About Me 0108: internet marketing

The experts have long agreed: Creating a corporate blog is an important step in giving your company a voice, building brand, and establishing that all-important thought leadership.

Your blog is to be your hub, the place where all the rest of your social media marketing connects. It’s an opportunity to encourage users to connect and form attachments over their affection for your brand and what you represent. All of that is true and awesomesauce. Well, until your corporate blog attacks your business, kicks your customers in the face, and quietly sucks your sales dry. What, you didn’t know that could happen?

The surge in blogging over the past few years has resulted in some problems for business owners who blogged first, asked questions later. Because, for all its strengths as a communication platform, blogging can also help business owners shoot themselves in the foot if they’re not careful. Here are a few ways your blog may accidentally sabotage your business.

You dilute your link profile

If you’re reading this, you’re either someone who understands the power of search engine optimization and Internet marketing, or you just got very, very lost on the Internet (we’re sorry). Assuming it’s the former, you probably understand the importance of keywords and attracting links with a purpose.

You’re very deliberately trying to build links to your site and to your services pages to help them rank better and bring more awareness to your users. So imagine what it does to your link profile when you acquire 10,000 links to your home page for the very-useless term [lisa barone]. Imagine how that might throw off your rankings for the terms you actually wanted that page to rank for. Yeah. Welcome to me getting scolded by nearly every boss I’ve ever had.

One reason people pointed so many lisa barone-laden pieces of anchor text toward previous home pages was because there was no Lisa Barone page on the sites I blogged for. When someone wanted to reference me, they linked to the company that I worked for. Understandable, but counter-productive. Also make sure that you’re not diluting your own link profile by linking to your home page when you should be linking to your personal About page. Before you start a blog, take into account how the links coming into your site may affect it and have a plan for tackling that.

You make your blog your home page

When a new visitor lands on your site, they are there for a purpose. They’re looking for information about who you are, what services you provide, how you get the job done, why you’re different, what your rates are, and how they’re supposed to get in touch with you. The purpose of your home page is to answer these questions, show relevance, and to entice them to click and enter your conversion funnel. New visitors to your home page are not looking for your latest blog post. Serving them that will confuse them and leave them with no information about your business or what you offer.

Some businesses will make their blog their home page because that’s the page mostly frequently updated and where all the conversation is happening. However, it doesn’t mean that page best addresses your customers’ needs. And that’s what your home page should do. Instead of serving up your blog as your home page and making users figure out where they’re supposed to click, how they learn more, and who, exactly, you are, give them the home page they’re looking for.

It’s disconnected from the main site

Corporate blogs work best when they’re a natural extension of the rest of your Web site. When the content found on the blog serves to give more information/street cred to your services. And to do that, readers need to be able to see the connection that exists between to the two entities.

Your corporate blog fails when you put it on a separate domain and make it hard for people to tie back or access your site. It fails when your blog doesn’t link to any other pages on your site or reference your service offerings in any way. Sure, blogs shouldn’t be overly-promotional, but never mentioning your products or services is actually more awkward than giving people useful information as it’s relevant. If you treat your blog like a totally separate island, consider what value it’s really bringing to your company.

Your blog becomes your business

Blogging is a lot like working out – once you take to it, it’s addicting. You have to blog every day and you have to blog harder than everyone else around you. And that’s great if you’re a professional blogger and blogging is how you make money. But for most people, blogging is not their business. [Even professional bloggers have to worry about things like branding these days.] It’s one facet of much larger marketing strategy. Don’t forget about the rest of your marketing strategy just because your blog talks back to you.

Remind yourself about how your blog relates to your business, what its objective is, and what it’s supporting. If you’re involved in catering marketing, your blog may be one part of that. But you still have to figure out the rest of social media, network within your industry, and then, you know, find time to run your catering business. Don’t let your blog become a distraction, either because it’s more “fun” than your other work or because you like the way it makes your ego feel.

You don’t commit to it

As a small business owner myself, I can certainly understand how time consuming (and exhausting) it is to continually be producing content to publish so that you can publish it on your blog. However, showcasing a blog that you update once every you feel like it may not give the best impression to potential customers. It shows them that you do things without a plan and that you’re not always the most reliable service provider. If you can’t commit to blogging a regular basis (even if it’s just once a week), consider if it’s worth doing at all. What are you planning to get from it?

You don’t play well in the sandbox

As Outspoken’s Chief Branding Officer, I often recommend companies take on corporate blogs as a way to get their voice out there and to establish personality and a POD. If you can hook someone to your blog, you’re giving them a direct line to your company message and your way of thinking. Assuming they connect with that, you’re able to significantly lower the bar to winning them over as a customer.

