08/03/09 by lizm | Social marketing | No Comments »
I’m having one of those “smack your forehead” moments.
Michelle McPhearson has written a report I should have written. It’s what I do for my clients and it’s the way I do it. We do it the same because we both have taken our online experiences and melded them with what we learned from the same great teachers (including Ed Dale, Dan Raine and Bob Summerfield-thank you!).
What’s different is that she recognized an opportunity to turn that into an information product that will lead to passive income sales online. That’s another thing I help a lot of my clients do.
So why can’t I seem to do it so well for myself?
I can tell myself it’s because I’m busy down here in the trenches trying to drum up (and finish) the business that’s going to pay the rent this month. And yes, I recognize that as the same sort of excuse I hear from prospective clients who know they should be doing more to market themselves online, but aren’t.
Like all excuses, it sounds good, but doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s holding me back.
Social media marketing is such a natural outgrowth of everything that’s come before that it falls into my “everyone knows this, it’s not special” category. I suspect everyone who’s been working in their profession for a while knows exactly what I’m talking about. All of us tend to take our knowledge and the value of our lifelong experiences for granted this way.
In my case, the basics of what you have to do to attract qualified buyers to your website or blog is not some new secret I just tripped over. It’s something I’ve actually been doing for years. Time has blurred many of the painful lessons it took me to learn what works and what doesn’t, so I have a hard time thinking of it as something valuable that someone else would be willing to pay for.
So I’m once again vowing to treat myself and my life experience with a little more respect. If you’re in my boat, I hope you will too.
And I’m recommending that everyone in earshot get themselves over to http://www.socialmediamyth.com/ and sign up for Michelle’s free and wonderfully valuable and readable report right now. There are no great and profound “secrets” being withheld by greedy gurus to be uncovered in a $97 per month private membership setting, but web 2.0 social marketing does take time and effort. Armed with Michelle’s report you’ll know where to apply that time and effort. If you don’t have the time, you’ll at least know why I do the things I do on your behalf… and why they work.
04/02/09 by lizm | Social marketing | No Comments »
Randfish said on the SEOmozBlog that he and Darren Rowse had talked about blogging evolving away from sharing, and how that might leave an opening for twitter links to start trumping blog posts and appearing above them in the search engine results. The importance of rankings for any business makes this worthy of serious thought. He said:
…It seems very likely to me that the search engines will need to start relying on Twitter’s tweet graph, particularly for “new” information and content. Darren and I remarked that:
* Twitter, and sites that aggregate data from it, like Tweetmeme, actually expose content before social voting sites like Digg, Reddit or Hacker News
* It can be 12-24 hours between when content is first “tweeted” vs. when it earns its first external link
* Many pieces of “throwaway” content (a quick, funny image, post or video) will earn virtually no links, even if hundreds of people have shared them on Twitter
I think it’s way too early to determine if this trend is real, or if it will continue, but the SEO industry has been talking for years about when the engines might start to evolve beyond link analysis. This is one of the first credible expansions I’ve seen.
I am very happy to see this evolution unfold and ultimately think it’s good for both blogging and Twitter. Removing the “junk” and overly personal posts on many blogs improves their quality and relevance for a reader immensely. At the same time, confining those personal tidbits and shares to a micro 140 character outburst makes them a lot more palatable and desirable.
In a time starved world, the twitter/blog combo is a perfect division of labor. I can still convince myself that I am connecting with people even if all I get is a brief glimpse through their eyes at what is funny, important, fascinating, or revolting to them. I get that through the links they share on twitter. Of course, to truly connect we must engage each other in real conversations and use @replies, etc. that aren’t solely self-serving…
Even if all I do on twitter is absorb other people’s tweets and links, I can then explore, in depth and dimension, the blog posts that those links take me to. If twitter forces bloggers to concentrate and present more unique, high quality content, in the hopes of gaining links, more power to it.
That makes twitter the sizzle and blogs the steak. Having that sizzle come in the form of a 140 character message is a huge relief after enduring looooonnng sales letters, and squeeze pages of no information fluff in hopes of getting a bite of real meaty content.
So here’s my bottom line contribution to the discussion Rand and Rowse had:
I’m no search engine algorithm expert, but I do work every onpage and offpage angle I can to help my clients rank well and grow their business.
