Oct 6, 2014 | Communication, Governance, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Seeking a simple metaphor to explain how SEO fits into a digital strategy to a “digitally challenged” client running a successful small business, I struck upon the map of the London Underground.
If you look at the map, there are stations on single lines, stations with several lines running through, and stations with multiple intersections, some to other networks outside the underground, busses and British rail.
At any time, there are people in various stages of a journey. Some are waiting on a platform, some travelling towards the underground entry and exit points, and some on a train going to some predetermined end point of their journey.
Imagine now that every person had a descriptive tag attached, which was stored waiting for a request about that person, that could be read, and communicated to anyone asking.
SEO calls this process of asking for a location and description as “Crawling” and “Indexing”.
Each piece of information, if it has been appropriately tagged, or described by the person putting it onto a site, is “indexed” by the search engines, and when someone types a search request into a box, the engine crawls through the indexed material and returns a link to the location and description of the item to the searcher.
Back too the metaphor.
Each person with the tag on the underground, can be found, and returns the requested information to the enquirer. Location, what they are wearing, who they are, what they look like, with links to others who may be with them, and where they are going.
There are just two dimensions to having an effective SEO strategy.
- Get the technical stuff right, and this can be really complicated, and to the novice, even many professionals, is challenging. Find someone you trust to get it done for you.
- Have a strategy and action plan, without which you will be lost irrespective of the quality of the SEO.
Back to the underground metaphor. You never (perhaps rarely, a late night can make a difference) climb onto an underground train without knowing where you are going, and what the best route is under the circumstances that prevail.
Why should it be any different for an SEO strategy?
Sep 25, 2014 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
There are lots of so called “measures” that get touted as being able to deliver useful insights into the effectiveness and productivity of investments made in Social Media. Many tell you nothing of value, and are often misleading, but because they are easy and obvious, are often the ones used. Measures such as friends, followers, number of posts, even quasi mathematical ones that measure nonsense like the ratio of followers to followed are touted, but really tell you nothing of value, nothing that assists the process of building the returns from your investments.
However, there are three measures that will give a very good view of the productivity of your investments, the first two are easy, the third takes more work and understanding, but nevertheless can be accessible to even a small business without great technical and financial depth.
- Conversion rate. Not necessarily to a sale, but to something that you are asking visitors to do. Download a whitepaper, enter a contest, comment, offer a suggestion, etc. This requires the receiver of the message to actively participate, and take an action, to be converted in some way. The word “engagement” is often used in this context, and is a reasonable simile, but can mean different things to different people, so is more “fluffy”
- Amplification rate. This is just the number of shares, retweets, reposts, and embeds, and backlinks that an individual piece of content generates, and the rates overall of what you achieve. If your first level contacts amplify for you, over time, their contacts become yours, and evolve into your sales funnel.
- Financial value. This is obviously the holy grail, and there is no way I know to measure easily, but it is the reason most of us invest out time and resources in Social Media. Setting out to create a measure requires that you build a picture of your sales funnel, and have sufficient sensitivity in your data to be able to follow a prospect from the lead generation stage through to a transaction. This can be done with the integration of CRM and web analytic tools, but is generally pretty challenging for small businesses. However, if you know your average sales cycle times, sales numbers, and track the investments made in Social Media, you can get a reasonable picture using excel.
Being without a simple, and consistent way of measuring the impact of your investments when the tools are available and easily deployed should never be tolerated. The days of “black box” marketing are well and truly over.
Sep 24, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Marketing is all about stories, the journey taken that the reader can identify with in some way. Blog posts are just short stories, by another name, and by following the rules of stories, can be more interesting, engaging, and ultimately, deliver a commercial result.
So how do you tell as story?
I have 4 kids, adults now, but as kids I read stories to them, regularly. This is not the same as making up a story as you go, and for a good storyteller, perhaps a cop-out, but the stories of others were usually more engaging than my top of the mind make-ups.
As they got a bit older, it became clear that each preferred a different type of story, and they seemed to fall into a small number of themes, always around a common “backbone” of a hero undertaking some sort of quest, confronting dangers and failure, then finding the only escape route, which was about to close, then revelling in the redemption.
The storylines around the backbone were:
- Rags to riches stories, these were favored by my boys. The protagonist drags himself from the streets to the heights, overcoming the disadvantages of injury, lack of education, or being abandoned in some way, and ends up giving back.
- The travelogue, the journey from A to B via the rest of the alphabet, with adventures and barriers at each letter.
- Tragedy, the hero saves someone from a fatal flaw of their personality or circumstances, and the difficult situations that flaw creates.
- The quest, which travels with the protagonist seeking a solution to an insoluble problem
- Beating the Demon, who keeps on coming back, and usually saving the damsel in the process.
- And finally, comedy. Funny but often sad things that happened, centred around peoples lives, shortcomings, and loves. I found that stories that were able to deliver a message with splashes of humour were always the ones that the kids remembered the best.
