Official SMX Sydney Site: www.searchmarketingexpo.com.au

Official Twitter Hash Tag: during the conference, it was #smx, but post-conference, it’s reverted back to #smxsydney

Live Blogging

Glenn Murray (@divinewrite): great live coverage, both Day One and Day Two
Kalena Jordan (@kalena): a dozen articles, covering a session each, starting here, continuing here, and ending here. Wow.
Matt Burgess (@therealburgo): a very captivating recap of Matt’s highlights here

Photos

A few hundred of Kalena’s photos on her public Facebook gallery
My efforts: Night 0 / Day 1 Morning / Day 2 Afternoon / Day 2 / Day 2 Site Clinic & Harbour Cruise

Videos

Interviews by The Lost Agency (@thelostagency): Jet Interactive / AdLux

Presentations

From Brent Payne (@brentdpayne): SEO for Content Management Systems

Analysis

Jaaved Khatree (@jaaved): a quick write up from his point-of-view as an exhibitor here
and from Martin Reed from Dejan SEO: this report
Marc Ellison from Bruce Clay gives a quick rundown of Day 1
Chris Thomas from RESEO with a lengthy rundown

In the gallery below, you’ll see the presentation of the iPad to the lucky attendee; the official conference photo; and the ‘Under the Bridge’ Harbour Cruise. As before, feel free to pinch any photos, just include a one-liner attribution if you can.

For more photos, Barry will soon have all 2500 photos from the conference, and should be putting all 400 or so of the best on Flickr.

Thanks once again to Barry, Lisa and Paula for a great SMX Conference – another memorable and brain-expanding couple of days. AB out.

PS – Feel free to download/pinch/upload these photos and use them as you wish. Attribution to me would be lovely. Either ab@rebusiness.com.au or @allroundniceguy. Easy!

Upstairs at eMetrics, the attendees were learning about measuring qualified visitors.

Bootcamp sessions were jam-packed full of introductory content on dozens of important topics: Pay per click; SEM Essentials; Social Media; Blogging; Facebook; Twitter…  and lots more.

After the final afternoon session, much-needed drinkies were served.

Barry Smythe opens the conference…

…and Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of searchengineland.com, delivers the keynote…

Ballroom A at the Sydney Hilton was packed…

Record attendances…  1000 on the first day alone

Meanwhile, upstairs, Jim Sterne leads the eMetrics stream of the conference.

The free Search Engine Bootcamp sessions were always full, with an array of speakers holding the crowd’s attention.

The exhibition hall was the place to be during breaks – and the food! That’s a post in itself…  : )

Greg Boser, from 3 Dog Media, started the morning sessions on Day One.

Miniature tiramisu. *wow*. The fact is though, that the food got better and better as the conference went on. Seriously.

OK. I have this Wordpress Gallery thing figured out now – here’s the complete set of Day 1 morning session photos… Enjoy!  : )

A wonderful warm week in Sydney – typically 25º all week…  lovely!

In the Marble Bar under the Hilton for @kalena’s Tweetup the night prior to SMX. Who won the prize for best geek t-shirt??

I know who won the prize for best poser: @motherwell  : )

OK. I have these Wordpress Galleries figured out now – no more odds’n’sodds of photos – here’s the complete ‘good ones’ Gallery of  Night 0: Sydney/Tweetup

I’m not pointing any fingers (and I’m certainly not immune to it myself!), but increasingly, I come into contact with businesses and business people who have, well, stopped.

There’s nothing wrong with a quick recharge of the batteries, or doing a little bit of navel gazing before ploughing onwards and upwards… But if you’re not exactly firing on all cylinders, how to you get back into gear again?

Here’s a few reasons why we stop pushing the envelope, with some common-sense antidotes.

Tiredness

When it’s just you in your business, you’re inexorably linked to the success or failure of your venture. So much so, that one mentor of mine likes to assess the concerns of a business by only assessing the character of the businessperson – he knows that the business follows directly in step.

So if you’re at the end of your rope, there’s simply no way to push any envelopes at all. Things have to change – if you can’t cope, neither can your livelihood.

Find something to change your lifestyle, to change your outlook, or at the very least – to change your sleeping habits! Begin with the obvious: your health has to be a priority, but next most important comes some ‘me time’ – a regular mental health break – book out one evening per week solely for your own hobbies or interests.

