Category: Managed Services

Startup Success

I know about the wild ride of creating companies. I’ve created four of them (lol). I know and have interviewed (for ScentTrial on Technorati) hundreds of startup entrepreneurs. I’ve noticed one big difference between successful startups and those whose entrepreneurs end up working for someone else again:

Successful startups are more OPEN!

Successful startups share, collaborate and engage. They harvest the wisdom of crowds and use their social nets to tweak, modify and improve their business model, tactics, strategy and people. Being open on social media can help your startup reach for success.

5 Social Media Marketing Tips For Startups

Tip 1: Facebook Is Your Exclusive Club
Tempted to NOT have a Facebook page? “Too early,” someone might say, and they would be wrong. The faster you create a viable Facebook community, the more traction every other digital asset you create and your company gets. Here are 3 good Facebook Usage Guidelines:

1. Listen more than you talk.

2. Contribute meaningful content TO Facebook.

3. Drive links OUT to your owned properties (websites, blogs, other social).

Ask questions. Treat your Facebook page like an exclusive clubhouse. People in your club love you and want to help, so let them. BTW, play for LIKES and SHARES since they help SEO (Search Engine Optimization). LIKES and SHARES are the table stakes of social media marketing, the report card on your efforts, and you need to get all A’s.

There is no replacement for learning as you go. You will learn how best to phrase and share so your stuff gets picked up, commented on, LIKED, SHARED and Retweeted. I wish I could give you a magic bullet, but experience is the best teacher because YOUR voice is (and should be) different from MINE (lol).

One last FB tip: Pictures and video RULE. The more visual and social you can be, and this rule applies to every marketing activity you create, the more you are likely to win.

Tip 2: Twitter Is the Radio of the Web
Use Twitter to announce stuff. Keep your “self-promotion” links to about 50%, and curate and follow others with the rest of your space. For example if you are creating mobile apps, you might want to follow Luke Wroblewski, author of Mobile First.

Be generous, and people will be generous back. Be an ass, and you won’t last long! If you are young and arrogant (you know who you are!) in real life, try to appear less so on social media. Social media amplifies your positive and negative traits, so a little arrogance becomes an ego that won’t fit in the room. Humble, kind and honest all work. When in doubt, get someone you trust to read your stuff (or even if you’re not in doubt). I do this kind of “how does it sound?” review for lots of friends all the time, so don’t hesitate to ask your Internet marketing friends for help.

Tip 3: Blogs Are Traffic Catchers
Blog early and blog often. The more you blog, the more SEO traffic you catch, the more feedback you get, and the stronger all of your digital properties become. Short 200 to 500 word posts are better than long posts (says the man famous for 1,000 word blog posts, LOL).

Long posts are great for search engine spiders, but you sacrifice engagement, so I wouldn’t suggest ANY startup write long blog posts. Being long-winded feels incongruous with “startup,” so keep it short and post DAILY. Break up longer, complicated topics into multiple parts if necessary.

If blogging gets good to you and you want to post more than daily, CREATE a second blog, since you don’t want to step on your own blog posts. Remember the Facebook visual rule and ALWAYS have at least one picture or graphic in every post. Consider creating a Vblog or Video Blog too, since the video tsunami is almost here.

Tip 4: Video on YouTube and Video Because Marketing Is TV Now
The BIG THREE social media tools for startups are Facebook for community, Twitter for announcements and YouTube/Vimeo for telling your emotional short stories on video.

If you are in the advanced social media class, Scoop.it should be in your bag of tricks, but only if you are a master of at least one other social media tool (because social media tools amplify each other). Scoop.it is a great HUB for all of your social media– when you are ready.

Think of your startup as a reality TV channel. There is always something on TV. You should be generating fresh content constantly and at an ever faster pace (see More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better on ScentTrail Marketing).

Create content that creates and then successfully resolves (in your favor) cliff hangers. Humanize your creations, your products. Make people CARE. Steve Sabol, the creator of NFL Films, famously said, “Tell me a fact and I remember, tell me a truth and I believe, tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” Grab your customers’ hearts and never let go.

