Web New Point 0

Reputation Management Basics

2010-03-10T15:03:00.005-06:00

Regardless of how aggressively you might be trying to launch yourself or your company into the realm of social media, and even if you are more comfortable hiding in the anonymous shadows of the Internet, everyone should give some attention to managing their online reputation.

What does this actually mean? Well, think about first impressions. Sometimes, before you've even had an opportunity to define yourself to a new acquaintance, someone is talking about you beforehand (are your ears burning?). It's important to understand that we all have a mutual acquaintance who is constantly blathering on about us to anyone who will listen. It's our good friend Google.

Do a vanity search in Google on your own name. You might want to put it in quotes, or add the city you live/work in to help Google weed out all the other people with your (or your company's) name who aren't you. How do the page one results look? Is Google telling an accurate story about you? Are the web pages that Google lists presenting you in the best possible light?

If you have never done this sort of search before, you may be in for a shock. Google is going to do an awfully good job of finding every scrap of content associated to the phrase you searched. Are you finding "the real you" showing up at the top of the results? Perhaps you're seeing some links to comments you placed on a message board five years ago. Or maybe you are seeing a slightly inaccurate version of you, or perhaps someone who isn't you at all but leaves that distinction a bit hard to discern. Whatever you find, this is the first impression you are leaving when anyone (a prospective employer, client, business partner, etc..) does a little digging on you.

Let's assume that the results you see leave some room for improvement on Google's first page of results. What can you do? And what if there is something that you really wish would go away? How can you get rid of it?

Well, you aren't going to have much luck removing a webpage result from Google's algorithm unless you can reach out to the party responsible for that page and get them to take it down. More likely, your best bet will be to create as many opportunities for Google to see the real you, so the not so "real" stuff sinks from view.

Here's what you can do. Begin by creating accurate profiles about you and/or your company on social sites that Google trusts. Once you have created these, Google will likely start presenting them as its top results for searches about you.

Here is a short list of places where you should absolutely tell your story, and Google loves each of them:

Facebook – Seriously. Regardless of your opinion on the Facebook fad, if you don't have an account there you may as well create one if for no other reason than to give Google something accurate to place as the number one result for a you-specific search. Google's algorithm likes Facebook profiles that much. And you don't have to start "friending" anyone. Just create your profile and make sure your settings allow the search engines to find your page. You'll easily figure this out in your account settings.

You might also want to create a Facebook Fan Page – Google loves these too, and while you might typically think they are intended for businesses, plenty of people have fan pages. They rank very well. You can make one for yourself and it will show up right along with your own profile.

Got a blog? Get it listed in Facebook's NetworkedBlogs directory. That Facebook page can rank too.

LinkedIn – Don't have a Facebook account? Chances are then that your LinkedIn profile is showing up as Google's top result. Don't have a LinkedIn profile? Stop reading this and go get that taken care of right away. This goes for your company as well. Make sure you have built a company profile in LinkedIn and that every employee of the company (all should be in LinkedIn too) is correctly connected to that profile.

Your Website – If you have a site and can make use of its "About Us" section make sure you have an accurate and robust page about you. Google might not hold your webpage in as high esteem as it does Facebook and LinkedIn (which is why you need to leverage those platforms), but your website is a logical place to feature correct information about yourself.

Google Profile – Google allows you to create a profile connected to your Google account. This is handy on a number of levels, not the least of which is that your Google profile will tend to always be placed as the bottommost entry on the first page of search results in those you-specific searches.

There are lots of sites online where you can publish profile content about yourself. To varying degrees these profile pages will also tend to rank well for you in Google. Do a little digging and you're sure to find enough outposts for your personal/professional content that Google will soon be delivering the version of your story that you'd like it to tell. You never know who's out there asking the search engines what they know about you.

Photo by Fraser Johnson

Don't Waste A Drop Of Your Digital Assets

2010-02-18T16:04:00.005-06:00

Making an online name for yourself requires a lot of effort. If you're going to do a good job of it, much of that effort will center around content production. Being able to produce content is no small feat. It intimidates companies looking to launch a bold new web face, and it plagues companies struggling to continue the effort long after an initial site is launched.

Don't make it harder on yourself than it has to be. Don't squander the ability you have to leverage and repurpose any and all forms of content you might have on hand. It is quite possible that you have a library of digital assets that are being under-utilized at this very moment. Items such as product photos, videos, whitepapers, sales collateral, and presentation material can all play a strategic role in placing your company in front of an online audience.

Here are some easy-to-implement steps that can help you make the best use of all the digital content you have on hand.

Images
This is a crucial content type that can boost your ability to reach an audience. Applying good SEO tactics to all of your online images can help them rank and lead people deeper into your site.

Make sure search engines can reach the directory level where your images are stored, and be sure to use ALT tags to name your images with descriptive titles (not some numbering system you use to catalog them in a folder).

Also, make use of images across your social media profiles. You might want to create a robust gallery of your images in Flickr or Photobucket (or both). Any way that you can push your visual content out will aid in bringing visitors in.

Video
Do you have video content living a sheltered life on your site? Product demos? How-to's? Company profiles? You should give serious consideration to leveraging this content across a myriad of video portals, not the least of which is YouTube, currently the world's second largest search engine.

Presentations and other collateral
Do you have a library full of PDFs, Whitepapers, Case Studies, and Sales Presentations? These should reside somewhere on your website as optimized content. Plus you might consider self-syndicating some of your favorites via social platforms like SlideShare. This is a great way to allow your already produced content to achieve a second wind while spreading your reputation even further across the Internet.

Not only can your digital assets find a life of their own across niche search engines and social platforms, but now that traditional search engines are all shifting to a more universal presentation which includes ranking everything from web pages to videos to social media statuses, you owe it to yourself to make sure you are getting your fingers in as many different communication media as possible – many of which you might already have waiting in the wings to take the stage.

Web Marketing To Company Goals

2010-01-07T10:28:00.003-06:00

For years now most people would agree that the Internet is here to stay. It’s not a fad. It has legitimately redefined the way people communicate and how companies advertise. Yet many small-to-medium businesses remain completely disconnected from knowing how to effectively approach the web as a marketing vehicle.

Even to this day, many businesses view the Internet like a planet in some foreign universe where the laws of physics are completely different from our own. They wrongly impose a distinction between "running their business" and "dealing with the Internet." And it is precisely this assumed separation that stymies so many companies in figuring out their approach at the most basic levels.

Almost without question all small-medium businesses now accept the Internet as a necessary challenge. Yet many companies continue to miss the forest for the trees. I’ve said it before, and it keeps ringing true the more I help clients develop their Internet strategies: The devil is most assuredly in the details. All too often, businesses inadvertently leapfrog themselves into the thick of branches, leaves, and bramble, without giving any attention to what tree they are standing under, or where on the map this forest even stands.

It’s not that the details aren’t important—we must tend them in order to grow and refine tactics. But a business must always be answering more broad questions when it decides where to forge ahead, when to cut, and what to cultivate. How does the current decision serve the ultimate strategic goal of the company? Tying Internet strategy to the foundational measures of a company itself is often missed completely when approaching the online space.

There is, however, a fundamental aspect of Internet marketing that ties the core goals of a business to its online efforts. Use it, and it can clear confusion and guide decisions:

Hold Your Internet Strategy Accountable.

It’s not enough to re-build a website on the desire to improve your company’s image. You must develop an approach which will foster the measurement of this goal as it relates to the metrics your company uses to track success overall. How will your online efforts be tied back to serving the company’s bottom line?

