Blog of Ronnestam » SEO

AIDA Transformed By Digital Media. What Does It Mean To Your Brand Communication?

ronnestam — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:03:11 +0000

The other day I wrote quite a long post on the future of integrated communication from a digital perspective. I stressed the fact that in order for your brand to create and maintain strongs brand in the future you’ve gotta provide people with true values not just fun stuff that entertains. On top of that I’ve also written a quite extensive post on how all your brands belong not to you, but to the consumer. You might wanna tap into that one too before reading this post. Here we go:

You’ve lost control of almost all of your sales process. Accept it and change or die. (Had to go punk style)

That actually happens to tactical communication as we know it when all rules are changed? What happens to ads, prints, point of sale, direct marketing etc?

Let’s me elaborate on that based on an old communication model called AIDA, Attention, Information, Desire and Acquire, first described in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis. Some people say it’s dead since way back. I say it’s more alive than ever but it’s transformed.It serves a great purpose when explaining to you guys and girls heading brands and companies out there how you’re supposed to rock your brands in the future.

Information, desire and acquire in the hands of the consumers

How your brand communication is changed on every level as we move into the future of communication.

A- Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer

Yesterday: Use creative advertising that intercept whatever the consumer is doing and make him/her crave your brand

Tomorrow: Here’s the good news. If you know branding, advertising and all that good stuff we’ve been doing for years. You’re in for a ride. Brands will realise that TV, Print, Outdoor, Banners – all those yummy above the line things – will rule the next 10 years. There’s simply now way to grab peoples attention but to shake them around in a medium where you cannot miss them. Of course, people say young kids does not watch TV, but they still do if it’s relevant. On top of all those old things you of course gotta get your shit together when it comes to the product. In transparent times – failure is not an option!

I – Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits.

Yesterday: When we tried to get hold of more information about products our resources were limited. Of course we could ask friends. But what were the chances of us having the exact same crave for a product. We then relied on newspapers, magazines and TV channels. Honestly. Who believes the reporter for a car magazine wasn’t bribed in one way or another when writing that excellent article about the new BMW 3 series you’re looking for. On top of that you can be sure the PR people did their best to make sure he was positive anyway unless he didn’t fall for fancy dinners and test drives accompanied with wonderful wines and spicy women in the south of spain. We even had use for the phone catalogue. That pile of paper served its purpose.

Tomorrow All changed. Let’s say the advertising agency has gotten your blood running in your veines. What’s next? Easy. Google or a status update in Facebook. And BAM – you’ve lost control. That Google search will turn up, not that brand that he or she is looking for. Instead we’ll land on review sites, price comparison sites, blogs, forums, social networks and more. The results in Google will all be based on the intelligence of the people, or at least the people that knows how to build brands for the future.

What to do: Start changing your mix. Head over to that post of mine that I mentioned above and study how to change your media mix. Build value. Make sure people benefit from linking to you. Set your prices so that Pricerunner and other comparison sites list your shop first. Spread content everywhere.

D – Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.

Yesterday: You OWNED this one. Clever managers educated clever sales people. The consumer, stuck inside your defined space where you built up a POS (point of sale) presence that made him/her crave your products. Of course you spent money on industrial design and shit. But compared to today you relied on the retail channel to do their work.

Tomorrow I OWN this one. Me and my friends. As I’m getting closer and closer to deciding upon which product I’m gonna get I ask around. What does people think, what do my friends say, comparisson sites etc.

What to do: Make sure you focus ten times more on your product development, turn your industrial design department into GOD. They should steer the entire company forward. If you’re lucky we’re coming to visit you. But like a kid, armed with her/his wishlist for Santa Claus, the consumer of tomorrow knows exactly what she/he wants and what the right price is.

A – Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

Yesterday: Let me follow you to the cashier” – Remeber this one? To break free and decide not to buy your product when been given a 30 minute sales pitch is prettyd darn hard.

Tomorrow If you’re unlucky (or lucky depending on your digital competence) you’re looking at closing the deal online. Usability, language, design, visualisation, payment processes etc etc etc. Alone behind my computer or mobile device, that’s where I’ll be. And the second I feel insecure, doesn’t find where to go next and so on, that’s the second I leave without buying anything.

What to do: Get wired. Never again hire marketing people that doesn’t know how to convert people. Change Microsoft Office into A/B testing in your hiring profile. Send your troopers back to the school. Have them learn everything there is to know about online commerce – cause you’ll need it.

Last but not least. Of course there are brands out there that doesn’t have to give a shit about this. After all, we will not buy nuclear plants for some time still over the Internet. The rest of you – get going!

Future Integrated Communication From A Digital Perspective

ronnestam — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:51:13 +0000

Leading a brand? Thinking about how to create a long term integrated communication platform? Think no more cause I’ll share the model I’ve been using for the last three years when leading brands into the future of advertising, communication and advertising.

Normally I’d work a company or brand through a series of workshops. We would then slowly start to follow this model over time. Changing how you, your brand and marketing organisation work with advertising and communication is not something you do over night. I would recommend brands to keep on doing what they do best – shoot fireworks -while slowly start to change their way of communicating their products and services from ground up.

Moving your communication into the future is also tough on your organisation as your moving from campaign based communication activities to instead building long term equity that will generate results over time. Send your entire marketing organization as well as your IT department and management team on several digital communication crash courses cause your CEO better understand what you talk about when you’re talking conversion, SEM, SEO, AdWords, H1, Keywords, Stats and shit.

Have a read. If you like what you read – get going. Change!

Here we go – The Key To Future Integrated Communication by Johan Ronnestam

The basis of your online communication platform

The first thing we’ve gotta agree upon before moving further into the model is the following: Your brand consist out of two things. The product/services you offer and the content you’ve created to explain what your product/service does. In the worst cases companies have more or less done nothing beyond publishing images of their products with accompanied product name. In the best cases they’ve done tons more. We’ll go in to this bellow. This is the essence of your communication presence online. Hopefully you’ve got this wired, however, you might actually have this presence online without owning it your selves.

Value and conversion leads to traffic and sales. Your objective and key performance indicators.

People don’t have time to read your shit. You’ve gotta provide them with a true value. After all, your products and services are nothing without the problem they solve. This is what you’ve gotta base all your hosted communication activities on.

Value first

The more value you provide your target group with, the more traffic you’ll gain. This is based on the simple principle of the link. If you keep bragging about your products without truly do something good for people you won’t earn any links. If you on the other hand share ideas, knowledge and solutions that helps your target group to be better you’ll see that people will come. Once you’ve opened up that stream of people you’ll have the opportunity to point the towards the products and services you market, the same product and services that of course can be used to do whatever you tought people to do.

Let me share one example – Michelle Phan. I started to follow this girl online already two years ago. Back then she was an independent girl who just liked to share her thoughts on how to wear make up. In November 2010, Phan became “the No. 1 most subscribed female on YouTube and the first female to reach 1 million subscribers. Michelle Phan joined Youtube on July 18, 2006, and as of November 2010, she has created 100 videos that have been viewed over 260,000,000 times. The one where she does a Lady Gaga makeup has a stunning 23,457,472 views.

Michelle Phan sharing the value people want

Michelle does what the traditional make up brand don’t. She shares value. While Michelle teaches young women all over the world how to do their make up, brands like Chanel, Biotherm, Clinique, Loreal and Lancome does one thing – sell sell sell. Michelle shares knowledge while these brands just throws a pretty girl in your face saying “you can look like me”. No wonder Lancome suddenly this year in February turned Michelle into their spokesperson. Today Michelle even got her own make up brand.

So, value first. Before selling. Make sure you think about your reason for being. Do you sell football shoes, teach people how to score, do you sell wine, teach people how to buy the right wine (like Gary Vaynerchuck does), do you sell cars, teach them about how to drive better and more cost effective, do you sell clothes, teach them how to style themselves.

The content you create should of course go social

Once you’ve decided how to provide your potential visitor with a true value. Make sure you spread that value across the net whereever possible and relevant.

Your Potential Customer Is Out There – So Your Content Should Be Too

If you produce videos send them to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip and tons more. Use TubeMogul to handle the process. Your images on Flickr and others. Documents on Slideshare and Scribd. If you go live, use Livestream or Bambuser. Heck, head over to Brians and Jess3 Conversation prism and do the homework.

