Wait, There’s More?!

5 things that have come to my awareness in the past three months due to the world of digital marketing.

1. The unveiling of a new self

In my past four years attending WWU, I have become many new and different things:

• A good talker

• A good writer

• An unlimited thinker

• An active voice

• A vessel to pursue my dreams

Until recently, I never thought of myself as particularly technologically adept, or analytically focused.

I thought this way because my entire past life has given me evidence and feelings of negativity towards both ideas. I am smart and fairly good with numbers, the internet, etc., but my lack of passion for visualizing the world through quantitative data had kept me at a distance from really learning how I could use it to my benefit and advantage.

It was not until I realized that no matter how good of an idea I could come up with, or how confident I was that it would work, my enthusiasm would mean nothing if there is no analytical data to back it up.

I then also realized how fairly frequently even my most inner gut instincts have led me astray from actual results.

Numbers don’t lie. If you can compile and analyze them properly, you have the ability to make a lot of positive change.

2. The importance of analytics

Data is not just data. It is people. It is every person who has ever visited your site. You know:

• What city they were in when they were looking at your page

• What web browser they used to get there

• Wow many pages they viewed

• If they were on their mobile device or pc when viewing

• if they visited for the first time or have been repeat customers

• A lot more

To me, numbers and statistics in themselves are not very interesting, but the people behind them are.

And to know the people, you have to know what all of them are doing, all at once, at any specific point in time.

The numbers condense and filter the people you are interested in most so that you can best serve those who are loyal to you most. Or figure out why the ones who aren’t, aren’t.

Nobody trusts nobody but themselves, so if you wanna be good, you gotta back your claims. You gotta own your words.

That means you have to prove results. To prove results you need to track data You need to test, analyze, tweak, and repeat. Data is a lot of fun when you realize it’s all just one big science experiment.

3. The importance of learning a new language

I always wanted to learn a new language. The trouble for me doing so was that I couldn’t justify the benefit of taking so much time to learn only one. There are so many out there, and so many different ones that I will interact with in my life, that I would have to learn at least 20 to really benefit from spoken language in travel.

The great thing about programming languages, is that they are universal languages. Someone with knowledge of how to program could build a website or app for someone in Brazil just as easily as they could in the U.S..

I love speaking and I love creating and using language. Building and creating with html and css have opened my eyes to whole new world of creativity though the universal language of digital code. I can now see its importance in connecting our world and how I can use it to do just that.

4. What inbound marketing is all about

Everyone knows what good marketing is.

We may not know why it’s good, just that it is. We may not know that the conversion goal was achieved most likely because after an entire year of A/B testing, it is now possible that the red “buy now” button (as opposed to the green or yellow one) is the best color for instigating conversions.

But we can tell when someone is authentic. When they know what they are talking about. When they are saying what they believe to be truth

It is these types of companies, which speak truth to the best of their knowledge, that are able to most effectively connect with customers and build a truly loyal customer base.

They are able to do this because they truly believe that they have a good idea other people will be excited about and stand behind them for. They believe that their idea can help to change peoples lives for the better.

They are real people. They have real stories, real experiences, real questions and answers. Not ones hidden behind layers of financial statements, legal documents, bricks and mortars of the industry cut throat monkey chase to the top of a corporate ladder to nowhere.

They share to inspire, inform, educate. Their voice is through the company which represents them. If what is attractive to you is attractive to someone else, they will join you in attractiveness.

Business is about relationships. Marketing is about value. We must build more valuable relationships.

Crowdsourcing and product co-creation have allowed just that. No longer do companies guess whether or not their product will be a hit. They now ask the people what they want from the get go. An idea is presented, a prototype shown, and then those who have an interest in the potential that the product has can offer insight as to how the company could make it better for their needs.

With enough input from followers, a company can create a product which caters to a wide enough audience of loyal customers and clients. Since the relationship with a follower has already been established by the co-creation process, a business can more easily and effectively support them after product launch so as to ensure that the next and best thing they create will even better be able to satisfy those customers’ needs.

When you authentically care about the well being of others, uplift and educate them by sharing educational and engaging content, and do your best to share your vision by building mutually beneficial and healthy relationships, you will be engaging in effective inbound marketing.

