I like foursquare. I like the opportunity it gives business’ to form direct connections with consumers. I like that it’s free and I like that any business, big or small, can take advantage of the feature set.

Which brings me to the mayor feature, and some advice I have (as an active foursquare user) to entrepreneurs who would give their mayor something just for achieving mayorship, or mayorhood (mayoral status? You get the idea).

To become the mayor of any location on foursquare, you need to have the most check-ins in a 60 day period. To the casual observer, that would suggest that you need to actually go to a place more times than anyone else, right?

Actually, I’ve discovered that checking in requires only (limited) proximity. Basically, if I go one place downtown, I can check into no less than 10 different places. Even in my home, I live close enough to the old quarter of my city to check into 5 or 6 places without putting my shoes on.

I discovered this recently, after I noticed that one person was popping up as the mayor of, well, every place I went to. Either this person was spending their entire day visiting the restaurants and shops downtown, or they were *gasp* cheating!

Yep. The mayor of everywhere had figured out a loophole. Sit in one location, check-in anywhere and everywhere you can.  If businesses offer mayoral specials, cash in.

The lesson to business is that a check-in doesn’t equal a sale, so make sure that any offers you offer up along with frequent check-ins are tied into an actual visit to your location.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 19, 2011 at 10:00 am, filed under Mobile Marketing, Social Media and tagged foursquare, thursday. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’ll just jump right into it. I think more restaurants need active web presences. That means online menus, daily specials posted via Facebook and professionally photographed food.

I know most restaurants don’t have time. Thankfully, I do. This is the Cafe Elements theme from Press75.

Built for the WordPress CMS, Cafe Elements features flexible layout options, pre-formatted fields for contact information, menus and daily specials. As with most WordPress blogs, in about 3-4 days you could be up and running with a stylish site to feature your foods.

The Cafe Elements theme is $75 from Press75 or *free if you get it from Harbour City SEO. Check out the live demo for Cafe Elements here or email me at this link and type “I want to switch to WordPress!” in the subject line.

*You need WordPress to use the theme. That means you need a domain and hosting. You also need a logo. Pictures, content. None of that stuff is free. Still, the theme is $75, so it’s a pretty good deal.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 18, 2011 at 10:00 am, filed under Content Marketing and tagged Press75, restaurant, WordPress. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Since the early days of search, categorization of data on the web has been done primarily by marketers. The obvious problem is that marketers don’t know how to (or don’t want to) properly categorize anything, so documents are constantly mislabeled. Imagine a bookstore where all the jackets were switched around. Now imagine that there are one billion books with incorrect labels. It’s chaos. And nobody is there to tell us how to look beneath the jacket to find the content we want and need.

In the future, that ought to be the job of the librarian. The obvious problem with that is that most librarians are stuck in libraries, pushing books around. The major search engines haven’t created enough appropriate demand to get them away from their desks and involved in organizing the index.

Seth Godin nailed it in his post: The future of the library

We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage is going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

I agree completely. I see the role of the librarian as an internet guide, instructing us how to find information online quickly and efficiently. On the search index and content creation side, the librarian is an invaluable asset in creating meaningful information architectures.

But we’re not there, so we have to teach ourselves how to root for information truffles deep underneath the dirt of the search indexes. As the index grows and the layers become more complex, information will be harder to find – so those who can do it quickly are going to have a clear advantage over everyone else.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 17, 2011 at 5:27 pm, filed under Marketing and tagged librarians, trackback tuesday. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Our tendency with marketing is to push. Broadcast to everyone. Those who are interested are bound to be among them. Pull based advertising is more passive. It speaks to a smaller audience, or several smaller audiences.

To push is to treat everyone as a potential buyer. When you market (push) to everyone, everyone that doesn’t buy is considered a lost customer. The numbers change significantly when you accept that not all online activity should result in a sale. To pull is to create the best opportunity for conversion by showing your purchasables to people specifically looking to buy.

To start a pull based strategy, you have to put yourself in the visitor’s shoes. Once there, say this out loud.

“I want to…”

Then finish the statement with what you think the visitor wants (here’s a hint, not everyone will answer with “buy a widget”). If it helps, gather friends of different demographic persuasions together in informal focus groups to see how different people interact with your content. You might be surprised at the intelligence you come up with.

