Category: Marketing

Shareist Renames Notebooks to Projects

Renaming Notebooks to Projects, Plus Copying Pages & Element Aliases: “This morning in Shareist, we are changing what we call Notebooks. When we started Shareist, the term Notebooks made sense, but as we added Inboxes, team collaboration, and other features, the metaphor started to fall apart.

We are now calling them Projects, which is a term that lends itself much more toward the direction that Shareist has gone. We think creating a project to manage a website, or a client, or a topic, makes much more sense. Each project has an inbox, and pages, a public website, and potentially a team of collaborators.”

 

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Great news.

We use Shareist a great deal internally as a mixed Basecamp and Omnifocus.

That sounds wonky at first if you think of Shareist as something between Evernote and WordPress, but for us Shareist has been more of a project management system over the past few months than anything else.

The real beauty of Shareist is that it captures images, texts, videos etc from the web so easily and allows them to be ported out to the right place at the right time within the confines of certain projects (or what were formally notebooks).

It’s like Basecamp with social integration (and don’t bring up the bloated Hootsuite platform that is a total lock-in).

It’s great to see the Shareist team embracing a more pro-sumer future. I think there just might be something there for them as more and more companies and agencies will need the type of tools to do social and content marketing that are present in Shareist.

Email as the Ultimate Social Network

I can’t agree more that email is the real social glue that binds together the social web, for better or worse.

If you want to have a company that has successful social media presence(s), make sure you’re also doing due diligence with tools such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber or iContact to ensure the best results over time.

We love and swear by MailChimp but folks like Shawn Collins do the same with Aweber because of its performance marketing features.

Whatever you chose to use, include email as a part of your social media strategy (the linchpin of such a strategy we would say).

Email is, honestly, the greatest marketing tool ever concocted by humans in our opinions (and from looking at our aggregate data):

Email is still the glue that holds the social Web together | TechHive: “But don’t forget that email isn’t just the oldest social network, it’s also the biggest, the broadest, the most user-controllable, the most integrated, the most powerful and ultimately the best social network on the Internet.”

What Does Your Brand Stand For?

I’ve asked this question of our clients so many times… “What exactly does your brand stand for so that we can do the best job of marketing that meaning to people who need to hear it?”

The answer I frequently get is “um, well, that’s why we hired you.”

Hiring a marketing agency to help you with getting the word out about your products, services, apps or ideas is a great step but should come after your company has a clear identity. We help folks develop brand strategies, but don’t confuse that with marketing and advertising.

Seth has a good first step for every company to take…

Seth’s Blog – “What does your brand stand for?”: Make a list of the differences and the extremes and start with that. A brand that stands for what all brands stand for stands for nothing much.

Why Email Marketing Still Matters

I got my start in online marketing in 2002 working for an email marketing group in Columbia, SC. I was fresh out of an Ivy League masters program with a degree in ancient religion and literature (and some archaeology experience). Needless to say, that wasn’t a highly valued skill set for a 22 year old just moving to South Carolina.

However, those years I spent with that email marketing (eventually affiliate and search marketing) company were the perfect trial-by-fire for finding my legs in the wider world of performance marketing. I realized some very important things about online marketing in general and email marketing specifically. It was a great education in the various ways of doing agency business in a post 9/11 but pre CAN-SPAM world of glitzy conferences, making lifelong connections and getting deals done with great agility and detail.

Although “the long tail” is a term that has lost much of its 2007 cache, there is still a great amount of truth to the term within the concept of online marketing. I’ve argued to clients and friends over and over that email is (and will continue to be) a very long term prospect of increasing returns over time in a world of short-lived Twitter and Facebook promoted posts as advertising.

The SumAll folks have a great post laying out a similar argument and some nice tips you should read at the end…

Why E-mail Marketing is More Valuable Than Ever – SumAll – Blog: “It’s been a widely held notion that after you’ve sent out your campaign, you have 12 hours to get the most opens you can before your e-mail is lost in inbox limbo. But based on our research, e-mails have a much longer tail than people are aware of. “

Whatever marketing channel you’re using, email is a great compliment and something you should bake in early in your campaigns.

How We Sign Documents

We’ve been using RightSignature the last few weeks for client docs, contracts, insertion orders etc… really a great service and highly recommend if you need to pass signed docs back and forth in a legal and consistent (and transparent manner):

RightSignature | Sign Documents Online, Electronic Signature, e-Signature: “The easiest, fastest way to get documents
filled out and signed online.”

Harrelson Corps Summer Internship

We’re looking for a great intern or two (or three) to help us out with day-to-day operations of Harrelson Agency, Harrelson Press, Harrelson Racing, Harrelson Autos and/or Thinking.FM. Specifically, we’d like to find folks interested in learning about indy marketing agencies or programming or copy-editing or podcasting or SEO or any combination of those.

It’s a fun role for a young person to fill either in our Columbia, SC offices or virtually (we use FaceTime, Skype, HipChat, Basecamp, Google Apps as backbones) if they’re tech savvy enough.

