Asking for information from potential customers

A frequent conversation around the office involves how much information to gather from customers and when. On our search product there is a constant discussion over whether our clients should force users to register in order to search (sometimes there are regulations around this). And then there’s the contact form that asks for every possible detail about a potential customer’s life. I counted 38 fields in one recently. Imagine meeting someone for the first time and then they ask you 38 questions about yourself.

Just because we can ask for information doesn’t mean we should. When putting together forms we should really only ask for information that we need in order to help the person who fills it out. If we aren’t sending them something in the mail do we really need to know their street address? Small things like this make a big difference.

In a conversation about the proposed privacy features of IE8, Jim Sterne devised a tiered set of access and features to give to site visitors based on the information they allow us to gather. Notice how each level of information sharing relates directly to the kinds of features the customer gets. There should be a one-to-one mapping between the data we gather and the benefit we provide.

Measuring the Conversation for Smaller Businesses

KDPaine linked to my post about measuring the conversation and noted the problem of measuring conversation share for smaller business: if your brand doesn’t generate much chatter you just won’t show up at all in Tweetrush. Here are a few quick thoughts on this. Read more

Bringing the Olympics home: 5 blog post ideas for Local.

With the Olympics going on right now there seems to be a lot of Olympic-themed blogging going on. This is probably great for being current, but maybe there’s ways to think more long-term on this. After all, the Olympics happen on a regular basis (every two years: Summer then Winter etc) so there could be a fireworks-like advantage to blogging about the games.

Let’s combine two ideas: Current Events and Local

Blogging about current events is always a good idea. It lets people know you’re listening and can add some context or value to the conversations that are occurring every day. When those events repeat on a regular basis this gives us some added incentive to write about them because there’s a predictable pattern to the number of people giving attention to the topic. Today I’m going to use the Olympics as an example.

Being “local” could mean the obvious: write about your nearby geographic zone. But it could mean your special niche or directly relevant topic. Today I’m writing mostly for my real estate readers so I’m going to be using the geographic kind of local.

And let’s also make it relevant

There are lots of ways we could try to stuff the word “Olympics” into an article. Then we’d get a lot of traffic looking for generic Olympics information and those visitors wouldn’t be happy and then they’d go away. Not much point in that. Let’s make articles that are Olympic-themed but also provide value for the people you most want to serve. In today’s example I’m using real estate buyers/sellers/watchers. But I bet you can synthesize this into your own industry.

Olympic-themed blog post ideas for Real Estate “Local”

• Any Olympic athletes grow up, live or train in your neighborhood?
• Any Olympic training facilities in or near your neighborhood?
• If someone wanted to train for the Olympics in your neighborhood, how would they get started?
• Any team leaders, coaches or trainers for the Olympics active in your neighborhood?
• How about Olympic gear and equipment manufacture or purchasing options? I can tell you from experience that getting a properly set-up biathlon rifle is not something you can do anywhere.

Notice how all of these ideas involve connecting a current event back to your area and gives some insight, context and value to someone who is truly interested in the Olympics. Also notice how it will help you position your neighborhood in relation to the Olympics and athletic competition. You might get a long tail conversion, but at the very least you will be adding good content about your neighborhood to the web. Search engines like this very much.

The strategy here, as you might guess, is to get the attention of readers both now (current event) and in the future (people who will make decisions based on how your neighborhood relates to the current event). This is an example of a content-planning strategy that makes use of the long tail marketing concept.

Examples of good Olympic blog posts:

Zillow, making use of it’s position as an aggregator of information, tells us about the state with the most Olympians in the 2008 Olympics. Talking about the state and cities brings us some local aspects, talking about the Olympians inserts their brand into the current events conversation. They even provide some additional value by linking out to the source that identifies the home of all the Olympians.

Feeding a small tidbit of news/gossip, The Real Estate Bloggers, lets us know about Olympic hero Michael Phelps’ recent condo purchase. Olympic content? Check. Local information? Check.

