Time to conquer the world...

I wish all of the classes I’ve taken at the university level had me as excited as the ones I’m taking this semester.

The class I’m most excited about is my entrepreneurship class. I have the assignment to start a business from ground zero, using only my current resources and 1 dollar of capitol. The business that makes the most money gets 100% in the class. Whoever takes 2nd place gets a 99%, the next gets 98%, then 97% and so on. Guess who is determined to win…

I will be documenting my experiences here on a weekly basis. I’ll let you know what works, what doesn’t, and all of the other nitty gritties.

Right now I’m in the idea phase… I think I know what I want to do, I just need to find out who to do it.

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For starters, check out this cool article by Dave Hale, the Internet Marketing Professor. He polled a large handful of industry professionals asking for their Social Media Predictions for 2010… I was one of them.

Also, the wonderful people over at the Social Media Club of Utah Valley were nice enough to profile me last month. My own ego won’t allow me to not share this for all to see. More to come over the next weeks.

I’ll be taking a stab at some video production as well as my first legitimate large scale Social Media Marketing campaign.

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Image courtesy of Businessweek

This weekend I was able to go to Vegas with some friends for the Blog World Expo. It was one of the best weekends of my life, and I spent most of it with a bunch of married mom bloggers. Don’t worry, I behaved.

One of the coolest things about being a blogger is that from time to time you get invited to do cool stuff because you’re willing to write about it.  Here’s an example where this paid off for me…

One of the highlights of the weekend, aside from meeting some of my marketing heroes, and networking with some amazing people, was that we were able to attend the Beatles themed Cirque du Soleil performance called “Love.”

I’ve seen Broadway productions before. I’ve also seen a few shows in Las Vegas.  But honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show as interesting, beautiful, and aesthetically pleasing as this one. The music, choreography and acrobatics were mind-blowing. Honestly, words really can’t describe how amazing the performance was.

I kind of feel like I cheated the system to get to see the show for the price of a blog post. But honestly, next time I go back, I’ll definitely be in line to purchase a ticket.  It’s just something that you can’t take in with one sitting.

The lesson here? Never discount working for trade, or ignoring people who can become your biggest fans. Next time I hear of someone going to Vegas, guess where I’m going to send them?

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Ben Ilfield, COO of the Sacramento Press saw the need to make a change, and has some incredible success. Ironically, the strategies and methods used by this new, strictly online community newspaper contradict everything that conventional journalists both agree with and conform to.

When the local news conglomerate decided to drop their local offices to save funding, and focus only on ‘big news,’ Ilfield saw an incredible need for localized, community news source. So, he turned to the community.

Over the past year, The Sacramento Press has been created and run mainly with the help of community journalists. Citizens of the community who are passionate about making their neighborhoods a better place contribute their time and energy on a regular basis to provide highly relevant content for local readers. As payment, they get to see their community improve and connect because of their writing.

The Sacramento Press provides tools for these amateur writers, such as photography workshops to help volunteers take compelling photos, writing classes, and even free copy editing.  This helps to encourage writers to provide the best possible content.

Beyond offering this great collection of tools, the Press empowers authors to publish their articles at any time on the website… and then encourages them to interact.  Often times, an article will create controversy or discussion.  Authors are encouraged to participate in the discussion (in a non-contentious manner). This allows them to better understand the interests and personalities of their audience, as well as explain things in the article that may have created confusion. In a nutshell, communicating with the readers rather opens up a whole new way to create a community within the community, creating loyalty and a sense of ownership of the project.

This mentality has helped the Sacramento Press grow hand over fist over their first year of publication.  They grow at a rate of nearly 50% per month, and that growth has been consistent.

They are now able to help other local publications grow in relevance, popularity and credibility. Obviously, the idea of creating a community to retake the local press is ingenious, and it can even be very profitable.  If you ask me, it’s time for journalists to look at making a change… especially if you are trying to create an community.

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If you want to separate your business from every one of your competitors in the social media sphere, you absolutely must be consistent!

