You know more than we do
The end of 2008 is looming and we are doing a bit of navel gazing here in IIA HQ. Navels are all very well for gazing at but they’re a bit low on useful information. All of you however have lots of information about our events in your pretty little noggins and we want it!
We’ve prepared a survey about our events where we ask you about what you liked about last year’s events, what you didn’t like, what kind of events you would like to see next year and we also ask your opinion on some specific aspects of our programme. So fill out the survey please – it’ll only take five minutes!
Social Media Working Group publish Draft Guide to Business Blogging for review
The Irish Internet Association’s Social Media Working Group chaired by Brendan Hughes, FBD.ie, are holding a workshop to discuss the first draft of their first Social Media Guidebook. This first draft publication is entitled “Blogging for Business: a Guide for Irish companies”.
In the spirit of Social Media this guide was developed collaboratively online by the members of the working group. Continuing this collaborative model the working group hope to share this draft with anyone interested in blogging for business and to discuss and develop it at a workshop. If you have never blogged before the Social Media Working Group are interested in your feedback. If you eat, sleep and work blogging, the Social Media Working Group are interested in your feedback. The draft will be circulated to all workshop attendees as soon as they register (so please register sooner rather than later).
It is hoped that remote attendance will be facilitated. Please follow www.twitter.com/iia or email members@iia.ie to express your interest in attending remotely if the facility is available on the day.]
Audience: Those interested in using Social Media for business be they expert or non-users.
Aim: To create a useful beginners guide for business people planning to get started in Social Media
Objectives: To discuss and develop the material prepared by the Blogging subgroup of the Social Media Working Group
Venue: Presentation Room, Digital Depot, Roe Lane, Thomas St., Dublin 8
Time: 3.30pm – 5.30pm
Date: Friday 5th December
Cost: Free to IIA members/ €20.00 non-members
Advertising on Google: The Bluecube Guide for Beginners
A guest post from Will Roche who works with IIA Member company Bluecube Interactive with some great tips if you are looking into starting an AdWords Campaign on Google to attract targeted traffic to your site. Will previously worked with Google so he knows a thing or two!
“The noblest search is the search for excellence”
-Lyndon Baines Johnson
Advertising on search engines is one of the most effective methods for driving qualified traffic to your website. Compared to traditional forms of advertising, it is more cost-effective, you can measure performance from the very beginning of the campaign and you will be reaching out to potential customers at the precise time when they are looking for information on products and services they want to buy.
At its very heart, this form of advertising is wonderfully simple – a user sees an ad based upon their search – but there are many factors that you must consider to ensure you don’t pay more than necessary and that the clicks you receive are actually contributing to your profitability.
With this in mind, Bluecube Interactive has created this guide to help you get started in this much-misunderstood area. The advice that follows will help you to lay the foundations but remember, our search team is always available if you need to take your advertising to the next level.
Account Structure
The structure of an AdWords account is vital to achieving a great return on your investment. The right structure will ensure that users are served the most relevant ads at all times and it will make reporting, account navigation and optimisation much easier.
The ideal account structure is one which separates the products and services offered into their own campaigns. A good example would be a company who offers two services – web hosting and web design.
Each service should have its own campaign. This has numerous advantages. For instance, if web hosting is the more prominent service, a greater proportion of the overall marketing budget can be allocated to that campaign. It also makes comparing the cost-per-click performance of both services much easier as you can see at a glance which campaign is driving the most traffic, achieving the most conversions and is providing better value for your business.
Within each campaign, there should be numerous ad groups which group related keyword phrases together that are reflected by specific ad text variations. Examples of ad groups would be:
- web hosting
- website hosting
- UK hosting
- Linux web hosting
The goal should be to make your account as granular as possible and to think about the user who is searching for your keywords. If they are served an ad that relates directly to their search, the user is more likely to click on your ad and convert into a sign-up, lead or sale.
Keywords
As mentioned previously, keywords should be as specific and targeted as possible and they should relate directly to the ad that the user sees. If a user is searching for product codes or other specific terms, they are likely to be further along the purchasing cycle than those searching for more general terms and therefore, more likely to convert on your website.
