I'm guilty of crimes against the social media community!

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 29th, 2009 | Comments home title

I just had an epiphany. I was checking my @ replies on Twitter and saw that Michael Reynolds who owns an awesome Indianapolis web company called Spinweb had retweeted one of my recent posts.

I thought to myself, “Man, he helps me promote my posts all the time! Why haven’t I been reciprocating?” I’m a big fan of referral marketing and I believe that you have to give a little to get a little. Plus, it feels great to help others.

What would it be like if everyone on Twitter decided to only promote other people’s content and ideas. That would be an awesome community. I’m going to make it my mission to always give more than I take from now on.

On that note… I can personally vouch for Michael Reynolds and Spinweb. They are a first class web company. They’re especially good at building sites for membership organizations and manufacturing companies. If that’s you, you should definitely shoot him a line. You should also check out Michael’s blog at zenbox .org.

By far the best social network ever…

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 28th, 2009 | Comments home title

…is the one that works for you.

I’m a bit of a minimalist. If I spread myself too thin everything just starts to get crazy. I use Facebook for personal contacts, LinkedIn for business contacts, my blog to get my ideas out there and Twitter for information gathering, promotion, and relationship building.

I’d love to see how others are tying different social media services together to create a network that makes life easier, more productive, and more profitable. Please share in the comments below.

5 Ways you CAN ignore the internet.

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 27th, 2009 | Comments home title

Where is the ROI in social media?

It seems like every marketing professional I know of is saying, “You can’t ignore the internet, any more.” I think it’s obvious that I believe online tools hold endless potential for marketing, but I’m willing to concede that it’s not the only way to get your message out. The problem with offline marketing is that in order to be effective and measurable in the same ways as online marketing, it is often expensive and time and resource consuming.

So you don’t want to blog. Not a problem. A great alternative would be to put out your own print magazine once a month. You could have all your employees write articles with helpful tips and best practices for your industry then send it out free of cost to all your customers. They’ll be extremely impressed that you’ve gone to the trouble of providing them with excellent information in a readable format. The only disadvantage is that this approach is going to be ridiculously expensive and time-consuming. You’re not going to want to go with cheap printing or graphic design. Bottom line – it’s going to eat up a sizable chunk of your marketing budget.
You’re not interested in generating leads from online sources. Just hire a salesman to go out and cold-call people. Phone cold-calling is pretty tough these days, but there’s no reason you can’t send someone out door to door. You’ll probably want to send your new salesperson through some training courses and you’ll have to provide a vehicle and gas. You’ll also need to shell out a decent salary (commission only salespeople rarely succeed – too much pressure – they won’t bring you good clients). If you’ve got 70-80 grand to spare in your marketing budget, this might be an option.
You don’t need to use online tools to establish yourself as an industry expert. Why not just go to trade shows? You’re probably already doing this and not getting as much out of it as you should be. Studies have shown that as many as 80% of leads generated from trade shows get lost in the mix. You’re going to want to invest in a new customer relationship management software system if you really want to make a dent through trade shows. Plus, you need to hit ALL the trade shows, not just some. If you’re not properly staffed to do this, you’ll probably need to hire more people, plus there’s the cost of travel, print materials, SWAG, and of course a nice display so people know you are serious.
If you want to create buzz around your message you don’t need to be using social media. Just hold an event! Rent out some convention space, pay some industry leaders to speak, serve food and refreshments, and watch the cheddar roll in. The first thing you’re going to need to do is dedicate someone from your staff to doing nothing but event planning for at least a month before the event. Make sure all your people are promoting the event to your customers. Be careful not to annoy them, though.
You’ve got plenty of ways to educate your customers without using social media. You’ve got a customer service department don’t you? They answer calls all day long. There’s no reason to invest time and resources on an online campaign while this system still works. There can’t be that many dissatisfied customers or else you wouldn’t still be in business, right? Just to be sure you might want to send out surveys in the mail and hope that some of your customers will fill them out. Don’t forget to follow up with them by phone. Remember that it’s costing you money every time one of your people has to pick up the phone.

The key value in marketing through social media is that it fills so many needs at once while being cost effective at the same time. I urge you to consider the real costs associated with running your business and think about ways that some of them might be circumvented through using social online technologies.

marketing activities on the internet (spiderfood911.com)
The Masters of Disaster: Promotion is Not Enough (freelanceswitch.com)
Say Goodbye to Expensive, Complicated Business to Web Integration (seomashup.blogspot.com)
Thought Leadership Interview #13: Engagement Marketing 101: Will Schnabel from Silverpop Engage B2B (funnelholic.com)

These are a few of my favorite things.

