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Online Marketing Tips Video: Online Reputation Management

By Li Evans

This week's online marketing tips video is all about online reputation management in social media and search marketing.  It's a little different look beyond just monitoring with Google alerts and buzz monitoring tools (the first tip).  Buy building relationships and loosing your grip, these tips can also help you with your reputation online.

Reputation Management Online Tips Video Transcript after the jump....

Online Marketing Tips Video: Community Building

By Li Evans

Finally I'm back with our Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing!

Today I decided to focus on Community Building in Social Media.  It's under 3 minutes, quick and to the point about 3 tips for helping to build the community around your blog, forum, or even networking group like those on Facebook or LinkedIn.  Enjoy!

Full Community Building Tips Video transcript after the jump ....

How to Get Over the Ouch Syndrome in Blogging

By Li Evans

Let's face it, no one likes to hear "bad" things about themselves.  It's never more true when you have a corporate PR or Marketing department who's only job is to "spin".  But negative thoughts, comments and situations are a given whenever a company enters into the public spectrum.  There is always a detractor somewhere.  This is why companies who are entering into the social media space really need to be prepared to accept the love as well as the "non-love" with their brand, products or services.

So with a little inspiration from the group on Sunday night's #blogchat group and from Debra Mastaler (who I've personally called the Link Goddess) I present some ways for companies to get over the "ouch" of starting a blog.

1. Grow a Thick Skin
   Everyone has a detractor.  That old saying that you need a "thick skin" or just let it roll off like "duck off a waters back" is very true when it comes to blogging.  Blogging naturally attracts emotions of all kinds.  People love you, people hate you, you as the company or blog owner need to have a thick skin to be able to accept both the negative and positive comments the posts on your blog will attract.  The biggest thing is don't freak out!  The next biggest thing is don't go into the standard "defense" mode.  Think things through before you actually respond to a negative comment.
2. Don't Engage (or Feed) the Trolls
   Don't feed the trolls anymore goats than you need too. It's a bit tough to pick out the constant complainer & avid troll, from that customer who loves you but just has this one complaint or two.  Understanding the difference is key.  It means the difference from having a constant enemy to having the most evangelical fan out their for your brand, product or service.
3. Allow Comments on Your Blog
   Don't be a one way communication device.  The days of just jamming a marketing message down your audience's throat is gone.  Even though it is technically your soapbox, blogging requires at least two way communication.  Even more it requires community participation to become authentic and authoritative, that's why comments are vitally important to a successful blog.
4. Post a Comment & Trackback Policy Prominently on Your Blog
   To make things clear, and fair, companies should post (very visibly) policies about what types of comments and trackbacks they will recieve and publicly post.  This protects both the audience and the comment poster (not to mention the blog itself).  Having a policy that points out you will not accept comments that are vulgar, defamatory on a personal nature or racist in any way avoids companies from having to post such negative garbage and having to defend themselves against it.  Post a link to your comments & trackback policies prominently on your blog to avoid this type of nonsense.
5. Don't Moderate for Negative Comments
   As much as anyone hates negative comments about themselves, you have to let them through, you can't moderate them out, not if you want to be taken seriously.  Even if the person thinks you are the worst brand to walk the planet earth, you have to have that think skin (referr to bulletin item #1) and just let that negative roll right off your back.  Look deeper into the comment and try to understand why the commenter is upset.  A lot of times negative commenters are really people who like you but are just really upset because you disappointed them in some way, shape or form.  By taking the time to figure that out and addressing it, you have the opportunity to turn that negativer commenter into your biggest evangelist!
6. Admit When You Are Wrong
   If you were wrong, or your company did wrong, don't avoid it - just admit it and get it over with.  By admitting that you did wrong on your blog - whether its through blog comments or through a blog post itself, just admit you were wrong.  By admitting you were wrong, you'll gain a lot more respect from your audience, as well as loyalty.  We're all human, we all make mistakes, but when you can admit to those mistakes in a public forum, something that sticks around for a while, it creates a whole new dimension to your "trust factor" as will s strengthening your relationship with your audience.

I'm sure there's other tips out there for dealing with the "ouch" syndrome, do you have something that worked for you?  Would love to hear about it!

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President Barack Obama & His Social Media Agenda in the First 50 Days

By Li Evans

Quietly, without trumpets, fan fare, ticker tape parades or walks outside of the limo that give the secret service heart attacks, President Barack Obama has been changing the way the executive branch of the government does business online.  Not only that he's influencing the other branches, in particularly the legislator, both Congress & Senate.

In the first 50 days of his presidency President Obama's team has pushed forward a number of new sites to help citizens of the United States understand better what the President and his staff are doing. This was something we have never seen before, all we ever got before was a static WhiteHouse.gov site that people continually tried to Google Bomb for "miserable failure".