General keywords like ‘photocopiers’ or ‘printers’ can be very good for driving large volumes of traffic and can also be beneficial for branding purposes. However you should be aware that general terms are also more expensive and may not lead to the same return on investment that can be achieved with specific keywords.
Another keyword type that you should be aware of is the negative keyword. Almost as important as the keywords which trigger your ads, this type of keyword prevents your ad from showing on irrelevant or unrelated searches. For instance, if your keyword is ‘printers’, this term is liable to be expanded to show for searches like:
- inkjet printers
- laser printers
- free printers
- screen printers
- second hand printers
If your business only sold inkjet printers, you may not want your ads to be displayed for searches on laser printing terms so you could add ‘laser’ as a negative keyword and reduce the amount of irrelevant impressions on your ads. This would result in the same amount of clicks, less impressions, a higher clickthrough rate and because Google’s system rewards highly targeted advertisements, you should see a reduction in your average cost per click.
Ad Text
The actual ad text shown to users searching on your keywords is very important and we recommend using three variations which the AdWords system will rotate evenly until it determines that one variation is performing better than the others.
As mentioned previously, the ad must relate directly to your keywords. It is also very good practice to have the keyword in the ad text itself. If the searched keyword is part of the ad, that text will be highlighted in bold letters and makes your ad stand out to your prospective clients.
Another best practice is to give the user an idea of what you expect them to do once they reach your website and you should certainly use call-to-action phrase to do this. Phrases like ‘order online now’ or ‘contact us today’ can be very effective in driving conversions. If your goal is to have potential leads call your sales team, you may wish to try an ad variation which has your phone number. In this way, you could potentially solicit leads without the need for any chargeable click activity.
Landing Page
Once a user clicks on your ad, the landing page is the next important step in ensuring a strong conversion rate and ROI. More often than not, advertisers use their home page as the destination for their ads but if you have many products or offer different services, you should choose the webpage that is most relevant to the keyword searched and the ad displayed to the user.
It is always worth remembering that more you make a user click, the less likely they are to convert. Generally speaking, if a user is searching for ‘accounting software’, you should bring them to the page with all the relevant information about that software to make their purchase decision. We would also recommend not bringing users directly to ‘contact us’ pages unless those pages contain an adequate amount of information on the product or service itself. Landing pages which only contain large contact forms and no information tend to have very high bounce rates (the amount of users who leave your website) and do not convert very well.
If you are mostly interested in driving phone calls to your sales teams, I would recommend having your contact details and phone number on every page of your website. Once again, this prevents the user from having to navigate your site for the information they require. As with all things related to Google advertising, the focus should always be on the user experience and how you can make their conversion as easy as possible.
About Bluecube Interactive
We are a small company with big ideas, and we have a lot of big ideas about search engine marketing. Our experienced search specialists offer a range of services to ensure the success of your campaigns.
Our Services include:
Account Creation
After researching your existing online environment we will create keyword lists, text ads and calculate your optimum cost-per-click settings to ensure your ads appear on the first page of results for the most relevant searches. Our expertise will ensure detailed campaign performance analysis and increased budgetary control.
Optimisation
One of the key success factors with a PPC campaign is the continuous refinement of keywords and ad texts based upon historic performance. Our specialists can recommend and implement changes that will noticeably improve the performance of your campaigns.
Website Analysis
We use traffic analysis software that allows us to see how valuable each keyword really is, if your conversion goals are being met and what we can do to maximise these conversions.
Account Management
We offer full-time account management services that make us solely responsible for the success of your PPC campaigns. We will discuss your marketing goals, research the online environment for your industry and create the campaigns that will deliver strong results. We also provide regular reporting on account performance and how users are interacting with your website
Our account management service ensures that all areas of your search engine marketing are in the hands of experienced professionals who will be in regular contact with your marketing team.
The real Spice Girl is at Spicendipity
A big IIA welcome to Spicendipity a company who facilitate one of my favourite things in the whole world: baking. I have sampled Spicendipity’s brownies and I hate to say it but they are better than mine. Deborah 
Hadley, the woman behind Spicendipity, was also recently shortlisted in the Net Visionary Awards for Best Business Blogger. A quick gander at her blog will tell you why she was nominated and then chosen by the judges. I also had the luck to hear Deborah presenting at PodCampIreland in September and was very impressed by her approach to setting up Spicendipity. Social Media has been very much at the core of her business plan. She also made very good use of her market research as a starting point for her future email communications which I thought was a very clever approach. If you ever have the opportunity to hear her speak, take it.
