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Pop Quiz: What is the 3rd biggest search engine?

Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?

None of the above. It’s YouTube.

This is not surprising especially considering the largest search engine owns it – Google. This now means that as you use more video content on your website, you have to learn the best ways to optimize and distribute it. Hubspot provide an excellent guide to optimizing your videos, which will save me time as I want to tell you about your alternatives and why it’s worth choosing different platforms for different reasons.

If YouTube is the biggest and best why should I bother with the rest?

Here are some of your options:

• Wellcomemat – Real Estate specific. I am a fan but don’t like their search functionality. Maybe they will read this and change it! Union Street Media has a channel and some of our clients, which have had a big impact on search engine visibility and user engagement.
• Vimeo – High quality host that offers a good array of viewing widgets for your site especially with Macs. Serves the creative community well with shorts and artistic videos in HD. The free basic option only allows 1 upload a week though and most importantly NO COMMERCIAL CONTENT.
• Tubemogul – TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. It can distribute your video to all of these: Youtube, Yahoo, Myspace, AOL, MetaCafe, Google, Rewer, DailyMotion, Blip, Veoh, Crackle, Sclipo, Viddler and HowCast.
• Viddler – Very user friendly with a good variety of formats you can upload with, customize and distribute including social media APIs. I especially like the option to be able to use your own branded watermark instead of the platform as you see from YouTube or Vimeo. This of course is with the pay version. Drat!

Google’s new Universal Search is randomly placing thumbnails next to video search results, attracting the eye FIRST, even before the #1 search result. This new style of blended search results is the kicker for video. Whatever happens next, it’s clear that video SEO is finally starting to catch up to the rest of the web. With services like SpeakerText and YouTube captions emerging to help eliminate unsearchable content issues, the future likely holds more automated and accurate video-text mapping and perhaps eventually video editing with the use of cloud computing. There’s a thought.

Search Results for Union Street Media: A good example of Universal Search, where it’s not just about web site results anymore.

There are a lot of social media terms thrown around these days, and sorting through all of the jargon can be tough. First, let’s differentiate between the “big three” social networks.

Facebook logo

Facebook is a social network site that connects friends, family, and businesses. People can share updated statuses, pictures, personal information, links, and more. With more than 250 million users in the world, 120 million of which log on daily, there is a large market to reach here.

Twitter logo

Twitter is another social network/micro-blog that allows users to to send and read messages (or “tweets”). Tweets can be up to 140 characters, and they are shared on your personal page and distributed to people who choose to “follow” you. In the last year, Twitter’s growth rate surpassed 1,000%. The potential here to reach customers is huge.

Wordpress logo

Wordpress is a personal publishing platform that works as a blogging service and as a web hosting service that is run on PHP code and a SQL data backend. Confused? Wordpress.com offers a free blog hosting service that requires no PHP code knowledge and a user friendly interface that allows easy updating, customization, and built in widgets to add to your blog. 77% of internet users actively follow and read blogs, so this platform also provides great opportunity to reach and engage potential customers. Wordpress isn’t the only blog hosting application out there; there is also Blogger, Vox, and more.

Now that we’ve covered some basics, let’s go into more depth…

Social Media Structure

This graph illustrates that every social media account you possess should link back to your homepage. This type of infrastructure is what the search engine spiders and real web surfers like.  There are even some applications, or tools, out there to help make interconnecting your sites simpler. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Place a Twitter widget, or “badge,” on your Facebook page, blog, website, and any other web presence you deem appropriate. Creating this widget is easy:

1. Sign into your Twitter account and click on Settings.
2. Once you’re in Settings, make sure you’re in the Account tab.
3. Scroll down to the 5th field, “More Info URL”. Click on the link directly below it that says “(You can also add Twitter to your site here)”.
4. Select which social media site you want to create a flash/html widget to.

