Just on the train heading into London for tonights #140conf London meetup themed ”How real time web is facilitating offline interactivity’

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that communicating online using social networking platforms and tools can be a ‘cost effective’ (subjective I know…) alternative to its historical big brother.

But what’s even more interesting for me is the corporate mind shift that wants to incorporate customer service into the bigger picture of marketing…!

Don’t get me wrong, I think customer service is the ‘new marketing’ but traditionally comms/marketing and sevice were at opposite ends: marketing and communications, for the most part, were produced from an inside-out perspective (messages were created inside the company and got pushed out); whilst service almost always was viewed as an outside-in perspective (customers telephoned, emailed the company for the reason they had)

But If customer service is merging with engagement marketing efforts then who actually owns ‘customer service’ now?And is this at last a sign that board level members are beginning to understand that ‘customer service’ engagement should be a ‘top agenda’ subject?

Let’s hope so

Really looking forward to tonight and what questions the 140conf gang throw at the panel

If you can’t make it tonight then you can always take part using the following hashtag on Twitter #140conf_LDN

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Page <title> & how it helps increase search engine visibility

This is part 3 of 8 of my mini series on SEO. Currently, people use search engines the most to discover websites that contain the most relevant content that they’re looking for. And the ‘Search’ function is also the most used ways site visitors navigate around individual websites. So what is surprising is that page titles are in fact one of the main ‘tools’ to attract new visitors from search engine results and help your site visitors find the exact pages that they need.

The page <title> tag is an HTML code and is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERPs). It’s sometimes called ‘microcontent’ as search engines typically only show the first 66 characters or so of it. Yet, along with the META Description content, it’s one of key factors that visitors use when deciding whether to click it or not…!

What does a page title look like?

Using Google as an example, the word ‘Google’ at the top is a page title i.e. the wording that appears at the very top of your browser when you’re viewing a website:

But what is important is how you display them on subsequent pages. Remember this, your site or company name is not important to the site visitor – only its content is! So subsequent page titles should first show what the page content is then your site/company name… not the other way around. Again if we use Google as an example, after I enter the search term ‘milk a chicken’, see how the page title changes to ‘milk a chicken – Google Search’

(NOTE: Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. For your homepage only, begin with your/company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don’t start with words like “The” or “Welcome to” unless you want to be alphabetized under “T” or “W.”)

For all other pages, start the <title> with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page – but don’t spam it! Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it’s also used as the label for that window in the taskbar, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. So if all your page titles start with the same words, you’ll reduce usability for your ‘multi-windowing’ users.

If you’re working in a programme like Dreamweaver, then you can set the Page Title by including the following between the <head>  </head> section of code:

<title>Enter the title of your page here</title>

But if your using wordpress, for example, then by installing the Platinum SEO plugin you’ll be able to control not only the page title but other key areas on a post by post basis.

That’s it for today… come back tomorrow for part 4 of  ‘SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website’ and I’ll go through META Description

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URLs (Uniform Resource Locator)

Yesterday I wrote the intro to this 8 part mini series on SEO. So without further a do, let’s get stuck straight in.

Firstly, this isn’t a discussion on what static or dynamic URLs are. (If you want to know to the difference then take a look at this aritcle although reading it is not a prerequisite for this post   )

What this post is about is how we name our web page URLs can improve our search engine ranking positions.

For example, I’m sure you’ve seen web pages with something like this http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic in the address bar… When you look at it you can probably only remember the

a) example.com bit
b) or maybe at a push the /cgi-binbit that comes after

…but then it becomes a bit fuzzy…

Wouldn’t it be easier to remember if it was something like this http://www.example.com/product-info or http://www.example.com/exactly-what-you-eneterd-into-google …?

Well you can do it… and not only is it memorable for the person using it but search engines like Google reference your efforts in the search results.

For example, let’s say I was searching Google for information on dynamic and static URLs, I might enter into Google ‘dynamic static URL‘. This produces quite a few results but the first one displays the following:

Notice the web address in green and the words which are in Green B old www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php – Talk about relevancy

This is called SEF or search engine friendly URLs – but how is it done?