Once you got that value right – focus on conversion

So, this is the next step where tons of brands go wrong (as I’ve written about before). They simply haven’t got their conversion wired. In order for you to really know what you’re doing you’ve gotta set your targets right. Do you want people to buy online, should they download your product sheets, contact you or maybe just spend five minutes with your products online? Anything is right as long as it suits your needs. Once you’ve got that wired, set up your funnels right in your stat tools and start working those A/B tests. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING should serve a purpose if you’re looking to convert those visitors of yours to clients.

The funny thing is that once you start eyeing those performance metrics of yours you’ll end up getting insights about your traffic that you can never learn from anyone else. Business online is all about knowing your own audience and constantly improving your site. After all, a banner or button in the wrong place might kill your conversion or increase it by 400%.

5 things you can never forget when converting your site visitors into buyers

1. Usability is key

Usability is by far the most important thing to think about when you’re looking to convert your visitors into buyers. This means no funky animations, links should be easy to click on, preferably underlined, less is more, guide your visitors etc etc.

There’s tons that has been written about this area. Whatever you do, don’t buy any bullshit that people click thru a site if it’s cool. Ask anyone who’s been working with e-commerce and they’ll tell you. Why do you think Amazon looks the way it does? Go ahead and follow some blogs and you’ll be up and running in no time. Start with The UX Booth.

2. Product presentation

I don’t know if you read my post about the car brand SAAB the other day. Well, this recording below (excuse my bad english in this one) was actually done for this post. It got me worked up though and that’s why I posted that other thing the before this one.

We’re alone when surfing the web – compare that to the real world where a sales man is following us around in the store, always ready to answer any questions we might have, we’re all alone on the web. This means information, information, information, information and more information. If I’m looking to be convinced to buy a car online I’ll tell you right away – I wont be pleased with a freakin flash site that sings a song and let me rotate the car once. I want at least forty-five 60-second movies showcasing everything there is to know about your car. I want photos, not 5 wonderful photos taken by Europes most expensive photographer. I want 100+ photos that are showing that car from every angle. Of course you should package it all beautiful, but don’t have me loading any animations and shit.

Then, only then might I go to that buy button. Remember, your competitors are one click away!

3. Copy
Copy actually do matter. Write it good, write it well, but remember what I talked about in nr 2. I’m alone, so don’t go wasting to much of my time! I was planning to write a longer piece about this, but Smashing Magazine has done a great job already. Go there ›› (thanks Per for the tip)

4. Feeling secure
Logos from payment providers and other things like awards and shit. That’ll do the trick. After all. We’ve been monkeys in an earlier lifetime.

5. Faces
This might sound funny. But a face looking straight at you actually has proven to do good. Make sure you online presence contain humas, preferably not from actors, but instead from humans that you might actually meet in your office. Hire a great photographer and do them good!

So where does the traffic come from?

I have focused here on writing about prospects and not existing customers. Given that I’ve listed 4 traffic sources that more or less are the same for any company with an online presence. Above and below the line advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and finally social media.

Above and below the line advertising

Here’s the good news. If you know branding, advertising and all that good stuff we’ve been doing for years. You’re in for a ride. Brands will realize that TV, Print, Outdoor, Banners – all those yummy above the line things – will rule the next 10 years. There’s simply now way to grab peoples attention but to shake them around in a medium where you cannot miss them. Of course, people say young kids does not watch TV, but the still do if it’s relevant. After all we’re pretty alone behind that screen when it’s time to click something. Being friend with a brand will help!

Search and The Social Internet – They go together like birds, bees, the flowers and the trees.

There’s two ways to pull traffic through search.

1. Adwords, at first glance it’s easy. However, if you’re running a business with mature competitors, say for example online travel it will be everything from easy. You’ve gotta get down with how to get your brand visible in the paid search areas. Either you know how or you start to study hard. Read books, books and more books. Then start to follow some of the high profile SEO bloggers in the world. Why not start with Seomoz, Searchengineland and Greywolfs SEO blog. Some Swedes I’d ad to the list are Jesper Åström, Nikke Lindqvist and Simon.

2. Search. The second way to get yourselves visible in the search engines is of course the SEO side of it. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people go on about their blog and the fact that it doesn’t drive traffic. But hey, it’s not that simple. If you’ve got a blog present, the chance is that other bloggers or maybe even a newspaper links to that blog. In the long run this will do good for your presence in search engines.

(I know I know I know…affiliates, banners, bought links etc etc. I just don’t have time to go into all of that now. This post is a top level post)

Conclusion.

Future communication is all about relevance. Relevant product, relevant services, relevant content and advertising that support those things. If you’re creating brand communication offline – fine, your only objective should be awareness and making sure people understand what your brand stands for. But when you’re communicating products and service – make sure the actual products and services are top notch and then create relevant communication that makes people search for them. If they do you’re home free! (that is if you’ve made sure to be seen everywhere online).

But worth repeating. Create advertising that make people search for your product or service category. Then by making sure your digital activities are focused on value, spread over a vast number of social networks, your AdWord campaigns and earned search positions in place you’ll make sure to get people hooked.

A qoute from Jeff Jarvis, the writer of ‘What Would Google Do‘, is in order here: “Construct information (on your website) so it can be understood by machine and man. In a word, be clear. If you’re a dentist, say you’re a dentist, not a smile doctor. Use the word “dentist” in the title of the page, the headline, and the beginning of what you write – make it so obvious even a computer couldn’t be confused. This also means that when human beings come to the page, they’ll know what you do. Clarity is always beneficial.”

So how do you get going. How do you make sure your brand platform is ‘future proof’?

Move your media budgets!

Most brands today seem to think change can be achieved within the production budgets. This is wrong. There’s just not enough money in that pot. There is only one way to make this happen. You’ve gotta take money from that eyeball highjacking fund called media and instead spend more on earned eyeballs.

Move 10% of your allocated media budget in order to gain a long term digital effect

Of course you shouldn’t move it all today. Start small but start. The next time you’re campaigning. Cut the media with 10% and start focusing on value as I wrote about earlier. Do the Michele Phan thing, whatever that means to your brand, products and services. Boom – now you’ve entered the long term value creation communication process. Keep doing it for another 6 to 12 month and make sure you track what you’re doing. You’ll see change coming your way!

Come on! You can do it!

The Social Formula For Small Business Owners

ronnestam — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 16:16:21 +0000

About two years ago I frantically started writing on this blog post. Then the sheer length of it got the best of me and since then it’s been stuck in my unpublished library. Now I thought it’s time to give birth to this baby even though most of it was written about two years ago, before Facebook got big, the iPad and more.

When you read it – remember I pushed publish to share the love, not the excellent writing.

This post covers how you start and run a company practically for free.

The post will guide you all the way from day one until you’re up and running and need to consider things like sales, advertising, process support, crm, intranets, extranets etc etc.

I spend about 1-2 hours a day reading about communication, advertising, social media and innovations through my Netvibes account. What’s truly amazing is the fact that almost every day a new service is launched somewhere in the world (mostly in the US) that replaces the old way to advertise, communicate with clients, run projects, process customer data, run your IT systems, keep track of your finances etc etc. And what’s even more amazing is that all these new services are practically always available free of charge or at least only for a small fee.

So I thought why not spread this knowledge to my blog readers and especially you out there who are running a company or thinking of starting one. Here are some ideas on how to think when setting up a future brand.

So, here we go – How to run your small business without loosing your pants (or the money in your pants that is)

The development within the ‘so-called’ web 2.0 services has now gone so far so it’s possible to run your company practically without any in-house IT systems. Even a larger company could without problems move everything they do online at practically no costs at all.

When you sum it all up it’s time for companies to reevaluate how to do business. Social networking and long tail services are taking over.

So, what if you were to run a company today? What’s the formula? How can you run a business without paying a dime for technology and getting social attention at the same time. Once you got that business idea of yours ready to go. Then it’s time to tell the world. And don’t worry, if you haven’t got one, there’s even resources online that give away business ideas for free.

0.9 Before you start

First thing. In terms of costs, there are two things you should prioritize over everything else and that is: 1. Broadband – get the fastest connection possible. And make sure it’s down and upstream. 2. Get a really good computer. Choose a Mac. Not because I’m against PC but because it’ll support your creativity and once it’s up and running, you’ll never have to restart it again. It just keeps running and running.

A good friend of mine told me “We’re changing our tag line. But in order to know which one to use we’re putting out Google Adwords campaigns for 10 of our finalists. The one that generates the most traffic, that will be our choice”

1. Business plan, marketing plan and a key note presentation.

Whatever you do. Make sure you put it on paper. Putting things on paper forces you to choose carefully. Put whatever you’ve written into the hands of friends and you’ll get great feedback on what you need to fine tune. Do you need inspiration? Visit slideshare.net or Scribd and then get going.

