We have a couple of people coming in to interview this week, and it brings questions to mind for me. Not the obvious ones–though those are bouncing around in there–but ones about how I can shortcut the long and winding path to getting what we do. It takes a while. Once you get it, then you can start innovating. Things come zipping along nicely, and it goes from being a bunch of acronyms to being a delicious basket of possibilities. For most people, there’s a hurdle of frustration and boredom before the “aha!” moment with search marketing, made more frustrating because you understand the potential but haven’t quiiiiite clicked with it yet.

This is part of a larger block of thinking I’ve been doing for the past couple of months. It would be awfully nice to be able to have some nuggets of insight in hand this week, though. For me, it’s made more important because we’re interviewing a potential summer intern tomorrow morning. She’s smart–4.0, worked on the AdFed team whose project went to nationals, really wants to learn about web marketing and get some actual work experience. I had a couple of office jobs in college hoping to get experience and learn, only to find myself mired in the admin pool. That sucks, but it sucks more when you’re the smartest one there and get to do things like staple and take an inventory of the magazine and catalogue subscriptions. In the year 2000, I got praised by the boss two levels up from mine for the brilliant idea of using the internet to find the information nobody had been able to locate. I mean praised as in stood up in front of the office and talked about as an example.

The last thing I want to do is waste my time and the time and resources of someone who actually wants to learn and could do a great job. Yes, it’s just a summer job. I get that. But if those of us who live a level or two above the norm in the tech atmosphere could find a way to put people closer to that Matrix moment of understanding by being clear for once, we could reap some really amazing things. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s personal and you find in your own time. Social media is that way–once you figure out how to use it and connect in ways that make sense, it’s powerful and not a task. Virtual worlds are that way–once you make friends or learn to create/build, everything falls into place and you’re hooked.

What’s the magic connecting point for what we do and how quickly can we bring people to it? Is it seeing the results graphs for what happens in the months after the site you redid goes live? Is it finding the competition’s weak spot and trouncing them? Or is it simply moving into mastery of a craft that can’t be skipped ahead to?

My son has mastered the cable remote, which means he’s no longer a captive to Boomerang. Suddenly he can take himself to the rest of the kid’s channels…and be doused in their calculated and scheming heaps of commercials for a bunch of crap.

Thank goodness a friend taught us about “What’s The Lie?” About 15 seconds in to a commercial for sneakers, my son shouts “The lie is that those shoes can make you jump as tall as a building and have cartoons coming out of your feet!” The next one is easy – after a couple seconds he says “The lie is that having that will make a lot of cool-looking kids want to hang out with you.”

The third commercial is for markers made to mix a pair of colors when they write…he has some first-hand data here. “That they work after the first time – that’s the lie,” he says as wryly as a child can be wry. The next up is a public service announcement against kid’s smoking. “No lie in this one, right mom? What’s it called again, a PSA?”

What turns out to be the last commercial in this set is for a boxed set of radio hits from the 70’s. A tough one…My candidate for the lie is that the offered price is a bargain, but what comes through visually is more an assertion that dancing to this music will make you happy…and, well, that’s true.

Here at the office, we more and more frequently are in dialogue about how to assess ROI for the not-quite-so-analytics-friendly tactics - like articles and press releases and blogging, for instance - in our quiver as part of a really thorough web marketing campaign. The ROI here – it has to be about trust, right?

The return on investing the time and resources to educate, inform, inspire, and interact with your customers is that they become invested in your relationship. (Yes, there are benefits that translate into something you can show on a graph or include in a report) The point of these tactics that aren’t exactly marketing isn’t about ROI in the way that PPC advertising campaign management is. The return on that is calculable, downloadable directly from the service in a variety of file formats.

The return on actually sitting down and interacting, on giving away information that helps and enriches your customers, that’s the kind of return you can’t show a direct correlation in a quarterly report. But it is the difference between loving and loathing in a lot of cases. If you go in saying you’re interacting and real, but the whole thing is about ROI and selling, your customers will spot the lie faster than my son can tell you breakfast cereal won’t make you friends with cartoon leprechauns.