Tip 5: People, Not Things, Sell
People want to buy YOU. Don’t frustrate that desire; don’t make your communication and website all about your widget. I got so frustrated with the typical startup “all about the widget” approach to selling that I wrote People, Not Things, Sell.

Here is another important idea for startups: Social media and the web NEVER FIX ANYTHING, at least not by themselves. The web and social media is just a huge megaphone. If you don’t know your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), your elevator pitch, your core values, the web will not help you find them. The web will point out inconsistency and sloppiness fast, very fast, so have your marketing act together. I just wrote about the need for courage and self examination yesterday.

What about other social networks such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Hunch, or Scoop.it? Using social networks is like weaving a content tapestry. You can weave a bigger and better tapestry with more, but you can also be overwhelmed and confused. If you are ready to teach a social media masterclass, then weave in as many social nets as time allows. If you are time-limited, as most startups are, get good at the big three:

• Facebook for community.
• Twitter for its radio-like qualities.
• Video on YouTube and Vimeo to tell your emotional story.

Social media should be a startup’s BFF. Have your core marketing act together and share, share and share more. Keep calm and Retweet.

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Made It Through Panda and Penguin?

Feel like your website made it through the Google algorithm changes? Maybe, but a complete checkup is the only way to know for sure. Google’s algorithm changes are ongoing. There are more changes coming.

Did you know that Google is writing listing descriptions from your website’s H1 tags? Google’s post-Panda desire is to find the truth of the page, and they are ignoring possibly overstuffed <title> and <description> meta to instead pull descriptions from your page’s content, especially H1 tags.

Here are a few of the implications of Google’s use of H1’s as page descriptions:

• H1’s should have keywords.
• H1’s are being concatenated after 65 characters.
• Multiple H1’s, never a good idea, can be very damaging now.
• Multiple H2’s is not a problem.

See How Google is Describing Your Pages in 3 Easy Steps

It is easy to see how Google is naming your pages:

1. Google search “Site:<yourURL.com>” to see your website’s indexed pages.

2. Review the descriptions and identify their source (probably H1 tags).

3. Make sure your descriptions use the best keywords for your website and the page.

Example of Google Using H1 As Listing Description

Here is an example of a listing using a website that is not an Atlantic BT client, Etymotic.com:

The highlighted listing is for this page:

Here is the page’s Title:

<title> Etymotic Research, Inc. – High-Fidelity Noise Isolating Earphones and Headsets </title>

Here is the page’s Description:

<meta name=”description” content=”Etymotic Research, Inc. is the world leader of In-The-Ear Technology and Hearing Instrumentation” />

Here is the H1 and the source of the Google listing:

<h1>High-Fidelity Noise Isolating Earphones and Headsets</h1>

DIY SEO Google Description Audit

If you like to work under your website’s hood, follow the steps above to see your current page descriptions. If you know how to do the keyword research needed to enrich your H1 tags, then keyword research should be your second step.

If you need help with a Post Panda and Penguin SEO checkup, let your Atlantic BT contact know you need help.

New customers, email the head of consulting services Mike.McTaggart(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com . Mike and his team will be glad to get your website in for a complete SEO checkup.

or call 919.518.0670.

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Atlantic BT Contact Page

It was a wicked sense of déjà vu. The feeling was strong. I lost concentration driving on I-40 during rush hour (not a good idea). For a moment, I was channeling a former life. September is the quiet before the storm for e-commerce B2C retailers. September is the last time “quiet” can be safely used until about March. As a Director of Ecommerce, I didn’t sleep much between September and Christmas. Sweating and pacing I remember, sleeping not so much (lol).

We don’t want you to sweat and pace so much this fall. This post shares ways Atlantic BT can help your website make more money this holiday selling season. E-commerce is so sensitive. Business-to-consumer (B2C) Ecommerce websites can be tuned at this time of year. A tiny tweak here and there NOW makes more money over the next 12 weeks.

