If you’re in charge of marketing or advertising, knowing how best to use your budget on-line could be the deciding factor in whether you’re still in charge of marketing or advertising in a years time! Even if you employ an on-line marketing company to help you plot your way to success on the web, understanding which on-line tools can best achieve your goals gives you the peace of mind that you’re spending your time and money on the best route for your business. There are hundreds of social media sites and tools on the web for you to choose from, you couldn’t possibly use them all…

Of course, it will always boil down to setting on-line goals – but once you’ve done that, how do you know which tools best meet these goals?

Well, you owe CMO.com a big thanks – they’ve taken some of the main social tools that can be used in on-line promotion and created an easy-to-follow infographic which summarises what you can achieve with each tool: The CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape. The infographic (below) gives a great overview of the strengths and weaknesses of social tools when used for on-line marketing campaigns. It’s also a fair indication of how the tools you use should reflect your on-line goals.

Here’s my summary of which tools to use for your on-line marketing campaigns

Well, it’s really my summary, of their summary:

• When you’re looking at having communications with your customers, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are the tools to use.

• If you’re looking to promote your brand around the web,Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Digg can all lead to great exposure.

• If you want to drive more traffic to your site, Digg and StumbleUpon are the tools you’re looking for.

• When you need some SEO magic sprinkled over your site, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us can all share some much needed link juice.

Of course, you also need to make sure that the actual campaign you’re running is suitable for the tools you use (which means making sure your campaign is suitable for your audience), or you’re wasting time, money, and potential customer’s eyeballs.

Make sure you check that the tools you’re using for your current web promotions, and be sure they’re meeting your on-line goals. If you’ve got no on-line goals, STOP! Make sure you know what you’re trying to achieve before you set out your master plan – your results will be far greater…

You can check out the infographic below – The Social Landscape Guide – or read the original post over on CMO.com, where there’s also a downloadable PDF you can, er, download.

I’ve been waiting for the official release of WordPress 3.0 for quite a while – it’s taken around 6 months and 218 people to get it out – and this morning I was greeted by the official upgrade notice in my WordPress dashboard: WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now.  So I updated now. Easy.

Who cares?

If you publish posts or pages to your website, or are wondering whether WordPress is the right publishing tool for your needs, then 3.0 gives you a ton of extra features. I was going to write a long list of them all and tell you why they’re so awesome, but then I decided rather than spend the next 2 hours writing a long list of features and why they’re so awesome, I’d play around with my new version of WordPress instead. I settled on a short list of features:

• Custom Post types: choose to post videos, images, product reviews, whatever you like.

• Manage your background and images: header images can now be different for each post, and you can easily change your site’s background image.

• Custom Menus: page menus can now consist of your pages, post categories, or custom links – so your site or blog can be navigated however you choose.

• Manage multiple sites from 1 WordPress admin: Run multiple sites? Manage it with 1 admin area.

All in all, WordPress is becoming more and more like a fully capable CMS (content management system), with the ability to power an entire site.

I’ll leave you with the official WordPress 3.0 video, which does a great job of summing up what all the fuss is about. (Rather read a long list of features? OK then, see the full list of WordPress 3.0 features)

Oh, and if you’re one of our clients, we’re in the process of updating all your WordPress blogs for you. We’re good like that.

Well, having your content shared on Facebook is very simple thanks to the “Like” button.

Typepad users are reporting a 50% increase in referral traffic since installing Facebook ‘Like’ buttons to their blogs, so say Typepad on their blog. Bloggers who use Typepad as the blogging tool of choice can easily add the ‘Like’ button to their posts, the footer, or the sidebar of their blogs, and adding the “Like” button has seen traffic soar:

When we introduced Facebook Like for the blog sidebar, allowing any reader from Facebook to “Like” your blog and receive post updates directly in their news streams, over 1500 bloggers installed the widget leading to an overall 50% increase of referral traffic from Facebook to all TypePad blogs. This is, as we say, a good thing.

