Internet Marketing Blog

Technology Use & Media Consumption Presentation

I've been doing a lot of presentations lately; here's the most recent. I believe that in order to most efficiently and effectively communicate online, we need to first understand the context within which we are trying to communicate. The success of communicating online depends in a large degree to the extent to which we understand the technology and devices people use to consume media, be it a newspaper or a phone or an Xbox 360 console or an iPod, and how people use those technologies.

Another important aspect to online communication is trying to anticipate trends in order to get ahead of innovation, which can profoundly change the online environment practically overnight.  Our ability to anticipate such changes depends to a large degree on our understanding of history and historical forces. Thus, my presentation begins with an overview of the history of communication:

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Conversational Marketing Presentation

For The Minnesota Council Of Nonprofits Technology Conference - 3/27/08

This is the presentation my Tunheim Partners colleague Pat Lilja and I gave to the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits annual technology conference this year:

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Minnesota Council Of Nonprofits Technology & Communications Conference

I've been presenting at the Minnesota Council Of Nonprofits' annual technology and communications conference for the past two years and I will again this year. This year the conference takes place in Minneapolis on Thursday.

It is an all day event and a big production; I've always been impressed with the scope and quality of the conferences. This year, the conference is called Message+Medium+Message and it is largely devoted to social media. There is clearly a demand for information on the topic because the Council had a record number of registrants this year and the event sold out.

The conferences are so good because the Council consistently gets such talented people to participate. Perusing the list of presenters this year, I'm struck by the quality of the people who will speak. Within the social media and Internet technology sphere, here are some of the people who will share their knowledge and expertise:

Aaron Landry will be talking about Web 2.0 basics. Aaron is a prolific blogger. If you pay any attention to the Minnesota blogosphere, you can't help but run across his content. It's clear, too, that he's immersed in social media, from his blog to Twitter to Flickr, he's integrated online communication into his daily life.

Beth Kanter will talk about Nonprofits in the Age of Social Media and she'll conduct a social media game. I've been following Beth's Blog about social media and nonprofits for some time now and I'm continually impressed with her ideas there. She's also a great resource for discovering new and useful social media sites.

The citizen journalism site Twin Cities Daily Planet is represented by long-time Strib veteran Jeremy Iggers and editor Mary Turk. They'll talk about Media Relations in the Age of New Media.

Peter Fleck's wonderfully titled session, Why I Hate Facebook, will address how nonprofits can use social networking sites and, of course, why he hates Facebook. Peter blogs at his PF HYPER Blog. Peter will also talk about perhaps the most important technology of all for social media, RSS, the glue that holds the social net all together.

There are ton more talented people presenting: Check out the sessions and bios pages.

This year I'll be presenting with my Tunheim Partners colleague, Pat Lilja. Our session is called Conversational Marketing: New Media Communication Strategy. Pat and I will discuss how to engage in the conversations taking place on the popular social media sites.

If you're attending the conference, track me down and say hi. If you can't make it, I'll probably Tweet from there, so you can follow my Twitter account, if you like. I'll also be putting resources from our session online and I'll let you know when it's live.

Microblogging In Plain English

I am a huge fan of the microblogging service Twitter (which, by the way, explains why I was so upset when my estrategy Twitter account just up and stopped working and Twitter ignored my pleas for help. I'm still fairly bitter about it, but, you know, sometimes you just gotta move on. I have another Twitter account, so if you want to follow my Tweets, go to twitter.com/derickson.). I am also a huge fan of plain English. Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows, therefore, that I'm also a huge fan of Common Craft's In Plain English series of videos. Their latest is about--tah dahhhh!--Twitter. Enjoy:

See also:

 
• Social Networking In Plain English
• Social Bookmarking In Plain English
• Wikis In Plain English
• RSS In Plain English
• GoogleDocs In Plain English

Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

Corporate Blogging - The Team Approach

Though most people understand the concept, corporate blogging is still a relatively novel concept that encounters a significant amount of reluctance to employ as a marketing tactic. Often, one of those barriers is a perceived lack of resources. Who will be the blogger? How much time will it take?

Team blogging is often the answer.

Last November, the Marketing Voices podcast interviewed Southwest Airlines' PR Manager Paula Berg about their team approach:

• Southwest Airlines Blog

New Word Of Mouth Networks - Teens Talk Online

I haven't fully digested the new Pew Internet & American Life Teens & Social Media report, but the summary makes clear that teens' online behavior is creating new networks that will require online word of mouth marketing to be an increasingly crucial tactic within overall Internet marketing strategies.

The Pew study shows that they are prolific online content creators:

• Of the 93% that are online, 64% of them have created content online.
• 39% of online teens share their creations online.
• 33% create or work on others' blogs or web sites, be it for friends, groups they belong to, or classroom assignments.
• 28% have created their own blog.
• 27% have a personal web site.
• 26% create mashups.
• 55% have created a social networking profile at sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• 47% have uploaded photos.
• 14% have posted video online.

