Image from Vancouver2010.com

Note: This post takes a distinctly Canadian slant. Like a good Canadian, I’ll apologize for the gushy outpouring, but will go ahead with it anyway.

At the time this blog post is being written, the showdown between the US and Canadian Men’s Hockey team is a mere hour away. From my home in downtown Toronto, I can see little pockets of people – donned in red and white toques, Team Canada jerseys and maple leaf-kissed mittens (which are far too warm for the current weather, but we care not) – making their way to bars, pubs and friends’ places. There, they will lubricate their voices with a good domestic brew in preparation for the hollering and cheering that is in their future.

Besides learning that Canadians are far more proud of their country than we’ve let on in the past, these 2010 Olympic games in Vancouver have come with other lessons:

Set A Tough Goal And Back It Up
Despite having a population smaller than California and a less-than stellar history of medaling in Olympic games, Canada set into motion ‘Own The Podium,’ a plan to earn the most medals in the games. With it, came unprecedented funding for athletes and training facilities from both corporate and government pools. The result? A best-ever showing of a Canadian team at any Olympic games, third overall in the medal standings and a record-tying (possibly breaking if our hockey team pulls through) feat of earning the most Gold medals won by a country in any Winter games.

The content marketing connection: If you want to stand out online, you need to create a plan and invest in it properly. Research opportunities like SEO keywords you can compete with and take over, hire talented writers and pay them accordingly for their expertise and time, steadily work toward the goal by consistently adding new optimized content marketing pieces like blog posts, videos and social media interactions.

Listen To Your Audience And Adapt
One of the complaints the Vancouver organizers heard right away was the inaccessibility of the Olympic cauldron, which was kept behind a rather unfortunate-looking chain-link fence. Thankfully, they listened and quickly made changes so that more people could enjoy the Olympic flame in an atmosphere that was less refuge camp-esque.

The content marketing connection: While it’s important to know the difference between snark and constructive criticism, being open to feedback is important. Make sure when developing your content marketing strategy that you’re open to differing opinions, flexible in your execution and keep the main goal in sight: bringing value to your audience.

Don’t Let The Bashers Get You Down
The host nation will be the first to admit the Vancouver Olympics got off to a shaky start. The death of Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, hours before the opening ceremony was a particularly sad moment for everyone involved in the games. For the first while, things didn’t seem to improve much – a cringe-worthy gaffe in the opening ceremonies showed us exactly how well Steve Nash can hold a fake smile, warm weather was turning these winter games into the Spring Olympics and complaints about broken equipment, missing buses and line-ups earned Canada some major snark from the international media. Members of the British press went so far as to suggest Vancouver was hosting the worst Olympics ever, dubbing them “The Glitch Games” and “The Calamity Games” just days after the opening ceremonies.

But the organizers – and more so, the people attending and participating – pushed on. The vibe in Vancouver is one of overwhelming positive energy. The 2010 Olympics have become a story of perseverance, teamwork and the inspirational power of an underdog that refuses to give up.

The content marketing connection: When it comes to social media, everyone thinks they’re an expert. You’ll also find the anonymity of the Internet allows people to be far more vicious than they’d dare be to your face. As a result, you will sometimes experience intense negatively in the form of blog comments, video feedback and commentary on social media platforms. Take the hate mail with a huge chunk of salt and sift out what’s constructive – if anything – about it. Rally the troops, think positively, adapt as needed and work hard. You’ll come through alright, eh.

Edited To Add @5:54pm EST: YYYEYYEEEEAAAAHHHH!

Plagiarism is for chumps.

Ian Lurie of ConversationMarketing.com has a bone to pick – and we’re right there with him. On his blog, he recently wrote a post eloquently titled “Content thieves: I want to punch you in the face.” It turns out that several sites and so-called marketers had lifted his carefully thought-out content and used it in their own materials without any reference or credit (in fact, they replaced his company’s name with their own in several instances). In other words, they stole it and he’s outing them.

If you develop original content and want to prevent people from getting their copy and paste on, Ian has a few entertaining tips to booby-trap your content from plagiarists. But what if you’re hiring a writer to develop content for you? How can you ensure it’s legit (and yes, you need to. As the publisher of the work, YOU are responsible.)?

