We have been talking an awful lot about social media here at the old RefreshWeb world headquarters. While a lot of this is either theoretical or the critical examination of how what’s out there actually fits in with our clients’ goals, there’s an aspect that really doesn’t get discussed. You can feel the question radiating off of people in meetings. For the people that don’t already use social media apps in their own lives, they don’t really get the point of marketing by not marketing to people. What’s with all of this giving away information just to have educational resources?

Start talking social media strategies with clients, and they’re very likely to ask a lot of questions about where the ROI is and why on earth they would want to invest time and energy. These questions don’t get asked outright by marketers much. Nobody wants to not know how to use the hot new thing people are so excited about. It’s pretty obvious, though, that the majority of marketers don’t know how to leverage it well. They cram traditional techniques into places people have created to not be barraged by marketing, then they’re surprised when the angry masses revolt.

People are willing to do the work to make something that can be distributed through social media outlets, but the part about doing even more work to build the community connections to make their social media efforts? No way are they going to go around reading blogs and Digging posts. That’s fine. People used to think it was stupid to put up websites. Just like not every business actually needs a website, not everyone is going to benefit from being involved in social media.

If you are thinking about making forays into social media for strategic marketing purposes, I would suggest reading a couple of posts:

• Marketing is NOT Social Media - Social Media is NOT Marketing by Chris Brogan is great. It’s part of his Social Media 100 project–100 posts about social media. He’s not a marketer, and I find his to be an excellent perspective. I love Eric Weaver’s analogy about pushy selling in the comments.
• Tamar Weinberg’s post on becoming immigrants in the social community is super. It’s an analogy that would serve you well explaining how much work and commitment is involved in these endeavors.
• These were both linked (as are other good, relevant posts) in a post on Internet Bard, Social Media and Marketers: Learning to Play Nicely Together

Wednesday was Austin AdFed’s monthly luncheon, and the speaker was GSD&M’s Luke Sullivan. I hadn’t heard of him before, but the “How To Not Suck” title of the presentation had me too intrigued to not sign up. If I had gone to school for advertising, I would have read his much-praised book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This!, but I have an English degree. If you missed it, that’s sad. It was truly excellent and pertinent.

Mr. Sullivan talked about excellence in the craft of what you do, and it was directed at creatives. Luckily for me, he was a copywriter for 17 years before moving into creative direction. All those examples about honing your work into excellence were about writing. Here’s what I got out of it:
A big part of producing work that’s really high quality is from having a good work ethic. Be in early, work hard, and really do your best on each small piece. Treat all jobs with the same level of attention and care, whether it’s a Superbowl ad or the graphic for a pay per click campaign’s landing page. No job is above you, and you certainly won’t get to the dream assignments doing a halfway job and kvetching about the work you have to do now.

It’s the sum of many small pieces of work that were all done better than they had to be that makes an exceptional product. This sense of quality isn’t really tangible–leather seats and a fast engine alone don’t set a BMW apart from other cars, but the thousand small parts, each designed with precision and care do. Precision takes time, and it’s your job to find ways to fit more time in for doing a good job. That means you probably need to stop playing online and talking to people.

If you find yourself procrastinating, it’s probably resistance to writing (or drawing, etc.). A good way to get over that is to use pencil and paper, just get all the ideas down without it being on your computer, where you’re in production mode. You come up with a hundred ideas and pick one. Distracting yourself until the One True Idea hits you upside the head gets nothing done. (This is a particularly egregious sin of mine.)

It was recently The Holidays, which means business gifting along with the usual slate of presents for friends and family. When I was little, it was always an exciting time because dad would come home with gift baskets from vendors and clients. They contained strange and wondrous things, like cheese that didn’t seem to require refrigeration! And candy!

As an intern, coming up with, purchasing, assembling, packaging, and mailing gifts for clients became my responsibility. The first year, we had a handful of clients and I was on a month-long break from college. Since I’m a bit of a rock star in the kitchen, we did tins of handmade gourmet cookies, fudge, and my great-grandmother’s pecans. Last year, we did hat boxes filled with local goodies from bakeries, candy makers, tea shops, coffee roasters, and the great spicy Nuts on a Hot Tin Roof from the Houston Junior League’s cookbook.

You can’t really do that level of handiwork and personalization as your client base gets bigger and bigger. I understand ordering from one of the many corporate gift catalogs that start arriving mid-August. Over December, we had some things arrive in the mail to thank us for providing services, for using this service or that. Two stand out especially to me because they are gifts to us, their clients, from competing services–Google’s AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

One caveat: most of our clients are tech or b2b, whose demographics overwhelmingly prefer Google. This means we spend a lot less on pay per click advertising services with Y!SM than we would were we b2c-focused. What we spend isn’t insignificant, though. Which is why, when these arrived on the same day, one looked a lot better than the other.

From Yahoo!, we got a card that has seeds in the paper, so you can plant it and grow a mystery plant. It came mis-addressed–wrong first name, wrong business name, right address. Makes me wonder if Joe over at Rhino Engines and Transmissions has a fancy box of Yahoo! swag. A couple of weeks later, one of those roll-up USB keyboards arrived, in Yahoo! purple, natch. While it smells so strongly of chemicals you’d be afraid to touch it, you can use it in the bathtub or a sandstorm. This is a poor way to say thank you to a company who spends the cost of a house (albeit one in a marginal neighborhood) with you every year. Especially the messing up the address part.

