Now that I have this thing, this self-employed marketing consultant thing, more than ever I realize I’m still terrible at networking.  I don’t tweet very often (at least I haven’t), I don’t Facebook every day, I haven’t blogged in months.

I’m not in the Chamber of Commerce or BNI, I don’t go to luncheons, I haven’t done much active sales or participation.

Should I be doing these things?  Probably.  I tend to get busy with other stuff and push it to the side (as all self employed folks do) and I’m not really social by nature.  So what if you, like me, aren’t suited to the business before breakfast type event?  What if you’re not motivated to join clubs, shake hands and kiss babies?  Does that mean you’re doomed to fail?

I don’t think so, but you will – at some point, have to find a way to network with other people to build your business. If you wait for people to find you, no matter how brilliant your marketing is, you’ll fail before you’ve even started.

I mentioned before  that I’m not so great at networking, but I think it’s important to learn, and try.  I’ll let you know how it goes, you do the same for me.

I love to play with stuff, I’m a kid at heart and the internet is the coolest toy I could’ve asked for.

I was looking for directions to the ReStore here in Nanaimo, so I jumped on Google Maps and zoomed around with street view to locate the entrance. Remembering that all of Nanaimo (or most anyway) is now street view enabled, I checked out my little place on Craig Street.

The resolution is pretty good, I can see my Honda Element and neighbours’ cars. Zooming around, I thought to myself “you could create a cool-ish 360 if you screencapped all the street view angles and loaded them into some sort of 360 degree program”. That’s when I remembered MS Photosynth, a cool program that takes your photos and uses logic to seam them together.

It’s free, so I went to Google Maps and used FireShot to capture images of my complex and the surroundings. I cropped the photos using Irfanview, loaded them into Photosynth and got this as a result.

Pretty cool right? Here’s what you need to pull it off

1. FireFox or Internet Explorer
2. MS Photosynth
3. Irfanview
4. FireShot

Back in 2009, Hosting Nation launched a video of Dave the Dog to promote their Pennies for Pets campaign, a fundraiser where they donated 50% of proceeds from new hosting campaigns to local SPCA organizations.

One year later, the video titled “Dave the Dog goes Crazy!” has come back with a vengeance.  Daily views on YouTube have gone up to by the thousands. Dave’s recent fame really set in for Hosting Nation on the morning of April 28th, when Inside Edition – a popular current events program broadcasting across North America – phoned to ask if they could use the video in their lead out for today’s program.

The recent fame for Dave has prompted Hosting Nation to bring the Pennies for Pets promotion back online.  You can learn more by visiting the Hosting Nation Blog or checking in directly at www.hosting-nation.ca

In my years of internet research, stumbling, browsing and surfing, I’ve never had such a difficult time finding something.  See, I’m trying to find out where the surfers on the net hang out, blog, post and share stories.  That’s how I get to the root of a thing I’m researching, find out what the people doing the thing are talking about, what motivates them and try and tap into it.

After a few Google web queries on the subject it became clear to me that I wasn’t about to find anything authentic.  Most of the top results were based on trip and vacation details, surf camps, surf shops and other services.  Well, that’s fair I guess, but it’s not what I wanted.  I wanted to hear from people, not companies.  Still, I figured that the shops might provide authentic information…

No such luck though.  Most of the sites I went to tended to use the same boilerplate copy that you see everywhere.  It’s not bad copy, certainly fits with conventional wisdom on web copywriting, but in most cases it lacked authenticity.  Could’ve been written by anybody, whether they’d been surfing or not.  I’ve dubbed it Robocopy… and again, it’s not bad copy by any stretch.  There’s no shortage of web experts who’ll tell you that this method is the most proven to create the opportunity for conversion.

And they could be right, but I don’t see it that way.  I think we have to look beyond the conversion to the people we’re having the conversation with.

If you’re interested, this is the formula for writing effective sales copy.

Introduction: Introduce yourself and your company, then spell out a key problem the visitor is experiencing while trying to identify with them on a personal level.  You might say something like,

Your widgets are important, they’re what makes your company function day to day!  When your widgets break it can cost you thousands of dollars in lost orders or production time, something you simply can’t afford in today’s struggling economic climate.  Tom’s Widgets carries thousands of widgets, and provides free overnight delivery of all standard and non-standard widgets around the world!

Elevator Pitch: Quickly explain the unique benefit your organization offers, something like:

Tom’s Widgets provides guaranteed overnight delivery on all widget orders.  We pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service and a vast array of widgets of all sizes, makes and models.

