My point is there is always an excuse for a marketing failure. When I heard the news about Borders folding they blamed it on digital readers and people buying off sites like Amazon. But the truth is, if they were really paying attention and marketing themselves well using the same media they claim did them in they’d be as solid as companies like Barnes and Noble and Books a Million.

The first sign that lead to their demise happened nearly a decade ago when they farmed their website out to Amazon.com. People forget that it hasn’t been that long since Amazon started posting record profits. In the early 2000s they were only just starting to really explode and so were sites like MySpace. Where other companies so digital shopping as a competitor Borders saw it as a way to be lazy. They farmed their online store out to Amazon and gave them a huge leap in web traffic that drove people to exclusively online shop and killed any chance they had of taking advantage of Social Media and SEO.

One of the things that surprised me a lot is that Borders never really took advantage of social media in the last few years. They had a readymade audience on Facebook and Twitter. It would have been easy for them to build a Twitter of over a million followers and a Facebook page with lots of action. They already had a niche audience with tons of disposal able income and they basically handed it to Amazon in a gift wrapped package. What they should have done was promoted their Social Media pages to get people talking about what was going on in store. Promote the store as a place to meet like minded people. Give them what they can’t get sitting on their computers, a genuine social experience.

They missed their chance to do this with MySpace in the early 2000s but when Facebook and Twitter sprang up with their audience full of teenagers and tweens they squandered that too. They should have set up local Facebook pages for each store. (Usually I’m against this because it weakens your SEO but it would have worked well here.) They should have started running online exclusive events and online an Q and As with authors or other people interested in a particular book (It’s not like that age group isn’t reading these days.) Then after a while they just shift things from online to in store. You’d be surprised how much a big event can spread word of mouth, especially among that particular audience.

Pictures also go a long way in making your place look like it’s fun to go to. With all these midnight release parties for those Twilight or Harry Potter books they never really put much of it online. They should been all over those things with live blogging, pictures and even streaming video. The best way to establish yourself as a fun place to spend a night and a place with happening events is to show people what they missed by not being there.
Ultimately for Borders to not take advantage of social media was a huge mistake considering their audience was already on it and looking for the next big thing. Even with Amazon undercutting them if they could establish that there social media sites are the place to go to get the next Twilight or Hunger Games people would buy come inside and buy there. Instead they sat there and barely lifted a finger in the social media scene that could have kept them alive a little longer.

The lesson of Borders: Bookstores need to guide us

With Death of Borders, What Is The Future of Independent Book Sellers?

Independent bookshops consider future without big boxes; Bull Moose to bid for Borders stores

There are some drawbacks to using your social media along with your print media. Well, not so much drawbacks as just losing some of the advantages that come with social media. For starters, you have to plan things out a little more. You can’t change things about your social media strategy on a whim if you are putting it on your print media later. You are also leaving yourself at the mercy of whatever happens with your social media site. Sometimes things happen that are out of your control. I know of a company that put Tweets in their newspaper ads for the weekend and realized Monday morning they were flooded with complaints on an unrelated issue all weekend. That isn’t a good start to a potentially good cross media marketing campaign. But really that shouldn’t stop you from trying something that could mean huge returns for your business. I’m simply pointing out some things to be aware of.

Kraft Foods just announced a huge initiative that will have them put Facebook and Twitter reviews on their product boxes. Kraft is taking a big step in turning social media into a legitimate advertising form – as opposed to the current landscape where companies are just learning how to take advantage of it. If Kraft’s campaign is successful it could mean that other big companies will see social media as a tool to augment their print media as well. You could soon see a lot more companies will billboards and posters telling you to tweet them for deals.

That brings me to something else I’ve touched on briefly at times. One way a lot of companies go from being local to regional or regional to national is to be one of the first to do something big via digital media. 5 Guys went from a local chain in New York to being a worldwide trending topic on Twitter this week without spending much at all in the way of advertising. They took advantage of things on Twitter before other people did and it paid off huge. This could be a first step toward that kind of thing – if you take advantage of it.

