Archive for the ‘Understanding On-line Marketing Tools’ Category

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Video by Dr. Michael Wesch - Kansas State University.

The Web 2.0 machine may be using us, are you using it?

Now that our kids are of an age - finally! - to be left at home alone in the care of the eldest, my wife and I take every opportunity to grab a chance for a walk. At week-ends, this can often lead to a hour or two spent drinking cider by the fire in a country pub. Yesterday, however, the sky was blue and the ground dry early on and we grabbed the chance for a walk in the fresh morning air. After a couple of days of intermittent but heavy rain and a cold cold breeze, it felt almost like late summer again. No pubs were open at that time, of course - and it was Sunday - so we made do with a long walk and a full breakfast on our return home.

So there you have a picture of marital and bucolic bliss. (Not that we live in the countryside but it’s only a short walk away.) And, of course, that is not the point of this post.

Getting to the point
On the walk back home my wife asked me about one of the bpodr proposals we sent out last week. My wife runs a successful company. bpodr recently helped the company revamp its web site. In addition, we’ve devised a strategy for increasing site traffic, helping the company expand into other markets, and set up a personal blog (and blogging strategy) for my wife. She’s well aware, then, of the benefits of the internet tools available to businesses of all sizes.

And yet, if I mention the term ’social media’ she guffaws. She snorts. She jeers and mocks. In short, she laughs. To her ears, ’social media’ is an ‘airy-fairy’ term. ‘It sounds as if it was made up to sound important,’ she says. ‘It’s an empty phrase. What does it mean?’

What’s in a name?
What indeed? This raises a couple of questions. Firstly, what is to be gained by collecting a number of internet tools and giving them a label of any sort, never mind one that has intelligent business people sniggering behind their hands? Secondly, how do people expert in these tools and passionate about the benefits they bring convey the impact they can have on a business without resorting to the ‘airy-fairy’?

(A quick aside: if you haven’t read this Dennis Howlett guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog and the huge number of responses it generated, please give it a visit. Although much of the discussion was about the take-up of the technology, there were a significant number of comments on the terminology itself. I think it will prove to be one of those posts which will be seem to mark the start of a sea-change in ’social media’ thinking. And by ‘post’ here, I include the comments - a good post is really only as good as the conversation it inspires.)

In most cases, there is a technological divide between companies of a certain size and the enterprise. The latter usually has the budget and staff - although perhaps in shrinking numbers at the moment - to allow a bit of boundary pushing, testing, and breaking when it comes to the sharp edge of internet innovation. Smaller businesses, however, are by nature and necessity slow to the curve. They need proof that any expenditure will satisfy at least a minimum ROI before they write cheques.

What are we measuring?
Terminology doesn’t often win over business owners. It’s usually about the bottom line and for companies trying to deliver services to these business owners, being unable to offer hard evidence for success and hiding behind what can, at times, appear to be condescending jargon, is not a recipe for a successful sale.

Griping about the difficulty of measuring ROI or complaining that revenue growth is hard to equate directly with increased web site traffic or asserting that the value of reputation cannot be counted in pound coins does little to instil confidence in the tools we propose to use. Surely it is up to us who hope to use the tools to be able to define exactly how the customer will benefit.

If it’s hard to measure something, it comes down to one of two reasons. Either we’re measuring the wrong thing or we’re using the wrong tool to measure it.

This goes for our set of tools, too. Hide behind a vacuous term and you don’t deserve a client’s business. Tell the client you can work wonders for the business but it will be hard to put that in hard numbers and watch while security arrives at the door.

A south London estate agent recently launched a new web site that had taken many months and many thousands of pounds to build. The new site looks good and works well in terms of usability and purpose. Unfortunately, it launched with no metrics in place. That meant there was no way to tell if the new site was working better than the old site. (Imagine the correct Homer Simpson response here.  If you need help imagining the response, just watch the quick video below.)

You’ll be relieved to learn that the site now has metrics installed.

Web sites, if they are to be a serious aspect of your company’s marketing strategy, are about performance. (It could be argued that, if your web site doesn’t play a serious part in your marketing, you should shut it down. A feeble site will almost certainly do your brand more harm than having no web presence at all.)

So, it’s about performance. And you have no way to measure the performance of your site if you don’t install some form of metrics. When you fail to measure, you have no ability to learn, change, and improve.

