New Media Campaigns

Recap of Internet Summit 2009 in Raleigh

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:50:00 EST

Yesterday was the second annual Internet Summit in Raleigh. We were excited about the event, so we sent three NMC Team members, including myself. The event boasted an impressive speaker list, including the founder of Technorati, president of Pandora, and the CEO of Lending Tree.

With these big names on the roster and an imposing (maybe read: pretentious) event title like the Internet Summit, it was clear that the event was trying to reach national exposure and pull attendees from across the country. I applaud the Triangle area for trying to cement our reputation as a hotbed of tech and startups by hosting the Summit.

The panel topics ranged from the very technical (Cloud computing) to entrpreneurial (Growth & Liquidity) to buzzwords du jour (Social Media and Real Time). While I enjoyed all of the different options, and we often found ourselves splitting up to see different panels because there were a couple good ones in the same time slot, I think it may have been overly ambitious to cram the whole Internet into a single day.

I would've preferred if they made one or two areas, say Search Marketing and Social media, the focus of the majority of panels and then sprinkled in other topics, rather than having such a broad focus and single panels covering entire industries. The decision to stay broad caused for a lot of high level discussion didn'tplay well with the knowledgeable and inquisitive audience (at least the ones I spoke with) who would have preferred in depth case studies or a look into an industry's future, rather than hearing comments like "content is important in social media."

That's a general overview of the conference: some good discussion, but could have used some more specifics and even to be spread over two days. Now let's get to some specifics.

The Highs

There were several panels that provided some really great discussion. Through good moderation and interesting panelists, they managed to avoid the tendency to be broad and really focus on specifics. The top few panels that I caught were Search Marketing, Online Advertising Strategies, and Email Marketing. Email Marketing really stuck out as an awesome panel -- even though it's a common topic, the panel featured execs from industry leaders Bronto, iContact, and Emma. The panelists were very open, interesting, and thoughful.
The overall setup and running of the conference. The conference was hosted at the Raleigh Convention Center, which provided a lot of space to walk around, post up with your lap top, make phone calls, and host side meetings. Furthermore, the wireless was flawless, and the conference had side areas for bloggers to craft posts and for media to gather. The Demo showcase was a nice touch to highlight local startups doing exciting and interesting things in the space. The food was great, the after party beer was quenching, and the overall aesthetics were well thought out. Thank you to the convention center for doing such a great job!
Final keynotes from Pandora president Joe Kennedy and Lending Tree CEO Doug Lebda. Both of these guys gave really great speeches. Kennedy spoke about the importance of "disruptive innovation" (I was a little worried at first) in entrepreneurship and drew a phenomenal extended metaphor to the birth of modern film with The Great Train Robbery. Furthermore, he provided some really interesting facts about Pandora's business, including the stat they have 20,000 new iPhone app registrations every day! Lebda was one of the most engaging speakers I've ever seen. Period. He did an unusual format for his keynote and structured it as a Q & A with the CEO of Peak10. He was incredibly honest and interesting, and the majority of his answers were centered around his entrepreneurial journey, his failures, how his company has evolved, and what he's learned. The committee hit it out of the park by choosing these two speakers.

As you can see there were several factors that made the conference a joy to attend.

The Lows

Keynote by Richard Jalichandra, president of Technoratti. Everyone in the audience and in the tweetstream agreed that this speech was horrendous. He was pretentious, unprepared, and boring. Other people informed me that he was the same at past conferences, such as BlogWorld. IS09 should've done some research and realized that he should not have been put on the list.
Many panels lacked specificity that was desired by a knowledgeable audience. This point was mentioned in my overview, but is worth coming back to. A panel of four people, none of them especially notable, were given 60 minutes to cover social media. That strategy will almost never work, as there's just far too much to cover and discuss. The conference would've been better served to bring in a renowned expert on a specific area of social media and have them go to town on that specific element, rather than trying to cover the whole space. Again, this could also be fixed by having a multiple day format.

Since I enjoyed the experience overall, I don't want to be too negative and will just leave it with those two lows, as those were the two most glaring errors.

Bottom Line: Was it Worth the Price of a Ticket?