2. Register a domain.

IMPORTANT: Register your domain with the company where you intend to host your website.

IMPORTANT 2: Unless your fancy with code – don’t register with a hosting company that doesn’t have support for auto installers. I personally recommend Bluehost.com. But if you’re a Swede you might wanna check Binero out.

There are of course some other alterantives like Active 24, Bust A Name, Miss Domain and SEDO.

3. Forget expensive software.

Don’t buy software. They’re expensive. You’ll have to buy updates once a year. Instead use online softwares. Most companies need Email, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For that I recommend Google Apps instead. Some companies may need graphical design tools. Well, then use Gimp or something like Splashup for graphical design.

Inside Google Apps you’ll provide your employees with Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. On top of that Google Apps is integrated with Salesforce, something I’ll explain more about under CRM.

Gmail — Offer custom email addresses to your organization with up to 25 gigabytes of storage for each account, search tools to help people find information fast, plus instant messaging and calendar tools built right into the email interface.

Google Talk — Your users can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free — anytime, anywhere in the world. File sharing and voicemail is included, too.

Google Calendar — Your users can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. Your organization can also publish calendars and events on the web.

Google Docs — Co-workers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and share online files without having to keep track of multiple versions of the same attachment. And it’s all compatible with Microsoft Word.

Splashup is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photosharing sites like Flickr, Picasa & Facebook, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress.

Forget expensive phonecalls.
When it comes to calling, you should of course make sure you have a regular phone number. But when you do, consider IP telephony. Messenger, Rebtel & Skype

Forget conference call systems
Campfirenow and since some time back Skype allows you to hook up 5 screens at the same time.

Forget finance systems
Blinksale, Freshbooks and Billings.

Many of the other sites I’ve written about can be used dependably of where in the world your company resides. But when it comes to financial applications, you really have to find and use a local products.

Blinksale is perfect for anyone in the US who needs to invoice clients for services or products sold. Basically, if you need to send invoices, Blinksale can work for you. What’s really cool also is the fact that if you’re using some of the other online products like Basecamp and Highrise (that I’m writing about below) the Blinksale also makes it easy to import and invoice your clients and customers without having to re-enter their data into Blinksale. Finally, is also has a fine API if you wanna integrate it into your own cloud.

4. Intranet and internal processes

Once your team (or you) are set to go, you may wanna set up the processes that you need in order to run your business. Let’s start with the internal stuff.

Intranet (or actually Intranet 2.0)
Let’s make sure you get an intranet that is alive and kicking. There are a couple of ways you can solve this by putting it all online. Here are three suggestions:

Use a wiki. Wetpaint is an online community where anyone can start their own wiki. Choose from a set of templates and you’re set to go. Of course you can make sure all your content is private. Another alternative is PBWIKI, used by Citigroup and at&t among others.

Use Facebook. Ah, I know what you’re saying. Stupid. But actually not. Facebook with all it’s application makes up the perfect intranet. Just make sure all your employees are set up with a Facebook account and then start a group. Make sure the invites are personal and the group private. Then your’re off. Chattsupport, documents, videos, forums, etc etc etc. Perfect.

Use your own Facebook – Ning. This place was founded in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create their own social networks for absolutely anything. Today Ning powers the largest number of social networks on the Internet.

Finally. My own favorite. Use Yammer. Yammer is like Facebook and Twitter combined and it’s set up in seconds. This is the shit if you wanna create an Intranet 2.0 for your company.

Now when you’re done with the internal stuff, obviously you can use all those three examples to create an extranet towards your best B2B clients.

5. Project management.

Forget Microsoft Project Manager. What you need is a great group collaboration software. And Basecamp is exactly that. As they say themselves: “Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.” I’ve been using Basecamp in tons of projects and it’s a killer. Not for free, but not far from it.

6. Sale support & CRM

Many companies spend millions on getting their CRM and customer support systems in place. Stupid.

First. Let’s get a little bit 2008 when it comes to customer support. Don’t believe your IT department when they wanna throw a heavyweight system that makes your budgets explode. Instead, use something that is free, something that positions your company as new thinkers and at the same time caring. Use Get Satisfaction for example. Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and FREE. Head in there and register your company. Who knows, maybe it’s even up there and people care about it…or the other way around. In that case, make sure you claim it fast and start supporting your customers.

What about CRM? Yep – no need to buy expensive software here either. Two places where you can get exactly what you need: Highrise and Salesforce. These two online CRM platforms provide Easy-to-use Web-based CRM solutions for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations that streamlines customer relationship management and boosts customer satisfaction. Salesforce is probably my number one recommendation as it is seamlessly integrated with Google Apps. On top of that they’ve already created a slick integration into the iPhone that let’s your salesforce access critical customer information instantly through the iPhone’s familiar touch screen format.

Lately however I’ve gotten more and more fond of Bantam Live that combines the power of Yammer with a typical CRM thinking.

7. Your website

So, the time has come to become public and show your ideas online. If you’ve done what I told you too and gotten yourselves a domain at Bluehost.com. Then it’s easy as one, two, three. There is a beautiful thing called Simple Scripts. It provides you with auto installations of the most common open source content management systems out there. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Geeklog, Mambo, Xoops…the list goes on.

My recommendation is WordPress. WordPress is originally a blog system that lately is being used more and more as a web content management system. Developers all over the world are adding drag and drop plugins that enable most things you would want on your website. And when it comes to designs, you have about 5000 free templates to choose from. The last couple of month more advanced templates such as Thesis and stuff Woothemes and has been released for a very small price. By using Bluehost auto installer you don’t have to care for anything in terms of configuring databases and emails on forms etc. It just works. All for the price of $6.95 a month…including hosting. Practically FREE.

If you feel you wanna get moving with WordPress. Here’s a guide I wrote some time ago on how to create a WordPress blog that rocks the world.

Once you’re done with the website and your posts and articles pile up, it’s time to burn your feed. Make sure you register your blog/site with Feedburner.

Why a Burned feed is better than a not-burned feed?

Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
Optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
It allows you to analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they’re coming from and what they like best.

If you’re planning to sell your products online.
Not to worry. Let PayPal handle the payments. If you are planning to sell tons of products, then let Amazon Webstore handle the whole thing. Cost? $59.99 per month. Ok, maybe not free, but a whole lot cheaper than a multimillion dollar system. And I assure you, the Amazon Webstore will work like a charm. If you’re Swedish, then head over to ebutik.se and you’ll be up and running before you know it. Costs for ebutiken? Practically the same as Amazon Webstore.

Oh, and if you’ve set your site up in WordPress you could actually build your site on Thematic and then use the child theme Simple Cart powered by the great plugin WP E-commerce and start selling your gadgets for even less.

You might wanna consider checking who’s the visitor to your site.
Then time has come for another FREE product. Google Analytics. Log on, register and implement on your WordPress driven site. Google Analytics will ask you to submit a site map that makes it easier for them to crawl your site, but not to worry, there is a FREE plugin for that as well. An alternative to Google Analytics is MINT. However, that requires a little bit of technical skills, but it might be worth it.

If you’re this far into the post and have gotten your website up and running. Make sure also to check out Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a lot of goodies there.

8. Company videos and photos?

Maybe you should pay for an expensive solution to make sure there’s now glitches when your clients visits your website. NOOO, open a Flickr account, place all your videos and photography there. This way you’ll make sure you pay nothing for a fantastic streaming and storing solution. Something you normally pay at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars for normally. Cost? $24.95 a year! And oh, I forgot. If you got a hacker in your organization, you can easily use the Flickr API and create your own video and photo applications. Finally the beauty of this is that you can use a simple drag’N’drop plugin to showcase both the photos and the videos on your site and at the same time everyone who think your company is the shit, they can send these things further. By using Flickr you also make sure you have a presence in more than one place. Social networking! Obviously you can also do exactly the same with your videos on YouTube, but maybe it’s easier to place them all in one place.

There is however a new Danish player in town since a couple of weeks back. They’re called 23Video. Their business idea is pretty simple. Build your own video portal, host as many videos as you want and pay no more than 675$ a month. Splendid idea for you who wanna host your own stuff.

Whatever you do, you should make sure that you spread those videos outside your own or the network you choosed. An excellent product that I’ve written about long time ago and was reminded about in the comment field of this post is TubeMogul. TubeMogul lets you spread your content over tons of video sites and you’ll get a great overview of how it’s performing.

Let’s move on. It’s time to put that business presentation of yours into action.

