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.

As the marketing arm of the Extreme Website Makeover project, it’s my responsibility to arrange and organize the marketing and SEO for Robbin’s Wreaths.

Since I started looking at Magento last year, I’ve been extremely impressed with it as an eCommerce solution; I really thought it would be a great tool for Robbin’s Wreaths.  The eCommerce framework is sound and there seemed to be a lot of extensions and add ons for it.

I say ‘seemed’ because I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at it; probably an hour all told.  Knowing the the design for Robbin’s is on it’s way, I decided to have a look at the SEO options for Magento.  Thankfully, the kind folks at Hosting Nation allowed me to use their Magento demo to experiment with the options available.

I have to give a tip of the hat to Yoast, who did this amazing article on SEO for Magento.  If you’re a novice, the steps might be a little daunting.  I’m a salty old SEO dog though.  I’ve done SEO for Joomla and Virtuemart.  I’ve done SEO for WordPress and other custom PHP sites, even coordinated on a strategy for a giant .asp eCommerce site.

This is the first time I’ve ever done SEO for Magento, or used the system at all. I’m going into it virtually blind, counting only on Yoast’s tutorial to guide my way.

Step one: Configuration

This part is simple.  Once logged into the admin area of Magento, I follow Yoast’s steps to set global configuration and SEO settings.  Next, he recommends canonicalizing your domain – basically redirecting the WWW to non-WWW version (or vise versa).  No problem there, I can just refer to my URL Canonicalization Script and copy the rules over to a new file.   I continue with the tutorial and complete the configuration by installing the two extensions Yoast provides for meta management.  The whole process has been a breeze up to this point, much less complex than installations I’ve done with other content management systems.

Step two: Optimization

Easy.  Navigate through the upper menu to the page, category or product you want to add keywords for.  Open the meta information screen for the project and add the keywords you want.  Save, and your titles are added.

Now, there are a lot more steps to optimizing your site laid out in Yoast’s post and I haven’t finished about 90% of them.  I did accomplish what I set out to do, check my options for Magento SEO and make sure I had it down before tackling Robbin’s Wreaths.  No problem, within 20 minutes I had my first title entered into the system.  The most amazing part is that I’ve never used the system before. Now that I’ve started, I’m really looking forward to more.  Thanks to Yoast, and Magento, this is going to be a pleasure.

The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate and disagree.

It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner.  My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.

In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee.  The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again.  One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.

It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different.  Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.

Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries.  One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”.  My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.

I’ve been having an unrequited love affair with semicolons for some time now. Oh, if you look through my posts you won’t be likely to find any; I haven’t been comfortable that I’m using them correctly when I write.  That is, until now.  Inspired by a 2009 post on Daggle titled conjunction complex sentence misfunction that Danny Sullivan twote this afternoon and a recent comic by The Oatmeal titled: How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on earth, I’ve decided to bring semicolons into my life more.

5 ways I’m bringing the semicolon into my life.

• I will use “and”, “but” and other conjunctions less; I will confidently use commas and semicolons instead.
• I will make more winkies in chat programs; I will discover other emoticons that require semicolons.

Ok, that’s only two.  I’m sure I can come up with three more.  Follow me on Twitter to see what they are!

You may be wondering what this has to do with link building. Stay tuned, I’m making my next post about it.

If you haven’t heard, I’m involved in the Extreme Website Makeover project.  Extreme Website Makeover is a joint project with Hosting Nation, Oceanside Web TV, Fusion Creative, Square Eyes Media, and Harbour City SEO.

We’re currently working with Robbin’s Wreaths of Parksville and providing them with a FREE state of the art e-commerce system for their small wreath manufacturing business.  The site will include a custom design built on the Magento framework, hosting and a domain, graphic design, development, programming, internet marketing and search engine optimization.  As we work to complete their new site, we’re taking applications for new contenders.

If you have an engaging story to tell about your company and the challenges you have faced to get onto the web, we’d love to hear about it.  You never know, you could be selected to receive a custom website valued over $5000, absolutely free!

How do you apply?  Well, drop me a line through my contact form or visit extreme website makeover to get the complete application.

Incidentally, items like this are a great way to promote your business.  Getting involved with community driven projects and coordinating with other agencies work wonders for building your online presence.

Above: Verdana, Below: Georgia - which speaks to you?

Type speaks.  The typefaces you use on your website will change how users perceive and interpret information.  The last few years have shown some major advances in the ways we are able to use different fonts on our websites.  You can use the @font face syntax in your CSS files to load a font from a remote server (A List Apart has a great article), and companies like FontSquirrel go so far as to provide @font face kits, styles just need to be copied and pasted.

You can also try Cufón; Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.  It’s meant to act as a simple alternative to sIFR, which is known to be complicated to use and configure.

But we’re not quite there.  Fonts are very heavily licensed, and though there are free fonts available for use – chances are that you’ll end up using one of the 8 core web fonts rather than trying to find a free font that’s easily readable.  Those core fonts are all owned and licensed by the Microsoft Foundry, which is why you’ll find them in your version of MS office. They are made of up of three serif fonts (fonts with ‘feet’) and five sans-serif (no feet).

