1.Rosenbaum

Question about video placement and click through rates – getting stuff noticed etc.

Call to action buttons. Put the video in a prominent position. Build in a way to gather testimonials. RSS Feed to news section. More choices for interaction

New Media 2.0 blogs and whatnot for the banking industry.

Well it’s regulated and staid. Dull and stuffy. MSN money – use tools/widgets and such.

Fairmont Federal

Show a younger demographic a bit more openess and visibility – especially a credit union. Alignment.

Public Sector Blogging.

People are going to complain no matter what. Political transparency people. These problems don’t go away but it’s also an avenue to plant more positive stuff and develop a more positive conversation. Rather than anonymous detractors tackle them head on. A valid point for all businesses and folks wanting to blog. Pull your head out of the sand. Don’t be an ostrich.

Goodwill advocacy ambassadors. Remember to be proactive. It doesn’t have to be a singular effort, the more the merrier.

Now if there’s one thing I’m taking from today, or has become apparent in this really good little end session, and it’s that the morning’s initial negative comments / general ambivalence to blogs and blogging seems to have been turned around. Not only do more people seem more accepting but the room seems to get it more than they did.

Perhaps I’m wrong and hopefully you’ll set me right.

So an exceptional job, gentlemen. It’s been an absolute pleasure from my point of view.

All your comments are gratefully received.

Check the videos.

We’re wanting raving loyal customers. Or loyal raving customers.

Would you refer us to someone else?

Net Promoter

Great little example of advocacy of Zappos.com from Jenny in the audience in her explanation of her Zappos usage – “Any shoe you would ever need.”

If you check their site you have have testimonials front and center. Let others toot your horn.

Good memory moment from Justin about a great thing Zappos did for a customer a while back. I’d forgotten about that one, but then again, I’ve forgotten what I had for lunch.

Seriously, read Seth Godin. If you don’t have a sublime realization of zen-like wowser-ness then I’m a numpty.

Get your free copy of Groundswell. (Although it’s a free for blog review copy.)

Right, where are we.

The whole general idea here is to not act like you give a crap but to actually give a crap and align in that kind of engagement with you and your customers. Yes, it’s something you have to do, but it’s something you honestly can’t fake. Or can’t fake honestly.

You can inspire them with going the extra yard like with the Zappos example above.

Linkedin

If you do happen to be an existing member of Linkedin or sign up for the service after the conference, feel free to mentioning it in the comments if you’d like to connect.

Beware the John McCain spam troll strategy.

Whatever the channel, you need to engage and communicate with your customers and develop a deep relationship. It’s fairly simple. Blogs are fabulous in the current Web landscape that is of the read/write variety, but if you feel more comfortable utilizing video or audio (podcasting) then go right ahead.

From a personal point of view I’ve always been a more avid writer than speaker. And I’ve always had a face for radio. Blogs are an easy choice from my pov . I’d also argue that because of additional benefits such as the search engine reach they’re more beneficial as a more rounded marketing strategy. Let a blog be your Web presence’s engine room.

Is it possible to liveblog a Q&A while scoffing a marshmallow cookie?

Probably not.

Video:

Does only two percent of this fine nation ski? I’ve never really thought about it to be honest.

Anyway, a niche market is a niche market. Brad is talking about wanting to keep Snowshoe’s customer’s engaged via direct marketing. Where are the 5 million new skiers coming from – no idea but Snowshoe wants to be in the right place to help them out.

Question Time:

How’s your marketing become two way rather than a megaphone one-way blast:

Travel. Coattails and slipstreaming. Float around see what people are saying and monitor forums and blogs and cream them off.

Key new marketing influencers

Really powerful voices – Beware being hijacked by trolls…..the John McCain strategem. Tap into the voice of the customer. FInding key influencers. Take them out skiing. Show them what SNowshoe does and let them enjoy your service

Do you key people into email adveritisng effectiveness

Easy email tool. 80,000 on email list subject line versioning – split messages between two groups. Email A/B split testing.

Which Web 2.0 tools do you use.

MySpace – not sure on effectiveness. Paid search is the best tool they’ve found so far. Not strictly speaking Web 2.0, but nice bone thrown to us at Direct Online Marketing. Now he’s advocating buying competitor’s brand names as keywords. It’s all shades of grey.

Talk about search phrases Snowshoe uses

Branded and non-branded. So, those terms with Snowshoe in them and those that don’t include those terms. So terms with Snowshoe as a modifier.

Anything helped with bad ski seasons.