I stated back in November that President Barack Obama was going to be "Our First Social Media President", within the first 50 days of this presidency he's sure living up to that moniker I tacked on him (sure hope he doesn't mind).  We also know that Blackberry is sure thankful for the free press, since he wouldn't give up his and got that super dooper James Bond one.  Besides the Blackberry, in the first 50 days of his presidency, President Obama and his team have launched a number of new sites above and beyond just WhiteHouse.gov and that's what I'd like to focus on today, along with some other things.

Online Marketing Tips Video: Blogging & Gaining Subscribers

By Li Evans

I hope you can forgive me that this video is a day late.  It was made yesterday, I just ran out of time and energy to get it posted for you all.  Blame my 6 year old nephew if you must, he tuckered me out yesterday with playing in the snow and yes he didn't care it was only 15 degrees out. 

I've got three more blogging tips, to round out my tips on blogging.  Theses tips aren't as technical as last week's online marketing tips video, in fact anyone can implement these tips!  So check it out.

Full Blogging & Gaining Subscribers Tips - Video Transcript after the jump.

Online Marketing Tips Video: Building Your Blog Audience

By Li Evans

After a little hiatus the Online Marketing Tips Videos are back! This week I'm discussing three tips that can help you build your audience a bit more around your blog and the community that forms around it.

Full Building Your Blog Audience Video Transcript After the Jump....

SES London 2009 - SEO Through Blogs and Feeds

By SEOidiot

Moderator: Andy Atkins-Krüger, Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd

Speakers: David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
Sante Achille, Consultant, Sante J Achille
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Maile:

Lead for the webmaster central blog Blogs
Think about Blogsearch as a way of adding opinionated content to the search results

Triggered by hot topics

• Entertainment
• Tech
• Politics

Publish > ping > indexed (typically less than 10 minutes)
If you aren't using a service like blogger or wordpress you can ping the service manually

SEO faqs

Publish full content or snippet?

It doesnt make that much of a difference but its mildly better for Google to get the full (only makes a few minutes difference)

Can I robots.txt some of my categories etc to avoid dupe content

If you are confident with robots.txt yes but google will try to sort it at their end

What about tweets?
Not currently in the ping service, crawled if linked to on the web.

Security, blogger and webmaster tools

Receive 'hackable software' notification in webmaster tools message centre
Blogs seem especially vunerable
Up-to-date software software can prevent attacks
Verify your site with webmaster tools

Feeds for product search

Back end is Google Base
Google.co.uk/products
Submit your products through feeds, text, xml, api or even manual submission

Product feeds appear in universal search via the onebox
Extended Product pages show in uk (electronics) and us for (electronics, books, dvds etc)

Best practices for feeds

Strive for accurate information
Good attributes to include in your base feed.

• UPC (unique product code)
• MPN (manu part number)
• Brand
• Accurate description
• Image

In the US there is a data quality tab that will help verify UPC's and checks if titles are correct lengths

Google base discussion group is a good resource More of these features coming to the UK

Sante:

Architecture
How to optimise your blogs architecture

Avoid starting on free portals
By starting on a free service and growing there its hard to take all that work with you.

Showed an example of a site that moved from moveable type to wordpress and gave up due to the work involved in trying to migrate so many inbound links

Make the urls better

Recommended www.domain.com/category/title-keywords

Custom structure in wordpress /%catgory%/%postname%/

Should I change to keywords from ?=
If its working well now then leave it

Theme templates
Choose a theme that privileges your content so the content is prominent rather than the sidebar being first in the code.

Move the get_sidebar to below the content loop

Personalisation
Plugins
Be cautious to avoid problems and badly written plugins
Check the number of downloads
Research who is using it and whether there have been problems
Mine your content to identify keywords that help you create new content

Wordpress as a multi lingual platform
Blogslot (Plugin to help group content by language)
Group your categories into languages

Dave Naylor;

It starts with what software to use Wordress, Drupal, Movable Type, Blogger etc....
Wordpress is the best to choose

The fact that wordpress pings google blogsearch
Its a solid CMS

Check the plugins carefully as there are many out there that can cause problems

Considerations for the blog Root sub dom or subfolder

Tend to put them in subs for clients Hosting - put the subs on different servers and therefore ip's so you get a gain from google thinking they are external rather than internal links

Making the blog SEO friendly

• Make the title of the post count
• Make use of heading tags - H1's H2's etc
• Change the url structure to be your-doamin.com/your-post-page/

Blog linking

If you dofollow (eg using the do follow plugin) you have to be sure to spend the time moderating
Link to relevant sites Social networking
Add the relevant buttons to your blog posts (Dont go crazy, just add the relevant ones)
Submit your stuff to digg, stumble etc

RSS feeds

Snippets tend to help bring people to your site and see your ads etc but full feeds make people more likely to subscribe
Use Joost's (http://www.yoast.com) RSS-Footer plugin to add a link to you in your feeds
If someone is using your feeds and not linking back email them and give them a deadline to remove or add a followed link.

What Jury Commissioners & Judges Could Learn by Taking a SouthWest Flight

By Li Evans

Yes, I know a rather bizarre blog post title, but bare with me and it will all make sense in just a short time.  This post, btw, is all owed to my ever creative buddy Donna Fontenot.  Always in the most bizarre situations Donna manages to challenge me to find a story out of my most bizarre situations.

