Nick's Technology Charter

I’ve been working on a code of practice when it comes to marketing and technology. It’s just a personal thing that ive been thinking about for a while, so I thought it would be helpful (to me at least) to write this out.

The idea is to have a simple charter, so when suppliers offer marketing technology services, the purchaser has a core set of principals to work by.

For instance, if you want to reduce the cost of your IT marketing spend, a good way would be to :
-          never be dependent on a any supplier,
-          use open source code so you don’t get tied into expensive licensing agreements
-          reuse code to reduce the security and cost overhead.

My personal charter for technology in outgoing marketing.

Strategy
-          Low coss
-          Secure
-          Reliable
-          Flexible
-          Easy for end users to use

Supplier / vendor
-          Non dependence on any supplier
-          Never be taken advantage over, through licence cost escalation
-          Own the source code / have the right to use the code in perpetuity

Characteristics of Software
-          100% open to code level inspection i.e. open source code
-          Commonly used
-          Secure
-          Flexible
-          Understood by the business
-          Inexpensive to implement

Technical development infrastructure
-          Version controlled where possible
-          Reusable i.e. build a library of code
-          Standardised i.e. work to a set of agreed coding standards
-          Interoperable code where possible i.e. coded in a modular way, so chunks of code can be reused

Visuals
-          Working to brand guidelines
-          Fulfils usability guidelines

Process optimisation
-          Multi streaming of projects i.e. High / Med / Low : Security Risk, Complexity, Degree of Integration

Simple!

The clever part is building up a standard framework, so as the diverse parts of a company do their thing, each new piece of technology can then be potentially reused on some other part within marketing.

In practice, this means separating the content management system from the dynamic elements of a site. Making those dynamic parts modular and easily reusable on any part of the content management system so you get the benefit of accumulated libraries of code. The other thing (for most marketing) is that the content management system should not be the expensive bit. Open source CMS’s are getting better and better and cheaper to roll out.

A good place to look at open source software ‘out of the packet’ is http://www.opensourcecms.com

All things Google

Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized image (580px × 3959px)

Show me the money £££

I’ve been looking at ‘web 2.0′ sites and ideas surrounding how they can possibly make any money. This interesting project has loads of nice ideas and in late July some of these are going to get built!

Social Innovation Camp

Some of my thinking on this:

Just looking at this list: http://scotland.sicamp.org/?page_id=47

Nearly all of these ideas are based around exchanges, but as ever with this kind of thing its going to be critical mass that gets them off the ground.

So I reckon the basis of a great web 2.0 marketing architecture is:

- Site is of use to a niche group of the web searching public. You have to start niche since there is too much competition for anything mass market.

- Get mass decentralised participation (wiki’s) so it self generates. More is more whe you think about the long tail and the easy by which you can find stuff on teh most obscure subject.

- Organise your site so engines can get in and comprehensively index.  Search engines typically account for about 50-60% of a well built site’s free traffic and they are critical to the word of mouth effect on the internet.

- Make the content very ‘linkable’ so the engines and ‘connectors/mavens’ (bloggers etc) give these sites authority. Linkable is another word for socially acceptable on the internet. The more social standing you have, the more prominence you will gain.

- Make sure the meme behind the idea is very strong. If you can put it into 6 words, great! The simpler, the more useful, the greater chance it has of spreading

- Build the site so its in the self interest of the user to pass it on.  The clever thing hotmail, gmail, various IM’s, user reviews on Amazon, facebook apps, facebook, linkedin, any social network site has, is more people is more for me.

- Low barrier to participation, high barrier to exit. So its easy to get started with and hard to leave. Think web hosting, email accounts, photo upload sites facebook. In fact anything where you get a ton ov value, where you invest a lot of time, where its reall hassle to move on.

Then you have a good chance of reaching critical mass and thus making the site worthy of taking revenue as a middleman. Obviously people don’t readily pay for information, but if the site offers enough utility, then there is a space for charging:

- To advertise if the exposure is great enough, but craigslist shows us that there are only certain things that are chargable (cars, jobs, property) I think the caveat is that people will pay if they are sure they will get  a sale, otherwise they just go where the risk is lowest i.e. a free site

- To pay for the utility a site offers, like flickr pro. The catch is that you really have to offer something exceptional.