Not a lot can be done with bad snowfalls

Seasonality?

7% of revenue during summer. 40 % of ad revenue spent during summer. Snowshoe = skiing during the winter but they have diversified to include other sports elements and lesuire activitities during the off-peak season. Marketing is busier off-peak preparing for the ski season.

Snowshoe got together to devise their grand brand plan. Devlopment of their core brand strategy. They came up with a brand book so they were all on the same page – as it were. ONLY FOR EMPLOYEES. It’s a secret.

7/11 and Snowshoe as a partnership….no. Subaru and Snowshoe – yes. Right partnerships and new products.

Measurement: how do you measure the right mix of response rates and their correct combination.
Unique phone numbers for each. Web visits – shopper to buyer ratio. Gone from a 56 to 16 page brochure. Wondering if it’s still viable.

How do you maintain the site.
Dangerous to market by committee. It’s a one person shop with 10 urls. Brad is that one person. Consistent voice on the Web site.

What kind of market research?
Voice of customer – intercept surveys when somebody comes out of a restauarant on holiday gets surveyed then gets sent a follow up email with discounts offer. Net promoter – raving fans vs non-fans – 60% score.

Focus group of people who used to come every year but why they had stopped. Found they had a higher propensity of coming at a later date. 15 %

Traditional media doesn’t work. They only use traditional channels to please employees. Targeted mail and direct research.

Nutshell moment from Brad:

Understand paid search. Have everybody in line on who the company is and what they want to achieve.

It’s easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Developing relationships in marketing in an eHarmony stylee – the 29 degrees of ultimate connections. Is eHarmony that one with all those smug self-satisfied types wittering inane anecdotes about what they did after they met. Whoops….we’re onto something else.

Prioritizing Customers – in no particular order:

revenue – potential
revenue – historic
repeat revenue
profitability
lifetime value
relationship
influence on others
noise.

Let’s concentrate on the influencers. By the way, I might as well plug The New Influencers by Paul Gillin as some follow up reading.

What kind of weird term is pyschographic targeting? Is it one step removed from pyschopathic targeting? Sounds like facebook and Beacon.

Google Books preview of The Tipping Point

Mavens – connectors – salesmen.

Influencing influencers isn’t quite the same as trying to suck up to the cool kids at school. However, it’s key to find those people who personify and embody the exact values and demographic of your target market. If you can excite the people who may be purchasing your products or services then you can or should be able to excite the influencers.

Is it the same as John McCain and his his family bbqs for journalists?

It certainly isn’t the same as the John McCain campaign trying to spam / troll / influence other political blogs by sending out his online minions to comment on related posts and receive points for posting what they’ve posted back on his site.

I’m not having a go at Mr. McCain, just at a really dumb tactic.

Lunch time, my good fellows.

Just a little background info – Justin just so happens to be my boss and I just happen to be his “New Media Specialist”.

So you can rate this liveblog post on a scale of 1 to 10 on the blowing-smoke-up-backside-o-meter…

Anyway here’s the basic gist of the general gist:

• Organizational blogging

• Social networking, wikis, twitter, and other forms of social media

• Search engines, online press releases, and ways to fuse online and traditional forms of marketing

Blogs: Somebody not interested in reading blogs – man it’s like a personal slap in the face…..I shall get to this at some point.

It shouldn’t be a case of reading blogs so much as coming across information written on blogs. I mean, does anybody claim they don’t read forums as an entire mass? Pfft.

How many people write blogs…..stat attack. (will find)

Still amazes me about the low information threshold on RSS feeds and such.

Basic blog rules and ethics. Probably best to throw out a few top five lists on certain points Frightening or perhaps not or maybe I’m in my own little blogging bobble bubble.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

We’re at least fairly cogent on facebook mysapce and social networks.

PRESS RELEASES:
Brad wins for most press releases with 4-8 a day.

Press releases as SEO.

A big happy new media and old media conflab. All media is crap apart from the decent crap. Point out the uses of social media with regards to blended/universal search.

Not as much on this as there should be and that’s my fault.

So, seeming you’ve got your notes, go ahead and ask any questions you’ve got loitering in your frontal lobes.

I’m supposed to know about this stuff!

Honestly, I’m the only one round here who has to listen avidly. Still, if what I’ve read and heard thus far (and it’s all been excellent) is anything to go by then I shan’t be needing any of these:

Eyestickers: How to look awake while taking a nap…

Like a lamb to the proverbial slaughter I’ve been roped in again; not because I have the touch-typing skills a dextrous ninja wordsmith (they’re more like those of a sun-baked walrus if truth be told), but because……well, just because.