9. Creating banners and TV commercials?

Of course you should run banners and TV commercials. But SEO, affiliate programs and Adwords is the shit.

Hiring an agency will of course give you the best results. But, let’s say you’ve just started, since you already spent about $10 on Flickr your pockets are empty. No worries. Now that Google features TV ads on their websites it’s easy to head over to Jivox or Spotmixer and start putting that wonderful piece of your together. Once you have created that wonder ful piece of your’s head over to Videoegg or Google TV ads and start spreading the words.

When it comes to creating your own campaigns and banners you should also consider placing competitions on sites like 99 designs. You’ll get great stuff while paying close to nothing. Look, Robyn does it.

10. Search Engine Marketing – SEO/SEM

Oh, this is probably the most complex thing you can put your mind to. First of all, before you even start you gotta get a shitload of traffic in order to experiment with it. And once you got that valuable traffic you are probably to afraid to try and you won’t make use of your SEO knowledge anyway. But luckily there’s people who can point you in the right direction – Aaron Wall, the founder of SEO Book.com. Of all the books and all the sites I’ve read on SEO marketing when I started writing this post, SEO Book.com was one of the best. Some time ago though Google published their version of a SEO book, and that one is of course free so I’d recommend you try that one first.

Apart from reading up on SEO at home I do recommend you to start following Nikke Lindqvist, Jesper Åström and Simon Sundén. Three friends of mine who shares their ideas through their blogs. Nikke and Simon in Swedish and Jesper in English.

11. Marketing

When I say marketing most people start thinking about sales people, advertising, events and getting articles about your product into newspapers and TV channel. Well, you can do without all of these channels. Think about it – ever seen an ad that sells Google?

What you’ve gotta do is get into Google Adwords, learn about affiliate marketing and get down with Facebook ads. There are of course tons of services out there. But if you become good at these three you’re almost there. If you then on top learn to master social media you’ll end up in those traditional newspapers and TV channels sooner or later anyway. Once you’ve got a database with clients you should get going with MyEmma or the better one – MailChimp. Two great email marketing services that will kick but.

12. You know what….I don’t have any energy left to finalize this post.

I just thought it was important to get it out there. So in order for you to get hold of nr 12 you’ve gotta learn how to do it by yourselves

Go get em!

ps. Feel free to share more ideas and tricks in the comments of this post!

The Essential Guide On How To Start And Configure A Blog That Rocks The World

ronnestam — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:09:34 +0000

I have gotten the question over and over again from people, organizations and brands: “How do we start a blog the right way” – I’ve decided to put my advice into writing.

Some of you might think this post is unnecessary. Other people have written about this already. I thought so too until I started searching for good posts on how to set up a kick ass blog and learned most things written on the subject either covered the tool or the actual writing but not actually leading you to do it the right way I think there’s room for another post on the subject.

The purpose of this post is sort of a combination of two things that I hope will lead to the following:

Make sure agencies cannot charge big money for setting up your blog. Setting up your personal or branded blog is to me a democratic right and should be free and accessible for anyone who has something to share.
I think more people should start a blog. It’s good for you. It’s good for the democracy. It’s good for the world.

Here is the essential guide on how to start and configure a blog that will rock the world:

1. Buy a unique domain name for your blog and preferably do it at the same place where you intend to host the blog

Personally I’ve followed WordPress own recommendations and used Bluehost.com to buy my domain name and then installed a WordPress blog with their simple script functionality. It’s a 3 minute process from registering that domain until your blog is actually up and running and accessible from anywhere in the world. It’s a wow feeling!

Of course you can pick any hosting facility but if you’re not into setting up databases and shit – make sure they have some sort of simplified way of setting your blog up.

2. Why a WordPress blog?

The famous WordPress content management system

There’s of course different blog systems but if you want the best I’d say you should go with Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress. I think most professional bloggers today would agree with me and the stats speaks in favor of me. WordPress is the most used blogging platform (and in many cases content management system) in the world and as a result you cannot find any system that gives you more themes and more plugins.

Matt Cutts who’s responsible for Google’s search engine even says there’s no better tool in the world if you wanna make sure your website is being watched the right way by Google’s spiders.

3. Don’t design your blog. Find a theme that you think suits your needs and tweak it.

Theme is another word for design. WordPress separates functionality from form in the most beautiful way. Swapping between different designs is easier than saying hello in Swahili. What’s even better is the fact that there’s tons of great designs out there for free. However if you intend to turn into a mighty blogger you might look already now look into a paid theme. Woothemes and Themeforest has some sweet themes for any kind of business.

Personally however I prefer the Thesis theme by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger and Chris Pearson. The sweet thing with Thesis is that it can be customized into infinity with hooks and customized functionality. Another advantage with Thesis is the fact that it’s more or less perfectly prepared for Google and other search engines. Once you’ve decided on a theme – upload it with a FTP software of your choice and ad your own logo and style to it. Personally I use CSS Edit to tweak the style sheets but any old CSS tool will do.

4. Set up your WordPress blog right

Once you’ve set up your blog you can login to your domainname.com/wp-admin with your login information. Take some time to get acquainted to the left menu. Later when you start to write you will use the Post menu to start blogging. Of course you can set up a couple of pages too but the actual blogging will be done by adding posts.

5. Change the link structure

Setting the right permalink is one step closer to success

You don’t want to use the original set up in WordPress when you’re going live. This will decrease the Google traffic. Instead head into the menu settings called Permalinks found under ‘Settings’ and change the permalink structure from http://www.ronnestam.com/?p=123 to /%postname%/ . There are some different opinions out there which structure is the right one. But I’ve found over time that most people tend to recommend this one.

6. Make sure your blog pings the right blog search engines and portals

Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Swedish Knuff and a lot more sites out there are listing and indexing blogs. WordPress has got this sweet functionality that lets you automatically update these blogging portals once you’ve posted something new. There’s of course different ideas on how to do this. But I’ve decided to share my personal PING information here.

Just ad the ‘code’ below to start updating search engines etc

Copy this information below and enter it into your Update Services option that you’ll find under Settings/Writing

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://nyligen.se/ping/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Copy the ‘code’ above and paste it into the bottom field under the section Writing in settings. This way you’ll make sure your content is visible to the important search engines online.

7. Choose your title wisely

You’re almost done configuring the settings. The last thing you might wanna do is setting up the title of your blog. You’ll find that under General Settings.

Choose this one carefully as you shouldn’t change this one later. Once you’ve earned some page rank and you’re up to speed you don’t wanna make Google angry by messing with this one since it actually sits on ever single post from now on.

8. Download and install the following WordPress plugins

Find and learn how to use an FTP software. That’s important for anyone who wants to keep a website updated. For bloggers it’s essential since WordPress plugins and themes are the corner stones of a good blog. Others have written great stuff how to choose the right FTP for PC or Mac so I’ll leave that part to them.

The essential plugins that I think you need to install for your blog however – that I’ll share here. All your other needs can probably be catered for if you search for WP plugin and whatever you want either on Google or in the WordPress plugin library. Hell, you can even turn your blog into an E-commerce with the right setup.

These are the WordPress plugins I think you should make sure to start with:

Aksimet
Activate the Aksimet plugin to take care of SEO spammers, bots and trolls. No need to download this one – it’s inside WordPress and waiting for you!

Disqus or Intensedebate

The Disqus plugin let’s people join the conversation

Install a commenting system that treat your conversation right. This is what Disqus and Intensedebate does. On this blog I’ve had Disqus making sure visitors can interact the way the want. Lately however I’ve grown more fond of Intesedebate and only weeks ago I activated that on my Whisky blog in order to try it out. I think maybe I’ll switch on this blog too soon. One advantage with one of these plugins over how WordPress treats comments is the fact that you gain a small social spread over other networks. The biggest advantage however is that people can choose to login and comment with Facebook connect, OpenID, Twitter accounts and personal Disqus or Intense Debate accounts.

WP Super Cache
You’ll do fine without this plugin until the day you do something really really right. Let’s say for example that you end up on the first page of Digg.com, the online social newspaper, then tens of thousands people will swarm your blog for blood (your post that is) and only seconds later your server will crash. WP Super Cache takes care of this and turns every page in to static html pages that lets people ride rodeo over that blog of yours without falling off. You need WP Super Cache.

The All In One SEO Pack or the HeadSpace 2 SEO plugin
Same here. If you’ve gotten Thesis as your theme then move on to the next bullet. If not this plugin is essential. SEO is an art form many people have yet to master. But using the All In One SEO plugin will at least give you the right tools. [updated] Simon Sundén suggested I should ad the HeadSpace2 plugin as an alternative (in his mind better). So now I’ve done that. Thanks Simon!

