WSI Blog

Web Equity by Mike Blumenthal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.blumenthals.com.

Facebook is the social networking site that's turning into a monster business marketing tool.  But how should your business use Facebook and what are the best ways of getting into a daily routine with your Facebook business page?

1. Post good, relevant content.  Make it part of your daily routine to be a provider of useful information to your friends and followers.  This shouldn't be a relentless one-way sales pitch, but rather a sign-post of industry news or latest trends.

2. Reach out a make connections with other businesses.  Spend some time to go and find their business pages, and press the Like button.  Post a comment on their wall and start to interact with their businesses. After all, this isn't just about your business.

3. Engage with your fans. Spend a little time responding to their comments, reacting to their posts or otherwise maintaining an open line of communication with them.  That way, they'll be more inclined to come back and visit, and more importantly to stay in touch with your business.

4. Learn how to measure your Facebook page.  Spend a few minutes looking through the Facebook insights page in your account, and understand what the numbers mean.  The simple things to measure are how many new fans you have, how many posts were made your wall, and when things get a little more advanced, there are plenty of third-party tools and software that allow you to measure brand engagement and reputation management.

5. Try, measure, adjust.  Once you build up a working routine with your Facebook page, measure the effect (or impact), and if it's working, carry on, but if not, try something else.  For example, if you keep posting lots of thought-provoking questions but nobody ever responds, them perhaps you need to ask easier questions, or perhaps you might that asking questions at all is not an effective method.

Facebook is powerful, with over 600 million accounts and still growing.  Businesses can harness the power of Facebook through an effective and engaging page design and a well though-out content & communications plan.

Is Facebook working for you?

Website accessibility is concerned with making websites fully accessible for all people, irrespective of ability.
Over recent years online accessibility has become more prominent in the minds of businesses, with the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in 1995, revised in 2005. The key aim of the DDA was to tackle the discrimination that disabled people face in society on a daily basis. The DDA also included requirements for websites for be fully accessible throughout the online community.

The Equality Act came into force in October 2010, which replaced the DDA, in England, Scotland and Wales.  The DDA & Equality Act are similar in that they both have the aim of tackling the discrimination which many disabled people face.

It is therefore very important to ensure that websites conform to the latest World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, which will help ensure that your website is fully accessible. The risk of non conformance and having an inaccessible website, is the potential for legal action to be initiated by somebody that is unable to use your website, and as such being discriminated against.

The Equality Act is ‘anticipatory’, which means you cannot wait until a disabled person wants to use your services, but you must think in advance and on an ongoing basis, what disabled people with a range of disabilities might ‘reasonably’ require.

As well as having potential legal implications, there is also a strong business rationale for ensuring websites are fully accessible to disabled users. There are approximately 10 million disabled people in the UK alone with a combined spending power of approximately £80 billion, so an inaccessible website may also result in lost business.

Making a website accessible

To make your website fully accessible it is recommended that conformance to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0,  Level AA is achieved.

Conformance to these standards, will involve testing a website against a number of guidelines, identifying and resolving any issues. There are a number of potential issues that would prevent your website being accessible to disabled users, with one of the most common being failure to have a meaningful text alternative for images on a website. Not all visitors will be able to see the images so its essential to provide a text alternative, which can be read by assistive technologies, such as screen readers.

Action For Better Access

At WSI Preston we are passionate about creating an internet which is inclusive for all sectors of the online population and we have recently partnered with the UK charity 'Action For Better Access', to provide online accessibility services.

Action for Better Access and WSI will work now together with the common aim of seeking to raise awareness and improve online accessibility for the disabled community.

The 9 Cs of social media - which type are you?









(Taken from an original Econsultancy report here.)

Social Media Marketing is still relatively new ("65% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months" - a 2010 report by Social Media Examiner), but is rapidly becoming mainstream.

So mainstream in fact that businesses are now actively in the foot-race to incorporate social media into their corporate or business website.

