The Lonely Marketer

On November 26th, 2006 I made my first post on the Lonely Marketer. It seems that just yesterday this incredible experience began! Honestly, when I wrote that first post I never imagined that anyone would ever read what I was writing. There are all these great writers already writing about similar topics - why would anyone stop by the Lonely Marketer?

Then, I discovered the power of social media. I discovered a great community of marketing and search engine marketing bloggers and how to integrate myself into these already very lively discussions. I found advice, networking opportunities, resources and most importantly, friendship, from this experience. Here are some statistical highlights:

Readers: 917 (at time of writing this post)
Technorati Authority: 344 (14,006th ranked blog)
Most Popular Post: Beginner’s Guide To Setting Up A First Blog Site
Most Traffic: 15,000+ visitors in one day (from above post)
AdAge Power 150 Rank: 89
M20 Client Side Marketing Blog Rank: 4
Chapters Written in Published Book: 1
Speaking Engagements: 4

But really, these stats are meaningless. What I’ve taken away most from this experience is the great people I’ve met and all that I’ve learned. I thought about linking out to all those people, but literally there are hundreds and I was afraid I’d leave someone out. I’ll have to hope they visit and read this post.

I remember sitting at dinner with a group of people in San Jose at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I sat down only really knowing Matt McGee, but left with friends from Search Engine Guide, Pole Position Marketing, and the Worst SEO Blog Ever. This is just one example, but I’ve made more connections than you care to read about. Social media has an incredible way of connecting like-minded people.

With all these wonderful experiences to remember, I don’t know what lies ahead for the Lonely Marketer. With a significant promotion and a growing family I’m not sure I’ll be able to maintain the level of content to which my readers are familiar. But know that whatever the future holds, this has been one of the most amazing and gratifying experiences of my professional (and personal) life.

Thank you friends and readers!!

I was very excited when Jennifer Laycock and Robert Clough over at Search Engine Guide announced their new conference called Small Business Marketing Unleashed in Houston next April 21st and 22nd. Here’s an excerpt from the website:

What if you went to an online marketing conference and instead of going home with a notebook full of sound bites, you went home with a detailed plan of action to improve traffic and sales on your web site? What if instead of talking at you, the conference speakers worked with you to come up with a plan for your business?

That’s exactly what will happen for small businesses who gather together with some of the best and brightest minds in online marketing next spring.

I know much of my audience is small business marketers and I can’t think of a better conference to attend. Plus, the venue is a replica of the Alamo which certainly is a nice change of pace from the typical conference ballrooms.

I was also honored when Jennifer and Robert invited me to speak at the conference! I’ll be speaking on Blogging for Business which is a topic I love and believe in very much.

The agenda is packed with great information so check this one out - it’s definitely worth your time!

Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent has invited me to contribute to a string of posts dedicated to businesses measuring the ROI and success from social media efforts. If you haven’t already you should check out Valeria’s site - I think much of my audience would find her content very useful and engaging!

I’ve been asked my thoughts on companies measuring social media efforts many times. In fact, I’ve gone through the process of justifying the effort and definitely have a strong opinion. If you’re a marketing manager wanting to jump into social media, but your superiors are hesitant to give budget for the effort, you really need to think out how to position the medium.

I don’t think you can put a dollar figure on social media to prove ROI. You’ll have a hard time showing what the revenue increases were from your blogging or other social media efforts. The medium has not advanced far enough for that. I also don’t think that the medium is wide-spread enough that you can justify ROI with only subscriber count and number of comments. Many senior executives wouldn’t know what an RSS subscriber even means.

With that said, I think this is a very viable form of corporate marketing and there are a number of ways the medium can be sold up the chain and measured throughout the year:

• Don’t Isolate Social Media: Position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

• Sales Tool: When is the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a social media medium could be considered along the same lines. With every piece of content we create for our company blog, we make sure our sales people are aware they can share that content with interested customers. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

• Feedback: We’re also finding success in using blogging as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your products. We’ve already received valuable feedback that rivals that of an individual order placed.

• Promote Realistic Expectations: I think many marketers who are into social media and blogging are a bit misguided as to the affect blogging will have on marketing efforts. In the marketing blog community, you can start a blog, link out to 50 other bloggers in your first week and pick up traffic and subscribers that are fun to measure. Not all niches have that opportunity. Many communities lack a large enough niche in which to socialize. What then? I encourage people in less sociable niches not to pump the benefits of thousands of subscribers, millions of page views, or hundreds of comments. It could take years to develop that following in some online communities as the medium matures. Focus less on expected statistics and more on how social media will be integrated with the rest of your product marketing efforts.

• Multipurpose Content: As a small business marketing manager, it’s always music to my ears when someone says that we can use content we’ve created for multiple purposes. If you’re blogging, you should be creating valuable content. Have you thought about using portions of that content for an eNewsletter creation or the beginning of a white paper? Make sure you have a plan to have multiple purposes for your efforts.

• Go Find Your Customer: One easy case I was able to make for blogging was the ability for our company to more easily go meet our audience where they begin most online searches that lead to our website - Google. Most of our website traffic originates on Google so it only makes sense for us to continue our efforts to get in their search results. Blogging platforms are very solid ways to optimize content for search engines - especially if you’re updating often and using the right methods.

