Ethan McCarty is Moving to Bloomberg as Global Head of Internal Communications

It was a great pleasure last year to interview Ethan McCarty, who, along with Susan Emerick, did so much for listening (the IBM Design Labs) and employee advocacy in IBM Global Marketing. McCarty is moving to Bloomberg, where without doubt he will make his mark.

 

Here's the letter he wrote yesterday morning to his friends; I'm publishing it with his permission:

After thirteen challenging, rewarding, meaningful years, today is my last day at IBM. I am going to Bloomberg as the Global Head of Internal Communications.

I have worked on amazing projects and programs at IBM -- building IBM Research's digital communications system, launching Autonomic Computing (!), developing and facilitating the Jams, producing the Annual Report, introducing Smarter Planet, personalizing, socializing and democratizing our Intranet, growing our Alumni network, celebrating our Centennial, creating our digital strategy and our Social Media strategy and, last but certainly not least, launching the M&C Labs.

When I told a mentor that I was leaving, he said something that really stuck with me: you are starting to ask questions of yourself now that IBM cannot answer.  I think the biggest one is, of course, can I do great things outside of IBM?

At Bloomberg I will be at the crossroads of financial services, media, technology and even politics -- the very things that make New York City such an exciting place to live.  The company has a very strong and unique culture (and concomitant zaniness too, no doubt) and it is going through an exciting moment -- its founder's return, a massive expansion of the employee population, expansion of the core terminals business into adjacent industries -- that will make a compelling challenge for me as I build their Internal Communications capability. I aim to apply much of what I have learned from IBM to Bloomberg's CEO's quest for a more cohesive identity and narrative for Bloomberg employees.

So I am excited to test my mettle outside of IBM -- and nervous too: IBM is like my home town and leaving is scary.  Yet I feel very good about the work I've done with all of you and the network of relationships I have through IBM.  Looking back at my time at IBM, the massively overwhelming feeling is that it has been time very, very meaningfully and well spent.  And I have you, my fellow IBMers, to thank for this.

I am hopeful for IBM and all my IBM friends -- the company is on the precipice of a set of changes that will be super interesting, challenging and mind-expanding. You can feel the engines revving up for a course-change. And I will be rooting for you to make it in grand style (and not just as a shareholder).

Because I will always be an IBMer; I feel as though I have a tattoo on my heart in blue ink -- it's the eight bar logo, of course.

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SEO for Dummies: Learn SEO in 10 Simple Steps

If you are anything like most people, SEO can seem like the unwanted elephant in the room. You know your business needs to deal with it, but you don’t want to be the one responsible for this task. When most people think SEO, they assume difficult, complex, and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be any of those things. In fact, you can learn SEO in 10 simple steps. All you need to do is lean in, listen, and apply the information you are given. While no two businesses operate the same, SEO is flexible enough to accommodate any need, desire, or shortcoming. Remove the elephant in the room and take your business to the next level!

Step 1: Setup
During the initial setup stage, you should prepare yourself for success. Just as a house needs a solid foundation before the framing goes up, so does your SEO strategy. The foundation in this case consists of tools like Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Google Webmaster Tools.

• Google Analytics will play a major role in tracking and analyzing how visitors interact with your site. Because it is free of charge and relatively intuitive, it is a necessity for every SEO campaign. In addition to creating an account and adding it to your website, you will want to read up on the features it offers.

• Google AdWords is particularly useful as it pertains to SEO for its keyword research capabilities. This incredibly valuable tool allows you to find out what users are searching for so you can cater to their needs, wants, and desires.

• Google Webmaster Tools allows you to gain the most out of your SEO efforts by letting you view your site through the eyes of Google. This toolset gives you keen insight into how pages are performing, which links are pointing to it, keywords that are working, and aspects that need to be fixed. You will find it useful to read through Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Step 2: Site Audit
If you have an existing site, you will want to perform a site audit when starting your SEO. With each passing month, Google is becoming more stringent with its penalties, and rules are becoming increasingly cut and dried. The best way to ensure your site is in compliance is to perform a detailed site audit.
One helpful site audit tool is the Moz Site Audit Checklist. As a reliable source, this detailed checklist is great for examining everything from content and accessibility to site architecture and internal linking. Another good option is WooRank. This helpful website audit tool automatically checks and analyzes many items on the Moz checklist. While a site audit may take significant time and energy, it is completely necessary to SEO. Penalties for preexisting violations can be harsh and eventually undo much of the hard work you put into your site.
Step 3: WWW or Without
Surprisingly enough, a very important part of SEO depends on those three “w’s” you see in front of your site’s web address. If you aren’t careful, you could make a costly mistake regarding these letters. People often think this determines whether someone can arrive at your website by typing www.domain.com or domain.com, which is not quite the case. At its core, this is about how the search engines view your website and how links pointing to your site are treated. You can choose to go with the ‘www’ or without it, but it is important to choose just one. If you choose both, the search engines will view your website as two separate sites, which can badly damage your rankings and link quality.
Step 4: Keyword Research