To figure this out, start with one question: Six to twelve months from now, how are you going to know if your Internet strategy is working? The answer to that question reveals exactly which slivers of data will be meaningful to you, and can guide your content development and user path architecture.

Manage your web strategy like you would an employee in your company. Set goals, brainstorm tactics, and don’t be afraid to change direction when needed. Business on the Internet is deeply intertwined with the business most people think stands so separately from it. It follows and responds to the same guideposts. Imposing accountability is a key step in succeeding online, and it can clear the misconception that the Internet is happening on another planet.

Facing Social Media ROI

2009-12-17T12:35:00.004-06:00

Are you struggling to find ways to justify social media marketing? Do you dread having to find a way to respond to business leadership as they demand to see a direct correlation between all this Twitter/Facebook hocus pocus and an actual return on investment? Do you wish that they could just see the inherent value that you know is there--the power of building human relationships with your prospects, the strength in cultivating an audience around your brand, the ability to demonstrate your company's thought leadership to the world? Why don't the bean counters appreciate the wonder and opportunity that social media represents for what it is, and leave it at that? The allure alone shows enough potential in social media to justify entire rooms full of practitioners forging ahead on the frontline of the socialsphere, right?

Wrong. In fact, those bean counting business leaders have it absolutely right. That they are concentrating on the bottom line is not an indication that they don't "get" social media. On the contrary, many absolutely see the potential and the need to advance into the space. But they are also rightly looking to hold social media accountable as a sound business practice. You shouldn't need much convincing that if you want to successfully implement social media for a company, you had better get yourself firmly on the side of those business leaders who pay the bills.

Even if you do manage to razzle-dazzle them with what they perceive as smoke and mirrors enough to let you get started, you are only digging a hole for yourself when the unavoidable happens. No matter if it's a big or small company, eventually the entire social media effort is going to have to be equated as a line item on someone's P&L (Profit and Loss) sheet. You had better take steps to make sure social media is seen as a legitimate cost center. Your ability to see social media through the eyes of your boss will actually help you tremendously.

It becomes your challenge to walk the line between the difficult to measure human components of social media and the financial realities of business. On one side you have the intangible wins that slowly grow over time as you cultivate your web presence. These are the true core building blocks of social media which come from "doing it right." On the other side you have the reality that you are actually doing this entire thing for gains that help your company grow. And in business, growth is going to end up as a trend line on a spreadsheet. Get comfortable with that. It's okay.

So now the question is "How?" How can we force the square peg of social media into the very round hole of business ROI? There are countless paths to doing this, but let's look at one that is staring us in the face. Let's appreciate social media for something it undeniably is--a critical Search Engine Optimization element.

With universal search now an implicit component in all the major engines, their ability to serve up a broad result set of authoritative content is greatly enhanced. Now the strides you take into the multimedia dimension of content creation (most all of which is social media driven) can increase traffic to your web presence all the more.

You probably already track the traffic coming to your site and evaluate the results of that traffic whether by cost per lead or some other conversion metric. This gives you an immediate benchmark over which social media can be layered. At the very least, without having to fashion some entirely new measurement dashboard, you can start tracking social media's impact on generating quality traffic to your site. A strong twitter account could easily increase targeted deep-linked traffic into a site by a significant percentage. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Other content types and platforms can also influence the volume of traffic you already measure. And where traffic is being tied to ROI (how can it not be?), it gives you a legitimate starting point for evaluating social media's impact on your cost of conversion.

A twelve month goal to see if social media can increase web traffic while potentially driving down the cost per conversion is a legitimate reality. In your business leader's eyes, this probably fits into a known metric and takes a bit of the mystery out of social media too.

There are numerous ways to tie social media into the established measuring sticks at play in any company. SEO is just one of them. The fact is this: there is every reason to see social media marketing from a business perspective. It doesn't change the fact that doing "good" social media marketing still requires authenticity, human dialogue, and genuine interaction. Doing those well represents a whole slew of challenges in and of themselves. The bigger challenge is in knowing how to serve both sides of the measuring stick while never letting the ball drop on either side.

Trouble Ahead With Real-Time Search

2009-12-08T12:43:00.007-06:00

Google announced the roll out of real-time search results into its algorithm yesterday, solidifying what most anyone should understand by now—real-time content is a commodity and is here to stay. Now that Google has joined the ranks of search engines succumbing to the obvious shift in user intent, the debate is over and we can get down to planning just how we will monetize this new facet of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). How to SEO for it? How to advertise within it? And how to potentially turn everyone off on these results for good.

I'm afraid that with real-time results finally making it into the "big leagues," traditional search marketing may steamroll over this authentic user-generated content only to devalue it completely out of authenticity. Authentic user-generated content has turned the search engine world on its ear. Now the engines are combating this by layering these elements into their results. This may be a dangerous day for all parties concerned, and I feel the potential to kick the user experience in the shins is as strong as the excitement surrounding a significantly stellar transformation of the search space.

But rather than brooding over the cloudy visions within the crystal ball of search monetization and the potential to crush authenticity, something far more immediate seems to be ringing a warning bell in my ears—the complete disconnect between getting authoritative, trustworthy results from a search engine along side the newest, freshest stream of conscious flowing out of the gigantic mouth of social media.

While I am all for real-time search results and their ability to keep me up to date on current events and trends, there seems little means for a search engine to evaluate the good, bad, or indifferent when deciding which particular blip of micro-blog to serve me on its page one results. And I have little interest in simply seeing the most recent real-time "anything" being said on anything I might search. There isn't any metric available to adequately evaluate the "authority" of a micro-blogging twitter user. Don't be fooled. It isn't the number of followers. It isn't the balance of followers to follow-ees. And it isn't even the ratio of user lists you show up on. Real-time search results are pretty much just that—the latest spew out of the cloud of "current" content. I'm less interested in the "most current" stream and more in the "most valuable" current stream. Finding that subset takes some significant self-filtering in the search space.

Searchers segment themselves nicely between those doing research, those doing commercial buyer activities, and those looking for the latest news. Unfortunately, when I search "Britney Spears" it isn't really clear to the engine which of those three searchers I am. Is the solution to serve me everything? I see myself needing some massive lever I can flip before doing a search that states my intent to the engine before I hit search. That way I don't have to suffer through those pockets of content for which I have no interest.

Yes, it's cool that engines are now going to give me a slice of photos, videos, tweets, products, web pages, and blog posts whenever I go surfing, but is an all-in-one solution SERP really the best SERP I could ask for? I doubt it. I don't discount that this is a major upgrade. Ranking web pages alone is far from a complete user experience picture. The engines' evolution provides confirmation that there is value in diversifying the results page. But might it be becoming too homogenized at the same time?

Might real-time search be truly valuable only when I can have it show me results from my circle of trusted content sources? As it stands, while exposure to the very most recent chatter about worldly subjects is useful, I'm not sure it is nearly filtered enough for my page one results on a search engine, at least not all the time. User generated content is too susceptible to being over run with unqualified rambling. It's already impossible to sift through my own twitter network stream. Imagine when search results are showing the entire world's stream on page one all the time. Ugh.

2010 is going to be a very interesting year in Search Marketing to be sure.

The ABBs of Social Media - Always Be Branding

2009-12-02T11:44:00.004-06:00

One of the oldest acronyms in the sales industry is ABC (Always Be Closing). It's an easy mantra-like reminder that everything you do in a sales relationship comes down to closing the deal. For businesses (and individuals too) in the social media space there is a similar acronym to be followed: ABB (Always Be Branding). It's a softer version than the sales-minded mantra, but no less critical. If you forget this one, you could be risking more than losing a single deal.

