Mad 4 Blog

On May 2, Yahoo debuted a Marketing Dashboard for small businesses. This interface allows managers of small businesses to localize all of their website promotions and social networking strategies so that it’s easier to access and oversee all from one place. Clearly, Yahoo is hoping to be that place.

The dashboard offers such features as:

• Campaign tracking, with a focus on SEO and SEM
• Search engine optimization reports, showing where your business really stands with sites like Yahoo, Google and more
• Live online feedback aggregated from Facebook, Twitter and other sources
• Technical support 24 hours a day, with free and paid options
• Traffic analytics reports showing how a company’s website is performing
• News from across the World Wide Web that’s regularly updated and specific to the needs of small businesses

Yahoo hopes to provide those in charge of interactive marketing with a clear-cut, easy-to-understand platform by which they can monitor and analyze all of their online advertising in one central location.

Some may say that Yahoo is a little behind the curve with launching new systems for collecting website and social marketing data – most preexisting companies have, hopefully, already established a way to monitor their marketing by now. But hopefully Yahoo can introduce new formulas and improve upon existing platforms after looking at what’s popular or what doesn’t seem to work for other, similar dashboards. By directly facing the competition with more established options, like Google Analytics, they may be forced to step up to the plate with a system that’s truly a viable and rewarding options for those in charge of small business marketing on the Web.

What do you think? Will this help Yahoo stay relevant in a fast-changing field that’s dominated by such social media titans as Google? Or is it just a desperate bid to keep up with the status quo?

We’d love to give you a thorough lesson on how to get more “likes” on Facebook – but comedic website The Oatmeal has already done that for us! And it doesn’t take a long lecture or slideshow presentation; it only requires a series of extremely basic comics that boil down the concept to its simplest form, which is just to be more likeable. It sounds so easy, isn’t it?

Here are some of the points made in the comic, which we elaborate upon:

1) Don’t make your entire page about your “like” button. Hopefully you have more interesting content to offer than a bunch of reasons why someone should like you. If your page is designed well, easy to use and informative, then people probably will. They won’t if you beg, plead and cajole. It might look like you care more about yourself than you do the people that you’re hoping to serve, and if there’s one thing we can’t say enough, it’s to think about serving your potential clients and customers first. On Facebook or in real life, this always pays off.

2) Don’t contact everyone you know and ask them to “like” you. It’s not enough to ask to be liked, you have to earn it. People don’t typically enjoy it when you reach out simply for the sake of solicitation. They’ll see straight through that. Instead, you can promote a sweepstakes or post something on your page that would genuinely interest your target audience. Then reach out to them and tell them about that thing. Hopefully, they’ll click “like” just because they want to. Even if you have to offer some kind of incentive to click “like,” people will do it when there’s a benefit for them. And they’ll feel way better about it than if you just said, “Hey, click “like” for me! Thanks!” Give them a real reason.

3) Treat it like meeting a potential friend for the first time in real life. If you were meeting a potential client for lunch, you wouldn’t walk in and say, “Hey, you should like me and give me money!” You wouldn’t do that with a friend or potential romantic interest, either. When you want to impress someone you’re meeting for the first time – especially someone you want something from – then you would be on your best behavior, act respectful and find a way to tactfully bring up your potential partnership. This etiquette should also extend to online.

The Oatmeal closes by listing a bunch of creative ways to draw people to your Facebook business page. But the heart of the matter is that you want to think about your audience and what they’d enjoy reading about. Put this on your Facebook page, and your audience will find the content. Sure, you may need to market your inherent awesomeness a bit before it catches on, but in the end you’ll get an infinitely bigger response than if you’re hoping and praying that people are hitting “like” just because you asked – or worse, begged – them to do it.

Here’s the comic, enjoy!

Last week we talked about why and how Google Alerts is an important tool when it comes to brand marketing and management. So now are you ready to try it out?

