While there are a variety of Facebook applications that accomplish this goal, RSS Grafitti is our favorite because it’s easy to configure and works with multiple accounts. Designed for Facebook Page administrators, the application actually allows you to post any RSS feed to any wall. If you’re managing multiple Facebook pages this would be particularly useful, but it’s also an easy way to automatically post your own blog content.

First, make sure you have a feed set up for your blog. We suggest you use Google Feedburner to manage your web feeds. Then, add RSS Grafitti to your personal profile and configure it for whichever Facebook page(s) you are administering. While the process takes only a few minutes and is intuitive, full instructions are available on the RSS Grafitti Wiki. The two important pieces of information are:

• The name of the feed
• The URL of the feed

After configuring the application, your blog posts will automatically be posted to your Facebook page with the blog source name, date, and RSS grafitti icon.

We began by setting aside the particular technologies of today and thought more broadly about the possible connections and interactions. This particular exercise can be done anywhere, and is great fun. Get some post-it notes and wander around a physical space attaching notes to anything that you would like to interact with, sort of like a real world version of VH1 Pop Up video show. It can be helpful to think about what you would like to say to the thing, what you would like to know about the thing, and any two-way communication.

During our exploration activity, we came up with a variety of different kinds information and interactions:

• information about the thing (needed parts, manufacturer, origins of parts, where to purchase another, operating instructions)
• reviews and interpretations (what do you think about this piece of art?), any online community around the thing or idea (how do you use this thing? can we share?)
• whether the thing needed attention (plant needs water/light, printer needs ink, bike chain needs grease, light needs new battery/bulb)
• history of the usage of the thing (info on past text on whiteboard, past owners of the object)

Brief overview of some current augmented reality technologies

While augmented reality is here in a variety of forms, there is going to be lots of change in the technology as well as how people actually use the technology, so don’t get too attached to any particular form of technology discussed below.

The classic way to say “I am here” is with a nice graffiti tag, as humans have been doing in one form or another for millennia. Now, however, we can take this information into the digital realm, whether located on a webpage or encoded on the object.

More recently, we have been busily identifying our location through our phones. Depending on what service you are using, you can then find out about useful things nearby (food, entertainment, friends).  Location-based services are starting be a normal part of smart phone usage, with Pew Internet reporting that of the 28% of Americans are using location-based services of some kind, with directions or recommendations based on their location one of the most common actions.  Fewer folks are sharing their location (checking in) via Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Twitter, and various other services, but that is also a popular extension of your physical self into the digital realm.

We are also increasingly able to use digital maps to identify where we are (or would like to be) and find out information about that physical location (This topic is worthy of a full Lunch & Learn, blog post, and more, but check out this article about a Dutch start-up and map layers and another project to identify what was there). These map layers are being constructions by individuals as a community exercise as well as a more commercial enterprise.

There are lots of tools available to provide more information about a thing that what can be written on it. We are all familiar with bar codes on the side of our cereal boxes and other products. RFID tags are appearing in library books and inserted into clothing to prevent shoplifting, as well as in our USA passports.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a great newer technology to allow secure (hopefully) two-way communication between two devices.  This is what is underlying the Google Wallet payments excitement that has been in the news the last few weeks.

QR Codes

QR Codes came, like so many interesting tracking codes/tags/devices, from Japan. They have been around for decades, but have only taken off in popular US culture more recently. You can identify a QR code by the nice boxes in three of the four corners.

They are easy to create, and can include a fair amount of information. They are easy to duplicate and you can send them via email, webpage, and even television. Their square footprint can make them an interesting visual accent to a layout, and they can fit easier on many items than a long string of text. One service, QR Stuff will generate them for you for free, and then would like to put them on stuff to sell to you. Another, JumpScan, is all about sharing your contact information rather than creating any QR code you would like.

The simpler the QR Code visually, the less information included. These simpler codes are also less likely to get corrupted from part of the code missing.

While you can conceivably could put all sorts of interesting things in the QR code, the phone scanner applications (programs) are currently all over the place in how they interpret the code.  If you are going to encode some information today, you are  safest with either plain text or a website URL.

Challenges

For a QR code to actually be used, someone needs to be interested enough to have a device (typically their phone) that has a good enough camera to scan a code, have added a QR Code scanner program to their phone, and actually pulls out the phone to scan the code. This may get easier as more phones have image stabilizers and flashes built in, scanner programs come bundled the phone, and information of value is included in the codes. But for now, not that many people are scanning them, and they are mostly younger, male, and economically well-off.

QR codes are also in some danger of being the hot thing of fall 2011, and may look dated in the future if they are leapfrogged by another technology — so don’t get your forehead tattoo quite yet.

