hal9000.ie

Here is a cool SEO (search engine optimization) tool to visualize competitors with websites in your space that are ranking with Google. You can easily see the terms that they’re ranking for and it also shows the relationship between them.

You can create an SEO Visualization Graph for one term and then layer other terms on top. The graph will show how the various websites are related in targeting these terms.

The tool uses Google’s search results to show the top results for the given terms. The graph then displays the results in a great visual way to provide clarity.

Take a look at the following graph created for the search term ‘SEO Dun Laoghaire‘ with the term ‘Digital Marketing Dun Laoghaire‘:

You do see some spurious results however. For example, one of the results for the term ‘SEO Dun Laoghaire‘ is for a wedding photographer presumably because he has a footer link on his website with anchor text to an SEO company.

If you add in another term, ‘online marketing Dun Laoghaire‘, this is what the picture looks like:

They also have a similar tool for personal use with Facebook which shows how your friends are connected to one another (but you probably know that already).

Create your own at TouchGraph.

All Class Kitchens in Naas, Co. Kildare are a typical local business trying to get more visibility online. Having redesigned their website (and a lovely job done too – thanks to Amosh Designs ), the next challenge is how to reach their prospective customers.

Local business search marketing is key to providing a return on the investment in a website and here we’re going to look at the things they could/should be doing to market themselves. A similar strategy applies to other local businesses.

Online is a big place, so it’s all about relevancy and targetting.

Geo-target with Google

In this example, the website allclasskitchens.ie is already relevant for Ireland because it has a .ie domain. But it could also be set to target Ireland in the Google Webmaster Tools facility.

Localise with Maps

A great way to localise a business is to place a map on the website. You can use Google Maps to pinpoint your business and make it easy for Google and customers to find. Our case study could add a map to their ‘Contact’ page.

Address and Phone No.

Also have the business address prominent, so that search engines can tell where the business is located. Ensure consistency of the address across all places it appears online. A local landline phone no. will create trust with your local visitors. All Class Kitchens have this clearly laid out on their Contact page, but it could also be added to the footer of each page to emphasise

Google Places

Formerly known as Google Local Business, a Google Places listing is a must for every local business. This is even more important with the increase in smart phones. The Google Places app for iPhone and Android is being used more and more to tell people where the nearest coffee shop or kitchen supplier is. The business in our case study, All Class Kitchens, already have a listing but this could be enhanced in a number of ways:

• Tag with all the keywords relevant for the business.
• Place the business in all the relevant categories
• Add pictures. This enhances the result for visitors and search engines like to return quality results to searchers.
• Get reviews from your existing customers. This is an important one. In search engines eyes, the more reviews you have the more relevant you are.

If your business doesn’t already have a listing, you can add a Google Places listing. It’s free.

While Yahoo and Bing are not widely used in Ireland (less than 5% of search engine market share), and you can’t add local Irish listings at the moment.

However, if you have a UK presence then you can add local listings to Yahoo Local Listings and Bing Local Listings.

Also, take a look at Facebook Places and adding your place here. For more info see  Facebook Places Business.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

Local Directories

A number of local online directories are available to place listings, mostly free. Some of these also have review features and therefore get more attention from Google. The business can place listings with these. It’s important to keep the details, in particular the website URL consistent across these entries.

A good tip on choosing directories is to do a Google search for a similar product or service and see which ones  Google is returning. Also, you could check to see which ones your competitors are listed with.

Some of these directories include:

• hotfrog.ie
• whoseview.ie
• yourlocal.ie
• browseireland.ie
• yelp.ie
• qype.ie
• niceone.ie

There are many more. See also whether there are sector specific ones. For example the An Post managed site Iloveshopping.ie is for ecommerce sites or childcare.ie for children-related businesses.

Of course, the site itself needs to be optimised for the key terms of the business. For example, the business  in our case study also designs and builds bedroom and home office furniture. So the relevant pages should be optimised.

And there’s more. But that’s for another day.

The number of Irish users on Facebook is now almost 1.9m, and growing. So chances are that your customers, and the ones you want to have, are there. Here’s an overview and a look at the top Irish pages.

An online presence for your business

In the past, businesses often had to be encouraged online and even now only 68% of Irish businesses have a website (according to Amas, State of the Net). Today, the place that is relevant for many businesses to set up a stall is Facebook. And compared to the cost of website platforms, it’s free at entry level.

