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Dealing with detractors is perhaps one of the biggest pain points for companies just starting and even well entrenched in social media marketing. “What if someone says something bad about our company?” is often asked by brand managers, executives and more when opening their websites or even Facebook pages to conversations and interactions with consumers.

There are many examples of companies engaging detractors that can illustrate why you don’t have to be quite as worried about the complainers and combatants as you think. But only through experience can you develop your own tested processes of handling the various types of detractors. Having advised a number of companies on how to deal with the negative online, plus having to dig myself out of a few incidents where my sense of humor has gotten the best of my sense of decorum, here are the six steps I take in dealing with detractors:

• Acknowledge their right to complain
• Apologize for their situation, or your mistake (if warranted)
• Assert clarity in your policy or reasons (if warranted)
• Assess what will help them feel better
• Act accordingly
• Abdicate (Sometimes a turd is a turd)

Forrester originally classified the different types of detractors as legitimate complainers, competitors, engaged critics, flamers and troublemakers. I like a bit less formal designation in my list. I think you deal with offended publics, disgruntled stakeholders, competition, trolls and turds. The difference in a troll and a turd is that a turd identifies him or herself with a name and/or email address. They’re accountable, but still being a pain in the ass, mostly likely just because they like being a pain in the ass.

Identifying which you’re dealing with will make using the system easier. But then again, you have to dive in and do it to really learn what works best for you.

Is how you handle detractors off-line different that how you would handle them on-line? Do you do something differently than what I’ve suggested? Add to the knowledge by adding a comment below.

Related articles by Jason Falls with help from Zemanta

• How To Engage Detractors In Online Conversations (Older thinking from SME)
• How To Respond To Rants And Other Criticism On The Social Web (Interactive Insights Group)
• Dealing With Detractors (Brass Tack Thinking)
• Engaging Detractors (Conversation Agent)

It’s interesting that those in the social media industry believe everything that’s occurring with respect to social media is new. As I look back to direct marketing, database marketing, networking and advertising – I don’t believe our goals for businesses were different at all. There are a lot of doom and gloom stories about how every business must adapt or they’re going to fail. I don’t believe that’s true.

While I agree that the mediums have changed (and improved), businesses are still trying to achieve what they always have. The goals for business have never been different, it’s the mediums and the expectations of consumers that have changed.

If I were to write a manifesto for business, it would probably have these ten goals:

1. My business will be available where prospects and customers are looking for us.
2. My business will be available when prospects and customers need us.
3. My business will respond when prospects and customers make a request.
4. My business will set realistic expectations for prospects and customers.
5. My business will deliver what customers expected.
6. My business will deliver when we said we would.
7. My business will admit when we made a mistake.
8. My business will fix our mistakes.
9. My business will be honest with you.
10. My business will effectively communicate progress along the way.

In return for being open, honest, accountable and available, businesses hope that prospects and customers will return the favor – communicating how well they performed. This isn’t just good marketing or new marketing, this is good business. These have always been the goals of the businesses I’ve worked with.

As you review these goals, there’s nothing mentioned about new media, experiential marketing, social media, search, search engine optimization, twitter, Facebook, email or any other marketing medium. Those mediums’ existence make it much easier to achieve the business goals – but it doesn’t require that every business adopt them.

Image credit: (CC) Brian Solis. www.briansolis.com. Drawing is by Hugh MacLeod from Gaping Void.

Your company may find that good old fashioned cold calling does the trick. Remember – it’s still true that the majority of the business world has not adopted social media, and many are successful, growing and even flourishing businesses. Take Apple for example… I don’t see Apple being open, transparent or overwhelmingly engaged in social media – but they’re doing quite well, aren’t they?

My point isn’t to discourage companies from adopting and utilizing social media. Quite the opposite. If your business wants to adopt the goals of the above manifesto, I have no doubt that social media will accelerate your business given the proper resources and the right strategy. If those goals are not the goals of your company, social media may not be a fit.

