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Job Seekers – Your Reputation Precedes You

Elmer Boutin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:50:41 +0000

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-

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Book Review: “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness” by Dan Zarrella

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:51:19 +0000

Dan Zarrella

I’ve been following Dan Zarrella, the “Social Media Scientist” for a few years now. I get a lot out of his writings and webinars because his studies go beyond the “feel good” or “unicorns and rainbows” (as he puts it) ideas which go around. He attempts to put some hard numbers behind what he recommends and this gives me some great starting points to do my own experimentation and measure how things work for me and those I work for.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness is a compilation of many things Dan has already shared in various media, put together in a nice, easy-to-read format which can help anyone involved with web marketing get a great head start on working their own strategies.

The book is full of interesting statistics and studies of data showing:

what may be the best time to share on Facebook and Twitter
how timing affects email opening and click throughs
how often one may wish to post on Facebook or Twitter
what makes information shareable by others
how to define goals and measure whether they were reached

All in all this is a very good work and well worth reading. If you’ve never heard Dan speak nor read any of his other work, you will find this quite interesting and full of ideas to get you thinking. If you’re already familiar with Dan’s work, this is a great reference where everything is in one place so you don’t have to hunt it down.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness by Dan Zarrella

Note: all links to the book in this post are Amazon Affiliate links

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A Tale of Two Contests

Elmer Boutin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:55:45 +0000

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.

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Don’t Stop Communicating

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:56:35 +0000

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!

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PubCon Vegas 2011 Day 3 – Convergence of Online Marketing and Analytics

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:15:45 +0000

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.

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PubCon Vegas 2011 Day 2 – Algorithm Proofing

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:59:38 +0000

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.

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PubCon Vegas Day 2 – Hosting Issues and SEO/SEM

Elmer Boutin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:29:56 +0000

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.

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One Week Until PubCon

Elmer Boutin — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:20:50 +0000

Once again, PubCon is upon us. This time next week I and two of my colleague will be winging our way to Las Vegas for this excellent web marketing event. It’s going to be a busy time of learning and exchanging ideas.

If you’re a Crossing reader and will be at PubCon, I would love to meet you. If you see me wandering the hallways or in a session, please stop and introduce yourself. Here’s my partial tentative agenda:

Monday

I’ll be at the kickoff event at 5:30pm. This is a great time to meet new people in a social setting.

Tuesday

I will be presenting as part of the In-House Team Building and Training session at 2:55 in Salon D. This will be a great panel with some luminaries in this area: Tony Adam, Peter Leshaw and Josh Gampel.
In the evening I’ll be playing in the Raven Tools poker tournament. Thankfully this is just for “funsies” because I am not that great of a poker player

Wednesday

After all the day’s festivities, I’ll be participating in the Epic Dinner organized by Alan Bleiweiss.

Thursday

From 2pm until 3pm I’ll be sitting in on PubCon Labs. This is a new feature of PubCon which I think will be a huge hit. Session speakers will be at a table and will sit down with you and answer your questions. Reservations are going fast. I’m scheduled to cover Beginning SEO, but I don’t think anyone would mind if you wanted to talk about In-House issues or anything else web marketing.
From my Labs session, I’ll be rushing over to Salon G to moderate a session entitled Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests with Matt Craine and Lisa Buyer
Fest Call! At 7pm we’ll be having an informal and unofficial meetup at the Hofbrauhaus. Anyone is welcome to attend, but I’d especially like to invite Veterans of the Armed Services to come out and tell lies and talk web marketing.

Instead of posting a long summary of the sessions I attend at the end of the day, I’m going to try posting summaries of each session individually. I think this will be more efficient for me and easier to read for you.

What say you? Are you headed to PubCon next week? What do you hope to learn? Please feel free to share in the comments.

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Book Review: “Winning The Zero Moment of Truth” by Jim Lecinski

Elmer Boutin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:42:03 +0000

Back in the day (and not to long ago, either) we were taught that the sales process (or purchase process, depending on which side of the transaction you were on) went through a process shaped like a funnel. It was more or less a linear process. It may not have actually been so, but it was a nice model and likely fit many transaction processes.

Now, with the internet and all of the information resources it makes available to consumers, the sales process is no longer linear at all. Often, by the time a customer walks into a store, he has researched features, brands, prices, warranties, and any other information available and knows exactly what he wants. If research wasn’t done ahead of time, it can be done in the store with a smart device. The world, literally, is in each customer’s hand.

This is where the idea of the “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT) comes in. It’s no longer easy to predict where or when a customer will make her purchase decision. It could be any where at any time. The information which goes into her decision process can come to here from traditional advertisements to banner ads, reviews, videos from other customers on YouTube. Many times another customer’s “Second Moment of Truth” (experience with a product or service) can very well become another person’s ZMOT. If you can find a way to get the right information to a person at the critical time, you can win at ZMOT.