Facebook  vs Website

Facebook is a different beast to a website, it’s all about interaction. Those who go to your business page are not ‘visitors’ in the same sense as those who go to your website, they are in a social mindset. They ‘like’ things – it’s an emotional response, transitory, uncommitted. If it annoys them subsequently, they can ‘unlike’ it in a very casual way. They are much more likely to post to a facebook page wall than fill in a contact form on a business website. Therein lies it’s greatness. Customers are people, and people are social.

Is it relevant for B2B?

It is more of a B2C space, but depending on your sector it may be relevant to B2B. After all, it’s people who make decisions, not businesses. Take a look at Simply Zesty’s page to see what a B2B social media company can do with Facebook. They’re interacting with nearly 17k people. Having said that, it’s hard to find good examples of Irish B2B pages.

Top 5 Irish brand pages

1. Baileys……………………………. 1,035,459    Likes
2. Blackberry UK & Ireland………..   228,708
3. Guinness Ireland………………..   221,231
4. Jameson Irish Whiskey…………  183,183
5. Guinness…………………………. 178,449

[http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/ireland]

There’s a high alcohol content in this B2C mix, with the leader being Baileys. Now Baileys is nice, but not that nice I’d have thought. The page doesn’t have a Welcome page (or landing page) and the Profile picture on the left sidebar isn’t too exciting. But they do have recipes. And 1,035,043 people like them.

Guinness Ireland is in 3rd place and has a competition to draw people in. They’re showcasing their new ad and encourage people to post it on their wall. They have a page to promote the Storehouse, but the ‘Like’ button image on this is not clickable. With the recent Facebook changeover from FBML apps to iFrames, these buttons can now be added to customised images and be clickable through (instead of people having to click the facebook ‘Like’ button at the top of the screen).

A big factor in online success is keeping the number of clicks to a minimum, it’s about making a process as easy as it can be for users.

At no. 4 is Jameson Irish Whiskey, who streamed live radio from facebook on St. Patrick’s Day as part of their Global Party. Who doesn’t like a party?

Top 5 Irish media pages

1. Oxegen……………………….. 164,984
2. Spin South West……………… 62,549
3. Today FM……………………… 44,239
4. Aviva Stadium………………… 32,389
5. O’Neill’s Sportswear…………. 25,197

The Oxegen page has great interaction and is clearly where it’s customers are. In common with the other pages, they have customised the URL to get to the page – it’s www.facebook.com/Oxegen. This can be done once a page has 25 likes or more. It makes your page more identifiable from a branding perspective and  easier to remember. The name is not case-sensitive. This customisation is all  the more important as the search facility in Facebook is not too highly evolved.

Hats off to Spin South West who are using QR Codes in their profile picture to promote the iPhone and Android apps for the radio station. They’re also running a competition.

Aviva are relying on the popularity of rugby. An easy sell then.

O’Neill’s Sportswear is clearly popular and they’ve ran a photo tagging competition to win a jersey. Elverys Sportswear, in contrast, have lower likes but have a well-designed welcome page and a Facebook shop powered using the Owjo application.

One thing is clear, successful pages get engagement by offering people something – a competition, shopping experience, special offer or promotion, or perhaps just information. There generally needs to be something enticing, something to make someone click the ‘Like’ button.

The second part of this is the response. Once you’ve got the fans on-side, it’s time for conversation. Having a Facebook Page is an on-going committment where fans expect someone to be listening. It’s a two-way process.

Have you gotten a great deal from CityDeal?

Promotion sites like CityDeal could present a valuable marketing opportunity for your business. They have the customers and you have the product or service. It could form an important part of your digital marketing strategy. What could possibly go wrong?

I want to take a look at the benefits for businesses (and consumers), but also look at possible drawbacks and the potential to damage your reputation.

What is it?

CityDeal is a voucher deals website owned by Groupon, a company that has grown massively in the last year. Groupon is so big globally that Google tried to buy them last Dec for a reported $6 billion. But Groupon weren’t for selling.

And there are many other voucher code and deal sites with various offerings operating in the Irish market:

• Boardsdeals.ie
• LivingSocial.com
• One4all.ie
• Fatcheese.ie
• Pigsback.ie
• BeThrifty.ie
• Easydeals.ie

How does CityDeal work?

The site offers a deal each day, dependent on whether enough customers sign up for it. This allows a business sell a minimum number at a particular price.
Customers sign up for a daily newsletter which offers them the deal of the day. This can get your business in front of a lot of eyeballs in a way your business might not be able to achieve otherwise.
CityDeal build on their existing database by a ‘recommend a friend’ reward system. They make this easy by placing social media sharing links on every deal.

