The project, IQPicks.com, is a revolutionary pick the score web service. Its revolutionary because its the only pick-the-score application that can be embedded in any website, blog or forum absolutely free of charge and its the only pick-the-score application that calculates a person’s SportsIQ based on the accuracy of their predictions.

Our mission from the outset was to support avid sports fans with the online tools that enhance their sporting experience and provide them with an accurate measurement of their sporting intelligence and I think we’ve accomplished that with our first product release.

In addition to making it available to embed in any website, we have also created the functionality for any member to create and manage their own pick-the-score leagues whether they be open to anyone or limited to invitation only.

In terms of ranking the participants, it really is quiet a sophisticated algorithm that we have developed. Its safe to say that most other pick-the-score services are nothing more than ‘pick the winner’ services; limiting participants to simply pick the winner of selected games/matches. IQPicks on the other hand, lets participants predict the final scores of as many or few games/matches as they’d like. They are then ranked on the following criteria:

• Was the winner predicted?
• How close were their predictions to the actual score in terms of point spread and total game/match points?
• How many predictions were made?

IQPicks has also built in the ability for people to easily announce their predictions to their friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter, which should significantly increase participation among the people in their social networks.

Though we are only currently covering Rugby (Six Nations and Super15), we will soon be adding all other major sports to our offering.

If you’d like to learn more about the service or discuss partnering opportunities, please feel free to drop me an email at patrick(at)iqpicks.com

The thesis of the email is that over the past several years a small but vocal consumer group has emerged. This niche consumer group feels that it is their moral duty to rate every product or service that they consume. They are using sites like Yelp, Metacritic, Localist, GDGT and Trip Advisor to rate everything from the massage that they received from their physio to the Indian takeaway they had on the weekend.

When you couple this phenomenon with the dramatic increase in popularity of the rating sites by the average consumer the result is that a very significant number of people are making their purchasing decisions based on the opinions of a few.

You see, in the old days, it was about distribution, location, marketing spend, celebrity endorsement, traffic buying or the black art of search engine optimization.

Today it’s about getting a positive net-promoter score and making your five-star histogram look like a gun: a lot of five-star reviews coupled with some four-star reviews make the barrel. A dramatic drop-off to three stars, followed by slightly fewer two- and one-star reviews, makes the handle of your gun.

The quantity of reviews, of course, reinforces this pattern.

The reality is that a few early negative reviews can absolutely sink a business. A business can no longer afford to be just good.

No amount of marketing or gamesmanship is going to flip the upside-down gun over. If your product sucks, it’s over. Transparency is a bitch.

The problem is that it is impossible to be excellent 100% of the time. Even the best restaurants will get an order wrong on occasion.

Given that you cant be excellent 24/7, what can you do to ensure that one or two negative reviews don’t sink your business?

The only solution is to encourage all of your customers to rate your business/products – the more reviews you have, the more likely that they actually provide an accurate assessment.

My wife and I went to a relatively new Thai restaurant last weekend and as we were leaving the owner asked us if we enjoyed our meal. We said that we had and he said that it would mean a lot to his business if we rated his restaurant on Localist, which we did. And guess what? Their reviews are what you would expect – mostly 5s, some 4s, and a handful of 3s and 2s.

There are going to be times when not every customer is as satisfied as we were, but he has ensured that his overall ratings can survive a few negative reviews.

But that all changed when Google became the de-facto search engine.  Can you even remember the last time you actually used another search engine other than Google?

This is why I was quite surprised when one of my clients shared with me a fax they had received as a follow up to a phone call pitching a search engine submission service.

Search Engine Submission Scam

I had no idea that Kiwis used over 500 popular search engines every day!

They normally charge $399? Crikey! What a scam.

You do need to submit your website to  Google and Bing and you can get started by clicking the following links: Google, Bing.

“Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant, and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.” (Wikipedia)

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” — Joe Pulizzi

Sounds great, huh? After all, as marketers and business owners, we’d all like to be doing things that establish our businesses as industry thought leaders, generate leads, increase direct sales and improve search engine ranking and customer retention – all possible with a good content marketing strategy. So if content marketing has so much potential, why aren’t more marketers doing it?

The short answer is because it’s difficult and time consuming. It’s difficult because it’s hard to know exactly what type of content (that is still relevant to your business) is going to resonate with your target audience and over time elicit a profitable action. Once you identify the type of content that resonates, then you need to either produce the content, curate the content or some combination of the two – both of which are resource intensive and take a lot of time. Keep in mind that this is not a one off activity but rather a continuous process.

Then there is the distribution side of things – getting the content to the audience. Do you have the right infrastructure (i.e blog) and established social networks in place? What about growing your friends and followers? The bottom line is that for your content marketing strategy to have any success at all, you are going to need to put in a lot of work before you see any results.

For many businesses, it’s more economical to invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising. It’s cheaper, the results are much more immediate and it requires far less resources. The problem is that while SEO and PPC can certainly generate leads, increase direct sales and improve search engine ranking, these activities cannot help you with customer retention nor facilitate word of mouth advertising.

