Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I told a new client just last week that my silly, personal posts often generate the most comments. And today I had that experience, once again. My little vacation from technology over the weekend generated a little conversation that’s been quite fun for me. And it welcomed a new resource into my world, Dawn Foster, who writes over at the FastWonder Blog.

I’d heard of Dawn from one of my clients, who mentioned she does online community consulting, and used to work for Jive Software, source of one of the major platforms for online communities.

Well, she happened to stop by my post this morning and comment on it. And (as is human nature, and why I tell my clients not to be afraid of posting little personal posts once in awhile) I had to go check out her blog.

Wow. 

What a resource. Her post last week on Maintaining A Successful Corporate Community is a fantastic example of what a great blog is about. Real information, eminently readable, and truthful advice. In a blog about topics that are fascinating to me. I’ve not yet met Dawn, but as soon as I’ve finished this post, I’m going to email her to invite her to lunch. I suspect we might have a lot in common. I know I’ll learn from her. I hope we’ll each have time to make lunch happen.

Regardless, I’m subscribed.

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Sometimes we have to make significant choices. I believe my clients would rather deal with a woman with a soul than a machine tethered to technology. Which is why I chose (consciously, many times over the past weekend) to stay unplugged from the grid.

On Friday afternoon, we packed the dog in the car and drove the short, 70 miles it takes to get to the Oregon coast, where friends had invited us to stay for the weekend.

I had packed my laptop (to write the second in a series of “how-to” digital marketing papers I’m working on) and a manuscript on mobile marketing (for which I’m providing a pre-release quote) - both with good intentions to finish them.

We arrived at sunset, and - martinis and champagne in hand - we toasted weekend ahead outside and (because it was chilly) inside the house, enjoying an unobstructed view of the big red sun slipping into the water for the evening.

It was a great start to a delightful weekend of ignoring car, computer and iPhone. Here’s what we did instead:

• Walked to coffee (six times in two days)
• Walked to lunch and looked at places for sale
• Let the dogs romp along the beach (exhausted Joey was a trouper on those three-inch legs)
• Played cribbage again for the first time in 30 years (won one game, lost one…)
• Bought lottery tickets (people from small towns win more often than those who buy in big towns)
• Watched a sea eagle hunt for dinner over the dunes
• Contemplated the randomness of life, observing flowers change while walking by the place where a plane crashed into a home in August (that happened to be right along our walk)

I can read the manuscript in the evenings, and write my paper between meetings this week.

My choice to unplug means I will always have the memories we generated at the coast this weekend. Some delightful, some contemplative, all fuel for my soul.

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…she asked me, quite innocently… Apparently I do, I told her.

On Mondays, it seems, the guilt of neglecting my blog meets with the promise of a new week, and I can spring into action and post!

I’ve taught blogging for business for more than three years now, and have ALWAYS said to blog 2-3 times a week, or you’re not a serious blogger.

A Blog of Small Things

However, since my blog is my web site (it works for me); it seems appropriate for me not to post small things… I choose to wait until the energy or a good story moves me. It’s not particularly good for my Technorati ranking, but I believe it’s better for my readers.

I got an email on Sept. 11 from a colleague who forwarded a daily blog post she subscribes to, and said,

“Seth’s daily blog seems to me like a daily Fortune Cookie.  Am I missing something here?”

My response: “I think your observation is fabulous. He’s tired, and experimenting… when you’ve been blogging for years, you either do what I do, and go for spurts when you blog 2-3 times a week, and then only on Mondays… or you do what he’s doing, and dash off thoughts that look like haiku and sometimes work, most of the time, don’t.

But what’s that saying about Babe Ruth and the number of strikeouts vs. home runs he had?”

Blogging is Personal - Make it Yours

A blog - yes, even a business blog that doubles as a web site - is a personal, living, breathing thing. And when people are not inspired, writing can be uninspiring. You never know what’s going to move someone to action… to post, to comment, to reference… but poorly written, boring or uninspiring posts rarely do.

My friend Dylan posts on Sunday afternoons. He will often queue up posts for the week, and then be done. I think that’s smart. But I don’t have his discipline.

So I often blog on Mondays… it seems to work for me.

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Google announced they’re expanding their search into old newspaper archives (via Reuters), and in a stunning coincidence today, United Airlines shares lost nearly all of their value.

How are these two things related, you ask?

