Dave Walker

After a sh**storm yesterday (did I hit a nerve? I saw a 5x traffic spike) and a looong night with a teething toddler, here’s a whole lot of not much.

I just launched a web site for a new Vietnamese restaurant in northwest Calgary, the Green Papaya. No wonder I’ve been craving Vietnamese food for the last few weeks. Can’t wait for it to open. Web site notes: the Vietnamese characters were the toughest part of the site. Just sourcing the HTML entity codes was difficult, but I found a great site for it, and I’m glad I know my eth from a dyet.

I have created the first draft of my Squidoo Lens, Social Media Marketing Action Plan. Comments? Please be kind, I’m still battered and bruised (but pugnacious - watch out). It’s aimed at smaller business who want a way to get started interacting with their customers online in a non-”marketing” way.

Things I’m reading:

Interesting article on raising a brand-free kid. Something I’m struggling with, having a toddler of my own.

Primate Diaries. Monkeys, evolution, athieism, Intelligent Design and religion. Put your thinking cap on.

And I will never pass up a chance to promote The Comics Curmudgeon.

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There’s a battle in the agencies over social media. Doug Walker at Webwalker blogs about this battle, and looks for the middle ground between advertising people and public relations people doing social media marketing. I’m not sure either community should be doing this.

Social media (blogging, really) belongs to the people and the community, and more often than not, the heavy hand of marketing (advertising and PR) tromps into the social media sphere like a herd of elephants. And everyone trembles when the CEO blogs. Actually, Seth Godin makes a good point. Blogging is based on candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, utility and controversy. Not a typical CEO. And the calculated words of both advertisers and PR people fail at several of these points.

Blogging and social media by it’s very nature is entrepreneurial: quick and driven by personality rather than policy. Bloggers are single people giving their voice, their opinions and sometimes, bucking the trends. Microsoft doesn’t have a blog; Richard Scoble blogs, and happens to work (have worked) at Microsoft. Google doesn’t have a blog; Matt Cutts blogs and happens to work at Google. For many in SEO/SEM, Matt is the face and voice of Google. And, surprise, surprise, Matt is not a marketing guy. He’s an engineer. Scoble is not a “marketer” per se (despite a title of “Director of Marketing”) - he is best know as an evangelist.

Keeping up a regular blog (not a “blog campaign” - ugh) takes the passion of an evangelist. It takes the desire to be involved - not because you are told to (or paid by the client), but because you need to. Please keep in mind that these techniques - journaling, media bookmarking in the form of sending links to friends, etc. - have all been around long before “Social Media Marketing”. Are marketers are seeing this passion, and trying to force feed it to their clients? Are the clients seeing this passion amongst their people, and trying to turn it to bottom-line goals? Does the passion become dilute when applied commercially?

And I tremble at the idea of the “SMM Campaign”. That doesn’t get more calculated and unnatural - all of the things that social media isn’t.

 Update: Doug Walker summed up the post a little too accurately (is it warm in here?). Should marketers stay out of the blogosphere? Um…

My response on his blog:

Unless they are talking about marketing. That’s interesting.

Maybe I should step back a little tiny bit and ask the question: How can marketers find the evangelists with the organization to blog, and how can marketers facilitate blogging, including convincing the upper levels of management to go along with this.

Marketers-as-bloggers (unless they are talking about marketing) is scary IMHO. If I said that marketers don’t have a place in SMM, I’d be shooting myself in the foot. But is the role a traditional advertising/PR role? I don’t think so; it’s a new channel looking for new approaches.

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Yesterday, I promised I’d look at where my blog traffic comes from, and I’ll gove some insight into some of the marketing tactics I use to get traffic.

We all want people to come to our blog, but if you simply write a post and let it sit there, it’ll be hard for anyone to find. You need to actively get your information out there; the good news is that the basic steps are quite easy, and can give decent results.