Well if your website is an open source CMS (content managed site/system) then you can pretty much bet that someone has written an SEF plugin for it that will take care of business for you. Here are a few links to get you started:

• Wordpress
• Joomla
• Drupal

There are others and you need to follow installation or how to instructions when implementing them – but the instructions on what to do are easy enough to follow. However, if in doubt… DON’T DO ANYTHING and ASK

If you have a static website that you’ve created using something like Adobe Dreamweaver – then you don’t need to worry about components or plugins – just save the page you’re working on based on the content of that particular page e.g.  http://www.example.com/how-to-milk-a-chicken.html – if milking chickens is your thing… ! Just remember not to use spaces or punctuation between the words use a ‘ - ‘ (dash) to separate them.

Note: This is also better than using an ‘ _ ‘ (underscore) because these can’t be seen when the URL becomes clickable and could be incorrectly written down if your site has links that put an underline beneaththem when the mouse hovers over it e.g. this_is_just_a_test_link

But for whichever type of site you have, if you’re really up on your game, make the URL include what people are actually searching for… which I’ll go over that in Part 4…

See you tomorrow for Part 3 of  ‘SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website‘ – Page Titles

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How many websites do you think are out there that underperform? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Answer… far too many! This is where I tell you about one of my hobbies: I like testing sites to see how they perform against their competitors. I know … I’m a bit sad and I need to get out more – but if you met anyone who knows me they’ll tell you that I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. Some people read, watch TV… I, err do stuff like this.

Now, the problem is because so many websites fail to attract the right visitors they fail to sell the product or service that they were initially designed to do, so are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard! They sit there in ‘webspace’ like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens – waiting in cryo hoping to be found – basically doing absolutely nothing!

But it doesn’t have to be like that. If the website content is written from the perspective of the person who is looking for it rather than the company’s perspective then you have a visitor magnet…

If you analyse your website, the market space you’re in and your main competitors you’ll be able to tell whether your search engine rankings can be improved. And I put a Cadbury’s Cream Egg on it that they can

If you use organic SEO (search engine optimisation), which involves two different techniques – on-page and off-page – then you’ll find that your site will naturally rise up the search engine rankings.

On-page SEO

This involves optimising the ‘on-page elements’ of a website such as:

• URLs
• Page Titles
• Keywords
• Descriptions
• Headline tags
• Content
• Hyperlink text

Off-page SEO

This involves link building i.e. the number of back links or links back to the website from other ‘relevant’ websites. The higher your link popularity, the higher your page rank (PR) will be and the higher your site will appear in the search engine results.

From an On-Page SEO perspective, websites and their content that are developed from a user perspective (using Organic SEO techniques) are favoured by the search engines like Google because they match what people are searching for and are given a higher priority – as they are seen as being created naturally (not tested on animals).

So for the next 7 days I’m going to review each of the seven areas of On-Page search engine optimisation so you can see what you need to do. Now, it might be that you don’t have the time to personally undertake your own SEO – but then you can use this as a guide to what needs to be done before you contact an SEO specialist (and that wasn’t meant to be a hint…)

So, see you tomorrow for the 2nd part of  ‘SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website – part 2′ …

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Free Twitter Alerts by Email!

Let’s face it, twitter is fab! And has many uses… But it’s functionality is a bit limited (but it’s simple and that’s why we love it!). But there are developers that use the twitter Api and come up with some great addons. And TweetBeep is one of those online apps that is brilliant! I’m not saying it’s unique, but what it does is send you email alerts – like google – on anything you tell it to!

On an hourly basis, it keeps track of conversations that mention:

• you
• your products,
• your company
• anything that you want it to ,

You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, and what I particularly like is that it can track a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). Nice!

