When you compete in a corporate landscape with automation startups and well funded SMEs, you've got no choice but to innovate. Everything from advertising agencies to film production rental companies and print shops all get hit with digital transformation. What consulting do you need?
Just flew back from LA for a few days. I'm sitting in a cafe in the Gangnam district of Seoul. You've heard of it. I'm sure.
There's a table behind me full of beautiful 20 something modelesque, tall, gorgeous women dressed in Prada and Gucci. In front of me there's a table packed with 5 young business men from Europe somewhere. They look like they too could be models.
A few minutes in, I realize the table in front of me is a delegation of businessmen from Spain. They are here to work with the WTF or World Tae Kwon Do. But their conversation is the same one you'd hear at any table.
"Miguel, you speak the most Korean here. How do you hit on a Korean girl?" They ask, in Spanish. I know because I lived in Madrid.
Behind me, the gorgeous girls as saying, "Uhn ni, soh gae ting hae joh!"
They are asking each other to introduce them to European men.
Neither groups even realize they are looking for each other.
This is exactly what it's like in the Venture Capital and Angel funding world. You might have a startup that needs one missing link. Maybe you have a technology that needs to be integrated into a bigger ship. Maybe you have a team that can make disruptive innovation happen but you just need to bring in another element that you can't afford right now.
Well, chances are, while you realize that you'd love to have a gorgeous infusion modelesque infusion of capital, you may not think you're packaged or presentable yet. What you don't realize is that there are VCs who want you and need you just the way you are now. THIS is how to get Venture Capital and Angel Funding for Startups: Getting Investing.
It's surprising to most people who find out that all you have to do is send an email with the rigth words in the subject line at the right time and a VC or Angel will fly you out to meet them if you can't affort the flight.
We've built a lot of social and quasi social network sites. We've built components for large sites. And we've built entire sites that have gone big. And these are the common factors or general guide lines for understanding the information architecture of a social network website. See: iPhone and Android App Programming Process Best Practices
While your website can look as different as Quora vs Pinterest. You'll see that they both follow the exact same principles. Only the visual CSS Design elements are different. By stripping away the superficial differences, we're left with the foundation skeleton of what today's HTML 5, CSS, C++, PHP, and Ruby languages can do coupled with server side database driven content.
Basically, what this means is that the examples below will show you what can and cannot be done today.
You want to email everybody in your inbox and you want to email everybody in your contacts. And well, that's just not possible unless you do it youself.
Or is it?
Why Mass Email Programs Suck Or How to Mass Mail Everybody In Your Gmail
Half of the above is true. You do have to do it yourself. If you use Aweber or MailChimp or even Google Groups
1. It looks like spam
2. It is impersonal (even with mail merge)
3. It has to legally have that lame "to be removed" link at the bottom that screams "you're just a number to me."
You'd be amazed the rate of responses you get back using this method of automating your emails straight from your Gmail inbox instead of some 3rd party bulk mailer.
The number 1 advise professional HR people tell prospective hires is, "work at applying for jobs like a job."
We all know that most of life is a numbers game.
Even if something is as mystical as love and spirit, it's still got statistical underpinnings. It really is all about numbers. The guy that gets the most dates just asks more girls. The best sales man just makes 10 more phone calls. The greenest pastures get more days of rain.
Sales and Marketing is no different.
It's all a numbers game. Now, to sweeten the game, prequalify. The higher the likelihood that one prospect will be a customer, the higher the conversion rate when you've you've got a target count of 1,000.
So the question then becomes, how do is find 1,000 people who are highly likely to want my products or services? The answer is either Google (which is challenging to stand in the limelight. see Google SEO) or Craigslist.
But Craigslist poses two problems:
1. If you're a contractor or firm, they only want employees.
That's just a perception issue. They only THINK they want an employee. It's simple to convince a HR department to outsource instead of hiring in.
You might be surprised how easily you can extract 1,000 email addresses of the companies who are looking for your app, product, or services from Craigslist.
There are two types of women (yes, you can already tell this is going to be a gender biased article. but bear with us, it's done tongue in cheek.). First, the women who will want to date you. Second, the women who will want to date you, now.
