2010 Marketing Plans: Facebook page upgrade add to must do list.

I was reading the social mouths blog on make your Facebook page shine and  I really like the actionable items that are listed.  The full blog is at: http://socialmouths.com/blog/2009/12/16/make-your-facebook-fan-page-shine/

 Facebook is an area where we will all live work and play.  So as a CMO, it is imperative that you dig in and get to know how you can leverage this way of the future.  This blog does a great job of summing up options and directions that you can look at to add it to your must do 2010 marketing initiatives.

 His top 10 that you need to read about  from SocialMouths are:

 “1. Insights (Your In-House Analytics)

 2. Vanity URL

3. Big Profile Pic (Banner Style)

4. Invitations & Bulk Messages

5. Facebook Widgets On Your Blog

 6. Twitter Integration

7. Blog Promotion

8. FBML Landing Page

9. Facebook Ads

10. Facebook Apps”

 

Will altering your website change search?

Will altering your website change search.  This question was searched on my blog and I thought it was very important to reply.

 Yes Yes  and YES

Change meta tags and it will change search, add title tags or keywords and it will improve or hurt search.

Change and add anchor tags and it will change search.

Add more relevant copy and it will change search,

Add Metas to each page, it will add relevance to each page

Add an XML site map, makes is easy for Google to search,

Get rid of drop downs and make it easier to have Google search,

Get rid of an all flash, non Flash 4, and make it more of a searchable website and it will improve your SEO score.

Be sure if it is flash you have an HTML version of your site for search

Title tag every photo will improve search

Add videos , and it will improve

So yes altering your website will change search, if done right for the better.

Create more relevant pages and it will improve your PPC score.

Smart POS marketing or desperation marketing, does deep discounting work?

It has been a very difficult year in retail to say the least.  I was mused by the signs of the times I found at a local high-end mall near me, so much that I had to take some photos, since I could not believe what I was seeing .  Have retail marketers lost their minds, so desperate or perhaps they laid off  their marketing staff?  Is the merchandising or sales team now doing marketing too, with no focus on the future?  This is what was on my mind, instead of shopping, after seeing these POS signs. The merchants are either brilliant at getting you to stop and go into the store or so desperate that anything goes.

Here is the first cell photo I took of a  deep discount sign example of : Almost Free Clothes…Details inside…what does this sign mean!!!  Almost Free Clothes.???.. in a store when nothing is under $250?

The next photo I took  was from a store that had desperation written all over it, but what does it mean when the discounts are promoted as 15% to 80% Off ??  Confusion   How credible is the discounts promoted when they are so wide. Looks more like a going out of business sale.

So is desperation marketing the new flag needed to get people to open up their wallets? It will drive sales no doubt, but what about the next sale or lifetime

value of these value price focused customers.  It may work today, but will not create a pipe line of future sales or customers who profile to an ongoing relationship with you.

If you have more photos you find like these, please send them and I will post them .

Merry 1% to 100% off and an Almost Free Happy New Year.

Screencast is a way to document all your online processes in digital content for employees, customers and prospects.

Knowledge transfer and the ability to create a way of capturing your online process and a how to for all your interfaces is quite a daunting task for a CMO to take on.  Most just assume it is not documentable and are not addressing it.  With online talent still a high commodity, it needs to be done for each of your tools and web interfaces.

The ability to video or screencast a training session of a current employee doing what the do everyday is critical for future knowledge.  If you do not, when that person walks or is downsized or move to another department, you are left with a huge knowledge gap.  Screencast  is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration.

Our webmasters use an online solution called Screencast-O-Matic, which is an original free and easy way to create a video recording of your screen (aka screencast) and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install. Another company to check out is Screencast.com.

A good example for use as a sales tool for online or complex screen instruction is done by Dropbox, who is a file management company that put files or folders on-line or share.  They do a good screen cast example to give you an idea of how the technology is used as a consumer facing solution.  Anytime I need to revisit how to do something on various interfaces, I have a screencast to refer back to in video as well as in words.

Critical Thinking Techniques for Marketers key for 2010

Critical Thinking Techniques for Problem Solving and Decision Making  

Guest blogger: Mike Kallet is an expert at teaching Critical Thinking in the US and abroad. (by disclosure he is also my brother-in-law) His point is that most people in companies, government and education have been trained to think, but are not trained to lead others to think or use Critical thinking, 

 ”Thinking” is the foundation for Problem Solving, Decision Making, Creativity, and Innovation.   “Critical Thinking” is a way of thinking and looking at situations in what we call “manual” mode, as opposed to our everyday “automatic” mode. Often asked is what is critical thinking , why it is important, and what are the critical thinking techniques that you can immediately implement when solving problems, making decisions or tasked with creating something innovative.”  