Some experts go as far as to say keyword research is the most important part of SEO. It’s hard to argue with that statement, as there are plenty of statistics to back it up. If you are serious about SEO, you need to invest heavily in keyword research. For your site to stand out against the more than 100 billion Google search queries per month, you must appropriately optimize. That starts with keyword research. Everything else falls into place after you gain an understanding of what your audience is searching for. Here is a sampling of useful tools you can use to get started:

• Google AdWords Keyword Planner
• Google Suggest
• Ubersuggest
• Google Trends
• Google Webmaster Tools

Step 5: Navigation
Navigation, as it relates to SEO, is important on two ends. First, it is imperative for visitors to be able to navigate smoothly and quickly through your site’s pages. Second, search engines need to find clear connections between individual links and pages.
To accomplish both of these goals simultaneously, you need to build a universal navigation. Do this by identifying why visitors come to your site, what your top exit pages are, and what search terms are used on site. Next, you should divide your products and key pages into categories with useful names. Finally, put those categories in the universal navigation and keep things simple. If you use drop down menus, they need to be in HTML in order for the search engines to read them. If your product pages have more than 20 items on a page, consider adding a filter for visitors to narrow their search.
Step 6: On-Page Content

While there is significant behind the scenes work that goes into SEO, you still need quality content for visitors to read and view. Google’s newest algorithm is putting a major emphasis on useful, high-quality writing instead of heavy keyword usage. Avoid keyword stuffing and instead use calculated, well-placed keywords. It is best to target one keyword phrase per page. As for the structure, each page should have a distinct arrangement and headings.
Step 7: Meta Tags
In order to understand the value of meta tags, you must think about things through the eyes of search engine users. When you search for something, how do you determine which result to click? You most likely analyze the first few results and read a few words from the title and accompanying description. As a site, you only have a limited string of characters to persuade a user to click on your result over millions of others available. That descriptive sentence is known as a meta tag.
Your site will see a noticeable improvement if you are able to properly attack meta tags. Each meta description should be around 160 characters and should include natural keyword phrases. It is also crucial that you include some sort of call to action. This can be difficult to accomplish in only a few words and requires careful planning and thinking. If you’ve done your keyword research and organized site content in an effective manner, it should all fall into place.
Step 8: Coding

Coding can be a difficult part of SEO for those unfamiliar with the topic. While you will probably need to find someone well-educated in coding to perform detailed actions, there is one area you should understand: robots.txt.
In simple terms, robots.txt is a text file that you put on your site to tell search engines which pages they are allowed to visit. While this code is not mandatory, it is very helpful in cases where you have pages you wish for search robots to avoid. Think of it like a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door. Thieves can still get in if they like, but most folks will leave you alone. It is important to make sure your robots.txt file is in the main directory of your site and is structured appropriately.
Step 9: Sitemap
You can have a beautiful, properly structured site, but unless people can view it, your hard work doesn’t mean anything. To get the maximum amount of traffic and visibility, your site must be indexed by search engines and directories, like DMOZ. Otherwise, the big guys, like Google, Yahoo! and Bing, are unlikely to find the most relevant page on your site to display (if your site is found at all).
Many techniques and tools promise to get your site indexed by search engines. However, the least time consuming and most reliable way to lead search engines and visitors through your site’s content is by creating a sitemap. With an HTML sitemap, visitors can quickly navigate the contents of your site and head to the most relevant area. Similarly, an XML sitemap is read by search engines to ensure the most relevant page of your site is displayed.
Step 10: Off-Page

In addition to the work you put into your site, you’ll need to spend some effort working off of your page. Focus on link building through content marketing, blog writing, guest blogging, infographics, site directories, and other tools that allow you to leave online footprints leading back to your site. Off-page efforts also include social media marketing. When properly used, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram can be helpful tools in acquiring site traffic. Whatever you do, avoid black hat SEO techniques when it comes to off-page efforts.
Bonus! Build Trust
In addition to these 10 simple rules, you should understand the importance of building trust online by using Google+ Author Verification and WOT. These tools enable your site to build a healthy reputation and trust relationship with search engines and visitors. Registering your domain name for a minimum of 5 years also instills trust and indicates that you plan to be around for the long term.
SEO: You Can Do It!

