Disqus Comment System

Disqus replaces the WordPress comment system with it’s own, which allows readers to see their comments across all the sites that use Disqus, and it has good spam collection.

FD Feedburner Plugin

FD Feedburner is a WordPress plugin which redirects all the blog’s feeds to Feedburner to utilize Feedburner’s stats and additional feed functionality.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML site map to help search engines properly index your site.

Lijit Search

Lijit Search lets readers search the content on your site — can also support ads for your site (search and content-related).

LinkWithin

LinkWithin WordPress plugin displays other recommended stories on each article to help increase the amount of time people spend on your site.

PostRank

PostRank provides some social network tracking as well as top posts.  I use it to track the PostRank of each post which is also a metric used by the AdAge 150.

Scribe

Scribe is a paid WordPress plugin (affiliate link) which quickly and easily provides recommendations to increase the search engine optimization for each post.  Requires a theme which supports it (I use the Thesis paid theme — affiliate link).

ShareThis

ShareThis provides links so your readers can share your content on various social networks.  Lets you control which social networks show up (and what order).  Provides stats for how many times that button is used.

TweetMeme Retweet

TweetMeme Retweet adds a button for each post so your readers can tweet a link to the article.  Counts the number of times the article has been tweeted (doesn’t always catch alternative ways to tweet the article).

Wibiya Toolbar

Wibiya Toolbar adds a bar at the bottom of your site which has links for sharing your content on social media, as well as a message (among other features).

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup automates the backing up your blog’s database — can have it email a compressed copy or save to your server or computer.  Your theme along with your database are the key parts of your blog.  Having a backup of your database means you can recreate your blog if you have to.

WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box customize a message to your blog visitors depending on where they came from.  For example, ask visitors from Digg to Digg your post.

WP Minify

WP Minify WordPress plugin helps your blog run faster by combining and compressing javascript and CSS files to improve page load time.  I’ve seen a huge improvement since using this plugin.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache adds caching to your blog (which you can control) to make the pages load faster.  Site speed is now a consideration for Google’s PageRank.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

(photo by Sarah Worsham)

Finding Customer Touchpoints

It may help to list out all the different ways a customer (or potential customer) may interact with your brand.  Talk to customers to make sure you have everything on the list. Think about all the different times in a sales process that someone may interact with your brand. Also think about all the times a customer interacts with your brand, product or service after a purchase. Things like trying to look up a question on your website are often overlooked.

Customer Experience Mapping

Once you have all the touchpoints, map out how customers interact with each touchpoints and what they’re trying to do. Think of different tasks a customer may be trying to accomplish. How do they accomplish them? The map will probably look like an inter-connected network.

Improving Customer Touchpoints

Now that you have your customer experience map, highlight places where you’re doing well and places where you can improve.  What can you do to make the experience easier for the customer in the places where you need to improve? What parts of the process are giving customers difficulties and how can you fix them? With touchpoints that are going well, what’s working and what can you learn about it?

Increasing Sales

Customers are more likely to buy from you again if they have a positive experience with your brand (all the way through their experience). Customers are also more likely to recommend you to others if they have a positive experience. By improving customer touchpoints, you improve the experience of current customers who will be more likely to purchase or recommend you in the future.

How do you improve your customer touchpoints?

(image by Patrick Hoesly)

Being Too Self-Promotional

Only using social networks to send out advertising and marketing messages. On the social web you  need to send out content that your audience wants or else they’ll just ignore you (which is very easy).

Being Too Selfish

Only sending out links and content on your own sites. If you want people to respect you online, share content and links from others in your network.  Give more than you receive.  Follow the 80/20 or 90/10 rule — 80 or 90% of your content and tweets and shares should be either links and content from other sites or content that is helpful or informative to your audience.

Being Too Automated

Only sending out content automatically, auto-following and auto-DMing new followers.  Take the time to look at each new follower and decide whether or not you want to follow them back.  Quality is better than quantity.  If you want to send a message to new followers, do it individually.  Take the time to respond to people personally and thank them when they share your content.

Being Too Inconsistent

If you blog every day for a week one week and then come back a month later, people are going to forget to check your site.  The same goes with Twitter and Facebook and other social networks.  Taking a day off here or there is fine, just try to be consistent in how often you post.

Being Too Overwhelming

Sometimes too much information is overwhelming.  Look for clues from your audience about how much content is right — or better yet, just ask them.

Being Too Personal

While most people err on the side of being too impersonal, some people share things online that they wouldn’t tell a person standing next to them.  Think about what you share and whether you want that information to be public information forever.