One possible technology is pure text scanning — if your item already has the website written on it, and someone can easily scan the website URL, why would they scan a QR code that is just going to take them to the same website?

The security concerns with QR codes are considerable. Anything could be in that code, and you can’t inspect it with your naked eye. Furthermore, most free QR code readers automatically open web urls, potentially taking a visitor to a hostile website which could do very bad things with/to their phone. Most free QR scanners do not currently appear to have any significant security protection. Our initial review of free and low cost QR code scanners/reader programs (or applications, as they like to call themselves) for iPhones and Android phones did not immediately locate any programs that were committed to security and in fact indicated that the programs themselves are requiring access to all sorts of information and functionality on your phone. If you have a scanner program that is deeply committed to privacy and security, please let us know in the comments.

Implementing QR Codes

Reasons to create them right now:

• If your customers, employees, and/or community of people interact with physical things/places, adding a QR code that takes them to additional information about those things or sending them to an online location to discuss the thing could be really helpful
• A high percentage of your people are younger, well-off men
• If you have coupons that can be redeemed online
• You’re excited to use them

1. What they are looking for
2. How they make decisions
3. How #1 and #2 can be aligned with your business objectives to create results for your organization

One of the most effective tools to help understand if your website messaging, copy, functionality, layout and design is helping your visitors to make decisions is the Decision Making Quadrant, a tool for understanding how visitors make decisions online.

This tool, adapted from the Eisenbergs various books (such as Always Be Testing), is a quick way to look at any site and think about how you are addressing these decision making styles.  The core principle for this tool is to understand that people make decisions in two main ways: fast vs. slow, and emotional vs. logical.  These two axes combine into a quadrant for looking at four different decision making types online.

The 4 Types of Online Decision Makers

Another helpful way to look at each of the types is in the kind of language that they are looking for:

I hope this tool is helpful to you in your marketing efforts as you look to maximize the number of visitors that engage with you.

There are four key components to every email campaign, and they are outlined below.  We like to call them the Email Purchase Chain, because each of these steps should be part of an unbroken chain of expectations that you lead your prospect through.  We often find that small businesses only think about the middle two steps (email capture and clickthrough) when they think about email marketing, because they think of the website as outside of the scope of email marketing.

It is also important to think about the goal of each step being to get your prospects to the next step in the chain, not necessarily to make a purchase. It is easy to try and do to much, but you may find it useful to remember the adage about dating: you may think he or she is the one, but you are just trying to get a first date, not get them to marry you.

These components are very valuable in helping you to understand what to track and optimize for your email efforts, and how to make sure that you are guiding your prospects to the next step in your campaign with the appropriate messaging and tactics.  We will be going into each step in more detail in future posts.

1. Email Capture

Email capture is the process of gathering emails in the first place. While we often use old lists from a CRM or other source, the best email campaigns are from lists that people have intentionally opted in on your website and that deliver emails that match the expectations set when they opted in.

At a high level, your success at capturing emails will depend on the value that you offer your visitors in exchange for their email address versus the friction or anxiety that your signup process creates.  Focus on having a signup that is both relevant to your target customers and offers exclusive content.

The expectations that you set here should be continued throughout the rest of your email purchase chain, and are key to the success of your efforts.

2. Email Open

The email open is the process of persuading your subscribers to open the emails that you send to them.  There are two primary components that drive the email open:

1. Email subject line
2. Email from address

The art of writing great headlines is worth practicing, but if you are looking for inspiration, check out our post on the 100 Greatest Headlines of All Time.  I strongly recommend a program like MailChimp that has the ability to test multiple subject lines on the fly. This means that you can give it two different subject lines and have it test their effectiveness on your first, say, 1,000 people on your list, and then it will deliver the rest of your emails to the most effective subject line without any more work on your part.

The from email address is usually overlooked as a factor in driving email opens, but it can have a big impact.  The more specific and relevant you can make it to the visitor the better.  The worst thing you can do is have a from email address that says something like “nospam” or “donotreply.”  Good email addresses are the person with whom the prospect had their initial contact or your company name and department.

3. Email Clickthrough

The email clickthrough is driven by creating interest in the information to be gained in exchange for clicking on a link.  Your body copy and imagery are the major factors in getting someone to click through.  Two key strategies to continue:

1. Make sure to create a problem and a solution.  All too often we jump straight to the solution, but without a problem we have not created any interest.
2. Make sure to provide multiple links around the primary offer.  As our article on the Latest  Email Marketing Research shows, this will increase clickthrough rates and decrease unsubscribe rates.

