The Asus eee-pc is a huge success in Asia. Why wouldn’t it be, it’s shock proof, has 6 hours of battery life and a 60GB hard drive. But somehow I think the marketing has something to do with it… You tell me.
Now get back to work.
These are the top 5 sites I visit just about every day to discover more about WordPress & Blogging in general. They are presented in no particular order.
1. Mashable’s WordPress Category
3. Yoast
4. Hongkiat’s WordPress Category
5. Webmaster Talk Blogging Forum
Hope these help, they are kind of off the mainstream…
I’d like to set the record straight over some recent events that have caused quite a stir on the social sphere. There was never any Matt Cutts’s imposter Facebook Page, it was a Facebook FAN Page about Matt Cutts, BIG difference.
Bill Hartzer, a Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Blogger, started a Facebook Fan Page for Matt Cutts a few years ago.Bill Hartzer and Matt Cutts spoke at PUBCON in Las Vegas (I believe ’08) about this particular Fan Page and from what I understand Matt encouraged the idea, having trusted Bill.A couple of years later Bill shared the administration access with me on Facebook (big mistake 
). I never did much with the Page except a minor self-promotion but recently that all changed.
Saturday, June 26th I wrote a blog post about the power of Ping.fm when used in conjunction with the multiple social networks it connects to. I spent most of Saturday afternoon connecting all my social media accounts to Ping.fm. When it came time to add “Facebook Pages” to the line up I did so with the normal “Allow Ping.fm to Post to Facebook” integration, and while connecting, the option to add Pages popped up with just one of my pages visible to me. I did not see any other of the 9 Pages I have on Facebook, so I assumed that it would only post to the Page I was viewing during the integration. I revisited Ping.fm before writing this post and I must admit I do notice a pull down now where I could have chosen which Pages I wanted to post to and which Pages I did not. But when I added it the first time I did not notice these options because I was in the process of adding multiple networks and was not paying close enough attention. And the pages were behind a pull-down menu, so it would havedefinitelybeen easier and could have well prevented this entire thing from happening if it was more apparent.
So what happens next? Well I added a WordPress plugin to four of my websites that integrate with Ping.fm, and then went on to publish multiple blog posts and videos to each website. I I thought each time I posted how great it was that all these posts were being pushed out to the social sphere. Indeed they were. They were not only posting to the website attached to Ping.fm, then on to Facebook – they weresimultaneouslyposting to Facebook FROM each of the social networks in which I connected with Facebook as well! Since I always use the “Login with Facebook” button on the social networks I frequent, there were several extra submissions to Facebook of the same post. So let’s get this straight — Ping.fm to Facebook –Ping.fm to each social network in which I logged in with Facebook — then multiple submissions of the same post to Facebook. See where I’m going with this? So each post was effectively hitting Facebook multiple times from multiple sources with exactly the same submission! And here’s the worst part, I had NO idea that it was posting to not only Matt’s Facebook FAN Page, but all of my own as well. This morning I logged into Facebook with a huge yellow message informing me that Matt Cutts’s Facebook Fan Page was shut down.
Now keep in mind, this was a FAN page, just like Taylor Swift would have, or possibly even Tom Cruise… AND Bill had mentioned this FAN Page to Matt Cutts with his approval, even though it is not a requirement under Facebook’s Terms & Conditions to do so. Notice in the terms where it states “Pages are special profiles that may only be used to promote… celebrities.”Now maybe in the Gen 1 SEO days Matt Cutts was not so much a celebrity, but come on folks, nowadays Matt is like the SEO God.
So number one I want to offer my deepest apology to anyone this affected in a negative manner, I can assure you it was never my intention for this to happen. But secondly I want to point out that I believe this should have been stopped with some sort of “SPAM detection” system from either Ping.fm or Facebook. How in the world is it that Facebook would allow the same post so many times from so many sources to the same account?
All I know is if someone wanted to exploit what I have done inadvertently, there is nothing in place to stop it. What if I would have had Facebook posting to Twitter while Twitter was posting to Facebook. Would the loop have ever stopped? What can we do to stop this from happening in the future? I agree I should have managed my accounts with more diligence, but with thousands of social networks connecting to each other through API, who can keep up?
Although I signed up for a Ping.fm account a while back, until recently I did not realize the power it has in terms of social media distribution. Ping.fm isessentially a tool that integrates with hundreds of different social media websites and allows you to publish to all of themsimultaneously. It takes quite a bit of work to set it up, but it’s well worth it. I connected most sitesit works with and then installed the CR Post to Ping.fm plugin for WordPress by Arief Bayu Purwanto to integrate my blog with Ping.fm. Now anytime I hit “Publish” in WordPress, it will send a link to my post to almost 100 social media sites. It is VERY cool.
