The Bella Buzz: Successful Web Design, Internet and Social Media Marketing Strategies from Desiree Scales, CEO--Bella Web Design, Inc.

Personal Branding Webinar Preview with David Cohen from Equation Arts

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Who watched the Academy Awards show on Sunday Evening?  As we have discussed plenty of times on The Bella Buzz podcast, we have another missed opportunity to tie in social networks directly with a live event!  There was plenty of discussion taking place by following the #Oscars hashtag but no mention of any direct acknowledgment of the conversation. Our guest today David Cohen, from Equation Arts has some insights into a Facebook campaign that indicated it might be the entire broadcast, but may have been just red carpet and backstage. 

But we didn't bring David on to get his Oscars review, we wanted to talk to him about his specialty helping people and companies uncover their branding message.  He is a self described Brand Therapist. His first words of advice are to look at the current results that are being achieved, and analyze where the message may be missing the mark. David works with clients to identify up to 10 unique elements that make up a brand such as leadership, culture, understanding lingo, rituals etc.. that must in the end be crafted to allow people to understand what you are capable of delivering.

David will be providing specific information about Personal Branding for Social Media Success with two distinct sessions as a webinar on March 18th.  Why am I not getting results from Social Media? Digital Reputation Building kicks off at Noon, followed by Awful to Awesome - Authentic and Effective Personal Branding at 6:00 pm.

One of the cautions that David gives for anyone listening who might be considering branding advice or educational sessions is to dig into the qualifications of the presenter.  Do the strategies that have been developed match with the overall objectives of your organization or does the prepackaged advice only work if you are in a very narrow niche.

A major challenge in the world of social media consulting today is crossing the chasm in front of business owners who believe they do not have the time to invest in personally executing social media tactics and assigning brand responsibility to someone who either is not clearly representing the brand, or may indeed move on from the business and take some brand reputation with them.  David's advice is to make sure that the pillars of the brand are clearly documented and to never assign full responsibility to a single individual.

He brings to light the difference between the original CNN Twitter account which was an RSS re-posting of news headlines into the Twitter stream, and the personalized fan account CNN BRK which raced Ashton Kutcher to 1 million followers.  The CNN account that was more human oriented, speaking in a real voice was the account that grew the largest and was eventually incorporated by CNN into their regular social networking strategies.

An additional example that David uses to demonstrate a company that understands its brand and does not get off track from its intended mission is 37 Signals, the makers of the project management system BaseCamp.  Both Desiree, who uses BaseCamp for managing projects, and David believe that 37 Signals is successful in maintaining such a loyal user base by having strong brand awareness. They are in business to build easy to use tools.

We want to express our sincere thanks to David Cohen for taking the time to appear on The Bella Buzz, and if you are interested in participating in his webinar on Thursday March 18th, follow this link and use the code BELLABEACON to get 50% off.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

How The Historic Oakland Cemetery Uses Social Media to Attract Guests

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On this week's episode Desiree speaks from the cockpit of The Bella Beetle, as we welcome Chad Elkins, the voice behind the social media strategy of the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. He first came to our attention through a writeup on the blog Not Easy To Forget from its author James Ball. 

For those who are not familiar with this Atlanta landmark, Oakland Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries and one of the largest green spaces in the City of Atlanta, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places.  Famous "residents" include Bobby Jones the golfer, Margaret Mitchell the author, Maynard Jackson the former Mayor of Atlanta, and Joseph Jacobs who was the proprietor of the soda fountain where Coca-Cola was first served in 1886.

Chad brings a great perspective to his use of social media in attracting new visitors to the cemetery, and believes that his use of a Twitter account has reached a different demographic than the traditional destination / attraction marketing that tourism venues typically enact.

The content that Chad likes to generate through his social media efforts include the same types of things that any business should consider distributing.  Don't let the fact that he is interacting on behalf of a cemetery fool you!  He is looking to engage in conversations about events and answer customer service type questions, plus he can include some interesting history that makes his tweet stream an interesting read.  Chad believes that it helps to share information about other things that are happening around the City of Atlanta so that it incorporates Oakland Cemetery as part of the "eco-system" of venues.

Successes include driving measurable traffic to the web site at Oakland Cemetery.com, as well as seeing additional friends and fans attend their events such as the Run Like Hell 5K, Halloween Tours, and Sunday in the Park. All of their events had record attendance which can be attributed to these efforts.  It also pays off from a volunteer recruitment standpoint (and must also be applied to employee recruitment in more traditional business).

