Recently, my friends and I have been hiking every weekend. It’s a great way to get some exercise in and it’s a fun activity to explore nature with friends. Not to mention it’s something that I can do with my dog on the weekend to give him a much needed energy release after being cooped up in the house all week. But, it wasn’t until I wrote a blog post for a client on Maine’s Waterfalls that I started to get really inspired.

Maine has a crazy amount of beauty and so many things to discover. But, the caveat to that is, in order to see a beautiful waterfall or awe inspiring mountain view, you first have to make the hike to do it. Hiking is NOT easy. In fact, many of the trails that are required to get to these Mountain Tops can cause you pain and exhaustion. However, once you hit that apex you get to stroll down and the endorphins kick in and it was all worth it.

But, the more you hike, the easier it gets. You develop your muscles, strengthen your heart and lungs and build endurance. In the end, it becomes more natural and more enjoyable.

SO, what does this have to do with web marketing success? EVERYTHING!

Social media doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I can’t count how many times we hear clients say that they didn’t know it was going to be so much work.  Blogging is work, creating content is work, posting updates takes time and imagination and it all has to be valuable and interesting information for your audience.

Waterfalls were my inspiration, what’s yours?  What is going to get you excited to put the work and effort in to get the web marketing and social media results that you want? You can look for inspiration for your posts in many places, did someone say something to you today that sparked an idea, did you hear something on the radio, did you read a blog or magazine article that got you thinking? Anything you hear, read or do can be used to spark an idea for a blog post or Twitter update.

Like with starting a workout or starting to hike, it takes time to adjust and adapt to your new activity until it becomes easier or a habit.  This also goes for web marketing.  Right now it may not seem like it fits in your schedule or it may not feel natural to you.  But, the more you do it the easier it becomes.  Create an editorial calendar for yourself and stick to it. Commit to posting one blog post a week or making 3 updates on Facebook a day. Do that until you master it and then add on the next phase of your web marketing plan.  Like with taking a hike, the first trail is the hardest and with every new trail (or marketing step you take) the easier it becomes.

Results! We all do this because we want the web marketing results.  With a hike it’s an amazing view, endorphins released from exercise, fresh air or a waterfall, with web marketing we want to get our message to the right people resulting in our end goal.  Whether that goal be more leads in the sales funnel, more people attending your event, more traffic to your website or better customer service web marketing and social media are just our tools to help us achieve those goals.

So, what are you waiting for? Find your inspiration, make the commitment, and take the first steps.

If you’d like help developing a social media plan for your business, or a personal trainer for your social media marketing to help you stay with it, flyte can help. Just contact us to get the ball rolling.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Hiking Web Everest

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference on Twitter.

The current State of Personalized Search

Speakers:
Jack Menzel, Google (@jackm)
Stefan Weitz, Bing (@stefanweitz)

Personalized Search – Jack Menzel presentation

SMX?  We think it’s easy for search engines right? Not. A bunch of other things that comes up other than the conference.

What is personalization?
Personalization can help fill in the gaps  (ex. If you are searching for bars and you are in NYC, a list of NYC bars pops up, instead of the best bar in the world)

Context:

-       geography
-       language
-       context from previous queries

Personalization

-       topicality
-       preference
-       pattern
-       social

This must be done in a privacy-sensitive way

-       transparency
-       control

Example  -  “bus schedules” – needs to be regionally relevant to you

Recent searches ( if you were recently looking for a camera, and it pops up as a recent search)
Interests
Preferred Sites
Social Endorsements

Filter Bubble:
Personalization is working!

Perfect personalization + Totally passive Users + myopic focus on clicks = Very bad dystopia

But, reality is – Personalization is far from perfect, users have active information needs, quality/relevance is more than just clicks.

Google is not only looking at clicks as relevance.

The moral of the story:

- Users maintain control over their data.
- Be transparent about how the data is used.
- There is no canonical result set for a query.

Search Pour Vous – Stefan Weitz Director, Bing

-  Stop thinking about it as just reorganization of results and predicting where you want to go. “not just re ranking results”

-  Look a lot at how you return the highest value of personalization for the lowest cost

-  5 W’s still apply when it comes to personalization

Often really a proxy for intent

-  “Selective Personalization”  If you do too much you actually see clicks going down

Personalized search is the new normal. It’s part of the overall experience.

Who: Interests |  what is it you actually care about
What: Behaviors | look at past searches, clicks, behaviors
When: What time is it?   A search for a bar at 9 am might be different than 6pm
Where: Carmen Sandiego
Why: So Meta |  Why do these sort of end this way?

Personalized Search – Just search, it’s just the way it is.

Social – should be able to search the real way like they do every day, asking people for advice etc.

-       presentation – what can we do differently with the results on the page

-       Context – what you’ve done previously

-       Dynamics – what’s been changing across the web and from before

Lots of social available through partnership with Facebook – look up more, but he used examples, of it will show you if one of your friends lives in an area you are searching and then you can grab rest recommendations, you can see a site that they like that you wouldn’t have known about, etc.

