Email Etiquette

Posted on by Chris Jenkin

Let’s get back to the basics. In a world where keyboards have replaced the mighty pen, there’s still a place for email etiquette. Before you shoot off thousands of emails to your contacts or subscriber list, make sure you’re respecting their time, while representing your company with class.

Choose Your Subject Carefully to Avoid the Trash Pile

The subject of your email will make or break it, and determine whether or not someone will even open it, or discard it. Make your subject purposeful and relevant to the content you’re sharing and avoid clever marketing ploys, which will only irritate your reader. Avoid using all caps, all lowercase, and poor grammar. Your subject line makes the first impression.

Practice Professionalism in Your Correspondence

Work emails are supposed to be professional. Avoid sending offensive jokes or irrelevant emails to your colleagues. If you’re using business owned equipment, keep it mind your employer will frown upon the misuse of company time and supplies. Internal emails are a serious issue. If you want to be treated with respect from your coworkers, you must practice professionalism on the job whenever you correspond.

Addressing the Recipient

How do you address an individual you just met? While many people quickly assume a first name is suitable, it’s proper etiquette to wait until your new contact requests a first name basis, for example he might state “You can call me Joe.” In the beginning of all correspondence, email etiquette includes using a formal salutation.

Avoid Misspelling Names

It takes just a second to check your recipient’s name and spelling.

Use the Blind Copy Option When Necessary

If you’re sending a bulk email to recipients who do not know each other, it is common email etiquette to use the blind copy option in the address fields, so that you’re not sharing their name and private email addresses to the rest of your contacts.

Avoid Reply All

Have you ever been caught in a texting chain of messages, none of which matter to you? Reply all is the same thing. Unless you want everyone to read your message, be sure to carefully select the appropriate reply option and don’t send to everyone unless necessary.

Get to the Point

Successful email marketing is targeted and gets right down to business. Don’t waste your reader’s valuable time by beating around the bush to say what needs to be said. Short sentences and short paragraphs are easier to read, and much faster too. The less time a reader has to invest his time reading, the more time he can use making an important buying decision.

Don’t Over-punctuate

Over-punctuating your sentences makes them cumbersome to read. Although you may hope that your reader feels your excitement through multiple exclamation marks, if you choose the proper words and format your sentences correctly, very little punctuation is necessary.

Add Links

The main purpose of your email correspondence might be to gain more business and make a sale. Don’t forget the importance of adding links within the body of your email message. At the end of your message you should provide that call to action and also close your email with the necessary contact information.

Why Email Etiquette Matters

Email etiquette matters because people’s time is valuable. In addition, it can be difficult to allow your humor or intent to correctly flow through words alone. Establishing a set of email etiquette rules for yourself will help guide you in the process of communicating with your partners and colleagues in a positive manner that encourages loyalty.

From the beginning to the end of your email message, proper email etiquette ensures your work ethic and professionalism shine.

Facebook Live and the End of Television

Posted on by Chris Jenkin

An anchor sits at a desk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, talking with guests about the future of Facebook. The cameras pan and switch between shots, broadcasting in an eye-pleasing wide frame.

It would be easy to mistake the broadcast for a CNBC TV show, except for the big piece of cheese sitting on the middle of the desk. This is Cheddar, the first startup betting on Facebook’s embrace of live video as the next big thing.

Cheddar was founded by Jon Steinberg, who previously served as chief operating officer and president of BuzzFeed. It’s a business-focused, video-first media operation that broadcasts live five days a week for up to an hour. It plans to expand to eight hours a day by the end of the year.

Its content will appear on platforms aside from Facebook, but it’s clear Steinberg sees the social network, and particularly its Live platform, as the beginning of the end of TV.

“It’s going to replace live television,” Steinberg said. “I think it’s the opportunity of a lifetime for new entrants.”