Think before you leap! The water is cold and deep.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about meetings recently. Seth’s post on annual company events inspired me to begin formulating this post. As a person with a business of one employee, I’ve got to be absolutely careful of how many meetings I attend that are non-revenue generating.

Each day, I am invited to a meeting – typically a cup of coffee or a lunch. Much of the time, they’re professional relationships or even leads so it’s non-revenue generating today, but tomorrow it may lead to something. These meetings are incredibly exciting… typically brainstorming or strategizing about a company, their marketing, or a technology on the rise.

That’s quite different from when I used to work at large companies that held meetings daily, though. Meetings at companies are expensive, interrupt productivity, and are often an absolute waste of time. Here’s the kind of meetings that damage the culture of a business:

• Meetings held to find consensus. Chances are that you’ve hired someone who is responsible to get the job done. If you’re holding a meeting to decide for them… or worse… to take the decision away from them, you’re making a mistake. If you don’t trust the person to do the job, then fire them.
• Meetings to spread consensus. This is a little bit different… typically held by the decision-maker. He or she isn’t confident in their decision and scared about the repercussions. By holding a meeting and getting consensus from the team, they are trying to spread the blame and reduce their accountability.
• Meetings to have meetings. There’s nothing worse than interrupting someone’s day for the daily, weekly, or monthly meeting where there’s no agenda and nothing happens. These meetings are incredibly expensive to a company, often costing thousands of dollars.

Every meeting should have a goal that can’t be met independently… perhaps brainstorming, communicating an important message, or breaking down a project and assigning tasks. Every company should make a rule – a meeting without a goal and agenda should be denied by the invitee.

Many years ago, I went through a leadership class where they taught us how to have meetings. That may sound funny, but the expense of meetings to large organizations is significant. By optimizing every meeting, you saved money, time, and built up your teams instead of hurting them.

Team meetings had a leader, a scribe (to take notes), a time-keeper (to ensure the meeting was on time), and a gate-keeper (to keep on topic). The time-keeper and gate-keeper switched each meeting and had full authority to change topics or put an end to a session.

The last 10 minutes or so of every meeting were used to develop an Action Plan. The Action Plan had 3 columns – Who, What, and When. Defined in each action was who would do the work, what the measurable deliverables were, and when they would have it by. It was the leaders’ job to hold people accountable on the agreed upon deliverables. By instituting these rules for meetings, we were able to switch meetings from being interruptive and began to make them productive.

I’d challenge you to think about each meeting you’re having, whether it’s revenue generating, whether it’s productive, and how you’re managing them. I utilize Tungle to schedule my meetings and often wonder how many meetings that I would actually have if you had to pay a fee by credit card to schedule it! If you had to pay for your next meeting out of your salary, would you still have it?

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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This is a special guest blog post from Matt Umbro at theppcblog.com.

Any PPC campaign interface provides valuable metrics such as number of clicks on a particular ad or the click-thru-rate (CTR) of a certain keyword, but to solely look as these figures when determining the success of a campaign is a mistake. To truly realize the value of your PPC campaign you must view your data in accordance with your analytics and determine the value of your conversions.

PPC does not stop when users click your ad. It is necessary to make sure the landing page experience guides users to convert (whether that conversion is a purchase, a whitepaper download, etc). Getting the click should never be considered enough just like going to the Super Bowl and losing is still a defeat. Users may click your ad because it stands out the most, but if they do not convert you need to find out why.

This is where your website analytics come into play. Say you are bidding on the exact match of the term “casual shoes” and the CTR is 12%. Congratulations, you have a very good CTR for this term, but upon further inspection you notice that the keyword has seen 100 clicks and has only converted twice. Users are finding the query relevant to the ad, but post click they are not converting.

You look at your analytics and see exactly how this keyword is doing post click. Within the casual shoes ad group you have created two ads each utilizing a different landing page for A/B testing. Both ads have the same message, but one goes to a landing page with business casual shoes and the other goes to a page with everyday casual shoes. The business casual shoes landing page has been the destination URL 58 times while the everyday casual shoes page has been the destination for the other 42 clicks. You see that the two conversions occurred when users landed on the everyday casual shoes page. Whereas you have a total conversion rate of 2% for the keyword, you have a 4.76% keyword conversion rate when users land on the everyday casual shoes page. Additionally, users are spending two minutes more on the site when landing on this page.

