Bill Solominsky

I am preparing to start a new SEM campaign and recalled a TechCrunch post this summer regarding regulating the industry, http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/the-time-has-come-to-regulate-search-engine-marketing-and-seo/. It is written by an anonymous writer that is a “well known executive”, and argues that the algorithms for ranking on search engines should be disclosed. The writer compares it to free trade and controlling of boarders, where Google is the boarder patrol and can allow or disallow companies into the ecosystem at their will.

The only way I’d agree with this is if Google does have a conspiracy to omit selected sites based on personal bias. I have never heard of this being proven, although some companies do complain that partnerships with Google competitors seem to drop their rankings.

Overall, I disagree with this author for many of the reasons listed in the comments, and one big one: there are other ways to advertise your product besides Google. The main reason to work on SEO and SEM campaigns is to take advantage of this form of advertising. There are plenty of other ways to advertise a product online, including other search engines, niche ad networks, link building (to actually reach other interested customers, not just increase PageRank), and partnerships, to name a few. If all of these are performed well, and you have a relevant URL to match your company or product, there is no way that Google can keep your company down in the rankings. This applies to both start ups and established companies.

The other thing to look at, even if you’re a pure internet company, it doesn’t mean that marketing has to be done purely online. How did people advertise before the mid-90′s when there was no internet? Print, TV, radio, door-to-door, conferences, trade shows… All these methods are still valid. And the big upside, even with all of the fancy analytics to be gained from online metrics, nothing compares to meeting and talking to your customers face-to-face. You get genuine feedback, suggestions, and take a huge step in customer service in establishing a solid relationship. That, in turn, will help bring in more revenue than a top ranking on Google.

If you’re like most people that use Twitter, your main purpose is to update the world (or your 100 or so followers) what you’re doing at any given time. Perhaps just below that in importance is to see what all of your followers are doing, reading, writing, etc. These are both “push” techniques, since users are “pushing” their content to you, and you are pushing your content to your followers. This works extremely well for the majority of Twitter users.

How about the other end, the “pull” part? If you perform a search, you pull all the tweets that contain that keyword. Using the Twitter API, you can come up with a lot more uses by pulling in content from the Twitter stream. The average user likely won’t ever need to use the API, and probably not much more than an occasional search.

What’s the point of this post? The groups that can benefit the most from pulling Twitter content are businesses. When you read about social media advertising, it appears that most companies follow a common set of procedures:

1. create a Twitter account
2. tweet about your product and amass followers
3. push ads and specials on those followers to entice them to buy more products

Sure, this might pick up some sales, but this is also extremely difficult to measure in terms of ROI.  Most companies don’t have social media campaigns for this very reason.

What is a better method? Think back to the fundamental rule of sales, product development, and customer service: listen to your customer! If you are a company on Twitter, don’t just send out a general question soliciting feedback from your followers. Only the people with very strong opinions will respond, and that will not help the company reach the other 95% of your audience. Instead, take the time to actually read through the tweet of your followers; see what they are interested in. Don’t have the time? Write a script using the API to pull in the tweets from your followers that mention your company or specific keywords. Then you can understand your customers’ interests, engage in a converstation with them, and you may just have a customer for life.

I first saw this video in the summer of 2008 and was blown away at how much sense David made. This is an excellent, inspirational talk that puts businesses in perspective. He covers eyeballs vs revenue, million dollar vs billion dollar businesses, and how the level of happiness doesn’t change once your reach a certain amount of wealth.

Although this is a great talk for start-ups, it is relevant for any size business. For example, if you are part of a large company working on a product, focusing on gaining 2000 customers for a product niche and gaining $1,000,000 additional revenue for your company will never be frowned upon.

A interview posted on CNN.com today with the writer of “Creating Success from the Inside Out”, Ephren Taylor, discussing his start up experience at such a young age. The basic premise is to start a business when you’re young since youth is typically more risky and has less responsibilities. He lists 5 tips for young entrepreneurs:

1. Turn your disadvantage into your advantage
2. Persistence pays
3. Read
4. Don’t over analyze the opportunity
5. Recession = opportunity (if he’s a computer programmer, shouldn’t this be “==”)

This is good advice, but I worry that people reading this won’t take a step back and see the big picture and weigh the negative as well. You can only be persistent for so long. At what point do you realize that you do not have a good idea, or that your product will not sell? If you wait too long, especially right out of college, you could miss an opportunity to gain valuable experience. Its a huge gamble and leads to a paradox, because if your company is a success, you instantly become a credible expert on your industry but likely don’t need to look for work again. However, if your company is not a success, you could be labeled as lacking experience which hinders your job search, which is now necessary to keep up with responsibilities.

People like Mr. Taylor, who are widely successful at such a young age, tend to be over-optimistic about risk and attempt to lead people down their path. I believe people that were successful later in life, and have gone through failure before obtaining wealth, can offer much better advice since they tend to see both sides of risk.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at ProductCamp Austin. My presentation, “Leveraging Current Events for Product Design and Marketing” was voted as one of the 35 to present out of the 50 that were offered. The voting took place that morning, and the schedule soon followed. I was up right off the bat at 10am, which allowed me to enjoy the rest of the day’s sessions instead of going over my slides in my head all day.

The session had about 25 attendees, and a good solid mix of presenting and conversation. The basic premise was to discuss lessons learned from my two start up projects, BankOfObama.org and National Event Rental. BankOfObama.org dominated the topics, likely because of its recency and larger reach. We covered Product Design: Timing, Market Research, Development, and Pricing. Next was Product Marketing: Memory, Press/Media, and Grass Roots.

Quick summary:

Timing: make sure your product life cycle is congruent with the expected length of the media coverage of the current event.

Market Research: No time for traditional market research. Instead, use interviews from news, twitter trending topics, etc. to find the thoughts and feelings of customers.

Development: Agile development techniques work well. Quick, open, short development.

Pricing: Aggressive and dynamic. Change price if needed (up or down), and use as many revenue sources as you can. Remember that if you target in general is the United States, and if you have already reached 1,000,000 visitors, there are still over 300,000,000 people that don’t know your product.

Memory: Media and press have already done your branding campaign for you.

Press/Media: Even if you media is calling you, still “sell” your story to ensure coverage.

Grass Roots: Many current events cause groups to spring up. Contact these groups from both the top and bottom to get your message viral.

Other sessions that I attended:

• Roadmaps: The Bridge Between Strategy and Tactics (Byron Workman)
• Anatomy of a Modern Launch – How to Use Internet Marketing Techniques to Launch Your Physical Product (Vicki Flaugher, CEO of SmartWoman Publishing)
• Twitter for Small Business (Chris Sherrod)
• Link Building: Finding Your Most Valuable SEO Link Prospects, Faster and Easier. (Ben Wills, ontolo.com)