In meetings this past week with a number of prospective clients - all large and successful companies aware that their existing web sites are just not cutting it - the common theme was that they knew something was wrong with their sites but couldn’t specify exactly where the failings lay. Now whether it was low traffic, old-fashioned design, poor usability, or confusing content and unclear messages, all the sites had one thing in common: insufficient metrics.

Web metrics has become an increasingly specialised area of web site build and on-line marketing. As it has become more specialised, more and more companies seem to be ignoring it rather than embracing and exploiting its full potential.

Here is a quick list of essential reasons for installing - and using - web metrics:

1. Web metrics tell you WHO is coming to your site
2. Web metrics tell you WHERE they’re coming FROM
3. Web metrics tell you WHAT they’re doing on your site
4. Web metrics tell you WHY they’re coming to your site
5. Web metrics tell you WHY they’re leaving your site

These measurements - combined with the rather more sophisticated data that sit behind them - are the foundation of any successful analysis of your site’s performance. This becomes the structure that directs and supports site changes, improvements, and redesigns.

It’s no accident that the list reads like the traditional recipe for a press release. This is the other side of the ‘reach your market’, after all. You’ve created something that is meant to appeal to a target audience. Now you need to know whether that audience is, indeed, finding your site and how they are reacting to it.

This week Google announced a new homepage for their Google Blog Search service. The update enhances their blog searching technology, making it easier to browse and discover stories in the blogosphere.

Using similar technology to it’s sister site Google News, blog search will group related stories together making it easier to track the conversation about particular topics. It also adds the capability to browse and uncover latest posts by category.

It seems Google may be taking aim at Technorati with its feature enhancements, and will no doubt become a valuable tool for people or businesses who wish to keep their finger on the pulse of conversations happening on blogs daily.

Give Google Blog Search a test-run…

You might be interested in what bloggers are talking about regarding the latest technology, selecting the technology category will show you that Nokias new touch screen N5800 is getting a lot of buzz, with 147 blog posts about it in the last 18 hours. Selecting the posts will also show you the frequency of posting over the last 18 hours.

Think of something that’s happening in your industry or business, type a phrase or keyword into the search box and see what’s being said about it on blogs around the world.

If you’d like to limit the results to blogs in the UK, select advanced blog search, and enter UK in the ‘at this URL field’.

Also, why not type in your business name, or one of your products to see what conversations are happening right now. You might find some interesting new blogs to keep track of, and get a feel for how people are responding to you. Remember you’re free to leave comments on blogs, and could give you a great opportunity to reach out to new customers.

Keeping track of what’s being said by bloggers - about you, your business or your industry - so easily is a great way of keeping your finger on the pulse of the blogosphere.

If you are reading this post from our website, you may have noticed that we are in the process of refreshing this site with a new design, clearer messages, and more relevant content - whilst trying to eat our own dog food. Our blog forms the spine of our site (why a blog?) and we wanted a powerful, expandable, and easy-to-use tool to allow us to manage it all. Free would be nice too, of course.

Step up, Wordpress. Wordpress is a blogging publishing tool, which is free, and can be easily expanded to provide all the features of a complete content management system. From the Wordpress site…

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.

It’s also open-source, which means anyone can open up the bonnet, have a play with the source code and make changes to suit. We use Wordpress for all of the reasons above: Free. Easy-to-use. Lots of features. Free. Fully customisable.

Why choose Wordpress for your business blog?

• It’s easy-to-use. Wordpress gets out your way, just providing the tools you need to create and manage all your site’s content, through a secure, password protected admin interface.
• You can host within your own business domain. Choose to create your Wordpress blog within your domain name and you retain full control over your own content, instead of hosting it elsewhere.
• You can fully customise the design. Skin Wordpress with a free ‘theme’ of you choice, or get a bespoke design completed to compliment your existing site and brand.
• It supports multiple Authors. Wordpress can manages multiple authors, which makes it more than capable of supporting a structured blogging strategy.
• Plenty of features and easily extended Boasting a vast array of plugins plus the ability to open the bonnet and code your own feature extensions, Wordpress can cater for almost any requirement.
• Oh, and it’s FREE.