The analytics tell you:

1) Users who search for the exact match of “casual shoes” tend to be looking for everyday casual shoes.

2) The casual shoes ad group needs to be separated into two ad groups, one for business casual shoes and one for everyday casual shoes.

3) Within the new business casual shoes ad group the ads need to better include the targeted keyword(s).

This is just one example of why it is necessary for your PPC campaign and analytics to be in synch.

You also need to analyze the quality of the conversions. If you are running an e-commerce site you need to be able to track every sale back to the converting keyword. You could very well find that a term is costing you more per conversion than the revenue it is bringing in. Same thing goes with a B2B site. Your conversion goal might be for users to download a whitepaper. A particular keyword may bring five conversions, but none of these end up being good leads. So even though a term is showing good PPC metrics, your business might actually be losing money.

PPC cannot be done in a vacuum. To effectively manage and optimize a PPC campaign you need to know what is happening post click and make sure the right types of conversions are coming in.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

A friend was telling me a story the other day. She’d felt she’d been burned by a company she’d been doing business with and needed to vent about it. Several months ago, when the relationship began, they’d sat down and agreed on how they’d work together, outlining who’d do what and when. Things looked pretty good at first. But as the honeymoon phase began to wear, she saw signs that all was not as it had been discussed. In fact, the other company wasn’t keeping specific promises they’d made. She addressed her concerns with them and they promised to not let it happen again, to keep on track. I’m sure you can see where this is going. Recently they did it again – and this time in a big way. They agreed to approach a situation a certain way and then one of their guys completely and knowingly blew it. She walked away from the business.

What does this have to do with marketing? Everything.

Everything you do is marketing. Not just your ads and your blog posts and your websites and your sales pitches. Everything. And when you make promises explicitly or implicitly, you’re asking for someone to trust you. If you’re lucky, they’ll grant you their trust. If you don’t uphold your promises, you’ll lose their trust. It’s that simple.

If you imply that your product is the fastest, it better be the fastest. If you say you answer calls in 24 hours, you’d better answer calls in 24 hours. No ifs, ands, or buts. People can be forgiving. You can make a mistake. You’ll have to earn back that bit of trust that you lost.

But, you cannot intentionally deceive. Not allowed. Say what you’re going to do and then do it. Mom always said, “if you make a promise, keep it.” Who knew she was talking about business, too?

This post was written by Nila Nealy

Nila is the principal of TwentyTwo, a business consultancy specializing in brand strategy, identity, and communications. TwentyTwo helps businessess inspire and excite their people, interest and influence prospects, make meaningful connections with their customers, and purse profit with purpose. Learn more about Nila at LinkedIn or my web site.

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The ultimate objective of social media and blogging is link building and brand reputation management. Do not dive into social media with the expectation that the community is going to receive your messaging with open arms. If you become too pushy or spammy with your online interactions, you are making a huge mistake. To be a part of the online conversation, it is important that you listen first and then respond once you have something valuable to contribute. Social media is about community. If you aren’t a part of the community in the real world, chances are you won’t be online either. Reputation works both ways.
For more details visit http://www.readyourarticles.com/Art/6427…

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is an advanced feature in each major search engine that can help you create more relevant ad text by automatically inserting a search query into an ad text. When used correctly, this tool can be very helpful in increasing the relevancy and click-through rate of an ad text. But if not applied correctly, your ad can end up disjointed, confusing, and completely irrelevant.

Inspired by a PPC Hero reader submission, this post will review some pitfalls that you need to be careful of when using dynamic keyword insertion.

