Social Media | Totally Incorrect

David May 3, 2009

Blog Of the Week – Danny Brown

Danny Brown’s blog is my blog of the week.

For this week I had planned to make a change from my usual Social Media type blogs and move to somewhere else – photography to be precise. I knew exactly which blog I wanted to talk about – one that has really helped me with improving the photography for my wedding photo business.

The only problem is that this Danny Brown guy has been getting in my head all week and I’m wondering if putting some thoughts about what he is doing into this post will help get him out.

If you’ve not come across him before, this Brown character is a north of the border person twice over. He’s a Scottish guy who now lives in Canada – maybe it’s a character flaw!

The question is how the heck did this person get to take up residence in my head? I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that everywhere I go in the Internet these days he is there – almost as though he has figured out my likely destinations and decided to camp out there, waiting! He is all over Twitter for example It is impossible to take part in any of the #chats without seeing his avatar. To make it worse, he is making comments all the time as well.

So in an effort to escape, I might head over to some blogs. Same thing; there he is again, ready to ambush me. If he isn’t being talked about he is posting in the comments or – gasp – guest blogging. I’m seriously considering contact Al Gore and warning him that his invention is being taken over.

The main reason for Danny Brown being in my head is that all these Tweets, blog posts, comments and guest blogs make me think. I’m still a newcomer to the whole Social Media thing and I have so much to learn. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest Reading Danny Brown’s to get any answers, although there are certainly some there. I find that after reading his work I am questioning what I think I already know. Danny Brown challenges me by showing how little I really know and how much there is to learn.

Oh – if you’ve seen the 12for12k logo on my site, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Danny Brown is the founder of that as well.

If you’d like to take the risk of reading some of Danny Brown’s work, head over to his blog at dannybrown.me. If your business is trying to get to grips with how to integrate this trendy Social Media thingy into your marketing plan you can also check his business site PressReleasePR.com.

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

What do you think of Danny Brown and his approach to Social Media? Is he someone who has gotten it together, or just a Scottish guy with poor fashion sense when it comes to headwear?

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: blogs, Marketing, social media 3 Comments

David April 30, 2009

$50/Month Marketing Program: Part I

$50 Marketing Program: Part I

OK, you have a small business, you have a great product or service an idea as to who would need it. Now you need to let your potential clients know who you are and how you can help them. Only downside? You are not exactly in a position to spend a lot on marketing your idea.

So here is the challenge: put together a workable marketing program for a small business. Nothing remarkable about this, other than the monthly budget is only $50,00!

What do you think; is this even possible? I believe it is, using some of the fabulous resources that are available. In fact, for the $50.00 budget, I believe I can put together a very viable program that would help a small business build their presence.

The $50 program includes both traditional outbound marketing techniques and some inbound marketing ideas – exactly what marketers should be doing, regardless of budget.

The program uses some key components:

Paid Programs
Website and blog (including hosting plan)
Constant Contact email marketing
Vonage VoIP phone service

Free Programs
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
Podcasts
Google resources

You’ll note that this isn’t a real marketing plan – more a collection of ideas. In any case, I’m hoping they will be helpful for anyone starting a small business and wanting to effectively market their services on a limited budget.

OK, let’s get started. There are two things that every business must have, phone service and a website/blog. In the budget, I’ve allowed for Vonage unlimited calling plan and for domain registration and hosting fees for a website. I’ve assumed that the business owner already has broadband Internet access that can be used.

We need to register the domain name and get a hosting account. For this, I’m going to use that old faithful – GoDaddy.com. I’ve used GoDaddy for years and other than the horribly unfriendly website, I’ve never had a problem. The price is right – $10.00 for a .com name and $5 per month for a Linux hosting account.

For the website, My plan is to use WordPress as the platform and to purchase a template that can be customized to suit the business needs.

I budgeted to use the Corporate template from StudioPress. There are several reasons for this:
• Easy to customize, a high of programming skill isn’t needed.
• Combines static site and blog pages – both are essential for any business
• Excellent support forum available at no additional cost
• I’ve had good SEO results using StudioPress themes
• Can use any of the huge range of WordPress plugins

One thing I like with the GoDaddy hosting is that it comes with WordPress already to go as well as the MySQL database that is needed to drive it. There is pretty good documentation on both the GoDaddy and WordPress sites to help get everything installed.

