This place rocks!
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Lunch with David at Jimmyz Hibachi
A Taste of the Future (No Crystal Ball Needed) – Online Consulting Tips
I’ve been heavily involved in social media marketing for several years, and involved in internet marketing for our company since 1997. I began my own online consulting business in 2009. As such, I’ve seen a lot of changes take place over time.
Here are a few potential surprises, depending on how long you’ve been active online:
When I first started optimizing our website for the search engines, Yahoo was absolutely dominant, with something on the order of 65% market share. If you weren’t being found on Yahoo, you weren’t getting a whole lot of traffic. Was Google in second place? Nope – it didn’t even exist. Other search engines that were important back then included Excite, Lycos, and Altavista. Have you heard much about those lately? Wow! Me, neither.
When I began blogging for business in 2007, MySpace was the dominant social network platform. Facebook existed, but it was sort of a non-factor for marketing. Twitter also existed, but it hadn’t gained much traction. Now, MySpace seems like a giant abandoned playground.
Statistically, people are spending less and less time watching television, or reading traditional (meaning not online) newspapers. Those who do watch TV shows watch a good-sized percentage on sites like Hulu.com and Fancast.
I haven’t looked anything up in an actual Yellow Pages in many years, and I would wager that you haven’t either.
Despite Facebook’s recent privacy concerns, they have edged out Google as the most-visited site online for the past couple of months. Let that really sink in for a second.
Can you guess what the second-place search tool online for raw traffic is today after Google? It’s YouTube.
So, what does all of this mean for the future of your own marketing efforts?
- First, don’t focus on the tools and platforms themselves. Instead, focus on having a strategy for engaging people on your own turf and terms somehow. (i.e. Don’t depend on Facebook to always be there for you. It may be a distant memory in 10 years.)
- If your business doesn’t have a social media strategy, the time is absolutely NOW (or more accurately, yesterday) to figure this out.
In the next several years, if your business doesn’t have a social component that allows your customers/clients to share their experiences about you along with some type of strategy on your part to “listen” to their needs/concerns/praise, two things will happen:
1. They will be talking about you anyway.
2. You won’t hear them.
The bottom line here is that I wouldn’t waste any time or effort on “snail mail”, TV, radio, or print advertising UNLESS you are planning to tie it into your website/blog/online presence somehow. After all, as marketing becomes one big conversation, you don’t want your business to be the shy wallflower in the corner.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/4305344218/in/set-72157623226308089/
2 Billion Videos Viewed Daily, Are You Optimizing Video In Your Online Marketing?
Yesterday I read an article on Mashable that YouTube recently passed 2 Billion views a day on their network. YouTube, a company that recently celebrated their 5th birthday has become quite the major component to any businesses online marketing strategy. Whenever I am doing online consulting with a client regarding their social media marketing strategy, I always try to encourage them to integrate video as a main component of the online marketing strategy.
Next to behemoth search enging Google, YouTube (which is actually owned by Google) is the second most used search engine in the world. Companies can gain instant notoriety by establishing a solid video online. Examples: Remember the Social Media Revolution? This video regarding some statistics on the power of social media gave a businesses YouTube channel an instant jolt of traffic. Or maybe you remember the infamous song of how United Breaks Guitars? The band Sons of Maxwell became overnight successes because of their catchy tune about how United Airlines broke a guitar and refused to pay for it. They created a quick video poking humor at the event & within no time the video had been viewed over 8 million times. Their success was so great they even created another video United Breaks Guitars Breaks My Career that basically says thanks for destroying our gear, you made us famous!
So how does someone optimize their efforts on YouTube & other video sites? Well, there are a few things that if done consistently will help you to get the best results.
1. Tagging & Title of Video. Just like when you write a blog, the title of the video is one of the most important parts. I had a client who had a video that was really good on something that people would want to see, but the title was done all wrong. In fact, it had just the basic random title that the video camera named it when they downloaded the video. When the client uploaded it to YouTube, they never took time to change it and could not understand why their video was not getting much traffic. So, we renamed the video to a term people would search for & the video started to take off almost instantly. Now, that video has over 1,100 views! The tags are also important on a video because they help to categorize your video properly to be searched. I find myself going to YouTube now for answers on a question rather than search engines.
2. Distribution of Video. The second thing most people is load their video to YouTube but nothing else. Nowadays we all have Facebook, Twitter, websites, blogs, Posterous accounts & more. YouTube has now made it really easy to distributet your videos out to other networks. When I take my reach of all these networks & add them together, it is well over 8,000 people. Why not share those videos with that audience? The more exposure you can give to a video, the more likely it is to be viewed by masses. Not to mention, those who watch the video & like it will then also share it on with others. Each person has a wide net of connections and you can see quickly how your video can then spread like wildfire!