So are you ready to give content marketing a chance?

In the next segment I will discuss how to determine if your business can take advantage of content marketing and how to design a content marketing strategy.

If I’ve had a great brand experience I can share that on Twitter. More than that, while its likely that only my ‘followers’ see my post, it is publicly visible, which means its available to millions. Why is this important if you are a marketer? Because there is a good possibility that your clients are talking about your brand. The likelihood increases the more positive or negative their experience with your brand becomes. Given this, it is extremely important that you pay attention so that you can act accordingly depending on the sentiment that was expressed. If handled appropriately, you can diffuse a potentially negative situation as well as strengthen the bond that your customers have with your brand. Take the following example:

Some random girl with 135 Twitter followers makes a thought provoking/humorous post about combining two Dentyne flavours and the same day Dentyne comes back with a brilliant reply. 7 days later the photo above appears on Reddit and and gets 880 up votes and is seen by tens of thousands of people. Incidentally, these were the top three comments on imgur, the site where the photo is hosted:

So how did Dentyne know about this post? If you’ll notice at the bottom of the Twitter post by Dentyne, it lists the time and date it was posted as well as that it was posted via TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter and Facebook accounts that allows users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. TweetDeck also allows you to create and save searches based on keywords. In the case above, Im sure that Dentyne’s social media team is using TweetDeck to monitor things like their brand name among other things. This is relatively easy to set up and monitor. TweetDeck is great, but Hootsuiteworks as well.

You have no excuse not to reward your customers when they mention you on social media nor ignore those customers who are sharing not so favourable messages.

Well, as it turns out, the following phrase is pretty popular with Certified Public Accountants: “Our firm’s reputation for providing quality service reflects the high standards we demand of ourselves. Our high standards, responsive service and specialized staff spell the difference between our firm and the rest.”

Just how popular you ask? If you put that phrase into Google, it turns out that there are just over 500 firms (yes, that’s 50 search result pages on Google) who have used that exact phrase.

Ironic that they are talking about their high standards

Hat tip to Reddit

Edit: It turns out that these are CPA firms who have purchased their website from a company called CPA Site Solutions and were simply too lazy to change the boilerplate.

Though on page search engine optimisation (SEO) was still an important factor in Google’s algorithm (click here for a good resource on on-page SEO), Google also began factoring in the quantity and quality of inbound and outbound links to a site. Generally speaking, the premise is that the more links a site has going to it, the more popular it must be.

Although the Google algorithm certainly improved the relevancy of search results, the results are still being gamed by companies that are investing big money in SEO. So while Google’s search results are good, it is quite possible the top search results may still not actually be the best. Google knows this and frequently tweaks its algorithm.

However it appears that Google may be supplanting its traditional link based algorithm for a new indicator of popularity – one based on the popularity of user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. Venture Beat has a nice write up on the recent introduction of Goolge + results in Google search results.

I believe that this is a massive change in search and illustrates the importance of having a comprehensive social media strategy. Google may have fired the first salvo but companies like Facebook, Twitter and Bing will not be far behind. In fact, I believe that Facebook will unveil a new social search engine in 2012 and will quickly challenge Google for the top spot.

This change will be great for users as there is little doubt that social search will yield much more accurate results and will be harder to game. The task for companies will be to develop a compelling message and then have a social media strategy which supports that message. Companies that do social media well will certainly reap the rewards in search engine rankings.

Software development projects are notorious examples of projects where millions of dollars get invested in projects that never reach the market, which is why a new approach called agile development has gained so much popularity. According to Wikipedia, “agile software development is based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.”

Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author, has applied this mindset to what he calls the Lean Startup movement – a new-business strategy which directs startup companies to allocate their resources as efficiently as possible. There is a great interview with Eric on Venture Hacks for those who are interested.

So if an iterative approach can be applied to software development or launching a new business venture, then why not in Marketing? As it turns out, ‘Agile Marketing’ is starting to get some traction. There is a great podcast on Marketing Profs dedicated to agile marketing. You can visit the page here.

In this episode of Marketing Smarts, we talk with Frank Days, an enthusiastic practitioner of Agile marketing who is also the author of theAgile Marketing Blog and co-host, along with John Cass, of the Marketing Agility podcast. Days defines the Agile method, discusses why more and more marketers (particularly in the tech sector) are “going Agile,” and recounts his own experience putting the Agile method into practice.

Why does Frank find Agile marketing so appealing? First of all, he feels that it is the most appropriate approach to projects, such as content marketing, which are non-linear by nature and require the ability to respond quickly to the unpredictability inherent in social media.

Second of all, with its emphasis on daily meetings (“scrums”) and ongoing communication, the Agile method promotes alignment of team members and encourages them to focus on the things that matter right now.

Finally, and most importantly from a productivity standpoint, Frank says that, with an Agile approach, “In general, you get a lot more done.”

If you’d like to hear our entire conversation, you may do so here. Otherwise, feel free to grab this and other episodes fromiTunes.