Here’s the formal announcement but feel free to email sam@harrelson.co for more details or if you have any questions…

“Harrelson Agency and Harrelson Press are offering a joint summer internship for high school or college students interested in design, publishing, and where those two fields intersect. The internship period will run for six weeks beginning July 8, 2013. The pay will be a stipend of $500.

Interns are expected to maintain a professional attitude and work schedule, which includes working remotely, meeting with clients, and individual weekly progress meetings. The internship will include website coding, copy-editing, e-book design, and other related services.

Interested applicants should submit a 500-750 word bio and/or a link to your blog or Twitter profile to merianna@harrelson.co for consideration.

Let’s get started!
Sam Harrelson and Merianna Neely”

The Joy of Working For You

Whether it’s this blog or Thinking.FM or StudiesLab or Harrelson Agency (and even more soon), I can’t agree more with Daniel here…

An Indie State Of Mind – Bitsplitting.org: “Like Marco, I derive a great amount of satisfaction from doing things for myself. Also like Marco, it can sometimes be a fault. No doubt I would benefit in many ways from working for a company or from joining a podcasting network. The resources and reach of these institutions could help me build greater things and get them in the hands of more people. On the other hand, they could force me to build things that suck. Folks like us, we with an indie state of mind, tend to face a far simpler choice: be dissatisfied working for somebody else, or gratified by the thrill of trying our own thing.”

Maybe it’s just my only-child mindset, but I’ve always found it’s a lot more enjoyable to work with people rather than for people.

And that’s the beauty of something like affiliate marketing.

Pinterest Gets Analytics

Pinterest has announced their iteration of web analytics for bloggers, businesses and groups with a verified website in the profile of the popular sharing service:

Introducing Pinterest Web Analytics – Pinterest Blog: “Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, “what are people pinning from my websites?” These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting. Today, we’re pleased to announce Pinterest Web Analytics, a first step towards doing just that. Web Analytics gives site owners insights into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites.”

Getting your website verified by Pinterest is a pretty painless and straightforward process involving dropping some code into the header of your site.

Most interesting is the ability to see stats on not just your pins but also repins as well as impressions and clicks. This should make many of the marketers and businesses that have been eyeing Pinterest but not sold on the platform because lack of analytics happy.

This isn’t a good thing for sites such as PinReach that have sprung up to fulfill the need for analytics and insight into Pinterest trends. However, much like Twitter’s once flourishing API coral reef (still a great post six years later), these sites can become interesting platforms to dig deeper or look at other types of social engagement outside of what Pinterest itself offers.

Pinterest is definitely upping the social media involvement ante with businesses as it continues to scale its user base and explore areas of monetization and ad serving in a different path than either Twitter or Facebook.

Instead, look to LinkedIn and Twitter for further innovation in the social networking monetization space.

The Web Has Been Acquihired by AOL

Fantastic post:

The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL! – Brian Bailey: “An update from the Founder and CEO of World Wide Web, Inc.

October 1, 1998

I know this blog has been quiet lately. It’s been a crazy few months of meetings and negotiation here at WWW HQ, but we’re finally ready to share our big news: World Wide Web is joining the America Online team next month! We couldn’t be more excited.”

Go read the full post, especially the postscript.

Thankfully, the www was born in 1991 and not 2011.

EMail Marketing and Search Still Important on Social Web

Email Users in US

With Mature US Online Population, Small Gains for Email, Search Usage – eMarketer: “Email and search engine usage, two of the most common digital activities, have also reached saturation among internet users. For the vast majority of internet users, email and search are basic functions necessary to efficiently use the web—and navigate daily life—unlike other digital activities such as social networking, video viewing or gaming.”

While the social web is a fascinating and lucrative place to spend time and attention building your affiliate site traffic or online business customer base, there’s still a great deal to be said about effective email marketing and search campaigns.

One of the best ways to see early growth on a new campaign or site is to put together a coherent and well-thought-out marketing effort involving good content, personable social media presence and coordinated email newsletters with good organic (and perhaps paid) search listings. Putting in a little time at the beginning will save you much more time and money later and prevent you from spending extra resources playing catch-up.

Bundles of Non-Delight

Great read on exploring the minds of customers from J.P. at Confused of Calcutta…

The Mind Of The Customer – confused of calcutta: “Next on the list is the bundle.

What a delight. Not. This is where the company looks at what it’s got, knows what the customer wants, and more importantly, knows what the customer doesn’t want. But they need to sell what the customer doesn’t want. So what they do is they make a new thing, one which contains both. A bundle. You want to fly to Istanbul for the Champions League Final? Yes we have flights, but only ones that come with hotel rooms. You’re OK with that? Great, here are the flights. And five nights hotel accommodation. Yes, five nights. All our one-night packages are sold, sorry.”

Microsites and SEO

Microsites can still be powerful additions to your business’ web presence.