We all need inspiration and vision. Companies coming up with mission statements and doing corporate retreats to get people excited used to confuse me. What’s there to get excited about? It turns out that there’s a lot, even when you’re just a little guy in the trenches. We all contribute an important and necessary piece of the solution. But sometimes, after the conference or the approval of that brilliant idea you had, you find yourself wondering what happened to all of that energy and enthusiasm.

It’s like when you throw a great party, have fun until the wee hours and stumble off to bed some time before first light. You did all that planning and preparation, then people showed up and got into it. It was exciting and fun, but now there are cups everywhere and you have to do all the work to complete the thing. If you’ve thrown a party, you know the worst part is the cleaning up afterwards. Keeping the enthusiasm and enjoyment you had for the good and worthwhile party is hard to do when you’re left handling the actual costs of all the fun. Do you drag around your trash bag and vacuum swearing you’ll never throw another party? Or do you think about how much fun you and your friends had and how great it was?

For actual parties, I’m often the former, but wish I could be the latter. I keep entertaining. The inspiration and enthusiasm comes back over and over. An occasion comes up, or we start talking about getting together for drinks: my mind starts putting together menus and music instantly. Because I lack a brain-to-mouth filter, I always volunteer, then I wind up having a great time doing the thing. The work party is harder. You can’t spend your time conference-hopping–you have to take what you learn and turn it into something good.

You need something to help you get through–something that motivates you at a core level. Whiteboard. Put together a bookmarks file of the sites that got you excited about developing that new thing. Take a cue from visual designers and make an inspiration board with ideas on sticky notes and quotes and pictures or sketches. I have lots of these–it’s a little bit like A Beautiful Mind when I’m brainstorming. Sometimes it feels like it’s easier to be inspired in visual design, but that’s probably just me. For those of us who don’t get to push through by cranking The Smiths and visiting the agency beer cart, might I refer you to inspireUX? These are quotes that make you think, from people who have great things to say about user experience. Most of us are involved in creating and supporting a good user experience aren’t we? As someone who creates a lot of content, I like this one:

Find one you love love love? Print it out. Stick it on your inspiration board. Share it. Then you can crank up The Smiths on your headphones and get back to doing good, fulfilling work. That’s what I’m doing today.

Let’s start simple.

When I’m working with a client, one of the key questions I ask is Where do you want to be 12 months from now?

It’s a critical question to consider before embarking on all the effort and money that will be set in play. Remember, in a social media/marketing strategy you’re not just paying Google for click-through ads each month. You’re directly involving yourself, your time and your money by building an ongoing relationship with your web traffic.

For a very small business, it’s usually more than enough to say we’ll start blogging consistently, build an audience and focus on all the tasks necessary to build a workflow of content and enroll others in the company to help. The goal being to build traffic and learn the ropes of blogging and engaging in conversation with other bloggers and your audience. I’ve seen this process work so well that many smaller businesses, typically in the services area, no longer need to worry every month about expensive SEO efforts. Blogging done right (content, connections and conversation) brings about a change in the way you interact with your customers versus buying advertisement to throw at them, hoping something will stick. Of course, this is a simple strategy for smaller businesses that everyone seems to be climbing on board with these days - as well they should, in my opinion. People expect more than ‘billboard’-looking websites that haven’t been updated in months (or years, in some cases).But what about a larger business, especially in the enterprise class? How do you develop social media/marketing strategies that leverage your efforts into business growth and keep you ahead of the competition?Or, what if you have an idea for a start-up business that is social media/community-related? How would you go about doing that in a way that is not simply ‘yet another social network’ site?

Enough about the search engines’ market share, already! It is spring in Austin, and it’s a great time to get out of the office. It’s good for the soul to remember that, in a non-virtual, totally offline life, “twitter” and “tweet” are words that anchor you to life, and are not trendy at all.

This Flickr “badge” is a widget–a little bit of code that does something interesting–to show you how easy it is to incorporate your photos into your social networking. If you click on a picture, you’ll go to Flickr and get an enlargement, and from there you can view the entire photo set as a slide show. Very yummy pictures of nature, wildflowers, waterfalls, etc., if I do say so myself. Good motivation to get you up and OUTSIDE. ;>)

Have you seen this yet? Interestingly enough, the number of raw searches was up on Yahoo! and Microsoft even though their percentage of the market fell.

