Following on from this morning’s post on Bing and Google user insights I just had a look at what Alexa say’s my blog readers demographics are – quite an interesting bunch of peeps aren’t you

And finally…

So do you fall into these catchments:

• Most of you are aged 45-54
• Most of you have children
• Many of you have been to college
• A few of you have a post grad qualification
• 50% of you are female and 50% are male
• And most of you prefer to read my blog at work but a lot of of you read it at home…

Let me know below

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I get a lot of questions asking about how to communicate with people online, which may seem simple to some but it appears to cause hours of sleepless nights to others…

• What if should I do if no-one replies?
• What should I do if someone replies?
• What tone of voice should I reply in?
• etc etc etc

Communicating online, especially with brand advocates, isn’t as difficult as might be first perceived: if people are talking positively about you – simply thanking them is quite often enough to get them talking even more positively about you.

For example: I recommended Vodafone’s mobile network to someone on twitter:

RT @shelleyfishel @leesmallwood thinks u have best deal for iPad. Just got 1 & am @vodafoneuk Customer. How do I get a sim? #orangefail 10:37 PM Sep 21st via Twitterrific

@shelleyfishel … and definitely best network coverage – 3G all the way from Bath to London & back again cc @vodafoneuk #OrangeO2Fail
10:48 PM Sep 21st via Twitter for iPhone

and Vodafone replied:

Makes you feel all warm and fluffy inside doesn’t it…!

Now, the next time I’m in a position to recommend a mobile network who do you think I’ll recommend? Not rocket science is it!

And this is a global company taking the time out just to say ‘thanks’. They didn’t try and sell me anything – just a warm felt ‘thanks’.

Online Adocates and Influencers

click to enlarge

For any company or organisation, identifying who your advocates and influencers are is vitally important – see it like an extension of customer service.

These people may continue to speak highly of you without any engagement from you… but are definitely more likely to continue to do so if you acknowledge them publically.

What’s even more important though is that their networt of friends, family colleagues are also seeing the ‘conversation’ you’re having with them – and the positive experience they’re having with you, which they might not be experiencing with their own supplier, provider etc…

The Power of Reach

Conversion paths are fulled by ‘reach’ (how far will a message travel) and generally follow a simple route (see image on the left):

• a message goes out
• it’s picked up by an influencer
• an advocate amplifies the message
• and it finally lands in front of the people that you’re trying to reach

And finally…

When a message moves this way WoM or WoW (word of mouth / word of web) it has a far greater impact than if you were trying to broadcast the message your self. And as James Poulter wrote in his blog post “The DNA of a Recommendation“:

This new culture’s currency, the recommendation, when automated, facilitated and propagated efficiently can become a very powerful tool – one that can move financial markets as well as social ones.

So… don’t be complex or cryptic… be yourself and let others see what the people that already use your products or services see…

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Yesterday I posted the start of a mini series ‘Defining the elusive meaningful metric‘, where I discussed:

Engagement for me is when someone cares enough about what you have written to such an extent that they felt compelled to do something about it.

and

Metrics I like to use to understand the effectiveness of online communications are based upon the number of people that:

Stage 1 – read it (easy to measure)
Stage 2 – saved/embedded/downloaded it
Stage 3 – rated it
Stage 4 – repeated/quoted/retweeted it
Stage 5 – commented on it
Stage 6 – recommended it (challenging to achieve)

In this series of posts, I’d like explore different ways to encourage people to move from just reading what you write…to recommending it.

Know your Audience

Question:

Do you know about what people want to read or find information about in the space that you operate in?

If you don’t then the chances are that your content is probably stuck ‘Stage 1 – Read it’ I see a lot of new fangled gadets and widgets on peoples sites that help people share content with their readers’ networks, but how many are actually tracking what their readers do with the content they’ve just read…?

Without this information we’re a bit like a mushroom – left in the dark and covered in sh*t(!) Yes, the likes of Tweetmeme counts how many retweets but what is the total amount of reach that has been achieved?

ShareThis Analytics

There are of course platforms out there which produce reports on reach, levels of engagement etc – I personally use Radian6 (through 6consulting.com) however, there are widgets out there which will help you analyse what your audience is doing.