5. How to follow my dream

I feel like I have the toolkit now. I know what has been done, what needs to be done, and what I can do. Many things that need to be done cannot be done now because I am unable to do them.

Yet I do know what I need to do to be able to have the skill to do what needs to be done.

After being in this class, I feel like I have real and applicable skills and ideas that I can bring to any company of any industry.

Most importantly, I have benefited most from this class because I now have the resources to market my own ideas.

That is why this is all so exciting to me.

I have always known this is what I’m good at, and this is what I will need to learn, and what mindset I will need to have to do it. I just never knew that this was how it would turn out.

Thanks a lot, Mark. It’s been fun. I look forward to keeping you updated. See you all soon.

Here are some screen shots of my site stats for the quarter:

I typed a total of 12,922 words.

A Community Mobile Engagement

Mobile is about engagement. Our phones are so close to us at every moment of every day that it only makes sense that businesses should find a way to use them to engage with their customers. So how can they do this?

According to Nielsen, social networking is all about mobile, and what’s a better way to social network than through both the digital and analog life. See Neilson’s Social Media Report here.

Starbucks does a great job of connecting customers to their company by allowing them to pay for products using an in-phone Starbucks app. Customers are also awarded points for their money spent so that once they gain enough, they can come in for a free coffee or treat. The payment/reward system has been very successful thus far. From Mobile World Live, “…figures from the first quarter, which covers the holiday season, show more than $1 billion was loaded onto Starbucks cards, the highest amount ever. One in 10 US adults received one of the company’s cards as a gift during the quarter, an indication of its popularity. Nearly 20 percent of transactions on Starbucks cards now come through mobile payments.” These numbers are clear indications that their mobile payment/reward app is providing a lot of engagement. It also shows room for app use to grow.

Yet mobile interaction is most definitely not all about quick payments and easy rewards at hot coffee shops. Every business has the opportunity to be involved in mobile. They must only watch out for the next big app that will allow them to do so.

For example, what if every time a person walked by any shop anywhere, there was some type of notification, or an offer, or a status, pushed to the potential customer who was walking by on the street.

As a mobile phone user of this type of interaction, you would do anything you normally would on any normal day. If you are walking, driving, skateboarding, etc, while passing shops and stores, a message will be pushed by the store to your mobile phone.

It would be an idea set up similarly to Twitter, as an rss feed of notifications. One where the messages you receive would not be intrusive. Your phone would not beep every time you received a push notification from a business but rather when you chose to, you would open up the app on your phone to see if there are any good deals or offers available close by.

Messages pushed by businesses could be as simple as “Just want to say, hope your having a good day!” or something along the lines of “stop in and make a purchase in the next 20 minutes to receive a 20% discount!

I believe I have just invented content advertising, except for it already exists. But this type of content advertising engages people in a much more interactive and immediate way than the industry standard. The idea is that you give a user something interesting, informative, helpful, that immediately advertises your business and can invoke an immediate and direct purchase.

A business participating in the program could update their advertised content as often as they would like. Changing deals and messages as often as they would see fit, either according to the time of day or happenings of current events.

The app would have access to the entire network of businesses using the app. It would be be seamlessly able to be integrated among businesses and platforms.

This application would have the ability to not only promote an individual’s local business, but the community as a whole. Businesses could facilitate events together using the app that would encourage interaction among people who were participating.

For example, a city wide scavenger hunt could mobile interactively take place in say, downtown Bellingham, Washington, in which a business would push an interactive challenge to a hunter that would require them to go in store to find out. Participants in the hunt would travel from business to business, clue to clue to win the event.

In this way, the use of mobile can not only increase the profits of a business, but the well being and profits of a community as well. One of the overarching themes of greater technology has been greater connectedness among human beings. What a better way to connect people than with a messenger that never leaves our side.

We the Consumer

I have been having some problems lately. The worst, my internet sucks. It sucks right now, it sucked in the past, and it would have continued to have sucked well into the future.

Why would I pay Comcast $50 a month to have a consistently inconsistent, spotty internet connection? It doesn’t seem right to me.

In the past, I would have let it go, not spoken out about my problems because of fear that Comcast had some kind of power over me. That they were such a big company that any complaint I would have would simply be lost in the confusion of robotic voices and endless touch pad tones to nowhere that get nothing solved.

