Making connections

Author: Michele Lawson

Date: Dec 03, 2009

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Frank Matys

Josh Muirhead, social media coordinator at Muirhead Marketing.

SIMCOE COUNTY - The word “Toronto” might mean “meeting place” in its original Huron language, but the Internet’s the place to go these days to get deeply connected. With more than 300 million active participants (half of whom are online at any given time), “Facebook is the fourth-largest country in the world,” says social media coordinator Josh Muirhead of Muirhead Marketing. Never has cross-border buying and selling been so simple – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In promoting its Media Convergence Forum this year, the London-based newspaper company The Economist (which has widely expanded and updated the way it delivers its message since opening in 1843) posted a video called Did You Know 4.0 to illustrate the relevance of its theme. “A surge of new technologies and social media innovations is altering the media landscape,” it flashes in mock newspaper tear-sheet fashion across the small You Tube display. “It’s easier than ever to reach a large audience, but harder than ever to really connect with it.” With 90 per cent of the 200 billion emails sent out every day being spam, online viewers are quick to pass on irrelevancies with a dismissive click. But they can be stalled if approached in the right way. Businesses are counting on it. In a June 12 blog post, Claire Cain Miller told her New York Times audience about Dell reporting it “had earned $3 million in revenue directly through Twitter since 2007, when it started posting coupons and word-of-mouth products on the micro-blogging site.” During the last U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama skipped all campaign fundraisers in February 2008 preferring to focus on online social networks. In 29 days, he raised $55 million dollars. John McCain brought in $11 million going the traditional route. These grass-roots information and connection tools, which were initiated for friends and families to interact, started to catch the attention of the business community as statistics showed people visiting social media sites for extended periods of time. “Suddenly you had three million people staying on these social media sites for a half-hour and up per session,” says Muirhead. “At first, companies were just broadcasting their messages just as if they were in the traditional media, like print or broadcast – like ads, but then the shift started.” The Internet and all it’s formerly fringe networking tools have landed solidly in the mainstream. At first the domain of uber-techie university students and communication-crazed youngsters, Facebook now reports its fastest-growing demographic to be among the 35-plus set. And where consumers are, business will follow. It’s not unusual now to see blogs, or Twitter, Facebook and You Tube links on a corporate site. Websites and social media activity have become intrinsic mutually supportive components to overall successful marketing campaigns and plans. Other popular tools include Scribble Live, Flickr, Vimeo and Yammer, says Muirhead, who helps his clients navigate through all the options to focus on the best strategy. “Certainly MySpace is still out there. And Plaxo.” Plaxo, like LinkedIn, both founded in 2002 (two years before Facebook) were unusual in their early focus on the business community, but they performed more like databases than networking forums. It wasn’t until the popularity of Facebook, however, that the corporate potential began to be appreciated. “Businesses realized John knows three people and Suzie knows five,” Muirhead explains. “So they realized they could start building networks online and open up the channels of communications to the consumer to build relationships. And from that, to staying top of mind when someone’s thinking of buying.” People believe peer recommendations 74 per cent more than direct advertisements, he cites, so creating an on-line network is a valuable referral partnership. As a following is built up, the information from one person is shared to a network and then onto a network of networks, and the message continues to be spread exponentially. The interaction of these networks can also allow companies to evolve and implement their research and development at a breakneck speed. “Companies are better equipped to build their brand because now they can engage with their target market,” he continues. “They’re getting great customer feedback immediately.” But positive results happen faster if the attention that’s being generated is a profitable kind of attention, says search-engine optimizer (SEO) Warren Houston, who has operated NetConneXion since 1998. In the end, it’s about using all the online tools possible to increase traffic – the right traffic – to the website. In Dell’s report, the multi-millions of dollars in revenue came by attracting interest and directing that attention to a website that helped those potential clients become customers. With all this traffic from its social media marketing strategy, Dell would have also received the side-benefit of improving search engine rankings, so non-networked buyers could find the company easily as well. “What good is a website if nobody sees it?” poses the MBA-trained Houston. “Social media is a low-cost way of increasing site traffic, and increased site traffic is another way of improving web ranking.” Just like any marketing strategy, the first step is determining where the target market is, explains Houston. “We don’t do anything without keyword research,” he says. When developing a plan to optimize a website, it’s a two-part initiative – onsite and off site. “Onsite, what we do to the website is manipulate it to connect to the targeted traffic on Google – and that’s the whole goal.” He says people can often find themselves on at the top of the Google ranks when doing a keyword search on their name or industry jargon, but that’s not necessarily how most people are going to search for their goods and services. Consequently, NetConneXion does the market research to find out how a particular target market searches for specific things. “A lot of the time, companies are so involved in their industries, they don’t realize the traffic out there searches for them a bit differently because it doesn’t have those same inside terms,” he explains. “They’re too close to the industry and they don’t put their customer hats on.” These shoppers have not been linked in by a network, they’re fishing and their lures are keywords. The “fish” in this case are websites wanting to be landed, so they need to know what lures to look for and how to be caught. But having those keywords throughout the site and attached to social-media messages aren't working if Google doesn’t view a site as important enough to be highly ranked. “Offsite, one of the biggest pieces of SEO is linkage, because Google always wants to be relevant,” Houston says. If many external links are pointing to a particular website, Google figures it must be credible and consequently bumps its ranking. But gone are the days when reciprocal links have the same impact. Google is constantly updating its programming to combat such easily recognized tactics. “It’s looking to be more thematic,” he explains. “One link from another site in the industry is seen to be more valuable than 50 from others that have no relevance.” Whether a blog, video or profile page is being posted, there’s an opportunity to include keywords that provide a link back to a site, so everything is working together. While it may only takes a second to fill up the allotted 140 characters per Tweet, savvy businesses understand the growing techno-psychology of social media marketing and are leveraging the opportunity. But the opportunities are growing and they’re all labour intensive – they are all ongoing projects, not static one-timers like a billboard, for example. Time management and skill assessment are important factors in determining how much of the development and upkeep will be done in house or by contracted specialist. “The idea is adding different touch points so current clients can stay connected and future clients can be referred to you,” says Muirhead. Simple. Cutline for attached headshot: Warren Houston, president of NetConneXion, helps businesses optimize their website search-engine rankings.