It’s incredibly common-sense stuff, but in the battle between important and urgent, it’s the important things these that give way to the constant daily seemingly-urgent things.

Sticking to the Status Quo

“Everybody else is doing it/no-one else is doing it. Don’t see why I need to anything different.” Ah-ha – an easy one to dispel. When the global financial crisis hit in early 2009, a lot of companies were put under the pump. With the ‘expected’ crisis, businesses were faced with a choice to either hide under a rock and weather it out, or alternatively to use the uncertainty to trial new products and services.

History tells us that the crisis wasn’t as huge as it could have been, and so those businesses who ‘zigged’ when the others ‘zagged’ had an 18 month window of opportunity when wages froze and interest rates were down – and when the tide turned, they were the first ones to ride it.

If no-one else is doing it, you have to ask the question: do they all know something I don’t, or are they all just sticking to only what they know, too?

Internal/External Friction

If internal forces inside your business are causing you to hold back your grand plans, then maybe it’s time for either some serious education OR a rethink of your organisational chart. Your staff and your customers are the two major obstacles in moving your business anywhere: even if your staff love you, they still value job security as their No.1 priority; and while your customers do pay the bills, they also shape your future.

Henry Ford (Mr Model T himself) once famously said “If I had have asked my customers what they wanted, they would just have said ‘faster horses’”.

The best way to overcome friction is with education. For your staff, they need to come on ‘this journey’ with you, so enlighten them – train them – and they’ll see the same rationale you have for pushing your envelope. The same goes for your customers, too. Sometimes you need to educate them in these new products, new opportunities before you can sell it them.

Lack of knowledge

Ouch. A common reason, but also not a great reason. Refer to the above Henry Ford quote once more. You just don’t know what you don’t know. Former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld went a step further and declared that: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

OK. So half the world laughed at him for making such a confusing mess of a statement, but, actually, we was totally on the ball.

TL/DR: In this day and age, don’t be caught short with a lack of knowledge.

Solutions? The internet is a vast resource of people trying to help you learn new concepts (case in point: what you’re reading right now!); there are blogs on every topic known to mankind; wikipedia.org has just enough truthiness to be considered factual on over 3.2 million topics; there are more ‘for dummies’ books in your local bookstore or library than ever before; and there are even people in your own suburb who would welcome an opportunity to give you a ‘brain-dump’ for the price of a large flat white with two sugars. Seriously, it’s not hard *to* learn – it’s hard to *realise* that you need to learn.

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Me? I’m happy because I finally put my Donald Rumsfeld quote to good use. Now, stop reading and go out and do something awesome. Go. Now.

AB out

What is a domain name?

At it’s most simplest, a domain name is a signpost, pointing the way to a location on the internet where web sites, email servers, or other internet services are located.

It’s an address that’s human readable and hopefully memorable. I’d far prefer to remember ‘rebusiness.com.au’ than ‘202.125.46.16’. That long number is called an IP address, and it’s the actual address that computers use to contact each other – but it’s the domain name that we humans can cope with.

A domain name is also a legal entity. Think of it like the title to a piece of property – a block of land. In this way, a domain name is the right to build something on the web at a certain address. You can leave the block of land untouched, you could build a small house, or you could build a huge skyscraper on your block of land – whatever you build is up to you, but the domain name is the means to get a block of land that others can find!

Practically, a domain name is most often seen as a web address… All the bumper stickers and TV ads you’ve ever seen with a web address at the end are purchased domain names for some sort of commercial or promotional purpose.

A domain is also used for other services that you can use on the internet – email is the next most common example. If you see an email like info@mydomain.com.au, then the ‘info’ portion is the actual email addressee, the ‘@’ bit is literally the word ‘at’, the ‘mydomain’ is the bit that you actually buy, and the ‘.com.au’ are to designate the type of domain and the geographic region.

The upshot is, that if you ever see an email like me@mydomain.com.au, that’s not a generic Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail free email, you can go to www.mydomain.com.au in a web browser and be very sure that you’ll find that person’s web site.

What’s with the ‘http://’ and the ‘www’??

Ah – old school! Please ignore the ‘http://’ portion, and *please* don’t write it on any of your business stationery! It did have a purpose back in the early 90’s, but now, the confusion it creates – the mistyping! – and the time it takes to say ‘haitch tee tee pee colon slash slash…’ could be better spent making a customer *happy*, not confused!