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 23rd, 2009 | Comments home title

favoritethings I was just having a conversation with the extraordinary graphic designer, Austin Wechter, about how sometimes all I feel like doing in my blog posts is RANTING! That’s where my head was at this morning, but I decided that it might be unproductive. Instead, I’ve chosen to turn things around and share some of my favorite things! That’s a happy topic, right?

Let’s start with some online services

Cli.gs - My favorite url shortener. Great analytics and tracking. I know lots of people are using bit.ly right now, but I’m a CLIGS man.
Digg.com – I could spend days there. I know, rumor has it that it’s mostly spammers, but it’s still a social tool and there’s still a ton of great content there.
Friendfeed – New friend feed is really cool, though I havn’t had much chance to play with it (read my review). The thing I like most about it is that you can use it to combine all your feeds. Very zen-like.
Rhymezone – Great rhyming dictionary that I’ve been using for years. Also has thesaurus and definitions.
Google – Yes Google I love everything about you. Don’t change a thing.
Twitter - Nuff said.
Woothemes, Elegant Themes, and IThemes – The absolute best sources for premium Wordpress themes.
Youtube – The king of viral video sharing.

My favorite blogs.

Livecrunch – For my money it’s the best up-to-date info on what’s going down in the tech community.
Kyle Lacy’s blog – My boss and mentor. Brilliant.
Seth Godin’s blog – Every adult in the workforce should be reading this blog.
Chris Brogan’s blog - Fantastic social media insights.
Cracked – Hillarious. Some of the funniest stuff out there.

Now some simple offline pleasures.

The smell of freshly cut grass.
Grilled cheese sandwitches with bacon and tomato.
Opening a brand new can of coffee.
Relaxing by the pond behind my parent’s house.
Playing music with my friends.
Watching movies in bed.
Finishing a good book.

And some of my favorite TV shows / Movies.

The Office – A consistenly hillarious show. Cudos to you Mr. Scott.
Arrested Development – Why they ever took that show off the air is beyond me. Damn shame.
Boondock Saints - A fantasticly violent delight.
All of Wes Anderson’s movies – The Darjeeling Limited is my favorite followed by The Royal Tennebaums. They’re all great though.
The original 90210 – I just can’t get enough of Dillon, Brandon, Brenda, Kelly, and of course David Silver.
High Fidelity - My favorite movie. Jack Black and John Cusack’s best work.

My favorite books.

The Catcher in the Rye by JR Salinger – The original book about teenage angst.
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut – One of my favorite authors. I’ve read most of his books and this is my fav.
A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway – A gorgeous book from a bygone era.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy – What can I say? I was a history major and this book helped me understand why the world is the way it is.
All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin – This book was the paradigm shift that made me fall in love with marketing.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby – The book that inspired my favorite movie.

Could referral traffic be the key to online supremacy?

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 21st, 2009 | Comments home title

Chris Baggot of Compendium Blogware wrote a post at Imedia Connection last month discussing some predictions for the next 12 months of corporate blogging. One of his arguments was that you should only focus on search as a traffic source to your corporate blog.

When you consider the three main traffic sources to corporate blogs (direct navigation, referrals, and search), search is the only measure you should focus on because it’s the only one you can control and, more importantly, scale. You can’t increase the number of referrals or direct navigation; it either happens or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, when discussing search, if you want more organic traffic, you simply have to add more blogs targeted specifically to your keywords and write more content.

I found this interesting, because I’ve been using referral traffic as my primary measure of success for a while now and I’ve found that it is a much more active way to generate traffic to your blog or website and it causes the other two sources (direct traffic and search) to increase as a byproduct. Here’s why…