Personalized NAV

If they see you going back to a singular link over and over, it will become #1 on the SERP

Introducing Adaptive Search: Adaptive search is a new personalized search being released today

Looks at previous history and reranks to promote more relevant links higher

Go to Bing blog to learn more about it – go watch the post, to find out more…

Dynamic – will actually show you new content on site since your last query etc.

Presentation – different tailoring’s

What about the serendipity?

From e-rays to silly putty via Uranus: Serendipity and its role in web search
examine the affects that personalized search can have on web results

Queries that are very interesting buy not particularly relevant are potentially serendipitous, those that are really interesting and really relevant are helpful

Personal score:
Study on web – says we do actually sometimes crave the serendipitous, not relevant but very interesting

Is SEO dead? Because everyone is getting personalized results? No, it’s actually probably making it easier, you don’t need to be the best bus schedule site in the world, you only have to be very best for that particular audience.  However, it may make it harder to measure, but you can still look at organic traffic and gather info from there.

Social is becoming more and more important as personalization of search is being placed in use, because they are using it for search results, and it’s going to be harder to just rank the highest for a keyword.

Logged in vs. logged out: Previous queries for like 90 to 180 days.  So, contextual and geographical still into play, regardless of whether you are logged in or not.

Bing if you sign out all social turns off. Geo and all that still there.

Bing re-established relationship with Twitter: Crowdsourcing,  look into news on this

Focus on Content, social, links

Today I created my first ever YouTube ad so I had to share the process here.  It is incredibly simple to set up an ad, it’s very cheap, and hopefully very affective.  According to the video below, users are experiencing great success with YouTube Advertising.

And, so our experiment starts off.

Here are the steps for creating your first promotion on YouTube:

1. Sign into your YouTube account.

2. Go to www.ads.youtube.com

3. Add promotions to your account. *note: There will be an initial non refundable $5 charge when you set up your promotions account.  This is how they weed out those that are not serious about advertising.

4. Set up your billing.  All you have to do is enter your billing information and then establish a daily budget.  This budget will be used across all video promotions, however you can go in and change it whenever you wish.

5. Create a new video promotion

6. Choose a video from your YouTube channel (They will list them all there for you so you can just check the box of the video you would like to use) or you can upload a new video.

7. You must agree to the terms.  The terms state that you have full permission to use the video and that you either own all rights to the material or have been given rights to use it.

8. Write your promotion.  Choose your title and your copy.  Note that there are character limits of 35 characters per line so you must be concise. Also, while create your promotion you will be given a few different screenshots from your video to choose from as the video promotions image.

9. Add your Keywords.  You can do this one of several ways, you can simply add in any keyword that you think is applicable to the video line by line, or you can have YouTube Suggest them for you.  You can also use the demographic tool.  All of these tools are to help get your video in front of people who are searching for this topic and would be interested in it.

10. Set up your CPV (Cost Per View).  You can pick anything you like, it just has to be under your daily budget.  For instance I decided on $0.20 a view and a $10/day budget.

11. Preview your ad.  At this point they will lay out everything in front of you so you can see how your ad is going to look, your targets for you audience and your budget.

12. If everything looks okay, then hit the “Okay, Run My Promotion!” button and your off to the races.

YouTube provides you with a dashboard that you can then track your progress to see how your ad is performing, you can then edit your ad from there.  All in all it couldn’t be more simple.

Looking to learn more about YouTube Advertising? Check out the YouTube Ads presentation at this year’s Social Media FTW.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
YouTube Ad Enthusiast

Zuckerberg opened up the Live Announcement on Facebook Live today by talking about the new metric of sharing.  The old metric focusing on how many users they have, which by the way just passed 750 million and growing, is no longer priority.  He compared the social eco system’s growth to that of the internet back in the day, as it is following the same trend when focusing on sharing.  And, because sharing is growing exponentially, there needs to be a metric in place to plot out the future so Facebook and other social media platforms can be prepared for what apps are going to have to exist 3-5 years down the road, in order to keep ahead of the growth rate.

There are 4 billion things shared on Facebook every day now.  5 years ago people on Facebook weren’t sharing as much, but feedback and surveys showed people wanted to be sharing more, therefore Facebook started building products  like share buttons, the news feed, photos, chat etc.

So, with that said, the next product/s that Facebook have created in order to keep up with the demand and stay ahead of the ever growing curve are:

Group Chat - Facebook noticed that about 50% of people on Facebook are using groups and they love group chat so, allowing you to then have your more intimate conversations with friends via group chat seemed like the next step. But rather than creating a whole group there needed to be an easier way to do it. For example you get a spontaneous idea that you want to see a movie with a few friends, now with 1 click you can add friends to chat and make it a group chat so you can coordinate your night.  If they are not online at the time they will receive a  summary of the chat at a later time in their message box.