But without doing a complete overhaul or spending fortunes on a website re-design, here are 7 ways to integrate Social Media to turn your existing website into a "Social Hub":

1. Make it easy for your visitors to share your information amongst their own networks.  Add Social Media quick-links and Facebook 'Like' buttons to content pages and blog posts.

2. Add live feeds to your website so users can see your Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/etc information on your website in real time.

3. Create original, engaging content that can be shared.  Share your expertise and provide relevant content to your users, then (using 1 above) encourage your visitors to share the content with their networks.

4. Allow your visitors to have their say and provide opportunities to get their feedback. Make it easy for users to comment on blogs, encourage guest blog posts, get users to upload photos or videos and display it on a page on your site.

5. Get reviews and ratings for products and services. Encourage customers to provide these ratings - Google loves them and they become a source of positive validation of your business.

6. Build a blog on your site.  Wordpress is the king, but there are lots of easy (and cost effective) ways of incoporating a blog on your existing site. Build the blog, have a regular content strategy, and put an RSS feed on your blog to allow users to subscribe and get immediate notification when each new blog is posted.

7. Play the game! Gaming is huge, and gaming strategy is a key feature in social sites such as Foursquare or Facebook games such as Farmville. Whether we're interested in playing the game or not, the fact is that the addictive and competitive nature of gaming is a well known part of building engagement and loyalty.

Social Media Marketing continues to explode, with new social networking sites and Smartphone apps arriving daily.

Making it work for your business doesn't need to be daunting, but it does require you to make a start.

Meet Katherine:

- She's smart.
- She's successful.
- She runs her own business.

...and now she's decided to become her company's Social Media Expert!

It's a competitive world out there, and businesses need new customers to survive.

Across Lancashire and the Northwest, the economy has been tough for the last 2 years.  As we move into Q2 2011, things might be looking better than they were, but there's no hiding from the fact many businesses have gone to the wall.  Some are still holding on for dear life, clinging to their reputation and hoping that repeat business from a few cherished few customers is enough to see them through.

But at the same time there have been huge success stories too.  Companies have invested wisely and diversified early.  Others have such unique products and services that there's a natural buffer zone against economic downturn.

We can see evidence of renewed investment and economic regeneration; Blackpool being a case in point.  Last week the famous North Pier was sold by the Council to the Sedgwick family, amidst promises of renewed vitality and investment.

So How Can Local Businesses Keep Their Pipelines Full And Their Phones Ringing?

97% of people use the internet when researching or buying.  That staggering statistic alone tells us that any business, regardless of size or industry, needs to be online.  But not just being online; it's having an internet strategy that puts their business in the right places at the right times.

Your website: must exude your business philosophy, be an accurate portrayal of your products & services, and be an engaging and compelling place for visitors to be.  Boring is easy - fun & captivating is not.

Search Engine Optimisation: your business is invisible if you aren't found for the most basic of Google searches. Think about the 5 most common ways your customers might describe what it is you sell.  Then do a Google search for each of them.  Where does your website appear?  That's SEO.

Pay Per Click: if you can't get to page 1 of Google 'naturally', then pay to be there.  And better still - choose the precise keywords and search terms you want your advert to appear for.  It isn't cheating - PPC is an entirely predictable, scientific method for bringing qualified visitors to your website.

Website Analytics: how is your website working for you?  How do your visitors interact with the site?  How many people find you every month?  But most importantly, does your website do a good job of converting a visitor into a customer?

Email Marketing: perhaps you're lucky enough to have a large customer database, people who have bought from you in the past.  But do you keep in touch with them?  Do you communicate with them with engaging, relevant material, to keep them coming back?

Social Media Marketing: Are your customers already using Social Networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare or LinkedIn?  Do you have a presence there, building up relationships and being seen as a responsive company who invests time and effort in its customer relations?