So instead of doing that. I decided that I would take action, demand service, and settle for nothing less than I think I deserve. Heres what I learned from the experience.

1. You, the consumer, have the power.

2. Threatening to switch service providers is a great way to assert your customer dominance and get the compensation you deserve.

3. If you ask the right questions, and have the right attitude, companies will do things to help you out.

I used to think I was stuck. That experiencing a fairly low level of customer service from a large company was just the way it was. Someday it would change. But not now. I was just gonna have to deal with it I guess. There is no way that such a big company like Comcast would ever listen or help me out unless I was able to talk to some of the bigger dogs of the company.

Well, this thinking was wrong. In my pursuit for justice I discovered a better understanding of a company’s thinking in regards to the way they handle customer service. I am also better able to clearly see the distinction between companies who have alright customer service, and those who obviously have great customer service.

Over the course of my Monday afternoon, I spoke with both Comcast and Wells Fargo with customer service related issues.

The first came with a call to Comcast. As I told you before, my internet sucks, has sucked, and would have forever sucked had I not picked up the phone and called with the intention to demand better service and compensation.

My call began just as any other generic internet problem call to Comcast would. What’s always the first and at many times the only step you take with Comcast when trying to fix your internet issues? Unplug router, wait, replug router, Comcast will send a “power signal” to the router, and your problem should be solved. Sure this method works sometimes, but I already went through this process. Twice.

So I told the comcast rep that no, I would not be unplugging and replugging my router and waiting for you power poop signal because I have already been through that. It won’t work.

And here my friends is where I, the consumer, took the power back. Because it was the right thing to do.

I pay money for internet, and thats what I should get. I pay money for internet that works, and that is what I should get. Every second I have to spend and have had to spend figuring out problems has cost me. My time is valuable. You, Comcast, know I feel this way. You, Comcast know that I dont have to take these problems bent over. That there are other isp’s I could switch to and never lose a wink of sleep at night knowing that I will most likely never give your company money again. My future family and our kids neither.

So Comcast. Now that you know I am fed up and that I deserve some real help from you guys, what are you going to do?

Oh, you’re gonna upgrade my internet speed from a max of 20mbps to 50? Cool, you’re gonna give me cable tv too? Sweet, I’m still gonna pay $50 a month? Awesome. My router won’t come in the mail until Nov. 10th? nuh ahw.

(Btw check out speedtest.net to check your own internet connection’s speed.)

I need internet right now. School depends on it. Work depends on it. Other people depend on me. This problems should not even be happening in the first place.What can you do for me Comcast?

Oh, you can get the modem to me on the 6th now? Well that was magical. You should have said so in the first place. But guess what? That’s not good enough. I need it now. Response?

“Well sir, you could drive out to one of our offices and pick it up today.”

ORLY?! Thanks for letting me know, I would have absolutely done so in the first place if you would have told me!

To make the rest of the story short, I picked up my equipment, hooked it up, it works, and now I have blazing fast internet and can watch the Seahawks on Sunday if I so feel inclined.

When I could have just let the problem persist and continued to believe that nothing I would do could change it.

It wasn’t hard. All I had to realized was that I have the power, not Comcast. I had to remember that they need us, not the other way around.

And I got all this free stuff for doing so. Pretty cool.

I really appreciate the way I was received and talked to service reps of Comcast. They were all nice and all very understanding. But I am upset that to get what I deserved I had to jump through unnecessary hoops and waste unnecessary time. If I would have been given the upgrades off the bat as compensation for the horrible performance I had been receiving, I wouldn’t be writing this today. In order to not get put off and queued into the Comcast line of waiting eternity I had to act tough. Like I was the bad guy. Like I was doing something out of the ordinary by asking for good service. This is troubling because it tells me that Comcast is being tricky on purpose. It tells me that if they can, they would rather hope to have a customer talk to a machine and forget about their problems rather than deal with them head on from the get go, fix their problem, and then allow both sides to be on their merry way.

Good customer service isn’t just about options and mediums of contact (Check out Comcast’s variety of contact methods here ). It is simply a mindset in which all of the correct solutions to solving customer service problems will follow. When you truly care about giving customers a quality product from the best of your ability, you will have minimal customer service issues and you will save time and money. Where you will lose money is when you lose lifelong customers because your company is trying to cut corners and focus on the business rather than what is really important, the customer.