Getting it Right

The right mix of content and engagement varies from company to company.  Try social media out.  Get some feedback.  Take a look at what works and what doesn’t and make adjustments.  Keep trying new things and learn about what works with your specific audience.

What do you think? How else do people commonly social network the wrong way?

(photo by Kaiban)

1. Choose the Twitter profile and click the “+ Add Stream” button.

Select the tab for the Twitter profile you want to setup for monitoring (this assumes you already have HootSuite set up with your Twitter profile) and then click the “+Add Stream” button in the upper left.

2. Select the Twitter profile & Select the Type of Stream from the drop-down menu.

Choose the “Mentions” stream and click the “Create Stream” button at the bottom of the window.

3. Check for the Mentions stream under your profile.

Now you’ll be able to monitor when someone mentions your twitter name (uses the @yourname) –you may have to scroll the window horizontally to see the stream.

4. Repeat step 1, now choose the Search tab under Twitter.

Enter in your twitter name into the search query box and click the “Create Stream” button at the bottom of the window.

5. Check for the search stream under your profile.

Now you’ll be able to see anytime someone includes your twitter name in their tweet. I use both the mention stream and the search stream because they seem to pick up different tweets.

6. Repeat step 4, but enter your company name in the search query

Repeat and add search streams for your company name, product names, your actual name (i.e, Sarah Worsham), and keywords that are important for your product or company.

The Results

Now you can keep track of what’s being said on Twitter without having to read every single Tweet.  Monitor for keywords, searches and mentions so you don’t miss anything important. Since you’re not reading every single tweet, you should have more time to respond and converse, which is the whole point of social networking.

How do you monitor Twitter?

Walmart pretty much ignored both cultural and consumer differences with its German operations.  They tried to run German stores like they do in the US with corporate policies that don’t work here.  And while they did change some policies, they were very slow to do so.  After 10 years of trying, they recently closed all their stores in Germany.

Even companies who only operate in the US or in one country still need to be cognizant of differences in how people want to purchase from them.  Customers in different industries or for different products may have different purchasing cycles or product preferences or contact preferences (among other differences).  The Walmart case reminds us to learn about our customers before we try to sell to them.  Luckily social media makes this easier than before.

Have you experienced differences in consumer preferences or purchasing?

(photo by Sarah Worsham)

Searches for “old spice” (and related terms) have also gone up in the past week — starting probably with the upload of the new commercial, and then increasing as people became aware of the video responses, which have been shared vigorously via Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.

Takeoff
How the campaign went viral can be seen a bit by looking at the statistics available with each individual video on YouTube.  For example, on the first video response posted:

Here are the associated stats:

You can see how the video’s popularity increased & what sites it was embedded on (and how many views it got). Interestingly enough, the video was most popular with men, their buying audience.

Interactions
While its a bit more difficult for an outsider to see this information, the number of interactions with the brand can be measured via the number of tweets, comments, posts, shares, etc. from a combination of sources.  Old Spice can also see how many people have subscribed and viewed their content (in total) since the start of the video responses — this info is available to anyone, but you’d have to do a bit of spreadsheeting to get it all and Old Spice would presumably have access to previous numbers to know how these increased.

Back to the Sale
As brilliant as these commercials and viral videos have been, it all comes down to whether or not they helped increase sales.  While it’s difficult to pinpoint directly whether there was an effect, Old Spice should see a lift in sales after the videos and the weeks to come, which is most likely attributable to this campaign — you’d have to take a look at all the numbers to make a more educated conclusion.

Thoughts?

1. Enter a topic you want to track and click the “Dashboard it!” button

Choose an image from the popup window, and then you’re good to go.

2. Check out the News tab

Monitor mentions of your topic on various news services, including Google News, blogs, and Flickr.

3. Check out the Video tab

Monitor when videos about your topic are posted on YouTube, Truveo, Vimeo, Dailymotion or Metacafe.

4. Check out the Conversations tab

Keep track of mentions of your topic on Twitter (including hashtags), WikiAnswers, YahooAnswers, Topsy, blogs, and other social networks.

5. Check out the Google tab

Monitor searches of your topics using Google search for the web, video, bogs, news, images and books all in one place.

6. Add any additional content

You can add widgets to show you content from all sorts of social networks, websites, and specific searches.  Or tailor your dashboard to have widgets which show you mentions of related topics as well.

7. Remove the General Tab

Click the name of the tab (General), click the Edit link next to the name.  In the box that drops down click the Delete this tab on the right — agree to delete the tab forever.

This is just a preference, but in my opinion, the information in the General tab is way too general, and not necessarily useful for using Netvibes for social media monitoring.  Feel free to keep it if you like it.

