I’ll be heading to Orlando for the week for a nice vacation with my girlfriend. It’s been a year since we went, and in that time a LOT has changed. I’m just happy everything has turned out so well for me.
(Not to sound trite if you’re looking for work right now, but remember: Sometimes losing your job can lead to the best opportunity of your life.)
Unfortunately, this also means I probably won’t be blogging this week. At least not about SEO, social media, marketing, PR… all those things I love quipping about on here.
Instead, my Girlfriend and I will be posting about our trip on our separate travel blog, 20 Pounds of Disney. We’ll put up all our videos and pictures here, as well as some tips on how to make a trip like this happen. (My girlfriend works for the travel industry, and is a pagan god of putting deals together. If I told you how little this trip cost, you’d weep openly.)
Still, since I brought it up, travel is always a great excuse to learn blogging if you’re new to it. (Hey! I’ve got a social media post brewing in me after all!)
A lot of people know they want to create a blog for their business or to have something more to show employers than a resume and a Linkedin profile. The problem is learning the habit of blogging. When you travel, though, you see all sorts of new things worth telling others about. Having something you’re excited about is a great excuse to post.
Besides that, your friends and family are a built in audience. You know you’re going to ambush them with your pictures and your stories when you get back. If you blog about it, you don’t have to – and they can look and read whenever they damn well feel like it. Everybody wins!
It is not technically possible for you to have gotten to this post without having heard from someone that Apple released it’s entry into the tablet market yesterday, the iPad. It’s impossible because news of it is everywhere, and I just don’t have that kind of reach to have gotten to you first. So I won’t bother recapping.
I will say the negative reaction has been weirdly huge. Everything from jokes about the name, (the hashtag “#itampon” was huge on Twitter yesterday,) to complaints about what the thing doesn’t have, (camera, Flash support, the ability to make phone calls,) are making even the most hardcore Apple fanboys cry.
I’m not an Apple guy – I don’t have a problem with their stuff, but I don’t own a Macbook or an iPhone or an iTouch. I’ve had the same iPod for three years now, with no need or hope of replacing it. That having been said, I recognize that Apple is brilliant at defining new markets, and frankly the iPad will do just that.
Everyone has been, for some reason, running to Kindles in the last few years. I don’t get it, because I like reading books on paper myself. But a burgeoning market has opened up, and Apple is now stepping into it. This is just like what they did when they debuted the iPod: MP3 players were everywhere, then Apple came in and redefined the standard. It’s also what they did for smart phones, which were very rare before they came out with the iPhone. They aren’t trying to give you a newer version of something you already have, which frankly really would annoy me.
The iPad is getting slammed, I think, because most of the people slamming it have no use for what it does. Fine. But that doesn’t mean it sucks, it just means it isn’t meant for you. Not everything is, you crybaby. Given what people say they want to use this for, I think most of them were hoping for a completely touch screen laptop. So stop your whining and get a laptop! What’s the matter with you?
The one complaint I do understand is that it will finally cripple AT&T’s data network. That is because AT&T is the single worst possible service provider Apple could have ever tied themselves to. They’d already started asking iPhone users to take it easy with their use of the data service they were actually paying for. Think of that – people were paying for AT&T data service, and AT&T was asking them to not use so much of the data service that their customers were giving them money to use… the bald-faced chutzpah of that always screws me up.
And now Apple has a new wireless device that’s going to need to use the same network. Hey – maybe AT&T are the ones getting everyone to bitch about how the iPad is crap! Because if it does succeed, they may have to finally throw in the towel and admit they don’t know what they’re doing.
Conferences work when you hear that one thing that makes you say, “Yes! That’s what I needed!” It’s when you get that one chunk of information you were either hoping to find out, or that you didn’t know you needed until you heard it.
Today’s Social Media Arizona event had several of those moments for me, but here are the two that stick out:
1) Leave off the last paragraph of a blog post. If you don’t wrap up the story you tell, it leaves readers wanting more, and gets them to want to finish it with their own comments.
2) If you want to convince your company it needs to explore social media, find the 1 or 2 executives who are the forward thinking ones, the ones most likely to get it. If you can win them over, they will win the rest over.
