Facebook Privacy - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #206
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009I don’t share my vacation pictures with everyone I know in real life so why do it in the social world? Jason would not have shared this picture with everyone in our office but it was out of his hands. If you believe in complete transparency online, then this is not the post for you. For the rest of you out there, this post will help show you how to manage your Facebook profile so you share only what you want to share with each of your friends.
Step 1: Login into Facebook and click on Settings -> Privacy Settings (it is in the top right).
Step 2: Click on Profile. From here you can control who can see what on your profile. The default setting allows your friends and those in your network to see almost everything. For most of us, one of our networks includes the city we live in. This means anyone in your city can see your full profile include pictures, videos and more. If you want to specify exactly who can and cannot see your photos for example, in the drop down menu next to Photos Tagged of You click Customize… From this pop up you can select the option Some Friends and then list each friend you want to be able to see your pictures.
Step 3: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Search. This page allows you to control who can find you via the search feature in Facebook. It is also automatically configured to create a public profile that can be found by search engines.
Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on News Feed and Wall. Here you can choose what stories are published to your news feed to be seen by your friends. There is a second tab on this page called Social Ads. Click there and you can choose whether or not you want to appear in social ads. Social ads are those that pair your profile picture with an application you use or page that you are a fan of. By default, these will only be seen by your friends.
Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Applications. The page that you will see shows how applications interact with your information. If you click on the second tab, Settings, you can control what informaton can be seen by your friends through applications they use.
Step 5: Go back to the Privacy Settings page. The final option available is to Block People. I only friend people I know, so I have never had to use this feature, but it is nice to know it is there if I ever do need it. Feels a little like a virtual restraining order.
I love that Facebook allows us to easily share pictures and what is going on in our lives. Without Facebook, everyone wouldn’t be able to see me hanging out with David Meerman Scott. However, I like being able to maintain some privacy online. This guy could have avoided being called a fairy. Would your boss be so cool?
Where to Begin a Website Overhaul? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #204
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009I am sure most of you have heard of HubSpot’s Website Grader. If you have not, it is one of the best free tools out there to help you figure out where to start your website redesign. The basic principle behind website grader is to rate your website on a number of attributes, mostly relating to SEO, and give you ways to improve your rating. It is very easy to get started. First, go to website.grader.com then simply enter your website, any competitor websites (this is optional) and your email. Click generate report and you will have a full report of your website in minutes. (Be patient; trust me it’s worth it.)
The report shows you how your website is doing in six major areas:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Blogosphere
- Social Mediasphere
- Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
- Competitive Intelligence
Each category is broken down further and the report gives you a rating in each as well as advice on how to improve. Some items are quick fixes like shortening your meta descriptions or adding your company to the Yahoo Directory. Some things may take longer and require involvement from others in your company, like starting a blog, if you have not already.
This report may also show you that a full overhaul of your website is not necessary. You may just need to tweak a few things. And if you do decide a full overhaul is the way to go, make sure you know what your website is already doing well so you don’t loose it. You never want to loose good inbound links or high keyword rankings.
Keep in mind that this is a free tool and cannot take the place of a good SEO consultant. However, it is a great starting point to help you decide where to begin first if you are planning an overhaul of your existing site. The great thing is you can keep coming back to see if your score is improving.
Social Bookmarks - Is more really better? Marketing and Sales Tip #203
Monday, February 16th, 2009Is it better to have a lot of social bookmark icons on your blog, or ones that are relevant to your space? I have heard (and seen) different opinions on this. What do you think?
I personally think you only need to have ones on your blog that are relevant to your audience. So how do you going about finding these?
I don’t know if there is an easy way, or if it depends on what you are looking for, but I used sites like Social Poster to look up social bookmarks. Then, I went through them individually and searched “marketing” to see if there was anything. That’s how I made the decision of what is on this blog as of now.
Any ideas or know where to find other applications like this to help B2B Marketers?
Twitter CRM? - Marketing WTF?
Thursday, February 12th, 2009We’re currently conducting a survey of B2B Marketers inquiring about how the economic downturn has impacted their budgets and activities. As part of this survey, we’re also probing for what types of social media activities are being tested by these Marketers. Some of the results are not surprising (blogging), but there are a few surprises (which you’ll have to wait until we publish the final report to find out about). Some B2B companies are experiencing or interpreting success with their company blogs and even Twitter participation. The latter is of particular interest, especially since finding a way to monetize corporate participation on Twitter appears to be a leading candidate for Twitter’s “how do we make money off this” strategy.
As most of what I see on Twitter (and even blogs) seems to be people mass-emailing the types of random, quippy things that we used to put up on our Yahoo Messenger status, the true relevance of content circulating about Twitter falls into a fairly classic signal-to-noise ratio problem as depicted below. However, as the Post Office makes it increasingly less attractive to do direct mail marketing and technology makes it more difficult to do email marketing, it will be interesting to see how those who Twitter on their employer’s behalf will fare in their experimentation with this. Done craftily, I could see CRM systems build on top of Twitter, similar to what this company is doing. Those who don’t grok it so well will unleash upon us a brand new epoch of spam….several times a day, 140 characters at a time.
