I’m certain that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was not a subject that was on the curriculum when I studied marketing.^[1]

However, in the year 2011, it’s hard to call yourself a digital marketing consultant and not understand the drivers behind new customer acquisition via search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO is not as sexy as witty, or zeitgeist catching creative. It’s not as trendy as social media or as cutting edge as location based services with augmented reality, but my informed guess is that Google and Bing send more customers to your site than any of these marketing methods.

Despite the fact that most businesses say that being on the top of Google is one of their most important customer acquisition methods, marketing people (like me) have never really been given the SEO tools to help clients take control of this essential digital marketing task. There are thousands of marketing and PR agencies that have SEO in their menu of services, but in reality, most of these companies don’t know how to do it.

So how important are search engines for driving traffic to your website? The following is a breakdown of where new visitors come from for one of my sites.^[2]

• Google – 49.9%
• Direct – 16.4%
• Facebook – 7.5%
• Bing – 4.4%
• Yahoo – 4.0%
• Twitter – 2.8%

So whose responsibility is it to look after the 50% of new business that is delivered this way? Is it Marketing, PR or IT? The answer is that all these functions have a part to play in making sure that your business has the best chance of being at the top of the search engine results.

Luckily, for marketing and PR people, we already have the basic skill-set required to do SEO. At the heart of good search engine optimisation is the creation of relevant content for an identified audience. If you know how to do targeting and messaging, then you know how to come up with keyword phrases that your customers use to search for your products and services.

If you know how to pitch an article to a newspaper or magazine,  then you know how to pitch for a link from an authoritative website. Building relationships with influencers is a key part of SEO, so all your work building a following on Twitter and acquiring Facebook fans can add-value too.

Okay – now for the disclaimer bit – for the last few months, I have been working with a company called Linkdex who have been funded by Amadaues Capital to build a set of SEO tools that help businesses take control of SEO. The online application allows marketing people to build workflows and procedures to make the most of this new business acquisition method.

Everything they never taught you at marketing school about SEO is woven into an integrated set of tools that can take you from zero-to-hero if you apply the methodology. The secret that SEO people don’t want marketing people to know, is that anyone who knows how to use WordPress or similar CMS can rank at the top of search engines.

Even if you don’t sign up to the SEO tools developed by Linkdex, you should check out the great free Learn SEO posts that reveal how to do key tasks like link-building.

1. ^[1] I first saw Mosaic running during my 2nd year at university. Alta Vista may have come shortly after that. ↩
2. ^[2] www.yachtsponsorship.com ↩

This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all gone horribly wrong, but some simple, old-fashioned marketing meant that Abarth managed to achieve it’s goals for the weekend.

Until recently, I had never heard of Abarth. The marque is part of the Fiat group which also includes Italian sports-car classic brands such as Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and of course Ferrari. One of the reasons that the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB was created was to increase the awareness of the Abarth brand, but also to hopefully drive sales.

Here are some insights from the weekend.

1. Understand your audience.

I know. It’s fundamental right? But this simple piece of advice is overlooked time and time again, often by consultants trying to sell a technology or process that has no relevance to your stakeholders. Abarth had several audiences to relate to throughout the weekend including; motorcycle fans, professional motorcycle teams and riders and specialist motorcycle media.

Make no mistake, a car brand at a motorcycle event is risky. Bike people are a very close community, extremely brand loyal and passionate about their sport. Luckily, the Abarth brand has motorcycle credentials – the founder, Karl Abarth, starting his career as a motorcycle mechanic and racer. The Trofeo Abarth 500 GB event poster paid homage to this history and thousands of these posters were given away during the weekend to bike fans.

In the paddock, Abarth hosted a party with a live band and invited riders, mechanics, the media and volunteer track marshals to experience hospitality usually reserved for VIPs. For the cost of a beer, the brand bought great word-of-mouth that created ambassadors on forums and social media.

2. Simple is often the best.

While a lot of online buzz focusses on new marketing techniques like ‘social media’, brand building is a much more broad discipline than just ‘clicks’ and ‘follows’ and ‘links’. The simple marketing tactic employed during the weekend to build awareness was to give away hundreds of flags. All around the Cadwell Park complex, children, and some grown adults, literally flew the flag for a brand that they had probably never encountered before. Not quite ambush marketing, but certainly the Abarth scorpion appeared in a lot of photos and even on live tv coverage.

