Posts Tagged ‘website’
As the Social Media Guy: I want my website to go viral. How do I do that?
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008A:
Viral is a term that’s easily misused: it can’t be planned, and it can’t be predicted. it can only be hoped for. Besides, a site won’t go “viral,” only content can do that. Be careful not to confuse compelling content for a sticky website.
Oh, and your website will not be getting you the traffic you covet. Your content will. So let’s concentrate on that. What you want is a lot of traffic, and fast. For that, you need to do something unique, memorable, and sharable. Easy, right? Of course it is!
Here are ten surefire ways to attract a lot of online attention:
1.
Conceive a baby with someone famous, and talk about it to anyone who’ll listen. If you can do this, odds are you need a publicist, not just a social media plan, and she’ll handle your online brand for you. (Federline)
2.
Position very young puppies and kittens in front of your webcam (replace them frequently, you don’t want any fuzzy animals older than 8 weeks). (Shiba Inus)
3.
Do something hilarious involving a video game and/or a paintball gun.(Penny Arcade)
4.
Write lyrics referencing a current event that fit perfectly with the melody of a 1980s top ten hit, then sing your song badly and post the video. (Chocolate Rain, et al)
5.
Leak company documents referring to impending layoffs, and use really cruel language to describe the PR you’re going to unleash on the day of the mass-exodus. (Carat)
6.
Teach an infant to swear. Post the video. (Anonymous parents and/or Wil Ferrell)
7.
Give people something they really need, but didn’t even know was possible. Go back to school if necessary. (Nate Silver)
8.
Be the most interesting guy in your industry—it helps to be good looking, but not so good looking that you’re intimidating. (there are as many examples as there are industries)
9.
Perform an extraordinary and anonymous act of heroism or charity, then decline interviews until three days after the event. (Secret Santas, subway heroes)
10.
Take a picture of something freaky, like this possibly demonic child. Never leave your house without your camera.
(see flickr)
Have a Q for us? Shoot it over to askus@springcreekgroup.com
Ask the Social Media Guy: Explain Twitter
Friday, November 28th, 2008Q:
What the heck am I supposed to do on Twitter?
A:
Answer the question, “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. That would be the obvious reply, but I can tell you’re looking for a little more than that.
Start out by posting a few things: links to things you find interesting or relevant (use tinyurl.com). Make sure your profile is complete, and definitely include a link in your bio so others can get an idea of who you are. Once you’ve set up the basics, start following people you find interesting, or who’d you’d like to keep in touch with.
Then talk to them. They might help you find your next spouse, job, favorite pizza place, or BFF. You can even scoop the traditional media on breaking news stories—use twitter search and look up #mumbai to see Twitter own CNN.
Basically, it’s about talking to people. In the social media world, that’s sort of the point.
There are as many takes on twittering as there are people using the service. Here are a few things that actual twits (not an insult) have to add about using twitter:
“I use it to keep in touch with some of my favorite people and some industry and other folks who have interesting things to say.”
“To tell jokes that would otherwise go untold. To connect with my peers. To connect with my fans.”
“I see a lot of people self promote with websites and links to their blogs.”
“I’m using it to take over the world. That’s not going so well.”
“I use it to connect with customers. To thank the happy people and try to help the angry ones.”
Before you hop on the bandwagon, just remember that social media applications are like college classes in three ways:
1: You only get out of them what you put into them.
2: You can skip a few and still make the grade.
3: If you skip all of them, you fail.
Have a Q for us? Shoot it over to askus@springcreekgroup.com
Beware SEO Consulting Snakeoil… You Can Probably Get All the Info You Need On Your Own
Thursday, January 31st, 2008We try to be as transparent as possible at Spring Creek Group about what we’re good at, what we’re great at, and what we believe is better off handled either internally by our clients’ own marketing and development teams OR handled externally by other, more qualified and deeply experienced expert agencies or consultancies. One of the areas about which we are asked most often – and it appears the marketplace is most perilous for decision-making – is SEO. And to be clear, the end game isn’t SEO for its own purposes, but good and improving natural search engine results for a client’s website against the potential available list of search terms and phrases most relevant and aligned with their business / value proposition. When we can, we offer a set of “core principles” regarding website architecture, page code and construction, and linking and content propagation strategies (including SEO / SMO PR and Communications publishing and editorial principles). And I believe we charge fairly — which is to say “not excessively” – for providing this information to our clients, when they request it and it’s pertinent to their marketing goals. However, we are VERY CAREFUL not to over-sell, over-promise, or over-promote our agency’s capabilities in the realm of SEO simply because we believe two things:
1) Most SEO “best practices” can be researched, learned, understood, internalized, and taken action upon BEST by the program managers and development managers + teams who are chiefly responsible for the UI / UX and actual website code development for a given domain;
and,
2) Genuinely best practice SEO guidance and principles are available from a pretty short list of deeply knowledgeable, right-on-top-of-the-topic-as-it-develops-given-the-ever-changing-nature-of-the-search-engines-algorithms SEO firms and websites out there. To site a few of the best ones we’re aware of, there’s SEOMoz, SEOBook, ethical-yet-clever reputation management and search engine result improvement services such as Visible Technologies’ TruView service, and some of the resources available via links from the Wikipedia page on SEO (including SEMPO).