Tweetmeme Retweet Button
The Tweetmeme retweet plugin is what places a small Tweet This button along every blog post. Just like the green little thing I’ve got on top of this post (press that one please). Sometimes you’ll write posts that people love. Then Tweeting that post is the fastest and simplest way for them to show their love. Other people that might land on your post will be more eager to read through your post if it has been tweeted many times. It’s like a quality mark. Make sure you’ve got an own Twitter account to go with this one since it will earn you followers over time if it’s your ID that is being retweeted.

WP FollowMe

By using the WP Follow Me plugin you’ll get a nice little bird watching over your blog
Make it easy for people to follow you on Twitter. This plugin places a badge to the right (or left if you want) on your blog that makes following you easy.

SexyBookmarks
In the bottom of every post on my blog you can see a set of buttons that lets you share my blog posts easily over your personally preferred social network.

I’ve decided to go with the plugin Sexy Bookmarks. I like the functionality and the tone of voice. However before I started using this one I had the plugin Share This taking care of business and it did a good job to so I’ll give that one a shout too.

PingPressFM
Allows you to spread your wonderful blog to 10+ social networks via Ping.fm.

Google XML Sitemaps
In order for Google to be able to list your blog the right way you should install this plugin. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

WP DB Backup
Last but not least. If you keep on writing every week or maybe even every day you’ll sooner than later end up with some kick as quality inside your database. WordPress usually don’t break down but we all know of Mr Murphy. That’s why you need to perform a back up every now and then. Don’t rely on your hosting service, even these guys mess up (trust me I’ve been through it a couple of times) that’s why this is best done with WP DB Backup. Then make sure you got Dropbox or something to place your personal backup in the cloud since we all know Mr Murphy will probably put your computer on fire otherwise.

Redirection
Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors with this little plug.

WP Cforms
Make sure you don’t write that email of yours as it spells out since that will only award you with tons of spam. Instead write something like: nameATdomainDOTcom. Most people will get that. Also remember to inform people about your social presence on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages (don’t use Groups), Skype, Slideshare, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and more. It’s also a good thing is always to post an extra page where you use the plugin WP Cforms to let people get in touch with you through a classical form. Personally I’ve also written my phone number on that contact page. Talking to people is after all very nice!

9. Time to start writing that blog post of yours?

I wont tell you what, how and why to write something. Other people have given great guidelines on that before me, both on style and SEO parameters. My only advice would be – find your own voice. Writing like other people will never get you anywhere.

However, once you’ve written that post of yours remember a few things:

Tag your content with relevant keywords.
Keywords will serve both Google and your readers with information. On top of this there’s some sweet tag clouds you can use to make people crawl your blog for more.

Ad the post not only to one category but to many.
By creating a set of categories that is relevant to your blog (not more than 15 though) you’ll help your readers to find the right posts later when your blog is filled with wisdom.

Remember to make use of that added SEO functionality
You’ve got a set of tools that came along with Thesis or The All In Once SEO Plugin. Use them! This means writing a specific header for Google. One that will earn you more readers (hopefully). Don’t worry – it won’t show up in your post.

Edit the URL of the blog post.
Make sure it’s relevant, SEO optimized and not to long.

Preview before posting!

Post at a good time of day.
I’ve written a longer post on the Social Viral Spiral that covers this subject.

10. Spread the love

Pick a series of social networks where you spread that love of yours further. Facebook and Twitter being the obvious ones. But don’t forget about all the rest. Think about what your content is all about and where people might be interested to read it – seed it there!

On top of this you should also remember to change the RSS feed into something like Feedburner for example. It gives you more control over it and you’ll be able to track your engagement.

I know tons of people link like crazy to other blogs in order to get higher rankings on different blogging portals. Personally I hate this. You should of course link to content that is of great importance to your blog. But linking to tons of blog posts only to gain traffic – that’s spam according to me.

11. How do you know your blog is doing good?

People tend to set up blogs and then they’re tracking the stats while wondering why nothing happens. Here’s a few pointers that might help you on the path to blogging heaven.

Comments and trackbacks
Once you’ve pressed publish your post is out there. This means it’s all out there. The entire world can now interact with you. Since you’ve opened up for comments (blogs are all about conversation) you’ll have to be prepared to actually respond to what people are saying about your brand. Trackbacks will also show you other blogs and sites linking to your content. Make sure you follow them to interact and praise fans or defend your standpoint.

Statistics
Ever blog should have a Google analytics account set up. That’s sort of hygiene. It will teach you a lot about your online presences and turn you into a professional blogger.

However for daily and even hourly stat reads I’m using Mint. It’s not free but at a low cost you’re getting a quick overview of where people are coming from and what they’re engaging. Seeing that traffic build up only minutes after a blog post turns you on – I promise. That’s the energy you need to keep on writing.

Is your content engaging?
Personally I’ve set up a Postrank analytics account that gives me a good idea of whats actually happening after I press that publish button. Postrank is a tool that measures the online engagement with your content. No engagement = not a good post (or at least no one else thinks so) Lots of engagement = you did something right.

Track your brand online!
Last but not least – remember to track your brand online in order to engage if people pick up and comment/debate that post of yours. I’ve written that guide on how monitor your brand online before.

Now it’s all up to you – I’m looking forward to reading your posts!

3 Social Media Models That Will Guide Your Brand Into The Conversation Landscape

ronnestam — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:26:17 +0000

Think social media and conversational marketing might be the next train to heaven for your brand but don’t know where to board? Well, here’s three social media marketing models that will make sure you’ll find your station.

If you wanna get moving into the social country of love where conversation rules you’ve gotta get one thing straight. Valuable content is king. Buying a loudspeaker and start tweeting wont get you anywhere. Swedish brands like Comhem and Boxer have effectively proven that just twittering the 140 sign language doesn’t earn you any followers. Every social network will provide you with it’s own possibilities and traps. A well executed strategy is a must or you’ll end up in a minefield.

Here are 3 models by Johan Ronnestam that will guide your brand towards a successful social media strategy.

3 Models That Will Guide You Into The Social Media Landscape

The Social Staircase

The Social Staircase is a model that focus on the overall process. It’s the stuff that pays for your ticket to love.
The Social Tool Matrix

Now you know what kind of presence your business needs. Now it’s time to map the tools to make sure you know what to keep your mouth shut, when to speak and when to listen.
The Social Viral Spiral

This is about speed. Spread that love I’m talking about below. But make sure you do it with finesse and timing. Create a couple of Social Viral Spirals and you’re ready to make out!

How your brand makes good use these three models is entirely up to you. When I’m working with brands within this area I off course spend quite a lot of energy and time on getting it right. But hopefully it will be of value for you without my help. Here we go:

1. Get your strategy right with the Social Staircase

The Social Staircase consists out of 4 steps that guides your brand into the conversation landscape called Social Media

I have outlined 4 steps that make up the Social Staircase. These are the ones I’d suggest you’d use too when you wanna move into the social room.

Step 1 -Strategy
Establish a strategy that supports your business. Whatever you do in life you should have a strategy in place that supports your business. In other words this means you should strive to achieve your vision, your goals and making sure you don’t loose money while doing it. This should be your approach to social media initiatives too.You should of course be prepared to risk money since it’s still an early adoption initiative. But still you should strive to measure results and revenues. Sooner or later your boss will ask you what he’s paying for and then that answer should be well prepared.

Step 2 – Presence
The mother of all conversions is content. Think about it – when you’re at a party, how long do you think your conversation would last if you didn’t provide any true value. Bullshit or merely staying quiet wont earn you any new friends. Of course some people you’ve known since way back will stay put but sooner or later even them will stop inviting you to their party.

I haven’t bothered to create any models for this step. It’s a simple rule. Think about you and your business. What value can you provide people with and in what format? Blogs, Video, Photos, Podcasts, Livestreams, Advisory, Games, Knowledge etc. Based on your strategy in step 1 – what kind of value can you provide your target group and potential fans with? Cause that should always be your goal – turning people into fans! If you’ve done your homework this should work like a charm.

If you’re looking for inspirations. Head over to the Social Media Wiki.
Step 3 – Tools
Ok. So know you know that kind of presence you’re after. Then it’s time to gear up. Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, WordPress, LinkedIn, Scribd, Google Buzz might be the obvious ones. But dig deeper – there’s something for everyone out there and you should consider where your content will do the boogaloo at it’s best!Tools defined? Then move on and figure out when to run with it and when to slow down. Move over to the conversation step, create a set of social viral spirals and get down to business.

