Purpose, Your Second Marketing Friend

Purpose is the second P in Social Media Marketing

Whether the purpose is connecting with friends and family or sharing recommendations, social networks provide the means and people are embracing the privileges that come with having a voice and being heard.

What is your Purpose?

When you are posting status updates, each one should have a purpose. That’s why we don’t post what we had for lunch, unless it has meaning in the big picture of our business. For example, if you were a food critic, nutritionist or personal trainer, you might post what you had for lunch as part of your offering to your customers, but most other posts about what you ate are just gratuitous.

Marketing with purpose means value is (price, i.e. value for money) provided. It’s also the solution to a problem (or the product, which solves the problem). Purpose is personal, unique, relevant, practical, objective, sensitive and engaging.

Why does your business exist? What is the purpose of your product? What purpose does your offering have to your customer? What is the purpose of this communication? By understanding these answers completely, you’ll know exactly how to provide value to your customer.

Often your purpose will be similar to your strategic vision or core business idea. It dictate all actions and tactics that the company takes. Take Red Bull for example, their tagline (aka strategic vision/core business idea) is “…Gives You Wings.” The purpose is then to make people feel like they have wings when they consume the product, but also throughout all marketing and branding.

RedBull's Purpose is to give you wings

Google AdWords Certified

This is a belated announcement, but never-the-less important. We are proud to say that our very own Cariwyl Hebert is a Google AdWords Certified specialist. In order to achieve Google AdWords Certification one must study a series of lessons and then take a rigorous exam. Cariwyl passed the exam with flying colors and is our in-house AdWords specialist. We’re very proud of Cariwyl and very pleased to be able to offer this qualification to our valued clients.

If you are in need of Google AdWords assistance, please give us a call at 415.305.6403. Thank you!

WordPress Wickedness

I’ve been making a few updates to my site today and was frustrated by not seeing the changes showing up immediately, in real-time, after saving. This is annoying to me, because I am used to clicking the save button in content management sites where changes are instant. So trial and error is my friend today and if you’re reading this, hopefully my trial and error will save you from having to do it in the future. After an hour or so of investigation, I discovered that if you are saving changes in widgets and/or files in the Appearance editor, the changes don’t show until you have published or updated a blog post. Eureka! So simple right? Right!

Well if you missed it, here it is again: If you are struggling to see a change you made in a widget or on in files in the editor under the Appearance tab, try publishing a new post or even just updating one of your previous posts. Then review the other change you were trying to make. You will see the changes take effect immediately.

For example, I was changing the text in sidebar.php and it wasn’t updating on the live site. Finally after posting something and publishing, the text changes in the sidebar showed. Another issue was that I was trying to format my mailing list sign up widget (a form created with Google Spreadsheets) and it wasn’t letting me control the scrollbars. Update a post and Voila! scrollbars are gone.

This must have something to do with the way WordPress handles posts versus pages. The “save” button in pages and widgets is almost like a save to draft, in that there is a slight delay before you see the changes. Publishing posts seems to publish the whole site, i.e. all changes that have been saved are now published to the LIVE public site.

Another problem solved. Now I just need to remember it for the next time I am making edits to widgets or in the editor. Hopefully this post will joggle my memory and yours.

Have you had any similar experiences with WordPress?

An Introduction to Social Networking Presentation in Oakland

Save the date:  September 25, 2009 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

I am honored to have been invited and excited to be giving a presentation titled “An Introduction to Social Networking:  Tools to Grow Your Business, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…what works for you?” The presentation is to women entrepreneurs as part of  a joint effort by Honorable Jane Brunner, Oakland City Council President and the East Bay Community Foundation.  It is one of many presentations in Councilperson Jane Brunner’s “Women In Business” Brownbag Lunch Series – Informative workshops targeted at women entrepreneurs.

It should be a great way to personally network with some cool women in business as well.  Please share this flyer with your friends and colleagues.

To attend, please RSVP by September 21, 2009 to Luis Aguilar via email at laguilar@eastbaycf.org or phone at (510) 208-0845.

Susby?

plate
Well after nearly four months of getting the business up and running, here we are finally with our brand new site.  We hope you like it.

What is “Susby” you’re wondering, right?  Well let me tell you:

When I was in high school in Cape Town, South Africa, my friends called me Suse (pronouce: “Sooz”).  Then there was another Susan, go figure – there are millions, and even more “Susan Barnes”es – just look at Google and you’ll see.

Anyway, I became Suse B, short for Susan B.  I also created handmade birthday cards for all of my friends and family and signed them with By Suse.  So Margaret Barlow, choir mistress and piano teacher extraordinaire started calling me “SusBy” – for By Sus(e).  From then on I have been SusBy or just Susby and that’s the name of my new consulting firm.  I am Susan Barnes, aka Susby and the firm is Susby Internet Solutions Consulting, aka Susby IS Consulting.

Short sweet, nothing to do with bees or honey, sorry.  Oh, and yes, the licence plate is real.  I have had it since 2006.  I must have been dreaming of owning my own business since then.  Be careful what you wish for… 🙂

Logo_SusbyIS

Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Tactics

1. The Title Tag Is Your Friend
Make sure your keywords appear in the title tag and try to keep your title to seven words or less. Think billboard with keywords and make sure the keywords are relevant to the content you are displaying on the page.

2. Think Niche
The more focused each page of your site is around ONE not five, not three, not even two, but just ONE keyword term, the easier it will be to achieve a good ranking for that keyword term. Make sure the content on that page is relevant to the term and include content that is not only good for keyword-loading, but more importantly useful to your HUMAN visitor. Search engines want to offer value to the person doing the search. Remember that there is a person on the other end of the search box and your page should offer value to that person.

3. Link Love
What’s more important than a bunch of friends on Facebook? A bunch of websites linking to your site. You see, search engines look at the number of links coming to a site as a measure of popularity. Think about it. If you have more votes, you get to be president (well most of the time anyway. You get the idea.) And how do you get links? See item number 4

4. Provide Value
The sites that perform best are the ones that have the best content and that’s really what the engines are trying to their searchers. Content has always been and continues to be king, so just quit messing around with Flash, bells and whistles and gratuitous use of technology because it looks sexy. Think about what your customer is looking for and provide them with the content and value they are looking for.

5. Monitor Measure Learn and Adjust

  • Make sure you are monitoring your site’s analytics
  • Set goals that you can measure changes against,
  • Learn what worked and what didn’t and
  • Adjust your content, keywords and design if necessary to improve your results.
  • Oh, and after all of that, rinse and repeat.

Finally if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to see how well your site is optimized, head on over to the Website Grader and get a free report.