Five Ways Atlantic BT Can Help B2C Customers Today

Here are 5 B2C audits I would hire Atlantic BT to help with if I were still a Director of E-commerce.

Email Campaign Audit

Most e-retailers have a schedule for their email campaigns already on paper. Some have campaigns waiting in a tool such as Constant Contact, Bronto or Responsys. Campaign creative and segmentation are queued and ready to fire on a schedule. When I was a Director of E-commerce, Email was our most profitable channel. Email marketing consistently produced profit margins greater than 30%, much higher than the next most profitable channel. Ask these questions to increase results from your email marketing this holiday season:

• Is your marketing segmented and using personas?
• Are you sending relevant creative to your segments? (Hope you aren’t blasting same offer to everyone, a very BAD idea now.)
• Do your emails tell a story?
• Do your emails curate valuable social content?
• Do your emails look good on mobile devices?

If YES is the answer to all of these questions, you should be good to go. But it never hurts to have another set of experienced Internet marketing eyes reviewing your email campaign strategy and testing your assumptions. A tiny tune here or there can make a BIG difference in email marketing results.

Related article:  Email Marketing is Live Ammunition

Post Panda and Penguin SEO Audit

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are creating sudden and dramatic changes to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Even if you’ve come through fine until now, Google algorithm changes continue. Don’t wait until there is a problem. Hire Atlantic BT (or someone) to check SEO basics. Search Engine Optimization is an area where tiny tweaks can keep you on page one or banish your website to the cheap seats, forcing your website to earn its way back (been there, done that; trust me, you NEVER want to have to live through a Google reset).

Landing Page Audit, PPC Review & PPI

Do you have special landing pages for the holidays? We organized gifts for him and her with special search result pages, links, copy and graphics. We also increased our PPC and drove to specific landing pages on hot products or unique merchandise bundles. Landing pages are as much art as science. If you’ve tested and tested and tested all summer and are ready to use the winners from those tests, good. But even after a summer of testing, a quick landing page and PPC review can come up with small suggestions that may double conversions. Such a look over your shoulder is especially important if you don’t have a testing culture (take our Testing Culture Quiz).

Google is offering Pay Per Inclusion, PPI, for the first time this year. PPI functions similar to a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber.com. You load a feed and BUY your way into the “organic” index. If you’ve never purchased PPI, GET HELP. We bought PPI from Yahoo back when Google said PPI was original sin and I was a Director of Ecommerce. If you can’t work your way into your most important organic terms in this lifetime, PPI may be a good answer for presence on key terms. PPI is NOT intuitive and only as good as your feed, so get help unless you are a shopping comparison engine pro.

WebSite Audit

It never ceased to amaze me when our customers saw our website better than we did. Customers don’t have what the Heath brothers call, “the curse of knowledge” in one of my favorite books, Made To Stick.  When you look at a website each day, you don’t see it anymore. Since 20% of your pages will capture 80% of your holiday revenue, hire an external resource to review those pages. Have someone audit those “mission critical” pages with a fine tooth comb. Grammar and spelling matter, image size matters to site speed, and too much javascript in your <head></head> hurts SEO. Get another trained pair of eyes or two to review your most critical pages, and make sure they look behind the curtain at code.

Mobile Audit

Holiday 2012 will be the first MOBILE holiday. Mobile commerce is coming, but mobile curation is here. If your website or emails don’t look good on mobile devices, you will lose sales and traffic. Mobile is used to curate communication. Mobile is easy to use to delete or ignore groups of emails. If your website doesn’t look good on mobile, if it is slow or if your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, you will lose sales and damage your brand. There are technical things Atlantic BT’s team can do to help your website and emails look better and sell more on mobile devices this holiday season. If you are uneasy about mobile, ask Atlantic BT for a Mobile Audit.

