The Net Impact

The Net Impact’s Internet Marketing team attended the leading search and social marketing event, Search Engine Strategies San Francisco on August 16th-19th. A part of Connected Marketing Week, the West Coast SES Conference and Expo moved from San Jose back to its roots in San Francisco. SES attracts thousands of Internet marketing professionals who attend educational sessions and labs pertaining to the web marketing industry. This was the third West Coast SES Conference The Net Impact Internet marketing team attended.

The subjects covered at SES included: SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, online video, site optimization, usability, and high-level strategy. The conference also featured an exhibition hall with over 100 companies, networking events and parties. The Net Impact team attended various informational sessions including: Search, PR and the Social Butterfly, Secrets of Top-Converting Websites, SEO through Blogs & Feeds, How to Become a Link Magnet, Mobile Marketing Strategies, and more.

“One of the most interesting things I learned was about the importance of citations in Google’s new organic caffeine algorithm,” said Lauren Pesko, Internal Marketing Associate at The Net Impact. “Google is now looking quite a bit at social networking sites and how many times your website or blog has been mentioned or linked to. This is really great to learn from an SEO standpoint. The speakers emphasized the importance of adding feeds to your “static” website and turning it into a blog. This can have an SEO benefit because Google’s new caffeine algorithm is giving weight to blogs due to the fact that they offer up to date information – caffeine is all about the real time.”

The first and perhaps the most memorable part of the week was keynote speaker – Jeffrey Hayzlett, Celebrity CMO, Best Selling Author & Former Eastman Kodak CMO. Jeff discussed the changes in the world of marketing and changes his former company, Kodak, had to undergo in order to compete with its competition and adapt to the growth of technology. To achieve this, Kodak’s brand image had to shift from an “old” and trustworthy to a more “modern” brand, while not abandoning their core values. Kodak was actually the first company to hire a Chief Listening Officer. Kodak tweets in 12 different languages over 120 countries, while monitoring all online communication surrounding their brand name. Jeff preached that “passion is not a substitute for planning” and that “creative people should never compromise what they do, or how they do it.” 

“Jeff’s presentation really resonated with me and was a motivating beginning  to our week at SES. His underlying message of the importance of keeping creative people engaged, challenged and free to make mistakes in order to implement positive change is a concept that people from all professions and organizations, large and small, should take into account,” said Web Account Mangager at The Net Impact, Angela Trokey.

The Net Impact Internet marketing team is looking forward to putting together an informational session to share with clients and friends what they learned at SES this September!

“This has been an exciting year for the ever-changing Internet marketing industry,” said Project Manager at The Net Impact, Mandy Christanell. “At SES we learned how to implement proven techniques for transforming tactics into proven strategies that garner results for our clients today, while ensuring they stay ahead of the competition tomorrow.”

Cities need to do whatever they can to communicate with their public, and that means going where their community goes. In this day and age that place is online. In an era in which governments need to be more responsive and accountable to the needs of the public, social media marketing can help governments accomplish this goal. The emergence of social media has generated a new and innovative way for cities to create dialogue and receive useful feedback in a way never before thought possible.

 “I see blogging and all social media as a way to extend our reach to people who might not get their news from more traditional sources and I look on it as a way to be more interactive with our residents,” said Florida Director of Public Affairs, Wayne Segal.

A 2009 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that one in five Internet users searched for political information, posted their views about issues or engaged in another civic activity on a social network. Last year, Shark’s organization surveyed chief information officers of local governments about their social-media plans. Some 72 percent of those who responded said they were currently using Facebook or Twitter in outreach efforts, or planned to do so. There are other signs that the public sector is getting on these sites. GovTwit, a commonly used directory of government Twitter accounts, has close to 1,000 of them listed with the “state-local” tag.