Customers appreciate and respect reliability.  If you have commitment issues with your Twitter account (you go multiple days or weeks without even a text), you suffer from blog neglect (inconsistent and less-than useful posts), or you Facebook abandonment, you’re doing it wrong.

If you’re not willing to put in the effort to provide useful, interesting content on a consistent basis, you may want to reconsider using Social Media at all.

This week at Blog World, Social Media tycoons, Patrick O’Keefe; writer, web developer, entrepreneur, community administrator and author of ManagingCommunities.com, Amber Naslund; Director of Community at Radian6 and blogger at Altitude Branding, Wayne Sutton; Partner at OurHashtag and blogger at SocialWayne.com and Robert Scoble; Managing Director at Building43.com at Rackspace and blogger at Scobleizer will be presenting on this and many other social media mistakes made by so many new media n00bs attempting to use this new forum to help their business. You would do well to pay attention to their mad internet skillz.

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Here’s a look at Nate’s presentation on tools to use to build solid a social media presence, as well as Seth’s list of tools to create an awesome listening tool to help you manage both positive and negative feedback being posted about you on the web.

I had the privilege of speaking on having a cohesive online and offline marketing strategy.  I’m a firm believer that if you want to get the most out of an online social media campaign, you must be practicing the same mentality in the analog world.  Empower your clients and employees to talk about you however they see fit. Give them reasons to talk about you positively. Make them your advocates.

Andy Sernovitz gives some great ideas on the principle of empowerment on his blog. If more companies followed his lead on this, they would have so much more success and loyalty it might just blow their minds.

It’s also important to know who your target audience is.  If you are selling hearing aids, Twitter may not be the best forum for you, as the majority of your market has only heard of the micro-blogging platform at random moments from their favorite Fair and Balanced news station.

You need to make sure you’re paying attention to the right people with the right influence, as Janet Meiners-Thaeler explains on her site. Find your niche of advocates who are willing to talk for you, endorse you and especially trust you. If you’re willing to do this, even if the group is small, your efforts will be rewarded.

Slides from my presentation are forthcoming…

Special thanks to Costa Vida Fred for sharing his time and expertise with us in the Q&A session. What a champ!

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Jump on the bandwagon.

I’ve been having some discussions with a good friend of mine over the past few weeks regarding social media.  He just got back from a conference in Arizona.  The conference was full of CEO’s and corporate executives who were (in his words), “drooling over social media,” and he was not at all happy about it.

It seems that as social media has become a more mainstream method of advertising, corporate leaders have begun to  interpret the phenomenon as a magic moneymaking pill. They assume that if they have a Twitter account, or a Facebook fan page that the dollah-billz will just start pouring in.

If history has proven one thing, it’s that there are no magic bullets or secret formulas.  Adapting this incorrect opinion of social media is foolishness.

Social media cannot make a crappy product, a poorly run business, or a weak marketing plan successful.  It’s possible that your product is amazing, your company is groundbreaking and your marketing is visionary, and that social media still isn’t meant for you.

The catch 22 right now is that social media marketing is something that the early adapters don’t want to miss out on, but it’s so new that there are currently very few ways to measure ROI.

So, before committing to jumping on the social media bandwagon, make sure you have goals in mind and a defined value that you would like to glean from your efforts.  Without some sort of metric to track or goal to measure, your efforts in social media will be hollow and fruitless. And, just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you should be doing it.

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Overcoming the road block really only requires persistence.  There are also a few tools that will definitely make the transition through the Twitter Road Block much easier:

Twitter Search

Twitter has a service called Twitter Search which allows you to search for Tweets with specific words in them.  The coolest thing about Twitter Search is that you can subscribe to specific search queries using RSS.  Or rather, you can track multiple specific keywords at the same time via your Feed Reader.  Think about it this way. Lets say you’re the president of McDonalds and you want to work on client retention and customer service.  You could search for negative words associated with your product or company name, like “Hate McDonalds” or “:( McDonalds”.  You could then subscribe to the feed, and you will be notified every time someone sends out a negative Tweet about your company.  You can then fix it.

