SEO Werkt!

Wexley School for Girls are the tricksters of modern day advertising. For one, their agency appears from the street to be a gallery of curios, or a museum for the eclectic. And the name itself is a clue to their ability (or is it a willingness?) to differentiate.

Then there’s the work…

I love how Wexley and Taco Del Mar does a lot with a little here. You don’t need big budgets and extraordinary production values to send an effective message. In this case, a simple set design, solid script and strong casting are doing the job quite nicely.

Previously on AdPulp: Taco Del Mar: Of course, Of course

Around six months ago I purchased a Brazilian blog about the Android operating system (called Blog do Android). I wasn’t too happy with the write that was taking care of the content there, so last week I decided to hire a new one.

First of all I published a post on the blog itself saying we were looking to add a new staff writer to the team, asking interested readers to get in touch. Within a couple of days I received 50 or so emails showing interest.

After that I replied to all the candidates explaining the hiring process: basically they would send me a first article. If I liked it I would publish it on the blog and they would work and send me a second and possibly a third article. After that I would have enough data on my hands to make my decision.

And here’s the interesting thing: the “data” I am referring to above is not only the writing quality of the articles, as one could wrongly assume. In fact the writing quality is not even the most important aspect. What I want to test with the above process is the motivation and the willingness to work hard of the candidates.

For instance, a couple of the candidates sent me really nice articles. The grammar was impeccable, the style was humorous and easy to follow, and the topics they decided to write about were pretty interesting.

However, after I replied saying I liked their first articles and that they could start working on a second piece, one of the candidates took three days to tell me he would start working on his second piece, and the other sent me a second piece after six days.

By that time I had already hired my writer. It was a guy who sent me his first article a couple of hours after I explained to him the writing process. Once I told him I liked his first piece within six hours he had a second one ready to go, and was already asking for some feedback so that he could improve on this third, fourth and subsequent pieces.

Bottom line: if you want to hire someone, look for motivation and ability to work hard. If you want to get hired, show it.

When I was 30, I lived in a largely rent-controlled building in New York City with my (then) girlfriend, who was also my age. There were nine other residents on our floor: a young couple in their 20’s, and seven single elderly widows/widowers in their 70’s and 80’s.

The average age of our floor was 58. No one was 58.

While direct mailers were carpet bombing us with brochures to switch our 401K funds to bonds, the residents of our building were either living off of pensions or just beginning to invest. Trees were being slaughtered because someone asked “What’s the average age of that building?”

Every time we boil our marketing data down to a “what” and leave it at that, we make the same mistake.

Success lies in your willingness to ask—and answer—just one more question than your competitor.

For most of us, it’s the same one: “Why?”

(Get the details on the Power Of series, including calendar of contributors)

About the Tom Webster:

Tom Webster is a 20-year veteran of opinion, media and marketing research, and the principal author of Twitter Users In America, The Social Habit, The Podcast Consumer Revealed and other widely-cited studies of consumer technology usage. He is currently Vice President, Strategy, for Edison Research, most widely-known as the sole providers of U.S. Election exit polling data to all major media outlets.

The Power of a Question is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

Amazon plans to launch a better-equipped successor to its Kindle Fire tablet on July 31, according to a report by CNET.

Although, frustratingly, Amazon has not said how many Kindle Fires it has sold, the company claims it’s the best-selling, most-gifted, and most-wished-for product it has sold since its November launch. The $200 tablet has attracted the attention of big-name brands like HBO and Zynga, and companies’ willingness to make a Kindle-Fire-compatible Android app shows that the device has a fair amount of traction. Launching a more-powerful and better-featured second-gen Fire at the same $200 price point would help get even more folks on board, though some might be tempted by Google’s Nexus 7 tablet.

CNET claims that the Kindle Fire 2 will add a camera and physical volume buttons, two things users complained about with the first model. There’s no word on whether the device will get a better processor, Bluetooth connectivity, or more on-board storage than the Fire’s 8GB. Additionally, Taiwanese publication DigiTimes claims that the Fire 2 will feature a higher-resolution 1,280-by-800-pixel display.

DigiTimes also suggests that once the Kindle Fire 2 launches, Amazon will lower the price of the first Kindle Fire to $150. We’ll most likely see the e-ink Kindles get refreshed at that time as well. With Barnes & Noble’s latest Nook including GlowLight, we expect the next Kindle line will have at least one model with an integrated light, too.