Two things the Internet doesn't do: sleep or forget. If you and your company are to successfully develop a web presence, these are two factors you must contend with regularly. As you develop content, know that what you create is always going to be out there, and will forever make up the foundation of your online reputation. So it is important to always consider what you do, what you say and how you say it. Social media is continually shining something of a spotlight on your professional appearance, like the paparazzi lurking behind every parked car and tree waiting to snap a picture. Your social network is always watching.

While authenticity is a key to creating an effective social media voice, there is no denying that what you're doing every day is branding, plain and simple. Through your authenticity you are promoting yourself and your company. However, the social media "sell" is a different beast than that of the traditional sales environment. After all, your win in social media comes from being regarded as a valuable content asset—being someone that others appreciate for the added value you give.

The thing to remember is that this is happening whether you're thinking of it or not. So you'll need to take some precautionary measures to prevent missteps. The best way to accomplish this is by first establishing a content strategy. Having a plan will help you stay on course, and it need not take an inordinate amount of effort to create.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1—Adhere to a short list of goals. As you create any outbound content, make sure it is serving the grand vision of your efforts. This could be to build product awareness, to demonstrate expertise, to improve customer service relations, or any other key driver to your efforts. Before you hit the "publish" button make sure the content is serving your objectives in some way. This ought not get in the way of your producing a conversational rapport with your audience, but rather, ensure that this direct chit-chat doesn't veer off course.

2—Plan for the future. Without getting bogged down so much that it prevents creativity, take a bit of time to structure your efforts from day to day, or week to week. Based on your goals you should be able to decide on the subject matter of your next half dozen blog posts. You can also let your goals drive your decisions to participate in certain forums or groups.

3—Limit the cooks in the kitchen. As best you can, try to control your content outlets to as few people as possible. Make sure these people fully grasp the overarching strategy. It is understandably different from organization to organization, but it will be most effective if the strategists are the actual content producers. In the cases where efforts are mounted on a larger scale, it will become critical to produce comprehensive guidelines that communicate the strategy to the team that is producing content and sets measures and check points to ensure that content stays focused.

Through it all, keep the ABB mantra running in your head. It will safeguard both your reputation and the authenticity with which you build it.

Tending Your Social Media Garden

2009-11-12T15:08:00.008-06:00

What is that deafening silence you hear? It’s probably what looks like the complete lack of results coming from the social media efforts you just launched. If you and your company have recently decided to plow into the world of Communitising you may be somewhat concerned by the complete absence of reciprocal energy flowing back your way.

There was no doubt a giant flurry of activity and excitement related to your entrance into the social media arena--studying the space, creating accounts, uploading logos, perhaps even revamping a website. Now that you are there, it may be dumbfounding how utterly under-appreciated you and your treasure trove of industry specific wisdom appears. But hang in there. The world of social media mimics the real word in ways that defy what you might commonly expect from any other sort of online media blitz. The thing to remember is that, like many things in life, developing a strong and beneficial social media presence takes time, patience, and continual attention.

Think of it like starting a garden. Everything you did up until the moment you started posting, blogging and tweeting was akin to all the prep that goes into planting a garden. You shop for seeds. You turn the soil. You add fertilizer. You plant everything. You put little markers down so you’ll know what springs up where. You water. And you wait. And you wait some more. Not to point out the obvious pun, but creating a potent web presence is very much like watching grass grow.

The most trying time comes immediately after you finish all the heavy lifting of starting the garden. You can’t see the seeds under the dirt germinating. You can’t see the little tendrils and sprouts. There is no window into the magic happening within each seed. You stare at the dirt and wonder if it just needs more water. It does. In fact, it needs a lot of water. So you have to keep at it. It will take days (weeks, really), but eventually many of the seeds will produce shoots emerging from the soil and you will gain confirmation that your garden has actually been growing this whole time.

There will be plenty to deal with as your social media plants start to mature. Plenty to measure, prune, and harvest. This garden can easily take a year or more to fully appreciate and quantify back into other parts of your business. For now, know that your instincts were dead on when you decided to plant in the first place.

Even if you feel like you are socializing in a vacuum, keep at it. Continue producing content related to your passion. Eventually it is this passionate content which will lead the community to you. The first days are the hardest days.

Trusting PageRank

2009-10-31T09:13:00.002-05:00

Earlier this week Google removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools. That’s the 0 to 10 scale you can also see in your Google Toolbar that reflects a page’s “link popularity,” or authority--an indicator Google believes is overvalued by practitioners of optimization.

This turn of events has caused a mighty stir in the SEO community and PageRank has received quite a bashing through it all. “Who needs it?” “Only losers rely on it.” “PageRank is for grandmas.” And, all the while folks continue to admit that PageRank is a critical measure in optimization just the same.

There’s no denying that PageRank is one of the quintessential book covers by which everyone judges a site. It’s not likely to disappear from the collective conscious any time soon. Why?

Whether we call it a critical line in every rank report or reduce it to a kindergarten toy, the PageRank stat is the quickest path of insight into the way Google tries to reflect the real world around us. It attempts to provide an algorithmic representation of how much we can trust the content we encounter on a given web page. It’s the Google algorithm’s goal to be a searcher’s valued guide to the online world. If Google thinks you’re the bees knees, them maybe I’m safe to think so too. The entire concept of Google’s search engine is to play this real life concierge. It has been a key component to the engine’s success in becoming the dominant engine of choice.

So, Google can say what they will, and call it PageRank today or something else tomorrow, the concept of ranking pages based on contextual trust and authority will never lose its resonance with the end user, be they regular searchers or SEO gurus. We like it because the concept fits our “real world” view and helps us make sense of what we find online. That successful merging of the online and real world demonstrates how important it is for businesses to succeed in communicating their own physical reputations into an accurate web presence. When the two are in sync, they begin to serve each other and benefit any marketing objective.

Social Media & Small Business - Game Over?

2009-10-10T13:05:00.003-05:00

I caught this study in Reuters this week stating “Small Business, social media not mixing.” A telephone poll was conducted for Citibank Small Business by GFK Roper from August 20-27 of a sample of 500 small businesses which concluded that social media was not catching on, nor being found all that useful in the small business sector.

Maria Veltre, executive vice president of Citi's Small Business segment was quoted in the piece:

"What this survey indicates to us is small businesses are very, very focused on running their business and on generating sales and managing their cash flow and doing the things that are really important, especially in these economic times," Veltre said. "I don't think quite yet the social media piece of it has proven to be as significant."

Beyond the fact that we could venture to say that these “really important” things are always the drivers for small businesses, I think the sentiment of the article is entirely off the mark. What the low numbers really highlight is nothing more than the natural evolution of small business on its way into another “new” internet marketing arena. Some small businesses *are* currently using social media to profitable ends. However, when it comes to online marketing adoption, the small business segment at large has always ridden the back end of the curve.

While spending my own time stoking the fires of Local Internet Marketing between 2003 and 2006 – which was heavily focused on helping small business owners buy into the benefits of smartly executed paid search marketing and local business data optimization – I found that small businesses were not able to “buy in” until a clear and easy path was laid before them – two things which don’t currently exist in the social media landscape at all (we’re not talking about how simple it is to create an account on Twitter here). Small business owners don’t often want to be guinea pigs. With small exception, they don’t have the bandwidth, or the disposable budget to be marketing trail blazers.

