By George Whitely, President, Stephan & Brady, www.stephanbrady.com

@BridgetCarey Curious...when is the first look at the new studio?

Striking up a conversation with key local, regional and national reporters has become as simple as those 10 words on Twitter. That was the first Twitter conversation starter our Public Relations team had with the Miami Herald Technology reporter, Bridget Carey.

Her response: “Well it could be as soon as Tuesday, if all went well with my review video. Still haven't seen the edited piece yet.”

Back in the day, last year, this conversation never would have happened. Reporters covering their beat were overwhelmed with weeding through a daily onslaught of e-mail. And using the phone? Reporters didn’t have time to pick it up. Today, those same reporters are turning to Twitter to get quick and timely information about specific businesses and industries to write about.

It’s difficult enough trying to open the communication door with a business reporter you’ve never contacted before. They normally have their sources and stick with them for their information. But Twitter has changed all of that. We’re seeing outreach successes with @ColonelTribune (Chicago Tribune), @SunTimes (Chicago Sun-Times), and even @Pogue (David Pogue, New York Times technology columnist) all because we’re engaging the media with short and interesting news about clients.

Why does Twitter work for marketing a business? We believe the media is taking the time to read Twitter updates because it hardly takes any time at all. Twitter updates are so short (140 characters or less) that reporters and editors (get this) actually READ them. If it peaks their interest, they follow up with a quick @reply or a DM (Direct Message).

The other way Twitter can and does benefit marketing your business is that you can follow a reporter that fits your business beat. Send them an @reply letting them know how much you enjoyed their article. For instance, here’s a Twitter conversation our PR team had with @Pogue concerning a lengthy article he wrote:

@Pogue Long? Sure. But that was so interesting/exciting. Going to make my kids do school projects about this. Thanks!

Pogue’s response via DM, “Oh yay! I felt the same!”

Now, David Pogue is following our Twitter updates, along with the Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, Journal Sentinel and many other reporters and publications. Businesses using Twitter are now able to communicate with these once “untouchable” writers.

Promoting your business couldn’t be easier on Twitter. Start-up companies or those that have been around for years are all benefiting from the wildly inexpensive format of Twitter promoting. Hotels in Napa Valley (@napamarriott) and even NASA (@spacecenterhou) do special promotions exclusively for those who follow them on Twitter. @napamarriott holds a weekly trivia contest on Twitter and the first @reply with the correct answer wins a free night at the hotel or a free spa treatment. And @spacecenterhou does a similar promotion through Twitter for free tours of the Kennedy Space Center.

The strategies by companies who successfully promote themselves on Twitter have seen a dramatic jump in traffic to their Web sites. In February of this year TechCrunch, a Web site devoted to reviewing Internet products and companies, had an extra 130,000 page views on their site just from people coming to them from Twitter.

The 140 characters or less conversation has started and reporters are paying attention in a new way to what your business has to say.

By Wyatt Webb, Director of Web Development, Marketing Images, www.marketingimages.com

If you’re thinking about updating your website, consider a cost-effective solution that will help keep your site fresh, and make your life easier. A web content management system, commonly referred to as a CMS, is an application that allows you to edit and manage website content with little or no programming knowledge. You can update and refresh your site as often as needed, from any place, at any time.

There are a wide variety of CMS products to choose from, including customized solutions, which offer different capabilities, interfaces, and benefits. So how do you know which is the best solution for you? Defining your needs and then selecting the right product, service or vendor can be a challenging and time-consuming process. The following steps will help you with the process.

Build a Wish List

We encourage our clients to brainstorm ideas to develop a wish list of what they want in a website without regard to budget. These ideas can be written out as simple one or two sentence “stories” such as “I can go to the website and upload a document that only a few people can access.” Try to keep these stories relatively simple and consider each one a discussion point regarding desired web functionality. When you have completed your list of stories, prioritize them by importance to stakeholders. You can either divide your wish list into two buckets, “Must Have” and “Would Be Nice”, or rank your list in order of importance. 