Critical Thinking Skills can be applied to:
• General problem solving and decision making
• New product ideas and creation
• Improving Productivity
• Short and long term business strategies
• Competitive strategies
• Managing people and situations
• Improved development processes and quality
• Improved operational efficiency
• Crisis Management
• Revenue generation and cost reduction strategies
• Customer care improvement
• P&L Management

 

With the Benefits of
• Faster and higher quality decisions
• Creative solutions to problems and strategies
• Higher productivity and quality
• Being better prepared to tackle daily problems
• Avoiding mistakes and recognizing opportunities
• Leading others to “Think” 

 

For more information about critical thinking, HeadScratchers or one-day, on-site and open enrollment Critical Thinking Workshops, visit www.headscratchers.com

    

 

   

 

  Critical Thinking Techniques for Problem Solving, Decision Making and Creativity
mike.kallet@headscratchers.com
720-493-8567  

The FREE Tools list for social media on the web.

Guest blogger: Serena Carpenter agreed that I may share some  info from her social media classes that she teaches at Arizona State. She used this hand out for an American Marketing Association meeting that she was a panelist on.  I found her to be a breath of fresh air, really gets the space and is teaching students leading edge info, as it is happening.

She has so much great info that she uses with her students and is giving us access via her blog, which also has some other great info that you can read and learn from.

 FREE Tools by Serena Carpenter /Arizona State University, – used with her permission.

MONITOR YOUR REACH (Twitter Tools Featured Lower)

• YouTube “Insight” (Video)
• View detailed statistics about uploaded videos including views, popularity peaks, demographics
• SiteMeter (Traffic analyzer)
• Tracks location, key words used, referrals, site visit length average, average visits per day, etc. for your Web site.
• Google Analytics (Traffic Analyzer)
• Tracks how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, etc. for your Web site.
• Google Feedburner (Subscribers)
• Tracks the number of people who subscribe to your RSS feeds.  Submit your site also to Feed-Squirrel and OctoFinder Web sites.
• Google Alerts (Monitor Brand and Conversations)
• Provides email message when someone writes about you.
• Site Valuation and Other Stats Sites
• Website Outlook (http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.problogger.net)
• Enter your URL to determine how much your site is worth.  It includes other stats.  Other similar sites include QuarkBase, urlfan, StatBrain, CubeStat, WebTrafficAgents, and AboutTheDomain.
• Social Media Monitoring Sites
• SM2 http://sm2.techrigy.com/main/ offers tools to help businesses to find out what people are talking about.  You can measure your page’s popularity using Social Meter http://www.socialmeter.com/
• Analytics Toolbox from Mashable – 50 ways to monitor site traffic
• http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track-online-traffic/

SHARING

• YouTube (Video)
• Share your video postings on Facebook, Twitter or Google Reader.
• Vimeo Widget (Video)
• Embed a visual montage of your latest videos widget to your site.  You can cross-post video to YouTube and Vimeo.
• Slideshare (Presentations)
• Add the Blog Sidebar Widget to highlight your latest presentations.
• FriendFeed (Share numerous social media sites) use Socialthing or OpenID
• Share all of your social media activity with your Facebook friends or embed a widget for your site.
• Delicious (bookmarking site)
• Share your linkroll or a badge on other sites by embedding code.
• MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki)
• Create a wiki for your FAQ or Customer Service knowledge base.  Let your consumers enter the problems they’ve had via a public forum (the wiki), and provide your responses publicly as well.

GET YOUR SITE INDEXED ON SEARCH ENGINES

• Add blog to community portals and search engines
• Try adding your site to BlogCatalog, Blogged, Technorati, BlogPulse, Google Blogs, or NetworkedBlogs(Facebook).
• Update different search engines that your blog has updated
• Sign up for http://pingomatic.com/ and http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.
• Squidoo
• Community website that allows people to create pages (called “lenses”) on various topics.  Creating a topic related to your blog and include your feed in that page would help your blog get indexed.

