Going to Cardiff Start Up 11th April 2013 ?

I am looking forward to checking out Cardiff Start tonight. I am not sure what to expect. The world of the start up is getting a lot of attention recently. Some big names in the field from over the pond are Eric Reis and Steve Blank. They both believe that exploration and discovery are things that start up businesses do well after the business plan is written.

Business Plans & Waterfall versus Minimum Viable Product & Agile

The Blank/Reis or Lean Startup approach is iterative and flies in the face of the time honoured “write a business plan and build on it” model pumped out by many business support agencies. I suppose it’s a take on the waterfall v agile software development model. Waterfall projects begin with painstakingly put together requirements documented and extrapolated. Agile methodology prefers iterative steps. Blank and co offer the model of getting to a stage not much past a prototype (Minimum Viable Product) in order to test out the market. They argue that the agile framework suits the way start ups work in real life. In short business planning isn’t a one shot deal. There are many other really interesting concepts in the Lean Start Up model. For now check out this video of Steve Blank addressing business plans, org charts and many other sacred cows of business development!

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Came across this video on the Branded3 blog. It’s a video of Patrick Altoft talking about marketing. In fact its got the obligatory buzz words of “Using social media for SEO” to appeal to a specific target audience which is standard at these type of events.

No BS approach to social media

I have seen Patrick talk at a number of events and he is a great communicator. He does a good job here too.

Some takeaways…

1. Create something people are interested in. (Check out Mark Reis’ Lean Startup for deeper thinking on this)
2. Find people who can distribute your message/product. (In the social media world this is called  influence. You may also know it as PR, Endorsement, Product Promotion and maybe even  distribution or retailing) 
3. Develop a relationship with them (I believe the phone, email and money are often used)
4. This is a typical sales process – social media tools can help at each stage.

Seriously, if you are trying to make sense of how social media can really work for your business and the only people you can find are those who talk about tweets, retweet ratios then spend 10 minutes watching this video. 

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Just because you can measure it

It’s hard to be in “digital marketing” and not be swept away by the massed ranks of experts (defined by author rank or klout score of course!) preaching the virtues of analytics, conversion and optimisation.

You bet your life I can find causation

If you are not coming up with bankable insight about the correlation between retweet distribution, longtail SERP fluctuation and the effect on those with a follower count of over 15,000 then you simply aren’t being scientific enough!  

I have sat in one social media presentation where somebody drew a correlation between United Airlines’ share price dropping by 10% with one incident that sparked a mini twitter campaign. Now, there may be causation, but the first place I would look is the cost of aviation fuel rather than a twitter campaign.

Measurbation

That’s why this video about what Sutherland calls “Measurbation” is so interesting. Some things can be understood by measuring them, some can’t, and some things need a gigantic data set and huge computational power to be even close to understanding them because of the subtle complexities involved.

Whether you agree or not, Sutherland is his usual entertaining self so its well worth a watch.

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Five links worth 10 minutes

1. Who owns the right to filter your feed
2. Algorithmic illusions
3. The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
4. Are brands people, my friends
5. Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You

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I was luckily enough to deliver the Digital Marketing morning ‘quick start’ talk for South Wales Chamber of Commerce. Hats off to Graham Morgan & the Centre for Business Team, the format was spot on.  A short, sharp and concise introduction to get small businesses  thinking about opportunities in the digital space.

The format didn’t allow us to go into much detail so I thought I might post some follow up resources here.

SEO for startups in 10 minutes – advice straight from Google

Google Now

A constant theme during the morning was of concentrating on the needs and wants of the customer and then working back or around these core issues to find opportunities. Firms like Google do exactly that. The below video is their ambitious vision of how people will discover local content in a seamless way that may not resemble the lists of links we are used to when we are trying to find a business or service.

The following link is from +Bill Slawski on how context is likely to shape how people find things online. The future of finding things is likely to be more about where you are, what your doing, what you have done and whats on your mind than just what you type into a box.

Read Write Web ask a very different question – “Google Now” Knows More About You Than Your Family Does – Are You OK With That?

EU Cookie Law

The EU Cookie law was brought up right at the end and we didn’t have enough time to go into it in any depth. It’s quite a complex and fuzzy issue at the moment and lets face it largely unresolved. Here are some links to material that might help businesses with their thinking around cookie law compliance.

• These are the guidelines
• Some good examples of how companies are approaching the EU Cookie Law.
• Implications for data collection and analysis

As with all laws, the impact is unpredictable on many fronts. Until we see some real life challenges we will not be able to tell how the EU cookie law will be interpreted by the various judicial systems across all member states.

Further help and advice

If your business needs help with any aspect of their digital strategy be it planning, implementation or in house training please get in touch today and make a start.

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With news of the Mayor of Tampa Bay using Foursquare to show people around his city, it got me thinking about what the collision of technology and travel is doing to tour guide business models and the future of destination marketing in general.

You could argue that being a ‘tour guide’, your locality is your niche. Knowing a bit about an area is a good start, but in todays travel industry is it enough?

For a background on new approaches for tourguides Tour Guide Marketplaces - is auseful guide from Tnooz

 Designing the location based experience

A video that takes a peak at the intersection of storytelling and peoples experience of a destination. It talks of augmented reality but also, importantly about user experience design, albeit in a real 3D world not just on your website.

Mediating Mediums – The Digital 3d [Short Version] from Greg Tran on Vimeo.

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The following talk about perceptions and perceived value are insightful and relevant to anybody working in marketing, digital marketing or otherwise, there is always another way to frame a product or service.

Adopting this mindset when thinking about Web design, creativity in PPC advertising, content strategies for social media or offline direct marketing. If you have 10 minutes to spare the following video is well worth a look.

