1. It’s about slow, real relationships, not in-your-face advertising campaigns.
2. It’s about tried and true, not temporary and shiny.
3. It’s about meeting people, like you would at a chamber of commerce event.
4. It’s about knowing what the different sites allow you to do, and remaining within those bounds. (Trust me, we had one account shut down due to skirting some of the site’s rules).
5. It’s about a strategic effort to teach the world about your product or service, so that they’re exposed to your brand and eventually contact you, because they love what you’re doing and selling.
6. It’s about genuine relationship-building, in a more formal online process than has ever been available before.
7. It’s about generating your own leads, through reaching out strategically to potential clients.
8. It’s about getting out of the office, and eventually meeting face to face.
9. It’s about never missing a day you’ve scheduled to blog. No. Matter. What.
10. It’s about choosing wisely which online networking systems meet your goals, and not just getting an account on Bebo because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
11. It’s about writing for your readers first, and worrying about search engine optimization second.
12. It’s about devoting hours and hours over weeks and months to learn the tools, and not assume it’s only going to take an hour or two.
13. It’s about listening, listening, listening.
14. It’s about not expecting your first video – or 51st – to go viral, but putting out what serves your company best.
15. It’s about not trying to be all things to all people.
16. It’s about tailoring your content to the culture of each community.
17. It’s about taking seriously what you’re telling the world, and not expecting them to read what you wouldn’t.
18. It’s about making it easy for the rest of the world to share your content.
19. It’s about not wasting people’s time.
20. It’s about knowing your niche.
21. It’s about using the tools every day, regardless of where you are.
22. It’s about people.
Posts Tagged ‘business’
Online branding in three simple steps
Monday, June 28th, 2010
Many businesses are hopping on the Facebook bandwagon. There’s a lot of merit to that. But there are three easy steps every business should take first to help their online brands, prior to worrying about Facebook. This is especially true if the business works directly with the end user, like a hotel, restaurant or retail store. Search for your business online, and respond to what’s already posted.
Often Google Local search will come up.
1. Check and make sure that all the information about your business is accurate. If not, fix it. Do this for Bing and Yahoo as well. Then search using your company’s name on these different sites, to pull up any mentions you may not already know about, which could impact your online branding.
2. Read every comment you see on the first couple pages of Google, related to your business. Publicly thank those who said nice things about your business. That builds your brand with that loyal customer and other readers. Everyone feels good when they are acknowledged. This is a powerful mechanism for building brand awareness. So few businesses actually take the time to go online and respond back to those who post nice things about them. If you overheard someone saying something nice about you at a conference, you’d probably thank them. The same goes for online comments.
3. Respond to negative comments by publicly or privately apologizing to the person who had the bad experience, and offer in some way to remedy the situation, through perhaps a free item. If you think it might take a deeper conversation to unravel the situation, be sure to give the individual your e-mail, or direct the person to your website, so the discussion doesn’t take place online. This shows others you care about the complaint, and want to deal with it in a professional manner. This naturally helps your online branding.
If possible, try to make the initial apology public, because that builds your company’s credibility. Everyone knows companies make mistakes. What really impresses people are those companies that acknowledge making a mistake, and work to fix it. Making an apology public in most cases only helps your online reputation, so long as you’re not constantly having to apologize online. This all helps your online branding. Once you’ve done all this, set up alerts, so in the future you’ll be able to quickly respond to comments posted about your business.Photo Credit: Gregoconnell
Google Needs To Know You Exist, So Tag Correctly
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
This is the eighth installment in a series titled, How to Get Your Client on the Front Page of the New York Times, explaining how PureDriven helped vault the Google Twin Ports initiative (focused on Duluth, MN and Superior Wis.) to national prominence in its effort to win Google’s attention and become one of the few sites where Google will build an ultra-high speed fiber network. I’ve written this series in hopes of sharing with businesses, politicians and grassroots organizers how to best gain offline and online attention for your cause, event or organization.
Lesson 8: Developing An Online Tagging Strategy
is Critical to Getting Seen Online
Photo Credit: Jason Morrison
In our efforts to attract Google to Duluth, we knew we wanted the public involved, and we knew we wanted everything we did to be seen by Google. Your business also needs to get exposure, once you’ve invested the time having a website developed, or put your Facebook page together. So is lots of words and pictures the key? Yes, and no. If you have a gorgeous website, but no content, then Google won’t see you, and therefore neither will anyone else.
If however, you have a lot of content, but not the right keywords in certain slots, that can seriously hamper your efforts.
So first, define your strategy. For example, we wanted attention in a lot of different places, so everywhere Google went online on the issue of Google Fiber, a video we shot, an article done on us, something we wrote, or our Facebook group would display prominently.
Our strategy was to make our entire online effort strong, not only googletwinports.com.
So we focused on optimizing every piece of content we put out. We told people exactly how to write their headlines, so collectively our YouTube videos would rank high for terms like “Google Fiber.” We wanted hefty levels of chatter and engagement. So we had volunteers chatting all day long on our Facebook Group, keeping people engaged in the process.
