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Four Things I Like About the New Twitter

January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The social media landscape is evolving at  a rapid rate. More types of content are being integrated – not unlike Universal Search of a few years ago – Twitter is being embedded in more networks (and blogs! see right column on this post :-) ), Google +/Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn are all adding or updating business pages – it’s crazy! and awesome!

New Twitter Interface

But, this post is about the new Twitter – there are four things I really like about the updated design and new functionality:

  1. The new bar at the top including @connect and #discover. The @connect shows everyone who has mentioned me in their tweets from latest to earliest. In reviewing this I realized that I neglected to respond to an email to Eric – sorry! The #discover tag gives you a quick view into the rapid happenings captured by Twitter. The immediacy of Twitter is still it’s biggest value.
  2. Integration of videos and images into the main stream of tweets. This makes sharing and consuming the non-text much easier. Use #discover for SOPA and see the search results page for a great example – https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23SOPA
  3. Embedded Tweets. You can now grab embed codes for your favorite tweets. This means that rather than taking screen shots of tweets and uploading images to blogs and websites, you can embed tweets so that users can interact directly from the site.
  4. Brand Pages. Twitter is jumping on the business support train – finally! All major networks are starting to give businesses the tools to interact with current and future customers instead of relying on personal networks. These pages allow brands to add a customized banner to their Twitter profile page. This customization increases brand awareness and gives brands the ability to promote a particular phrase, image, or promotion/event. In addition, brands are able to pin tweets to the top of their pages, drawing attention to content that the brand feels is most relevant to its audience. Check out the Jet Blue page – https://twitter.com/#!/JetBlue

Social is more than a channel – it is a new way of communicating and interacting. I think this internet thing has some legs…

Filed Under: Social Media

QR Code 101 and Best Practices

December 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I just uploaded a deck to Slideshare the covers the following:

  • What are QR Codes (Quick Response)
  • How do they work
  • What are some ways to use them
  • Some examples
  • Some best practices

Enjoy!

QR Code 101 and Best Practices

Filed Under: Mobile, Website Optimization Tagged With: , , ,

Four Destructive Myths Most Companies Still Believe

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I just read a great article in the Harvard Business Journal by Tony Schwartz that covers these four myths and they really resonated with me. The four myths and a short description are:

Myth #1: Multitasking is critical in a world of infinite demand

Removing distractions so we can focus without moving back and forth – mentally – between email and conversations or whatever – is critical to get more things done. Humans don’t really multi-task – we transfer attention quickly which causes mental downtime between the focus items.

Myth #2: A little bit of anxiety helps us perform better

I’m not sure I agree with his thinking on this as a little anxiety helps me focus and work harder, but is probably hard on my health. Tony’s point here is that when we are performing our best, it is when we are reaching for the stars and not running from the big bad wolf.

Myth #3: Creativity is genetically inherited, and it’s impossible to teach

While I agree that we can learn to become more creative as  Tony opines, I believe there are different types of creativity and that we all have a “lane” that we are within more or less. I have a friend – David Harto – who is  one of the most creative people in the world from the standpoint of envisioning and creating out of nothing. I have no aspirations to his type of creativity, but I have my own way of being creative that he won’t approach. It’s relative, but can be improved.

Myth #4: The best way to get more done is to work longer hours

I believe this one as at the end of a day or week, more hours don’t help as I’m fried. I actively take breaks during the day to re-set and re-focus.

It’s a good article and worth a read here

Filed Under: Strategy & Leadership

Promoting A Local Restaurant Online – Part Two – Tune Up Your Website

November 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Wild-Sage-Bistro-Best-Restaurant-in-Spokane

In part one of this series, we discussed establishing the metrics and benchmarks for your restaurant. In part two, we’ll talk about tuning up your website so that when your site is found (which we’ll go deeper into in the next post), you have the best chance to engage the visitor and encourage them to choose your restaurant over the other options.

Build Relevant Content

Every restaurant should have a minimum number of pages on their website that answers specific questions and provides specific information to the visitor while encouraging them to select you for their experience.

  • Homepage – Establishes the brand look and feel, value proposition (why are you the best restaurant in your niche?), what makes you different and excellent navigation to the rest of the pages. You should also have your phone number displayed prominently on your homepage for mobile users who find your site on a smartphone
  • Menu’s – What are you serving, when and how much – set the right expectation for the visitor
  • Directions/Map/Hours of Operation/Payment Types accepted – Make sure this information aligns with all of the other places this data will live like Google Places, Yelp, CitySearch, etc. – We’ll get more into these sites in the next post in the series.
  • Awards, News, Testimonials – Who else says you are great? Local and national press is best
  • Review Page > all the great reviews from Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, UrbanSpoon, etc.
  • Dining Club, Newsletter or Some other Way to Collect Email Addresses – Converting an unknown website visitor into a known person that you can reach out to via email is critical for relationship building and audience growth. Dining clubs, newsletters, emails, etc are critical for this. This page should have a form, privacy guarantees and a strong reason for people to give you their email address/trust to contact them.
  • Catering? Banquets? Retail?> any information on ancillary services, space for banquets, sauces or rubs that you sell, etc. These should be built on their own, individual pages
  • Blog – why every restaurant doesn’t have a blog going nowadays is beyond me. I think of all of the posts around new recipes, new drink cocktails, events, parties, charity projects, big personnel changes, etc.
  • Resources or Sites We Like or Partners – A spot to link to your favorite source of bacon or the wholesale wine broker of your dreams. Giving link love to the sites that you love should result in getting links back.

