Your Online Reputation, That Is
I’ve had had an ongoing conversation on Twitter with someone opening a fast food franchise outlet in the area. He’s had a rough time finding qualified and willing workers for his establishment. This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve had conversations with many food service managers in the area who tell me it’s hard to find good team members.

I feel for him, because it’s tough enough getting the construction completed, certifications, permits, supply contracts, etc. set up. You’d think with lingering unemployment lurking about he’d have no problem finding people willing to join his team. Even with many applicants, he said a challenge to find people with good attitudes he can train to do what he needs them to do.

First, only half of the people with whom he scheduled interviews even bothered to show up. That in itself is telling. Second, he pre-screened applicants, checking their online spaces, and disqualified a few applicants because of things found in their Facebook profiles.

Your Online Reputation Matters!
He mentioned one applicant entered “Smoking Big Joints” as one of his interests. Another entered “Legalize Marijuana” as his interest.

I don’t want to get into the politics of things and do believe in one’s private life being private. But, how private your life is depends a great deal on how much you post online. Smoking marijuana and taking other illegal substances is considered such a liability in employment that many companies routinely screen new applicants for drug use. Coming up positive on a pre-employment screening means automatic disqualification. Many companies even go so far as to randomly screen all employees for drug use. This being the case, it really doesn’t make sense to advertise your use of such substances in a very public forum.

My friend is certainly not alone in his use of social media to screen potential hires. Consider this Mashable article by Erica Swallow from October 2011: How Recruiters Use Social Networks to Screen Candidates. This type of search is routine now and job seekers should expect that they will be “googled” when they apply for a job.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written on this topic. After I posted that article, I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague whose daughter was getting ready to apply for teaching jobs. She went through Facebook and “untagged” herself anywhere she could find herself “tagged” – regardless whether the picture could be considered “bad” or not. She didn’t want to take any chances.

Job Seekers: Market Yourself
Whether you realize it or not, you are a brand. When seeking employment, you have to market yourself in a similar way a company markets its brand. You have to show potential employers you have skills and the right attitude to be part of the team. If your career goal is to work in a head shop, then advertising the fact that you smoke marijuana might be a positive thing. However, if you want to work somewhere else, you might want to think twice about putting that fact in a public forum.

Some may be thinking to themselves, “That’s not fair.” Whether it’s fair or not is beside the point. This is where the job market is and you need to take your overall online reputation into consideration.

Current Employees Also Need To Consider This
If you are already employed, you might also consider what you post online and how your management might feel it reflects on them. This past weekend I told some business-owner friends about this article which prompted them to tell me about a problem they had with a former employee. He “friended” them and “liked” their Facebook page, which is nice. But, he routinely posted profanity-laced tirades against people he felt slighted him. They were concerned about how these posts might reflect upon their business.

I’m not for businesses having the ability to muzzle their staff online. However, it is worth thinking about how your actions reflect on the people who pay you salary. Whether you realize it or not, everyone is brand ambassador. Would you want your online actions to hinder your company’s ability to do business?

Employers also need to consider this. How much is too much when it comes to your team members potential damage to your reputation? It’s a good idea to consider this and create some sensible policies for this eventuality.

What say you? Have you run into any problems hiring or getting hired because of something posted online? Have you taken steps to clean up your online reputation? Please feel free to share in the comments.

Update: 1/22/2012: Marty Weintraub shared this post on The Bookshelf  Blog: How To Totally Destroy Your Facebook Reputation (& Life…) in 10 Easy Steps! [PRINTABLE FLOWCHART]. It illustrates very nicely how you can ruin your online reputation very quickly.

photo credit: -Tripp-

You’ve made or about to make the call to take your web site outside after hosting it in-house. Here are some things to keep in mind as you go through the process.

Contracts
When I was going through EMT certification, it was drilled into us to document everything. “If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen,” was (and is) the mantra. In business it’s very similar: “If you don’t write it down, it won’t happen.”

To some, the word “contract” has a bad connotation. They think contracts are only used when two parties distrust each other or if one side is lawsuit happy. I remember one time doing business with a man from Fort Worth, Texas who was insulted that I asked for a contract: “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Contracts are like locks in that they keep honest people honest. Contracts spell out what is required from each party entering into the agreement and penalties if they don’t live up to their end of the bargain. A good contract is critical to protect the interests of both sides of the agreement.

Be sure to include non-disclosure language and a clear section stating who owns the data and source code.

Don’t forget to put into the contract clear wording as to what each party needs to do if they decide later they want to leave the agreement. Again, this may not necessarily happen because one side of the agreement didn’t live up to their end of the bargain. Things change, so plan for it.