Closing Statement: Here’s where we go for the sale, in the business it’s named a “call to action” because it’s supposed to compel visitors to take some sort of action.  A closing statement with a CTA might look something like this:

Whether you need one widget to keep production going or thousands of widgets to outfit your factory, Tom’s Widgets is there to keep your productivity lines moving forward.  Contact Tom’s Widgets today for an estimate on our high quality widgets.

So, what’s wrong with the above copy?  Well, nothing inherently.  It gets to the point, tells me what I need to know and solves a big problem.  I’ve written copy just like this dozens of times, I think I just want a little bit more… I don’t need Hemmingway, I just need some personalization.  I turned then to Google Blog search and, voila!  I found some great surf blogs written in an authentic, travelers tone.  I guess the difference is that bloggers aren’t necessarily trying to sell anything, they’re trying to tell a story.

Sales copy is written with a specific goal in mind, to drive visitors (much like sheep, or lemmings) to perform a certain act.  That act may be something like signing up for a newsletter, filling out an inquiry form, or even making a purchase.  No doubt about it either, many of the ‘rules’ based on eye tracking studies, copywriting and user experience studies indicate are totally valid.

I long for the day that businesses break the mold of corporate and sales based communications to take on the more honest and open approaches found prevalently in the blogosphere, and I think to do that – we need to look past the conversion to really see the conversation.  So what do I mean by looking past the conversion?   Looking past the conversion is about connecting with the actual people visiting your site and starting real conversations with them, talking about actual experiences and telling the story of your business.  Maybe it’s idealistic, but it’s something to work towards.

I like powerpoint as much as the next guy, it’s a valuable presentation tool, it’s feature rich and a great complement to spoken presentations and keynotes.  More than a decade after its debut in 1997 as part of the Microsoft Office suite, Powerpoint has gained a virtual stanglehold on executive meetings and presentations.  The use of projectors, support for multimedia and outfits like SlideShare (which, you guessed it, allows you to upload and share powerpoint presentations online) has helped the eponymous presentation program nudge its way into uncountable processes and organizations.

Seth Godin recently blogged the article “Powerpoint makes us stupid” – these bullets can kill.   See, the Powerpoint revolutions has created some casualties, not the least of which are organizations (like the US Army) bogged down with ambiguous and overcomplicated presentations and, possibly worst of all, the common trend to write content using bullet points.

People like bullets (not all people, but more on that shortly).  They like bullets because:

• Bullets are an effective way of organizing content.
• Bullets summarize important points for quick and easy understanding.
• Bullets are easy, reading online is hard.
• Content developers can use bullets to explain key points rather than explain them with language.

It didn’t escape me that I used a bulleted list, I did it to make a point.  The list above is easy to read and it gets a point across, but it’s cold and impersonal.  It conveys information, but my tone of voice is completely lost.

So, like, think of it this way.  When I write for this blog, I tend to write  – more or less – how I actually speak.  If we were talking about bullet points over coffee (because bullets are cool), the conversation would be a lot like the one I’ve started above – though the live version would be decidedly less one-sided.  If I were writing for a rack card or brochure I might change my tone to sound more poetic.  If I were writing for a corporation I’d use formal language and speech.  This is all tone of voice, matching the language of the reader.

Using bullets is the absence of tone.  Bulleted lists are to writing what paint-by-numbers are to art, the effect without the inspiration. So why are they still used so frequently?  The answer, not surprisingly, lies in the problem of a slightly misogynist web.  Stay with me while I ponder…

The internet was and still is a field where men hold most of the key positions (That’s why cracked always makes the front page of Digg).  I’m not suggesting that women haven’t contributed as much, quite the contrary, but I’m suggesting that the web wasn’t (and isn’t) built for women.  This doesn’t jive with modern marketing ideas, we know that women make most of the household buying decisions – well over 90%, so why don’t websites target that?

There are rules that govern design and communication, most of those rules defined by previous theories.  Phrases like “above the fold”, “bullet points” and “call to action” are all things to look for in “effective” web content.  Not so plainly, notice how they all have a decidedly military feel to them?  It’s all very manly, the web, or at least it was.

Social media is about sharing and connecting, and in this – women rule.  They are more likely to share content and connect with other people like themselves, (men are more interested in creating content).   Women want to connect, to hear stories and to get long term value, men just want glory and status.  Some companies are successfully marketing to women, but most are still failing and it’s because while their design and brand has changed, they’re still writing and building for men.

