Like many people I use a variety of social tools including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  This success story started on Twitter, moved to Facebook and ended on LinkedIn.  It would seem that you need to use more than one tool for maximum effect.   The end result for me was a small contract to help someone merge two domains without losing ranking.  At first I noticed that someone was retweeting some of my posts.   I sent a thank you tweet here and there.  It continued like that for a while then one day I posted a slightly more personal comment about a rock band that I liked.   This generated a response from my follower.  We’d been interacting for a while and we clearly shared the same taste in music so I added this follower to my Facebook account.   Our post, counter-post continued there until I noticed a plea for help.   I offered my assistance and we started working together.   The process of landing the gig was very short as we’d already built up trust and a rapport over social media.   Subsequent to the conclusion of the work the client posted a recommendation on Linked In further reinforcing the value of social media.

The second success story does not have a sales component but it does demonstrate the ability to use social media to establish credibility and domain expertise.   A couple of years ago Garmin decided to launch a service that competed head to head with a small company located in Seattle called Groundspeak.   I already had a blog about geocaching and would post to it from time to time.  One of my readers tipped me off to the impending launch of Garmin’s new site before it was launched.   My site was one of the few that had early knowledge of the launch.   I used Linked In to find a contact at Garmin so that I could verify that they were going to launch the site.  It was confirmed and I started writing more about it and my audience grew.  It was a very hot topic in the geocaching community.   I was posting some of the better information which prompted a call from the PR person at Garmin.  Credibility generates more credibility and I was soon talking with one of the co-founders of Groundspeak.   I wasn’t really looking to sell anything to these companies so there wasn’t a real sales opportunity for me.   I was able to leverage the relationships for some help in a related business endeavour.

These are two short success stories that highlight the tangible benefits of social media.   You will get out of social media what you put in to it.  Remember to be social, interact and share.   That’s what it takes to get the most from social media.

I have used other products for this purpose in the past.   I really like Tribulant’s version for the easy to use configuration interface.    As WordPress plugin the Banner Rotator takes advantage of short codes for both the ad itself as well as the ad size.   This allows you to place a skyscraper short code on your page and then have all skyscraper ads show up there.   You might use this on category pages as an example.   This is definitely a hand feature.

Something about this plugin you might like is the ability to use text or html in the ad.  With this feature you can create a portion of your page that will change on every load.   This is a great way to change content on your site.

If you are thinking of placing banners on your site then I’d highly recommend this plugin from Tribulant.

One of the most important things I do is help my clients figure out the words a searcher is likely to enter when looking for what my client offers.  I often use the example of what we do with sensitive paper documents, most of us call that “paper shredding” but the people in the industry call it “document destruction”.    These phrases refer to the same thing but they results returned by Google are different.

The answers in my example are close but not exactly the same.  The difference gets larger for harder to describe problems.  Understanding what we mean versus what we say is a very complicated task.   Search engines have come a long way in helping us find the information we want but they aren’t good enough, yet.

I don’t disagree with what Danny Sullivan says in his blog – Could Google Play Jeopardy Like IBM’s Watson but I think he underestimates how Watson could impact search.  While they might be slightly biased the IBMers over at Writing for Digital wrote the 3 Ways Watson Manifests the Future of Search blog post.  Their post highlights how they think the Watson technology will help search.   I tend to agree with where they think it will go.

Watson isn’t about to replace Google anytime soon.  I do think the folks at Google and Bing will use this major PR win for IBM as incentive to make their search engines produce better results.

Getting the content out of Blogger wasn’t hard.  There is an export feature that allows you to easily export all of your posts.    The new blog runs on WordPress which has an import feature.   After a couple of steps the data was in the new blog but what about the URLs?

Redirecting URLs from Blogger is essentially impossible and Blogger wants it that way.  Blogger isn’t trying to lock you in to their platform.  They make it easy enough to move to another platform but what they don’t want you to do is redirect your URLs.  Why not?  The short answer is spammers.   Blogger is a free platform so ANYONE can use it.  By anyone I mean honourable and not so honourable people.   The spammers of the world will set up thousands of free blogs only to redirect them to some less scrupulous site.   It is for that reason that Blogger doesn’t want you redirecting URLs from Blogger.   This is a problem for real businesses that started using Blogger because it was easy.

My recommendation to you is that you don’t start out with a Blogger blog for your business.  At some point in the future you WILL regret your decision to use Blogger for your corporate blog.    If you really want to use the blogger platform then make sure you use a custom domain from the outset.   With a custom domain you have more options in the future on what to do with your URLs.

In talking to my client I explained what makes me different is my ability to think like a prospect.  I am not encumbered by the curse of knowledge that my clients seem to have when it comes to their business.  Many of my clients have forgotten what it’s like to not know that their product or service exists.  To deal with this I have use a process called Symptomeering.

Symptomeering (sym-to-meer-ing) is the process of identifying symptom based keywords that your target audience uses to explain the pain they are experiencing.  These symptom based keywords are then aligned with your offering in order to drive actionable traffic to your website.

The process looks like this:

Symptomeering Flow Diagram

I had one of the owners of WatServ as a subscriber to my SEO newsletter.  He liked the content and forwarded it to his partner.  This led to a first meeting and ultimately WatServ signing on as a client.   There new site is under construction.

In 2007 Facebook had over 600 million internal searches per month.  According to Comscore and others Facebook has doubled in unique visits from this time in 2009.   Facebook is clearly a primary destination for many.   How are you taking advantage of people that are searching on Facebook?

YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social sites also have their own search engines.  Yes, some of the content from these sites can be found in the major search engines but do you want to rely on them to expose your content?   What if a visitor never goes to the search engine but rather uses the internal search engines?

In real estate the sales adage is: location, location, location.  This can also be applied to search marketing.  You must be found where people are searching.  You can’t tell some where to search.  All you can do is ensure they find you wherever they search.

Mobile Subscribers:

• Rogers 8.6 million
• Bell Mobility 6.8 million
• Telus 6.6 million

Rogers reports that 35% of its subscribers are using smart phones.  Let’s assume that this is the same percentage across all providers.  That’s 7.7 million smart phone subscribers, in Canada alone.  

When was the last time you tried to view your corporate website on a smart phone?

At the very least you should make it easy for someone to find your contact information when they are using a hand-held device.  Treat your webpages like letterhead, put your phone number on every page.

LinkedIn has a large audience of over 70,000 users.   Your audience is probably looking for you there.  It is also a great place for you to do basic background research on companies and individuals.  Here are 5 tips to get your research going.  LinkedIn provides free and paid services.  The free services will meet most of your needs.  The advanced service is for power users for people in sales, marketing and recruiting.

UPDATE

It looks like I’ve successfully ranked my experimental site for mechanical paper fastener at #2 on Google within 30 days of launch.  Now that the site ranks well what does that mean for traffic?  It has translated into 6 visit in the last 30 days.

I set up this experiment to highlight the fact that ranking high isn’t in and of itself a goal of my search marketing efforts.  My goal is to get you qualified traffic that will lead to a conversion.