Hosting
If you’re going to take the sites out of your data center, it’s a good idea to make the change to a cloud-based host if you’re not on one already. Cloud-based services offer redundancy hard to come by in a single, corporate data center. The multiple data centers also offer speedier downloads as they spread the load virtually across servers, and geographically.

Don’t forget to have an escape clause: someone on your team needs to have an overriding administrator password so you can get to your data if something goes wrong.

Technology
Try to agree on what technology will be used on the new web site system. It’s not a bad idea to insist on something your current team can handle in case of an emergency. If that’s not desirable or possible, at least insist on something common and non-proprietary. Some specialty web sites will have technical needs going beyond what most people other than specialists in the field can handle – those would be an exception to the last point.

Just because you outsource, it doesn’t mean you can abdicate your need to be the technologist. As I mentioned in my recent PubCon presentation, knowing a bit about the tech being used can save you a lot of time and money if you know what you’re talking about and can ask the right questions. No one’s asking you to code the site or set up a server, but you need to understand the basic workings of the technology being used.

What say you? Have you moved a web site from in-house to an outside contractor? What success or problems did you run into? Any “gotchas” I might have missed? Please feel free to share in the comments.

Top Photo: photo credit: *_filippo_*

Middle Photo: photo credit: Jemimus

Bottom Photo: photo credit: kiler129

I’ve been thinking a lot about online contests over the past several months. Moderating the “Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests” session at PubCon gave me some new idea as to how I might use contests at work.

Over the long weekend I entered two contests. Each was for a brand I like very much which offered prizes I would enjoy having. One was for Cracker Barrel, which I learned about from scanning a QR Code on a tabletop placard. The other was for the Zagg “iPad An Hour” Black Friday event, which I learned about when they sent me an email. Here are some observations I made of each:

Cracker Barrel’s

Pros

• It was fairly easy to enter
• Bonus entries were available
• It was sharable
• The prize was valuable enough to be an incentive to enter (a gift basket and a $250 Cracker Barrel gift card)

Cons

• The form required way too much information. For example, did they really need my phone number and postal address if I provide an email address? Also, why was it necessary to set up an account with a password just to enter a contest? To their credit, they did offer login through Facebook, which may have negated the need to fill out the form.
• Because I got to the form by scanning the QR Code on the tabletop card, it would have been nicer to have been sent to a mobile-friendly version of the form rather than the one designed for a computer browser. Also, while I understand the reason for CAPTCHA, it’s a pain to use on a mobile device (Auto-Correct, anyone?)

Cracker Barrel Holiday Sweepstakes Entry Form

Zagg’s

Pros

• It was very easy to enter, just provide full name and email address
• Bonus entries were available
• It was very sharable (as this was the way to get bonus entries)
• The prize was valuable enough to be an incentive to enter (a new iPad2)

Con

• To be considered for each hour’s drawing everyone had to enter once every hour, which put a huge demand on Zagg’s servers. I had trouble getting the entry page to load early in the morning, though they had it under control and loading quickly in short order. The rest of the site loaded well during the short-lived slow time, so their commerce was, hopefully, not adversely affected.
• I didn’t win one. (Well, OK, perhaps that’s not really a ding on how the contest was implemented …)

Zagg iPad An Hour Giveaway Entry Form

 

Each of these contests had merit. Without knowing the goals of each, however, it’s hard to tell whether or not they were effective. Each had a good prize to offer and it was reasonably easy to enter both. From the consumer standpoint, however, I would say that Zagg had the better implementation given the very simple entry form. The one seeming mistake was that they didn’t anticipate the popularity of their giveaway and weren’t prepared for the onslaught; though they did recover quickly much to their credit.

Update: After I posted this, Scott Cowley at Zagg told me that from their point of view, the iPad An Hour contest was a huge success. He cited some stats on the results from Drew Conrad that look very good. Thanks Scott and Drew.

What say you? Did you participate in these or another contest over the “Black Friday” weekend? What did you think about them? Please feel free to share in the comments.

I had Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Amazon affiliate link) as my ear worm today – the title of this post is inspired by it.

This past Thursday’s PubCon keynote was a panel discussion between Topher Konan (CNN.com’s SEO Coordinator), Jeff Preston (SEO Manager for Disney) and Alex Bennert (In-House SEO for the Wall Street Journal). It was quite a lively talk about different issues facing in-house SEOs in large organizations.

