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Archive for May, 2010

What The Hell Are Location Based Services?

Monday, May 31st, 2010

For many small and travel/tourism businesses it can be a daunting task to keep up with emerging technology and social media platforms.

Things are not going to be getting any easier. Cue location based social networks or location based services (LBS). While they are not necessarily new, they are gaining users quickly.

The ubiquity of GPS enabled phones and our seemingly insatiable desire to stay connected has fueled a boom in social networks that allow you to share your whereabouts with friends.

In a nutshell, you create your user account, connect your phone to your account, and when visiting a location (everything from gas stations to hotels) you check in by using a few simple hand gestures to post to your account. While checking in you then notify friends, or those nearby, of your whereabouts and what you may be doing, or what you think of where you are. You can also do a variety of other tasks, depending on the platform. You can earn points and badges, you can share photos, post reviews, collect items, participate in a scavenger hunt or even earn rewards from businesses.

Many businesses are already finding ways to leverage these services. Here are two you can get started with, including a quick tip for each.

Foursquare
Combine location based check-ins with game mechanics and you have Foursquare. Check-in, earn points, earn badges, share to-do lists. This service is growing very quickly. Last week it was reported that nearly 1 million check-ins occur every day.

Tip: Create a company account, and sign up as the manager of your business. You can create a virtual customer loyalty program with rewards for check-ins and frequency.

Yelp
A stalwart in the review networks, Yelp now allows users to “check-in”. This is a powerful combination, that I think will serve as a model for others. It combines location based check-in with reviews. Users can also upload photos.

Tip: Be sure you have claimed your business on Yelp. Build out your profile with as much information as possible and monitor your page. If you are fortunate to receive your “people love us on Yelp!” decal, display it prominently! Also, don’t be “one of those guys” and review your own business. It is petty, and you’ll end up with pretty bad karma.

I’m interested to find out if you’re using any location-based services, personally or for your businesses. If so, what’s your take?

Tags: getting started in social media, marketing strategy, online reputation management, Pat Strader
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

I Plagiarized This

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Not this post. This one.

It wasn’t intentional; I’ve given the author of these ideas, Kristina Halvorson, president of Brain Traffic, credit on this blog before. I wrote a review of her book, Content Strategy for the Web, on amazon. I’ve tweeted about it, commented on her blog, and even got to ask her a question at her SXSW session.

That doesn’t matter.

I remember seeing a tweet from @halvorson one time a while back that read something like (I’m paraphrasing): It’d be nice if I got credit for my ideas from the person who put them in their slide deck. Of course, she’s right. Take out “slide deck” and insert “Ben Curnett’s blog”.

Since her book came out, I’ve been initiating more and more ideas about content strategy into our proposals and work. A lot of those ideas have come directly from its pages. It’s been an incredibly helpful resource, and I’d recommend it to anyone that’s making the transition from mild mannered web writer to content strategist.

The nature of my particular bit of plagiarism shows that I have a lot to learn in that arena. I had convinced myself that the progression that I outlined in my post was the outline for content strategy. It’s not. It’s Kristina’s. She developed it through hard work and experience.

There are other formulas for content strategy. Kristina’s has worked best for our clients. If I write about what I’m doing with content strategy, she deserves the credit for it.

It’s not an easy thing for me to own up to; plagiarism’s just not me. I’m a person who never once cheated on a test, and was actually falsely accused of plagiarizing in 10th grade (yeah, I haven’t forgotten that, Ms. Thompson). But I made a mistake, and I need to be honest about it with anyone who reads what I write. My apologies to Kristina, the content strategy community, and our readers.

Tags: mistakes, plagiarism
Posted in Content Creation | No Comments »

Buy In Or Fail

Friday, May 28th, 2010

I hate teambuilding.

Always have. I don’t like teambuilding exercises, ropes courses, or facilitated bonding. I’m not cynical about it (anymore); it’s just not for me. Call it a pet peeve.

A friend explained to me once why I had so much trouble with the concept: No buy in. I just didn’t accept it as something valuable. With that as a starting point, it never mattered where a teambuilding exercise went. I wasn’t going to get anything out of it. I hadn’t bought in to the premise. For me, teambuilding fails before the first trust fall.