The industry has a long way to go when it comes to solving the equation of mass small business adoption into social media, and until it gets there we are likely to see a skewed opinion coming out of polls and research. We haven’t even figured out universally consistent tools, measures, ROI, or margins when it comes to all this stuff; this to say nothing of the need to develop a tangible message which resonates with small businesses across the board. All of these things were of critical importance as solution providers stepped in to successfully bring Search Engine Marketing to small businesses in scalable mass.

All of this is coming, but it could well be a year or two off before the communal mind of small business appreciates social media as a tangible and fundamental portion of their advertising efforts.

What's Old Is New Again

2009-10-04T11:54:00.002-05:00

Over the last two months I’ve had the extreme pleasure of consulting with a leading marketing firm based in the Chicago area, helping them craft, launch, and incorporate a full web strategy layer into their existing business model. The 15-year-old firm is meeting client demand to figure out everything web2.0 and help them take advantage where it can best serve marketing goals. In so doing, they are also taking a “practice what you preach” attitude which includes a full website redesign and social media rollout. Busy days, indeed.

Here on the pages of WebNewPoint0 I often make the point that dealing with the “new age” of Internet marketing need not be as overwhelming as it appears. Beyond the undeniable hurdles of being able to create content (gobs and gobs of it), much of doing good social media comes down to understanding where it is and isn’t a challenge. Failing to evaluate the nature of the challenge can leave folks paralyzed in the starting blocks. The more I help people wade in the water, the more I see this element playing a role.

Here’s what I find most intriguing through it all: Social media is far less a new thing than anyone might imagine. In the formative days of this medium everyone seems caught in the glow of “shiny object syndrome.” We gotta have it, and all at once we worry about how the heck we’re gonna use it. But beneath all the glow we are apt to soon discover social media’s “something new” impediments aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. There’s less standing in your way than you might think.

In reviewing and preparing a host of case studies for this new site it has become clear that the marketing tactics which have historically solved client challenges are the same core tactics everyone is touting as all the rage in social media. As it turns out, social media might not be so revolutionary. Oh, it’s a fabulous new playing field for marketers, to be sure. But the game hasn’t changed all that much.

Leveraging a company’s internal wisdom to generate a monthly publication that goes out to a client base hungry to understand the value of complex tools and services? Sounds like the same tactic you’d use to produce a blog today. Re-branding and developing a communication strategy aimed at gaining prominence in a competitive trade show environment? Sounds a lot like the process needed to develop a compelling and consistent web presence across multiple online portals in today’s ever-shifting landscape. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

People tend to look at social media and immediately feel left behind – like they have to go back to school and learn things all over again. But my guess is some of the best tacticians in social media have yet to recognize they are already far ahead of the curve, while they are mistakenly worried they will never be able to catch up.

The Eternal Web Page Question: Why?

2009-09-18T06:53:00.015-05:00

When it comes to websites and their pages, nothing saddens me more than to see a well designed web page that completely fails to divulge why it’s there. It could be a sparse yet highly compelling branding message. It could be a robust informative rundown of product features. It could be a pinpointed display of expertise within a niche industry. While handy for a viewer, none of it will matter to the site owner if the page doesn’t drive a desired action.

When I look at a web page the first question I am asking is “Why?” No doubt this comes from the fact that I find it difficult to take off my marketing hat when I’m surfing the net. But more often than not, I am asking this question when reviewing a client’s website in an effort to improve content strategy and marketing effectiveness. If I can’t quickly see why a page is up on the web at all, it’s a pretty fair assumption that the visitors to that page are not easily being driven to an action that means something tangible to the website’s business.

If you are going to produce a web page, you owe it to yourself to think beyond the page itself and consider what comes next. Why do you want people viewing this page in the first place?

While things can quickly become complex, there is much to be learned from even the most basic answers. In all cases, you want to make it easy for people to take the action you desire. Forcing a page to demonstrate why it is there will keep the overall site goals sharply in focus.

Some examples:

1 – The Phone Call: “I want visitors to my site to call me for more information or an appointment.”
Great. Is your phone number everywhere? In a prominent spot? Worked into the logo that runs atop ever page? Is it listed at the end of every page’s content a la “Call 800-555-5555 for more information.”? If getting your phone to ring is important, your web pages should make this fact abundantly clear by showing the phone number and never forcing anyone to hunt for that next step. It sounds simple, yet you'd be surprised by how many websites fail to connect this goal to the site's content strategy.

2 – The “Contact Us” Form: “I need leads. I want visitors to fill out my form.”
Gone are the days of the contact us page, my friends. Sure it still exists, but if you want your visitors to fill out your lead form at whatever instance the urge strikes them while surfing your site, don’t make them hunt down a contact us page. Consider putting a simple form on every page. Make it easy to find (upper right?). Ask for as little information as possible (name, e-mail address) realizing that the more info you require, the less likely someone is to fill out your form. People are both lazy and unwilling to give away more info than they have to. Play to those tendencies.

3 – Branding: “I want people to stay on my site and soak it all in.”
This is key to any blog or site that values the need to make it easy for visitors to stick around. Your navigation elements are critical. Be sure to link within your content to other pages of relevance. Create an easy to follow navigation bar, tag cloud, or drop down menu so people don’t have to hunt and peck for more content that interests them. The easier you make it for people to realize you have more interesting content beyond the page they are viewing, the more likely they will be to stay on your site and absorb the experience of everything you have to offer. Never leave someone dangling. If you have tons of information, you never want to let someone leave thinking, “I wish there was some more info here.”

These are just three examples. There are countless others, and they almost always play together in some fashion. Whether you are about to launch an entirely new site, or are scratching your head as to why people aren’t doing what you wish they would when you get them to your pages, make sure you always answer the question of why each page exists in the first place – to drive measurable action that helps you build business.

Tips To Avoid Wasting Time In Social Media

2009-09-02T12:36:00.003-05:00

Any time spent forging into the world of social media is best served by following a path. While tramping blindly through the social media forest might at least qualify you as a member of the community, your chances of reaching any sort of qualitative destination are slim. Without a clear plan, or map to refer back to, you run the risk of wasting a lot of effort.

Knowing how precious time is for any professional, the thought of squandering any of it makes that potential loss even more painful. In fact, knowing how much time to devote, and how best to spend that time, are primary concerns on the minds of business people I speak with in my consulting practice. No one wants to waste effort on something clearly so important.

There is no set prescription regarding a number of minutes per day or week you should spend in the social media space. But, as you do create time for this adventure, here are a few cornerstones on which to build the foundation of your experience.

One Step At A Time – Don’t try to do everything all at once. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogging, video – all of these can be worthwhile endeavors. But it is a sure-fire path to system overload if you attempt to push yourself into everything all at once. Consider your immediate marketing goals (and perhaps your mid- and long-term goals as well), and choose as few roads in as possible. Even if you decide only to do one thing for now, that’s better than attempting to make a splash into everything.

Leverage Content – Directly behind finding time to venture into social media, the creation of content (so much content!) is the next burning concern as one makes their way into the web 2.0 world. Consider that you might already have volumes of inspirational and repurpose-able content right at your feet. White papers? Case Studies? Presentation decks? Marketing research? Product and service descriptions? All of these can become the seeds of future blog posts and conversation points in micro-blogging and discussions online.

Plus, there’s no foul in referencing (linking back to) something you’ve read online while offering your informed opinion on the subject. Not every scrap of content you produce needs to be the game-changing, paradigm shift-inspiring Holy Grail of information that’s going to change your industry forever. Leveraging the content available to you can ease the pressure of having to fill a lot of empty white virtual paper.

