There’s a good article posted by Nine by Blue’s Vanessa Fox (who, when working for google was responsible for google’s webmaster central), about why restaurants should care about local search.

Amongst the key points that it makes is that your business needs to take on a holistic approach to its online presence, not concentrating solely on search engine optimisation or social networking, but rather taking them together. It’s not an either or situation.  Fox takes a good example, which rings true:

A woman is reading Twitter and sees that a new restaurant has opened up nearby. Later, when she and her husband are trying to decide (yet again!) what to have for dinner, she remembers the new restaurant. Finally, a new idea! She suggests it. Her husband says great, but what’s on the menu? Will I like it? The woman does a quick search on Google for the name of the restaurant to see if the web site has the menu. Huh. The restaurant doesn’t come up. She goes back to Twitter and starts scrolling back through the tweets, trying to find the right one. In the background, her husband is getting hungry. And after waiting a few minutes, he picks up the phone and orders a pizza.

The moral of the story is as old as the hills, and as relevant as ever. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The amount of restaurants I see locally that have a presence on facebook, but nowhere else, is interesting. They’ve taken a good strategy, to use social networking to increase the visibility of their business, and completely missed the point – partly because it’s free, and partly because it’s this year’s fad. Many of the restaurants don’t even get the facebook equation right,  choosing the wrong options between personal, public and group profiles and having limiting privacy settings to boot (there’s a good article here for facebook seo).

And what they’re missing is the fact that an overall web presence can be cheap/free compared to more traditional marketing methods – so, for example, including yourself in the local business centre at google is a great way to get listed towards the top of the search results in a local search context. It’s free, and will pinpoint you on the map and give searchers useful information that traditionally you might have gone to the Yellow Pages for.

You can choose to add a location in twitter now as well, going into your account settings and clicking on ‘tweet location’. This makes perfect sense for businesses with a local presence – though perhaps less sense for individuals (privacy concerns have been raised by many, meaning it’s an opt-in feature).

If the restaurant has taken the step of setting up its own website (which is a must, in my opinion), then they should consider a number of things carefully to ensure being listed correctly for local searches.

• First, if you don’t have a specific top level domain (like .ie or .co.uk) relevant to your location, and your site is not hosted on a server in the territory you’re located in (both common problems for sites with a .com address), then the very least you need to do is to set up a google webmaster account and select a territory in your profile settings. This will give a very clear indication to google as to what local search index results you should be included for
• Obviously tied to this first point, you’ll need to make sure that your site has content that marks it out for local searches – put your address and telephone number in the page footer (which you should do for your customers in any case), and maybe include maps. Put in some local information on your home page etc.

These are tips obviously for businesses, like restaurants, that rely on people physically finding them – but the lesson is equally important to completely online sites where often the emphasis is equally misguided but in the other direction, ignoring the possibilities of social networking to bring traffic to your site. The presumption being that if your site is indexed by the search engines and ranks well for your keywords, then your online-marketing job has been done.

This of course ignores the fact that, while neither are the google-killers they’re periodically made out to be, both twitter and facebook have powerful search functionality that people use increasingly. Ignore them at your peril. As you rest on your laurels your competition will be out there exploiting them fully.

Food for thought:

Get Found Now! Local Search Secrets Exposed: Learn How to Achieve High Rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing

Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business

Buy any of the above books from the book depository and you’ll get free delivery worldwide!

There’s a interesting, though flawed, marketing campaign going on for Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus, The Scoundrel Christ. It takes full advantage of social networking and technology to promote the book, and is worth looking at a little more in detail for other novelists promoting their books online – with or without the help of an established publishing house.

How I stumbled upon the book was, like many others, through two great videos up on youtube, where Pullman talks about the book. The first video sees Pullman give an intelligent and strong response to a question posed during a public reading.  In turn this was tweeted and re-tweeted (look at the sharing stats at bit.ly alone http://bit.ly/info/c8wUyZ) .

This is a great lesson for authors – who often, reasonably enough are somewhat reticent about ‘promoting’ their work. In this case Pullman is saying something interesting, and his marketing team have taken full advantage of technology to let people know about it. It’s a far-cry from a simple ‘buy this book’ plea. It’s also something that you don’t need a publisher or marketing team to do, though you do need to put in effort and research.

The second video is a straight-forward promotional one, where Pullman talks about the enhanced version of the book (the book is being sold as an app for the i-phone, where you get an ebook, audiobook and video content all wrapped up together – a format that Canongate have already experimented with, ahead of the pack,  when publishing Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Monroe). This video is a straight promotional tool, but because it takes an interesting angle it’s more likely to be shared (and sharing is the name of the game if you’re going to put material up on youtube).

Now the technique of doing a simple but engaging video, putting it up on youtube, and getting people to share it is not beyond the means of a small self-publishing author either. The essential thing is to have something interesting to say, and to have already built up a reasonable following on the various social networks. Then you’re going to need to be inventive when tweeting, but hey – if you’re a writer that shouldn’t be so hard. So there’s a lot to learn from the Pullman campaign.