Steinberg admits that might be a bit optimistic, but he has a point. It’s tough to find anybody who is willing to bet that Facebook Live definitely won’t be the wave of the future in media — particularly after a week in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it a centerpiece of this week’s big developer conference.

Then again, just about anything Facebook wants to do could change the media world.

And the rest of the media world is maybe kinda over it.

Facebook [fill in the blank] could change the entire media industry.

First Facebook pushed publishers to embrace branded pages and social reader apps. Later came an emphasis on visuals. More recently, it was all about Instant Articles and in-feed (but mostly soundless) video.

This month, it’s live video.

Nobody doubts the power of Facebook as a kingmaker. Its audience — and, perhaps more importantly, its willingness to control what that audience is shown — are unmatched. Zuckerberg could wake up one day and decide that interpretive dance was the way of the future, and media companies would have to at least give it a try.

So when he took the stage at Facebook’s F8 conference this week to announce that Live was not only a priority, but now completely open to any live video (hint: make it prettier), it was received with a mixture of cautious optimism and hard-earned weariness. You could almost hear the media companies respond in unison with: Sure, why not.

In conversations with a variety of media executives, the message was relatively uniform: Yes, we are investing in this, but we really hope that there’s a plan.

“Overall I think we’re really looking forward to Facebook articulating the monetization plans just so we as publishers can plan how to invest on the platform,” said Sarah Iooss, senior vice president of business development at Viacom.

Concerns about monetizing Facebook go beyond Live. The allure of Facebook’s massive reach helped boost companies like BuzzFeed — and yes, Mashable — and convince investors that their brands would soon supplant the old guard as the media titans of tomorrow.

That might still be true, but Facebook’s sluggishness to figure out how to help media companies make money in the near term has deflated expectations. In a quote that could be applied to most of the digital media industry, one source told Re/code about BuzzFeed: “They’re driving in the dark at 60 miles an hour, without headlights…but that’s still better than standing still.”

Facebook has provided some light at the end of that dark tunnel. Media executives who spoke to us on background said their own interactions with Facebook had indicated that Live would indeed have a payoff.

Facebook declined a request for an interview, but it noted in a statement that the company will “be working closely with these partners to learn from them how we can build the best Facebook Live experience and explore with them potential monetization models.”

One source at Facebook who agreed to speak on the condition on anonymity said the goal was to quickly monetize Live, with its willingness to pay some producers, including Mashable, BuzzFeed and the New York Times, an indication of Facebook’s priorities.

Facebook won’t pay media companies forever, but it’s a small taste of what could be on the way.

Penny for your live stream?

To be clear: Every major media organization you can think of has already done a Facebook Live video, and most of them are planning to do a lot more.

What will they look like? To start, most TV companies seem to want to avoid doing TV.

“We are not doing CNN TV on Facebook,” said Andrew Morse, general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide. “I think it’s an interesting opportunity, but I don’t look at it as an opportunity to do broadcast television.”

Fine, it’s not TV, but it’s pretty close. Fusion launched a broadcast-quality program on Facebook, “The Chris Gethard Show.” E! has announced a daily talk show. And CNN has a handful of shows in the pipeline.

As for what’s been popular online, the first truly viral hit came from BuzzFeed with its already infamous watermelon video. The stream received more than a 750,000 concurrent viewers and now has more than 10 million total views.

Ya gotta believe…

For all the frustration over Facebook once against moving the goal posts, there are some indications that this is the real deal.

“Facebook’s roots are a social network, but it aspires to be a full-blown media and communications company.”
For one, Zuckerberg himself is said to have placed the highest priority on the project, having reportedly been “obsessed” with building it out.

The eventual goals of Facebook also fit nicely with live video. Jessica Liu, a senior analyst at Forrester, noted that the broader ambitions of Facebook are well served by live video.

“Facebook’s roots are a social network, but it aspires to be a full-blown media and communications company,” Liu said.

