New Media is More Accessible and Efficient

Traditional mass media was no friend to the mid-size business. You had to pony up the money and pay for far more audience than you really needed to reach. You had to get in a long line to use the three megaphones. And too bad if your customers didn’t like to watch “I Love Lucy”. You were stuck talking to the wrong audience and paying through the nose for the privilege.

Social Media Actually Listens

More than clumsiness due to sheer audience size, traditional mass media had a bigger problem: it didn’t listen, it talked. And talked and talked. Like a bad guest at a party, mass media didn’t care if your eyes were glazed over: it was in love with the sound of its own voice.

Clumsy, expensive and hearing-impaired, we put up with mass media because it was big and we had no choice. It had our customers – lumped in with all the other audiences, yes, but it had them.

In Modern “Social Economics”, Mass Media is a Friend to Mid-Size Business

Today, social media is the new mass media – it works with big, big numbers. In the following clip, the facts (and opinions) behind Socialnomics, the 2009 book by Erik Qualman serve to add up the big new realities.

Social media is mass media, but leveraged. You use it to pry your customers out of the mass. And once you find them, you don’t monopolize the conversation. Your spend goes so much farther when you don’t have to worry about your customers “Loving Lucy”.

And if you can’t do it, get someone to help you. Share some advice, stories and topics relevant to your business. Educate your market. But these are generalities. Let’s try making hardware interesting. Can we? Well, the hardware chain TrueValue may have done it. I’ll let their website do some of the explaining.

Do-It-Yourself Interactive Branding

TrueValue teamed up with five bloggers to be a part of the DIY Blog Squad and share their own home improvement experiences and know-how. Check back through the end of December for project ideas, advice and inspiration to help you tackle your own To Do list!
The members of the DIY Blog Squad are:

• Young House Love – We’re 25. Our house is 50. It’s old enough to be our parent, but we treat it like it’s our baby. Here you’ll find our adventures and misadventures in home improvement.
• The Lettered Cottage - I’m Layla, and my “Mr. Right” is Kevin: We’re the Palmers, but around these parts, we’re best known as the Lettered Couple.  We are dream believers.
• Bungalow ‘23 - The restoration and home improvement journal of a 1923 craftsman bungalow in Minneapolis, MN.
• All Bower Power - ABP is devoted to suburban home decor, renovations and the fine art of laughing.
• The Handyguys Podcast – A couple of guys who know a lot and have distinct opinions on the rest with real experience to back it up.

See? Not only are these blog topics interesting and relevant to the company’s mission, they’re highly specific and let people delve into topics most relevant to their lifestyles. And while there’s no shortage of DIY (do-it-yourself) material on the net, TrueValue is creating a meaningful community, educating their market and building brand equity.

Next Generation Marketing Will Begin and End Online

Showing that you care is more than just the sale at the store—though that’s essential too—but the conversation can begin and end on company websites. After all, people are as comfortable as they’ve ever been in front of screens, and it’s beginning to look the next generation of consumers cannot envision a day without sitting in front of one.

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that kids are spending nearly every waking minute in front of a screen. The study observed children ages 8 to 18, and found that they spend over 7.5 hours a day on their cell phones, computers, or TVs. In other words, the new era of marketing means that the dialogue is genuine (remember “di” meaning “two” as opposed to the singular monologue?). Customers have a real voice today and if they can look at your brand as something more than a mouthpiece.

Community Content is King

Does that mean your restaurant can give cooking tips? Or your accounting firm can hash out columns on tax-saving premises? Giving advice is nothing new, but depending on input from readers and outside contributors for free is a relatively new concept. But let’s say, you have no conversation starters that you can think of. There are other opportunities to engage your reader or customers beyond “traditional” blogging, but learning this craft is fundamental to any business today.

Left Behind?

Those that stay behind, will be asking themselves the same question when people did in the mid 1990s: “Maybe we should get a website for our business?” And if TrueValue can make hardware and DIY an escapist and fun activity, imagine what you can do with your business.

