How about something fun?

Well, 6rounds seems to have something just for that purpose. If you’ve got a webcam, you can sign up for an account, and play "rounds", which include things like games, watching youtube video, etc. From their site:

6rounds is a live meeting point. It’s a truly unique, exciting and interactive online environment, offering users a variety of experiences that they enjoy together. Using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements, we present a wide range of opportunities: from watching videos, playing real-time games, listening to music, facebooking and youtubing, to shopping together and beyond.

6rounds users meet their friends and friends to be, by inviting each other to 1 on 1 Rounds or by joining timed Rounds, where they are matched with other interesting new people based on common interests and share experiences together. 6rounds is free for everyone to join and offers a safe place to have fun with friends and to meet new like-minded people.

It seems pretty interesting to me. I’ll check it out tonight.

While looking through my RSS reader today I saw two articles back-to-back talking about developing a "personal brand". I can’t explain how angry that phrase makes me. A short list of reasons why I loathe "personal branding"

• It strips away our humanity and turns us into a fictional concept
• It describes something so inherently self-important and egotistical that borders on delusional
• I want to be a brand about as much as I want to be a building
• It’s a stupid buzzword created to make something obvious seem more complicated and real

Do we really need to come up with a new buzzwordish term for everything we do as human beings?

It’s not your reputation, it’s your "personal brand".
You’re not talking to friends, you’re "joining the conversation".
I didn’t just decide to eat an apple, instead "after surveying the competitive landscape, I formed a focus group of one and explored the projected ROI and KPIs of each food candidate and after reading several whitepapers and attending vendor-driven webinars selected the apple as best-of-breed"

Seriously, when did we collectively decide that we should do all we can to turn ourselves into commodities?

I thought the ideas of "social media" and "transparency" were supposed to cut through all the corporate bullshit speak and promote the informal exchange of people using a human voice. Instead, now we’re all trying to sound like the corporate voice we were complaining about in the first place.

Is it me, or are people starting to sound like press releases?

The photo:

I apologize for the quality of the image. It was rainy, I was using my iPhone and I was in a moving car. Not the optimal conditions.

I saw the location as a web site, and the entrance you see here is their home page. The other entrance is right by the white car you can see underneath the sign. That’s a landing page.

Here’s what we see on the home page:

1. Vegetables Flowers and Plants- This is their page headline, and they’re using an <H1> tag around it.
2. Northshore Flower Exchange- This is their page title and the name of the site
3. Plants and Flowers- This is their subheadline. They believe that the majority of people searching for what they offer use the words “Vegetables flowers & plants”, but know that some people search for just “plants and flowers”, leaving out vegetables all together.

On the landing page they have the same sign as #1. It feels like a landing page, as you can’t actually get into the parking lot there. You have to follow the call to action and drive around to get in. I’m reasonably certain that if they had a third road-facing side, they would have another large sign that says “Plants and Flowers”. You know, for A/B testing purposes.

About one minute in, I noticed a few attendees feverishly taking notes. That’s when I realized I didn’t mention that I’d make the slides from the presentation available. Here they are (PDF Format).

This was the opening night of Aprigo’s worldwide multimedia production division (as in, we had a camcorder and a laptop with a webcam), so we tried something a little new. First, we were broadcasting the session live via stickam. Additionally, we took some digitial video footage and they’re available below.

It was a great event, and we really look forward to future Boston-Area Startup Marketing Meetups in the future. If you’re interested in checking them out, please join us on our Meetup Group page where you’ll meet over 100 other area startup marketers.

Boston Area Startup Marketing Meetup June 2009- The Intros from aprigo on Vimeo.

The June 2009 Boston Area Startup Marketing Presentation- Nathan Burke from aprigo on Vimeo.

6:30-7:00- Networking- Come on in, introduce yourself to other startup marketers, trade business cards, etc.
7:00-7:25- Getting Your Startup Noticed Online- Nathan Burke (the guy writing this who has now switched to the third person) will give a presentation on getting your startup noticed online. This will be a blend of his Podcamp Boston presentation on "Discovery: How People Find Blogs, Video and Podcasts They Love & What That Means To You" and his posts on MarketingStartups.com
7:30-8:30- Open Forum- Hey, it’s our first meeting, so let’s talk about the issues you’re facing as a startup marketer and how we can help as a group. We can talk about future meeting topics, future speakers, etc.

The Where:

Aprigo
460 Totten Pond Road
Suite 660
Waltham, MA
02451

From the slides:

The Great Content Shift

• Content-oriented marketing is undergoing a radical transformation.
• Broadly speaking, this transformation has content moving from:
  – Promotional to non-partisan
  – Highly controlled to less controlled
  – Occasional to ongoing
  – Corporate voice to authentic, personal voice
  – One-way to conversational

The Golden Road to Great Content:

1. Start with a Marketing Strategy.
2. Make Content Useful.
3. Consistent Message/Diverse Voices.
4. Content Depends on Platforms and People.
5. Dont Be Afraid to Lose Control.