Here are some quotes from the work which got me thinking:

Kim Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President, Global Marketing Group, Johnson & Johnson describes the change in mental models this way: “We’re entering an era of reciprocity. We now have to engage people in a way that’s useful or helpful to their lives. The consumer is looking to satisfy their needs, and we have to be there to help them with that. To put it another way: How can we exchange value instead of just sending a message?

Companies who are winning in this area are already on their way to becoming information resources. Rather like Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street,” they are becoming helpful to their customers, sometimes even at the expense of their immediate bottom line. They are looking to invest in the long-term success of their customers. Last year I wrote about Gun Dog Supply and how they turned themselves into an information resource for those interested training hunting dogs. By doing this, they made themselves an invaluable resource which helped their sales in a huge way.

How can you help your company do this?

Let me make another point about ratings and reviews online: They’re a tremendous resource for customers, but they’re also a tremendous resource for businesses.

“A focus group is artificial. People are paid to be there. They know that there are agency people behind the glass watching them … . The only thing that’s pure and authentic in terms of what’s actually happening in the marketplace is how people talk to each other.”

Think about this: You have a great opportunity to learn what you’re doing well and where you need to improve. This is a tremendous asset to the business person who realizes it’s there and takes advantage of the knowledge available to make positive changes to their product or service.

Beth Comstock, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of General Electric … says:

“Maybe if you make locomotives, or the software that automates production lines, you think: Why should I have videos or web content out there, who’s going to use that?

But one day at our marketing council we did YouTube searches for just those kinds of things. And you know what? Up came hundreds of videos, including videos from our competitors on things like intelligent thinking for product line automation. It was a great eye-opener.”

This really can apply to any product or service. People want to know what’s out there, what’s available and what might best solve their problems. If you can build out content (and not just videos) you can really hit a home run when it comes to attracting good attention. National Instruments has an excellent community full of content on how to use their products. I’m willing to bet all that great content gives them a big advantage over their competitors.

If I’m having this conversation privately with a CMO, this is the first question I ask: “Who’s in charge of ZMOT for you?”

Because if it’s nobody’s job, it’s not going to get done. If I ask you, “Who runs your TV department” or “Who’s in charge of your in-store marketing for FMOT?” or “Who makes sure your green beans reach the shelf on time?”, you’ll give me one person’s name. You should also be able to give me one person’s name for ZMOT.

And that’s because of no one owns it, it won’t get taken care of. I wrote about this regarding web marketing in a guest post on the PubCon Speakers blog. If you’re going to take ZMOT (or anything else) seriously, someone has to own it.

If you’re a marketer, I hope you’re encouraging your customers to make videos about your product that others can find at that Zero Moment of Truth. Never forget that your customers are ahead of you, and that’re ready to contribute right back to ZMOT in real time.

I sometimes get into conversations about creating content. Here’s an idea: if you can’t make enough content, crowdsource it. If people are delighted with your product or service, they’ll likely be happy to share that knowledge with their friends. Sometimes all they need is a little encouragement.

Check out Winning The Zero Moment of Truth by Jim Lecinski. The Kindle version is free. It’s a quick read filled with great information including quite a bit from Google’s research. It only took me a little over an hour to read it and watch the videos; very well worth the time.

You can also get more information by visiting the web site: www.zeromomentoftruth.com

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Personal/Business Blogging with Summer Huggins – BlogathonATX

Elmer Boutin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 22:08:24 +0000

Summer does content strategy, and has been involved in content generation for 12 years. Her employer requires all employees to have a personal blog related to content in order to let them have a voice in the industry. They also blog on the corporate blog.

Summer tweets as @summerH

Whether to have separate personal and business blogs really depends on what business you’re in
At a recent conference, it was said “Being human is the new black.” You need to express your real voice in your writing
The policy at her company is simple: “Don’t be stupid.”
The things you write on a personal blog can lead to business contacts. You never know who’s going to read your stuff. They may never find you “business” blog, but might get to know you anyway
Consider: if you want to be found – connect all your stuff together somehow. Otherwise, set up an alias to keep stuff completely separate
Even a corporate blog should have a personal voice. People will relate more to a person than a “corporation.” Instead of having a “talking logo,” be a person or persons. People want to know the people who make up your business
Summer tries not to tie herself to a calendar when blogging. She would rather write something interesting and timely rather than write “just because it’s Tuesday”
When posting, consider a filter like, “What would my mother think about this” or sister, or dad, or whomever. That can help keep you in line and possibly out of trouble
If you have separate blogs, you can use purposeful linking either by inclusion or omission

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