- If your informaiton can make individuals a profit, then its also chargable. Webmasterworld.com / expertsexchange  /ft.com / wallstjournal.

- When you reach critical mass and you are the only real choice…you can charge, but only enough to make users not go somewhere else / or where you stifle usage and so kill off the critical mass.

Since ad revenues have tanked and probably will continue to do so for a long time (or ever), there is no point in depending on ad revenue for income. Besides, until ads are really relevant, they just fall into the old school disruptive model of marketing. And thats really not web 2.0   

YouTube noise

The big headline is: for every minute passing, 20 hours of content is uploaded onto YouTube.

This means the odds of having a hit on youtube are slim… Why? Well lets assume the average video length is 2.5 minutes. That means as you watch your 2.5 minute video that you spend your marketing dollars on, another 1487 competing videos have been uploaded.

This is why I’m very sceptical about active ‘YouTube’ marketing, simply because the odds of getting above the noise is very low. I think its far better to wait for someone to break out above the noise and do a deal with them. Then at least you have a fighting chance of getting some prominence. Of course you cant change a video and add your message that has been a hit, but you can add commentary and links on the description of the video and you may end up there via video adsense.

All in all, I’m probably just going to use YouTube for its utility as a great way of playing video within a 3rd party site.

As we know Yahoo is a far bigger spread of websites than one trick pony Google, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo connects their assets together effectively create a very powerful social infrastructure. How? I don’t really know yet. But I’m watching since I sense some BIG commercial opportunities here.

At the end I met an extremely bright chap – Nick Garner – from Betfair however his top tip of the evening was for us all was to read ‘Scientific Advertising’ – perfect fodder for those wanting to develop the future of ‘influence’.

We were at the ‘freeconomics’ sesison held by Chinwag – read more here, and I met Abigail Harrison, who struck me as very connected in with online PR in general.  

BTW scientific advertsing is a great book and well worth the read!

ipadio audio blogging

 Simple ideas like sound libraries could be build up as you have picture libraries. But more importantly it just another form of expression and that’s good. I don’t think the written word is going to be dented by this

Audioboo iphone audio bloggging

From a business model point of view, I guess they will get into the equivalent of radio advertising…or subscriptions for a super fast service.

Anyhow, its another step forward!

Think about the subject

I was asked about keyword finding and here is my response:

I find the easiest way to start is to pick a few big phrases you care about i.e. football and so on and theme the site around these main words. This doesn?€™t mean writing stories where you try to have 5% of the keyword density saying ?€˜football?€™ ?€“ it means building an editorial plan around certain subjects.

So the big idea is to work out where you want to go editorially, and the rest will follow. For instance on a blog site I look after, I often roll out this stat: the site has had 285,000 unique key phrases.

If that were printed out on A4 paper , 50 phrases a page, you are looking at 5700 pages or 11 reams of photocopy paper?€¦.

But we have not tried to come up with 285,000 phrases, our users have. So the point is to not worry about keywords too much ?€“ focus on subject matter.

Of course there is a lot of optimisation work to do. One example is how you write headlines?€¦

Normal; Razza hat trick for reds in prem kick off

SEO: Manchester?€™s Renzo? scores 3 goals in Premiership semi final

It?€™s as simple as thinking like a librarian and making sure your ?€˜lablel?€™ content properly. Once you’re on your way and understand how to write for your user and SEO, then you can target more important ‘money’ phrases.

This is a case of one step at a time.

Find 'you' in the internet crowd

And here are a number if really useful reputation tracking tools:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/12/social-media-monitoring-tools.html

The ones I have used most are:
http://boardtracker.com/ for tracking forum conversations. On the whole these are just noise. but occasionally they are critical touch points that you need to either contribute to or get links from.

http://usernamecheck.com/ for seeing wether company social media profiles have been taken. its a brand territory thing.

http://www.backtype.com/ for searching comments on blogs. Whilst comments are mostly ‘noise’, its good to see where you are being talked about. You can also get some nice low level links out of these.

http://www.google.com/alerts and http://blogsearch.google.com/ both really comprehensive ways of finding where the conversation is.