One of the best things about living, working, and playing in the triangle area is the low cost of living. The conference maintained that theme by being a very cheap ticket, between $295 and $395 depending on day of registration, compared to other industry fairs like Web 2.0 that cost closer to $1,000.

So, if you're a local and didn't have to worry about flying or booking a hotel and losing a day or two of work, then yes, it was definitely worth the cost of admission.

However, if you traveled a good distance and had to tack on a flight, hotel room for a night, and missed work time for travel, then you probably didn't get your money's worth.

With that being said, it's really important to remember that this was only the second year of the conference. For a second year event, it was very polished, and it wouldn't surprise me if it is worth traveling to next year or the year after. So, definitely keep your eye on this one, as it might be a deal in the coming years.

Did you attend the conference? What were your thoughts?

Thanks again for all of the panelists, speakers (except Jalichandra), volunteers, staff, and to the city of Raleigh! Also, if the conference folks need any talented panelists next year, our Nov 2010 looks pretty open right now ;).

Looking forward to Internet Summit 2009 in Raleigh

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:05:00 EST

Clay, Kris and I are looking forward to spending today in Raleigh for The 2nd Annual Internet Summit! The Summit is designed to promote innovating thought on the Internet and surrounding technologies. As a Raleigh web design firm, this is right up our alley. Some of the big-name speakers we're excited to hear from include:

Richard Jalichandra, President and CEO of Technorati Media
Joe Kennedy, President and CEO of Pandora
John Kosner, Senior VP and GM of Digital Media for ESPN
Matt Van Horn, the Business Development Manager from Digg
Brian Williams, CEO & Co-Founder of Viget. Viget is a local company that we especially enjoy hearing from.

Personally, I plan on attending panels on Search Marketing, Cloud Computing, Social Media, Design & Usability, Email Marketing and Real-Time/Twitter. I know Clay and Kris plan on going to more of the technological panels like Analytics, CIO/CTO Roundtable and Growth and Liquidity.

Keeping in spirit with its purpose, the Summit emailed all attendees early in the week and established a Twitter hashtag for the event, #isum09. So if you're interested in what's going on at this very minute of the Summit, be sure to search Twitter!

Verizon Droid: iDon't Understand Microsite Search Engine Optimization

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:30:00 EST

I've been waiting for Verizon to announce a competitive smart phone for a quite some time. With a barely functional, 3 year old Motorola Q you better believe the first time I saw the much talked about "iDon't" commercial running during a ballgame I to ran to grab my notebook to check out the campaign's microsite: DroidDoes.com.

Big Red is flexing its marketing muscle to hype its self-proclaimed iPhone killer on all major mediums: TV, direct mail, Google ads, you name it. "Everything iDon't Droid does." Like the TV ad, these other pieces drive users to the microsite, too. With this big of an ad spend and a first-class partnership with Google you would think the microsite would be out of this world good.

As far as microsites and marketing landing pages go, DroidDoes.com is out of this world bad. Google should be embarrassed of how their Android Experience phone is being marketed. Not only is DroidDoes.com 100% flash but the flash itself isn't being indexed by Google, the content behind the flash is embarrasingly bad (pictured below), and you can't link to features you've navigated to within the microsite.

"Don't you wish you had a sidekick robot that moved at light speed?" This is what Google (via Google cache) sees when it visits DroidDoes.com and its indexing algorithm tries to figure out what the Droid is about. Google doesn't care about the fancy flash techniques or the robovoice saying "droid". Google cares about content, not flash.

When Google has access to meagingful content it can read, i.e. plain old "semantic" HTML, Google does a lot of work on your behalf. Check out what you get when you search for 'iPhone':

Not only do you get a link to the web site, but Google provides links to the other places on the iPhone website a visitor is likely to want to go and brings them directly there. This is possible because Apple's iPhone content is properly crafted using semantic HTML. Apple also used a meangingful meta description allowing Google to succinctly describe and position the iPhone.

