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Video and Photos from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 22nd, 2011 by

There are conference attendees and then those bringing the Search Engine Strategies 2011 conference home to you as best they can. Nothing brings home the flavor of an event better than pictures and video.

Da Li Social’s CEO, Li Evans, is both a speaker and moderator for SES, as well as video reporter exclusively for State of Search. Her voice usually wears out but that doesn’t prevent her from sharing the sights and sounds from the conference.

Our good friend Li Evans, author of the book Social Media Marketing is speaking at the conference and is doing training sessions for attendees. She kindly agreed to give us an insight view on what she is doing there. With her camera she records how she experiences SES San Francisco 2011.

Li Evans her first report from SES – I was eating pancakes while she was making this video at Mel’s.

Li Evans Reporting on SES San Francisco: Day Two

A Speakers View on SES San Francisco: Li Evans reports

Li Evans at SES San Francisco (#sessf): her Wrap Up – Can you spot my cameo walk on?

Li Evans interviews Greg Jarboe and Eric Garulay at SES San Francisco – My favorite is the one of the “The Jarboe”.

Li Evans interviews Avi Wilensky and Christian Georgeou at SES San Francisco – Check out StatDash.

Li Evans interviews Christian Georgeou SES San Francisco State of Search – “I’m a Walking Genius”

And my beloved Canon Rebel:
322 Pictures from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco

The Jarboe on YouTube at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 19th, 2011 by

Greg Jarboe may be my most favorite speaker at Search Engine Strategies and in San Francisco he wow’d us with how to use YouTube as a smart marketing tool in the NextGen YouTube Marketing session.

The Jarboe and Li Evans

After a funny introduction by session moderator, Li Evans, teasing whom we loving refer to as “The Jarboe” about his love for the RedSocks, he stood and told us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – but we never think of it that way.

It gets 22 billion searches a month. (And its not a search engine). We spend all the time optimizing for Google and Bing, neglecting the reach of YouTube. It’s also the second most popular site in the world, with the first being Facebook.

YouTube gets 149 million visits per month.

Facebook gets 129 million visits per month.

Greg "The Jarboe" Jarboe of SEO-PR.com

Twitter comes in at 32 million, with Linkedin 21 million and Flickr getting 22 million visits per month.
Where should you be spending your time and money investing in social marketing?

The natural sequence by users in YouTube – people come to discover things. Who seeks what in which channel with what effect? People need to find the video first before they can watch it and then share it with others.

The trick to going viral is to be discovered and be shared.

Make use of the YouTube Keyword tool. It finds relevant keywords for you (but can be quirky sometimes so use your logic.) Use these keywords in your in metadata such as title, description, tags, (Google ignores tags but YouTube loves them).

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The Enabling Power of WordPress: Search Engine Strategies, San Francisco 2011

Written August 19th, 2011 by

According to session moderator, Matt Bailey of Site Logic, he’d been asking for an Search Engine Strategies session on WordPress for several years. He finally got his wish.

Matt Bailey

Wordpress – Power to the People was a well-attended session devoted to the thrust and agility of WordPress for web site building and management, from small business to enterprise ventures. As Matt indicated in his introductory remarks, WordPress empowers people by making it easy to make web sites. They can try new things and not need a technical background. Many thousands of people have built WordPress sites to create revenue in addition to their regular jobs.

First up on the two people panel was Chris Auman, President of Sanctuary Media Group. As a web site solution, he said, if you want a solid, safe, easy to use foundation, WordPress is that. It’s intuitive and easy to use. Some of the points from his talk included:

Chris Auman

Not long ago, companies who built web sites sometimes built custom scripts to allow their clients to update their own web sites. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t, they needed to hire help. This meant losing some control and created a dependency on others.

Wordpress began as a blogging platform. Being open source based, it grew and grew into the ideal foundation for most any type of web site.

Try the Sanctuary.com/wordpress-setup-guide

Benefits of using WordPress are certainly the ability to control your own content and marketing. There is no need for programming. The WordPress community is gigantic, so education and support are readily available.

Clients who choose WordPress based web sites enjoy the reduction in overall costs and the freedom to access their own site whenever they wish.

By its very nature, WordPress is lean, fast loading out of the box, crawled quickly, offers seo friendly URLs’s, is text-based , and uses HTML. There is no JavaScript.

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Social and Viral Tips from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 17th, 2011 by

Social marketing succeeds because humans like to share. The “Like Me! Social & Viral Content Tips for Making Your Brand Look Sexy” session on Tuesday at SES San Francisco 2011 had plenty of examples to back that up.