Here are just  a few ways in which a city can successfully leverage social media:
• Receive valuable, honest feedback from city members
• Showcase success stories that might otherwise go unnoticed
• Help in organizing events, meetings and fundraisers
• Support reputation management and crisis management issues
• Promote your community’s event
• Community collaboration on documents, ideas, events for your city
• Make announcements, broadcast news
• Recruit new city employees

One of the most important benefits of using social media in your city’s Internet marketing strategy is driving traffic to your main website. Community websites are much more than a place to display basic information about a city. Today’s citizens want a more active, participatory relationship with their government and to have 24/7 access to reliable and valuable information that affects their everyday lives, and there is no better vehicle to reach a community than a city’s website. City websites serve as a platform to help maintain a direct line of communication between the city and its residents, visitors, businesses and community leaders. Implementing a web content management system, like TNI’s partner product Auctori:city, municipalities can make changes easily and quickly, ensuring their website visitors are accessing the most current information possible.  In addition, Auctori:city’s flexibility and robust, city-centric content management features allow cities to add character to their website.

In addition to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, another social media platform that will only continue to grow and become more useful to cities is mobile. A great example of how city’s can use mobile application is Boston’s Iphone App. This application allows for residents to snap photos of neighborhood nuisances – nasty potholes, graffiti-stained walls, blown street lights – and e-mail them to City Hall to be fixed. The application will allow residents to use the global positioning system function on their iPhones to pinpoint the precise location of the problem for City Hall. After submitting a complaint, users will get a tracking number, so they can pester city officials if the problem persists. The iPhone initiative is part of a push to make City Hall younger, hipper, and generally more user-friendly.

In conclusion, it is more important than ever that city government gets on board with social media, in order to grow communities and influence decisions that bring business to their local economy.  Social media marketing presents a comprehensive, integrated and innovative approach from which to manage municipal government resources.

Looking to use new tools to more effectively get the word out on your next event?

Whether you are marketing at a trade show, regional conference or an informal “tweet up”, an important part of many companies’ marketing strategy is event marketing, which focuses on face-to-face interaction by attending, sponsoring, exhibiting or speaking at tradeshows, industry networking events, conferences, etc.  Even though the focus is face-to-face interaction, effectively integrating social media marketing into your online marketing strategy provides a great opportunity to increase the value and success of an event.

Whether you are marketing an international trade show or an informal ‘tweet-up’, there are a variety of social media tools out there that can help you boost attendance and generate widespread buzz for your event marketing efforts. Social media marketing efforts can aid your event marketing campaign before, during and after the event.

Before the Event. Event planners need to focus on expanding their universe of prospective attendees while attracting new attendees, exhibitors, sponsors and advertisers. Social media can help build interest and awareness around your event.

The use of social media platforms, such as video marketing, EventBrite, Facebook events, e-mail marketing campaigns, tweets and Blog Marketing aid in your marketing efforts and drive targeted traffic to your event’ s landing page. When sharing links to your event through all your social networks consider using a shortened URL that you can track, so you can get an early gauge on conversion (what percentage of your invitees register).

During the Event. Social media can broaden the conference’s engagement for attendees and those who are unable to attend in-person through the use of social networks. You have probably been to an event where they were broadcasting live tweets or other status updates during the event. Microblogging formats like twitter allow attendees to comment on the proceedings as they occur. Ask attendees to post to your photo galleries, either on your site or on public forums like Flickr – This is a great way to generate buzz and encourage engagement at your event.

Enhance the reach of your event by making content about it socially shareable. To this end, create a unique event hashtag (such as #AMACONF) to aid searchability across social media platforms. Hashtags  enable Tweets about the conference or event to be organized and easy to find and follow.

After the event. Social media enables event marketers to remain connected to attendees, extend the impact of exhibitors and advertisers, and market other products including future events. Post videos, photos and other content on your site to attract a broader audience and to help build a community to contact for future events. Enhance live events by providing concurrent commentary and capturin ideas using Twitter, live blogging and live streaming. For example, moderators at live panels can incorporate comments and questions sourced from Twitter. Encourage speakers to share their presentations via a service like Slideshare following an event. Not only does this extend the reach of your content from this year’s event, but it can serve as an enticement to get people to register for next year.