Optimize Each Page

There are two major ways to think about optimizing web pages – First, for the user experience and Second, for the search engines. Both of these should be considered and acted on for EVERY page of your site so that the page is as PRODUCTIVE as possible. Here is a quick set of considerations for each.

User Experience Page Optimization

People scan pages first and then read. The makes the information hierarchy on the page (what is big, what is small, what is where) very important. Here is some guidance to the content you put on the page.

  • A short strong headline is critical – answers the question of where am I?
  • A sub-headline that qualifies the headline
  • A little info about what you want them to know – preferably in bullet format or short sentences broken up by whitespace
  • Videos, Images and good text formats make the page interesting looking and easier to scan
  • A strong call to action > what do you want them to do next? Call? Sign-Up for Something? Like You on Facebook? Follow you on Twitter? Go to another page? Make this action obvious and in the main eye flow of the page – not jammed in the upper right corner of stuffed into a footer
  • If you are interested in more information on this very important topic – read “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug.

Search Engine Page Optimization

Some of the recommendations here are dependent on what your content management system (CMS) allows, but all are important so that you have the best chance of presenting your website properly to search engines for inclusion and ranking.

  • If you have the option to make the page file name (/menu.html) descriptive – please do so.  A file name like /3×451.html or ?p=134  tells the search engines NOTHING about the page. This is a CMS issue so depending on which platform your website is built on, this should be updated. It is easy with wordpress, less easy with others – but important!
  • Keyword specific, clear, unique title tags – also called page title or browser tag. This tag shows up at the very top of the browser when you are on a page and is the title of your page result in Google, Bing, Yahoo when your page is displayed. It should be seen as a way to position and market the page to the person typing in “best restaurant in …” or “great <italian, american, vietnamese> restaurant in downtown <city>”
  • Keep title tag under 64 characters total (including spaces) so that it all shows up in the search engine results page (SERP)
  • Create a unique meta description tag – this is the body of the result in the search engine and does not contribute to rank, but contributes to someone wanting to click through to your page. Make it compelling and exploratory like “See why our meatballs are the best in the city!” or “Learn why we have a 4.5 avg rating on yelp…”
  • Keep meta description under 156 characters (same reason as title tag)
  • Make your headline styled as an <h1> tag. This give the engines a heads up that this copy is important on the page
  • Write good copy, but not too much – remember that copy is for visitors AND engines. Make it concise and well organized.
  • Use Alt-Text for images and video – this gives text to page elements that search engines CAN”T read like images
  • Use captions under images that describe the picture or video
  • There are lots of SEO guides out there – Google SEO Guide for Beginners is a good start.

So, there you have part two of our series. Part three will be around increasing your website visibility in search engines, review sites and local portals/information sites. All of which you need to be keenly tuned-in to.

Thoughts?

Filed Under: Local Marketing, Restaurants, Website Optimization Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Google Behind the Numbers: Business Metrics Infographic

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is a VERY interesting infographic about Google’s business, sources of revenue and comparisons. It includes a list of resources at the bottom which is good content for additional reading/understanding. Enjoy!

Google Behind The Numbers

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tagged With: , , ,

Success is Built on Belief and NOT Features

November 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I just watched a fantastic TED video by Simon Sinek who discusses the impact of belief on the success of organization and leaderships role – watch the video on Youtube Here.  In the video he discusses the three major questions of the “Golden Circle” and how thinking about these set of questions in a different order will help you think about what you believe.

Simon Sinek's Golden Circle

Think inside out vs outside in

What – What You Do. The features, products, services you produce.

How – How You Do It. The processes you go through, the things that differentiate you and your products.

Why – Why You Do What You Do. Why do you get up every morning? Why will people care? Are  you working for money or working for a purpose. This is the core question you need to answer and build an organization/business on.

Simon talks quite a bit about the intrinsic buying response is to do business with people who believe the same things you do.

A quote he repeats quite often is

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” – Simon Sinek

The primary example he uses is Apple and their ability to innovate more rapidly in a more compelling way every year than it’s competitors. They are just a computer/device/phone manufacturer right?

Watch the video. Here it is again. And apply to your business and/or life work.

Filed Under: Strategy & Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

Seattle Interactive Conference – SIC2011 – Day Two

November 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Day two of the #SIC2011 conference was well attended, with a slow start due to the party last night :-) . I attended quite a few sessions, with mixed results in terms of quality. The Spring Creek panel on Social Media ROI was lame and I was hoping for some more specifics and action items out of the Yelp and Ubermind/Alaska Airlines sessions.