Li Evans

Li Evans, of Libeck Integrated Marketing, explained that a social campaign that goes viral is accidental. It’s nothing you can plan for (this was repeated by Greg Jarboe in a panel on YouTube today.) When thinking about a social media campaign, the goal is show everyone that you or your company are a valuable resource.

Some Social and Viral Tips

When posting to Twitter or writing a Facebook status that links to a web page or video, offer a brief reason about its value to your readers.

Sometimes the point of a social marketing campaign is not exactly about getting more sales or traffic, but rather, changing the perception of a brand. For example, you may recall Proctor and Gamble’s new Old Spice commercial’s featuring the muscled and gorgeous, Isaiah Mustafa. P&G knew the image of an Old Spice man was of an older man, or less modern. To change the perception, they created ads aimed at women by featuring Isaiah, Fabio and other male models. The response was spectacular. The commercials were placed in YouTube and women shared them with their friends. They didn’t sell products as much as it changed perceptions of the product.

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Social Marketing on a Budget Brings Millions in ROI: Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 16th, 2011 by

Social media solutions on a budget was the topic today at 11am for the Social Media track at Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco today. The biggest proof of a low cost approach that rocked was presented by Jeffrey Harmon, of OraBrush.

Harmon, the Chief Marketing officer for OraBrush, told his tale and shared several humorous videos about the surprise success of marketing OraBrush on a tiny budget. Invited by a 75 year old man, who had spent several years trying to market it, without success, Harmon believed he could create a social media campaign that would work. It began by the creation of a $500 video that was released to Youtube about the tongue cleaner product.

Prescribe If You Like Tongue

At the time of the launch of the first video, YouTube had offered a promotional program that where the video would be promoted for $30 a day. The hope was to sell $35 worth of the product for each day the video was promoted. In record time, they got 422.153 million views and in 6 weeks sold out of 10,000 units of the OraBrush. Some of his key points:

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Packed Crowds at Week of Digital Marketing Training: SES San Franciso 2011

Written August 16th, 2011 by

Li Evans and myself, Kim Krause Berg, are here in San Francisco for a week of intensive conferencing, networking and training in the search marketing industries. There are some interesting new things to note.

Firstly, not only is the Moscone Convention Center and the San Francisco Marriott hosting Search Engine Strategies this week, but other companies are offering training as well. Running alongside SES are the OMS Social Medea Marketing Summit, MMA, the EEC, the IAB and more, such as Bruce Clay’s Training workshop on Friday.

A group of SES Francisco 2011 attendees shares a Mexican meal Monday evening.

This Clickz Connected Marketing Week allows attendees of all the various training and conferences to mingle with each other. So for example, last night’s meet and greet at the Thirsty Bear drew a packed crowd of attendees with a wide variety of interests, careers and skills. This unique blending allowed for a nice depth of networking opportunities and permitted marketers to meet people in related fields.

Instead of conference handouts, booklets, printed schedules, and the usual, everything is put into a small 3 x 5 pamphlet that is attached to where the conference passes are typically worn. On the back of each one are QR Codes. The lanyards are sponsored by SEOMoz. While I need my reading glasses to read the tiny print, that’s worth the effort to save trees. The pamphlet is light, always handy (around our neck) and includes exhibitors, maps, speaking schedules, rooms, and in the back are the free lunch tickets.

For those who want a more robust amount of information, SES offers a free app to download in the iTunes app store, as well as Android and Blackberry. I downloaded it to my Android. It loaded quickly. The app gives you a “My schedule”, photos gallery, events, exhibitors, news, speakers, Twitter access and more. All from your Smartphone. Very fitting for a digital oriented crowd.

This year’s Connected Marketing Week gathers folks from the digital marketing industries and related fields (like mine, usability.) They expect 8000 attendees. The weather is in the low 70′s. And it’s San Francisco, with its trolleys and famous places to see. Flying in from the East coast I got to see the mountains along the way with especially gorgeous views over Colorado.

Will be working and blogging this week for Libeck Integrated Marketing, Cre8pc.com and Cre8asiteforums.

Budget-Friendly Usability Testing Ideas for Small and Medium Businesses

Written August 12th, 2011 by

There are a variety of ways to perform usability testing on web sites and online applications. In fact, our access to tools and testing software seems to grow month by month. However, nothing beats human testing.

Of course, when you don’t have access or the budget to sit your customers down in front of a computer to watch them use your web site, there are decent substitutes or alternative ways to get good data. Someone asked me, “Can’t we get user data from Google Analytics?” Sure, you can. But the numbers don’t have little voices that explain why the left a page or where they got confused. We can get clues from logs and data tracking but its cold, emotionless and voiceless.