The Problem
Online reputation management becomes vital when a potential customer searches for your company on a search engine only to find damaging information about your business on the top of the search results. Since almost 100% of internet searchers use the first three search engine results, a negative reflection of your company’s image can take its toll on business.
There are several scenarios which would cause this to happen but typically it is when someone posts a negative review on sites like RipOffReport, Yelp, Epinion or Angies List. Thepredominantissue regarding negative information is that instead of someone telling their friends or family, it is viewed by thousands and thousands of people. This can inflate small issues that may not have been handled properly make your organization look much worse than it actually is.
With that being said, most businesses don’t have any problem getting their corporate website to the number one position on Bing, Google, and Yahoo. The problem comes about when negative content dominates the rest of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as well. In these types of situations businesses need to administer online reputation management to salvage their good name and increase traffic and visibility of their brand in a positive light. The administration of managing your company’s online reputation is not easy, it takes time and patience, but its much better than the alternative.
Try to envision the search results page as a piece of virtual real estate your company needs to acquire. Its going to take a lot of planning and time to develop your real estate. But if you dont own your real estate, it will own you.
The Solution
Add multiple search results for your business pushing the negative content below the fold, or the part of the page not seen when the results are returned in your browser. There are many ways to accomplish this but the most effective way is by using social media, mini-blog posting, and press releases.
The Strategy
Your strategy is to push negative search results below the fold with a combination of actions.
1. Social Media
Create and promote your company’s social media profiles.
There are many authoritative social networks that you can setup profiles with that will quickly show up on top of the search results page.This is a short list of sites I recommend that are updated several times a day.
- YouTube This one is the most important. Use a free service like Animoto.com to create and submit 10 short videos to YouTube. Then download the video and use the free service tubemogel.com to distribute the video. Videos rank fast and will start pushing negative items below the fold the fastest.
- Twitter A must. You absolutely need a Twitter account with your website link in your profile. If you are active (and there are ways to automate this), this will show up before your company in some cases.
- Flickr This site is very powerful. Getting a link on here is as good as gold. You can add HTML to the description; put a text link with your top keyword phrase here to your website.
- Facebook Page Set up a Facebook Page for your business. Add links, video, pictures and then invite everyone you know and all your former and current customers. Having an active page will hit the search engines quick.
- Meetup I dont know why or how, but if you create a Meetup group it will show up on the search engines fairly quickly.
- LinkedIn Another important one. Create a group of all your customers. Be active. All these websites will show up quickly in the search engines provided you build up your profiles. Spend some serious time adding friends and requesting the same and these websites will show up on the search engines and dominate the real estate on the SERPs.
All profiles should at least include the following details:
- Your business name.
- Link to your company’s website or blog.
- If the option is there, add a short company bio. It should be detailed and include links if possible.
2. Wikipedia
Create an entry on Wikipedia for your business and link to it and from it. Be careful not to be too salesy, it will get removed very quickly. Just write the facts.
3. Write a Few Articles on Blogging Platforms
Go to the following websites and create blogs for your business. After youve created the blogs write a unique post on each blog about your products or services and the benefits of buying them. You could write about a particular customers experience, how your product or service positively affected someones life, or just a description of what your products or services are. The key here is to make sure you dont replicate the work and write something worth reading. Write a unique article on each site. Inside your blog post make sure to link to the social media profiles you have created in step 1 and your company website with anchor text.
Use search engine friendly URLs where possible. Blogger includes these by default, so it may be a better blogging platform choice over some of the others if you are going to only choose one. And since it is owned by Google, and even though they “claim” not to give itprecedence, it does get hit by the Google Bot fairly often.
4. Press Releases
Write a press release and use PRWeb.com or a different press release distribution service to push it out. Programs like Press Release Submitter by Submit Suite do a great job as well.
5. Building Links
Start linking between the social media profiles, one page blog posts, and any positive reviews youve obtained using anchor text where you can. Anchor text is a hyperlink with your companys name or top keyword phrase. The blogs that you create are a great resource for building high quality links because they are crawled regularly and will show up fast on the search engines.
They also direct users and the search engines to other sites (social media) that rank well for your companys top keyword phrases. Link to the articles that you have written from the bloggers, reporters, and journalists you have contacted as well. Interlinking between these websites is the key strategy to making this effort successful. It forces all the sites to be indexed faster by chaining together all the links.