I have some theories about how some old rules are dying, or should die, and they lead to how to write better content.

The first old rule I want gone is bullets.  No more, please?  We all have big monitors now, nobody is surfing in 800 x 600 and, unless there’s something we won’t understand unless you explain it in point form, or your audience is exclusively men, we just don’t need them anymore.  Women don’t like bullet lists, I don’t like them either.

Then I want to see people craft content to make the most of new resolutions.  Turn to the website on your left.  Now turn to the website on your right.  Both of them were likely designed for 1024 x 768 resolution or less.  Did you know that ol’ 1024 x 768 (finally) is the third most used resolution with 1600 widths topping the charts?   Well, it is, and it’s a great landscape to craft awesome content.

Once I’ve knocked that small feat out, I want the whole world to start using contractions.  This rule of formal language (sans casual commentary) is old and I’m really tired of people writing “did not”, “was not”,  “is not”, etc…  Remember the old Star Trek: TNG Episodes?  Remember Commander Data?  Remember the unusual habit he had of NOT using contractions?  They did that specifically to make him sound less human.  When we don’t use contractions, it sounds as though we’re scolding our visitors through a robotic box.  Using them makes us seem more human and helps bridge the gap. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that a main reason for a lack of contractions is that apostrophes break source code.  As a marketer though, I’d say that’s the programmers problem.

And last (for now) I want the world to fix their error messages, notifications and confirmation messages to be more human, because I don’t like it when a web page gets angry at me for making a mistake.   I know this happens because web pages are made by programmers, and notifications are made to explain exactly what went wrong.  I fondly remember arguing with a developer friend who always wanted errors to be structural and informative.  I wanted to say things like “Whoops! We don’t recognize that email format, please try again”.  He wanted to say “That is not a valid email address”.  He never grokked that his would subtly treat people as though they were incompetent where as mine takes the blame onto the company.

The test I always run with web copy, or copy of any kind, is to read it out loud as things look very different on paper than they do when you say them.   Once you’ve tried to read a bulleted list aloud, you’ll probably never use one again.  Once you start writing naturally, not based on old methods, you’ll find your copy suddenly more appealing to people.

I was trying to get access to the last Canadian Internet Use Survey today.  Statistics Canada provides a CD-Rom for the low, low price of $2400.  Ouch.  I went to AskAway next, it’s a great resource of volunteer librarians from BC that are available 13 hours a day to help you find helpful reference information.

No dice, it’s not in the libraries (probably cost prohibitive).  UBC has a copy apparently, but you have to be able to log in to their archives to get it. (Any UBC students out there wanna make $50?)

It’s tough to find Canadian consumer data, after digging deep though I was able to find a report from Neilsen (the ratings and ranking company, you know the ones) that places Canada in the top 10 rated countries for overall consumer confidence.

What’s consumer confidence?  It’s how good or bad you feel as consumers about the state of the economy and your personal finances.  It’s measured, in part, by the things we worry about – like global warming and the economy.  It’s also measured by tracking where our money goes, and our thoughts on the future of the economy.

So, what are we worried about?  In a nutshell – our health, global warming and increasing bills.  We’re worried about other things too, but those three are all well above the global average. We’re not as worried about the economy either, a stat that’s confirmed when you look at where our money is going.

When we look at the data, we can learn that while Canadians are lower than the global average  in luxury spending, we are not quite as debt focused as the average American.

A corresponding study in the Neilsen report indicates that an overwhelming number of Canadians believe the recession will be over in a year.

Our language has turned from ‘recession’ to talks of ‘recovery’, which shows that the average Canadian feels confident with their financial status, job futures and the state  of the economy as a whole. Source: Neilsen Ratings: Canada breaks into the top 10

In the internet world, what does it all mean?  Possibly that internet properties will make efforts to target Canadians (and their wallets) more aggressively, and new Canadian startups are more likely to be profitable in the near future.

I’m a bit of a typography nut…  it’s why I linger around print and and graphic design (yes, you can often see me loitering in the type section of the library scanning ancient books on type and avdvertising).  I get to see literally hundreds, if not thousands of creative type uses.

And I am jealous.  As a web professional, my hands have been tied for years with the same old web fonts (yawn).  Cool as comic sans is, I need more.  I want more.  And now, I have more.

