Author: Suse Barnes

Susan Barnes is the president and founder of Susby Internet Solutions. Susan enjoys teaching and strives to have her clients understand how they can use newer technologies to promote their businesses. Susan has been project manager, designer, developer and lead online marketing consultant for various small to medium sized businesses for over eleven years.

Partnerships, the 6th P in Marketing

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Partnerships are key in new media marketing.

What makes perfect partnerships in business?

To be social means to have and form partnerships of all kinds. Whether it’s a partnership in the form of becoming a fan or follower, a friendship with a high school classmate, a business partnership or simply a meetup group for learning and expanding your contacts, partnerships are prevalent in marketing today. They always have been, but if you look at the most successful businesses today, it’s those that have been most strategic and smart with their partnerships.

Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin were the original dream team who started Google. They then hired Eric Schmidt to create a partnership that resulted in the beginning of profits for the company. Google purchased many a young startup company including Blogger, Picasa, and YouTube and those partnerships even if they were acquisitions has served to increase profitability exponentially over time. Google also partners with its customers by helping them make money for themselves through their core product, Google AdWords. They provide many tips, tools and tutorials for advertisers and reward customers who are performing well with better pricing and higher rankings.

Facebook has partnered with several third party application developers, (such as Votigo and Involver) service providers (like Spotify and Instagram) and game developers (like Zynga) in order to keep their user base. We partner with twitter users every time we reciprocate a follow, retweet or enter into public conversations. No solitary person can exist in a vacuum and certainly no marketing can happen without anyone around. In the conversation economy, word of mouth is a world of mouth. People and partnerships are crucial for business and even more crucial in social media marketing.

What are your favorite examples of winning partnerships in business today or from the past? Please add your thoughts in the comments area below.

Marketing, Search, searchmarketing, Social Media , , , ,

Participation is Marketing

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Participation is Marketing

Participation is Marketing

Brian Solis said, “Participation is marketing.” This has never been truer than with social media marketing. We cannot market unless we participate and being there and showing up is actually just one part of the success model.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter said in a TedX talk called the Six Keys to Leading Positive Change, that the keys all include “ups.” They are:
1. Show Up
2. Speak Up (Use the power of voice to shape and influence others’ thinking)
3. Look Up
4. Team Up (Partners matter)
5. Never Give Up (Everything looks like failure in the middle)
6. Lift Others Up (Find your inner Nelson Mandela)

Nelson Mandela. Participation is Marketing.

All of the above keys embody participation. If you’re just dipping your toe in the ocean of social networks and social media marketing, jump in, because in my humble opinion, learning through experience is the only way to learn.

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Proximity is Better than Place in the P’s of Marketing

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Proximity - location based systems provide convenience

Proximity, ie. Location, location, location

Although very similar to Place, in origin of the word, proximity is important in social media marketing because of our evolution to being consumers of smart phones, and mobile devices. With Social Mobile Local (SoMoLo) comes many check-in applications where people can share their exact location and thereby vote for products and venues based on their visit to a particular store, restaurant or other venue.

Proximity indicates where you are located in the world, whether near or far and allows for marketers to effectively create value for you based on your physical and geographic location.

Proximity has opened up a whole new way of marketing for local businesses including those brave enough to try group buying coupon/deal services like Groupon, LivingSocial, Bloomspot, and Yipit (to name only a few). Proximity is about place, but it’s not about the marketer wanting to have the product on the shelf at eye-level. It’s about reaching out to people who are already nearby or who have friends nearby, providing value in the form of convenience and connection. It’s about reaching people where they are, ie. adding value instead of paying for placement.

How are you using proximity and SoLoMo in your business?

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Passion is not a pitfall

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Passion is P Number 3

“Hire for passion, train for skills,” is a quote I heard on a recent Social Media Examiner podcast. The people that are the most passionate about what they do are the ones we remember most; they are also the most prolific and usually the most profitable.

What would happen if you hired a social media manager who was your number one fan? Passion is admirable, charming and inspiring. It’s positive, decisive and purposeful. It’s about pleasure and growth through pain. That love and obsession with something is what pulls us through the hard times and leads to pure happiness and ultimate satisfaction.

You won’t find a more driven and determined person than that person who is most passionate about your (or their own) brand, business or project and success.

So, look for passion first, then train them or collaborate with them to reach your goals. And if you’re thinking along the lines of volunteers or brand influencers, seek the most passionate there as well. It’s not only sex that pays!

Mad Scientist with passion

What gets you up in the morning?

Marketing, Random, Social Media ,

Purpose, Your Second Marketing Friend

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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

Social Media, Uncategorized

People First in New Media Marketing

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People are the best thing in the world.

In social media marketing, as in life and all marketing, nothing happens without people. Gary Vaynerchuck once said “The people in your life make the world better. People are literally the best thing in the world.” If there are no people to see/hear/respond, there is no promotion.