Teens share their online content and that sharing builds the foundation of their word of mouth networks because that content is a virtual conversation starter. The Pew study found:

• 89% of teens who upload photos say that people post comments about those photos at least sometimes.
• 72% of video posters say those videos elicit comments at least sometimes.
• 76% of teens who use social networks say they leave comments on other people's blog posts.

It seems clear that teen marketing for the short term, and, as these kids grow up, overall Internet marketing for the long term, will depend upon tapping into these online word of mouth networks.

Search Engine Branding

The description text that accompanies the links within search engine results are often overlooked for their persuasion and branding potential.

The purpose of that text, first and foremost, must be to persuade the searcher to click on your link. That requires creative, search optimized copy that is informed by the search phrase that you are targeting.

But people don't always click. When people search, they are exposed to 10 to 20 messages that are associated with the links on the results page. Even if people don't click on your link, they can still be exposed to your message through the link text and the description text below the link. This is search engine branding.

The pages of your site should be optimized to produce a "micro message" through these search results that, even if the searcher doesn't click, helps to brand your organization.

The following is an example of a branding problem I had with e-strategy.com.

Taking Control Of Your Meta Description Text

As is often the case, your own work usually gets pushed down your list of priorities "until you have time."

Such was the case with the search engine listings for e-strategy.com. The rankings for the site were fine, but the search engine branding of the site's rankings were not being displayed as I wanted them.

The problem was in the Yahoo! rankings for the site, specifically for the snippet text beneath the link of my listings. Search engines will usually gather text on a given web page to be used in the text snippet below the link for their search engine results pages. But if your site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory or the Open Source Directory Project, search engines may use text from the description of the site in the directory.

That is precisely what was happening with e-strategy. com. Unfortunately, the text I provided for the description of the site when I first submitted it to the Yahoo! Directory has long since become outdated.  This is what the listing looked like with snippet text drawn from the Yahoo! Directory (Click on the graphic to see a larger version):

I didn't want the text to say "catering to the small business and nonprofit markets" anymore, so I needed to change this. If I cared enough, I'd pay the $300 and resubmit the site to Yahoo with an updated description but I just don't think the costs justifies the little traffic I'd likely get from directory listings.  Fortunately, there's a less expensive way to address this.

The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN all support the NOODP robots meta tag that tells search engines not to use description text from the Open Directory Project. The code is to be placed within the <HEAD></HEAD> tag set of your page: <meta name="robots" content="noodp" />.

Unfortunately, only Yahoo! supports the NOYDIR robots meta tag that tells search engines not to use the description text from the Yahoo! Directory: <meta name="robots" content="noydir" />. Fortunately, my only problem is with Yahoo! anyway, so that suits me just fine. Here's what my listings look like after implementing these tags (Click on the graphic to see a larger version):

You'll see from the third listing, that the snippet text now reads "e-strategy.com is a search engine and Internet marketing firm based in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota."

That's more like it.

And because search engines first look to the Meta Description tag for snippet text, you have far more control over how that text looks by prohibiting directory descriptions.

TypePad's Updated Handheld Publishing Application

It's been a while since I've posted anything from my handheld using TypePad's mobile app because the last time I tried, everything was messed up, so I just didn't bother.

But I just downloaded and installed the latest version, so it's time to try it out again.

I'm posting from my T-Mobile MDA, otherwise known as the HTC Wizard--really, why couldn't someone come up with a decent name for this thing?!?

The phone is running Windows Mobile Pocket PC and I've got that slide-out thumbboard, so it's pretty easy to type.

The TypePad app gives you just enough functionality to do a quick and dirty post without any frills.

You cannot, for example, assign multiple categories to your post. There is no rich text editor, so there is no quick formatting but I suppose you could wrap such HTML tags as bold and italic around yor text I can't because my keyboard has no angle bracket characters

There is also no option for applying a meta description or keywords or Technorati tags to a post.

One really nice feature, though, is the ability to browse the photos on your phone and include one in your post. This is an exciting photo of my desk at work.

That makes it a perfect app for mobile photo blogging.

Even so, though, I like to keep my photos in my Flickr accout, so it'd be nice to have some integration there.

If this post works, I just may start moblogging more!

UPDATED 11/17/07: Because I'm particular about these kinds of things, I prettyfied this post with the links and keywords TypePad Mobile doesn't allow me to include.

The Case For Video Biographies For Business

A colleague sent me a blog post (YouTube At Work: Why Your Employees Should Be On There) recently that discussed the virtues of using online video for business. It's a topic I think about a great deal because video marketing is a component of Internet marketing that is growing ever more important.

But because the advantages of video marketing are so vast and varied, the overall topic is too big to tackle in one blog post. I will, therefore, break the topic down into its components and write a series of posts on various aspects of video marketing.