Contrast this with the official result on a search for 'Droid':

Because subpages don't exist, Google can't do a better job linking you to the things a Droid-seeker is looking for: how to buy, features, support, apps, etc. The DroidDoes microsite is one gigantic flash file Google can't link to. The DroidDoes.com website team should be even more embarrassed of their meta description which doesn't describe what Droid is, at all. Upon further inspection there is more to the meta description than meets the eye:

"Get to know Droid a little better. Droid Does the Network. Droid is exclusive to Verizon Wireless, the most reliable network available. Droid Does Android 2.0. Droid contains a new exclusive version of the OS. Droid Does Multitasking. Make a call, answer an email and launch multiple apps simultaneously. Droid Does 10,000+ Apps. Gain power with every app. Droid runs multiple apps simultaneously. Droid Does 5 Megapixels. With a built in flash and 5 megapixels of detail - enhancing resolution, you can capture low light, fleeting moment in detail."

What DroidDoes.com doesn't know is that Google caps meta descriptions at around 160 characters. The DroidDoes microsite's description is 550 characters. No one will ever see the meat of their description because it is too long.

Everything DroidDoes.com uShouldn't on a Microsite

Most of us don't have multi-million dollar budgets to launch and hype advertising campaigns on the scale Verizon has taken its Droid campaign. For all the money they are throwing at consumers they are losing valuable, targetted inbound traffic because of the many poor technical decisions making up DroidDoes.com. With tighter budgets the rest of us can't afford to make these microsite mistakes. Here are a few high-level lessons to take away:

Do not build 100% flash based microsites
1. Especially if the flash file is not created carefully for Google to index
2. Especially if you can't link directly to locations within the Flash file
Always have meaningful HTML content for search engines to index
1. Meta description should be less than 160 characters long and descriptive
2. Use language and keywords that people search for to find your microsite (i.e. not 'always wanted a pocket robot?' when you're selling a phone)
3. Content for all images and flash should also be in HTML

The Droid is going to be Verizon's most compelling smart phone. It's Google's most complete Android phone and first in the Android 2.0 line. Yet the Droid's promotional microsite is underwhelming, clunky, and out-of-touch with the internet of 2009. If your marketing budget isn't that of a Fortune 500 company you can't afford to make the same inbound marketing mistakes with your microsite as the hotshots at Verizon who decided to promote an internet phone that can't play flash videos using only flash video.

Judge an Ad Agency's Website On Content Not Creative

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:40:00 EDT

As advertising has moved further online and into social media over the past few years, it’s no surprise that clients have expected their agencies to be able to help them navigate and leverage this unfamiliar territory.

However, while virtually every agency claims to have the capabilities to help their clients in this space, few top agencies actually demonstrate that proficiency on their own site.

When judging agencies, you should judge the site on its content rather than its creativity.

Just about everyone I know wants their website to serve as a source of leads and to bring in new business. With that in mind, why would you hire a firm that has not even shown the ability to do that with their own web presence?

As a technology partner for advertising agencies, we have worked with many agencies to build their own sites. On each agency site, we place a premium on content and using the site as a lead generation tool. However, looking through top agency sites, it’s impossible not to notice that most agencies ignore the very advice that they give to clients.

This post looks at three very important content-oriented criteria on which to judge ad agency websites: blogging, optimization, and social media.

The Importance of An Ad Agency Blog

In today’s culture, no agency should have a website without a blog. It’s a proven inbound marketing and lead generation tool, an opportunity to promote work and news, and an educational resource for clients and prospects. Not to mention, they’re probably going to try and sell you one, so how can you trust them if they don’t eat their own dogfood?

Not only is it important to check that they have a link to a blog, but it’s also essential that you read the content and hold the firm to it. Is it thoughtful, helpful, and a priority? It’s important to ensure the firm is actually using their blog to engage, educate, and attract an audience rather than just somewhere that they post company news.

A great example of an ad agency blog is the DraftFCB blog. First, the firm demonstrates a rather rigorous posting schedule by adding new content nearly every day. Furthermore, it instantly caught my attention that management is responsible for much of the content. It’s not just a group of interns who had the summer job of writing posts.

My only complaint about the DraftFCB blog is that they host it on a separate domain from their main site, which is a definite no-no when setting up a blog for your business. Overall though, the top to bottom commitment and great content demonstrate that this agency really believes in blogging and its benefits for the firm and its clients.