The same thing is true with digital marketing.

You must put yourself in a position to buy in to the value with marketing online before you start. And if not, it’s never really going to pay off. In customers, connections, ROI, traction, and any other metric you throw at it. Without the buy-in, it doesn’t matter how many tools you set up; you’ll still fail.

There’s a fundamental change in thinking that has to take place. Digital marketing shifts the focus from product to personality. In fact, product is just a tiny part of it. Most of what digital marketing offers is a chance to interact and connect with people who are interested in the same things you’re doing. It’s only after an online audience buys in to your personality that your products matter at all.

So those interactions have to matter to you. For this to work, you have to care about what other people want when they’re online. Recognition. Respect. Consideration. All those things aren’t selling. Also, on their own, they’re not marketing.

They become selling, they become marketing, after a long period of buy in. That’s the only way to build up enough trust in others to sell to them. Without the buy in on your part, you’re just telemarketing with different media.

Tags: buy in, content, getting started in social media, marketing strategy
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

The Four Parts Of A Content Strategy For Small Business

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Digital marketing requires participation.

And, as a rule, participation as the cost of entry is setting the bar pretty low. In fact, it’s the award you got in P.E. when you weren’t good enough at sports to win any other awards (welcome, fellow geeks!).

From that standpoint, digital marketing is pretty simple. Get a website. Register your business on a bunch of networks (facebook and twitter aren’t the only ones, people). Start a blog. Post some pictures. Take a little video.

Yup, that’s it.

Except when you factor in a content strategy. That’s where the work, the planning, the effort all come in to it.

You need strategy for digital marketing, because you’re not just doing this to make friends. You’re doing it to make customers. But that business/customer relationship changes so much when you get into the digital realm, and social media, and all that it entails; if you’re not prepared, if you don’t have a strategy, you’re setting your business up to fail.

Publicly.

Without strategy, your blog gets neglected. Your facebook page gets no interaction. No one follows you on Twitter. Your pictures gather dust. Your video gets ignored.

Ever go to the gym and see people standing around? Those are the people with no plan. They don’t have a strategy for what they want to do. No goals. No way to measure their progress. No real chance at success.

Plan or fail. That’s when participation makes a difference. When your business takes the time to think about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, who to talk to, and why, that’s when it starts to pay off.

In other words, content strategy. Break this down into four parts:

Learn,
Plan,
Create, and
Govern

Here’s how that works. This is the content strategy workflow that was developed by Kristina Halvorson in her book Content Strategy For The Web.*

Learn- Take a look at all the content you have. All of it. Yes, someone has to read it. Create a spreasheet with all the information you have about those pages, including analytics and quality. Most small businesses don’t have any analytics info (one of the reasons digital marketing hasn’t paid off for you, if you’re in this group), so you’ll have to go on pure instinct: does this content help us with the direction we’re thinking of going, or is it outdated?

Plan- There are literally thousands of ways to market online using new and updated content. There are two main questions to ask here: 1) What are your objectives? and 2) What are your tactics? If you don’t know how to answer those questions, seriously consider hiring professional help. You’re a small business, so every dollar counts, and there’s nowhere that your money will go farther than in the planning phase of your content strategy.

Create- Ah, down to business. Here’s where you’ll map out who will do what and when, then put someone in charge of organizing it. Develop a workflow, and decide who will write, photograph, video, edit, etc. You’ll also decide what is getting created and when. The creation piece basically dictates who owns what; don’t leave it to chance. There’s plenty of room for strategy here, even with very small (like, two person) teams.

Govern- One of my favorite content strategy quotes from Kristina is “Text is messy as hell”. That’s why it needs to be managed. Once it’s up, it’s not finished; monitoring your content for conversion, for improvement, for user interaction, for growth… that’s all part of the deal when it comes to content strategy for small businesses. You can’t just publish it and forget it (and that goes for all of your content, not just text). Who owns the content when it’s up and running? That’s the question you answer in the governing phase.

What do you think? Does this process make you feel lost? Or is it too simple for what you have planned? I’d like to hear about how you’re using strategy for your content…

*Edited. The post did not originally name Kristina as the source for these ideas.