• Depending on your blog layout, you can also have your tweets feed into your blog, alongside your posts. Usually having either the Twitter icon or the feeds on your blog is enough, but not both. You don’t want to spam.
• Add an icon for your Facebook page onto your blog and website. You can create the HTML for your Facebook logo right in Facebook.
• Notify your followers automatically, with a tweet, every time you update your blog. This can be done in a number of ways, but applications like TwitterFeed make it very easy.
• Set up a feed that displays links to your blog posts (anytime you update) on the sidebar of your main website. This requires some coding knowledge, and often it is more helpful to get the help of a third party such as Union Street Media.

With a little handiwork, keeping content fresh on all of your social media channels can be as simple as posting to one.

Easy money doesn’t exist but free lunches do

Running a business of twenty people requires a lot of cash and none of it comes easily.  Each month our sales team is responsible for generating well over a hundred thousand dollars.  To earn that money, our web development team needs to produce the work, which requires our product development team to create a scalable architecture for the sites.  Our internet marketing team needs get the sites up in the search engines so that our clients get the traffic to generate a return on their invest.  Our support team needs to keep the sites live, handle incoming phone calls and help clients with updates.  Our office manager extrodinaire needs to invoice for all of this work and then made sure we actually get paid for it.  This is fun, challenging and inspiring, but not easy.

However, there are free lunches.  I know because I used to buy them for people and now, on occasion, people buy them for me.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires that we eat.  Every day.  Often three times.  I have used lunch as a way to get an hour with really smart people.  Our awesome attorney, Peter Kunin, helped set us on the right course over many-a-$10-sandwich, which is less then his normal billable rate.  I have had the opportunity to learn from successful entrepreneurs about the lessons from their businesses over a lunch, and applied those lessons to USM.  After a trip to the Google Campus in 2008, I discovered that 110% of Google employees eat free lunch at Google every day (I really appreciated the free lunch even if the shareholders might not).  So now we have office lunch too at Union Street Media every Tuesday.  We get together as a group, share stories, ideas and hang out.  It’s awesome.

A good networker is a netweaver

Jim Shattuck, the Director of Career Services at my senior year at Middlebury College, had a simple manta: “Network, network, network.”  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I actually honed this skill at Middlebury.  Freshman year I found out pretty quickly that if I knew the person behind the bar at a campus party, I got my luke warm Natty Light faster.  Today, I’m the most public facing employee at Union Street Media.  I spend about 10% of my time attending business events in the community and volunteering on boards of other organizations.  However, you can’t just take from your network.  You have to give back to it.  One of the things I like to do the most is connect people in the community with each other, whether it’s for business purposes or friendship.  When people move to Burlington, I invite them to the office and share my knowledge of the area.  They leave with a sticky pad full of names, emails and phone numbers from contacts at a company where they might find a job to the best guys fix-it-guy (Chris Labelle, 802-343-0269) and mechanic in town (Daren Smith, 802-660-3111).

Vermont actually is a good place to do business

After 30 years of listening to rants about the “richest one purcent“, Vermont may be one of the last places in the US that thinks you can tax the rich to balance your budget.  (It’s also the last place in the US where you’re better of speaking French then Spanish, which lined up nicely with my study-abroad year in France).  There are a lot of “rich” people in Vermont, they just stay for less the 180 days each year and take their tax dollars with them.  I wish Vermont could address it’s challenged relationship with money, but that is another topic.

From whence I came to where I will stay

Despite the best efforts of some elected representatives to make it not the case, Vermont is actually a good place to do business.  Vermonters, by-birth-and-by-choice, are honest, hard working people.  They do right by others and in turn do right by themselves.  The corruption that is rampant in many parts of the world doesn’t exist here.  There is a strong sense of community, place and identity.  The quality of life is second to none (unless you’re a surfer, like my sophomore year roommate).  Since good jobs are hard to come by here, people will stick with one for a long time.  It makes for a steady, albeit small, labor pool which is the number one ingredient for a successful business.