Kindle Fire photo: Amazon

Filed under: media, mobile

Last month we told you about C2-MTL, a business conference where “the experience” – the venue, the art, the music – took centre stage.

At The Art of Leadership, which took place in Toronto earlier this week, the focus was on informative and entertaining content delivered by six bestselling business authors and thought leaders. Here are a couple of key takeaways.

Stephen Shapiro presents on "Leading a Culture of Innovation"

People are different

As you probably gleaned from its name, The Art of Leadership was all about exploring what makes an effective and innovative leader or manager.

Turns out a big part of it is recognizing that employees have different motivations, habits, personalities and work styles. In the first talk of the day (each ran for a generous hour), Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules, gave us a breakdown of several different types of workers (from “activators” to “includers” to “analyzers”) and how they each fit in to a well-rounded team.

Chester Elton presents on "Creating a Culture of Buy-in and Belief"

In his talk on getting employee buy-in, The Carrot Principle author Chester Elton spoke about an “engagement continuum,” explaining how managers might transform employees from simply “enabled” to “energized” at work.

Elton, who engaged the Toronto Convention Centre crowd by tossing giant carrots into the audience, offered Zappos as an example, with the online shoe retailer’s motto, “Delivering Happiness.” A well-defined mission statement or “noble cause” goes a long way in motivating employees, according to Elton.

Susan Cain present on how to "Harness the Strengths of Introverts"

For her part, Wall Street lawyer turned bestselling author Susan Cain explained that everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum between introversion and extroversion. The premise of her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts, is that introverted people are an untapped resource in a world that privileges assertiveness and charisma over thoughtfulness.

In her low-key way, Cain audaciously called the acceptance of introverts in education and the workplace “the great diversity issue of our time” and ended her talk with various solutions (including cutting down on meetings and designing office spaces to include both communal and solitary spaces) for how companies can leverage the talents of introverts and extroverts alike.

Vijay Govindarajan presents on "Strategy and Innovation"

Great leaders take great risks

This may seem obvious but several of the day’s speakers offered compelling examples of the relationship between successful leadership and their willingness to think big and out of the box.

Reverse Innovation author Vijay Govindarajan pointed out the audacity of John F. Kennedy’s famous, fulfilled 1961 promise to “put a man on the moon and bring him back before the end of this decade.”

Kennedy’s declaration, according to Govindarajan, epitomizes the sort of seemingly unrealistic but incredibly specific goal that successful leaders set for themselves and their brands. “How many goal-setting and evaluation processes pander to mediocrity?” Govindarajan asked, rhetorically. Better to dream big.

This lesson was echoed by Innovation Nation author Leonard Brody, who argued in his talk that in an educated society where “smart is the lowest common denominator”, “today’s lucrative skill is the ability to see around corner and the willingness to take risks.”

Similarly, for Best Practices Are Stupid author Stephen Shapiro, “expertise is the enemy of innovation,“ meaning that too many successful leaders simply rest on their laurels, which hinders them from recognizing the next big thing.

There’s the rub with leadership. You always have to stay one step ahead.

The skyline from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

Value exchanged for payment constitutes the most basic aspect of business. It’s why a business exists, how a business survives and why it continues to innovate.

Daniel R. Blume via Flickr

Value, however is not what the business says it is, it’s what the buyer says it is by their willingness to purchase from one business over another and their willingness to meet the price asked by the seller.

Businesses that truly appreciate this understand that one of their primary jobs is to increase value in an attempt to sell more at higher prices.

One way to increase value is to stuff more features into your products and services in an effort to make them seem better than what others have to offer, but the problem with that approach alone is that it’s so easy to copy.

A far better long-term approach is to do the things that make your brand worth more in the market. To be the one that people talk about most.

You do this by committing to creating more value in the lives of your customers through tangible and intangible acts that allow you to build deeper relationships. This is how you build value that can’t be mimicked. This is how you build a brand that attracts customers that expect to pay a premium. This is how you create more value.

Measure

The first way to create more value is to understand the value you already deliver. So often we blissfully go about creating happy customers and doing as promised, without stopping to measure what exactly our client realized from our product or engagement.

The funny thing is, more often than not, they got more than we promised, received value that far exceeded what we felt was a reasonable fee. When you create some form of results review you can start to make real assessments about value and communicate these results as proof over promise.