Give and You Shall Receive: The Power of Authority and Free Content

Everyone wants to help the world. And everyone has their own vision of how they can best use what they know to do so. The reality is, we all have something to offer and we can all learn from one another.

In the competitive world of business, we all have equal opportunity and we all have the ability to “win” at success. Yet even though we all have passion and we will all work hard to reach those we can, making your organization visible and legitimate on the internet is no easy task.

The reason is that people don’t just want help from anyone. They’re not gonna take the time to listen to every nut on the internet who says that what they have to offer is more unique and effective than everyone else. The only way you can convince people to use your product is to allow them to trust you. To allow people to trust you, you need gain authority.

Authority gives you power and legitimacy in the eyes of consumers. It will be your key tool to converting a specific email audience to customers and clients that will financially support you.

From “The Business Case for Content Marketing” written by Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger Media, “The key to becoming an authority in any area is to learn all you can, and share all you can. Then you make money by selling something related to your authority, and even by re-packaging the content you’ve already created.”

The idea with authority is that you, similar to people like you, are seeking information on a certain subject that they are interested in. But the difference between you and most any other person seeking that information is that you have seeked and found so much quality content on your particular subject of interest that you have decided to share with others what you have found in a helpful way. To create a business out of the valuable information you have acquired, you can repackage it into your own program, service, or product and then convince others to buy it based on your authority.

Again from Brian Clark, “The key to becoming an authority in any area is to learn all you can, and share all you can. Then you make money by selling something related to your authority, and even by re-packaging the content you’ve already created.”

Your level of authority is all based on the quality and quantity of content you provide.

You can provide effective content in three ways:

1. Share on your site useful content that others have produced.

2. Produce your own content in the form of an informational blog post, photo, or video.

3. Make sure your content is up to date and relevant.

The more you share, the more reputable you will be and the more authority you will have. The more you help others, the more they will help you (assuming you share good content of course) because you are a good company with a good idea, and all good companies with good ideas can be successful with enough thought and enough ability to provide as many people as possible with enjoyable and insightful content.

In the world of the web, content rules.

Your job, is to simply do what you like doing.

Research, find good content (or generate it yourself), and then share it with others, FOR FREE. Once you gain enough authority that you become more legitimate than everyone else on the market, charge a fee for your most well detailed and self compiled information. For no one else can give what you give, and your product truly is, one of a kind.

The Importance of Social Care through Social Media

SOCIAL CARE

“Social Care is transforming customer service. Social media has emerged as an important channel for customer service, with nearly half of U.S. consumers reaching out directly to brands and service providers to voice their satisfaction or complaints, or simply to ask questions. In fact, one in three social media users say they prefer to use social media rather than the phone for customer service issues.”

Social care is now becoming one of the best ways to help your customers get questions answered and comments responded to about your products or business practice. One of the main reasons is the increased level of acceptability that social media provides between the customer and the client. The ability to feel comfort in numbers by presence or validation of comments puts us in the “social media mindset” that gives up the opportunity to communicate with a company just like we would any other friend.

When we post to a company Facebook page or Twitter feed, we are not alone. On any companies social media pages, we can easily see hundreds or thousands of others who have ranted, raved, and asked all sorts of different things about a number of different subjects relating to their company. Not feeling like we are alone in commenting to a company gives us all the more reason to feel comfortable doing so. Not only do we see through social media that other people have similar rants, raves, and suggestions like we do, but we are also encouraged by these people to express our own opinions because of their validation. One comment that we make will be seen by a potentially large number of people so that if our comment is a good one, and catches on to others thoughts, we will know so because of how many “likes” our comment has received. The ability to act in numbers has given the consumer a much greater level of power for change and service than in the days before social media. It is no longer the small, single customer against the one big company, it is now the large group of customers against the single small company.

Luckily, company interaction with large numbers of customers is just as much a good thing as it can be bad. The more questions that are asked by customers and answered by companies, the better. This is because future customers will continually have more and more data to search through from social media sites and forums to get their personal questions effectively answered. Rather than needing to post a complaint or suggestion to a company in the dark, over the phone, with no idea of if your issue will or already has been addressed, can use social media to more quickly and happily get their questions answered. Customer generated content is much more powerful and effective than company generated. A company vouching for their own credibility won’t take nearly as much weight as a recommendation from a friend or peer will.