Is the Content Optimized?

It’s true that major agencies don’t need to be focused on optimizing their site and content to an obscene level, as local targeting isn’t too important to them if they already have a national reputation. However, their site should still demonstrate the fact that they understand the basic tenets of optimization.

Perhaps the most common mistake among agency websites is that the content is totally invisible to search engines. If the site is built in Flash, then it is almost certain that its content is invisible to search engines.

If their site is readable by search engines, you should browse through the rest of the site and ensure that they have a basic understanding of SEO. Check to make sure they have clean URLs, place relevant title tags on pages, use web-safe fonts and not just images, and show an understanding of header stylings.

Again, most ad agencies aren’t going to take their SEO efforts to an extreme, and that’s completely fine. However, they should use their site to demonstrate that they understand how to make a content driven website in a way that’s easy for Google to index.

Social Media Usage

One surprisingly lacking element of top agency sites were their integration of social media into the site. Very few allowed you to easily share their news, blog posts, and other content across media such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicous, and others.

Furthermore, most agencies don’t have prominent links out to their social media presences. If they don’t make an effort to integrate social media into their site, that should be concerning to you.

However, that still shouldn’t stop you from actually making an effort to go scope out their presences on social networks. I would recommend looking for the presences of the general agency, the managing partners, and the account reps for your brand.

Look at how they use the medium. Are they engaging others and making a genuine effort to connect? Do they publish useful content? Have they been in the medium for a meaningful amount of time? These are all important things to analyze.

I’ve seen agency execs set up a Twitter account literally the day before a presentation, because they were pitching Twitter in the project. How can you trust them to advise you on using a medium if they hardly do it themselves?

Conclusion

An ad agencies site should be much more than a TV ad online – they should prove that they understand the medium and the responsibilities that come with it. If an agency is pitching you an overall online strategy, it’s essential that you take a hard look at theirs, too.

Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions and be willing to put some time into the research. What has been your experience with agencies that talk the talk but don’t necessarily walk the walk? Are there other things to look out for on agency sites?

Twitter for Business - Monitoring and Contributing to the Conversation (Part 2)

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

As a new media web design firm, we're often asked by clients how they can improve their online presence. As part of the solution, we almost always advise that clients begin or more effectively utilize Twitter as an online marketing resource. But what does that really mean? This post is the second in a 3-part series that takes businesses through a variety of methods and tools that will help improve their presence in the Twitter universe.

If you're not a Twitter newbie but aren't exactly sure how to take advantace of the service and benefit your business, this post covers:

Search
Being a thought leader
Encouraging Conversation
Listening and Learning

Part 1 of the series discusses the very basics of Twitter. For strategy on how to efficiently manage the increasing amount of information coming into your Twitter feed, stay tuned to our internet marketing RSS feed for part 3.

Twitter Search

Just this week, both Microsoft and Google partnered with Twitter to incorporate real-time search into their results, proving the increasing importance of Twitter Search. Real-time search is here to stay with it are several opportunities for your business.

You can and should be monitoring what people are saying about your brand (and your competitors) in real time. The real advantage of search on Twitter is not seeing what people are saying about you, but is being able to build a relationship with them by answering concerns and showing appreciation for praise.
The Twitter community is very vocal about the brands with whom they use and interact because they know that many compaies are listening. If you can quickly respond to or explain a bad experience with your company, you may be able to turn a critic into a fan. (If that's not valueable, I don't know what is.)
Also, if someone is happy with your product or service, showing them that you're listening will further build trust towards your brand. A simple direct message or @mention saying "thanks for the comment, we love the support" can make a big difference.

Be a Thought Leader

The best way to increase your number of followers is to consistently create and share interesting, relevant information. Hopefully, that includes exciting things you're doing with your own products or service but your tweets should also include industry news, recommendations, facts, questions, answers and anything else that shows you know what's going on right now in your field.

Your goal should be for people to use your Twitter feed as a human RSS feed for real-time information on your industry.

Even though it has nothing to do with our company, as a Raleigh Web Design Firm, many of our followers would find the above tweet by @newmediaclay extremely useful. By providing followers with valuable information, a company can use Twitter to become a resource and build trust towards the brand.