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

it scans a given page and uses its algo to work out wether the links on that page are going to spammy sites.

Having looked through my logs its clear that users arent migrating the new imporved IE7 like they should. So when you build a site, annoyingly , you have to factor in the laggers.

Stats from: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

To help you get around this pain in the neck situation, you need to see your site in development on IE6 – the problem is that Microsoft don’t let you run the ie7 +6 side by side unless…. you have a standalone version of IE6

check evolt.org for standalone ‘old school’ IE browsers? 

or use this online browser compatability tool if you cant be bothered to download and install a new browser on you PC

1. Neilson Net ratings said that 36% of online users think that 1st result in the search rankings means that company is the BEST company.

2. You may remember the accidential release of AOL’s user data? these were the amazing results from Jim Boykin’s analysis:n (the big number is volume of clicks on the data sample) 42% if users click No1 result, 11% No2 and 8.5% No3. It pays to be No1.

% of clicks
Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%

1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%

3. We assume natural search listings are neutral i.e. they are the most relevant they can be. Therefore asking a search engine a question is like asking a friend ‘what is your opinion’ – if you can influence this process, you are influencing the ‘friend to friend’ interactions of millions of people.

4. Where do journalists & Bloggers go for information? Yes, the internet. Be 1st in the right key phrase territories and you get into their mind space.

That is why i really believe SEO is simply a subset of online PR both here in the UK and internationally.

This is really useful if you want static content on the front page, but you want to run blog posts below the content.

I have had sooo many problems with this. I have tried ‘sticky posts‘ and a number of other plugins to get s ingle static piece of content to just sit there without affecting other parts of the site ( i wont extrapolate, aside that this issue is a pain)

The usual route is to set up an include on the theme above the blog posts. the downer is that this include then repeats itself on the ‘previous articles’ pages and so you get duplicate content…. not good for seo

So here is my fix

I have added this code below

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

and ive made sure it’s within the div tags theming the content.

<?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { // Do stuff specific to first page?>
<?php if ( is_home() ) : ?>
<div id=?€category-description?€>
<?php echo get_staticpage(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } else { // Do stuff specific to non-first page ?>
<?php } ?>

I have then set up a page called static-content.php and added the relevant content and saved it within the template files.

and then i have edited :

and function get_staticpage() {
do_action( ‘get_staticpage’ );
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’) )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’);
else
load_template( ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/themes/default/staticpage.php’);
}

then i have edited :

wp-includes/general-template.php

and added at the top of the file (below the php tag) :

function get_staticpage() {
do_action( ‘get_staticpage’ );
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’) )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’);
else
load_template( ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/themes/default/staticpage.php’);
}

and it should all work !

But online PR is a whole other beast ( so i’m finding )

The problem is that for a corporate, the connection between building buzz, getting links, then ranking is all too tenious and mysterious for them to generally take it seriously. As a result the online PR process gets packaged as ‘it’s like offline – but we send stuff to PR web!’.

The next level is where certain sites get targeted, but of course because the content does not have ‘buzz’ it only gets taken by crap sites. So the page views are tiny for the effort expended and the search benefits are negligable.

Luckily I do work with a couple of sites that rock on this front and when you see the connection between :

• SEO’d site
• Hot News
• Great writing
• And tons of links coming in

it is quite beautiful when it all works. It is like seeing an eco system flourishing. I speak of www.anorak.co.uk – cool site with attitude and a great example of how to harness ‘buzz’

- it has a long way to go, but what it does well, it does very well. Now it’s time to spread the knowledge,?  evangilise and motivate.

You can see the article here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_prominence

The plan is to write the seminal piece on SEP (which will be my linkbait) and get a link from wikipedia to here. Then I will make sure my SEP wikipedia article is as well linked to as possible to boost the ranking of this page. Then in turn it will promote this site.

The catch of course is to write content which is good enough NOT to get deleted or edited out on wikipedia.

the video or click on the picture