Malcolm co-wrote the case study, entitled “Anduro Marketing: Internet Services vs. Software Sales“, with Sid L. Huff. Sid is a Professor and Head of School at the School of Information Management, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

The summary of the case study as list on HBR.org is:
“Anduro Marketing is a Canadian company that sells technical services to companies wanting to improve their search engine website rankings. Though small, Anduro has attracted several major clients in both Canada and the United States, and expects steady profitability and growth. Anduro believes it can generate substantial additional profit by developing and selling a suite of software products that automate its technical service offerings.”

The case presents the conundrum that we had to either develop a technology suite related to SEO tools or focus on expanding our service offerings. I won’t tell you in this blog post what we decided to do. But you can contact me directly and I’ll let you know. Please contact Jeff Nelson via our Contact Us page.

This is an excellent question because even though social media is “free”, the time needed for a successful social media campaign is the real hurdle. So where do you start?

It is really just about time management! There are different approaches to this obviously, one being just hiring someone to do it. Fair enough! But if you don’t have that kind of budget, there are a few things you can do to get it under control.

Once you have the strategy in place – I need to pause here for a moment and just stress the importance of the strategy step – you need to decide how to move forward. Are you going to be the one in charge, Tweeting, YouTubing and Facebooking your way to business success??

OK, so once you have that figured out and have decided that it is in fact you that will be in charge of all of this, take a deep breath and put together a plan and FOLLOW it! Here are a few little tips that I use:

1. Dedicate one hour every day to social media. Whether you spend that time updating your blog, tweeting, or brainstorming a new video for YouTube is up to you. But don’t let anything distract or interrupt you unless it is an emergency. Sit down and do it.

2. Part of the strategy step would involve figuring out your message. Of course you don’t want to just blast your community of followers or friends with spammy, pitchy sales stuff so come up with some clever ideas to give out information that is interesting and useful to the ‘user’. You would be amazed how many people will stop following you on Twitter if you just blast sales pitches out there. It is bad form!

3. If you have some down time, use this time for social media. Come up with ideas etc so that on days when you are REALLY busy, you can just grab an idea, post it up and be on your way!

4. Use the tools available online – TweetDeck, HootSuite – the list is endless of great helpful tools.

Those are a few of my suggestions. I found a great blog post with some of the same ideas and some new ideas. Have a read here! It’s a pretty helpful post!

-Stefanie-

A few months ago one of our clients requested that we prepare a workshop on How to Use Social Media in a Crisis. During our preparation and planning for the workshop, Doug described in glowing terms how Michael McCain, President and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, handled the recall of numerous products due to Listeria contamination in August 2008. Doug explained that not only had McCain’s approach been sensitive and apologetic but McCain used a video on YouTube to reach all stakeholders quickly and directly.

Doug went on to say that in a situation of dire consequences McCain showed solid leadership and used social media to communicate a message brilliantly.

I’m familiar with social media but I couldn’t see the brilliance at first. Doug patiently explained that traditionally, when companies are in a crisis the typical approach is to stall, deny and twist the facts. The brilliance, Doug explained, was McCain’s lightening speed delivery directly to the families, the media and the public. Instead of using a traditional press release McCain posted a video on YouTube and backed up statements on the company’s blog.

I agreed with Doug’s assessment but didn’t think much about the details because I don’t eat cold meats. We held the workshop with our client and they were very pleased with the strategy and technology platforms recommended by Doug. I had learned something and assumed this was the end of it. However, I was soon to find out more about McCain’s phenomenal leadership.

A few weeks after the workshop back when the weather in Calgary was much warmer, Doug and I were having beers on the roof top patio at Broken City. I had invited another friend of mine because I thought the two should meet. Half way through our first beer I brought up the story of Maple Leaf Foods and ask Percival (not his real name) what he thought. Percival” took a rather large swig of beer and replied, “I was there”. That got our attention – Doug and I were stunned and ready to listen.

The events below are my memory of what happened as told by Percival while we gulped cold beer under a hot sun. I must start by saying that this blog post has not been sponsored by anyone. I’m describing what I remember because of my admiration of the strong leadership shown by Michael McCain and his brilliant use of social media.

Early in August of 2008, Maple Leaf Foods received a report from the Canadian government stating that the strain of Listeria that had caused the deaths was confirmed to be from the manufacturing plants owned by Maple Leaf Foods. The people in head office were devastated – nearly everyone was in tears. To complicate matters the regular PR team for Maple Leaf Foods was out of town and not able to help handle the crisis. McCain reached out to his contacts and eventually got in contact with my friend, Percival. McCain described the situation and asked Percival to prepare an approach and meet the next morning.