Grin and Bear It

My first choice will always be a user lab. But the reality is that small and medium businesses can’t afford this type of testing. Or they think they can’t. In truth, all you ever need to do is sit people down in front of a monitor, give them a task and be silent as they attempt to finish it. Offer someone a coupon, free dinner, gift card or some other incentive to bring them in for a few hours.

Remember these points:

  • Find someone unfamiliar with your business and/or web site. After a few passes (and accidental suggestions from you or others nearby), they’re no objective or brand new.
  • Assign one task at a time and make it one step and simple. “Find”, “Buy”, “Look for”, “Register”, “Show me where” and “Sign up” are common tasks.
  • Be quiet. Expensive labs have video cameras and software inside the computer that follow eye movements and mouse clicks. In light of investing in all of that, just sit nearby and watch. Take into consideration that people get nervous. They’re not used to your keyboard. They may not have slept well or were late getting there. In truth, these are all the tiny extras human factors love to incorporate into their testing (our emotional state and environment.) Do what you can to put your person at ease. You only want to watch. It’s not a contest. You’re not judging them. Give them chocolate or tea.
  • Listen. You not only want to watch someone use your web site, but you want to encourage them to tell you what they’re thinking as they go along. Encourage them to explain, AFTER the task, why they felt frustrated (if they don’t other swear at the screen). Why did the pick a certain product? Did they get lost? Could they read the pages? Were they distracted?

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Ten Ways to Improve Web Site Navigation

Written July 29th, 2011 by

Web site navigation design focuses on moving your site visitors about your site and helping them find what they came for or where to start a task. One of my favorite parts of using a navigation application in my cell phone is following the pulsing blue arrow because it relays back to me my “sense of place”. This same idea is what we try to design our web site navigation to do.

Three typical web site navigation goals are:

  • To get visitors from one place to another; be task oriented. (For example, if the link doesn’t go somewhere useful, avoid making it a high priority, top-level navigation link.)
  • Navigation should show the relationship between elements. This is achieved through sub-navigation groupings and link labels. (For example, underneath the About Us section is often links to company history, clients, contact, mission statement, press releases, etc.)
  • Communicate directions. In other words, it should be easy to figure where a user is, was, and can go to next. Read the rest of this entry »

20 Ways to Improve Newsletter Subscriptions

Written July 15th, 2011 by

Despite social networking and blogs, newsletters remain popular with your web site customers and fans who want to keep up with you. Some of the best offer a mixture of business and personal information. That extra human connection endears readers to you so they’ll look forward to your next issues each month.

The following are suggestions for how you can increase subscription rates and persuade newcomers that you have a newsletter worth receiving.