One thing you can do is make a game out of becoming one of your social media fans. Put out an ad saying that if you recruit a certain amount of fans you get some good deals. A company I worked for did something similar where we gave away a party for a fan and the group of friends he brings in. This is a great way to get people talking and build your social media. Another way you can integrate your print and your digital marketing is to do a contest for fan generated content. Do a poster or radio spot submitted by one of your fans. There are definitely a lot of legal issues but it could really get you some positive press.

Ultimately if you can find a way to get your social media audience involved in your print media, and vice versa, it can increase awareness and consideration for your brand. It can even bring you some good free press. It could potentially put you in the front of the line as far as a new advertising strategies go. Most of all it can get people talking about you. The great thing about social media is that, the more people talk about you the better your standing gets.

Kraft Talks Twitter, ‘Mac & Cheese TV

Brand Consistency Across Social Media

That’s not to say that don’t need to spend a little on social media advertising. It’s just that why would you spend the money when you don’t need to? Whenever I do presentations on social media I stress the low cost aspect of it while still making sure people know that spending advertising money is a possibility and if things don’t take off it might be necessary. You should go into social media advertising with that mentality. After all you are competing with everything on the internet including 1500 things added and uploaded to the public every second. Sometimes things just don’t catch on even if you do everything right and some bad campaigns catch fire for no good reason. But before you resort to doing paid advertising on social media there are a few things you can do.

First thing you can do is make sure you have a reasonable goal in mind for followers. Reasonably you can expect about a third of your audience on social media, sometimes a little more if you have a business that skews young and maybe a little less if it goes the other way but if you don’t see those kind of numbers in a few months maybe it’s time to think about trying a paid ad.

You should also realize that even if you have a good amount of fans at the start things could plateau quickly. You should always be doing things to get new fans, even if it’s just giving them new information. Remember to always give them something new. You could also try and build a promotion based on your Facebook or Twitter page that involves people in your storefront. Hold a promotion for people who get a friend on Facebook. That kind of thing can snowball in a big way. Try and get your fans involved and turn building your Facebook or Twitter page into a game. Above all the biggest thing you need to do is get people to post on your page. The more people post the more people will view and tag your page. Would you go into an empty restaurant? Well most people wouldn’t and the same is true for social media. People don’t want to hang around in empty pages.

If you’ve done everything right and still don’t think you’ve gotten as far in social media as you could (again, it’s possibility you should be aware of before starting something this rewarding, yet incredibly time consuming)then maybe it’s time to consider paying for advertising. Twitter offers promotional links that put you on the trending topics section on a regional level. That can be overkill if you’re a local business looking to drum up interest in your store or restaurant in Chicago so if you are going to pay for an ad, start on Facebook. There banner ads are inexpensive and focused on specific groups of people in specific areas. Social Media feeds on itself anyway so if you re gaining fans on Facebook you really should be gaining fans on Twitter and YouTube and on your message board too.

Ultimately spending money on social media advertising is a risky venture. You still really don’t know what is going to happen either way. The best thing you can do is try everything. Changing your social media strategy doesn’t cost a thing and what works for some people doesn’t necessarily work for others. Play with things for a while at different times and if all else fails then start to think about a paid advertisement.

Social Media: It’s the Wild, Wild West for the Auto Industry

Searching For The Holy Grail Of Facebook Advertising

Social Media: There’s A Bigger Mistake You Could Make

Just like with email marketing and social media, direct mail isn’t just about how many people come across your link or your flier, it’s about how many people click on it or open it. When I work with someone on a social media page, I make sure they know I’m not just looking at the number of fans but I’m looking at the number of page views we get. The same is true with direct mail. It isn’t about market saturation, it’s about definite interest.

