While attending Ad Tech in New York recently, I found myself cringing a number of times when some very smart email marketing professionals kept drawing a line between email and social. I shudder because I think it should be clear that anytime two or more humans interact, it’s social, regardless of the channel or channels they employ.
Every time we make this delineation of email and social we hurt ourselves and do a disservice to our clients and our brands.
If you are using the right email marketing service provider then ESP also stands for Extra Social Perception.
Of course we are all trying to “get our heads around social.” Everyone single person using social media is trying to get their heads around it. The very nature of it being a social channel means that it’s fluid and changing constantly. While the technology behind social media is cool, it’s the way people employ…
A survey of the most popular SEO tools
I found this infographic really interesting since it shows the range of tools available for SEO. It also shows how other people approach managing SEO and the kind of reasons they choose to use software to help.
I think software that helps review and improves SEO is great, as long as it is not trying to help cut corners, such as automated link building!
I have used a majority of the software mentioned in the infographic below and we have paid subscriptions for Majestic SEO (Backlink analysis) and Screaming Frog (Managing internal links).
Our reviews of SEO services:
Over the last eighteen months we've introduced the main types of SEO tools for marketers - here are the options:
Rank checking
Google Webmaster Tools
Keyword research and specifying target keyphrases to monitor
Monitoring competitor activity
Backlink analysis
Link-checking tools
Here's the infographic from Search Engine Journal:
…
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Yahoo mobile modes research
I found this research interesting since it set out to understand how users interact with devices on their mobile. We all know from our personal use of mobiles that, if we have a smartphone, we’ll prefer apps for some tasks and browsers for others. This research gives a nice clear statement on what these mobile tasks are:
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How NOT to use social media to communicate
It's confession time. At some stage or other I have probably committed most of these crimes while posting to social media. Some I still do on a nearly daily basis, although am trying to unlearn them. How do you score?
1. Using social media as a one-way broadcast communication medium. Not listening, engaging or responding.
2. Endlessly discussing what you had for breakfast and other minutiae. It gives social media a bad name.
3. Not having a profile pic. Signals newbie, spammer or Grandad.
4. Not thinking twice before you post/tweet. It's there forever. Ditto posting when drunk.
5. Jumping into conversations where you're unknown rather than listening first. Especially if your first contribution is to recommend your own product.
6. Blatant selling.
7. Emoticons. How old are you?
8. Posting a link with no explanatory text. Do you really want people to click on it or are you a spammer?
9.…
Today I'm speaking at the Fusion Marketing Experience in Belgium today and looking forward to talks by Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok), Joost de Valk (@yoast) and Jeff Molander (@JeffreyMolander). I'll be liveblogging, first up is @GerryMcGovern...
Gerry McGovern on Top Tasks and the Long Neck
I enjoyed talking with Gerry last night, listening to the methods he uses on studies for companies with huge sites like the BBC, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft.
He starts with a theme for today - don’t trust the design of your sites, your customer experiences, to “gut instinct or suits around a table with lattes”.
The essence of the method is to identify around 100 main tasks on a site from researching site visitor behaviour by analysing search, analytics and interviews. Usually there’s around 100 and a single page survey is used to get a rating of these.
Amazingly, just 4-6 top tasks get 25%…
Whilst it's not the best designed infographic, it contains some really interesting stats. The "offline conversations" stat is intriguing, we've not all changed so much then!
I'm not sure how you separate 'WOM" from 'social media though', it's all people sharing information?
…
4 Things to consider when writing page titles
In our recent post giving 21 simple SEO ideas we said how important titles are. Here we go into a bit more depth to show how non SEO specialists writing web copy can improve SEO through refining their page titles within the SERPs.
Titles are undoubtedly a primary signal for each page that search engines use to determine the focus of a pages content. There is no real black vs white hat techniques when it comes to optimising page titles, but there is a suite of best practices you should follow to ensure you are making the most of this element of a page.
Page titles often become the problem of "SEO teams" or agencies which tend to be technically led than creatively.
However, there is an argument that some of the best people to work on page titles (and meta descriptions) should be those that were highly…
A process for content mapping and workflow
I've posted a few weeks ago on marketing automation and also this week on lead nurturing, the concept is reliant on having great content at each and every stage, so I thought a post might offer some further insight. It's also easier than you think, a relatively simple and practical process that can be tested and improved upon over time.
What exactly is content mapping?
Content mapping is (amongst other things) a process for lead nurturing by which a team prepares and organises relevant and valuable content. Once done, this content can be distributed to prospects depending on the type of lead (persona) and their point in the buying cycle (scenario).
Create and map content that generates buyers
Persona definition - you'll already understand your personas from my last posts - once again Im stressing how effective persona definition is key, otherwise how do you…
Examples of how to integrate social sharing into email designs
You will have noticed how many emails include "share to social" buttons as a limited form of integration. Often they are not so effective as this report on viral and community links in Emails from Chad White at Responsys shows. Oftentimes, the links are in the header or footer and get little traction.
In the report, Chad argues that since folks do like to share, creative can be designed to integrate social sharing and give it more emphasis. Here are some examples to inspire:
First, an example from the report. The social sharing is still fairly incidental, but it has got more prominence than many.
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