Mobile Marketing: and here's the new kid on the block. £49.8M was spent on mobile marketing in 2010, predicted to surge by 2014 to £285M.  We all carry iPhones and Blackberries, and we routinely access the internet on such devices.  Is your website mobile-ready, and are you exploiting the features and functionality of mobile to find and interact with your customers?

The internet continues to grow, but it also continues to fragment.  With more and more channels available for businesses to exploit, the options for lead generation for local businesses are significant.

But which ones will your company choose, and will it help you to fill your pipeline and generate more sales?

Social Media continues to be a vast online space, and its explosive growth shows no apparent signs of slowing.  But how big exactly are some of the major Social Media Marketing sites?  Here's a collection of facts and figures:

640,000,000:                Facebook users worldwide
11 million:                      LinkedIn users in Europe
95,000,000 each day:  Tweets posted on Twitter
91 thousand:                Active contributors on Wikipedia
50%:                             Percentage of Facebook users who log in every day
4,000,000,000:             Images on Flickr
7 billion:                        Facebook posts per week

The sheer volume of participants and content is staggering, and is a clear measure of how engrained Social Media is in our culture. Not so long ago, speculation was rife how Social Media represented the demise of life as we knew it, including TV, websites, text messaging and many other marketing and advertising channels. But interestingly, the recent trends are revealing the integration of social media with, rather than the domination of, conventional marketing avenues.

So now, we see cleverly integrated marketing campaigns where a TV advert may direct its viewers to a Facebook Page, which in turn acts as a lead capture form in order to begin an email marketing campaign.

Or we may see a targeted Facebook advertising campaign which asks its visitors to view a series of videos to pick a winner, which then becomes the next TV advertising campaign.

So whilst Facebook, YouTube and Twitter continue their upward growth, it seems that we're just consuming more media, rather than simply preferring social media and abandoning other (more traditional?) forms.

This is good news for marketers: there are more channels than ever to attempt to access our customers.

It's also great news for businesses: the ability to provide compelling, targeted advertising to specific sub-sets of customer demographic allows for ever-more measurable and effective marketing results.

So, Social Media.  Huge.  And growing.

Online Reputation Management will soon become a significant challenge to many companies who are currently utilising Social Media as part of their overall marketing mix.

This week we were asked by Claire Sheehan of Business2Mentor to write a guest blog post on just this subject.  We were honoured to be invited and were delighted to submit the post.  You can read it here on Claire's Business2Mentor blog.

In summary, a lot of businesses are using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as prime marketing tools, promoting their products and services and engaging in dialogue with their prospects and customers.  This open dialogue is a powerful asset for businesses who wish to present themselves as proactive and responsive to the needs of their customers, but one of the inherent dangers of such a public discussion is maintaining control of their brand reputation.

This is where Social Media Marketing gives way to Online Reputation Management, and is where careful foundations must be laid.  Social Media Marketing is certainly a powerful part of the marketing blend, but it must be executed as part of an overall marketing strategy.

'Social Search': The last 2 weeks have seen significant changes to the Google search algorithm, as described on the official Google blog. In simple terms, this means they've changed the results on a typical Google search page. So if you haven't already, it's worth checking if and how your business rankings have been affected.

The message from Google is loud and clear: search results are now influenced more heavily than ever by social media. If your business doesn't yet have a social media presence, now is really the time to consider whether you should take that plunge.

When we're looking for information on the web, Google's job is to provide 'relevance'. Relevance can mean many things, but one of the key indicators of relevance is fresh, up to date content. It's no great surprise then Google is incoporating material from blogs, twitter, and other social networking sites into the search results, in an effort to provide its users with a richer, more rewarding search experience.  Google calls it a new emphasis on 'relationships'.

These 'Social Search' results are only available when you're logged into your Google account (i.e. when your browser knows who you are, it can provide content from within your own personal network). This is another step in the relentless process of the personalisation of Google search, where no two users get the same results.

Is your business publishing content on the web, via a blog, regular website updates or social media channels? Given the confirmed importance in Google's eyes, now is certainly a good time to think about it...