Follow this same procedure to remove any other tabs you don’t feel are useful.  You can also rename tabs or add new ones.

8. Create additional Dashboards for new topics

In the upper right corner, click Dashboards, then New.  Follow the same procedure that you did for the original Dashboard.

9. Save your work

Make sure you either sign up for an account or sign in to save your work. If you don’t, it may be available the next time you visit as long as you haven’t deleted any cookies from your laptop (and you’re visiting from the same browser and computer).  Be safe, and just login to save.

How do you use Netvibes?

1. It’s Not All About You – Make sure you’re not just using Twitter as another distribution channel.  While it’s ok to post your blog posts to Twitter, etc., people are only going to listen if you provide valuable content.  Think about what your audience is interested in and make sure that most of what you provide (80-90%) is for them. Then, it’s ok to throw in a promo or your own stuff occasionally.
2. Comment  - Reach out to people.  Comment on their updates.  Comment on their blog posts.  Don’t be a wallflower and expect people to find you first.
3. Share & Retweet – If you share and retweet posts from others, they’re more likely to reach out or share your content. It’s kinda like kindergarten….
4. Ask Questions – People like to give their opinion. Ask questions and have conversations around the responses (can be great content for blog posts and also a nice source of market research).
5. Use keywords – Many people monitor Twitter for certain keywords.  Don’t spam! But you may want to consider keywords that are important to your target audience (not to you) and try to use them occasionally. For that matter, monitor keywords for people who are worth following and also for starting conversations.
6. Use hashtags – You’ve probably seen those keywords that start with a #. They make it easier to follow conversations and find tweets about specific subjects. Don’t over-use them, but consider using them when appropriate (especially if you’re attending a conference). Monitoring hashtags for finding people to follow and converse with can be handy too.
7. Moderate a Twitter Chat – The great thing about Twitter is the ability to have a conversation with multiple people at once.  Setup a Twitter chat using a hashtag at a specific time (helps to have a topic too) and get people talking.
8. Find People You Know – People who know you are more likely to chat with you on Twitter and share your posts. In new Twitter – Click on your profile icon in the upper right, then click on “Settings”, then on “Find People”. For old Twitter, just click on “Find People”.  You can search by names, or find friends from your contact lists on other websites and networks.
9. Attend Tweetups – Find tweetups — or gatherings of people who use Twitter — in your local area to find other people who use Twitter and to meet in person.  Nice way to network as well.
10. Ask People to Follow You – Include your Twitter name on your blog, email signature, business card, etc. Ask people to follow you when you meet them.  I like to trade Twitter names instead of business cards because I can follow the person right from my smartphone immediately.  And people usually link up their website to their Twitter profile (or should) so you’ll have access to the rest of their info there.
11. Follow People in Your Industry – Find people in your industry to follow.  Reach out and comment on their tweets.  Many people also will follow people who follow them so this can be useful for building your own following (remember: quality over quantity).
12. Follow People in Your Target Audience – Use a Twitter Directory (like tweeple) to find people in your target audience to follow.  Reach out to them as well (have conversations, do NOT market or advertise).
13. Follow local People – People tend to feel a connection with people who live locally.  Find local people through Twitter or through offline events.

What works for you? How do you have conversations and increase engagement on Twitter?

(photo by Eduardo Fonseca)

Price vs. Quality

Everyone has a certain quality vs price tradeoff that they’re willing to make for any given product or service.  There’s a quality level below which no one will pay.  Same as a high quality level.  In order for someone to be willing to pay for your product, you need to be within their range.

Think about the different stores where you can buy groceries.  There’s Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Kroger, Hiller’s, Walmart, Meijers, etc.  There are also more direct sources such as farmer’s markets and co-ops.  Each of these locations targets a specific price vs. quality niche.  For customers willing to pay for top quality foods and convenience, Whole Foods is their store of choice.  For those who are more price sensitive, Walmart is the choice (where there is still a certain threshold for quality).  Even lower on price are discount food stores where people are willing to pay even less for less quality.

How does this apply to your business?

You need to think about your customers.  Who are they? Are they looking for higher quality or are they price sensitive?  For those b2b companies targeting smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, price sensitivity is probably very high.  You need to provide lower priced services that have a quality they’re willing to pay for.  But, you don’t want to come off as too cheap.  Else you’ll be perceived to have low quality & value.

Take a look at your competitors.

What services are they offering at different price points?  What is the highest price charged?  Who is the target audience and what is being offered at that price?  What’s the lowest price?  What’s offered at that price?  Where do you want to fit in?

Offer different price points.