Chad suggests that the Atlanta Tourism community look into something like the new location based application Four Square. Another service of this same ilk is Gowalla.

The success that Chad has witnessed on behalf of the Oakland Cemetery demonstrates a couple of key points that we stress on the Bella Buzz podcast, it can be accomplished no matter what the business is. If a cemetery can find a voice in social media, anything can have a voice.  Also, Chad works on a volunteer basis so it is not an all consuming time commitment requirement.

We have often heard the question raised that it can be a complicated scenario when an employee who has taken on the social media responsibilities, in effect, has become the voice of the organization, leaves for other opportunities.  Have the gains made been lost? Does that employee end up carrying the followers with them to the next stop?  Chad beautifully answers this concern by stating that the "voice" of the organization should simply be a reflection of the internal culture within the organization.  The term that we have used, and Chad reinforces is transparency.  By being honest and transparent, and reflecting a community culture, there should be no loss in effectiveness when reassigning the social media duties and responsibilities.

Chad can also be found at the Twitter handle @Ratpack

Just as we are about to sign off, we end up talking about Listening tools such as the ones we discussed on last week's episode.  One item we did not bring up last week was the search for commonly misspelled terms that you are monitoring.  Chad keeps an eye out for the misspelled Cematery and uses it as a chance to reach out to a potential visitor.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

Link Building: Why it's Important and How to Get it Done

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We quickly acknowledge the fallout from the Kevin Smith is Too Fat to Fly on Southwest Airlines controversy we had discussed on the last episode of The Bella Buzz, recognizing that social media has the ability to generate headlines in all forms of media now.  The story was covered everywhere from ABC News to Entertainment Tonight, spreading loudly and rapidly.

Should we be concerned with how much power does someone with many followers hold over a company?  Could it be that someone who grows a following (for whatever reason) might decide to use that voice for negative purposes? A blackmail opportunity?  Fortunately, Desiree points out that in a straw poll regarding the Kevin Smith situation 58% of respondents said they were on the side of Southwest. So maybe that points out an interesting development.  It might be considered that social media does actually portray a "wisdom of the crowd" mentality, and the greater good or the best opinions might actually win out in the end over sheer numbers. 

Our main topic for this episode is Link Building.  It was instigated by a thread in a Webmaster World forum that is one person's live link building process. He actually lays out his process in step by step detail that gets the topic flowing in regards to the value of the effort.

Without a doubt, the early days of the Google algorithm required that links point to a web site so that the search spiders could discover and index the site.  The higher authority of the site linking in, would pass along some of the relevance "weight" so the Google could get a signal about the importance of the site.  However, as the algorithm has become more robust, should the focus be more on creating incredibly powerful content and let the links come naturally?

Desiree describes that process and service that she uses with clients as a way to get a site useful inbound links. A valuable link must be looked at two ways.  There are links that bring value through actual visitor traffic, and there are links that bring the Google Bot and page rank value.

With her search specialist, a client's site can require up to 40 hours of intensive research and submission looking for sites to link to.  A Google search within a particular niche will uncover potential sites to inquire.  She looks at all of the many directories out there as valuable targets for inclusion. This is a regular monthly task to address to some degree, since there are many new sites cropping up all the time.

There are also consumer review sites such as Kudzu.com or Yelp that would have quality link value.

A service like Link Popularity can provide some information for measurement regarding the number of sites linking to your web page, or the Google webmaster tool using the parameter "Link:www.yourdomain.com" to see where the links are coming from.

Of course as we have said many times, creating quality relevant content is the best link building strategy for the long term.  It might be a short term effort to grow organic search engine ranking through link building efforts, but it takes quality, evergreen content that will provide long term inbound links.

Be aware as well .. the 40 hour commitment that Desiree shares does not mean that the listing will be at the top of the search results at that point.  What she means is that the foundation is set for the links to start appearing on other web sites so that the search spiders can crawl and index the link in the first stage of getting a good ranking.  It will take many months and years to achieve the highest ranking possible.

We are still in a Link Economy.

How do you do your link building?  Can you share with the rest of the Bella Buzz community how you go about getting others to link to your web site?  Share in the comments.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

Why You Should Establish a Social Media Listening Station: Lessons Learned from Toyota, Southwest and Kevin Smith

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There are times when a story just begs to be discussed on The Bella Buzz podcast.  At times, the cross-section of internet marketing and mainstream media provides an opportunity for us to analyze and dissect the world we now find ourselves living in.  The recent Southwest Airlines vs. Kevin Smith situation tied out topic together nicely.