A company’s most important assets go home every night

Union Street Media doesn’t have heavy machinery or physical capital that you can touch.  We have brains and some really smart ones at that.  Inside the heads of the people that work at USM you’ll find the future of our business.  My job, as I see it, is to harness the power of all these brains, align their interests with that of the company and then get out of the way.

Make serendipity happen

While I don’t know if Bo Peabody actually coined this phrase, it sure sounds like something he would have written in his book Lucky or Smart.  My brother and business partner, Jon, who has been along for much of this ride likes to say that 80% of life is just showing up (thanks to Woody Allen on that one).  Some of the best opportunities in our business have come from being at the right place at the right time.  Coincidence?  Sort of.  Lucky?  A bit.  Over and over again, we found our way to an opportunity and then capitalized upon it.  That’s what great teams do.

The spring of 2000 were heady times.  Everyone was full of optimism.  The NASDAQ was less then a month away from it’s all time high. Twenty-somethings like me were becoming multi-millionaires overnight on The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes business models and we were going to be the next ones.  A Doonsbury Cartoon from that spring summed up the times, as one character said to the other “Just finished the business plan.  I’m off to get a Mercedes.  Want one?”

Ten years later, the story didn’t play out that way for CollegeXTRA.com, Inc., but that’s just fine with me.  As a celebration of our tenth birthday, I’d like share a few things I’ve learned along the way, but first, a little history on how I got here.  If you want to fast forward through the “how we got here” part, my next post covers some of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.

The business you start is not the one you end up in. So how did we go from creating “for students, by students” web sites at college campuses to developing web sites for REALTORS?

Our original model was to develop sites like Middkid.com at campuses across the country.  Middkid, which is still very active today, is a hyper-local portal focused on the Middlebury College community and supported by advertising from the merchants in the town of Middlebury.  We have a local business directory with coupons from our sponsors, an offline printed discount card that can be found in the wallets many students on campus and a monthly special events email newsletter.  The site has a database with thousands of course evaluations written by students over the years, sharing their experiences about the classes they took and the professors that teach them.  There is a Middlebury student who is our Campus Manager each year that resubscribes the businesses during the summer and the updates & markets the site through out the school year.  It’s an awesome, paid internship that is one of the best hands-on run-your-own business jobs I’ve seen for college students.

With all the success we had (and continue to have) at Middlebury, why didn’t this go national? The answer there is a blog treatise in itself, but the quick points are as follows

• Ideas are great.  Implementation is really, really hard.  At 33, I don’t know much.  At 23, I knew nothing.  We experienced a lot of the challenges that faced most start ups.  Partners that didn’t always see eye to eye.  Lack of infrastructure.  A frenetic pace that wasn’t sustainable.  Insufficient skill sets in key areas of the business.  Some bad timing (we launched our expanded campus platform in September 2001).  The list goes on.
• As we chant at the hockey games “there’s only one Middlebury.”  The town:gown ratio in Middlebury turned out to be the perfect balance.  Businesses counted on students, but students had options so the businesses need to advertise.  When we went to smaller communities, like Hamilton, NY, home of Colgate University, there was only one pizza place.  When we went to larger ones, like Syracuse, the students were drowned out by the population of the community.
• We were only as good on each campus as the student that was representing us (and the student turnover was every year).  The priorities of college life require that you drink with your friends, hang out with your significant other, go to class / complete your assignments and sleep.  Managing a business came fifth, at best.  Only a select few of the students were as passionate about their campus site as I had been about Middkid.  It was a job for them, not their baby, and it took me a while to come to grips with it.
• We were ahead of our time.  Sounds like a cop-out, but in 2000, we were selling online advertising to College-town merchants who had no web site.  In order to get the sale, we ended up building a web page on the college site for the merchants and those pages were becoming their de facto web sites.  Since you follow the money in business, we went to where it was (web development) and left behind what wasn’t working.