One stand out comment was Jeff’s mention that everyone involved in the web efforts need to be at every meeting. His comment was very well received by the people in attendance. I was certainly glad to hear him say it, as that idea is something very important to me. It’s something which I stressed during my In-House SEO presentation on Tuesday. In the context of my talk, it was about the importance of marketers being constantly in touch with their IT counterparts.

What I said was something  like …

“If you treat your IT folks as an afterthought, guess what? They’ll treat you as an afterthought.”

Constant and consistent communication is important for several reasons:

• It helps maintain lines of communication which can otherwise get lost
• It helps build those relationships needed for smooth cooperation
• Both sides of the team learn from each other
• Both sides of the team learn each other’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses
• It makes working life just that much more pleasant

Remember that web marketing success means success for the entire organization. Although you may not see the need to communicate across departments on a consistent basis, that need is there. Keep in contact, even when you don’t feel like it. Make time to talk to those who have a hand in all pieces of your web marketing strategy, no matter how small their role may be. In the long run, everyone wins when you do.

Oh, and this applies to outside contractors, too!

The title of today’s post is inspired by the Warner Brothers cartoon. The coyote is always in a hurry to catch the Roadrunner, employing some wild schemes in his efforts – always to no avail.

On the first day of last week’s PubCon, Leo Laporte delivered the kickoff keynote address. Leo is best known for his work on “The Screen Savers” on TechTV, hosting “The Tech Guy” radio show, and starting TWiT.tv (“This Week in Tech”). This is someone who knows about building an audience.

He made an interesting point during his talk. He said that we (as marketers) shouldn’t be in a hurry to build an audience. He recommended starting out slowly and building over time.

This confirmed something I have been thinking about for quite a while regarding getting followers and fans on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook. I believe it’s a good idea to build followers as Leo described. I use the term “organic” to describe this because the growth occurs naturally as a response to a combination of delivering good content and engaging with the audience.

Many people I talk with think one should build an audience quickly through promotions. The way you might do this is to create a contest online and make being a Facebook fan or following on Twitter (or both) as part of the entry. It’s really quite simple, and it does work in building numbers quite quickly.

Here’s the question I ask when presented with this idea: What are you going to do with the audience when you get it?

The rub in building an audience too quickly: If you don’t have a way to keep their attention, eventually they will tune you out. Most of us have entered contests where we had to “like” a Facebook page or follow a brand on Twitter. We likely entered because there was an attractive prize being offered. But, after the prize is awarded, did you pay attention to the company afterwards?

If they didn’t have compelling content or some regular offering of prizes or discount, you probably tuned them out. You may have even “unfriended” or “unfollowed” them. I’ve done this many times;  jumping on a contest and then when it’s over completely ignore the company because they didn’t have anything else interesting to offer.

If you build your content first and get into the habit of creating quality and compelling content on a regular basis, your audience will grow slowly. It may even seem painfully slow at first. But, if you stick with it and keep creating those blog posts, videos and podcasts eventually you will hit that tipping point where your audience starts to grow faster and faster. This is partially because that smaller fan base will share your good information with their networks.

Don’t Just Chase Numbers
Alan K’necht is someone who often speaks on analytics issues and is an expert in the field. In a recent PubCon presentation, he likened counting followers or “likes” to counting “hits” in web stats. Out of context, the follower/fan count alone is completely meaningless. If you combine that number with how many people engage you, how many ask questions, how many go to your website and (of course) how many buy your product or service, it becomes very meaningful. In the end, I’d rather have 500 engaged and active fans rather than 1000 passive fans who pretty much ignore my message.

In the end I have nothing against using contests and other promotions to gather followers. Those are valid tools. My recommendation: make sure you have a solid foundation on which to build. That way, your efforts will have long-lasting success.

What say you? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this topic. Please feel free to share in the comments.

What a great week this was. Not only did I have an opportunity to attend PubCon Vegas, I once again had the privilege to do a presentation with and to a great group of people. It was an excellent week of learning and meeting some very smart, very talented web marketing people. PubCon is a great time, and I highly recommend anyone working in online marketing check it out. You’ll learn more than your head can hold.