SMAZ 2 in Tempe, AZ
I like having thoughts like these given to me. You can read blogs and watch training videos and you won’t necessarily find these important bits of philosophy in them. It’s encouraging to me when this happens. Mostly because, unfortunately, a lot of conferences don’t have a great deal of new, useful information in them. Especially when you’re talking about social media.
I don’t claim to know all there is about social. But I’ve heard enough presentations now that I hear the same things being taught repeatedly: Be real, have a goal, it’s about the conversations not the tools, and measure your progress. (Which, frankly, is good advice whatever marketing you do.) Beginners will doubtlessly find all of this interesting and exciting. They should. Social media is a brave new world. It’s the wild west. But once you hear these axioms enough, you hit a ceiling, where you hunger for new information, some new take.
Maybe at that point, you just need to go out and create your own stories, your own eye-opening study or tactic to share. Or maybe the best parts of any seminar can be gleaned from the Twitter posts that come out of it.
This isn’t a slam on conferences, mind you. Like I said, I was floating from room to room, and may just have missed the really good parts everyone was sharing. Still, I wonder if there’s always enough new information to share at all of the SEMPO, AZIMA, and even SMAZ events.
My friend Brian came up with the blog, “Blue Tooth Douchebag” – a cry in the dark against people who wear those awful earpieces in public. Every day there’s some new photo of a douchebag wearing a bluetooth, taken by one of his readers/supporters. (I’m proud to say I got one in too – I’ve framed it and hung it up on my non-existent digital wall.)
My submission to BTDB - I didn't get paid, but I am leeching off the bandwidth by posting this.
Each picture has a smart-ass write up, and everyone’s invited to pile onto the unfortunate cretin wearing the offending electronics. The reason the site works, I think, is that by now most of us have had to tolerate these people. It’s disturbing to share an elevator with someone talking into the Borg implant coming out of their head, pretending their talking into the air is none of our business. Most people find these people targets for our derision, and BTDB fulfills that need for us.
Beyond that, BTDB shows that all you need is a good idea and the willingness to commit to it. This was all started with a single idea, but it didn’t just appear from the ether with a “pop.” Serious work was put into the layout, and it’s been around long enough for word-of-mouth to spread.
Most importantly, IT GETS UPDATED ALL THE TIME. If you want your blog to take off, you have to post to it all of the time. I’ll admit – I’m bad at this myself. I’m nowhere near as prolific as the blogs I’m going to do write-ups of this week. I think I lack ambition.
Anyway, look the site over and have some laughs. Then take notes. I know someone out there has an idea for a “Rude Customer Service Blog,” a “Children in Public Wigging Out Blog,” or a “How Does this Doofus get a Girlfriend This Hot Blog.”
You can definitely make your idea work. All that matters is that it be a good idea, and you commit to it.
In 2006, Technorati came out with the (then) startling statistic that there were over 70 million blogs in existance, with something like 10,000 more coming on line every day. Now Technorati says there are 113 million blogs, with 175,000 being started every day. Even with embarrassingly high abandonment rates, (7.5 million of these blogs are active) blogging was really taking off – 184 million bloggers create 570,000 per day.
We used that stat to show that blogs had arrived. It turns out we were wrong – because NOW they’ve arrived.
Here’s why: The timeline of blogs breaks down into three parts. The first one came around 2001, after the dot-bomb. A lot of out of work tech geeks started publishing just to have something to do.
The fad caught on, and after a while some companies even started getting attention for their own blogs. When they joined in, that’s when the second wave hit. People were only just learning what blogs were, and their understanding was that it was either a corporate communications device, or a place where emo kids in their second semester at college talk about rain and poetry and how they can’t get laid.
The third wave of blogging has hit just this year, though. This year, everyone seems to be blogging. People without tech jobs, who don’t work for someone else, have some blog or another. People I know who last year didn’t even know what The Twitter was are now publishing on their own. It’s fantastic.
I’m sure the reason for all these new blogs is somewhere in between the number of people out of work and the sheer ease of setting one up. When I started blogging in 2002, there was only LiveJournal. (And skinning it was, as now, a bear to do.) With WordPress and Blogger and Myspace and Tumblr, you can be up and running in as little as five minutes. If you want to buy a domain name for it as well, a day. (Unless you use GoDaddy, in which case go with God because there’s just no telling.)