Link me, link me, say that you’ll link me
The way some people come from GAA or rugby families, I come from a jazz family. I have no strong feelings about this particular style of music myself but I do recall a game the jazz nerds used to play late at night after a long jam (man). Basically you would think of titles of jazz standards that included the word love and substitute the word love with lunch. Much hilarity ensued – I did say they were jazz NERDS.
Hence the title above with a bit of a pop twist when I was thinking about LinkedIn this week. Krishna De who has been presenting at some of our events this year, recently added an item to IIA.ie which I think might be a first for Ireland. Krishna is running a LinkedIn for Business Masterclass as part of Dublin City Enterprise week tomorrow.* Now considering Krishna has over 500 contacts on LinkedIn and that I recently joined her on her PodCampIreland podcast to talk with her about LinkedIn’s new applications suggests to me that here is a woman who (a) knows what she is doing and (b) continues to find out at much as she can about the online tools she is using. I would say that an afternoon in Dublin City Enterprise Board, O’Connell Bridge House and €30.00 would be well spent and you might well see me there.
You might see me there because, mea culpa, I am a LinkedIn newbie. It was never terribly high on my list of must-use sites until recently, partly because of the nature of the work I was doing prior to my role in the IIA. Recently I had a revelation though when one of our members contacted me looking to make a connection with another member company. I had a quick think and it suddenly occurred to me that the quickest way to do this was through LinkedIn. So hopefully those two IIA members will make connections that may have otherwise been more complicated to make.
With this in mind I have set up a group on LinkedIn Group for IIA members so I hope you will join us there soon. If there is a particular IIA member that you would like an introduction to please do not hesitate to ask me – that’s what I’m here for!
* And on a blowing our own trumpet note Krishna told me that within half an hour of posting that item on the IIA website she had one registration who referenced IIA.ie as their referral point. Lesson learned: people who like jazz really are nerds. No no no! Get posting your information to the IIA website. Update your profile. Add your RSS. Is that your old logo? Yikes! Change it. Tell us about your new appointments and post your vacancies – it’s all happening on IIA.ie
Contagious creativity
The subtitle of one of the IIA’s newest members Squire is contagious creativity and I really hope it is because I’m feeling in need of some creative contagion lately! But enough about me. Squire’s services include website design and development, flash development and animation, video & audio editing, dvd & interactive cd-rom production, flash banner ads and online advertising. So they’re not only creative but multi-talented. A great addition to the association.
Do you want to really understand the User Experience?
Joshue O’Connor, a member of the IIA User Experience Working Group from the National Council for the Blind in Ireland, outlines what delegates can expect from the IIA User Experience Conference next Tuesday 25 November in the Burlington Hotel Dublin.
In business there are many confounding variables that face you. Internal and external pressures at every corner. If you sell products then you must have people who must decide to buy and use your products, the same for any services that you provide. The web has opened up new horizons of possibility but how do you really get it right? Trying to understand what makes your users tick is a full time job in itself and not exactly an exact science.
Therefore coming to the IIA User Experience Working Group’s annual conference on the theme of “Brand building, profitability and customer loyalty through better User Experience” will really help you. Meet with some practitioners who spend their time trying to understand the user experience. There are many diverse and experienced speakers at this event who will endeavour to share what they have learned as practitioners. You will come away from this event with, at the very least, the realisation that there is a lot to be learned when you consider the complexity of the very people you are trying to reach, and hopefully a trick or two that may help you to improve the quality of the services that you offer.
Click here to check out the progamme, speakers and register for this event. Readers of this blog can get 10% off by using the code “UEBlog” when prompted during registering. At €145.00 for non-members and €75.00 for IIA members it’s a bargain even without the discount. As they say in Irish may you enjoy and gain benefit from it!
Mo gheansaí, do gheansaí, a gheansaí
Damien Mulley is running another innovative competition to find the best Search Engine Optimiser in Ireland. The competition has become known as the Geansaí Gorm Competition. (although I think it is being spelt “geansai gorm” without the accent. I’m sayin nuttin! 