Scooby Doo

When we decided to put the college student business model to bed, we looked around and saw another opportunity, which is the story of Union Street Media.  We had developed a great content management system that let the campus managers update their site.  We were able to leverage that tool for business clients who needed a web presence.  However, when you’re literally going door-to-door selling web sites, you’re competing with the most precious assett in business, and life: people’s time.  We were having marginal success at it, when our then advisor, now board member and long time mentor, David Bradbury, set us up with meetings at three different trade associations in Vermont.

We established partnerships with the Vermont Bar Association, the Vermont Lodging and Restaurant Association and the Vermont Association of REALTORS.  With each partnership, the association paid us to develop their web site.  We then discounted our services and they marketed us to their members as a benefit of joining.  As it turned out, lawyers were too smart for the internet in 2002, lodging & restaurant establishments in Vermont couldn’t afford it, and the real estate industry was about to be fundamentally changed by the “Internet Data Exchange” (IDX), which is the sharing of brokers’ listings online.  Previous to the internet, if you wanted to buy a house you needed to walk into a broker’s office and look at the “black book” of listings.  The book was printed monthly and out of date the moment it left the press.  It made for an extremely inefficient process, but let REALTORS control the information.  The tug-of-war that ensued with in the real estate community was vicious.  One Vermont REALTOR virtually accosted my brother at their annual convention in 2003 “Scooby-Doo” style for ruining his businesses (“if it wasn’t for your rascally kids…”)

From the early days of developing web sites for local Burlington VT real estate clients like Century 21 Advantage and Brian Boardman, we expanded to NH, MA, NC and Chicago (we’re White Sox fans).  We are now developing web sites and providing internet & social media marketing for hundreds of agents, brokers, teams and real estate offices all over the country.

Now that you know the history, check back tomorrow for the lessons I have learned over the past ten years running a business.

8/10 consumers trust brands that offer reviews, especially if there are bad ones too!

Sounds like an odd thing to say but the reality is in the consumer-to-consumer marketplace, the truth surfaces about products, services, ideas, and companies. For instance, when looking at reviews for bed and breakfast options recently, some friends of mine showed up with a very bad review from a disgruntled customer. I wondered, how could this be? This place is gorgeous and the hosts warm and courteous. I wanted to find out from them what happened so I asked them. They had no idea about this review but had noticed a dip in their bookings and when they looked at the review, they quickly knew what was going on and told me the other side of the story.

The reviewer in question had failed to book through the proper reservation system and assumed they would hold a room for him for the same time each year that he had been visiting during leaf-peeping season in Vermont. As the hosts were not aware of a booking they of course gave the room out to another party who had booked properly. He was furious and called them to complain. A few days later, some deeply unpleasant reviews began to surface on Trip Adviser and their bookings dropped during their most important season. Once they had sourced these reviews back, they went on the offensive and reached out to other long term guests asking them to provide some fair and balanced feedback on Trip Advisor. They came flooding and started to push the bad reviews down  becoming clear to others that there was a malicious hijacker at work rather than a bona fide review(s).

The lesson from this is that you will get bad reviews from time to time – it’s the nature of people’s sensibilities. It’s healthy in fact as it allows you as a business to learn from your customers to make your business better, much like test marketing. However you must keep a close eye on any muckraking and manage your reputation as best possible. Unless people break codes of conduct, then it is hard to have conversations removed from your digital footprint, but you can contribute to the conversations and provide more of the type of content that you want associated with your  brand. Encouraging customers to do the same is key, as people love user generated content in a trust based community as the web is.

How can you monitor your brand?

Two suggestions:

1. Set up a Google Alert on your brand, which means that whenever you are mentioned in news, other blogs, customer reviews etc you get emailed a list of these results either daily, weekly or monthly to your choosing.
2. Search you brand in Google with Google Suggest and see what Google is suggesting as you type. You will see any bad associations and be able to investigate the search results.

The blogosphere is an open and often candid forum, so being able to smell a rat and respond can help restore that trust that might have been lost either fairly or unfairly, as in the case of my friends at the B & B. Strengthening your community in life and online will inevitably help you create a strong business.