Here’s how to do it:

1. Visit Google.com/alerts

2. There are five forms to fill out:

• Search query (the word or phrase as you’d want it searched – with correct spelling and punctuation; Google search tools apply, so use “ “ around your phrase for an identical match)
• Result type (such as videos, blogs, news, etc.)
• How often (you can choose daily, weekly or as it happens and get periodic round-ups from an automated scope of the Web)
• How many (you can choose from only the best results (best matches, newest, most relevant) or all results)
• Deliver to (this is your e-mail address; if you choose “as it happens” and expect a lot of results, you may want to create a label, filter or unique e-mail address to receive your alerts to keep from cluttering your inbox)

3. Next you hit “Create Alert” and you’re brought to a page saying that you’ll receive the e-mail for confirmation before the alerts begin.

4. When you receive the confirmation e-mail (which should happen pretty immediately), you just have to click a link that says “Verify” and you’re all set. Just be sure you don’t click the link under it, which is to cancel your alert!

5. Now you should start receiving any relevant notices as soon as they happen. You can visit the same website and click “Manage Alerts” anytime to change your settings. Accuracy and effectiveness may take some tinkering but are worth the more specific matches to satisfy your searches.

Setting up and monitoring Google Alerts is just one of the services that comes along with our website development, social media management, search engine optimization and interactive marketing. Let us know if you have any other questions about how to amplify and administrate your presence online!

Whether it’s from a vendor, customer or your competition, you want to know about the word-of-mouth buzz going on about you. And honest feedback isn’t always easy to receive. People are not always going to head to the source by calling you, visiting your website or putting a message on your Facebook business page wall. Just because you create public forums for colleagues, customers and clients to discuss your brand doesn’t mean the conversation isn’t continuing elsewhere.

With today’s fast-paced social media growth, and countless spaces to monitor online, it’s hard for you to stay on top of every instance where your name is coming up in the world – even if you do a periodic search for your name or your business’s. The most effective way to keep up with what’s being said about you on the Internet is to create a Google Alert.

You simply set up an account through Google and type in the key words or phrases pertinent, specifically, to your company. (This is also useful to do for your own name and perhaps some of your competitors as well.) Whenever these certain codes come up anywhere on the Internet, Google sends you an e-mail “alert” telling you about it. Then you can check out what’s being said immediately.

This can help you be more active in any conversations about your business. You can network with people who are interested in your brand or seeking more information. You can also more actively engage with any and all claims and commiserations about your products and services. This can help you stay on the ball and take part in your overall brand marketing and management. Plus, showing that you’re interested in hearing what people have to say and improving or engaging based on those details always garners a great response from the public.

Ready to get started? Check back next week and we’ll walk you through how to do it!

Starting this month and continuing over the next few weeks, Google AdWords is introducing some changes that are meant to make it even easier to use the popular website-promoting and ad-placement tool. As ever, the latest slew of updates targets two critical factors: becoming more accurate and becoming more user-friendly.

The primary adjustment is to its secretive algorithm, which determines how to rank and analyze certain keywords in order to match and rank content.

For starters, AdWords will now allow advertisers to place ads based on more specific keywords. Instead of trying to match content using less descriptive means, marketers can choose the narrowest and most niche keywords so that their creative appears only next to extremely specific phrases and articles. And, of course, they’ll be able to track how certain keywords fare as compared to others in order to determine what those designations should be. Google is calling this option “next-gen keyword contextual targeting.”

And it’s important to note that this upgrade is coming along with a new and easy to use display grid that makes it simple to manage and monitor these campaigns.

In terms of targeting and tweaking campaigns, Google will be releasing a visualization aid that shows marketers how their campaign is faring on a grid that will help them quickly locate and assess the information they’ve collected. This graphic map plugs into analytics data and can be reorganized according to specific features that are an individual advertiser’s top priorities, such as keyword, location or topic. The Google AdWords visualization aid provides a bird’s eye view of trends, clusters and other historical data.

What do you think of these updates? And what other changes do you think AdWords still needs to stay at the top of its game in an increasingly competitive Web marketing world?