If you’re come to the blog via the home page, you probably noticed all the design changes, namely boxes defining some prospects’ needs, pointing to new pages addressing how we can address this particular problem.

This was all possible because last Thursday, we launched our SEO dashboard at InnoTech in Austin, in combination with more flexible, less expensive service offerings. This is a big milestone, because it’s the first fruit of our strategy to evolve into a product company. As a bridge from here to there, we’re only selling the dashboard in combination with services we provide. From the business perspective, we now have a $250/mo. entry level price point instead of a typical monthly price of $2000, so our expectation is that this will stimulate a lot more demand. Plus, now we can help a lot more people weather the recession.

As a company, our intent is to become known for personalized education about search, tools for clients to better oversee and manage SEO (either internally or for an overview of the results from their consultants or SEO agencies), and as a trusted partner for developing site optimization strategy. The SEO dashboard is the first tool we’ve created, in response to where we believe the market is headed, which is wanting to develop search marketing as an internal capability. With the right kind of help, we think clients can develop this as a truly sustainable competitive advantage.

The Houston Interactive Marketing Association is having their annual conference on 090909, and I’ve been invited to speak on “transitioning to digital.” We did some research on Houston companies in the Inc. 5000 last year, and discovered that there are some very big, very profitable (as long as oil is over $75) companies doing business with websites that look like they were done in the ’90s. As we say in Texas, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” So, my job is to help the marketing managers figure out a rational path from brochure ware to true interactive lead gen, and help them tune in to the right signal amidst all the noise on search marketing, social media marketing, SEO, PPC, Twitter, etc. Should be a great day, hope to see you there.

Early bird registration for the Interactive Strategies ’09 conference ends on July 3rd.

Yesterday, I was at VMX09, a video conference held in Austin. It was an outstanding intermediate-level event. They did a great job blending in marketing and new methods, for people who have been doing video, and then video production and scaling and workflow hints for marketing people who are looking to add video to what they do online. As a marketing person who’s done a few videos from start to finish, all by myself, it was helpful to know that I’ve been doing things right, how to do it better, and how to do it more easily and frequently.

Here are my quick and dirty take away tips:
1. Audio is the most important thing. People will put up with crappy visuals if the audio is great, but make them adjust everything and they’ll abandon.

2. Your content and info can’t suck. Be informative, entertaining, and to the point.

3. blip.tv is your new best friend.

4. Don’t go for the lowest quality. You can’t control where your content is shown. The services automatically compress and serve the right kind of file now, so you want to make sure people using web TV or big monitors have a good experience.

5. Read the Terms of Service for each site before you post anything. Period. Some sites can use your content without notifying or paying you, others absolutely do not allow anything of any sort of commercial intent and will pull your video. Yes, you demonstrating a product is commercial.

If this is something that interests you, or if your company is thinking about adding it, or if you already do it but want to improve production values or know where to spend your time and money to make it better, you might want to check out a few of the sessions. Everything will be available on streaming video next Wednesday here: http://www.vmx09.com/.

Marketing people are very good at communicating. That’s what we call it, and that’s how we make our money, but really, what we like to do is talk, have other people listen, and then see them take action. That’s exciting. On the web, we search marketers pay a lot of attention to what people are looking for, and try to help them find it, but I’m not sure if we marketers are really communicating with the market. That’s where social media comes in…where we get to listen.

Dave Evans pointed out the difference last Thursday at the InteractiveAustin2008 conference, and I wanted to bring it up in the panel I was on, because it needs discussion. That didn’t happen–we did have a lot to cover, between niche marketing on the web and bridging the generations–but it is something to keep in mind as you think about using social media in your marketing mix. Social media is about listening.

Where are people talking about you? What are they saying? Can you help solve their problem with your company or your product? These seem like great opportunities for marketers to get closer to your customers…and learn what they really want, not what we think they want.