We begin the podcast by focusing on the ways in which companies can establish listening stations using Twitter for use in a customer service environment.  This came from a question posed to Desiree at the Georgia Meeting Professionals International Emerging Strategies Conference she was presenting at.  An audience member asked how Toyota could use Twitter as a customer service hub in the face of the recent recalls. We have discussed this type of service in the past, and have seen great use of the network from companies such as Comcast, Intuit and Zappos. This now is the time to put a crisis type situation to the test with a large company.

Using the Search.Twitter.com tool, Toyota would be able to monitor what is being said about the global brand, their individual car models and recall notices.  Here is a great article detailing how to use Google Reader and RSS as a way to get a good listening station done.  This is a video from Laura Roeder about setting up a good station.

From there, we get into the use of a listening station to become aware of the negative comments that are hitting the social networks about your company, brand etc.. This is where the Kevin Smith story comes in. Without rehashing the entire story, he was removed from his flight when it was determined that he was a "safety risk" on the flight due to his size. 

Since Kevin Smith has a following on twitter alone of 1.6 million people, he was able to distribute the circumstances of his embarrassing situation very quickly and very broadly for a substantial impact on the airlines.  Kevin also conducts a podcast (Adult language / content .. you decide if you want to find it). 

(NOTE: there have been blog updates by both Southwest and Kevin that are still going on at the time of this blog post)

It does bring up a good point for us however.  Since he was not following Southwest on Twitter they could not conduct a DM conversation.  Twitter system functionality dictates both parties must be following for a direct message.  Do future business practices require that a response be made within the same channel that a critique is made?  Is it reasonable to move a controversial conversation, with many interested bystanders, quickly off line to a closed platform?

For the very first time we had a podcast addendum that we recorded. To make our case for using the social networks for listening tools, Desiree believes that Jenny Craig, or Weight Watchers or Medifast should be tracking some keywords that would have pointed out this event on Twitter and could have inserted themselves into the conversation in a good business development manner.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

Superbowl Ads 2010: A Lost Opportunity for Some, A Lesson for All

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It is a Super Bowl commercial postmortem on this week's Bella Buzz podcast.  Desiree and Joe break down the effectiveness of the advertising dollars that the big brands spent during Super Bowl XLIV, or should we say lack of effectiveness.

Last year, the expectation was more and more of the big brands would find creative ways to incorporate social networks into their traditional campaigns.  The rating for social media usage by this year's advertisers is once again a big #FAIL.

We know we tend to see things from within our bubble of online marketing and social media practitioners, but it's time for the big brands (and more specifically the big brand agencies) to start leveraging the dollars they spend on broadcast advertising by driving customers to interact via social networks.  The opportunity exists right now to engage a customer, capture some of their key contact data and then continue to interact with that customer so that they become a true brand evangelist.  Why are they wasting this media buy!?!

On the podcast, we did dig into a couple of the ads directly to discuss our reactions to them and the first one we reviewed was the Google Ad:

We had both heard that a spot was a possibility, so we were on the lookout for it to appear on the broadcast.  It was a very well done spot which subtly displayed how search is completely embedded in our lives. Google just needs to be careful about how well they present information for web searchers.  They could be accused of "scraping" so much content from web site owners and content producers that the traffic no longer actually clicks to the original site.

Throughout the night's broadcast there was a considerable amount of conversation taking place on Twitter using the hashtag #BrandBowl you can still see some activity there by following that link to the Search.Twitter service.  These large brands HAVE to be aware that there is a large, receptive audience ready to interact with them if the creative is done correctly.  That hashtag was different from the #SB44 which was mostly game specific conversations.  Brands should be able to manage the variety of conversations effectively by understanding the difference.

At the very least consider what we call the Offline Ask.  At every opportunity in front of a potential customer you must make the ask.  Ask them to become a part of your community whether it be to follow you on Twitter, join a Facebook Fan Page or submit an email address.

What specific actions should a business owner take when participating in the Live Web?  Get involved in the conversation around a particular event.  If you come with relevant, interesting, eloquent insights that make someone take notice and check out your profile .. which in turn, drives someone back to your business web site, you just might gain a customer.  

How did the Super Bowl ads work for you? Were you expecting anything in the social media space that didn't appear, or maybe you did see some things that we might have missed?  Let us know in the comments, we would love to know what you thought.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network. 

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.