Remember: As with any marketing program, it’s critical to measure your results to determine their effectiveness. Among the salient measures to track are participants, web analytics content sharing, media attention, revenue and expenses. Also, consider doing a survey following your event to find out what you did right, and where you could use some improvement. Keep it short and sweet, but get feedback as close to the event completing as follows. If you can offer an incentive for completing the survey, your chances of getting a response are much better. Use feedback to improve your next event.

In conclusion, social media can be an important component in the event marketing mix since it has the potential to provide benefits for both marketers and consumers before after and during an event. By using social media to enhance your events, you can extend your reach while providing additional means to connect with your firm.

Check out The Net Impact’s social media marketing services to help boost your next event!

The goal of search engine optimization is to show the search engines that your website is important. The single most important thing you can do to (after implementing basic SEO on your website) is to get quality links to your website’s link on other sites to generate increased traffic. In order for your website’s organic search engine ranking to reach full potential, your linking campaign must be well organized and developed.

Links can be directories, social media, blogs, articles, white papers and optimized press releases. Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links. They are designed to promote links and are sometimes free of charge. Social networks and blogs have also become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site. You should try to control the anchor text of links coming to you as much as possible. Having your best keywords in the link anchor can be a huge help.

When it comes to SEO, linking is a popularity contest. The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher depending on the number of your sites incoming links. Every link that you do manage to gain, whether it’s from a directory, blog or website, will help build your site’s core strength.

Here are just a few of the benefits of link building:

• Links are viewed as a ‘vote’ for your site
• Inbound links offer a route to your site from other sites
• Links to and from relevant sites help search engines assess what your website’s overall theme is
• A higher link profile can boost your site’s credibility and trust
• More links means more avenues for website traffic to find you
• Improved rankings for your targeted keywords
• Improved search engine robot crawl rate

When mapping out your linking strategy, don’t forget to focus on the quality, in addition to the quantity of the links.   A single, link from a credible website is worth more than dozens of links from junk sites. The relevance of the link and the strength of the site that has provided it, will often determine just how much strength you gain.  If you want to increase the search engine rank of your website, boosts your page rank with the search engines, and generate and increase in the flow of traffic to your site, then quality link building is a profitable investment. Having a good mix of quality and quantity in your inbound links will greatly increase your search engine results rankings and thus, drive more traffic toward your website.

Lastly, do not give up if you are not immediately seeing the positive  results of your linking efforts. The results of an effective linking program do not happen overnight, but rather something that grows over time. Remember, be consistent, be detailed and never stop. Your competitors are not stopping, even if you are ranked number one on Google, you can never stop.

The linking process provided exclusively by The Net Impact assures that links have a smooth feel in the page content, adding to user experience while also contributing effectively to the search engine optimization process. Contact The Net Impact today to learn more about how your business can benefit from a strategic linking campaign!

With the hype of the 2010 World Cup in full gear, here is an analogy of how the steps to scoring a goal in a soccer game are similar to making a visitor react a desired way on your website.

When it comes to soccer, the goal of the game sounds pretty simple– you need to put the ball in the back of the net. When this happens it is usually the goal scorer who gets the most credit, but what about the defense who got the play rolling? In reality, there is far more to a soccer team’s scoring strategy than the person who gets the ball into the back of the net; in fact, a system has been devised to track the contribution of each individual player. Created by Paul Tomkins, this system creates a value of how each player contributes to the team over a number of games.

“When turning soccer into numbers, there will always be problems. And when it comes to assists, this is especially true. How can you reward someone who rolls the ball eight inches from an indirect free-kick as highly as someone who beats seven men and puts the ball in the striker’s path in the six-yard box?”