Step 4 – Conversation
Listen. Talk back. Listen. Talk back. Listen. Talk…This is what a conversation is all about. We could actually call it interactivity. You create valuable content and then once you let it out in the open – listen and learn how to fine tune those spirals of yours.

(I’ve posted stuff before on the listening part and so have others – that’s of course crucial in this phase. Since neither me or them have posted a tip on Silverbakk then here it is.)

You should avoid creating to many spirals. They will only confuse you. But on the other hand if you got to few you might not hit the right spots. After all, segmentation has been around for ages and it’s not for the fun of it. Segmenting who and how to target your audience is essential.

Let’s move on and a have a look at the Social Tool Matrix.

2. What content goes where – Outline your tactical tools with a Social Tool Matrix

It’s all about structure, planning, organization and control (once you have something to say)

Don’t pick any tool out there for the fun of it and definitely don’t let one person in your organization handle them all. Every tool has it’s own advantages and should be treated that way.

Once you’ve passed the strategy and presence step in the Social Staircase it’s time to map which tools can do the work for you. It’s now time to create a Social Tool Matrix.

The Social Tool Matrix basically makes sure you and your organization analyze and choose a set of social tools that can deliver on strategy. While you’re entering stuff into the matrix you’ll be forced to answer the following questions:

What tools shall we use to fulfill our strategy?
Choose your tools carefully. Just because your competitor is riding the wave over at Facebook doesn’t mean you should. Look back at the social staircase. What strategy and what presence should you support?
Why should we use this tool?
Publish, interact, spread, buzz, images, video etc. Remember that sometimes you’ll be better off with more than one tool doing the same thing. Video for example. YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo are all about video but have different advantages.
Who should be responsible for the updates?
Don’t drop the entire load on top of a webmaster. Make sure your social marketing is spread out horizontally on your organization. The right person for the job huh?
What’s the naming / domain conventions?
I use ‘ronnestam’ everywhere I can. What’s your strategy? Think before you act and then keep track of it!
When can we say we’re successful?
This is a hard one. People that comment your blog posts. Diggs. Linkups. Facebook recommendations. Re-tweets. SEO effects. Actual sales. You pick your own index but make sure to pick a couple. Both qualitative and quantitative cause they’re both important.
Can we measure the return of investment (ROI)
If success was hard this is pretty darn impossible when it comes to social media. Some of you might say it’s not. But isolation of social media effects are hard. One of the few examples I know of is Dells Twitter outlet and that’s pretty unique.
What social spiral shall we use (this will be defined in the next stage)
You’re not here yet. But once you get to the next stage of this post. That’s when you decide on the social spirals. Every time you activate a tool. Remember what and what good it does. The Social Spirals will lead the way!
And whatever more you think should go into the matrix.
Last but not least. This post is inspirational – not an actual guide. You have to do your homework and your business might need a lot more inside the matrix than my actual example. Get it right and you shall succeed!

Once you got the social matrix mapped you and everyone in your organization is prepared to start the conversation it’s time for one last thing – the Social Viral Spirals.

3. Get viral with the Social Viral Spiral

Choose your tools wisely and start a conversation

Many of you have of course seen Brian Solis Social Conversation Prism.I love it too but it’s more of a wonderful image that maps all the possibilities with the social web than help for brands who are trying to figure out what to do and where to do it. Of course you can do everything and in some cases maybe you should. But what you really need once you’ve got an idea what you can do is a tactical tool.

I’ve created the The Social Viral Spiral for exactly that purpose. Use Brian Solis Prism and then translate the tools and services you need and create your own set of Social Flowers depending on what you are trying to achieve.

What the Social Spiral does is basically define where, what, how and when you should seed that content of yours into the social web. Triggering conversations online must start somewhere and then continue over a series of social networks and tools depending on what your purpose is. Marketing campaigns are in need of a lightning speed spread. Corporate information might not need that spread at all but still needs to go social due to SEO reasons for example.

A brand or company can have as many spirals as they want but I personally think you should aim for 3 or 4 depending on what kind of product and services your brand produce. The purpose of these spirals differ depending on a set of factors and you will probably have to adjust them over time.

Once you’ve got an idea on what kind of content and activities should be matched with a certain spiral you will surely have better chances in succeeding and most importantly you will have moved the knowledge about conversation from a specific employee to your organization!

Things that affect the intensity/speed of your spirals.

Type of content
Timezones
Time of actual publishing
Internet behavioral patterns
Where did you act the last time
Number of followers on Twitter
Number of friends in social networks
Amount of social networks where you intend to interact
How unique is the content you intend to promote
What brand do you represent?
Purpose – marketing, operations, news, etc…

Got that wired? Good. Then it’s all about creating that content and spin the wheel.

Right now you might have tons of open questions about this post OR it seems perfectly clear. I really don’t care which since I’ve gotta get this thing published before it consumes me.

Best of luck!

Social Media And Our Beloved Europe? The Truth Or At Least Part Of It.

ronnestam — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:02:24 +0000

Students over at the Berghs School of Communication asked for some advice on research about social networking behaviours in Europe.

As I gathered my links and sources from my Delicious account I ran into this wonderful presentation below by Tom Smith from Trendstream. The presentation was given by Tom to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase, sharing insights from Wave 1 of the Global Web Index. It’s well composed and extremely valuable if you’re into branding, communication, advertising, business development and social media. So I thought I should share it with you too!

Tom lists three big trends that will impact your brand in 2010 based on Social Media involvement across Europe.

The passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one
We increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network
Digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones

So there you go. Nothing to blame on now. Just get going!

A Book, MashUp, PDF or Whatever You Wanna Call It By Johan Ronnestam

ronnestam — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:27:37 +0000

I’ve always wanted to write a book. This is NOT it!
So far this year my blog have had more than 115 000 unique visitors and just over 240 000 visits. I’ve written more than 500 blog posts covering everything from design, gadgets, trends, technology, advertising, innovations, personal things, branding and more.

About 28% of the visitors during this last year have ended up reading a post that was tagged with branding. That’s probably not a coincidence since besides trends and creativity I’d say branding is the subject that is the most dearest to me.

When I’ve been looking deeper down into the stats I’ve seen that many of you visitors haven’t really explored my blog beyond the posts on the first page or the actual post you came to read. This is why I thought it made sense to gather them all like this – ‘Top 10 Blog Posts on Future Branding and Communication From Ronnestam.com’ - My first book.

A Book, MashUp, PDF or Whatever You Wanna Call It By Johan Ronnestam

Even though this isn’t actually what I would call a book it’s been the perfect opportunity for me to experiment with the production process of a book. I’ve put a big block in my calendar covering January, February and March and if everything goes right I will present my ‘real’ book sometime in April or May next year. It will be a book on how to integrate future communication with product and service development. One things for sure – I’m doing it on my own. But for now you have to do with this first book, mashup, pdf or whatever you wanna call it.

4 Ways to get your hands on Top 10 Blog Posts on Future Branding and Communication From Ronnestam.com With Love

1. Buy a signed copy of the printed book – 39€ including shipping world wide.

I’ve printed 150 books in Denmark at Norhaven. Out of those 150 I’m giving 50 signed copies away to the first 50 Twitter retweets of this post (if you live outside Sweden you have to pay for the shipping). If you wanna get your hand on one of the other 100 signed ones you either hope to get one at one of my speaking occasions during 2010 or you contact me to buy one for €39 including shipping costs.

2. Download the PDF for free (pay by linking or tweeting this blog post)

Here’s the PDF if you wanna download it and read it off your screen (lower resolution due to file size) or maybe print it yourselves. Like everything else on my blog it’s licensed under my Creative Commons license.

3. Read it on Slideshare or Scribd

Head over to Slideshare or Scribd, it’s your choice. But remember to spread the love and tweet the book.

View more documents from Johan Ronnestam.

4. Read each and every blog post here at Ronnestam.com

This is of course the simplest and fastest way. Get going below and if you like it tweet it!

Blog Post 1 – { Originally Posted October 7, 2009 }
All Your Brands Are Belong To Us

Blog Post 2 – { Originally Posted October 7, 2009 }
If you wanna get some brand love tomorrow you better get into the conversation today

Blog Post 3 – { Originally Posted September 26, 2009 }
Dear CEO’s, Board Members and Top Management – what’s more important? Wine or Change?

