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.

There’s a good article in Mashable magazine entitled ‘Why Your Brand Needs to be on Facebook Now’, which goes back over the fact that Facebook hit a milestone recently when it became a more visited site than google in the US – that’s their main reasoning behind why your brand needs to be up there: facebook is hugely popular, and with its advertising possibilities it makes sense for you to be on it.

Do you need to be on Facebook? Only if you're going to do it right!

Well, yes and no. Certainly if you’re willing to take time out and design an effective profile that integrates cleverly with your existing online presence; if you’re willing to assign someone the task of maintaining the profile; if you’re going to take social networking in general seriously and devote time to it, then they’re right – your brand should be on facebook.

If, though, you’re going to set up a two-bit page with precious little information or interaction that can’t be found at your main web site, then expect to have a dead duck on your hands – and worse than that, a dead duck with a very prominent fan count that shows it to be a dead duck.

The recent case of Nestle on facebook, where Greenpeace activists managed to combine the open commenting settings of the facebook profile, with the word-of-mouth effect of twitter to effectively turn Nestle’s social network presence into a firm denunciation of the company’s policies, show the danger of taking a half-assed approach to social networking.

If you’re going to do it, then, to paraphrase George Michael (and its not often that I find myself doing that…) ‘do it right, right!’.

Food for thought:

Facebook Marketing

33 Million People in the Room

The Social Network Business Plan

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

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel.

There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so far as to reprint Silman’s email address and phone number, for her readers to join in.

There are plenty who are labelling this as a great example of ‘how not to use twitter’, while Hoffman herself seems delighted to have this direct channel to discuss ’snarky reviewers’ with her readers.

Our view here at boduweb? It’s a great illustration of the power of twitter, and the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’s also an important lesson on how writers can get involved – for better or worse – in their own promotion.

Ony time and sales figures will tell whether Hoffman has the last laugh in this.

One thing that is essential, though, for any writer promoting themselves on twitter, is to understand the ramifications of using the system. If you post up there – even if you only have a handful of followers – your words may well be taken at face value on thousands of sites.  Remember, the system is disproportionately used by journalists and bloggers ever hungry for new stories to publish. It’s a double-edged sword.

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter.

The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ’should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as part of their research staunchly defend questionnaire neutrality.

An email and tweet campaign got under way encouraging people to vote yes on the poll, and so it was that right-wing rag saw 96% of the polled answering yes (with traffic that apparently almost crashed the newspaper’s server).

An interesting story in itself, but one with lessons for bands/writers/ businesses trying to promote themselves online. Hold on now! We’re not suggesting you start posting xenophobic poll questions in a tacky bid to increase your hits! No, but this combination of normal polling with email and twitter can be a great and powerful way to boost traffic.

An example: you’re a writer, so you put a poll on your site asking ‘who is the most important novelist of the last 5 years?’. You send out details of the poll to your email list – if you have one. You send it out to your facebook friends, and you post a link on twitter (making sure that the title of the tweet is short and snappy enough to encourage plenty of re-tweets).

The power of twitter (and social networking / online presence in general) to shift books has been forcefully demonstrated by the almost impromptu launch of the #wossybookclub.

Jonathan Ross, the tv celebrity who tweets using @wossy and has over 250,000 followers, decided last week to set up a book club on twitter. Browse over to his twitter profile and go back to March 15th and you’ll see the idea in evolution, up until the point when two days ago he decided that the first book to be discussed would be Jon Ronson’s excellent The Men Who Stare at Goats. No sooner said than done, and Ronson’s book stared flying off the virtual and physical shelves. Ronson’s book shot up the amazon sales rank charts to #292 – an impressive feat given that the book was published a number of years ago (for example, his other best-selling book Them has an amazon sales rank of #4750 ).

It’s early days, and I’d be inclined to hold out until the third book proposed for the bookclub comes up – Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a classic of American poetry much beloved by academics. If the #wossybookclub can turn that into a bestseller and trending topic its reputation will be cast-iron.

The initial success, though, does show up some important lessons – particularly for writers. It shows that just as tv book clubs like Oprah or Richard and Judy bucked the prevailing wisdom – that tv wasn’t a medium for book lovers – there’s plenty of hunger online to discuss books, and to find great new titles.

It shows that building up a community (Ross has over 6,500 updates, including a tireless live-tweet of the Eurovision song-contest) where members feel involved can have real paybacks. It also a great example of the changing paradigm. Ross puts a lot of effort into his twitter account, and this effective use of it goes to benefit not himself directly, but a cheery and well-deserving author who has a more modest 3,000 followers at the time of writing.

The interesting thing about the wossybookclub is how improvised and out-of-control (not necessarily a bad thing) it is. For example, there is a site http://www.wossybookclub.com, but it’s not official and just brings together the tweets at #wossybookclub. Given that anyone can post to #wossybookclub, it will be interesting to see how spammy it gets – browsing through it right now most comments are legit, but a couple of clued in authors have already started posting in their own titles.

It’s a web 2.0 irony, that the biggest social networking platforms find their biggest pr nightmares occuring through the use of their very own structure. It happened recently with Facebook when users started setting up facebook groups demanding a return to the old design, after Facebook changed the layout of user profiles (to give public profiles – i.e businesses etc – more prominence).

More ironic, though, is the storm being created on twitter – against twitter, or rather some ’small changes’ made recently to how the network deals with replies. Ironic because twitter has become one of the main engines for voicing public discontent with various brands – for example, the recent #amazonfail debacle where the virtual bookseller came under fire for changes to its ranking algorithms.

Head over to Twitter this morning and you’ll see that the top trending topic at the moment is #fixreplies, as users slam the recent decision to display to any given user solely the replys made to his/her account coming from people they follow. Previously you could also see replys to your account from people you don’t follow.

At least the twitter execs are coherent, using the network itself to try to win back some ground. Co-founder Evan Williams tweeted that they were looking at the tweets posted on the topic, and considering alternatives.

Localisation is the over-technical term used by software developers to describe the translation of their programs into other languages. It serves a purpose, though, to stress that translation is far more than simply substituting words from one language to another. For a program to work in different markets different cultures need to be taken into account.

Facebook have just announced a whole range of new localised versions of their platform, including several in Indian regional languages like Hindi, Tamil, and Punjabi. You might think this is of interest solely to Hindi, Punjabi, and Tamil speakers who can now access the popular social network in their own language. You’d be wrong though.

Google will be looking closely at the results of this particular localisation program, given that it’s in one of the few markets where their own social networking program Orkut is the leader. Facebook are in effect taking on Google in an effort to prove that their social networking platform is the best worldwide.

But the localistion, whether succesful or not (to be judged, presumably, by how many Orkut users defect) has another important lesson for all of us, in particular small/medium sized businesses that want to effectively harness social networks to promote themselves online. The lesson is that there are a variety of social networks, not just simply Facebook or Myspace – the two market leaders. Depending upon who you are, where your market it based, and what you’re trying to promote, your choice of most effective social networks may be radically different.

If you’re going to use social networks, do some research to find out which ones are the most compatible/useful for your needs.

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.

It’s EarthDay, and Mashable magazine – an invaluable resource for anyone interested in social networking technology and developments – have a useful article, by Elsa Wenzel, on how various activist organisations are harnessing the power of social networks, either using existing platforms like Facebook, or developing their own dedicated networks.

A more extensive list is provided by William Slawski at SEObythesea. Amongst the sites covered is GreenVoice.com which I particularly like.

Greenvoice - a social network for environmental action