Be Present Where Your Audience Gets Its Information – “If a tree falls in a forest…” Don’t make the mistake of delivering compelling and useful content in a venue where your audience hasn’t shown up. Blasting your messages across Facebook when your professional client base might be hanging out over on LinkIn is a wasteful mistake. Invest a bit of front end time to explore where your audience is before you pick the platforms you are going to exploit.

Control Message – In that moment of breath before you plow ahead with your social media “voice,” give some consideration to your messaging strategy. Is it your goal to be informational, instructive, promotional? Without considering the overarching plan to your message, it could become a bit fractured and disjointed. You’ll also find that planning a messaging strategy can help identify the sort of content you will come to produce. It will act as a guiding light.

Stay Open To Dialogue – At the end of the day, everything you do in social media is about facilitating an interaction with your audience. For business, social media is a two-way street of Communitising – marketing through communication. Be ready for people to interact with the content you produce (it’s a great measure of your success in the space), and be sure to respond back.

These are a few beacons that can help pave your way into successful social media marketing. Remember some of the core reasons you should be using social media in the first place: to listen, learn, respond, influence, and collaborate. Using these principles to evaluate your next step can insure that you are heading in the right direction.

Guest Article On Getting Up To Speed With Social Media

2009-08-25T07:23:00.004-05:00

I’ve contributed another guest article to ReelSEO.com. “Rounding The Social Media Learning Curve With YouTube” speaks to the way YouTube can help newcomers to Social Media realize they may know more than they think from day one.

Please stop over and check it out along with all the other useful content found at ReelSEO.com.

Surviving The Social Media Roller Coaster

2009-08-17T11:19:00.003-05:00

Wow. There’s nothing like a Monday morning in the world of Social Media. Firing up various dashboards, checking what’s trending, reading up on some news. It acts like an online manifestation of Attention Deficit Disorder – a million bits of information to absorb all at once as they fly by, all pulling your attention in every direction. Who needs coffee anymore? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Just as quickly as you think you’ve stumbled upon an eye-opening revelation or solved an impending crisis, you come to find that there is no hope of catching it all, and you’re hopelessly behind.

This negative impression can actually be your moment of enlightenment. Let it remind you that you aren’t supposed to scramble to take it all in. You are caught in a microcosmic example of one of Social Media’s biggest pitfalls: the thought that it’s about doing every little thing as fast as you can to achieve near-instant online marketing success. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

While no one will deny that you can’t reach any destination without taking all the little steps along the path to get there, remind yourself that social media is but one segment of the marketing approach which will help you succeed online. It isn’t where the gold is hiding – it’s just another tool for finding the gold. And as a tool, it only helps you construct your overall marketing machine.

Social media will not solve your marketing puzzle overnight, regardless of how much attention this wild new media darling receives. So don’t believe the hype, and don’t strap everything to this horse only to ride it into the ground. If you’re determined to reach a quick conclusion about whether social media can help your business, you’re likely to reach a negative one. You must give it time, and you must force yourself to take a measured approach as you integrate social media into everything else you do.

The importance of participating in the social media space can’t be understated. But like everything in life, balance is key. Resist the intoxicating draw of social media’s bells and whistles to trap you in a never ending cycle of lever pulling and dial adjustment. Plan a strategy and set your marketing machine down the path. Watch for ways that social media can inform the rest of your marketing initiatives. Use its statistics to inform and advise your overarching marketing agenda. This can be accomplished at many levels, even if simply by listening and taking note of where on the Internet your audience is gathering so you can plan how and where to engage with them.

Social media marketing requires time to work its way into your routine. Don’t be in a rush to see it solve the mysteries of the marketing universe. Expect it to open new windows into the way you approach your audience online, and don’t be surprised as it pays dividends that touch more than your bottom line.

Tired Of Social Media? Look Ahead To Web Presence Management

2009-08-13T08:43:00.006-05:00

Already people are sick of the phrase “Social Media.” Already it is becoming so over-used and over-hyped that its connotations suggest all the flash-in-the-pan uselessness of increasing hits and clicks to a website with no thought given to the quality of visitors the site receives, nor whether those visitors take any valuable action once there. Marketers and business owners alike are already growing weary of the social media craze.

But we’d be well advised not to miss the forest for the trees here. It could be useful to look a bit into the future of the Internet so we can begin appreciating social media for what it might be after the dust settles. We would do well to consider it two galaxies in the midst of colliding. Social Media and Search Engine Optimization are in the process of fusing into one singular future state: Web Presence Management.

Search engines are changing. The way we use search tools to find the content we seek is changing. While today this content is spread across countless platforms, eventually the Googles, Bings, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world will find a way to appease our wish to consolidate all the content we desire into an easy-to-digest stream. And the ability of businesses to reach their target audiences in this stream will come down to how they best manage all of the diverse platforms in which their content can be found, indexed, and served up in result sets. On our part, it will require Web Presence Management.

Web Presence Management is the future state of Search Engine Optimization, and it is where SEO and Social Media become one. We aren’t going to be optimizing for search engines anymore. Regardless of what new dashboard arrives or which new application rules the day we are going to be optimizing for the Internet itself. In the end, the core rules of SEO will continue to prevail as we look to position ourselves everywhere online. You will always need to give the engines (in whatever form they take) the ability to recognize you legitimately as the resource you are. Speak to them in their language, and allow them to reflect the “real world” in their result sets.

Today, when we talk about you ranking at the top of Google, the “you” in this statement is your website, or more accurately, your web pages. Tomorrow (and even today to some degree), it will no longer be about your website ranking, it will be your web presence. How you best optimize your presence will dictate how easily you are found.

Rather than optimization, I term this the management of web presence because optimization speaks a bit too much to the manipulation of elements which influence the algorithms. Web presence management reflects the more honest intention to make sure you are representing yourself online in a way that reflects the authentic nature of you and your business.

Come to see social media as the set of tools and content delivery mechanisms through which you can best articulate your real world value and position in the market (your Presence), and you will be well on the way to avoiding the distaste and distrust of all things "social" today. Begin using these tools as you see them in their future state, and you will start paving the way to reaping their rewards today and tomorrow.

Related Posts: You Are Not Your Website, From Information To Communication Highway

Can We Shift To Communitising?

2009-08-10T12:03:00.003-05:00

There seems to be a precious paradigm shift in the air. Businesses and marketers are poised to make such a genuine connections to their target audiences that it could change the rules of the game forever. It seems that through one of the highest values of social media – that of providing valuable, engaging content to an eagerly expectant audience – the world of advertising could transform into one of communitising: using authentic communication to grow sales, revenue, and profitability. Crazy, right? A lot of paradigm shifts look that way going in.

But it could all be blown long before the transformation occurs. How long until people give up on seeking out and welcoming in businesses and brands into their social media neighborhood? Who will mess it up more quickly and more completely? The big corporate giants as they stomp into the social media forest? Or the little businesses as they dart around trying to wrangle out customers in this new frontier?

Large corporations seem at risk of failing despite the best intentions of their well funded marketing efforts. Already we’ve seen examples of large companies stubbing their toes. And there’s no telling if the hoards of small and medium sized businesses won’t equally poison the water as they begin glomming on to the alluring siren call of social media and its ability to place them directly into a friendly dialogue with potential customers.

