If these people were blogs, you'd want to be THAT guy.

Blogging. This phenomenon is for sure here to stay and we have advanced past the time of calling blogs just a trend. They are now essential tools in building brand awareness. Blogs provide opportunities to speak directly to audiences engaged in the brand already. Speaking to audiences in their own terms is one of the best ways to explain what your brand is all about.

So what’s the point of blogging?

Visiting a website can tell you lots about a brand. But not everything. And not a lot of the things you really want to know. If you want to KNOW the brand, the voices behind it and the issues that are important to it, a blog is where it’s at. You might find the beginning threads of what you want to know on an official website but digging deeper into a brand requires reading more.

Do us a favor: Just Keep it Simple

If you are blogging for your brand, you don’t want people to have to dig TOO deep. (Or else they probably won’t do any digging at all and move on to the next brand, next blog and not remember yours). It is important to also find ways to keep your old blogs memorable too. Remember that unbelievably awesome blog you wrote a month ago? Well there are a lot of ways to keep that work relevant and entice readers to check it out again. It also has to be easy to read. Establishing your blog and engaging people in what you have to say isn’t always easy though. If it was easy, then brand awareness would be simple and we would all know EVERYTHNG about ALL the brands we use and want.

Write TO your audience, not AT them…

In order for people to follow your blog, they have to have that basic interest in what you’re talking about. You have to know your audience too. Who is actually reading this stuff? Well, you have to know in order to write to them. Some of the best bloggers out there will tell you that branding is all about how you speak to your readers. Having a conversation with your reader is the best way to keep them engaged but also to keep YOU memorable. There are a lot of great articles out there, to help us figure out how to talk to potential clients.

Blogging allows you to literally write your own definition of what your brand represents. By showing people what you are interested in and what’s important to you, you build a personal relationship with them. Successful branding is not easy. This we know. But what we also know is how to create that brand dialogue and it starts with building a relationship.

Companies are benefiting from their Apps in big ways. Here are some important Do’s and Don’ts when deciding to launch an iPhone App…

1. Don’t launch an App for the sake of launching an App.

You want to keep up with your competitors right? Well with the popularity of iPhone Apps at an all time high, some companies are launching Apps with no clear direction. You might say to yourself…”Our competitors have an App so we must have an App… Right now!”  Nope, you would be wrong.  Sure, you definitely want to consider having one but that doesn’t mean you should produce Apps with zero relevancy to your target audience or business in general. Take your time and make it better than your competitor’s.

2. Do think it through.

Don’t jump on the bandwagon just yet. Consider your options and consider your potential users. Ask yourself what kind of App will ….

a) help my target audience.

b) make my business more accessible to my target audience.

c) successfully integrate my business in a beneficial way into my target audiences’ lives.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask your target audience what they think.

It’s not a bad idea to ask your users directly what they want. Pitch an App idea to your current clients and ask them if this is something they would like or find beneficial to their lives. Ask them what they would find useful in an App or what they would find entertaining. After all, they are the ones using it.

4.  Do make it fun!

Phones do so much more than just make calls these days. They do basically anything. They make our lives easier, more practical and bring us more news and entertainment at the touch of a screen. The App should be this way too. A very popular App right now called foursquare is changing the way companies interact with their clients.  With this App, users can “check in” at a particular place, whether that be their favorite pizza place, Starbucks or grocery store and earn rewards and statuses. It’s fun, useful, practical and easy to integrate into daily use.

Making a mobile App work for you is important. It’s highly individualized for every business but can be highly effective when utilized to its fullest potential!