 TWITTER TOOLS

1. TweetStats.  Provides the average per day (http://tweetstats.com)
2. WeFollow.  Add yourself to the Twitter search http://wefollow.com/
3. Favstar.  http://favstar.fm/.  Favstar shows you who favorites your tweets.
4. Twinfluence ranking.  Expect it to be low.  http://twinfluence.com/
   1. If you have a grade of 75%, it means that you have a higher reach than 75% of the other twitterers analyzed.
   2. If your rank is #400, that means there are 399 other twitterers in the system who have higher reach scores.
5. TwitterGrader http://twitter.grader.com/

Both sites grade you on the number of followers you have and your influence on these followers.  Grader also measures the pace of your updates, while Influence measures the informational value of your followers.

6.      Twitalyzer http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/index.asp.  Measures your impact and success in social media

7.      Retweet http://www.retweetist.com/ lets you know what posts have been RTed.

8.      Twazzup http://www.twazzup.com/ and inView

http://myinview.com/login.php tracks mentions of you on Twitter

9.      Link shorteners capture traffic to twitter feed.  For example, use trim and bit.ly to shorten urls, then later add a + to see how many people clicked!  Example: http://bit.ly/JTkk+

10.  Search Twitter  http://search.twitter.com/

270 Tools for Running Business Online  http://mashable.com/2008/09/21/270-online-business-tools/

FixYa Social Tech Support  http://www.fixya.com

Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Fix Them  http://mashable.com/2009/09/21/business-blogging-mistakes/

Design Matters: To drive results, consider the effectiveness of design.

Guest blogger: Eileen Burick from Burick Communications Design.

On occasion, I invite guest bloggers to share a subject they have expertise in.  Eileen Burick and her husband Bob are the dynamic duo for high-end visual communications, print and web, and I value  their insight and expertise.  We spoke about the shift away from good original design focus to templates and what it means.  Here is her blog on the subject to help the CMO’s and Marketing Directors across the country bring focus in this area with their agencies and teams.

Design Matters

While there is understandably much focus on Search Engine Optimization, when a web viewer is delivered from a link they’ve found on organic, paid or linked search to their desired destination — even if the content is high quality — and the resulting web site’s visual presentation is average, cluttered or unprofessionally executed and the viewer has to work too hard to find the information they are searching for, the page view has a high likely hood of being quickly abandoned.

Research confirms that users make aesthetic decisions about the overall visual impression of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second).* If the look and feel of a site doesn’t deliver on the brand promise, conversions are lost. SEO functions like the yellow pages which may get a viewer to the landing page but if expectations are unmet because of poor visual impact, the SEO effort loses its effectiveness.
If image is important then SEO alone is not enough to propel sales. Employing a basket of visually distinctive technologies and tactics with multiple touch-points and telling a relevant “story” as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, will over the long-term prove most effective.
There is so much competition among Web sites that in order to truly “stand out from the crowd” it is critical that all three components — search optimization, quality content and effective, aesthetically pleasing visual impact — be addressed and developed with maximum care.

User Interface (UI) Designer, Hitesh Puri writes that “Attractive things work better.” The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a “skin” that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view. Those user judgments begin within 50 milliseconds of seeing the first page of your site.

Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs. Douglas Bowman’s recent experience as a graphic designer among Google’s engineers who want “data” behind every aesthetic decision is instructive: data and user feedback are always important components of good design, but they are never its sole ingredients.”

The Stanford Web Credibility Project (http://credibility.stanford.edu/) found that “…nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.

Participants seemed to make their credibility-based decisions about the people or organization behind the site based upon the site’s overall visual appeal.”

As search commoditizes its results the way to differentiate a company or a brand is through design. When there are so many template, “me-too” sites competing for attention, defining a unique ambiance and “voice” is critical to conversion.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson describes it this way: “Ambience is defined as “a feeling or mood associated with a particular place, person, or thing. Atmosphere. Web developers call it ‘look-and-feel.’ Though it’s hard to define, you know it when you see it. In a website, ambience is produced by a pleasing combination of logo, style, layout, typography, white space, color, types of photos used, and the “voice” of the copy. All these and more define the business’s “brand.”

You can learn a great deal about a business in the first five seconds that you’re on its site. Is it older and conservative, or young and edgy? Is it “all business” or is there fun peeking around the corner? Is it rather pompous and self-possessed, or does it seem care about the customer? At first glance, does it look like it can meet your need, or not? Is it bland and faceless, or does it have personality?