4. Conversion Landing Page

Your landing page is critical in getting visitors to convert, but all too often it is overlooked.  Three key components:

1. It should clearly contain elements from your email (don’t send them to your homepage!) so that visitors immediately know that they are in the right place.
2. It should have one clear action you want them to take (conversion) that they can complete on that page if at all possible.
3. It should follow landing page optimization best practices.  In particular, it should have as little noise as possible as far as a sidebar or top navigation.

The plans are in this R2 unit...Well, they were. We put them in a podcast for you, just click! Turn your website into your own secret weapon!

Below are blueprints of sorts, the beginning of how exactly to turn your website into your secret weapon. Now you probably think, hey, they will give us a little snippet of something good and then make us pay to get to the good stuff. No way, you’re getting everything. Below is a little bit from Synotac’s podcast done for E-Myth Worldwide, but it’s just the beginning!

Check out the 5 steps to turning your website from zero to hero and then click to the podcast for the details, in-depth information, free tools to help you accomplish these things, and practical advice from an industry expert.

1. Define Success: What does it mean for your website to be successful? What is it that you want people to do once they get to your site? Is it signing up for a newsletter? Selling a product? Filling out a contact form? Whatever it is, define it clearly and be ready to measure it.
2. Know your visitors: Do whatever it takes to get in the mind of your visitors. Think how they think, use the site as they do. Talk to your frequent visitors and find out how you can make their experience better. A website built around your visitors is a huge key to better conversions! You don’t want people leaving because they can’t find what they want or had an issue navigating it.
3. Give them something of value: If you provide something useful to your potential clients even when they aren’t actively searching for your services, you are still building your reputation, potential for word of mouth and referrals, and keeping your site on the minds of potential customers that look to you for things they need online. What can you provide, exactly?
4. Use many roads to get traffic: Building a site, even an awesome one isn’t enough to get people to come to it anymore. The sheer number of sites is astounding and your potential clients are bombarded with all kinds of links, offers, and ads constantly. To get to them effectively, you’ll have to explore multiple ways of capturing their attention.
5. Track: What is working? What isn’t? Where are people coming from? Where should you focus your efforts? What kind of people are you succeeding with? Who is ignoring you? This one is all about analytics; numbers, numbers, numbers.

Remember, this is just from the first 5 minutes! Listen to the podcast for all the juicy details, it’s free right here! Included are 3 Basic Tools To Improve Website Performance, the 4 Most Common Website Mistakes and much, much more.

Therefore, it is going to be increasingly important to monitor your own relative influence online and in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter so you can work to improve it and be a more valuable proponent for your links. Thankfully there are some great services out there for doing this already and we’re going to look at 3 that measure the influence of your Twitter handle. (Keep an eye out for when we look at how to measure Facebook influence)

1. Klout: Klout is a great site that is simple to use. All you have to do is enter your Twitter handle and away it goes. It scores on a bunch of different things, but the main report includes the True Reach, Amplification, and Network Score. True Reach looks at how many of your followers are actually real and active people vs. bots or dead accounts. Amplification is the likelihood a tweet will spark a conversation and Network Score is based on how engaged your most influential followers are. (Klout also now scores Facebook as well, but is still developing that algorithm)
2. TweetReach: This is a sweet little site that quickly looks up the last 50 tweets you posted and measures how many people they eventually reached through your network.  It also calculates a number of impressions and gives you the top people in your network that contributed to reaching people.
3. Twittergrader: Twittergrader is made by Hubspot, the same people who made the website SEO grader. Twittergrader returns a score out of 100 that takes into account the number of followers, number you follow, and tweets and retweets. The higher your score, the more influential your Twitter account is.

Keep an eye on influence, it is only going to become more important in terms of SEO and overall success of your content, links, and ultimately, your website.

1. Use the first person in your profile (don’t write it in the 3^rd person) - LinkedIn is for networking and like networking in person, the voice should be yours.

2. Put up your photo, and have a professional photo taken in the same clothes you would wear for a work business meeting. A head shot: head & shoulders. Not having a photo is like walking into a room with a bag over your head. – Those who only leave the Avatar on LinkedIn are referred to as ‘ghosts’

3. Your current position does not have to be just your current job. It can also be roles or training you give, e.g. “Conference Speaker”, “Member of the Design Business Association”, “University Guest Lecturer” “Football Coach at your children’s school’etc.

4. Make your summary focused on the reader – it’s a sales pitch. Talk about outcomes and benefits not features, and try to quantify what the outcome of doing business with you will be performance or offering. See it as a chat with your business prospect.