Similarly, 97% of web sites do not need the ‘www’ on the front of them in any modern web browser. Go on – try your favourite sites without it! It’s just one less thing to have your customers try to remember – so just hit them with ‘mydomain.com.au’ on your bumper stickers or at the end of your TV ads.

What’s with the .com .net & .au endings?

.com stands for ‘commercial’, .net for ‘internet related’, and .org for ‘non profit organisation’. These are called ‘top level domains’ or TLDs. There’s another TLA for you!

.au is a country domain – there are many hundreds of them that you slowly get to know, and every country but the USA has one.

How do I find a good domain name?

No question, the best way is to use bustaname.com. It gives you instant testing of the main .com .net and .org domain names PLUS it gives you a thesaurus for finding similar words AND a simple way of finding common combinations of your key words that might be available.

To check for .au domain names, try a more restrained search on netregistry.com.au

How do I buy one?

For Australians, my pick would be netregistry.com.au – their support is great, and they’re quite huge (so stable!), but the best reason is that their prices are fair. Generally $20 per year for a domain name, but they often have special promotions, so hop on their mailing list.

Melbourne IT was the leader for many years, but they still charge $75 per year for the same virtual piece of nothing as netregistry’s $20 per year. There are also even cheaper options… but you don’t want to have your domain name company go bust one day…

What happens if the one I want is taken?

OK – here’s where is gets tricky. Your first port of call is to choose a better one – a name that’s more marketable. Be inventive, but also try to be concise. The shorter and more readable the better. I’ve written a whole guide about how to choose a good business/domain name on rebusiness.com.au

But if you really must have a name that’s taken, then either consider the poor cousins of the corresponding .net or .biz domain name (but only consider them briefly!) OR find out if the .com or .com.au you want is for sale.

If the .com site looks like a placeholder site, full of ads, chances are it’s a domain that’s been parked and the owner is either waiting for an offer right now, or will consider an offer in the future. Look up the domain on aunic.net for .au names, or internic.net for all .coms and see if you can find any contact information. Or search for ‘domain names for sale’ on Google to find the hundreds of domains up for grabs at the right price – remember, a domain name is a legal entity, so it’s able to be sold at any market price.

And if your domain is taken by someone to simply make you unhappy, then your best bet is to start going down the legal path. If the owner is simply ‘cybersquatting’ to make you pay one day, then the courts can have their way and return the domain to you if you are the ‘most legal’ owner by way of trademark, copyright or other valid claim.

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Did I miss any tricky questions? Got some curly domain names quandries? The curlier, the better! Leave me a question in the comments (anonymously if you like!) and I’ll respond within a day.

Happy hunting!

Andrew Ballard

Promotional products: keyrings, pens, gimmicky things or practical things. They only cost a few dollars each, which does add up, but if you consider it a conversation starter between an established customer and a potential customer – all happening freely without your knowledge – what price is that worth to your business?

This month is a weird topic, but stick with me: the challenge to you as a business owner is to find yourself a virtual salesperson. Let me explain.

A salesperson in *your own* business would be someone who goes out actively seeking customers and new sales opportunities – either in person, over the phone, or via the internet.

A *virtual* salesman is a person who is not employed by your business whatsoever, but has a vested interest in actively telling others about your business, your products, and the wonderful service you provide.

The trick is in finding them. They’re most likely a small percentage of your customers – your most loyal regular customers, who conversely, you probably have the least interaction with. They’re the 20 to the 80 that take up your time on small tasks. They’re the ones who are regulars who you know by name or by ‘nod’, but have probably never had to market to in any way.

They’re the ones who simply ‘get’ your business, appreciate what you do, and would most likely be very happy to tell others about your business. If only they knew what you wanted them to say…

“Stand back, she’s gonna blow!”

Famously, Seth Godin (internet marketing mega-guru) calls these sorts of people ’sneezers’ in his book ‘Unleashing the ideavirus’. He rides the metaphor that while ideas are valuable in themselves, only decent, simple ideas are worth spreading. You just have to tell the ’sneezers’.

Seth Godin nominates the perfect ’sneezer’ as someone who likes to be completely up to date with new info – someone who other people who are happy looking to for advice and recommendations. If ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is important to many, then Seth Godin’s perfect sneezer is Mr & Mrs Jones.

That’s probably taking it a little too far: while having a virtual salesperson telling lots of others will get the word out, it’s generally quality you’re looking for, not necessarily quantity.