On the good side was Rand Fishkin – he and I are totally aligned on Content – Social – Search – Conversion working together for earned media, but I don’t think he went far enough. I’ll have a post on this in the near future. The session by Brian Fling on mobile development was great – he had one slide that showed a timeline of technologies: computing, network, internet, devices and web transitions and why we are at a major transition point (see below). The Digital Music panel and the So-Lo-Mo (Social, Local, Mobile) were both great.

Sessions I attended:

  •  Rand Fishkin – Inbound Marketing is All Connected – Presentation @ http://bit.ly/inboundconnected
  • Brian Fling – Pinch/Zoom – Mobile Design – Get Slides! @fling, book: mobiledesign.org
  • Yelp – Darnel Holloway – Local for Business
  • Digital Music Panel – Ross Reynolds (KUOW), Aaron Starkey (KEXP), Nick Harmer (DCFC), Sir-Mix-A-Lot, Tim Bierman (Pearl Jam Ten)
  • Social Media Panel – Measuring ROI – Kevin O’Reilly (Spring Creek), Ben Straley (Meteor), Neil Beam (Conversean), Julie Storer (HTC)
  • Mobile Experience – Alaska Airlines (Curtis Kopf) and Ubermind (Shehryar Khan)
  • SoLoMo – Social Local Mobile Panel – Scott Macklin (UW MCOM), Bryan Trussel (Glympse), Daniel Cowen (Echoer), Jason Wilson (MapQuest), Monica Guzman (Geekwire)

Rand Fishkin – Inbound Marketing is All Connected – Presentation @ http://bit.ly/inboundconnected
- Why did we become a marketer? To push? Interrupt?
- You can’t buy my business, you have to earn my business
- Inbound Marketing – any tactic that relies on earning people’s attention instead of buying it
- Additional decks: social media marketing + seo
- Content > Search > Social > Conversion
- Search is still a big deal and growing – Google – 3 Billion searches per DAY
- Social is Discovery Prior to Interest = awareness?
- A front page post of Reddit will drive 50k – 100k referrals to a site. A top post with some longevity will drive 250k+
○ Kimpton: thanks for visiting, anything we can do? > I want bathtub full of reeces pieces and a bed full of kittens > We’ll see what we can do > arrives to a note card with a bathtub and bag of reeces pieces + photo of kittens on bed > takes picture, submits to Reddit – 100,000′s of visits > BIG ROI
- Top three positions covered by SEOmoz – third position was a video – more clicks on 3rd position than first two
- Conversion: listen/survey > why did you buy, why didn’t you buy? What do you like/not like? What is confusing/clear?
- What you say > how you say it
- Trust happens “out there” not just on Landing Page
- Tips/Steps
○ #1: Data as Content Marketing
○ #2: Video Content + SERP Visuals – SEOmoz uses http://wistia.com to host and measure videos to embed on site – link points back to SEOmoz NOT YouTube and send and submit videoXML site map for you
○ #3: Thought Leadership + Rel=Author – Author markup, connected to Google+ (see social media kpis)
○ #4: Social Networks for Personalized Rankings – using social to personalize results
○ #5: Link Building w/ Your Social Followers – use export.ly by Simply Measured > Klout Score > Good people who are following me who have good sites who are not linking to me. LinkedIN, email lists, other connected sources.
○ #6: Long Tail SEO via Gamification – Quora uses a point system, 80% complete
○ #7: PR through Social Outreach > followerwonk – search by profile description “bend journalist”
○ #8: Viral-Worthy Content via Q+A Research > what do people care about in your niche? Google discussions, Quora, what are people asking for?
○ #9: Influence Search Suggest through Branding > Google – not logged in > generic term brand > “travel blog everywhereist” example
○ #10: Leverage Thought Leaders to Build Content > survey people in your biz, ask an important question (how much do you charge for a website), collate and present data, survey responders and others will link to it

Brian Fling – Pinch/Zoom – Mobile Design – Get Slides! @fling, book: mobiledesign.org
- We are in the third major stage of mobile
- Mobile experiences are NOT made in Photoshop or Basecamp
- “We could build the best mobile app in the world, but if the client doesn’t understand it – it could be the worst app in the world”
- Mobile is REALLY hard
- Business Goals + Technical Goals + User Goals > sweet spot is in the middle of equilateral triangle
○ Ex: technical – dispense soda, business – improve productivity, user – satisfy thirst quickly
- Apple Strategy against innovators curve
○ Refresh product lines before they become tired > OK with just 50% of market
○ A bold vision empowers people to cross the chasm together
- Social media is not a thing – it is pervasive across everything
- I love the slide that overlays time lines with computing, network, internet, devices and web transitions – get slides?

