why internet marketing

Just try. Tech won’t bite.

mknell:

Most of the value created in digital today is from the perceived (and often overblown) difficulties in actually creating things.  

Websites, ads, blogs, whatever.  Acronyms like HTML, AJAX, PHP, FBML, etc are made to sound scary, especially by agencies who like to make a buck off of selling you services that prevent you from ever having to “get your hands dirty” with this “nasty code stuff”.  This is a very large reason why digital agencies get business - because most business folks can’t “speak geek”.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t legitimate reasons for using agencies, especially when there really aren’t any people capable of doing things digital within your organizations, but even in those cases “speaking geek” you call “BS” when people claim they can’t do something you need them to do, because you can understand what goes into it.

I always try to tell Marketing and Product folks who work in digital to at least take an course in HTML/CSS, or JavaScript, or something that actually allows them to get under the “hood” of the Internet.   Understanding technology ALWAYS helps.

Of the people give these things a try, 9 times out of 10 realize they aren’t as difficult as perceived, or whoever sold it to them says it is, and they all up more empowered over the success of their products and services.  A lot of time they find it to be a fun exercise.

“Speaking geek” allows Product people/Marketers to become the glue that holds projects together.

In my 13 years of digital experience in just about every type of role imaginable, I’ve spent my time in the space between Marketing/Product and Tech.  I’ve found dozens of really smart people who just couldn’t communicate what they wanted, and tried to help them reach their goals.  In that time, I’ve found three things that remind the same no matter what the company is:

- Developers like to develop and build, but often have great ideas about better ways to solve problems that they can’t communicate (through political channels, or just not in a “non-geeky way”) to marketing/product people.

- The marketing/product people don’t always know what they want, and even if they do, this miscommunication makes it really difficult to explain in a geeky enough way to make it crystal clear to the developer what they REALLY want.

- This miscommunication ends up causing the deliverables to be different than expected, and requires a phase in the project where things are normalized.  And this is where a lot of time is lost on projects and launch schedules.

I genuinely believe that people are too defined in particular roles to be extensible (You’re just a *project manager*, you have to do A, B and C.  Or you’re an *analyst*, so you can only do X, Y and Z).  At the the end of the day, GOOD IDEAS come from anywhere, and product people need to understand and embrace that.

Being able to understand the guts of the Internet really helps to solve this problem, because now you can (pardon the cliche) “walk a mile” in another person’s shoes.  You can see in their mind the problems they are looking at, the issues they see during the project, and, most importantly, be able to communicate with the entire team on terms everyone can understand.  Teams learn best from each other when small groups of different disciplines work closely together, and the more the non-tech person can get out of those informal conversations, the better everyone feels about their knowledge.   When you’re on that level playing field. people are also more willing to give you the benefit of a doubt as a Product person, simply because they know you are trying to help. 

There are a wide array of resources available for individuals to learn technology.  Try one.  It’s not as difficult as you might think.

Well said.

Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

So you paid attention to what everyone is saying and you created a Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook Page for your business. You’ve got your press release links, photos and videos … but no one seems to care. What are you supposed to do now?

You’re on the right track, so congratulate yourself. A lot of small business owners don’t even bother to create a page — they’re simply not “on” Facebook.

But it’s all about where your customers and future customers hang out. And with people spending more than 700 billion minutes per month on this social networking site, it seems pretty apparent that your business needs to be hanging out there too.

Let’s review your Page. Go ahead, pull it up. Your Facebook Page should contain all or most of these:

• Links to your blog posts
• Links to related articles (whether they’re yours or not)
• Videos
• Photos
• Discussions

This type of content is key in getting people to “Like” your page, and contributes to its overall success. And how do we define success? By getting people to interact and leave comments on your Facebook Page, as well as travel from the page to your company’s website and, of course, buying your product.

Facebook Pages Need Attention

If you neglect your Facebook Pages, they will die. If you use Facebook, you’ve probably stumbled upon a company’s page with no conversations going on and no recent posts. I’m guessing you didn’t click “Like” on that page. An unattended Facebook Page leaves a negative impression of the company — don’t let yours fall by the wayside.

The more you pay attention to your Page, the more positive results you’ll see. Cathy Nguyen, President of LeatherandBags.com, has seen great results from her Facebook Page, but admits she could do more.

“Although I have a Facebook Page, I’m not utilizing it to its fullest potential because of time. I try to update when I can and should probably try to engage more often,” said Nguyen. “Utilizing Twitter, blogs and e-mails has worked, but then again, I’m not doing it frequently.”

People are used to passive marketing. In the old days, you could pay a magazine or billboard company to create an ad for you. Then you sat back and waited for sales to hopefully pour in. But those days are gone. Whether it’s you or someone else at your company, you need to dedicate someone to social media strategy.