Gary Vaynerchuck on People Discovery

With the onset of “world of mouth” media, yes that’s not a typo; we all now have a voice and a purpose to share what is most valuable to each of them. Social networks facilitate our human need to connect and share, breaking all previous barriers of place, making the world smaller and giving everyone courage to participate at their own levels.

World of Mouth - Social Media Revolution 2013

The shift from traditional marketing to word-of-mouth marketing is an evolution from a broadcast to the masses sales-like approach to one that is much more focused on community, tribes, followers, fans and connections. Social media marketing is about people first and foremost and people with a purpose.

Marketing, Social Media

Marketing with Social Media Means 4 P Shift

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4 P’s of Marketing Make Way for 7 P’s of Social Media

In traditional marketing schools, there are 4 P’s in marketing. These are product, price, place and promotion. In the 20th century these were followed as rules and guidelines for marketing anything and the marketer with an acute understanding of the 4 P’s generally succeeded in achieving his/her marketing goals.

The four P’s may also be translated into solution based approach known by the mnemonic, SIVA, i.e.

Product = Solution
Promotion = Information
Price = Value
Place = Access (Distribution)

Social Media Marketing expert Brian Solis recently posted an article about the 5th and 6th P’s in marketing. He believes these are People and Purpose. I agree that these are very accurate additions in in the twenty tens, however I think the shift is much bigger than simply adding these two.

Positioning may be the seventh P in the traditional (older) marketing world. In social media marketing, however, positioning stands for messaging, which can sometimes be frowned upon. Positioning or messaging in marketing has connotations of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the stigma of false advertising.

And conversely to Brian at the risk of rattling off several words that being with the letter P, I think the following seven words beginning with P provide a useful picture of the philosophy of social media. I believe we have shifted from the 4 P’s (Product, Promotion, Price, and Place) to the following:

People
Purpose
Passion
Proximity
Participation
Partnerships
Promises

The 4 P Shift in Marketing

We start with People as people are the most important component in any marketing campaign.
In social media marketing, as in life and all marketing, nothing happens without people. Gary Vaynerchuck once said “The people in your life make the world better. People are literally the best thing in the world.” If there are no people to see/hear/respond, there is no promotion.

With the onset of “world of mouth” media, yes that’s not a typo; all people now have a voice and a purpose to share what is most valuable to each of them. Social networks facilitate the human need to connect and share, breaking all previous barriers of place, making the world smaller and giving people courage to participate at their own levels.

The shift from traditional marketing to word-of-mouth marketing is an evolution from a broadcast to the masses sales-like approach to one that is much more focused on community, tribes, followers, fans and connections. Social media marketing is about People first and foremost and people with a purpose.

The next six posts will explore the rest of the new P’s in the context of Social Media Marketing. Please feel free to add your comments below.

Marketing, Social Media ,

SEO Tips for Blog Posts | SEO for You and Your Blog (not Spot)

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SEO Tips for Blog Posts may not be something you search for everyday, but it is indeed something many small businesses are interested in. That’s the reason for this post and I hope you’ll find it useful.

8 SEO Tips for Blog Posts

 

  1. Determine the keywords your post will be focused on.

    When it comes to SEO tips for blog posts, your first and foremost priority is keywords. You already have a topic for your post in mind, so you likely have some ideas for a keywords, however, your first ideas may not be the best. For example, my first idea for this post was not “SEO Tips for Blog Posts,” so you may want to do a little research to understand which keywords are going to get you the most search volume for the lowest amount of competition.You can do that by entering your keyword ideas into the Google AdWords Keywords Tool.

    It’s meant for use with Google AdWords, but it’s also very helpful for SEO research as well.The first (SEO for you and your blog) tool is your friend Google.For example if you’re writing a post about “Search Engine Friendly Blog Posts” search for that keyword term and look at the results.
    Search Engine Optimization for Blog Posts

    What do you notice? The competition looks very high and the keywords aren’t exactly what you’re writing about.If at first you don’t succeed… try again!

    If we look at “SEO for blog posts” instead we see the following:


    SEO Tips for Blog Posts - Keyword Research

    This is starting to look more promising, because we are seeing low competition and high volume.

    Further down in the list we see

    “seo for you” with low competition and search volume of 60,500.

    and

    “seo tips for blogs” with low competition and search volume of 1,300.

    and a combination of these should serve us well, so now we’re ready for Step 2.

  2. Include keywords in your post title/heading.
    Since we found a couple of phrases with low competition and high search volume, we are going to go with “SEO for You and Your Blog | SEO Tips for Blog Posts.”  This allows us to get more volume of searches with “SEO for You” and also target our audience or people who are looking for help writing SEO friendly blog posts, with “SEO Tips for Blogs.”

