If we had a dime for every time that the nebulous phrase, “social media”, was uttered in the context of some new fad that everyone in the corporate world is doing, well, we wouldn’t be wasting our time writing articles for our web site, now would we?  But we digress.

Social Media and Money

It’s no secret that the business world is emphatically excited about the potential monetization of social media.  Not everyone has figured out how best to utilize social media to help their business grow.  We hear lots of interesting stories from prospective clients about their incessant tweets or their Facebook fan page and we applaud most of them for trying to ride the wave while it’s hot.  The enthusiasm is fantastic and it’s great to see colleagues and clients get so excited about the promise of something big.  But do you think many of them have figured out a way to monetize it?  Nope.  Not a single one.  I’m sure they are out there, but the people I talk to are still trying to figure it out.

My favorite conversation about social media epitomizes how a majority of the corporate world thinks when it comes to social media.  A Fortune 100 client was recently in town to discuss their marketing plan and they were eager to share their internal “Social Media Marketing Plan” with us.  It was more of a manifesto than a marketing plan but now we’re being nitpicky.  When they were presenting their marketing plan, they mentioned that their goal was to create a social community of die hard fans of their product/service.  It included all the popular social media concepts like a blog, Facebook integration, Twitter integration, a discussion forum, an “Ask the Expert” section, etc.  A novel idea, in concept, but it’s been done a few times before.  The part of their plan that caught our attention was their plan for moderating the discussion forums.  Their plan was to have an internal administrator review all posts and approve only the ones that spoke favorably about the company.  In essence, they didn’t want anyone saying that their business “sucked”.  Let’s extrapolate on “sucking”.

A Word or Two About “Sucking”

No one wants to hear that they “suck” unless they are the State Fair Lollipop Sucking Champion.  This is especially true in the corporate world.  But lets face it, everyone sucks sometime in their life.  No company is perfect and no one is immune to criticism.  Arguably, it’s your customer’s job to tell you when you suck and when you don’t.  This allows you to do a couple of things:

1. Engage with the customer.  Find out why they think you suck and fix the problem, if there is one to be fixed.
2. Correct the customer’s expectation if they have the wrong impression or were led astray by an external source.
3. Fix your mistakes in a public forum so that other customers (or prospective customers) can see that they are dealing with a company that cares and is willing to own up to their mistakes.
4. Show the world that you are listening.  At the very least, it will make them think twice about posting potentially misleading information on your web site.

There’s a common saying in the business world that, “for every customer that has the guts to come forward and tell you that you “suck”, there are 10 more that feel the same way but will not admit it”.  We’re paraphrasing of course, but you get the point.  What other medium allows you to interact with your clients and potential clients so quickly and easily?  I can’t think of one.

One of the great values of social media is that it allows you to interact with someone in a raw and unfettered way.  It gives you the opportunity to confront your biggest fans and your worst enemies on a level playing field and gives you the opportunity to defend yourself (or apologize for your misgivings) in a public forum so that the world can see that you are a company made up of human beings that have feeling.  This personification of your corporate image has the effect of making customers want to do more business with you.  After all, no one wants to do business with a robotic organization that doesn’t have a soul.

Just in case you were wondering, our recommendation to the client was to lay of the moderation and let people be who they are.  Sure, there will be some whack-jobs that want to blow off steam at your expense, but when you professionally respond to them publicly in an attempt to address their issues and they don’t subsequently make an honest attempt to work with you on it, the world will quickly realize that they are just looking for attention.  People aren’t dumb.  And if they do respond and you can listen first, then address their issue  – imagine then how your customers will appreciate your honesty and integrity.  It’s going to take a while to figure out how that impacts your bottom line, but it doesn’t take an MBA to figure that any positive interaction with your audience is a good one.

Search is changing the way we think about the web.  It’s also changing how we perceive the organic results that we see today.  In the not-so-distant future, SEO will cease to exist, at least it won’t exist as we know it today.

The fundamentals of how search engines like Google display search results are shifting.  With the creation of Universal Search last year, Google opened up Pandora’s Box in the search world.  Prior to then, everything was fairly predictable.  You execute a search, the results show up from top to bottom in order of the most relevant web sites.  With Universal Search, Google began to incorporate Video results, Product results, Book results, News results, and Social Media results, to name a few.  This action paved the way for what we believe will be the next phase in search engine evolution: Personal results.

You are already beginning to see this on search engines like Amazon.com’s A9 and within Google itself if you are logged into your Google Account when you execute your search.  Today, you’ll occasionally see Local search come into play when Google knows where you are located.  But let’s take that to the next level.  Personal results will take everything that a search engine knows about you (not just your location) and tweak the algorithm ever so slightly so that items/pages are very specifically relevant to you and you only. This means that when you execute a search for “holiday gifts”, you will get a list of items/pages that are very uniquely suited to you and only you. Everyone else, however, will get an entirely different result set.