The @Font Face standard has come in the last few years and lets you use server side fonts to dress up your web content.  Let me de-nerd how it works.

First, you need a font that can go on the web.  Make sure you have licensing rights or choose one of the free and great @font face kits from Font Squirrel.

Second, edit the stylesheet.  Font Squirrel provides the styles, the fonts and a working demo of the font in action.

Then, upload the whole deal (fonts, stylesheet etc…) to your web server.  I found the best results when I put the stylesheet and the fonts all in the same place.

Follow the demo they provide, drop the inline styles into your web page, right before the </ head > tag.

That’s about it.  Reference the style as you would any other with the ‘class’ tag.  I just tried out a font called Airstream, as I’m looking for some creative type examples I can use on a retro themed website.  Here’s the font in action…

I love web fonts, and free fonts, and cool retro stuff. Here’s some ipsum goo to fill space… Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur non dui a ipsum elementum feugiat. Maecenas eu mauris lorem, quis consequat dui. Fusce auctor est eu ligula rhoncus sit amet imperdiet lorem tincidunt. Morbi ligula turpis, porttitor eget sagittis et, feugiat sit amet ligula. Vestibulum iaculis vestibulum enim et egestas. Nulla ut urna eu magna ullamcorper faucibus. Praesent semper lacinia tortor, eu placerat sapien laoreet eu. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.

Just like that, takes only a few minutes and works (amazingly) in both IE and Firefox.  Sweeeeet.

It seems every major corporation and conglomerate has grokked on to social media as a broadcasting tool.  As a result, there’s a drive for businesses of all types and sizes to make the leap from ‘broadcasting at’ to ‘communicating with’.

It’s a great idea for businesses and entrepreneurs to get inside the minds of their followers and fans.  You have access to a wealth of feedback and inside information about your services through the eyes of your actual clients.

Having said that, if you operate in a town like Nanaimo with only 80,000 people you’ll be facing some challenges before a social media campaign starts working for you.  Here are my ten tips for making social media work in a smaller market.

1) Tweeting is a luxury that you probably can’t afford.

Twitter is cool, but there isn’t much to be gained beyond the glory of tweeting.  Realistically, you just won’t get a huge amount of followers, those followers won’t convert to business and unless you’re really active, most of what you say will get lost in the crowd.  If you have a small hotel or restaurant you may see some success by posting ‘web only’ specials.  I really only recommend it for businesses with 50 employees or more, or those who are already spending a lot of time marketing their business online.

2) Blogging is still awesome.

Blogging is still a great way to generate content, build links and boost your search rankings.  Most hosting accounts come free with WordPress or some other blogging CMS and support text, images and videos.

3) Lifestreaming is the new blogging.

I could dedicate a whole post to this.  Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.  For instance, I have everything connected to my WordPress Blog including my twitter feed, my deviantART account, my Facebook fan page and my LinkedIn profile.  I get good, link rich content and a free post every week with links to my activity around the web.  Watch out for more like this in 2010, as the trend will be to invent new ways to aggregate everything for me in one place. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around it, but a good place to start is here.

4) Facebook fan pages.

Don’t link to your personal Facebook profile for business use unless they’re inseparable.  Creating a fan page allows you to have the same posting and communicating ability, but limits customers to only seeing business related content, not your cousin Judd’s halava recipe.

5) Social media is the tortoise, not the hare.

Slow and steady wins the race.  A new friend here, a new connection there.  Unless you’re Gary Vaynerchuk, you should just be content to spend no more than an hour a day on social media marketing campaigns.

6) Examine your goals before diving in.

Different social media campaigns can get different results.  Blogging will increase rankings and SEO, but isn’t always a great sales tool.  Twitter may give a temporary boost of traffic, but the effects aren’t long lasting.  Flickr is a great way to share photos, but won’t generate much for new business.  You can increase chances of conversion with custom landing pages and links, but these strategies are usually beyond the purveyance (and budget) of most small business entrepreneurs.

7) Maybe you don’t need it at all.

Ignore all of the networks, TV shows, superstars, pundits and adverts and examine what your actual market is.  Are there any other general contractors on Twitter?  Are there any CGAs with Facebook pages?  What % of people in Nanaimo do you think are on Twitter?  What’s the dialogue like for the average entrepreneur?  If you don’t see anyone doing it in your industry, don’t look at it as an opportunity to reach an untapped market, because it probably isn’t.

8) Try before you buy.