Start with a Marketing Strategy

Aside from providing you with a framework for content development, starting with a marketing strategy gives you a way of measuring the success or failure of your content efforts.

• Ask yourself:
  – Who are you producing content for?
  – What sort of content does this audience want?
  – How do they prefer to consume it?
• Consumption habits are changing quickly with social media and community content increasingly in?uential, as this PJA/Toolbox survey shows http://tinyurl.com/5h86sy.
  – What do you hope to accomplish with your content?

Make Content Useful

• Create content with your audience in mind by asking yourself,
  “Even if someone never works with us, would they still fnd this content valuable.”
• Focusing on “use value” should also get you out of the “content = copy” mindset. Tools and apps are content, too. (HubSpot’s Website Grader - http://website.grader.com/ - is a good example of tool as content.)
• Finally, if content is valuable in itself, there is a higher probability that people will share it with others. And sharing is GOOD!

Okay, enough slides. This is really an interesting topic for me, as I’m both the SEO guy and the Content Creation guy at my gig. Right now we’re planning out our site for our public release, and the next step is for me to sit in an isolated room with copious amounts of red bull to bang out the content. And since I won’t just be blogging, I’m looking for ways to make product pages have some real personality.

We’re also going to be incorporating things like video and audio, so I’m interested in hearing what’s up.

Well, presenter wants us to shut our laptops, so that’s all for this session.

I’m writing anyway.

The panelists:

Philip Juliano VP, Global Brand Management & Corporate Communications, Novell
Valeria Maltoni Director, Marketing Communications, SunGard Availability Services
Chris Penn CTO, Student Loan Network
Mike O’Toole President and Partner, PJA Advertising and Marketing
Matthew T. Grant Moderator, Doctor of Philosophy, Thought Ronin
Matthew Grant is talking now, and apparently he’s a stickler for not having people tweet, blog, etc. Never seen that one before, but hey, I understand. He’d be an excellent prison guard.

Content strategy starts with marketing strategy, so how does content fit into your marketing strategy?

The main point from the panelists is the idea that all content needs to support the master marketing plan. One gave the analogy that you wouldn’t just start building a house without a blueprint, so you don’t just start creating content without mapping it to a strategy. I’m definitely guilty of that a lot of times. At the new gig, I’ve been just going nuts because I’m not blogging there much yet, but it’s all part of a launch strategy. You really do need to create useful content that supports the master plan.

MG: How do you walk the line between being keyword-rich and spamming
CP: People are asking in his industry: “How do I pay for college?” and that’s the question he’s trying to answer on his site, and repetition is fine in that sense.

MG: What do you use for measurement to see if you’re hitting your marketing goals? What types of goals have you put around your content?

PJ: We start at the macro level and measure our brand, core messaging, solutions (awareness, purchase consideration) a couple of times per year. There are other ways we measure things on a  much more granular basis: CT rates, for example. They have a corporate magazine that they measure in terms of opens, views, etc. They’ve found a good correlation between purchase consideration and the overall direction of the company. Whether the macro or the micro, the measurements are absolutely critical.

CP: We look to see how many loans people have taken. One of the easiest ROI measurements is to ask “How did you hear about us?” You should collect as much data as possible, but you need to understand the “why” instead of just the what. For instance, you know that your home page bounce rate is high, but is it because your content is terrible, or was it because they found exactly what they wanted and left? The big question: are you making money? That’s really the big question when looking at how any campaign is working. If you’re selling a gulfstream jet that costs $94 million and you have a podcast with 100,000 listeners, but no one is buying, you’re wasting your time. If you have a podcast with 3 listeners and 2 buy the planes, you’re going to Maui for the next 2 years.

PO: It’s not about the activities, it’s about the outcomes.

MG: How do you manage the conversation so the message stays consistent on different platforms?

PO: At some level you can’t, when people are creating their own content about you, that’s somewhat out of your control. It’s important to be consistent, but not lock-step. You have to let people say their own things and let the personality come through. I’ve always been impressed with AutoDesk which has over 100 employee blogs. They do it well.

CP: Take a list of the top 100 customers you have, and go to twitter, facebook, blogger, etc and find out how many of them are there. If it’s a high percentage, you want to spend some time there. If they’re not, you’re probably going to waste your time. Another example: go to those same 100 customers and ask them where they spend time online. Great example: I was sitting next to an 80-year old grandmother on a plane, and she was stereotypical to a T except she had a kindle. I asked why, and she said that everyone at the senior center has one and loves it because you can change the text size to make it as big as they way. I asked “do you read blogs on that?” she said “what’s that?” I then took a look and she’d subscribed to a dozen blogs. I asked “what’s that?” and she said “oh, that’s the news.” The takeaway: People are talking about you and your industry/products, but they may be doing it in different places using different language.