Benefits

The benefits for businesses are obvious – you can reach many more customers and sell more. The site has an opted in email database that is every email marketers dream. Even if those customers are not in the market for your product now, you have got your brand in front of them for a few seconds. It can be a useful marketing exercise.
For consumers, there are definitely deals to be done. These kinds of sites have responded to the increasingly price-sensitive nature of consumers. And for customers who are flexible on the ‘when and where’, the goods are there for them.

Business drawbacks

•   The commission taken by CityDeal and similar sites has to be carefully looked at and can be up to 50%. In combination with the discounts, which for CityDeal may be up to 60%, the margin may not be worth it.
•   You may get more business than you can handle. If you don’t deliver the service, it can backfire.
•   Your brand may be cheapened. When customers realise what you can sell it for on a deal, they may not value your brand as highly.
•   Existing customers may think they have been paying too much and feel aggrieved.
•   The business doesn’t get paid until the customer redeems the coupon. If the customer never uses it then CityDeal pockets the money.
•   A weakness of the site is the lack of targeting. The deals emailed are ‘local’, but perhaps not local enough. If you live on Dublin’s southside, then a hairdresser deal in Malahide is not relevant to you.

Business beware

But I think a bigger problem for businesses is when they try to sell products and services that they can’t sell elsewhere. Businesses need to be careful that they are not seen to be trying to hoodwink people. A ‘deal’ is not a good deal if the availability isn’t there when the customer goes to book. With the rise of social media, consumers have a loud voice and reputation management for businesses is a growing concern.
Every business wants to get new customers, but customer retention is so important. If you annoy this group, who like your product and want more, then the whole thing is counter-productive.

Example 1:

Selling a luxury night away with a voucher value of €360, but when you go to book there is no availability except for a Mon, Tue, Weds and a couple of Thurs. Now, a mid-week hotel offering in Ireland is not the same as a weekend offering.

CityDeal ‘Voucher Value’ advertised               : €360
CityDeal cost for 1 night B&B for 2 people     : €150
Website cost of 1 night B&B for 2 people
+ DINNER FOR TWO – Midweek                         : €220

Do the maths.

The hotel referred me back to CityDeal and made no attempt to ‘deal’ with the issue. CityDeal, to their credit, addressed the problem quickly and agreed a refund without quibbling. It has since been credited back to my credit card.
But I won’t go back to Castle Leslie again.

Example 2:

Selling a Dinner deal, but when you go to book it’s only available until 6.30. In my gastronomic opinion, this is not ‘dinner’, it’s an ‘early bird’.
Does Conrad Gallagher want his customers to go back to Salon des Saveurs?
And I’m not the only one who sees a problem. It was noted last Sat in The Irish Times Magazine ‘What’s not hot’ section.

Experiences like these annoy consumers and so they hit the unsubscribe button.  Will CityDeal ultimately lose subscribers? It’s going to be a balancing act for them.

Groupon’s rise to online greatness

“Groupon represents what the dot-com boom was supposed to be all about: huge sales, easy profits and solid connection between bricks-and-mortar retailers and online consumers.”

To find out more about  ‘the fastest growing company ever’, have a read of this excellent Forbes article on Groupon.

What do you think?

Would you like to do some online research on the visitors to your site?

Perhaps you’d like to know what they’re looking for, or where they’re coming from (although your analytics will help here). Or, perhaps you’d like to know whether they find your site easy to navigate.

There are a number of services that offer easy to use and cost effective solutions. Let’s take a look at a few and then see some tips on how to make online surveys work for you.

1. Providers: SurveyMonkey requires a sign-up but offers a basic survey for free. This features a 10 question survey with up to 100 responses. So, you can dip your toes in without any committment. Surveygizmo is another and offers a free 14 day trial. Checkbox offers either a hosted (Saas) or installable solution, with a 30 day free trial.  Pollmo now has a free offering that you can embed on your own webpage or blog.
2. Objective: Clear objectives at the beginning will help achieve useful responses.
3. Concise: The temptation is often to make the survey too long and to find out all kinds of things that you’d like to know, but this can make people lose interest, get annoyed and drop out. For an online audience in particular, the user’s attention is limited so let them know it’s short so they’re more likely to buy into it. Check how long it takes to complete.
4. Questions: Be careful on the construction of questions and avoid leading questions.
5. Logical: Keep the flow of questions in a logical format and in related categories. Keep the least important information until last.
6. Easy: Make it easy to answer and avoid any ambiguity. Use terms you know your visitors will understand. They may not use terms that are commonplace in your sector. Consider Steve Krug’s Usability Principle – ‘don’t make me think‘!
7. Incentivize: You may want to offer an incentive to those to encourage a good response rate. Competitions work well.
8. Test: Run a small pilot before putting it out there to your audience.
9. Thank: Thank your participants for taking part.
10. Share: Publish the results of the suvey. Those who take part in surveys generally have an interest in the results. It also allows you the opportunity to interact with your audience.

