Righteous Marketing

I’ve been doing more work on developing a social media system, so this post is a follow-up that should provide a little more detail.

Time Leveraging

With so many social media tools, the key to my strategy is leveraging my time. I’m willing to invest the time to “get” social media and develop 1-on-1 relationships, but I don’t want to limit myself to just one platform. So here is how I roll:

• Sign up for StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us and install the toolbars in your browser
• Sign up for Digg
• Sign up for FriendFeed and connect your StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.icio.us accounts to your main feed. Then update your settings to publish your feed to your Twitter.
• I’m assuming you spend time reading/listening in your industry. When you find a good resource, go ahead and stumble it, bookmark it on Del.icio.us or Digg it. These are automatically posted to your Twitter feed, thus providing high quality content to your followers.

So I’ve been seeing a lot of posts around the blogosphere detailing how people manage the time suck presented by the number of social media tools. The post that got my wheels turning was by John Jantsch over on the Duct Tape Marketing blog. The time management principle of having a daily/monthly/weekly schedule is the most valuable point in the article. If you only do one thing, do that. However, that part that intrigued me was his leveraging of tools.

Leverage

I’m currently trying to reverse engineer the details, but there were a few items that I’ve figured out:

• Install the TwitterTools plugin for your WP blog and set to automatically Tweet your new posts.
• If you don’t have them already, get a Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Facebook account with (if possible) the same user name.
• Tie your Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Facebook accounts to your FriendFeed account so FriendFeed updates automatically

I’m still working on this list and will update as I learn more, but the takeaway is that social media can balloon to consume all your time if you don’t control it. Once you have control of social media you next want to leverage your efforts so that the limited time you are spending is multiplied. Getting more done in the same amount of time – beautiful.

This post is NOT another blog post to convince you to use Twitter or how to get started if you’re a noob. You might say this post is about advanced Twitter tactics, but I would say it is just plain old common sense.

It’s Who You Know

Hopefully I’m preaching to the choir, but Twitter is a fantastic tool. It allows you to hear what people are saying about you as if you were right there listening over their shoulder and to respond in a measured way. So ask yourself, what could you do if given the opportunity to hear what people are saying about you? Twitter can help you do that.

Now Get Social

Here we step it up to the next level. Monitoring the discussion and participating in the discussion are great, but this is a somewhat passive form of communication. What more could you do? My recommendation is to actively engage people. Arrange a Tweetup in your area where people can get together and meet the person behind the Twitter handle. Actually shake some hands and have some small talk. They don’t live in your area you say? Email or snail mail them a coupon or promotional item to increase their interaction with your brand.

In a nutshell what you’re trying to do is strengthen the connections you’ve made via Twitter by engaging on a different level and through a different medium. I love my Twitter buddies, but meeting them in person is infinitely more valuable in my eyes because I get a sense of their mannerisms, peculiarities, like, dislikes, personality, etc. So come on, get social!

For those of you familiar with Twitter Grader and Website Grader, Hubspot has launched the Facebook Grader to give you one more measure of your social authority/vanity. The tool is fairly simple, taking the number of friends you have, the power of your friends’ networks, the completeness of your profile and some other stuff to give you a score out of 100 (I’m a 59). The interesting thing to me though was Michael Arrington’s review on TechCrunch and Mike Volpe’s rebuttal on his blog.

The First Shot

I originally came across Facebook Grader when I checked TechCrunch this morning and saw Michael Arrington’s review. The title indicated the overall tone the review would have (“Facebook Grader For The Sad, Sad People Out There”) and he definitely didn’t disappoint as he summed up the whole shebang by saying “it’s beyond useless.” As you can imagine, Hubspot just might have taken exception.

The Rebuttal

When you’re the VP of Marketing and get a bad review on a major tech blog with, oh, about 1.7 million RSS subscribers, I guess you are required to speak up. And so Mike Volpe got the job. Mike posted his rebuttal on his personal blog and pointed out that the tool is really intended to measure the “authority” and “power” of a user. He makes an excellent point that certain users’ opinions carry more weight, though I don’t know if this tool’s algo captures it correctly.

Let the Rumble Begin

So who are you going to believe? Do you value the opinion of Michael Arrington more than Mike Volpe (TechCrunch is obviously bigger than Hubspot)? If you got a low grade (like my failing effort) would it impel you to improve your profile? Judge for yourself, but as for Michael vs. Mike, let’s get it on!

The SEO industry often gets a bad rap. Everyone knows at least one person with a horror story about an SEO firm that charged exorbitant rates and did little to no work. The paradox is that everyone wants SEO for their site (who doesn’t want gobs of free traffic) but few seem to know how to achieve it. So how does an SEO agency succeed in a marketplace full of pessimism and bad apples? Relationship selling!


Know Your Clients


When approaching a company to sell them SEO services, the key element is to put yourself in their shoes. Understand that they have a budget and are responsible for showing how each dollar of that budget is helping ROI. Also realize that you must overcome their preconceived notion that SEO agencies are dark wizards who practice black hat magic. You face an uphill battle.


