moving my business communications into the 2.0 world

I’ve been reading lots of online blogs recently from the great and the good commentators in how to best use the social web for business benefit.

And as a result I’m going to be changing how I manage my communications: I’ve always paid close attention to how I communicate with business colleagues & clients and pride myself on the quality of personal service I provide, but it appears a good email and phone manner aren’t enough any more!

And actually, the reasons are fairly obvious: Given the amount of content & opinion available on blogs, wikis, google, yahoo, twitter, linkedin, facebook, youtube & tripadvisor (phew! to name a few) we have all changed how we want to be communicated with and how we make decisions...

So I’ve been asking myself “what does this means to my style of business communications”? Here are a few thought provoking quotes I’ve jotted down:

• “ Don’t Broadcast: Engage, Encourage, Excite”
• “ Add value: Involvement > Interaction > Intimacy > Influence”
• “What can we share about ourselves that will make our clients more informed / interested?”
• “How can we be the people to help out?”
• “Start listening and stop shouting…”
• “Provide expertise to help solve problems”
• “Engage your customers appropriately online”
• “Engage the consumer through an increasingly digital purchase journey”
• “Harness brand interest by syndicating content that empowers the consumer”
• “Online purchasers increasingly want marketers to help them make smart decisions. They don’t want to be subjected to the hard sell – they expect marketers to engage them, not dictate to them”
• “Marketers are required to manage a staggering amount of content to support products, segments, channels & promotions”…

So as a consequence I’ve signed up to a few of the most popular services around to develop new skills & knowledge.

Please join me, link to me, follow me, add me as a favourite or give me the thumbs up as I embrace the social web.

Thank You.

DOs and DON'T of Social Media

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SEO 101. Taking the plunge into search engine optimisation

So once you've created a great looking website with good design, easy to use menus and built using the latest content management software this is not time to sit back, relax and be content with your work!! 

Your next challenge is to get your website noticed...  There is a lot of myth and legend surrounding the mysteries of search engine optimisation, but, actually, it's all pretty straight forward.  

Here are my top tips on getting the SEO basics right:

1.  Start by checking out your competitors!  Goto their websites, read their content, titles, headings and main text and assess how well they are getting their message out.

If you want to delve deeper, use the "View Source" menu item to look at the HTML of the webpages and jot down page titles, meta description and meta keywords that you will find listed in the top few lines .

2.  Then start thinking about content optimisation of your own site - write down your USPs (unique selling points) - and list the keywords and key phrases which appear most frequently in your list of USPs.

3.  Now here's the clever bit, run your keywords and keyphrases through Google's Keyword Tool and it will tell you how popular / good your key phrases are and will rank alternative suggestions for you to consider:

 4. Once you've identified your key phrases, then the next task is to embed these into your web page HTML.  If you are happy to do this yourself then repeat the key-phrases in titles, headings, text and behind images uses ALT tags.

 5.  and write the key phrases into your content using the guidelines listed in the slide. 

 If all this is a bit daunting, then now could be a good time to contact your web designer or seo consultant...  

6.  I also found the seo tools listed on the Build-Recipricol-Links website to be very useful in refining keyword density and checking your page rank.

SEO tends to be a very iterative process, so once you've got some results then go back and refine, refine and refine again:-)

There are also handy  tools to report on Page Rank and assess Link Popularity, but I'll write more on this my next post.

Please contact me if you would like a copy of the full powerpoint slides previewed in this article.

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