1. Pay a fair writing rate. While it’s not a guarantee, paying a reasonable rate for writing will reduce a writer’s temptation to get lazy. If you’ve hired someone to write ten 500-word articles for a measly $50, you need to remember: You get what you pay for. If this person was writing the articles legitimately, it could take them roughly ten hours to complete this assignment (including research, writing, editing, formatting and e-mailing with the client). That works out to a whopping $5 per hour. Ask yourself: How good of a job would I do for $5 per hour? The last time you earned that low a wage you were likely on your bike, hurling newspaper bundles onto your neighbors’ porches. On the flip side, a “writer” could instead spend two hours researching and copy-and-pasting existing articles into a document in under two hours, earning $25 per hour. Which do you think is more tempting?
2. Use Google to check the work out. Once you receive the work from your freelance writer and before you publish it, put a few lines from the document into Google and see if you come back with any exact matches. You may come back with a few, especially if there’s some generic wording, so take a look at those pages and compare it to what your writer handed in. If there are huge chunks of copy that are pretty near identical, you likely have plagiarism. Go back to your writer and look for an explanation (ideally, do this before paying them – you might be SOL otherwise).
3. Work with professionals. If you’re going to hire a writer for a major project – like a book or your entire website, it may be worthwhile for you to go to professional plagiarism hunters like Copyscape or iThenticate. Additionally, consider hiring a writer through a well-established content marketing agency. They’ll have screening and safeguards in place and will be able to guarantee the authenticity of the work.

Not everyone is good at writing, let alone writing SEO content.  The first step is admitting you have an SEO problem. The second step is hiring a writer who can help. At ideaLaunch’s free webinar tomorrow, February 25 (at 1pm EST), we’ll show you in the ins and outs to finding, screening, recruiting and motivating the talent you need to create the content that sells itself. If you are a freelance writer, you may want to tune in as well, just to make sure you’re covering all the bases clients will be looking for.

ideaLaunch founder Byron White and guest Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO of SEOcopywriting.com and SuccessWorks, will present the info and be on hand to answer questions. Instead of spending your lunch with that sad sandwich and Farmville, spend it with us (the sad sandwich is still welcome).

Register for this free SEO writers webinar now.

Plus, if you sign up for this SEO webinar, a PDF version of Byron’s 101 Content Marketing Tips will be available to you for free!

Want to know the real magic to improving your Google search ranking? Here it is, according to Dilbert:

Should you not have any virgins around, you might want to consider trying the following to improve your SEO:

• Get the lowdown on how to select and use keywords within your content
• Learn how to create inbound links that utilize select anchor text
• Use a mix of different tools in your content marketing strategy. Besides improving your website, think about starting a business blog, guest blogging on other sites, utilizing social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, publish videos on YouTube and other video sites, conduct webinars and place your presentations on sites like SlideShare, publish white papers and ebooks, develop a tip center, host a Podcast … and much more!
• Go to or follow SEO events and learn from the experts
• Hire a freelance writer that understands SEO content
• Check out a content marketing agency and see what they can offer you

Let’s take a look at the funny pages:

Umm … that was weird and not exactly funny. Ok, next:

????

No, Jim Davis has not lost his mind. What you’ve just seen are examples from Garfield Minus Garfield, a very humorous site (and book) from Dan Walsh who removes all traces of the lasagna-loving cat from old Garfield comic strips. The result is a whole different perception of the sad and twisted life of Jon Arbuckle.

While Garfield Minus Garfield is all a big joke, sadly a lot of people seriously go about their content marketing in this way when it comes to SEO content. I’ve seen people looking to hire a writer who will just stuff a bunch of keywords into paragraphs with no real regard for the human element, the content. You may have come across these “articles” yourself in your searches. There’s nothing helpful or useful about them – just the same few keywords appearing in every sentence mingled with useless filler words. That style of SEO content brings no value to the audience and it won’t bring any revenue to you.

We completely get that keyword-rich content is important for improving your listing on search engine result pages. But if you are only writing for Google software, you’ve missed the boat. Content is for people. Write for their eyes and brains first.  Otherwise …

You can do it, baby!

If your boss has just walked up to you and said it’s time for the company to get on “Twitbook” and “Facespace” and to create an “e-diary”, fear not. The world of social media and content marketing is probably easier to grasp than you think. Admittedly, there are a lot of components to it – which is why many turn to a marketing agency that specializes in content marketing – but that doesn’t mean this aspect of marketing is out of your reach.

