well, operating from a place of fear never helped anyone.

All you need is someone who has the political pull within your organization to make real change happen. If that person gets on board with a content marketing strategy, you can change the face of your company fairly quickly, and fairly permanently. That person has to be empowered, however, and that person must understand the way the web works.

Last night I was writing a blog post on TheAbundantArtist.com. When I was done writing the post I accidentally hit publish instead of pushing the time out for the next morning. When I noticed it, about five minutes had gone by. I unpublished, moved the time, and moved on to another project.

Later I was checking rankings for the site and I came across this.

That text that I circled? That’s from that blog post that was online for about five minutes, which I published this morning. Oh, and the date of Mar 19, 2010? That text does not live on the page with that date.

What does this mean? It could be several things.

1. It was a fluke. This seems likely to me, though I’d love to hear other SEO’s thoughts.

2. Google has me bookmarked to index anytime I change anything – I kinda doubt it.

3. Google followed a tweet that led to my site at just the right time. Brent Payne pointed out that Google is doing some strange stuff with Twitter.

4. Google indexes websites a LOT faster than people realize. There are (still) companies out there that make money ’submitting’ you to search engines. There’s no need for this.

Thoughts?

]]> http://www.coryhuff.com/crazy-fast-indexing/feed 2 http://www.coryhuff.com/advertising-to-the-modern-man http://www.coryhuff.com/advertising-to-the-modern-man#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:00:24 +0000 Cory Huff http://www.coryhuff.com/?p=222

I don’t know exactly what happened in the last few months, but I’ve been reading a lot of chatter from various male bloggers that I admire. We’re getting tired of the ridiculous advertising pushed on the American man. Perhaps it was the Superbowl ads and their pandering to neanderthal men.

How many men are there that are just sick and tired of it? We are MEN, not beer swilling, breast staring buffoons who have been whipped into submission by our nagging wives. Most of us are intelligent, capable, loving husbands and fathers (except me – I’m not a father). Why do these ads not target our demographic?

Are you one of those guys that agrees with me? In the last month I’ve had conversations with several of them. I’d love to hear your agreement in the comments.

Brett McKay from Art of Manliness told me that he’s focusing on working with small advertisers who are responsive to the interests of more enlightened men (read: most of us).

Ben Martin from The Father Life told me he has reams of data showing that men are more interested in advertisements that don’t make men look dumb.

I recently read this post from Natural Papa where he talks about the need to focus on the good things men are doing.

I know Tyler Wainright from Building Camelot agrees with me.

So here, the question:

What the heck are we going to do about it? Is there an organization that we can all join to help advertisers wake up? Do we form our own?

The only way that these companies are going to change is if we make if financially feasible for them to do so. Why don’t we all just raise a big stink? How about something like a Blog Carnival about advertising to men and what modern men are now (and what we’re not)?

What do you think guys? (this post was cross-posted at AGoodHusband.net)

I keep a folder on my desktop full of hilarious screenshots. I’m posting some of the best, sometimes inadvertant, advertisements, announcements, and incongruous images from that folder.

To the left here is a Geico ad on Facebook, aimed at the fact that I am Mormon. Pretty much left me speechless.

This next one is a screenshot from Amazon. *Sings* One of these things is not like the other…

and, finally, for today, is an insert from one of my very favorite Web cartoons, Savage Chickens. Tell me you’ve never felt this way before.

image by Ernst Vikne

Some of you come to me after trying to launch a new blog, or signing up for Twitter. You know that everyone’s talking about it like it’s some great thing, but you’re not seeing results. I’ll ask how you were using the tools, and I usually get something like, “I was sending out timed daily updates to let everyone know what was going on with my business.”

That’s usually when I put my put my hand over the phone, grind my teeth, and heave a huge sigh. Then I put on a smile and ask you to continue.

I’m grinding my teeth because you’re treating Twitter & blogging like you would treat TV, radio, or the newspaper. You set a message and forget about it, only counting whether or not you got leads from it. The problem, of course, is that social media doesn’t work that way.

It’s not about you anymore. Not that it ever really was.

The thing you have to realize is that your customers have a million options. You’re not the only service provider out there, and even if you are, they can probably get by with someone who does what you do on the side. They don’t care about your message, they only care about what they want – and that’s why using social media is important. You can use social media to get a strong understanding of what your customers want, where they want it, and how they look for it. It’s like doing surveys, but cheaper and it updates in real time.

If you understand what your customers are looking for, then you can formulate a relationship with them, and creating a relationship is far more powerful than pitching a sale.

Jeremiah Owyang shared this set of slides about how social media should be engaged in this way, with a great case study on how to engage mothers.

I maintain that social media is the best thing that ever happened to artists, startups, and unique businesses. Without a ton of capital you can engage with an audience who has a need or desire for what you want, and build tremendous word-of-mouth advertising.

If you’d like to work with me to engage with people in social media and turn them into clients, visit this page.

I’d like to hear about your experiences. What successes (or failures) have you had in social media?