I very rarely think of my own blog as I blog daily for handfuls of other small companies around the country. I wish I could even say that I think about my own blog monthly. But I don't. If asked to defend my slackidasical position, I would probably cite the ultimate cop out - "cobbler's kids" with an innocent shrug. Did you know there's actually an official cobblers kids syndrome? It's a syndrome where a company does not do for itself what it does successfully for its customers day in and day out. So, there it is. I have cobbler's syndrome.
33social has continued to grow as we are blessed with more very talented consultants and new clients. Here are our social media stock recommendations. After working with the various mediums/properties day in and day out, our enthusiasm for a particular property changes based on the social media market and the ability of these social mediums to get some play in terms of search placement. We look at content in a very organic way. Content should be distributed on a weekly basis. This content should be educational and helpful to the consumers within the demographic you're trying to market to.
Here is our current report
Blogging: enthusiastic thumbs up
Blogging continues to be a win/win for companies and their customers alike. Well written blogs that educate the correct demographic honestly about key components of decision making within the market where your company operates are beneficial both for consumers and for companies. Search engines love great blogs and they should. It's the ultimate content for organic search placement when it's well written to truly educate the target market.
Blogging tool: hosted wordpress blogs
As I wrote when I started this blog, WordPress made some slash and gash decisions about a couple of my blogs ostensibly because of excessive backlinks. I gave Blogger an honest try but were my blog not only on here I would not use it again. The biggest reason is because Google's navigation is the least intuitive navigation known to man. I get that and that's ok. Any programmers that can search and sort millions of website pages and return gazillions of results within fractions of seconds can be expected to suck at navigation. And they do. It's not just one part of navigation that they suck at either. They put things in the wrong place, call them unintuitive words, and use icons that are completely indiscernible. But, it's all good Google. You're a verb now and you're making money at it based on my next thumbs up.
Pay-per-click: thumbs up!
We have put a bit more time and effort back in to PPC marketing which we had previously been a little thumbs down about. The reason we were thumbs down is because we had hired third party companies to market our PPC. As it seemed intuitive at the time, those companies would take a larger percent of the dollars than necessary. And, that's why they wouldn't state what percentage they were taking. But, they really failed when it came to spending every single last stinking penny every single month. It should stand to reason that based on the varying cost of clicks and varying search traffic that there should be at least pennies left over on one month or another. But, there never were. In addition, after some poking around with some very unwilling representatives, I found that thousands of search phrases were being advertised. The companies I represented only sold a handful of services. The bottom line is if they could conceivably relate any word in any way to any product or service my clients had, they would spend my money advertising it. Would they eventually be fired because of poor performance? Perhaps. Could they get away with their strategy? By scatting thousands of keywords to the winds, they could generally show enough clicks to satisfy the unwitting advertiser.
I'm now managing these campaigns in house and running very tight campaigns. The geography is tight. The advertised keyword strings are on a short list and the campaign is written by marketers that truly know the clients business. We're pleased with the results.
Pinterest: jury's still out
Pinterest has some fun stats like their rate of growth and the number of referrals. The experience is nice and very sticky. The session times are juicily long. But, reports on the demographics of the Pinterest customer vary. The second problem is that their search is as bad as Twitter's search - abominable! If Twitter still hasn't gotten it right after all these years, who is to say that Pinterest will ever learn to search their own content? But the big issue with Pinterest is the lack of ability to target geographically. My clients are all in the home services industries and their creations are breathtaking. So, getting a re-pin is not hard. But I only want re-pins in one particular market for each photo and to this point there's no way to manage that.
facebook: dangit facebook!
Dangit facebook, will you ever come up with a compelling experience for non-retail, low-ticket, and non-cult brands? I have to assume that the lion's share of your "pages" customers don't have daily specials and aren't on the top 100 recognizable brands list. What is the benefit of following a page where the user won't get cheapies, freebies, or a cult brand squeeziee hugs? I know facebook, I should be figuring that out instead of writing this blog. But, I have to assume that you will come up with an "experience" for places that rivals the experience for humans.
YouTube: one thumb up
YouTube is in the group of properties that I require each client to have and create content for on a fairly regular business. Product company content, by its nature, is not viral. But, videos do a great job of telling a story and when we use our other successful properties to send our own traffic to YouTube, we are very thankful that YouTube is a free video hosting system.
On the testing block... Houzz
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