The timelime of web-mobile technolgoy

Pinch Zoom Web Technology Time Line

- Massive convergence of ubiquity + 4G + ipv6 + touch phones + HTML5
- Pinch/zoom – mobile bootcamp > get slides!
○ Get brands on mobile path quickly
○ Create shared vision of how mobile is meant to improve vision
- Challenges
○ Platform aesthetic
○ Many resolutions
○ Pixels per inch
○ Orientation
○ Design grids
○ Perspective
○ Dimensions
○ Interactions
○ Motion
○ Transitions
○ Color
○ Typography
○ Iconography
- Phones (currently) are about short, simple tasks (less than 5 minutes) and context sensitive
- Inverse Journalist pyramid is a good model: Most Noteworthy Info (who, what, when where, why, how) comes FIRST, then details. Can leave anytime.
- Tablets are about focus + consumption + portability
○ Swipe vs scroll

Yelp – Darnel Holloway – Local for Business
- Transactional interactions
- Younger audience – 18-34, but affluent – money to spend
- 80% of reviews are positive (3 stars or more)
- Restaurants are largest group, but shopping is close secon
- Quality control for reviews
○ Users can take down own reviews > restaurant had responded, reached out, fixed it > reviewers take it down or update
○ Set of reviewer guidelines > no hate speech, have to represent first hand experience, no conflicts of interest
○ Automated review filter > suspicious reviews and reviewers – fake profiles, fake reviews, cottage industry
- Biz.yelp.com > starting point for business owners
○ Respond to reviewers > join the conversation
○ Reviews are a form of market research > look at competitors as well
○ Respond privately or publicly (don’t freak out)
- Recommend others on your Yelp listing to get them to recommend you
- Post check-in offers in Yelp > similar to FoureSquare > check-in can post to Twitter and Facebook like 4Square
- Consumers are looking at overall trends not necessarily individual bad reviews
○ Engage the bad review in a polite, respectful way

Digital Music Panel – Ross Reynolds (KUOW), Aaron Starkey (KEXP), Nick Harmer (DCFC), Sir-Mix-A-Lot, Tim Bierman (Pearl Jam Ten)
- Napster and broadband changed everything
- Transactions happen all the time > monetary and musically and interpersonal communication
- Digital has benefited fans the most > lost the radio filter
○ Cream rising to top > walking talking brands
- Easier to spread word about music
○ Musicians are spending as much time thinking about how to connect and share vs practicing and writing
○ Content, video, conversations way more time thinking about generating content and connecting to events
○ A lot more work involved now
- Is radio less important now?
○ Independent radio is needed, Comcast type mega stations/format are dying
○ There is so much music that the stations have to listen to listeners more
○ The future is IP connectivity
- So many options I don’t know what to do – smaller, trusted radio stations help guide
○ Delivered via airways vs via Internet – the personal touch is important
○ More than just jumping in a van and going on-tour
○ Hire a social/marketing firm instead of a record company
- Two way communication and how people interact
○ Social networks have huge influence > reviews, recommendations, radio choices – replacing the record store guy
○ Spotify > what friends are listening to
○ Ambassadors – many more out there -who do you trust? Who do you spend your time listening to
- Crash and Burn Tactics
○ Trying to manufacture a viral event/piece of content/fake website
○ Underestimating the connection speed available and how to balance cost vs audience
○ Not ready to support a success event – special tickets, items, new sales, etc. Server crashing, slow, bad experience
○ Video about exotic cars > do not buy views on YouTube – bought 30,000 views to get rolling, but audience was looking for Ferarri’s not Mix A Lot
- Success Tactics
○ Last album, 1st video – live-one take video-happening live-recorded and shown all at once – streaming in HD while making it
○ Underestimating the success of videos – Florence and Machine – 100k plus views of in-house
○ Local photographer – Chase Jarvis – Shot album cover based on what the audience wants you to wear – kept going and going
- There is a glass ceiling on touring revenue
○ You can only do so many shows for so long in your life
○ At what point do you stop touring and continue to monitize your music
- Younger artists
○ Fame first > I had 2,000,000 downloads of our video! For free!
○ How do you start making money to support the music?
- Social tools for audience development
○ Maps, cell phones, Twitter
- I can define myself now vs going through the publicity department or DJs
○ Lady Gaga re-defines herself on a weekly basis
- How do you support the giant middle class of working musicians
○ Longer careers
○ Bigger middle class of musicians
- Recored labels have shifted the contract
○ Not a record deal, but a full package deal: concerts, images, likenesses, downloads, streams, t-shirts, everything
- Future of Music
○ Celestial Jukebox coming
○ Free music, everywhere – 4G (LTE) connection speeds
○ The way we make music > big divide in terms of production of music – higher quality, virtual collaboration
- Mix misses the “Mystique” of artists – transparency can work for a lot of folks, but not everyone
○ I don’t want to see Prince eating BBQ :-)
- Contract process has to speed up
○ It should not take 3 weeks to license one song

