sme sem

robwatts — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:07:12 +0000

Not just another social media monitoring tool

I’m writing this post on an iPhone whilst watching Arsenal trail 2-1 to Stoke, a testament to the interconnected world we inhabit today. A world where we can interact w/ our networks from virtually anywhere, a world where the old constraints of modems and hard wired cables in a phone socket are but a bemusing memory of a place left alone in the roadmap of time.

Back then we usually had to wait before reading a response to a post or a comment. Facebook and Twitter, the proliferation of other nkotb like foursquare, gowalla, brightkite et al were just twinkles in the eye of their respective founders. Today all are becoming a mainstay of the online world, acting as sharepoints for the herds that flock to the power of their distributive connectivity; full of people chattering and networking, discussing themes and topics of their everyday lives. Lets face it, it’s nothing short of a technological social revolution; the web how it should be, as envisaged by the technerd visionaries striving to push it all that little bit further.

As a result of all this, quite a few of us have got excited by the opportunities that this activity presents. Never before has it been so easy to connect w/ people in their ‘moment’ never before has it been possible to identify so very quickly, people who are talking about you, your brand or topics and products important to your interests. The whole proliferation of listening tools that have sprung up is testament to the hunger and appetite for finding new ways of measuring, interacting and building relationships w/ those of import.

In terms of the tools available we have a wide and awesome array. Some do a good job and some simply overwhelm. Of the hardcore tools I’ve used I must confess that some ( even for a tech head like me ) provided too much. There weren’t any that I knew of that enabled me to simplistically look at a couple of important web nodes ( the blogosphere and Twitter ) and not only listen and monitor, but respond to, and share internally, to identify and classify as a CRM or Sales opp, a Marketing or Crisis management issue. All did lots of things really well, but none offered the kind of things I was interested in at a one stop shop.

See for me, at a keyword brand or product conversation level, there usually exists a need. A need to find, a need to share, grow, love, hate, acquire, enquire, inspire even – people tend to talk about such things in blogs, social status updates or forums w/ niche followings or interests. Brands especially can no longer rely on traditional offline media to build brand, neither can they depend on law to silence vociferous detractors, the option of sitting back and allowing conversations to develop w/ no awareness of or engagement w/ is a recipe for soon to be disaster.

Yet honing all that down and acquiring meaningful insight into such events, in the absence of some uber web understanding was and for many still is incredibly difficult. Could crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the masses hold the key?

You betcha! I didn’t know the stats to hand but I took a punt and said if anything of import is happening in the world today then it’s likely to appear in a blog a forum or in Twitter somewhere. With a little pipery and Tommy Cooper jush like thatery I was pretty sure that I could build something that not only allowed people to do the traditional response thing, but to also begin to understand some of the DNA beneath. The ability to identify friends and foes, the ability to extract positive or negative external references, the ability to measure the relative power and importance of what those referenced nodes were about. The ability to segment and take snapshots in time. Actionable insights into cause and effect. How f*#^%in cool to be able to say, right – we launched product x or initiative y and this is how the world/continent/country/region/town responded. These are the people who influenced things, these are the places where it happened and this is where we need to do better.

Of course in terms of the whole GEO thing it’s still early days but, wow, what an exciting time for both marketers and consumers. Anyone who even half gets this stuff who fails to feel the power needs to pack it in tomorrow.

Ok, so yes – it isn’t oauth yet ( I got this thing called a day job) it isn’t beautiful on the eye, it needs a bit more ajaxification, it needs a little negative matching and a few more reporting options (pretty PDFs anyone) but it’s getting there. I hope you give it a try and if you find it useful, support the effort

Cheers

Rob

Sent from an iPhone

sme sem

robwatts — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:27:48 +0000

No, not *this* website silly, the websites of people who land on this page, you know, those people who sit on Google or !Y looking for ways of promoting their sites confused by the overwhelming amount of stuff out there all shouting, Read me! Read Me! Like some Alice in Wonderland Bottle of Drink Me.

Promote my your website online

Regular readers aside, there is a chance that you may have come from a search engine for a query related to promote my website online, or get on the first page of Google or SEO for small businesses or Improve my sites position in the search engines or … I’ll stop there, point made.

Potentially the list is endless. All manner of people search for things in all manner of ways. There is no set in stone route. There are indicators and tools that people and companies working in fields like me, use daily to get a feel for a niche or domain. We look at search data provided to us by the search engines based on the competitiveness of an a PPC keyword or phrase, some of us have access to stat counter data that allows us to use data collected real time from websites that have the code installed, allowing us to see things like referral strings, user activities and clickthroughs. In other words we use information indicators from real people in real life scenarios. There is little if any guess work involved, it’s asbout real data crunching and using that knowledge to inform your strategies.

Promoting a small business online

Big businesses with big budgets have it easy. They already have the content, already have the budget that enables them to invest in people who can help them get to, and understand what it is they need to do and how it is they do it. Small businesses do not usually have access to similar resources.

