I’m in charge of coming up with search marketing strategies for our clients, then helping get the content that makes them work through the process of development and implementation. That means I do a lot of research and exploration to find out what lies in that lovely matrix of customer interest and market opportunity. What I do is all about possibility. It’s about sorting out the puzzle pieces and making something cohesive from them (which I love doing).

My research takes me outside of the things that are my immediate domain because I need to have an understanding of what the client does already and how it’s working, what they’re not doing, and where the opportunities are. There tends to be a pile of “other stuff” that isn’t what we’re contracted to do. If there’s something that really needs attention, we’ll point it out and can help you get it taken care of or refer you to someone who can.

Sometimes, I wish that it was my job to help deal with this pile of “other stuff” that could be done as part of the web marketing strategy. It can be hard to curtail scope creep when you’re really excited about finding a huge, untapped opportunity for a client. You might be wondering how people missed these big opportunities in their own business. They’re often not the most obvious or trendy ways to solve the problem. Or maybe they solve the problem in an unexpected way. What they almost always are is the second right answer.

A Facebook page or Twitter stream might not yield big results for your company. You might not have the time or strategy to market it, maintain interest, and fill it with useful content. That doesn’t mean you’re exempt from needing to have some social media in place. Would answering common troubleshooting questions regarding your product or software on tech forums make users less frustrated and inspire brand loyalty? Is checking your reviews on Google, Yahoo!, and Yelp part of your routine? What about responding to customers that had a less than ideal experience?

If you’re intimidated or unable to build and maintain some of the bigger efforts that would boost your company’s web marketing strategy, I challenge you to sit down and think of a dozen things you could do that are second right ideas. Just because they weren’t the first right idea doesn’t make them any less right!

I’ll be chairing a panel on Metrics and Measurement at Interactive Austin 2009, and tasked the panel (Ian Strain-Seymour of Apogee Search, Pam O’Neal of BreakingPoint, Michael Wilson of Small World Labs, and Andy Meadows of BudURL fame and Live Oak 360) with coming up with questions we think people will be interested in. We’ve got a couple of search marketing gurus, a couple of guys with companies wrapped around social media marketing, and Pam’s a B2B social media maven, with some great success stories and real-world experience to share.

Please take a few minutes and complete this questionnaire on the topics, focus and specific questions YOU would like to have answered. We will be a much more focused, relevant panel if we can get your input. Hope to see you at IA09!

Click Here to take survey

Ran an interesting little experiment last week, testing the marketing effectiveness of promoting a new free SEO Web Design Tips PDF. Patrick’s blog post was too good not to use as link bait, but as you probably know, you can’t track the downloads of a PDF with on-page analytics tracking code.

However, link shrinking software CAN give you these metrics. Using a $4 account at BudURL, I created two shortened URLs, /SEOWebDesign and /SEOWebDesignTips. Then, I used LinkedIn’s News feature in all the groups I belong to, and sent out an announcement with a link to the new freebie. At the same time, I tweeted the news, using the shorter of the two URLs…at 140 characters, it’s not exactly a press release. I have about 100 followers, and I expected it would get retweeted, hopefully by some of the more popular Twitizens. However, in retrospect, I realized I should have specifically asked that people retweet.

The results? In a week, 271 page visits via LinkedIn, 2 via Twitter. Our site traffic was up 17% for the week, so all-in-all, a decent promotion. I’ll try retweeting the tweet this week with a specific retweet request, and see what we get.

I don’t think I’m any more well-known on the marketing groups on LinkedIn than among my Twitter peeps, but it’s certainly true that the audience self-selected in LinkedIn groups is better targeted. When you think about social media, don’t forget that you still need affinity, interest and motivation to see results…and, that if you measure your results, you can learn a lot about where you should be spending your time.

I often think about how to get messages to the B2B market on behalf of our clients.  Typical ‘networking’ and ‘lead-generation’ groups I’ve been involved with rarely had B2B participants.  I don’t know if you’d ever see a C-Level executive delivering their “elevator pitch” at your typical BNI meeting. I think B2B decision makers are so entrenched in their day-to-day jobs that they have no time or patience for networking, much less social media outlets.

Then, I stumbled upon “New research: B2B buyers have a very high social participation” on the Groundswell blog site. Groundswell is a book written by two Forrester Research analysts.  Their research shows that 91% of technology decision makers are watching videos and participating in (if only just reading) blogs and other social media outlets.  So, we’ll keep recommending social media strategies to our B2B clients.  I, for one, will feel just a little bit more comfortable doing so with some research statistics under my belt that validate the necessity.

What do you other B2B marketers think?  Are you encouraging your B2B clients to have a blog? post videos? Tweet away the hours?

Some people make resolutions around this time of the year. If you like them, great. I have no use for them. I prefer challenges and goals, things with restrictions and deadlines, things that demand work every day. The problem with resolutions is that they’re so nebulous, so open-ended. For me to be successful, I need a community, too. Back in college, a bunch of friends and I did the Danskin Women’s Triathlon. I never would have signed up on my own. Never ever. The community of friends was only way I wound up standing in front of a lake, watching the sun come over the horizon with a few hundred women.