Encourage Conversation

Twitter is categorized as a social network because at its core, it's designed to be social. Since relationships on Twitter oftentimes don't exist in the offline world, encouraging conversation is a great way to nurture those relationships and can turn your followers into fans. There are a few easy ways to encourage conversation:

Ask questions: If you're not sure what to do in an upcoming situation, curious what the public thinks about a current issue, or want to know how your opinion compares to others, you should ask your Twitter followers! If you're using Twitter correctly, your followers should represent a nice sample of your target audience. And if that's the case, knowing their opinion will be very helpful when anticipating how your entire audience will think.
Answer other people's questions: While it's easy to use Twitter to get information, because you want to your followers to benefit from your Tweets, it's important to give back as well. Answer other people's questions, remark on their tweets, retweet them, support them and they'll do the same. Build your community by giving and not just taking. It'll benefit you in the long run.

Listen and Learn

There are many businesses that, just like you, are trying to be a thought leader and encourage conversation. Don't use Twitter only as a means to market your business, use it as a resource too. Click on the links of the people you follow, read their blog posts, and expand your knowledge base. You're on Twitter to provide value by spreading information and expanding trust in your brand. Let other people teach you too. Twitter has spread so rapidly in the last few years because it can be useful. Take advantage of its utility in addition to molding it into your own marketing tool.

What other ways are you using Twitter to help your business? What have you seen other businesses do? Let me know in the comments and be sure to stay tuned for part 3.

Social Media is Not a Strategy

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:55:00 EDT

Photo Credit: The Brand Builder

With the onset of every new technology and business tactic unqualified vendors are born, each trying to make a quick buck through the gratuitous use of buzz words and confusion. One large scale example is the Dot Com Bubble where unqualified entrepreneurs were able to raise millions and millions of capital, but had no business plan except for the Internet.

Social media is the latest strategy to fall victim to this abuse.

Many companies, large and small, have been somewhat sideswiped by the whole social media phenomenon and have gotten lost in the fog. This slip is understandable as it is fairly new and confusing, and the space is much different from what decision makers have seen in the past. However, it’s inexcusable that so many firms and individuals ride in on a social media strategy flying carpet and promise magic.

Executives should not be fooled, they should recognize the fact that: Social media is not a strategy; it’s a vehicle with which to enact your strategy.

As Facebook crossed more traffic milestones and Twitter brought millions in revenue to large companies, more and more agencies started touting social media as the silver bullet that would increase your company’s revenues and your clients’ happiness. I mean the only reason that Zappos had a near-billion dollar acquisition was because they tweeted, right?

However, it’s not that companies tweet or post photos to flickr that is behind their success; it’s the fact that these efforts further their overall strategy of content creation, customer acquisition, and product positioning. Southwest would still be a very successful airline without Twitter, but a core tenet of their business is service and responsiveness, and social media allows them to carry this ethos through more channels.

Too many firms haven’t done their research and convince potential clients that just being in the space is the entire battle. I’m warning you that your overall marketing is the battle and social media is simply another weapon in your arsenal to help win it. Don’t miss the forest for the trees and allow a blind investment into social media that results in participation but no interaction or measurement.

Don’t get me wrong, I love social media (dorkiest sentence I’ve ever typed). It has paid dividends for our firm through inbound marketing, client relations, new business, and in countless other ways. Furthermore, I think there are tons of great firms out there that do social media the right way, such as our partner PR 20/20 and social media firm SHIFT.

These firms understand that it’s about an integrated online marketing strategy and there are a lot of steps before and after social media to have a truly successful campaign. However, it seems that for every firm that gets it, there are a half dozen impostors faking their way to invoices.

So, the next time someone comes to you promising the moon based simply on social media, ask some hard questions, review their metrics, and then look elsewhere.

Should You Build Your Own Private Social Network?

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:20:00 EDT

As social media have become more popular, organizations have frequently wanted to create a more branded and controlled experience for their target. A common (and expensive) solution to this problem has been to build a private social network aimed at connecting your users with one another while bypassing the “distractions” in other networks.