Wordpress is used to power millions of blogs and web sites all over the web, including: Dell (yourblog.direct2dell.com), Xerox (blogs.xerox.com), Southwest Airlines (blogsouthwest.com), Digg (blog.digg.com), New York Times (walkthrough.nytimes.com), oh, and Stephen Fry (stephenfry.com/blog).

Given the name of this blog and the fact that I also use Google Reader as my feed reader of choice, Commoncraft’s new quick intro video into how to use the latter to make sense of RSS and to organise your feeds was always going to appeal.

It was the team at Google Reader itself that approached Commoncraft, which is a fair indication that Sachi and Lee LeFever are seen as the creative team to turn to for explanatory video. Anyway, enough said: here’s the video.

More and more of the people I meet professionally these days have joined LinkedIn. The majority of these people recognise that LinkedIn has real value but haven’t quite grasped how to exploit its potential.

Step forward the Commoncraft team once more. LinkedIn approached them and asked them to create a short video that helped explain some of the benefits of belonging to the network. The original Commoncraft blog post about the video is here.

But if that’s too far to go, here’s the video.

We love a good portmanteau, especially when it’s relevant to the web, and even more so when it’s relevant to the web and to businesses working with the web - so you can imagine our satisfaction when we had a whole new word to play with after Inside View announced it’s latest on-line venture - Sales Viewâ„¢.

“Enterprises are inherently social because they are comprised of relationships between employees, and among sales people, customers and partners,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer of InsideView. “As social applications are reaching critical mass both in users and content, it is not a matter of if but when they will mature into becoming a core part of every enterprise application. InsideView recognizes this inevitability by introducing SalesView, the first Socialprise application designed to capture the burgeoning social data inherent within the enterprise.”

Sales Viewâ„¢ will allow CRM (customer relationship management) users to utilize the power of the web to deliver more information about potential customers and sales-leads, scouring blogs, social media applications and the like for the latest customer data.

I can see many businesses donning their trunks to ride this wave over the coming months - unlocking the wealth of information held by the individuals who feed social networking, blog and publish themselves on-line. The power of collaboration for whoever wants to harness it.

‘Socialprise’ represents more than just a catchy, nice-ring-to-it, word-2.0-type phrase - It represents the fact that the web 2.0 and social media applications (like facebook, linkedin, jigsaw) are being leveraged to help businesses of all sizes improve their efficiency, better understand their customer and ultimately, drive profits.

No matter what you call it, businesses embracing the social web is an exciting prospect.

If you don’t really feel like searching over 112 million blogs to find out what your customers / competitors / industry leaders are talking about, why not let Technorati do it for you?

Technorati is a blog search engine, tracking over 112 million blogs to bring you all the hot stuff from the blogosphere. As well as looking at blog posts, Technorati also makes use of ‘tags’ to allow authors to categorise their own content, and tracks the relationships between blogs and authors (who’s linking to each other, leaving comments or responses) - this all adds up to a comprehensive, real-time look at whats happening in the world of blogs.

Technorati easily allows you or your business to track what bloggers are saying about topics that are important to you. It’s a great starting point for tuning into the conversation.

We have incorporated Technorati tags at the bottom of each of our blog posts to allow us to tell Technorati a little about the subject of the post, as well as helping to categorise where this blog post should be found. You can view our Technorati profile at http://technorati.com/blogs/www.bpodr.co.uk%2Fblog.

Graham has also placed a not-so-subtle technorati button to the right hand-side of this blog, so you can mark us a Technorati favourite. (he’s too good to you!)

In the (very-near) future, we’ll show you practical ways of using Technorati to tune in and stay tuned to the conversation that matters most to your business.

What are you doing? It’s a simple question and often the perfect start to a conversation, for Twitter though, that is the conversation. in 140 characters or less.

Twitter helps build social networks for sending relevant, up-to-date and quick updates to your connections. The peeps at Commoncraft have done a great job in explaining how it works:

You can follow Graham and myself on Twitter and stay up-to-date with what we’re doing (You lucky, lucky things!). You can also see what we’re doing from our new widget on the right of this very blog. We’ll share our Twitter findings and experiences back here, along with a future post looking at how Twitter can benefit you (Quick tip: Does your resident industry expert have an active network on Twitter, commenting on industry updates?).

Do your customers care what you’re doing? Twitter.com