It’s harder to measure definite interest with direct mail because you can’t track just how many people open your envelope. Well, you can now by using your Facebook to bolster your campaign. Put your link in your direct mail piece and tell them to post on your Facebook for discounts or free stuff. I did work for a restaurant recently and we did a promotion where they had to write, “I got free stuff for opening my mail,” on our page and it was a great success. It just takes that little bit to have for yourself the beginnings of a great cross-media campaign.

One of the major challenges of direct mail is the same problem that plagues email marketing. In digital marketing you have to be careful to make sure you don’t find your message in a spam filter or past over like a pop up add. The major problem with direct mail is that there is a stigma on it. The tag “junk mail,” is one of reasons a lot of advertisers are losing faith in direct mail as a viable medium. This is another way you can use your social media to help out your direct mail. One problem is that people try to cram as much of their message in their mailers as they can this makes our piece looking cluttered and it’s akin to shouting at people with a megaphone on the streets.

In short, it’s kind of a turn off. Now all you have to do is give them a taste and tell them where to go to find out more. Hopefully, your Facebook is already filled with great user reviews of whatever you’re selling. If you get them to go there, they can do all your work for you. Some of the mailers I’ve done for major restaurants were just pictures of food and a few web addresses, sometimes that’s all you need.

Giving your followers free stuff is a great way to get them talking but there’s another interesting way to get them talking, sometimes even begging for more. You can give free stuff to other people. Send out a few random mailers with coupons and offers and talk about it on your Facebook page. Don’t just say it outright, be subtle. Say, “Jack got this great offer in the mail and now he’s enjoying his set of golf clubs he got for 50% off.” Do something like that just a few times and you could get people asking how they can get in on that. Pretty soon you’ve got people wanting you to send them your mailers and you get some of the random people added to your Facebook list.

One thing direct mailers are great for is finding out just how much of an audience you have in a given area. They’re great because people share that kind of thing with neighbors and friends. You could even walk into a few apartment buildings and leave them in the lobby to see just what kind of audience you get. Just like with social media you never really know what kind of an audience you have until you try a little of everything. That’s the point of having a cross-media promotional campaign. You can rest easy knowing you’ve cast the widest possible net.

5 Direct Mail Ideas Based Social Media Insights

Traditional vs. social media marketing for the independent retailer

Don’t be Social without a Plan

We need tools like search engines to help organize and make sense of all the data we’re producing. In order for us to make sense of all this data it means making the right stuff ‘findable’ at any given time. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. The search engines are doing their best to index your site’s relevant content, but there are things you can (and should) do to make sure they are successful. Search engines get better all the time, but they’re still just robots and can not reason the same as you and I. They scan your content and your markup and collect what they ‘think’ is valuable. Until some significant computing breakthrough’s occur, It’s your job to provide them with hard data that matches your concept of what the site actual is meant to embody. This will, in turn, make you more easily findable to human searchers.

SEO can be tricky. It is not comprised of a singular practice, but rather a collection of several practices that can vary from project to project. These practices carry different weight in effecting the search rankings and due to ever-changing search engine algorithms different practices can become more or less important over time.

Confused yet? What’s worse is the search engine companies don’t really even come out and tell everyone what the secret sauce is. Periodically they leak out bits of information on their algorithms, but they are closely guarded secrets for the most part.

So, what should you be doing to implement SEO into your site? Here’s a basic run down of essential techniques for Content, Markup, & Server-side SEO:

• Write copy that is naturally keyword rich (not stuffed). This means being honest. Don’t try to trick the search engines.
• Make content visible to the search engines. Currently, technologies such as Flash, Javascript, and Ajax can make content harder to index.
• Create an XML sitemap so the search engines can easily crawl and index your site. You can learn how to create one here.
• Name your files and folders in a descriptive manner. Use keywords whenever possible.
• Keep keyword density around 7-9%. Anymore than that is not going to have a natural tone and you could get penalized by the search engined for going too much over that. Several free online tools exist.
• Abundance of inbound/outbound links affect your page ranking. Search engines like sites that promote linking.
• Follow all best practices and web standards when marking up your pages. This will help ensure that the search engines don’t have trouble indexing your site and give your content hierarchy. Search engines take this into account when they run their algorithms. Head tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>…) are a good example of this.
• Make the most of your <title> tag. It weighs heavily in determining ranking. Keep it under 12 words (70 characters) and remember to keep the language natural. Don’t just stuff keywords in.
• Keep URLs clean and meaningful with keywords in them if possible
• META description tag – Like the Page title tag, it also weight heavily on the search results rankings. Utilize this tag for every page in your site if possible. Try to keep it to around 150 characters. It can be longer, but most search engine result pages will truncate your copy if it is.
• Anchor tags – The text labels for links are perceived as one of the most critical places to position relevant keywords.
• Alt tags. These help make content such as images visible to the robots. Using them is a standard accessibility practice as well.

Of course there are many more techniques you may want to consider depending on your goals and the site you are trying to optimize. As mentioned above, search algorithms change and sites like Google frequently experiment with ways to improve and keep up with the landscape of the web. Various content types such as images,video, and real-time data are starting to play a larger roll in how search results pages are populated and new ways of indexing this data are always emerging. At a certain point you may want to consider seeking the services of a professional if your site is complex or has some cutting edge features. At the very least, try and be pro-active in learning about the basics of SEO and keeping an ear to the ground concerning changes within the field.

Further reading:

Ambient Findability: by Peter Morville

Building Findable Websites: by Aaron Walter

It might sound creepy but the programs that search engines send to your website are called spiders. They sound worse than they are; essentially a search engine sends out spiders through links such as Facebook, Twitter, and other well-known sites. This is why; first and foremost, a social media presence is essential in today’s marketplace. It’s the main way search engines like Google know you exist. Spiders travel through links. Once they find a site, they catalogue the text, videos, and links so when someone searches specific keywords or looks for certain sites, they find you. Knowing how search engines work is the first step in using demographic research for SEO and keyword optimization.

If you try keyword optimization without demographic research you’re basically trying to catch a whale with a fishing pole. There’s really no way you can get every necessary keyword without knowing what kind of fan base you have. You may find your restaurant isn’t getting a lot of the “spring break crowed.” Perhaps that particular demographic isn’t searching for “family restaurants,” or “kids menu,” phrases that are plastered all over your website. Including words like “drink special” might bring in more of the “spring break crowd.” Spider programs are great because they follow you and change in accordance with your site. Therefore, you can change your keywords, as your demographic research dictates, on a regular basis. This is especially advantageous if you have a seasonal business like a hotel, bar, or tourist attraction.

It isn’t a matter of cramming the word “sale” into your site. Search engine programs are made to look for titles and headlines more than long form text. In fact, if you try too hard to include general keywords, you run the risk of turning people off and having your site reported as spam.

Using headlines for keyword advertising is the best bet that the SEO programs, used by search engines, recognize your site for what you want. Another great way to get more bang for your SEO buck is using links. This is another way your demo research can pay off. If you know the groups you need to reach, or are lagging in, you can tailor your links to those. Post a funny and relevant YouTube video on your site that appeals to your target audience. You can also post site reviews and links to sites that your focus demographic frequents. I’m sure there’s someone in your office who would love to look for intriguing YouTube videos for your site.