These attempts range from a few wildly successful cases such as MyBo and Pickens Plan to many failures that just turned into virtual ghost towns.

The successful private networks are definitely the exception and not the rule. You’ll notice all the successful cases were supported by organizations with really, really deep pockets. It’s very difficult and nearly impossible to start a private, niche, network that organically takes off.

However, the very popular and high profile cases catch a lot of headlines and thus lead people to consider launching one for their own organization. I frequently speak with great non-profits, corporations, and individuals who are toying with the idea of launching their own network.

My answer is almost invariably no.

Save Resources and Go To Where Your Audience Already Is

Even though services like Ning have reduced the dollar amount to almost nothing to build a private network, the cost is still too high. The true cost is your time and resources devoted to attracting and engaging users on a new network when they’re already herded and conversing on others, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

Your audience has already set up shop in their desired social media, and to convince them to leave and spend the time to launch another presence is a nearly impossible task. Rather than building your own space from the ground up, you should focus on leveraging the organizing tools in place on popular social networks that your target already inhabits.

From Facebook Fan pages to LinkedIn groups (read more on using LinkedIn for business) to Twitter discussion, rather than trying to slowly build an audience from scratch and then engage them, you have the power to immediately connect with them in a space they’re already accustomed to.

Making Sure It's the Right Decision for Your Organization

Before you build your own network, you have to be able to answer the following questions with a definitive yes:

Have you already built a formidable community (I’m talking thousands and thousands of folks) through other social media?
Do you have the available resources to support and promote the new network with other media?
Has your brand cultivated an audience that is passionate enough to sustain its own community?

If the answers to those three is yes, I congratulate you on having a great organization and taking advantage of social media. However, it still doesn’t mean you’re ready to launch your own presence. You then must be able to pledge your continued and persistence efforts to the following:

Creating loads of content that provides valuable information and fodder for discussion to educate and engage the community.
Continually interact in the community by answering questions, greeting new members, posting content, and encouraging interaction.
Progressively upgrade the network with exciting new features, offers, and opportunities.

As I stated above and these checklists demonstrate, it's very very rare that it's appropriate for an organization to build its own social network, it's even more rare for that intiative to actually succeed.

Your resources would be best utilized to engage your target on their ground and terms rather than trying to dictate a new gameplan. Have you seen other organizations that don't fit this mold successfully build their own networks? Have you been a part of a winning private network?

Connect the Dots Between Your Online and Offline Marketing

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:35:00 EDT

I took a trip to Charleston, SC this past weekend, and even though it was a “vacation,” I found myself catching some interesting marketing techniques used by different groups.

I’ve noticed for a while that many organizations don’t have a fully integrated online marketing communication plan, which is somewhat understandable as it is hard to adjust to all of the different online marketing media available. What is more shocking to me is that so many businesses still fail to connect their online and offline marketing.

That’s why a huge smile came across my face on the trip after seeing a couple of great examples of online/offline integration.

The first example is a small boutique store named Bijuju (formerly known as Vanity). This little store out thought most national brands by having cards pushing their different social media presences strewn across the store. In addition to simply having these cards, they also provided a compelling offer with the taglines “Be a fan on facebook. Be rewarded” and “The early bird gets the deal.” Kudos to Bijuju for connecting the dots and doing some great marketing.

The second, larger example were the state of South Carolina’s license plates. They did something that I haven’t seen (or at least noticed) on any other state’s: they put their tourism website’s address, www.sctravel.com. For virtually no cost, this strategy allowed them to increase the site’s exposure and impressions by millions. They essentially purchased several million moving billboards to promote their state.

These are two simple examples that likely have big results for these two businesses. Here’s a quick checklist of three things your organization can do to tie together your offline and online marketing.

Have your website and social media on your business cards (if you still use business cards). Most people hold onto a business card and let it go through the wash at least once. While they may not remember you or the discussion, by putting your web and social media addresses on your card, you increase the likelihood of them interacting with your brand in the future.
Push in-store specials through the web and social media. Just because you’re talking to someone online doesn’t mean they don’t exist in the real world. Use social media updates, blog posts, online news releases, and more to let your online community know about specials or events happening at your physical location.
On-site email signups. Ask customers, volunteers, lurkers, and everyone else for their email addresses. It can be as simple as a pen and paper (trust me, it’ll be worth spending the time to type them into your contacts database) or you can have a laptop station set up, but always push for an email address to stay in contact with them and give special offers.