The same week the seed card arrived, a precision-engineered box the size of a trade paperback arrived. Nestled inside the center hollow was this, with a nice little note and a gift card…

From Google, we have a very nifty 2GB flash drive that’s the size of a credit card with carrying case and a charitable donation gift card for $100 to DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose.org is a great thing. Teachers from poor districts register for what they really need for their classrooms, and you can give toward it. We helped outfit a 1st grade class with magnetic marker boards in a school in Queens that has a 95% poverty rate. The last thing we need is more exotic mystery cheeses that don’t need refrigeration. This was a great idea, providing something fun and useful for me and for people who really need it.

It’s obvious that only a corporate behemoth like the mighty Google could do something like this, and I’m not suggesting that this should be the norm for most companies. The important difference here isn’t how much one cost over the other. It’s about the thought that goes into it. Yahoo! would have been better off not sending anything than sending something that looks like it got bought from the picked-over shelves of the 24-hour CVS on Christmas Eve. It’s simple–you put your name on something and it becomes an emissary of your company. You know how in Scrooged, Bill Murray sends out towels embroidered with his network’s logo as Christmas gifts? Don’t be that guy.

After a recent phone call with a potential client, I thought to contribute a short post regarding the role of expectations in the SEO agency/client relationship.

As a relatively new business, the SEO/SEM service set is not always clear in client’s minds, and this elevates the importance of getting clear about expectations. 

It’s important to communicate about what services are offered - and what services are not, and the results to expect. Without clear communication, problems resulting from mismatched expectations can easily arise. The client will often think that the scope of services is much broader than the people at the SEO agency.  We have all heard about projects that quickly move into client expectations of total web site redesign…at no extra charge.

As the relationship starts, and we deliver the obvious advice, such as dropping the all-Flash home page, clients can think that all the work will be this obvious or clear cut. Upfront, we tell them it is not, and why.

Another area where expectations can diverge is the need for regular maintenance and tweaking. Upfront, I make it clear that well-executed SEO is not a quick fix. 

Because each client is unique - different industries, different needs, different levels of technical sophistication – each time you set these expectations, it is a different challenge.

The Houston Interactive Marketing Association (HiMA) is bringing Geoff Ramsey to Houston. He was the speaker at our inaugural HiMA meeting last January, and I remember being in awe of his presentation style and what he had to say about the future of the internet. He’s witty, smart, and a great presenter. I bragged about my recently acquired wisdom for weeks! This time around, he’s going to talk about social networking, mobile marketing, online video and virtual worlds.

For those of you that don’t know him, Geoff is an Internet and Digital Marketing Visionary and is CEO and co-founder of eMarketer. They do market research and trend analysis on all things Internet.

If you’re even slightly involved in Internet marketing, and located somewhere close to a major Texas city, you don’t want to miss him! You can register to catch his presentation in Houston (lunchtime) and Dallas (evening) on Wednesday, 1/23, and in Austin (lunchtime) on Thursday, 1/24. If you’re attending in Houston, stop by and say hi to me. RefreshWeb folks will be attending the Austin event, too.

At long last, I have some shiny blogging presentations for you! The Understanding Search Marketing one is the presentation that Susan the Meticulous and I did for a luncheon a few weeks back, and has an overview of some of the more important areas of search marketing, plus an edited version of the blogging presentation.

If you have any questions or want clarification on anything, please don’t hesitate to email me (sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com) or ask in the comments. These are both something used when I’m there, live and in the flesh, running my mouth and answering questions.

P.S. I shouldn’t have to tell you, but these are the copyrighted property of RefreshWeb, and if you take them and call them your own, very bad things will happen to you. Things involving ninjas and paper cuts from manila folders.

One of the things we all struggle with is building relevant links to our sites. “Relevant” being a link from a page that’s actually related to the site content, and “building” as opposed to “paid,” which has become a no-no in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Assuming you are a professional marketer with search as one of your many responsibilities, we certainly understand the need to outsource. But since you can’t throw money at this problem any more, and it goes without saying that you have better things to do than spam site owners asking for reciprocal links, what now?

PR is a great way to get links. For us, links outweigh ink in terms of the benefit. A story gets interest for a day, but press releases with links to your content stay out there forever. Because we’re active in social marketing, we’ve watched very carefully as online press releases have become, for some, the preferred way of getting news. A Google Alert takes a minute to set up, and you immediately get updates on any new web content relevant to your interest. Take that and add optimized press releases, and you have a much more energized public for your public relations. (You may also may be keeping your competitors more informed than you would like.) However, public companies have fiduciary responsibilities that sometimes get in the way of aggressive marketing with PR…so PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Taking the next flight into cyberspace, why not look into promoting your site, your product, your expertise with articles? The intent of the article submission sites is to provide non-copyrighted articles for use by publishers doing newsletters, blogs and periodicals, so they prefer that the article be for a general audience, and not self-promotional. But you can easily explain the benefits of using your product or write a brief educational piece (400-600 words) that gets people thinking. In the “resource block,” you can place a short bio and a link to your site. When someone picks up the article and includes this resource block, you get another link.

As an experiment, I wrote a couple of articles in November and submitted them. Within 30 days, I found that we had 42 new links to the site, picked up by Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Now, we have 51 links from those articles. Considering that investing an afternoon in writing and publishing increased our link total by about 11%, article submission is definitely my new best friend when it comes to getting links. I control the content of the page, and I control the keyword phrase used to link to the site. The only thing I don’t control is where and when the article runs, but one did get picked up by a national search marketing newsletter. I found that one by searching on my name…because they didn’t include the link. Running a Google Alert on your name is a great way to see where the article gets picked up.