Research Existing CMS Products

With a well-thought out plan of what you need regarding web site functionality, you can begin looking for CMS products that may provide these capabilities. When conducting this research, it is important to realize that there can be a great deal of variance in how each function is delivered. To help get an idea of what some of these variances are, request a demonstration of CMS products you’re considering. We recommend avoiding any CMS product that is not browser-based. Many off-the-shelf CMS products require web development and design skills to install and configure for your use. The list price for these products usually represents a licensing fee and only a portion of the actual project cost. This research is primarily meant to educate you on what is currently available, compare basic product pricing, and help you understand why two products that look identical on paper may vary greatly in price.

Seek a Web Solutions Expert

Websites are a “living” tool that require short- and long-term planning, ongoing changes and upgrades, provide business efficiencies, and represent your company’s brand. So it is important when selecting a company to provide web services that you look for a partner, not just a vendor. As you meet with potential partners, it is best to find one that has experience in both working with and customizing off-the-shelf products, and providing completely customized solutions. This experience will allow the web partner to help you assess your needs, recommend additional options, develop a project budget, and support your website so it can grow with your organization’s needs. Once you have selected a web solutions provider, you will benefit from relying on that company’s expertise in recommending the final CMS product. Whether it’s an off-the-shelf product that requires little modification, a completely customized solution, or a combination of the two, an experienced web solutions provider can recommend, implement and support a user-friendly, powerful CMS tool to meet your needs.

Allow the Web Solutions Partner to Conduct an Assessment

It is important to devote a portion of your project budget to conduct an in-depth analysis of your needs and related processes. This is something that should be performed by your selected partner. The partner should review your budget restraints, user stories and related business processes, suggest new user stories and interview various potential users of the website. This assessment can be a time consuming yet valuable process, as it provides important information to everyone and ensures delivery of the best solution for your needs.

By Robert Wendt, President, Heritage Printing, www.clickheritage.com

Since Variable Data Printing (VDP) was introduced more than a decade ago, the ability to customize mass printings with text, graphics and images tailored to recipients has heightened the focus on response rates. Early market research claimed average response rates of 40% or more, and marketers achieving 20-30% response rates were trumpeting them loudly.

Soon, these double digit numbers became the standard by which marketers evaluated all VDP campaigns. If they didn’t see upwards of 20% response, they considered the campaign a failure. After all, with VDP more costly per piece than traditional direct mail, they figured that such response rates should be the norm.

As VDP marketing has matured, however, marketers have learned that response rates are often the wrong way to evaluate the success of a VDP campaign. The success of a VDP campaign is all about ROI, not response rates alone. You can have a modest increase in response rate, but a huge boost in ROI.

Let’s look at some hypothetical numbers. In a traditional campaign, you might mail 50,000 full-color pieces at a cost of $.10 per piece to print. The average response rate to mass mailings is 0.5-1.5%, so splitting the difference, that’s about 500 responses. With each response resulting in a $75 order, $37,500 in revenue would be generated from $24,500 in printing and postage. That’s not even a 2:1 ROI.

In a VDP campaign, however, mailings are often not sent to everyone in a database. Rather, the database is culled for a desired demographic for that campaign. By virtue of the highly qualified respondent base, this increases the likelihood of a higher dollar value order. Let’s assume that the mailing has now decreased to 10,000 pieces, at $1.50 apiece. Even if the response rate increases to a mere 6% because the dollar value of the order is higher, the revenue generated is now $75,000 at a cost of $18,900 in printing and postage. That’s a 4:1 ROI! And the total costs of the campaign were 25% less than the traditional mailing. That’s with only a 6% response rate and an average order boost of $50.

Most well designed programs will have higher response rates. Average VDP response rates from experienced marketers range from 9 to 12%. Due to the nature of most VDP campaigns, the dollar volumes in play are often much higher. Of course, these examples are oversimplified and do not take into account the costs of design or database development and preparation. The point is simply that with even what would be considered an “unacceptably low” response rate, one well-designed campaign can have a spectacular ROI.

If you are dealing with high-value products, such as mutual funds, automobiles or furniture, the average dollar order could increase substantially. Imagine the increase in ROI when you sell 3% more mutual funds or autos. It’s also important to evaluate the success of a VDP campaign in light of the success of the client’s previous campaigns. One banking institution, for example, was thrilled with a 3.0% response rate because its previous static campaigns had averaged only 0.4%. In terms of its goals, which were to increase business customer sign-ups for its Internet-based banking, the bank was thrilled. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Keep in mind that it’s not the response rate alone that determines ROI, but also total campaign cost and dollars generated per order. When developing a VDP campaign, remember to consider the client’s goals (whether to generate revenue, to improve compliance or to boost sign-ups to programs) and evaluate the success of the campaign in light of those goals, not some arbitrary desired response rate.

