It took a couple of pining hours, but when Sara our blog guru and fashionista de officina arrived she immediately said “Oh my gosh, look at your shoes! Oh my, those are amazing.” And then graciously she endured my enthusiastic telling of the siting and capture of these stunning pink and wedge heeled mary janes finished with white trim, a peek-a-boo toe opening and a big white flapper-dancer button clasp.

Just about now you just might be thinking “I thought this was a b2b web marketing blog,” or “Crud, I Googled s-h-o-e instead of s-e-o; I must really be tired…”

Hang in - you’re in the right place. This is a b2b internet marketing agency blog. The topic today is online social networks, and the question is how much of an individual’s personality is appropriate for their social network presence, especially in industries like ours, where we are likely to have an online presence for career that flows quickly in to our personal online profiles.

Barring the extreme, say, for instance, a case where I’d have a facebook persona called Notice My Cool Shoes, and another account with completely different credentials called Susan McElhenney Views Source…where does professional social networking stop and personal hanging out on the web begin?

A creature of detail, I’ll move us to examples. That I do Search Engine Optimization, that’s professional. That I am a working mom with 2 young children…appropriate detail for my Facebook profile? Linked In? How about my interest in transcendent bikram yoga? OK, now, how about the detail that I’m a long distance runner? What if I run with a group called Marketers Marking Miles? What if I run with a group called Moms For The Right to Nurse Our Babies While Standing In Line At the Bank? Are these affinity groups part of my work blog profile? My linked-in profile? My facebook profile? What do you think: Can I twitter my new pink shoes?

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.

It’s spring, and my brain is in overdrive. I don’t know if it’s the usual seasonal restlessness or if it’s a combination of a lot of ideas and influences percolating at once, but man oh man, I cannot stop thinking. For once, my thinking is turned to work. I usually think of travel, of art, of letting my body and life fly as fast and free as my mind. A creative, relaxing trip to Spain with one of my best friends is in the works for June, so that beast is quiet.

Instead, I’m tenaciously drawn to excellence, to actually identifying and solving the problem, to being utterly devoted. It does me no good to be devoted to serving the next big thing, to being an early adopter for the pleasure of “been there, done that” once everyone else picks it up. I’ll do that for my own enjoyment. For clients and friends and readers, though, I want to bring them what they need and want. My question to them shouldn’t be, “Have you seen this cool new thing?” It should be, “How can I help you? What can I do to make your job and life easier?”

To that end, I’m putting together questions and a survey to actually sit down and ask how we’re doing, what we could do better, and what you need to know about in the sphere of web marketing. The companies and people that you see and want to emulate are awesome because they know their audience and serve them well. They encourage and enable their people to go out and do their thing and do it well.

I love this video. That’s what we want to do for web marketing. Ask us your questions, tell us what you want to know, what you need, and we’ll answer. We’re marketers first and foremost, and we want to be your partner in web marketing, plain and simple. Not to sign you. Not to market to you. We care about making your job easier. About helping you make sense of the million things you could do and the few you should do. We want you to be able to answer the questions you get asked. We want to make you look good in front of your boss. Seriously.

I’m working from home today, nursing the cold/allergies/mystery SXSW bug that has attacked me (and, it would seem, a lot of others). I get a giant FAIL on the liveblogging of panels, but I *did* take notes. I’ll work through posting the ones that seem most relevant in the next couple of days. When the podcasts of all the sessions come out, I’ll post links to those with a downloadable copy of my notes for the panels I attended. If there’s a panel you were really interested in and want our thoughts, holler and I’ll listen and analyze it. Probably even go find better analysis than mine and point you to it… A lot of what I got out of the conference, aside from the euphoria at being with so many fellow nerds, is either applicable to RefreshWeb or specific clients of ours. Some of that will wind up gradually changing some things around here, so as to be more relevant to you guys. I took a few people out for dinner after one of Gary Vaynerchuck’s fantastic wine parties (yes, he is that awesome in RL). We were talking about what we’d gotten out of SXSW, and they could hardly wait to get back to work and start doing what they’d learned. As for me? I wanted to get back and do things too, but what I really wanted was about a week to sift through everything and figure out who it would help, how to do it. So that’s what I’m doing. I’ll post on the new tools I saw, what people were doing right and really wrong, and more.

I can feel the 60 cycle background hum from SXSW Interactive, with every blogger, pundit and SEM bandit in the interactive world downtown twitting and liveblogging. RefreshWeb’s social marketing maven Tom Parish’s session on social media marketing metrics is covered in Wired’s blog, from the perspective of Meebo chatters sniping away during the session. Learning about the how and why of metrics on social media would take my undivided attention, and I would probably be taking notes on my shiny new MacBook Pro instead of passing notes in the back of the class, but that’s me. I’m at work sending proposals and depositing checks, and the crew is sitting in panels…when they aren’t offsite showing off Austin’s finest bartenders.

From the Wired post: Here at SXSW this year, Meebo-sponsored chat rooms are a major part of the panel-going experience. They provide live feedback on panelists’ performance with all the decorum and kindness you associate with blog comments. Or, in the words of nancy: “Chat room snobbery: high; chat room maturity: low. chat room dorkiness: (through) the roof.”

The big news today is the audience mutiny against Sarah Lacy’s bumbling interview with Mark Zuckerberg, “who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site.” For a penetrating analysis of whassup with the whippersnappers and what it means to marketers, read Thomas Myer’s post: “These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.”

Every nerd’s dream is to win the epic battle using his brains and maybe some secret ninja skills, thereby winning the admiration of Pamela Anderson.

