ionadas local Blog

Note: This position has been filled, although the blog post will remain here for historical purposes.

A Client of ionadas local is looking for a Social Media Specialist. This is a part-time position expected to require approximately ten hours per week, although additional hours are likely needed the first few weeks. This position is ideal for a current student looking for real-world experience in using social media commercially. It also might be of interest to a college graduate looking to break into the social media industry.

The Client is a producer and marketer of premium tequilas that is in the midst of a rollout to the U.S. market. The job is located in Austin, Texas. The Client is not interested in telecommuters at this time.

Initial screenings for the position will be provided by ionadas local staff. Final interviews and the hiring decision will be made by the Client. Training in the proper use of social media for commercial purposes will be provided to the one hired.

To apply for this position, please send your resume via email to info@ionadas.com with the Subject Line “Social Media Specialist, August 2009”. No calls please.

The job description is as follows:

Social Media Specialist

Do you tweet and use Facebook all day, everyday? Is building social community so influential to your life that you just can’t stop? Do you understand why blogging and feeds are important? This job seeks a highly a motivated individual with experience and fanatical passion for blogging, micro-blogging and community participation as well as leadership.

The Social Media Specialist is focused on implementing, managing and expanding the Client’s Social Media Strategy and advocating Client’s Products to external communities. He or she will identify influential opportunities and engage regularly with the Client’s audiences online. This person will work with the Client’s Marketing Assistant to ensure that all Web 2.0 communications match the Client’s established tone, philosophy and strategy. He or she will monitor discussions across a number of blogs, forums and Web 2.0 sites, engaging as the Client’s public representative when appropriate.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Coordinate social media outreach and viral campaigns to promote Client messages that increase awareness and/or drive traffic to the Client’s site.
• Establish and cultivate positive relationships with key/targeted bloggers.
• Develop and manage pages on popular consumer social networking sites as specified in the social media strategy; such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Engage in regular participation within the Client’s customer community, including the review of blogs, forums, wikis and other communities.
• Track and monitor the success of online initiatives (i.e. impressions, reach, influence and other metrics) and provide regular reports to the Client’s marketing team.
• Educate staff on the implementation and use of new technologies.
• Promote and evangelize social media activities internally.
• Serve as the eyes and ears of the Client’s brand as if his or her own reputation depended upon it.

Skills and Qualifications

• Strong familiarity and efficiency with Twitter, Facebook, and other such social media outlets.
• Upper classman or graduate. Business, communications, or liberal arts majors/degrees preferred.
• At least twenty-one years of age.
• Knowledge of/experience in the distilled spirits industry is desired.
• Fluency in both English and Spanish is a plus.
• Flexible communication skills. Strong editorial writer.
• Able to present needs and plans internally and has a distinct, personable voice for external engagement.
• Eagerness to exceed objectives and take on more responsibility than may be issued.
• Outstanding organizational skills and the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously while meeting tight deadlines.
• Proven ability to manage negative situations toward positive outcomes.
• Willingness to experiment and ability to deal with uncertainty.
• Professional attitude and demeanor.

Reuters reports that Yahoo is trying to sell its HotJobs and Small Business units. This is part of an effort by Yahoo to focus on its core businesses.

Yahoo Small Business primarily engages in hosting services including web hosting, domains, and merchant solutions. Frankly, Yahoo has never been a particular strong competitor in the hosting space, so this makes sense.

The division also includes sponsored search and display advertising. I would assume these offerings will be moved to a different division (at least from a sales perspective).

This division does not include Yahoo’s local business listing service.

I was asked yesterday how important ranking is within the Google 10-Pack, assuming you’re listed on the first page. I’d like to share my thoughts here.

Google has not published any statistics on the difference that one’s placement in the local rankings makes, but this is not surprising with a beta service. Local listings are one of the primary battlegrounds between Google, Yahoo, and Bing and they’re all keeping their data very close to the vest.

Still, there’s definitely an analog to traditional rankings. The higher up you are, the more traffic your bound to get, all else equal.

The analog is not perfect, however, as local and organic don’t lay out in the same way on the page. For instance, the tenth organic listing is at the very bottom of the page (e.g. below the fold), while the tenth local listing is still at the top of the page.

In addition, the presence of review data on listings can certainly skew the CTR to be different than the ordering might suggest. A listing with a top ranking but low average reviews might not get the clicks it would otherwise receive.

None the less, being first in the local listings is certainly much better than being tenth.

Over the weekend, the New York Times revealed that ESPN is continuing its push into local markets. On Monday, ESPN announced new sites for New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, which will join its test site for Chicago.

Marketing Pilgrim is calling this yet another nail in the coffin of newspapers, and saying it may impact local television stations as well.

Perhaps.

While ESPN certainly has a wide reach, can it truly provide the staff needed to cover a city, except in the biggest cities? I’m not so sure.