One SEO experience, I gained working for an agency, involved writing landing pages for a few community colleges. I was given extensive notes on SEO and the kinds of keywords the customer base looked for. I used headlines displaying strings like “New Career,” and “Financial Aid.” Research studies found that people looking for a community college commonly searched using these headline phrases . Using demographic research and implementing it in SEO ultimately proved very effective. The great thing about keyword advertising is that it cost the same no matter how much you do. As long as you conduct your research and use keywords strategically, you can be on your way to the top of the Google search list.

searchengineland.com/how-to-target-your-seo-landing-pages-demographic-profile-30988

blog.dropshipaccess.com/bid/34581/5-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Marketing-Isn-t-Working

techjournalsouth.com/2010/07/five-easy-inexpensive-ways-to-add-seo-new-media-to-your-pr/

When I started out in advertising, I did cold-calling for an agency’s sales team. I spent most of my day trying to get decision makers on the phone and listening to excuses and reasons why they didn’t need a digital advertising agency. I learned a lot about the misconceptions surrounding advertising that are not only untrue – but could actually be very bad for business. By far the number one excuse for people who didn’t want to do digital advertising was. “I just paid for a great new website,” Or some variation on that.

1. I just paid for a great new website

Having a nice looking website is great and it’s a necessity for doing business these days, but the truth is that if you rely on just a great website for your online presence, you are likely wasting your money. Having a great website is useless unless you do something to draw people to it. You can do more with a plain website, a great SEO presence, and a Facebook/YouTube campaign then you can by just pouring money into a website with tons of Flash and videos.

2. We’re a small business and we’re never going to have the budget to compete with bigger companies.

That’s another one I heard at least once a day. Of course if you have 2 pizza places that are successful you’re still not going to spend hundreds of millions or get a Super Bowl ad. But your Facebook advertising cost the exact same as Pizza Hut’s. Dominos spends as much on Twitter as I do ($0.00) every month. And you can by a video camera and post YouTube videos just as easily as Papa John’s can shoot and post a viral ad. You have just as much of a chance of catching on with your video as they do. That’s the beauty of the Internet; great ads have a way of catching on like a blaze of fire regardless of who made them.

3. Our audience is older and doesn’t use the internet.

That might have been a good excuse ten years ago but the facts show that more and more older people are using the internet for online shopping, keeping in touch with friends and family, and shockingly enough podcasts. With phones and TV connected to the internet becoming standard, and sites like Netflix making is easy and convenient to get movies major companies have started gearing some of their advertising to the 55 and over crowed. Even Facebook has started promoting itself as a place to keep in touch with your kids and grandkids showing that advertisers are taking older people surfing the net very seriously.

4. I’m trying Facebook and I don’t get a lot of fans.

This one is a big one that I dealt with just this last week. Business to Business pages don’t get a lot of fans. If you look at an owner or manager’s personal Facebook page you don’t see a lot of fan pages. The numbers you should be looking at are the ones that Facebook is kind enough to send you in an e-mail once a week. If you are the admin on a page you get metrics that say the number of visitors and how it’s changed since last week. Facebook knows that those are the numbers that ad agencies and marketing managers really want to see. They don’t tell you just who clicked the fan button. They tell you how many people took time to look at your page and those are the number that really matter. Don’t get hung up on the number of fans.

Ultimately, getting to the meat of what is true and not true about social media (and understanding the value of digital agencies) is really a question of doing the costs/benefits research and finding someone who is trustworthy to service your online marketing objectives. So, the next time a kid calls, trying to set up a pitch for a digital agency, keep an open mind; he could be your company’s next big thing!

www.g4commerce.com/all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-it/
www.socialmediaexaminer.com/4-facebook-marketing-myths-and-how-to-overcome-them/

www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2003/11/14/old-people-like-the-internet-39116903/

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610074159

www.toprankblog.com/2010/06/content-marketing-curation-context

It’s hard to think of bookstores that only sold books, but 15 years ago the idea of getting your books, DVDs, and CDs in the same place was a bit of a novelty.   Borders had just started their expansion and Amazon was just starting and still on shaky ground.  With their initial public offering they decided it was time to compete in that arena by offering a wide selection of DVDs and CDs, their only advantage being that they had a much wider selection, the question was, how do you use that advantage?