The linking should include:
- Links from your social media profiles to your one page blog posts
- Links from your one page blog posts to your social media profiles.
- Link to / from your Wikipedia company post and your companys website.
- Links from your social media profiles to press articles.
- Links from your one page blog posts to your press articles.
- Links from your press articles to your company website.
Summary
Online reputation management is a vital part of your organizations long term marketing plan and essential to owning the most precious real estate on the SERPs. If you want to get rid of the negative information about your company its going to take time and effort. Even if there is no negative information on the SERPs, you should practice the methods I laid out on a regular basis. It is an excellent way to prevent the situation I described above to ever happen to begin with. This method can yield results as fast as two weeks if you are dedicated to it.
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- Google Home Page Automatically Changing Background Image On June 10th http://bit.ly/d5fWqr #
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- Does Google Give Mahalo A Spam Pass Or Positives Outweigh Negatives? http://ff.im/-mdVYw #
- Google's Soft 404 Errors Also Include 5xx Errors http://ff.im/-mdVYv #
- Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Search Results Now, Switch Over Complete August/September http://ff.im/-mdVYy #
- Bing Creating Their Own Caffeine Indexing Speed? http://ff.im/-mdVYx #
- Google Doesn't Like Apple's Safari 5? http://ff.im/-mdVYz #
- ZachBrowne: A particularly nasty edition of one of Twitter's notorious service outages got in the… http://bit.ly/9bhxCL #
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- Video 33 – 34: Google Adsense Adsense is one of the easily way to make money blogging. http://bit.ly/ckmSCa #
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- WordPress MU is best for those that are only familiar with WordPress. http://bit.ly/bcl1l0 #
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- Social Media Day a global celebration of the revolution of media becoming social. http://bit.ly/aCWvP4 #
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- Daily Search Forum Recap: June 18, 2010 http://ff.im/-mjk5L #
- Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: June 18, 2010 http://ff.im/-mjk5J #
- Nick Diaz: MMA's Most Frustrating Fighter http://zach-browne.com/blog/2010/06/12/recreation-sports/nick-diaz-mmas-most-frustrating-fighter/ #
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- 8 Easy Steps to Create Your Corporate Facebook Page http://goo.gl/fb/V84Wm {zb} #
- Just made a video on Animoto called "Zach Browne Promo": http://animoto.com/s/6v14VUVZf7NLFoF4whu6ew #
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- Jets' Sanchez Should Play Despite Minor Knee Pain http://bit.ly/beFliB #
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Your Facebook Page is your brands official social network community. It should represent what your company is, who you are serving, why they should care, and where they can go to learn more or take further action. When people become fans of your Facebook Page, their friends are notified via News Feeds. If they click on the story, they are taken to your Facebook Page. Pages are also often used as the landing page for social ads.
Here are eight simple steps for getting started:
1. Register for a Facebook account. To create a Page or buy ads, you have to sign up for a Facebook business account.
2. Create a new Page.
Most products and services fall under the Brand or Product category. If you are a smaller business focused on a specific location, you can select the Local option, which Facebook has defined mostly for service oriented businesses who cater to a particular city. The last option is for artists, bands, and other public figures, such as politicians and celebrities. Once you have come up with a strategy and your set of content, actually creating a new Facebook Page is fairly straightforward. Just specify the name and type, and Facebook will generate a page template with blank sections for a company picture, description, wall, photo, video, and notes.
3. Upload a picture, provide basic information, and customize the look and feel.
Use a large, high-resolution logo for your picture. Grainy pictures look unprofessional. Next, provide basic information about your company, such as when it was founded, a link to your website, company overview, mission, and list of products. To make it more entertaining and stand out, its not a bad idea to also include interesting facts such as celebrity customers, funny quotes, and brand trivia. Last, but not least, you can use Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to customize the Pages look and feel using HTML and Flash. You might want to make this consistent with your brand look and feel elsewhere. Some companies choose to purposely create a completely different look and feel to bring fresh perspective to the brand.
4. Add engaging content, platform apps, and opportunities for interaction.
Before you make the Page public, seed it with interactive content and apps, such as polls, petitions, games, contests, slideshows, and surveys, to inspire engagement. Platform applications can be added to Facebook Pages just like they are added to a persons profile. In addition, you should write a welcome message on the wall, post relevant links, seed discussion board topics by posing open-ended questions like what are your thoughts on X?, upload photos, and add your blogs RSS feed to the Note tab. When you are ready, publish the Page so that it becomes public, shows up in search results, and becomes viewable by others.