Percival spent most of the night preparing a strategy and arrived at headquarters the next morning. Percival met McCain who invited him into a room full of executives, advisors and lawyers. McCain gave brief introductions and then asked Percival what he recommended. Percival passed a one page sheet to everyone. McCain started to read the statement out loud eventually read the words, “I am sorry.” Immediately, others in the room started to protest, explaining that this statement couldn’t be published in a press release because the fallout would be disastrous. McCain cut the protesters short and continued reading out loud. He then opened the floor for comments. Predictably, the lawyers argued that saying sorry would be admitting fault and that there would inevitably be an expensive class action suit. Heated discussion ensued without Percival’s input. Eventually, McCain turned to Percival and asked him to explain his rationale. Percival faced the room and asked a question, “How much will a class action suit cost?” The legal team and accountants made quick calculations and estimated that the cost would be in the hundreds of millions. Percival then asked McCain what were Maple Leaf Foods’ annual revenues. McCain replied that revenues were over $5 billion per year. Percival stated that Maple Leaf Foods was going to get sued no matter what approach they took. The issue was how to handle the crisis with the least damage to families, employees and investors.

At this point, Percival set aside the traditional press release and recommended that McCain prepare a video tape of his statement and post it to YouTube. He stressed that Maple Leaf Foods should provide information that was honest, forthright and delivered quickly. In later months Maple Leaf Foods started to use their company blog to reinforce the public statements on YouTube.

McCain’s response to the YouTube suggestion was to ask everyone to leave the room. He then called his videographer to record a statement. The videographer then posted the video on YouTube. You can view the video and McCain’s statement here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgk3o3AJM2U.

The end result is that Maple Leaf Foods took the high road and paid its dues to families. These actions helped to restore the public’s faith in the company. What more can you ask?

He has done some research and has come to the conclusion the Tweeting less and posting a fewer number of  links actually gets you better results in Twitter.

Read his first blog post here and the follow up one here. The follow up blog post talks about which times of day and which days of the week are most effective. Really interesting blog post!

-Stefanie-

The title is, “When to Restructure Your PPC Campaign or Completely Start Over” by Amanda Chaney.

She points out 5 scenarios which may lead you to have to make a decision to either restructure or start over:

1. Change of Direction – company is going in a new direction, with a new site

2. Client Evolution – long standing account may not be working anymore since the internet and search behaviors change.

3. Site Redesign – if the site is undergoing a redesign, so should the PPC account.

4. Reporting Reasons – companies may want to see data grouped differently, focus on certain aspects of their site etc.

5. Poor History – if the account has poor history such as poorly written ads or poorly organized structure.

I would like to give my input here.

If at all possible, I don’t think it is a good idea to start over unless you have to. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Account history is a big deal – especially with Google Adwords. Google bases a lot of decisions on the account history and how the account has been managed in the past. Having a good account history will help and if you just go a restart from scratch, you will lose all the history. This is not only not great from Google’s perspective but just think about all the useful data you are losing. What can you use to compare the new data to? The account will have changed too much to compare it to the old campaigns so you have no real way of determining if the campaign is successful.

2. Making drastic changes when a client is making drastic changes to their website spells out trouble. We did this with a client of ours recently and here are the issues: they were getting a lot of conversions before they launched their new site and we redid their PPC campaign. All these changes were made and conversions dropped like a rock. We obviously had no way of knowing for sure if the problem was the PPC Campaign or the website. After about 3 months, we figured out that it was actually the site and not the campaign (CTR was much higher and more people were getting to the site but not covnerting). So be cautious when making drastic changes – either to your site or the campaign.

Small changes are better to make than big ones. The results may not be as obvious but in the end you know what changes made the difference.

So to recap, unless you really have to, I would always try to redesign rather than start fresh. What do you think?

The first email was related to an interview that CBC did with me. Dave Simms from CBC Television wanted my opinion on the Bing-Yahoo search story. The crux of the issue is whether or not the alliance will have an impact on Google search volume. My answer was No the merger will have minimal impact. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter will have more of an “impact” but realistically Google as a search medium will be with us for quite a few years. 70% of the searches worldwide go through Google. Actually, that is incorrect – my figures seem to be out of date. Market Share by NetApplication reports that Google has over 80% market share. Statcounter agrees. Wow.

We also sent out an email to announce our preview event on Wednesday, September 2 for IMC Vancouver. Avinash Kaushik from Google will be the keynote speaker. The conference will be fantastic and Anduro is helping to promote the conference by hosting an event here in Calgary a few weeks ahead of time. More about this in a future post.

Maybe we should have waited a bit before sending the second email. Today I received an email from a person I met a couple weeks ago at a business networking function wondering if it was “commonly accepted courtesy” to send a newsletter to someone without formally “opting-in”. This is an interesting question so I did some research and some thinking about what is ethical. Keep in mind that this event is explicitly a “networking function”.