Stay tuned for the next post about Game playing: IKEA launched a Facebook campaign that put followers on a virtual scavenger hunt.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

That means, your furniture store or restaurant will yield a query on Google along with starred reviews and your website so people can browse on-the-street and on-the-web. Fact is, the marriage is increasingly part of the retail landscape: browsing on the street, inquiring by the web.

The Power of Customer Reviews

And negative or positive, people really like customer reviews (and they tend to trust them). For example, according to Internet hosting site 1&1, four in 10 UK shoppers rely on independent online reviews or recommendations before buying items. One in four consumers look for customer service commitments on the store’s web sites.

Today’s shopping behavior has changed radically, and local businesses can quickly embrace this trend by enrolling in Google’s program or by even posting both positive and negative reviews on their website or in-store.

Our Pizza Sucks

To think of it another way, Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco handed out staff T-shirts to their employees, donning reviews from Yelp with quotes like “this place sucks” and the pizza was soooo greasy.” It is a way to embrace the negative and turn it into something positive by acknowledge their short-comings. Obviously no business is perfect and by putting that truth in front of others (via T-shirts) we see how there’s opportunity in customer reviews that may have not existed several years ago.

It’s a way to show that a business may have nothing to hide, and realistically, you can’t please everyone so why fight it? Embrace it. The pizza joint, which blasts punk rock music with staff donning throwback sneakers, is the perfect outlet for such playfulness.

But this may not pertain to your particular business, maybe you can’ t hand out edgy T-shirts  with the word “sucks” on them. As one T-Shirt says “We celebrate the good, but not as much as we focus on the bad…It’s a public flogging.”

Make Lemonade out of Lemons

Yet, social networks like Yelp do give business owners a new way to dialogue with their customers—even if it’s negative. Businesses can respond directly to customer reviews on yelp and they also have a forum on Twitter.

It’s obvious that  the business landscape has changed, and while customers are as empowered as they’ve ever been,  and maybe so has small business. And as with Google’s new service, we see that our online reputation is becoming as important as our offline one–and the two will be difficult to differentiate in the coming years.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

Prior to working in new media consulting and consumer trends, Mike was a reporter for the Naperville Sun. There he wrote for the features, sports and city government departments but also contributed to Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Southtown, Naperville Sun, Indiana Post-Tribune, and Aurora Beacon. He has contributed to the Chicago Tribune, WGN TV, CLTV in Chicago as well as numerous blogs.
As a reporter, Mike covered the political scene (interviewing personalities such as Barack Obama, Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert and Jenna Bush), and essayed product and behavioral trends.

Mike has a Masters in Science from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, becoming among one of its youngest graduate degree holders at the age of 23, as well as a B.A. in Journalism and minor in Business Administration from Lewis University.

That’s why I don’t represent Twitter follower counts, for example, as an exclusive indicator of success. It’s not easy to build a quality Twitter presence or blog subscribers or website traffic. These are important “results”. But website traffic and followers are not ROI. I like Olivier Blanchard’s classic methods in The Basics of Social Media ROI where important results like Twitter followers or blog subscribers correlate to actual financial performance.

Legitimate Social Media Marketing ROI

Business results should be measurable. New business relationships, or percentage of website traffic are two areas I watch like a hawk for a client, because that’s where ROI lives. We look at new media metrics in traditional media terms. It’s no less legitimate to consider the number of twitter followers than it is to consider a television program’s Neilsen ratings. But reach and frequency is not ROI either. Like Blanchard lays out, ROI requires comparing pre-social media financial performance baselines with positive results and corollary financial performance.

Stephen Baker’s BusinessWeek Critique is  Illegitimate

That said, mainstream business media’s eagerness to beat up on the social media marketing industry merits its own critique. Consider the fear-mongering this piece in venerable old BusinessWeek: Beware Social Media Snake Oil. One of the most telling paragraphs in this piece is when social media marketing is compared to Enterprise 2.0, a trend in business software that Stephen Baker feels business overbought.

