Today Facebook announced that they would be reverting back to their previous Terms of Use. For those that haven’t heard, Facebook updated their Terms of Use two weeks ago — a change which attracted immediate attention and “feedback” (as Facebook puts it).
Many people relate “social media” to marketing, social networks or don’t know what it is at all. However, it’s something much larger than that. It’s giving consumers the power to change how businesses make their decisions and it can sometimes force these businesses to focus on their customers and not just on the bottom line. Social media gives consumers a voice, and a loud one at that.
It was a voice that was heard loud and clear by Facebook — loud enough for them to reverse a legal change in their terms within 14 days.
Facebook didn’t make this decision because a few people called their customer service line complaining about it. No, instead, people like Perez Hilton (who gets millions of visitors a day) posted things like this:
Not to mention the article on Mashable (a social media news site) with their post on the topic: http://mashable.com/2009/02/16/facebook-tos-privacy/
And, of course, you have the consumers that will take the time to compare companies to their competitors: http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/
When the internet was just getting it’s legs, consumers didn’t yet have this voice. In fact, people were still unsure about buying things online, and Amazon.com and Netflix.com were deemed crazy ideas. Sure, there were ratings in magazines and top 10 lists, but it wasn’t as unfiltered and blunt as the comments made by consumers today (in both good and bad ways).
What products and companies would have been different, changed, unreleased or quickly taken out of the market if we could speak up like we can now?
…and how will this power change business decisions in the future? Will it force companies to focus on quality and the interests of their customers more?
This list the includes some of the major benefits to having a blog for your business. When consulting with our clients, we usually recommend moving their entire site onto a blogging platform, not just the blog itself. Contact Chief Ingredient for more info.
By having a business blog, you’ll be able to leverage technology to achieve faster search engine rankings, attract more qualified visitors and easily scale to meet customer demands.
Once your blog is setup, it’s extremely easy to add pages, posts, comments, contact forms, and more. All major blog platforms have online administration capabilities that allow you to manage your site or blog from any location with an internet connection.
There are many plug-ins that allow you to track your online web traffic — whether you want to access from within the blog administration section or connect to an existing account within Google Analytics, it’s usually only a few clicks away.
Many blogging platforms automate this process by pinging the search engines every time an update or addition is made to your site or blog.
An XML Sitemap is like a road map for search engines. It explains where all your pages are, what priorities they have and more. They are a pain in the butt to make… unless they are generated automatically every time an update or addition to the site or blog is made — which is what a number of blogging platform plug-ins will do for you.
Many blog platforms will provide plug-ins that will send your content directly to sites like Twitter, MyBlogLog, Technorati and many more. Leverage this automation to save time and marketing costs.
With today’s blogging platforms, you can create any site, with any look and feel on a blogging platform without the “blog” feel overtaking the whole site. This site, for example, is written entirely on the Wordpress platform.
Take advantage of social bookmarking through easy-to-install plug-ins. Your users can save and share your site, pages and posts with others in their networks through Social Bookmarking.
One the best benefits of a blogging platform is it makes it very easy to build a URL strategy designed for search engine optimization.
Many of the benefits described in this list are created through the 1,000’s of plug-ins found on many blogging platforms. They allow you to extend your site and posts with functionality, sans the custom development costs.
Rather than having your contact forms go directly to your email, make sure all the data is automatically saved within a database you can later export and access for future marketing.
If you’re ready to get started blogging for your business,
contact Chief Ingredient for more info.
It’s one thing to get traffic to your web site and it’s a whole new ball game generating quality traffic. You’ve heard the pitch a thousand times “We can get you 6000 new visitors to your site a month!” Hmmmm… really? Are they the visitors that are specifically searching for your products/service or JUST visitors.
When it comes to the game of Online Marketing (and I call it a game because there are winners, losers and rules you must play by), that is one pitch that should sit in the penalty box.
We get questions about these claims from our clients every once in a while, and once we describe the difference between a quality visitor and a regular visitor, they know they are making the right decision by avoiding such an offer.
We’re able to show the difference easily through the use of any web analytics program installed on their site. Here are four items to look for when trying to discover who are your quality visitors, what keywords are they using to find your site and what other web sites are referring quality visitors to your site:
Ok, so you have networked with somebody at an event exchanged business cards, now what?
For me, being a people-person, it is easy to connect and get a conversation started at a networking event, but in today’s internet world my next steps are usually online.
Typically, I follow a specific format to connect with new business that anybody can use:
1. GET INVOLVED! – Create an account with LinkedIn, join groups within the site, send out invitations to connect, attend events, and get the word out. Post intelligent comments and pieces of useful information promoting your business on forums and social networking sites relating to your field, such as Digg, Twitter, Technorati, etc. If people are unaware of your knowledge as an industry expert, advice, or your services you’re done before you even get started.
