10 of the Most Important Web 2.0 Activities for Promoting Your Online Presence

It astounds me time and time again! Companies of all shapes and sizes spend thousands of pounds building the most beautiful website but doing nothing to promote it so it kind of sits around looking pretty but doing nothing, like a girl being stood up on prom night.
With the web 2.0/social media revolution on the internet in full swing, it is now more important than ever to concentrate on your promotional as well as building a beautiful website. I remember the good old days of ‘web 1.0’ when all I had to do to promote a client website was create a email list and make sure they perform pretty well on search engines. These days, there are thousands of web 2.0 type services out there that help promote your website and in turn do recommendations to your audience. This means that your audience is more fragmented than ever (creating ultra-niches) meaning that more than ever you need to promote your web presence to reach your audience. Chance are your competitors are doing this already.

If you’re still not convinced, have a look at the promotional diagram of this blog (click on it to see a bigger version) to see how much effort is put into promotion as compared to the site development:

Where to start promoting
If you’re not entirely sure what you are doing in the social media space, then it’s time to call in the experts as it can be a mine field of disasters if not done properly. That being said, here are 10 things you should be thinking about or researching:

• Search engine optimisation: Get up the rankings on Google!
• Social Media Press Release (which can help with search engine optimisation) if done correctly.
• Social network marketing: How’s your company’s presence on Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Your audience are there and can be reached with little cost.
• Social bookmarking bar: Make it really easy for your readers to recommend your presence to millions of likeminded readers.
• RSS Feeds: Once you have your content in RSS feeds, there are many things you can do with it, essentially using your valuable (in consumer’s eyes) content to promote your online presence.
• Widgets: A great way to go viral and you can use the content from your RSS feed to dynamically populate the widget.
• Email subscription option: If your website doesn’t have this, it’s time to pull out the ol’ drawing board.
• A Blog: Position your company as thought leaders by writing a regularly updated blog about the space you operate in.
• Active blogging: Keep an eye on blogs talking about your industry and comment on them when relevant.
• Sitemap: Get a XML sitemap on your site to make it easy for Google to index your site and push it up the rankings.

Anyone want my Job? Seriously!

 

Some of you may have heard that I am moving onto bigger and better things (the details of which I will reveal at a later stage) but in the mean time, the guys I am currently working for need to replace me.

Basically it is a central London based PR firm and I have been working as the new media manager here trying to get the department to greater heights.

So you would need to know social media and web 2.0 inside out and have good strategies on how to implement this technology to help clients out with their online marketing campaigns. You’ll also need to know the basics such email campaigns, SEO, PPC and website building.

I have also just got the directors to agree to employ another person below this position so that would be your first task as manager and you can find your own slav.. I mean associate, to work under you!

Would also be good if you had a bit of skill on the design/HTML/PDF etc side of things. And of course, you’ll also be UK based (or can get here in a few days) and be eligible to work in the UK.

So if you’re a social media jack of all trades, drop me a line on Twitter 

del.icio.us Tags: social media manager,social media job

Dropbox is the best application I have seen for ages

Dropbox is simply genius. Every other online file storage site out there including Windows Live’s dismal attempt, Skydrive,should fire their entire product and development teams and bow down at the mercy of Dropbox genius.

Simply download the app start your account and it’s just there, a folder on your computer just like any other, so you can store your files online seamlessly without having to go to a URL, login to anything or uploading files one-by-one (Skydrive, seriously is that the best you can do?). It’s so seamless that people wouldn’t even realise that they are storing stuff online if you installed the program for them (I’m thinking of my Mom here).

Staying on the theme of simplistic genius, you can link as many of your computers to your account as you like, so whatever is on Dropbox on your work PC is on Dropbox on your home PC.

Great features include:

• Ability to add friends to specific folders so that folder appears in their Dropbox seamlessly, but not the folder with all your naughty pics!
• Versioning for collaboration of documents although I haven’t tried this yet.
• 2 gigs of free storage!
• An online site with all your files in case you aren’t at any of your computers.
• a public link to a pretty funky gallery of your pics in case you want to share them with Mum, who’s only just learnt how to click a link on an email, but it works per folder so once again, hiding your naughties.