Now think about that from the standpoint of a company like G4 Commerce.  We optimize web sites for a living.  Our clients pay us to get them to the front page of Google for their important keywords.  How will we possibly do that for each of the millions of users of Google each day?  It’s a good thing we are multi-talented

After search engine optimizing web sites for countless numbers of clients over the past 7 years, we’ve noticed that much has changed…and much has stayed the same.

What’s Changed?

• New niche search engines pop-up regularly.
• Microsoft now favors changing it’s search engine name at least two or three times a year.
• Google et al. are incorporating many different forms of media in “Universal” search results giving us much more to peruse than just a simple web page.
• Social Media is playing a much larger role in the relevancy of a web page than ever before.
• Yahoo is giving up the search war to Google and Microsoft in favor of a strong focus on digital advertising.
• “Paris Hilton” is no longer the number 1 requested keyword search each month (thank you!).

What’s Stayed the Same?

• Microsoft still hasn’t figured out that it cannot build a search engine that people will use with regularity. Not just because their technology is inferior to Google’s, it’s actually not that bad, but because a majority of online searchers don’t like or trust Microsoft’s brand image. Searching is a very personal experience.  Every day we pour the questions that are on our mind into a little tiny box on a screen and divulge our inner curiosities. This information, in the wrong hands, can be damaging and no matter what they call their search engine (MSN, Live, Bing), people still will not trust them.
• Tried and true search engine optimization tactics are still the safest and most effective way to increase search engine rankings over time.  Let’s extrapolate on this topic.

Tried and True

The SEO tactics that are working well in today’s awkwardly changing search environment are the same techniques that worked 5 years ago.  Fundamentals like proper TITLE tags, H1 tags, lots of inbound links, well-formed HTML and good page content still heavily out-weigh the tricks and traps that you can find when you search for seedy topics like “SEO tricks” or “SEO secrets” on Google.  Sure there are little nuances and small tweaks that need to be made regularly to keep companies like us on our toes, but the fundamentals still hold true and can get an un-optimized site huge gains in very little time.  So why are there so many bad SEO companies out there if these techniques haven’t changed all that much?  Let me know what you think.

Look, it’s no secret that the economy is in the drain and times are tough.  We don’t believe that the cost of entry needs to be tens of thousands of dollars and nor should you.  So stop spending your hard-earned cash on fancy schmancy ad agencies and go the Web 2.0 route: Simple.  Clean.  Effective.  You’ll thank us later.

Web Development

There are many ways that web design and development firms go about building websites, but for simplicity, lets narrow it down to three main approaches:

1) Custom Web Development - They build it from scratch

Pro’s: You get exactly what you want (assuming that the web development firm listens well and documents your requirements.

Con’s: Rarely is a content management system included because they usually have too many limitations for custom web work.  Custom work is always pricey – think tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Custom web work usually takes months (and sometimes years) to complete since there is almost always scope creep and requirements usually always end up disappearing when it comes close to crunch time.

2) Semi-custom Web Development – They usually start with some sort of framework and customize/tweak it to get as close as possible to your requirements.

Pro’s: For the most part, you can get real close to what you want as long as it’s within the confines and capabilities of the chosen framework or content management system.

Con’s: Since there is still some custom work to get done, the implementation is usually long and the cost is still fairly high, but much less than a custom implementation.  Sometimes you have to live without a few bells and whistles because the framework doesn’t support it and the development team doesn’t know enough about the framework to be able to build it themselves. Some frameworks or content management systems have a very boxy look and feel to them thus limiting your creative options.

3) Off-the-Shelf Web Development

Pro’s: This is usually the least expensive route and can save tons of time if you are willing to live within the limitations of an existing web framework or content management system like Wordpress.  Some companies find very few limitations but it depends entirely on the complexity you are looking for.  These sites can usually be implemented in days and get you up and running fast.  You can focus more on running your business than on managing your website because most content management systems take very little time to learn and can save hours of work.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of design templates to choose from which greatly increase the speed at which the site can be implemented.

Con’s: You are usually limited to a templated design which may have been used by another company (but most good design firms can customize any template enough so that it is indistinguishable from the original design template).  You pretty much have to live with any functionality that is built into the framework but doesn’t suit your needs.

Web Sites on the Cheap

The path you choose depends heavily on your flexibility as a company and your desire to be unique.  For most entrepreneurs and small business owners, the need is to have an immediate website deployed on a web server so that they can begin building their business.  For others, the custom or semi-custom route might be the best way to go.

We work with both small and large businesses, each with their own unique needs and challenges.  In our experience, 75% of them are completely fine with a Off-the-shelf design approach and do just fine in the long haul.  It’s important that you know where you belong and instruct your web design firm to use the approach that is best for you and your budget.

We’ll take results over pretty pictures any day of the week.  In fact, our clients demand it.

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