Men tend to not understand the difference. They figure that if she's female, she's gotta want me. Ironically, they apply the same myopic thinking in marketing.
"If they're in the right demographic, they want my product."
And just as in real life, whether the female is too young, too old, too married, too in love, too smart, or two dumb, even if by all outward appearances, she fits the bill, there are a million reasons they are not your target. So, where do you go find the people who are in your sweetspot and want to date you right now, because for all practical purposes, the people who don't want you now are not your prospects now.
1. Google
People searching for what you do are searching because the demand is present.
2. Social Media with a Question Mark.
When's the last time you did a Twitter search or a Facebook or Quora search for a question who's solution is your product or service? Do it.
3. Craigslist.
No matter what you do. There's someone looking for an employee to do what you do. Now, all you have to do is convince them that you're the right company for the job and that outsourcing is smarter than hiring (unless you want to be hired)
So, now, how do you email every single person at a rate of 1000 per day?
I don't care if you're a street sweeper guy or a gas station attendant. You sell.
You may not sell products or services directly. But if you've got a guy who pays you, like your boss, you gotta persuade him to take what you've got so that he will give you what you want. That's called a sale.
If you're a CEO, marketing director, writer, content producer, etc, then, you're a pro salesman.
And the #1 Most Powerful Sales Producing Emotion Is...
As such, whether you know it or not, you must tug on one primary emotion in order to produce the will to make the deal with you. And most of you choose desire.
Most people try to make their target customer feel desire to consumate a purchase. Well, desire is the second most powerful emotion in producing a sale. If you use the #1 Most Powerful Emotion in Generating Sales and Conversions, you'll have an immediate 800% jump in CTR and Sales.
You'll write your blogs differently. You'll conduct customer service calls differently. You'll even build your marketing strategy from a totally different perspective. This is it:
via social media agency: Have you ever worked at an ad agency? It's like working for a law firm, accounting firm, and Japanese pop art studio at the same time. The are anal and neurotic about data, testing, metrics, and somehow, coming up with a vision that stands out. Even if that vision doesn't do anything but stand out, meaning that it generates no sales, they test it to see what they can learn about audience reaction and see if they can somehow take the components that drive sales and genetically fuse them to the components that get people talking (even jeering) about an ad campaign.
This means that if you're the marketing guy at your company (which means you're probably the CEO, founder, receptionist, sales manager, etc), you're probably using social media very differently than the way an ad agency uses Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, Digg, etc.
Sad for you, this means that your competitor, who's using an ad agency, is driving far more sales than you are.
So that leaves us with the all important question, what can you do differently or take away from the smartest people in the marketing world for your business? Can you duplicate what Ad Agencies are doing for their clients (read: your competitors) and do it in house?
Why Yes.
What Social Media Ad Agencies Are Doing (That You're Not)
1. They Back Trace Their Target Market Use Behavior
You use social media to market your company the way that you use social media. This is bad. Remember, when you use social media, when you tweet, post to facebook, post to pinterest (if you do that at all) you're doing it when you do it. This is like going fishing when you're hungry.
Ad agencies go fishing when the fish are hungry.
Ad agencies did the research. They figured out that if your target is a 35 year old woman with an office job and 2 kids, she:
A. uses twitter at 8:45 AM her local time til 9:am. That's 15 minutes people.
B. logs on to Facebook at exactly 5 PM her local time for 22 minutes while waiting for parking lot traffic to clear.
C. uses Facebook for 40 minutes after 10 pm on Saturday and 9 pm on Sunday.
Social Media Ad Agencies also know that:
A. tweets remain visible for about 50 minutes after posting
B. facebook posts remain visible for 3 hours after posting but ONLY get exposed to 18% of your LIKErs.
What I'm saying is that you're Tweeting when nobody is there.
You're NOT Facebooking when everybody is there.
2. Social Media Agencies Create Perceived Ubiquity.
This is more important than #1. Let's discuss this in the next post. And, it will be a private subscriber only post. You can join here: http://sparkah.com/private
If it was just as easy as "if you build it, they will come." It would be a simple life. But it's not really like that for most of the disruptive products, apps, services, or companies in startup mode now. It used to be that if you had a restaurant with good food, they would come. But now, especially in trendy parts of town, nobody wants be seen as a restaurant where there's not a scene.