The Facebook Like button allows your readers to “like” your content, which shares a link and the title of your post in their Facebook news feed, which is then seen by all their friends. Of course, if you don’t produce great content that people find useful, people won’t particularly want to share it. It’s not a magic solution, but it can be a great way of spreading your content to a wider audience.

“Hey, I’d love to have a like button, do I need to use Typepad?” Fear not – Facebook allows any developer to add “Like buttons” to web sites and blogs. If you are a wordpress user, it’s even easier: a free plugin – Like – is available to download that adds Facebook’s like feature to your blog.

Let us know if Facebook’s “like” button has increased traffic to your blog, or if you’re thinking of adding one.

Neville Hobson (follow him on Twitter) wrote a post yesterday about ghost writing blogs. I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion that “it’s a terrible idea”. I also believe that, when it comes to disclosing the fact that a blog is being written by ‘other hands’, the very thing that makes blogging unique is rendered useless.

There is possibly nothing that underlines the difference between a press release and a blog post more than the expectation of authenticity. We know that a press release has been written by someone paid by the company to present news in a particular way. A press release is successful when its target audience can use the contents to create other content: top-down dissemination of information. A blog post, on the other hand, is more like a step forward in a relationship. A single post may elicit no responses or trigger much of anything at all. But the accumulation of posts over time presents a unique voice and allows trust to grow.

When we discuss blogging with our clients and when we create a blogging strategy for them, we emphasise the need for transparency. We tell them it’s more important to be genuine than grammatically perfect, more important to sound human than to toe the corporate line at all costs.

And yet, for many of our early clients, I ended up writing blog posts. I’ve even ghost tweeted. (The shame, the shame.)

Why? It came down to cash and confidence. We were offering services that were not widely understood (even by us) and we wanted to make them seem more inclusive. We built the blog so we thought we may as well populate it with content, too. Clients, like many people, were often nervous about presenting themselves to the web via the written word and we weren’t confident enough of the principles (and our bank balance) to offer a “you write the blog or don’t have one one” ultimatum.

Those days are in the past. The bank balance may not be a lot healthier but we know that ghosting blogs does not pay – in any way. However well crafted the writing, however spot on the subject matter, in the end the lack of genuine tone seeps through and you’re left with a series of posts that resemble a true voice in the way that semaphore conveys emotion. It’s also bloody hard gearing up to write posts about things that don’t rock your boat in any way.

I don’t ghost blog posts now.

This post was written and conceived by Graham Stewart. Honest.

At just over £13 after Amazon’s usual discount, this was not a cheap book. (Just checked and the price is now down to £8.66. That will teach me for pre-ordering!) It also ‘weighs’ in at under 175 pages, with lots of white space. Finally, much of the content has appeared before on both MacLeod’s gapingvoid blog and in a document for download (an e-essay) called “How to Be Creative”. As MacLeod himself writes in the preface, this essay has been downloaded over a million times.

So, who’s buying the book? And why?

The same people who read the blog and have downloaded the essay. MacLeod has built an audience based very much on the methods he outlines in the book itself. If ever there was a recursive proof in the pudding, here’s one baked right in.

That’s not to say that MacLeod has simply cashed in on the success of his methodology and reproduced a warmed over version of old leavings. But let’s face it, however wrapped up in the digital world we might be, we still love books. And this is a nice book. It looks good and it feels great in the hands. And it’s not a book you’re going to read once and put to the back of the shelves. This is a book you’re going to keep close and dip into repeatedly. By the time you’ve read it three times, it’s price will probably start to feel pretty much of a steal.

It’s an easy read. I mean that as a compliment. The chapters are blog post short, of course, and they’re continually enlivened – and often reinforced – by a whole raft of great cartoons. The cartoons often hit hardest just when you’re sitting back and thinking that perhaps MacLeod hasn’t really nailed what he wanted to say in the chapter you’re reading. Just as you allow yourself a smidgeon of superiority to creep edgewise into your brain, there’s one of his cartoons sneaking up and hammering your ego with the claw end of the tool.

On top of that, many of the chapter titles and sentences read like well-honed epigrams. MacLeod has a talent for pungent brevity that Nietzsche might have envied. What about these?

