The Out-Smarts Blog and Podcast

I had the pleasure this evening to present at an event co hosted by the Professional Women’s Network, the YWCA Mentoring Program and the Downtown Networking Association aimed at introducing mentors and mentees to professional growth strategies to help you realise career goals. My topic: “Building Valuable Business Relationships in the Virtual World”.

As promised, I am going to blog over the next few days about some of the issues I touched on at the event, the first of these being Internet networking hubs.

Internet networking hubs are great forums to expand your business network and extend your reach. Obviously those you use will depend on what it is you do. For example a photographer would likely use photo sites like Flickr to showcase their experience. Someone in the music industry is likely to benefit more from MySpace than Facebook. And a lawyer might is more likely to join a law forum than a web development forum. Its up to you which you choose but Internet networking hubs are great places to grow your on line network and in turn your business. Here the handout I gave out tonight:

Yesterday I read an article called the 90/10 marketing rule that talked about how businesses often focus most of their time on creating a product or service but give little time to marketing it effectively. It linked in to an article that pointed out that Internet marketing is no different - how true that is.

We regularly come across businesses that have gone about developing web sites without giving an iota of thought to who they are trying to attract or how they can go about doing so effectively and they come to us wondering why their site doesn’t get much traffic.

Marketing, in case you didn’t know is all about understanding the needs of the customer and developing offerings that meet those.

When considering your website the first thing you need to do is put yourself in the shoes of your customer, think about who they are - get inside their heads as well as their shoes! If that is a challenge then ask existing customers or people you know who fit the bill.

Once you have a feel for who the customer is, its easier to work out what makes them tick - what they like and don’t like, and why.  Ask yourself what attributes they have that make your offering compelling to them.

Finally use that information on your site to create a compelling environment that appeals to your niche. It should be clear and simple and obvious what your company does from the moment the page appears.

If you take time to do these simple marketing procedures before hiring that super duper web designer, your site will drive much more business - guaranteed!

In a world of never ending SPAM it’s a real challenge to create successful e-mail campaigns but its not impossible. Here are some pointers to bear in mind:

1. Avoid the hard sell - people get so much spam these days that if you try to sell to strangers via e, you’ll hit the junk file faster than you can say spam;
2. Better to use email to keep in touch with clients than to try to sell - newsletters are better than sales letters;
3. Use a call to action title - one that is brief, catchy, intelligent that will entice people to open the mail;
4. By adding an unsubscribe button, your mail is perceived as more professional - just remember to delete those who request it from your mailing lists - always;
5. Drive them back to your website by including a link - you can then easily track click throughs to make follow up calls more targeted;
6. Make it simple stupid - the old adage applies here too - don’t add too many fancy images or graphics - it will just clog people’s mail boxes;
7. The body of the text should include some incentive to act but don’t overdo it or you will raise reader suspicion;
8. War and Peace just isn’t appropriate in an e-mail. Keep it short and to the point if you want people to read;
9. Think outside the box- content and topic should unique and should tell them something they don’t know about your product service or offering - something that makes a difference to them;
10. Build your email list by encouraging visitors to subscribe online, and telling people about your newsletters in the real world;
11. Don’t SPAM ever, ever. Always use valid e-mails from people you have actually met or who have given you business cards at events and shows. If you don’t its the fastest way to get an unsubscribe.

1. Use Twitter to market to you audience (assuming your audience are Twits that is (or should that be Tweets?). It can be used for branding and networking effectively. Dosh dosh lists 17 more Twitter marketing applications and innovative Tweet uses.

2. Participate in the blogosphere. Find blogs pertaining to your industry or your target audience and get commenting. You would be amazed at how this can help spread the word.

3. Find out about new technologies that make it easier for people to do business with you - like Skype - the on-line phone service or that help you present your offering more effectively - like Flickr the photo site -  and make full use of them on your website.

4. Get creative with video clips about your company: make them quirky, funny or alternative and post on YouTube. You never know, this could be the next big meme.

5. If your not comfortable with writing blog comments or posts or are camera shy, why not consider a Podcasting your message. Its much easier than you think.

6. When you find interesting articles, pages or clips, share them with your others in your field. I Stumble but hear that Magnolia and Deli.cio.us are great for this too.

7. Join Facebook, MySpace or Linked In (or all three) and get networking. You know the old adage about a friend of a friend being your friend too: its so much easier to do business with people you’ve been referred to by a friend or colleague.

8. Use Internet advertising technologies such as AdWords or Facebook Social to reach and promote to the right audience.

9. Forums or chat rooms where your audience collaborate are great ways to get involved, join the conversation and establish expertise with a wider audience.

10. Get wiki with it. Join Wikipedia and share your knowledge (but be careful not to be blatantly corporate or your posts will just get deleted) with the global audience.

At a session I attended this week at CES questions were posed of 4 panelists on the subject of taking the blogosphere seriously. The panelists consisted of industry experts including “rock star” blogger (the mediator’s title not mine) Ryan Block from Engadget. Here are a couple of the questions posed with my slant on the answers:

Who isn’t taking the blogosphere seriously? Answer - there are 70 million blogs out there and thousands more added daily if corporations aren’t taking it seriously then a heck of a big chunk of their client base is. Simply put there are people who get it and people who don’t. Those who do are reaping the rewards and those who don’t face extinction.

When asked how the panelists would approach convincing a CEO to blog, the general consensus seemed to be that if a company isn’t using the blogosphere (either to listen or to communicate) then they risk losing control of their brand completely.

