Out-Smarts Internet Marketing

After a brief hiatus over the summer, our podcast is back and once more were having some great adventures producing and presenting the feed. This week we tackled branding and next week we’re looking forward to discussing some design and development tips to make your website more magnetic.

The hardest podcasting lesson we’ve learned lately is that if you set up an RSS feed for your podcast, there is a good chance that RSS readers (like Google reader) will pick up blog posts as well as podcasts. This isn’t ideal, especially if you want to promote your podcast channel effectively.

Thankfully we came upon a great solution thanks to the good folks over at Wordpress. Simply categorize each podcast in a dedicated category (ours is podcast) then add some code to your .htaccess file to redirect the traffic. The result: a dedicated podcast feed featuring only your audio work.

Our next New Adventures in Podcasting post will tackle how and where you should promote your podcasts until then check out the previous posts in this series and good podcasting!

New Experiences in Podcasting 4
Podcasting - Dead or Alive
New Experiences in Podcasting 3
New Experiences in Podcasting 2
NewExperiences in Podcasting 1

Our latest podcast tackles the issue of branding with Isabelle Mercier, co-founder of Leapzone Strategies: a Vancouver firm dedicated to working with motivated entrepreneurs to help them realize their version of massive success through business and branding strategies and performance coaching. Prior to Leapzone Strategies, Isabelle headed up an award winning creative firm that specialized in managing brand identity so she really knows a thing or ten about branding.

Podcast: Play on page | Download

For business people used to marketing in the traditional way, the new way of marketing can be confusing. There’s little wonder that this is the case because the fundamentals of marketing have, essentially, be turned on their head.

With traditional marketing, companies created, controlled their brand and crafted it in such a way as to appeal to their target audience. These days control of the brand has been turned over to consumers. Whilst this is great news for Joe Public, it can create major headaches for organisations used to the old way but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Numerous articles both in the press and on TV have drawn attention to corporate new media fiascos, note able among them the Tim Horton employees’ Facebook group (which poked fun and more at their employer), Wallmart (the company created a fake blog and got caught out) and the social network groups against telecommunications changes in Canada (customers banding together to mass complain in networking forums). These are all examples of how companies have failed to recognise the true nature of new media.

Companies should not try to use the forums to control their brand - it will back fire and you will be caught out. You cannot manipulate your audience. A seachange in thinking needs to happen where companies recognise these forums as a constant interactive loop rather than a one way street. Rather than a threat, make social media work to corporate advantage. Its a great way to understand your audience, customers and to better serve their needs.

Organisations should put in place policies and processes to: manage and monitor employee participation (put it in your company handbook); to use these forums as research tools to help keep a pulse on the industry; to improve brand awareness through better customer service, and in getting creative by using these new media to build positive consumer loyalty.

New media needn’t be scarey for marketers. Simply take time to understand how the changes are playing out in your industry and alter your marketing approach to include your consumer/audience rather than exclude them. Look on this as an opportunity and not a threat.

This post originally appeared here in the spring of 2007 but the lessons still apply to those about to embark along the corporate blog path. We’re posting it again in case you missed it because the post consistently attracts visitors to our site suggesting its still of interest to you, our audience. Here are 10 tips to bear in mind when blogging for business.

1. Keep entries to one page or less - a blog entry should be short and to the point.

2. Blogs are intended as on-line logs or journals and are more informal than other marketing mediums so write accordingly.

3. Use simple terms - don’t include jargon or abbreviations unless you are sure your audience will understand otherwise it will simply put them off.

4. Don’t use your blog as a forum to attempt to promote or sell - its not appropriate.

5. It is generally accepted in the blogosphere that you can quote from another blog as long as you state your source and link back to it.

6. Remember to add value. Think about who your intended audience is and write posts that are informative - share useful links to cool sites and on-line services.

7. Emoticons may be okay for a personal blog but in a corporate one they look unprofessional. Unless your target audience is the under 20 consumer crowd then its best to avoid using emoticons at all.

8. Its good to include video clips, images and podcasts.

9. Don’t use fonts that are too large or hard to read and be sparing with capitals (no need to yell!).

10. When you include links to other web pages, always remember to check that your links work before publishing your blog article (there’s nothing worse than clicking on a link in anticipation only to find that it doesn’t link take you where its supposed to).

In celebration of International Blog Day. We’d like to share some great non marketing blogs with you.