Stephen Baker may be right about Enterprise 2.0 and he may be wrong. Who cares? I don’t understand how the comparison to social media marketing makes any sense. Let’s not confuse the use of Web 2.0 collaborating technologies within an enterprise to modern marketing. Let’s be a little more thoughtful about our logic before we go around using words like “snake oil” at a time when mid-size businesses finally have an opportunity to use democratic technologies and level the marketing playing field. Oh, and let’s not compare the costs and risks associated with implementing enterprise software (seat licenses at tens of thousands) with using Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook as a marketing channel.

BusinessWeek’s bias is particularly striking when Baker cites a tragic social media snafu which happens in traditional media over and over. Remember the poor woman who died of water intoxication after taking part in a radio station’s water drinking contest to win a video game system?  Dumb ideas are dumb ideas on the radio, print and the web!

What is a Micro-Blog?

The “micro” part of micro-blogging comes from the fact that each tweet—the messages that Twitter users send—must be no longer than 140 characters (including spaces). This feature—some call it a constraint, others say it’s the best part of Twitter—forces you to compress whatever it is you have to say into only a few words. As an example:

+Beginning after the first plus sign and ending before the second plus sign, this sentence serves to show you exactly how long tweets can be.+

Between those plus signs are exactly 140 characters of content. That’s the longest tweet you’ll ever see. In order to accommodate these parameters, the abbreviations and jargon that most people associate with instant messaging and SMS (i.e. text messaging) have found their way to Twitter:

Its not odd 4 u 2 c thngs writn like this since lots of ppl can stil undrstnd u w/o seein it all spelled out.

Tweets Can Be Professional

Writing in SMS style, though occasionally important in order to fully communicate your message, has it drawbacks: it lacks professionalism, and some users might balk at the seeming incomprehensibility of it. The truth is, most of the people on Twitter are not tech nerds or impatient 12-year-olds who lack basic grammar and spelling skills. Many are older, educated, and just discovering social networking, so catering to their sensibilities is important.

Making it Fit

Another obvious way to fit into the 140-character limit is to eliminate non-essential words like articles, prepositions, and other content-poor words that we use in everyday conversation. If you wanted to tweet about the Copenhagen climate summit happening this month, you could write with proper grammar: “Obama is going to the climate change summit in order to seal the deal on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.” That’s 107 characters. Or, you can communicate the same point with only 62 characters: “Obama going to climate summit to seal deal on Kyoto successor.” Writing in this truncated “headline” style may feel strange at first, but it also enables some of the other features that make Twitter one of the most important websites currently in operation.

@Replies

Replying to a tweet enables you to comment on others’ tweets and hold an open conversation between your networks of followers, depending on each person’s settings in that regard. To reply to someone you merely begin your tweet with “@” followed by their username, and then fill in your content. This conversation style is great for businesses looking to talk directly to customers, partners or prospects.

Retweeting is Currency

Retweeting is a way to spread something you saw in someone else’s tweets while giving credit where credit is due. Depending on the character length of the original tweet, it must be shortened to accommodate “RT @username.” “RT” stands for “retweet,” which is just an indicator to your followers that you’re passing something along. (Important Note -We coach our clients to make it easy for others to retweet their messages by  leaving 20-30 characters for this citation.  Retweeting is the currency of Twitter because your message is broadcast  beyond your own direct followers.  Check out How to Retweet: A Simple Guide.) 

Link Shortening Services

The first time you want to pass on a link, like a news article or something business related, you may notice that the link is too long to fit into a 140-character tweet. This fact has not been lost on Twitter users. A bunch of secondary services have sprung up that will generate mini URLs that fit into your tweet and leave as much room as possible for your comment or message. Among the most popular are bit.ly; TinyURL; and Cligs. They all work on the same principle, though bit.ly and Cligs can also provide analytics about your links, giving you valuable information about how many clicks the link has received.