Simplified New Chat Design – Zuckerberg explained that there are billions of messages going through the chat system a day, but that’s surprising because as of now it’s kind of hard to find people online.  You either have to click on the buddy list down in the bottom right corner or use what they call the “face pile” on the left hand column of your profile page to see who’s online.  However, even though it’s not easy there are lots of conversations going on, so the new design will make it easier for those who aren’t power users to find people to chat with.  The new design takes into acct your browser size, and if it’s wide enough will show you a side bar, it will then show you both people that are available online and those that are offline.

Video Calling- Skype is now available through Facebook!

What does this mean? It means you no longer have to have multiple applications open, it means you now have all your friends in one place that you can grab and video chat with instead of trying to find them, and it’s a lot easier to use.

With Skype through Facebook you can go to a friends profile click video chat and it’s that easy. It’s also very easy for those that are not signed up yet, you just click call, it will pop up a set up window and as soon as you click okay on the applet it immediately connects.  It’s literally two clicks to connect and talk, so even for the person that is really technically challenged its super easy.

You can start Video calling one of two ways, you can hit a button on the chat tab or you can click call right on your friend’s profile page, you just click the call button, the connection takes a minute between the two machines, you’ll see an image of yourself and then an image of your friend  you can chat with them just like you do now on skype now.  SO EASY.  No separate accounts or websites to go to and it’s great because it’s on a site that already has all your friends.

Facebook is rolling this out today so keep checking your profile to see when the button has been added!  See the video announcement.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Maine SEO

The following is a recap from the twenty-second Social Media Breakfast Maine, a monthly workshop organized by Amanda O’Brien and Kyle Pouliot. For more on SMBME, follow the Twitter conversation!

The morning started off with three USM students who’ve taken over the marketing plan for the Saco Drive-In. Read more about the story at the Portland Press Herald. Follow the Saco Drive-In on Facebook here. A few things these guys have done well.

• Do one thing and do it well.
• Run promotions (they were able to offer 1/2 off opening weekend if they got over 5,000 Facebook fans by next weekend).
• They are making connections online, but also making them in person.
• They’re able to assess their target market and go after them – in real life and online.

Next up is Sault Colt, the head of Magic for FreshBooks. You can follow Saul on Twitter here or check out SaulColt.com.

Saul starts with some fun and full of personality slides, some including our own local celebrity Chrystie Corns! He also starts with a great quote: “Best reason in the world to not do things the way most people do them is most people are not successful.”

How do people market right now?

• PPC
• Banner ads
• Facebook ads

All of these work, but there has to be more!

It’s about being a little bit sexy. Not sexy is important but it isn’t the whole picture. Marketing creatively is about the product and its features.

Saul’s recipe for Magic

• Marketing is about influence
• Influence isn’t about influencers
• Influence comes from making a connection
• Connections come from emotion
• Emotions come from entertainment
• Entertainment come from magic
• Magic = marketing

The marriage of Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and advertising have to become more one in the same. Making an impact and making it memorable is becoming far more important than an entire marketing strategy. Things like guerilla marketing, as Saul sees it, will be far more important in the future.

Customer expectations

Customer expectations have changed. Customers now have a sense of entitlement and you have to work into that. We’re now programmed to be able to tweet or complain about a company online and expect that a representative from that company to reach out to us.

Customers want to be spoken to as humans. They want their ideas to be heard and be apart of the product – from creation to use. For that reason, it’s more important than ever for your products and services to be built specifically for your customers.

Why the “E” word isn’t “Engagement” anymore

In the past, the secret to social media has been “listen and engage“. Saul suggests that engagement may not be for everyone. If you (or your employees) are not comfortable with engaging, then don’t! Instead, just listen and do what your customers want.

To take it a step further, empowering is more important than engagement. You should empower your customers.

You do social media so that you know your customers better. The more you know them, the more you’ll try not to disappoint them (much like with friendship). Two important things to take away here:

1. People need to see themselves in your brand so you need to open up to them so they see themselves in your brand. Fight on their behalf.
2. Do interesting things…and then more interesting things. When you can’t compete…don’t bother. Change the rules. Have confidence in what you do and take some chances! What can you do in the real world that will drive people to social media?

Create an experience not the conversation. Let others start the conversation and just keep pouring gas on it. That’ll certainly start a conversation!

Twitter

Saul doesn’t think Twitter is the Holy Grail anymore. It’s very niche and tweeps don’t necessarily go outside of their networks and interests. Instead, find the true niche sites that your customers participate in (e.g. Associations, trade sites, community sites, online forums.)

Creative Marketing

• Make your customers scratch their head.
• If word of mouth fails, it’s no big deal because no one knew about it!
• Do contests with your customers all the time. People love funny things. You can get away with a ton of things if it has a story.
• Change the word campaign to lifestyle.