The answer was one of the first forms of viral marketing, the internet advertorial.  In essence, the idea that people will buy more if they feel they’ve learned something.   And with that, the Internet Movie Database was born. (us.imdb.com) Amazon could have gone broke trying to match the major retail suppliers advertising.  Instead they beat them on their home turf, the Internet, by creating the largest, most comprehensive website for movie facts and trivia.  Do you want to know more about Burt Lancaster?  Go to IMDB.  Does he seem like a pretty cool guy?  You can click on the link and go by his films on Amazon.   This was a great move because, not only did it give them a great advertising tool that has ballooned into everything from a social networking board to a news site, but it also gave them a leg up on SEO marketing which was just getting going at that time.  When Google ballooned and everyone and their ad agencies were trying to be the number one search result in their field, Amazon already had theirs pinned.  Is it any coincidence that right around the time Google became the top search engine in the world, Amazon turned record profits?

A few other interesting links:

http://www.seattlepi.com/business/158315_amazon28.html

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/organized-chaos-2/

The first thing I was forced to do was introduce the idea of Search Engine Marketing.   A lot of companies make the mistake of thinking a website is enough to draw people in, but with the multitude of websites, pop ups, and everything else on the internet,  just having a website isn’t going to cut it.   A website is a necessity in this day and age.  (Most franchises are starting to factor the website into the start up cost.)  Search Engine Marketing is what is going to get you on the front page of Google and get customers to your website.  It might seem like using the internet for local advertising is like using a canon for an alarm clock but there are some easy techniques that can help you use the internet for local advertising.

Keyword embedding was the first thing we implemented to draw in people.   We changed the name to something that would come up on a local search and added taglines that were full of keywords used when people search for office supplies. (service, technology, delivery, etc)  One trick you can use is embedding keywords in the coding of your pictures.  Just don’t be one of those people that adds random words so your site will show up in every other search.  It’s tacky and you might turn off people.  Think “relevancy.”

Beyond that, setting up a message board can draw people in and get you some good reviews in the process.  One of the things I did for another company was stimulate message board conversation on a daily bases for over a month.  It might take some time to get the ball rolling, but if you can get a serious message board going you’ve got a huge advantage.

If you aren’t afraid to pay a little extra for guaranteed service you can get one of those sponsored links on Google.  You should get results pretty quickly and it can be a great way to build your web presence in record time.  If they do it right you should be able to cut those sponsored links after a few months to a year.

Like my office supply company a lot of people dismiss the idea of search engine optimization for local businesses.  But 7 million people every hour look at Google and Yahoo! and there really is no reason why your website can’t get a piece of that action.

Could an animal survive and thrive if it had extremely sensitive ears but couldn’t discern where the sounds were coming from? Perceiving the sound is only part of the equation. Answering the follow up questions in a split second is the other part. Where did the sound come from? When did it occur? What made it? Should I take action?

I’m sharing this observation because it seems like every time something (of any quality) is posted to a social media outlet / site it gets picked up somewhere else, and rebroadcast from that site, where other sites and bloggers pick it up and rebroadcast it yet again. It finally makes its way to the outer reaches of the ether and back again, often mutated. And this can all happen within a few hours. I think I’ll call this Social Media Echo.

For many content creators (authors) in the social media universe this is a great thing (i.e. SEO, exposure, and the like). But if listeners are going to make sense of this information they need to answer the above questions. Where did this come from? When did it appear? Who is making it? Should I take notice?

At least for future (and ongoing) research in any field, a more linear or trackable system for organizing and categorizing sources of new information that’s being posted every day would remove much of the haze that current aggregators, meta-bloggers and psuedo-news services are unintentionally producing. Wouldn’t it be nice (to quote the Beach Boys) if we could quickly know the original author and site location from an iron-clad aggregator and see all its echo patterns in other sites and services. Then we could quickly answer those important questions and stop walking in circles in a dark room, reaching for door knobs of authority.

Is it just me? I guess it’s time to write a plug-in, unless anyone has heard of such an aggregator filter.