Whether you have tried SEO in the past and failed or have never given it a shot, don’t be intimidated by the noise. There are thousands of help articles discussing the “Do’s” and “Don’ts” of SEO, but you don’t need to learn everything at once. Follow these 10 simple steps and you will be well on your way to optimizing your site in a healthy way.
If you have any questions please post them in the comment area below and I will answer them as promptly as I can for you. Thank you—class dissmissed!

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How Data Analysis Can Transform Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is the topic that is on everyone’s lips. Just like word of mouth marketing and those old-fashioned leaflet drops before it, content marketing is another way to get people talking about your brand and, if executed correctly, the results surpass almost any other marketing channel. When audiences react positively to your brand, they’re directly influenced by to talk about your brand, link to your brand and, ultimately, buy from your brand.

But how do you actually go about creating that killer content? In many cases, there is a huge amount of guesswork involved in trying to determine exactly what your audiences will find useful, entertaining and engaging but the good news is that, with the right insight and research, you can eliminate those hunches and assumptions.

The five steps to content marketing success

Like many marketers looking to plan their content marketing strategy, my approach follows a clear process to determine what content will represent my brand. This five step plan consists of:

Assessment of brand values

“Who are we?”, “What makes us different?” “What do we want to be known for?” You need the answers to these questions before you can even start to consider how you’re going to create content that reflects the personality of your brand and, more importantly, your audience.

Determine channel objectives

What does success look like to you? What is the purpose of your content? Whether it is an increase in page views, more traffic or a more engaged audience, your content must have a reason to exist.

Develop content concepts

Coming up with the right concept is vital to the success of your campaign and typically, a successful concept will have at least one of these three properties:

• Always useful and something that people need. Whether it is a guide, an advisory piece or step-by-step instructions, useful content keeps people interested in you.
• Brilliant, right now. From royal baby content through to Specsavers’ offer of ‘goal line technology’, content that is brilliant ‘right now’ can be created literally ‘right now’. If you’re agile enough to pull it off, it can be a great way of getting people to talk about you.
• Big content that gets people talking about you, such as the Maximuscle Protein Project.

Check your ideas

Make sure that whatever your idea is, it is on brand, relevant and feasible.

Create that content

Make your content and then, most importantly, measure its effectiveness.

Following those five steps will, in most cases, get you on the right path to content success but occasionally, good content misses the mark. That doesn’t mean that the content is badly done or badly used but instead, it could mean that you have missed out a vital piece of analysis to understand just who your audience is and what your audience likes.

The right information can transform your Content Marketing

There are a number of tools that can shed light on this very mystery, including Google Analytics and GlobalWebIndex. Using these tools, we can eliminate the guesswork and work out what our target audiences actually want. How do we know this? Because people say that they want it.

Take the following example for a hypothetical supermarket brand (click to enlarge):

 

The key thing to remember here is that in answering these questions, the survey group had to agree to the question being asked in the first place, which means that we are dealing with clear, honest answers.

From this data, we can see the different types of content that different demographics want from a very specific type of brand. For example:

• 18-24 year olds prefer video content.
• Those who are 50+ are least likely to engage with mobile apps.
• The 30-40 age group value brand-focused content.
• All age groups want to be inspired.

This data gives us some clear direction on what how content marketing strategy should be structured. If, for example, we were tasked with getting more 18-24 year olds through the doors of our hypothetical supermarket, a campaign of inspirational videos would be high on the agenda.

Using GlobalWebIndex provides insight on how our audience wants to interact with our brand, where it wants to interact with us and what content they want. Instead of creating content purely to appease the SEO demands of the business, we’re now in a position to create content that is right for the brand and, more importantly, our audiences.

Finding the Opportunities

Of course, surveying alone will never fully enlighten us on what people want but we can’t ignore the hard facts and data around internet behaviour. Google Analytics allows us to analyse the total number of pages against total number of views. Whilst this doesn’t sound like the most revolutionary approach to market insight, it does highlight some key opportunity areas.

In this example, which looks at the homeware department of our hypothetical supermarket, we can identify a number of opportunities:

• In the decorating category, the percentage of total unique page views is much higher than the percentage of total pages on the website.
• There is potentially too much news content being produced, with this content being the least viewed area of the site. This could also suggest that news content needs to be more visible.
• The amount of content about special offers and furniture is about right.

With this insight, we can start to create content that reflects the online behaviour of our audience. Where there is a clear appetite for certain types of content, the content strategy should reflect this.

For the example we shared, the target audience wanted more video content and they also demanded more content around the decorating category, due to visiting habits. Putting two and two together tells us that compelling video content about decorating should be very much a part of our content marketing strategy.

The only challenging bit is ensuring that the content you create is truly interesting, sharable, exciting or hilarious. For that, there’s no silver bullet; just clever recruitment or a clever agency.