I hope that you now understand the difference between a standard template business site and a custom approach that communicates your business personality in a memorable way. While you can communicate your unique voice in a bland site, you won’t be visually memorable.”

So, to be memorable and to drive results, consider the relevance and effectiveness of design.
Tiny URL:  http://tinyurl.com/ybxaxw6

*  http://hiteshpuri.blogspot.com/2009/11/visual-decision-making.html?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir=open&toggle=MONTHLY-1254335400000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1257013800000

Eileen Burick, President, Burick Communication Design
eileen@burick.com  602-866-3305 
Please visit  http://www.burick.com/briefcase_henkel/
HIGH-END MARKETING COLLATERAL MATERIALS  |  VISUALLY DISTINCTIVE DESIGN FOR THE WEB

Meta Tag basics

Meta tags is one of the basic areas that CMOs overlook or do not know about.  You can look  at the Meta Tags of your website from the back-end of the code, this can also be done to look at your competitor websites meta tags for this important information. You should also do this for all pages, not just your home page.

Here is where to look to see your meta tags:

1: Open the website page you want to see the meta tags for.

2: Go to the outlook tool bar and click on View,

2: Then click on Source.  This will bring up the back-end HTML code for that page of the website.

3: Now look towards to the top of the code for the words:  Title: read what it says, since this is what Google is seeing. Be sure to use all of this valuable marketing area.

4: Next look for Meta name Description, Read those words,does it match the message you want for your company to be found under.

5: Read the Meta Keywords.  This will give you what keyword terms the search engines would be searching under. 

Over the past few years, Google is relying less and less on Meta tags due to keyword stuffing, but it still should be in place for each page.  Many times I find this basic meta missing for websites, or only done for the home page.  Designers can design a nice flash website, but may not understanding that Google cannot search older versions of art done in flash, if it is not Flash 4, and they also did not know enough to at least put in the basic meta tags per page.

Here is the rule of thumb as to what to do for Meta tags.:

Title tags: No more that 65 to 70 characters ( letters) Place your main keyword first.
Description tags: Up to 160 characters or 24 words max.
Key word tags: Choose your top 25 to more than 50 per page per particular page.

Remember you cannot use the same term ie photography,over and over again with a different key term, like product photography, still life photography.  So you will have to get creative of how to say the same thing in different ways.

Salesforce.com contact management package system for small business.

Customer contacts and lead generation go hand in hand.  I have used all of the systems over the years.  Salesforce, Outlook, Act, MyMail List, Excel, custom builds, and each has its advantages and disadvantages.

The basic must do is Outlook, Linked in,  or my new find, Google Gmail contacts and calendar that syncs with my Blackberry.  If you need more than that or want to centralize contacts then something more robust is in order.

Salesforce.com  has been known around bigger company circles, but a friends blog professing love for Salesforce for under $100 per year for her small business, caught my eye.  If you are a small business or have independent sales reps, this may be a great option, without the heavy expense to check out.

Here is her feedback: “I love my new salesforce.com contact management system! They announced mid-Oct that they offer a few new versions for small biz. Mine is the base level, $99/year. web-based, easy to use, flexible. bye-bye horrible (Name withheld), hello being organized! I say, if you have multiple lists/contacts, use this,  better than outlook, ACT and excel for sure…”

So let us know what you are using and the pros and the cons to help others choose a contact management system that will work without a lot of expense.

BrowserLab is a cross-browser compatibility testing tool, featuring multiple viewing and comparison.

A browser is needed and used to view a web page.  Everyone  is a PC or Mac. Then it is a choice of browser to view the internet via (IE)  Interner Explorer, Safari, Windows, Chrome, Firefox, and many others and then there are many versions of each browsers depending on when the viewer last upgraded their browser.

So why is it important to always check and see how your website looks in various browsers?  It is a “must do”  every time you make a major change to your website.  It is critical since your web site may look great in IE and have bugs or fail in Firefox.  Or for viewers who are  in older versions (meaning they have not updated to the latest version) of browsers, your new graphics may look different, have bugs or  fail. 

It is also all about readability, finding out if your web page size fits the browser.  It will also allow you to check font metrics and size across browsers with an overlay that will show you exactly the areas that are the same and what will change.  If you are looking to control brand consistency across the web, then this is an area to drill down on.

BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems.  Here is a link to their free tool for a limited free preview of Adobe® BrowserLab.   Your web designers should know  this and other companies provide this service.