Customers that seek you out because they value your content are more likely to remain loyal than customers who came in because yours was the deal of the day.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 16, 2011 at 2:33 pm, filed under Content Marketing, Marketing and tagged broadcasting, Monday Marketing Message, pull advertising, push advertising. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

What could be better than babies smashing cake?  Why, a live feed of babies smashing cake of course!

My friends over at Greg Howard Photography run a semi-regular photo shoot called “smash the cake” (it’s exactly what you’d think).  During a recent conversation, we remarked that it would be great if we could (somehow) do a live feed.

Well, it’s easier than you’d think.  Ustream + a little ingenuity and luck, and we’ve got a live broadcast that we’re showing on multiple websites and Greg’s Facebook page.

The show starts on Sunday, May 15th at 9:00 am.  Visit Greg on Facebook (don’t forget to like the page) or Harbour City SEO on twitter for the password to watch the live feed.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm, filed under Social Media. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

What I like isn’t what you like.  Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t.

Twitter is about recommendations, right?  I want to take that a step further and say Twitter is about solicited recommendations.

If I ask for suggestions on people to follow, then do tell – but don’t wait til Friday to tell me as I probably won’t wait until Friday to ask.  Plus, I know that my competitors are watching, so I’m not likely to be talking about anything that will reveal what I’m planning in the long term.

Trying to help others build their network is a good intention, but #FF isn’t an organic process. I would rather have 100 followers that followed me because they like my writing and were inspired to act on my tweets than 1000 that just followed me in the hopes of increasing their reach. Wouldn’t you?

Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 13, 2011 at 9:58 am, filed under Social Media. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’ve been following threads of content marketing and location based services lately, especially QR Codes and location based services.  It’s all neat, and I think moving towards larger trends in marketing.

Among the banter about QR Codes, there’s a loud voice in the background shouting.  “QR Codes don’t work!” they say. “There’s not enough engagement from business’ using them to capture the attention of the viewer.  Ditto with location based services.”

The lesson here is that companies, large and small, are failing at engagement.  So it shouldn’t be said that the new technology doesn’t work, it should be said that it isn’t being worked properly.

But this isn’t a post about how to engage an audience with QR Codes, because I don’t have the answers yet.  Like anything new, the early days of innovation are often wrought with the excessive failures of a few pioneers, present company included.

We’re talking about content.  Content is king, and the more content you create, the better off you’ll be.  Right?

In my time as an SEO professional, I’ve watched a lot of business’ sell content development as a major part of their SEO strategy.  I’ve advocated it myself.  But there have been some recent shakedowns in the SEO industry that lead me to believe a major shift is needed in the way SEO companies sell their services and that those who don’t adjust will have a tough time creating new sales for their clients.

This is what I’ve seen recently that leads me to think the times they are a changin’

• Google’s panda/farmer update slaps down providers of syndicated content
  Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change? (via Search Engine Land)

• Location based services, QR codes and other layered web services may be failing.
  Read this post, this post and this post for some historical context, and follow it up with this post – all posts on Read Write Web found via this tweet from Don Power.

While it’s only two articles, there’s other supporting content I’ve read that makes me think that there’s been a fundamental shift in how we should develop and market content.

So is content king?

The answer, in my opinion, is no, but content marketing is. You should develop content, yes, but as with anything done “for search engines” (make no mistake, most SEO still is), they’ll eventually catch on to any tactics and devalue them, resulting in what amounts to starting over.  So at the core of content marketing, you should be thinking about who is reading it and what they expect.  If the trail doesn’t lead to a follower or a conversion, then think about why you’re creating the content in the first place and restrategize.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 20, 2011 at 11:29 am, filed under Content Marketing. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

You don’t need to pay for a thing these days.  Don’t believe me? Let me give you an example of a marketing plan that can be created using entirely free services.

Need a website?  Great, create one using Google sites.  Add a blog using Google’s blogger platform, or a free WordPress site. Total spent so far?  $0.  Let’s keep going.

People need to find you, so add your business to Google maps via places.  Create a Facebook page and Twitter feed to advertise.  These services are all still free, so your total spend is still $0.  Good news, especially for a small startup on a tight marketing budget.