Part of the work we do as a b2b internet marketing agency is helping clients choose words to describe their products and services. When we start a project, we ask for a list of the keywords they already use to talk about their goods, as well as for words they might be considering using, have heard their competitors using, or have discovered some other way.It makes for a delicate inquiry, and sometimes an awkward first dialogue. A marketing executive who has spent a great deal of time and money in the creative, analytical, and political work to get agreement on a differentiating way to describe what they sell can be at least disappointed when her SEO agency doesn’t want to work on making their site visible for their new slogan.

After many, many meetings to come up with “Lightspring Cloud Walkers,” hearing us say you’ve got to make your site visible for “diabetic foot shoes” might not be all that thrilling. Or say you’ve spent a year getting agreement on “Mini Mobile Executive Identification Device (MMEID) ” and your SEO agency suggests optimizing your site for “employee badge” and “nametag.” You need the bigger name, you say, because next year the MMEID also will have fingerprint and retina scans built in…and we give back…”security badge.”

Like we say, nobody’s searching on your tag line. At least not yet, anyway.

The Google toolbar (and others!) is a favorite internet marketing tool of mine. It may not seem like a marketing “tool” to everybody, but when I spend time researching on behalf of a client, Google toolbar is front and center. So, I thought I’d let you in on a most-used trick: searching a site, even if there isn’t a search window on the site.

To begin with, download the Google toolbar (not just the little search window that’s installed in various toolbars) from toolbar.google.com.

Let’s say you Google a word, get a bunch of results and then don’t find the term you were searching for on a particular site that was returned as a result. There’s a little icon available on the Google toolbar that looks like Mr. Magoo (for those of us old enough to remember him!)–or maybe it’s a magnifying glass with spectacles. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be, but it sure is a handy little guy.

(Yahoo toolbar has a similar function available via the “Search Web” drop-down menu.) This function allows you to search for a term “only on the current website.” If it’s not showing on your Google toolbar, right click a blank area of the toolbar and select “customize.” You’ll be able to click/drag the icon onto your toolbar.

So, for example, when I’m researching a particular search phrase for a client’s organic SEO project, I use Mr. Magoo on the various (mostly competitor) sites and get a feel for how they’re using the term. You can check your own web pages to see if your copy is reflecting the search terms that are important to you.

Enjoy this Mr. Magoo search-in-a-search trick. Actually, you can use it from any site without doing a search first…as long as you have the toolbar open.

Recent economic news – slowing Google PPC revenues, a likely recession, slowing consumer spending, has interesting implications for SEO. And some economists are saying it is going to get much worse.

Of course, no one knows for sure. I like the old moniker for economics - “the dismal science”.

If people cut back on PPC ad spending, what might be the effect on an SEO agency, for example?   If businesses can borrow less, and cut spending, how would that affect the agency? We are a B2B internet marketing agency and are looking at the possible effects of an economic slowdown.

I believe that when times get tough, good marketing is even more important. So I would put more emphasis on a smart, high-ROI web marketing strategy during a downturn.  

This industry might be too young to know how customers will react if the economy gets worse, but I’d put my bets on smart online marketing.

Okay, let’s talk about some down and dirty marketing. I have a bee in my bonnet about something, and a survey says a bunch of other people do too. I haven’t come up with a catchy title or neat phrase for it, but it will be a series of posts tagged around the main topics concerned: customers, brands, and loyalty. Surely I can come up with something better… (or maybe you can).

Forgive me, but I’m going to use a little industry lingo because hey, I’m not a philosopher and we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re all used to looking around at marketing and advertising stuff–the articles, the blogs, the case studies, the campaigns–and we can get really inspired by them. I mean fired up about the kinds of things that are possible. They’re not easy to do, as evidenced by the multitude of failed ad campaigns. They take a team of people working really hard to pull off, and even then they might not be successful. That’s not the intimidating part for me. No, the intimidating part is that they’re B2C, for companies that have a loyal, energetic tribe of followers.

People out there have logos of computer companies tattooed on their bodies. They start blogs to track and detail new products and interact with other fans. How on earth can we inspire that kind of loyalty–even a portion of it–for brands and products that aren’t part of our daily lives? Read the rest of this entry »