I set up my blog posts to feed to various social networks. I engage with other users on these social networks. I direct all traffic to my most recent blog post. Sometimes just to get some additional data I’ll even use a url tracker/shortener like http://cli.gs so that I can get additional data about who is clicking through to my site. I can use my analytics numbers to figure out which referral sources are paying off and which are not. I can increase activity on a network if it’s generating significant traffic.
This helps increase your search traffic. Everyone says content is king for search when what they should be saying is Content was king last year! Just like linkbuilding was king 3-4 years ago. Search changes all the time! Right now Google and Yahoo are giving more cred to sites that not only have lots of content, but also good content that actually means something to people. How many people are searching for your company name? How many blog comments are you getting? These are all results of how active you are on the social web. If you focus on referral traffic, your search numbers will naturally improve and you’ll build a heck of a lot of brand awareness which means more people will type your company name into the search bar.
Direct traffic is the best kind. Would you pay a bunch of money to get your listing in the phone book if your phone was already ringing? Of course not! That’s the goal right? If you’re focused on broadening your footprint on the social web, you are increasing awareness of your site which means that more people will come to you directly if they are interested in what you’re saying. Then you don’t have to work so hard to get traffic, but you have to do the leg work to get the thing going in the first place and doing it through search alone is a slow road. Why not take an active role?

Bottom line… it’s a lot more interesting to generate your own site traffic than to wait for big results from just the search engines. Building a network of referral links on the social web WILL help you win searches as well as get more direct traffic. If you have three areas available to work on, why not work on the one that improves the other two?

10 of My Favourite Online Business Resources (peekabookidsgear.com)
Why Search Engine Rank is Important (ariwriter.com)
Analysis: “Online news aggregators – friend or foe?” (blogs.praized.com)
Tracking User Conversations Across the Web (rotorblog.com)

5 Ways to prepare for the year 2011

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 21st, 2009 | Comments home title

seth_godin Seth Godin made an interesting prediction in his blog post yesterday.

Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you’re doing today to be ready for that?

I thought the post was pretty brilliant and it goes right along with my current marketing philosophy. What should you do to get ready for the new era? How are you going to cope thrive? Here’s a good start.

Start a blog. Blogs give you search engine supremacy, they give you something to promote in the social web, they let you tell your story… the list goes on and on. I shouldn’t have to sell this any more. It should be a given. If you’re in business, you should be blogging about your business. You won’t understand it at first. That’s okay. You won’t see any benefits for a few months. That’s okay too. You need to get lots and lots of content out to the web or you’ll be left behind.
Identify 5-10 highly connected leaders in your business community. Malcolm Gladwell calls these people ‘connecters’. These will be people who seem to know everyone and love bringing people together. Set up 1 on 1 meetings with these people and ask them which social media services they are using. Chances are, these are the same services you should be using. Make it your goal to engage with these connectors online at least a few times a week. You’ll find that the relationship you build with these influential few will pay huge dividends in the next few years.
Read lots and lots of blogs. Things are already changing extremely quickly. This is only going to accelerate in the next few years. You need to stay abreast of the latest trends in your industry. Most thought leaders are already on the social media bandwagon. Follow them, and do what they do. If you work at it, you might even be able to join their ranks in a year or two.
Know where you stand. How closely are you watching your Google analytics reports? How are people finding you? You need to know this so that you can leverage it to grow your business. Let’s say you own ABC company which sells widgets and you find out in your analytics report that you’re getting a lot of traffic from the term “widget failure from ABC company”. On the surface this might look like a bad thing, but if you’re smart you can use it as a positive. You could post all kinds of content showing how you’re preventing widget failure. Turn things around. Control your message.
Slice your market paper thin. There’s too much noise out there to not know who you are marketing to. Have you taken the time to profile your ideal customer? Why would you want to market to anyone but profitable, low-maintenance customers? When you find out what that customer looks like make that your focus. I know it’s scary to give off the impression that you’re turning away business, but I guarantee that seeming a little more exclusive will benefit you in the long-run. You can always take on a new customer that’s less-than-ideal if you need to, but your marketing needs to be targeted to your most profitable prospects.

Solve a Problem – 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems (problogger.net)
Debunking One Social Media Myth (michsineath.com)
The Reason That Social Analytics Will Succeed Over Traditional (openmode.ca)
Just Call It Marketing (seohack.site88.net)

If I had my druthers, Internet Explorer 6 would disappear!

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 16th, 2009 | Comments home title

Warning: This post is a rant!

ie7sucks

I’ve written posts in the past about which web browsers I like and why. Most people who know me know that I’m a bit of a ‘browser whore’. I use multiple browsers on a daily basis, but I rarely use Internet Exporer unless I’m checking a web page to make sure it’s IE compliant. I have IE 6 on my computer because some of my clients are still using it.

I hate this! IE 6 was designed for a different internet (the internet of 4-5 years ago). It doesn’t display web pages the way it’s supposed to. It’s slow. It lacks features. It was fine when it first came out, but now it SUCKS!