5. In the “specialties” area under your summary, write a list (separated by commas) of the keywords of how people would look for someone like you or for what you do. E.g. graphic designer, branding, print design, website design etc.

6. Under “public profile”, click on the “edit” button and take the funny stuff off from the end of your name, so your url reads something like this: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/madelynpostman

7. Get recommendations. No one cares what you say about yourself (your marketing) only about what others say about you In order to have a profile completeness of 100% one thing you have to do is to have at least 3 recommendations. In a recent UK university study, it was found that 13% of people believe the ads they see while 90% believe peer reviews. So get reviewed by your peers! You can give out recommendations to get a warm and fuzzy feeling and then you’ll have a chance that those people will reciprocate. You can also just ask for them outright.

8. Click on the “settings” link (currently at top right as a drop-down from your name) to look under the bonnet and switch around anything you want to so you’re comfortable with the level of privacy. You can make your photo not visible (kind of defies the point but…), not show who you’re connected to, etc.

9. Link to whomever you want. Some people only link to people they know and like (this is called a narrow but deep network –where relationships are close). Others will link to anyone and everyone (this is called wide but shallow – where you don’t personally know everyone well ,but you are now connected). Do what you want.

10. Under your website links, you can link to specific things you can have up to three back links to your website – use them all to drive traffic to your website like a portfolio page of your website or a blog. You don’t have to limit yourself to just one link per website. You can also customize the names of those links (instead of just “Company Website” for example.)

11. By all means add in your interests/hobbies if you want under the “interests” section — it can provide an opening point for conversation. Part of the networking Know / Like / Trust process of relationship building

12. You can set up a company page for your own company.

We thank Mark Perl for this great information and helpful recommendations, visit his site or stop by one of his social media profiles list below.

Mark Perl UK Mobile: +44 (0) 7907 438 454 www.markperl.com http://twitter.com/markperl Connect with him on LinkedIn Connect with him on Ecademy

• Used car sales
• Cell phone companies
• Consumer banking
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

So why am I picking on search engine optimization companies?  Because they are an industry full of shady practices, and for no particular reason.

SEO as explained by a five year old

People have questions.  They go to the internet to ask strange creatures called “search engines” these questions.  If the “search engine” gives a good answer, these people keep coming back.  Because the search engine has earned their trust, it is allowed to provide additional answers to questions from companies that are willing to pay to have these visitors come to their website to answer their question.  To not violate their visitors’ trust, the search engines have to ensure that the answers they supply, both paid and unpaid, are good answers.

SEO as explained by most SEO companies

Give us regular amounts of money, sign a long term contract, and we will do some magic stuff that results in your website ranking highly for search terms that generate a lot of business for you.  We may want to make some changes to your website that makes it sound strange to a human who reads it.

What’s missing?

What’s missing is that most SEO companies work against the interests of the search engines.  In the language of a five year old, they are tricking the search engines into putting a bad answer in their results instead of making your website a better answer to the questions your prospects are searching for.  While this tactic may work in the short term, it never works in the long term.  For this reason, I would not work with an SEO company that cannot explain their services in the language of a five year old.

While there are a number of factors driving this change–a severe recession, the ubiquity of the internet, the growth of mobile devices, the dramatic decrease in the cost of computing power and storage, innovative new ways to communicate–I believe that this shift fundamentally boils down to the reality that your website is no longer a spoke in your marketing efforts, but the hub around which your efforts revolve.

We have created a model of this new reality that we call The New Marketing Ecosystem.  This model allows us to understand what the different components of our clients’ marketing are, and how we can most effectively amplify each component using their website.

Fundamentally your marketing breaks down into five Drivers of web traffic:

1. Paid search engine marketing
2. Organic search engine marketing
3. Word of mouth
4. Offline media
5. Mobile devices (not technically a separate source, but becoming important enough that it needs to be acknowledged)

And two Attractors that both receive traffic from your website and send traffic to your website:

1. Social media
2. Email marketing

The goal of the website is to provide continuity between the Drivers and your website, provide persuasive reasons to engage with the Attractors, and limit any friction between your website and the online purchase or lead being generated.

What do you think?  How could this model be improved or extended?  We are always looking for smart people to advance our thinking.

We all know that social media is a BIG DEAL.  After all, we keep hearing about it every day, right?  But one of the surprising elements of this current fad is that so few people actually understand what social media is.  This is a topic that requires going into greater depth than I have time right now, but the collection of services that gets lumped together as social media–Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Yelp, Geo-services like Foursquare, and more–are a very diverse collection of tools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.  Read David Pogue’s article for an excellent summary of the different services and why you should care.  For anyone still feeling confused about social media, this is a great place to start.

www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue.html