One of two things should happen when you get serious about measuring value: You’ll discover you are not charging nearly enough or you’ll discover your clients are not getting nearly enough – either way you’ll have the information to confidently readjust your business based on value.

Lead

One of the most potent ways you add value is to lead. Your clients are quite often looking for someone to offer them direction. Take a stand and declare a point of view about your industry that you consistently support and become a leading voice for your point of view. Don’t worry about pleasing everyone, leaders take a stand, welcome all points of view and defend what they believe – and that’s where the value is created.

Create groups in social media for those that are attracted to your point of view. Write article, make presentations, blog and invite others, including your competitors, to share their views.

This kind of thought leadership is how you establish more value for your brand, but it’s also how you build a community that wants to be a part of something more dynamic than the typical me too players in your industry.

Teach

If you’ve learned how to something well, one of the best things you can do for your own growth, and those that follow you, is to teach others how to do it well.

This idea certainly applies to the natural elements of your business offerings, but where the real magic happens is when you expand this concept beyond what anyone would logically expect from your business.

For example, if you sell plumbing supplies, but you’ve figured out how to get a lot of value from your Facebook page, take the time to teach your customers how to do the same.

Bring in experts in every area of your customer’s life and make them available as part of what your brand stands for.

Inspire

Many people draw inspiration from art and creativity. One of the best ways to inspire and differentiate your business is by investing in and caring about great design.

Spend the time, effort, thoughtfulness and, yes, money to get design that inspires.

This is a tricky one because design that inspires is so relative, but know this, great design in your marketing materials, websites, products, packaging, even your invoices, is one of the easiest ways to stand out and differentiate your business. It is an investment that will return many times over.

It’s hard sometimes to convince people that design adds value, but all you need do is look around at most industry leaders in every category to find examples where great design is the leading difference.

Listen

I’ll end with another not so intuitive way to add value – listen to what you customers care about.

I know that seems pretty obvious, but we rarely do it.

Invest in the tools that allow you to monitor everything your customers are saying publicly in social media and invest the time to ask them what they need in face-to-face settings.

When you sit with someone and ask them something meaningful about their life, you shut off your phone, look into their eyes and really focus on and care about what they are telling you – you add value. Nobody listens much anymore and people know when they are being heard.

Doing this in the manner I’ve just described is harder than it sounds, but it’s how you fill your relationships with confidence and that’s a kind of value that people cherish most.

5 Ways to Create More Value is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called “Highlight” that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highlight lets the average user, not Pages or businesses, select an “important post” and “make sure friends see this”, but not color it yellow as Stuff wrote when it first spotted the feature. A tiny percentage of the user base is now seeing tests of a paid version of Highlight, but there’s also a free one designed to check if users are at all interested in the option.

Highlight could show Facebook’s willingness to try more aggressive ways of making money, which should delight potential investors. But Facebook is playing with fire here. The service has always been free for users, and a pay-for-popularity feature could be a huge turn off, especially to its younger and less financially equipped users who couldn’t afford such narcissism.

The official statement from Facebook on this is:

“We’re constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.”

I doubt Facebook is going to see positive reactions to Highlight, but if it did it could turn into an unpredicted revenue stream. Just the fact that Facebook would test this could bolster confidence for potential IPO investors. They want to know the company is interested in striking a more advertiser-friendly balance between a pure user experience and the goals of advertisers. That’s especially important now, as yesterday Facebook had to warn investors that its ad business is in jeopardy as more users access via mobile where it doesn’t show nearly as many ads.

But the problem is the potential for Highlighted updates to reduce the general relevance of the news feed. Facebook’s news feed sorting algorithm is designed to show you posts by your closest friends or that have received a lot of Likes and comments. Highlight distorts this, and will encourage news feed spamming club promoters, musicians, small businesses, or anyone else with something to gain from more clicks.

How Highlight Works

If you’re in the test group and post a status update, you’ll see the “Highlight” option next to the Like and comment buttons below it. If clicked you’re shown the prompt above. Depending on what version of the test you’re seeing you’ll either get a free Highlight, or have to pay a dollar or two for the extra news feed prevalence. Facebook’s testing different price points, but users always pay with a credit card or PayPal, never with its virtual currency Credits.

