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The Online Marketer’s Web Strategy

I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the MarketingProfs conference over the past two days, and it was a phenomenal conference, full of lots of good ideas. However, one thing stood out among the various discussions that I wanted to make a point about. There is a definite structure and strategy to online marketing that you need to follow to improve your likelihood of success.

During a number of sessions, folks were talking about all the social media stuff available to marketers, about how to choose and how to get started. Social media was the buzzword at the conference.. Social media is sexy. Social media is the hot new thing.

Social media comes LAST, gang.

That’s right, last.

What comes first?

You first must have CONTENT. Something worth talking about. If you want to be in social media, the social part is conversation and discussion. If you have nothing worth talking about – and nothing worth others talking about you – then any effort you put into social media will largely be a waste of time.

Once you’ve got content, USER INTERFACE comes next. Make a web site that’s attractive, easy to navigate, easy to find stuff on. Hire a professional designer or information architect to help you with this if you’re not so good at it, or use a proven templating system. Whatever you do, focus on putting your content into an easily managed format that is a pleasure to use. Make sure you have at least one way of converting a visitor into a database entry somehow, whether it’s a simple mailing list, or a complex lead generation system.

If you’re marketing online, you’re marketing with a web site. Do your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION next. Make sure your web sites validate with W3C standards, at least minimally. Make sure you optimize your sites, build some links, do all the basics. Check out Hubspot’s Web Site Grader for a great starter tool. When you set up profiles on other social networks, make sure you link back to your web site, always. SEO is all about capturing passive traffic, capturing people who are looking for your content.

Only after you’ve completed the steps of great content, user interface, and search engine optimization are you ready to dive into social media. There’s no way you can win the road race if your car is lacking tires and an engine. Content, UI, and SEO are the basics you MUST have in place prior to diving into social media, or else you’ll be wasting time, energy, and the limited slice of attention your audience is giving you – and they won’t give you again.

Photo credit: CC Chapman

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Image via Wikipedia

For fun, I logged into Twitter tonight and checked the followers page. To my great surprise, it seems as though about half of the people I thought I was following are not, so it’s an evening of re-syncing Twitter to follow friends old and new who I thought I was in sync with.

The scale of it almost makes me think that Twitter did a database rollback of some kind. Very strange.

I’m also taking the Chris Brogan philosophy of Twitter following, too. Unless you’re an obvious spambot, I’ll follow back whether or not I think you’ve got anything of value to say. This is the surest way to de-fuse the criticism that I follow some and not others (and yes, some people have actually said that!) – by devaluing my Twitterstream to near uselessness, I achieve equality of everyone’s voice. No one’s voice is greater than anyone else’s, because I can’t hear any of it. Not that I could anyway, with Twitter’s reliability being in the toilet lately.

Short summary: if you suddenly got a notice saying I was following you, this is why – re-syncing Twitter.

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Reality is a harsh mistress.

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I got a hilariously off topic pitch from a PR firm today to the Financial Aid Podcast.

“Financial Aid Podcast Feature Topic – New Proposal Offers Free Cell Phone Headsets To Motorists Ticketed Under New Cell Phone Ban Law”

Christopher,

Here’s some information for a timely and interesting feature topic. The release below details how one company is launching a creative way to help educate motorists about the new hands free cell phone bans being implemented in more and more states nationally.

We would be happy to arrange interviews help in any other way further. If there is someone better to send this to can you please forward this to him/her or provide me with the contact information? Thanks and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Name withheld to prevent accidentally promoting this firm

I’m not sure where to begin evisceration.

First, the journalism outlet – the Financial Aid Podcast – is an internet radio show about financial aid. Has nothing to do with driving, cars, telephony, headsets, mobile phones, or hands free cell phone legislation. This isn’t just off-topic, it’s off-industry.

Second, how did you even find out about me? Yeah, I’m on lists like HelpAReporter.com and such, but if you’re pitching based on that subscriber list, Shankman’s going to toast your ass.

Third, when I read the actual release out of morbid curiosity, you as a PR firm missed the point of your client’s release. It’s actually an interesting story of sorts – the company is doing some cool stuff that might be worth talking about, instead of the generic, bland copy you sent along as a cover letter to the release. You need to hire a better copywriter.

I’d be tempted to add the PR firm’s address to the PR spammers’ wiki, but honestly, I don’t want to give ANY ink to the firm, positive or negative, and I kind of actually want to keep getting their press releases, just to see what additional, wildly off-topic releases they send to me. They’ll never get published, but at least they’re good for a laugh.