Pitfall #1: Entering the DKI Code Wrong

Both beginners and experienced pay-per-click managers can fall victim to an incorrect keystroke. Whether it is a misspelling, missing space, or extra punctuation, most of us are guilty. However, when it comes to dynamic keyword insertion, a wrong keystroke can make the difference between a highly targeted ad text and ad spam. You have to be very careful how you type in the code. With one mistake your ads will end up irrelevant and in this case, spammy.

In the example below, the manager incorrectly entered the DKI code by adding an extra space before the colon. So the DKI code was entered in as {keyword :Eligo} versus {keyword:Eligo}. That extra space before the colon makes all the difference. When you enter the DKI code, confirm that there are no errors by taking the time to double check your work.

Pitfall #2: Misspellings in Ad Text

Bidding on misspelled keywords is an age-old practice for pay-per-click. But when you are using DKI with misspelled terms, those keywords are going to end up in your ads. In this example, all of these accounts were bidding on ‘chilrens’ to capitalize on a common keystroke mistake in search queries. For all three advertisers, their ads utilized DKI for headlines and the misspelling ended up in the title.

No matter how targeted and relevant you ad is, having a misspelled keyword in the headline or description will automatically hurt your credibility. To avoid this, restructure your pay-per-click account so all misspelled keywords have their own ad group… and don’t use DKI in this ad group!

Pitfall #3: Using DKI for Broad Match Keywords

In the cases below, the pay-per-click managers have combined DKI with broad match keywords. So when a searcher types in ‘Obama’ or ‘Leg Amputees’ they are served ads that are both irrelevant and confusing. Correct me if I am wrong, but I am certain that the Secret Service would not approve the transaction if I tried to purchase President Obama at an online bookstore.

The goal of using DKI is to serve highly relevant targeted ad text based on search query. Relevancy is hard to achieve with broad match keywords because you have a lot less control of when an ad is served. Do not use DKI when you are running broad match keywords. In many cases your ad text is going to end up with non-relevant terms.

If your ad texts look similar to the examples above, then you ad groups are too broad to begin with. Make sure your ad groups are structured properly for DKI so that every keyword in the ad group can appear in your ad text. Also consider your match type. DKI is best implemented in conjunction with exact match terms. By using exact match, you can define the keywords that will appear in your ads, and tailor the ad copy so it remained relevant across multiple search queries.

Pitfall #4: Creating Generic Ads

Formatting is crucial to creating relevant ad text using DKI. I often see DKI headlines that use only one keyword like our example below. This means the entire headline is one word, when is not optimal when you have 25 characters to work with. These headlines often look spammy, and in most cases, do not have high click-through rates.

Boost your headline relevancy by including another keyword similar to the example below. Of course, this format assumes that your ad groups are structured properly. If you cannot achieve something similar, then you need to consider restructuring your campaigns into more targeted ad groups.

Now you know some of the common pitfalls for using dynamic keyword insertion. Always remember, DKI should be used with extreme caution. It should only be used in the case of giving relevancy an extra boost. It should not be the crutch of your pay-per-click campaign. But when you decide to use it, make sure you don’t fall victim to these pitfalls!

For more examples on improper uses of dynamic keyword insertion, check the Your PPC Sucks blog.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The social web has almost relegated website traffic to a shoulder shrug of a statistic for some. But the number of people of visit your website or blog is an important measure of your reach or exposure. However, many people make a mistake in analyzing or even determining a website’s traffic. And the social web is partially to blame.

RSS feeds change not only the metric, but the information you’re looking for. Here’s why:

Provided you are following the sage advice of social media and/or Internet marketing counsel, you’re publishing content on your website. Perhaps it’s a blog. Maybe it’s company news or other information run through your content management system. If your CMS was created in the last four or five years and isn’t called Cold Fusion (little developer’s joke for ya), it probably produces an RSS feed, or XML file of content updates. Hopefully, you’ve let visitors know the feed is available should they choose to subscribe to your website’s changes.

The shift in thinking then comes because those who access your website’s RSS feed often do so in a feed reader like Google Reader or Netvibes. These readers display the content from your website without a visitor ever being registered there. Someone read your blog post, but your web analytics package never registered any data.

