Biznology

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I really believe it’s bad advice to recommend that companies fire their social media consultants, experts and agencies only to bring everything internal. While “everyone” is on Facebook, social media is no longer a land of tinkerers, it’s a land of consumers. If you fill a room of potential brand ambassadors you harvest from your own ranks, I guarantee that only 1% to 10% of those people are active participants and the rest are passive, sometimes participants, most of whom are lurkers. And when people bring up Zappos as the corporate exemplar, I always remind them that Zappos is exceptional and that’s why they’re the only company anyone can think of who does it as well internally. Plus, Zappos is a died-in-the-wool customer-service-centric company with an aggressive visionary founder. Someone who has completely rebuilt itself to over-serve its communities. Kudos, but seriously a truly exceptional example.

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The other day, I posted about choosing the right social media listening tool for the right job. I usually don’t post again so quickly on the same subject, but I got so many questions that I thought I needed to. In my last post, I made the point that simple (and free) engagement tools (such as Hootsuite) work just fine if all you want to do is to monitor for crises (and you’re OK with watching many irrelevant results fly past as long as you eyeball the correct stuff). Any use of social media that is good enough for a person to look at individual social conversations can get by with just these free tools. But if you need to look at aggregate data to do market research or it is too expensive or error prone to have a person look at every tweet to find the relevant ones, then you need a better tool–one that incorporates text mining and probably that uses machine leaning technologies based on human-analyzed training data. Read the remainder of this entry »

Yesterday, I gave a Biznology Webinar called, “Search Marketing on the Cheap,” that covered the free tools and techniques available for search marketing.  If you think that successful search marketing forces you to pay Google and the other search engines to send visitors to your site, think again. Find out the free techniques for search marketing that everyone with a Web site needs to know. You don’t need to be a technical guru or a star copywriter—what you really need is the right knowledge and a willingness to work. Don’t let the investment you’ve made in your Web site go to waste. With the right moves in search marketing, you’ll bring more traffic to your site than ever before, and you won’t pay the search engines a dime.   Read the remainder of this entry »

My definition of blogger outreach has always been about acquiring earned media coverage from bloggers and online influencers. My definition–and my assumption–has always been that blogger outreach is public relations and not paid media. I may well be mistaken.

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The Internet offers so many opportunities to mathematically create world-views that can help us make marketing decisions on expected sales and where they’d be coming from. I’ve often told clients using my SEO services that the number of keywords they’d use in their websites would influence sales volume. And of course, this was never doubted by anyone. But many still want only very few keywords taken from the very many that are actively searched for…

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