If you can, try to offer different products or services at different price points.  Offer a no-thrills price with very little in non-essentials.  Offer a middle and a high-end price with more options.  Think about the airlines.  Many have first-class, business-class and economy.  Each gets you to your destination, but they have different prices and different services.

How do you price to meet customer expectations?

(photo by Photos8.com)

If you click on the See All in the upper corner of the Insights box, or you access your Insights by editing your page and clicking on All Page Insights under the Insights box on the right, you’ll be taken to a page with some graphs and charts.  Let’s break it down:

At the top of the page, you’ll see some numbers that look like this:

This will tell you how many interactions you’ve had this week (this is any time someone posts a comment, likes, shares or posts something to your wall – basically any time they do something other than read your page), which is further broken down into how many likes (when people like a post), how many comments (on your posts), and how many wall posts (you’ve posted, not total). In the upper right corner, you’ll see a number with some stars – post quality.  This is a measurement of how engaging your content is – how many shares, likes and comments you get on how many posts you’ve done in the past 7 days (it doesn’t count any posts by others).

Next you’ll see some charts and graphs for fans who interact with your page:

The chart on the left will show you how many interactions, posts, likes, and comments there have been per day for the past 7 days.  You can also select to view charts for interactions per post, post quality, posts, discussion posts, reviews and mentions for the past 7 days.  This can give you some feedback on which posts have done better than others and what your fans are engaging with.  On the right you’ll see some demographic data about the fans who are interacting and posting on your page, which may help you tailor your message (and possibly your product).

At the bottom is another chart and graph for total fans of your page:

The graph on the left gives you an indication of how many fans you’ve gained and lost over the past 7 days, but also can show you new/removed fans, top countries, demographics, page views, unsubscribes/resubscribes and media consumption.  On the right you’ll see demographics for all your fans (whereas the top chart shows demographics for those that have interacted with your content in the last 7 days).  If there is a large demographic of fans who isn’t interacting, you may have an opportunity to try to tailor a message towards them.

Hope that helps give you some basics for understanding Facebook page statistics.

How do you use your Facebook Page Insights?

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Metrics help measuring progress.  To know how you’re doing.  They can be extremely useful to know how well your marketing campaigns are doing or how well your social media strategy is playing out.  But if you don’t have a goal in mind, you may find yourself spending time and money on actions that don’t really matter to that goal.

For example, if you goal is to increase sales on your online store by 5% this quarter, what metrics should you measure?  Obviously the number of sales and conversions on the website itself.  But what are you doing on your blog or social media to help increase sales?  How can you measure that?  Starting with the goal first helps you build a strategy to reach that goal and to understand the proper metrics to look at to see how you’re doing.

If you start on the metrics side, say how many Twitter followers you have and how much that increases every month, you may get a feeling for how your online influence is growing (maybe), but how do those metrics tie in with your goal?  By focusing on metric first, you may spend way too much time trying to attract new followers and following people in hopes that they’ll follow you.  A greater following may help you reach the goal of increasing sales, but you need to figure out how to measure that.

In the case of Twitter, how do measure what we do there with reaching the sales goal?  Well, people are usually going to follow and retweet you if you provide useful information, not spam them with marketing.  But if you provide useful information and people come to trust you, it’s usually ok to put in a few words about your products from time to time (maybe a specific promotion).  If you lead people from Twitter to a specific landing page on your online store, it’ll help you measure what you do on Twitter with how it helps sales on your store.

This is just one example of how starting with a goal can help you plan actions online and how to measure them, but I hope you’ve found it useful.  I’d love to hear your stories about how you use social media and the Internet to drive business goals.

(photo by Haundreis @ Flickr CC)

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Technorati tags: analytics, statistics, marketing, strategy, business

Many of us have heard of Facebook and many of us use it to connect with family and friends.  But, have you ever considered using Facebook to promote your business?

Facebook is now both the largest and fastest growing social network.  With people spending a great deal of time there during their personal time, there is also an increased opportunity to connect with both customers and business contacts.

The biggest concern I have heard from clients/readers is not letting business contacts see all the silly stuff you do with your family and friends.  Facebook makes it possible to create different networks of contacts each with different levels of access to your profile.  This allows you to create a business network that doesn’t have access to your poke war with your college buddies.

Ok, so how do you tap into this network of potential?  One way is through traditional advertising – ads on the side of the page.  Facebook contextual targets their ads, so there is a bit of a higher chance they’ll be clicked on.  But, as with all advertising, people tend to ignore ads.

