Receptional

 

I'm about to do a talk in Sweden about Google Universal Search. Unfortunately - it appears I have not even gotten my own image on the image search phrase "Dixon Jones". That's a bit emabarrassing and hopefully temporary as the next speaker is using me as an example of how ignoring Universal search might go wrong!

SEOMoz sent me an email this morning. That was weird in itself. I thought SEOMoz was all about the new stuff. Engagement marketing over push marketing. Infact, it was the rarity with which I receive emails from Rand and the guys there that made me read the email in the first place. Turns out I'll now be getting an email once a month. I'll add that to the same folder as all the others I expect.

 

To be fair, Internet Marketers are in a slightly awkward phase of the internet it would seem. SEOs and techies alike can see that RSS feeds are much less intrisive and much more respectful of our potential clients' time but they still have a flaw. The flaw is that not so many people read their RSS feeds every day. RSS has started to reach a tipping point in terms of web site implementation, but not yet reached a tipping point in terms of user take up. That's probably an issue for Rand. Being all "next generation" (even though RSS is an incredibbly old and basic technology) is all very well, but only if your client base follows.

 

If an organisation like SEOMoz resorts to good old fashioned monthly emails, then nobody is in a position to give up email marketing just yet, because Rand's readers must be amongst thee most web savvy there are on the planet. But a newsletter can do so much more than just avoid the spam filter. The trick is to combine three things in one to run a modern day newsletter well. Writing a newsletter and sending it out the same time every month is - quite frankly - a pain in the rear. The pain is most acute when the champion of the newsletter is on holiday or ill that week and sooner rather than later the newsletter becomes quarterly instead of monthly. These are:

 

The trick for the good old fashioned newsletter is in the "process" so that the newsletter does not take up valuable extra time and contributes to the online marketing effort. I think Silicon.com and Search Engine Land both have it about right and we run the same methodology for our own monthly internet news. The process doesn't exactly "write a newsletter" each month as much as regurgitate the pick of the crop from the CMS/Blog. What's more - the newsletter doesn't contain the content of any stories. Just the titles and maybe a snippet, with a link back to the permalink on the website. Of course, the blog or newsroom itself is search friendly and has RSS built in, so now you've got three sources of traffic for one piece of content: Email readers, RSS Readers and Search engine readers. If you then combine that with embedding the news into your web's home page then you've got an extra kick as well.

 

You can automate this process, like A4U does. But personally I think this is a step too far as it assumes that every news entry over the course of the month has the same value to the email audience. Better is to look at all the content written over the month and select the three stories best suited to the people you are about to interrupt.

 

About once a year I get to speak at somewhere slightly out of the ordinary. Last year it was Reykjavik, in Iceland: this year it is Vilnius, Lithuania.  There are a number of reasons why this special over and above the location.  The most relevant for most readers will be that it was an entirely “2.0” experience. (Yes – I KNOW I  shouldn’t  talk about 2.0).  The enquiry initially came via LinkedIn, a business to business social networking site.  A friend of mine from university, Jeff Hurst tracked me down.  We had not met for 20 years, but when he found me he saw my profile.  On a separate track, a friend of HIS was putting on an Internet Marketing conference in Vilnius and asked my old firiend whether he knew of any speakers that might be interested.  Expenses were to be paid, so - inspite of the talk being just one day before AdTech London - I took the chance to say yes.

The web 2.0 experience didn’t stop there, however.  Between the confirmation and the event date, we talked – of course.  Our natural tool of choice was Skype and Skype instant messenger.  From there I was able to ascertain enough about Lithuanians to modify my presentation to suit the audience.  I found out, for example, that more Lithuanians use a site called “Frype.lt” than Facebooks and so I joined Frype (after getting an invitation from the conference organiser) and managed to read the entire site quite well in English and set up a profile – albeit with only one friend!  This was to all to create one specific slide in my presentation showing the immediacy of information that social networking offers and the real advantages they have over traditional search engines.

The web 2.0 experience followed into the talk.  Because I was going to be speaking to an audience at least partly using translation headphones, too much text on the slides struck me as one leap too many for the poor translators, so I decided to illustrate much of my talk by taking the audience around the world using Google earth.  The presentation eventually got to Eva – a model on a massive canvass of the front cover of Maxim magazine, sitting in the Nevada dessert – and then jumped to Flickr, where a guy (I assume a guy!) called Methodshop had captured the image and started taking Maxim’s viral message to a wider audience.

Before the presentation I let my friends know what I was doing through Facebook and updated the “places I’ve been” application to include Vilnius and Lithuania.  All through the presentation, I had my video camera on a tripod, with a view to possibly cutting up the 50 minute slot into smaller videos for popping up onto YouTube.

It really is incredible how the new world is coming at us, which was – not unsurprisingly – the central theme of my presentation and I was delighted to have been given the chance to talk in the Baltic.

So what’s Lithuania like? Well I only got to spend a day there, but if you think they are a little “behind” then you had better wake up and smell the coffee!  I saw proportionally more Saabs and BMWs than I would on a UK street and everyone was extremely “chic” – as were the shops and the whole culture.  My fellow speakers (one Brit, one German) were also surprised at the incredible speed with which the country had replaced their old communist trappings with the new.   The Lithuanians aren’t just coming – they are well and truly on board. To the north, Estonia is so far advanced and internet-connected that they even run their elections online.  Now why are WE so behind?  Can you imagine the UK or the USA going that far into the new world in the near future?

If you think web 2.0 can’t help you in business, think of this next time you say that thought aloud!  Here’s the various ways Receptional is currently using 2.0 ideas (other than the Lithuanian presentation).  If you’d like to find me on http://linkedin.com or http://Facebook.com , track me down and feel free to hook up (but PLEASE – add a note saying who you are and that you were reading this article or I’ll ignore it).  If you want to stay in touch using RSS our newsfeed is at www.receptional.com/newsroom  where you will also find the chance to sign up to the good old fashioned newsletter. The photos are here.