What I love about all this is the variety of blog types. People aren’t satisfied to just write about their day. Those are great when you’re friends with the author, or, like LJ in the old days, you were blogging to a community that blogged back. That kind of “here’s what’s up with me today” publishing is handily taken care of by Facebook and Twitter, so there’s no need to create a blog just for that.
Which is another reason I think blogs are as big as they are today. Given the lifespan of all other Internet fads, they really should have imploded by now. But blogs can be about anything, going in any direction the author wants to go in.
This week I’m going to try to post about some of my favorite blogs. You probably haven’t heard of them, because for me blogging isn’t about being on top of the most popular posts or knowing what the cool kids know, it’s about hearing more from the people I want to hear more from.
I’m seeing a lot of advertising on the Internet lately, but very little in the way of a marketing strategy. It seems most companies have not gotten the message that they need to be on line somehow, and some have even heard the call of all this “social media” jazz. The problem now is that they don’t know what to say.
Just blaring, “buy our stuff” is not a marketing strategy – at least, not a very good one, and certainly not one that’s been thought out. I think the problem is that while we all have these tools to amplify our voice, we aren’t that sure of what we should be saying.
Before you start thinking about how much you should budget for paid search or you hire somebody to build you a WordPress blog, sit down and think of what it is you really want to share with people about your business. Is there anything that would interest your potential clients?
You can find out pretty quickly by doing some Twitter searches. Maybe there isn’t a lot of talk in social about what you sell, but there’s a ton of traffic on search engines. (You can check this pretty easily too – Google Insights is great for this.) If you’ve got more potential clients on search than social, you need to switch focus to that.
Once you know that, you can start to talk to your potential customers about what they want to talk about.
This short piece by Robert Middleton explains the importance of messaging pretty well. It’s just a starting point, but if you’re trying to put together what you should be saying, instead of just how you should be saying it, the end of his piece is a brilliant starting point for you:
“Focus your marketing message on ‘what the client gets’ instead of on ‘what you do.’ It almost seems too simple, but it makes all the difference.”
Here’s the important thing to remember when you’re using Google Analytics, or really any site tracking software: It’s all about who hits what page.
If you don’t already have tracking software on your site, you should. It’s the only way you’re ever going to know who’s coming to you, where they’re coming from, what they’re reading, what they’re buying, and where they’re turning away. Google Analytics is the weapon of choice for most in this. It’s simple to implement – just put the generated tracking code on all of your site’s pages. It’s free, as I said, and it has easily accessible reports.
The issue I run into most when I talk about GA is explaining what it can and cannot do, because it does have limitations.
Goal Conversions
These are conversion points based on people hitting a specific page. If you want to know how many people bought something from your store, then your goal would watch for people hitting your receipt page. Why? Because presumably only customers are going to ever see your receipt page – they can travel all over your site looking at products or blog posts or images, but only the people who click the “order now” button should ever see your receipt page. If you set up your goal to look at this, then you can look at how many of these conversions came from natural search, social media, direct traffic… whatever you need to drill down into.
But what if you have several different kinds of conversions, but they all end up going to the same receipt page?
If your goal is still the receipt page, and the people who hit this are ordering goods, and/or signing up for your e-mail list, and/or downloading a white paper, their numbers will all muck up into each other. This becomes a problem when you want to know how many e-mail sign-ups you get from Facebook in a month.
Funnels
One solution for this is creating a funnel for your goal. Simply, you’ve still got the same goal page people need to hit, (your receipt page in this example,) but the funnel dictates that they must start at a certain page, hit some other pages after that, and eventually come to your goal page.
In this way, if you know that e-mail sign-ups always start on your “e-mail sign-up” page, you can establish this as a necessary first step in your funnel. The report you get will then show you how many people hit your e-mail sign-up page, how many people abandoned it, and how many people continued on to your receipt page – where, presumably, they signed up.
Problems with Funnels
The problem with using a funnel to track your actions is it doesn’t take into account what happened in between the start and the finish of the funnel. If I start out on your e-mail sign-up page, and wound up on your receipt page, how do you know I didn’t instead go to a product page, then buy it WITHOUT signing up for your newsletter? Just viewing the funnel results, it looks like I completed an action.