Keyword Research Tools - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #201
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009A website redesign/overhaul can be a daunting task but, for some, a necessary one. One of the first steps, from an SEO perspective, is to define your target list of keywords to use when optimizing your site for search. I have heard recommendations of having anywhere from 300 to 500 keyword on your list. Keep in mind you will optimize each page of your site for only 2-5 keywords.
Here is a list of the top keyword research tools you may want to use:
Keyword Discovery - According to their web site, Keyword Discovery has a database that tracks over 36 billion searches from 200 search engines worldwide over the last 12 months, including seasonal trends over this time period. This tool is useful in building keyword lists, overall campaign planning and competitive research.
Price: Standard - $69.95 monthly/$599.40 annually; Enterprise - $495 monthly/$4455 annually. They offer a free trial with limited functionality.
Wordtracker - Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential. Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers - Dogpile and Metacrawler.
Price: $59 monthly/ $329 annually. They offer a 7-day free trial.
Wordze - With a database of about 552 million keywords and 68 million unique search terms, Wordze is a great tool for building keyword lists. But it is also valuable as a tool to assist in creating SEO strategies, as it provides analysis on competing sites on specific search terms.
Price: $38.98 monthly, $7.95 1-day trial
Google AdWords Keyword Tool - If you are running (or plan on running) a Google Adwords campaign, then this tool is critical to your sucess. One can only guess the size of the database (all of Google?) and how frequently it is updated, but it is excellent at showing you what a site looks like according to the Google spiders. While a free tool, it does not lack in features.
Price: Free
KeywordSpy - KeywordSpy offers analytics to study competitors’ tactics as well as monitor their online search campaigns. According to their website, their database includes over one billion keywords. Best used for competitive research.
Price: monthly subscription from $89.95 - $139.95. They offer a free trial with limited functionality.
SEMRush - SEMRush uses 25 million of the most popular and expensive keywords to collect Google search results. SEMRush can show you keywords for any domain ranked high enough to be in top 20 search results results or that purchases AdWords. It helps you to keep track of your competitors, uncover your competitors’ organic and AdWords’ keywords, find their landing pages, discover your own long-tail keywords, and check Google rankings of any site.
Price: monthly subscriptions from $19.95 - $499.95. Free version available with limited functionality and only 10 queries per day.
SEO Book’s Keyword Tool - This keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API. You can explore more keywords by subscribing to their powerful keyword research tools. Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing. Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.
Price: Free
SpyFu - The SpyFu database can point to which sites and advertisers rank highly for any given keyword phrase. They can also indicate advertising trends, including Top 500 Advertisers, Top 500 Organically Ranked Domains, Top 500 Most Clicked Terms, Top 1000 Most Expensive Keywords. Best for competitive research.
Price: $38.50 monthly. Free registration for basic features.
Google Insights for Search - Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best, determine seasonality, create brand associations, and determine a new market. Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It then shows you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms. Keep in mind it was created for advertisers.
Price: Free, need to have a Google account
HubSpot Inbound Marketing System’s Keyword Grader - This is what I use. You import your list of keywords (or type them in one by one) and it shows you how many monthly searches that term gets, how difficult it is to rank for that term, your website’s current rank and the cost per click. Once you have had your tracking scripts on your website it will also show you how many visits you are getting from each keyword. There is also a competitors view to see how you compare on each term vs. each competitor. HubSpot actually does A LOT more than this so I didn’t originally include them in the list but since it is what I use I thought I should add them on.
Price: $250 monthly subscription (mostly for business owners) or $500 monthly subscription for closed loop marketing analytics and salesforce.com integration
Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more website redesign tips.
How to Find Industry Blogs - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #197
Monday, February 2nd, 2009I know you have probably read somewhere that even if you aren’t blogging yourself you should at least be out there to see what other people in your space are talking about. The best way to do this is by reading industry related blogs. To ensure you are keeping up on a regular basis, set up your Google Reader. All of this sounds great but where do you find the right blogs to read for your business?
Here’s what helped me:
- Alltop – or “all the top” sites on the web. ReachForce’s space is B2B Marketing and I looked here for “all the top marketing news.” It has all the top Marketing blogs (even including this one!) based on results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us.
- Just Google your space…like “B2B Marketing Blogs.” First on the page was Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs by Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog. And keep moving down the page for more. Other bloggers also compile lists of top blogs in their space. For example, Web Market Central has a list of Marketing-Related Blogs.
- When looking at other blogs, be sure to check out their blogroll. It is a good way to see what blogs someone else follows and recommends.
So…now start looking for blogs in your industry and get into the conversation!
Did the Secret Service Kill Obama’s Social Presence? - Marketing WTF?
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Here on The B2B Lead we declared Barack Obama (of course now President Obama) to be Marketer of the Year (and Advertising Age had something to say about that too) on November 5th, after winning the presidency. He and his team had a marketing strategy unlike any other before him. They had a clearly defined message of Change and targeted that message to the people by speaking to them in a way and through a forum they already understood. He understood the power of viral marketing and social media and embraced it, using it to his advantage. I believe this played a major role in him first winning the democratic nomination and ultimately the presidency.