5. Recruit early fans.
Make sure to become a fan of your own Page, and ask your employees, friends, and acquaintances to do the same. Its important to seed the Page with a critical mass of fans before going out to the public and recruiting new people. You want people being exposed to your brand orPage for the first time to feel like its dynamic and in high demand.
6. Promote your Page to get more fans.
You can help promote your page using Facebook Ads. Another popular technique is to include a link to your page in your e-mail signatures, website, blogs, and other customer or prospect touch points so they know where to find you on Facebook.
7. Moderate the community by periodically updating content and responding toposts.
At least once a week, refresh content with new surveys, contests,videos, photos, articles, and announcements. Hopefully, you will have developed these for other channels such as your website. You can reuse them here. Less frequently, you might want to check out new platform apps to add and switch out old ones. Respond where appropriate to user-generated content, such as wall posts and forum messages, especially if someone asks aquestion that has not received a response. Dynamic content is best at keeping users engaged, so select content that is timely, recent, and preferably multimedia. People will keep coming back to your Page only if you give them reasons todo so. If your Page is stale, you will lose peoples attention and potentially even hurt your brand. Set the right expectations for your community according to the high-level strategy you developed, and then make sure you follow through on the commitment.
8. Consider different Pages for different audiences.
Just like you might create multiple landing pages in traditional online marketing to tailor your message tospecific audiences, you might consider creating multiple Facebook Pages. There are trade-offs to maintaining more than one Page, so it might not make sense in every case. If you do decide to support multiple Pages, keep in mind you can reuse elements across Pages, such as streaming blog updates,video, and apps.
I really hope this helps you get started on launching you first corporate Facebook Page. If you need any help, be sure to contact me.
Online marketing is going through unprecedented changes, brought on by a volitile economy, the rise of new methodologies, and the demand for financial accountability from promises made. Marketing online is cheaper and easy to measure, forcing traditional media to work harder and harder to break even.
Here are some suggestions to stay on top as online marketing diversifies:
Make your email marketing more relevant
A majority of marketing consultants are increasingly using email marketing – making it the most widely adopted marketing tactic. With email adoption pervasive and consumers’ inboxes increasingly crowded, moving beyond “the shotgun” strategies and working hard to stay relevant is becoming imperitive. To do this, create more compelling campaigns, but with a stronger focus on analysis and management of inbox placement, content rendering, and reputation management. Companies like Aweber are a good place to start.
Look at search marketing from a wider perspective than just Google
There are no signs our society will stop using search engines as their primary vehicle to find products and services anytime soon. However, instead of spending all our energy on the head clam, take notice of search engines other than Google. Not only does Bing’s growth look promising, but global markets already have strongly entrenched local players like China’s Baidu and Russia’s Yandex. Start mixing in the new innovations in usability, mobile, geo-location and collaboration to make sure you are staying on topof the entire search arena from a global perspective.
Expand targeting and personalization on websites
About half of the internet marketers I know are already using targeting and personalization on their site, and another quarter are rolling it out in the next few months. This personalization is growing more sophisticated, anonymous tarketing, geo-location and other insights, so start extending email segments, offers and messages to your websites, to better match the overallmarketing message for a particluar campaign. You’ll get better results with landing pages and website optimization complementing site personalization.
Learn about and adapt to growing marketing channels
Maketing professionals are increasingly being enindated with a complex array of new channels – mobile (messaging, websites, apps), rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), social media (microblogging, social networks, user generated content), and more. New tactics are being born every day, success is hit-or-miss, and campaigns are not well integrated with other marketing efforts. Despite these challenges, the opportunity to efficiently and effectively reach and engage customers is undeniable, and we need to continue to experiment, test, and adopt emerging channels.
Expand your offerings as mobile continues to become more significant
Interest in mobile marketing has exploded, driven by the tremendous success of the iPhone and Android. As more and more people dive into smart phones, it is starting to expand beyond mobile messaging, and making mobile email, mobile websites and mobile applications opportunistic channels to market to. The plethora of new devices, increasing internet speed and pinpointed locationing, will push this vertical market towards greater importance.
Reach deeper into social media as it continues its march
Websites such as Facebook and Twitter have grown into everyday vocabulary. We are finding ourselves thrown into a space where we have to consider how much control consumers now have with our brands. Blogs, review sites such as Yelp, and other newer sources of media are mixing with marketing messages to combine a new perception of company brands. As companies try to zero in on the specific social strategies that work best to engage their own customers, they are starting to expand their individual participation are continuing to adopt a wide variety of social media strategies. Social marketing extends the reach of a company’s brand and helps viralize company messages, user generated content, and reviews. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are already staples in the marketing mix. As this new “customer driven” theology settles into place we need to rely more heavily on these proven channels.