Judging by the turnout at the session most CESers were more interested in gadgetry than the fine art of blogging - more fool them perhaps. For more ruminations from the panelists:Taking the Blogosphere Seriously, Consumer Generated Media, David La Plante, Really? This is my job.

Back in the last century the web was seen as a great way to create an on-line brochure. The idea was that if you had a web presence you could be attracting new business 24/7 while you were sleeping. Alas the days of the static website have come to an end. Its simply not good enough these days to slap up a web site and leave it to stagnate for months. There’s nothing worse from an audience perspective than returning to a website that hasn’t changed since your last visit or worse a site that has dated “news”. I don’t know about you but when I go to a site like that I assume the company is kaput and go elsewhere.

A website is no different from having a phone, if no one knows your number then no one is going to call, if you don’t answer or return your calls then having the phone is pointless. Interaction is key. Likewise a website is simply a tool to facilitate business but if there’s no interaction you may as well not bother.

Fortunately technology has also come a long way in the last decade or so and its becoming easier and easier to create dynamic user experiences that will keep visitors coming back. A blog, for example is the perfect way to ensure that your site is updated regularly and it encourages users to interact. RSS feeds are another way to make your site fresh by linking to applicable news feeds or posts from iconic blogs in your industry. Using photo and video technologies to showcase your offering and allow for an enhanced user epxerience is made simple by the likes of Flickr and You Tube. None of these techniques cost much to implement but the impact of these on the effectiveness of your web site can be huge.

Brr Brr Brr Brr - is there anybody out there?

Julie Anderson, VP of Marketing at PeopleMaps was kind enough to share their experiences with corporate blogging on our Facebook discussion forum. PeopleMaps puts blog technology to good use for different purposes in their organisation:

“PeopleMaps has been blogging for a while - and we do it in a few different ways:

We use our main company blog as our news channel out to all our audiences. We ask new customers to subscribe to email updates to be sure they’re kept up to date with our activities. We don’t blog all the time on this channel - people are too busy to read our news every day!

We use 2 other blogs to speak to two separate audiences - our consumer audience and our corporate audience. This allows us to be specific in our topics - and builds up our traffic independently from our website SEO and online advertising activities.

Internally we blog to keep various other groups informed of our activities - e.g. our shareholders. These blogs are private as we don’t want just anyone to read that info - the blog technology is just really easy to use and a great way to push out information informally, without relying on email.

Oh, and we use Typepad currently as it was the easiest platform to get started with. We’re messing around with WordPress for some other activities though.”

Do you know how many visitors your site gets, how long they stay, where they come and how often they come back? These are vital statistics used to track Internet marketing efforts and in monitoring the effectiveness of your website investment.

Fortunately our friends over at Google have just the solution. Google anaylitics is a free web site traffic analysis tool that tracks traffic to your website. It works by having you enter some code on your website so that its engine knows to track your site.

Using Google is a great way to understand your on-line community: how they find you; how they navigate your site and how they become customers. Website owners can monitor and improve web site results by honing in on their specific community. The service includes a dashboard containing vital visitors stats and the ability to drill down on these to find out more; score cards to assess traffic; conversion rate tracking analysis for keywords targeted; targeting by region (for example); the ability to create and share (send and schedule personalised e-mail reports) and export data.

Analytics is a free service that is used to attract customers to Google’s fee paid Ad Words and Ad Sense offering but those are optional - the benefits of this free data at our marketing fingertips are unquestionable.

There’s an interesting article in this week’s Business in Vancouver about Second Life and its real life tax implications: “Taxing Events in your business Second Life”. Beware any foolhardy Second Life entrepreneur who thinks that making money in the virtual world is free: the tax man may be watching. The bottom line is that earnings your avatar makes are tax deductible just like earnings in the real world and should be recorded as such. (FYI the the Linden $ is currently trading at $.003 Canadian and holding its own better than the US dollar is these days!).

The article suggests having 2 avatars - one for personal pleasure (whatever that maybe) and another if you intend to do business in SL.  By doing so you can easily track spending and income for tax purposes.

Apparently there’s a whole person dedicated to helping companies maximise the value of their SL ventures over at PriceWaterhouseCooper’s downtown office. I have asked this question before and I ask again, what self respecting business man has the time to sit on SecondLife and wait (and wait and wait…) while SL loads and reloads? Well I think I see the answer: one with plenty of patience who sees a growing potential market place as referenced by the $1,063,606 US spent in Second Life over last 24 hours alone. Little wonder revenue Canada has their eye on SL.

I was going to keep this one for our Reasons to be Cheerful post for October but its too good to wait. I am always looking for examples on the web of innovative companies that are using Web 2.0 and its collaborative capabilities in really innovative ways. I came across an example of a web site that really does this well called Threadless. This T shirt design company that truly engages clients online by:

• encouraging visitors to design their own T shirt or order from the catalogue of unique and popular shirts;
• promoting participation by using blog technology so that visitors can share tips on design, opinions on T shirts and other hot topics;
• hosting an ongoing competition that draws visitors back by having them vote on the best designs submitted this month - winners get a cash reward;
• building a loyal following that shares photos of T-shirts and wearers building loyalty;
• having users sign up as members of the “Street Team” and begin promoting the Threadless web site to earn T Shirt credits and virally spread the word.

Threadless uses Web 2.0 to market its offering very effectively - go take a look and be inspired!