Online Marketing

The Online Presence of a Local Business

Businesses may feel more helpless than ever to control the conversation about their brands. People speak their minds, and it is shared and presented and there is nothing that a business owner can do to stop it.

An Actual Business Discussed on Facebook Today:

Now obviously the sentiment is not what Joe’s Crab Shack was looking for, and there is little they can say in this situation to repair it. In fact if they entered into it they would either seem like they were pandering or making excuses.

So what can a business do to build positive commentary about their brand online?

Engage people, be present, shine the attention on people making good comments. (If there are none that should tell you something else) Those are all great ideas, and you have heard them before.

What I really want to tell you is if you believe in your product or service, be the star that champions it. If you are willing to put your face on it, do the same online. If you wont say something good online about your own product who the hell else will?

What we have as small business owners is a world where we must do the same things, convey the same feelings, take the same responsibility, and deliver the same quality as we always have. We just have to do it via a different set of tools.

Yes Social Media is one of them, so is your website or blog, and so is your email list. They need to go hand in hand with the rest of your business communications. This is not hocus pocus, it is just the way things get done right now.

This Technology is just a more efficient way of doing things, efficiency is good if you are the one using it.

Too often we dumb it down, take away 90% of its power so that we don’t have to learn it. Examples: RLS2000 for Realtors or another is Tumblr for Bloggers…

RLS2000 for Realtors: Every realtor needs to have a website right? I think so. This is the deal: YOU ARE THE BRAND. You are selling your name, not houses, you are selling your service, not condos, you are selling your knowledge/experience/connections, not land. So what does that mean for your website? You need to do a series of things for the people that are going to be checking the agent they (theoretically) are giving 5-6% of their home to.

Things a Real Estate Agent must do Online:

Demonstrate your knowledge of the market, activity in the market, and results in the market.
Be the real you that people will get to know through what you share online.
Market the homes you sell in ways that people would want for their homes and that others are not doing.
Make it easy for them to see more, and learn how to contact you.

Which of these things does RLS2000 make it easy for you to do? Not 1,2, or 3 and a partial on 4… ok so 25% and that one is probably the easiest of them all to accomplish.

The fact is when you have a website that is virtually identical to 500 other agents in your state, one that makes it a chore to add a page, and impossible to craft modern looking blog posts, you are not standing out for any good reason. Not when you could be creating content like this example from one of my client’s blog.

TUMBLR for Bloggers:

TUMBLR for Bloggers is like the hearing the best album you have in a long time and making a copy of it, then handing that copy to your friends and telling them that you wanted them to hear YOUR new album… it still sounds amazing but it’s not really your music right?

Your TUMBLR is not your blog, its your TUMBLR, and to use a service that homogenizes the style and content you have, hosts it on their servers, and makes that collection subject to them going under, being bought by Apple or Google and being shut down, or simply just falling out of favor to a newer cooler platform is silly for your blog, cause its not your blog, its your TUMBLR.

Takeaways From All this?

You have to be comfortable in your product or service, you have to be present to support it, and that means online too. If you are missing in those conversations who is going to be building positive relationships around your brand? Reasons people don’t do this that I want to shoot down right now:

If you are too worried about who might be looking at your Facebook to use it to propel your business forward you are letting that fear take one of the most powerful marketing and communication tools out of your hands.
If you don’t want to learn how to use Twitter and therefore give up on the best way of getting the attention of the press today you are missing out on that free exposure too.
If you want to take the easy way out and make a cookie cutter site like RLS2000 for realtors or TUMBLR for bloggers, or the myriad of others, you will end up blending in and being a prisoner of a platform that by its very nature creates uninspiring homogenous online brochures subject to the whim or profit motive of its owners. You are a tenant without a lease.
Small Business = Your Business, Your Name, Your Brand

Unless you are hiding from the law, in which case its really cool you are reading this, you should be confident enough in your skin and your business to represent it online (social/site/email) as yourself.

If you are not, please tell me what are you afraid of?