Certainly this is bad news for the Chicago Tribune, which is already on the edge, but I doubt the impact elsewhere will be that substantial, except for a handful of top markets.

It’s not clear that ESPN knows how to sell to the advertisers that would want to place on these sites. ESPN is used to working with national agencies and advertisers, not local businesses. ESPN’s current sales staff is unlikely to want to work such smaller deals, which come with smaller commissions. Will they hire a new sales department to work with such advertisers?

Or will they offer a self-serve model like Google AdWords? This is a large reason why Google succeeded with smaller advertisers.

This is certainly an interesting move by ESPN, but I think it’s too early to call it the end of local media and press.

Any small business creating a website needs to keep a number of things in mind. While each particular situation will require specific additions, this list is a great place to start.

1. Don’t forget to set goals for your website and define metrics for success.
If you don’t know what success for your website looks like, how will you know when you get there? Prior to building the site, you need to decide what you want the website to accomplish, and define your metrics for success or failure. This paints the picture of the destination, so that you have a reasonable chance of getting there.

2. Don’t build the entire site in Flash.
Designers love Flash because it gives them complete control over the look and feel of the website. Unfortunately, the search engines have a hard time indexing Flash sites. While they’ve gotten much better over the last year or two, I still have yet to see a Flash site ranking for even a moderately competitive keyword.

Flash elements within a page are perfect fine, however. Just don’t make the entire site out of Flash.

3. Don’t pretend that a MySpace page is a website.
If you’re building a website for your band, perhaps a MySpace page makes sense. But don’t pretend that creating a MySpace page (or FaceBook or LinkedIn page) is the same thing as creating a website.

Having a website that runs on its own domain gives a sense of legitimacy that every company should want.

4. Don’t have a redirect in front of the homepage.
I see this one a lot. Someone goes to:

http://www.xyzcorp.com/

…and the site redirects her to:

http://www.xyzcorp.com/homepage2.aspx

…(or some other page).

There are a number of problems with this. First, it’s another chance of confusing the search engines. If Google can’t index a page (or site), you can be darn sure it won’t return it for a search query.

You can use a search engine friendly redirect, but it’s not clear that all linking benefit passes through this.

People will tend to link to the domain of your site, not a page within the site. Make sure you’re receiving the entire link benefit you’ve earned by having the homepage load under the base domain.

In addition, it seems these redirects are often done because the page is in a temporary location. If you later move this page, you then lose the link juice coming into that page directly (or at least part of it if you redirect the old page to the new page).

Ideally, visitors coming into the homepage of your site should just get the domain, not the page designation.

5. Don’t use a splash page.
I’ve been fighting against these since at least 1995. A splash page is a page that comes up when you go to what should be the homepage of the site. It generally is a big graphic or flash animation that someone at the company thought was really cool. The splash page usually redirects to the true homepage after a few seconds, but sometimes you are forced to click on a link to get there.

Splash pages are a distraction and delay the visitor from getting to the content he really wants. And they’re also yet another chance to confuse the search engines.

6. Don’t have the site play music by default.
Many of us find websites with music (or any sound) to be annoying at best. Imagine if your prospective customer is surfing your website while at work, and suddenly the music from your site comes blasting out of her speakers.

Do you think you’re likely to get that order?

If you site must make noise, default to muted and allow the user to choose to turn it on.

7. Don’t put up a site that is just brochureware.
You’re site might be beautiful and have great ad copy, but if it is not transactional, how will you know if it succeeds? For an e-commerce company, this is easy. The sales on your site are the transactions.

For most everyone else, it’s a bit more difficult. The transaction on your site might be contact form. You might go a step further and give a valuable white paper in exchange for contact information. Or, your transaction might be an online demo.

A bricks and mortar store might have a coupon on its website for customers to print out and bring in.

The fact is that you need some sort of transaction on the site that can be measured. Ideally, you should also be able to ascribe some value to it, so that you can track the ROI of your marketing efforts.

8. Don’t neglect to install an analytics system.
If you don’t know what’s going on with your website, you can’t know what is succeeding and what is failing. At the very least, you should set up Google Analytics on your website. While it’s somewhat limited, it’s also free.

Alternatively, you could install one of the entry level analytics systems such as HitsLink. It’s quite a bit more powerful than Google Analytics, and starts around $50/month.

9. Don’t forget to proof read the copy.
Few things look more unprofessional than misspelled words and grammatical errors. Be sure to read through your copy for mistakes. Better yet, have someone who hasn’t read the copy before do so.

10. Don’t just assume people will come to the site.
Once your site is live, you need to actively drive visitors to it. Have a plan (with designated and preferably detailed budget) for generating interest in your website, both online and offline.

If you follow this advice, you’ve greatly increased the chance of your small business’s website succeeding.

And I’ll let you in on a secret: these rules apply to the websites of large companies as well.