Search marketing for SME’s

So how do you get started? Lets just assume you already have a website that’s been built, you might have already paid an SEO or an SEO Company to optimise your website or you might not have, whatever the case, lets just look at what might be a typical scenario.

A typical brochure type website

Your site is some old type standard 4 page website with a Flash animated intro perhaps a Home, About, Services and Contact page with a bit of static text that says not very much at all. What people don’t know is that, despite you being small, you have a massive catalog of products and stock, you have a small sales team, a customer support team, a marketing dept that deals with newspaper ads and off line directories, you have a distribution network, a product development team with an inhouse design dept too. You are small on the grand scale but in your niche you like to think you are getting to where you need to be. Your company in the area you operate is well known and respected, and your suppliers and customers all value what you do tremendously. Yet outside your little bubble nobody knows that. A little glance at your website reveals none of any of that, in the online world nobody knows because nobody told them.

Invest in your online presence and get that ROI

I hear some of you saying but hang on, I just paid $5000-00 for that website You mean Ive got to rip it all up and redo it? The answer to that is in some cases YES in some cases NO. Some websites are so awful that they are just beyond redemption. The attention they need is so drastic that they might as well start again from scratch, they need a root and branch deconstruction that addresses absolutely everything, their only redeeming feature is the email addresses that came with the domain. For others it’s not so drastic, it’s a fairly straightforward case of assessing the resources at hand and deciding what to do with them. This single blog post isn’t really the place to do justice to what is often a complex individual thing in that no two businesses are exactly the same. All have their own strengths and weaknesses that need to be assessed in the light of the company at hands aims and objectives, that said there are a few things I’d like to leave you with to consider.

7 8 general SEM tips that will help your website succeed online

Employ a professional SEM/SEO firm or SEO ConsultantThe best way would be to employ one of the above to deliver an improvement. Forget the outlay, it really shouldn’t be a concern. A well constructed, SEO/SEM campaign can deliver a massive ROI, massive. They should be able to help you look at your business and help you with a strategy that will propel you through the roof.Don’t want to do that? Scared off by the fees? Don’t have the initial investment capital required?
Not to worry, you can have a go at doing it yourself, at least aspects of it, but prepare to make a few mistakes and lose a $ or 2 in the process…
Invest in a PPC program.You wouldn’t think twice about paying £500 for a onetime half page local newspaper advert, yet the same money could deliver up to 5000 laser targeted geographically related enquiries directly to your site from people in buy mode. Try this link (free £50 at the time of publication). A good PPC program will enable you to identify related keywords and phrases relative to your product or service and deliver visitors who have entered these into search engines.
If you have a product database, put it online! If you sell things then people online will not know unless you tell them. Getting your inventory into a web based system is an absolutely crucial part of any online marketing and promotion strategy. Do it now, send me a message from here and I’ll tell you where to go, heck I might even do it for you.
Use your staff to build you content Identify your company strengths and use the people you employ. Install software that will enable you to use your team to big up your products online, allocate company time to key individuals with something to say, get them all singing from the same hymn sheet, get their enthusiasm for your company, their jobs, your customers, your products out there.
Interact with your customers and suppliers Install software that gives your customers genuine opportunities to feedback and interact. Show the world that your company is alive and reacting to customer issues or concerns. Allow the people who have used your products or services to talk about their experiences, if your products and services are good then with the right approach you’ll be surprised at how you can pull people in and share their views. This well help solidify relationships and improve repeat sales and increase user confidence in your company its products and services.
Use social media to reach out to your niche The online world has an array of fora with dedicated categories and communities for all manner of interests. If a category or community doesn’t exist then consider creating one. Interact with bloggers and stumblers generate interest and get your stuff dugg build networks and friends with similar interests. Use sites like Myspace and Facebook to generate interest and Buzz, get your company or you out there in your space.
Get relevant links to your site for the keywords you seek to attain There is no real substitute for using a bonafide link building service, a good link building service will know where to acquire the right kinds of links. They will often as part of their service, offer a content writing service too which will help your domain get the necessary links required to assist in your overall website promotion strategy. It should be said too that by following the proposals above you will naturally attract links to your site which will over time, improve your websites performance in the Search engine results pages (SERPS) ultimately lowering your PPC adspend into the bargain.
Read blogs and content from people and companies who have a passion for this stuff Not vital, but you’d do a lot worse that to read articles and content from people who live and breath this stuff, me aside of course you might also do well to read blogs related to Online marketing ideas, Niche marketing ,Social Media , Search marketing and online sales to mention a few. Why? Simple really, doing business online is the future for many businesses today. By increasing your knowledge base you increase your ability to make informed choices that will enable you to make the best possible purchasing decisions. If you ever bought a ‘pay £10 per month for submission to a zillion search engine package’ then you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Getting back to where I started initially, if you found this article online then it might have been because you were looking for ways to promote your site. Perhaps you’d been burned in the past by some company that didn’t deliver or for reasons related to a limited budget. Heck you might even be a company just starting out looking for ideas and information. Whatever the case, I hope you found it all useful and wish you every success for 2008.