Thinking Digital Conference - building your brands online

I attended the Thinking Digital Conference at The Sage in Newcastle, Gateshead last week. I would recommend this conference to anyone who's in the digital sector and wants to find out the latest trends and thought leadership.

There were some outstanding seminars - the ones I really found inspiring were from:

• Stowe Boyd - reclaiming the social space
  
• Mike Southon - being a successful entrepreneur
  
• Tara Shears - talking about the big bang and CERN
  
• Jonny Chung Lee - presented new ideas in human - computer interaction
  
• Caleb Chung - kids toy inventor
  
• Alex Hunter - Head of Online for Virgin Group
  
• Tara Hunt - creating your Whuffie factor - the value of your social capital in the online world

I was in awe of the presentation by Alex Hunter and the launch of the online community around the Virgin brand. A bold move, but one they won't regret. They are embracing the new wave of social web and moving from being brand guardians to brand custodians. A move mos big brands are afraid of doing.

Tara Hunt gave a great presentation about boosting your Whuffie factor - which is the value of your social capital in the digital world.

So putting these presentations together started me thinking about building and managing online communities. So are great and some are a complete flop - but what are the factors at play which determine their success? Having been working with the team at Reach Further, I've started to understand the magic ingredients.

Getting the word out........
You can't just put up a community (unless you are an awesomely huge brand such as Virgin) and hope members join and start participating. You have to think about your community in the real world - and how you would start getting customers into your store or restaurant. You don't just open the door and hope people flood in. You start marketing your new restaurant in the local vicinity and newspapers.

The online version of marketing in the local vicinity and newspapers is to ensure you seed you are present in the conversations around your content- whether this is on Digg, facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Creating a killer application - perhaps on facebook or on Linked In. This is where boosting your whuffie factor will boost the success to the sign up rate on your community.

Getting to know you
Once people are starting to sign up they need to be made to feel welcome - the equivalent would the front of house in a restaurant and directing you to an appropriate table. You'd then be seated, given nibbles and told of the specials of the day.

Ensuring your new members are made welcome and sign posted to relevant content is important. Making sure you have a purpose for the community is important to the overall success - is it to get feedback on your products and services or to stimulate discussion around a topic (such as landscape photography).


I like what I see.....
Once you have got people through the door and seated at the tables, you then need to start getting people within the community to start sharing information - which meal off the menu do you recommend?, Have you been to this restaurant before? Generating community specific content is crucial to retaining the interest of the members - get exclusive interviews or webinars....that type of thing!


Can I take your number
If it's a success, members will start spontaneously chatting, sharing information - perhaps meet up in the real world? (such as photographers meeting in a forum and then meeting up on location!). Acquiring and retaining your members is then an ongoing cycle.....

Other tips that I've picked up onlong the way:

1. Building an online community takes time, start with a blog and get comments on there

2. Using Drupal is a good open source platform to base your community on

3. The content on the public part of the site needs to be your shop window - to entice members in. So it needs to be inviting, authentic and relevant

4. Sign up to the community needs to be as easy as possible - don't take all the personal information at once. Build up trust and let them build their profile.

5. Make sure you moderator the community - you need to be in control


I felt that I was on the cusp of the new wave of the social web. It's exactly where I was 12 years ago when I moved into online marketing - and Google started boosting it's market share. There's a new way of building your brand and driving traffic to your website.

Come on in......now then, where would you like to sit?

LinkedIn - every individual is a small business

I went to the IoD Annual Convention on the 29th April. Reid Hoffman, Founder LinkedIn was one of the speakers. He had some really interesting points which I would like to share with you are they were inspiring for me and have made me think about how I use Linked In.

• Every individual is a small business, as a typical job lasts 2 - 4 years. Using LinkedIn is one way of promoting your brand and building your personal network which will support you as a small business.

• My learning from this is that you need to keep your skills and positions current. Use your offline network to connect online and only connect to those people you know will assist you as a small business. These are your advisers, suppliers, collaborators, customers - people in your sphere of influence who you feel confident to recommend to other people.

• Before you start promoting yourself make sure your profile is complete - and your current business profile is complete. I certainly have had instances where people have met me at a networking event, lost the card and then searched for me in Google and my profile has come up. Making sure that the data is correct vs your elevator pitch is essential.

• Embracing and using new technologies will create the competitive advantage for you as a small business (in the above scenario). Therefore using LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging etc can help promote you as a brand and small business - which will give you skills over other people and businesses. Being an early adopter of technology will help boost your competitive edge in a high pace world.

I already used LinkedIn and have done quite a bit of business over the past few months through Linked In. Ensuring that I am an early adopter of technology is certainly that I can work harder at to create that competitive edge over other online marketing consultants.

The Long Tail of Key Phrase Research

I gave a seminar last week at Reach Further on social search optimisation, which was about optimising your blog, twitter, Linked In, You Tube videos so they all appear in the search engines on the specific terms related to your products and services.

Some one then asked me about the difference between generic and niche key phrases and how to identify them.........which got me thinking about the best way to explain it to a newbie.

The Long Tail

This is a niche business strategy that states:

'Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. (http://www.longtail.com)

So how's this relate to key phrase research?

When using a tool to research your key phrases (such as Google Keyword tool) you will get a mixture of key phrases which range from high volume to low volume; one key word to 3, 4 or 5 key words........but how do you choose which are the most relevant for your products and services?



The generic, high volume keywords:

• are highly competitive
• take longer to achieve rankings
  
• will drive high volume of visitors
• will have lower conversions
  

The more niche, lower volume keywords:

• will be less competitive
  
• will drive lower volume of visitors
• take shorter length of time to achieve rankings
• higher conversions

However, the long tail also represents the process by which customers refine their search and move from the generic searches into the niche searches.

How this reflects the customer search process

When a person starts researching a product or service they start off quite generic in their searches as they are unclear exactly what they are looking for. So the terms used are the generic key phrases.

When they understand further about the attributes of the product or service, they then refine their search to include the attributes, so they key phrases become longer and more niche. The customers naturally move down the slope on the long tail, through their search / buying process.

Customers will be more likely to purchase from a site if they have appeared in a niche term compared to a general term. Which is why it is important to understand your business goals / products and services to ensure that you match up these to your key phrase research.

However, you need to ensure that you have identified the key phrases along the long tail that the customer might use and include these in your campaign.

Years ago I went to a seminar run by E-Consultancy in Manchester and the marketing director from a large travel organisation was talking about the branding perspective of PPC. They had done a huge overhaul of their PPC and removed all the generic terms which had a low conversion rate or high cost per acquisition, thinking this would improve the overall performance of the campaign. Quite the reverse happened and the overall performance decreased.

This was due to the branding aspect of appearing in the PPC listings. If an ad appears in the listings throughout the long tail of customer research, then, the customer will be more probable to click and purchase on that site compared to a site that only appears solely in the generic or on the niche terms.

This theory applies to search engine optimisation or even social search optimisation. Ensuring your website appears in the listings for the long tail specific to your business is essential for the success of your campaign.

So when doing your keyword research think about the long tail for your key words and get a good distribution of phrases in your campaign.