However, as my experience with the internet has grown stronger, I have began to notice that I am able to trust companies on the internet more and more…The ones that are trying to help me out that it. But sometimes it is hard to tell if a company online actually has your interests in theirs.

Thinking about this though, I realized something. I realized that I am no longer afraid to connect with people on the internet.

I have been searching for good social media and marketing blogs lately and came across one I particularly liked called socialmouths.com.. After reading an article there, I found myself wanting to hear more from what this place and what they had to say.

At first, I felt hesitant to take the steps necessary to do so. For example, the “full access to the Mini-course for building Facebook Tabs for FREE!” sounded pretty awesome, all you have to do is give them your email address. Yet even at this small and seemingly harmless request, my initial feelings toward giving it up turned dark. My mind became flooded with bubbling and fiery emotions implanted by the past deceit of scammers virus implanters. How could I trust someone offering something for free? What was their angle? Does this free course even exist? This type of thinking was common place for many people during the early realms of advertising on the internet. It was hard to distinguish the genuine entrepreneurs from the shortcut scammers.

But times have changed. Credibility on the internet is rising and trust between online identities has grown stronger. I took a second to step back from my anxiety of connecting with this blog and who was behind it to then realize that they are just like me. They want to educate the world. They want to give their knowledge and passion for the enjoyment of others. Of course they need to make money and will try to persuade me to give them some by first baiting me with free content and then asking if I want to pay for the really good stuff… but thats ok. Any type of high quality service worth paying for should be paid for. They need to make money, we all do. And to make their good ideas stand out, they need to. Instead of thinking about their idea of monetary incentive with disgust, I became appreciative of it. If this website was not trying to make money, there would be no content on their page for me to enjoy and learn from. I trust the people at socialmouths.com because they have set up their personality for me to do so. And as Rachel Botsman says: “The currency of the new economy is trust.”

Let the Spiders Crawl with Good SEM

As search engine algorithms become better and better at finding specific answers to customers’ queries, a web designer must be able to know what information the search engine will be looking for and where it will be looking for it when it browses through relevant data on your site to potentially post up as a result to a query.

As more information becomes available on the internet, relevant data available for any type of query increases. So if you happened to be the only ice cream shop in Bellingham, and someone were to search “ice cream in Bellingham”, more likely than not, your business would come up as the first listing on the results page. But if someone else were to open an ice cream shop in Bellingham, and their website was optimized better than yours to tell a search engine that they sell ice cream in Bellingham, say because they have the words “ice cream” and “Bellingham” both at the very top of their page, that company’s website is going to be ranked higher than yours. Because of this, when someone searches “”ice cream in Bellingham”, they are going to be much more likely to go to your competitors shop to buy ice cream possibly regardless of quality or location (say, for a tourist, or someone who was not already heavily invested into the already established ice cream shop).

Especially in the case of sold goods that have no striking differences in quality or appearance, SEM is key. “The top listing in Google’s organic search results receives 33 percent of the traffic, compared to 18 percent for the second position, and the traffic only degrades from there.”1

The high percentage of people who click on the first or second links of a results page shows the importance of making sure that your business’ website comes up highly ranked and visible when relevant.

However being able to be found on the internet is only half the battle when it comes to effective SEM. The increase of people realizing the importance of community in business is driving businesses to provide great content on their sites. “People want to know whom they are dealing with. Your customers are checking for your website, location, map or directions, social media links, contact information, hours and even a photo of the owner or staff. Your customers want to see who they are doing business with. They want to be able to visit your business location even before they step foot through your door.”2 Customers are demanding more. They want more information, and they want to be able to find what is relevant to them more easily. If a business wants to continue to be successful, they must give the customer what they want, and SEM has just the tools to make that happen.

There is no doubt that growth in SEM will continue. As more people use the internet to find intimate information, businesses will need to make sure that theirs is available. The websites with the most relevant and revealed information will win customers. And as long as business want to attract more customers, SEM will be a most useful idea.

Sources:

1http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2276184/No.-1-Position-in-Google-Gets-33-of-Search-Traffic-Study

2http://www.newwindmarketing.com/why-is-search-engine-marketing-important/