Tell me your stories on this. How you have had to manage your online reputation?

New Hampshire real estate agency Prudential Spencer Hughes is a long time client of Union Street Media. They went for a redesign to update the look of their website. They’re also continuing with our Report Recommend Revise Internet Marketing services to ensure the site’s high level of performance.

Overland Summers is a teen adventure program that offers a variety of lifetime experiences to youth. Their offerings include hiking & biking excursions, writing programs, language immersion programs, and more. Overland came to us wanting a redesign that would better express the incredible programs they offer. They are also marketing their website through Union Street Media’s RRR Program.

Eve Thompson is a Reston, VA, realtor who has been utilizing our Internet Marketing services for some time. Eve made the decision to have Union Street Media build a brand new website that reflects the “new urban” appeal of Reston. Our Internet Marketing team continues to work with Eve on her online marketing efforts through the RRR program.

The Burlington Tennis Club is a member-owned, non-profit recreational club located in Chittenden County, VT. They came to Union Street Media wanting to keep up with the times, and attract younger members with a cleaner, better designed website. Their goal was to shift their advertising focus from traditional methods to include more digital marketing.

Located in Greenwich, CT, Brunswick School is a college preparatory day school for boys in grades Pre-Kindergarten through 12. Brunswick needed a fresh, new design for their site that provided easier navigation for potential students, their parents, and alumni. Union Street Media gave them the functionality they desired in a professional and aesthetically pleasing package.

Bullrock Corporation has been in construction management and real estate development since the early 1980s, and in 2000 they became involved in the senior living business. Bullrock Corporation came to us needing a website that provided clear information about their services, targeted potential customers, and provided a professional representation of their business.

Union Street Media is proud to add each of these sites to our evolving portfolio of clients!

Blogging can lead to other benefits for your business as well…

Another Hubspot study conducted in August of 2009 – viewed here – revealed that businesses that blog receive better marketing results in general. The study surveyed 795 businesses that blogged and 736 that didn’t. The results showed that business that blogged received:

• 55% more page visits
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

It makes sense; you’re constantly expanding the online content associated with your business, which in turn draws more attention to your site, from both people and search engines. There are many distinct blogging benefits. A blog provides:

• An opportunity to expand keyword rich content;

• An interface that is highly tuned for search engines;

• An excellent way to earn inbound links;

• A forum for you, as a professional, to display your expertise.

With a blog RSS feed on your site, you also have an automatic way to produce dynamic content for your main site. Many blogging businesses find their websites easily zooming above competitors’ static-content websites in the search results.

For more information about how to effectively blog for business, click here.

Remember, just because you have a blog doesn’t mean your website traffic is going to shoot through the roof. You need to take care of your blog consistently, monitor the comments your posts generate, and make sure your content doesn’t get stale with regular posting. Blogging is also more effective in garnering leads as part of a complete internet marketing strategy. When combined with an optimized main site and active participation on social media sites, blogging will help deliver a higher volume of high quality website traffic and leads.

Traditional “Outbound” Marketing is the kind of marketing that we all grew up with. It is essentially advertising and is based on quantity. You choose your message and then pay certain media outlets, newspaper, TV, radio, in your market area, to carry that message to potential clients. The more that you pay the more exposure you get.

This model had and still has many benefits; most notably it allows the advertiser to present a consistent brand with very little chance for criticism or feedback (you can’t effectively talk back to a television ad). It also allows for a very direct sales message. You present your brand and your value proposition and wait for inquiries to start coming in.

This model also has lots of disadvantages, most notably it depends on the strength of your chosen outside media outlet. This presents two problems; first, media buys are just that, it is the purchasing of space/time on someone else’s brand. The problem here is that all the capital that you spend on these outbound channels has a very short return on investment window. Once the issue of the paper or the round of TV advertising expires you’ll have no residual benefit aside from a small amount of brand recognition from your client base. All that money you have spent is gone and can no longer work for you.

