"The concept of micro goals is really about looking at all of the little things that can happen with your social media campaigns," she told WebProNews in an interview at PubCon in Las Vegas. "So we think about it in terms of, how many followers do I have on Twitter [or] how many fans do I have on Facebook? But a lot of times people don’t look at the other small level goals that happen, so like how many times has this specific article been retweeted or how many times does the discount code off of Twitter get used?"

"When we look at all of those as individual goals (micro goals), they just are what they are, and we put them together, we can get a lot of insight into an overall campaign," says Laycock. "We may see a lot of links and a lot of traffic coming into some of our articles, but then if we go and look at the engagement level or the conversion rate off of some of those articles, it’s next to nothing. Well, that’s easy to say this is just link bait, and if we wanted to accomplish something, we need to re-write it. We need to come up with something different."

"So, it’s having those micro goals in play to give you the way to see sort of the overall picture," she adds.

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By getting a better view of that picture, you should be able to fine tune your efforts in order to increase traffic and conversions. "The nice thing about micro goals is that if you’re looking at it on that level, you can kind of change directions a little more quickly with your campaign, because you’re not just looking at that end goal of did my conversions go up or did I get more traffic?" she says. "You’re actually seeing it as it’s happening. So you have a lot better opportunity to change directions mid-stream, and fix something that’s not going the way you want it to."

Having goals means knowing why you are doing certain things in social media (as opposed to just jumping on the social media "brand" wagon). "What I’m seeing a lot happening now as companies call, is I’ll get that call that says, ‘We need you to build a Facebook Page for us.’ And I’ll say, ‘why?’ And there’s just dead silence. And I get, ‘Well, I don’t know.’…because everyone’s doing it," says Laycock.

"You don’t want to do just what everyone else is doing," she adds. "Don’t jump off the bridge because everyone else is…People spend the money on the Facebook Page. They have fun making friends, talking to people, and then at the end of the day, when the CEO comes in and says, ‘Well what did this do to our bottom line?’ they go, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s problematic."

"If you want to impact the bottom line of your business, set a goal and figure out which social media outlets are actually going to help you reach it," she continues. "Not just which ones are most popular."

You may think that you have to be on Facebook or you have to be on Twitter, and there are certainly plenty of good reasons to be, but if these reasons aren’t practical to your own business, you can probably do without them, although it’s hard to imagine not having a goal of reaching as many people as possible with your message. 

"I, much like most of the other people in the industry, used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I find myself spending less and less, because it was taking away from what I needed to do, which is work with clients," says Laycock. "So, invest the time to get the understanding, but once you have that understanding, ask yourself honestly: is this working for me? And if it’s not, start investing some time into learning something else."

It doesn’t hurt to keep your eyes open for new technologies, like New York Times tech columnist David Pogue was saying in an interview with WebProNews. There are so many technologies coming out so frequently, you’re not going to be able to jump right into all of them, but you can keep an eye on the industry and look for practical ways to use different services. As he said, it may be dangerous to wait too long. That said, don’t forget about your goals. 

The short and skinny of what is to follow is this:

Understanding humans better benefits business
Think overall strategy, not just tactics
Twitter has good search placement (tactic)
Twitter is a goldmine of permission-based marketing (strategy)
Building relationships also builds trust and opportunities
Niches are inevitable (and present); find yours
One-to-many communication is efficient and on your terms

Previously, I and others suggested Twitter was destined for spamminess, or at least some kind of deceptive marketing. Indeed it is and indeed it has already begun. That’s not a reason, though, to avoid it. Use it while it still has value.

Also previously, I waxed existential about Twitter being, for me, a place to observe and learn from humanity. While that doesn’t seem immediately useful (if you’re old school, it seems like a real waste of time), a very large part of marketing is not just identifying your market, but understanding it better. Twitter provides a perch from which to observe and learn. A new app called Twittearth makes that perch that much more intriguing.

Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock referred to it as "acceptable eavesdropping." From this perch, you can exercise a novel concept in marketing: listening. This is the difference between you and a spammer or spaghetti-against-the-wall message-pounder, always with his mouth open and his ears shut.

"Personally," says Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss in a blog post on the difference between strategy and tactics, "I’ve felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans."

So what’s the difference between a strategy and a tactic? A tactic would include actions like ones used by the aforementioned loud-mouth spammer, who, if we’re just talking Twitter, would either never be followed to begin with or would be unfollowed as soon as he betrayed a Twitterer’s trust. Or, it could include utility of the knowledge that Twitter, like Wikipedia, now ranks very well in Google’s search results.

Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron showed us this when he noted that only eight people ranked for "I got a call from eBay." Sure enough, there’s more to it than the one freak occurrence. At Shoemoney, AJ Vaynerchuk shows how well Twitter users’ personal brands ranked in Google’s search results. Twitter profiles appeared on the first page almost without fail. Tactic: Establish a brand on Twitter, a site with high trust (the creator is a Googler, by the way), and you could establish some visibility in the SERPs.

What good does that do you? None if you don’t have something to offer. But it could fall into the greater strategy of connecting with people and building relationships. The deeper, harder to crack usefulness of Twitter is via the oft theorized but little focused on concept of permission-based marketing. Twitter followers and followees are in your network by choice, and if you’ve earned it, they’ll listen.

"It also gives you some insight into who companies and bloggers are as people; their likes, their dislikes, their personalities," says Ms. Laycock. "This can be invaluable when it comes to putting together pitches and building relationships both inside and outside of your industry.”

In a small survey of online marketers done by SmallBizTrends, two social networks popped up most when asked which were the best for small businesses to use: Twitter and Facebook. That’s because they allow you to unobtrusively interact with your market to build relationships and trust within – and here’s the important part – your niche. You’ll see more and more niche-based networks pop up and those will be useful too, but in the meantime, there’s a good chance your niche is already hanging out at Twitter or Facebook or even LinkedIn.

Messages are short and to the point, which people like, and those same people have given you permission to interact with them. It doesn’t have to be a marketing message (besides, nobody likes a pitch they can smell), but a genuine relationship to build trust. Think carefully about trust: When buying a car, you’d be more likely to deal with the guy your dad has dealt with for 30 years than you would with the kid that just shook your hand on the lot, right? It works the same way. People are more likely to do business with people they are already familiar with.

And you don’t build that familiarity with on-message bombardments people are likely to ignore or resent. You build it by understanding them better and by helping them understand you better. Tweet to tell your audience about recent successes, about what happened on the way to dropping the kids off at school, about your thoughts on current events, about a really kick-butt blog post.

Really, that’s the best part about these sprouting one-to-many, permission-based communication channels: It’s your message on your terms. Just ask the Prime Minister of Britain, whose team has a Twitter account to deliver his messages without the media’s filter/translation/supposed bias. You can wax about whether you can trust anything coming out of a governmental office, but the idea makes a lot of sense. Others have used it for free giveaways and to answer customer questions.

Hopefully, this illustrates how businesses can use Twitter and other social networks in a meaningful, strategic way; hopefully, how you apply the knowledge will foster two-way, permission-based relationships, not marketer-versus-customer tactics. Remember that box you’re supposed to think outside of? Welcome to the outside.

(Coverage of the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Jennifer Laycock

Viral marketing is content designed to build a buzz. Laycock said, " The good thing about viral marketing is it’s cheap." It works because people distrust ads and they trust friends or strangers in online communities.

The challenge of viral marketing is the idea. "Any idea won’t do, it must be something worth talking about," Laycock said. Create brand evangelists by giving people a reason to talk about your product. A sense of importance will increase credibility.

When creating an idea keep in mind what sparks passion in your customers and if it has done before along with the audiences willingness to risk their reputation. Laycock said," Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader, not the originator."

Use existing networks, "You have to know where your target market is hanging out," Laycock said. Be familiar with the places they visit like discussion forums and blogs.

There are a number of types of campaigns to consider. Using humor has universal appeal, spreads quickly and leaves a positive association with your brand. The down side is it can be tough to sell to the executive crowd.

If you use breaking news have it first and say it best. The negative is it can take a lot of time and may not be a good match for your brand.

 Start a debate by offering a friendly challenge, if done properly it can help you gain respect.

Avoid using an attack campaign, instead be a resource that educates and informs. You can also use a fear campaign, which can be a motivator.

Offer free things but only to "key influencers" as it can impact your bottom line.

Make a campaign personal by appealing to people’s egos.

You can get the word out by emailing friends and colleagues, using search engines to find sites related to your topic and using blog search.

Laycock said," Understand what matters to small businesses."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.

Ok, this one has come and gone but I wanted to provide a short debrief. I have to say that I had a fantastic time. Searchfest marked my one-year anniversary speaking at conferences. They opened the door for me at Searchfest 2007 and were kind enough to invite me back this year. Boy, am I glad they did.