We suggest following these steps to get started in social media and content marketing:

1.Know where your business stands now. If your goal is to improve conversion, you obviously need some base numbers to go from. How many customers do you have? What revenue do they provide? How are they finding your business? How many website visitors do you get? Do any of them become customers? What’s your Google Page Rank?

2. Educate yourself on content marketing. Find website content tips. Read up on internal linking strategy and  how SEO factors into your success. Take a look at social media case studies on see how others have both excelled and failed. Follow content marketing blogs.

3. Set your goals. To simply have a presence on social media platforms isn’t enough. What do you want to do with the presence? Improve conversion rates? Make a certain number of industry contacts? Increase your web traffic by a set amount? Become known as an expert on a particular subject? Write it out and set the plan.

4. Hire the right talent. Make sure you have people on your team that understand SEO content and social media behavior and can execute plans with that knowledge. If full-time employees aren’t in the cards, consider hiring a freelance writer instead on a per project basis. Have a larger budget? Contract a content marketing agency that not only takes care of hiring writers but can work your strategy out for you, keep things on schedule and even get your site up to snuff.

What does the Matthew Effect have to do with link-building and SEO?  Basically, whenever any of us are researching anything online using a search engine, the top results often get our attention. If we are referencing those concepts within our own material, we often link right to them – which strengthens their position even further as a top listing. In fact, I’ve done it in this blog post while linking the term “Matthew Effect” to the Wikipedia entry.

This means that if your website deals with a term or keyword that is well-represented by other sites, you have a major uphill battle ahead of you in order to get up in the rankings, let alone into a top position. More about this can be viewed here in the original presentation (you might want to expand to full size – the font is a little thin):

As a content marketing agency, ideaLaunch works with its clients to develop SEO techniques that can help a David topple a Goliath. Take a look at our link building strategy tips or contact us if you’re interested getting the traffic you want.

However, these content marketing pieces, blog posts and articles on your plate won’t write themselves. We’ve talked already about finding inspiration in pop culture to get you moving – but what if you already have some thoughts in mind and just need to get rolling?

Write or Die is here to kick you in the butt. The simple program from DrWicked.com puts the “prod in productivity.” You set the number of words you need to complete, a time in which you want to complete them (great for freelance writers who are trying to stick to a smart per hour rate), a “consequence mode” (more on that later) and a grace period (how long you can go without writing before the consequences begin).

Once set, you’re given a screen that you can write in. The word count lets you see as you go how you’re doing and there’s a countdown timer on the same screen. At anytime, you can select pause or hit done.

Depending on the grace period you selected, once you stop writing at anytime another invisible countdown clock begins. If you don’t start writing soon (in some cases, it’s 15 seconds, in others, it’s a mere 5 seconds), the consequences will kick in.

These writer’s block butt kickers range from:
- Gentle: The background goes from white to pink to red and a pop-up comes up to encourage you on.
- Normal: After the background goes to red, an annoying “Banana Phone” song comes up.
- Kamikaze Mode: Your words start to get eaten. This is obviously a consequence you want to avoid but may need to select if you really need to get pushed to keep going.

Write or Die will get you going if you’re facing a writer’s block or just a lack of motivation. The great thing about writing is that the process of doing it actually allows you to think through your thoughts more thoroughly and quickly. As you’re forced to write, the more a story or content marketing angle will grow out of your work. Before you know it, you’ll actually be done that assignment.

We recommend after using Write or Die that you copy and save your work into a word processing program, take a wee break (even just 20 minutes) and edit it with a fresh brain. Hurrying through content writing doesn’t always result in the best work, but it can get you on the right path.

If after using Write or Die you still find yourself staring at a blank screen, you may want to hire a freelance writer or a content marketing agency.

Kevin Smith: He's Mad As Hell. Image from ViewAskew.com

I’ve never been one to suggest that “the customer is always right.” Having worked as a cashier in my high school years (an experience I think every North American should have), I can tell you emphatically that the customer is indeed not always right. Sometimes the customer is just plain wrong. And mean. And even a complete idiot.

But just because bad customers exist does not mean a business can or should counter them with bad customer service. The danger in allowing any level of poor customer service to be dished out is that it’s too easy for employees and business owners to stay in that mode and become indignant to customers who may not fit the mold of your ideal client, but are, in fact, right about a situation and what they should expect from you.