UPDATE: Right, we’re finally connected and this is now turning into some kind of retroactive / retrospective liveblog. Just ask any questions about any of the sessions in the comments sections of any of the posts as and when you feel like it.

He’ll be live blogging the conference today to give folks that couldn’t make it – or are waiting to register for Martinsburg – a taste of what we’re discussing.  You won’t get the slides, the free marketing book, a free review of your Web site, the opportunity to network with other Morgantown, WV area marketing professionals, to meet Jeff James or twitter with Skip Lineberg…but it should give you a glimpse of how you can be more effective in your own marketing efforts.

This is good news for everyone except Paul; he hates live blogging (with good reason – it’s hard!).  Maybe he’ll post a picture of himself with a frowny face here to complement the post.  It would complement his “oooh” picture from his live blog of the Southpointe, PA online marketing conference.

The conference is SEM II: Join the Evolution and is being hosted by eBizITPA.

The agenda:

* a review of his speech at SEM I back almost a year ago

* designing for success – we talked about this a little before hand and it should be really interesting for the crowd (great turnout today, btw, with a lot of walk ups in a very snowy Erie)

* social media

* helpful online tools

1st really good point: Web developers are really astute and great at their craft from a technical standpoint (mostly), but often they will benefit from working with seo or marketing folks.  Highly agree – both teams benefit from working together.

Good analogy for putting Web sites together: measure twice, cut once.  I remember my dad beating that into my head when I was younger.  Develop a plan.   Think about seo AND user friendly design, conversion, analytics, promoting, monitoring, managing.

Aah – a nice memory from my LA days – “ask for the order.”  It’s not just when a sales person speaks with a person – it’s important for your Web site to do the same.

Neal’s from Catalyst Connection, a great outfit for businesses that believes in lean and related management processes.  Going through the process for putting together an effective, seo friendly Web site.

Talking right now about businesses using keywords that THEY know.  Need to figure out what people are actually searching for.  Also talking about the different number of searches for singulars vs. plurals.

SEO basics – 2 steps:

1. Indexing pages; ranking is based on the content of the indexed page.
2. Ranking  = relevance; broken into 3 parts:
a. page content (keyword density)
b. organizing codes (meta)
c. link popularity

I usually break #2 into two parts when explaining to seo newbies, but this makes sense too, separating on screen page content out from meta.

Folders and root directories – how do you organize?  Name dropping with Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan, etc. (all named are great industry sources)

Hits on one of my biggest pet peeves – frames.  Arrgh!  Going onto  div / layers instead of tables now.  He’s 100% right, but (don’t tell anyone – I still use tables for quick stuff just b/c it’s so much easier for me – don’t let me personally do any page layouts for your site).

CSS – this is all really good stuff for business execs, owners, small businesses, everyone who’s not doing this for a living.  Things that are more than they need to know from a ‘how do you do it perspective’, but can grasp fairly quickly and will help them be able to dictate how their site should be built.

Navigation – link structure – comparing it to a giant circuit board.

Social media – points out that it’s not just for kids (anymore) or goofy wedding videos.  bookmarking sites, media sharing sites, blogs, and content syndication.  Talks about a polyurethane (sp?) stamping company client of his – put the video of how it works onto youtube.  Great results.  I love examples from manufacturing companies!

On digg stuff now – touches on, but doesn’t really go into being wary of the strong backlash you should prepare for if you post the wrong type of article / press release / news story.  Some good strategy points, including the importance of participation, being real, and offering value.

Lists some helpful tools like keyword discovery and other keyword suggestion tools.  My favorite question (the one I’d ask) from the audience: “Is it free?”

Brought up another one that he said someone will kill him if they knew he brought it up.  I like Neal and don’t want to see him dead, so I’m not putting it in here.

Talking about analytics – going into Google Analytics right now.  I’m not linking to them – figure they have enough juice as is and might be able to survive without one from this blog post – maybe!

Another good one – Domain Tools.  I’m not as big a fan of alexa, but having that information along with the other info it provides doesn’t hurt.  Having a private conversation with Cathy von Birgelen about alexa right now.   Seems like a better tool for site owners to point to to try and sell ad space.

Onto site maps now – not the traditional one that you click on when you see sites, but xml ones.  VERY important.  robots.txt, too.  Neal’s saying not to list disallows anymore b/c they don’t work; instead, under disallow, use <sitemap_[url].txt>  Everything’s standardized among the major search engines.