By Jen Keller, Keller SEO Services, www.jenkeller.com

About a year ago Google announced that it had hit a major milestone – the search engine had uncovered 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web.  No wonder getting your website found is getting harder and harder!  The involved science of ranking a website high in the search engines is called Search Engine Optimization and I could fill a book with the common SEO mistakes I've seen over the years. For starters, here are the three top mistakes I typically encounter:

Mistake #1:  Limited Keyword Research, If Any.

It’s time for a Pop Quiz…

Raise your hand if, before you designed your website, you sat down and:

(a) Identified all the search phrases (a.k.a “keywords’) your target prospects or customers might use to find you in Google;

(b) Ran those keyword phrases through keyword analysis tools like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery  to see if there’s actually search volume for those phrases.  Because, ranking #1 for a keyword phrase no one searches for… well, gets you very little!

(c) Via the tools, identified other synergistic keywords (i.e., “website design”, “website design services”, “website design development”, “website graphic design”, “ecommerce website design”…) you hadn’t even thought of but are great ranking opportunities for your website. Note: Chances are if you didn’t think of these hidden gems, your competitor didn’t either.  Score one for you;

(d) Finally, mapped every keyword phrase you decide to rank for to a specific webpage within your website.  A well optimized website has 3-5 keyword targets for each important webpage.  The days of just optimizing the home page are long gone!

If you did all that before you designed your website, well… stop reading because the rest of this article is NOT for you!

Mistake #2:  Not Enough “Real” Content On Your Webpages

80% of searches are a result of people doing research on a topic, product or service. People have a question -- they “Google” to find the answer.  Most people are not searching with the intent to order or purchase something -- at least not before they finish researching.

Therefore, in order to stay relevant, search engines have a bias towards valuing websites that are “information-rich”, ones that satisfy the needs of the researcher.  Google’s well publicized mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  If your website helps Google satisfy its mission… If your website provides substantial original content that is well organized around specific subjects… you will have an inherent edge when it comes to search engine rankings.

So, review your webpages carefully.  Do you provide real information -- details, how-to-steps, pros, cons, case studies, statistics, tips, reviews, facts?  Do you offer the kind of information that would satisfy a researcher? Or are your webpages more like sales and marketing brochures with high level descriptions of your products and services, wordy with features and benefits?  The websites that successfully combine their marketing message with rock-solid information are the ones with the ranking advantage!

Mistake #3:  Failure To Carefully Craft Title Tags

“Hmm… What’s a ‘title tag’?”, you ask.

Bring up your website and look way up at the top of the top of your screen…upper left-hand corner, near the little Internet Explorer (or Firefox) icon.  See the textual words just to the right?  Those words are your “title tag” and although seemingly inconspicuous, they are extremely important in determining ranking. Search engines look to the title tag for important clues about a webpage’s topic.  If your title tag only contains your company name and your catchy tagline or perhaps some random words your web design firm put there… well, you’ve given the search engine little help.

Instead, make your title tag keyword rich by working the 3-5 keywords you’ve assigned to each of your webpages into the page title tag.  The actual place to make these changes is in the code so you might need a web developer to execute this for you.  Don’t worry, it’s quick and easy.  A client of mine recently re-worked her title tags and saw her website jump 12 places to #5 in Google – all because of carefully crafted title tags!

Conclusion

These three common SEO mistakes are just the tip of the iceberg.  There are dozens and dozens of others errors that websites, both big and small alike, inadvertently make. However, you can begin your SEO process by addressing these three.  Try it. You just might see some higher rankings in Google as a result.

By Jim Bernthal, President, Top Floor Technologies, www.topfloortech.com

It continues to amaze me the wide divide that exists between the traditional marketing professional and the search marketing professional. Even though companies have been trying to market themselves on-line for over 10 year these two disciplines seem to live on different planets. If we are going to best serve our clients we have to find a way to come together and maybe the first step is understanding the problem.

Traditional Marketers are from Mars. Search Marketers are from Saturn.