RSS allows people to access your content, not your website. So the information you are looking for is no longer web traffic, but content traffic. And content traffic is measured both on and off your website.

So how do you determine your website’s traffic in the world of the social web? It’s not as simple as you may think.

First, you need to know your website’s unique visitors. Your analytics software will tell you that. Then you need to know your RSS analytics. To find this, you need to run your RSS feed through software packages like Google’s Feedburner, which is free, or a competitor like FeedBlitz, which is a paid service, but cheap and more reliable. These services not only help you manage your subscribers, but analyze and present you with metrics about how your RSS feed is used.

Now, you may think you take your unique visitors and add the number of RSS subscribers and there’s your content traffic. But it’s not that simple and that number is going to be unbelievably inflated. Not to mention, some people click through the feed to your website and are, thus, counted twice in that scenario. The thinking here is flawed because the total number of RSS subscribers is not representative of the number of people who do something with your feed.

According to Google/Feedburner, the RSS subscriber total represents the number of services (not people) that access your feed for distribution. While there are roughly 9,500 people who subscribe to Social Media Explorer’s RSS feed, if 100 of them abandoned Bloglines a year ago, but didn’t shut down their account, those 100 people never access the feed even though Bloglines still pulls the data for them.

Fortunately Feedburner has a metric in their analysis of your feed called Reach. This number represents the number of unique people who have either clicked on your feed (driving them to your website) or read your feed in a reader. However, I could not find a delineation between “click through” and “read.” By that rationale, unless Feedburner has some hidden metric, there’s no 100-percent, accurate way to know how many people consumed your content. You don’t know how many clicked through to subtract from your unique visitors.

To make matters more confusing, if you download your Feedburner statistics (Excel or CSV file) you can identify the number of “item click throughs.” However, this number is greater than that of the Reach metric on my reports, so you don’t know if that’s click throughs to your site or clicks on headlines to expand your feeds or something else. In fact, if it were either of the first two, the Reach metric should be the larger number.

Clear as mud?

My assumption is a better set of metrics can help you with FeedBlitz, but I’m testing it now and have not yet seen their full reporting. If you use it, please help us with a run down: Can you pull data that tells you how many people read your feed vs. how many people click through to the site?

For now, I would tell people that while my content traffic is an inexact number, I calculate it by adding my daily unique visitors to my Google Feedburner Reach number. There is some overlap, but using August 31 as an example, there were 981 absolute unique visitors to Social Media Explorer. Feedburner says 246 RSS subscribers did something with my feed. Thus, my content traffic was 981+246 or 1,227 people.

As inexact as it is, this is what we have.

Or is it?

Analytics folks, unleash your wisdom on us in the comments. Tell me if my math is wrong, I missed some metric feature. Or, even better … tell me there’s an easier way to do this. If I’m not seeing it, we all want and need to know.

Related articles by Jason Falls and Zemanta

• Understanding RSS Subscriber Numbers (Get More Sales)
• Understanding RSS/Feed Subscriber Stats (Squarespace)
• Understanding RSS and XML Feeds (eMarketing Talk Show w/Feedburner’s Rick Klau)
• On RSS Subscriber Counts and Feedburner Metrics (FeedBlitz Blog)
• Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing (regulargeek.com)

At times when you do keyword research when blogging for search engine optimization, you may find that a high number of searchers mis-spell or concatenate words. An example might be USS Forrestal versus USS Forestal.

Showing up in search results for mis-spelled words is a tactic that works quite well… but you may not want to blatantly mis-spell a word in your post title or in your content. Invariably, someone will point the mistake out to you!

Rather than looking embarrassed, take advantage of other places in your content to purposely mis-spell the word:

• Your Post Slug (video below)
• Within title tags in anchor tags (links).
• Within title or description tags in images.

Here’s a short video on how to modify your post slug in WordPress. DON’T do this after publishing a blog post, though! While you’re writing your blog post, you can update your post slug quite easily:

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