The post has received considerable social media activity, including over 500 tweets, many from influential SEO and online marketers world-wide.

I’ll try not to spoil the anecdote at the beginning, but it’s about two men being chased by a lion. Not only will it bring a smile to your face, but perfectly sums up how you should be approaching your SEO strategy.

SEO is not about trying to “game” Google, nor is it a one size fits all approach. Rather, SEO is about analysing your market (in your specific location), understanding the factors responsible for the success of your competitors, and then eventually outpacing them with more stable, longer term link building activities.

The article includes a detailed case study, comparing the competitive landscape for the term “online shopping” across 3 Google locations – Australia, UK and USA. The analysis shows that ranking factors vary significantly between these countries. For example, social signals play a much larger role in Google.com than in Google.com.au, where anchor text and lower quality links are still important signals for achieving top search engine rankings.

What’s the take-home message? Successful link building involves a detailed understanding of your specific market in order to outrank your competitors in the most cost-efficient manner for maximum ROI. At the same time, be sure to future-proof your SEO efforts for long term stability by understanding the competitive landscape in more SEO-advanced markets.

The first thing Apple acknowledged and made a point of, starting their document with:

The lines between public and private, and personal and professional are blurred in online social networks. This means that there will be consequences to stuff you post online, as a company employee, whether you identify yourself as one, or not. If you post anything on online networks which is against company policies, or “deems inappropriate”, there will be a price to pay.

Apple’s general approach is – Use your best judgement. As an Apple employee you should always keep to the HRCCC principle – Honesty, respect, confidentially, community, compliance. The Business Conduct Policy and the HRCCC principle apply to all employees, contractors, and anyone who has a business relationship with Apple. What’s interesting here is the holistic approach the company has taken, not isolating direct employees only – everyone who’s doing business with your company has an impact on your brand, and representing you in some shape of form – they should be included in company policies as well.

Another interesting choice of words is that Apple has many internal policies, but when Social Media is concerned, the term for the document is – Social Media Guidelines. The thing is with Social Media, is it is very difficult to police the employees’ activity. Trust is very important, but even when you “trust” thousands of employees, you should still guide them in the right direction, and in accordance with the company culture.

During discussions with many executives about Social Media in the workplace, I often hear valid concerns about how social media can effect productivity, when used during work hours. The fact is – your employees are using social media during work hours, whether you allow it or not – on their mobile phones, their ipads, or any other mobile device. Apple has addressed this concern, saying: “In general, what you do in your own time is your business. However, activities that affect your job perfomance, the performance of other Apple employees, or Apple’s business interests are still covered by company policies and guidelines. This applies whether you engage in these activities in or outside of work, and whether you have identified yourself as an Apple employee or not.”

In the past few years, I’ve trained many recruiting firms on how to use social media, and LinkedIn in particular. The most common concern was (and that was based on a few cases, in Australia and overseas) that consultants may connect to their clients on LinkedIn, and when they leave (and that’s another topic altogether), they take their database with them. Apple have addressed this in a less-trusting manner, putting it under the “customer privacy” banner: “Do not use or discuss any information regarding customers for any purpose. This includes contacting customers for social reasons or soliciting outside business.”

The documents leaked are comprehensive and very detailed, and have many great points. One last interesting point I’d like to mention – the document spelled out the following:”Finally, do not post or disclose the contents of any Apple policy. These documents are intended for the use of Apple employees, and not for public distribution.”

This goes to show that in spite our tendency to trust our team members and employees, there will come a time when the trust will be broken. A well crafted Social Media Policy will at least give you the right of action, in such case.

Since less and less people trust company’s advertising campaign, there is a major shift towards peer reviews, for almost everything we buy. From seller ratings on eBay and Amazon, (I won’t even consider buying from a seller with less than 95% customer satisfaction, would you?), to reviews on location based applications such as Foursqaure, GoWalla, and websites like TripAdvisor – we now rely on what clients say before we make a buying decision.

What does this mean to us as businesses? If consumers are rating us for our service, and other consumers base their buying decisions on their peer’s reviews, I think the answer here is quite obvious, but there are 3 components to it.

1. Provide excellent service. To ALL customers. Good is not good enough – the competition is fierce, and there is very little tolerance now (because the choices are many). The consumer market is, on the other hand, not growing that much – so every client is very important to get, and more important – to keep!

2. Be aware of what people think about you. If your customers are rating you (and your competition), wouldn’t you like to know what they think (and say) about you? Are you really providing the service you think you do? This message works for a small business owner, often trying his best to juggle his different hats in the business, trying not to “drop the ball”.  However, it is most important to larger businesses and corporates, where the customer-facing staff are executing top level management policies – are they executing it like it was meant to be?