I can’t answer the question of who might ruin it for everyone else first, and I’d love to think we can solve for the potential disaster long before it occurs. But I fear most for the small business owner. Eventually, scalable and potentially automated solutions will come onto the market touted as the all-in-one solution for small businesses to step up to the social media challenge. These solutions will be marketed out through the massive sales channels which already own the client relationships (much like mass Pay Per Click services have gone to market). If these solutions get it wrong, the entire opportunity could fall to its knees.

In order for Social Media Marketing to succeed en masse, it is going to take a well balanced methodology which adheres to the integrity of social networking while also demonstrating an ability to offer return on investment. If both the large corporate brands and the small and medium business can get it right, we might see amazing things happen.

But it’s going to take a well thought out and measured approach to succeed. I fear that with social media being so exciting, new, and alluring, “well thought out” and “measured” are going to be in for quite a battle as this portion of the online marketing industry establishes its “best practices.”

I, for one, hope we get it right, and learn to take advertising on to communitising.

Stop, Look, & Listen - Good Social Media Baby Steps

2009-08-04T12:18:00.006-05:00

Whether individual or business, everyone is coming to understand that all this social media and web 2.0 hullabaloo requires some attention. Often it comes down to a particular individual within a company who hears this calling and starts worrying that they might be left in the dust while the competitive world around them launches forward and succeeds in this new landscape of customer interaction and acquisition.

There comes a moment of consensus and decision to take the leap. But just as one’s toes reach the edge of the cliff, options paralysis sets in leaving the decision of which direction to jump a complete mystery. Many will use this as a cue to step back from the cliff and do nothing at all. What was moments ago an invigorating plan to take things boldly into the future becomes an overly cautious and guarded return to the past.

There is simple way to ease oneself over the cliff, and to avoid avoiding the adventure ahead. In fact, no one generally succeeds in social media by throwing everything at the wall all at once. A measured approach is often the most intelligent and cost effective means by which any company begins using social media productively. That easy first step? Just listen.

That's it. You barely even need to lay your hands on your keyboard. Your mouse will do quite nicely. Just go exploring a bit in the land of social media. You don’t even need to participate right away (as important as interaction will obviously become later on). Just do some passive research for a while. Thirty minutes here and there. There need be no rush. Rushing will just send you running from the cliff edge again anyway.

Call it research. Call it listening. One of the easiest things you can do without sticking your neck out at all is to take a look at conversations related to topics you find interesting and relevant. There are countless tools out there which will allow you to monitor the conversations occurring in your space. You can track brand names, products, hobbies, or anything at all, and simply observe what is being said.

Here are a few tools that are intuitive to use, and can help you discover what, if anything, is being talked about:

Collecta is a pretty cool search engine that monitors real time posts across blogs, Twitter, and more. It can expose you to everything from casual conversations to blatant advertising going on related to your search terms. It can also lead you to interesting content around the web. Check out the search options which allow you to narrow your results in interesting ways.

TwazzUp is Twitter search engine, but with an interesting variety of result sets. Not only showing you who is saying what about your search phrase, it also ranks web content relevant to your search and shows how much Twitter activity it’s getting.

TweetVolume allows you to track how many times any phrase has appeared in Twitter since its inception. Good for judging the overall popularity of topics and the slight variations of how people are talking about stuff (note the difference between the phrases “social media,” and “socialmedia”). While it doesn’t allow you to narrow search by a date range, it is still quite insightful in learning what topics have “buzz.”

Google Blog Search Okay, this one might seem like a no brainer, but if you haven’t explored it yet, it is worth some play. It’s essentially Google, but restricted to the content appearing specifically in blogs.

So go exploring. By first studying or listening to some of the conversations going on out there, you can gain an appreciation for where you might fit in when you get more comfortable actually participating in the dialogue of social media.

Approaching Online Video Marketing

2009-07-27T09:20:00.000-05:00

Creating high quality online videos about your business, its products and services, and useful subject matter expertise you can share with the world at large may sound like something far too involved and costly to even consider, especially if you are only just venturing into the Internet advertising space. However, there are compelling counterpoints to these potential worries which should inspire you to fully explore the possible benefit of making a video marketing investment. If you cover all your bases, you can come away with expertly produced video content which is relatively affordable and fully optimized for the search engines, allowing your prospects more avenues from which to find and interact with your business. Because of it’s effectiveness as a communication tool, video represents a valuable component to social media marketing.

To help you gain some perspective in making the video marketing decision, it’s important to understand some of the reasons that online video can be impactful to your marketing success overall. A lot of it comes down to some pretty obvious facts. People are simply predisposed to absorb video content. Remember that television your parents told you was rotting your brain? Addictive stuff, right? Well, online video taps into that same predisposition to become glued to televised content, capturing an audience’s attention in quite a different way than the printed word. Video conversion rates (the percentage of people taking the action you want vs. just watching a video and moving on) tend to be higher than conversion rates on text-based messaging. In a world keenly focused on the value of driving action more so than mere traffic, this is a critical factor to consider.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that people are online watching video solely as a brain rotting activity. While I’m sure there is plenty of that going on, when it comes to consuming video content related to products, services, and educational/informative topics, it must be understood that the viewer is most often arriving at this content after taking some sort of proactive step to find it in the first place. This audience is best described as “sit forward,” rather than one which “sits back” to watch more passively. The video searcher wants the “commercial” content they find. They are driving the delivery of what they view by actively seeking answers to questions.

Consider a person searching online for a solution to a termite problem in their garage. They might not even be looking for video, but finding a 30 to 60 second spot by a local pest control company that addresses the problem, and offers a solution, can be extremely impactful on the user. The premise is that a user is far more likely to engage with a company that they can “see and hear” than one they have to do a lot of reading on. Giving them all the information they need to make the decision to act (pick up the phone or fill out a form) in the span of 30 seconds, feeds perfectly into everyone’s appetite for quick actionable content. No one wants to waste their time unnecessarily.

Video can be more engaging. That’s just the way our television addicted minds work, even on the Internet. Is it foolproof? Of course not. Nothing online is. And I’m not saying that video is the silver bullet to all your online marketing woes. But, while companies are coming along making it more and more affordable to deliver high quality, SEO-ready video to your proactive end users, you can be sure it becomes easier to stick your toe into the video marketing water.

The rules for knowing what sort of video content to create follow the same rules related to printed content online: give people something useful. One suggestion that can start you down the right path is to come up with a list of commonly ask questions related to your particular industry. Then you can create the answers in video. This is a critical component in participating in the dialogue format of web 2.0’s social media landscape.

For example, an Orthodontist’s office could create numerous 60 second videos answering specific question often on the minds of parents: How many different types of braces are there? What’s the right age to start braces? Are there alternatives to braces? The list goes on and on.

Answering common questions plays directly into the foundation of social media. Forget for a moment that it might lead to business. These questions are an open door to an interactive conversation. There is an audience looking for topic-specific, useful information which you possess. Just as other facets of your online presence allow you to become an active participant in your online community, video can also play its part. It provides another vibrant layer in the multiple ways any business must seek to engage with its audience online.

Guest Article On Social Media & Video

2009-07-27T09:15:00.005-05:00

I’ve just done a little moonlighting. Over at ReelSEO.com, a site devoted to online video and video marketing, I was asked to provide an article talking about the synergies between video and social media. This connection exists at many levels, and is even being explored during a full day devoted to Social Media & Video Strategies at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA.

Check out my article, "On The Blurring Line Between Worlds: Humans, Screen Watching, and Social Media," as well as the rest of the wisdom shared over at ReelSEO.com.