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For quite some time now online marketers have recognised that links are an important part of  success online. There is lots of great stuff on Linkbuilding around at the moment so I thought I would quickly document some linkbuilding stuff I have stumbled across recently.

What’s a good link?

Prospecting Tools

Will Critchlow tells us more about the linkbuilding tools they use at Distilled

Linklove Roundup

And to finish off (and at risk of a little duplication) we have a complete list of tools from the Linklove 2012 conference lovingly curated by SEOptimise

Happy Easter!

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The little guy can win

The tourism industry

The tourism industry is largely made up of small businesses often micro businesses . In other industries distribution is always important, but with information as the core product, travel and tourism is dominated by distribution. The end result – suppliers & intermediaries are all thrown into the same competitive landscape.

For most hoteliers, holiday cottage owners, and bed and breakfasts the reality is that the vast majority of their customers are delivered through an intermediary of some sort.

Be Realistic

Effective channel management – If you’re small forget competing directly for high volume direct traffic in the conventional sense. Instead Use analytics tools to work out who can provide you with customers in a cost effective manner. Hotels are often plugged in directly to ‘the travel distribution’ network they are more comfortable with managing inetrmediaries, holiday cottages and B&B’s less so.

I am not saying forget about directly acquiring customers – only to strike at the right time, in the right place with the right offer.

Long Tail – If you are familiar with the long tail you will know that people describe what they want differently and niche products and services can often provide welcome volume for small businesses.

this is the sweet spot you are looking for, that where volume and clear intention exist

Why  not take a leaf out of the Paid Search managers handbook. Don’t spend budget on high volume low converting terms.  The deal is often done after the prospect has narrowed down their options and is ready to specify exactly what they want – this is the sweet spot you are looking for, that of where volume and clear intention exist.

Beyond search – The long tail doesn’t just apply to search – for every nich interest there are directories, communities and portals to gain exposure through.

The good news is a small business doesn’t need that much volume – it is quite feasible to run a healthy small business in this long tail.

Recontact strategy – with so much hype about social media these days its easy to forget that email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to market. It can be highly targeted and highly effective. Be realistic and pay for traffic you could never get, but once you have a customer make sure you keep them and get lifetime value from them.

Be Local

In terms of search, one advantage of being a small local business is that you are exactly that, small and local.

What tell tale attributes does a real life, bricks and mortar local business have?

• A physical address and phone number
• A local presence
• An affiliation and presence in a relevant trade directory (Trip Advisor, Local Tourism Association)
• Links to other local businesses
• A reputation – real life reviews from proper paying customers

These concepts are the foundation of local search engine optimisation – its an example of one of the truths of SEO “think like your customer”.

Details like which networks and sources search engines are currently favouring may change but these principles underpin the process.

Be Different

One way of re targetting your business online is to simply do something different. Many businesses have products or services that differentiate them like a hotel offering murder mystery weekends. When I look at hotel or self catering websites I see all the effort going into competing headon with intermediaries or bigger businesses when they should be exploiting what makes them different.

When I look at hotel or self catering websites I see all the effort going into competing headon with intermediaries or bigger businesses when they should be exploiting what makes them different.

Be Seasonal

OK so this wasn’t in the title but it would be a glaring omission if I left it out.

Seasonality, Volume and Realtime marketing – Small capacity of micro businesses means that much of their marketing is wasted. They will have choke points in their season where they are full and lulls when they struggle for occupancy. Social Media and Paid Search are not often talked about together, but they both share a valuable characteristic – they are both real time marketing technologies perfect for the tourism industry.

Couple these technologies up with a good content calendar and you have the ability to exploit the benefits of being a small business squeezing value from intermediaries but also feeding on the seasonal and long tail nature of the tourism industry.

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SEO or CEO - Customer Experience Optimisation

The new process interview

I was catching up on some SEO reading courtesy of inbound and I came across an interesting interview with Mike King.

A lot of what is discussed  will resonate with anybody who has ever carried out  in house SEO or been a digital marketing manager within a large organisation. To me Mike King always talks like an SEO who really ‘gets’ marketing and harnessing an organisations processes to result in better performance.

Question: Is it better to pay an agency to go out and build relationships with industry authority sites? If you have a PR department why not re purpose them?

A follow up question:  While spotting the opportunity might have required some SEO insight, its a management skillset that makes this happen for an organisation so what levers do you use to reprogram PR?

I digress….to get back on track and to quote the interview “Far more needs to happen first before we fire up the keyword tool”

Some nuggets…

Opportunity Discovery within the vertical – Understanding the business domain is sometimes neglected by agencies, yet is essential first step.

Business Goals – This is usually the second element after you understand the space the client operates in. Quite often business goals takes some teasing out – after this is done its worth revisiting the opportunity discovery phase armed with more detailed information.

Audience insight – success online is usually found via obsession with the customer and the end user. In the days when social media information wasn’t readily available understanding user intent was a process of reverse engineering keyword phrases. Key word research is still important but there are now many platforms and techniques that expose what your customer really wants and is interested in – remember we are not just interested in what somebody types in – its the motivation behind it that will inform much more than your SEO (think landing page design creative, copy etc.) This process is usually pulled together by some form of persona development.

SEOMoz to Moz – A customer centric move?

SEOMoz may soon drop the SEO from its monicker and be going with ‘Moz‘ . I don’t want this to be an ‘is  SEO dead’ style comment  but with social media and its relationship with search its worth asking…

Does SEO mean anything to anybody but the most technical of clients? The process eloquently described in this interview would be best described as digital marketing rather than SEO.

Secondly, a whole bunch of small businesses  are pestered  daily with people contacting them ‘promising them to make you number one in Google’ using SEO. So, back on the customer centric tip – calling yourself an SEO may be a badge of honour with your peers, but are you selling to your peers?

Image: epSos.de

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