My question now is - will he continue? He united many Americans under the promise of Change and reached out to them where they were to deliver his message. By having a presence on many social networking sites, he seemed accessible, a people’s politician. I believe that his presidency will be strongest if he continues to communicate with the people the way he did during his campaign. Don’t we all want a people’s president?
But it seems since the campaign ended, there is little to no involvement in the same social sites that were instrumental in getting Obama elected. For example, his LinkedIn profile still lists him as US Senator and Presidential Candidate. His Facebook page still has over 3.8 million supporters and over 500,000 wall posts but little to no interaction from Obama or his team. His supporters seem to still be interacting on Facebook but without much from the big guy himself.
What Obama did do after the election is create change.gov. This site was set up to allow Americans “opportunities to participate in redefining our government.” The site did offer some neat opportunities for Americans to give feedback and their opinions for where the country should be headed. Unfortunately, as of today, the site has been taken down and directs you to instead visit whitehouse.gov.
The new whitehouse.gov includes a blog as well as the President’s soon to come weekly video addresses (past Presidents did these too, in case you didn’t know, but have always been on the radio). The first blog post comes from Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House. It is very informative and gives you an idea of what to expect from the new administration. I felt the most notable was that they “will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.” You can also sign up for email updates from the President.
The new website went up exactly at 12:01pm today so not everything has been completely fleshed out. Phillips wrote, “We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know. Like the transition website and the campaign’s before that, this online community will continue to be a work in progress as we develop new features and content for you. So thanks in advance for your patience and for your feedback.”
I am looking forward to seeing what else they add. I hope there is continued involvement in the social networking sites that contributed to Obama being elected to the White House. Or is his Facebook profile now a matter of national security?
Day in the Life of a Social Media Marketer - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #187
Thursday, January 8th, 2009I know not every company has the option to hire someone specifically for online/social media marketing and here at ReachForce I do have other responsibilities, but my main job is to get ReachForce more interactive online.
There are many reasons companies aren’t taking on social media initiatives - they’re scared, they don’t have the time, they don’t understand the value, etc.. And you already have enough work as it is, right? All true, but as you have probably heard by now…social media is worth investing some time into. To help, I have listed below what I do at least once every day (I have sort of made my morning routine around it), and hopefully you can pick out some things you can start doing on a regular basis too so you can get started online.
Google Reader – This is most important to get started in social media. Every day I read our Google Reader we put together with blogs in our space. I go through reading (skimming) and pick out posts I think would be good for us at ReachForce to comment on.
Twitter – I have my own account and ReachForce has a company account that I update a few days a week. If you aren’t twittering today you should at least be checking out search.twitter.com to see who is talking about your company.
LinkedIn – I scan LinkedIn Answers for ones I think ReachForce can help with or we may have an opinion on. And there are many times our Marketing Director (Amy) is able to offer some good marketing advice. This process has been made easier with the help of groups I have joined and the weekly email I get with discussions, and with inbound marketing system HubSpot.
Facebook – We have a ReachForce corporate page. When needed, I upload photos or videos, put our events coming up or send a message to our fans. I usually always have to update our RSS feeder from our blog…for some reason it doesn’t do it on its own? Anyone else having this problem?
Social Bookmarks – I use Digg and StumbleUpon the most. I feel right now we get the best traffic from them. I recommend using it for your own blog if you have one, or recommending other people’s post you like. (Use your Google Reader to find these)!
Blog – At ReachForce we do have a blog and we post at least 4 times a week. I don’t write all the content, but I do manage it.
To help stay on top of what is going on in the social media realm I look at mashable.com and subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog and newsletter as a start.
Okay, so this is most of my morning routine (yes it is a little time consuming, but this is what I was hired on to do). Hopefully you can pick out bits and pieces and start putting it in your routine. For those of you who do use social media on a daily basis, what else do you do every day?
Book Club Wrap-Up - ReachForce Book Club
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series. Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.
- HubSpots’s Get Found Online
- What we had to say…
- David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
- What we had to say…
- ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
- What we had to say…
Happy Reading. We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.
It’s the Holiday Season, Time to Get Social
Tuesday, December 23rd, 20082008 has been a big year for B2B Marketers. The idea of using social media as part of our lead generation programs has become a reality. Whether it be blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook B2B Marketers are taking on new challenges and figuring out new ways to reach their audience through the readily available social media outlets. Here’s a list of some great social media posts from this year. There’s lot of lists and dos and don’ts, if we’ve left a great post out, let us know, we’ll add it to the list.
50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve their Marketing
10 Aspects of an Effective Social Media Campaign
How to Build a Community of Twitter Followers
Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have
6 Keys to Bringing Up Social Media
24 Things to do When Stuck for a Topic to Blog About
Health Check: How Trusted is your Corporate Blog?
50 Social Media & Marketing Predictions for 2009
5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook
If you’re already knee deep in the world of social media, please share some of your successes or experiences. Are you able to measure real ROI?
Happy Holidays and thank you for following us on The B2B Lead. We look forward to sharing more B2B Marketing and Sales best practices with you in 2009.