If you’ve got two computers, collaborate remotely, are a digital nomad,  or share files often, you have to try this program. The sheer simplistic genius is hard to appreciate until you have given it a go.

My New Blog

I've started a new blog that will focus more on communicating to current and potential clients about the need to engage in social media. It's not exactly perfected yet but I'm very happy with the look and current functionality.

I've written the first post, expaning on my Lunatic Fringe Model about how web 2.0 affects your business and what you can do about it.

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Marketing with Twitter Revisited

 

Since my last article about Twitter marketing, I have been keeping a close eye on my stats while I network both online and offline with the key focus of growing quality following/follower relationships on Twitter.

Because of all this targeted activity, Twitter is now my seconds biggest referrer, overtaking direct referrals. The first time any referrer has done that, ever, on any site that I have dealt with! Surprisingly, I have also noticed a slight drop in RSS feed subscriptions around the same times suggesting that maybe my readers are relying on Twitter as a news source more than ever. Very interesting stuff.

One unsurprising stat is that the UK has taken over South African and America as my biggest region of readers mainly because I now do my networking in the UK.

Can you answer this question?:

There’s still one thing perplexing me about Twitter referral stats on Google analytics: If someone clicks on a link to my blog from a Twitter client, will analytics count that as a referral from Twitter?

del.icio.us Tags: twitter marketing,google analytics

Marketing with Twitter works!

 

The debate still rages: Is Twitter a useful tool for marketing online? Well for me and my marketing blog the answer is yes!

Looking back on Google Analytics, since I start my blog until today, Twitter is my 5th best referrer after Google organic traffic, direct traffic, Stumble and Muti.

Over the past 6 months, as I’ve built up a quality list of followers and followings (is that the correct term?!), Twitter has been pushed up to third spot on my referrers list, surpassed only by Google organic traffic and direct traffic (when people just type in your URL and go straight without search or links etc) which you always expect to be your top 2 referrers anyway.

Now considering that Stumble Upon, Delicious, Digg and Technorati are all parts of my blog marketing efforts, this makes Twitter a major player as a web 2.0 promotion tool. I also know that I am getting quality hits from Twitter as the people that follow my stream are mainly people in the industry I want to be talking to.

It kind of makes it easy to see why we should be recommending that our clients get active on Twitter, whether they understand it at first or not.

del.icio.us Tags: Twitter marketing,Twitter,web 2.0 marketing

How to always get an image that suits your Blog post

 

I never thought I’d be saying this about a cartoon website, but I have found one of the coolest online apps around that happens to be a cartoon creation wizard.

Whoopty doo you might say, but think about this for a minute: Darren Rouse and co always insist that you add a representative image to your blog posts but searching Flickr for rights-free images can take ages and you still only find a random images that only marginally represents what you are talking about, check out this post of mine for example. So now you can create a cartoon/image that represents exactly what you are trying to say, avoiding your viewers scowling at their screens in confusion.

But what really blew my socks off, is the ease of use when creating a cartoon strip with Bitstrips. It is really quick, once you get the hang of it, easy to use and requires no ability to draw whatsoever, yet the detail is as deep as you need it to be and the variety of scenarios, poses, expressions, characters etc are endless. 

Definitely go check it out!

del.icio.us Tags: cartoons,blogging,imagery

Need some Blogger relief?

Berocca have an interesting campaign on at the moment aimed at bloggers. I found it so simple and intriguing that I've applied for my blogger relief pack and am now even blogging about it which is obviously what they want!

Check it out here: http://www.berocca.co.uk/bloggerrelief

15 reasons you should be using a proper e-mail campaign service

I had a fella ask me the other day why he should pay for iContact when he could just use some software and send from his own servers. I laughed and told him I could probably think of at least 15 solid reasons but I couldn't do so on the spot so I told him I would write a post about it. PS I do not have any affiliation with Icontact (or any other email services for that matter), I just think it's brilliant and use it all the time!