To use these services, follow the above links to their websites. On bit.ly and TinyURL you can immediately put your long URL into the box and have it shortened. Then, copy the short URL into your tweet. On Cligs you have to navigate to the “Create New Clig” tab, but once there the process is the same: insert the long URL, shorten it, and post the short URL into your tweet.

(Important Note – Sometimes URL shortening like this is used to hide the URL of a malicious website, exposing you to security issues if you click on something corrupt. So always make sure you trust the user who sent you a link before you click on it.)

Photo in this post is by Jeff Turner (respres)

Word of Mouth Marketing for Mid-Size Business

So is what’s good for the lunch business good for your own business? When it comes to the elemental force of people talking, the answer is a resounding yes. We’re big fans of Andy Sernovitz, who wrote the THE book on Word of Mouth Marketing and what he teaches applies equally to B2B and B2C businesses. His “Five Ts of Word Of Mouth Marketing” are applicable to just about every business under the sun:

Talkers: Find People Who Talk

From our lunch counter to the most obscure and specialized niche in, say, industrial chemical sales, people talk about the matter at hand. The project of finding who they are can be difficult, or it can be obvious (especially on social networks). But business is always at some level communication between people. They’re there; they need to be located.

Topics: Give People a Reason to Talk

A product innovation, a contest, an industry development, something you’re in front of, something you’re behind, something that happened or didn’t happen today. Topics must be interesting, memorable and portable (easy to pass on).  Having a handle on what these are is essential to stay on top of your market, and creating news and developments is the stock in trade of word of mouth marketing.

Tools: Help the Message Spread

The speed, power and reach of Twitter and other social media are the lubricant that allow large groups of interested people to intensify their interest and raise the amount of time spent discussing your operation. Without this plumbing, the chatter moves at the slow-motion speed of a trade publication or a trade show schedule.

Taking Part: Join The Conversation

It’s one thing to be in business, it’s something else to gain objectivity about your business, your market, your customers and your competition. This is frankly one of the biggest conceptual stumbling blocks for businesses accustomed to traditional marketing when evaluating social media’s payoffs. Traditional marketing is a one-way discussion, social media is more about peering, which leads to…

Tracking: Measure and Listen

Social media’s unique word-of-mouth marketing advantage is that it easy to measure. Being active in social media not only gives you the essential opportunity (we’d say obligation) to represent yourself in the discussion, listening means you have a rich source of data concerning the health of your business’s image.

People talk. Be heard!

One fantastic plug-in is the All-in-One SEO (“AIOSEO”), which has a few key fields for assigning strategic keywords and phrases. There are several other SEO plug-ins (AIOSEO is the most popular). Plus, some WordPress themes like Thesis actually build-in similar SEO functionality. Whichever you choose when installing WordPress, the same basic concepts apply.

It’s very important to have a keyword strategy for your site and support it with individual blog posts and SEO settings.  In this post we’re going to cover the most universal fields found in most SEO plug-ins.  When adding a new post, look for the SEO fields below the text editor section:

Custom Title Tag Field

This is the Page Title that you will see at the top of a web browser. It is the most important of the three settings. By default, it inherits the blog post’s editorial title. But, for the purposes of SEO, it is possible (even advisable sometimes) to override the default post title by specifying a custom title tag that optimizes your content in search results.

Let’s say Bill is the CEO of Bill’s Human Capital Consultants in Chicago. Bill writes a post with an editorial title “Head Hunting for Top Executives”. Depending on his keyword stategry and objectives, Bill might want different in this field so that Google associates his company with the desired search results. For peak SEO power, Bill might override the default Title with the keywords “recruiting” or “Chicago” so that it reads “How to Recruit Top Chicago Executives”.