Couple of things:

1. I use Google Analytics on every page of my site, including pages outside of my blog. The direct referrals usually come to the home page, not the blog.
2. I’m doing basic marketing, not aggressive marketing so the volume of traffic may not seem impressive, but I’m happy with it. I don’t have any goals for the blog - just get it out there. I’m using this blog as a test arena for a few theories, too.
3. The blog is two weeks old; it’s too early to get fine patterns, but there are some obvious trends.

Overall traffic

Since October 14:

• 352 Visits
• 678 Pageviews
• 1.93 Pages/Visit
• 56.82% Bounce Rate
• 00:02:27 Average time on site
• 77.27% New visits

I’m OK with the visits; this week has been a significantly higher average over last week because I’ve tried a new bookmarking tactic. I’m not thrilled about the 1.93 pages/visit - I need to cross-link other parts of the site much more heavily. This should help with the bounce rate as well. Time on site is OK, and the % new visits is OK for a new blog - I’m still building a regular audience.

Sources

I’m really interested in this one, especially with the PageRank reshuffle this week.

• 17.9% direct traffic
• 74.72 referring traffic
• 7.39% search engine

The low search engine traffic is interesting - very few people come to the blog (or the main site) via search engines. I’m OK with that - the terms I’m using on the main site are very competitive, and I’m not doing any PPC campaigns. This volume of organic traffic is OK since this isn’t the focus of the marketing. I’m pretty pleased with the 75% referral traffic - people are linking from other sites. The backlink strategy is working.

The actual sources are even more interesting:

1. StumbleUpon: this is amazing. This is my single biggest source by a wide margin, and I’ve only been Stumbling the site for 3 days. I’ve had 118 visits, but the best part is the bounce rate from Stumblers is a very respectable 35%. They are reading and exploring the site. Thanks, Stumblers!
2. Direct: 63 visits
3. Digg: 61 visits. I’m surprised here. Even though Digg is a respectable third place, I’ve been Digging for two weeks, and the bounce rate from Diggers is high. The thing I don’t like about Digg is the categorization - I still need to find the performing categories.
4. Seth Godin’s Blog trackbacks. This is the next strategy of commenting on other people’s blogs and linking back to yor own. Seth’s blog is an excellent read, and there’s always an insightful observation to comment on. I’m trying to limit myself to one trackback a week, but it’s hard. Interesting thing: I would have expected traffic spikes on the days I comment, and complete drop-offs on non-commenting days, but there is still traffic coming from the non-sommenting days. People read the archives, and the comments in the archives there. I’d love to know what his average pages per visit is.
5. Google (organic). This is highly disappointing. Plenty of traffic, but 91% bounce rate and an average of 7 seconds on the site. People come, see that it isn’t what they are looking for, and bail. I need a better SEO/page content strategy.
6.  and on. This is mostly linkbacks from comments I’ve made on other blogs. It’s the long tail, but respectable traffic.

Visitors

• USA: #1 by a long shot, with California, esp. Silicon Valley, leading the way. No surprise there.
• Canada: #2. Thanks, countrymates!
• Great Britain #3
• and into the long tail. Hi to everyone from outside North America, and thanks for reading!

Loyalty

Not a surprise here, but I can do better. 1 visit is the top spot (no surprise), but I’d like to say ‘hi’ to everyone in the 9-14, 15-25 and the 26-50 (which is probably me before I took my IP address out of the equation) groups; I have some regular readers! Yay!

Browsers

This floored me. But, upon reflection, not surprising, considering the audience.

1. Firefox: 63.35% (Wow - this is *waaay* above the typical market share of browsers)
2. IE: 33.24% Again, surprising, considering Microsoft’s market dominance
3. Safari: 3.12% Hi, Mac people!
4. Opera: 0.28% This represents 1 visitor, which was probably my testing the CSS.

The IE 6/7 split is about 67%/33% for v6. v7 is coming on fast. Firefox is interesting. Even though it sent nearly 2/3 of my traffic, the time-on-site is low (1:11 min) and viewed 1.61 pages on average. IE users, on the other hand, spent, on average, over 5 minutes on the site and looked at 2.5 pages. IE users, despite the lower number, are using the site much more.