Where do I find/how can I make some virtual salespeople?

It depends on two things: 1) your ability to spot the 20% of your best customers, and 2) your ability to make it easy for them to spread your message.

Your ability to find the top 20%, 10% or the absolute best 5% of your customer base *should* be an easy task – you *do* measure key metrics against your customer base, don’t you? OK. There’s a good chance you don’t measure such things. There’ll be another column on measuring key data next time, but for now, look beyond WAGs (now there’s an acronym for you!) and begin documenting sales against customers. And if you don’t record your customers, begin a customer loyalty program. (Another column in and of itself right there…)

Once you have your top x%, make it super-easy for these customers to pass along your message.

My top 10 ways to make it easy for your message get passed on:

1) Make your message strong and simple. Use the tag line of your business, that’s displayed everywhere, as your marketing message. “The best X this side of Texas”. Imagine it being passed on… “Well, they say they’re the best X this side of Texas, and I’d say they’re just about right”. If what you do isn’t clear, or your message is too long, you’ll simply be asking too much.

2) Within your top 20% of your customers, hand-pick the enthusiasts or groups of enthusiasts. They’re the ones who would talk about you in the sleep or underwater. Every business has fanatics who love the industry you’re in. Sponsor some classes in your industry. Hand out free info on your web site to inspire budding… whatevers… Connect!

3) If you normally include a flyer/brochure/menu with every purchase, include 2 or 3 – to be handed out to others when the conversation arises. Very cheap and easy – you’re already printing them, and the price becomes more economical with quantity.

4) Two for the price of one special offers. Depending on if your customer can actually *use* both products/services or not (hopefully not!) it might be a way to initiate one-for-me, one-for-someone-else.

5) Customer clubs with membership benefits. Offer your best customers added benefits which they can either use themselves, or offer to new customers as (above board!) incentives. The CostCo ‘members only’ model comes to mind.

6) Fridge magnets. Big ones. Everyone has kids/grandkids/neighbour’s kids/overdue bills to keep somewhere prominent. Don’t skimp – big ones!

7) Invite 10 key customers to be ‘ambassadors’ of your business. You give them insider knowledge of new products and new direction, and they give you direct feedback on your business fro ma customer point of view. A bit of backscratching can help everyone, and allow your ambassadors to really feel like they ‘know’ your business – making firm friends, not just customers.

Promotional products: keyrings, pens, gimmicky things or practical things. They only cost a few dollars each, which does add up, but if you consider it a conversation starter between an established customer and a potential customer – all happening freely without your knowledge – what price is that worth to your business?

9) Loyalty cards: offer a good deal, not just an average deal. Make it worth talking about. Buy 3 and get your 4th free. Or let your customers stamp a new card for someone else. You don’t have to run the deal forever, but even so, you need to measure what a new customer would be worth to you.

10) Above all else, make sure that the message is being passed on for free – offering commissions sways people’s perceptions in a subtle but definite way. In just the same way as an article in a magazine versus an ad gives more (??) credence to the article, offering paid referrals instantly casts doubt on the reality of the offer and the genuineness of the business itself. If it’s genuinely worth talking about, it must genuinely be that good. Don’t muddy that with offers of money.

AB out

Part Two

Last month, I outlined what social media is, and began to give you, the parent, a quick primer on some of the big players. We covered SMSs, MySpace and the wonderful world of Blogging, but we saved the best till last…

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Facebook

facebook.com overtook myspace in terms of millions of users in 2008, and hasn’t looked back. Beginning life as an online yearbook for university students, it quickly grew due to it’s more refined interface and (counterintuitively) it’s lack of graphical customisation. Instead, Facebook uses plugins called Applications, that allow the user to add unique games/quizes/audio/video/etc etc etc – there are tens of thousands of Facebook applications – a stratch for every unique itch.

Facebook is popular with a wider audience, generally teenagers through to baby-boomers. It’s not unknown for younger people to ’sign up’ their parents without their express knowledge, only to find that thier parents enjoy the experience just as much as the children.

In my experience, I found Facebook early on, and didn’t see much in it – simply because there weren’t many people using it at the time – perhaps only a million or so worldwide. But in recent years, I’ve been ‘friended’ by old school mates who have all been on it more recently, and I’ve been more thanb pleasantly surprised by the uptake of it by non-geeks – it’s the first big league sucess cross-over from a technical crowd to a mainstream crowd.