Well, according to an article in today’s NYTimes called “United Shares Plunge on False Bankruptcy,” a false rumor started spreading this morning that United had declared bankruptcy. According to the Times, a Google search started the cascade of events…

“United said the rumor occurred when the Web site of The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, posted a six-year-old article from The Chicago Tribune archives about United’s previous bankruptcy filing. The airline operated under bankruptcy protection from 2002 through 2006….

….The outdated article received wide attention when it appeared that it was posted on Bloomberg News by a reporter for Income Securities Advisors, an investment research firm in Miami that tracks information about distressed companies.

Richard Lehmann, the founder of Income Securities, said the company’s reporter discovered the article during a routine search on Google for information about bankruptcy filings in 2008. A link to the old Chicago Tribune article appeared as the first search item, bearing a current date, not its original date, Mr. Lehmann said.

When the reporter clicked on the link, it navigated to the United Airlines article on the front page of the Sun-Sentinel Web site, next to a radar map showing the location of Hurricane Ike, Mr. Lehmann said.”

The context for the Google search certainly looked like it was “ripped from today’s headlines.” And can you imagine the confusion for United employees, wondering why their shares were halted from the NY stock exchange today amidst bankruptcy rumors?

I applaud the notion of scanning newpaper archives (quite literally scanning, in this case) so there’s no possible confusion by well-meaning researchers as to the date(s) of their results.

Meanwhile, the coincidence of the two articles appearing within moments of each other in my RSS reader was not lost here.

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Any marketer living in the 21st century, and responsible for a web site, should know three fundamentals of optimizing a web site for search.  However, most marketers leave even the basics up to their internal or external web resources. That is an expensive, irresponsible practice.

The basics are just that - three fundamental rules every marketer should understand. So I’m going to spell them out here in the hope that marketers (and the people who serve them) will understand these concepts well enough to use them in making every day marketing decisions.

Decisions like:

• How do you decide on a new content management system (CMS) to help you maintain your site without knowing whether it’s built to fulfill the basics?
• Beyond that, whom should you ask to add content to your site without knowing the basics? (What skills do you look for? How do you vet candidates? Do you already have people capable of doing so on your team?)
• How do you evaluate your search engine marketing (SEM) vendor without knowing the basics? (As above, how do you judge a potential working relationship without knowing even the fundamental rules? Are they willing to share the basics with you?)
• How do you evaluate the effective integration of your marketing messages oline? What are your potential positioning challenges as they relate to this very important medium?

So here we go - commit these three basics to memory, and you’ll be a much better marketer for it.

Optimizing Your Site

1) Your “Title tag” is the most important optimization tool on the page. You are limited to 64 characters in a title tag, which is sometimes called a “Browser title” in a CMS system. You should have a title tag for each page of your site, as it’s the first signal of relevant content to search engines.

The title tag in this case is: ‘The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia’ which is 59 characters long. It provides contextual meaning for people and spiders as they assess content on a site. In this case, the keywords they’ve optimized for are the brand, “news,” and “multimedia.”

Your CMS system or your web designers should have the capacity of creating relevant title tags for every page on your site. Consider your keywords carefully, and use them craftily. Even 64 characters can be enough!

Hint: Consider putting your best writer (perhaps in your PR department) on the title tag case.

2) Once you have keywords selected for each page on your site, use them in your headlines and in the first paragraph of your body copy. Again, keywords provide context, and spiders (and people) look to headlines and will read the first paragraph (if you’re lucky) to see whether they’ve come to the right place.

This goes for regular pages on your site, as well as landing pages from your pay per click ad campaigns.

Hint: Your PR folks are great at writing headlines and killer first paragraphs. Perhaps you can have them look at your web site and help optimize it…

Optimizing for Search Result Actions:

3) Your “Meta description” is what people see when they get search results, and is limited to 160 characters (in Google, which has more than 60% of the search market, so you might as well use their limits):

In this case, the meta description is: “CNN.com delivers the latest breaking news and information on the latest top stories, weather, business, entertainment, politics and more.” which is 151 characters, and provides plenty of context for me to decide whether the site has relevant content for me there…

Most CMS programs will allow you to input a meta description for every page on your site. Use the tool to make your results meaningful - especially to people who have plenty of choices as they review search results.

Knowing just these three basics of search will improve your results immensely. And it’ll improve your confidence along the way…

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