You app might need two or three different user types to fly on it own, like a dating app. Your product might need thousands of merchants to use it for millions of consumers to use the other side, like the first credit card machine. Or maybe you need just one guy to use your product where nobody wants to be the first person to use it, like a fax.
This is traditionally called the chicken or the egg problem in marketing. In business schools they like to call it the multisided platform or two sided network adoption problem.
By the way, there is an answer to the chicken or the egg problem in real life. In genetics, the problem is easily solvable. To help solve this problem, we must first ask a better question. The question, essentially is, "how did the first chicken come to be."
In biology, If you have that same genetic level change in a single cell environment, a zygote, it's called mutation. And if that mutated organism can reproduce, bingo. You've got a chicken. If you have a genetic level change in a multicellular environment, like a living organism, it's called carcinoma. Cancer.
So the first chicken came about as the first chicken egg at the zygote stage (if you believe in evolution). =p
This is really more of a note-to-self than anything else.
I find that if I'm dreading that problem client's email and even after getting it, if i sit on it till the last moment, it just keeps consuming brain computational cycle time.
BUT, if I take a deep breath and read the memo or email, even if I plan to do nothing about it, especially if I do nothing about it, then I'll immediately know the scope of the problem and my imagination will stop running away with me. Another major benefit to diving into the bad news immediately is that it gives me a ton of time to reflect and wait for support from people I've delegated to.
The Problem Can Solve Itself If You...
Often, if I wait till the last moment, to read bad news, I realise immediately after reading it, that it could have been solved with one google search 12 hours ago. Now, out of time, I have to deal with it in full graphic detail.
Best of all, hearing out the issue asap will give you the guidelines to know what NOT to do to make the problem worse. Ultimately, just letting my subconscious have maximum time to refect on the problem can actually allow the problem to solve itself.
But when you can get 5 million people to join up and register, you know that cold calls work. In fact, any sales person, even the salesmen at Apple Computer know that cold calls work.
If you're thinking that Apple doesn't do any cold calls. You're totally wrong mon frere. They call on government agencies and school districts out of the blue to sell integrated systems and server products.
Reaching out to people who never opted-out works.
But in the world of social media including Twitter and Facebook, how do you engage in cold-calls? how to reach out to people who are likely to be in your marketing demographic sweetspot without being flagged and taken down for spaucage?
As a brilliant and under leveraged example, behold the UNIVERSE. He answers questions that we never directed at him. And people love how he intersepts them. Over 16,000 people prove that Twitter parody accounts work for marketing. Now, if only the universe was an iphone game or a plush animal doll-pillow or even a company mascot.
When's the last time your blog actually created a sale?
No, not a phone call. Not a contact request form completion. An actual sale.
WAIT. That question assumes you already have a blog. What if you don't even have a company blog. Sure. Your website might explain what you do. Your website might explain your company's value to the market. Your site might even explain the pros and cons of your products and services vs a competitor's. So why do you need a blog?
Well, what your site can't do (and really shouldn't) is elaborate on all the possible applications for your product. At this point, you might be wondering, "what other applications are there?! It's just a ___BLANK___."
Don't Ask Questions You Don't Want to Know the Answer to.
People, people, remember you're in the public.
If you're going to ask a dumb question, ask it in private. Do your reaction testing in private then take it out to a larger audience. In this case, Samsung Electronics violated the first rule of public opinion. "Don't ask a question you don't already know the answer to."
By asking "what device would you take to a deserted island," Samsung got a global response that made their PR case look really, really bad. And THIS from people who are Samsung Fans. Hint: the answer included the iPhone 5.
When David Cartier reached out to us, we thought he was just another young photographer. He sounded professional, he sounded artsy, he even sounded like he might have had some vision.
"I'd love for my work to be exposed to more couples soon to be married," he continued.
Then, we looked at his website. Sure, it takes anybody years to make a name for themselves. In this age of social media and blogging, ironically, it takes even longer. That's because while all the tools for being exposed are available, even more pros are fighting for that same attention.