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, content strategy, small business
Posted in Digital Marketing | 2 Comments »

The Worst Sentence In Blogging (And How To Avoid Writing It)

Friday, May 21st, 2010

There’s one surefire way to turn off your readers and keep what’s on your blog from being spread around and taken seriously: don’t post regularly.

Posting “every once in a while” is the wrong thing to do on a whole bunch of different levels. Even if you have the best intentions in the world, an inconsistent blog is a sign (a billboard, actually) reading “I don’t care”. And if you don’t care, why should your readers?

The Worst Sentence

I’m going to tell you exactly what the worst sentence you can write in your blog is. It’s seven words long. You’ve read it a hundred times.

First, a word on timing. Timing doesn’t come naturally to most people, and others will never get it. It’s like the old Steve Martin joke: ”If there’s one thing that’s important in comedy, it’s… …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …timing.”

Some people have a natural gift for timing; those are the ones with the super-organized closet, socks arranged according to moon phase. They have their timing down to a science.

Most people aren’t like that, myself included. I need practice, and the only way to practice is to have a plan. Because timing isn’t natural (anymore; it’s why we need alarm clocks), it has to be developed. And the positively proven way to do that is to get a system and stick to it.

Oh, and the worst sentence in blogging is this:

“Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.”

Blog, Meet Calendar

An editorial calendar is a tool that’s been used since periodical tablets were sold on Babylonian street corners in 4 column 9 pt cuniform. In other words, way before the internet. The calendar is simple way to plan out out posts, so you’ll never miss one, and your content will always be fresh. It’s an alarm clock for your blog.

Here’s how to do it:

Have a whiteboard session.

A legal pad will work, too. Make 12 labels, one for each month.

Plan out subjects for each month.

Seeing your posts laid out on a calendar will allow you to plan for temporal topics, which can help with your SEO, as well as just being interesting to people at the time they happen to be interested.

Enter the subjects into an ecalendar.

Every electronic calendar available will allow you to set warnings via email for the due dates of each one. Do that.

Huge Step:

With each subject, write a title to go along with it. This is a deeply creative process, and there’s an art to it. It’ll take some time, but it’s going to be incredibly worth it to have your title done ahead of time.

A couple tips to go along with creating your editorial calendar:

Be flexible

Don’t get stuck with something you ultimately can’t write about. If something comes up on the calendar that you can’t create, keep going. The important part is to replace it with something else. No dead spots.

Don’t get bogged down.

You don’t have to have all of your subjects tied to a specific date or event (July 4th, say). It works for some subjects, but not for every single one. What I mean is, if you do tie all of your posts to a date, you end up with something that’s more like a newsletter than a blog.

Leave space.

One thing a blog has to be above everything else (except for being current) is to be interesting. So make sure that you have space in your calendar for things that come up.

Commit.

Once the calendar is in place, make a commitment to stick to it. At least, stick to most of it. If you don’t that’s a lot of hard work going down the drain.

An editorial calendar is not a cure all for everything. But it’s a good way to start planning ahead and being consistent.

And it’s a good way to never have to write the worst sentence in blogging.

Tags: blogs, content, editorial calendar, marketing strategy, motivation
Posted in Content Creation | No Comments »

No One Is Listening To You

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Except the people who want to hear.

That’s a tough nut for most small businesses to crack. It used to be that you could just send out your email blasts and your brochures and your mailers, and that was it. Wasn’t not knowing that people were ignoring you great?

No. No it was not.

If you actually measured how many people weren’t listening, it would be downright depressing. All that broadcasting you did, throwing your stuff out there to see what would stick? Sheesh. Who’d want to measure it?

Listen to the sounds of silence. Those are the people not listening to you, not interested in what you’re saying on Twitter. Not fans on your facebook fan page. Actually, facebook has made it even more plain: They don’t “like” you.

Which leaves just the people that do like you. The people that are listening.

Those are the same people that help you do things like spread your message, increase your credibility, talk about you to their friends. Yours are the words in their “word of mouth”.

How many people are listening to you depends on a lot. You have to ease their pain, to put it in Jonathan Fields terms. You should be doing for them, and making it clear and plain that that’s what you’re up to, because it is so easy to ignore someone online. So you need a very clear way of saying what it is you do, and how that can help those listeners. Proving it over and over (and over) is as much about marketing as it is about your actual business.