Those in the Internet marketing industry can relate Tomkins’ soccer player contribution strategy to their website conversion attribution. When it comes to website conversion, each keyword searched, link from Twitter or direct visit, which ultimately results in a conversion, is in most cases a hit from a repeat visitor or from a visitor who is familiar with your brand name. Each step of your search engine marketing strategy can be seen as an assist that kicked that conversion goal to your website, and that is why a web analytics strategy should be in place for all of your online marketing efforts. All marketing campaigns should be custom fit to your business objectives and consistently monitored, analyzed and adjusted to optimize revenue.

Looking at every step of your marketing strategy, rather than just the end result, will tell you which components of your overall efforts are effective and which ones could use some extra attention.

Keyword Research= Defensive Build Up: Who got the ball rolling in the first place? In the case of a soccer game, it may start with a key pass by the goalkeeper. When online, perhaps it was a particular keyword search at the early stage of the searching process. After this happens there is still a huge amount of work to do in order to grab that conversion, but you need to start somewhere!

Linking= Midfield Pass : In soccer, midfielders are the link between the defense and attack and must possess excellent passing skills. Just as it is difficult for forwards to have good shots on goal with having the ball being strategically set-up by the midfield, it is difficult for websites to ascend in search engines without substantial use of a linking program. Search engines consider quality linking to be one of the main criterions for website ranking on keyword searches.

Social Media Efforts= Assist: If Liverpool scored a goal last season, there’s a good chance Xabi Alonso (player known for his high number of assist) was involved at some point during that move. This may not have a huge importance to the overall outcome, but if involved more often than not, then he is clearly having a positive impact on the team. This could relate to an email marketing campaign, social media campaign, a guest blog post on an industry related blog or an optimized press release. If you take these small efforts away, you may start to see a noticeable drop in conversions.

Website Conversion = Goal: You found a visitor who is interested enough in your well-designed and user-friendly website to complete a sale, give you a call or whatever your conversion goal may be. This is the same as giving a player a free shot with just the keeper to beat. You won’t always get a 100 percent conversion rate – but in both cases there is a very good chance it will end up with a goal.

So in which stage does the most importance lie? In tracking the performance at all stages you can really get a strong idea about how every aspect of an online marketing campaign (or soccer team) is performing. With this valuable feedback from web analytics, you can make an informative and successful decision – whether that decision is to change up your keywords, improve your email marketing efforts or to trade your center midfielder – based on the actual facts and figures.

Just like a winning soccer strategy, successful Internet marketing happens only with careful planning, timely execution, persistent monitoring and ongoing improvement of the results you achieve.  With each online solution completely customized to fit the specific needs of your individual company, The Net Impact combines web design, development, marketing and consulting to complete your online strategy. Based on your individual objectives, we develop a campaign plan that is designed from the ground up to not only drive your targeted audience to your site, but to score a conversion goal.

User Testing – A Small Change can Make a Big Difference

Let’s  say you have just launched a new website.  Your marketing team loves the web design.  Your IT team is thrilled with the security and efficiency and the C class folks are all lining up to salute.  It’s perfect right?  Maybe, maybe not.  What about taking that quantum leap and testing your site with your intended audience, your customers?  Or, as The Net Impact recently determined for the City of Wentzville MO, why not test the site from the perspective of your citizens?

When it comes to a municipality website, the usability of the site by its citizens is a necessary condition for performance.  If the  website is difficult to navigate, people leave. If a landing page fails to clearly state what the municipality offers and what users can do on that page, people leave. If users do not like the access to pertinent informationof the website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to find or doesn’t answer their questions, the visitors will be left hanging or will  soon be clicking away to a differetn website. Notice a pattern here?

So how do you determine if your website is user-friendly? User testing allows you to roleplay how citizens will navigate your site. At the same time, you record their comments and responses to their efforts to navigate and move through the site in order to accomplish a designed task.  Sound complicated?  It’s really not.   