Sign up and create your Twitter alerts

It’s a great little tool for online reputation management and for collecting @replies, @mentions or even for monitoring buzz…

…And finally

TweetBeep is a free service (has adverts in the email – fair exchange IMHO), although there is a premium version for $20 per month that gives you 200 alerts, a 15 minute alert option with no ads – if that floats your boat

Enjoy and let me know what you think…

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Searching this morning for things related to iPhone’s – which is a bit of a routine with me because I love mine, I couldn’t help noticing the description from O2:

Image: Is this an oversight or a last ditch marketing attempt? - over to you o2

Errr, that’s not right…! The iPhone hasn’t been exclusive to O2 since last November when Orange started selling it, followed by Vodafone in January!

Now, as we don’t yet know how this has happened it could be a couple of things:

1. an oversight
2. or it could be one of those instances where nothing is changed until something is said (I hope not…)

If it’s the latter then O2 haven’t accounted for the potential ‘groundswell’ that could easily follow on from this. If it’s an oversight, it doesn’t look good from a public perception… ‘Schoolboy error’ hmmmm

So what should O2 have changed last November?

The text that displays underneath the link can easily be set using the META HTML tag and then using name=”description” content=”put the text you want displayed into here”. For example, I’ve set mine to the following:

meta name=”description” content=”A marketing resource, helping you maximise the return on involvement and audience engagement through online tools using social media -”

(Quick question for you, does that accurately describe my blog? Please let me know )

Now, this text isn’t visible on my site (unless you view the source code), but search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, display it to provide information to the searcher as to what they can expect to see after clicking the link. (I think now you can see why this issue with O2 is a problem)

O2’s Meta has the following in it (click image to see full size):

O2's Meta Description and Keyword copy -text- error on 25 Feb 2010 (click image to view - open's in new browser)

…And Finally

I see a lot of sites that don’t use the Meta Description, but I can’t understand why as it’s such a valuable resource. People searching for

answers/information etc tend to make a decision to click or not to click based on what ‘text’ is in there.By leaving out the Meta Description, you put it into the hands of the search engines what to put there instead – and that might not be compelling enough.

But remember, if you use the Meta Description then the copy you put there must be accurate otherwise you’ll soon have people pointing out your mistake and that will potentially damage your credibility.

So what do you think? What should O2 do next? Do O2 get this weeks SMASBO? (Social Media Anti-Social Behaviour Order) And if you are someone from O2 can you clarify please?

As always, happy to be challenged and educated…

Update 25 Feb 2010 at 17:30 : Just checked the O2 iPhone page and they’ve nowremovedtheir META Description and Keyword

Mobile network O2 changed their Meta description (sometime between 15.30 and 17.35 on 25/2/10) Click to enlarge - opens in new browser

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I talk about the new ROI (return on involvement) a lot – maybe too much? Not enough? I don’t know, you tell me…. But if I wanted to sum up one benefit each for small and larger organisations then:

Small is the new big

For small businesses, successfully competing in a local market will come to those that continue to build deeper relationships with their clients or customers – offline as well as online!

Real people behind the logo

For larger organisations, competing in multiple markets or globally, using social media to be ’social’ will play a big part in their future success. Why? Well because of how quickly information travels. Time is of the essence and you’ll be measured not only on what you say but how long you took to say it!

…And finally

People, have new expectation levels for engagement/service – and they use social media to help them make the ‘right decision’ for them, when the time comes to make that decision. So whether you’re a small business or large corporate if people feel a ‘real’ connection with you – either on screen or in person, they will continue to use you or switch to you when the time comes – as long as the perception of value is greater. And that applies whether they follow you on Twitter or not…

Rocket science…? I think not

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If you haven’t noticed yet, the talk of the town is how to integrate social media into everyday business. Whether from a small business or a global organisation perspective, everyone’s trying to find the ‘best way’ to incorporate social media in some way to solve their ongoing business challenges.

But eventually organisations – big and small – need to evolve and discover the best ways to integrate these communication tools into their management and business practices.