A great story, well told will be remembered, whereas a recitation of facts passes from memory quicker than an iceblock on a hot summers day.
Sep 22, 2014 | Branding, Governance, Marketing, Social Media
Your facebook, linkedin accounts, and all the other social media platforms with which you interact are not home, they are places you visit, and perhaps rent a space to leave something behind for storage and easier access and use. They can be taken away, moved, or you can be banned, excluded, or diminished without being able to do anything about it.
Just like renting a house, you have some rights, but ultimately, you do not own it, and the ones who do hold all the cards. When you own the house you live in, you can do pretty much anything you like. You own it, and it cannot be taken away.
When you think about your digital life with this simple thought in mind, it should change the way you behave.
You know the old story, rental cars go really fast in reverse, they can be abused by those renting them, simply because they do not own them, and are not responsible for the damage done beyond the superficial. That is also true for rented space on the digital platforms others own. Your content, presence and connections can be misused, abused and lent to others without your knowledge or consent. Just ask the B class celebs who recently have had their nude pictures shared from the Apple servers.
Should, have kept their nude antics at home.
Anything you want to own that is held on a public platform, your mailing lists and personal photos for example, must be assumed to be at some point, compromised. If you do not want the risk of it being on the front page of the paper one day, keep it at private, at home.
At the very least, back them up onto something you own, leaving it where it is on a rented or worse, free platform, anything can happen.
For business, it comes back to the notion of owned, earned and paid media. Each has its place, and can be complementary as well as synergistic, but make sure you get the mix right, and that you understand the implications.
As a result of the increasingly powerful grip the social platforms have on the reach you can generate organically, driven by their business model. It is therefore ESSENTIAL that you have your own digital real estatre.In other words, a website hosted on your URL, which actd as yur home base. .
Sep 16, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Westslawntennis.com.au fundraiser
The business function of Social Media is to spread the message, and make sales. Each platform differs in the balance between the “Social” and “business” focus but nevertheless, they are essentially the digital equivalent of a social gathering. Some are the digital Sunday BBQ of a group of friends, while others are more like the voluntary after work drinks of the sales reps, sharing things of common interest, but usually about their successes, quotas, problem customers, and bitching about the boss.
Having fun is great, it helps the quality of the output enormously, but the objective is commercial, and so the investment of time and resources should be considered in the context of all the other investment options a business faces.
To effectively spread the message, there are a few seemingly simple, but in fact really hard things that need to be determined and done.
- What is the message I need to spread?
- To whom should I spread it?
- What can I do in return for those who take the time to absorb and hopefully respond to my message?
This last one is really important, and often overlooked, as the “social” part of social media takes over. As in life, there is a principal that always works, “Reciprocity”.
Doing something for someone sets up a psychological “balance” of favours, and doing one for someone, is like putting a favour in the bank, when you come to make a withdrawal, there is something in the account.
Like any account, you can overdraw with prior arrangement, but sometimes the interest rates become a bit onerous, so having a positive balance is always a good idea.
Social Media is not a very good vehicle for sales, it is “Social” and sales in a social context grate, (when was the last time you knowingly asked a committed Amway rep to the friendly Sunday BBQ?), but it is a great vehicle for accruing favors, and reciprocal rights to be cashed in later.
Social Media is however, a great set of platforms for the generation, storing and sharing of information of all sorts, and if information is the lifeblood of commerce, as we all accept, it seems like a good place to be making a few investments.
When you need help sorting through the myriad of options, give me a call.
Sep 9, 2014 | Change, Communication, Social Media
Man has always found ways to communicate, Social media is not new, it is just the tools we are using today are upgrades of those we used yesterday.
Alex Bell patented the telephone in 1876, after many inventors had played with the physics of electro magnetism and its applications to voice transmission. By the 1890’s farmers were using the barbed wire fences that were strung the length and breadth of the US to communicate. Phones in those days generated their own power by means of a crank and batteries, all you needed to do was hook up to wire, give the mail order telephonic device a crank, and bingo, a phone.
Downside was that someone had to be on the line at the other end waiting, and there was no direct dialling, so everyone was on at the same time, the ubiquitous party line, where privacy was a victim.
Sound familiar?
(Reliability was also an issue, everything from rain to the neighbours randy bull causing problems with the wire)
Point is, all this fancy new technology is no more than a new solution to an old problem: how to communicate effectively with those to whom we have something to say, from the mundane and trivial to really life altering messages.
Small businesses need to remember this simple truth, as they are bombarded with “opportunities” to expand their reach via social media. The only useful contacts are those with whom you have something in common, and with whom you can collaborate to generate value for you both. Those sorts of “friends” are invaluable, and do not just “happen”, it takes time and effort to find them and build relationships individually. Just getting a “like” on facebook is as useful as Harold Holts flippers, particularly as the organic reach of facebook is now down around 5% as Facebook seek to financially leverage their membership base.
Fancy some barbed wire?