I’m not going for any conclusions right now; I’ll do that later when I have more data. There are a few strategies I’ll be testing in the coming week, and blogging about the results. Stay tuned!

Thanks to all my visitors, and I hope you are enjoying the blog!

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Yesterday, many of the big blogs woke up to find their PageRank lower by up to 3 points. And here I thought Pagerank became irrelevant two years ago…

Google PageRank is (theoretically) used by Google to weight pages in their search engine. The higher the PageRank, the better a page would do in the search engine. However, the PR system has been gamed and abused time after time, and Google’s Jaguar update in 2005 reset the criteria for PR, killing link farms and a lot of black hat SEO. When I wear my SEO hat, the last thing I look at is PR; it doesn’t tell me much. However, evidently many site sell advertising based on their PR. The Neilsen ratings system for TV has many of the same problems - see James Surowiecki’s analysis in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.

The remarkable thing about this PR shift is that (on one day’s data) these sites do not seem to be losing traffic.

Is PR, or even search engine marketing/optimization, even relevant in the social media sphere anymore? Yes and no, depending on the site. I’ve argued before that SEO is not dead, but there are better ways to get qualified traffic.

Many commerce sites still rely on the search engines for their traffic - the organic and paid listings are critical to their success. Strong organic optimization and good AdWords campaigns are the lifeblood of most businesses. But how relevant is this to bloggers, and are bloggers relying on the SEs for traffic? If they are, they’re hooped.

Referrals from other sites accounts for over 75% of my traffic. StumbleUpon is, by far, my biggest traffic generator, and Digg is a solid second place (I’ll talk about my traffic sources tomorrow). Admittedly, my numbers are not huge, but for a two-week-old blog and minimal marketing of the blog, I’m pretty happy. Social bookmark sites and referrals from other blogs have helped me far more than the search engines, and I’ll bet that other bloggers with strong SMO and SMM will say the same things.

Optimize for the search engines, keep the Google in mind, but don’t rely on them - there’s better ways to generate traffic.

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Everyone wants to get the word out, and for business blogging, this can be very important for getting traffic to your blog. Are you doing these things?

1. Make sure your blog posts can be shared. On many blogs, you will see buttons or links for “Subscribe” (or “RSS”), buttons for del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and so on (see the “Share this” at the bottom of this post). People us these tools to subscribe to your posts (use a feed program like Feedreader or a web site like Bloglines to see your subscriptions).del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit are “social bookmarking” sites; if people like your blog post, they will submit it to these services where other people can find your blog. These services can bring tremendous amounts of traffic to good blog postings.To install these tools, you can sign up for services at Feedburner.com for RSS subscription tools, and there are lots of plug-ins for syndication tools. I use a WordPress plug-in called “Share-this”, and the individual syndication sites have snippits of code you can put on your site to facilitate sharing.
2. Submit your own content to the syndication services. Once. Digging and Stumbling your own content is fair, but do it only once. Let others find your post, and if it is good, the traffic will come. The places I syndicate my content: Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Reddit and del.icio.us.
3. Comment on other people’s blogs. Most blog commenting tools have a place where you can enter a web site address (see below) - use this to create a link back to your own blog. Rule when commenting: don’t comment for the sake of commenting, make it good and relevant to the discussion. The links from other people’s blogs are very search engine friendly; Google likes blogs and links from blogs. Incorporate this strategy as part of a SEO strategy.
4. Write compelling, easily readable content. There are many reasons people read blogs, and there are a few formulas for writing popular postings. My rule, and the goal of this particular blog: give people some tips and advice on design and marketing they can use immediately and every day.Easy-to-read content is also key. Long blocks of text with no breaks is difficult to read; lists are very easy. Use bold and italics to highlight important points and provide places where people’s eyes are automatically attracted. Good web typography is important.

Any other ideas? Share your tips in the comments!

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One of the core components of social media is the community web site. Flickr is a general photo community, Facebook et al is the ultimate digital society with many, many subgroups. There are also a lot of niche groups following a SM structure. And, as a designer, this is one I can’t live without.