There are infinite other connections and I encourage you to add them in the comments.

Remember, that by taking a page from Bijuju and also presenting a compelling offer of special deals or offers, you greatly increase the likelihood of people actually following your push. Have you seen any other great offline/online marketing connections?

Twitter for Business - The Basics (Part 1)

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

As a new media web design firm, we're often asked by clients how they can improve their online presence. As part of the solution, we almost always advise that clients begin or more effectively utilize Twitter as an online marketing resource. But what does that really mean? This post is the first of a 3-part series that will take businesses through a variety of methods and tools that will help improve their presence in the Twitter universe.

If you're new to Twitter or just want a refresher on the basics, this post covers:

What Twitter Is
The Language of Twitter:
- Tweets
- Follows
- Mentions
- ReTweets
- Direct Messages
- Hashtags
- URL shorteners
Twitter Profiles

For more advanced strategy on leveraging Twitter for your business, part 2 discusses specific strategies for engaging and increasing your followers and stay tuned to our internet marketing RSS feed for part 3 which will discuss how to efficiently manage the increasing amount of information coming into your Twitter feed.

What exactly is "Twitter"?

At its core, Twitter is a tool for communication. Twitter's site suggests that you share the answer to the question "What are you doing?" The real value in Twitter however is not in sharing what you're doing but instead sharing "What has your attention?" Most people don't care that you had McDonalds for breakfast. What they may care about however is that "you're realizing that you're more frequently going to McDonalds for breakfast since their rebranding effort... accompanied with a link to an article about McDonalds' rebranding."

Twitter is a way of communicating. And just like when you're talking to someone in person, the more you engage your listeners and discuss things that interest them, the more closely they'll pay attention to you. As a business, being able to consistently demand the attention of consumers, clients, or your target audience has incredible value.

The Language of Twitter

Because Twitter dialogue is limited to 140-character statements, Twitter users have established several abbreviations and notations that have become essentially standard. These widely understood and generally accepted shortcuts provide efficiency and increased usability for practiced users but make jumping right into Twitter and fully taking advantace of its functionality a little more difficult.

After taking a few minutes to learn the lingo however, anyone can quickly join and fully participate in the Twitter community. Below is a list of the basic notations and vocabulary and what it all means to get you started:

A tweet is simply a status update or post. It's what you're sending out when you answer the question "What are you doing?" or "What's got your attention?" If you're still confused, think of it this way: sending a letter is to mail what posting a tweet is to Twitter.

Follow

You follow someone if you have signed up to receive that person's tweets (updates). Since it is common curtesy to follow people back who follow you (or at least take a look at their Twitter feed and consider following them), a good way to increase your number of followers is by following other people first.

Twitter unlike Facebook is a social network with a very low barrier of interaction. Do not be afraid to follow someone you don't know and by the same token, don't worry about unfollowing someone. You wouldn't expect someone to follow you that doesn't find what you have to say interesting and you don't need to follow anyone whose updates you don't want to read.

If you're not sure where to begin, FollowOnTwitterLists.com is a collection of all the lists of people that you should be following on Twitter (in order of Google Page Rank).

Mention (@)

Our first symbol, the @ sign is used to indicate that you are mentioning or replying to a specific person. The format for a mention is '@twittername' (no space).

Instead of saying, "I didn't know Oprah Winfrey was the most influential woman in the world.", you would instead say, "I didn't know @Oprah was the most influential woman in the world."

This not only indicates that someone is using Twitter, but also gives your followers a chance to look at that person's Twitter feed and even begin following her, thereby expanding the Twitter community.

Note: Twitter will automatically link to the Twitter feed of any name following an @ symbol. Replies are public and anyone looking at your Twitter feed will see them.