Blog Post 4 – { Originally Posted February 18, 2009 }
Let’s start a revolution – get of the boat and build yourselves a new brand transportation system.

Blog Post 5 – { Originally Posted February 1, 2009 }
Controlling your brand with creative excellence

Blog Post 6 – { Originally Posted August 25, 2009 }
Seduce us or excuse us – 11 ways to bring your brand up to date

Blog Post 7 – { Originally Posted January 2, 2009 }
Get your clown suit ready if you wanna reach out to consumers in 2009

Blog Post 8 – { Originally Posted March 4, 2009 }
WWRD – 36 things Ronnestam would do differently if he had control of brand that delivered broadband, telecom and television services

Blog Post 9 – { Originally Posted September 8, 2009 }
Why SAAB, Volvo, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Peugeot, AUDI, Chevrolet, Buick and the rest of the car industry should the adopt the iPhone model and develop the InCar OS

Blog Post 10 – { Originally Posted December 29, 2008 }
Brand and communication predictions for ?2009 by Johan Ronnestam

ps. At the moment I’m trying hard to finalise my predictions for 2010. Keep a look out for that.

Happy New Year!

Seduce us or excuse us – 11 ways to bring your brand up to date

ronnestam — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:41:59 +0000

We’re fed up with boring old school advertising. We don’t want your information and rational explanations. We wanna dance, laugh, feel and love. We do not want be treated like idiots!

James Dean knew how to seduce people while looking pretty darn boring. But face it. He’s dead and would be pretty out of date now!

Information is all over us. We’re accessing it everywhere faster than ever. The more shit we get our hands on the less we wanna mess with, so you’ve gotta stand out.

Future brands don’t buy media they create brand dramas that build value and generate SEO equity – only then will you reach your future friends (aka. target group). Future brands tell stories.Future brands rely on drama and constant innovation – totally integrated.

Here are eleven bullets of love that you can load that brand gun of yours with: (or a crash course in modern branding)

1. Social currency

As social networks spread all over the world the opportunity to spread your brand globally is bigger than ever. What you’ve gotta do is get your head around your own brand values and think hard…think harder than ever before…what – can – you – give – to – me – that – builds – ME – among my peers. Yes. You heard right. You’ve gotta turn your mind around. It’s not about you winning. It’s not about you getting things. Give and you shall recieve. After all, we’re only humans deriving straight from a slimy fish or something. We only wanna fit in. And your brand can help us do that.

2. Creative excellence

People around the world are savvy. We’re accessing information from all around the world on the fly. We’re evaluating it on the fly. There’s no room for flaws. Get your business right when it comes to design, ideas and creativity. Only then will we support you! If you need some advice – talk to Mr Steve Jobs.

3. Value

You might trick us into falling in love with you. But in order for us to stay married you’ve gotta give us value for our money. A well known brand had a problem with too many calls to their call center. People complained about their products. This had led to a meeting where the management team were discussing how to develop the call center so that they could serve more people. A friend of mine were in the room and said “Why don’t you make your products better instead” – bang on target. Tomorrow there’s no room for errors. You’ll end up in price comparison engines, your page rank will drop or at least be associated with the wrong things, you’ll have protest groups on Facebook etc. Provide us with a true value and we’ll stay in love.

4. Open source

If you’re looking to race against the best you’ve gotta drop your pit stop times. With this blurry talk I mean – don’t get stuck in a big ass back-end system that won’t let you change things fast and cheap. Go open source as soon as possible. Drop everything else and run for it!

5. Know your target audience better than you know your mother in law

We’re not runners anymore. We’re not car lovers any more. We’re not mac fans any more. We’re not Nike lovers. We’re not adidas lovers. We’re everything! We want to be the best in everything we do. We don’t settle for less.

6. Join the conversation

Your brand is out there – everywhere. And you’ve gotta do your best to be part of it. Did you hear that – be part of your own brand. I mean it.

The blue dot is your brand!

Your brand is no longer built primarily on what you tell people about it. It’s built upon what other people say about it. Given that’s a truth I think it’s time for you to step into the crowd and start listening.
Note – start listening!

7. Linkonomy

Page rank – the one formula you should learn in school

This one is simple. As long as Google rules the empire – make sure people link to your site, your content and your domain. There’s no other way you’ll be seen. Ah…you probably have to link to them too

[updated]

@deeped commented that page rank is not all that simple to explain to companies. That’s not really my intention. But it’s a great point though. The guys over at SEOmoz, the best site on SEO, posts a great piece called Search Engine Ranking every two years. The survey includes the Top 5 Ranking Factors, the Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors, the Top 5 Most Contentious Factors and the Overall Ranking Algorithm. It’s a must read.

This year the Top 5 Ranking Factors were:

Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

73% very high importance
External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)

71% very high importance
Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)

67% very high importance
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

66% very high importance
Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

66% very high importance

Head over to SEOmoz to read the full survey.

[end of update]

8. Usability

Curiosity used to make us ask for directions but not anymore. No matter if we’re talking online usability or how to direct people in a subway – lead us to the good shit now! Loading times no! Confusion no! Simplicity yes! Hospitality yes!

9. Kick Lucifer out of the basement and trade your media money for content

If you lead a large brand you probably have one budget in your safe. Then a couple of hundred meters down in hell you’ve got a big bag of media budgets waiting to be blown up. Ever thought about what that money can do for your brand online if you build things by the book (seo book that is)? Cut your media money by half and move that half over to the equity side of your marketing mix – online content. Built right, written right and distributed over the right social networks it will do ten times more for your brand than any 30 second commercial will ever do.

10. Make us laugh

Is there anything better than a refreshing laughter? It’s a trip. It’s a drug. It makes us fall in love. Never ever forget that. If you’re a CEO or a Marketing Director representing a brand that creates boring, no good, sleep ‘pilling’, price fighting commercials. Report yourselves to the next mission to Mars – cause we don’t want you on our beautiful planet!

11. Finally drop the following word from your vocabulary:

Control. You don’t need it and you can’t have it.

See you out there!

If you wanna get some brand love tomorrow you better get into the conversation today

ronnestam — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:45:51 +0000

Branding today is about creating a brand platform, then dramatize it and start screaming to people – COME ON AND BUY MY PRODUCT. IT’S GREAT. Of course in a slightly creative and modest manner than that. But it very often about traditional advertising in classic media channels.

Branding of tomorrow is about knowing who you are, what your brand stands for and start experimenting with innovation, partnerships, entertainment and above all involving your potential audience as a part of your product development. And note – call them audience, cause the will pay to stay but leave if they don’t like the show.

It’s all about constantly innovating your brand and then making sure you know what people think of your work. Do they like it? Do they hate it. What do they miss, what would they do differently. Speak to them. Learn their language. Once you think you know the formula to success – erase your brain and start all over again. We do not want repetition from brands that lead we want the new stuff, the shit that makes us go wow!

The first step to keeping on top of your game is getting into the conversation. There’s no need to wait even if people aren’t talking about your brand just yet. Get in there and learn!

First step – automize your intelligence information
The key to becoming successful when becoming a brand conversationist is to know…yep, you guessed it, where people who talk about your brand are hanging. Put your ears to the rail and listen for. And remeber that most of these things you can output as a RSS feed into Google Reader or Netvibes. Built a dashboard!

Google alerts
Twingly blogsearch
Twingly microblog search
Get Satisfaction
Co-comment, Backtype, Intense debate
Google analytics
Have a mint
More statistics…you can never get to much!

The 59 services you can currently keep track of using Friendfeed.

Get into the discussion
Once you know where people are discussing your products, your brand or anything else related to your mission (cause you have one of those huh). These are the tools you should get accompanied with.

Twitter & tweetdeck
Bloggy
Brightkite
Jaiku (still not dead)
Messenger
Friendfeed
Co-comment, Backtype, Intense debate
And don’t forget to get into blogs and comment on subjects relevant to you!

Spread your digital presence
Getting into the conversation is not only about spying on others and then going after the buzz. Your digital presence – website, campaigns, digital events, groups…everything has to go beyond their own sphere and servers. In order to do this you’ve gotta start spreading your information socially. There’s tons of tools but a first must have are these.

The god of spreading content – SEO (Note, not paid search)
Ping.fm
RPC all content that you write to leading aggregators and mashups on your local market.
Send images to leading photo sites like Flickr and Picasa
Send videos to leading Video sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo and others (See earlier post on this)
Socially share things with Share This
Connect your RSS feeds to Twitter, Jaiku, Bloggy, Friendfeed and other social plattforms.
Constantly create playlists that are killer in your office and spread them on Last.FM and Spotify
Post book marks on Delicious
Pixelpipe
Tarpipe
Feedburner
Widgets
Facebook groups (and others)
Wikipedia if possible

And more and more and more and more. This goes on forever. But you’ve gotta be everywhere!