Going into real world examples right now.  Ahh, now I know how to spell urethane.  Holy cow – I just looked up and it looks like I got it right.  He’s being very nice and trying not to offend me on behalf of tpaid search folks everywhere talking about cost reduction.  As I told him ahead of time, I’m always in for cost savings!  Be smart with budgeting, bidding, testing, keywords used and on and on.  I don’t want anyone to spend more than they have to to get great returns!

He brings up a great story about a company getting bought out.  Since their site seo ranked higher than the parent company they decided to ditch the old site.  Reminds me of one of our clients.  They do business all over the world and do stuff in Australia quite a bit.  There are some jobs that are too small for them to do the travel, so they turn it over to partners.  The CEO was grinning ear to ear in talking about how mad the other company gets that a US company gets the lead and not the company in the Aussie’s (remember, pronounce with a ‘z’, not an ’s’) on backyard.

Good speech all around, Neal.

Lindsay works in online community building, managing the corporate blog for Spreadshirt and the website. Read Lindsay’s full speaker bio.
Business blogging, whilst not always free is remarkably cheap. Big shout out to Wordpress being the best blogging platform know to man, woman or child.

Here we go with what blogs are and why you should have one. Blog is a type of Web site. It’s chronologically backwards content – the newest is generally first. If we’re taling categories in a blog on this particular blog you’re reading the categories are down the left hand side. You place posts within those categories.

Comments vs no comments. You can have either. It’s a great feedback channel but can also be a spam headache.

RSS feeds – your blog can be read in a feed reader such as Google Reader . (Here’s a list of other RSS readers.) You can read many blogs at one time. \Good for skimming. To subscribe to the Online Marketing: Innovations that Work blog’s feed just click on this RSS button in the left sidebar. Aggregate your chosen content and let it update and you see the updated sites when you login to your reader.

Q. IS there a time you wouldn’t want to use an RSS feed as you’d rather drive people directly to your site.

Vanity searching for Lindsay Patross. Copy the RSS link to your RSS reader and it will update if you’ve been mentioned. Ties into what Justin Seibert was saying about reputation management earlier. Follow the conversation whether it’s good or bad. You need to know what is being said about you online.

Blogs are a great method of interactive engagement. Word of mouth recommendations.

Why should business blog?

Share info with customers; get feedback from customers; industry information; interesting and fun facts; learn to use your own products differently; establish a brand for yourself or your company. Start a global microbrand!

Passive content. Good for SEO. Tell a story. Humanize! Check the Spreadshirt blog.

LIST OF DIFFERENT BUSINESS BLOG EXAMPLES.

Discretion can be the better part of valor in relation to what you put on your blog. Negative commenting. Be honest and respond to criticism.

SET UP A BLOG:

Here’s a blog software list.

Don’t forget google’s blogger which is free and easy to start with.

Don’t regurgitate. Add to the conversation, don’t repeat it.

lorelle.wordpress.com

Q. How do you get people to link to your blog?

A.Write good content.

Q. CEO of Whole Foods making remarks to drive competition’s price down.

A.Laws of business etiquette should apply to the Web. Better to be honest and transparent

Q.Should a blog be part of a site or separate?

A.It can be closely branded to your site or talk about completely different stuff.

Q.How long would it take for marketing staff to maintain a corporate blog?

A.It depends on the type of content you’re putting up If you just want to be informational put simple stuff up as and when.

Steve is a Strategic Business Consultant for WebTrends Inc. Check out his full speaker bio.

Presentation Synopsis:

Not only is Marketing Labs 2 capable of showing you where your visitors are coming from and how long they’re stopping, but it can also measure how engaged a user is on any given page of a site.

There’s no need to panic as Sarah manages to switch off the laptop.

The good old days of spending $500-$600 dollars to drive one person to your Website. Forget about throwing as many emails as is humanly possible to see what sticks.

80% of execs believe their company loses sales due to a failure to engage customers. What drives customers to buy and how etc.

What’s needed for succes?

360 degree view of consumers.

Data-driven decision making

Easy access across the organization

Automated, self-optimizing systems

I honestly think it’s best if you check your presentation notes and check out Marketing Lab 2 itself.

Coke & Mentos video

15-20% of install base is SME.

Q. Ajax and page views – can you track Web 2.o sites?

In a word, yes. It’s got a bit technical on the tracking front I’m afraid and I can’t hear what’s being asked or answered. Which is always slightly problematic.