One point of view by FutureQuest is that companies should have prospects opt-in if the email address is obtained from a business card. Technically this is probably correct but I’m not sure that this is practical or that it really makes a difference.

Another point of view that I like is expressed by Chip House. His post is titled: Business Card in Hand Doesn’t Mean Opt-in. Chip makes a differentiation between receiving a business card along with a handshake and receiving a card in a fishbowl. The former implies “opt-in” and the latter requires formal opt-in permission. I agree. Meeting someone, shaking their hand and getting a business card leads me to assume that I can phone the person, mail them a letter (even direct mail), fax them and send them an email – assuming that all those points of contact are on the business card.

Practically, I’m not sure how much difference it makes to get “opt-in permission”. Technically, we don’t have formal permission to send out the first email asking the person to opt-in.

My conclusion is that when I meet people at networking events I consider them business contacts who are interested in me, our company and what we are doing. I know I’m definitely interested in them and their company. So if you don’t want me to phone you or email you (tailor made or eNewsletter), then don’t give me your business card. But if you want to gain value from all the business contacts that we have in our company then we would love to have your business card and start a dialog with you.

I went and sat down with my little notepad and laptop. I looked around the room and thought, “Hmm this seems like a really small turnout for a social media event and these guys don’t really look like the computer/social media type.” As I wrote that, I realize that I am not exactly sure what a computer/social media type would look like but that is just what went through my head at the time.

The presenter started chatting with one of the ladies there about the latest book she had read and how her company published the book. Strange.

So the presentation starts – I managed to sign myself up for a Book Publishers guide to social media! “How do you market your books online using social media.”

I took a deep breath and thought, “Ok, it doesn’t really matter what the product is, I can apply this stuff to other clients as well.” So, we go on to learn how to set up an account on www.goodreads.com which is apparently a site where you can keep track of which books you have read, want to read, hated, loved etc.

I am an avid reader so it wasn’t all that bad.

Then we were taught how to set up a Facebook account.

I sat through the rest of the workshop Twittering about my disbelief that two hours of my time was spent learning things I have been doing for at least a year!!!

I did learn a few really interesting things:

Did you know facebook now has 200 million users? And that 60% of these users are between the ages of 35 and 54? Wow! Incredible. So for everyone out there thinking FB is for teeny-boppers and their little friends, think again! FB is becoming much more popular among “adults”.  The number of users aged 34 – 54 jumped by 276% in 2008!

Lesson learned – read the small print at the bottom of the site where it tells you that the workshop is put on by a Book Publishing company for other book publishers!!

Wednesday afternoon well spent!

Stef

Please note the use of the word “appear”. While this obviously doesn’t apply to all clients and all accounts, I have come to the conclusion for some that simply because people aren’t converting right from Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean the campaign isn’t working.

I just got off the phone with a client of ours who has us running Google Adwords and Facebook PPC campaigns. Internally, he has a Facebook fanpage. I just sent him a report with a bunch of numbers indicating which platforms are bringing in the most conversions. To an untrained eye, the report seems to scream, “Shut down the Facebook PPC NOW!”

But I walked him through the report and some of the numbers and came to the conclusion that even though people aren’t going straight through to buy his service, his direct traffic has almost doubled since the Facebook campaign has been turned on. This leads to the possibility that people are going there, having a look around, signing out, thinking about it and then coming back directly to the site to buy!

The point here is: make sure you look at all the numbers and factors before cancelling a campaign on any platform. You just never know what kind of traffic you are getting if you just look at one set of data.

Google Analytics is fantastic for this. Just make sure when you set up your Facebook campaign (and some others) that you use the Googel URL builder so Analytics can track it.

Questions about this or how to set up a PPC account? Just ask us!

Stefanie

That was in May 2005. Since then the tool has turned into a powerhouse for webmasters and SEO professionals. We now get over 15,000 visitors per month.

In Simple Mode the tool is great for browsing through a website and looking at the text and links. I can usually pick up one or two ways to improve a site just using Simple Mode.

In Advanced Mode we’ve added about 25 metrics related to the website and the page you are viewing.  In addition, there is a menu at the top with links to various tools; some that we have developed and some that are off site.

Visitors and users frequently send us questions about there site. Most often the problem is with their site but occasionally they point out a problem with the tool. A couple weeks ago, one user showed us a site using SEO-Browser that looked different in Internet Explorer and Firefox. That problem we had to fix.

Have a look at the tool: www.seo-browser.com. Try it out on your site and your competitor’s sites. You may be surprised by what you find out.

Contact me if you have questions.

Jeff Nelson
jeff.nelson@anduro.com

He writes a blog and has an interesting perspective on the industry of web strategy. See http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/. The post on May 5th has a video where Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies interviews Jeremiah.  In the video Jeremiah outlines 5 eras of social networking. The video is worth looking at.

Jeff Nelson