From Information To Communication Highway

2009-07-13T15:36:00.003-05:00

It’s a subject that gets a lot of attention in the online marketing community, and even plays out at summer backyard barbecues on the weekend while non-geeky web folks consider all that’s new on the world wide web. Is Social Media the real deal, and if it is, what the heck is it anyway? It’s even a subject that I’ve touched on more than once here on these pages, yet it continually deserves more thoughtful reflection aimed to help folks separate fact from fiction. And we can pretty quickly confirm the fiction that Social Media is the savior to everyone’s business marketing woes online. That said, it is a fact that Social Media does play a role in successfully being a business online today. In fact, the premise of Social Media has been at play far longer than the craze has been going on – we’ve always been using the Internet to spark compelling interaction between business and prospect. The methods by which we accomplish this just keep on changing, and that’s okay.

Constant change is nearly the only consistency in Internet Marketing. Amidst its ever-shifting landscape there are, however, several recurring themes. How to reach the right customers? How to reach them cost effectively? How to measure the effort? All the while, companies struggle to keep up with the changes, and fear wasted and costly efforts they can’t quantify or recoup.

While Social Media is all the rage, many businesses feel obligated to participate. However, there is no denying that many view it with skepticism, assuming that it is just some passing phase, hoping they won’t have to master yet another Internet tool. Businesses must take care not to miss the Social Media forest for the trees as they watch the comings and goings of things like MySpace or Twitter. The popularity of platforms and applications will always rise and fall, but they aren’t a true indicator to the value of the medium they serve.

Social Media’s evolution is born out of technology’s ability to improve communication. This is the overarching consistency which Social Media serves. Key to business communication is driving a marketing message and encouraging customer interaction, two things that Social Media can directly influence. Reaching customers, delivering compelling content, and fostering a valuable relationship with consumers continue to drive marketing efforts online. This has long been the function of Pay Per Click ads, and display/banner advertising as well. The tools evolve, but the goals remain consistent.

To enable businesses to successfully evolve along with the Internet Marketing landscape, simplification is key. No company can effectively navigate the path while it appears cluttered and confusing. Aligning and prioritizing Social Media tools based upon how they best meet a business’ marketing goals can be a welcome revelation. Staying attuned to your goals can simplify the path. When it becomes clear that no one must do everything all at once, and more importantly, not do things just because everyone is doing them, the path to successful Social Media marketing clears.

Businesses participating in Social Media can recognize that it allows them to engage with customers, share content which benefits their audience, and study the conversations occurring online within their space, no matter how niche. They can not only begin to measure the impact of these efforts as a specific marketing metric, but also reap the more long term, and often hard to quantify benefit of simply joining in the dialogue with their target audience – a concept too compelling to ignore. Using Social Media will soon be as obligatory to business as having a customer service layer, or as building a website in the first place. Getting started need not be daunting, and once prioritizing the tools to business goals is understood, tangible benefits can begin. Keep the goals of improving communication and dialogue in the forefront and it naturally drives down the static and confusion as you approach Social Media.

Got Business? Get Listed

2009-07-08T10:52:00.004-05:00

Local and regional companies traditionally conduct nearly all their business within a 50 mile radius of their physical location. This is likely true of your business too. Even in the digital age, proximity is a key factor in building a client base. Customers themselves drive this statistic based upon their tendency to want to do business with a company they can “see and touch.” It’s no wonder that Local Internet Marketing caught fire over the last several years as consumers strove to make use of the Internet when looking for businesses ranging from restaurants to building contractors. And the search engines responded to help facilitate their own ability to serve those searchers the results they were looking for (and thus retain those precious user-eyeballs).

Today, search results are populated with content culled from any number of trusted business information sources which the engines have come to rely on, not just for basic business information, but for “trusted” business information. What’s that? Well, consider that a search engine kicks its user experience in the shins if they supply an “out of business” business listing at the top of their results. If Google were to show me that its best search result for a landscaping company was a company whose phone number was now disconnected, this would sour me to the usefulness of Google as a local business search tool. So, the search engines do everything they can to make sure that the information in their results is current, accurate, and useful to the searcher.

One of the best ways you can show the engines that your business information is current and accurate is to get it submitted online everywhere you can, so that as the engines index (go out and gather) business information, yours is consistently found, and it’s full of useful information.

Set aside a little time to make sure your information is out there correctly. Here are just some sites where you should submit your business information and thereby feed the data sources which in turn play a role in feeding search results. Not to mention, folks actually uses many of these sites directly when looking for products and services. Spread your business information around. Remember, you are not just your website, you are a web presence. Be present everywhere possible.

Business Listing Directories:
Localeze
Universal Business Listing
infoUSA
Yellow Pages
Super Pages
Yellow Bot
iBegin
Yelp

Navigating The Sea Change From Print To Online

2009-06-30T10:09:00.001-05:00

The writing is on the wall for the print advertising industry. It’s been there for a long long time. Everyone knows that print marketing dollars are migrating to digital because that’s where the eyeballs are going, and with that come several challenges that all businesses must confront so they can make informed and intelligent decisions with their marketing dollars.

Even after having spent nearly seven years firmly in the online marketing space, dealing extensively with products aimed directly at small and medium sized businesses, I still find that the paradigm shifts are only slowly moving across the vast face of businesses at large. As quickly as the marketing field changes online, the pace of businesses figuring it all out moves equally slowly. This points to a sense that the transition from old traditional advertising models to new ones is not one of seamless grace. There is no easy hand off happening.

Part of the reason for this unsteady evolution is related to the sheer scale of eyeballs out there looking at ads in general, and where the looking is happening. Despite the mind numbing numbers of online users growing year over year, there is still a staggering number of people looking at printed pages that contain ads (even while those print viewing numbers continue to decline). Because of that, businesses must think long and hard before jumping ship on their long standing traditional advertising models. A simple example drawn from one of the most basic measures of advertising effectiveness serves this caution well: phone calls.

While it is not true for every business type, many industries will find that well executed online marketing strategies produce a more profitable cost per phone call, often far less expensive at a call to call comparison with print advertising dollars. A plumbing company, for example, might enjoy a $22 cost per call online, while spending $57 per call in print. Is the answer easy here? Should the plumber immediately pull out of print and pour all ad dollars into the Internet? This is where the sheer scale of eyeballs comes into play.

This hypothetical plumber could be generating 200 calls per month out of a print advertising campaign. Their online campaign might be generating 50 calls. The problem arises when the plumber wishes to replace those 200 $57 print calls in the online space. The fact is, there may not be enough searching eyeballs to support all the money the plumber would love to spend online getting cheaper calls. Especially pertinent for local businesses in an online search scenario, an advertiser will eventually run out of searchers who might see and click on an ad. This is not too dissimilar from the concept that there are only so many full page ads you can buy in the newspaper or phonebook before ad dollars becomes wasted. In the end, online advertising might only be able to generate 80 calls per month, far too few to keep this hypothetical plumber’s fleet of trucks on the street.

In these cases, businesses must work this enticing online lower costs per phone call into a realistic marketing measure. They must view their on and off line marketing dollars as a whole. Instead of trying to get all their calls for $22, our plumber must view all marketing avenues collectively and strive to get a blended overall average cost per call down to, perhaps, $45 through well balanced on and off line strategies.

Again, the shift away from print is happening, of this there is no doubt. But making the best use of all marketing media is a challenge that all businesses must face as the technology advancements work at a pace slightly different than that of the end users migrating from one medium to another.