Unfortunately, most muscleheads would crush the typical nerd in any battle, particularly an epic one, because of one factor: muscle. The nerd’s problem is he’s dreaming of victory without putting the daily sweat into his game plan. He’s trying to short circuit the system. No sweat, no victory.

We see this attitude with black hat SEO. While slugging through competitor sites for a client, Susan the Meticulous discovered a site that put a pile of hidden text on the home page, and then duplicated it throughout the site. They even included links to a completely unrelated website, most likely another SEO client of theirs.

Ethical search engine optimization means that you have to do the work. You cannot short circuit the system. This is one of my biggest soapbox issues. Technology only creates obstacles. It does not provide solutions for SEO.

Black hatters think they can avoid hard work by creating hidden text. It’s hidden because it’s stuffed with keywords and is bad for marketing. Technology is only giving that site an invitation to the blacklist.

If the nerd sweated it out at the gym 2 or 3 times a week, he would have the strength and agility to defeat the musclehead. Similarly, if you add good content to your site 2 or 3 times a week, you will be in a much stronger position as time progresses.

The irony of this is that Sara Rasco, our Blog Overlord, has been cracking the whip because I have been lax in my blog postings. My job is not about writing blog posts, and I’m guessing that yours isn’t either. This is why it’s so tempting to look for the easy way out. The site with the hidden text should have spent the time to write great marketing copy.

Note: if you’re a nerd and a woman, please substitute the words “his brains” with “her brains” and “Pamela Anderson” with “David Hasselhoff”.

Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian, “‘Intellectual Property’ is a silly euphemism” is a good talking point on the noodley world we content crafters inhabit. There’s a friend I go around and around with on IP law and acceptable usage of things like, say, a photo of a famous work of art. If I’m writing about color theory and illustrate my post by putting in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and something from Picasso’s blue period–even though we’ve all seen the images before–she says I have stolen art. Not Picasso’s art, mind you. The photograph is someone’s art that I have stolen and should be paying for. The art may be public domain, but images of it aren’t somehow? That’s just silly. It’s an impossibly fine distinction.

Maybe it’s generational. There’s never been a time in my life where anyone couldn’t record something and share it–mix tapes, movies on TV. I remember sitting up late with my boom box in middle school to record the hip hop music on the radio my parents wouldn’t let me buy. It’s not malicious. If I post a 30-second video clip of my dog on my blog and put it to (credited) music that I didn’t write, record, and edit myself, have I committed a crime? Have I harmed album sales? Most people under a certain age would instantly say, “No, of course not! It’s like free promotion!” Have you ever bought music someone else used in this villainous manner? I have, and a lot of it. Music I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Yes people flat-out pirate, and we all know it’s wrong. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Media is the most accessible way to talk about this because it’s a lot easier than trying to explain someone owning a theory or concept. But as internet marketers, content creators, and people that are in the forefront of emergent forms of media and content, we run into this constantly. We’re out there making mashups and homages to products we love, but a lot of the people whose titles start with a C aren’t happy about it at all. Some companies embrace it, like Apple, who went ahead and used a customer-created iPod ad. That’s the good. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba talk about fan-created content a lot in their book Citizen Marketers, and they make some excellent points for marketers and corporations to consider when they’re deciding what to do about this loss of control over the message.

The bad is more like blogs populated by bots that post scraped content. Or outright plagiarism. Some people think that just because it’s on the internet, you can take it and use it however you like, without attribution. For me there are two main questions to be answered in determining if it’s right or wrong: is there profit involved? are you attributing the source of what you’re using? Where do you think the line is between what constitutes fair use and thievery?

Immediate engagement starts before your prospects visit your site. Maybe they’ve listened to those enlightened podcasts you’ve been cranking out for the last few months, or seen the wacky videos you’ve posted on YouTube.

The more you focus on drawing prospects from social media, the more likely they will get to know you on a personal level before they know you professionally. Once they’re engaged, don’t loose them with corporate speak.

BAD, BAD HOME PAGE
Consider the following example from the home page of the fictional Happy Baby Megacorp website.

At Happy Baby Megacorp, makers of Happy Baby Cloth Diapers, the rashless diaper solution, and H.B. Powder Ups, the only baby powder with added vitamins, our goal is to be the global leader in portable infant waste entrapment and removal solutions for working mothers, in-home infant health care workers, and government-supported and private health care facilities.

Seriously, nobody cares what your goals are. They just want their babies’ butts to be clean. Building loyalty comes from helping people meet their needs. As marketing professionals, you already know that.

The danger for us as marketers is the potential disconnect between the personal voice we use with social media and the professional voice we use on our website, particularly the home page. So how do we maintain our professional dignity without losing their interest?

First, be consistent with your message. You can’t just go off on some obscure diaper example without having an underlying message that matches the message on your site. Have fun with the social media, but stay on message.

Second, always talk to your prospects on their level. That gives a consistent feel to the conversation as they move from connecting with you “out there” in the social media universe to their interaction with your website and eventually with you.

Third, engage them at every step. Your vision statement sounds like the Happy Baby Megacorp example above. Keep it to yourself. Consider how your home page sounds to the person who only knows you from your quirky blog posts.

Finally, use excellent organic seo practices. People may be entertained by your social media content, but they will likely use search to find the right solution.

SEO’s flexibility gives you the advantage of being able to quickly change as the market changes. Suppose a competitor posts an obnoxiously cute video on YouTube for their “Super Baby rash-free diapers.” Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapers”… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.”

Incorporating new terms in a way that sounds natural is the cornerstone of ethical search engine optimization. When your message is consistent, talks to your target audience on their level, addresses their needs, and when your site uses good seo copy writing so people can find you, then you can connect with them effectively with social media and search.

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

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.