3. Do your homework.

It would have been so easy to evangelise about how the 30,000 strong crowd could have got together on Foursquare, but when the venue isn’t even listed, then you realise that urban, high-tech marketing may not be the best way forwards.

Does it work? Yes it does. How do I know? I have proof. See my next blog about a case study that has big implications for sports sponsorship.

The Sportbusiness New Media conference was held in Manchester on Wednesday. I was invited to speak on a panel entitled “Opportunities and Threats of Social Media.” The questions asked of the panel were slightly different from the brief, so the delegates present heard different answers to the ones below, but here are some of my considered thoughts on the issues raised.

Topic One – The positives and negatives of an organisation (brand, governing body or rights-holder) getting deeply involved in social media

The use of the phrase ‘Social Media’ means a lot of different things to different people. For many, it is a catch-all for a few well known sites like Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter. For others, the definition is broader and includes web 2.0 enabled blogs and some gaming applications.

While there is no doubt that these platforms have a huge number of users, they are hyped a little by the media and those who work in the digital industry. Many sports organisations have reason to ask questions about the relative merit of different platforms, but I think that the time has come where the opportunities do outweigh the benefits.

To put this question into some historical perspective, rephrase the question to “what are the positives and negatives of getting a fax machine or a post box or publishing your switchboard number on your website.

According to figures presented by Comscore at the conference, Facebook is the largest site on mobile – bigger even than Google. This is no real surprise – mobile is a person to person communication media and Facebook is a person to person platform.

So to answer the question (something I was accused on Twitter of not doing on the panel)

Positives.

Social Media is another channel. Another touchpoint. Another mechanism to listen to and communicate with partners, customers and fans. At the very least, these mechanisms make it more convenient for your fans to receive your news and content.

The listening part is important. While some may focus on the negatives of being open to criticism (See Negatives) others see that the feedback channel is a great way to improve the product, to understand what works and what doesn’t and to adapt to that feedback. This is another way of saying that the voices are a diverse set of opinions that are perhaps more useful than the groupthink of old white males that usually make the decisions.

Social media provides an immediacy that other media cannot. This is not just what fans are saying, it is what they are saying now, and in many cases their location can also be determined. The insights from social profiles and monitoring of sentiment in conversations provide a level of demographic information that traditional registration forms can’t match.

Finally, there are demonstrable benefits of using Social Media for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Obviously the more times your team, club, organisation or sponsor is mentioned on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc with a link back to your site, the more highly it will score with Google, Bing and the like. This will become even more important as Google moves to include real-time results in it’s search mechanism.

Negatives.

Many of the negatives associated with Social Media are actually not problems with the technology. A lot of the negative perceptions of social media come from a misunderstanding about the true nature of who is using it and how it is used.

It is true that anything negative will be amplified and accelerated by Social Media. A larger group of people will be exposed to comments and if the correct procedures are not in place then this can get out of control quickly.

Many of the negatives associated with Social Media can be fixed with good business practises and policies, so here are some of the issues to consider.

The use of social media when done properly will require resources that may not exist in the organisation. There is no point in doing it for the sake of doing it, if you are going to engage in a conversation with your most important stakeholders via this mechanism, then you need to show them that you are committed and you take it seriously.

I disagree with the sentiment that you can “throw a rock out the window, hit a teenager and get them to run your social media programme.” Better to invest in training the people who understand your business, its products and culture to represent you and your brands online.

Social Media is two way. This scares a lot of businesses who are worried about criticism. Many sports organisations, particularly governing bodies have a tendency to be faceless bureaucrats, sitting behind gatekeepers and policy. But here’s the thing – people will use social media to criticise you and your policies whether you are there or not. You can’t stop it. You can’t control it. You can’t spin it. The best that you can hope for is that you can influence key people via participating to see your point of view.

Read Part 2 – Monetisation of Social Media for Sport

I’m a big fan of Twitter search. I have a cool plugin for Firefox that brings back the latests tweets for a search term and displays them above the same results for Google. It’s one of the reasons that Google is rumoured to be building similar functionality, to bring back real-time, real-people sentiments. But does Branding have to change in a world where only plain text is available? Without the fancy logo that surrounds your brand, can your customer find you?