But what we saw on David's website put him in a league of his own. Maybe not his own. Maybe one that includes black and white portrait photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson. Before you discount this comparison too quickly. Take a peek at David Cartier's online portfolio. You might also notice that he has a way of disappearning, both from his subjects and from his viewers, leaving nothing between you and the people in the photos.
Creating this kind of visual intimacy isn't easy. And it sure shouldn't be confined to just Melbourne Sydney, and Brisbane.
There are forces that make the slightest attempts go huge and the biggest attempts fade into obscurity if your timing is unfortunate.
Since this is the day after 9/11, it reminds me of a company that manufactured parachutes. They tried every form of marketing and sensational press release media blitzing. Ironically, after the tragedy of that day, where several of my personal friends were hurt, their sales skyrocketed.
On the other end of the spectrum, there were 3 clients we were working with to launch their revolutionary new travel and hotel bidding websites. They had invested millions of their personal money and lost everything. All the marketing they did went to nothing. Quick.
On a lighter note, we all know that Bagel shop on the corner. Their sales went off the carts about the same time when trans-fats were declared evil.
There's a lot of confusion about SEO Copywriting for generating high CTR for your blogs and website pages. So let's clear it all up now.
This blog will serve as a guide line for our internal Sparkah.com writers and anyone else who wants maximum visibility in Google or Bing (not that Bing matters much). The tricky part for professional writers and pros with journalism degrees is that writing for Google is different than writing for a periodical like the WSJ or NYTimes.
The primary difference is that magazines and journals need clever seductive titles. This generally means that you leave out, OMIT, key details and facts in the title so that you can expound on them in the body of your article. In Google, that will kill you. Google depends on you putting key details in the title because that's exactly what Google users search for.
Journalists Suck At Google
And there are many other criteria so let's break up this post into three categories:
1. Stylistic Differences Between Google SEO Copywriting and Journalism
2. Crafting the Title or Headline
3. Composing the Body of Your Blog or Article.
Key Stylistic Concepts You Must Adhere To For Google SEO Copywriting
So, #1, as we've already mentioned, you've got to put names and proper nouns in your title. Be as witty and clever as you can but not at the expense of building in keywords. Yes, you're still telling a story. But Google can't read stories. The only thing Google can do is count words. So while you're writing for people, think and remember that you're also writing for a machine. You're writing for Google. make the keywords that people will search for easy for Google to find.
Crafting the Title or Headline
Do any search in Google. Go Ahead. Search for "Green Catchup" if you want. You'll notice that 9 out of 10 headlines that Google spits back at you only has about 7 or 8 words. So you're looking at a total of a 45 character count for your title. Match that.
Then, when you write your actual story, keep asking yourself, what words in my story are directly related to the story AND are words that people will Google. People Google names. People Google:
1. People
2. Product Names
3. Company Names
4. Names of Cities and Towns
5. People Google using qualifiers:
Instead of just googling: "Buildings," they Google: "Green Buildings," "Big Buildings," "Brick Buildings."
Craft your title with as many proper nouns as you can fit WHILE still making your Google user curious enough to want to click your link.
Here's a series of examples for a dating blog:
BAD for Google / GOOD for People:
"7 Things Boys Do That Girls Hate" -- REASON: Nobody Googles words like: "things," "boys," "girls," expecting to find your article. Syntax relevance is super low here. And nobody Googles the number "7."
GOOD for Google / BAD for People:
"Dating Tips Dating Etiquette Common Cultural Dating Misunderstandings." -- REASON: Anybody who's looking for dating advice will Google these terms. But even if you're blog post DOES come up #1 in Google for a search of any of the terms in the title, the title sound like it was ripped straight out of a Nun's text book. Nobody will click you.
GOOD for Google / GOOD for People:
"7 Dating Tips & Etiquette Train Wrecks Across Cultures" -- REASON: We're using all the keywords we can to match possible search queries but we're also using descriptive imagery conjuring words like "train wrecks." If you want your blog post to also rank well in Google for "Common Cultural Dating Misunderstandings," then you'll just have to write another blog post because we're out of space in the title. Besides, blog pages are cheap.