However, they can also cause you some serious headaches down the road if implemented incorrectly in 2013 (Google is an evolving beast).

Rand’s video from 2009 still rings true:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The Microsite Mistake from SEOmoz on Vimeo.

Additionally, go read his description of “subfolders” vs “subdomains” for more info on the topic.

We’ve done a great deal of work with clients on microsites over the years and are always astounded when people within the SEO industry confuse the subject to the point of actually hurting a client’s optimization. Always do your homework and always make sure to ask lots of questions about implementations and long-term strategies.

Social Media Marketing Sizes Cheat Sheet

We use this as our internal “cheat sheet” for social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ at Harrelson Agency for finding the right size for images and texts.

It’s a great quick reference to help our clients get the job done.

You can grab a copy from Scribd below or use this Dropbox link for a view or download.

Enjoy!

Social Media Marketing Sizes Cheat Sheethttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/118366124/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-27uvd00byzynodbr39xn(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Discovery in Your Comments

Disqus keeps improving both as a commenting and discussion platform but especially as an advertising platform.

Disqus gets in right in a critical way. They aren’t selling their advertising strategy to only publishers or only advertisers. They also aren’t leaving out users.

Just as we talk of Discovery as a combination of three things (paid search, SEO and social media marketing), Disqus is using the term “Discovery” as the linchpin for their strategy towards both publishers and advertisers (and especially users).

From TheNextWeb:

In addition, it keeps on improving its algorithm to increase the targeting of the content it recommends. Relevance is key here; it means that publishers can boost page views and drive traffic to advertisers without annoying their readers. This is the challenge of Disqus’ model, but also its power, as it focuses on three parties at once: publishers, advertisers and users.

We’ll be experimenting with Disqus’ model in a few weeks with a new client and can’t wait to see the results. We’ll def report back when we have some hard data.

In the meantime, go explore how comments, discussion and user interaction can also mean a better experience for your business for you and the people you’re trying to have discover you.

Social TV Rating from Nielsen and Twitter

Fascinating on many levels but especially the notion of analytics and real-time engagement (something performance marketers have acknowledged for a while but larger brands are slowly realizing):

Nielsen and Twitter Establish Social TV Rating: “Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, and Twitter today announced an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the ‘Nielsen Twitter TV Rating’ for the US market. Under this agreement, Nielsen and Twitter will deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.”

Yahoo’s “New” Ad Format

I’ve got a long long history dealing with co-registrations and lead generation going back to the halcyon days before 2003 when email marketing was all the rage (still should be) and FreeSlide was just a twinkle in our performance marketing eyes.

I’m not a defender of the admittedly very tacky and mostly illegal tactics that many “marketers” employed to get iPod-wanting visitors with a zip code and an email address zipping down registration paths towards free Gevalia coffee pots or Netflix DVD’s, but the registration path become an essential part of performance marketing during this “wild west” (as we called it) period.

So, it’s interesting to see Yahoo roll out a new Cost Per Lead (CPL in the industry lingo) ad format in its search results that looks strikingly familiar…

Yahoo Intros Cost-Per-Lead Search Ads, First New Format Under Marissa Mayer: “The new ad format, which can collect information like demographics, email addresses or phone numbers, is called Cost Per Lead for Search. It’s clearly marked as ‘Ad from’ with the advertiser’s name following.”

Square and Disruption

Square Gift Cards from Square on Vimeo.

We make no secret of our love for Square and the ability to democratize transactions to the point of making our on-the-go clients very very happy. We even gave them out as stocking stuffers to clients.

We couldn’t be more excited about Square’s new gift card functionality that will surely make a few of the great folks we work with happy as well (especially during the holiday season):

Square Introduces Gift Cards: The Slow Death Of Physical Credit Cards And Cash Continues | TechCrunch: “Today, payment service Square has introduced a new way to send gift cards, through its Square Wallet app. You can now go through all of the businesses that use Square to process payments, pick the right one for your friend or family member, and then purchase them a gift card of in amount of your choosing.”

It can only be a matter of time before Square gets acquired by Apple (I think). It’s an obvious partnership and makes sense given how disruptive Square is becoming to local payment industries.

New in WordPress 3.5

We’re super excited about the upcoming release of WordPress 3.5 as we use the insanely flexible and competent WordPress content management platform for our own blog as well as a a number of client sites (especially in the affiliate and performance marketing world).

MediaTemple, who we use for hosting this site and can’t recommend enough to others who need server hosting, has put together a great post about the new features of WordPress…

(mt) Media Temple » Weblog » Blog Archive » What’s New in WordPress 3.5: “WordPress 3.5 is set to be released this Monday, December 10! What can you expect from the new upgrade? In this article, we will cover the basics of the new default theme, Twenty Twelve, the new Media Manager, and some lesser known but very useful features that will be a part of 3.5.”

We’ll post our experiences with 3.5 next week after we’ve had a few days to kick the tires.