Social Media Uprising

By now we are all just about sick of hearing about the MotrinMoms event that happened via Twitter in backlash to their ad. The thing that makes me so mad about this fiasco, isn’t the ad, its the response to the ad. There was silence from Motrin until they finally released an official, legalese style statement on their homepage. Social media is all about the give an take, and although their media was a traditional ad, it made it into the social media arena, and as such it has to be treated as such. Even though their intention was not to produce a viral video, they did, and they should have been paying attention. Shame on them for that! 

Time for a Social Media Consultant?

The good news is, this will not be the end of Motrin. The bad news, (maybe good news for one of you lucky folks out there) is that they need a Social Media Consultant. Shame on them for their first mistake, but if they make it again, the community will not be so forgiving. 

Social media enables everyone to have a voice, and for Motrin this proved to mean a whole lot of brand backlash, but will this cause them to run like hell from social media, or to embrace it for what it could have done to soften the #motirnmoms event? I really hope they chose to embrace, oh what could have been helped if this had been a two way conversation, which is what is meant for social media to accomplish.

Finding the Balance, or Not

I recently read a post from the Viral Garden that literally punched me in the stomach. Mack Collier explained that you’ve got to know when to “remove the perfect filter” in order to get a great idea out there. Wow. That is me. Every-time I write a post it sits in my “unpublished” space for days, while i ponder whether or not it is good enough. Eventually more than half of these not-good-enough posts go in the trash. 

These posts then become untimely, irrelevant, and ultimately useless. What a shame!

Finding the balance between that great post, and a mediocre post isn’t always the key to having a great blog. Each reader will have their own favorite post you’ve written, some reason they keep coming back. They’ve found value in something you’ve written, and most likely they are not hanging on your every post. Sure we all know they come back for the superstars, but they aren’t disgusted or even deterred by the ‘good’ or even the ‘mediocre’.

So stop worrying that every single thing you write isn’t the best thing you’ve ever written, and start to realize that the people who find value in some of the things you write will come back and wait for the next big superstar. You’ve already made them your fans, you don’t need to blow them out of the park every single time.

Search Engine Optimization

Today I atteneded the Texas Domainers and Developers Convention to listen to Bill Hartzer’s, (Vizion Interactive), SEO Presentation. Here is a rundown of his tips:

• Title Tags- Use title tags for every single page of your site. Within your title tag you should include your business name or something else that is relevant to your site.
• Inbound Links- Relative inbound links are key to ranking higher on search results. Inbound links must be from authoritative and relevant sites. (The speaker did not mention this, but a great way to get inbound links is through the use of trackbacks) 
• Keep Content Fresh- Create an RSS feed for your site, and update your content regularly. Blogs are a great way to ensure that your site is considered fresh and relevant. 
• No more Submitting your site- now-days search engines will spider your new site within minutes of registering a new domain name.
• Social Bookmarking- Add your own site to social bookmarking sites, del.ici.ous for example in order to get more inbound links, and to get your fresh content spidered more quickly. 
• Yahoo Directory Listing- This costs $299 but according to —- this can be very useful. He reccomends though that if you prefer not to spend the $299 bucks, you can simply register your site with the sites who provide the directory listings to Yahoo. 
• Keyword Research- Whether you are interested in Organic or Paid Search you must do your keyword research to find out what people are searching for that is related to you, your business, or your product. 
• Keyword Research Tools- Bill says that these tools are very useful, but that you must remember that each of these tools use different methods to collect their data, so you must be careful not to take one tool’s information as gold. 
  • Google Keyword Tool
  • SEO Book Keyword Tool
  • Wordtracker.com (paid)
  • Hitwise(paid)
  • SpyFU.com
• Keep Visitors Coming Back- Rather than park a domain name, keep content on the site in order to build your visitors. 
• Expired Domains- use a 301 permanent redirect on moved or expired pages. 

This was a decent refresher course in SEO, but I did not get anything new out of this presentation. All in all I was rather disappointed- the speaker mentioned that there were over “126 contributing factors” that search engines rely on to rank your site, but he did not expound on this except to say, go to google and look them up! I really thought this was what I would be learning. Wow..