  3. Search for your title ideas in Google (SEO Tips for Blog Posts) to see what your competition is.
    ReSearch your competition based on the title your have defined to understand what you’re up against. Remember there are no competitors, only teachers.  What do the results you see from this search teach you?

    Search for Your Competition: "SEO Tips for Blog Posts"

  4. Include keywords in hyperlinks in your post.
    Can you link to a related article, video or site using your keywords in a hyperlink?  If so, this will give you a boost in your search rankings.

  5. Include the keyword phrase several times within the post, but no more than 5% of the post.
    Yoast is the best WordPress plugin for SEO for your blog. The plugin will tell you exactly what changes to make in order for each blog post to be SEO friendly.

  6. Make sure the post is 400 – 800 words long
    Too short and there won’t be enough words for the search engine to understand the relevance of the article.  Too long and you will dilute the relationship between your keyword phrase and the rest of your content.  Don’t overload your post with the keyword phrase you have chosen. Just be sure that appears about 5% of the time throughout the content. The Yoast plugin for WordPress tells you exactly how much you are over.

  7. Add alt tags to any images
    These help human visitors understand what each image is if they are viewing with images turned off and/or if they are visually challenged.  Search engine don’t mind if you include keywords in alt tags, but it is best to be as descriptive of the image as possible so that your blog post is most accessible.

  8. Embed videos and/or add links to videos and other related content
    As with any blog post, it’s always good to add value and offer as much as you can to support your idea.  After all, good content is what people like to share and link to and those inbound links are also extremely helpful in SEO and your search engine rankings.

What are your biggest SEO and blog related tips and/or questions?

SEO , , ,

Web Analytics Master Certification

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After completing a rigorous semester of training in web analytics from the guru of all web analytics gurus, Avinash Kaushik and his partner in Market Motive crime, and previous founder of ClickTracks, John Marshall, I am very happy to announce that I am Web Analytics Master Certified.

Web Analytics Master CertifiedNot only does this mean that we can help you figure out what area of your business to focus on and how you are really doing online, it means we can help you run Google experiments, advise you on the best search strategies (paid search and search engine optimization) and make the recommendations that will help you succeed on the Internet, i.e. increase your bottom line.

We look forward to working with you to drive more business and awareness to your website and brand. Please call us to schedule your web analytics review today. (415) 305-6403.

What is your biggest question about your website?

Analytics, Marketing

Speaking Social Strategy

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I am honored to be speaking at two business organizations and teaching several classes on social media marketing strategy for SF State University’s College of Extended Learning’s Social Media Marketing Program over the next month. If you’re looking to learn a little more about social media marketing and how to develop a winning strategy, I hope you’ll consider joining me at one of the following events:

On Tuesday, May 22, I speak at the NorCal BMA, Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Roundtable in Palo Alto. The topic is Strategic Thinking for Social Media Marketing and should start your Tuesday off nicely since it will be jam-packed with juicy worms for those early birds.

The Introduction to Social Media Marketing: The Power of Community class starts on June 4th and usually sells out, so make sure you register soon. The classes are on the evening of Monday June 4th and June 11th and all day on Saturday June 16th. We cover social media marketing basics, what it means to be a community manager, developing your social media strategy and successful and failed implementations of social media marketing.  This class is part of the Social Media Marketing Certificate program and is the kick-off course for students seeking a certificate, but it’s most definitely open to everyone.

On Thursday June 7th I will be presenting at WIC (Women In Consulting).  This is a four-hour workshop on how to Master the Art of  Strategic Social Media Marketing for consultants marketing their own businesses as well as marketing consultants, implementing marketing strategy for their clients. I’m excited to be collaborating with Women In Consulting as the organization has several veteran marketers and consultant members and is a great opportunity for in person social networking.

On Wednesday June 13th, we kick off the Social Media Marketing Intensive: Strategies, Campaigns and Measurement at SF State’s downtown campus in San Francisco. This is a three-day workshop including Day 1: Strategic Social Media Marketing, Day 2: Social Media Campaigns: Best Practices, and Day 3: Social Media Metrics and Performance Measurement. I teach Day 1 and the supremely talented and my co-advisor of the Social Media Marketing program, Avery Horzewski is teaching Day 2. Then we tag-teach the Measurement class on Day 3. It should be a fun and collaborative intensive lens into social media marketing, how to develop your strategy, campaign building best practices and tips for measuring your social media marketing efforts for constant improvement.

I’m very excited to have all of these engagements and looking forward to discussing ways to keep your audiences engaged. Since the topic is social media, it’s sure to be fun for all and well, super social.

Are you planning to attend any of the presentations or classes? If so, do you have anything specific you are hoping to learn? Please let us know by commenting below. Thanks!

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