“Currently, they have the community, publishers, and ad content. If they want to challenge the TV industry, they would need to successfully incorporate original programming, network programming, and major live events… and marry that programming with their user community.”

That community is key to making the Facebook Live experience better than regular TV.

“This would create a unique live viewing plus live social commentary experience that the broader TV industry can’t deliver,” Liu said.

Right now, Live is just video that shows up in your news feed, but some see the potential for more.

Jigar Mehta, vice president of digital operations for Fusion, noted that Facebook has developed a habit of spinning off successful product.

“Right now it’s starting off in the feed, but I could see a future where it’s driving another experience kind of the way Messenger is driving another experience,” Mehta said.

As for Steinberg and Cheddar, he said watching Facebook Live develop has been like seeing a highway built in front of him as Cheddar was on the production line.

With Facebook Live, he sees a focusing of the tremendous power that the social network has to level the playing field. He’s already attracting thousands of concurrent viewers, hundreds of comments and plenty of prominent guests who are eager and willing to appear on his not-quite-TV show. And it’s just week one.

This is only the start of how Facebook is going to change TV and how people consume live video — as long as it still wants to.

“Nobody’s going to have a cable box, and you’re going to watch on-demand programming and that’s going to be Cheddar,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Author credit: JASON ABBRUZZESE

Red Flag Tips for Avoiding Shady SEO Providers

Posted on by Chris Jenkin

There’s shady people all over the world. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to do business with them. While it’s normal for businesses to operate with the bottom dollar in mind, some will go to great extents to protect themselves at your expense. Don’t get taken advantage of while you wander into the world of digital marketing.

We stole (*not shady) the following tips from Search Engine Land’s Greg Gifford. These are the 10 red flags you should look out for. We’d make a list ourselves but that looks sorta shady and all. (And let’s face it- Greg seems like a pretty cool guy.)

Greg Gifford’s Red Flag Tips for Avoiding Shady SEO Providers

Maybe I should have used an image of me jumping on a soapbox, because I’m about to preach.
Spring conference season is in full swing, and I’ve had my mind blown several times already — not from amazing presentations (although there were several), but from conversations with business owners and newbies in the marketing world.

Case in point: At an automotive conference, I talked to a dealer who had deleted his dealership’s Facebook and Twitter accounts on the advice of his SEO provider. He said they told him it wasn’t good for him to have an open forum where customers could say whatever they wanted about his business. I pointed out that the customers would still be out there, even if his dealership wasn’t… and he agreed! He said he thought that sounded weird, but he shrugged and figured his SEO guy knew what he was doing.

I’ve talked to far too many business owners this spring who feel like they’re getting fleeced by their SEO providers. I’ve talked to far too many marketers who have just started off in the field who don’t know how to judge the value of the work their employer provides. Those conversations are scary, and they’re happening far too often.
I thought I’d take a look at some red flags and warning signs with this week’s article here. While I’m stepping up on my soap box to preach, I’m also taking a step back and looking at the SEO industry without any preconceived notions.

(Note: Yes, most of us are legitimate SEOs and marketers who know what we’re doing and do everything we can to help our clients. This post isn’t meant for y’all — sorry. This post is for the business owners and the noobs in the industry.)

Following are 10 red flags which signal that you may be dealing with a shady SEO provider….

1. Low quality, duplicated content
I talked to a dealership that suspected their content was just phoned in by their provider. Their blog was packed with “Honda Civic AC Repair in (city), (state)” posts — and there was a version for every car in their lineup. In total, we’re talking 15 or 16 posts, all exactly the same. The only thing different was the model of the car.
And it gets better! They had taken those 15 posts and used them all again, for around 20 different cities — 300 blog posts, all exactly the same, just with a few keywords substituted in each one.

Obviously, this was bad news. If you suspect you’re getting cruddy recycled content, copy a sentence from a post and search for it in Google inside of double quotes so you only see exact matches. If you’re like this dealer and see more than 42,000 exact matches, you know you’re in bad shape.