I wonder if, instead of taking over the rankings directly, twitter will play another important role in the future of search. I can see a “tweet score” being added to Google’s algorithm instead of tweets outranking posts. If tweets are replacing blog links it makes sense for a tweet score to replace the pagerank formula so many experts have already remarked no longer seems to hold much meaning. It makes even more sense when you consider that pagerank measured the importance of who linked to you.
Even if Twitter is cannabalizing links, I can’t see Google feeding it search prominance while waiting around to see if Yahoo or MSN is going to buy it. They’ll gobble it up first by incorporating it in their supersecret formula (and it won’t cost them a buyout penny). At least that’s what I would do if I were Google.
01/17/09 by lizm | Local marketing, Social marketing | No Comments »
Still think having a website, or some some of online base of operations is an option, not a necessity? Still think you can ignore what customers and prospects are saying about your business online because you do business with local clients who have to see you face to face?
Here’s a little story that proves just how wrong you are. It shows just how far the Internet has matured and how much power the online marketing savvy really do hold over the profitability of your business.
My car broke down. It died on the side of the road and I had to have it towed to my favorite mechanic. He’s a certified master mechanic who has treated me fairly for years. It hurt him to have to tell me I needed to take it to a dealership for the diagnostic equipment and tools they have.
It hurt me to learn they wanted $800 to fix my car. It hurt me even more that I knew the person I spoke to was padding the repair heavily describing each part in terms such as “essential plugs and wires” and misquoting what this or that part does. I called my mechanic back and asked what he thought of the estimate and work to be done. Then I called the dealership back with a request for an estimate on just the one vital part to be replaced.
The dealership came back with two “absolutely crucial” things to be fixed and a new quote of $500. Thank God we got the $300 tune up off the table. I bet he thought I should have been happy he was looking out for my best interests. He raised his voice to emphasize just how sincere he was about not wanting to let his own wife or daughter drive off in a job half done not knowing whether that second part could go bad at any time. I didn’t need my master mechanic to tell me that was a scare tactic, but it was very nice of him to apologize to me on behalf of a fellow mechanic none the less.
This dealership is probably well aware of the marketing fact that a happy customer will tell 3 other people about their experience and that an unhappy customer will tell 9. So I’m sure in their staff meetings there is a Service Manager who drums home being polite to customers, sounding sincere, etc. Under those circumstances even an unhappy customer will have cooled off somewhat by the time they drive home and in a day or two will have moved on to other gripes. If you act politely, they may only tell 2 or 3 friends after all.
What they most assuredly haven’t taken into account is that the Internet has changed this enormously and permanently. In addition to having this blog, I could also post about my experience on Facebook, MySpace, and in my Friendfeed rooms. I also have Twitter account.
I’ve searched my local midwest metropolitan area for other people who use Twitter. Between Rockford and surrounding areas, there are more than 100 Twitterers. In 140 characters, I can make sure that everyone of them know about my situation. I could rally them to retweet my warning to everyone who follows them. I could link through to this blog post, or any one of those other social posting places and do all of that in less than one hour if I chose to.
By the end of the day, how many people will have heard? How many people have every been in a situation similar to mine? Do you think they would be easily persuaded that I am telling the truth? I am by the way, but I ask that to drive home the point.
If you are in business today, you have to be listening for this kind of chatter. You have to know what people are saying about your brand if you want to protect it.
And, If you are in business today, you simply must have an outlet to tell the world who you are, what you are and what you stand for. You need to have your story told somewhere, somehow, and you need to be able to jump in to the conversations around you right now. Today. This morning.
You may choose not to respond to every story like mine. In fact, if this dealership was a client of mine I would done everything possible to convince them NOT to respond immediately or in kind to my story, no matter how many twitterers contacted them to find out if it were true. But they still need to have a way for all those twitterers to reach them.
Long before this morning and this story I would have had them using those avenues to tell people stories of the repair experiences that went right. We would have included a disclaimer that not all do and may have even pointed out that sometimes we had to turn repair requests down, but we would have been able to do it in a controlled way.
If even a local car dealership’s service department needs to be able to talk to their customers where their customers are today, don’t you think you owe it to your business to be able to do so