Today I'll address a topic I've been tossing around for some time: Video Biographies for Business.

Staff Biography Web Pages

Many company web sites include a staff section that include an individual page for each employee featuring their written biography, a photograph of the employee, and such essentials as their title and contact information.

Why not add a short video interview of that employee to their bio page?

The Benefits Of Video Biographies For Business

The benefits of video biographies are many.

People are familiar and at ease with the medium. Americans have been watching television for 60 some years. And, as the extraordinary popularity of YouTube demonstrates, people love to watch video online and increasingly are coming to expect it.

Video biographies are easy to use. It is a lot easier to watch a video than it is to read. I'm not suggesting that video should replace written biographies, but why not make it easier on your site's visitors by offering them the option to watch a bio instead?

People are increasingly distrustful of faceless organizations. Video biographies can help a great deal in overcoming that obstacle to gaining people's trust. Trust, after all, is the foundation of any business transaction. Video biographies will help humanize organizations by focusing on the people that make up the organization rather than the faceless entity itself.

In Naked Conversations, authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel credit the Channel 9 video blog with helping to humanize the monolithic Microsoft corporation. Bill Gates has been one of the most vilified chief executives ever. This video interview with the head of Microsoft for Channel 9 shows he's human who likes the 24 television program and maybe even a little boring when he talks tech. But it's hard to consider him evil after watching the video:

There is nothing like building trust than seeing someone eye-to-eye, even if it is through video. Video biographies showcase the humans in an organization, and people are much more likely to trust other people than they are an organization.

Video can help demonstrate the passion, expertise, or competence of your staff. Humans' presence and demeanor cannot be communicated through text. A person's tone of voice and phrasing can convey emotional triggers that are lost in print. When people love what they do and are confident in their abilities, those qualities come through loud and clear when they talk about their jobs. Video can demonstrate that better than any other medium.

Video biographies can familiarize your staff with strangers and provide an icebreaker. Most people will look for a biography or other information about strangers they are about to meet with in a business setting. Video biographies can help strangers not just recognize one another but the content of the video biographies can serve as a conversational icebreaker.

Video biographies for conferences, events, or speaking engagements. Many organizations offer select employees to serve as speakers or as experts or representatives at conferences and business events. Such events traditionally include a list of participants and short biographies of those people. More often than not, these bios are posted online. Providing embeddable video biographies is a great promotional tactic that will definitely make your biography stand out.

Video biographies can help strengthen media relations. Journalists are trained to be professional skeptics, so they are more inclined than most to distrust organizational messages.  Video biographies for organizational spokespeople put a personality to what is often just a voice over the phone for journalists. Just as for anyone visiting your web site, video biographies can help to humanize your organization to reporters and help build trust with them.

Finally, video biographies can be marketed off site. In addition to featuring video biographies on your organization's web site, video biographies can be marketed off site at video sharing sites, as well.

The Obstacles To Implementing Video Biographies

Asking your employees to be interviewed for video biographies may be a tough nut to crack.

Plenty of people are uncomfortable in front of a video camera. Some people may feel uncomfortable about having a video of themselves online. These are legitimate concerns and should obviously be honored. Video biographies should be voluntary.

Not everyone in the organization need have a video biography. Certainly, the top leadership of an organization should have video biographies, especially if they want to convince lower level employees to have their own. Video biographies are most important for the people who are often in contact with others outside the organization.

For the camera shy, these people need not even appear in the video if they don't want to. They could be interviewed off camera and appropriate visuals could be edited in over the course of the video.

How Should Video Biographies Be Done?

Though the style of video biographies will depend upon the nature of the organization, here are some thoughts on how video biographies might be implemented.

The interview format will probably be the easiest and most natural format for your employees to execute.  Include job-related questions (what do you do? what is the favorite thing about your job? etc.) but also include some personal questions that will help viewers get to know the person rather than the employee.

More often than not, video biographies should be informal and conversational so as to reinforce that this is a person rather than a spokesperson or an employee.

Unless you're a slick production studio who wants to demonstrate your slick production capabilities, I think raw, even amateurish video helps to reinforce that personal and informal atmosphere.

Video biographies can also be as simple as the subject talking directly into the camera telling the viewer about themselves without the presence of an interviewer. This format might be more difficult to pull off because the subject may try and read from a script or memorize a script and therefore come off as less genuine.

Conversely, video biographies could be as sophisticated as a Ken Burns documentary complete with voice over and featuring a montage of images and video that is not necessarily about he subject directly but related to the subject's bio.

You can get as creative as you like with video biographies but always remember that their primary purpose is to build trust.

See Also:

• Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine, Blends Search Results

Meta Me: My Lifestream Through Google Analytics

Now that Google is increasingly owning everything online, they ought to start thinking about integrating their Google Analytics service into everything else they own not called AdWords.