1. Find a large enough group of people to talk to. Marketers are always looking for new segments to penetrate with their products and blogs are a great channel to communicate with them.  For example, if you sell executive suites to small businesses, you will probably want to target prospects based on geography and perhaps service firms. That will give you a large group of people to talk to but this group will probably be composed of several smaller groups with similar interest, so don’t stop there.
2. Learn what is unique about each smaller group. Within that larger segment you should create a variety of content that speaks to what is unique to each one do those smaller groups. Following the example above, it could be interesting to create content that talks about the importance of first impressions, the role of branding in finding new clients, the most successful stock investments strategies or the latest high-end entertainment events in the area.
3. Share with them and build trust. We all know that people like free samples, gifts, give away, free content, free research, extras or free trials. Use those to start building your brand and relationship with them.  Once you have built that trust and created that first impression, it is really hard to lose it – unless you really screw it. When blogging for sales you must honestly want to share knowledge and tips without expecting something back immediately, you must have patience.
4. Be patient and keep sharing. This is key as the game has changed for marketers and sales people, if you go aggressively for the sale without really knowing where the prospect is in the purchasing process, you will create a lot of enemies that could have been clients down the road. More than 95% of your blog’s visitors will not be ready to buy so you must be softer and broader with your message to appeal to a larger group that is most likely looking to simply educate themselves. However, make sure to make it easy for those that are shopping to contact you or purchase online.
5. Embrace your visitors and their networks. As people comment on your posts, bookmark them, share them on social networks and subscribe to your blog, make a task for you to develop each one of those relationships and ideally try to take them offline if appropriate. Don’t try to sell them until they are ready and ask more about your product or services. Developing those relationships will also help you reach a much larger audience than you can reach yourself.
6. Keep improving your sources. The content that you put in your blog is the fuel that will get your lead generation machine going, so make sure to create an editorial calendar and follow it religiously. If you have trouble coming up with your own thoughts or ideas, you can comment on research reports, studies, do book reviews, interview other experts, etc. Don’t ever run out of gas.

Jose Guerra
Principal

Exito

Search Engine Optimization has been a cat & mouse game since its inception, marketer and web masters spent their time figuring out how to game search engine algorithms to only find out that these sites kept evolving and coming up with new criteria. The beauty of this game has been that it has evolved in the direction of making results more and more like what you would find on an offline search for a product or service. The difference though is that looking for an accountant offline could take you days or weeks to find a good one. You would probably look for one on the yellow pages, then ask your friends if they knew one, then interview several, than ask for references, to end up probably working with one that worked with someone you trust.  However, online you can do this in a matter of minutes or seconds. Product or service searches on Google (using their filters, social search features and Google buzz) or searches on Facebook (which can also be filtered for friends) will, if not already, complete the entire search and selection process.

So, the questions are: How do you optimize your web presence? How do you embrace word of mouth and user generated content around your brand? How do you grow a network built on trust and reputation? In a few words, and you can watch the presentation below to get more details, the answer is three-fold.

First, you want to establish an editorial calendar because it will help you increase content quantity, quality and your will get more subscribers. Do simple math, more content + better quality = better search engine ranking. Add a little of smart marketing and you will get more readership and that will drive more subscribers (or potential customers)

Second, become a publishing warehouse as it will help you get your target audience in the format and timing that they prefer the most. Take the topic for the day, week, month, whatever your reality is and put in your “content development process” to create blog posts, articles, presentations, tweets, white papers, questions, videos, podcasts, etc. or whatever your target audience respond best.

Third, leverage personal branding to distribute content to networks built on trust and reputation. As stated on a previous blog employees can become a great channel to distribute your content.

By Jose Guerra
Principal

Exito

As a marketer, I have been waiting for analysis of search engine effectiveness to include measures for user relevance and the power of the communications to establish connections.  I am encouraged because that finally seems to be happening. According to Dwamian Mcleish and Jose Guerra, SEO is passé; the new term should be Content Search Optimization (CSO). Communications specialists like me should be cheered because the system has finally begun to catch up with what we always knew.

Graphic designers have similar concerns to those of content providers.  They believe that attractive, easily navigated sites will increase the power of the organization’s web presence. Unfortunately, the traditional measures by search engines do not include many metrics for these factors.  In fact, only recently have search engines begun to read flash so designers were cautioned not to use those impressive graphics.

Similarly, search engine rankings required that content developers integrate as many key words as possible in the copy but also keep it short. This is not useful to the reader however, because target audiences expect messages to respond to their need.  Packing search terms into the text does not add value for the reader.  It was just another way of gaming the system to increase visibility of the website on the Internet.