“Good ideas have lonely childhoods.” (p14)

“A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.” (p44)

“Avoid the dullards; avoid the people who play is safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct; they are extinction.” (p71)

“Diluting your product to make it more ‘commercial’ will just make people like it less.” (p90)

“Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle – that is, being human.” (p117)

There’s a certain ‘fuck off and die’ attitude that exudes from a lot of MacLeod’s writing that either grates or wins you over. In my case, I’ve travelled from the grate to the win. Macleod, being MacLeod, won’t give a toss but the reason for my journey is grounded in that very indifference: he talks the talk and then backs it up.

This is a dangerous book in all the right ways. For a start, it’s a blueprint for living the life you know you want. Best of all, it doesn’t come wrapped up in new age style waffle about laws of attraction and spiritual fulfilment. The overriding message is one of hard work. For MacLeod the choice seems simple and binary: work hard to get where you want to be (which may actually be a different place to where you first intended) or choose what at first seems to be the easy option (but which is ultimately the route to joyless middle age) and keep believing that personality or luck alone will be enough to see you emerge from the mass striving to compete in your chosen work or artistic milieu. In other words, if you’re an employer shackled to the idea of keeping your employees competing in mediocrity to maintain the status quo, buy up all the copies you can to prevent them slipping into the hands of your workers.

Everyone else, just buy the book and get started on your new life. Don’t ignore me on this!

For anyone hoping to get to the crux of what defines social media or hoping to point their boss or a client towards some books that state the case more eloquently than you feel you can do yourself, it can be hard picking winners from among the huge range on offer.

To that end, in this post and the next I’m listing 10 that I believe will take you on a great journey down the main roads of social media and new marketing and what it means to your business. Here’s the first 5:

The manifesto

1. The Cluetrain Manifesto- Levine, Searle, Locke, and Weinberger (1999)
The book is an expansion of the original 95 theses that the authors posted to www.cluetrain.com in 1999. In an echo of Martin Luther nailing his own 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirche in 1517, Levin, Locke, Searle, and Weinberger were looking to spark their own reformation; this time in the way businesses and the internet interact. The first sentence reads, “A powerful global conversation has begun.” That was the spark.

Some of the most important theses – and which lie behind many of the subsequent developments in new marketing and social media – in a book full of important theses, are no. 1: “Markets are conversations.”; no. 19: “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.”; no. 26: “Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.”; and no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it”.

The essays in the book reveal that the internet is not about the technology itself but how it lets people connect to, discuss, and change the businesses they use. This is the book that got many of us started on the journey and is still a guidebook worth turning to when faced with unfamiliar territory. Smart businesses see it not as the manifesto of a group of angry customers but as a blueprint for how to adapt in a new environment in which they are no longer in complete control.

Learning to listen and engage

2. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers- Scoble & Israel (2006)
This was really the book that gave blogging its business credentials. Conversations may have evolved and new tools have come to prominence but the case studies that pack this books remain relevant and underpin the core social media concept: namely, when businesses listen to their customers, they’re likely to succeed.

Like all the books on this list, the book is a joy to read and there are take-away concepts on almost every page. If your company doesn’t already have a blog – and even if it does – this book will inspire you to start one or improve on the one you have.

3. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies- Li & Bernoff (2008)
This is the book that shows you how to implement social strategies on-line for your business. It’s a book with tables and graphs and fifteen pages of notes at the back. It’s also written by two analysts working for Forrester Research at the time. And yet, it’s a clear and concise read and each case study is presented in such a way that the problems to be solved, the tools implemented, and the benefits gained are all easy to understand.

This is the book to take to your boss if he or she needs convincing that some other company has already succeeded with the strategies you’re trying to put in place.

The on-line business environment

4. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture- John Battelle (2005)
Most people use Google for on-line searching. Even when they don’t, they use the term ‘to Google’ to describe what they’re doing. This search traffic dominance – and the revenue generated by AdWords that follows from it – has given Google huge wealth and the ability to reach out into areas. Now, for any company hoping to benefit from the internet, Google is as much part of the environment as business regulations, audited accounts, and corporate assets.