• Stats: I know, I know - stats are important. I just didn’t want them to be the focus of this post because not all social media efforts should be measured with analytics. Believe me, I do follow our stats, but I pay more attention to subscribers, comments, and from where the visits originate. These are important statistics to gauge how well your audience is receiving your content.

In two years, I’ll guarantee that there will be measurements in place that prove ROI from businesses engaging in social media. This method of conversing with your audience is growing by the day. But right now we need to focus on social media as a tool in our marketing toolbox that supports all the other tools we’re using in our marketing plans.

I’m supposed to tag some people to also contribute to this conversation, but there are so many people I’d like to hear from that I don’t know where I’d begin. For starters I’d like to see what Marty, Matt, Pat and Stoney have to say. But, if you have opinions and want to chime in, please do - and send me the link to your post and I’ll add it this one.

Reader Responses:

• Measuring ROI on social media investments (Francois Gossieaux - Emergence Marketing)
• Social Media Measurement (Tom O’Brien - A Human Voice)

With all the “advice” we’ve been receiving from search engines on how to manage our sites and provide the right user experience, I was thrilled to happen upon a little experiment. I recently created for myself the opportunity to do some user experience testing on the various search engines. I was surprised by the result and surprised by the advanced universal search experience on some engines while others really lagged behind.

You can read my full How Tony Bennett Inspired a User Experience Experiment article over on Search Engine Guide!

Okay readers, I need your opinion. Should a small business company blog offer a full or partial RSS feed? Having participated in the blog world for over a year now, I’m 100% in favor of the full RSS feed. In fact, myself and others have written about how partial feeds are such a turnoff because we use RSS readers so we don’t have to always click-through to the individual sites to which we subscribe.

But, that opinion is largely drawn from my participation in the marketing blogging community - both search marketing and general marketing bloggers.

What happens when there is not such a large number of bloggers in a particular niche and your audience is comprised mostly of customers and end-user prospects who don’t maintain blogs themselves - or are even that familiar with RSS and blogging? Should your RSS distribution mentality change? Here are the pros, cons and discussion points we’re tossing around:

Why companies should offer a FULL feed:

• RSS content distribution is meant to give readers the flexibility to consume content on their own terms.
• Readers may not want to visit your site each time.
• Content is more engaging when can be presented in full in a Reader

Why companies should offer a PARTIAL feed:

• One goal is to get people to your site. A partial feed would get more people to click through to your site on a regular basis to see offers or other product information.
• Customers can’t purchase, request more information, or get additional resources from within their RSS reader.
• If the goal is truly to interact with your customers via your blog than you need to get them to the site for the conversation.

As I was writing this post, Stoney deGeyter posted about the full or partial RSS feed topic on Search Engine Guide. He makes a great case for why a full feed is good.

BUT, the goal of any small business marketing effort is, of course, a return on the investment and the time. Is a full RSS feed inhibiting ROI efforts or is it lending to a greater goal of community? Is community enough of an ROI factor? I’m just wondering if maybe the rules shouldn’t change slightly when it comes to company blogs.

Your thoughts?

This is probably one of those things that’s been written about that I completely missed, but I just did a search in Google for my friend Matt’s site, Small Business SEM and noticed the StumbleUpon icon and a star next to the result for Matt’s site. It’s actually a reference to a StumbleUpon review for his site. On further research it looks like the option is now available to add in your friend’s reviews of pages in your Google search results. It looks like this:

Wow, as a StumblUpon user I think I like this feature, but that could dramatically alter people’s searching habits if they’re active users of StumbleUpon.

Wouldn’t you be more swayed if your friends indicated they liked or didn’t like a page or site?

Michael Jenson over at SoloSEO introduced a new index ranking tool his company has developed called IndexRank that allows you to measure the rate at which your site is indexed. On a scale of 0-10 you’re given an indication of how often Google (or any search engine for that matter) is coming to index your site.

The main factor is content. The more often you add content, the more your site will be indexed while site owners who only periodically add content will see a lower rate of indexing. The age of your site plays a factor as well.

What a wake up call! I wasn’t real concerned with the Lonely Marketer because I add content often and am not real concerned with how I’m indexed. BUT, checking on the site for the company at which I work was a different story. We have some work to do. We have a fairly sophisticated site with alot of content, but unfortunately we’re not adding new content often enough.

So, why does this matter? Why should a small business marketing department be concerned with their rate of indexing?

Well, for one, this is an indication of how much content you’re adding and how fast you’re doing it. The more relevant content your site produces the more hooks you have to keep visitors around and hopefully turn them into leads or buying customers.

The other side of this is how often the search engines come through, crawl your site, and add your content to their indexes. The last thing you want is to create and post a piece of relevant, current content and not have the search engines crawl it for a month afterwards.

Check out their tool - it’s quick and easy and provides useful information!