Monday Tips For B2B
There are other ways we can help, other audits that would provide value, such as a Google Analytics Audit or a Social Media Marketing Audit. We can discuss the other ways we can help if you have questions or concerns. Conducting one or several of these B2C e-commerce audits will help you sell more this holiday season. Need help conducting those audits?

Call us at: 919.518.0670

Email Mike.McTaggart(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com (Head of Consulting Services)

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Cool Twitter Header Contest Winner

And the winner is….

We All Won Here’s How
We all won by watching two social media titans, Phil Buckley (@1918) and Gregory Ng (@GregoryNg) compete. Watching taught valuable Internet marketing lessons such as:

• 1:10:89 Rule.
• Gamify.
• Speed Matters.
• Storify.
• Fun is contagious.

1:10:89 Rule
The 1:10:89 Rule says 1% of your website’s traffic will contribute, 10% will vote on the contributions of the 1% and 89% will silently consume and support. Phil Buckley (@1918) has 3,314 Twitter followers. Gregory Ng (@GregoryNg) has 3,906. These local Raleigh social media experts weren’t the only ones mentioning our Twitter Header Contest.

Topsy puts social mentions of the Twitter Header Contest at almost 200.  Figure an average Twitter following of 2,000 followers and the Twitter Header Contest generated 400,000 impressions. There were 352 votes. Some would look at such a spread and feel failure. Perhaps I’ve been doing this Internet marketing stuff too long (lol), but I think about a little game like our Twitter Header Contest differently. Here are some of the positives:

• New Organic Page 1 Listing (Twitter Header Contest we are #5 according to Mike’s).
• 106 Tweets, 87 Facebook likes, 4 G+
• Votes came from 20 countries including Japan, Canada, UAE and Jordan.
• New Tent Poll (this idea can link out to new content creating new conversion points).
• Have a contest we can repeat (and it will get bigger as awareness grows).
• New Traffic (can’t create a relationship with people that don’t know you exist).
• Low cost game (like most games, this one didn’t cost much)

I’ve had to learn an eastern philosophy to be an Internet marketer. Everything we do matters. Everything teaches and helps. Even things that seem to HURT really help because we learn, modify and move on. Would it have been great to have 30,000 votes? Sure, but we are thankful for 352 people who took time out of their lives to think about Atlantic BT and the cool twitter headers we shared and who voted. Thanks.

Gamify
Is there any Internet marketing that isn’t better with a game? NO is the answer to that question (lol). Games guru Jane McGonigal believes games can save the world. I’m reading her book Reality Is Broken and becoming a believer. I was half there already after writing Gamification: Winning Hearts Minds And Loyalty Online with the Jordans (Jon and his sister Joanna) and the team here. Games may be the stickiest content on earth as our Twitter Header Contest proved again.

Speed Matters
Phil and Greg demonstrated the give and take, stimulus/response nature of what we do for a living (Internet marketing). Back in the day, when I worked in marketing for M&M/Mars or NutraSweet, we could campaign like an army invading a country. We could organize our strategic plans, anticipate response and move slow and deliberate.

That time is gone. NOW is the time that matters most in Internet marketing and now changes in unanticipated ways every second. When every action has an equal and opposite reaction winning is in the margin. Another way of saying this is tiny things make huge differences online. Tiny things, those things easy to loose in the fog of war, are the difference between a new car and a set of steak knives. Speed matters.

Storify
With two days left and votes starting to lag I wrote a little Casey At The Bat story on Google Plus about our clash of local social media titans. That story, the magic of a deadline, and the “Who Will Win” tension between @1918 and @GregoryNG put new life in the contest contributing 15% of the votes.

I heard a Marketing Director for Warner Brothers discuss, “Putting impressions into the marketplace,” at the Expion Racing Ahead Social Media Summit a few months ago. Putting impressions into the marketplace with intent is an apt description of Internet marketing where “intent” is conversion. Storify is the best way to “put impressions into the market” so those impressions engage and convert.