Organikal - tips on green living for families.
I am an Organizing Junkie - Actually I am not which is why I like this organiser’s blog.
Being Five - cartoon about a junior blogger
The Scottish Football Blog - commentary on the Scottish football scene (and by football I mean football not that North American rugby equivalent!).
The Stay at Home Mother - Great blog by a local mom.
For more:

Judging by the sheets of rain outside, summer is almost over here in Vancouver but never mind, there are lots of reasons to keep us cheerful on the new media front. Here are links to our discoveries this month.

Jotform - the simplest, easiest way to create forms online.
Mixwit - make your own music mixes.
wiki How - wondering how to do something? Ask wiki How. Know how to do something, contribute to wiki How.
spoink - social blogging by phone.
veoh - an alternative to YouTube.

International blog day is coming up again (on August 31) and once again the Out-Smarts blog will participate. The whole point of this day is to break down borders and allow bloggers from all over to connect.

What do you need to do? Find 5 blogs that you like and blog about them on the day. They have to be blogs from other countries, areas of interest or culture. Last year our favorites included a rock tumbling and travel blog. You’ll have to wait till Sunday to find out about this years favorites.

As someone who can fritter away hours on Google analytics looking at web traffic patterns and trying to understand them, I was over the moon when the opportunity arose to review a book for the Mini Book Expo for Bloggers about just that.

Click - Unexpected Insights For Business and Life by Bill Tancer takes a very close look at online patterns: specifically what millions of people search for online and turns up a number of unexpected and interesting parallels.

Bill is the general manager of global research at Hitwise, a company specializing in online competitive intelligence and as such has vast amounts of data available at his disposal on how and where people click. He loves finding patterns and predicting outcomes, some of which he shares in the book and, as I found out, he has an uncanny knack at uncovering search habits one wouldn’t expect.

Did you know, for example, that searches for “Prom Dresses” peak early in the year or that on-line sports gamblers like to play poker in the close season. These are some of the first discoveries Tancer discusses in the book. He goes on to analyze celebrity addiction and what we really fear as opposed to what we say we fear. Tancer makes the valuable point that people are more transparent and honest when they search online. They see it as a forum providing anonymity and are therefore more comfortable using online search to find out about touchy subjects than they would be face to face or in “real life”. By tracking who searches for what, where they click and when, patterns emerge that tell us a lot about the habits of our society and the way we use both traditional and new technology.

As a fan of the Arctic Monkeys, it was interesting to find out that Bill was able to track their meteoric rise to fame through as small number of “super connectors” spreading the word in MySpace and that TV also plays a major role in driving online traffic patterns.

This book is full of case studies and interesting anecdotes and has many gems of information such as the fact that Pareto’s 80/20 rules doesn’t apply online where 1-9-90 one does: 90 percent of people online are lurkers, 9 percent are intermittent contributers and 1 percent active collaborators. A kick in the teeth to the web 2.0 ideal of everyone participating.

As an Internet marketer, this book is invaluable and effectively displays the value of data mining online to hone in on your target audience but its not simply a book for the internet or marketing professional. It provides an entertaining analysis of online habits written in laymen terms that would be applicable and valuable to anyone interested in the habits of our society.

Thanks to Hyperion and the Mini Book Expo for the advanced reading copy of this book and especially to Bill for sharing his insights. I look forward to more in the Hitwise blog.

I love tracking the stats on the traffic that comes to this web site and can easily while away hours finding out where people are visiting from and what they are interested in. I was therefore fascinated this weekend as I watched traffic to the site spike at a time when there had been no post so of course I headed straight into Google Analytics to find the solution. There I discovered that it wasn’t a new post that people were finding but an old one.

Let me explain. Back in December 2007, the there was a similar spike that happened when I posted Facebook overpopulated? and Facebook Overpopulated - the aftermath discussing a fun wall post I had received in Facebook warning that the system was overloaded and that inactive users would be deleted unless they forwarded the message. It was a classic chain mail hoax and many were taken in.

By using Analytics I was able to determine that the traffic patterns to this site were repeating this phenomenal surge in traffic but this time there was no new post simply the old post that worried Facebook users were finding. I can only assume that the hoaxers (is that a word? - sounds like the Scottish word for armpits - which is rather apt really) had decided to revisit their little scam.

If you have indeed received the fun wall or email similar, here is Facebook’s excerpt outlining how they communicate with users in the event that they need to do so. ”We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:

I hope we have put your mind at rest somewhat. Thanks for coming to our site. Please stay a while and find out more about what we do….

Gotta love Google Analytics.

Thanks Sam for the photy!

Thanks again to Rob Cottingham of Social Signal for this.