Social Media Panel – Measuring ROI – Kevin O’Reilly (Spring Creek), Ben Straley (Meteor), Neil Beam (Conversean), Julie Storer (HTC)
- Email – when new – experienced the same issues
- What is the business objectives?
- If you could track one metric, what would it be
- Direct measurement vs indirect measurement
- Long cycles, multiple touches, on-going conversations
- What are the transactions that you can and should measure > what was the financial impact
- Influencer Campaigns
○ Macro influencers (Justin Bieber), Micro Influencers (Matt Cutts at Google)
- Engagement as a metric
○ How to define

Mobile Experience – Alaska Airlines (Curtis Kopf) and Ubermind (Shehryar Khan)

- Work with leading companies
- Game changing, disruptive solutions > what is different, compelling
- Deep expertise in mobile and what it means
- Mobile is not a project > it is a long term channel and strategy
- Had to be designed for agility – iterate rapidly and often
- UberInsights
○ New to airline industry’s underlying complexity
○ Availability of backend services
○ Leaving “platform solution for truly custom app
○ Differentiated mobile strategy
○ Apply lessons learned from other industries
- Principles
○ Start with customes > not just an Alaska customer but what are they used to on mobile
○ Simple, intuitive experience
○ Be different
○ Seamlessly integrated teams
○ Be agile, learn and adapt
- Scenarios
○ User interface – the “flight jacket”
○ Mobile boarding pass
○ Responsive to customers changing needs
- What Helps
○ Committed product owner
○ Embrace agile development process
○ Tem chemistry
○ Constant feedback loop
○ Living, eating, breathing mobile

SoLoMo – Social Local Mobile Panel – Scott Macklin (UW MCOM), Bryan Trussel (Glympse), Daniel Cowen (Echoer), Jason Wilson (MapQuest), Monica Guzman (Geekwire)
- Where are you, where am I, what are we doing?
- Layer of utility and enhancing social relationships > connecting to places
- Help me make a decision about what is worth doing, what do my friends
- 350 million mobile Facebook apps, more smart phones purchased than not for the first time
- Where do you want to meet?
- I am here, come get me
- Find/attach one need
- Becomes more useful as more people are on it (the app)
- Phone has eyes (camera) it knows where it is (geo-location) > point the camera at something to get information – replaces the need for key input
- Read Snow Crash – merger of CIA with Library of Congress
- Sharing and generosity is at the core
- Privacy
○ They used to call it stalking, now they call it location based notification
○ Privacy means different things to different people
○ Share your location for a limited time frame, only you can send the Glympse > different for various situations
- Building the slo-lo-mo infrastructure
○ Like building a city > you didn’t start out saying how are we going to monetize this road
○ We will be surprised with what will come out of it
- Lots of Gadgets and how they are uses
○ Google maps, kindle, iphones, etc.

Filed Under: Events, Local Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Strategy & Leadership

Seattle Interactive Conference – SIC 2011 – Day One

November 3, 2011 By 2 Comments

I attended the Seattle Interactive Conference today (#sic2011) and wanted to share my notes. There were lots of great sessions, but I could only attend four. Best session I attended was the first – Sean O’Driscoll from Ant’s Eye View and his stages of social media program – “the journey”. I really liked how he laid out the five steps of the journey to a fully engaged social media program.

Conference thoughts: The place was packed with people but the space is not laid out very well – especially the registration. Before 9am there was an hour long wait for passes – the ops team blew that piece. I was there a bit early so missed the mass lines, but many folks missed the opening sessions.

I really enjoyed the range of topics: SEO, Social (lots), Mobile, Design, UX, Cloud – very cool

Sessions I attended with notes below:

  • Sean O’Driscoll – Ant’s Eye View – Practitioner’s Guide to the Social Engagement Journey
  • Vanessa Fox – Getting Out of the SEO Silo
  • Dan Gerber – Pop – Camping Out – Setting the Foundation for Interactive Design
  • Panel – Beyond the Hype: Social Media and Business 101 > social features to the enterprise
  • Ben Elowitz – Wet Paint -  The Social Operating System

Sean O’Driscoll – Ant’s Eye View – Practitioner’s Guide to the Social Engagement Journey

