Creating a social marketing strategy

By Bob North on 4 February 2010

No matter how good your website is, if no-one know it’s there, it’s a complete waste of time. So it’s important you have a strategy in place to spread the word. Naturally you’ll be doing all the standard cross-referencing: including it on your business cards, packaging etc, but if you really want to reach out to new people you’ll eventually have to think about online marketing.

Unfortunately this can be a minefield. The landscape is evolving, with lots of players like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace etc all vying for attention, and each varying in their relevance depending on the nature of your business. Where to start?

There are two things I’d suggest for ‘day one’: See what your competitors are doing: if they’re already doing this, you can at least match that, and then see what else you can do. And, regardless of them, I’d start with some mainstays of online marketing: write a blog, post links to it to Twitter, and build a Facebook fan page.

Don’t rush at it though: despite the apparently trivial nature of some of these platforms, your reputation hinges on every public posting you make. Choose your language carefully, don’t act on a whim. Think about how things will read in the cold light of day.

Plan for the long-term. Writing a blog requires commitment: far too many blogs are started, and abandoned forlornly a few days or weeks later.

neatComponents provides some key technologies to help you manage and integrate all this: you can create your blog within your site: no need for it to be on a separate blog site where blog traffic won’t benefit your business. And you can get the site to store up and publish your blog postings on a schedule. Create a batch of postings in one session, and leave it to manage itself for a week or two.

It also integrates automatically with Twitter, giving you a smooth way to drive traffic to your blog – and to your site. Again, this can be done to a pre-arranged schedule: so a Tweet can be sent out when your blog posting goes live, and a reminder Tweet can be sent out a few hours later, catching a separate audience.

There are lots of people out there who will guide you through this whole process, but it’s hard to assess the professionals from the hopeless. Once business which falls squarely in the ‘professional’ category is Consoltis. They’re based in the UK, but work with clients worldwide, and put a lot of thought into providing a personalised service. They get a mention here as they are one of just a handful of “neatComponents Gold Certified Partners”, and they really know their stuff.
 

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Your web, post-Amazon

By Bob North on 3 February 2010

Last time I looked ahead to a world where global players like Amazon overstep their role in the market, and a forced to take a back-seat.

Today I’m looking at what will fill this vacuum, and how you can get position yourself now to be able to take your fair share when it happens. In essence this boils down to two key concepts: ‘own your data’ and ‘structure your data’.

Owning your data means keeping control over it. Don’t simply post it to content aggregators like Facebook or Twitter, where it is easy to add the information, but hard or impossible to move it to another platform. (But it’s okay to use them to point people to your content).

Keeping control means you should own the website where the content is delivered: that way you will not be beholden to others who might decide to switch you off. Luckily self-hosting is easy to do these days, as the cost of hardware reduces you can lease a dedicated server for $100 a month, and there are even cheaper methods if you host from your own office.

“Structuring your data” is all about making is usable, both now, and in the future. If you structure it properly – using forms and a database to store the information, splitting it down into different fields, then you will be able to present the information in lots of different ways, including ways that haven’t even been thought of yet. But if you just throw the pages together at the beginning, they may look great now, but later on you will have a terrible time restructuring it.

So, if you’ve prepared for the post-Amazon era by taking ownership of your data, and structuring it sensibly, what can you expect? More players will enter the market to search through the structure of your data to make it available and usable in different forms. So if you are selling products, you might find your items listed in lots of places, with innovative ways emerging for the user-generated content (comments, ratings, companion-product preferences etc) to exist outside of the walled-garden of a single vendor. Naturally we’re unlikely to have heard the last of the present giants: I’d imagine both Google and Amazon will evolve into this aggregating role, along with players who currently seem to be in a totally different place: for example hardware companies like HTC, and hybrid hardware/content companies like Sony.
 

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