Ecommerce Tracking
This is an extra bit of code for Google Analytics, specifically designed to not only track conversions, but the specific products purchased and purchase amounts. If you’re trying to prove the ROI of your site, this is what you absolutely need to have in place. Without it, you can’t know how much money you’re getting as a result of your $1000 a month paid search campaign. That $1000 you spend could be earning you $2000 a month, in which case you want to jam your spend up as high as you possibly can. Or that $1000 could be earning you nothing, and you need to stop your campaign immediately.
Obviously, this gives you more information than a goal conversion, which only cares if visitors hit a specific page. With ecommerce tracking, if you only have one receipt page, that’s fine. You have much more granular data about what got them to that receipt page in the first place.
Putting your Google Analytics code onto your site can be done by hand coding, template driver, or server side include. So if you have scads of pages on your site, it’s easily included. This is the added information for including the ecommerce code.
If you use your website as a business, you really can’t afford to not know what your visitors are doing once they find you. With the information you get, a few quick fixes may be all you need to turn your small business into an incredible money maker.
My girlfriend said, “this band is like something Generation X threw up.” I have to agree. I don’t entirely understand why this commercial keeps getting played. Especially since it took me several minutes to think of what they were advertising just to find it on YouTube.
Everyone writes the introspective, year-in-review blog post around this time of year. As I am someone, that means I have to as well.
But I can’t easily write a, “Top 10 Things about 2009,” because for the most part, 2009 was rotten. Recession, the mortgage crisis, that Twilight sequel… This very blog was born out of my own layoff, since I no longer had my old company’s blogs to spout off on.
So instead, here is my warning of things you will have had just about enough of by the end of 2010.
(By the way, I specifically did not mention Microsoft here, because we’ve all been sick of them since 1998 or so. So if you want to add Windows 7 or Bing, just know that I am with you. I am with you.)
1) Augmented Reality – This is already a buzz word that’s making the rounds, with marketing managers scrambling to find out what it’s all about and iPhone app developers making “squwee!” noises loudly over this new use of GPS tracking and camera.
It’s a nice idea: Mash up your location with various social networking tools, so you can, say, see where geographically all of your Twitter friends are, or view a street with the names of all the shops listed on it. It is pretty neat stuff – but the deluge of articles and videos and seminars teaching you how to “harness this powerful new tool!” is going to hurt after a while. My suggestion: Just make sure your store is listed on Google Maps and all the other social tools you’ve heard about, and leave it alone.
2) Facebook – I’m going out on a limb with this one, but I really think people are going to start to sag with Facebook. It’s great for people to get in touch with people they haven’t seen in a while, but haven’t you noticed that a lot of your long lost friends have been lost for a reason? You don’t have any need to talk to them. Everyone else is a short found friend you talk to every day. That’s what phones and coffee shops are for. After that there are some games, but really, no new or useful information is shared on Facebook.
They’re at a tipping point – a bad one, where people could start falling off at any moment. Add to that their ever-increasing need to monetize their user base, and they’re sure to mess it all up for themselves. As soon as someone introduces the, “next big thing,” Facebook will join MySpace out on the curb.
3) AT&T – Let me say, again, that while I don’t own an iPhone, I do think it’s a pretty rad little device. I have a G1, which I’m sad to say always makes me think of Ziggy from the show “Quantum Leap”: An amazing piece of hardware, but one that gives me so many problems I feel like I constantly need to hit it in order for it to work.
While it is a great phone, stories of AT&T’s idiocy abound. From denying Google Voice’s app to asking users to not use so much data, they’re begging people to switch carriers as soon as the AT&T/Apple contract expires. As much trouble as my G1 gives me, I’m thankful T-Mobile doesn’t give me as many headaches.
4) Information Overload – We’re in this now, but someone’s GOT to make this an issue in 2010. Between my Facebook Wall, Google Reader, Twitter, the blogs I read, the blogs I should read, SlideShare, YouTube… there’s just way too much stuff to stay on top of. I still seem to hear about the latest thing from actually talking to people who are in the know.
It’s actually what keeps me hopeful that FriendFeed will remain afloat for some time, as it’s the best aggregate of everything that still exists.