You may be familiar with ShareThis – known for it’s social media sharing widget, but what you may not know is that they’ve recently made an amazing addition… Social Reach and Audience Indexing. This is pretty unique as it provides a bigger insight into the type of people visiting your site, whilst also allowing you to compare results to other sites in a similar category to your own.

It also categorises your site visitors and profiling the type of people your content is attracting. This provides a complete view of your content online and how people are engaging with it, as it measures and tracks shared media across the social web, beyond the standard metric such as how many shares on Facebook and how many retweets on twitter.

Both the Social Reach and Audience Index options will be available in the reports you receive from ShareThis, though they haven’t currently been rolled out for all users…

How to set up ShareThis on WordPress

It’s easy to add ShareThis to your WordPress blog/site. Simply download and install the plugin to get started. There are two ways to do this:

• Automatic Installation (see below) – search, install and activate the plugin completely within WordPress.
• Manual Installation – download and expand zip files, upload to server, and activate.

Automatic Installation for WordPress Self Hosted sites

Manual Installation

1. Download and unarchive the plugin folder.
2. Place the uncompressed share-this folder in your wp-content/plugins directory. You should end up with up with wp-content/plugins/share-this/.
3. On the Plugin page in your WordPress Administration area, activate the ShareThis plugin.

Plugin Options

Once you have successfully installed and activated the ShareThis plugin. A link to a new settings page in the sidebar will be generated where you can customize the plugin.

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I have a bit of a fixation with eyes – for me they are the gateway to the soul. You can tell exactly how someone is feeling or whether they agree or disagree with you just by looking into them. Those little ‘inflections’ that appear when a person is talking about a subject that they’re passionate about and truly believe in, is clearly seen emanating from their eyes: sincerity, optimism, disappointment…

The thing is, and this is slightly off-piste, there are times during a conversation when I suddenly realise that I’ve been looking at one eye only – and I don’t know how long for! So, in an attempt to ‘balance the situation’, I switch to looking at the other eye. I’ve tried looking at both at the same time but feel my eyes start to cross over – which makes me a little self-conscious of how my own eyes must look to the person I’m speaking with or listening to… a real ‘Metallica moment’ – ‘Sad but true’…!

The eyes are just part of it, however, the lines around their eyes complete the story of how someone has lived; each one a chapter of laughter, love, challenges and are as unique as a finger print…

Now here’s the thing, the problem when communicating online is – that you don’t have the opportunity to see those ‘inflections’ that just show how a person really feels about what they’re taking about or about what they think of what you’re trying to convey…

When something is written, it can be misinterpreted by different readers, and the readers ‘understanding’ can be a ‘bus journey’ away from what the writer was meaning to convey. After all it’s written from one subjective opinion and interpreted by another…

How many times have you posted something online only to have to follow it up with a comment saying something like, “actually I didn’t mean it that way” because somebody wrote an ‘off-the-wall’ comment that left you asking yourself “what did they mean by that?”.

There are ways to combat this situation, especially when there’s something important to discuss and avoids any form of misunderstanding.

Online video.

There are so many video platforms out there that enable you to record directly to them and/or upload to them for free.

And if you’re wanting a great example of it in action, take a look at a video Steve Trister (@stevetrister – Twitter, TristerTV – YouTube) uploaded a few days ago.

It takes a lot to speak as openly as that, so – if you can – leave a comment on his video or better still leave a video reply. But if you can’t comment you can do your bit by sharing it – I know Steve would appreciate it

And finally…

Look at the eyes and see what I mean … But don’t worry about looking at only one of them

And if you’ve seen other great examples then post links to them in the comments section with why you liked them …

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This post is support my 7 min talk at the Late Late Breakfast Show, at the Sway Hotel in Holburn tonight (20th July 2010). I will keep adding to this list when I come across sites, but if you know of any that are not here please can you add them in comments.