3. Keeping it to the point. Have you ever clicked on a video to watch & as it starts you see it is 8:39 and you just do not want to sit there that long? Videos that drag on longer than 3-4 minutes normally have a lot higher viewing level than those that are 8-10 minutes.
In addition to these three tips on how to optimize the use of YouTube & other video services, here is a post I wrote a while back on how to create effective videos. This post shares with you 5 really basic tips on how to make videos that people will actually sit & watch without having to spend thousands of dollars to have the videos produced. It covers things like music, how to pan shots properly, and much more. It is a great beginners guide to starting on video.
In closing, if you are not yet using video in your marketing strategies, it is definitely time to start exploring this. One final piece of advice: You do not need to be a professional videographer to create good video. Most videos that go viral are ones shot with basic digital cameras, flip cams, and most of the times are not even edited. So do not allow things like that hold you back from getting started. Raw video can be just as beneficial for your business as one that is shot by the pros. If you want some assistance in getting started with this, feel free to contact me and I can help you. The biggest key however, is to just get started!
How to Eavesdrop on Your Customers – A Few Tools
It seems that just about every restaurant these days has a “receipt survey” in place. You know the kind I’m talking about, right? When I’m trying to pay for my meal, I get a long receipt with a code highlighted near the bottom.
It’s always a little awkward when the server says, “Visit our site and use this code and you will be 
entered into a drawing to win something useless to you.”
Okay. I know they don’t really say that, but that’s what I hear.
What are the exceptions for me, if any? What would cause me to actually visit the site and use the super-long encrypted code?
That’s easy. There are exactly two occasions when I would bother to follow through:
1. The service was phenomenally good.
2. The service was horrendous.
Everything else falls into the lukewarm spectrum in between. Is this really candid or valuable in any way?
With that in mind, how can restaurants (and other businesses, for that matter) get a handle on how they’re actually doing? Unlike the title of this post, I wouldn’t advocate actual, in-person eavesdropping.
I have two ideas to help.
The first one involves a bit more work – ask them a couple of the intended survey questions personally before they leave. Offer to reward the customer immediately by giving them a free dessert or knocking a small amount off of their bill.
The second idea is a little more elaborate, but it can be done free of charge. You can easily use some simple online tools to get a feel for what people are saying about you. Believe me, if you do much business at all, someone is having a conversation about you and your company.
Here are a couple to get you started:
Set up Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts) for your company name or the names of your competitors. If people are writing blog posts that mention how terrible your coffee tastes, you might want to know this. Conversely, if someone is raving about you to their online sphere of influence, offer them something cool, like a t-shirt or a free dessert.
Use Facebook’s “deep search” function. Many people don’t even know this exists. Use the “SEARCH” box on Facebook and put in your company name (or your personal name). A dropdown menu may appear there automatically. If so, make sure you click on the “See More Results for ______ Here”, which will be the bottom result on that list. The results could surprise you.
Utilize http://search.twitter.com – the “advanced search” gives you a lot of options. Again, you could be surprised by what you see, both good and bad.
Of course, there are plenty of others, some of which are professional (read: paid) in nature.
If you are a business owner and you need help understanding how to leverage social media tools to help you improve your company’s image and make more sales, let us know how we can help. We love this stuff!
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilt/2517652/
Summer Has Arrived in Myrtle Beach
Grilling weather is my first sign. Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
Blackbird Pie Enables the Embedding of Tweets
Yesterday afternoon Twitter released a very cool feature they are calling Blackbird Pie. This new function allows you to insert a link from an old status update & it will create the code to embed this tweet directly into a other places. So maybe you are referencing a tweet by someone in a blog post, or in a press release. The old form of sharing this information, was to do a screen capture & then upload the image into your blog. The problem though with this was that the names were not clickable to visit the links in screenshot. Nor could the person simply click on the followers username to see more of the conversation. That was until yesterday afternoon.
Now, users can embed tweets directly into other sites with live clickable links, usernames and even hashtags # for a topic. First below, you can see an example of an embedded tweet I recently sent out to some of the co-hosts of the online radio show, Social Media Edge:
Hey @thekencook @jasoncrouch @mikemueller have you guys ever had any #blackbirdpie? http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
Jeremy Blanton
jb140
This quoted tweet now adds value to a post much more than just the screen capture of it. A person can now click on each twitter users name to visit their page, they can click on the link in the tweet to see what I was referring to, and they can also follow the stream of conversation regarding the topic #blackbird instantly. Now that I have shown you what it is, let me show you just how easy it is to create an embedded tweet:
And if that wasn’t easy enough, here is an even simpler way to embed tweets. To set this up, simply go grab this Blackbird Pie bookmarklet & drag it to your toolbar on your browser. By doing this, you can get the code for any tweet in three easy steps. Here is a quick demo of how it works:
Is Blackbird Pie a gamechanger for Twitter and the way we use the network? Probably not, but it is a pretty cool new toy to enhance our experience there.