Of course, if I were this PR firm’s client, I might be questioning the ROI of using this firm. Just sayin…

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Social Media and Business Ethics

Prior to my involvement in social media and new media, customers were exactly that – just customers. Rows in a database, indexed by various criteria, points of data making a beautiful line, so to speak. As an online business, my company, the Student Loan Network, never had to really deal with customers all that much, since almost all transactions were digital, almost all were automated, and almost all were without incident. Having a customer base that was a complete commodity also made business decisions relatively easy – send newsletters and notices X number of times a month, accept X percentage unsubscribe rates, calculate X percentage revenue from the clickstream.

To be perfectly candid, we never really had to think about the customer as a human being.

Sure, we said we did, just like everyone else, but if you had asked me off the top of my head to name three customers without opening a SQL command line, I’d have given you a blank look.

Social media changed all that. From the day I got my first piece of feedback as a podcaster, social media changed how I, and how the Student Loan Network, interacts with its customers. Suddenly, at the other end of the command line output, there were human beings I knew by name, and even call friends. I’ve had lunch with a few.

More importantly, when I go to write a newsletter, a blog post, or an episode of the Financial Aid Podcast, I have to consciously think about what level of quality I’m creating, about what value I’m creating, because it’s no longer just about percentage clicks from the clickstream, it’s about making sure that when Ricky, Fernando, Leah, Nolan, James, and many others get the content I create, they get some value out of it.

Sure, some days will be better than others, but I know that personally knowing customers makes a huge difference in how you approach your business. Being friends with customers radically changes how you do business, because ultimately, if you’re a person of sound ethics and morals, you don’t willfully screw your friends over. It’s the same general concept as requiring the children of elected officials to serve in the infantry of a country’s armed forces – there are real, personal consequences to every decision you make.

This is one of the many upsides of social media – the ability to transform your business into a human enterprise again, if you’re willing to be adventurous and take the risk of letting employees truly and openly communicate with customers and develop real relationships.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Food for thought: the United States military budget is $713 billion dollars. (Slate) For every American man, woman, and child, that’s $2,376 paid out every year.

Whatever your politics, understand that this reflects our national priorities, where we put our tax dollars to work, governed by who we vote for.

Food for thought: two months’ worth of the military budget would wipe out the student loan debt of every current student in America and then some.

Four months’ worth would send every student academically eligible to attend college to school for free.

Three months’ worth would pay for the entire reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, erasing Katrina’s damage.

As we remember those who have given their lives for the country, please consider carefully who you vote for this fall, and urge every American you know to get educated about the candidates and participate by voting and staying involved in the political process after the election. Hold your elected representatives accountable by staying in communication with them, sending them email, faxes, YouTube videos, whatever it takes to ensure your voice continues to be heard about the priorities that are important to you.

“Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living.” – Mary “Mother” Jones

My calendar grows increasingly crazy as the various ventures I work with continue to gain popularity, from the Student Loan Network and the Financial Aid Podcast to Marketing Over Coffee and PodCamp. Recently, I found myself having to sync two iPods, a phone, Google Calendar, and iCal, and in the process, a whole bunch of things got badly messed up.

Here’s how I fixed it.

First, I took Google Calendar – since that’s where I do most of my data entry – and exported the calendars there as iCal ics files. Those I saved to my desktop.

I deleted my entire Google Calendar, top to bottom.

I also reset sync on all my devices, effectively telling those devices to start from scratch the next time they started up.

After all the external points were deleted and reset, I disconnected everything and started up iCal. I imported all the different ics files and found I had a calendar about 10 times as large as I expected. Literally had half a dozen entries for every single event, which was unmanageable to say the least.

I found this terrific script called iCal Dupe Deleter (donationware). Ran it against iCal overnight (it took that long!) and when I woke up this morning, I had a clean calendar, free of duplicate events, ready for the world.

I connected all the mobile devices, synced them, then connected back to Google Calendar using Spanning Sync. Now iCal was serving as the master record, and everything else got copies of iCal. Going forward, Google Calendar will remain the data import point for new events, but iCal will still be the “golden master” if I need to do this manual re-sync process again to de-dupe and clean up.

Disclosures: Spanning Sync, by the way, is $65, just so you know. I get zilch from recommending it.

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