ReTweet (RT)

If someone has an interesting Tweet from which you think your followers would also get value, you can ReTweet that person and give them credit for their post. To do this, simply type 'RT' in front of their Twitter name (ex. "RT @twittername ...") and copy their tweet into your status update. The 'RT' concept was created by users but Twitter began officially supporting the notation recently in order to set a standard format for newcombers like you.

Direct Message (DM)

Whereas Mentions (@) are public, direct messages are private. Only the person who you direct message will see the post and as a result, as opposed to most of Twitter conversation, direct messaging is for one-on-one communication. The DM format is "D Twittername" (single space, no @ symbol).

There are some restrictions to Direct Messages:

You can't send a DM to someone who does not follow you.
You can't use the reply (@) button to reply to a direct message with a direct message (the message will be public)
While DMs are private, they are not secure and you should not send DMs with information like passwords or bank accounts.

You should use DMs when having a conversation that you think only one of your followers will find interesting or relevant.

Hashtag (#)

Twitter users established the # symbol as a way to assign categories, groups or topics to tweets that other users can also use. For example, Gmail has gone down several times in the last months. Twitter users, when trying to get updates on the status of Gmail, would end their tweets with "#Gmail #Fail". This way, people can search Twitter for only tweets about Gmail going down. See below for examples of its use.

URL Shorteners (bit.ly , tinyurl.com)

Because you're only allowed 140 characters in each tweet, people use URL shorteners which redirect URLs from a short domain so that users can save their valuable characters for what they actually have to say. Twitter officially sponsors bit.ly. But the five most used shorteners are:

Twitter Profile

Your Twitter profile is where people decide whether or not to follow you so you'd better make it creative and informative. Here are a few tips for how to make sure you stand out:

Pick a picture of yourself unless you're tweeting as your company.
- Twitter is a place to give your business a little personality. Having an image of a real person instead of a logo will re-inforce that down-to-earth-ness and encourage people to talk to you as an individual.
Create a custom background image.
- Here's where you can let your company brand come in a little. Keep the colors in your brand or put your logo in the upper left-hand corner if you want to tie in your business. Add some text as an image in that blank area on the left-hand side. Here's a great article on exactly how you can customize your Twitter background.
Take some time to think about your bio.
- Twitter is all about saying what you want to say in a clever way so people will want to read it. And of course, you have to do it in a very limited amount of space. Your Twitter bio is your first test. You have 160 characters to sell yourself as someone people want to follow. Think of it as an elevator pitch for your Twitter page.
Create a Twitter landing page for your more info link.
- You could use the homepage of your business as your more info link... Or you could create a page that specifically targets your Twitter audience. Use the language you would use on Twitter and give them the more information they want without losing your Twitter personality.

That's it for a Twitter introduction. Rememer to stay tuned for part 3. And if I missed anything, please be sure to let me know in the comments!

We're Hiring

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:20:00 EDT

Our team is excited to announce two career opportunities we're accepting applications for: Front-End Web Developer and Interactive Project Manager.

Interactive Project Manager

Project Managers 2.0. They have extensive knowledge of all things online media and are able to communicate how to leverage the web because they, themselves are completely engaged in new media technologies.
Aware of the importance of a company's website as the hub of its online presence.
Love working in a high-energy environment and are able to manage multiple clients at the same time while being completely thorough with each one.
Naturals at dealing with people of all shapes, sizes and levels of technical savvy because of their responsive and patient communication skills.
Writers, bloggers and storytellers.
Happy to occasionally extend the work day past 5 to make sure a job gets done right, a site is launched on time, or a client is kept happy.

To apply, fill out the Interactive Project Manager application.

Front-End Web Developer

You should be completely comfortable with and interested in:

Rapid development / prototyping of front-end XHTML / CSS / JS
Debugging cross-browser compatibility issues
Design Usability and Semantic HTML
Photoshop's basic features for design manipulation, chopping up, etc

Other skills it would be a bonus for you to have, or really want to learn:

JavaScript, with an emphasis on jQuery
Web Design and Photoshop/Illustrator Mastery
PHP or other web programming languages like Ruby or Python
Front-end template languages, i.e. Smarty, Django Templates, XSLT
HCI/UI/UX best practices

To apply, fill out the Front-end Web Developer application.