2. Lazy, outdated tactics
I had a fun conversation at SMX West with a few attorneys. One of them was telling me that their new SEO provider sent their website guy a list of requests (They had never asked for access to WordPress, which is a bad sign all on its own). The requested title tag was nearly 30 words long, and they had at least 35 cities listed in the META KEYWORDS.

They had also requested that all but the first sentence of the home page be hidden behind a “read more” link.
If you’re reading Search Engine Land, then you’ve got access to a wealth of information about SEO best practices. If something seems shady or outdated, some simple checks online with trusted sources can help you confirm or deny your suspicions.

3. All you get is blog posts
If your provider’s entire SEO strategy is simply providing blog posts, that’s obviously bad news bears for your business. Clearly, there’s so much more to making your website a relevant resource than sharing a bunch of blog posts. Blogs are an important element, but they’re just one piece of a much larger pie.

4. Artificially lowered bounce rate
Sure, your bounce rate can be a good engagement signal, but it shouldn’t be your “be all, end all” metric. Far too many business owners obsess over their bounce rate when there are much more legitimate metrics for SEO success.

At the last SMX West before he went on hiatus, Matt Cutts said something in an open Q&A that’s stuck with me ever since. When someone asked about their bounce rate, he told them that if their call to action was a phone call, they wanted a high bounce rate. If they were driving users to make a call, then a high bounce rate could mean that users were converting and then leaving.

If your SEO provider promises a drastically lower bounce rate, you should ask them what they’re doing. Many times, they’re simply adding a script that pings Google Analytics every four or five seconds that a user is on a page. BOOM! The bounce rate is magically lowered — but not because the content is engaging or because customer behavior has changed.

5. A la carte SEO services
If you’re hiring an SEO provider, you’re doing so because you believe that their expertise will help your business get more visibility online. If they show you a menu of possible services, with everything broken out into individual elements, that’s not a good sign.

You’re hiring them because they’re the expert — they shouldn’t expect that you know exactly what your business needs to gain more visibility in searches. It’s perfectly okay if they have several different packages, but if you’re expected to choose individual components to create your own package, that’s not a good business decision.

6. Guaranteed ranking
I’m not going to dwell on this one, because it’s 2016, and you’ve read this about 327 times before. But hey, if you’re brand new to SEO, here’s the truth:

Nobody can guarantee rankings.

So if your provider is doing it, run away.

7. “Cheap” SEO
SEO can’t be automated — it takes people sitting there, doing the work. That’s not cheap. SEO takes manual work, and it takes time. If you’re paying less than $750 to $1,000 a month for SEO, that’s another bad sign.

8. Setup fees for SEO
If your provider is charging a “setup fee,” ask them why, and what’s included. Setup fees are rare — but sometimes, since there’s more research on the front end of an SEO project, providers try to saddle new clients with a setup fee.

It’s likely that they’re just asking for extra money because they can. If they’re charging a setup feeand your first month’s service fee, they’re not doing any extra work that first month, compared to what they do the following months.

9. No access to Google Analytics
If your provider sets up Google Analytics for your site but refuses to give you access, you need to run away as fast as you can. There’s zero reason why your provider should deny you access to the analytics for your own website. Yes, this sounds crazy to most of us, but it happens all the time.

On the flip side of the coin, if you start working with a new provider that doesn’t ask for access to your Google Analytics, you should run just as fast. Without access to your analytics, they have no idea what’s going on with your website — so how can they be optimizing for better traffic?

10. No monthly reporting
Your provider should absolutely be providing a monthly SEO report. I talked to several providers at a recent automotive conference who were using a large, well-known provider who only produced quarterly reports. Since that was the only provider they’ve ever used, they didn’t know any better.

I’ve also had a lot of people tell me that their SEO reports only show keyword rankings. In today’s world of localization and personalization, keyword ranking reports are worthless as an SEO success metric. Your reports should always show organic traffic and lead trends over time.