Tribal Election Marketing

I finished reading Tribes, by Seth Godin over the weekend, and as usual Seth continues to inspire. We all ‘know’ what tribal marketing is, simply from our exposure to it, Apple, and Harley Davidson are based on tribal marketing. 

I love that I finished this book before reading Seth’s blog post regarding today’s election and the candidates tribal marketing strategies. Campaigning for a seat in a political office has got to be the most tribal form of marketing, and yet most of us over look it. I will not be as bold as Seth as to call the election one way or the other, (although I do believe he has gotten it right) but I will say that we will very soon learn who’s tactics have paid off, and why. 

What makes the Obama supporters so much more enthused (and therefore willing to donate millions) about their candidate than the McCain supporters? Obama got beyond his fear of being a leader, got beyond his fear of speaking up for what he believes in, and was able to inspire a nation to follow him. Obama also figured out what were the common, core beliefs of his followers and embraced them. Obama was able to successfully lead, to successfully inspire a tribe to follow him, to believe in him, and to act on their beliefs.  

The McCain supporters look much more frazzled, dangling, and non-united, with no real base to speak of. They are scattered. Worst of all McCain’s position is not that of a specified McCain / republican attitude, but that of an anti-Obama sentiment. He has done more defending than propositioning and leading. Sad. 

Just my 2 cents.

Neat little Firefox Plugin

I found this little firefox plugin that displays a sites favicon (assuming they have one) in your search descriptions.

 You can download the plugin here, but you will need to login/register to do so, because it is still in beta. 

By the way, I completely agree with Wylisa- every site should most definitely have a favicon. If you do not currently have on, check out my post on creating a favicon.

Are you with it? (social media marketing)

Many companies have already realized the benefits of implementing Social Media Marketing, but for those who have not yet come to terms with this idea, now is the time to get with it! 

It is a proven fact that during difficult economic times, startups with semi-grounded footing flourish, because they can see opportunity where others see turmoil. The cosmetics industry was formed in exactly this way. During bad times they saw that by simply providing a cheap luxury to women, they could turn a huge profit. Nice. 

The same is true for marketing tactics. Social Marketing brings people together like no other previous marketing tactics- ever, and now people want to come together. Companies need to take notice, especially those who are just gaining marketplace footing. 

There are a few simple ways (small) companies can take advantage of this cheap marketing strategy. No need to hire an expensive marketing firm here!

• Engage your audience with Twitter, but be sure and follow Beth Harte’s Advice.
• Write a company blog- this might take a bit of effort to get set up and looking nice, but it creates a conversation with your audience unlike any other. This gets the conversation started, and allows for comments, and for others to write about your blog in their blogs- oh and then there are trackbacks and pingbacks, very useful.
• Add links to your blog for your audience to digg, stumble, float, or add to technorati, reddit, xanga, or del.icio.us.
• Engage in local Social Networking events by hosting a group like RefreshDallas, or some other Social Group in your specific industry- they are out there, try looking on Upcoming.org or Meetup.com
• Monitor your success through such Social Media Monitors as Google Alerts, Google Trends, BlogSearch, Twitter Search and others. 
• Create a forum for your users to talk about your product, ask questions, ect. 
• Take full advantage of your website, and put it to work for your brand and your company. Represent yourself well, and hopefully you will be well represented throughout the blogosphere. 
• Email Marketing- I know I know, you are saying this is not a social media, but think about it, if your reader clicks into your landing page and fills out a contact form, they are socializing with you, because you first reached out to them. 

Brand Reputation Management: Part 1

We are seeing the trend of using Viral Marketing concepts such as Social Media take a dramatic turn upwards with the economic downturn. It’s virtually free, and is fairly easy to track- and best of all it is reaching more and more folks than traditional marketing media, such as advertising, and analyst reports.

Tracking social media is rather simple using an RSS reader, and a few subscriptions. Just take a look at the list of Social Media Trackers below:

Technorati, Digg, and Reddit

These three offer the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of any search. By simply entering in your company name/product name, (or your competitor’s name) and subscribing to the search feed, you will be automatically notified every time an article appears which contains your search criteria.

Twitter Search

You can use this tool to search Tweets for those mentioning your brand or company- and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria.