John Battelle‘s book is so much more than the story of one company’s phenomenal growth to financial success. He combines wonderful writing and excellent investigative journalism with an in-depth understanding of all things related to the internet. The result is a book that reads like a cross between a thriller and popular science. And yet it’s a business book. Still the best analysis of why search is so important and how Google came to dominate a market nobody believed existed.

5. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand
- Chris Anderson (2006)
Chris Anderson is another excellent writer adept at bringing into sharp focus the region where technology meets the business model. This book is a much expanded version of an essay that first appeared in Wired magazine and does nothing less than force a rethink of the way businesses need to think about markets on-line. In effect, because the reach of the internet is so vast, there is a market for just about any conceivable product and service.

What makes the book as exciting as much as well-written, is its representation of a world where businesses can create niche products and be confident of a level of profitability. A perfect antidote to ‘blockbuster’ thinking.

That’s enough books for one day. I’ll expect you to have read them all by tomorrow, when I’ll add the final five books on my list.

If you’ve read them already, what did you make of them?

As a greater number of companies and businesses look to make their brands more remarkable in these tougher times, it seems many are looking, understandably, to have an increased presence on-line. Social media offers a cost-effective, measurable return on effort, and creates opportunities to reach a broader base of customers.

But how do companies and brands navigate through the complexities of managing their on-line presence? Mashable have churned out a great number of articles recently, offering some great sign posts for companies looking at getting more actively involved on-line. The pick of which are:

• The importance of focus: a guide for social media brands

• Why we all benefit from big brands being in social media

• 5 examples of social media blunders and what to learn from them

• How-to: Manage multiple social media profiles

If you’re wondering what the fuss is all about, or want to get greater bang for your marketing buck on-line, these articles are a great starting point for any business or brand looking at getting into the social media space.

If your appetite is whetted, and you’re looking at how you might start becoming more involved with social media for your business, you can always set up your RSS reader to start collecting similar articles and experiences to point you in the right direction.

You can get a good summary of the story on the AdRants blog but it’s better to read the original blog post itself, if only to look at the appalling series of abusive comments from Ryanair staff.

Once you’ve recovered from the levels of idiocy shown by these poeple, there are a few points to consider.

It’s irrelevant, really, whether or not Jason found an exploit or that he was bragging about his coding expertise. And he didn’t and he wasn’t. As he says in one of his replies to the moronic Ryanair ‘staffers’, he was a customer trying to use the site and found a bug in the way the site is coded. This happens all the time. Sometimes people blog about it, sometimes they contact the site’s webmaster. It really should not have been such a big deal.

It became a big deal because Ryanair has not implemented a blogging policy and hires people who care more for scoring points than for the reputation of the company they work for. That’s the real problem Ryanair appears to have – a problem far larger than a minor bug in their web site.

Ryanair’s responses indicate three levels of idiocy:

• Level 1 – not understanding the purpose of the original blog post: they could have politely suggested that this was, indeed, a bug but one which led to confusing displays rather than any true ability to get ‘free’ tickets. Then they could have thanked jason for pointing it out, suggested that if he finds more such things to send them an email, and told him – and his readers – that they were working to get this fixed.
• Level 2 – not understanding that blogs are public: ranting and railing at Jason and calling him names is a strategy that would have made any ‘private citizen’ look stupid, churlish, and immensely unattractive. That each of these commenters identified themselves as Ryanair staff – and, by implication, as representing Ryanair – made the company look stupid, churlish, immensely unattractive, and very unprofessional. Just what you want from someone carrying you at 30,000 feet.
• Level 3 – not understanding that bloggers and blog readers are customers: how many times is this going to happen? Where a simple ‘oops, sorry’ would turn things into a non-story, a company reacts like a bitter and jilted lover, stamps feet, slams doors, breaks its toys and creates a maelstrom of news on Twitter and blogs. News travels fast on the web and, whatever the Ryanair spokesman quoted in the AdRants piece might think, more and more of Ryanair’s prospective customers will be getting that news on-line. What’s the last impression these prospects will have of the company they were thinking of using for a cheap flight. Winner in this? Easyjet.