Organization and timing are very important and it will take you several hours to set up the social channels so before you commit to branded social media pages, launch a test campaign and see how you feel about the results.  A simple one or two week campaign in the beginning is a great way to gauge the response of your customers to this type of marketing

9) How will you inform people?

If you build it, it will sit there.  That’s my new motto for 2010, because it’s not enough anymore to just build a site and profile.  Conventional SEO (page titles and content) are just a foundation these days and unless you are alone in the market, are probably not sufficient to build up decent rankings.  Having a twitter page and a Facebook page will not entice people to communicate with you, you have to work it and continually provide value.  Asking people to join is a great way, if you have a newsletter list.  Advertise on your web site, and incentivize people who join and follow you with exclusive promotions.

10) Who dares, wins.

It’s not that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats, it’s that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats.  Edgy content wins every time, so you’re better off having a video of a car driving through your front widow or a faux haunting than you are having walkthrough tours of your custom built character home.  I’ve often said that a great social media campaign is one that gets people who would never use your product or service to talk about it.

That about sums it up, of course it’s up to you to decide if social media marketing is right for your clients.  Be organized, be daring and you could be the next willitblend.  You never know!

Watching each day, white knuckled in front of the television I have found myself completely engrossed with the Olympics.  I feel as though I’m close enough to Vancouver to feel the buzz, the energy of a collective mass of people united

Now that the ‘lympics are over I’m seeing social updates about “back to normal”, “what now?” and similar sentiments.  What I’m feeling is a bit different, instead of “what now?” I’m thinking “what’s next?”

Sounds the same, but has a different impact.  I was in sales management for many, many years before my time in SEO.  A huge part of successful sales is motivation and energy.  Taking positive feelings and pouring them into your job, your life and allowing them to generate their own momentum.

It would be easy to allow the games to become tainted with scandal.  To suggest that the negative impact on the community, and the country, wasn’t worth the $4 Billion.  I don’t think you can place a price on the good will and pride of a nation.  Assuming that you could, I think that those two weeks were some of the best $150 I ever spent.

If we let the games, Canada’s most successful games, fade into nothing but memories then nothing is gained.  I want to take something more than memories.  I want momentum; action.  I am inspired.  I am committed to working harder, and reaching higher.  Are you?

I just watched The Big Lebowski again.  It’s not for everyone; it did terribly in the box office back in 1998.  Now, it has a massive following worldwide.  There are festivals, message boards, even a recognized religion with an official website for followers of dudeism.

The Dude talks of takin’ it easy, man.  What will come will come, and when it comes – you just take it and move on.  It’s a philosophy that has served me exceptionally well during my years in marketing.  There’s a lot of literature out there talking about what works in marketing, where it works, what doesn’t work, what works to what degree.  There are hundreds of discussions debating the validity of one method over another.

Debating the validity of one method over another is, well, kind of pointless and not dude-like at all.  Everything works.  If it didn’t work, it probably wouldn’t exist.  There are varying levels of effectiveness, though I don’t think one can debate what that is without trying it.  It’s a marketer’s responsibility to learn and experiment with whichever disciplines they want to specialize in, because when you can prove your answers to the questions of viability it’s easy to get work.

If you don’t know the answer to a marketing question, it’s ok.  Have a seat, take a sip of your white russian and think about your options in terms of  time, money and risk.

If you have the time, you can do the thing yourself.
If you can’t do the thing yourself, you’ll need to scrap the idea or pay someone else.
If you find a cheap and fast solution, it will be accompanied by a massive risk.

There’s nothing wrong with risk, or spending time or money.  If black-hat SEO didn’t work (cloaking and scraping for example) people wouldn’t keep doing it.  Sure, it’s insidious, but it works.  It works most effectively when seasoned hatters sit at the helm of the spam-train.  It works least effectively when you have to search for “how to do black hat SEO”.  It will probably destroy your brand and your reputation, but it definitely works to generate revenue.  White hat SEO takes a long, long time but there’s virtually no risk and the payout always happens, eventually.

This is where Dudeism is helpful.  There is a path of least resistance, and there is a path of utter improbability.   The path of utter improbability contains great treasure and great rewards but is a hard and dangerous journey.  The path of least resistance is cool, meandering, easy and breezy but the pay is terrible.

What about you?  Would you rather take massive risks for a possible quick payout?  Would you rather pay for perfection?  Or take the time and do it yourself?  Whichever you choose, the Dude abides.