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.

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? (more…)

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.

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?

No, not by the IRS. We’re talking about having an SEO agency do an audit of your site. It’s something we believe in so strongly that it’s become a policy for us to start with a site audit. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what’s broken or why or how to fix it. Starting a web marketing expedition without the audit is just like taking your car to the mechanic and saying, “It’s making this noise sometimes, and I smelled something funny.” Then him saying, “Oh, that’ll be $3,000.” And then you pay it. If it doesn’t work, you can pay him some more or chalk it up to those cars and their confounding mechanical systems.

You don’t do that, though. No! You get it diagnosed. That’s why there’s a diagnostic fee–they really do have to do some work and look around to tell you what’s wrong. If you’re debating about whether the money spent on a site audit is worth it, the answer is yes. This great little article from Search Engine Land covers the stages of search marketing and SEO your company might find itself in, then explains how an audit would be of assistance wherever you are. Go forth and read!

Susan the Meticulous has had a relationship with social media like those little birds with twiggy legs at the beach have with the water. They run toward the incoming wave, get a little bit of a leg or beak wet, and then turn around and run away fast. While I believe in the power of telling, and believing a priori is not a strong suit of mine, I go through periods of resistance to blogging, filling out the “about me” part of the social network profile, saying any more than absolutely is necessary. I struggle between desire to share and fear of exposure. Personally, it’s the fear of saying that one very wrong thing. Professionally, well, it’s exactly the same.

What do you think – do younger people, people who have been blogging or reading blogs since their teens and are now in the workforce – have that same fear? Privateness – it just seems to be so, like, out. Controlling who one is to others by self-editing, holding back, playing cards close to the chest…who needs that layer of faking it? Hey, duh, we change, we evolve, we adopt new perspectives. Yesterday we were blue and today we’re red. If we’re smart, we are where our customers are and trying to figure out if orange is next and if so exactly what shade.

Here’s another wonder: for seo agency client companies marketing to people young enough and social-media-centric enough to assume that a transparent evolving personal or corporate identity is the norm, what are the limits of the fabled transparency?

Corporate competition always has been secretive. Will businesses seeking to prosper in a social-media public relations framework adopt a norm of carefully spawning yet another public corporate image – people creating characters whose purpose it is to be real people on social media? Perhaps a persona of a CEO telling all or an entry-level worker climbing the ladder, personas we’re drawn to… personas manufactured as distraction and to give the appearance of transparency.

Or will social media be able to do what it seems like it could do – through sheer volume of uncontrolled communication, be able to establish a fairly enforceable terrain of true and customer-mandated transparency?

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.â€Â� Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapersâ€Â�… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.â€Â�

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

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.