) This phrase was chosen so as not to pollute the rankings of actual businesses because it was unlikely that there are many trying to sell geansaithe goirme online (bang goes the Spailpín Fánach’s line in blue jumpers…)
The competition runs until 3pm on December 1 2008 so if you are really good there is still time to get ranked in Google for geansai gorm. I’m really looking forward to seeing the resuls. I’ll be keen to see how much social media helps the winner or whether the purchasing of AdWords helped. I’ll keep you posted on the results.
Now I’m off to sell all the mentions above of geansai gorm to the contenders… 
A very social (media) week
As Brendan Hughes mentioned in the previous post, the IIA Social Media Working Group welcomed input from Neville Hobson this week at an open meeting. I live tweeted some of the meeting but unfortunately the free wifi in the Digital Depot where we held the meeting broke down – bad timing or what! One of the things I love about live tweeting on a purely selfish level is that it gives me a chronological re-cap of the event that I am attending so excuse me if the following bounces about a bit.
We had asked Neville to join us to talk to us about his experience of the business case for Social Media. Neville provided some insight into how some of the larger corporations that he is working with are embracing customer engagement by using social media and discussed that what they might lose in control they gain in new and more engaged stakeholders and customers. Neville said that it’s a given that social media is going to disrupt and businesses will have to change the way they work but that understanding this change relates more to understanding societal behavioural change in general. This point is echoed in a book I recently finished that was lent to me by John Beck, the director of one of our member companies, PillarProjects. The book was called Good to Great by Jim Collins and examined how a number of companies achieved sustained greatness. It included the concept which Collins called the Hedgehog Concept which suggested (put extremely simply!) that the great companies that his team examined had a core concept for the companies from which they did not stray. If one agrees with this one might ask why would one change one’s approach to communications and customer relations? However, I believe that a company with a strong Hedgehog Concept will easily take on the added challenges and benefit from the opportunites that social media offers because of the very strength of their core concept. A great company which is made up of great people will easily be able to engage and involve all their customers in their work.
Another great practical aspect of the afternoon that we hope to use for future open meetings of the Social Media Working Group was the addition of OnlineMeetingRooms.com. This doubled the attendees at the event and we had seven from Clonmel, two from Kildare, and one each from Dublin Southside, South Tipperary County Council, Limerick, Greystones and Munich!
I posed a question which many of the people I meet and talk to on the phone ask me: how to make time to use social media, how to know what is a good use of that resource in relation to it. And here I am breaking my own rule writing this post at 7.44pm on a Friday evening. Sad or what!? Like many who make a living out of their knowledge of social media and have the time to blog every day, Neville didn’t really have a straight up and down answer for this except that the whole discussion answered that question. He talked about CEOs who blog in their own voices and the value they place on that and indeed the value which is placed on it. He talked about social media tools allow him to use his time more effectively and (gratifyingly for me as I am writing the chapter on RSS for the SMWG’s guide to Social Media) he said, “RSS is the best thing ever invented!”
To finish he was asked what kind of goals could be set in relation to social media for a business to which he replied that businesses shouldn’t get hung up on return on investment (ROI), the goals are softer than that but you could look at things like Technorati authority which is based on linking, set realistic comparisons with the ROI on other marketing, subscriptions to RSS feed, citations or links, tools like StatCounter or Google Analytics could be used, your own comments and comments on your blog etc. could be evaluated.
Regular readers of this blog might be thinking “Good Lord, Roseanne, please get off your Social Media Hobby Horse!” and obviously I have a certain bias as I’ve been blogging since 2003. But one point that Neville made, with which I agree heartily and I noticed there was a lot of head nodding in the room, was that currently we make a distinction between the web and social media; soon we will not make that distinction. All media, even traditional media, will be social, in the new sense, in the not too distant future. Anyone who thinks it is not social already doesn’t understand how people interact with information. Your business is being discussed online AND offline, make sure you are part of the conversation.
Thanks to all in the SMWG who came along and also to Campbell Scott, IGoPeople.com, Damien Mulley, Emily Tully, Eoin Kennedy, Slattery Communications, Eoin from Bord Gáis, and the students from Tipperary Institute, our online attendees and anyone who I’ve left out!