Perhaps taking a tip from Zillow, Lynne Pope further segments that California list down to the athletes that are in her market area.

Might be time to get ready for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Scott Nellé who wanted to skip work today so he could watch the basketball game.

Google Page Rank updating

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Google is in the process of updating PageRank. So I figured now would be a good time to geek out and write about this esoteric feature of search engine optimization. For those of you who want to get right to the meat: As long as you create useful content and don’t try to outwit Google, PageRank will take care of itself. Read more

Understanding and Using AIDA (including 22 things you can do to improve your site performance)

The name Aida (made famous in Verdi’s opera) means “visitor” in Arabic and “reward” in Swahili. This post is about the marketing acronym, related to visitors and rewards, outlining consumer attitudes: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. I’ll present the concept, orient it in relation to your site visitors and give you some ideas on how to use this conceptual model for your own marketing.
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Business Strategy and Twitter

Like any tool, there are greater and lesser reasons to use Twitter in a business setting. The articles on this page are focused on delivering strategic thought about Twitter for business use.

• Everyone loves a bullet list so here’s your list of 50, courtesy Chris Brogan.
• Integrating Twitter into a business culture courtesy of Jerry Owyang.
• Another one from Owyang about strategic use of Twitter so it doesn’t overrun your life.
• If your strategy is enhanced by being perceived as a guru, this post quickly walks you through the listen-network-be-a-guru process.
• Laura Fitton has a great reading list about using Twitter for business.
• Elliot Ng of UpTake discusses the process his company went through in determining their business use of Twitter. Includes thoughts on corporate Twitter handle vs personal Twitter handles aka Personal Brands.
• A discussion of the difference between having a lot of followers vs having less but more loyal followers, using High School as an anti-metaphor.
• If you’re using a variety of social media channels already, you may be interested to know what Twitter disrupts. Laura Fitton’s research should help you out.

If you’re ready to begin, check out the Getting Started with Twitter for Business page. If you’re looking for something more detailed or specific, perhaps you’ll find it on the main Twitter for Business page.

Feel free to use the comments to let me know about other business strategy and Twitter articles.

Long Tail, Business Blogs and Measurement

There has recently been some chatter about long-tail-focused blogging, especially in that little corner of the blogosphere occupied by your local-loving real estate bloggers. And since I can’t help but wade into something that could possibly be measured I bring you this post.

If you want a sparkling essay on why long tail strategies may be better than mass media/generalist approaches, Theresa Boardman has it for you at Inman News.

If you want a brief example of the longtail improving a business, read how the long tail is affecting Jonathan Dalton’s business.

What is the Long Tail anyway?

The Long Tail as a marketing theory was established by Wired editor Chris Anderson back in 2004 and or Clay Shirky in 2003. Wikipedia tells us that the Long Tail is used:

“to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”

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Paid Search vs Organic Search for Realtors

If you’re a Realtor who has been hesitant to dive into Google AdWords, today is the day to get started.

First, you’ll want to be clear about the difference between “organic search” and “paid search.” Organic search results are a product of a Search Engine’s algorithm (a fancy word for method), rather than paid advertisements. Search engine algorithms are a bit of a mystery and always changing – and Google and Yahoo like to keep it that way. Until you’ve spent some time (and perhaps money) to optimize your site content and understand the variety of elements that contribute to the algorithm, ranking high on a Google search engine results page (SERP) with “organic” search can be frustrating and challenging.

Another way to get traffic to your site is by setting up a “paid search” campaign with a tool such as Google AdWords to generate more traffic to your site. If you’ve done a good job delivering those people to the right part of your site for their search terms (known as a landing page), those new visitors will hopefully “convert” by contacting you and/or registering on your site to make best use of the search tools the next time they return. You can also use what you learn from your advertising successes to help inform decisions on your site content, but that’s a topic for a different post.

You can get started with online advertising on your own or get in touch with the Internet Marketing Team at Union Street Media. You can also keep following this blog for more information about internet marketing for Realtors. In particular, follow G. Dewald’s series on Website Optimization for Real Estate.

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