So today, I had Jury Duty.

I was a grump, total absolute grump (ask my friend with the beautful hair).  I didn't sleep well, because I kept having dreams I missed Jury Duty and the Sheriffs were after me to come and serve.  So with lack of sleep, and a total lack of desire to do my civic duty, I headed down to the opposite end of my county.  I even managed to avoid some rather annoying traffic, so at least I didn't have road rage to add to my list.

After getting through security and checking my coat to some lady who was way to cheery for that early in the morning, I sat with about 50 other people in what I can only compare to a holding cell, with amenities and lots of "Don't Do This" signs.  We sat there for about 20 minutes till they "marshaled" us into the Jury Marshaling room.  There we got scanned in like produce, and told to go sit and wait some more.  Soon enough the Jury Comissioner came to the front of the room, gave a speech about this and that (very boring), showed us a video (very boring), then had a judge preach to us, finally wrapping up with more do's and don'ts.  It reminded me of the normal airline safety speech.

I've never heard the "speech" from the Jury Commissioner before.  I've never saw the video they showed before.  I never heard the speech from the judge that came to spoke to us before.  I'll never remember any of them either.  It all translated to me as "Blah Blah Blah".

After Donna challenged me, I got to thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to put the Judge and the Jury Comissioner on a Southwest flight and ask them to learn from it?  How can they get their potential jurors to not only really pay attention to the job at hand, but to CARE about what they are about to be entrusted to do?

How could they make the experience more beneficial not just for the jurors, but for all parties involved (I'm talking about lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, etc.).  How can they make the experience seem like less of an inconvenience and a lot more tolerable?  Of course Government workers aren't marketers, and of course I know enough to be realistic that thinking like this from Government entities like this would not happen in my lifetime (but I could wish right? Obama did use Social Media, so there is SOME hope).

I also understand budgets are limited, and rules and regulations must be followed, but with what I expereinced this Jury Selection / Jury Duty process is more of a disservice to all parties involved and an actual civic duty. 

So I turn this around to marketing.  How do you get a totally disinterested audience, a grumpy audience, an annoyed audience to pay attention, listen, and most of all care?

I wrote about Getting Your Audience to Listen  by relating my with my flight on SouthWest story to you all.  You start by doing the unordinary.  That gets their attention, and it gets them to listen.  So instead of the Judge droning on about this being a privelege so you can have your driver's license and so you can vote, perhaps he should have likened the situation we were presently in to Law & Order .... and then stopped and said "that's really not how it works".  It would have gotten a lot more people to relate and understand, rather than a judge preaching/droning on.

How do you get them to react?  On my Southwest flight people actually applauded the the man who gave the safety speech.  Talk about an unusual reaction.  So how do you get your uninvolved, grumpy, uninterested audience to react.  Again, it goes back to doing the unordinary and unexpected.  In this case, the judge could have been more interactive, we expected him to "speak AT us", not hold a conversation with us.  Had he held a coversation, it would have been totally unexpected and more engaging and not been interrepted as "Blah Blah Blah" by 75% of the audience.

In this case it all starts with the Judge and the Jury Comissioner.  If they have a passion for the judicial process, they should express that!  The judge, by all accounts has a passion for the law, he wouldn't have ran for Judge if he didn't love it.  Instead of preaching, he should be demonstrating his passion.  Instead of thinking he has to be locked into this stoic and reserved personna, wouldn't it be of more value to say "this is why I love the law, this is why each and every day I'm amazed by what you as jurors can do to help ensure our judicial process keeps in check"?

If you love what you do, don't be afraid to share it, express it and turn that mundane "civic duty" your audience is being tortured with, into something extraordinary.

Think about it, are you expressing the passion for what you love to do (your business), with your audience?  Maybe that's why they aren't listening!

Online Marketing Tips Video: Turning Your Friends Into Fans

By Li Evans

Due to SES Chicago and traveling last week, there wasn't a Tuesday's Tips video last week.  This week though we've got a new Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing Video and it's all about turning those friends you've accumulated into Fans or evangelists.  From giving up some control to asking your friends to help, there's three tips in this video that can help you reach out, interact and turn those acquaintances into your biggest customer advocates.

Full Turning Your Friends Into Fans Video Transcript after the jump....

Online Marketing Tips Video: Engaging Your Audience

By Li Evans

I know it'd Wednesday, but still working on fixing the kinks with my software.  Let me tell you, Adobe CS4 Premiere Pro is a memory hog!  More so than CS3 - big difference.  I wrestled with things till very late last night and decided to finish it up today. 

This week we've got 3 tips on how to Engage Your Audience.  Whether its your blog, your community or even MySpace or Facebook, these 3 tips if put into a social media strategy can help you interact, and engage the members of your audience and maybe even turn them into evangelists!

Full "Engaging Your Audience" Video Transcript After The Jump...