To promote your business you need to give people a reason to choose you over your competitor.  Foursquare and Groupon offer some unique opportunities as do QR Codes.  All can be set up for free, so you still shouldn’t have spent a dime on all of this marketing.

Send your clients a newsletter for free with Mailchimp (under a certain number of sends).  For a startup, again – free services are invaluable.

The above are all off the top of my head.  So far, you’ve spent nothing and have what equates to a full-fledged marketing campaign.

So where’s the problem?

There’s isn’t one. For businesses in the initial startup phase (3-6 months), there’s little reason to pay for much more than some initial branding and design.  Use as much free stuff as you can for as long as you can get away with it.

Invaluable as freebies are, it’s worth mentioning the following words of caution.

When you use a third party service, you leave all of your content in the hands of third parties that can change their terms at any time, for any reason.  Even in the instance of many paid apps, you sign all of your rights away as soon as you click the little box that says “I agree to the terms of service” (and admit it, you probably never read them).

Twitter can go down (and does).  Facebook and Google could start charging for business use, change their terms or do away with the services altogether. Those services could drop out of search results if Google updates its algorithm to exclude certain sites or platforms.

The solution is to own your own content.  Own your marketing.  As soon as you can, take ownership of your website by purchasing a domain and building a basic website.  Optimize it for your business name and make sure when people search for you, your website shows up first.

I’m not suggesting that you don’t use free tools.  Use as many as you can for as long as they’re free, but make sure that the one person with total control over your business’ web presence is you – not a third party – because, well, sometimes the landlord is a real dick.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 18, 2011 at 5:32 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization, Social Media. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’m trying to organize my content more effectively.  By that, I mean that I want to have things positioned in such a way that everybody sees the content that was created with their needs in mind, regardless of who they are.

Not that there’s content people shouldn’t see, but each person that visits any of my web personalities is drawn in because they have a specific goal in mind, and my current goals are to connect them with that content as quickly as possible.

My first step is defining the things I do and creating a taxonomy of sorts, and nothing says “fun”  like a venn diagram.  I’m also testing out some new fonts (A display gothic, and Museo slab) that I may use in some new marketing as my headings and body text respectively.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 14, 2011 at 3:49 pm, filed under Content Marketing, Copywriting, Link Building, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Raise your hands if you have a website.

I see a sea of hands in the air.  That’s good.  I think we’re long past the time where it’s a question of whether one should have a website or not.

Now, raise your hands if you have an SEO strategy for your website.

It seems most of you do.  That’s good too.  Like having a website, having some sort of strategy to gain positioning in search results is as important as having a website.  In fact, I would say that those of you with no SEO strategy at all may as not have a website.  Like a tree falling in the forest with nobody there to see it, a website without SEO is a storefront in the middle of the Sahara without a sign.

That’s not to say you should spend a fortune on SEO, but you should be doing something – even if it’s a few links from friends and a basic keyword strategy.  That still counts.

Alright.  Now, raise your hands if you have a contextual content strategy.

Anybody?

If you don’t, well, that may be fine.  But it might not be fine.  It might be that your content is getting streamed out willy nilly, being read by the wrong people in the wrong places.

Contextual content marketing is the art, or science, of positioning your streams of content in ways that target the people specifically intended to read them.  It’s exciting, more so now than ever before, because there are so many effective new ways to position content.

The benefits for search engine rankings and new business are primarily twofold.

1) When the right content is read by the right people, there is a better opportunity to experience something actionable.  The best content read by the wrong people will result in nothing actionable happening.

2) Contextually relevant content with a lot of action may be seen as more relevant.  In short, the right people reading and interacting with the right content increase the overall relevance (read: authority) of that content, so link backs will be worth more.

I’m guessing at the above, but I have a pending experiment that should prove my theories – one way or the other

Is building a strategy easy?  No, certainly not.  I’ve yet to do a proper one for myself.  But now that I’ve got the technical components of SEO under control – this is definitely my next step.  How about you?  Comment below and let me know if you have a contextual content strategy, or if you’re interested in talking about one.

Author: Sean Enns, posted on April 13, 2011 at 1:40 pm, filed under Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.