For an excellent example of  usability testing review the  recent case study conducted by The Net Impact for the City of Wentzville’s website.  After The Net Impact  launched the  The City of Wentzville’s new website, the city worked with our Web marketing team to conduct a series of usability tests to gauge how user-friendly the website’s navigation and overall experience was for visitors and to get a better idea of ideal traffic flow for visitor satisfaction. We created a series of scenarios and tasks for testers to complete on the City of Wentzville’s website.  These tasks were specifically designed to take testers through the navigation pathways of the site and to recreate the experience of a typical visitor to the website.  An impartial  third party service was enlisted to select a broad sample of testers.  A random sampling of testers, with diverse backgrounds including gender, age,  income level, and computer skill level, was determined.  This group best represented the  profiles of actual visitors to the site. As testers performed each task, their mouse movements, clicks and live feedback were all recorded.

Once the user tests were complete, our team of Internet marketing specialist analyzed videos and tester feedback to generate a recommendation report and next steps in order to improve the user experience. From the results we concluded that overall the testers were impressed by the amount of information provided.  Several commented that they wished their own city provided this information and thought this site set the bar high for other municipalities.  However, there were still ample comments from  testers reflecting confusion and difficulty in  finding information .

The Net Impact’s recommendations included consolidating menus, eliminating redundant information and making links to highly requested information more obvious. Some of the tester’s comments also regarded  web design.  The majority of the testers found the site aesthetically pleasing.  Many liked the colors and the rotating photos, but wanted to see more pictures of the city. In addition to suggesting Wentzville add more images to display the character of the  city, The Net Impact suggested different options for the city to make other tools, such as their community calendar easier to find and more simple for visitors to use. – Read more TNI  Case Studies

In conclusion, based on the invaluable feedback from the user testing, our team continues to work with the City of Wentzville to revise aspects of their website to in order to continue to increase effectiveness and functionality. 

Bottom line: User testing is an important aspect of any Internet marketing campaign. The Net Impact employs usability testing as part of our analytics methodology in order to construct  complete online marketing strategies. Remember as well that website testing is an ongoing process, but when managed properly it will drive your efforts and help visitorsrealize a greater satisfaction with your municipal website. Contact The Net Impact today to learn how we can help you find the most effective way to make your website visitors take action.

Strapped for time, money and manpower, more and more nonprofits are turning to social media marketing to generate mass interest at minimal cost. The social media space provides the non-profit sector with the opportunity to connect and collaborate quickly and inexpensively, and without the help of big company sponsorships. Many non-profits are leveraging social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to connect with their supporters online by crowdsourcing ideas, providing feedback and monitoring conversations regarding their organization.

An excellent example of a non-profit organization that leveraged social media to enhance their marketing efforts is Epic Change. Have you heard of TweetsGiving? It was one of the first charity initiatives on Twitter. In November 2008, during the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, Epic Change leveraged Twitter to raise money ($10,000 goal) to help build a classroom in Tanzania. In 48 hours, that goal was met from 336 unique donors. Not only was money raised, Epic Change found a slew of new volunteers who were interested in the causes the organization seeks to support. Why did it work? It was more than just a sheer charity initiative. Using the holiday where most Americans express their thanks, a part of the TweetsGiving initiative was to act as a creativity catalyst, asking people to tweet what they were thankful for with the #tweetsgiving hashtag. All in all, there were over 3,500 tweets expressing gratitude for something in their lives.

Stacey  Monk, Founder and CEO of Epic Change says, “Social media is making change possible. With social media, we’re able to hear totally new voices, who might not have had access to mainstream channels, which represents a real shift in power, and where change can originate.”

From dipping their toes into the water with a low-investment campaign to diving off the cliff, today many nonprofits are actively exploring social media. But a common problem many non-profits face is that they blindly leap into social media without implementing a strategy. Without a well created Internet marketing strategy, there is no way to measure your online efforts. This leaves the non-profits at a loss to justify their investment of time, money and resources, or reap valuable insights to improve their efforts. Whether you measure social media success based on how many new volunteers you recruit, the number of sponsorships or donations, the dialogue shared among your online community, or the influx in web traffic, fans and followers, it is vital to measure your results against clear marketing objectives, just as you would with any marketing campaign.