  • Educate large brands on how to integrate conversations into their workflow > how to be nice to your customers
  • Where should you post your status graph – find
  • Business strategy vs a twitter strategy or social media strategy or facebook strategy
    • It’s not about being “on” or “off” the social web
    • Are you a “fully engaged” enterprise > it is a journey defined by stages of operational maturity
  • Five stages of the journey
    • Traditional – listening to what people are saying, not engaged, conversation passing you by
    • Experimental “the arrival of the mavericks” – someone reaches out to do something, entrepreneurial ins spirit
    • Operational – someone is given budget and authority to create strategy, materials, hire > more in an influence role as a lot of contacts happen outside of the “marketing” group. Frustration about metrics starts to bubble up, what does an engagement metric look like? What does it look like?
    • Measurable – start to track business impact, broken through functional silo’s, defined success/influencers identification/engagement strategy and approach. Strong orchestration.
    • Fully Engaged – Everybody has the opportunity to take action in a clear way, with process and clear roles
  • Pathways to the Engaged Enterprise
    • People and Process – what is the strategy? Is it written down? Clear business objectives? Measurable goals against timeline, set initiatives, tactics – costs, timeline (one page – plan on page)
    • Education – policy and guidelines are necessary, but not sufficient. Need to know and share the “how” and not just the “what”. Use a series of playbooks “how to do a Facebook contest” At Dell > only one way to do a Facebook contest and here are the two vendors -  prescriptive guidance is important as you pass education through the organization.
    • Channels & Technology – balance the needs of the business, resourcing realities, and platform independencies. Do your tools just take a pulse (listening and monitoring) or are you effectively distributing the use and competency across the organization. Do you want more data or more insight. Insight > connect information to outcomes and routing to people that can do something about it.
    • Insights and Analytics – How are your metrics comparative? I’ve got 200 likes – is that good? Contextualize your outputs based on your business, size, industry and competitors
    • Activation and  Execution -  Start with an  insight, not an idea. Businesses that win build relationships Begin with advocates. Using the Agile Marketing Approach process to identify customer stories, tech/activities to solve, sprints to get there.  Working across teams in scrums.
  • Tips from Sean
    • Start with a customer need
    • Executive buy-in is key
    • Real results lie “between the seams” – between operational and organizational functions
    • Look for early wins, set expectations
    • Measure for impact
    • Kotter: look for a case for urgency + create a coalition of resources that can support and execute
    • Google+ is like a third sock. It may be a great sock, but I only have two legs. Kick ass on the legs you have.

Vanessa Fox – Getting Out of the SEO Silo

  • Showed an example of Hasbah Tamadot website is all images > basic SEO tactics
  • Getting the basics right important for big brands
  • Search terms and researching happens from a lot of different angles and stages
  • Who is your audience?
    • What audiences search for
    • What audiences talk about
    • Market research, email open rates, on-site behavior, etc.
  • How do you solve their problems?
    • What information/content type will satisfy the general need
  • The Personal Lifecyle – book for usability
  • Business Objectives
    • What is project goal?  What does success look like?
    • What is brand objective? What lasting impression?
    • What is value proposition? What makes you different?
    • What are conversion events and engagement events? What makes you money?
    • Who are key audiences?
    • What motivates them?
  • How do we solve peoples problems?
    • Google correlate > correlated terms
    • Discussion link > what are people talking about?
  • Pick an event or audience > what are their key questions?
    • What time does the SuperBowl site? Key audience in local market. Should be important text in the TV website
  • Client impact ideas
    • Review title tags, meta descriptions and destination pages for alignment of copy to expectations to website
    • Persona’s – how can we grow this element of our services

Dan Gerber – Pop – Camping Out – Setting the Foundation for Interactive Design

  • Camping is group and individual
  • Camping is a process: packing, getting there, setup – camping = fun – take down, blue tarp for rain,
  • Interactive designers – strive to create meaningful relationships between users and design
    • More than wire frames
  • IxD shoud be:
    • Data-driven
    • User-driven
    • Goal-driven
    • Idea-driven
  • Step One – Embrace Discovery
    • More than: order taking, check-box checking, creative brief (need more, need to dig in deep)
    • Should explore: User motivations, behaviors + context, user empathy
    • Is best with: success goals, experience KPIs, strategic concept + direction
  • Step Two – Expand the Role
    • Own the problem: build on data, tackle business goals with user goals, define success on and off the device > drill in to true user research and understanding
    • Experience strategy: user research, behaviors + motivations + emotions +  propensities, UX discovery tools (analysis,  personas, journeys)
  • Step Three – Own the Concept
    • Strategy + Design: UX at core of the concept, concepting before + beyond the visual, strategy big + small
  • Even some of our industry best practices ASSUME too much
    • Different approaches are great, but need to dial in to project
  • Example – Defining a mobile app concept – Seattle Sounders
    • Challenge – design a club app, not a league app for mobile
    • The team is important, but so is the experience at the game and what it means to be a sounders fan vs a specific player fan
  • So how do we get to a concept?
  • Concept Setup
    • Adaptable research: internal brainstorming, 300 fan comments on facebook, fan survey, flickr audit, literary review, stadium shadowing, global app review, group audience interviews
  • How do you know when you have enough to design something great?
    • Driven by time/schedule?
  • Sounders  PULSE – maintain pulse of fans throughout the engagement
    • Fans wanted an app to drive engagement between the games
      • Fans can follow the emotional state of the match and team – authentically
      • “scarves up vs scarves down” poll result
      • Contant, quick social connections to community + team
      • Balance between club app v. fan app
      • Use cases that play to fan contexts
      • Streaming audio – stream games if not there – connect with those who can’t be there – 40 countries using streaming app
      • Red card/yellow card – easter eggs, take advantage of emotion – shake app to make screen go yellow > swipe to go red
  • When UX is involved in concepting, UX can guard the strategy throughout execution and delivery
  • Challenges
    • Multiple concept owners: some tension good/some is not, creating idea advocates – not consensus
    • Keeps IxD’s away from prototyping: Builds other strengths, increases user empathy, tracks business goals
    • New skills: stretches thinking from tactics to strategy, beyond comfort zone
  • You comfort zone (happy place), where magic happens (outside of comfort zone)
    • “setting up camp” can keep you away from wireframes but the results will be worth it!