5) Social Celebrities – I will not name names, but there are far too many people famous in this enormous little circle to take seriously anymore. Some of them have great things to say, most of them are just brilliant at doing their own PR. The result is the interesting people are hard to find because they can’t be heard above the noise. The plus-side of this is it will be good for the publishing industry – because it seems if you really do know what you’re talking about, a publisher will be willing to commit your wisdom to paper.
In short, you aren’t an expert at anything unless you can prove you’ve done something more than get a lot of views on your YouTube channel.
6) Cable Television – Speaking of risky predictions, here’s a great one. Why the hell would cable television be at risk this year? Because the way we get content has changed so dramatically, we aren’t going to be willing to wait for our shows or movies to appear at their scheduled times. Netflix and RedBox are killing Blockbuster with this, as they’ve already killed Hollywood Video. Add to that Apple’s forthcoming subscription service, and you can see that consumers will soon be getting what they want when they want it.
Cable companies themselves see this writing on the wall, and are – smartly – making a good deal of their content available through their on-demand services. I have a feeling the flood of options coming our way will eventually make all cable television on-demand.
7) Web Cams – I know this is just me, but with handheld video cameras now so cheap, and each with a USB slot, there’s no longer any excuse to shoot your 12seconds posts or Vlogs with a web cam. No one hears what you’re saying, because they’re asleep from the visual of another nerd sitting in front of their computer. Unless you have an Internet strip show, you can take it outside.
Let me also say I’m so thankful to my girlfriend for getting me one of these for my birthday, so I can finally openly chastise other people over this.
8 ) Social Media Marketing – I’m already seeing this now, in fact: Agencies abandoning social media as a marketing tool, and going back to traditional venues that have proven their worth before, like SEO and media purchases. This is because social media is supposed to be the voice of the user. You can teach a company how to use the tools, but you can’t out and do it for them quite as easily.
SMM itself isn’t going anywhere, but the idea of hiring someone to do it for you will slowly die. In it’s place, consultants will sell their services training businesses to do it for themselves, and specialty shops will make a fortune building phone apps, games, and anything else that seems like a good idea.
9) Digg – I don’t think I need to do too much of a tap dance on Digg’s head here. While there is still a huge amount of traffic going to this site, it’s usefulness as a “social” news site is over. Let’s see if they improve after Google buys them up. It’s over, hammer.
10) Paying for Wifi – If you have a hotel or coffee shop that has Wifi, for the love of God, give it to your customers for free. This is something so widely used it can’t be used as a profit center anymore. The occasional hip businessman with a laptop has been replaced by everyone. And everyone now has a smart phone and a netbook. If you just give this away, you’re enticing more people to come to you. You’ll get your money back, I promise.
If McDonald’s says it works, you know there has to be something to it. They’re 70 years old, make $3.9 billion a year, and they suck – so they know the tricks to keeping customers happy.
On ABC World News Saturday, there was a bizarre example of the media’s hate/hate relationship with one of the nation’s largest air carriers, US Airways.
The story was about delays at airports, and a graphic was presented that shoed the average delays at America’s busiest airports.
The graphic was designed to look like an airport terminal, and a screen reminiscent of takeoffs and arrivals. But look more closely at the names on three of the bottom screens.
For some reason, in this story about massive delays, ABC News chose to single out US Airways – in a story that wasn’t even about US Airways!
There are two possible reasons for this: One is a horribly misguided ad buy on the part of the airline, which I tend to doubt. Sure, they may have said, “yes, we’ll gladly pay for your animation if you put our name on it,” without asking what the context of the story was.
Now, if that is true, someone really needs to be fired.
Because the takeaway from this animation is that US Airways is consistently late in taking off at three of the nation’s major airports. The fact of the matter is US Airways was #1 in on time performance in 2008, and is predicted to keep this title in 2009.
Since the story was about the average delays for all airlines, people seeing this might think US Airways itself has this level of delay times.
Also, the three airports mentioned are the busiest in the nation – and all three have been in need of additional runways for some time. The reason these three airports have such lengthy delays is that not enough planes can take off – regardless of carrier.
And this all came after the story about an attempt this week to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit. So people not paying too much attention came away with air flight terrorism, lengthy delays, US Airways.
If this didn’t happen because someone at US Airways was using up their annual media spend and didn’t watch where it was used, this story shows a strange bias against the airline that I don’t frankly understand. This is something their public relations department should definitely get on top of.