Creating a Facebook Strategy

Maybe we put the cart before the horse in creating the Page without a clear-cut plan. That’s OK. Let’s develop a plan together. First, decide why you want a Facebook Page. Is it because everyone else is doing it? Or because you understand the value in connecting with customers who spend time socializing on Facebook?

Write down five goals for your Facebook Page. They might be:

• Create awareness of our brand on Facebook
• Get 10,000 “Likes” by year-end
• Have at least 5 comments or shared items each week
• Make Facebook one of the top 3 referrers of traffic to our site
• Get 2,000 entries to our Facebook contest

Once you have these goals, break down the tasks required to achieve them. If you want 10,000 people to click “Like” on your page, you’re going to have to expand your contacts through your profile. Post your page link on Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, your blog, your e-mail and everywhere else. If you want interaction, you need to post insightful and thought-provoking questions and comments. Decide how regularly you need to post (I suggest at least 3 days a week).

Now determine who will handle these tasks. It might be one person or several. If it’s you, post the tasks to your calendar so you don’t forget to do them. In time, updating your Page will become second nature.

Ginger Anderson, who handles the Facebook Page for Scripps Health in San Diego says that when she started handling the page, all it did was push health news. Now the Page offers a mix of news, useful articles and videos that frequently get comments and questions from the 900 plus San Diegans who follow the brand.

“Our intention is to build relationships within the San Diego community (specifically with current patients and employees) and position Scripps as a trusted leader in healthcare,” said Anderson. “We receive the most comments on the posts that are general and applicable to a wider audience as opposed to disease-specific. We try to balance serious health news with fun, general health and wellness related content along with stuff about San Diego life (again, making sure it’s not always about us).”

Practical Tips

Just updating your Page won’t make it fabulous — that will take a little work from you. Here are a few tips to make your page more searchable and appealing.

• Title: Some say the title is the most important part, so make sure your title is descriptive of your business and unique on Facebook.
• FBML: Facebook Markup Language helps you create a custom landing page for your Facebook presence. If you want to promote a special event or direct attention to a particular product, this is a great way to do it. Don’t run screaming when I say that this code can make your page better. It’s not complicated, but if you don’t want to deal with it, hire someone to help.

• Photos and Videos: Don’t underestimate the power of photos and videos. Even if you don’t sell products, you can still add photos to spice up your page. If you’re a dog groomer, take “Before and After” photos of those precious pet makeovers. A realtor can add photos of the houses on the market. A services firm can post pictures from the office to help visitors feel more connected to the staff.

  For videos, why not shoot a tutorial on getting the most out of your products? An office tour? There are applications you can install within Facebook that will let you pull photos from places like Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr. This can save you the trouble of uploading them in two places.

• Questions: The jury’s still out on Facebook Questions, a recent addition to the site. But by asking questions through your Page, you can start discussions that will spread beyond just the people who follow your business.

Once you’ve put together your strategy and have worked on it a bit, give it three months. Then analyze your results and decide: Is Facebook helping your business?

More Facebook Resources from Mashable:/>

- 10 Fascinating Facebook Facts/> - 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks/> - How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream/> - How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph/> - 5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad



Scripting <b>News</b>: What kind of <b>news</b> system...?

And it's not okay that they're making a bid for exclusivity on the role of News System of the Future, and they can't even keep their servers running properly. Either you deliver the benefit of being the sole provider, or sorry (to ...

Homosexual advocacy group not legitimately Catholic, military <b>...</b>

After receiving a letter from the group Catholics for Equality urging a change to the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, the Archbishop for Military Services responded, saying that the archdiocese's position is “clear.

Facebook Making Changes to <b>News</b> Feed, Requests, Bookmarks to <b>...</b>

After the changes take effect, people who do not play games will no longer see news feed stories from friends who do play games — same goes for any other third-party app. Because news feed stories were a main way that people found games ...


robert shumake


Scripting <b>News</b>: What kind of <b>news</b> system...?

And it's not okay that they're making a bid for exclusivity on the role of News System of the Future, and they can't even keep their servers running properly. Either you deliver the benefit of being the sole provider, or sorry (to ...

Homosexual advocacy group not legitimately Catholic, military <b>...</b>

After receiving a letter from the group Catholics for Equality urging a change to the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, the Archbishop for Military Services responded, saying that the archdiocese's position is “clear.

Facebook Making Changes to <b>News</b> Feed, Requests, Bookmarks to <b>...</b>

After the changes take effect, people who do not play games will no longer see news feed stories from friends who do play games — same goes for any other third-party app. Because news feed stories were a main way that people found games ...