Panel – Beyond the Hype: Social Media and Business 101 > social features to the enterprise

  • Myth #1 – Build it and they will come
    • If not solving a problem – won’t be adopted
    • If not part of normal workflow – big effort to change behavior > facebook, email, search, webpages are current workflows
    • Apply game theory to activities > I get the Outlook badge when certified on something > creates centers of expertise and is aspirational
  • Myth #2 – Social Media is Facebook for the Enterprise
    • You can’t just turn on a community and expect it to work
    • TheLoop > slowly and selectively build communities
    • Internal corporate social networks are much different than public networks like Facebook
    • Colleagues vs friends > connect, collaborate, communicate
    • Allow for profile creation, pictures, expertise
  • Myth #3 – User Experience Does Matter
    • If you have to do extensive communication on what this thing is and how to use it > it’s not useful
    • SharePoint  > documents go there to die. Training for two years on how to use SharePoint, IT Learning Center at Eli Lilly is adopted much more quickly
  • Myth #4 – Social Business is more efficient
    • How can it be more efficient than email
    • Can be more efficient under the right circumstances
  • Myth #5 – Social business moves info faster
    • The coming assault of activities feeds – Salesforce Chatter
    • Must be relevant and not stashed into a folder
  • Myth #6 – It’s all about the cloud
    • Control via governance > what kind of information can be outside of firewall
    • Permissions are critical > high, medium and low business impact > each level has it’s own governance impact

Ben Elowitz – Wet Paint -  The Social Operating System

  • FatRain (1st startup), BlueNile (2nd startup), Wetpaint (3rd startup)
  • Wetpaint – all media is becoming social – wiki service gets ~600million visitors per month (really?)
  • Wetpaint  Entertainment – Fully Social
    • 1.1 million fans > they see them on avg 30 times per month
  • The consumer has changed
    • 20% increase in media consumption
    • The technology is with us all of the time
    • We have changed in terms of how we
    • 69% growth in time on Facebook in last year
    • Rest of websites – down by 9% in last year
    • Google is transactional, Facebook is long term relationship with your fans
  • The big benefits of the social operating system (Social OS)/Social Networks
    • For Consumers – Bring all of my data to me
      • Relevance
      • Personalization
      • Accessibility
      • Now
    • For Publishers
      • Audience data
      • Virality
      • Relationships
      • Ongoing
  • How to Win on the Social OS – 5 Steps to Know and Serve Your Audience
    • Determine what it takes to win > what do WE get out of it
      • Just having a bunch of facebook fans in and of themselves doesn’t help > we make the most money when people  come to my site and we serve advertising againt that impression.
      • We get the most value when we get referrals (transfer now) and continuous relationships (transfer forever)
      • We know that a comments is worth 2x to us than a Like
    • Create a social laboratory
      • Keep tinkering, keep testing, keep trying new things
      • Co-founder lays out 100′s of ideas
      • 700 data points per week on what is working or not
    • Segment your audience
      • 1.1 million fans > each one thinks of themselves as the most important person
      • Wetpaint covers 25 different TV show channels > what content resonates with which segment the best
    • Create Great Content
      • Every post is part of a test: format, poll, statement, video, headlines, etc.
      • How do you measure what the audience think about that?
    • Test & Measure Everything
      • Through testing and measuring > seeing audiences 30 times per month – up from 10 per month
      • Add the wins to the playbook
  • Facebook page is less powerful than the Facebook news feed
  • Facebook traffic performs 1.9x better than traffic from Google
    • True for content and Wetpaint
  • Creation and Distribution of Content
    • Editors need a ton of data to create great content
    • Social media people need to be in charge of distributing it
    • Separate the two functions
  • Social TV
    • 75% of activity happens on the 6 days outside of the show day
    • Connecting to other people about the show, not to the show itself

 

 

 

Filed Under: Events, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Strategy & Leadership

Promoting a Local Restaurant Online – Step One – Establish Your Metrics

October 13, 2011 By 2 Comments

Wild Sage Bistro - One of the Best Restaurants in SeattleI’m helping my friend Tom Sciortino promote Wild Sage Bistro online.  Wild Sage is one of the best restaurants in Spokane serving an American Bistro fare that is fantastic. The reviews, awards and social chatter support how great the restaurant is, but Tom wants to improve his website and amount of business he gets through his online presence.

I’m going to chronicle the research, steps and results of our program. This post outlines the strategy and game plan for a local, independent restaurant using the internet and mobile to improve online visibility.

Step One – Establish Metrics for  Success and Where you are Now

One of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make is not understanding their key metrics. At the end of the day, you have to have an idea of what works and what doesn’t when you spend resources and the only way to really understand that is to have some some basic measurement in place.