Monday – a travel day, but there was one story and this is the write up most people referred me to: How To Set Up A Google+ Brand Page by May-Mae Elliott on Mashable

For the rest of the week, I’ll list highlights from the sessions I attended at PubCon

Tuesday

• Bing/Yahoo! Partnership
• SEO: Hot Topics and Trends
• In-House Team Building and Training

Wednesday

• Keynote with Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal – Did someone really ask Matt Cutts about how to make better doorway pages?
• The Convergence of Search and Social Media
• Global Search Strategy
• Hosting Issues and SEO/SEM
• Algorithm Proofing

Thursday

• Convergence of Online Marketing and Analytics
• Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests

For more PubCon coverage:

• Lisa Barone and Michelle Lowery from Outspoken Media covered a lot more sessions than I could – and they are THE live-blogging experts. Check out their PubCon session summaries on the Outspoken Media Blog.
• Melissa Fach put together a very comprehensive list of PubCon posts and summaries over on Search Engine Journal: Did You Miss #Pubcon? Recaps of Sessions & Links to Photos

Friday – No news today. I’m sure there was some, but I’m spending the day being a tourist.

This session was hosted by … me.

Lisa Buyer, President & CEO of The Buyer Group @LisaBuyer

• Doing Sweepstakes with Wildfire
• There are a few reasons to use social to build exposure: Grow your fan base, generate leads, engage fans, and monetize.
• You need to be certified and have to so a minimum amount of campaigns a year to use the service.
• Contests are defined as a submit and vote setup. A sweepstakes is defined as a random drawing to award a prize. Wildfire will let you do both.
• The idea is to gather customer information and get leads.
• A very good campaign can be run for about $115 per month.
• A nice-looking page can be created through the Wildfire system. It’s easy to do and very compelling.
• Promotions can be done through press releases, website widgets, tweets, etc.
• The Wildfire tools are very easy to use, too.
• Has great analytics tools, too.

Matt Craine, Owner & President, MattCraine.com @MattCraine

• Exposing brand and building social exposure with contests.
• Use a contest to move customers to a new platform – i.e. from web site to iOS or Android app.
• Make it easy for customers to share their entry via social. Helps spread the word.
• Offer download of the new app after the entry.
• Winners often engage with their networks, getting you more buzz for your efforts.
• Consider using bonus entries for incentive to share on social spaces.
• Be original. Make your prizes personal and identified with your company. Avoid “Win an iPad” contests because there’s no branding available for you.
• Don’t forget to evangelize your current customers to help spread the word about your contests.

This session was moderated by Mark Knowles

Tom Critchlow, Head of Search, Distilled @tomcritchlow

• Data is a marketing asset. Not many companies are using data to their advantage. It’s more than just a research tool.
• Infographics can be useful for showing data in a meaningful way.
• It’s easy to get attracted to a bunch of cool tools. Find the metrics which you care about and apply to your business and watch those.
• Also measure things you can control. Find out what you’re doing which works and what doesn’t and make changes as approprite. You can’t change things you can’t control.
• Data is difficult to get information from without context. Make changes and test to learn what happens.
• Set up custom variables so you can track content on a page as well as the page itself or to measure how many Facebook users visit your site. This will give you actionable ideas.
• Don’t forget to include user feedback in your data.

Alan K’necht, Founding Partner, Digital Always Media @aknecht

• Instead of calling it “social media” we should call it social marketing, because we’re all marketers.
• Fires draw people together, since the days of the caveman. We want to start fires in a more modern way.
• You need 3 things to make a fire: Fuel, Heat and Oxygen. These items can be measured. Perhaps not perfectly, but they can be measured.
• Our big mistake: measuring head count. How many people follow or like us. Out of context, this is a meaningless number.
• Another measurement mistake: Volume of content creation. While more can be good, but is it quality content and are people viewing and engaging?
• ROI, engagement, and sharing are better tools to add to other measurements.
• Going back to the fire analogy:
  • The fuel is the number of fans, followers, etc. You can measure the quality of the fuel to a certain degree. These numbers can tell us how big a fish we are in the pond, and how big the pond is.
  • The oxygen consists of those brand advocates. They are influencers who help spread the flames.
  • The heat is the content. Don’t measure quantity, measure quality!
• Use URL shorteners and tag them with web analytics code so you can track them. This allows you to measure engagement and what gets shared and clicked on.
• Create a dashboard showing raw analytics data combined with the data from URL shorteners and other sources to show the big picture.
• See if you can correlate increases in sales or store traffic (with physical locations) with upticks in web traffic and buzz.
• Just because you have a bigger fire, it doesn’t necessarily mean increase in revenue. Remember how much people were talking about BP during the spill crisis?
• Measure attraction. Be careful not to compare you company with others, even competitors. You have to make your campaign work for you.





Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]> http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-2011-day-3-convergence-of-online-marketing-and-analytics/feed/ 0 http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-2011-day-2-algorithm-proofing/ http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-2011-day-2-algorithm-proofing/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:59:38 +0000 Elmer Boutin http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-2011-day-2-algorithm-proofing/
Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]>

This session was moderated by Rob Garner

Glenn Cooke

• Chase Google’s goals, not the algo. Google wants to serve relevant, authoritative content, so have that on your site.
• Have an Adwords campaign ready just in case.
• Look for ads on other venues. Make sure to check for relevancy and where your potential customers are ready to buy.
• Have some sites ready in reserve. There should have good content, but not a lot of time investment. If the main site is hit by an algo change you can go to another right away. You’re not looking for tons of traffic on these sites, they’re mainly for backup.
• Get a professional graphic designer to design your site. It’s worth the cost for the user experience. This can help you get links.
• Don’t get content from expert writers. They may be great writers, but they aren’t experts in your field. Exert content is written by experts.
• Build links one at a time. Go for quality rather than quantity. Don’t build links just for SEO purposes.

Paul Edmonson, CEO of HubPages

• HubPages got hit hard by Panda.
• Duplicate content hurt the site and by internal links.
• Went through and removed affiliate links to spammy sites, removed pages which were considered low quality and pages which really shouldn’t rank anyway.
• They also reduced the number of displayed ads and news feeds.
• Have you ever tried negative SEO testing? Sometimes it helps to try to make your site ranking go down to see what perhaps might make it go up. Use this with caution and only in extreme circumstances.
• Make a plan to carry you through hard times, including having cash in reserves.
• Splitting up author content into subdomains helped rankings.
• they also deleted a lot of content, even in some highly trafficked pages.
• since making all the changes, some authors are still getting lower amounts of traffic, some are higher and some are the same. Overall, HubPages has come back to pre-Panda levels.

Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting @stonetemple

• Search Engines want to increase market share so they can make more money on ad sales.
• Google goes though a 4-step process before changes get implemented.
• Users want instant answers to their questions. People are extremely impatient and will leave if things don’t get to them fast enough.
• If your site is differentiated, you can be very algo proof. If you can stick out and be relevant you’re doing well. Don’t do what everyone else is doing.
• Links and social mentions from authorities carry a lot of weight.
• Remember that user experience is a huge factor in ranking. Treat your visitors like kings and queens.
• Watch time on site and bounce rates. If your are higher than your competitors, you. Ight be in trouble. These two factors could go I to future algo changes.


Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]> http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-2011-day-2-algorithm-proofing/feed/ 1 http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-day-2-hosting-issues-and-seosem/ http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-day-2-hosting-issues-and-seosem/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:29:56 +0000 Elmer Boutin http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-day-2-hosting-issues-and-seosem/
Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]>

The session was moderated by Stephan Spencer

Scott Hendison, CEO and President, Search Commander @shendison

• IPV6 is still not being implemented fast enough. IPV6 and IPV4 don’t talk to each other natively, so conversion needs to happen soon.
• To comply with the standard, you can use translators or do dual stacking. Dual stacking is the preferred method because it’s faster and there are fewer configuration problems.
• If you ask your ISP about this and they tell you not to worry about it, find a new host. They should at least have a plan.

David Vogelpohl, Founder and CEO of Marketing Click @davidvmc

• If your “neighbors” on your shared host are causing problems (like sending malware or spamming) your site can be adversely affected.
• Make sure your host keeps software up to date and has adequate security measures.
• Pay attention to download times. If your site is slow because of host issues, consider moving. Check out pagespeed.googlelabs.com. Google uses the installed Google Toolbar to determine download times.
• Consider using a monitoring service to watch for downtime.
• Check potential hosts for tech support levels. It’s bad when your site is down and you can’t get ahold of someone.

Michael David, Founder, TastyPlacement @tastyplacement

• Site load speed is critical for SEO and user experience.
• http://tools.pingdom.com – tests download speed. Gives detailed reports so you can take action to speed things up.
• Find a monitor to check uptime. Texting and email alerts are a key feature.
• http://majesticseo.com/reports/neighbourhood-checker – use in conjunction with Google’s safe browsing tool – checks for bad neighbor issues.
• Find a tool to do load testing. Also check Google Webmaster Tools for speed issues.

Ralf Schwoebel, Founder and CEO of Tradebit @trabit

• When your site is down, you are in trouble. Long term outages can hit rankings hard. Avoiding downtime is a reputation management issue.
• Monitor, use an outside service.
• Use Lynx with GREP to screen for links placed by hackers.
• Duplicate your site. Replication and load sharing helps with speed issues and downtime issues.
• Use round robin in DNS to spread the traffic around.
• Make your life easier by outsourcing. Use cloud email and nameserevers.





Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]> http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-day-2-hosting-issues-and-seosem/feed/ 0