Here’s what won’t work: You cannot expect to put a couple of words out there in the information stream and get much attention. It’s just not that helpful.

And if you are being helpful? The amount of people still not listening to you will be staggering. But the number of people who do will grow. It’s a slow process. It takes patience. But it will happen.

That’s where you should start. No one is listening to you, except the people that are.

So talk to them.

Tags: business trust, content, content marketing, marketing strategy
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

5 Reasons You Need A Map

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Not NAP! I said MAP, with an “m”.

Travel and tourism folks, be advised: everyone wants a map of your area. Everyone. And there’s little debate as to whether you should use digital or dead trees.

Use both.

Provide digital maps for their ease of use. Provide paper maps for their familiarity. Just as long as you are the navigator, the one that shows up with map-in-hand.

But since we’re primarily digital guys, we want to focus on those. I personally think everyone can use them. And below are 5 reasons why:

Layers
One great benefit of having maps online is being able to layer activities and destinations. Almost all the maps that you find online will have some layers that you can add and subtract, giving users the ability to refine their browsing as they search. Also, it’s a way for readers to aggregate information the way they want to. Here’s a good example (with cool auto zoom!) from the Butler County, Ohio CVB.

Personality
Maps don’t have to be just the same old boring, “here’s how to get from A to B”. Modern marketing is all about drilling down and communicating with your audience, right? Well, use your map to help do that. Check out this map from the Kansas Sampler Foundation. Chicken Fried steak map? You bet.

Membership
Maps are great ways to give members of your organization more exposure than just their write up on your page. For businesses, a map can help increase visibility for service partnerships. For DMOs, it’s a great way to showcase your area and at the same time provide more value to businesses you work with. Here’s a map of state parks in the region that we did last year for the Southern West Virginia CVB. On this site, we went with a separate map for every member category.

Tons Of Info
Another reason you need maps: They can share an amazing amount of info over a wide variety of categories, with locations thrown in gratis. Ever try to do that with text? I can tell you, it sucks. And I’m a writer. Give me a map any day. Don’t believe it? Check out this map of the northern U.S. and Canadian Rockies, and imagine trying to display all that information with just words.

Off The Beaten Path
Maps are being introduced with more and more functionality, including online maps that go way beyond driving directions. Many DMO’s have good reason to create all kinds of maps that get to the road (or path) less traveled, and now it’s easy. Or easier. These excellent examples of hiking maps from Backpacker Magazine are interesting, informative, and provide exactly the kind of content their readers expect. Tourism operators can be thinking of ways they can do the same thing.

Three big key points to keep in mind for tourism maps:

Google is king for functionality.

Non-tech folks can make simple maps for themselves and embed them easily, and more functionality can be added by pros.

Drill down as much as possible when you create your layers.

Go for specifics; it will appeal to a smaller audience, but it’ll include more people who are really interested (as with most new media).

Geotag everything.

The more information you have associated with a piece of content, the easier it will be for people to find you, and find what they’re looking for. Here’s the wiki on geotagging.

So, those are some of the ways people are thinking about maps. How about you? Feel free to share some examples.
Big thanks to #tourismchat and Anne Hornyak for the inspiration for this post, and for all the participants for providing links. #tourism chat is on Twitter every other Thursday at 3pm EST.

Tags: content, content marketing, content strategy, maps, tourism, Web Development
Posted in Content Creation | 4 Comments »

Three Very Simple Fanpage Tips

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

The Facebook Fanpage. It’s everywhere!

After some time of groping in the dark, and some functionality changes to groups and pages, marketers have now turned in force toward the fanpage.

Why? It’s another platform for interacting with your audience and expanding brand recognition.

Need more? Here are some lovely statistics from Morpace, Inc…

Facebook has more than 400,000,000 registered users.
68% of consumers with Facebook accounts say a positive referral from a Facebook friend would make them more likely to buy from or visit a retailer.
36% say Facebook is a good tool for researching products.

Here are a few very simple tips, which can greatly improve the quality of your Facebook marketing…

Give your fans a voice
Interaction with your fans is a goal, so allow it to happen and allow it to be easily found.