Before, if you screwed over a customer, the most you could expect is that you lost their business. Perhaps they’d tell their friends. If they were REALLY angry, they’d write a letter to somebody. Not any more. With the gaining popularity of social media, word of mouth now has a microphone. Give someone crappy service, they’re going to get loud about it, and some people have pretty impressive microphones.

This weekend, writer / director Kevin Smith was asked to leave a Southwest Airlines flight on account of a “safety issue.” The safety issue? Someone at Southwest determined Smith was too large for just one seat and required two – but as a second seat was unavailable, they opted to eject him from the flight. They did this, despite the fact – according to Smith – that he fit into one seat and between the armrests – the apparent gauge of measurement Southwest uses to determine whether a “Customer of Size” requires more than one seat.

While still in the airport waiting for the next flight, Smith took to Twitter, where he has 1.6+ million followers (a good chunk more than Southwest’s Twitter feed has) and started describing his experience in the colorful language Smith is well-known for.

Hundreds of people started tweeting Smith with their own humiliating stories of Southwest’s treatment, with a fury not entirely unlike the “Mad as Hell!” scene from Network, which Smith was only too happy to retweet to his followers.  Southwest reacted with a blog post, one that many people, based on the comments, felt was inappropriate and lacking. While we’re the first to applaud content marketing and social media usage, the emphasis is on content. Smith provided his full side of the story, complete with a part about a fellow Southwest passenger who experienced the same treatment on Smith’s flight, in his latest podcast SModcast #106 (in case you weren’t sure, the language within it is NSFW, so plug those headphones in!).

An ineffective customer service issue has now become a giant PR crisis. Happy Monday, Southwest.

Smith is hardly the first to take to Twitter, Facebook, blogs or Podcasts to complain about sub-standard customer service. Heather Armstrong, a blogger behind the exceptionally popular site, Dooce, let Maytag have it when the company was less than responsive when her new washing machine broke in late August. And it’s not just “celebs” who are taking a stand when customer service has failed them. Yours truly received better service from Netfirms after snarking on Twitter about how lame my service experience had been. A friend of mine received local news coverage after complaining about a restaurant’s treatment of a customer via her blog and Twitter.

Want to avoid this? What should you do if you own a business?

1. Treat each customer as if they might have a million Twitter followers. They might. Or they might be friends with someone who does. Or the “pithy” 400 followers they do have might retweet to their followers and theirs and so on. After all, that’s how the Motrin scandal got started – by non-celeb social media users.
2. Review your policies. Take a look at your policies and see if there are any aspects of them that would give your customers a legitimate reason to be upset. If those policies can’t be changed, make sure they are communicated to customers and staff clearly and that you have a sensitive and consistent way of enforcing them.
3. Expect more from your staff. Train them well. Check up on their service. Give them incentives to treat customers well such as stock / ownership options or bonuses.
4. Don’t be afraid to apologize and admit where you went wrong.
5. Make sure you’re engaged in social media monitoring. To its credit, Southwest has been monitoring and involved in social media and this situation. Is it handling it right? You be the judge!
6. Take care of the customer in question first, and the public interest in the scandal second. According to Smith, the top customer service executives at Southwest had NOT contacted him despite the blog post suggesting they had. Certainly give your audience a heads-up in the medium they’re using (Twitter) that you’re aware and dealing, but make sure that first customer is prioritized.
7. Understand crisis communications in a web 2.0 world. Take a look at our tips for avoiding a social media faux pas and tips for reacting to a social media bomb, part 1 and part 2.

Image from Wowowow.com

Happy almost-Valentine’s Day, Hallmark fans!

If people were to list the qualities they look for in a Valentine or a relationship, chances are, they’d include traits like:

• Funny / has a good sense of humor
• Able to keep things fresh
• Intelligent
• Trustworthy
• Dependable and stable
• Thoughtful of others
• Capable of reaching out
• Understands me
• A good listener
• Around to open jars

With the exception of the last one (unless someone at this marketing agency has developed super virtual powers I need to know about), each of these things are what good content marketing should strive to be. Whether it’s understanding how the audience thinks and selecting the right SEO keywords, hiring a freelance writer that puts a smile on faces, or developing daily content people can count on – these are reflective of the traits valued in both personal and business relationships.

If you’ve been developing a website, blog or podcast that just doesn’t connect to people, doesn’t quite have much heart to it and is feeling rather shallow and lonely – consider contacting an online relationship doctor like a content marketing company. By this time next year, you may just be in a full-bloom relationship with your dream customers.