SEO Consultant Ireland

HubSpot is definitely a company everyone in the online marketing world should watch closely! I wrote about them before, and still use their Grader products.

I got a preview of the new book by: Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, both co-founders of HubSpot: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media). A great read really. Since the in my ‘past life’ I was into the recruitment and jobs, it was really interesting to read the part about the Recruitment of the Marketing Team. Here is a short snippet:

What does this change mean for your marketing staff? Simply put, your hiring
criteria need to change and your way of measuring performance needs to change
along with it. The following is a suggested framework called DARC for hiring and
developing inbound marketing savvy employees.

• D = Hire Digital Citizens
• A = Hire for Analytical chops
• R = Hire for Web Reach
• C = Hire Content Creators

They also wrote a long list of the handy questions for the recruiters hiring Inbound marketing staff. The list is really, really good:

• What RSS reader do you use? Can you show it to me?
• What blogs do you read?
• Do you rank first for your name in Google?
• Do you use Delicious? Can you show it to me?
• Do you have a blog? Can you show it to me?
• Do you use Facebook or LinkedIn? When was the last time you updated
  your profile?
• Do you use Twitter? Can you show me?
• Do you have a channel on YouTube? Can you show it to me?

Interview questions about the Reach:

• How many subscribers to your blog? Do you talk about our industry on
  your blog or about personal stuff?
• How many Facebook followers do you have? Do you talk about our
  industry at all on your Facebook account?
• How many LinkedIn followers do you have?
• How many Twitter followers?

The writing style is extremely light. A complete novice to the digital marketing should have no problems following the book. There are tons of good tips, pointing a reader on how to organise the Inbound Marketing team in the eBook itself. Well worth reading!!!!

Blogging for Business article described where and how blogging falls into your company organisation structure. The Chief Blogger was the role. A year later blogs still have the tremendous importance in the online marketing but the social networks are here, and are here to stay. The online communication technologies are changing in the accelerated pace, so we know now that the next year is again most likely to bring jet another way we will communicate online. Hence the online marketing title for the ‘Public Online Representative’ of your company should be:

Senior Manager of Emerging Media Marketing

Senior – Why Senior? Think about it, it is that one position, that one role, that will represent your whole company.

Emerging – Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking,… we cannot be sure what will even the next few months bring in the online marketing arena. The person needs to be forward thinking and listening to what is happening online worldwide and in their own market.

Marketing – Remember that your blogger is not your IT geek. IF you sell IT geeky stuff – you can get your IT geek who maintains your web site. If you sell anything else, you need to find a person who will appeal to your target market.

Here are a few tips to get you started on your selection program in finding your future Senior Manager of Emerging Media Marketing:

Requirements:
LinkedIN profile – 100% completed, with +500 connections, +10 recommendations, +5 Best Answers…
Twitter – with +1000 followers
Facebook – again decent account like the above
Active Blogging experience for +12 months. Multiple blogs are the advantage. Blog comment posting and management experience.
Understanding of the acronyms: RSS, SEM, SEO, PPC, CPM, CPC, LOL, IMHO, WTF, API, B2C, B2B, CTR, IM, PV, RON, WWW, TTYL, LMAO, ROTFLMAO, WYSIWYG and, most importantly, RTFM
Copywriting skills

Nice to have skills:
Search Engine Optimisation – samples of high rankings in Google for search phrases with large search volumes (cars, phones, insurance,…)
Google AdWords and Google AdSense experience
Link-baiting skills – creativity!

For a one man band situations the following will come handy:
Basic HTML skills
Basic PhotoShop skills

Did I miss anything in defining my Senior Manager of Emerging Media Marketing job specification?

How to plan, start and organise your Social Media Marketing?

To market yourself you can use a number of online tools. Here are just the main ones:

1. Your web site
2. Your blog
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIN
5. Facebook

The list is endless. What will work for you might not be the best for everyone else. You need to understand where your target market ‘hangs out’, and use those sites.

Your Web site

Using one of those tools by itself is good. The true success in social media marketing is when you start combining them. Years ago, having a web site was enough. Then the search engines came and it was important that your web site is search engine optimised. Otherwise no one has seen it! Today, the number of optimised sites is so huge, and the size of the data published online that SEO itself is not enough anymore.

What become the powerful tool is the subscriptions to ezines and newsletters. You captured the web site visitor and he agreed to get an email whenever you decided to send one. It’s all great but we all started getting far too much mail we really wanted. As a publisher of a web site you always wanted to ‘talk’ to your visitors. Here comes ‘The Blog’…

Your Blog

Blogs are a bit magical from a number of aspects:
1. Interaction with the visitors via the blog comments is unique. The web site visitors can have their say on your web site! Unique.
2. RSS feed subscription enables everyone to subscribe to your updates and read them where and when they like, in a very manageable format.
3. From the search engine optimization perspective blogs are almost always performing better than your own web site. In majority of the cases a blog will attract a multiplication of the total number your own web site can attract.

Twitter

So what do you do with all your blog visitors now? You get them subscribed to your feed or at least on Twitter. The best exit path from your blog after the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Subscribe’ (or whatever is a conversion on your site) is ‘Follow me on Twitter’.

LinkedIN

Let your visitors connect to you via LinkedIN. There you capture their name, phone, email and actually their whole professional life is logged there. It is quite easy to export your LinkedIN Contacts, and here is your perfect marketing list.

Facebook

Similar to Twitter as it is another permission based (marketing) message broadcasting channel. Facebook is more ‘feature rich’ compared to Twitter. Get your web and blog visitors to Connect to your on Facebook.

So why getting your web site visitors to the social networking sites to connect to you? Simply to capture their details, and enable them to start and engage in the conversation with you. You then use the social networks to advertise your new products, special offers, services… and back they come to your web site and your blog. The big red ‘Buy now’ button is jet again in front of them. And again, and again…

Any of the online marketing tools alone cannot achieve anything similar by itself. Your offering will determine what will you use, but you have to use either a web site or a blog, and you have to use at least one social network. The choice what to use will not be based on what you like, but based on what your target market is using .

Last week I was invited and have attended IIA Congress 2009 and the IIA & Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary Awards 2009 on 21-22 May. It really was nice, and I would like to compliment the organisers and thank again for the invitation.

Colm Long from facebook had an interesting presentation, and I guess the most impressive fact and slide was the ‘stickability’ of facebook. Curently they are at 200 million users who are active on the site (have logged on in last 30 days).

Just a clarification that is this many users: 200000000
(for the record…)

The Welcome Pack of the IIA Congress 2009 was also nice. Inside was also a sponsored USB Memory Stick by Elucidate. When I plugged it in I was a bit disappointed that the capacity was only 512 Mb. Lately when I think of the storage I think in gigabytes and terabytes. Then again it was a really pleasant surprise that the memory chip is obviously quite fast since my Microsoft Windows Vista accepted it as a storage for the ReadyBoost – extension of your RAM on the external disc. The Elucidate Flash Drive will obviously be a very good friend of my Notebook that has ‘only’ 2 GB of RAM, so additional 512MB is more than welcome!