And let’s not even get into the whole realm of “paid links” practices and firms… which we regularly and firmly denounce, because linking should be a result of company advocates and compelling content doing their thing whenever there is content or information on your site that deserves a mention and link elsewhere on the Web. We DO help clients provide tools to increase the likelihood and velocity of “voluntary linking and sharing” of our clients’ sites, via integration of content syndication tools like RSS feeds and integration of Bookmarking, Sharing, and Permalink/Email “one-click” tools such as the very simple and comprehensive ones that AddThis supplies… for free!
Well, the following post came across our RSS Reader today and we thought it merited linking to — and extending commentary upon — because the whole topic of SEO is genuinely a growing problem for marketers and their good-hearted efforts to improve their customer acquisition funnel and brand awareness.
We did some research a few months back, and the marketplace research and analysis reports seem to suggest that SEO consulting services represents between $1billion and $1.5billion annually in Web marketing services revenues. And it’s growing as rapidly or more rapidly than Web media/advertising fees (usually structured as 15% – 20% of total media buying budget spend, when serviced externally by an agency partner).
The short story – from our perspective, as well as the author of this post‘s – is that sound SEO practices DO NOT come down to spending exorbitant fees on SEO consultants and “black hat” SEO firms. Instead, they come from doing two things well:
1) Learning and staying knowledgeable internally with a website development and/or product management / product marketing stakeholder about the highest-priority core principles of search engine natural results performance effectiveness,
and,
2) Allocating the focus and resources regularly over a long period of time towards this marketing opportunity, alongside the focus and resources allocated to the other key customer acquisition and brand awareness channels on the Web such as SEM, display and rich media opportunities, Web-optimized PR practices, and social media marketing opportunities.
The author of this post – and countless others like it – is absolutely correct: $350-and-hour SEO consultants not only often aren’t worth it on an ROI-basis for your marketing spend, but often they don’t know any more about the leading edge thinking and theories regarding SEO best practices than what your talented internal team members could learn at little or no cost (beyond the “cost” of their resource time and attention dedicated to the topic, of course).
We believe we have some knowledge, information, and experience to offer our clients in this realm, just as we do from both a strategic and a tactical standpoint when it comes to performance-marketing advertising campaign management, social media marketing and management strategies and programs, and web analytics methodologies and technology solutions. We’re in the business of helping our clients grow their online brand awareness and penetration, and helping turn that into increased flow of potential and returning customers into their website conversion funnel. But we strive to do so using completely ethical and “value-fair” services which neither under NOR over-charge our clients for the actual value of this knowledge, experience, and services to those clients created by our partnership with them in pursuit of their marketing and business growth goals. We deserve to be held totally accountable to this standard. And so does the rest of the SEO industry.
There is real, non-zero value to this knowledge… and most importantly translating it into actionable, impactful strategies and tactics/development for B2C and B2B Web-enabled businesses of all kinds. And it’s true that this value increases as the desire, ability, and inclination to gather and act on this knowledge by any given company internally declines. But much like any other marketing investments — comprised of both actual dollars spent + value of resource time internally and externally spent on the channel — these SEO investments should be evaluated by the same metrics and standards applied to all other Web marketing activities: “What is my return on spend?” The math is pretty simple here, much like it is for total SEM, display, rich media, promotional, PR, social media, or other marketing spend:
Total Expected Profits from Channel / Total Expected Cost for Channel
If your SEO investments are too low today, look at your overall marketing budget + resources mix and determine if you can improve your profitable return by investing more here. But if you are over-spending, be sure it’s not because your cost of acquiring SEO knowledge isn’t wildly out of whack in relation to your current and expected future return in real revenue and profit growth from increasing your natural search results “ranking” and domain presence.
And one last point on this topic: The reality is that most businesses have, at best, any luck of hitting the first page of search results for maybe 10 or 20 search terms. Beyond that, if you want to be there, unless you are in the upper 1% of site content optimizers and link-generators, your most cost effective expenditure between SEO and SEM investments to get on to the first page of search results for a given search term or phrase is likely to be cagey, analytics-driven search engine advertising.
Happy SEO researching — and auditing of your SEO investments/expenditures on behalf of your business. Don’t under-spend, but certainly don’t over-spend here either. Snakeoil wasn’t medicine… it was just something that made you think you would get better. [And often the principle ingredient was alcohol, to divert your attention later from the fact that you had been duped into buying something you didn't need and that wouldn't work the way the salesmen said it would.]