Highlighted posts may appear higher in the news feed, stay visible for longer, and appear to more friends and subscribers. However, they’re not colored differently to make them stand out. And to be clear, this is not like Twitter’s Promoted Tweets which is designed for businesses. Facebook Highlight is for the end-user.

Luckily Facebook doesn’t seem to be betting the farm on Highlight, since the user who leaked the test was in New Zealand — a more isolated but English-speaking location where Facebook seems test features it doesn’t want too many people to know about. That’s smart because it could erode the site’s sense of community. On Facebook, what’s supposed to matter is how interesting your posts are, not how deep your wallet is.

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Other Big Facebook News:

Facebook Launches File Sharing

Find Great Facebook Apps In The New App Center

Facebook’s Messenger Mobile App Now Shows If Someone’s Read Your Message

There are two concepts that can be the building blocks of massive success in digital marketing, if you have the awareness and willingness to integrate them into your practices: iterate and automate. Today we’ll be discussing iteration; tomorrow, automation.

Iterate means to repeat a process, but to do so making improvements along the way. If you begin with the assumption that there is no such thing as “success” or “finished”, you clear the way for iteration, for continuous tweaks and improvements. As you know, I publish a personal newsletter on a regular basis. When I first started doing a newsletter, it was mostly just updates about what was going on with me (example). That wasn’t terribly helpful, so the first iteration was to improve on its value.

The next major iteration after adding some actual content besides a list of where I was speaking was to enforce a rigid production schedule. Personal newsletters had always fallen on the list of “I’ll get around to it”. That changed in the summer of 2010 when I made a commitment and created a calendar of publication dates. Once I found a repeatable recipe for the content, I improved on the newsletter’s frequency to weekly in the fall of 2011.

Along the way, I also found a great template that I really liked and used that once I switched to the weekly process. Things were relatively streamlined, working well, and the response I got was generally positive. At this point it’d be easy to say, “newsletter successful, the process is built and baked, we’re done, let’s just keep going with what’s working”.

Except that there was one little detail – people liked the newsletter, but didn’t love it. When I asked trusted friends about it, they said yes, that the information was valuable but disorganized – signs that it was time for another iteration, another wave of asking for feedback and making improvements:

I took my wonderfully tuned process and shattered it to develop a completely different process this past over the last month, creating an entirely new system filled with bugs and flaws, but structurally sound, and now it’s a question of iterating to improve it, taking feedback each week from readers and making changes as needed:

Iteration also requires multiple stages and steps of screwups as you revise, revise, revise:

Eventually, if you’re patient enough and willing enough to make changes, your iterations pay off:

Here’s the hardest part of iteration: you have to be willing and ready to say to yourself that you’re wrong, that you’re doing it wrong, that things aren’t as good as they could be. You have to be willing to let your ego take some serious body blows, especially if you’re a veteran practitioner. The voice in your head that says, “I’ve been doing marketing for X years, I know what I’m doing” has to take a back seat to what your customers’ voices are saying, and that can be tough to swallow.

Once you get over that internal hurdle, once you are willing to take the leap and throw away something that’s working “good enough” in order to make something that’s better, the rest of the process is simply doing, revising, and listening again.

Tomorrow, we tackle automation as a core facet of iteration.

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2. Apprenticeship, little things, and formulae for success
3. Why Personal Brand is Essential To Corporate Marketing Success

A lot of folks might approach “social media engagement” like these fellas did with golf:

We just need to put our fingers gently on the keyboard, and address the world, “Hello, world!”

Umh … no.

Observation with intent to engage begins with watching, listening, learning. This type of approach requires an open mind. A willingness to learn.

Intent to Engage. Open Mind. Willing to Learn.

And awareness of what resonates – with you and with others. How might certain conversations fit with your business (and with your time schedule)? What level of engagement are you able to sustain?

Sometimes, engagement may simply be listening and responding to others. At other times, engagement may be you igniting the conversation eliciting responses from others (and you in kind when appropriate). Just as every EPIC journey has its own unique puzzle, engagement levels may vary between companies – and sometimes between platforms used within a company.

Knowing your mission (strategy), before using the tools and powers (tactics) is key in determining what, where, and the depth of your engagement level. In this way, when you say, “Hello, world” – you’ll know what to say next when someone says “Hi” back.

Hello Ball – Addressing Social Media Engagment is a post from: ConverStations