2. MAKE A CONNECTION! – Once a relationship is established from a meeting or an email, send a polite email thanking your potential client for the opportunity and enclose a non-intrusive piece of marketing material promoting your service and a link to your web site. I like to try and request to get a conference call scheduled in this transmission as well.
3. BE PATIENT, NOT PUSHY! – Don’t automatically assume you are going to get a response. Don’t automatically assume you won’t. Sometimes people get busy, sidetracked and/or are just plain not interested. That’s ok, don’t give up, because everybody knows somebody. In other words, if a lead does not convert to a sale, you have reach out, made connections, and that person or company, may end up referring you to a potential client, or may come back when the time is right.
4. THEY RESPONDED! - Ok great, so they are interested in your service and want to schedule a call. Remember, you are the industry expert in your field. The conversation should be an education process. You are teaching the person on the other end about the benefits of your products or services. In my industry, Enterprise Social Media, I walk my potential clients through a 4 step process, which entails Research, Platform, Buzz, & Opinion Monitoring. Using a graphically depicting slideshow and a screen share, I go into detail, educating them on how our system works from the research process to the web site being built with key components such as – automatic pinging to the search engines, URL structures, scalability through plug-ins, networked within social media, and lead management features. I take questions throughout the presentation. I am selling nothing, but simply teaching.
5. CONCLUSION OF CALL - Ok, the presentation has concluded and you answered their questions. Now what? For me, my closing statement is similar to this…”Ok, NAME, if you could kindly send over your competitor’s links, a list of initial keywords describing your business, and any other additional information to help me build an accurate proposal, we can get started.”
6. FOLLOW UP! - Send another email thanking your potential client for taking the time to learn more about your product or service and remind them, that you need the aforementioned information to begin the campaign.
7. SEND PROPOSAL – Create a detailed summary of services you intend to provide, pricing, deliverable dates, and any disclaimers. Make sure there is a place for both you and the potential client to sign, to make it an official binding agreement.
FINALLY, BELIEVE IN YOURSELF! This is the most important piece. You must be confident in what you are talking about. It sounds silly, but builds confidence…practice your delivery in front of the mirror or amongst friends and/or co-workers.
Again, the best way I personally have found, to avoid scaring off potential business is to educate them. You are educating your potential client on the services you provide, and if accomplished successfully, it will sell itself.
Google Keyword Trends allow you to see how your selected keyword or keywords (separated by commas) performed over a period of time. Currently, you can view keyword trends both on the Search Volume and the News Reference Volume. However, Google Keyword Trends does not provide you with actual numbers for the scale, it’s all relative.
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Recently, Google has published a whole set of Google Analytics Tutorials on YouTube. These Google Analytics Tutorials include over 11 videos and have over 4 hours of tutorial footage.
If you’re like many of our clients, you don’t have 11 hours to spend watching tutorials. However, to make qualified decisions both for your web site and the business you run, you should have a basic grasp of what can be gathered and what data is available with Google Analytics.
Here are the few Google Analytics Tutorials that I suggest:
Yahoo! offers a whole slew of free tools for “anyone creating content” (their words, not mine) on the web. Although some of the tools are only related to their companies (like del.icio.us for bookmarking), overall they provide quick functionality to make your blog or web site a little user-friendlish.
Y!Q allows you to place contextual searches within your posts or content. Unlike other contextual linking tools, this one doesn’t create a pop-up javascript window as soon as you rollover. So it stops your visitors from wanting to chuck their computer out the window while reading your content.
It also comes in two flavors “contextual” and “inline”. I prefer the inline, since it is less intrusive and doesn’t require the reader to jump pages unless they find something of interest.
Collin Grady put together a Wordpress Plugin for Y!Q.
This tool has been around, and in beta, for a couple years. Please leave a comment on why you would or wouldn’t use this.
These buttons allow you to quickly add functionality for: bookmarking (only on del.icio.us), sending (via default email client), blogging (via Yahoo! 360), and printing.
Ok Yahoo, so I can see how you want to promote your own companies, but limiting how it’s blogged and how it’s bookmarked really limits the number of people that would want to really use these tools for their full potential anyway (leave a comment if you agree or disagree). Del.icio.us is the select choice for online bookmarking, by providing capabilities for other tools, you would probably get more users for del.icio.us anyway.
Unlike the Y!Q, this is actually very easy to place into a blog post. For WordPress, use the HeadSpace 2 plugin to include the required javascript on the individual posts you would want to include these buttons on.
Either way, the bookmarking, print, and emailing quick links have their purposes.
You have three options: search your site, search Yahoo! News, and search the web. All of which you can turn on or off. It does include the Yahoo! logo beneath the search box, but it also includes the functionality for “popular searches”. I thought this was pretty nifty.
You are able to specify the width that you want, so it’s easy to fit it in any layout. And last but not least, you can adjust the color themes.
All this is done in a couple steps, and Yahoo! provides a management tool to handle the search engines you create. I can’t complain there.
Tru 3D
… Probably not yet.
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