Fun Is Contagious
Humor is a form of currency online. How else can you explain the popularity of cat videos (lol). I say that and boy if you could only see the crazy things MY cat does (LOL). Our desire for  THE FUN is increasing as time compresses our lives. Our lives are being compressed by computers, phones, families, school, dogs, cats and everything, so creating fun games with a story feels like a great idea.

You don’t have to convince any of our finalists, power Internet marketers all, about the importance of fun, games and stories. Our thanks to our local titans (Phil @1918 and Greg @GregoryNg), our international curators (Khaled @Shusmo and Susan @eddebainbridge) and our newcomer (Chanda Gohrani @black_headed).

Thanks to everyone who shared Twitter Headers. People who submit are the magic 1%, the 1% who help us all become better.

Thanks.

Twitter Header Resources

Great, simple example of how to change your Twitter Header is on SarahsFav.es.

Why Changing your Twitter Header is a Darwin thing on ScentTrail Marketing.

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What business are we Internet marketers in now? I know the ROI brigade believes we are in the making money business. Here is a shocker for them. Making money is at the end of a much longer means curve. Making money is NOT and never has been a means to some greater end for a company. Making money is a trailing indicator, a final report card. Asking one of those simple and complex at the same time questions helps. What is money?

What is Money?

Money is an idea, a confidence. Pegged to gold, money had a physical value, a physical presence (still mostly mirage, but that is another post). Nixon set money free from the gold standard on April 15, 1971. Money then became what it has always been – pure confidence.

Money has a single mission – to replicate itself. That mission isn’t judgmental, biased or much impacted by our human desires and wills (lol). Money as an abstract construct, as an idea, only has a single purpose – self-replication.

Warren Buffet explain why he didn’t give money to charity, years ago, before he made his amazing gift to the Gates Foundation. He was a better captain of the money replication team than any charity, he explained. Buffet would end up giving over $40 billion to the Gates Foundation to save the world. Pretty cool, and hard to argue with Warren as the captain of the money replication team.

If this talk of replication as a single mission sounds familiar, you are an Internet marketer who has been reading my posts (here or on ScentTrail Marketing). As Internet marketers, we understand an important marketing truth: Content is king, and content has a single mission – self-replication via likes, shares, tumbles, blogs and links.

Content’s Mission – Self Replication

The beautiful thing about content’s mission is there is no Warren Buffet, no 86,000 pound content replication silverback Gorilla who dominates the replication market. I’ve had blog posts dashed off on a Saturday end up reaching almost a million people via power Retweeters. If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, you recognize my Content Replication Cycle bell curve as his technology adoption life cycle:

Our jobs, our Internet marketing mission impossible (lol), is to move the slider on the bell curve, to increase the size and speed of content replication. Content replication laws are forming NOW (almost as I write this). There are no hard and fast, “Will Go Viral,” rules, and there may never be such immutable rules or laws. Things that make content go viral, such as pop culture, change fast. Change happens on whims, much like a school of fish responding to a signal only they feel: Content influence darts this way and then that.

Here is another look at Moore’s famous bell curve. This curve describes how much of your content will go viral, a small amount to the very right of the curve:

I’ve had 5 pieces reach more than 2M people via Retweets. I did some back-of-the-envelope math, and that is a little less than 1% of the content I’ve created.  This “Highly Viral Content” is on the far right of the Content Replication Performance chart above.

Since our jobs as Internet marketers is to move the viral bar, to increase the number of posts that earn viral pickup, here are common characteristics of my 5 “highly viral” posts:

* Shorter is better.
* Power Retweeters MUST support.
* Didn’t write to be viral: Viral happens.
* Surf (i.e., write about) large cultural and business waves such as Social Media Marketing.
* Use powerful platforms such as Technorati sometimes.
* 2 of the 5 were written and posted on Saturday (breaking every rule, LOL).
* Tools and tool reviews are important. Every post discussed cool tools in some way.