COLOURlovers.com

There are many facets of this site that make it a great social media/community site, at least for those of us who love colour.

1. All content is user-generated. This is a hallmark of a Social Media site. User-generated media, or crowdsourcing, is a model followed by many sites, including Digg.com, YouTube.com, Wikipedia.org and iStockPhoto.com.
2. There are strong commenting, rating and bookmarking tools. The ability to engage with others on the site through commenting on palettes, making friends, rating people’s palettes and colours, and bookmarking and saving colours is very easy, and heavily encouraged through a points system. This generates a high degree of contact between the community members.
3. The site is based around people’s profiles. The profile - a page about you - is a core feature of social sites. It provides an anchor in the site, and a place where people can learn about you (like the small talk of any cocktail party), and you can learn about others. Facebook.com is a profile site; other sites use profiles to create the community aspect.
4. There is a strong and continual sense of branding on the site, but is not intrusive. Everybody on COLOURlovers.com is a “lover”. All of the text, down to the 404 page, revolvers around this theme. If you want to leave the site, they’ll understand because not all relationships work out, and they hope that we can still be friends. The consistency of this theme is incredible - rarely has this been executed so thoroughly and consistently.
5. The blog establishes the site’s expertise, and selected members of the community guest blog. The site has established itself as an expert in colour through sharp commentary in the blog, and selected experts within the community share their observations in the “official” blog.
6. The crowd contributes heavily to social bookmarking. The blog posts get Digged frequently by the community, and occasionally show up on Digg’s front page driving even more traffic to the site.
7. COLOURlovers.com maintains and encourages a Facebook group. Using other social media sites to promote your site’s community is a very basic SMM tactic.
8. The site’s founder - Darius - is front and center in the community. And the site’s not so big that you can’t get a personal email from him. That’s socialbility.

There are at least a dozen more ways that this site is a textbook example of a vibrant web community. It is very much a niche site, but the web site facilitates, not hinders, the community building.

Check out my palettes!

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I’ve been working on a web site for a Vietnamese restaurant, and the owners want the full Vietnamese names on the menu. The Word document they sent doesn’t translate to the web; I need HTML entity codes for these characters.

The good news is that Vietnamese is basically a Latin alphabet, but with non-standard Latin diacritical marks. For example, typical characters might be:

?

?

The first item is a “small letter u with a horn and a tilde above”. The a has a hook above.

The characters are a part of the Unicode specification, but finding the characters can be difficult. However, there is an excellent web site (not so easy to use, but information-rich): http://www.fileformat.info.

First, you need to declare your language encoding; the language set that your web browser will use to render the text. This is not mandatory, but it is good practice, even if you web site is in English.

For Unicode characters (good in this application - it is a wide set of characters):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

For a basic English web site, you can use:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Next, you need to use the HTML entity code for special character which looks like this:

{

The characters I used for the Vietnamese menu are in the Latin Extended Additional set of the Unicode specification; there are usually HTML Entity equivalents you can use. For example, the Unicode code for the small u with horn and tilde is U+1EEF; the equivalent HTML entity code is ữ.

The site is coming together nicely, and having the correct language, including the diacriticals, is the icing on the cake.

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Have you seen the Wal-mart ghost on Facebook? Trying desperately to escape the cellophane package it’s trapped in?

(If not, see Rob Maguire’s post at The Dominion for picture and commentary).

There has been a lot of excellent commentary about Wal-mart’s venture into social media, but time and time again, they prove they just don’t get it. I’ve argued that social media is not just another channel for traditional marketing, and Wal-mart seems to prove this over and over with kludgy Facebook pages, failed social networks of their own, and a failure to address their criticism at a grassroots level.