In addition to analytics, the Google accounts and services I use include Webmaster Tools, Local Business Center, iGoogle, Alerts, Gmail, Talk, Docs, Notebook, Calendar, Maps, Maps for Mobile, Earth, Picasa, Groups, Page Creator, Reader, Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Blogger, FeedBurner, AdWords, AdSense, Checkout, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Video, YouTube, Desktop, Mobile Search, GOOG-411, Google SMS, Web History, Trends, Suggest, Sets, and Toolbar.

I'd like to get statistics for all of these products and services to analyze how and how often I use them. I admit, it would be a huge step for a lot of people to surrender and personally identify all that data about themselves and entrust it to a megacorporation.

Services such as Tumblr and the most recent Google acquisition, Jaiku, allow account holders to plug in the RSS feeds from all of their various online accounts, from your blog to YouTube to digg to Flickr and Twitter and display the content you create in one "lifestream" to which friends (or strangers) can subscribe. The emergence of the notion of, and services catering to, lifestreaming suggest that the idea of sharing your entire electronic life is gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness.

Certainly, user statistics for all these services are being collected by the service itself, though that data is not necessarily personally identifiable. Why not allow people or organizations access to their own data?

The payoff could be huge for both the user and the organization. Say Google runs with my request and integrates Analytics into all of their products and opens up the user data to their users. The analytics of how you behave online could prove invaluable to those users in terms of finding ways to use their time or services more efficiently or in hundreds of other ways we have yet to fathom.

The payoff for Google is massive and obvious in that they would accrue a gold mine of user behavior data, the knowledge from which they could then apply to their existing and future products.

Further, with Google's foray into the productivity software business, the resultant integrated system could form the foundation for a largely automated time recording system to calculate time sheets in the background, saving businesses a lot of lost time and productivity.

And that could the mother of all cash cows.

Robotics - The New Internet Marketing Platform?

To date, serious, practical robotics have been the domain of industry and the military:

Ultra-cool stuff but it doesn't do much for me professionally, unless my target market is infantrymen or reconnaissance units.

And until recently, consumer robots have been mainly clever, cute, and expensive toys:

Now companies like iRobot Corporation are selling affordable, practical domestic robots to the consumer market. iRobot sells products that sweep, vacuum,  or wash your floor; they sell robots that clean your pool or gutter.

But it is their new product that has piqued my interest beyond my normal fascination with robots. For less than $500, consumers will be able to buy the iRobot ConnectR, a virtual presence bot that essentially attaches a two-way video to a mobile robot and slaps on a broadband wireless connection so you can visit virtually:

If such products take off, and I'm confident they will because think the ability to use robotics for social purposes has great consumer appeal, then consumer robotics deserves scrutiny as an online marketing platform.

The larger social question is whether such products, by taking over our annoying daily chores, will produce our long-awaited domestic utopia or the sci-fi dystopia we all know and love:

Or perhaps our humanoid companions will simply prove insufferable:

Google Docs Explained In (Ripped Off) Plain English

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Google must really like Common Craft's Lee LeFever  because they've totally ripped off his "In Plain English" gig.

I've posted LeFever's wonderful explanatory videos before and I will again, but I came across this derivative video produced by Google that explains Google Docs, which recently added presentations to the office suite of online word processor and spreadsheets that the service offers.

NOTE: I was wrong! Read the comments below and this correction post that explains that Google hired Common Craft to produce this video:

See also:

• Social Networking Explained In Plain English
• What Are Wikis?
• What Is RSS?
• Communications 2.0 - Marketing With Google Docs

Emoticons - An Essential Online Communication Tool :-)

Emoticons
Originally uploaded by d.rex

The humble smilely face :-) emoticon [and it's opposite: :-( ] turn 25 years old today.

The text symbol for happiness,  approval, and humor was invented by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman twenty five years ago today as a tool to avoid misunderstanding of text-based online communication within emails and online forums by clarifying that the writer intended the preceding text to be a joke or ironic.

The smiley face and frowning emoticon inspired many more emoticons, which have now become standard practice for clarifying online text-based messages used in emails, online forums, chat rooms and instant messaging, and text messaging.

Though the use of them might seem cute, silly, or juvenile at times, as anyone who has had an email disasterously misunderstood can testify, emoticons are an essential tool for clear communication. Though the emoticon was invented for use in old school email and obsolete Usenet newsgroups, they will not be fading away anytime soon in the multimedia age. They remain a central component of clear communication not just for email, chat rooms, and instant messaging, but also and increasingly within mobile communication mediums such as text messaging.

Do not think of emoticons as something just the kids use. They can certainly be a great device to use in marketing campaigns targeted at younger demographics, but properly and appropriately used, they can be an essential tool in delivering a crystal clear marketing message to any audience.

Emoticon Examples