Unless, you’re a jerk. One of the most awesome ways a corporate blog can sabotage your business is when you use it to attack, alienate, and annoy other people. If you don’t know how to play well with others and the idea of occasionally smiling for diplomacy offends you, then maybe a blog shouldn’t be your best friend. Because as Vitaly Borker found out, “crazy bully” isn’t a long-term business strategy. It’s only beneficial to let people “see the real you” when you think there’s a chance they’ll actually like the real you.

While starting a corporate blog is often a good idea, it’s not always a good idea. How else have you seen businesses burn themselves by starting a blog? Any juicy examples to share? :)

MMA to Create Mobile Privacy Guidelines

Greg Stuart, Global CEO of the MMA, said the group recognizes the importance of consumer privacy. "In order for marketers and publishers to responsibly and sustainably engage consumers through and with the mobile channel, we need to continuously update how we address the collection, management and use of personal data or related consumer information," he explained earlier this month.

To create the new guidelines, the MMA is asking members of the mobile community, including carriers, marketers, agencies, media companies and media technologies, to join its Privacy Committee. The issue will also be addressed at its upcoming Consumer Best Practices Meeting, January 25-26 in Boca Raton, Florida.

Compared with the $25 billion online ad industry, the mobile marketing industry is still in its infancy. It won't reach $1 billion until 2012, reported AdWeek, citing data from eMarketer. "If we'd seen how fast mobile Internet and apps were going to grow, maybe we would have stepped in sooner," Stuart told AdWeek.

[Author's Note: if they had seen how fast it would grow? Were they not watching?]

There's no timeline for the completion of the new policy, Stuart said. "It's more important that we get it done right. This release was a call to arms."

A Need to Address Mobile Privacy Concerns

This issue was recently in the forefront of people's minds, thanks to a Wall St. Journal series called "What They Know," that highlighted the growing lack of privacy in today's digital world. One piece in particular ("Your Apps are Watching You") dealt with mobile privacy.

The Journal found that, after an examination of 101 popular smartphone applications on iPhone and Android devices, 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without the user's awareness or consent. 47 also transmitted location and 5 sent age, gender and other personal details.

Counterpoint: Tracking is GOOD

The somewhat overly paranoid reporting from The WSJ was met with some backlash online, especially from the tech blogging community. In a post entitled "Hello, My Name is: 9649e796e8b23900dc9629a18f2d47306430e62f," BGR blogger Andrew Munchbach made a convincing argument that mobile tracking isn't really all that bad. (The headline referred to his UDID, the unique device identifier that's used to build an online profile of a device, and therefore, the user).

"I’m not all that concerned with third parties, even advertisers, knowing the age, gender, UDID, and/or the general (or even specific) location of my device’s end-user (that’s me)," Munchbach wrote. "So Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, knows that the dude using my mobile device is, um, a dude, was stuck on level 5-13 for six straight hours, and was in Newport, RI when this all occurred. So the game looked through my address book to see if there were contacts that were also playing Angry Birds with whom I could connect. I kind of like these features," he said.

He also said that even when that data is passed to an analytics company, it's used - anonymously - to provide useful usage statistics and intelligence. "Rovio can use this information to improve its product, which would seem like a benefit to me, the player. Heck, Flurry may even go one step further and use this information in its own reporting and assessment of the mobile industry or publish a report about it...still doesn’t trouble me all that much. Why should it? It’s an age, gender, and ever-changing location that is linked to a number that represents a mobile device."

...But Some Want to Opt-Out & Today You Can't

While in Munchbach's case, the tracking is seen in a positive light, there are some who would prefer the option to opt-out, as you can in most of today's modern desktop-based Web browsers, through the use of built-in tools like privacy/"incognito" modes, browser add-ons and extensions and even alternative search portals that promise no tracking.

WSJ polled its readers on the matter, and a majority (67.7%), said they want apps to tell them every time they collect and send info about their mobile device. Clearly, these voters were worked about about the idea, having just read the article. Apps that constantly nagged you if and when they could share information would be worse than Windows Vista's User Account Control security feature which seemed to ask you every single time you tried to make the simplest change on your PC.

Still, the mobile world, as of yet, does not have any such opt-out options. It's all or nothing - use the app, or don't. But if you do, you're agreeing to certain conditions. The MMA's influence may help to create new scenarios here that will better serve mobile users, not just with regard to apps, but for all sorts of mobile ads, including SMS text messages, in-app banner advertising and ads on the mobile Web itself.

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Thursday, January 13, 2011

internet marketing

MMA to Create Mobile Privacy Guidelines

A Need to Address Mobile Privacy Concerns

Counterpoint: Tracking is GOOD

...But Some Want to Opt-Out & Today You Can't

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