In the last few weeks, Facebook has been going down the path of Twitter, with more emphasis on making and keeping track of the ’status updates’ of your friends. This is exactly analogous to Twitter’s ‘tweets’, below.

Facebook has an impressive array of features and plugins, and everything you do can (and will, unless turned off!) be broadcast to your friends as a ‘life stream’.

Privacy rules require authorisation before full contact can be made with new people, but like all online web sites, it’s only as secure as a poassword. There have been many reports of user’s profiles being overtaken by third parties – usually due to password guessing or trojan horse applications asking for personal details. In these cases, Facebook’s ‘real-life’ staff are hard to get a hold of, with little or no chance of finding the offenders.

Twitter

Twitter is the latest entry in the world of social media, and it’s derived from the simple concept of ‘tell the world what you’re doing’. You only have 140 characters per ‘tweet’, which is a short message broadcast to all your ‘followers’. As a Twitter user, you can follow anyone else, thereby watching (reading) their stream of tweets.

The proverbial tweet is the one describing what you had for breakfast that morning, but once you get past that, Twitter is a great resource for either chatting with people in SMS-like increments, or for following what other inspirational or otheriwse interesting people have to say.

It’s also turned into a fantastic resource for tapping the collective wisdom of the ‘twittorati’, and for watching the *reaction* to events happening in the real world. If Google gives good search results from a day or two ago, Twitter gives a good ‘feel’ of the vibe of events happening – as they happen.

Twitter is currently attracting the 20’s to 40’s, and then, still a very internet-centric audience. It hasn’t turned into the mainstream like Facebook, but current growth rates suggest it will head that way.

MMORPGs

Into Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games? Join the 11 million online *right now* playing ‘Warcraft’, or the many millions more playing any of 100 other MMORPGs.

It might not be your cup of tea, but if it *is*, then it’s a highly addictive world of solo game playing, combined with community-based and faction-based strategy. Add to that some immersive worlds and a never-ending competition to be the best, and you’ve got yet one more way to spend hours a week interacting with the world, without ever leaving your chair.

Combining the best of the above two Social Media is the Farmville phenomenon: a free game within Facebook that lets you compete against friends and against the world to see who can build the biggest/bestest farm. It’s actually a lot like the MMORPGs, above, in that it’s incredibly easy to begin playing, but you get hooked very quickly – as there’s always a ‘reward’ if you play for that *little bit* longer…

The mobile/iPhone revlution

Everything is going mobile. With the surge in mobile phone ownership almost equalling current populations (and beating it in some countries!), the trend is clearly to be on the Internet where ever you are. Facebook and Twitter all have mobile-phone specific versions, and MySpace and blogs are easily accessed by the iPhone’s internet browser – the first to be (almost) as decent as a regular computer’s internet browser (save for the fact that it’s on a screen barely 4″ across).

For the first time, data over mobile phones is becoming cheap enough to use without worry about huge phone bills. To send this article via Twitter or via mobile phone data plan might cost only 1 or 2 cents, given an 8k file size. Compared to the $16 plus for an SMS, that’s hardly worth contemplating.

So – the internet, Google, and the world of social media is with us and our children, anywhere we go… so…

What should I do now? How should I react ot my kids using Social Media?

My suggestion: either ignore it or embrace it. It’s easy to ignore it, and write it off as *the fad* of the current generation. There’s an element of truth to that: many of these social networks won’t exist in two years, let alone 5 or 10. If you pick the ‘wrong’ social network it may die off over time, but it’s easy enough to spot the trend, and find another, more vibrant one to replace it.

But there’s also an underlying change in the way this new generation has grown up compared to our earlier generations: these technologies *are* the skills of this generation. This new generation does not *need* to know how to break down an engine block and put it back together – it does not *need* to know how to sew any more… the mastery of computer games, the knowledge of electronic devices, and the ability to adapt to new user interfaces are all highly sought after ’skills’ of a new workforce.

Just this year, the US Army advertised for more jobs as pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles than for pilots of jet fighters. The skills required are in computer systems, computer control, problem solving, and the ability to totally master an Xbox and/or Playstation.

It’s a brave new world.

I hope this has started some interest in learning the ropes – if prompted, I’ll flesh out more of the social media scene for you over the coming weeks and months.

AB out