Last but not least! Create advertising and communication that matters to people. We want to have fun – as I said earlier this year. You’ve gotta be a clown!

Ok, that’s it for now. I’m aware that I’ve left a couple of question marks in the heads of you guys who don’t know what RPC, RSS etc is. But I don’t have the time to elaborate on that now. I’ll get back to it soon

Wondering how to get a viral spread of that great video of yours?

ronnestam — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:05:35 +0000

There’s a lot of talk about viral marketing through video. But given that you have produced something worth seeing, how do you actually get it on the run?

Well, it’s not necessarily that easy and the biggest single mistake brands do is they believe a good little piece will take off by it self. Is that the case? Of course not. You gotta give that moving beast of yours more than a push, you’ve gotta strap some rockets to each and every frame and hope for a safe launch into outer space.

Spreading video online is not about putting it on YouTube. You’ve gotta see the whole web and each and every site’s own potential.

Björn Falkevik, professional new media producer is one of the most competent consultants there is when it comes to new media publishing. He is sharing this great process map of video spread on Flickr and his blog. Unfortunately it’s in Swedish but I think you’ll get the picture anyway.

Björn Falkeviks social video publishing (Swedish)

Apart from spreading it SEO is important. ~~Scott Willoughby~~Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz.org clears more questions in this short video.

Finally. Use tools like Tube Mogul to administrate the spreading of the content. And you might wanna consider using agencies like Unruly Media to spread it. If you end up pushing something out there Viralvideoshart compiled by Unruly brings some intelligence to why and where you’re getting spread.

Nothing comes for free but learning the tricks of the trade keeps you ahead of the competition!

Brand and communication predictions for 2009 by Johan Ronnestam

ronnestam — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:47:10 +0000

Last year, inspired by ReadWriteWeb I stuck my nose out and tried to predict what 2008 would bring us in terms of trends, technology, communication and ideas. About 70% of my thoughts were confirmed but I of course missed out on some too.

2008 is coming to an end and it’s time for me to let that poor nose of mine feel the heat again. 2009 is harder to predict than ever since we have a free falling economy in the world at the moment. How will smaller budgets effect advertising, investments in technology, self confidence and personal evolvement? Hell if I knew, but here are some ideas.

Here are 9 things/trends I believe you should look out for and possibly follow in 2009

1. Technology becomes a commodity and ideas prosper from it
Open Source in combination with broadband access in low cost producing countries will make companies move their technology projects outside their local markets. Companies that earn money from building content management, blogs, communities and other common systems have to move their competence from production towards ideas. Cause after all, who will pay €100 000 for a content management system when you can get Typo3, Magento, WordPress, Pligg, Joomla, Drupal and other excellent systems for free. On top of that, have people in India bidding for it and you’ll end up paying $600 instead of $60 000 for the implementation of it.

Making it do the right thing and look right, that’s something we wont oursource just yet. So, bet on ideas and brains.

2. In 2009 print and outdoor advertising grow stronger while TV continues to die.
Analysts, brands and media agencies all say people move money from traditional advertising to digital. Personally I believe glossy magazines and outdoor locations close to standing still environments (bus-stops, squares, subways etc) will grow. These are locations where people cannot leave.

Solutions however will be far more customized than today and we’ll focus on fewer but better placements.

3. Communication Capitalism is born in 2009
We’ll see more and more brands moving from the strategy of putting it all on one card to campaign experimentation.
More brands than ever will in 2009 dare to loose control of their communication and try multiple campaigns beside each other. The ones that deliver on target will be feeded more money, the ones that doesn’t deliver are killed and new ones are born. Exactly like you would treat your stock portfolio – don’t put everything on one card.

In 2008 I started to call this strategy Communication Capitalism and it’s time for you to do that too cause in 2009 it’ll kick off.

4. Online advertising suffers from lack of competence and will slow down in 2009 for the first time in years
Lots of brands have now tried different strategies for online advertising. While doing so they’ve gotten better at measuring their campaigns and the results doesn’t meet expectations. Flash campaigns with full screen video doesn’t give shit. Banners keep on loosing click rate. RSS feeds are great but how do you place advertising that people see inside it? Facebook advertising didn’t deliver. Adwords is kinda of nice but where’s the branding?

On top of this the media companies doesn’t know jack shit about what’s going on. The digital agencies produce fantastic campaigns but there’s not enough senior employees to choose communication over cool technologies. Over at the brand side the competence on digital media is in generally low and the marketing directors has to choose a communication partner. Today that partner is the traditional advertising agency mostly because of their senior employees. The problem here is that they don’t understand the digital medium – and that’s a disaster for the brands and their communication efforts.

To sum of the problem.

There’s just not enough senior people in the world that really understand how to combine traditional and digital communication.
This means agencies, brands and media advisors continue to suggest the wrong things.

Result: Brands will pull out of online activities due to it.

5. SEO / SEM freelancers organize themselves
If you’re looking for people that truly understands SEO/SEM marketing you choice shouldn’t be a media agency or any other company for that sake. Most people out there that truly understands SEO/SEM are individuals or very small companies. The problem however for big brands is that these individuals or companies cannot cater for their needs, their basically too small.

In order for SEO/SEM to kick off we really need to see some sort of network that can bring all these great brains together but still let them run their own companies. Media companies are all about taking over everything. These SEO/SEM newcomers are all about networking and sharing so sooner or later something like this should come.

6. Apple launches the iPhone Pro and starts selling iPhone and rate plans in iTunes.
After winning the hearts of millions around the world it’s time for Apple to launch the second generation iPhones and I believe it’ll be a Pro version of the iPhone.

We’ll see better memory capacity, more space, better keyboard, maybe even a bigger flip out screen of some kind. On top of this they’ll use the magic bullet gained by cooperating with different operators in every country world wide. They’ve more or less gotten them all to pay for the iTunes implementation and now the exclusive deals are starting to run out. Haha says Apple as they will start selling iPhones in computer shops and sell the rate plans online.

(Rumors say that Apple will launch the iPhone Nano but I just thought it was boring to go with that one)

(Update: While I was writing this part, rumors started to spread about an iPhone Pro as well)

7. Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect continue to grow but Friendfeed Friends might be the winner in 2009
During the later part of 2008 we’ve seen how Facebook and Google has moved their positions forward to grab a larger part of the social networking cake. In the background however lurks Friendfeed. It’s quickly growing and the people that use Facebook Connect of Google Friend Connect would probably welcome a social connector from someone else than the big ones and use that one more. Friendfeed could and will be that third party.

Why not call it Friendfeed Friends?

8. Branding is being reevaluated in 2009
Digital communication is totally revamping the landscape of telling people about your brand. The base of brand strategies will remain the same but the tactical part of it – treatment of logotypes, typefaces, colors, graphical guidelines and who officially represent a brand will change.

In 2009 we’ll se more brand than ever that let their corporate guidelines loose and start experimenting. As more and more brand activities get digitized brands will learn that it’s not about the graphical guidelines but instead about keeping the conversation alive.

In 2009 branding becomes being a personality and personalities change constantly but their heart and spine stay the same. You might say that this is not something new but until now most brands believe their brand manual is the guide to heaven when it’s actually the guide to hell. In 2009 this old fashioned way of communicating your brand will change.

9. Mashups grow up and conquer the corporate world.
This year we’ve seen how a lot of sites turned into mashups.

A mashup is about creating one place where visitors can view content from sources like YouTube, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Facebook and much more.

Until now most of the good mashup sites has been personal websites or web 2.0 companies. In 2009 we’ll see how large brands like Nike, Diesel, adidas, Apple, Coca Cola, Disney, GM, Puma, Ikea, Samsung, Absolut and more will turn their websites into mashups.

All kind of brands will see the benefit of not hosting your videos inhouse but instead creating channels on multimple social video platforms. Your images will be better spread if placed on Flickr. That corporate blog of yours works better if it’s running on WordPress and mashed into your and your partners websites. Sites like Yahoo Pipes and Tarpipe will do wonders for the social spread and suddenly you find your brand site being turned into a true web 2.0 entity.

So, there we are. Nothing else to do this year now but wishing you all a happy new year. May 2009 be as interesting as this year has been.

See you next year – Johan Ronnestam