While setting up the hosting account, also set up an email forwarding account. GoDaddy allows a whole bunch of these per domain. I used this feature to send my comcast.net email account that I got with my broadband account to my me@mydomain account I set up with GoDaddy – easy and looks much more proffessional than using a gmail, or comcast type account.

Once the hosting account is set up, it is time to get WordPress installed and upload the new theme you have purchased. It’s then time to get customising to make your new site reflect your business and personality. Use the support forum at studiopress.com to help with this.

Since we’ve been in spending mode, let’s also set up the Vonage account. This is the most expensive thing we have to deal with – $25 per month for unlimited local and long distance calls.

I would prefer to use a mobile phone (as I do in real life – haven’t had a landline phone for years) but this would cause big budget problems.

So. let’s quickly review what we’ve achieved so far and what it has cost.

Registered web domain – $10 = $0.83 per month
Hosting account – $5.00 per month
Purchase site template – $60 = $5.00 per month
Phone service – $25.00 per month

Total monthly amount = $35.83

Not bad so far. In the next part of the story, we’ll start to use our new stuff.

Are you involved in marketing for a small or start-up business? Do you have any comments or ideas to share?

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: blogs, Marketing, social media 1 Comment

David April 28, 2009

David’s Twitter Newbie Tip

Getting some followers.

If you are just discovering Twitter (as I was a short time ago – I’m still basically a newbie!) you’ve probably found that it gets much more interesting when you build up a group of followers. There are a lot of strategies around for doing this, including many schemes that offer to get you thousands of followers in a very short time. If you want to do this – go for it. Personally, I think it is better to build a network of people with similar interests to yourself; people you might actually want to have conversations with.

Here’s a strategy that I think works.

Provide some information in your profile. If anyone (other than a spam bot) is interested in becoming part of your network, they are going to want to get a feel for what you are all about. A quick one line intro, a photo and a link to your website or blog goes a long way.
Post a few tweets on subjects you are interested in. For me, I will usually not follow anyone who hasn’t made at least some posts.
Find some people with similar interests and follow them. A lot of the people you follow will follow you back – especially if you’ve taken care of the first two steps. If you look at someone’s profile and their numbers of followers and followed are pretty balanced you’ll know you are in with a good chance.
Join in the conversation. A really good thing to do is to get involved in some of the organized “chats” on Twitter. I’ll post more on these in a future Twitter Tip if you don’t yet know what these are. The one’s I like to take part in are #blogchat on Sunday and #smbiz chat on Tuesdays. There are a lot more to be found.
If you find a good organized conversation with a subject that interests you, you’ll find a lot of people to follow and (if you take part) you’ll be followed too.
If you find something of interest on Twitter Retweet (RT) it. This lets more people see the interesting content and the originator of the material will usually thank you and often follow you. Here’s a good guide to ReTweeting.

You’ll find that once you get a few followers and start becoming active in the community, your number of followers will increase with little or no effort needed. I’d strongly suggest that you follow back people that take the trouble to follow you. I nearly always do except for the “get 10,000 followers by lunchtime” and “get rich quick while sitting on your bottom” crowd. It’s a good policy to always check out the bio of anyone you are thinking of following (see my first point at the start)

Most importantly of all, I think Twitter works best if you just want to network and have fun, rather than having an agenda.

If you are a Twitter user, how did you get started in building your network? Are there any great tips you could share?

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: social media, twitter 2 Comments

David April 26, 2009

Why you really do need to blog

You really do need to blog – I’m not kidding!

Well at least you need to blog if you have the responsibility of communicating with the clients of your organization. There really is no question in my mind, using a blog can really give you an edge over your competition, can help customers find you and can improve the experience a client has with your company. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

I’ve been around long enough to have used a progression of communication tools. In my early days, if a client wanted to get some information it was a case of putting some brochures in the mail – courier service if the need was urgent.