It took me awhile to realize that paid search was not a game! Really. Paid search is big business and potentially a large amount of a small business marketing budget. But like many people, I jumped in headfirst and was enamored with tweaking ads, trying new keywords and spending my company’s money. My early ways were more PPC Gunslinger than responsible Marketing Manager. Then, slowly over time, you realize that PPC is actually very similar to a sales process and you need to treat it as such.

Catch my full post - Bonding With Your Paid Search Prospect? - over on Search Engine Guide!

I thought it was time to dig through my del.icio.us account and highlight some of the many posts and articles I’ve bookmarked recently. Here are some of my favorites:

• 12 Wordpress Editors you can choose: Want to try something else besides the boring old Wordpress editor? I’m looking forward to getting some time to try some of these out.

• Landing Page Testing: How Much Is Too Much?: I really like this post from Jon Miller at Marketo. He points out that not every site has the same amount of conversion traffic and you should take that into consideration when testing.

• Lessons From Baseball: How To Discover & Track Your “Quality Starts”: Two of my favorite topics - baseball and online stat tracking. The focus of this post is on measuring BtoB PPC and SEO campaigns and how benchmarking is so important.

• Is Social Media Marketing Sustainable?: A great post on the social media marketplace and actually developing a career in the trade.

• Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation: Very thorough and well-written post by David Wallace. He outlines search results for his company, Search Rank, that show how he monitors their online reputation.

• A Beginner’s Guide to RSS and Google Reader: For some of you readers who are new to the world of RSS feeds and feed readers, I thought this was a nice outline put together by my friends at 10e20.

• Dear Small Business Owners: Put Down Your Ranking Reports: Matt writes a great article about why the focus should be less on reading stats and more on creating valuable content. Good lesson here for small business marketers!

• The Best Damn On-Page Optimization Process Checklist, Period: For my readers interested in SEO and website usability, you’ll want to check out this checklist.

That should keep you reading for awhile! Hope you find something you like.

One aspect of social media that I truly enjoy is watching companies, who historically engage in traditional marketing mediums, adapt and change as their audience changes. More and more articles are popping up talking about companies who have jumped into social media in an attempt to meet up with an audience their trying to attract. A recent example I saw on AdvertisingAge focused on Febreze, a P&G brand, and their attempt to attract coeds with a new Facebook campaign.

The relatively young (Febreze’s family of products has been around less than a decade) but burgeoning $600 million brand has just kicked off “What Stinks,” the online and viral campaign for its fabric-refresher spray aimed at college students.

“There are 18 million college kids out there and we’ve never really targeted them,” said Martin Hettich, North American marketing director for Febreze. He said there have been pockets of students that over the years embraced the odor-fighting spray, typically priced between $3 and $7, despite the fact that there has been little in the way of dedicated advertising toward the group.

Citing the fact that “washing is not a convenient part of the lifestyle at college”, the Febreze execs probably took a sizable step outside of their marketing comfort zones and tried something new. With ROI being in such focus for marketers, that’s not an easy step to take, but I love the risk they’re taking and I think it will pay off. Let’s take a quick look at a couple elements of Febreze’s What Stinks campaign. Naturally, the first thing I did was see if they bought the domain. Yes, they did and here is the landing page:

You definitely get the feel for the graphical elements of the Febreze What Stinks campaign. The other aspect of this page that I like is there being one link on the page. So, there is only one way to go from the page and that is to the Facebook group. The page is obviously here for people like me that hear a campaign name and instantly type into my address bar of my browser.

Next, we visit the Facebook page dedicated to Febreze’s campaign:

I like the fact it carried over the graphical elements from the website. That consistency typically indicates a well thought out campaign. CO-ED Magazine picked up the Febreze story and also includes the main graphics so Febreze did a good job of branding the campaign.

Now, let’s check out what they did with the “I Tell Febreze What Stinks” Facebook page, which at last check had over 750 members:

Along with a comedy tour schedule, the page contains cartoons, some user generated photos, an intro video, and a potentially viral video game called The Dank Game. Other standard Facebook features such as a discussion board, member photos, and The Wall are also included on the page.

One last element I thought was creative was the Wheel-O-Stink:

This is Febreze’s subtle attempt to educate the college crowd about their various products and how they might be used. Very creative! Out of curiosity visitors will try this out and will get some exposure to the Febreze product line.

A potentially dangerous aspect of this campaign is the fact they’ve opened themselves up to potentially damaging Wall postings on animal testing and crude stories about smells that could diminish the brand. I noticed a few of those while on the page. The college crowd could easily jump on the wrong bandwagon with some of that.

One other quick note is search engine exposure for the campaign. I went to the major engines and Febreze does not rank in the top 3 or 4 results for the phrase “What Stinks” and they also are not running any paid search ads. People curious about this campaign might head to a search engine and search for details, but may not look far enough down to see the actual Febreze website. A PPC ad could help guide them to the campaign page.
Overall, I think Febreze did a great job with this campaign. They’re obviously taking major steps to make their brand recognizable by the college crowd and they’ve done that by going to where that crowd is hanging out. Am I curious about the results? Yes! Brand appeal will be tough to measure, but if their goal is the college crowd I think they’ve done it right.

What are your thoughts?