For those of you who can’t make it tonight, here’s my presentation…:

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I read on Sky News yesterday that there is a slight difference of opinion on ‘which party’ is currently out in front? There were three poll results published: ComRes, YouGov and Populus who conducted telephone interviews over two days between the 18th & 20th of April

• ComRes – interviewed 1012 adults on April 18th & 19th puts the Conservatives 9 points in front on 35% with Labour and the Lib Dems both on 26%
• YouGov – interviewed 1595 adults on April 19th & 20th and puts the Lib Dems back in the lead on 34%. With the Conservatices on 31% and Labour on 26%
• Populus – interviewed 1501 adults on April 19th & 20th and puts the Liberal Democrats a 10 point increase from last week (31%), just 1 point behind the Conservatives (32%) down 4 points, and 3 points in front of Labour (28%) down 5 points

Confused? Yes… me too. So I thought I’d add some additional keywords into my General Election dashboard on Radian6 around the subjects of:

• Will vote
• Won’t vote
• Not sure

I set the date parameters from the 18th up until today and there’s a total of 35,336 posts with 7,124 posts mentioning keywords from within the 3 areas above. Not a bad sample I thought – at least 4 times as many as the official polls…And here’s what I found:

• 46.8% will vote (3336 posts)
• 45.9% won’t vote (3271 posts)
• 7.3% not sure (517 posts)

The next question begged to be answered: What percentage % of the ‘Will Vote’ would be Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem… and this is what I found:

• Lib Dem 42.2% (1484 posts)
• Labour 31.2% (1098 posts)
• Conservative 26.5% (932 posts)

And this is the total online conversation split between Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems

And this is the sentiment split over the last 5 days:

Click to enlarge

…And finally

For me, the parties need to engage with the people that are openly stating that they ‘won’t vote’ and address why directly with them – rather than push the traditional ‘Vote <insert party name here> with no substance or perceived value behind the conversation and expect people to say ‘ok, I’ll do that then…!’

It’s quite obvious that so many people cannot separate the parties, which potentially makes people think:

a) ‘What’s the point’
b) ‘My vote won’t make a difference’
c) ‘I don’t understand how to tell which party is right for me’
d) ‘They’re all as bad as one another’

All the political parties need to start addressing these ‘common’ thoughts, and engage with honesty and transparency. And the first one to do so, implementing the new ROI (return on involvement) will have an edge going into the General Election on May 6th…

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Paul Weston was made redundant in February 2010 and decided to use social media as a way of proactively raising his online profile to find work. And before you say anything… I’m not calling Paul Weston a ‘Tool’ but the way he has been utilising online tools in order to find a new job is an example of how other people in the same position as Paul can do to make themselves more visible.

Paul Weston’s Background

Paul wrote a post on Rob Cameron’s blog ‘The power of networking…2‘ explaining the situation, if you haven’t read it yet – read it now as it explains in full what has been happening. But the following excerpt gives a little sneak peak:

I am a 34 year old married father of 2 lovely little boys. A month ago, life was sweet, happy as a pig in the doo doo! Since the end of February 2010, I have been unemployed. I worked as a Senior Estimator (Head of Pre-Contracts) for an interior fit-out contractor. Basically carrying out commercial and high end residential refurbishments and fit-outs.

Adding to the conversation

‘So what has the effect been online?’ I asked myself… Well finding out has never been easier now with the help of Radian6, and this is what I’ve found:

481 mentions over the last 30 days

Graph showing increased chat ('buzz') of Paul's job hunting campaign

conversation cloud of chat reltaing to Paul and Treehouse Appeal - click to enlarge

…And finally

And here’s a link to the complete list of all the conversations that have taken place, twitter and blogs, with links to them or if you prefer a PDF I’ve uploaded it to my Scribd account. Remember to follow Pauls blog or/and follow him on twitter

And please spare some change for ‘EACH’s’ appeal to raise £3 million to build and equip a new purpose-built children’s hospice in Ipswich. You can follow EACH on Twitter and find out more about the fantastic work EACH are doing here.

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Yesterday evening I was told at the end of presenting a proposal that we’d won the project for a European product launch. There had been a few late nights ‘Sat by the Mac’ pulling ‘stuff’ together – oh, and that is me on the left – so it was great feeling to get the immediate go ahead…

The journey there

But I nearly didn’t get to the meeting – as my car broke down on the M4 only 10 mins away from getting there! I’m sure you can imagine the colourful language that was exiting my mouth in between inhalations…(!)