The goal of the search engine is to provide highly relevant, easily accessible information to the consumer. Consumers will benefit as organizations begin to realize that the easy measures are not enough anymore.   As the website owner, attracting visitors through high page ranks is about helping them find you but it is also about delivering value once they are there.  Overall, you increase your rankings if you build that trust over time.  At the Branding SIG for the DFW AMA on February 2nd, Dwamian said that the search engines are beginning to develop measures that incorporate content relevance into the rankings.  It cannot happen too soon.

If yes, then call us. If not, then you are just probably finding ways to keep your job and we recommend you to read the 6 tips below and then tell us how they worked for you.

1. Don’t Spend Your Entire Marketing Budget. Costs saving initiatives have been more popular than ever before. If you can manage to not spend your entire marketing budget you will be rewarded. Showing savings is always a good thing these days, and who cares if you hurt your lead generation volume and quality or stall your brand building efforts. What is more important though is to get a tap on your back from your boss for finishing the year strong. Nobody will hunt you down if you don’t continue your efforts to capitalize on the upturn of the economy we will see in 2010, right?
2. Keep Reducing Headcounts. Everyone had been letting people go and most have successfully managed to survive this economic crisis based on these decisions. These types of initiatives are effective and opportune to let go of low performing employees. You can always hire top performers later in the year; although you may not have enough budget. Remember you saved so much money by not spending your entire marketing budget that your boss will probably decide that you could do a great job with a smaller budget in 2010.
3. New Market Segments are Not Worthwhile. Although, trends such as the high broadband Internet penetration, the surge of web 2.0 tools and the social media boom are making it easier and easier to reach out to smaller segments in very cost effective manners, many people would argue that is not enough. Segments based on race, language, gender, age or sexual preferences are not big enough yet to allocate enough resources. No one cares that one of every five young adults today (ages 18 – 34) are Hispanic, which are ONLY about 50 million people. And nobody believes in Forrester estimates that Hispanic disposable income as a group will grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013 from $951 billion in 2008.
4. Search Engine Optimization is Overrated. People justify SEO investment with arguments such as that more than 1 billion people worldwide, ages 15 years and older are Internet users or that more than 74% of the US population uses the Internet. Also that organic search drives 75%+ of all search traffic. What value does all that have? How many people really use the Internet to purchase or influence product purchases? Not many really, the penetration of ecommerce, on product categories such as computer electronics and media (books, music and videos) is ONLY 25%. There are still lots of people that you can reach out to without using the Internet, so why bother reaching out to these demographics, right?
5. Email Marketing is From the Past. Email marketing started in the mid and late 1990’s, which is a long time ago in Internet history. It boomed in the early part of this decade, but as of a couple of years ago many argue it is being replaced by social media marketing and other new media channels. Companies used to BLAST emails because it was easy and cheap, but CAN-SPAM laws, anti-spam software and other tools are allowing people to hide from email marketing messages. Let’s look at some stats again to support this argument. Email open rates are above 30% in many industries and click rates get up to 6% or higher. So if you are a small or medium size business and you have an opted-in list of prospects and customers of let’s say 10,000 emails, you are directly reaching ONLY 3,000 people and building strong relationship via your content or offers with ONLY 600 people… EVERY TIME YOU SEND EMAIL CAMPAIGNS.
6. Social Media is a Fad, Let Your Competitors Go There First. Much has been said about the reach of social media, the engagement capabilities it adds to the mix, that is taking Word-of-Mouth marketing to the next level and that is incredibly more cost effective than other tools. But, it is so new that many marketers feel threatened or not knowledgeable enough to jump into it, so they are waiting for others in the industry to lead the path to figure out how to use it. Let your competitors work with “social media” marketing firms and create some success first before you join. Why take any risks? We still need to survive 2010, right?

We like to share ideas, thoughts, best practices or whatever we feel like writing about in lists of 6. But, you can add to it…so, If you are going to take one risk, make it sharing your thought and believes with others. Feel free to comment, tweet, share or do whatever you want to do with this.