Here’s an example to illustrate my point. Once upon a time there was a wonderfully innovative mobile phone brand called Orange. Famously, millions of dollars were spent to come up with the catchy strap-line “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange” and the brand became a case-study for marketing students of the 90′s.

But what happens to Orange when you take away the strapline and type just the brand into Twitter search? The  results include chocolate sprinkles, a county in California, termites, Orange juice, orange rolls etc…

Try the same test with Vodafone. Type the single word with no qualification into Twitter and every single result refers to the mobile phone / internet brand.

Why is this important? Well increasingly, smart branding people are using sites like Twitter to monitor brand sentiment. The power of having an uncensored feedback loop from your customers around the world allows marketing people to tweak the mix to satisfy the needs of their audience. Monitoring brand sentiment on Social media platforms is in it’s early days, but it is a lot easier when you have a distinctive brand.

Try it for youself. What do you get when you type your brand into search.twitter.com ? Is it a lock-out? Is the whole page filled with people talking about you, or is it muddied with other things?

Or why crowdsourcing is trendy, but not always good…

Seems that a lot of social media evangelists, many of whom have almost no business experience, are proclaiming that crowdsourcing will spell the end of advertising and branding as we know it. The fact that many of these self proclaimed experts lump advertising together with branding in the first place suggests that they don’t really have a handle on marketing in the real world and are merely spouting something they read in a retweeted link to a blog somewhere (just like this one).

Those who would sign the death warrant of the advertising agency cite social media stunts run by large brands where their agencies were dropped in favour of contributions from the wider world. One oft-quoted case is that of the Unilever brand, Peperami. Many of the Twitterati have lumped the project in with consumer-generated ‘new flavour’ polls and revelled in the oncoming doom for traditional agencies. There is no doubt that ‘traditional’ agencies are struggling to come to terms with the new world order and many are bereft of new ideas, but what most social media tub-thumpers have missed is that Unilever themselves believe that the creative will probably come from professionals rather than consumers.

Noam Buchalter, Marketing Manager for Unilever’s Marmite, Bovril, Pot Noodle, and Peperami brands said in a recent interview:

We’re not really keen on the idea of fully open and public sourcing, as Walkers did on their recent crisp flavour campaign, our undertaking is to enter into a rigorous and serious creative process.  The brief is relatively open, but people will have to work hard on their ideas, and part of the brief is also to produce print ads. It is open for everyone to enter, and we are hoping that many professional creatives will take part.

So in some cases, crowd-sourcing may lead to new ideas and the discovery of brilliant creative work. It’s also pretty cheap. The ‘prize’ offered by Unilever for the Peperami campaign was £10,000 and it’s hard to imagine one of Unilever’s preferred supplier agencies charging such a low fee.

Let’s not get carried away. Unilever have spent millions of dollars and tapped some of the best marketing talent in the world to establish the Peperami brand. It is therefore no surprise that creative minds can come up with new material given the brief. It would be a brave brand indeed that left their corporate identity to the crowd.

Incidentally, the ‘Walkers’ campaign alluded to was not so much a branding exercise as a mass-market focus group. There is no doubt that the internet and social media tools can help poll huge numbers of people very quickly, but how is a brand manager (a title also soon to be defunct according to some) to weigh a vote from Twitter user “sxychk25″ against letter writer; “Loyal customer from London”?

My own view is that crowdsourcing can reveal new creative talent in the way that the X-Factor reveals music stars, however these stars are probably not going to be ‘consumers’. Most brands aren’t lucky enough to have consumers that are so fanatical that they will give up their day jobs to do marketing for a large corporate without being properly compensated. While listening to your audience is important, the true marketing experts will still be required to synthesise the feedback and integrate it into the long term brand vision.

Brands that have established their core values will be able to take advantage of crowdsourcing in a more productive way, because consumers will be conditioned to working within the  confines of a brand personality that has been created through millions of dollars of traditional advertising.

Finally, there is always a danger that crowdsourcing will lead to a dull average. Brands that are not well understood by consumers and have a mass market appeal may be tempted to please everybody and as a result fail to differentiate themselves sufficiently.

Marketing is changing, and social media is providing a way for brands to engage their consumers and develop relationships with them. Branding by consensus though will ultimately lead to watered down, politically correct, boring marketing. The strongest brands will be the ones that give their consumers the perception that they have an input but who have the courage to set their own vision and follow it.