With this understanding, start you dialogue by setting realistic expectations. Help them understand that SEO is a long term investment, not a quick fix to their traffic problems. Let them know that they really won’t see a lot of results until they have a first page ranking. Beware of spreading efforts over too many keywords lest none of them ever really gains any traction. Be honest with what you can, and most importantly, what you can NOT do for them.


Trust


The overall objective of your sales pitch (and I use the term despite a potentially negative connotation) is to build trust. Being honest increases their trust. Education increases their trust. Referrals from current clients builds trust. Showing up on time and keeping the meeting as short as possible builds trust. SEO is a harsh mistress, so you’re going to need all the trust you can get for when times get tough down the road. Now go and do!

The number 13 has always been my lucky number, so I should have expected good things to happen today. Those good things came in the form of some exceptional meetings with potential clients, and that got me thinking about relationship selling. Therefore, you can expect a post on relationship selling on Thursday and I expect you all to hold me to that. Drop a comment if you have some questions or suggestions that you’d like to see in the post.

The world of search is dominated by Google, everyone can agree on that fact. Looking at market share we also see that Yahoo is the clear #2 in the market right now. Bringing up the rear (yes, I’m basically limiting the field to three) we have Microsoft Live Search and up to this point I have consigned MSN to perpetual failure. 

Money, Money, Money!

Microsoft’s previous efforts to gain market share have revolved around, essentially, bribery. The first effort was the creation of Microsoft Live Search Club. The objective of this program was to inflate MSN’s search numbers by creating a bunch of word games that ran a search for every correct answer. The incentive to actually play the games? Prizes! I myself acquired a Zune for 20,000 points. A great idea, but inevitably unable to move the needle.

Attempt #2 was Microsoft Live Search Cashback. This program took bribery to the next level by paying cash to get people to search with MSN. To get the money all you had to do was search for a product on MSN and then buy it through a qualified seller. Lots of companies got on board because Microsoft was footing the bill and pay they did. However, the temporary boost in market share soon faded, seemingly confirming my belief that Microsoft just didn’t have what it takes to compete.

Microsoft Ready to Play With the Big Boys Now!

My change of opinion came at CES 2009. In his keynote address Steve Ballmer came out with the usual stuff about the next Windows (7 or something?) OS and some other software stuff, but then he dropped what I consider the bomb-shell: Microsoft had locked up an exclusive search deal with Verizon, soon to be the largest cell phone carrier in the US. You read correctly, Verizon. The same Verizon that was talking to Google last year. 

This means that Live Search will be the default search option for all internet-enable Verizon phones and Microsoft will be handling mobile ads on Verizon phones. Normally I wouldn’t give a default option so much credit because tech-savvy users just change it. However, internet-capable phones are proliferating at an astounding rate and the tech noobs are starting to buy smart phones when they upgrade. These people will be much less prone to changing the default and will likely just roll with their phone as is. Yes it will cost Microsoft around $600 million in shared ad revenue (that’s just the guaranteed part), but this might be the game changing move in search.

PS Lest I forget, Microsoft also made a deal with Dell to get their toolbar preinstalled on Dell machines. Also a nice move.

I will preface this article with full disclosure: I am what many would consider a “Mac hater”. I do not own a single Apple product (no small feat I assure you) and am outspoken in my opposition of Apple. The main area of my displeasure has always been the iPod/iTunes monopoly, so yesterdays Phil-note at MacWorld was of considerable interest to me for a couple reasons.

No DRM?

When this note came across my live stream I double checked the carbon monoxide detector to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating (ok, that’s a little exagerration since my office doesn’t have a CO detector). Then it sank in that Apple was indeed fatally wounding the much maligned DRM. No longer will users have to complain about not being able to transfer their songs from one device to another. Hallelujah, I thought.

Ahhh, the Catch

I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought until a very good post by Erick over at TechCrunch that gave a little perspective. He brought up the point that all the current songs you iTunes using suckers have now can be “upgraded” to non-DRM, but only if you pay $0.30/track. That may seem like a small price to pay for DRM-free songs, but this means $1.8 BILLION dollars will be collected to remove DRM from current iTunes songs. And you can guarantee that the music industry will be getting a few hundred million of those dollars for their “gracious allowance”.

Also, don’t forget that we now know who really runs the digital music business and it isn’t the labels. Apple has now demonstrated their full power by forcing the major labels to bow before their superior music selling machine, iTunes. No doubt this is a watershed moment in the industry since now everyone knows that Apple is more powerful than all the labels combined due to their 75 million credit cards on file and 6 billion downloads to date.

Happy New Year! 2009 is officially here and with each new year comes resolutions. I have many personal resolutions regarding fitness, relationships, finance, etc., but I also have a couple of resolutions for this blog specifically. In order to keep me on track with accomplishing my resolutions I will post them here and rely on you, my readers, to hold me accountable.

• Post regularly. The schedule I am setting is twice weekly, on Tuesday and Thursday.
• Comment on current news and events and,
• Write useful posts to help others avoid the mistakes or learn lessons I have learned the hard way.