What can Wal-mart do to revamp it’s strategy? It’s a long road, but here are a few ideas (no, even if approached, I wouldn’t consult for Wal-Mart - I’m not sucking up, just trying to illustrate a point. Oh. wait, the mortgage is coming due…  :)  )

1. Comment on the critical blogs.
   The social web is an excellent place to address criticism and make your side of the argument heard. But tread lightly.
   • Admit to mistakes (very, very hard to do, but you look humble and you open a dialogue instead of a diatribe).
   • Don’t get defensive or aggressive. Don’t allow your marketing people to write anything - it must come from the top levels of management; remember that this is a conversation with those who are in a position to make a difference.
   • Don’t let “spin” or “damage control” enter your mind. Be honest and open and genuine.
2. Revamp the Facebook strategy.
   Don’t promote - it’s too transparent. Treat us with a bit more dignity, please. If you *have* to use Facebook “to connect with your target audience” (markety-speak), make it social, make it interactive, make it fun. I’ll join becuase there’s something there for me, not to listen to you. Target is fun (with a bit of selling), Walmart is selling (with not much fun). There’s a reason Target has 14,000 members screaming that they love you and Walmart has 1200 members screaming that they hate you. Make something fun, like this from milk (I love this, have I mentioned that?).
3. Connect with your fans.
   Find the people that love you (not your staff), and get them talking about you. If enough fans talk about you loud enough, it’ll drown out the critics.
4. Don’t give people anything to criticize (well, that’s my own 2 cents).
   Honest and fair dealings. Quality for a good price. Be the company that everyone admires. Is goodwill more meaningful to you that good prices? Can you have both? I’m looking at you, Mountain Equipment Co-op…

Stop talking at me and start talking with me. There’s your SMM in a nutshell.

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Social media seems to bring out statements like “let’s spread our brand virally” or “blogging will drive traffic to our web site”. I’ve talked with marketing people who see SMM as just another channel to promote their brand and are not treating it like a brand new communication channel that has its own set of rules. And they are missing the one and only thing they must know abour social media marketing:

Be genuine

1. Be genuine in your desire to talk to people.
   Social media is social. You need to start, join and participate in conversations. Marketing is about talking at people; social media is about talking with people. If you are unwilling to talk with your audience, good and bad, SMM is not for you.
2. Be genuine with your content.
   Blogs that pitch, pitch, pitch don’t get returning readers. While it is OK to occasionally pitch your company, readers quicky tire of advertising. Educate, amuse, inform or editorialize; this makes good content. Rohit Bhargava has an excellent presentation: The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging … And When To Use Each One
3. Be genuine in your reason for wanting to do social marketing.
   Why do you blog? To drive traffic to your web site or because you have something to say and share with people who will find it useful? Social media marketing is not about “campaigns”. It is not something that you can take or leave depending on market conditions. SMM is about a genuine desire to create and nurture genuine links between you and your audience. It take energy and commitment, and if you are not passionate about your audience, don’t try to fake it.
4. Be genuine in your interest in the social web.
   Read blogs, Digg stories, spruce up your Facebook profile, comment, get involved. The social web is a difficult place for dilettantes. Commit to understanding social media.

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“Let’s make something viral”. A marketing colleague of mine gets this line from his clients. His reponse: “well, do something good, then”.

I also got a line recently: “how can we get some word of mouth marketing?”. Trust me, you don’t want word-of-mouth marketing, you want viral marketing. And here’s why.

Actually, I will cheat and summarize Seth Godin’s blog post today: Is viral marketing the same as word of mouth?

Word of mouth marketing decays. The message is repeated a few times and fades. A good meal, a bad flight (to use Seth’s examples). Unless the story is unique and memorable, the bad flight story sticks around long enough to be replaced by another bad flight story. The marketer usually needs to repeat the story over and over before there is any staying power.

Viral marketing takes off like a virus - grows, replicates and spreads without the marketer’s assistance. Something that is so good it cannot help but spread. The marketer is out of the loop after the initial seeding; the idea spreads on its own from person to person.

Which brings me to milk.

Or, more specifically, Get the Glass. First of all, milk (actually, the California Milk Processor Board) has done brilliant viral marketing - Got Milk? is a cultural meme.

But Get the Glass is a whole lot of fun. I got an email from a good friend of mine today insisting I had to look at this game. And I played it. And I was wowed. And I will pass it on to my friends.

‘Nuff said. Go look it up. And pass it on.

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