To finish off I’ll share this slideshow I found today with you. It gives the lowdown on social media in a no nonsense way. Please excuse the title: relax it’s Friday and apart from the expletives this is very well put!
(Found on MediaThink)
(Found on Edit: Brendan Hughes, chair of the Social Media Working Group, has written a series of blog posts encapsulating his thoughts that arose from the Open Meeting. You can start with Part 1: Context.
Also Eoin Kennedy has since written a post on his thoughts on the above open meeting. As he works in Slattery Communications Eoin focusses on the public relations and communications opportunities that exist in social media. He obliquely makes a good point that PR company are content generators.
Social Media Collaboration
A guest post from Brendan Hughes of FBD.ie and chair of the IIA’s Social Media Working Group.The IIA’s social media working group has been up and running now for a few months. We each work in different organisations located in various parts of the country and the group was configured so that there would not only be social media experts, but also business professionals with relatively little knowledge or expertise to date. For many of us the group has provided a great opportunity to learn by doing since we decided from the outset that we would seek to use social media as much as possible to support our collaborative working. The following are some of the social media tools we have used to support our endeavours.
The online hub of our collaboration has been the online project management tool Basecamp from 37signals.com. I’ve seen companies use this to communicate their project timelines with clients but it comes into its own when you need to collaborate with a dispersed group. Each member of the working group can post messages for the entire group or to just a few. Members of the group can reply or comment, just like on a blog. There are whiteboards where ideas can be teased out. Everyone is kept up to date by email and all communications are tracked. It gives great transparency on everything we do.
We decided that we would initially write 4 white papers on particular aspects of social media that we felt would be of primary interest to the business community in Ireland. To support the task of up to 16 people working on a single document we set up a wiki. A wiki is essentially a tool that allows anyone to edit an online document and have their edits tracked. There is a complete audit trail of who does what and changes can be easily rolled back. Notifications, or “watchlists” can be set up so that whenever a change is made to a particular document you can receive an email. While we struggled with the first version of the wiki we used since it was not very intuitive to use, we have since moved onto a new version – SocialText – that meets our needs better.
Rather than dragging everyone into the Digital Hub in Dublin every time we needed to meet we agreed to hold Skype conference meetings when we needed to. As smaller groups this worked well but when I personally tried to organise a full group Skype meeting I managed to leave most of the group out of the conversation for 20 minutes or so. I had an older version of Skype installed than was necessary to host the full meeting. Thanks to Skype’s instant messaging facility I was alerted to the problem by the excluded members and was able to get someone else to host the meeting.
In between meetings we’ve all been keeping in touch and letting each other know about useful resources or activities via social network websites such as FriendFeed and Twitter. These have been really useful ways of providing information quickly. Many of us have our own blogs and we’ve been using these and the IIA blog to try and keep people outside the group up to date. The social networking tools have been great for us individually in creating links with interested people outside of the working group. It was great to go to the Podcamp event in Kilkenny and to meet most of the working group there, as well as many of the other people I’ve connected with online over the past while.
Our white papers are now coming close to publication. We intend to widen the circle of collaboration and with this in mind we plan to publish the documents (via the wiki) in draft format. We will then invite people to review and post comments directly to the wiki. We also intend to host a review session for each document, online of course, using the services offered by OnlineMeetingRooms.com. I’m personally very excited about this as it provides the opportunity to gather the expertise from practitioners and interested business professionals in a constructive and engaging manner.
We’re also planning to host an open meeting with social media expert Neville Hobson from the UK to discuss the business case for social media. Neville is coming to Ireland on November 5th and we’ve managed to secure a few hours out of his busy schedule. The meeting will be organised via the social media website upcoming.org, allowing anyone who’s interested in attending to register for free and see who else is attending. We’ll post more information on this later.
We certainly haven’t exhausted the range of online collaborative tools available out there, but what we have used to date has proved very useful for maintaining the momentum of activities of a diverse group of individuals. What’s more, we have done it all with minimal cost. Learning the new technologies is not without its sometimes humbling (and frustrating) moments, but thankfully there is never a shortage of knowledgeable people only too willing to help out.
As an footnote, I came across a interesting video-cast from BT on their BiggerThinking website talking about how companies can collaborate with customers, using social media technologies, to build better products. Well worth a few minutes of your time.
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