Unify web analytics to offer a more rounded picture
Web analytics focuses on integrating customer data from the web, search, mobile, and the social sphere. Integrating customer’s social profiles, using metrics such as sentiment, and real-time tracking are more important than ever.
Keeping up with the strong movement of emerging marketing technologies, tracking and utilizing the change to your advantage, and focussing on integrating your metrics and increasing personalization will be the difference in who thrives and who sinks in the evolution of online marketing. Research and employ more progressive techniques, stay on top of emerging marketing channels, and learn to adopt quickly and you’ll stay competitive and increase customer retention.
One of the biggest challenges associated with email marketing campaigns is establishing meaningful contact with customer targets in order to increase sales, while protecting and enhancing your brand. Successful email marketing designed to drive sales and build brands requires adopting a methodology that includes more precise prospect targeting, better permission-based models, a better overall consumer experience and better quality lists.
More precise prospect targeting
Better targeting translates directly into better response rates. Accurate customer profiling, which looks at demographic information related to consumers, business industry type and company size, is needed to define the target market. Knowing more about the target company or individual leads to messages with a high degree of relevance and therefore, impact: the higher the relevance, the better chance that the intended message will break through the clutter.
Better permission-based models
Any customer or potential customer will be more apt to read an email from a trustedsource. In building a permission-based email list, it is now much better to go beyond a single opt-in where the customer gives the OK just once and use double opt-in instead. Companies like Aweber even offer a non-branded video or audio double opt-in as part of their service. While some marketers may see this as an unnecessarily high goal, double opt-in reinforces the relationship with the customer, serving as a reminder that they have granted their permission, and improves the likelihood that the emails will be opened.
A better overall consumer experience
Marketers need to also keep in mind that simply inundating their customers with too many irrelevant messages will deteriorate customer relationships and counter any long-term loyalty goals. The emphasis needs to be on the quality of the experience. Relevance, personalization and segmentation all add to the overall user experience.
Better quality lists
And finally, list selection can make or break the success of any campaign. However, few list owners and managers understand how to best develop such lists. It isimportant to find a source that can provide accurate data. A highly targeted, accurate,permission-based list is a valuable asset– the more accurate the information, thebetter delivery of your messages. Furthermore, a successful email marketing program should encompass a multi-phased approach that provides an unprecedented ability to reach a targeted group of prospects by combining data compilation, sourcing and analysis to produce real results.
The phases of this type of program include:
Phase I: Identify your target audience
Identify your target audience by using sophisticated technology and an extensive database to provide the most accurate customer profile. Then, based on this program, select your best prospects from a pool of permission-based individual contact records to find prospect matches for your profile. From this prospect universe, further hone your customer target list based on your particular preferences, such as campaign size, budget, geographic region or additional campaign requirements.
Phase II: Establish contact with your audience
Based on scientifically proven permission letters, establish contact with your audience by generating a permission letter and sending it to your predetermined target list, inquiring whether they would like to receive information and/or promotional offers from you. This tactic establishes a second level of permission based on responses received. Message deliverability is confirmed by successful permission letter delivery, further insuring the success of your program. You may also establish links and tracking mechanisms on a multi-channel basis. As well, controlling your own creative assures consistent messaging and seamless integration with other multi-channel messages.
Phase III: Campaign in progress
Once you’ve sent out your branded messages to the target audience, test the creative based on geo-demographics and other target preferences, and package your message differently to subsets of your prospect audience. A reliable scientific approach is A/B split testing. Also, expanded creative options allow you to link to websites and provide offline methods of contact, and incorporate motion and soundfor added appeal. Frequency is your key to success. Studies show that by being in front of your target audience frequently, you are able to educate them while they are researching their purchases. Most importantly, you need to be there in front of them and trigger a response when they are actually in the market to buy.
Phase IV: Ongoing analysis
Throughout your campaign perform open, click and conversion sales analysis. Then, within your campaign, after enough responses are generated to do so, build and utilize a predictive model to refine your audience even further.
Phase V: Review program success and ROI
Finally, review the program success and ROI based on a post-campaign analysis with the data generated and/or an extensive match-back analysis. The reliability of this approach enables you to confidently expand your program.
And lastly, a key factor in delivering a successful email marketing program that builds brands and drives sales is selecting one that provides an affordable platform for marketers to test their campaigns in a controlled environment, making it possible to lower their risk and make any necessary adjustments to optimize their results.