Where the campaign falls down though, is on the seo front. The video does have a screen at the end linking to the book’s dedicated site (http://www.thegoodmanjesusandthescoundrelchrist.co.uk), but do a search for ‘the good man jesus and the scoundrel christ’ and you’ll get press coverage and links to a wide variety of sites but not the official site (i’ve gone four pages in without finding it), which is a shame because the site is a very nice one indeed. One problem it has is that its front page is a fancy flash screen which does no favours whatsoever for search engine indexing on what should be the most important page on the site. Add to this the fact that if you go to Pullman’s official site you have to delve deep before you get a mention of the new book – go to the links page and there’s no link to the dedicated site etc.

Another questionable choice is the youtube route in this case. If you’re going to set up a dedicated site for a book, and you know you already have a following, why wouldn’t you set up a dedicated video player (with the option for people to embed on their own sites) with seo’d video, so that when your must-be-talked-about content starts ranking you pull people not into a youtube page (where you can’t buy the book directly), but directly to your own site where you can offer your visitors various calls to action (and monitor more accurately the traffic and stats).

None of which is to take away from the marketing of Pullman’s book – the people at Canongate are doing a great job, and the audience that Pullman already has means that these seo issues will probably have little impact on their overall sales. If you’re a self-publishing or unknown author though they could have a huge impact.

So, to sum up – take the lead from this campaign, in terms of creating interesting and shareable content to promote your work.  Use as many avenues as possible to distribute that content, but never lose site of the end-goal which, for you, will be to grab people’s attention and pull them into your site, where you have control and can benefit directly from your hard work.

The plot is nearly always the same – social networks start off with a technologically clued in vanguard using them, then thanks to word of mouth their user base starts to grow, until that magical moment when the media starts latching on. At that point new users signing up skyrockets alongside hyperbolic predictions about how this new platform/network will change the world.

The latest blockbuster is obviously Twitter, which had a huge boost in the US during April when the hugely influential Oprah Winfrey dedicated time and space to the social network, and also set up her own twitter account @oprahwinfrey (with over 3,000 followers).

The New York Times, though, has an interesting article worth considering when you’re weighing up how much time and effort to dedicate to different social networks. It examines the retention rate for Twitter, and finds that for most of last year it was in and around 30% – while this year it has edged up to about 40% (source Nielsen Online).

What that means, in simple terms, is that only 40% of people setting up an account on twitter are still there a month later. They come, influenced by media events, word of mouth etc try it out, and then fade away. Not very encouraging, particularly when placed in contrast with Facebook and Myspace – both of which have retention rates of around 60%.

Does that mean that twitter isn’t worth bothering with?
Not at all. There are two things to consider about twitter that make it worthwhile for your online marketing:
1) Ease of setup – it’s free, and can be set up in seconds. With Myspace and Facebook, to do it properly you need to customise the look of your account page, and spend time adding useful features. Twitter setup is much simpler (though we recommend that you do use a customised background for your twitter page).
2) Networking possibilities
While plenty of people sign up to twitter and then forget about it, there are a whole host of important people in various different industries that use it daily – and due to the open nature of the relationships, you can start building up important contacts quickly and effectively.

So, the moral? Do work on your twitter acount, but take the ‘twitter is the new google/facebook/etc’ talk with a pinch of salt. See it for what it is, and use it to your advantage.

There was an interesting article last month about twitter search, which raises questions for any prospective webmaster – given that search engine optimisation is, rightly, a major concern in the design and upkeep of a site.

The article, published in twitip.com, will have pleased twitter executives as it – with more than a little hyperbole – trumpeted that twitter search is destined to replace google. 

It was intersting, not because of the over-inflated claims, but because it gives a useful introduction to the strengths of twitter as a network: brevity (which encourages people to engage – it doesn’t take you ages to write a tweet), depth, and the ability to specialise. You can cultivate your own network, over time, which may contain the best and brightest minds in a specific area – allowing you to participate and feed into discussions. All to the good, and well worth reading if you’re new to twitter.

It’s a rosy picture though – unsurprisingly, given the site’s raison d’etre is giving info on twitter – which ignores various factors competing when someone is searching for information.

First off, there’s the presumption that your request for information from twitter will be answered immediately. If you post a question on your twitter profile, it will be seen by your ‘followers’ – but you’re dependent upon them having a) the knowledge you’re looking for, and b)the inclination and time to reply. 

Next there’s the stage of refining your search query. Many times when you search with a search engine, you’ll find that your initial request was too-vague, or imprecise. The first round of results then helps you to zone in on what you’re really looking for in clearer terms. Twitter may be better placed in this process, presuming human intuition is always better than a machines – but you’re still going to be dependent upon someone else responding to you. With a search engine your results are next to instantaneous.

The real failure of the article though is to realise that people now, and will continue to in the future, use a variety of integrated systems to find information – they may use google, facebook, twitter, the company canteen, forums, the telephone etc.

Twitter, in my opinion, is far stronger in terms of providing recommendations and value based judgements  to vague-and-impossible-to-answer-by-formula questions- what book should I read next? Is the new album by x any good? Should I go to Rimini for my holidays? etc

And that’s as good a reason as any as to why you should be on this free network.