I have to say that I was really surprised by the marketing power they were able secure for each session was amazing. I felt severely out gunned on both panels I was on. I was amazed at the quality of the information provided and the overall environment established by the SEMpdx team.

I met quite a few people in the industry and instead of trying to list them all here I just want to say thanks for making my SEMpdx experience a great one!

Search Engine Strategies: New York

By the time you read this the conference will already be happening, but it’s not to late to drop by for some sessions. I’ll be taking the red-eye in to arrive on Tuesday morning and hope to grab an early morning session before heading back to my hotel for a power-nap. Wednesday I’ll be attending a few sessions and then speaking on the Vertical & Retail Track in a session called SEM Small Business Blitz. I’ll be speaking with Jennifer Laycock and Matt McGee, both providing valuable information that’s worth the price of admission.

My presentation is titledWebsite Marketing Strategies that Don’t Suck (Money from Your Wallet) and I’ll provide some quick hits on

• keyword organization
• website architecture
• getting attention
• PPC strategies
• competitive intelligence

Search Engine Marketing: Unleashed

This one is my favorite of the three, and not just because I have a secret crush on Jennifer Laycock. What you need to know about Unleashed is that this will be unlike any other conference you’ve attended in our industry.

Instead of hearing a panel of speakers share four different viewpoints, (leaving you to figure out which one is right) we’ll give the stage to one expert who knows how to explain the nuts and bolts of their topic to the small business audience. You’ll get the information that’s vital to improving your online marketing techniques and you’ll get it without the techno-talk and industry jargon so common to larger online marketing conferences.

On day two, we’ll take things a step further, breaking the show down into intensive work-shops that actually walk you through the process of beginning to market your site. Whether it’s keyword research, viral marketing, paid search advertising or a variety of other topics, our expert marketers will walk you through the actual steps of launching your online marketing campaign and will send you home with the knowledge you need to finish the job.

If you have not reserved your seat then you’re too late for the early-bird pricing, the registration fee of $975 is still a bargain. Here is a list of the speakers you’ll be treated to:

• Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide
• Matt Bailey, Site Logic
• Wendy Piersall, eMoms at Home Network
• Matt McGee, Small Business SEM
• Debra Mastaler, Alliance-Link
• Heather Lloyd-Martin, SuccessWorks
• Mack Collier, The Viral Garden
• Christine Churchill, Key Relevance
• Sage Lewis, SageRock
• and myself, Stoney deGeyter, Pole Position Marketing

I’ll be speaking on Website Architecture and have a fantastic presentation put together that I’m sure everyone will benefit from.

Finally, here is a great video put together by the Small Business Marketing team. Sit down, relax and enjoy the next minute and a half.

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2008 is a good year to think beyond Websites and start thinking about lifestyles—how we live and why we do what we do. The Web isn’t going away—but the way we interact with it, might just turn into a moving target. Actually, it already is.

(Thanks to Jennifer Laycock for this). As Armano says, life is becoming increasingly mobile.

While fully supporting his sentiments, and although Microsoft has some powerful initiatives, I predict that Mobile 2008 will be the year of the Google. They have a number of irons in the fire, but the activities of the Open Handset Alliance will strongly support their mobile thrust.

By chance, the US Patent Office has already published in 2008 a Google Patent Application on a User Interface for a Phone, which Bill Slawski describes:

User interface for mobile devices
Invented by Sanjay Mavinkurve, Shumeet Baluja, and Maryam Kamvar
US Patent Application 20080005668
Published January 3, 2008
Filed June 30, 2006

Since it was filed in 2006, nothing should be read into its appearance now. However I believe it has symbolic importance.

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Are Your Social Networking Connections Hurting YOUR Reputation?

) brings to mind the saying of my grandmother’s: ” You are known by the company you keep.”

While some may dispense with this as old-fashioned advice in the new socially-networked world. I find it to be true now more than ever.

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Jennifer will be blocking all search engines from indexing the Bento Yum site while she works to promote it in other ways. She’ll also be writing a series of articles that follows the progress of the business.

I thought this would be a good time to step back from seo for a moment and think about what it really means to your site and business. Do you really need search traffic to grow or maintain a successful business? Do you need to optimize your site to gain maximum visibility in search results? The key word in both sentences is ‘need’ and the answer to both questions is no.