Just try. Tech won’t bite.




mknell:







Most of the value created in digital today is from the perceived (and often overblown) difficulties in actually creating things.  




Websites, ads, blogs, whatever.  Acronyms like HTML, AJAX, PHP, FBML, etc are made to sound scary, especially by agencies who like to make a buck off of selling you services that prevent you from ever having to “get your hands dirty” with this “nasty code stuff”.  This is a very large reason why digital agencies get business - because most business folks can’t “speak geek”.




This isn’t to say that there aren’t legitimate reasons for using agencies, especially when there really aren’t any people capable of doing things digital within your organizations, but even in those cases “speaking geek” you call “BS” when people claim they can’t do something you need them to do, because you can understand what goes into it.




I always try to tell Marketing and Product folks who work in digital to at least take an course in HTML/CSS, or JavaScript, or something that actually allows them to get under the “hood” of the Internet.   Understanding technology ALWAYS helps.




Of the people give these things a try, 9 times out of 10 realize they aren’t as difficult as perceived, or whoever sold it to them says it is, and they all up more empowered over the success of their products and services.  A lot of time they find it to be a fun exercise.




“Speaking geek” allows Product people/Marketers to become the glue that holds projects together.




In my 13 years of digital experience in just about every type of role imaginable, I’ve spent my time in the space between Marketing/Product and Tech.  I’ve found dozens of really smart people who just couldn’t communicate what they wanted, and tried to help them reach their goals.  In that time, I’ve found three things that remind the same no matter what the company is:




- Developers like to develop and build, but often have great ideas about better ways to solve problems that they can’t communicate (through political channels, or just not in a “non-geeky way”) to marketing/product people.




- The marketing/product people don’t always know what they want, and even if they do, this miscommunication makes it really difficult to explain in a geeky enough way to make it crystal clear to the developer what they REALLY want.




- This miscommunication ends up causing the deliverables to be different than expected, and requires a phase in the project where things are normalized.  And this is where a lot of time is lost on projects and launch schedules.




I genuinely believe that people are too defined in particular roles to be extensible (You’re just a *project manager*, you have to do A, B and C.  Or you’re an *analyst*, so you can only do X, Y and Z).  At the the end of the day, GOOD IDEAS come from anywhere, and product people need to understand and embrace that.




Being able to understand the guts of the Internet really helps to solve this problem, because now you can (pardon the cliche) “walk a mile” in another person’s shoes.  You can see in their mind the problems they are looking at, the issues they see during the project, and, most importantly, be able to communicate with the entire team on terms everyone can understand.  Teams learn best from each other when small groups of different disciplines work closely together, and the more the non-tech person can get out of those informal conversations, the better everyone feels about their knowledge.   When you’re on that level playing field. people are also more willing to give you the benefit of a doubt as a Product person, simply because they know you are trying to help. 




There are a wide array of resources available for individuals to learn technology.  Try one.  It’s not as difficult as you might think.







Well said.





Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

So you paid attention to what everyone is saying and you created a Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook Page for your business. You’ve got your press release links, photos and videos … but no one seems to care. What are you supposed to do now?

You’re on the right track, so congratulate yourself. A lot of small business owners don’t even bother to create a page — they’re simply not “on” Facebook.

But it’s all about where your customers and future customers hang out. And with people spending more than 700 billion minutes per month on this social networking site, it seems pretty apparent that your business needs to be hanging out there too.

Let’s review your Page. Go ahead, pull it up. Your Facebook Page should contain all or most of these:

• Links to your blog posts
• Links to related articles (whether they’re yours or not)
• Videos
• Photos
• Discussions

This type of content is key in getting people to “Like” your page, and contributes to its overall success. And how do we define success? By getting people to interact and leave comments on your Facebook Page, as well as travel from the page to your company’s website and, of course, buying your product.

Facebook Pages Need Attention

If you neglect your Facebook Pages, they will die. If you use Facebook, you’ve probably stumbled upon a company’s page with no conversations going on and no recent posts. I’m guessing you didn’t click “Like” on that page. An unattended Facebook Page leaves a negative impression of the company — don’t let yours fall by the wayside.

The more you pay attention to your Page, the more positive results you’ll see. Cathy Nguyen, President of LeatherandBags.com, has seen great results from her Facebook Page, but admits she could do more.

“Although I have a Facebook Page, I’m not utilizing it to its fullest potential because of time. I try to update when I can and should probably try to engage more often,” said Nguyen. “Utilizing Twitter, blogs and e-mails has worked, but then again, I’m not doing it frequently.”

People are used to passive marketing. In the old days, you could pay a magazine or billboard company to create an ad for you. Then you sat back and waited for sales to hopefully pour in. But those days are gone. Whether it’s you or someone else at your company, you need to dedicate someone to social media strategy.