You've got to drop names in every blog post that are related to the topic you're covering. For example, if your blog post includes the words:
Robert Dinero
Risotto
Nolita
Google will think that your blog post is about Dinero's new restaurant in NYC. If you want Google to realize that your blog post is about Dinero's best Movies, and not about food or restaurant industry news, skew the topic graph back to movies by dropping other movie industry related names like
Al Pacino
Marlon Brando
Humphry Bogart
Even if you don't discuss the other 3 actors, drop their names. Remember, Google is a computer. It tries to figure out what your blog post is about (in this case, movies, NOT restaurants) so give it other proper nouns so that Google can start to build a picture in it's head about the nature and character of your post.
#2 Link Blocking
Most of you don't know this. Let's say you have 5 links in your blog. If you're quoting someone else's blog or post, that deserves an attribution link. So that's 1 of the 5 already. And one of those links are to your own website. So you have one link that you want google to notice and 4 others that are there to offer the readers value or keep you out of an FCC or FTC fine or penalty.
Well, Google will look at your page and give it a score. Let's say Google gave you 100 points. You linked to 5 other urls so each of those urls gets an average of 20 points. Technically, if the link is high up in your post, it will get positively weighted and get 30 points while a link at the end gets only 10 points. But let's not get too technical here.
The main point is that you are only giving your own website 20 out of a potential 100 points. You're giving 4 other urls 80 points. Dumb.
So, just put a rel=NOFOLLOW tag in the other 4 links so that links to YOUR site get 100% of the points Google passes on internally.
There's More. Watch the video for the rest:
(PS. There are 73 Other Guidelines for Google SEO Writing That Our Sparkah.com PR Writers Must Follow. To Find Out What They Are, Click: SECRETS)
There's a Korean Top Model that you've all seen without knowing you've seen her. You'll probably not even recognize her name: Choi Lee Yoon. But she's been in all the top movies and commercials and even music videos that come out of Korea. The reason you don't know who she is is because she's a body model.
She does body double work for the biggest stars in Korea.
She is reknown for her flawless skin and glowing complexion. She makes the most beautiful women in Korea as beautiful as you (mistakenly) imagine them to be. Her secret? She told an interviewer on a TV show called Hwah Sung Een Virus that she swears by Pevonia Botanica.
Instantly, the world of Korean Bloggers and Naver lit up with searches for this brand nobody had ever heard of. And then the anger came out. You can't get Pevonia Botanica in Korea. Even the stars have a hard time getting their hands on it.
We at Sparkah were rushed two different bottles from SpaSkin.com ... Our own (beautiful) Korean PR Team women tried it and loved it too. One said she was most impressed with Pevonia Botanica's authenticity. She wondered why the bottle looked so anti-glamorous for the price.
Then, having done the research, she discovered that the bottle itself was also made from natural corn fiber instead of the industrial plastics that contain the bad estrogen that leads to painful women's health issues. So thanks to Spaskin.com not all gorgeous Korean women are angry (atleast until their bottles run dry).
When I was a kid, I saw my first convenience store that was bolted to a gas station. I wondered who the idiot in charge was. Because while I was only 12 or 13, it took him 12 or 13 years to make this happen. Later when I was in my 20's, I saw the first in-supermarket bank. Again, I wondered why it took some idiot my whole life to come up with this idea.
Partnerships work. Alliances work.
Nations knew this as far back as the Medic Wars when the Hellenic League: Athens, Lacedemonia, and Macedon teamed up in 500 BC. Actually, I think the Cannanites teamed up with the Phoencians to fight Moses or Joshua in 2,000 BC.
But powerful people have been doing this from the beginning of time. That's how they got powerful.
The other day, I asked a competitor if they'd want to team up with me. They replied back acridly, "don't you realize we're competitors?" I replied, "that's exactly why I reached out to you."
When big companies and successful CEOs are growing their organization and delivering more and more value to the shareholders and employees of their organization, small companies just keep struggling to pay the bills because they can't get over their egos and collaborate. After all, how many clients are you going to lose by trading blog posts with a competitor? How many customers do you think will leave you because of your marketing alliance? Frankly, it's tough to change user behavior. It takes a lot more than a single blog post from your blog (that nobody reads).
But what you have to gain is limitless when you think of all the traffic you'll get from newly landing on Page One of Google. I mean, who better to give you 100% relevant links than somebody who's actually in your industry?