When starting a social media campaign for you non-profit, remember: a simple, yet powerful mission and message can take a campaign far. Non-profits on social networking sites should set goals, update consistently, become a part of the conversation, build community and create value. Without a clear vision and well thought out strategy, it is difficult to encourage an audience to participate. If the time and energy are strategically spent to create a social community, others will help spread your message and your desired results will come.

Recently The Net impact teamed with St. Louis based non-profit, the Karla Smith Foundation to help build online aware for their campaign event with BringChange2Mind, a non-profit superheaded by award-winning actress Glenn Close that works to combat the stigma of mental illness. KSF and BringChange2Mind combined forces to host an unprecedented mental health awareness and anti-stigma event, “Change a Mind, Change a Life”, in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Karla Smith Foundation was in need of a strategy to build online buzz around the event and direct traffic to the event website. To quickly and effectively generate awareness around the campaign, The Net Impact worked closely with the Karla Smith Foundation to create the website, www.changeamind.org, for the highly anticipated event. In order to direct traffic to the website and create online awareness, The Net Impact implemented a social media marketing strategy for the campaign, which included a strong presence on Twitter and Facebook. The KSF social networking sites were updated daily with exciting news regarding the event, such as notices of upcoming media appearances, videos and pictures, and sponsorship information. The KSF Facebook and Twitter continued to see steady growth in fans and followers as well an increase in the level of fan engagement in the weeks leading up to the event.

As a result of the social media marketing campaign, KSF was provided with the opportunity to share valuable information with their existing community, increase interest around their event, catch the attention of local media, build their brand awareness and attract new fans and followers to get involved with their organization. Most importantly, the KSF Facebook page now serves as a platform for their online community to share personal experiences and give valuable feedback in real time.

In conclusion, while many non-profits still have a long way to go, the integration of social media in their marketing efforts can help these organizations meet and exceed many different goals. Social  media is a platform that allows people to participate in a conversation about what they think, feel and care about, making social media and excellent space for the non-profit sector to continue to explore.

 Online videos are an effective platform to share valuable information, while providing companies with the opportunity to create hype around their brand. For example, the King and Prince Beach and Golf Resort created a 3D flyover video of their popular Georgia golf course. This innovative video drives traffic to their website, markets their golf course and engages their online community. Check out the video here.   

Online videos are not only an effective marketing strategy; they are also an effective tool for search engine optimization. Search engines are showing videos in their search results, but what you may not be aware of is how many people actually go to YouTube, and other video sharing sites, and search for specific information as opposed to using a search engine. For this reason, it is just as important to stand out from the crowd on video channels as well as in the search engines. Video sharing web sites use tags for search engines to find them. You must include your main keywords in these tags if you want your video to be indexed by the search engines. 

 In order for your videos to be found by the right audience, be sure to research your top keyword phrases and use these in your upload descriptions and titles. Find out what your targeted audience is searching for and then use a keyword tool to identify keywords and phrases that you can really dominate. Keyword research is critical because it will help people find your content and over time will mean increase your rankings. Doing this crucial research and tracking click-thrus and website conversions will only help you to secure your most cost-effective keywords and phrases and boost the visibility of your videos. 

Blendtec, a company that produces blenders. The company received millions of YouTube views and great press for blending objects like iPhones and wood blocks, proving its product was durable. Not a bad way to establish your product’s credibility and get some attention, right? 

But don’t worry, you don’t have to blend objects or perform insane stunts to create an effective video. You just have to build compelling content and use your videos to spread the word to the community you want to target. If your content is compelling, and you promote your videos through social media channels and other marketing and public relations efforts, you can increase your product’s visibility and influence. 

Just remember, the goal of video marketing is to create short, attractive, effective videos based on solid keywords that convert viewers into customers and stand the test of time.  

 Has your company incorportated video marketing into your online marketing strategy? 

Suggested music to listen to while reading – http://www.jango.com/music/Tag+Team?l=0