Incorporating all marketing platforms into one concise overarching metric of profitability is a critical step of consideration for businesses as they strive to succeed with the marketing landscape changing beneath them.

You Are Not Your Website

2009-06-22T11:29:00.006-05:00

Something you will do well to accept as you use the Internet to promote your business is that you are not defined by your website. In fact, a company’s website ranks well down the list when people rate what sources of content they use to build a trust level with a given product, or company.

Do you need a website? Yeah, probably. A website can be seen as the authoritative content benchmark for your company. It’s like a stable backbone from which a wealth of information springs, feeding the diverse avenues on the information highway. And it’s a resource for someone to best weed fact from fiction while they are out there gathering information from more trusted sources. In this day and age, every business needs a website. But it is critical to understand that a website is not a web presence, and your web presence defines you far more than your website ever will.

Frustrating? Sure it is. But when we start to see studies pointing out how social media, opinion sites, profile ratings, and the way people desire to see a company meet them in these venues all factor into the way we interact with companies online, there is no denying that a business (and even a person) must build a web presence even more so than a website.

Think of it like this: Your web presence is like a garden full of vegetables and flowers. It requires planting, watering, weeding, tending, and pruning in an ongoing cycle that is never dormant. You must pay attention to it, and constantly nurture and protect it. Your website, on the other hand, is like a statue or fountain placed in the garden. Far more stationary, it does what you want it to, and beyond occasionally repositioning and cleaning it, once you add it to the garden, your done.

When your company becomes present online, it provides as much the ability to get your message across as it allows you to receive messages. And, this bi-directional communication is vital to business success. When you effectively push out your marketing message, you will attract customers. When you listen to what people are saying to, and about you all over the web, you become open to many more things. You could solve a customer service nightmare before it actually happens, or gain insight into a new way your product or services could be developed to meet client needs. Listening is handy that way.

So, accept that being online happens on a continuum. You won’t succeed by building a site and saying you’ve made it online. Successfully being online is an ongoing, ever-evolving experience that requires your presence and persistence.

This Bus Runs From Monologue To Dialogue

2009-06-11T09:07:00.005-05:00

So, imagine my delight while walking to work yesterday morning through downtown Chicago as I passed a CTA bus that had the living embodiment of Web 2.0 splashed across its advertising panel. I chuckled as I was struck by this non-Web example of the whole Social Media hubbub we see happening online. Forgetting that for the vast majority of my fellow commuters, this scene likely held nothing close to the same level of fascination – heck, I stopped to take a picture of the side of a CTA bus at 8:45 in the morning, something must be wrong with me – but this scene stopped me in my tracks. Defacing billboards is nothing new, but that someone with a black marker had transformed some unassuming ad text about a perfectly delicious hazelnut and chocolate bar (“driving you nuts”) into an engaging and somewhat witty open ended question regarding our city’s transit system resonated for me on many levels. “Is C.T.A. ‘driving you nuts’ ?” Classic.

At the deepest level, it touched me because I had spent all of my high school years riding CTA trains and buses every day to and from school, and many were the times that I could blame the CTA for getting me to school late. And at Lane Tech that meant Mr. Burns was going to give you a period of detention for being tardy. “But the bus…” It was a pointless argument. Yes, the CTA had driven me nuts plenty of times.

Tied into my current professional life that centers on web marketing and all this social media stuff, I couldn’t help wondering if the CTA was catching this mention of their brand. I couldn’t help but note how a person had engaged with an advertising message, striking up a dialogue – not even related to the advertiser itself, but with an entirely different, yet wholly present business entity – and while I reached for my phone’s camera, I wouldn’t be surprised if later in the day, someone reached for another marker to add an answer to the question now sitting on the side of a bus.

Like a blog post, forum question, or fan page, here was in interactive marketing experience, the evolution from monologue to dialogue. Here was a brand being taking to task. Here was an invitation to continue a conversation. Here was a “real world” example of precisely what we see going on in the current Internet experience. I found it at once comical, and poignant. And while it probably means far less to those uninterested in this online space, it’s probably something at least mildly interesting to you, a person who is right now taking the time to read a blog like this one at all.

As I continue to preach the lack of distinction between who you are, and who you are online (whether a person or a business), I wonder if this is life imitating art in some way, and if perhaps knowing which is which is becoming intriguingly more and more difficult to discern.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

The SEO Genie

2009-06-01T15:49:00.005-05:00

The world of SEO contains the seeds for a great modern age “genie in the lamp story.” A business owner is granted three wishes, and among them, one is squandered on the wish “to have my website rank number 1 on Google.” Granting the wish, the genie then waits, ready to shrug his shoulders when the business owner returns to complain that ranking number 1 in Google didn’t bring the expected riches. “Master, you never told me *what* you wanted to rank for on Google.” Ouch! Lesson learned. Who knew genies knew a thing or two about SEO?

In the “perfect world” for any business, all Internet traffic will come for free because their website ranks idyllically on page one of Google for all their important keyword phrases. However, the road to this utopian wonderland of web presence can be long, and sometimes it can careen up and down steep slopes veiled in thick fog, especially if you don’t really know what your “important keyword phrases” are.

Once you get over the false assumption that organic traffic is free – to do it really well, someone will have had to invest in solid SEO best practices, and that costs money, time, or both – you then need to confront the issue that “my website ranks at the top of Google” is an empty statement unless you know for exactly what terms it is ranking, and more importantly, that ranking for those terms matters in the slightest.

How can ranking number 1 in Google for something not matter in the slightest? Well, it won’t matter much if you are not seeing a tangible marketing return for that ranking. You might have a web page that ranks at the top of the engines for a particular keyword phrase, but if you aren’t making any money off of that ranking, do you care? You might have nothing more than an interesting conversation piece for your next cocktail party. “My business ranks number one for “XYZ.” I’ve never made any money off of it, but it’s pretty cool.”

When I talk to businesses, there’s a concept that consistently comes up which tends to catch them off guard: A good SEO will get you to rank for just about whatever you want. Given enough time (and investment), you’ll rank. But you’d better make sure it’s for something that means the most for your bottom line. Sometimes this concept doesn’t dawn on a business at all. So alluring is the Xanadu of Google ranking, they fail to tie it back to their marketing goals and dollars.

So how do you get to that point where you know what terms are worth all the SEO investment? You test. If you have not been studying your site metrics for years, you might do well to put your website through its paces with some aggressive Pay Per Click marketing. With PPC, you can rank for 10,000 keywords 15 minutes from now, and you can precisely measure the effectiveness of not only the dollars spent on those keywords driving traffic to your site, but your site’s ability to convert that traffic to a desired action too. Eventually you will learn which keywords lead to the desired action most cost effectively on a per page basis based on cold hard analytic facts. Those, then, are the keywords you go after organically. Whether you come to determine that PPC should be just an SEO investment tool, or perhaps a solid part of your online marketing initiatives can also be discovered through good Pay Per Click tactics.

At the end of the day, a single web page might be able to rank organically for a small handful of keyword variations. You owe it to yourself to figure out which keywords, out of hundreds and thousands, are the ones that bring you the highest return. Pay Per Click advertising can prove this out for you in a matter of months (or weeks sometimes, depending on how aggressively you drive traffic). Then you can go down the path of optimizing your web pages to rank naturally for just those keywords that you’ve proven are your money makers.

Don’t waste your time getting your web pages to rank number one in Google for keywords you *think* they should rank for. Take the time to figure out which keywords are worth that time. Then it won’t be wasted.