Creating a Facebook Strategy

Maybe we put the cart before the horse in creating the Page without a clear-cut plan. That’s OK. Let’s develop a plan together. First, decide why you want a Facebook Page. Is it because everyone else is doing it? Or because you understand the value in connecting with customers who spend time socializing on Facebook?

Write down five goals for your Facebook Page. They might be:

• Create awareness of our brand on Facebook
• Get 10,000 “Likes” by year-end
• Have at least 5 comments or shared items each week
• Make Facebook one of the top 3 referrers of traffic to our site
• Get 2,000 entries to our Facebook contest

Once you have these goals, break down the tasks required to achieve them. If you want 10,000 people to click “Like” on your page, you’re going to have to expand your contacts through your profile. Post your page link on Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, your blog, your e-mail and everywhere else. If you want interaction, you need to post insightful and thought-provoking questions and comments. Decide how regularly you need to post (I suggest at least 3 days a week).

Now determine who will handle these tasks. It might be one person or several. If it’s you, post the tasks to your calendar so you don’t forget to do them. In time, updating your Page will become second nature.

Ginger Anderson, who handles the Facebook Page for Scripps Health in San Diego says that when she started handling the page, all it did was push health news. Now the Page offers a mix of news, useful articles and videos that frequently get comments and questions from the 900 plus San Diegans who follow the brand.

“Our intention is to build relationships within the San Diego community (specifically with current patients and employees) and position Scripps as a trusted leader in healthcare,” said Anderson. “We receive the most comments on the posts that are general and applicable to a wider audience as opposed to disease-specific. We try to balance serious health news with fun, general health and wellness related content along with stuff about San Diego life (again, making sure it’s not always about us).”

Practical Tips

Just updating your Page won’t make it fabulous — that will take a little work from you. Here are a few tips to make your page more searchable and appealing.

• Title: Some say the title is the most important part, so make sure your title is descriptive of your business and unique on Facebook.
• FBML: Facebook Markup Language helps you create a custom landing page for your Facebook presence. If you want to promote a special event or direct attention to a particular product, this is a great way to do it. Don’t run screaming when I say that this code can make your page better. It’s not complicated, but if you don’t want to deal with it, hire someone to help.

• Photos and Videos: Don’t underestimate the power of photos and videos. Even if you don’t sell products, you can still add photos to spice up your page. If you’re a dog groomer, take “Before and After” photos of those precious pet makeovers. A realtor can add photos of the houses on the market. A services firm can post pictures from the office to help visitors feel more connected to the staff.

  For videos, why not shoot a tutorial on getting the most out of your products? An office tour? There are applications you can install within Facebook that will let you pull photos from places like Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr. This can save you the trouble of uploading them in two places.

• Questions: The jury’s still out on Facebook Questions, a recent addition to the site. But by asking questions through your Page, you can start discussions that will spread beyond just the people who follow your business.

Once you’ve put together your strategy and have worked on it a bit, give it three months. Then analyze your results and decide: Is Facebook helping your business?

More Facebook Resources from Mashable:/>

- 10 Fascinating Facebook Facts/> - 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks/> - How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream/> - How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph/> - 5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad







robert shumake


Scripting <b>News</b>: What kind of <b>news</b> system...?

And it's not okay that they're making a bid for exclusivity on the role of News System of the Future, and they can't even keep their servers running properly. Either you deliver the benefit of being the sole provider, or sorry (to ...

Homosexual advocacy group not legitimately Catholic, military <b>...</b>

After receiving a letter from the group Catholics for Equality urging a change to the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, the Archbishop for Military Services responded, saying that the archdiocese's position is “clear.

Facebook Making Changes to <b>News</b> Feed, Requests, Bookmarks to <b>...</b>

After the changes take effect, people who do not play games will no longer see news feed stories from friends who do play games — same goes for any other third-party app. Because news feed stories were a main way that people found games ...


robert shumake


Scripting <b>News</b>: What kind of <b>news</b> system...?

And it's not okay that they're making a bid for exclusivity on the role of News System of the Future, and they can't even keep their servers running properly. Either you deliver the benefit of being the sole provider, or sorry (to ...

Homosexual advocacy group not legitimately Catholic, military <b>...</b>

After receiving a letter from the group Catholics for Equality urging a change to the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, the Archbishop for Military Services responded, saying that the archdiocese's position is “clear.

Facebook Making Changes to <b>News</b> Feed, Requests, Bookmarks to <b>...</b>

After the changes take effect, people who do not play games will no longer see news feed stories from friends who do play games — same goes for any other third-party app. Because news feed stories were a main way that people found games ...