 

 

 

 Keywords: Best Practices, Social Media Marketing, Content, Branding, Analytics, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media

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Free or Cheap Social Media Tools You Should Be Using

As an online reputation and social media manager, I’m always looking for cheap/free tools to help create content and keep track of my social platforms. I recently came across three different tools that are sure to help any social media professional make their life easier. They are Animoto, Infogr.am, and Followerwonk.

Animoto

Animoto is a web app that lets you create truly engaging video content.

Here’s an example of an Animoto video we created for Silverback Social: 

This was done with the “plus” version (which cost us a paltry $30/year) that lets us create videos up to 10 minutes in length, choose from up to 44 different styles, access over 300 music tracks, and the ability to download the video. There is also a “lite” version that is free, but video length is only 30 seconds and you can only choose from a limited number of styles.

The best part of this web app is that it’s SO easy to use. You can include images, text, and even other video into your Animoto clip. It’s a simple matter of uploading and rearranging the order you want the content to come up.

My one sticking point with this web app is there isn’t enough customization.  Although the “pro” version lets you create unbranded (no animoto logo at the end) videos up to 20 minutes with multiple songs, users should be able to do more, like change colors and how the video unfolds from one piece of content to the next.

Despite limited customization, this is an incredible tool for brands to take advantage of.

Infogr.am

Infographics are some of the most engaging pieces of content you can create for your brand. They offer a wealth of information, while being easy to digest. To create truly stunning infographics, you’re going to need a designer, but sometimes you won’t have the skills or the cash to hire one. That’s where Infogr.am comes into play.

Here’s an infographic we made for the Westchester Digital Summit using this free tool:

Aside from being free, what’s cool about this web app is there are a ton of different chart types you can use, as well as multiple infographic styles. Chart types range from simple bar graphs to pictorials and financial charts, and you can even upload Excel data. You can also add text, images, and video to your infographics.

Infogr.am also has a “pro” option that costs $18/month (or $180/year), however I only recommend it if you plan on distributing the infographic onto a website, email, ebook, etc. This is because you won’t be able to download/embed your infographic otherwise. The pro version also comes with 4 other design themes, allows password protection for infographics you create, and the ability to privately share the infographic with a non-public URL.

As great of a free tool as Infogr.am is, it really falls flat with its “pro” features. It lacks any true customization – you can’t change the colors of the infographic template, and the charts themselves lack dynamism. Sure you can change the colors of the charts, but paying users should be able to adjust the size of different aspects of the charts (for example, changing the width of the bars on the bar graph).

If you don’t plan on downloading the infographic, I highly suggest sticking with the free version because you’ll still be able to share the graphic onto your social places (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest). There simply aren’t enough options available for paying users to be worth the money, but it is certainly very robust for a free tool.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tool created by Moz (formerly SEOMoz).  Moz is known for its great SEO tools and is an industry leader in Internet marketing. Followerwonk is one of the most robust Twitter analytics tools on the market today. From the free version alone, you can search twitter bios (i.e., highest Social Authority, journalists, SEO, CEOs, most followers etc.), compare users, and analyze a user’s followers or the people a user is following.

Through the “analyze followers” function alone, you can get a world map of your users by region, active hours of your followers or those you’re following, Social Authority score of followers, gender of followers, keywords used by followers, frequency of @mentions used by followers, % of retweets by followers, % of retweets with URLs of followers, language, total tweets of followers…the list goes on.

For Silverback Social's Twitter, our followers are most active at around 5:00pm EST:

 This breakdown of keywords tells us what type of content we should be posting:

I regularly use this social media tool to manage the social content Silverback Social produces on Twitter so we can tailor our content to get the highest engagement possible. I also use it to analyze our followers’ accounts to see whom else we can engage with in our field.  In terms of finding new engagement opportunities, Followerwonk really makes it easy to pick and choose the right accounts to follow instead of bloating our following number with low quality accounts (i.e., low # of tweets, low social authority).

The PRO version comes chock full of other features. There’s too many for me to write all of them here, but here’s a screen of what else they offer for paying members:

The only downside to Followerwonk is that it comes at a fairly pricey $99/month. However, they do offer a free 30-day trial, which is more than enough time to decide if this tool is good for your needs.  Also, you must be comfortable with looking at graphs and numbers to use the tool to its fullest potential. There is no single way to use it because everyone has different goals and everyone weighs metrics differently according to those goals. If you are serious about utilizing Twitter for your business, I can’t recommend this tool enough.

Are there any tools you use for social media? Tell me in the comments below!

 Keywords: Monitoring Tools, Social Media Marketing, Content, Branding, Analytics, Metrics, Twitter, Engagement, HandsOnSMT, Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Media, Tools & Apps, Animoto, Followerwonk, Infogr.am

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