Jose Guerra
Principal

With Thanksgiving holiday coming up next week, and Christmas just around the corner…one usually finds that many companies will disappear all together from social media. It’s understandable how this can happen, employees run off to their families and get caught up in the holiday spirit, but let’s not forget to feed the bird while you are away. Now don’t get me wrong, family time is important time, but consider this, if you have down time, so will your prospects… and a lot of time, that down time translates to online time. So here are 6 ways to keep the bird fat while basting the turkey.

One. Designate, then delegate. If you are small or medium business that already has your employees involved in your online community, ask them to contribute over the holiday. (Hint) Having a little incentive to do that will also help.

Two. Set a schedule. Designate at least 20 minutes each day to find, connect, and contribute to your community. This will show that you are actually in the driver’s seat for your brand and just because it’s the holiday, doesn’t mean you lose control.

Three. Don’t be afraid to get a little personal. This one is tricky because you don’t want to get too personal, like say tweeting about how bad your wife’s turkey turned out, but giving a little high level info on your do-abouts won’t hurt either.

Four. Try to set your conversations on auto-pilot. You can accomplish this by explicitly asking for comments and feedback on the stuff you post. Once the conversation gets going on its own, you won’t have to ignore your family the entire time.

Five. Take the time to learn about how your competitors approach “down time”. You should always be learning about your competitors and the holidays are no exception.

Six. Don’t get consumed. I said keep a pulse, but don’t let it consume you. Your family demands just as much time as your consumers so ignoring them may not work out too well for you.

In conclusion, showing your consumers that you are always ready and able to listen to them, even when “the man” closes business, will show that you are in the driver’s seat for your brand and will give you a major competitive advantage.

Don’t forget to visit our Facebook fan page to drop your 2 cents @ cornersix.com/facebook. Enjoy your cranberry sauce!

#1 Sell your expertise more than your products
This one is crucial. Demonstrating that you actually know what you are talking about will boost your credibility amongst consumers of your products or services.

#2 Person to person marketing is key
The internet is now ruled by your everyday techno-savvy users. They are privy to a multitude of information. Mass forms of advertising and marketing have evolved their filters. Reaching out to them on a one-on-one basis will move them closer in a personal relationship with your brand than that really expensive advertising atomic bomb. You may be thinking that this would take a lot of time, and you would be correct. I am not saying that this should be your only tactic, but try doing something personal for your potential customers and see for yourself. It just works!

#3 Direct customer service
This one goes along the lines of number 2, but expands it into actually gathering feedback from your clients using the mass number of venues in which they gather online. Always keeping a pulse on your brand and reaching out to your consumers when they give both positive and negative feedback will demonstrate that you care about the experience you provide to them.

#4 Maximize your  footprint
Participate, then participate a little more. Enough said!

#5 Get all your employees involved
Some companies cringe at this one, but getting your employees involved in your online endeavors not only increases your resources and reach to consumers online, but it will also help to portray the culture of your company. In many cases this is a good thing. However, if you are a company that is not exactly sure what kind of culture you are (we’ve seen it) then you may want to gain insight into that first (we can help here).

#6 Keep up with the trends
Last but by no means least, make sure you keep up with the trends online. Knowing what users are into will give you an advantage in reaching them.

The main gist here is get personal. Developing a personal relationship with the current and potential consumers of your products or services will give you a selling advantage over your competition.

Tell us what you think by commenting on this post. You may also view the corner6labs website at www.cornersix.com. Until next time.

(No corner6labs clients included)

1. Twitter To Go: One Houston Coffee Shop Makes its Mark. Today, he credits Twitter with almost doubling his clientele and with opening his eyes to a whole new way to build Community.
2. Real Estate Consultant & Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic. This small business relied solely on word-of-mouth and personal referrals until three years ago, when it first diversified into the world of social media and quickly found cost-effective marketing success online.
3. myFICO: Online Customer Community Drives Accomplishment of Support, Marketing, and Sales Goals. As a company operating within a heavily regulated industry, FICO is limited in the information it can provide to customers.
4. 5 stories in one. Kogi BBQ, Marsh Cafe, Kogi BBQ, Duke of York’s Cinema, Wiggly Wigglers and Howies
5. Lion Brand Yarn Drives Measurable ROI with Social Media: Lion Brand Yarn was not sure if its customer demographic would be likely to engage in social media but was willing to experiment with.
6. Pink Cake Box is a specialty cake shop in northern New Jersey with 10 employees. They opened for business in 2005.
7. UNLEASH 2009, the Mediasite User Conference: Energizing Users On-site and Online. A campaign to increase conference attendance that resulted in a 15% increase in conference attendees
8. Sweetriot, a small business out of New York City has gotten a lot of buzz over the past several years for their mouth-watering, fair trade dark chocolate. CEO Sarah Endline explains in the short video above (click on the image) on how she engages in the social media space.