Fast forward a few years and we had this great invention – the Facsimile or Fax Machine. This was really cool in its time. Rather like photocopying the brochure and it would appear at the client’s machine. The only problem we had initially was that the closed fax machine was in the Post Office in the nearest big town about 30 miles away. As you can imagine, only the most urgent documents got the special treatment needed for them to be sent via this cool new technology.

Luckily, this fax technology was subject to the usual cost reductions over time so every office soon had one (or more) of their own. Need to send a brochure – no worries; over to the fax.

Needless to say, when Al Gore invented the Internet, he gave us the opportunity to put those sales brochures on-line. Indeed that is just what many early websites seemed to be – scan the brochure, put it on-line and you’ve got a website. Thanks, Mr. Gore!

Today, I still tend to think of most websites as the on-line version of the sales brochure. Sure there is often a lot more going on, but that is what they are, the corporate sales brochure. No amount of cool effects can disguise the fact that websites are, on the whole, rather static and boring – charged with getting the sales brochure to any potential client that might come by.

What websites generally don’t do is engage the potential client in any kind of conversation, provide dynamic content that visitors might actually want to read or help with building any kind of real relationship. If there is one thing I’ve learned through my years in business it is that relationships are the single most important thing.

Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not suggesting that anyone go and dump the corporate website. For most companies, the website remains an important part of the overall marketing strategy. What I am strongly suggesting is that you supplement your corporate site with a blog that will let you engage your clients at a different level.

So what is it about blogs and blogging? How can they help a business?

Well, one of the most important things is that blogging gets you out of the old marketing mindset of sending information to clients. Now you can create relevant content that people in your market might want to read. Do this well and clients are going to start to come to you.

Show your clients a less corporate side of your organization. Include news about the people in your business that clients interact with (and those they don’t). Show that there is more to you than the corporate site.

Allow people to comment on your posts. Make it a two way conversation.

Blogs are more dynamic than conventional sites. Keep yours up to date with quick stories that would never make it to your corporate site.

Google likes blogs. Quite often stories I post on my blogs appear near the top in Google searches after just a few minutes. I think this is the combination of carefully optimizing the posts, plenty of links and relevant content.

If your content is good there is a very good chance other bloggers will link to it or quote you.

Readers can subscribe to your blog by email or RSS giving them flexibility in how they read your content.

Blog creation and blog readership is growing at a very high rate. See Mack Collier’s excellent post on this here. (Mack’s blog The Viral Garden happens to be my Blog of the Week this week. At a time when everyone seems to be claiming to be a social media expert, Mack really is one – you better read his stuff!)

Blogging is incredibly cost effective in money terms. (Can be expensive in time so be sure you have the mindset to see this through if you start)

Also – blogging is just great fun. jump in and enjoy!

By the way, the screenshot is from our Labeling News blog and shows some of the stories we write. New additions to the Winco ID family, a story with amusing photo of our guys at a trade show, ideas of new developments in the labeling world that can solve problems – we can write about a lot of things that just might be of interest to our readers.

If you have any ideas about effective blogging, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: blogs, Marketing, social media Leave a Comment

David April 11, 2009

Balanced Marketing – HubSpot

If you’ve read any of my marketing posts, you’ll know that I’m a huge believer that successful marketing today calls for a balance of traditional and new techniques – a blending of outbound and inbound marketing. Here at Totally Incorrect, I want to create an occasional series of stories that feature businesses that I believe have gotten it right.

HubSpot is a start-up business in Cambridge, MA that has developed a system for managing inbound marketing. In their own words: “HubSpot is an inbound marketing system that helps your business get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of those prospects into leads and paying customers.”

Sounds good – inbound marketing is trendy right now and there are plenty of marketing managers looking for ways of integrating inbound marketing into their plans. This article is about how HubSpot sets about this.

Just a quick disclaimer, I’m not affiliated with HubSpot in any way and I’m not a customer at this time. I am a member of the Pro Marketers Group at Linkedin, which I believe was started by HubSpot.

OK, let’s get going. First of all, like most companies, HubSpot has a built a presence at Google. I did a quick Google search on “Internet marketing” and quickly found the two results you see here – one organic (I expected to see HubSpot higher on the page than I did, to be honest) and one in Sponsored Results. Note that the AdWords one is attempting to entice the viewer to click on the ad with the promise of getting something for free. Personally, I’d normally only see the organic Google result – for this story, I went to the trouble of disabling adBlock just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Normally, I’m pretty much ad-free. I also have huge doubts as to the real effectiveness of pay=per-click advertising, but that’s for a future story.