3. If it is broken – FIX IT!  you may have burnt a few customers to date, with mediocre service, and made a few mistakes… Once you realise what people are saying about you (see point 2 above), you can address the problem, and fix it. You can also go the extra mile, and offer some sort of compensation to the disgruntled customer (un suspecting, of course – they don’t expect you, in most cases, to be tuned in to their criticism), and make them an advocate for your business.

In many cases, and on many sites, you can “claim your venue” – declare an establishment as your own, and manage it, add promotions and special deals, reward loyalty and much more.

Social media plan for marketing, recruiting, or customer service can work really well, if done right. These components should be included in your social media plan, regardless of organization type, size, and structure.

• Initial self-benchmark

In order to improve, we need something to compare to. A baseline. Doesn’t matter what it looks like now, all that matters is the up-trend…

• Competitor Benchmarks

Competitors make an easy (and fun) target. See what they do; learn from what they do well as well as their mistakes.

Whatever you do, don’t assume that because a competitor seems to have their act together that they actually do. Follower counts, engagement and a well-designed presence are often the result of pure longevity, and not the implementation of unique ideas.

• Goals and Objectives

Social Media activities aren’t as easy to measure as a Pay-per-Click campaign, or email direct marketing. Some of the objectives will be not as tangible, like “engagement” or “awareness”, and some will have a number associated with them (follower/following ratio or sales inquiries).
Although it isn’t an easy task, you should get creative, and put together a set of easy-to-reach goals and objectives, to help you get started.

• Naming Strategy

Seems like a simple thing, but it is seldom done right. Your social media accounts can represent individual people, departments, company or brands. Different social media tools will appeal to different audiences, so it is vital to do some thinking before naming a Facebook/Twitter/…. Account.

• Human Resources Plan

You are going to need people to execute your social media plan. That’s right. People, not a person.

Even if you are a small business just dipping your toes in the social media water, it will take the efforts, influence and direction of more than one person to make your plan come to life. You may only have one person doing “the work” but any successful social media plan relies on a group, not an individual to carry the weight of the plan. I could write an entirely separate post on this, but you cannot successfully execute a social media strategy without ideas, support, and resources flowing from throughout your organization.

• Content Calendar

I can’t stress enough the importance of generating content for your social media marketing channels. Each channel has unique audience, which you’ll get to know over time. Make sure you feed them with content they’d like to consume, and put your finger on the pulse, so to speak, to test the level of engagement with each piece of content.

Consider important events, and plan your social media activities to complement them.

• The Ideas!

Don’t create a plan that only revolves around day-to-day tactics: tweets, updates, followers, friends. It may be organized, but it won’t be special.

Special comes from social media Creative Campaigns, not the day-to-day tactics. Stand out from the crowd and create a contest or special-offer campaign.

•  Examples

At some point, you’re going to have to sell this plan to supervisors, investors, or colleagues. Chances are that most will not grasp the business case for social media, and will question whether your plan makes sense compared to other corporate initiatives (when discussing budget allocation).

The easiest way to conquer these objections is to show examples of how similar organizations have used an organized social media plan to achieve specific goals and objectives. You’d need to do your homework, and see what other organizations in your industry have done in the social space. Examples are easy to find, and will mean far more than your own proclamations about why social media can have an impact on your organization.

• Reporting and Analysis

How are we going to track our progress and return on investment? You’d probably get this question multiple times during your social media planning process.

First, based on your goals and objectives, decide what you want to measure. Second, decide how you want to measure against those goals and objectives.

Count on this: While each social media property includes some basic analytics, you may need to explore a variety of tools and software packages to arrive at your ideal reporting and analysis solution.

Social media planning is not easy. As a matter of fact, it’s painful for most organizations, because many of your stakeholders will not understand the first thing about using social media for business. All you can do is embrace and include these components in your plan, develop some thick skin, and get moving!

Google + may not have the volume of users that Facebook has yet, but they have one major advantage up their sleeve, a not so little product of theirs called Google Search. Google is now starting to leverage this to drive their Google + product through the integration of Google + pages into its organic search results.

Businesses with a Google + page will see more information from their Google + page alongside existing organic search results. Links to Google + pages, recent posts from Google + pages as well as the ability for users to add these businesses to their Google + circles will all start to appear in organic search results.

The only catch is that these results will only show for Google+ business pages with Google + Direct Connect and even then it may take some time as these new features are being rolled out slowly.

With so many businesses questioning why they would need both a Google + page and a Facebook page, increased exposure in organic results and updated posts is a pretty strong reason to get on Google + ASAP.