One thing that sucks about such a great conference is that hey, there are multiple things you wanted to go to happening at the same time. Fortunately, people like Roo Reynolds videotape them and stick them on teh intarwebs for me to see later. Merlin Mann’s pitch from Worst Website Ever is too good not to share. This panel basically pitched the worst possible website ideas to a VC, in which we all learn what not to do with those shiny new media ops.

His slides are here.You might know him from 43Folders.

The point is, even though they seem cool and everyone runs over there and jumps into the mix with new technologies, that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea for your business. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that most people don’t use or even know about so many of the things we web nerds use constantly. Even if it’s totally lame, you have to be where your customers are. If refrigerator magnets with your phone number are the way to go, then do it. When I want to order takeout, I don’t go visit your SecondLife location to put in an order for pad thai. HP doesn’t go trawling MySpace pages to find the hottest new nanochip technology for their gizmos.

Here’s my post on what I got out of Tom Parish’s SM Marketing Metrics panel. If you’re looking to read about the Meebo/Tweeter mini-revolt, it’s in posts below. Email me or drop a comment if you have any questions or want clarification on any of these points. I’m sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com.I’m here in the audience listening to experts discuss and debate social media strategies and metrics. I had always thought SM would be easier with bigger companies. They already have brand following and a huge number of users. If 1% of the Microsoft or Apple users create content and interact in meaningful ways, that’s a heck of a lot of people. Those are the kinds of things to look at and wish for when you’re approaching SM for a small or medium sized business. The audience size makes it easier. However, the giant gnarly corporate structure makes it incredibly hard to get things implemented–and you have a lot more pressure to prove the value of something. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are some things that hold true.

• You can’t start by hosting a fancy, new platform for interaction. You start small, build a reputation and experience. Then you can move into the next phase.
• Blogs are where to start. It’s not unusual for the page views of the blog to surpass those of the site. The buzz that a blog can generate may very well be the push the C-levels need to give the go-ahead to moving into further SM programs.
• The other way to go might be an internal effort. If people start interacting and being more productive through the ease of social media interactions, how much more valuable will the interaction be once it introduces feedback and input from customers? Internal, firewalled blogs like Dell’s are one option, but really anything where you get people from different departments able to be talking to each other is a good thing.
• Moving customers out of the marketing loop and into one for retention risks losing their customer evangelism to their friends because they stop being marketed to. The message becomes that you’re not as valuable anymore, when, in fact, these people are incredibly valuable assets that are seriously under-utilized. SM is a way o keep them in the marketing loop while giving them tools they need to evangelize to their friends.
• Regarding reputation and crisis management… A press release is not a platform. When these things happen, you have the opportunity to demonstrate how it could have been avoided and how you can fix it through social media. Companies that had been hesitant or resistant before are often suddenly very receptive once they understand how helpful using SM could have been.

The last question was awesome: Regarding the net gen who uses social media and networks constantly and in a totally integrated way, there are billions of dollars at stake going forward. What needs to be proved and how do you utilize these for marketing in an authentic and provable way? The panelists talked about creating things of lasting value that are actually useful–i.e., actual content and not ads. I agree, but what do you think?

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.”

I’m going to the Interactive portion of SXSW in a few weeks. Got any recommendations for panels and parties that aren’t to be missed? Or ones to miss? Our own Tom Parish is leading the Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They? panel on Saturday, which will be excellent. I’m hoping it doesn’t overlap with Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! (Annalee Newitz), The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007 (Henry Copeland) or Creating Findable Rich Media Content (Jennifer Taylor) that are all on the same day.

If you’re going, shoot me an email or comment and maybe we can meet up. I’ll be the one in jeans and a Threadless shirt with an iBook liveblogging… no, wait! That’s everyone. My bad.

If you’re going and you’re not from here, I’m happy to make recommendations before people send you to eat really awful Mexican food and make you wonder what the fuss about Austin restaurants is if this is the best we can do. (Hint: if the margaritas are supposed to be great, they’re either really cheap or only good if you substitute the primo tequila so they make it with limes instead of mix. This will serve you well at Matt’s El Rancho/Trudy’s/El Arroyo).

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.)

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.