The Role Of Search Traffic In Your Business

Think about your business and what it takes to make your business a success. You might have a variety of goals, but somewhere in there is possibly products and services you sell. You likely have some goals set for how many sales you need to make each month, quarter, or year. To get those sales you hope to drive traffic to your site and also hope a percentage that traffic goes on to make a purchase.

Search engines enter the picture as a source of traffic, but it’s important to remember they aren’t the only source of traffic. Someone who’s been to your site might email a friend and include a link to your site. People might find your site through an ad you placed in a newspaper or magazine. Perhaps someone finds your site through your forum signature or profile on a social media site. There ways to find you that don’t include a search engine.

Search traffic is good. If you’ve optimized well, the traffic can be highly targeted. You get to place your products right in front of someone at the exact moment they are looking to buy that product. Search engines are a way to reach people who’ve never heard of you before. They are not the only way for people to find you, though. Search engine marketing should be part of your overall marketing efforts, but it should not be the sum total of your marketing efforts.

Links Are About More Than Search Engines

Think about link building. When you’re building links into you site you may be thinking about how those links will help you rank better in search results and all the traffic the search engines will send your way. What about the links themselves? Those links can drive traffic directly. Place them on sites related to yours and the traffic that arrives through those links is also going to be targeted.

When you hear advice to look for relevant links a part of that advice is geared to get you to see that the link itself is valuable. Even if a search engine never finds that link or decides it’s not going to consider that link when ranking your page the link can and will drive traffic. Get the right kind of links and you won’t care what a search engine thinks of them. You’ll still have targeted traffic that is interested in your content and what you have for sale.

If the links are helping you rank better great, but even if your search traffic disappeared you’d still have targeted traffic that can sustain a successful business.

Do you want to know why the nofollow attribute didn’t work to stop spam comments on blogs and guestbooks? The idea was that since a search engine would ignore the link when considering rank, spammers would stop the automated submissions. Spammers aren’t interested in the ranking, though. They long ago discovered the links were valuable for their own sake. Spam 10,000 blogs and you have 10,000 potential entry points into your web page. People do click those links.

Please don’t take from this that you should start spamming blogs and guestbooks. You shouldn’t. Do take that links are valuable for their own sake and have benefits outside the concept of a search engine.

The goal of seo is to bring targeted traffic to your site. Smart SEOs and marketers know that targeted traffic doesn’t necessarily have to come from a search engine. A search engine can be a great source of that traffic, but search engines are not the only source of that traffic.

Search marketing should be a part of your marketing efforts, but that doesn’t mean you should focus on search marketing to the exclusion of everything else. If you don’t believe me maybe Jennifer will be able to convince you.

I’ll be looking forward to reading about Jennifer’s experiences with the site and learning some of the ways she promotes it. We should all be looking for new avenues to bring traffic and new channels through which to market our businesses. I’m sure Jennifer will help us find new ways to promote our businesses and generate ideas for how we can find even more ways. I’m looking forward to her new series of articles and I hope you will be too.

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At SEW Live in Ohio, Laycock explained that you and your marketing are only as good as your ideas.  Search engines, she said, are attempting to become more and more human (or, rather, their designers are trying to program those tendencies into them), so there is no longer any sort of magic formula.

Laycock dubbed this trend the Pinocchio Effect, and believes that it is already in play.  She firmly stated that there is no sandbox – it makes no sense, according to the Search Engine Guide editor – and said that, like a person visiting an Ethiopian restaurant instead of a Chinese takeout place, search engines attempt to find uncommon content.

As Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Ask’s little Pinocchios become real boys, tracking click-thrus and latent semantic advertising are on the horizon.

This leaves just three rules of organic search, according to Laycock.  First, speak the customer’s language.  Second, understand the search buying cycle.  And third, searchers must learn to be more effective, building interest, doing research, and making purchases.  And the number one rule of pay-per-click: it’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers.

Want to gain some more insight on these subjects?  Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide guru, recommends reading Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  After all, the Great Equalizer is just common sense.

Though social networks and social marketing have become the hottest topic in online business these days, Laycock advises that Digg.com is a bit narrow when it comes to audience.

Depending on what a business owner is selling, there’s a high likelihood they are targeting the wrong market. Digg is mostly male, young, IT professionals and engineers – a fantastic audience for certain interests.

(It should be noted though, aside from the traffic Digg can generate, that too much about its audience shouldn’t be presumed. Hunting equipment, most probably, wouldn’t appeal to this Silicon-Valley-and-Star-Wars-minded crowd, but there is a range of things that could surprise the presumptive marketer. For example, a Digger may have a father who likes to hunt; they also have wives, mothers, daughters, brothers, uncles, aunts, and friends.)