Join my email list at the top, leave a comment below, or shoot me a note on twitter @spirocks. Much love for reading this far.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

An Online Marketing Argument for Non-Believers

Spiro Pappadopoulos

I am writing today to those of you who don’t think your business would benefit, or those who are not taking part in your companies inevitable involvement in online marketing. So if this is you, take a few moments and read on.

Online Marketing Relies on the Interconnections between People Online

The following explanation has its roots in the study of Stanley Milgram, who was an American social psychologist who was fascinated by all aspects of social order. For more details on his studies you can see this recent article on PSYBLOG.

I intend to focus on his studies of the interconnectedness of human societies.

In 1969 he conducted an experiment which sent letters to random people in Nebraska or Boston and asking them to forward it to someone who might be more likely to know the target person, who lived in Massachusetts (Travers & Milgram, 1969).

He found that on average it would take 5.2 intermediaries for his letter to go from the first person to its destination, via each person’s social network.

This was 1969 and the experiment required the subjects to overcome the relatively high obstacle of physically mailing something, and to rely on their social network which (without the online networking tools of today) was significantly smaller, yet it still only took 5.2 intermediaries to find its mark.

This Number is Surely Lower Today

With the average number of online connections reaching the thousands the ability to sort and direct information today is much higher than when this study was conducted.

Here is a Facebook insight Statistic from a recently launched real estate company Facebook Page:

Notice two stunning statistics here: 87 people have liked the page, and if they all shared the page’s next post, it would reach 24,885 people. Amazing isn’t it? That is 286 friends per person who liked the page, and what this does not tell us is how many connections those friends of fans would bring to the table.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Local Business and Google Search Ranking

Spiro Pappadopoulos

So What Can You Do?

Make sure your website or blog is optimized for local search results. Focus on the terms that people will use when they search for you locally, broad and general terms will likely leave you ont he 90th page. Use the local area you are in, whether it is SOHO in New York City or the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. That is your Ace in the Hole.

Content Creation. You may think that it is obvious since you are a restaurant located in a particular town that you are catering to them. But to Google it is not obvious unless you spell it out. So when you are crafting your messages that means you are writing to both the reader and to Google. Mention your location. One of my restaurants, Evenfall, does a lot of private functions like rehearsal dinner and such. So we strive to be a top result in our area by targeting search terms like Rehearsal Dinners Haverhill, Rehearsal Dinners Merrimack Valley, as you can see we fuse the service with the location in the search terms.

Take Advantage of the HTML Code that Google Checks. Each page should have focus keywords that it is designed to be found for. Each page should also have a carefully considered title as it is a major part of the indexing process and then it is what the searcher will see when he/she comes across you in google search results. Finally the Meta description should be a clear and concise summary of what the page contains as that will be the text that is weighted heavily in search rankings and the text that will be displayed in results.

Submit Your Site to Google via SiteMaps and URL Submissions. Your website should have a sitemap to take advantage of the XML Sitemaps protocol, which will allow you to submit every page in your site to Google and Bing. Google also just realeased a URL submission tool that you can submit URLs to get crawled. It is a good idea to do both.

What do I do for Clients?

I talk to them about their business, and ask them which terms they would love to get to the top in. Then I take the time to make sure everything above is taken advantage of, and I try to create content for them that will be ranked the highest in their niche for those terms.

I also try and think like a customer, easier for me then someone running the business, and work to create keywords that i beleive would be searched for. I create content that will be found for those keywords too.

Then using Google analytics I track the ‘Organic Traffic’ generated from search engines and look at the best performing keywords. Those are the ones that generate the most traffic that leads to a conversion page (point of purchase, Email list sign up, etc). Those become the focus of a second round of content creation that is aimed at bolstering the site’s results for those keywords and the conversion rates that we are after.

If you are interested in talking about your business, seeing what i would do for your site, or just getting more info don’t hesitate to comment here, on twitter @spirocks, Google+ top right, or call my office (617) 379-2430. I am always happy to talk about these things whether you want to hire me or not.

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I am Spirocks on Twitter.