Would you like to try out the Pollmo offering?

Thanks!

First things first, what does Crowdsourcing mean? Check out this definition of Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing can be considered a new model of problem solving as it allows for ways of solving problems and achieving goals that were not easily accessible before the internet. In particular, the recent explosion of social media has changed the way people engage online. This is true for businesses also.

There are a variety of companies that have moved into this space, devising new ways to use the ‘crowd’ to focus on different tasks and deliver solutions.

Here are a few of them:

UserTesting: This company offers affordable website usability testing. Importantly, the service is easy to use.

CrowdSPRING: These specialise in Logo and Web Design. The client posts a project and states a price and member creatives pitch custom designs for the client to choose from.

Tongal: Their website states that “Tongal allows businesses to activate a global community to procure and distribute a diverse selection of high-quality content”. They specialise in video.

Interestingly, the name Tongal is an anagram of Galton (Sir Francis Galton), an English statistician who observed that when guessing the weight of an ox, the average of the crowd’s guesses was more accurate than any one individual. Hence, the wisdom of the crowd.

NamingForce – Here people contribute names to all kinds of things and the names can be voted up or down. The winner gets paid. I particularly like the submission ‘Pride and Groom‘ for the name of an upmarket pet store!

Starting a Crowdsourcing project

Every project is different, but here are some features to bear in mind:

1. You need a ‘crowd’, or access to an online community.
2. Connect with your readers, fans or visitors – projects work best when the task is aligned with their motivation to participate.
3. The company, or initiator, must be open to new ideas and ways of doing things.
4. A system for vetting the ideas or results is required.
5. Ensure it’s easy to use.
6. Keep the task, or requirement, quite specific though not so narrow that there’s no scope for creativity.
7. Use in addition to your staff, not as a replacement.
8. Avoid exploiting the ‘crowd’ or any possible perception that the ‘crowd’ is being exploited.
9. To this end, maintain communication with your collaborators and give feedback.

What’s your favourite example of a crowdsourcing project?

What is a QR Code?

A QR Code is a 2-dimensional code that is scannable by a smartphone. It works in a similar way to the more familiar bar codes on products in the supermarket. The difference is that they look more like a pictogram and they can be scanned by anybody with a Smartphone. Read more about ‘what is a QR Code’.

How to generate a QR Code

You can generate a QR Code quite easily using a free site like Kaywa.  Here you can enter a URL or a Phone no. or SMS message and the code is generated for you.

How to scan the code using your phone

Then you can install a free app such as NeoReader on your iPhone which uses the phone’s camera to scan the code and, if the code contain’s a URL, the user will be brought to that site. There are other readers available for other smartphones. In fact, Google’s Android has it built-in on some devices.

Ways to use QR Codes in Marketing

Connect your Direct Marketing campaign to your Online Strategy by putting a QR Code with your site’s URL on printed material. This URL could be a video showing a demo of a product, more information on the product or it could be bringing the user to the site to make a purchase or a sign up page for more information or open an email to contact. Use them on:

• Billboards
• flyers
• magazines & newspapers advertising
• promotional stands in shops
• product packaging – for links to installation videos
• toy packaging – for links to richer experience like games on website
• printed coupons – with special offers to purchase online
• property for sale signs – to get the tour and details
• bus stops – to get an up to date timetable
• business cards – the contact details can be fleshed out

Location Marketing is one of the big opportunities in the mobile space. The QR Code could bring the user to the nearest shop. Google are also promoting the use of QR Codes in Google Places.

The other great advantage to Mobile which is driving growth is the real-time nature of it. People go nowhere without their phones. They even go to bed with them. When they go out, they’ll probably forget their wallet quicker than their phone.

Google also have Google Goggles which is an image search facility using the camera on a Smartphone. This returns search results based on the image and can also be used for QR Codes. It comes as part of the Google App and you use it by clicking the camera icon in the search facility.

Smartphones are on the increase so this market is only going one way and the opportunites are out there. If we look at Google Trends we can see that the interest has been shooting up globally throughout 2010. This has been reflected in Ireland also.

Here’s an example of one containing text. Do you know what it’s saying?