If your business wants exposure online, step one is normally creating the website or blog. Step two meanwhile, is making sure the pages are all tagged correctly. For a short primer on where to stick keywords, visit our first search engine optimization instructions page. And to see where those tags physically go, click on our second search engine optimization page.
One caution however. We’re currently upgrading our keywords, so what to pay attention to are the spots they go in. Pay no attention to the words in the boxes. If you need help choosing keywords, visit this excellent site called Google Insights For Search.
So Remember: If you want to be found on the web, you’ve got to have content filled with keywords not just in your copy, but also in the correct spots on each of your website pages.
Go ahead and post questions or comments down below, and I’ll do my best to answer them.
To read the first post in this series, visit “Google called, so we vaulted our client to Page 1 of the New York Times”
To read the second, visit “In Campaigns, Little or No Money Sometimes An Advantage”
To read the third, visit “When Running Big Projects, Simple Tools Work Best”
To read the fourth, visit “Steer – Don’t Order – Volunteers For Best Results”
To read the fifth, visit “My Mistake Was Not Viewing E-mail as Critical”
To read the sixth, visit “If You Can’t Be Yourself, Be Someone Else”
To read the seventh, visit “ A Google Fiber Tip: Connect, Don’t Chastise Competitors “
A Google Fiber Tip: Connect, Don’t Chastise Competitors
Monday, May 10th, 2010
This is the seventh installment in a series titled, How to Get Your Client on the Front Page of the New York Times, explaining how PureDriven helped vault the Google Twin Ports initiative (focused on Duluth, MN and Superior Wis.) to national prominence in its effort to win Google’s attention and become one of the few sites where Google will build an ultra-high speed fiber network. I’ve written this series in hopes of sharing with businesses, politicians and grassroots organizers how to best gain offline and online attention for your cause, event or organization.
Lesson 7: Connect With, Don’t Chastise Competitors
Photo Credit: AndyRob
With more than 1,000 competitors, the Google Twin Ports Fiber Initiative had a lot of reason to worry. Not only were we competing against most other communities in America our size, we were also up against big cities with far more resources and money than we had. This post isn’t about why we eventually rose to the top online based on this Share of Voice Report, or landing on Page 1 of the New York Times. I’ve already covered those two topics. What I wanted to focus on here, is the attitude we had throughout the campaign, that I believe really helped us stay focused on our goals, which helped us catapult ourselves to national prominence.
We didn’t care a whole lot about the rest of the country. Sure, we paid attention to what everyone else did, and incorporated ideas we thought worked extremely well, like the idea Grand Rapids had of having everyone post their confirmation codes, after explaining to Google why they ought to build their network that that particular community.
But we didn’t spend our hours worried about resources other cities and companies had, nor felt like we needed to simply copy what everyone else did. We live by Lake Superior, so we used that in our wildly fabulous video, from which the world learned of our campaign.
Instead, we encouraged the cities who we thought were our biggest competition, by connecting with them through private messages, and even kicking around ideas for how we might be able to team up on public relations stunts to sell our cities collectively. We also did our best to credit companies by name with work they did for us, whenever we were being interviewed as well.
We also took opportunities to build on what other cities have tried. In response to Topeka renaming itself Google, we put out a spoof video renaming our kids Google and Googlette. You can see all those videos by visiting our YouTube channel.
We realized that over the long haul, you get so much further in life by linking arms and minds with others, instead of viewing everyone as a threat. Sure, we had our own secret sauce projects we didn’t share with the competition, but we knew worrying about what everyone else was doing would only cost us time and energy. The online and even offline marketplace may seem packed with competitors offering your services more cheaply than you can. But remember, you only need a small sliver of the overall pie to be successful. And the way to get a bigger piece of that pie is to encourage your competitors. Then they want to help and work with you. People aren’t genuinely thankful and helpful, which makes your effort really stick out. I know it sounds nutty, but view the online world as a friendly marketplace full of potential customers and other businesses you might partner with. In the long run, it will prove a much more fruitful venture than if you view everyone as a threat.
Don’t believe me? Jason Fried, of 37signals.com, wrote a great piece along the same lines, which you can read in the most recent INC. That particular column is exclusive to the magazine I believe, but if you click on the link, you can read other great stuff of his.
So Remember: Being helpful and kind to others can only help your business. Worrying and acting mean to competitors feels natural to many of us, but will ultimately lead to fewer sales.
To read the first post in this series, visit “Google called, so we vaulted our client to Page 1 of the New York Times”
To read the second, visit “In Campaigns, Little or No Money Sometimes An Advantage”
To read the third, visit “When Running Big Projects, Simple Tools Work Best”
To read the fourth, visit “Steer – Don’t Order – Volunteers For Best Results”
To read the fifth, visit “My Mistake Was Not Viewing E-mail as Critical”
To read the sixth, visit “If You Can’t Be Yourself, Be Someone Else“