Overall, this was a really good presentation, with the overall theme being:

• Have a marketing strategy
• Create content that maps to that strategy
• Find out where your customers are
• Talk to them there

Though the presentation wasn’t focused on giving any new information, it was an excellent way to reinforce the ideas that I think most of us are familiar with, but don’t always do. It’s difficult to have a strict process to come up with relevant keywords, create content to go after those keywords, measure how the content is doing, etc. It’s a hell of a lot easier to blog your ass off and hope good things are going to happen (ahem, what I’ve been guilty of a LOT), but I think the results prove otherwise.

On the Nathan Burke arbitrary rating scale, I’ll give this one 3 and 5/8 elephant eyes on a scale of multi-colored rugs to tin cans. (what?)

The first session I’m checking out is all about SEO, a topic that has always fascinated me. Here’s the description:

Bringing SEO In-house Without Missing A Beat

Many companies are considering bringing SEO in-house to save money, but doing so is challenging. It’s usually done with a lot of trial and error and often has a detrimental impact on the program. In this session, we’ll show you how companies are bringing their SEO programs in-house wihtout missing a beat. You’ll discover real-life examples about how companies are implementing SEO in-house across the globe.

You’ll learn:

• How to mitigate the obstacles
• What works, what doesn’t work
• When it still makes sense to use an outside agency, and how to make the most of your spend

Speakers:

Jessica Bowman- In-house SEO Advocate, founder of SEOinhouse.com
Bill Scully, Director E-Marketing, Siemens Water TEchnologies

Jessic Bowman isn’t here, so Bill Scully is jumping in to run the show. Rather than making the presentation about moving from an agency to in-house, he’s going to focus on what to do to optimize SEO in house.

In house SEO requires dedication and continuous learning, and takes up a huge percentage of a person’s time. He’s showing his Daily, Weekly and Yearly tasks:

Daily SEM tasks:

Listen to SEO and Online Marketing Podcasts- Downloading and listening to them going to and from work.
Reading SEO/SEM Newsletters and Blogs
Check Twitter Account for breaking news
Keep  a journal- Keeping a log of tests and changes
Check Analytics

Weekly SEM tasks:

Analyze web logs and reports for:

• Key campaign traffic changes
• Goal changes
• Overall Traffic Changes
• 404 errors
• Linking Generation Reports

SEO maintenance:

• Page sculpting
• Copy optimization
• Work with IT
• Link building

Monthly SEM tasks:

• Attend WebEx
• Audit site/templates
• Check all no-follows are still in place
• Make sure robots.txt file is still correct
• Check custom 404 Page is still working
• Check redirects are 301 and go to the proper pages
• Update XML site map

Yearly:

• Put together a 1 and 3 year SEO strategic Plan
• Budget
• Review staffing, service, training needs

Overall Strategy to get More Buy-in

Identify what you need to do

• Do an SEO audit
• Get a WordTracker Account
• Start a program under the radar

Roll Out Small Pilot

• Work with early adopters and meet monthly

Expand Pilot

• Success breeds success
• Go after easy wins
• Ask for bigger commitment ($)

Make Business Case

• Share Stats
• Share competitive research

Ask for buy-in

• Market your Keyword Tools
• Meet with Product/Market Mgrs
• Go after next year plans

That’s it for Bill, and now that Jessica is here, we’re going to go back to the other side of the presentation. The slides are available here.

Session Review Before It Is Over- Yup, I’m going to review this one right in the middle, as the presenter is taking time out to monkey around with the powerpoint file.

This one was okay. I think the reason I didn’t learn anything here is that:

• I’m not from a huge company looking to bring SEO in-house
• Because of that, I don’t need to learn the process of getting buy-in from different departments

So, if I were from a large company looking for advice into how to get more $$ for an in-house PPC campaign, this might be a really informative session for me. I’m definitely not knocking it; I’m just not the right audience.

The key takeaway from the session is this: SEO takes a lot of time, and you’re probably doing it wrong. That’s the message that I’m hearing here.

One bullet that makes sense: In-house resources often do not have the respect of a consultant. I completely agree with this. In my experience, an in-house person that is absolutely kicking maximum ass at driving traffic to the site is seen as an amateur doing the bare minimum. The company brings in a consultant that puts together a 15 slide PowerPoint that regurgitates Matt Cutts quotes, talks about Meta Tags and charges $5K, and they’re hailed as a genius without actually doing anything.

I’ve been there before, folks (three or 4 jobs ago), and I’m not bitter at all.

Piece of advice: Everyone that wants to get started with Keyword Suggestions, Difficulty of keywords, SEO score and grading, etc. that is in a b-to-b company that is currently using an agency should sign up for Hubspot. I strongly recommend it.