A tale of two strategic approaches

Over the last few of years, I’ve seen a variety of ‘right’ approaches. First came Forrester with the POST methodology:

• People
• Objectives
• Strategy
• Technology

This approach was a good start as it spoke a language that Marketers understood – campaign strategy. But the problem with campaigns are that it’s traditionally how agencies and marketing departments organise themselves. “when are we rolling this out”, “how long will it run for” etc etc etc

This is also how many organisations, that ‘outsource’ their creative and marketing functions, start “dipping their toe in the water”, using several one off ’social media campaigns’. The problem with a ‘campaign’ approach is that it’s one sided and social media is about communicating differently, building relationships and engaging with people. Afterall, you can’t expect relationships to deepen after a series of ‘unique campaigns’.

Like Rome, relationships aren’t built in a day! Imagine telling a friend that you can only be a friend to them for 12 weeks! It doesn’t need a Degree to guess what their response would be…

On the flip side to Forrester is the Dachis Group, who published their ‘Social Business Design’ methodology stating:

The only way to compete in the future is re-organize the entire enterprise from the ground up with a framework to be a social business by design.

Now this is fantastic and I believe they’re right… But, and it’s a big BUT, I don’t know many organisations that will ’set a side’ the way they’ve always done things to “try” a new way to grow a company. If you do I’d love to meet them(!) Let’s face it, even if the management teams agree, the shareholders will probably have something to say about it…

Happy medium – for now

So this leaves us somewhere in the middle. We can’t loose sight of the fact that we need strategy, guidelines and procedures to outline how things will get done, establish goals and metics etc (otherwise how will we know if we’re heading in the right direction…?) But, from an online communication (operational) perspective we need to ‘drop’ the word campaign from our vocab entirely! And although there are people within an organisation that “get” social media and understand how it can benefit their company, there are other people that still need to be convinced that this new “socialite medium” craze will last before they invest any of their time into it. So addressing culture change/transition will be a big factor to have answers for. (Baby steps come to mind)

… And finally

Each business is different, that’s what’s so exciting about social media – it’s not a one size fits all thing. At last the ‘generic repsonse’ can be put in the ‘Smithsonian’. The personality of the company needs to out-shine the usual corporate chatter, and this is something that cannot be copied; it’s as unique for each organisation as our own personalities are to you and me.

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At first glance you might be fooled into thinking that Disqus (pronounced ‘Discuss’) was just another commenting system – but… you’d be mistaken. I thought the same, 9 months ago. Actually, if I’m being honest I originally installed it because it looked better, asthetically speaking, than any of the other options. But now I wouldn’t use anything else… why?

Simply put, it joins the dots between your original blog post and the online conversation that continues within the comments you and your readers leave; posting a link back to the comment left to your social networks when a new comment has been made. Now some might say that this is and has been achieved by RSS for a long time – which would be correct but nothing wrong in increasing you’re visibility

Disqus Benefits & Advantages

Social Network Integration.

Anyone can leave a comment in the traditional way:

• Fill out their name & email
• Website (optional)
• Post their comment

BUT they can also login to Disqus using their Facebook, Twitter, OpenID details and in doing so will not only show links to their profiles, but also include their profile photo

If you register with Disqus as a commenter, then you can have links to your blog AND social networks show up on your comment.

Individual Comment Features

Your readers can ‘like’ other comments that people leave, find the social networks of a commenter, report inappropriate comments and easily repost comments.

Another great user function is that your readers can see other comments left by anyone, subscribe to them across ALL the blogs they post on.

Also, if you want to delete a comment (not recommended – better to post a retraction than to delete IMHO) you can from Disqus or edit/moderate them.

How to Use/Setup Disqus

• Register for an account with Disqus (free)
• Download the Disqus Comment System plugin
• Install it from your Wordpress dashboard
• Finally, from the Settings link in your Wordpress dashboardDisqus:
  - choose your display options and rules
  - make simple styling modifications,
  - and import your other comments.
• When you’re done, Disqus will remove your existing commentplugin and replace it with Disqus. ‘Simples’ – thank you Alexandr

And finally…

It’s very easy to miss setting up of one of the best features of Disqus: linking your comment posts to your existing social networks. To find this little golden nugget do the following:

1. Go to http://disqus.com
2. Click on your user name at the top right of the page next to your Avatar picture, if you’re logged into Disqus this link will take you there

Click on your user name at the top right

3. You’ll see a list of networks that you want to post to your comments to – select the ones you want

4. Now when you write a comment, before you post, roll your mouse over ‘Share on…’ and check the social networks you want to post a link back to your comment post

Roll your mouse over the 'Share on...' to get a list of social networks to post a link of your comment to

And if you want to try it on my Disqus comments below then that’s cool with me

Some quick links to Disqus plugins and don’t forget to follow @disqus on Twitter

• Disqus for Wordpress
• Disqus for Joomla
• Disqus for Movable Type

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When prospective customers, clients or even employees are searching for you, what will they find within the search results? Could there be something there that isn’t favourable? It might be that it’s through no fault of your own – a disgruntled employee or a competitor posting anonymously perhaps, or it could be because you’ve done something in the past and have now learned from it and implemented new rules, procedures, policies etc so that it won’t happen again. But who knows that? Have you told people?

If you don’t control your brand online, someone else will. Managing your online reputation is best practice.

If you make a mistake, the chances are that someone online is going to pull you up on it. But the old saying of, “honesty is the best policy” stands strong. Put your hands up to it and address it… Don’t be fooled into thinking that it will just go away… because it won’t.

How do you assess your online reputation?

For many people searching for information the first page of the search results is as far as they go – without expanding the search term that is. And most users won’t look past the second, so look at a couple of result pages, from each of the search engines, for keywords relating to the following:

• Your Name
• Company
• Brand(s)
• Products / Services
• Employees
• Usernames

The results will vary based on your location and search history. So in order to get the most accurate search results you’ll need to log out from your account on the search engine e.g. if you’re using Google disable personalised search.

Grade your findings

I find the best way of recording your results is on a form using the following headings:

• Search Engine Used
• Keyword Phrase
• Date

And before you ask, yes you’ll need to do this for each search engine and for each keyword…!

Your column headings should be something like these:

• Position in Search engine
• Link to URL
• The type of result (e.g. PDF, word doc, blog post, website, news item etc
• Opinion (e.g. great, good, ok, could be better, poor, worrying…)

Once you’ve listed 20 search results for each keyword phrase and search engine, add up the results to find how many were positive, negative or indifferent. This will tell you whether you need to build your online reputation or manage it.

Build and manage your online reputation

The following steps are the basics for building and managing your own online reputation:

Protect Your Name

• Purchase all relevant web domains relevant to your company – yes all of them. It’s a small investment in comparison and it supports/protects your brand
• Register your username with these five essential social networks, if you haven’t already that is: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn,Twitter, Naymz (Then use KnowEm.com to identify all the other platforms that your desired username is available on)
• Manage your social media presence using tools like:

- CoTweet, HootSuite and EasyTweets for multiple Twitter accounts
- Ping.fm to distribute tweets to multiple social profiles at once
- Disqus to track your comment threads
- Atom Keep to update multiple profiles at once
- and SocialStream to aggregate multiple social accounts

Monitoring what is being said

When building your online reputation you’ll need to monitor what is already out there in the social space. The following tools will help you keep track of the ‘conversations’  and help you can identify opportunities your obligations to participate and to handle any customer service issues:

• Google Alerts Track web results, news, blogs, video and groups for free
• Yahoo Alerts Track web results, news, blogs, video and groups for free
• Twitter Search A simple search for any mentions of a particular keyword phrase on Twitter
• Search Technorati Tracks mentions of your blog or specific keywords amongst other blogs
• Social Mention like Google Alerts, but designed specifically for social media

As your online presence grows so will the amount of tracking you have to do. This is not a negative thing as it shows transparency in what you’re doing. But if you always remember to be accessible, build credibility, be authentic and respond to criticism you’ll be on the right path.

As always, happy to be challenged and educated

Little Note about the above: It isn’t meant to be a definitive list or a complete ‘how to’. I’ve written it only as an introduction to online reputation management – so please, always seek guidance and advice if you’re unsure…

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