Serif fonts:  Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier

Serif fonts are often claimed to be more easily readable.  In my mind they project a certain inherent seriousness and trustworthiness, like the voice of a newscaster.  That’s not to say they do for everyone, there’s no empirical evidence that serifs are easier to read than sans-serif and in fact, sans-serif fonts weren’t widely adopted until the 20th century. Serif fonts are most closely associated with news and information; I like Times New Roman for headlines and Georgia for text in this case.

Sans-serif fonts: Arial, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans, Impact, Verdana.

Forget Comic Sans or Impact for general text, neither are easily readable at small resolutions though I find Impact works well for headlines.  For text, you’ll be choosing between Verdana and Arial most likely as Trebuchet MS can look nice, but can be tricky when users don’t have that font installed.  Given the choice, I would choose Verdana.  Created in 1996 for Microsoft, it’s one of the most commonly used and readable fonts out there – like the Helvetica of the web.

Don’t forget the spacing.

Whichever you choose, make sure you pay close attention to the spacing: that’s line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing.  Too close together and the words become hard to read.  Too far apart and you may have “rivers” running through your text.

For now, our choices are still limited.

While the foundries and the browser companies hash out issues of licensing more fonts for standard use on webpages, choices to users without a lot of CSS experience are still limited.  Just try to remember that it’s not about what you like, the goal of type is to make a thing easy and enjoyable to read.  Until next time!

Applied Theory is a web comic about axioms, models, theories, maxims, principles, laws and postulates.  This is the first issue.  Click on the comic for a larger version.  Also, go ahead and download it, share it, hot link to it, repost it or whatever – just leave the copyright intact.

The first of Watzlawick’s five axioms of communication is “One cannot not communicate”.  Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.

On the web, you are your website.  Your website (you) communicates with visitors, who in turn try and communicate with it (you again).  As in real life, sometimes there are breakdowns in communication, and the message doesn’t come across clearly.  Here are some things to watch for…

Too much wewe talk.  Not talk of small or diminutive things, or anything inappropriate – it’s talk about you.  Your company.  What you have done.  Why you’re great.  Why I, if I was smart, would buy from you.

This type of copy is a killer.  People respond more effectively to copy that talks about them, talks to them, solves their problem.  Copy that lacks a strong customer focus will lose visitors quickly.  If you mention your customers (you, your, yours) at least 2 times more than you mention yourself (we, I, company name), you’ll be doing well.  Don’t hurt yourself by checking manually though, use the We We Calculator from Future Now.  I scored 65% customer focused (alright, enough about me).  I challenge all of you to do better!

Too much jargon and meaningless corporate-speak.

Yes, we all get it. Your company is poised on the edge of several strong vertical markets, and ready to leverage new media and web 2.0 technologies to blow away existing old world dynamics and surge forward with new synergies and exciting, action driven initiatives.

Except nobody (except for looney tunes executives who don’t know what they actually want) really talks that way, and nobody likes being talked to that way.  You would be better off to say “We like all the new technology out there and are looking forward to incorporating platforms like Twitter and Facebook and using audio and video on the web to allow us to communicate with our visitors better.”

Fight the Bull is an extension for MS Office (works in Open Office as well) that analyzes your content for heavy jargon and meaningless speech.

Too many typefaces.  There can be only one.

I’ve been reading about type lately, two good books – one is called “Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works”.  The other is called “Designing with Type”.  I like fonts and typefaces, both are important to communication as some typefaces convey trust while other can convey doubt.  Without getting into it too deeply (because I will later), conventional wisdom tells us that we should use no more than three typefaces at a time.  One typeface for the main headline; one for the copy; one for sub headings.

The colours, ooooooh the colours.

Your main font should be one colour, something close to black or dark gray.  Your background should be slightly off white.  Line spacing and letter spacing should make your copy easy to read.  If you must use colours in your fonts, or on your website, use them sparingly.  It’s not a circus tent, after all, it’s your business and unless your business supplies flashing coloured lights and tie dyed clothing, you should probably keep it toned down.

If you can’t write, hire someone who can.

Some people are great writers.  Some people write by smashing their fingers on the keyboard in rapid succession.  At least, that’s what it seems like when I read some of the copy out there.  I’m always amazed by the care and attention people pay to the graphic properties of a website and to what lengths they’ll go to get something ‘perfect’ and how little they seem to care about their copy. Don’t spend $4000 on a website and follow it up with amateur hour copy.  A great writer will work with you to craft your site’s copy, perfect a tone of voice and attitude and, most importantly, make sure grammar and spelling are consistent and correct.

Coming soon = Leaving now

If you have a page that says “coming soon, please check back later for updates”, that tells me one of a couple of things.  First, that you wanted this great website and maybe underestimated the time an effort it takes to write copy.  If the “coming soon” persists, I’m going to assume that you no longer care about your website.  If that’s the case, why should I or anybody else care?

These leaps in logic may be fallacious, but perception is everything.  If you can’t finish them, hire someone to. If you can’t do that, unpublish them.  If you don’t want to do that, believing that the “content helps for search engine rankings”, I’ll be blunt and say, all you’re doing is showing people what looks like a strip mall with half the stores empty.  Empty pages, optimized or not, aren’t going to help you.

Anything else?

Plenty, stay tuned during communication week at Harbour City SEO for more communication tips and tools.  Ciao for now!