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The first session I’m checking out is all about SEO, a topic that has always fascinated me. Here’s the description:

Bringing SEO In-house Without Missing A Beat

Many companies are considering bringing SEO in-house to save money, but doing so is challenging. It’s usually done with a lot of trial and error and often has a detrimental impact on the program. In this session, we’ll show you how companies are bringing their SEO programs in-house wihtout missing a beat. You’ll discover real-life examples about how companies are implementing SEO in-house across the globe.

You’ll learn:

• How to mitigate the obstacles
• What works, what doesn’t work
• When it still makes sense to use an outside agency, and how to make the most of your spend

Speakers:

Jessica Bowman- In-house SEO Advocate, founder of SEOinhouse.com
Bill Scully, Director E-Marketing, Siemens Water TEchnologies

The good people over at MarketingProfs were kind enough to give yours truly a press pass for the 2009 Marketing Profs Business-to-Business Forum here in Boston. So I’ll be checking out all the sessions today and will be covering them on a few of my blogs: Blogstring.com, MarketingStartups.com, and BtoBSaaS.com.

The sessions I think I’ll be checking out:

9:00 am- 10:15 am- Bringing SEO In-House Without Missing a Beat

10:15- I’ll be running out to my car to feed the meter so I don’t get a ticket (fingers crossed)

10:45- 12:00- Developing Robust Online Content To Keep Prospects and Customers Engaged

1:45- 3:00- Make Every Investment Count: The Measure of Marketing

3:30-4:45- Putting Measurements into Action to Improve Leads, Conversions and ROI

After that, looks like there’s a cocktail thing and a dinner, which should be excellent.

I’ve decided to shy away from the Social Media types of sessions, as I’ve been to LOTS of them lately.  So, if you’re here, be sure to say hello.

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• MarketingProfs Internet Marketing Conference - Register Today! (blogmarketingjournal.com)

Here’s what they say it is:

Qajack uses video to play with what you know and what you want to know. It’s deliberately simple, no profiles to fill out, just login and play.

Qajack combines competition, ie gameplay and reward with information exchange, ie questions and answers.
How? Simple: Qajack is all video and it’s a game.

You can ask anything and answer anything by webcam! Each video capture is a maximum of 60 seconds long to keep the game flowing. Feeling shy? then you’ve got 140 characters of text or feeling verbose, you can upload a video from your desktop.

Though I have played around with the app a little bit, the real story is their messaging. It’s really rare that someone really nails down the personality of a webapp to make it seem “cool”, but they’ve done it. Here’s the email I received asking me to try out the app:

Dear Nathan,

Trust you’re well, by way of recall I’m Adam who you’ve never before, but if we did I’d almost certainly purloin some branded stationary from your office.

I’ve been involved in a start-up for last 12 months which just launched and would love for you to take a look - the new missing link in online social media, with an unpronounceable name.

We’re big String tweethearts and would stalk you if we could and it was legal and we lived in the same country/town.

www.qajack.com

Qajack uses video to play with what you know and what you want to know. It’s monkey simple, no profiles to fill out, just login, play and gamble with your reputation.

If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance.

Beta 1.0 release only supports Safari and Firefox, but we’re pounding our chests to get IE working too… oo …. oo.

We’re 3 founders, bootstrapped with my Mum’s new window fund and based in London, Barcelona and Bogota.

Best Wishes,

Now let me tell you the subtle brilliance of this email.

1. It immediately addresses the fact that we’ve never met, but moves from the feeling of spam to the feeling of familiarity.
2. It is self-effacing, calling out the fact that it has an unpronounceable name.
3. It throws a shout out to the blog, and pays a compliment.
4. It gives a crystal clear description of what it is and how easy it is to start.
5. It frames the app in a familiar context with a comparison to twitter
6. It tells me that they’re a group of 3 entrepreneurs trying to make something great with no money, just guts…and does it in a really funny way.

Now you tell me, after reading something like that, aren’t you immediately on their side?

What’s even better is that the tone of the messaging doesn’t end there. It’s consistent in their site as well:

We bootstrapped with old boots, a kindly grandparent and selling pretty much everything we owned.

My wife has threatened to leave me, until I persuaded her I could make iPhone Apps for comedians to pay the bills and feed our kids. All the while Qajack bubbled away. We talked about a launch in July 08, what were we thinking?! We’ve iterated, procrastinated (mostly me), master…ed the art of UI simplicity and like feral parents bombed on smack we’re now giving our child up for adoption.

So come and take a look, whilst the parents are pooped, stressed, narcoleptics, the kid is kinda cute and very clever. She’s like Che Guevara and Monica Bellucci’s love child, if such a thing were even possible.

If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance.

Awesome job. After I play around with it a little more, I’ll be sure to write about how the app actually works!