The secret wasn’t support, though that was great. It was having to be accountable on a daily basis for working toward a goal. We hired a coach. We learned to run and to swim together. We were stunned at our successes and marveled at the unexpected roadblocks. Almost every single big, personal accomplishment in my life has a similar structure. NaBloPoMo was easy compared to NaNoWriMo (next year, so help me God, I will get to 50,000 words).

I’m a writer, and I mostly live in the land of words. That’s not all I do. Right now, I take pictures every day. Every single day. If there weren’t flickr and the various groups and challenges and projects and photo friends, I think it would be really hard to do. It’s the same with anything. When people ask me about adding various social media aspects of marketing to what they’re already doing in marketing, the main point I try to make is that it doesn’t create itself. Yes, it’s free and available to everyone, it’s not hard to do, but you actually have to DO it.

We all have computers, pen and paper—how many of us write books or poems or stories? The idea of sitting down to write a book is incredibly daunting. Writing for an hour or so a day for a month? Not so bad. You can do all 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo in 60-90 minutes of writing a day. You can do social media in far less time. A huge part of successful social media is being involved with the community. You don’t have to blog every day. Blog on Monday mornings. On the other mornings, you come in to work, grab your cup of coffee, and spend 20 minutes reading what other people write. Make pertinent comments. Internalize what they say. Not only does it foster relationships and bring you readers, it makes you informed and creates something for you to write about when it’s time for you to sit down and say something.

My challenge to you isn’t to make resolutions or identify places that could use some work, but to actually find something small to add to your daily routine that will make a big difference in aggregate. You don’t have to be a writer or a social media expert or incredibly clever in snippets of 140 characters or fewer. You just have to do the work.

Here are some numbers from page 42 of Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff:

From a sample of 10,000 online US consumers, the percent who say they do the following things monthly:

Use Twitter – 5%

Write articles, stories, poems, etc, and post them online – 7%

Use RSS – 8%

Listen to podcasts – 11%

Publish / update their own Web pages – 11%

Publish / maintain / or update a blog – 11%

Post ratings / reviews of products or services – 11%

Listen to or download audio/music from other users – 14%

Contribute to online forums or discussion groups – 18%

Add comments to someone’s page on a social networking site – 18%

Update / maintain a profile on a social networking site – 20%

Read blogs – 25%

Read reviews / ratings – 25%

Visit social networking sites – 25%

Read online forums or discussion groups – 28%

Watch video from other users – 29%

Those of us in b2b marketing must keep in mind that business-to-business happens person-to-person. And more and more, folks are getting together online to swap stories in one way or another…are your prospects there?

…says the Wall Street Journal. I agree. The book is “Citizen Marketers – When People Are the Message” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (favorite bloggers of ours at Church of the Customer).

This insightful book is a quick read and helps explain how social media has come about and how one person can truly make a difference. The book is a social media primer. It’s an historical reference more than a how-to-do-social-media guide, but some of the history happened without my noticing and it’s nice to have a short and sweet explanation of things that now “define” social media.

If you’re not clear what all the hype is about, it’s worth a few hours to read this book. The authors deliver their message via informative, real-life stories. You’ll read about the effect an individual can have on a brand, and how that single person can influence what LOTS of people buy. Get ideas on how companies can benefit — and profit — from engaging Citizen Marketers. Social media is a “trend” that’s real and is becoming a new standard for good marketing and communications.

Now I *almost* understand why people spend so much time blogging, posting videos, creating podcasts and composing advertisements. It’s powerful stuff.

Recently, I received an invitation to join John’s network on TimeBridge, a social media site allowing groups of people to share schedules and availability. TimeBridge may be a good solution, but my relatively short experience was pretty bad.
(more…)

I happened across an interesting article from Sean Carton with the Clickz Network. It’s titled, “Why Social Marketing Nirvana Escapes our Reach.” Sean talks about the not-so-distant past where businesses were hot to set up “portals.” Portals were sure to keep people coming back … keep them staying on YOUR site … keep them from looking elsewhere for things like news, sports, stock prices, etc. Fortunately, the corporate portal goals have died (and Sean explains why). Unfortunately, the push for the must-have portal sites has become a push for must-have social networking sites. Or, so it seems.

It’s not prudent to create a social networking site just because some businesses are doing it, or because some experts say you have to have one. Your site might do just dandy by only providing customers the information they need to make a purchase decision and the ability to find/buy your products. Of course, you must optimize your site so those customers can find you, but you don’t necessarily have to create a new social “neighborhood” to get – or keep – their attention.

RefreshWeb staffers know an awful lot about social media and we do believe there are benefits to social networks – where appropriate. We’re also good business people and would advise against putting the time, effort and money into something that isn’t strategically important for your business. Are you feeling pressure (from your company or the media) to jump on the newest Internet bandwagon?

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 sighting 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, absolutely fabulous shoes?