Search engine optimization, or SEO for the cool kids, is one of those subjects that always give people the quivers. There is so much information out there that it can overwhelming to people who are just looking to get their name out there. Guess what?… I don’t have good news. SEO is not getting any easier because you can get buried in the multitude of information especially since we are living in a time in which real-time information rules the internet.

There has been a lot of talk recently about Google and Bing’s new deal with social media powerhouses, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven’t heard, then let me bring you up to speed. Google and Bing recently struck a deal to include live social media feeds in their search results. There are a lot of positive implications of this, one worthy of mentioning is the undeniable admission that social media is here to stay.

Aside from the obvious implications here,  we decided to uncover some other quasi-obvious outcomes of these and other moves related to mainstreaming social media. Here is how to get started:

Do what “they” do
One of my very favorite SEO tools is Axandra’s Internet Business Promoter (IBP) . I have been using it for years and have been very impressed with its’ ease of use and power. An overlooked part of SEO is one of the things that IBP does very well, figuring out what works for a particular keyword. When you choose keywords, see which other websites perform well with those keywords and what kind of presence they have, even if they are not your direct competitors. Look at it this way, if they have your keywords, they are your keyword competitors. Mimicking them will not necessarily make your website have immediate success, but it is a very good base to start from when it comes to your SEO campaign. As a note, you will notice that IBP still walks you through setting your meta keywords and descriptions…I said they are not as powerful as they use to be, not that you shouldn’t still do them.

Always have up-to-the-minute, up-to-date content! This one is simple… always having fresh content means that search engines will have a variety of content to establish your relevancy. This will also make your website more appealing and attract repeat visitors.

Broadcast yourself
If you haven’t done so already, make sure you check out the most common social media platform in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the ever so important Blogging platforms such as WordPress. When I say have a look-see, I mean just that. If you are new to social media, it would be futile for you to sign up for all of them, especially if you don’t have the means to maintain them. Getting on the social media platform with no good strategy to maintain it is almost as bad as not getting on it at all. Instead, join one or two to get a feel for things, then start branching out once you have build up some confidence. If you are in doubt, we usually recommend starting with LinkedIn since it serves a more professional purpose, then move on to Twitter, because of it’s social simplicity. Facebook is also a great tool, but it will require a lot more interactivity than the two previously mentioned.

Aside from maintaining your own social media presence, you should participate in as many discussions related to your industry as possible. A good place to find and/or fuel those discussions is LinkedIn’s question and answer platform.

One other avenue of social media presence that companies usually overlook is encouraging their employees to fuel discussion about the company. Putting a system in place where your employees can help to maintain your social media presence is vital in distributing the responsibility and the workload of branding your company through social media.

Always link back to your website
This should be an obvious one, but I don’t know how many companies we have talked to that don’t do this. Linking content back to your company, will increase your relevancy and  reputation on search engines. Search engines love “linkbacks”, in fact, many SEO experts believe that external links to your website are one of the major contributing factors of SEO.

What’s the word on the street?
The most important concept to grasp is that you must always be monitoring your company’s reputation. Not all comments about your company will be positive, so it is important that you find the conversations people are having about you and respond accordingly. Search engines will find those conversations and without a voice, you are subject to the opinions of the masses instead of making people understand that you care.

In conclusion, you may have read this and thought this had very little to do with SEO in general. The truth of the matter is this is SEO in it most up to date form. Gone are the days when it was just changing a few tags on your website and exchanging a few links. Participation in the social media ocean brings recognition, recognition creates relevancy, relevancy drives traffic, and traffic bring sales.

Let us know what you think by casting your vote on this post. We also welcome your comments.