Fortunately, the chaps said that they would stay on – ‘phew’

Having to stand on the verge in the rain was not much fun however. But I had a good feeling that everything would be ok – very calming feeling…

Hitching a lift

Then I eyed the recovery vehicle pulling in (they only took an hour to get to me thank you HSBC Recovery ) and I thought to myself “I hope I can convince the driver to load the car on the back and drive me the last 10 mins so that I could get to the meeting…”

And fortunately – again – for me he said yes :0)

Fantastc…!

The meeting

Got to the meeting an hour late – met the chaps and went through the proposal – with findings – and then presented the visuals at the end…

Then, when I saw their faces, I didn’t care what had happened to my car, nor the fact that I was stuck without transport back to Bath or that I hadn’t eaten all day… The feedback and instant notification that we’d won the pitch was nothing short of a ‘perfect moment’

So what was so different about winning this project?

Well, we’d only been asked to take part in the pitch last Friday PM – and although they new it was short notice (Monday PM deadline) they asked if we’d be up for the challenge?

Over to you Churchill …. “Oh yessssss”

So I took the brief over the phone while Polly drove us back down the M6 after our holiday in Cumbria. They emailed the files Friday evening and I started producing on-page/off-page SEO reports for benchmarking. Set up my Radian6 dashboard to monitor the online conversations from the last 30 days and established where they were taking place – then tweaked it over the weekend. I called 6Consulting (UK arm of Radian6) and spoke to Paul to asked for advice on getting the best info we could over a short period of time and he asked Tom & Rhiannon to help out and review the R6 dashboard I’d setup (Dad always told me to measure twice and cut once ) – which saved me so much time (thanks for all your help) so I could carry on writing the proposal and then incorporate benchmarks for SEO and the social media findings.

Yesterday morning we received the remaining files, so I briefed Louise and Simon – two of our designers at m4 – at 10 am; who then worked their magic to make sure that I had concepts to take with me by 3pm (which the client wasn’t expecting to see because of the short notice)

…And finally

What made this win particularly special for me was seeing the look on our new clients faces. Then knowing that I would have the pleasure of letting Louise, Simon, Paul, Tom & Rhiannon know that together we’d won the pitch!

What I truly believe is that there are actually no limits to what can be achieved with the right ‘team’ – internal and/or external – all pulling in the same direction…

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META Description

Over the years META tags have been abused by many in order to try and manipulate search results. But in doing so many sites have been blacklisted. The importance of good META can’t be stressed enough and in this part of my mini series on SEO, I want to discuss why taking the time to write good META Descriptions in your site will help you stand out from the crowd and drive traffic to your site.

Don’t use the same META Description for everypage

I see so many websites using the same Meta Description on every single page, and the only reason I can think of why they do this is to save time. But if you wrote the same Twitter post everyday – with same wording – but the only thing that you changed was the link, would you click it? The time it takes to create good META Description isn’t the important factor here. The important point is that if you don’t create good META Descriptions people won’t click through to your site! And if that happens then you’ve wasted all that time writing excellent content…

Don’t be tempted by thinking “Any META description is better than nothing at all” – it’s not…! Why? Because the search result for every page on your site will come out looking the same. This is definately not what you want – you want your site to cover a range of topics and search phrases, and having a zillion pages that look the same is just asking for Google to treat them as duplicate content!

If you can’t create a unique META Description for every single page leave it blank and let the search engines create it from your page content. This isn’t all that bad as search engines do an ok job of creating relevant snippets. So you should only replace this snippet if you are going to be improving it.

META Descriptions are vital

Why? Because if you have ‘relevant’ META Descriptions for each page of your site or blog then search engines like Google will use this within the search results rather than creatingtheir own from your page content. Try to see it like Twitter (micro-content): in about 140 characters can you sum up what your page is about enough to convince the person reading it that the link to your page will give them all the information they need?

Search Phrase

In order to encourage search engines to use your META Description you’ll need to include the search phrase that people are using in there. Write first and foremost for the searcher so remember you’re trying to get them interested enough to click through to your website.

…And finally

What the above is all about is don’t give your site visitors a reason to leave your site before they actually get there in the first place!

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