Is it possible to use these conclusions to move the slider of the viral marketing bell curve? Maybe (lol). Don’t forget we are discussing the top and middle of a conversion funnel. Viral content can fill up the funnel, but conversion all the way to money requires another series of very delicately balanced steps – Imagine a ballet around broken glass. Don’t get lost in the viral content chase. Chase viral content because it chases back in the form of CASH (lol).

Perhaps my most valuable advice is Don’t TRY to create viral content. If you TRY, you fail. There is no way to automate viral pickup. Viral pickup requires too many spontaneous variables to ever become routine.  Increase chances by:

• NOT trying to get mass pickup (irony is a bitch).
• Write about what you know and love.
• Get to know some power retweeters.
• Don’t be above asking for a favor.

I keep a running total of “owed” and “earned” favors. Some favors I won’t be able to pay back in this lifetime, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try.

Good luck, and if you have a great purple cow, dog-bites-man, content-goes-viral story, be sure to share. Maybe we can help create a second act for your, “I was on the way to the store when….”, highly viral content. If you have stories of content that “should have but didn’t” go viral, share those too (we all have ’em).

Keep writing, and write more and more, faster and faster and better and better no matter what happens.

Thanks to Jan Gordon and her consistently GREAT curation on Scoop.it. Jan inspired this post. See my post from yesterday on Why Your Content Must Spring Legs and Walk Around the World.

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What Business Are You In?
The world is a noisy place. Our job as Internet marketers is to win the battle for customer hearts and minds. Great products are the table stakes of this new Internet marketing game. The ante is knowing how to use content as a knife to cut through the chaos and clutter of contemporary marketing.

Storytelling is a very important tactic. Storytelling isn’t hidden anymore. The secret is out. Everyone is hearing about the importance of telling great stories. Many talk the storytelling and viral content talk, but few walk the walk. My friend Jan L. Gordon, Curatti, talks and walks new marketing in magical ways. Jan’s approach is to share, explain, cajole and coax knowledge from key ideas such as content curation. Her tools are words and images, images and words.

Below, I’ve copied a recent important example from Jan’s Curation, Social Business and Beyond Scoop.it. I will weigh in tomorrow. If you don’t already follow Jan, you should:

Jan L Gordon on Scoop.it

@Janlgordon on Twitter

Jan Gordon on Linkedin.

Quoted from Jan’s Scoop:

This piece [by Chris Sietsema] is from Convince&Convert. I selected it because it addresses a challenge that those of us who create or curate content face on a daily basis – how do we make our content socialable?

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

We know how difficult it can be to find balance between intrigue and usefulness. We understand that it is much easier to talk about or simply develop a tool than it is to create a talkable tool.

Meanwhile, there is a realization that we need to develop a hybrid content marketing solution – one that is social and has substance.

Socialable content has to invite discussion, create a call to action, while informing people.

Here are some highlights:

Give your content youtility:

**Answer common questions. Does your website have a FAQ section?

**Why not translate that into useful, shareable content?

**Ask your consumer base what they need. What better way to find out what appeals to your customers than simply asking them.

Make Your Content Talkable:

**Make your content human. Sometimes utilities can fall flat if we don’t offer a way to show how they can and have impacted others

**Provide testimonials and attach real stories to your utilities so your audience can identify with their purpose.

**Add bits of entertainment, humor, fun. Is your content just boring?

**Give it elements that people would actually want to share and talk about. Simply add the ability to share. Creating something useful is more than half the battle. Often times, we just forget to let our audience spread the word.

**Allow and encourage your customers to share.

**By combining the effects of content that is worthy of chatter and extremely useful, we can create a harmonious content marketing program.

**Above all, try to avoid creating drab content that lacks both utility and appeal.

Reviewed by Jan Gordon covering “Curation, Social Business and Beyond”

Read full article on www.convinceandconvert.com.

Marty’s Note

I will continue the theme with a piece tomorrow, even though Jan’s intelligent discourse is always a tough act to follow.

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