    1. Are there too many opportunities for signup?
      Some web sites appear desperate. There may be a text link in the global navigation and footer, plus a box placed on every single web page. Some web sites have two boxes – one above the page fold and a duplicate below the fold. One “call to action” per page is fine.
    2. Did you extend a polite invitation during conversational content somewhere?
      There are many ways to invite signups, such as when introducing yourself or company, in a form return page when you direct visitors back to the homepage or somewhere of interest, or as an item in the About Us content. Link to a page containing information about the newsletter, and make sure this informational page contains a convenient signup form.
    3. Does your invitation contain scan words such as “Free”, “Sales”, Special”? (Ex. “Subscribe to our free newsletter.”) If not, consider adding one of them.
    4. Did you study your target market to learn if there is a need for your type of newsletter? Who are your intended readers?
    5. Be careful. Some forms are confusing, such as when they ask for a mailing address for an EMAIL only newsletter. Why do you want to know where they live? (If you have a good reason, it’s best to clearly state what that is.)
    6. Is the newsletter intended for an International audience? Have you made this clear in your invitation? If there is a reason to ask for personal information, make sure the form is designed for International users to fill out. For example, do not “require” a State field for countries that do not have States.
    7. Link to a privacy policy at or near the top of the sign up form. This explains exactly what will happen to the subscriber’s email address and any other information they’re asked to give. If they don’t trust your motives, they may refuse to sign up.
    8. A simple newsletter sign up box should request a name and and email addressthat will accept the newsletter. Instructions near or inside the box, or in the newsletter information page, explaining they’ll receive a confirmation email verifying their information, will increase user confidence.
    9. Always link to a sample issue. Otherwise, they have no idea what they’re signing up for. Always refer to the title of the publication. I’ve seen signup requests for publications with no name!
    10. Provide free archives. A history of a newsletter indicates if it’s new, or an established publication. The latter hints at authority on the subject matter. If new, note somewhere that archives will be provided. In this way, you offer a second chance to sign up later, once the prospect has an opportunity to see the product.
    11. Don’t tease. Some newsletters ask for content suggestions and ideas, but they don’t have an issue available, or archives online, making it difficult to understand what they cover or what was previously written about.
    12. How often does it arrive? Make sure this is indicated on the informational page. An informational page is a great way to sell your newsletter. It contains many of the items on this checklist and answers their questions. This will encourage more subscriptions because they have a much better idea of what you intend on sending to them.
    13. Is it HTML or text based? Do you offer a choice? Keep in mind that everyone has different needs. It helps to offer a choice. If your newsletter software allows a text version and an HTML version of your document, you can offer subscribers a choice of receiving it depending on how their email client preferences are set. For example, many prefer to read in a “text only” format. By presenting choices, you can make your newsletter offering more attractive.
    14. What are the benefits of subscribing? Does it teach? Offer discounts? Accept advertising?
    15. How good is it? Provide testimonials and reader feedback, with their permission. This is especially helpful in competitive industries. Another advantage is when you ask for feedback; you can follow up on their suggestions. In many cases, improvements are made based on reader feedback.
    16. If your publication is monthly, here’s an idea from magazine publishers. In your information page, list the topics to come in the next year beforehand. This is great for fee-based publications too. Keep the reader interested by what you plan to cover.
    17. Offer referral incentives. This may make more sense for fee-based publications, but be creative. If you’re a consultant, and want to drive up readership, is there something you can offer such as free 15 minutes of your time, or a free gift, or discount on future services?
    18. Announce upcoming issues on your homepage, and the publication itself. Some newsletters come the same day, every week. If for some reason they will NOT be delivered, make sure to warn subscribers in the previous issue. Otherwise, you may be bombarded with “Where’s my newsletter!” emails.
    19. Avoid relying on a simple box signup alone. Place a “View information” text link inside it that invites your visitor to learn more, gain trust, and get excited about your publication. Place a “Tell a friend” box on the information page too, for fast and easy referrals to your newsletter.
    20. Always create confidence and trust by offering an opt-in/opt-out system. A no hassle way to subscribe or unsubscribe is always appreciated.

      21.  

      Your newsletter sign ups can grow even more if you enable readers of the newsletter to share it with friends. Some text like this on the newsletter might lead them to share it with others:

      “If you enjoyed this edition of the [name of newsletter], and you know of someone else who might like it, consider forwarding a copy of it to them.”

      Towards the end of your newsletter, include a link to your newsletter informational page where people can subscribe if they’ve received a forwarded copy from a friend and decided that it’s something they would like to receive too. For example, you can write,

      “If you received this newsletter by way of a referral and wish to receive further issues, you can sign up for free using the link provided.”

      Even if you’ve been publishing a newsletter for years, updates to your procedures or offers provide interesting trackable data that will prove how successful your new enhancements are. The best newsletters have years of loyal readers because they’ve learned to incorporate the points listed above, but more importantly, they truly understand what their readers want.

Do We Need ANOTHER Social Networking Site, Google+?

Written July 1st, 2011 by

Who better to help test and spread the word about the new Google+ social networking website than the marketing and user experience industries? I’ve lost track of how many social gigs I’ve joined. Do I need another one?

Google Opens the Gates to Google+

Faster than the speed of sound, the moment Google opened the gate to play with their new toy, I received invitations, and sighed. Sure, it’s Google. But do I really need or want to join another social networking site? What does Google+ offer that Facebook, Linkedin, BranchedOut, Quora, and others don’t already do?

Who is their target user?

Firstly, if you receive an invite to test Google+, go ahead and take it for a spin. It’s free and from a usability perspective, easy to jump in and start using right away. So many people accepted and shared invitations that for a time, the gates were closed. While frustrating, I understood this to be part of their beta testing. Performance testing covers server stress, traffic volume and the stresses on an application by a surge of users. Google may have needed to stop and make adjustments. I got in last night.

Google+ has something for everybody and it looks like they took bits and pieces from other social sites and found ways to incorporate those ideas into their own property.

They ramped up Google chat by adding video.

Just as Facebook has categories for topics like Gardening, Books, Science, etc., Google+ does the same thing, but calls it “Sparks”.

Like Twitter, they show a row or two of tiny profile photos of who you have connected with in your circles.

 

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