Retargeting, if you’re unsure, works by placing a cookie in a user’s browser indicating that the user has visited a specific page on your site. No personally identifiable data is recorded, but through this cookie, we are now able to target this specific individual with advertising messages as they browse other sites online. Should a site they’re visiting be carrying ads, we then have a potential opportunity to reach them again with your message, tailored to the specific pages we know them to have previously visited on your site.

It’s a great yet simple technology, but one that’s extremely effective – the ads will reach only those people who have shown an interest in your site/brand already. And through some clever but pretty straightforward techniques, we can further refine the targeting, based not only on the pages they visited, but when they visited them.

For example, say you’re an insurance company and you know (through cookies) that an individual has visited your annual home contents insurance product pages, but you also know they didn’t complete their purchase with you online. Through retargeting, you could:

(i)              advertise to them for a month after their initial visit to your site, with the aim being to bring them back to your site and convert them to a customer on a subsequent visit

(ii)            use the same cookie(s) to cross-sell other relevant or related products you may have, e.g. buildings insurance

(iii)           then, a year after their initial visit to your site, when they may be considering a new annual policy, you could leverage the same retargeting cookies to reach them with very timely, very targeted messages about your home contents insurance product offers.

The technology behind this is pretty simple, but from a marketing perspective, it’s hugely powerful; most importantly, it delivers results. I’m actually surprised it’s not used a lot more.

If a user is looking for a product or service you supply why not make it easy for them to find that product or service?

Setting up a search engine marketing campaign is a pretty easy process, following just a few steps you can quickly have a campaign up and running. To set up an effective search engine marketing campaign it worthwhile taking your time in setting it up, this will lead to lower relative costs per clicks and better user experience.

Here are some hints and tips to consider when setting up a new search engine marketing campaign.

Analyse the marketplace

Research the marketplace to see who is advertising. Look to see you’re your competitors’ messaging is in the marketplace. Also research your competitors’ websites to see what their product/offering is and if you have a point of difference to them that distinguishes you in the marketplace.

Keyword research/selection

When researching keywords to use remember to choose the most relevant keywords to your offering. The more niche your keyword selection is to your business, the stronger response rates you will receive. Top level generic terms may have more traffic but will generally have more expensive costs per click and will have lower response rates than a more detailed/niche term.

Group keywords by theme

Once you have selected your keyword list, group them by similar themes or topics. This will allow you to apply more relevant ad creative for your keyword groupings. The more relevant your keywords are to your groupings of keywords will improve your quality score and in turn reduce the costs per click you pay.

Effective Ad Creative

Ensure your ad creative includes elements of the keywords you have grouped, including your keywords in your ad creative will help improve your quality score and in turn your costs per click. Have a strong call to action in your ads to entice users to click on your ads. Also try to include your point of difference to your competitors so that you stand out from your competitors.

Relevant Landing Pages

Always ensure that you are sending users to the most relevant page of your website to the keyword searched. This will ensure that users get the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. It may be worthwhile to create specific landing pages for your search engine marketing campaigns to increase relevancy further between keywords, ad creative and the URLs you send your users to.

Only target relevant locations

Ensure that you are targeting locations in which you provide your services, there is no point advertising to users who are able to access your products/offerings. There are many options for geo-location including country, state, region, city and even based on selecting an area on a map.

A few of my recent clients, didn’t have the rights answers to the above questions. Having a website “because I need one” is a start. It’s not a good start, but it is a start.

If you think you have a good enough website, please read on to get reassurance. If you were thinking it’s time to update my website, keep reading – you may learn something…

How to plan an effective website?

It pays to spend some time planning your website architecture. It can be created in a simple spreadsheet or Word document that lists the navigation and pages, or you can create a complex diagram that outlines detailed functionality requirements.

Too often people are in such a hurry to get a website live that they don’t pause long enough to consider the needs of the intended audience/s or the business itself. No matter how small or large you intend your website to be, mapping out its structure – based on its purpose – is essential to success.

Step 1: Identify your website goals

The first step in planning your website is to identify what you want it to achieve for your business and your customers. If you don’t know what you want the website to do – how will you measure its success?

Do you want your website to:

• Generate online sales?
• Generate new business leads?
• Showcase your product-range as a catalogue?
• Share downloadable/portable content (for example PDFs of documents, audio or video files)?
• Capture customer information?
• Build a database of subscriptions?
• Connect with the audience in a forum? or
• Provide easy ways for your audience to contact you

Once you listed your goals it will be easier to determine what type of website you need, what functionality is needed, and how to go about building it.

Step 2: Understand your audience

Who are you building this website for? What type of poeple are you looking to attract? What will THEY be looking to find on your website? Are you making it EASY for them to find it?