On the planet of Mars there is a big emphasis on image. It’s a very colorful place. Sort of weird but I couldn’t find a single street sign. The closest things to street signs were actually billboards with cool logos. Because Martians spend a ton on brand marketing they seem to know what these logos stand for, so while it’s not perfect, they seem to be able to find their way around.

The Kiosks at the mall on Mars list stores by brand name and logo only. What I found sort of amusing was they didn’t have a listing for “Restrooms” on the Kiosk. Instead there was a picture of a toilet. At first I wasn’t sure what it meant. I was wondering if Kohler had come up with a new logo. Thank God I figured it out.

Martians place a major emphasis on fashion. Everyone has their own style. Whether it’s grunge, punk or preppy it’s clear that everyone makes certain they fit the part. You could tell that even the grunge guys spent a lot of time and money making sure they are just the right flavor of grunge.

Something else weird; I walked into a store looking for jeans and this half naked Martian women kept coming up to me and telling be about “The Thing”. I’m not sure what “The Thing” was but it must be pretty cool- something to do with “brand”. Was “The Thing” a brand of jeans? Was I in a store that sold jeans?

Saturn’s a whole different experience.

Not a very colorful place. There is some color but it always seemed to be used for a functional purpose. For example; when I went to the Mall I noticed that when I visited the Kiosk all the stores I had been to that day were marked in a different color then the ones I had yet to visit.

The Kiosk and the Mall was organized by type of products. No logos or brand names at all. I found this sort of weird but I must admit I didn’t have any problem finding what I needed.

Quite frankly I probably didn’t even need the Kiosk because the entire mall was organized so well. It’s like they spent a lot of time trying to get into their customers mind to figure out what they might call the things they might be looking for. If there is one thing they are good at on Saturn it is anticipating what a person might be looking for and making sure they have no problem finding it.

In addition, stores were organized into like groups. All the sporting related stores were in one area of the mall, the home furnishing stores, in another and so on. Quite frankly Saturn is probably one of the most organized planets in the galaxy.

However, Saturn’s not a good place to grow up if you want to be a fashion designer. They had one clothing store- “Functional Fashion Wear”. As you can see, Saturnians don’t place a high value on individuality or creativity they just want to get the job done.

And so it goes. While the Martians and Santurians all seem to be happy in their own little world they really have a difficult time adapting to each other’s culture. They talk a different language and they have different value systems. They live in different worlds.

The problem is the Earthlings that count on these marketers get the short end of the stick, because on Earth it’s all important. So my question is this; how do we solve this dilemma?

Getting PR in Biztimes Milwaukee/Biztimes.com Tip #5:

Help BizTimes Milwaukee Editorial Staff hit a Homerun!
BizTimes Milwaukee focuses on delivering value to the owners and top executives of growing businesses in SE Wisconsin. There are three components to a homerun story on the part of our editorial staff: 1) Exclusive – If BizTimes Milwaukee is the first or only place our business-owner readers find the information, it increases the value we deliver. 2) Impactful –story content should be relevant and newsworthy to the local owner and executive that are actively trying to grow their business. 3) Operational Strategy – are there strategies, practices, steps, insights, policies, procedures, etc…that the business-owner can take from the story and possibly use to grow?  When tailoring your press release or planning your phone call - keep in mind that the more of these elements you have, the greater the chance your idea is picked up!

Consulting

ActionCOACH of Elm Grove recently announced the June graduation class of BusinessRICH, the two-day business boot-camp that supplies the fundamentals of building a successful business model.  Graduates included Rob Hudson of Vivosity Consulting, LLC, East Troy; and Art Flater and Chris Rosecky of Central Office Systems, Waukesha.

Jim Palzewicz of ActionCOACH of Elm Grove, was recently awarded membership in the President’s Club of ActionCOACH.  The President’s Club recognizes ActionCOACHes who have been with the firm for at least five years.

Advertising & Public Relations

Platypus Advertising + Design, Pewaukee, recently hired web designer/developer Martin Defatte to enhance its services and make comprehensive web capabilities available to its clients in-house.  Defatte’s programming skills complement the expertise in web design, strategy and marketing already offered at the firm.

Z2 Marketing, Pewaukee, recently hired Dawn Finnegan as vice president of client services.  She previously served as vice president of sales and partnerships at Hanson Dodge Creative in Milwaukee for eight year prior to joining Z2.