Bretts Marketing Bytes

Archive for April, 2009

I can’t tell you how many times a day I hear “I don’t get twitter” or “twitter is lame” or “I don’t see a use for it.” Does this sound familiar? If you answered yes, you are not alone.

The reason why twitter is so confusing to most people is because it is a vague product/service. It is one of those things that has no true meaning or usefulness until you give it meaning or usefulness. It doesn’t just come naturally; it takes a little thinking on your part to make it work for you.

Why some people think it is lame.
Let’s pretend it is your first attempt at twitter. You chose your username, created your account and are ready to write something. Then you sit there… uhh ok, now what? You ask yourself “what do I say?” Not sure what to write you decide to see what others are writing. Naturally your first thought is to look at someone’s profile that you know. Let’s say it’s your cousin. On his twitter page he talks about how he just took the dog outside, cut the lawn and is now cooking a steak dinner. At this point, you start thinking… Why is this important? You get frustrated and give up thinking twitter is useless. Does this sound about right? This is the average initial experience on twitter.
I suppose if I had no followers and the initial tweets that I viewed were about my cousin taking the dog for a walk, I would think it is pretty lame too. But guess what?
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Psycho Hockey Lady

Contrary to what most people new to blogging think, blogging is not just about online conversations. It’s about traditional communications as well.

We are humans and humans love to socialize, whether it is in person, online or over the telephone.  When creating a successful blog it is important to tap into all of these channels and network with other bloggers.

The more you network with other bloggers the more successful your blog will become.  Other bloggers can provide you links, trackbacks, references and possible exposure to more subscribers.

There are many ways of networking with other bloggers,  but the one that gets over looked the most is the face to face communication.

If you meet another blogger in person, ask them if you can get a picture taken with them and blog about the experience. This creates a good bond between you and the other blogger. It is also a great opportunity to share links and possibly get some exposure to each other’s readers. I have included an example below.

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Google recently released the new Google mobile application for the iphone and BlackBerry. After much hype, I finally had the chance to upload the app to my new iphone.
In a nutshell, this application allows users to voice their search terms instead of typing them into their device. I have to tell you, this is really useful when driving.  Aside from some minor issues that I had getting it to recognize certain terms, the app is pretty solid. But what I found most interesting, is how it pulls search results.

The Google mobile app uses the GPS in your phone to recognize the location that you are searching from to pull up relevant searches in that area. This is a neat concept if you are looking for pizza, or movie times. But what about companies who rely on organic results for lead generation? I did some experimenting to find out what this means for them.

During my experiment I used three searches. The first two were very similar with a city name included in the search. My third search excluded the city name. Here are my results.

First search: I vocalized the term, SEO Buffalo NY into my iphone and it brought up the Google local results first. This is because it was pulling from the geographical location that my internal GPS was giving it.

Second search: I spoke the term,  Search Engine Optimization Buffalo into my phone. Again, the same local results came up. This is no surprise as both of these searches include the city name of Buffalo in them.

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I am constantly asked about the benefits of Search Engine Optimization. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has many benefits to a company. I have put together a quick list of a few of them. Enjoy!

• SEO provides excellent trusted brand. When someone sees that your company is ranked high on Google, it builds trust.
• Search Engine Optimization provides a high ROI.  It is often higher than any other form of marketing.
• SEO generates large amounts of targeted traffic. Traffic means new customers.
• SEO will increases leads/sales dramatically.
• SEO never sleeps, the promotional effect of it will be effective 24 hours a day
• SEO is a long term solution, the results of an SEO campaign last

There are several more than this, but these are just a few that came to mind at the time of writing this post.  If you would like to add more, please put them in the comments section. Thanks

Email marketing is an excellent way to get people to buy your stuff if you know how to do it correctly.

Here are some useful tips to making email marketing work for you.

• Use opt-in email lists. This ensures that the people know who you are. If they know you, they will open it. One for sure way to get reported for spam is to send emails to people who don’t know who you are.
• Always personalize an email with the recipients name in the greeting.
• Keep it short and sweet. Some of the best success comes from just talking about one specific piece of information. Trying to cram too much into one email will annoy your readers and they will delete.
• Make it easy to scan. People like to scan an email and get the information that they need quickly. Make sure to use plenty of images and white space to make the layout easy to scan.
• Follow canned spam act of 2003.
• Use a catchy but not spammy subject lines. There are many different methods for writing catchy subject lines.
• Track opens, click-through rate and conversions.

Hope these are helpful. Be on the lookout for an upcoming post about writing catchy subject lines and the email marketing magic formula

twitter is so popular for the same reason that talk radio was such a hit in the 80’s. It is interactive!

As humans we like to have a voice and are sick of  big media giants telling us what to listen to, watch and read.

If you have ever read the book, "How to win friends and influence people " by Dale Carnegie, you know that the whole premise is based on the fact that people love to talk about themselves and want to be heard. It is a natural behavior that is ingrained in us as humans.

twitter gives us the medium in which we can start to act natural again. It allows us to voice our opinions, ideas and views in a way that has never been done on such a mass scale before. Sorry media giants, but you have been telling us what to listen to, watch and read for way too long.  It is our turn.

What does all this mean for business?

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It is easy to see what others are saying about your company on twitter by utilizing a few tools.

Who is responding to you?
To see who is responding to your questions or posts use the "@yourname" link on the right hand side of your screen.  Example: @bburnsworth

What are tweeple saying about your company, product or service?
If you want to monitor the brand of  your company name, product or service, simply use the Twitter Search feature (search.twitter.com) In the search type your name, product or service.

If you want to use this search again at a later date, click on the save search link.

Happy monitoring. Hope this helps.

Social Networking is such a huge part of business these days. However, most companies aren’t sure how to leverage it. This is partly due to their thought process. Business people think in dollars and cents, but with Social Networking you have to think in friends.

"Social Networking is NOT about making money, it’s about making friends or connections."

You should treat it like a networking party that never ends.  Good networkers don’t go to an event and simply pass out their card and ask you to buy their stuff, they become your buddy by sharing thoughts and personal information about themselves. They may even join you for a cocktail or two.  In fact, they may never even bring up business at all. People that are really good at this get you to ask them for their services without ever bringing it up.

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I was recently asked by a company if they should do anything critical before engaging with their web design company to perform SEO. My first response was “What makes you so sure that your web design company knows SEO?” They looked at me with a blank stare.

Believe it or not this is my answer to anyone who uses a web design company to do a marketing job.  My opinion is based on what I have seen in the past few years from web design firms who claim to perform SEO.

“Most web design firms are good at web design, keep it that way!
SEO is a marketing function. Most of the best SEO’s that I know have very little website development experience.”
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