Little do you know, whether you like it or not, people are talking about you, your company and your products on Twitter right now.  Time to start watching who, and talking back.

Don’t stop there though! Search for things you’re interested in and start talking to people who are interested in the same thing!  Twitter is a forum for discussion.  Most people leave because they have nobody to talk to.  The best way to build a great reputation for yourself on Social Media is to be social! Be the person who talks to everyone.  That is how you will gain the most value from Twitter, and how you will brake through that frustrating initial Twitter Road Block!

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If you’ve ever seen this image () on a blog, website, or even your Outlook dashboard, you have seen an RSS Feed subscription button.  RSS Feeds are basically electronic magazine subscriptions.  They allow you to keep tabs on the most current information whether it be your mom’s craft blog or the leading website in your industry.

You can subscribe to RSS Feeds using an RSS Feed Reader (which is free and requires little to no registration). Every time the website you’re subscribed to publishes something new, you will be notified of the new stuff in your Feed Reader. The perks?  You don’t have to memorize your favorite 100 website URL’s and manually bounce to them throughout the day wondering if they have published anything new in an attempt to stay current.  Just keep an eye on your feed!

The two most popular RSS Feed Readers are probably Outlook and Google Reader. (I prefer Google Reader because it contains some really cool features that most other Feed Readers don’t… but use what’s most convenient and easy for you. This is all about making things simple!)

Outlook's RSS Feed Reader

All you need to do to subscribe to a feed is watch for that little orange icon shown above (there’s one in the upper right hand corner of this site), and click on it.  That will take you a page that looks much like this:

RSS Feed Subscription Page

Select the reader that you would like to receive the RSS feed, and hit the “Subscribe Now” button.  Easy as that.  Now, what are you waiting for! Jump on that! Start subscribing. Just don’t get addicted.

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The key to choosing the best keywords for your Adwords Ad Groups is to focus on the Long Tail.

The Long Tail

The basic idea behind the Long Tail theory is that every industry contains a handful of super popular widgets (whether it be songs, movies, books, MP3 players or keywords).  These super popular widgets (we’ll call them the ‘hits’) saturate the market, and are consistently selling in high quantities. These hits comprise the head of the long tail graph shown above.  For iTunes, they are the top 100 songs that are purchased millions of ties in a given year. For Netflix, they are the movies that get rented over and over and over.  And in PPC, they are the super-broad keywords that everyone wants to show up for on the SERP’s.

The head of the tail is great… but in PPC, when you get thousands of people bidding on the same keyword, it can get very pricey. Trust me you don’t want to be paying $5+ per click… especially when there is an alternative.

Ironically, companies like Netflix and iTunes, (where the hits are easily measured and understood) more money is made by the accumulation of long tail products than those at the head.  It’s true!  Sure iTunes sells a bajillion copies of Brittany Spears latest single, but the number of bands down that long tail is so long (down to the bands that only sell 1 song) that they blow the hits out of the water.  Pretty cool, eh?

In Pay Per Click advertising, the same idea holds true.  Sure, specific ‘long tail’ keywords have a much smaller search volume than those at the head, but when someone searches for “Blue Schwinn 10-speed bicycle” and they find an ad for “Blue Schwinn 10-speed bicycles” you have suddenly put yourself in a very good position. Obviously this person knows exactly what they want, obviously you are giving it to them.  Your keyword might get clicked on two times a month, but you know what? Each time it’s by somebody who is interested in exactly what you are providing, and it’s costing you pennies instead of dollars!

Put enough long tail keywords in your campaigns, and you are going to find your conversions and your click through rates go through the roof. Your cost per acquisition along with your cost per click should plummet, and you, my friends, will be sitting pretty.

If you’re looking for some help chosing the right keywords for your campaign, here is a great step-by-step article loaded with tips and tools to help you out.

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