One last point. This guy is a pilot. He’s also a blogger. If that makes him an idiot, Ryanair are in big trouble. They just hired him.

Word Cloud for Best Marketing Practices

SEO, Blog, and Website representing the best return for marketing spend

Word Cloud for Worst Marketing Practices

Direct Mail, Trade Shows and Telemarketing amongst those efforts with the worst ROI

A great use of Tag Clouds to demonstrate the effectiveness of different marketing efforts, but what do they mean?

These images are the result of their State of Inbound Marketing report – surveying a range of business of all sizes about the ROI of their marketing campaigns. Clearly Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), business Blogging, and a company Web Site feature high on the list of reported ‘Best Practices’, so let’s take a look at what the businesses who participated in the survey have reported about these marketing drives:

• 75% of businesses who regularly blog classify their company blog as ‘Useful’, ‘Important’, or ‘Critical’ to their marketing;

• 55% of businesses stated that Blogging and Social Media offered the lowest cost per lead;

• Small Businesses compete with larger organisations by spending a larger portion of their marketing budget on SEO, Blogging, and Social Media activity;

• Online marketing provides a lower cost-per-sales lead than traditional marketing;

• SEO represented the most efficient ROI, with an average budget spend of 12% generating 16% of all business leads;

• Email Marketing accounted for 14% of marketing budget, returning 10% of all leads;

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing (Sponsored links on Adwords, etc.) saw 15% lead generation from 13% of the marketing budget.

You can grab yourself a copy of Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing report (PDF) over on their blog. Well worth a read if you’re thinking of re-evaluating the spread of your marketing budget during these tough times.

In order to help our clients – and others – to more quickly realise the benefits WordPress can offer, we have been in the process of producing a selection of video tutorial resources to help. However, those clever peeps at Automattic (creators of WordPress) have beat us to it by unvealing WordPress.tv – “Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress” – a mixture of WordPress how-to videos and presentations.

OK, so WordPress.tv is probably slightly more polished, and a little more in-depth, than our effort would have been, but the main thing is WordPress users of all levels know have an excellent resource for getting into, and around, the WordPress platform. The videos tutorials featured on WordPress.tv are short, precise, well produced, and well thought out.

The welcome to WordPress.tv post on the site’s blog gives an overview of the service, it’s objectives, and ambitions:

If you want to learn how to use WordPress, how to do cool stuff with it, how to push it to the bloody edge of reason – we’re building an exponentially growing library of video training content. You’ll find the beginnings of that in the How-To section of the site. There’s a lot more to come, both WordPress.com and WordPress.org side, but it’s happening, and fast.

So, you now have a great resource to accelerate the WordPress learning curve, and get more value from our favourite blogging platform. If your fairly new to WordPress, we’ve selected a handful of useful videos for you to check out:

New to WordPress…

• Introducing you to your WordPress dashboard (1:58)
  
• Writing and publishing posts on WordPress (1:59)
  
• Publishing posts at a later date (0:52)
  
• Adding categories and tags to your posts (1:56)
• Include images and video in your posts (1:46)

If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, and are a little more battle-hardened, these could be worth checking out to add extra value to your blog:

Extending WordPress…

• See who’s linking to your blog (1:01)
• Set your blog discussion settings (2:23)
• Managing other users on your blog (1:32)
• Creating post excerpts, and the ‘read more’ link (1:04)
• Changing your post editor interface (1:28)

Most of these video tutorials are for WordPress version 2.7 – if we’ve set your blog up for you in the past, and are running an old version, get in touch with us by the end of January, and we’ll upgrade for you for free. We’ll make next week a ‘WordPress 2.7, anyone?‘ week at bpodr.

If you have any questions about WordPress, or need something that isn’t covered on WordPress.tv – let us know, and we’ll create a lil’ screencast video, showing you how to do it and talking you through our answer. Get in touch with us and we’ll make it happen.