1. They have relationships with ISPs giving your emails the best chance of getting through firewalls etc and to their intended recipients.
   
2. They check your spam score before sending reducing the chances of all your efforts becoming a dud.
   
3. They tend to not let you bend any anti-spam laws (or at lease make you accountable of them) meaning that you can't spam, even by mistake.
   
4. If every bulk email software was like this, we would have very little spam in the world, kind of like what the smoking ban has done for pubs and restaurants - they are just a much better place to be now!
   
5. They usually offered unlimited email lists so you could have one account and manage multiple lists for multiple clients, or many lists for your company which is a good way of targeting the ultra-niches evident online these days.
   
6. They're cheap. Come on, a few dollars a month the get a 360 degree solution on emails which you can track directly back to sales is definitely worth it.
   
7. Look out for the service that charge per email address, not per email sent. Makes a big difference if you send to your lists more than once a month.
   
8. They recognise the same email across lists counting the same email as one email address so they don't charge you extra.
   
9. Strong competition in the industry ensures that standards of service, quality and price are always improving. Check out Icontact and Constant Contact, two of the industry's biggest players.
   
10. Thorough reporting on everything you need to measure success of your email campaign or that of your clients. Opens, clicks, deliveries, bounces, unsubscribes etc.
    
11. You don't have to send on your own, already overloaded, servers. If you send out 50 000 emails in HTML on your own servers while still trying to keep the office's online services running, good luck!
    
12. Do you really want to mange subscribes and unsubscribes manually across multiple lists of tens of thousands of emails when it can be done for you automatically and even have a report produced on it?
    
13. Sign up forms are simple, brilliant things. Set them up however you like and copy/paste the code into any web page / blog and grow your list organically. You can also select which list that sign up form should add emails to.
    
14. They have the facility to survey users on your lists. I would pay for that service on it's own!
    
15. They are getting into this social sharing thing and even include varying levels of share buttons at the bottom of their emails now.
    

Guerrilla Web 2.0 Marketing

What is Guerrilla marketing? Wikipedia defines it as this:

"Guerrilla Marketing" was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, as an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.

So my dad opened a Fishmonger the other day and shortly after that I got the call:
‘Jon, I need to market the restaurant.’
‘Cool, what’s your budget?’
’ Budget? Emails are free.’

Try to remember that the most advanced piece of equipment when my dad started out in retail was a machine that sent papers over the phone line and was considered a personal success when you received one without the machine jamming!

So of course, before I knew it, I was in a Guerrilla marketing campaign, which I haven’t attempted since the early naughties in the web 1.0 days. When I thought through a strategy, I found myself surprised that I had not entered a low/no budget campaign in the social media space as it is the perfect place to do it. I’ve obviously been spoilt by big client budgets of late so it’s time to get back to basics.

Guerrilla Web 2.0 marketing is all about getting people to ‘chat and share’ without spending a cent.

So I did what I do best and started a blog to place the restaurant right in the middle of the social space. It’s called www.fishmongermidrand.com (if you have no luck with that, try www.fishmongermidrand.blogspot.com as I have just registered the domain) so as you may have figured out, the restaurant is a Fishmonger in Midrand.

But you need a conversation point and a reason for people to share information about the website so I devised a 2 for 1 sushi special with my pops that will be available all day on Wednesdays. It is my hope that (of course) a killer special like this will get people spreading this blog around the South African internet and it will get some people into the restaurant.

So if you like sushi (and here is my shameless plug), sign up your email at the blog and spread the news about it please! I’ll also let my loyal readers know that the first voucher comes out this Monday so sign up now!

There might be a few more shameless plugs from me going forward for a while so please excuse me or listen to my plugging and help me spread the word. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: guerrilla marketing,guerrilla web 2.0 marketing,sushi,2 for 1