In most cases you’ll get more value if you override the default and manually set it to a title that explicitly associates a few of your most important keywords with your brand. Grammar isn’t top priority in this field since it does not affect the editorial title or body of the post. You can make the Custom Title Tag a little longer than this example, but don’t go overboard.

Meta Description

This is a 160 character summary of the post that searchers will see in the returned results. It’s not very important in terms of SEO, but it does entice the searcher to visit, as this is the text that appears below your title in search engine results. These descriptions should be short and sweet: “Bill uses a proprietary database for finding and evaluating top executives”.

Meta Keywords

Most search engines don’t pay much attention to Meta Keywords. But, just in case, we recommend including some of your secondary phrases that didn’t make it into the Title. Use commas to separate phrases like “Human Resources, Staffing, Hiring, Consultants” etc.

Blogging and the (AIOSEO) plug-in are a powerful and free start to your SEO strategy. A thoughtful keyword strategy coupled with a properly configured blog program opens new marketing doors for mid-size businesses.  Please contact us with questions.

NOTE:
There’s a lot more to SEO than discussed here. Using the WordPress SEO plug-ins correctly, coupled with writing good headers and content in your posts, helps you optimize your “on-page” SEO. The second and probably most important part of SEO, “off-page” optimization is not discussed in this post. “Off-page” optimization primarily consists of getting quality in-bound links to your site. A great first step to getting quality in-bound links is writing great content!

Check out the video:

(If you have trouble seeing the detail, you might want to view it at YouTube and maximize the video)

A few key WordPress authoring points from the video

The main two content types are “Posts” and “Pages”

• “Posts” are blog entries that can be used for timely content such as events, news, etc.
• “Pages” are the content on your website that are more static in nature: “About Us”, “Contact Us”, etc.

“Categories” and “Tags” can (and should) be added to posts.

They help humans and search engines find your content.

• “Categories” are for high level categorization of a post. For example an entertainment magazine might use “Music”, “Movies” and “TV” for the site’s main categories. Posts must be in at least one category, but you can add a single post to several categories if applicable. So, for example, if you write a post about the Godfather movie, the category might be “Movies”
• “Tags” are like keywords. You can add as many tags to a post as you like. It is not unreasonable to add 10 to 20 tags to a post. So, for example, if you write a post about the Godfather movie, keywords might include: movie, mafia, mob, 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, etc.

Two helpful tips

1. Make sure to hit the “Show Kitchen Sink” control in the WordPress editor to reveal a second row of editing tools (see image below):
   
2. If you are authoring or borrowing content from a Microsoft Word document, use the “Paste from Word” tool to avoid most funky character issues.
   

Here are helpful related resources:

• WordPress.org Posts definition
• WordPress.org Pages defintion
• WordPress.org Categories vs. Tags discussion

Releated Videos from WordPress.tv:

• How-to: Writing and Publishing a Post
• How-to: Adding Categories and Tags to Your Post
• How-to: Adding an “About” (or any static page)
  

Good luck authoring your content!

Twitter keeps track of all Lists that you follow as well as all Lists that follow you. Lists are automatically public by default but can be made private if you choose. Public Lists are particularly interesting as an organic research source because you can follow any public list and take advantage of  their grouping and interests.

To create a List, click “Lists” in the right sidebar just under the Search field. Below are some useful links to more information:

• How To Use Twitter Lists
• Twitter Lists FAQ
• 10 Ways to Use Twitter Lists

Rich Media Transforms Personality and Individuality into a Brand

Extraordinary businesses thrive on the backs of key individuals and personalities. They succeed because of relationships and the human element. YouTube is special because it’s a warmer medium. It humanizes your message and helps establish an interactive brand.

Cross Channel Integration

YouTube makes it very easy embed your video in other networks like Facebook or your business blog with optimized keyword tags. Of course sharing your video across networks also multiplies overall visibility and  SEO strength. I know it’s feels awkward, but don’t hesitate. Give it a shot.