Understanding your target audience is a crucial step in planning the site. Large corporations will make a significant investment in developing target audience profiles, commonly referred to as Buyer Personas, exploring all the different scenarios that users may expect when interacting with a site.

Size doesn’t matter here. This crucial step will ensure that your site can fulfill the expectations of your visitors.

Step 3: Plan for the future

When creating your initial website architecture you must plan for the future. Make sure your structure is scalable – which means you can add more pages/products, add/remove items, and generally speaking,  the site need to grow with the business. Make sure the underlying system can support growth.

Planning for the future is also a good way to manage and save for web development costs.

Step 4: Understand you have Commit to regular maintenance

An important part of developing and maintaining a website is planning for how much maintenance your site will require. If you’re keeping a blog – make sure it is updated on regular (or acceptable) intervals. Your visitors will take you seriously, if you do the same. Outdated information can be a real turn off for visitors, so work towards keeping your information generic or easily and cost effectively updated. Realistically determine how often your website will require updates and factor maintenance into your budget.

Step 5: Choose a site navigation model

People who come to visit your site, need to find what they are looking for, and quickly. If they can’t easily find what they want in a few clicks they’re out! Don’t make people think too much, and try to understandyour logic. Create an environment where  common sense rules. There is a well known book by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think which sums up this concept really well.

When talking to agencies and web designers, you’ll hear about UX, UI, Usability, etc… Simply put, the visitor need to find what they are looking for, fast! Making navigation too fancy or interactive can backfire because it can be frustrating and create barriers for your users.

Use logical navigation labels, make sure the purpose of the site is clear, and don’t assume the homepage will be the first page people will land on – they could arrive at your site via a link on another site or search engine to a specific sub-page.

The old KISS model works well. Keep It Simple!

Step 6: Create a marketing plan for the site

Building a site is only part of the process to establish a presence online. Creating the best website is meaningless, unless you have visitors. You’d need to plan how you intend to get visitors to your website.

There are several ways to get people to visit your site

1. SEO (search engine optimisation) – Getting the search engines to find and list your site (and pages), based on keywords and phrases used. You should really consult a professional, BEFORE building the site. If it’s not too late…
2. SEM (Search engine marketing) – Promoting your message on search results, by buying advertising on the different search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.)
3. Online advertising – Buying advertising space on other websites.
4. Social media presence – Create and maintain communities, and get them interested in you, your company and your product/service. They will follow to your website.
5. Social Media Marketing – Buying advertising on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, etc, targeting specific demographics.

If you’ve followed step 2, you’ll have a better understanding how to follow this step.

Step 7: Build the website architecture

Once you have carefully worked through the planning steps you should have a good understanding of who the site is for, and what you’d like them to do, when they visit.

The next step is to map it out.

Depending on your business objectives and budget there are several different options and approaches.

You can:

1. Develop the architecture yourself and work with the person who will be writing the content.
2. Prepare a creative brief for your web design agency that includes information architecture as part of your web project solution.
3. Where information architecture and usability are core to the business model and return on investment, then you need specialists to take on this project.

There are too many “gurus” and “experts” out there. The reason large agencies have the right to exist, is because building websites can be a complex project.

Consider this – if you had build a shopfront for your business, you’d probably engage an architect, a designer and a builder, to make it happen. Building a website is very similar – it’s your ONLINE shopfront, so give this project the respect it deserves.

One thing to remember – don’t dwell on it for too long. Plan, and execute quickly! If you struggling to find the time, get someone else to do it for you.

The web is changing rapidly, so even the best website today, may look old and tired in 3 years. That’s ok! If the planning is done right, refreshing the website should be easy.

1. They don’t understand them, or

2. They are ill-informed (“my girlfriend’s brother heard it is…”), or

3. They’ve thoroughly researched the subject, and realized it isn’t beneficial for their particular situation.

Since I can’t really do anything with the people in point 3, I’ll try to represent some of the common objections I get, when I suggest (or someone within the organization suggests) to look into social media, for a variety of reasons:

Since in my view, Social Media isn’t just a tool, it’s a whole mind shift about the way we used to do business, I actually invite more and more objections, such as:

Linkedin – “What if my good people get poached by other companies?”

Linkedin – “What if my staff connect with clients, and leave with that data base?” (mainly by recruiters)

Facebook – “What if my employees spend their days on Facebook?”

Twitter – “Isn’t it just about what people eat, and the biological outcome of that??”

Slideshare – “Why should I give out my information to my competition?”

YouTube – “We can’t afford video production, and anyway – what are we gonna say?”

And many more…

What sort of resistance do you get (or have) for incorporating Social Media in your business?. Let’s try to solve the mystery of Social Media in the Workplace. Thank you for your participation.