Laycock scores, though, with the thought that marketers shouldn’t put all of their eggs in one basket. Focusing all of your attention on Digg, like relying solely on Google for traffic, is a bad idea.

She recommends establishing a business presence in a number of social places like StumbleUpon, Netscape, del.icio.us, and Reddit, and especially MySpace.

A Flickr portfolio can be a great place to market, she says, because it is visual. YouTube, too, is nice for the opportunity to demonstrate products.

Remember, remember the YouTube blender?

And YouTube, well, can you think of another video medium that offers an audience of 34 million people hanging out for nearly a half-hour daily, and the only cost is for production, then you might find another video site just as valuable. You also might find out why the TV networks are so threatened by YouTube – it’s not only about copyrights.

Some Bullet Points from Laycock’s Presentation:

Understand which social networks fit with what you are working with

40% of MySpace users are ages 35-55

Don’t forget other popular destinations like Xanga, Facebook, and Bebo.

Utilize discussion forums; an online community devoted to Corvettes is perfect for select offerings

Enlist consumer review sites like Epinions, Hotels.com, Amazon.

If you have a brick and mortar presence, or a local angle, don’t forget local search, like CitySearch.

Give incentive to review, like coupons.

Have the right story for the right crowd.

Provide lots of information, lots of humor.

You’ll need a catchy title and a buzz-worthy hook with a call-to-action that’s easy to spread via link motivation.

Make the viral part easy. "The less work there is, the more likely that they are to [spread] it." Heh, like creamy peanut butter.

Build relationships with community members

The apology comes just days after a ham-fisted (ah, puns) cease and desist letter ordering Laycock, to borrow from the most clever headline about the row, "to remove her shirt." The shirt in question parodied the National Pork Board’s slogan, "The Other White Meat," by changing it slightly to "The Other White Milk," in order to raise awareness, support, and money for breastfeeding related causes.

Bloggers, especially in the SEM community, were outraged by the threats in the "lawyer crafted nasty gram," and by one especially egregious accusation to be noted later, and rallied behind Laycock by blogging to everybody they knew, threatening a Google bomb if the National Pork Board didn’t back off. And then, the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in on her behalf as well.

National Pork Board CEO Steve Murphy sent Laycock a personal letter of apology:

We apologize if the tone of the letter was impersonal or harsh, and will use your feedback to improve our communication processes in the future. Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. We wish you and your Lactivist program great future success.

The poorly communicated part of the letter to which he refers is, most likely, the part where they sling mud about Laycock promoting adult breastfeeding fetishism, giving the C&D an extra dose of nastiness. But, in that attorney’s defense, the seek-and-destroy proclivity toward pure meanness is probably why she was hired in the first place.

Also, according to a correspondence between the National Pork Board and Brian J. Moore & Associates, the firm that took up Laycock’s cause pro bono, the representative of US pork producers will take up a collection among its employees for a donation to the Milk Bank.

From that letter:

Because of the federal limitations on the expenditure of “Pork Checkoff” funds, National Pork Board is unable to make charitable contributions to any organization, including a non-profit organization such as Mother’s Milk Bank of Ohio.

Despite this restriction, however, and in light of the fact that the staff and leadership of National Pork Board have had their awareness raised concerning the needs of mothers who may be unable to breastfeed their children on their own, National Pork Board intends to conduct a voluntary fundraising campaign among its staff and executives to gather donations for Mother’s Milk Bank of Ohio. Although we cannot say for sure at this point how much money will be raised through this campaign, we anticipate – based on the support we have already seen among employees at National Pork Board – that this campaign will result in a generous contribution to Mother’s Milk Bank of Ohio.

The gestures did not go unrecognized or unappreciated by Laycock, who created a new shirt reading, "Breast: the original white milk."
She writes:

We all know how rare it is these days for a big corporation to admit that they’re wrong. Rarer yet, is the group of executives that are willing to dig into their own pockets to make a donation to right a wrong. (So much easier to dip into the corporate coffers and to write it off as a business expense.) If we’re going to lambaste the companies that behave poorly, we must celebrate the companies that do the right thing.

And so, after all is said and done, Jennifer Laycock and the National Pork Board are once again like two pigs in a poke.

Gosh I’m sorry about that. That’s all folks, I promise.

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