If you start thinking a bit more about your customers, you could create a page that highlights your business and automatically imports content from various sources – your website, blog, twitter, etc.  The idea here is to provide valuable content for your customers and a means for them to interact with your company (via a discussion).  This page could then be promoted through ads on the network.

Also available are groups. You could create one for your customers so they could interact with each other as well as you.  These work best if there’s a bit of momentum, so try enlisting some of your customers and business contacts to help you out.  You’ll need to lead discussions to get things started – and don’t treat this like a spam list or it’ll have a very negative effect.

Do you use Facebook for business?  If so, how?

Technorati Tags: facebook, social netwokrs, social media strategy, social media, business

Your company’s customer service can be ruined (or saved) by just one person. Because it’s so easy for customers to communicate their experiences with other customers (and potential customers), any bad experience can be multiplied a hundredfold. Here’s an example:

I’m a huge fan of J.Jill clothes, mostly because they actually offer pants for us Amazons (tall), but also because I like their styles and service.  I’ve been a loyal customer for many years (when will everyone offer tall pants?) and have had exceptional customer service both online and in their retail locations.  Until Tuesday.

On Tuesday, I went to a local retail store to try to return two pairs of jeans that had both failed due to material defects.  And I was denied, not just by one employee, but three, including the store manager.  I was told that the flaws were due to normal wear and tear and they wouldn’t accept returns for items I had worn.  Huh.  Really?  I’ve never had a problem in the past.  Maybe I should buy my clothes from a place that has a satisfaction guarantee – like L.L. Bean or Lands End.

Annoying a loyal customer doesn’t seem to be a good idea, especially during the current economic conditions.  And this store is in Michigan, which has been taking a lot of hurt.  I’ve never had a problem returning items that have failed before, and J. Jill has an awesome return policy:

There is no time restriction on your return. Your satisfaction is our top priority. If for any reason you are not thoroughly satisfied with your purchase, please return it promptly and we’ll exchange or refund your purchase price.

If I hadn’t had such great customer service in the past, I probably would no longer be a customer.  Luckily I happened to know about their return policy and so I contact their live concierge from their website where Melissa handled everything for me.  But, what if I hadn’t had so much great past experience?  Or what if I wasn’t so forgiving (they really do have nice tall pants)?  They would have been out a customer.  But not just that, I could have told everyone about my experience (like I’m doing now).  So, now how many potential customers has this one experience affected?

The point of this story wasn’t to rant (well not really), but to point out how much any person in a company can affect the overall customer service reputation.  Because it is so easy for customers to communicate to each other and to potential customers, a good or bad experience can affect more than just one person.  You could be losing thousands of dollars in sales from one point of failure in your company.  On the plus side, good past experience will help any bad experience, especially if you’re quick to make things right.  Unfortunately, bad experiences sit in people’s memory more than good ones, so it takes many more good experiences to make up for just one bad experience.

How does your company align all employees for exceptional customer service?

(photo by Suresh BJ @ Flickr CC)

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Technorati tags: customer service, reputation, business, marketing, brand

On Monday, we talked a bit about various branding strategies and why you should consider picking one to help your business and marketing strategies. With each branding strategy comes both advantages and disadvantages that you should be aware of.

• Corporate Brand – For companies that only offer one benefit to a customer, they usually use a corporate brand (unless they have an overall holding company).
  • Advantages: Everything the company does is attributed to its brand.
  • Disadvantages: Everything the company does is attributed to its brand.
• Distinct Brand – Some companies choose to release each product or service as its own brand (ex. Proctor & Gamble).
  • Advantages: Each product stands alone so failures do not affect the entire company or other products.  Distinct benefits for each product can be directly attributed to a specific brand.
  • Disadvantages: Each product will require its own marketing strategy and budget, with no synergy possible between products.  Successes will not be directly attributed to the company’s brand.
• Hybrid Brand – When a product extends the benefit of an overall brand or company, some companies use a hybrid branding strategy.
  • Advantages: Marketing and branding can take advantage of the overall brand for budgets and reputation.
  • Disadvantages: Any problems or negative press for either the product or the overall brand will affect both brands.
• Umbrella Brand – If a company offers different products with different benefits, but they all extend the same value to the customer, sometimes they are all offered under an overall brand (ex. Nike – athletic gear).
  • Advantages: Each product contributes to the shared value offered to the customer.  Marketing and branding strategies can be at the shared value level, touting all the specific benefits.
  • Disadvantages: Any product can negatively affect the overall brand and specific benefits may be muddled in the overall shared value.

Whichever branding strategy you choose, once you are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each, you can take those into account when preparing your marketing strategies.

(photo by Sarah Jane @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: brand, branding, branding strategy, business, marketing strategy, marketing