Blog Pulse

Searches through the blogosphere for mentionings of your brand or company name, and allows you to subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria. BlogPulse also has a great portfolio of free tools such as BlogPulse Profiles (beta), which allows you to enter in the URL of a specific blog, and get information such as their recent blog posts, trackbacks, common keywords, blogging trends, and find similar blogs. BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to search for a specific criteria, and see the “buzz” surrounding that brand/item/company.

Google Trends

Allows you to compare multiple search terms’ recent trending. This works a lot like BlogPulse Trend.  I searched “Apple” and “Windows”, and found that the search term “Windows” has consistently higher volume of search than does “Apple”.

Google Blog Search

Google searches the blogosphere for blogs containing your search criteria. This is great even for those of us who arent social marketers, but who would like to stay up to speed on product releases ect. I am using it to track Adobe Thermo, which has been in Adobe labs existence now for over a year.

Google Alerts

Alerts you via email every time your search criteria is mentioned. This can help you to watch for copyright infringement, as well as monitor your brand’s reputation. I prefer the RSS feeds to daily/as-it-happens emails, but for some this is the way to go.

And rounding out this week’s list is:

Compete

This is one handy tool! It allows you to track the Stats of up to 3 sites at a time in one chart. Very handy for, well, spying on your competition!

Stay tuned for more… I will be releasing the other half of this list in the next week or so…

Are your financials in the green?

With the economy in chaos, most Americans are trying to find a way to save, and to get in control of their finances. Mint personal finance management tool can help you get back into the green! Mint came out of beta earlier this week, and so far I am loving its massive array of features. 

This super cool, and free tool, logs in to all of your personal bank, credit, loan, and investments account to give you a complete overview of your financial status. For those of us who are wanting to keep up with the debt to income to investments ratio, this tool is perfect! 

I started testing out mint last night and was superbly impressed- it took less that 20 minutes to get all of my credit card, bank, and loan data imported. Once the data was imported it was aggregated and parsed together to give a clear graph of where you stand financially. I try to sit down once every 6 months or so to really understand what is going on with my money, and it is usually a 1/2 day affair, but with Mint, I can just open up my web browser, log in, and see exactly what is going on- without wasting half a day! Fabulous!

Creating a Favicon

Creating a nice little favicon, is relatively simple to create using Photoshop. To begin you will need to download the ICO Plugin for Photoshop from Telegraphics.

Installing the ICO Plugin

Once you have the plugin downloaded, you need to place it in your Photoshop>> Applications>> Plugins folder. When you next startup Photoshop the plugin should be automatically detected. If not, try shutting it down and restarting Photoshop.

Create your Graphic

With the plugin installed all you need to do is create a graphic for your icon. Create a new Photoshop document and for now you can set your canvas size to 64×64px (you will resize this to 16×16px later).

Create the graphic for your icon. Now all you need to do is scaled the image back down to 16×16 and Save it as a Windows Icon.

Uploading your Icon

Now simply drop your new icon into the root folder of your website. Viola! You have an icon.

Testing, 1, 2, 3…

To get your icon to show, you may have to clear your cache and restart your browser. If you are running Safari, you will specifically have to reset the favicon cache. To do this go to Safari>> Reset Safari, and check “Remove all website icons”.

Are you a freelancer or a “synergistic” startup?

If you are a Dallas area freelancer, missing the interaction of being in an office environment, then you should check out the Big in Japan Dallas Co-working Office Space. Becoming a tenant is free, but requires you reserve your space. You can chose to reserve the space for the month, or if you prefer just reserve it for a few days out of the month. The amenities of the space include:

• Drop Ins* and Monthly Registrations- FREE, but all require reservation. Not all monthly registrants will qualify- synergistic startups are sought.
• Hours- 7am to 7pm (door code will be given to new applicants after 30 days)
• Features- Foosball table, Wii (with rockband), small kitchen, free cokes, conference room, recording studio, in building bar and cafeteria. Check out the pictures!
• Ammenities- Free Phone (Cisco VoIP), Free WiFi and dedicated IP, 1/4 colocation cabinet in data center (5mbps bandwidth)