I often see businesses that have made it hard for fans to be visible based upon the wall settings. Allow your fans to post to your wall, post photos, and post videos. Real people posting photos of themselves using your products, well, that’s gold, especially if you are in the travel and tourism business.

Within your admin section, under wall settings, ensure you are allowing your fans to interact.

Ask A Question
How many times have you carefully crafted a wall post, only to have no comments or response? When you make statements, you automatically preclude interaction.

Ask people questions. For example, if you were going to post about an event happening this coming weekend, don’t stop with just the basic “This weekend be sure to visit blah blah for event XYZ.” Finish with an open-ended question, “What are your plans for the weekend?”.

Try it. Yes, social media is about connections. But people really (really) want to talk about themselves. Are you inviting them to do that?

Post Photos in Threes
Many small businesses are digital asset-poor not having vast library’s of photos and videos. Because of this you have to maximize your assets and try to receive the greatest amount of interaction.

So, when posting photos to your fan page, post in groups of three. You can continue to add to existing albums, and maximize the opportunity for interaction.

Why three? Simply because three photos are all that will show on the page when you post. Post three, then when it is time to post again, the freshest three will display on the page.

A side benefit is that it will display any previous interaction with the album, allowing you to leverage social proof to keep fans posting and interacting with your content.

Those are just three simple tips for fanpage optimization. There are tons more. What are your favorites?

Tags: facebook, fanpage marketing, getting started in social media, marketing strategy, Pat Strader
Posted in Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment »

4 Ways To Use QR Codes Right Now

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Have you heard of Quick Response (QR) Codes?

If not, you will. Soon. QR Codes are defined in Wikipedia as (I wish there was a better location with a definition!):

A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

Simply put, a QR Code is like a bar code that you see in the grocery store. However, instead of telling you how much your box of Fruity Pebbles might cost, it can share data in lots of different forms, from a link to an SMS message to almost anything you can think of.

The utility that these codes afford you (and the end-user, too) are equally as diverse. For the end user, it’s a method to quickly (QR = Quick Response, remember?) and easily retrieve, obtain or interact, using a tool that is nearly ubiquitous: a phone.

All users need is a handheld device with a free reader installed. For the business owner or marketer it provides not only a method of information dispersal, but also a method of tracking. While not all QR Code generators offer the ability to track usage, it’s not hard to find ones that do.

Here are some ideas to get you thinking about how to use them, and why…

Ideas for QR Code Use:

Make Offline Trackable and Interactive

Create a code linking to an optimized mobile-friendly landing page. Place the code on your print ads, rack cards even billboards. Utilize a simple call to action to scan (which you can measure) and re-enforce that call to action on the landing page. You just made an offline component interactive.

Go Paperless

Do you display at trade shows and conferences? Many that do spend time running to Kinko’s for copies (and then extra copies). You then hand off to attendees to be shoved in an over-flowing bag of other similar pieces. Display a code, linked to a PDF that folks can scan, download and print once they are back to their computer. Simple, trackable, cost-effective. And very green.

Make your contact information portable

You can create a vcard containing all of the same information from your business card, and display as a QR Code. I use one on my Twitter profile, have created stickers which I often place on my conference badges, and I’m even geektacular enough to have made a t-shirt with my vcard code, which I sometimes wear.

Perfect for Travel and Tourism

As many of your know, we work very closely with the Travel and Tourism industry. There are tons of opportunities for QR Codes to intersect with travel. Creating a QR code for monuments or historic locations can provide visitors with more information, even delivering interactive information. The photo depicts an “in the wild” example. I am told that they are becoming more prevalent on and around monuments in the Washington D.C. area as well. Battlefield maps, videos and photos, the possibilities are endless.

If you aren’t using QR Codes, it’s time to start thinking about putting them in play. Smart phone use is soaring (Readers are available for many other camera-enabled phones too), and many are coming out of the box with a reader installed. And the codes themselves can be created fast and cheap and provide tracking for your offline campaigns.

These are just a few. What are some ways you’re seeing QR Codes being used?

Tags: Digital Marketing, ideas, Pat Strader, QR Codes, Social Media
Posted in Digital Marketing | 6 Comments »

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