The second, and perhaps more compelling problem, is this: paying for advertising through traditional marketing channels is based on the assumption that your customer base has limited channels for news and entertainment and thus the channel you have chosen has value to your customer base. You spend money with these outlets because you believe that these channels are where people in your area come for news and entertainment and thus your message will be seen.

This basic assumption of limited marketing channels is quickly changing. Twenty years ago a given market had a finite number of media outlets, it had its papers and its television stations and that was it. The population was totally dependent on these outlets for  information. Because of this limited number of channels, you could also get away with a relatively “hard sell” message. An extreme example of this would be Billy Mays’s infamous high impact product commercials, which were aggressive and totally based on the viewers investment in the media channel that they were watching. That paradigm is a thing of the past.

Today those traditional channels are only one of many options. Blogs, national news websites and online entertainment have released a torrent of information upon the population. This torrent has fundamentally changed the way people find and interact with information. The Billy Mays approach of pounding a message into an audience is no longer effective because the multiplicity of information sources has softened people’s tolerance for the hard sell. Now people want value instead of pitch.

Enter the “Inbound” marketing model. If the Outbound model is based on quantity then the inbound model is based on quality. Just as the outbound model grew out of the media that supported it, the inbound model is closely tied to the media from which it was conceived.

With the sheer mass of online information sources, people can pick and choose where they get their information and how they are entertained. The simplicity of the Google search page makes every user a pundit who can judge different information sources against each other and decide who to listen to and to send others to. This qualitative evaluation presents major challenges for any business or organization looking to attract attention to its message or brand.

The quality-based inbound model takes advantage of this individual punditry. In the old model a larger competitor with a larger marketing budget could drown out its competition. Now if a website and blog are well optimized and are the best source of information about their product or service, people are naturally going to come to them whether it be for widgets or world peace. The quality of a website and information will naturally draw people to it allowing them to make a decision on the message or value proposition based on the quality of the content. Because of the nature of online media individuals can then share their evaluation, whether positive or negative, with others.

The main challenge that this presents to any brand is the basic acceptance of the lack of control inherent in the Inbound marketing model. As the Outbound model allowed you to control your brand image and message the inbound model leaves you wide open to commentary and criticism from every angle.

Don’t let this fact frighten you away.  If you believe in your message and brand, there is nothing to fear from healthy conversation and constructive criticism. In fact criticism is great! It means people are interested. Getting a healthy dialogue going with your critics is a fantastic way to draw attention to your message.

Once you engage in this new model, a conversation will begin with your client base about the quality and validity of your brand. Quality and identity of your brand will be extended or snuffed out by this ensuing conversation.  The “quality” that this model is based on is not limited to the content generated by the brand. The content generated by the brand is ideally just a starting place for other people to add their own layers of meaning. This process will help you refine your brand and make it more pertinent to your client base. With this new model you can’t tell people what they need, instead you need to listen to them and adapt.

Essentially by building a solid web presence based on solid SEO structure that utilizes inbound principles and effectively engages in social media you can build a brand without spending a cent on traditional advertising.

The growth of your brand will most likely happen slowly at first, as it takes time to gain traction with Google. However, in this system your brand will be evaluated and improved as you communicate with your client base. In the outbound model a brand had to pay an advertising agency to conduct focus groups to find out what their target market wanted. Now all you have to do to get a pulse on your market is engage with the resources that you already have. By doing this your brand will be refined every step of the way by the very people that make up your market, for free.

Inbound Marketing Model concepts can be put into action by anyone with the attention of a few hours a week using an effective website, on-site blog and twitter account. Of course having these tools in not enough, the tools alone are useless, what gives them power is the skill and passion that the user brings to them. So dive into the flow. Start the conversation and  you will find that your brand will come alive with a more competitive stance and a community of supporters and critics that will drive you to improve your message and brand as your brand grows.

Click here to view the embedded video.