So, those are the most egregious offenses that I’ve run into over the past year or so…. but I’d love to hear from all of you. If you’ve got a great story, please share it on social so we can both laugh AND use the examples to help people avoid the shady providers.

Do you need to fire your current website developer or SEO provider? Contact gotcha! Mobile Solutions today and hire the real deal.

7 Habits that Social Media Marketers Should Break

Posted on by Chris Jenkin

The following 7 habits that social media marketers should break have deemed themselves ineffective. Whether you’re the voice behind the brand or the owner of a brand new startup, the way you approach and interact with your social media audience can make or break your company’s reputation. Here’s the lowdown on which habits you should kick for good.

The 7 Habits that Social Media Marketers Should Break

1. Inconsistency- It’s hard to imagine but it’s true, there are thousands of companies who just don’t follow a consistent plan when it comes to managing and scheduling social media. While you don’t have to have posts necessarily pegged down to the exact hour, every single day, you should make great efforts to post several times per week at the minimum. To find a business and then search its social pages only to see next to nothing, doesn’t look very good. Potential visitors want to know that business is alive and kicking. Where ya at?
2. It’s All About You- Posting on social allows us the freedom to express our opinions, beliefs, and our feelings. But how much of that should you really be sharing with your audience? The whole point of building a social profile is so that you can interact and engage with your followers. If nobody is talking, and your posts are basically all about your business, your accomplishments, and your agenda, you’ll bore people. Make sure your posts are there to entertain and engage your audience, and if that’s not working you need to try something else.
3. Tagging- While tagging people on Facebook has its perks, it can be confusing to your followers, who are often left to wonder why there is any tagging to begin with. Should they click the tagged person? Should they start following them? What’s really the point of the tag, and why does your audience need to see it? If you’re tagging personal connections in your company posts, you’re no longer focusing on the relationship with your general visitor base. That can turn off visitors who don’t feel compelled to “get to know” your personal life or interests.
4. You’re Offending Your Audience- Always think of your reader. If you’re using social media marketing to also share your opinion on politics and religion, well then, get ready for the tomatoes. Keep your audience happy and keep the posts light. Avoid unnecessary controversial topics, and promptly remove any visitor posts from your page that can be interpreted as offensive to other readers.
5. You Ignore People- Social media is great if you don’t really crave the one on one human interaction of the “real world”, however, people still expect you to answer questions, reply to posts, and generally appear interested in them. Marketers need to use social media to get to know their target audience better, and then adapt the brand, product, or campaign to follow suit. Pay attention to your visitors and make them feel wanted. The more you understand your audience, the better chance you can capture them.
6. You’re Hashtag #Happy- While the #hashtag has its place, some people use the hashtag as a precursor to a funny joke they want to tell, using multiple pound symbols to convey varied opinions and thoughts. #Itgetstiring. #Peopleareoverit.
7. You Don’t Have a Social Media Presence- Perhaps the greatest marketing mistake you can make is not having a social presence of any sort. While it can be a bit overwhelming to decide where to place your efforts, it’s essential that you start somewhere and begin building the social platform on which your business will stand. Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest or LinkedIn are simple enough for nearly anyone to begin using.

Seek Digital Marketing Help

Do you need help creating a digital marketing plan? Don’t venture off into the unknown without a little guidance. Effective social media marketing isn’t an exact science. What works for one type of business, might provide zero results for another. It takes patience, research, and analytics to begin devising a successful approach. Since time is money and you want your investment to drive results, you need to first identify your audience.

Contact the professionals at gotcha! Mobile Solutions today, and begin your journey into the world of digital marketing. Here you will learn how to capture, engage and interact with your customers, and then of course, how to retain them. We will quickly assess your website and your social issues, and get to work on fixing them. Your efforts deserve to be noticed. Don’t waste another day partaking in any of these 7 habits that social media marketers should break.
Your visitors will thank you.