Key metrics that restaurants tend to care about from a marketing perspective include the number of people coming through the door and amount of revenue driven.  These are not metrics you can get from your website, however there are several important website metrics that indicate success that drives people to your restaurant and bar. Here are the critical ones to track – more info on how to do this next:

  1. Total visits – how many times people visit your site. The more times people visit, the more interest in your establishment, the more interest the more reservations.
  2. Total visits by source – critical for understanding which online sources: Google, Yelp, Facebook, Restaurant Associations, Emails, Paid Search campaigns, etc. drive traffic to your site. As you invest time and/or money in these channels, keeping an eye on how this traffic changes (hopefully improves) is a good indicator of success (or not).
  3. Total reservations or calls from the website – one tactic I really like is to have a unique phone number on the website and/or a form that generates and email that you can track back to the website.
  4. Track reservation source – have the front desk note the source of each reservation that comes in – this can be really simple – an then summarize in a spreadsheet by day (and by shift if you want). When a reservation is taken, a quick “we look forward to seeing you – and how did you hear about us?” will help tremendously.
  5. Total reviews of your restaurant – Positive/Negative/Neutral – word of mouth is critical to the success of independent restaurants. Creating a way to “listen” to what your customers are seeing online is important to managing and building your online reputation.
  6. Search Engine Rank for Critical Keywords – A high rank in Google for critical keywords such as “Best Restaurant in <your city>”, “<city> restaurants”, Thai Restaurants (or whatever your flavor is) drives site visits and visibility. Understanding where you rank is an important baseline metric.
  7. Rank in Social Review Sites – Where does your site rank in Trip Advisor for Restaurants in Spokane? Wild Sage is #4 and our goal is to get to #1. Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon, Yelp and CitySearch all have reviews and some form of rankings.

There are a ton more metrics you can track which will be covered in an advanced metrics post but these are the good ones to start with. In future posts, I’ll discuss specific tactics to improve those metrics.

Here are the resources to capture these metrics:

Google Analytics – a free web analytics program that is full featured and will give you more information than you thought possible. Create a Google Account with an email that you are comfortable using for a multitude of Google products including: Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google Places, Adwords (pay per click search), Feedburner and more.

BrightLocal.com – you can get a free 30 day trial of local search engine checking for a small group of keywords.

Non-Personalized Search Results – When checking your own ranks in Google, Bing and Yahoo (in the town where your restaurant is) it’s important to de-personalize the search results as engines use your personal search history to fine tune results. So, using the Chrome browser, fire up an incognito session and do the search. In Firefox, start a private browsing session. In Explorer,  click on Safety and then InPrivate browsing.

Twitter.com – There are lots of social media tools set-up to help with “listening” for what people are saying about your brand. Using Twitter.com to search for you restaurant name is free and as good as any. Plus you can follow people who are talking about you.

So, there is the first part of this series. Please shoot me any updates, questions or clarifications.

Next Post in the Promoting Local Restaurants Online Series – Step Two – Tune Up Your Website

 

Filed Under: Local Marketing, Restaurants Tagged With: , , , , ,

Merging (combining) Pages on Facebook

October 2, 2011 By 4 Comments

Facebook Logo SmallFacebook is constantly changing and adding features as well as new page types. This has created a mess for people who adopted Facebook early as a business avenue as there are now several pages for many companies and brands.

The recent addition of pages for business (which is the best option for most businesses) created a situation in which you may have current pages – either a regular facebook page or a community page (one that Facebook created for your brand, but contains only data from Wikipedia) that has followers and likes that you want to transfer to the new business page.

Types of Pages on Facebook:

  • Personal – you  know, for you and your affinity for stuffed animals (we’re not judging here)
  • Local Business or Place – great for restaurants, cleaners, local businesses
  • Company, Organization or Institution – for bigger companies, schools, etc with a broader presence
  • Brand or Product – big brands or products that have a significant social effort behind
  • Artist, Band or Public Figure – Includes political figures
  • Entertainment – TV shows, movies and the like
  • Cause or Community – niche communities like Breast Cancer survivors and specific cause related campaigns
  • Community pages – created by Facebook because they found your brand on Wikipedia and wanted to have you on Facebook

Here are the steps to merging the old pages into your new Business Page with caveats:

  • While logged in to your new business page as the admin for that page > select edit page > select resources > select merge  pages. This only works if the pages are the same name currently.
  • Here is a form for requesting the merge as well: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=page_migrations_external
  • We’ve had issues with the target merge page not being “authentic” > the best way we’ve found to solve this problem is to add a Facebook Badge, Like Button or Login Button on the domain.

Merging pages is not as simple as it should be but is worth the effort to consolidate likes and friends.

  • Contact Facebook with your issue – the more people contacting, the more they will try and fix: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=220217228006012

I’ll keep looking for additional options on this as it is a topic growing in importance as Facebook becomes an extension of your personal and business brand. Please let me know if these tactics work for you!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,
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