I also seem to remember reading that HubSpot buys banner ads at certain marketing sites such as marketingprofs. Because of my trusty adBlock I’ve never seen them and an unprotected visit to marketingprofs this morning revealed no HupSpot banners.

So HubSpot has done a bit of SEO work on their site and bought some Google clicks and maybe banners – good things to do, but pretty conventional. Where HubSpot sets itself apart is in the way the company and its employees have embraced Social Media marketing.

Where ever you go in the Social Media world you are going to come across HubSpot people – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin – there they are. HubSpot does things the way I like to see it as well – a corporate account which consistently promotes the company image and individual accounts where the employees bring there own personalities to the mix.

As I already mentioned, I’m a member of the Pro Marketers group on Linkedin which is a HubSpot group. It is nicely done so that, other than the subtle branding, it works as a resource for the members – not as an ad for HubSpot.

In my opinion, good useful content is the key for successful Social Media marketing and this is the area where HubSpot stands out. The folks at the company have clearly spent a lot of time putting together some great content, all designed to be helpful to the their target customers. As a Sales and Marketing Manager with a small company, I fit the profile of a potential client and I must confess that I use the resources that HubSpot provides quite often.

I have the feed for the HubSpot Marketing Blog in Google Reader so it is one of the blogs I read every day. I’ve also taken advantage of some of the webinars on marketing topics that are provided.

To be honest, the resources that HubSpot makes freely available are better than many that I’ve paid for in the past and I would recommend anyone with an interest in modern marketing techniques to check them out.

One very novel aspect that the company produces is a weekly video podcast – www.hubspot.tv.

The podcast is pretty nicely done (although I find one of the presenters a bit irritating) and each weeks show is archived at iTunes – just go to iTunes and search on HubSpot.

So this is all very well, but how does it help to sell the company’s software?

Well first of all, the whole point of inbound marketing to to get people to your site that are likely to have an interest in what your business does. In the case of HubSpot, if you engage one of their people at Twitter, click on one of their “Free Marketing eBook” ads, watch their video podcast, you either have no life whatsoever or are involved in marketing.

Let’s assume that most visitors are interested in marketing (the no-lifers won’t stay long anyway). When you click on most of the inbound links to HubSpot you are going to arrive at one of their landing pages (another must have) and you will often have to provide some information about yourself before you are allowed to get to the webinar, white paper, marketing kit you want.

When I went through this process, I wasn’t too happy with the number of fields I had to fill in. While I don’t have an issue with providing basic info for something I want – these guys form just goes on and on. I always just play and check off the biggest numbers for employees, $$ in sales etc. Make me fill in dumb forms – you’ll get dumb info back! (There’s that anti-social twist again!)

Anyway, if you get to the end of the sign-up form; two things happen.

First you get the content which is always of the highest quality and very useful.

Next, you get out of the inbound marketing phase of engagement and into a more traditional sales cycle.

The first thing you can expect is an email thanking you for your interest and wanting to show you more about the HubSpot software. I’m pretty sure this email is automatically generated via their Salesforce.com installation. No worries though – the message is nicely put together.

You can also be confident of a follow up call (or calls) from an Inbound Marketing Consultant – HubSpot speak for inside sales person.

I would describe the followup from the HubSpot sales team as politely persistent – just what I’d expect from my own sales guys to be honest.

So far, I’ve not taken that next step – to learn more about the HubSpot system and to find out if it would appropriate for our business. Just a matter of time though.

HubSpot is a perfect example of how a Marketing 2.0 business can use a mix of traditional and contemporary marketing and sales techniques to come with a balanced marketing solution. The fact I’m discussing it shows that it works!

I must remember to reactivate adBlock now – seen enough ads for one day thank you!

Update: AAARRRGGGGGG!!!!! – I forgot to reactivate adBlock and came across this HubSpot ad on a blog

I won’t let that happen again!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: lead generation, Marketing, sales, social media 6 Comments