If you know someone, ANYONE! who is still using IE 6, please please please get them to change to a modern browser. IE 6 is a terrible disease that’s still infecting the web community. According to w3schools.com 17% of web users are still using IE 6. I just puked in my mouth a little bit.

You ARE A Content Manager – With or Without An Internet Connection (graymatterminute.com)
Internet Explorer Add-on: Report a Webpage Problem (ghacks.net)
Microsoft is committed to a better web with MIX Online (wisdump.com)

5 ways Twitter could monetize.

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 16th, 2009 | Comments home title

I’ve been intentionally staying out of the Twitter monetization discussion, because I don’t want to jinx anything. I like that everything is free. However, Twitter is probably WORTH more than any other social network and will need to monetize to sustain its existence.

Put search on all twitter pages, then copy the Google model of putting paid ads next to the actual organic results. Here’s the kicker… you explain to everyone that this is what is paying for Twitter, so if they really are looking for a product to buy they should click the paid ads on twitter search. Those ads would be worth a TON!
Charge for use of the twitter API. They could make a modest amount free, then after that charge a small fee for users who are sucking up a lot of the processing power and causing ‘fail whales’. Always best to kill 2 birds with one stone.
Charge users that have tons of followers. Once you get to 10,000 followers you have to pay $10 a month, 20,000=$20/month, etc. Seriously, if you’ve got 100,000 people following you and reading your updates that’s a lot of promotional power. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have to pay a hundred bucks a month for it.
Develop a software program that has features not available through the standard API (I don’t even know if this is possible, but it’s a good idea anyway). Then, you charge 10 bucks to download it. There’s no reason all the great software out there should be free. I’d pay 10 bucks to download a really really good twitter interface. I know tweetdeck and twirl basically have the market cornered, but there are still improvements that could be made.
Sell out to Google. How great would this be… you type in a search in the google bar and you get 2 columns of results; one from Google and one from twitter. That would be sweet.

Writing compelling titles to drive traffic on Twitter.

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 15th, 2009 | Comments home title

Whenever I ask other social media experts for advice about social media best practices, they always recommend automation. How much content can you push out to the social web automatically so that it doesn’t run your life? There are lots of tools that are useful, but one basic necessity of all of them is that you title your posts strategically so that you get sufficient traffic when they push out to twitter.

The best thing to do is write long titles that clearly define what your post is about and that also compell twitter users to click through to your post. It always helps to make your title sound a little bit exclusive. Make sure the post title matches the key issue covered in the content.

This practice also helps boost your chances of appearing at the top of the Google search page. Long titles mean long h1 and title tags tags (if you’ve got your blog set up correctly). What does this mean? Basically in the hirarchy of important text on your your page, the h1 and title tags are by far the most important from a search perspective. Having long tags means you’ll rank for more ‘long tail keywords’ in search engines (many keywords typed in at once). I know that sounds a little technical, but it works.

Long, descriptive blog titles are a win-win all around.

Tweecious Converts Twitter Links to Delicious Bookmarks (readwriteweb.com)
Social Media 101 – It’s all about relationships. (socialfish.org)
Five things your brand should ask about social media in 2009 (thecustomercollective.com)

Why books will always be the best form of entertainment.

Posted by Colin Clark on Apr 14th, 2009 | Comments home title

: Image by cliff1066 via Flickr

I just moments ago finished reading the book ‘Time Quake’ written by the Indianapolis-born author Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve loved each and every one of his books that I have read, but ‘Time Quake’ is by far his best, probably because he borrows so much of his own life to tell the story.

I suppose one of the reasons I love Kurt Vonnegut so much is that he grew up less than a mile from where I currently live, and many of his relatives are buried just up the street from me at the Crown Hill Cemetery. Maybe it’s because I love history and he writes about my city from the point-of-view of a by-gone era. Maybe it’s just that he tells brilliant stories.

The point is that I began reading at about page 120 and couldn’t put the thing down until its conclusion at page 250. A good book is one of the truly great forms of entertainment, because it requires a deep level of commitment.

I love books. I try to read one every week if I can. Right now I’m working with two not-particularly-famous authors to raise awareness of their work on the social web so that they can make a living doing what they love. I hope to join their ranks one day soon and write a book myself.

I think Mr. Vonnegut puts it best.

“But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.”