my notes: You can see higher sales, better results in google, etc by adding value to your small business website.

my notes: Customers will appreciate the information and the expertise.

my notes: Use it to its fullest advantage, which I believe is openly and honestly communicating

my notes: Don’t make it a chore that sucks up energy and time from you, but instead is something that becomes routine.

my notes: Figure out what works best for you

my notes: So as a quick recap,

my notes: It’s not exactly a small business, but I’ve been impressed by dozens of libraries using Twitter on their homepages, often so that any librarian can update a short message without even needing access to a computer (holiday closures, special programs, etc via SMS).

I could see this being adopted by small businesses as well.

my notes: They are also one of the first companies on a new site called Get Satisfaction.com, a customer service for everything, for everyone kind of place.

They answer any and all questions and complaints from customers in the open here, with all their employees present. They’ve totally embraced this new open method of communicating with customers (even the ones with problems).

my notes: They’ve got a blog with new designs previewed that gets linked often by other blogs, they’ve got a flickr account with photos of new bags and happy customers...

my notes: You might have heard of Timbuk2 messenger bags, which was once a small SF-based company making bags.

my notes: They’re a pretty popular food blog and people travel from very far to eat there. They talk daily about their menu and suppliers and other sorts of stuff foodies love to hear about.

my notes: This is a restaurant in San Diego.

You can see the blog in the center of the front page

my notes: They had this foil ball on display, and the foil ball had its own blog with hundreds of readers, as everyone kept up to date on the size of the ever-growing ball of foil.

my notes: They have a flickr stream on their site, it looks like a fun place that I’d eat at.

my notes: I love that they publish a price comparison chart for pizza at every place in their city. Sometimes they are more expensive, but they’re 100% honest.

my notes: This is a pizza shop in Boise, Idaho

It’s got a lot going on and it’s crazy and awesome

my notes: This is their blog. They review new items in the store and it got such a positive response that they started selling things online to all their non-SF-based visitors that couldn’t make it into the store.

my notes: This is an arty knick-knack store in San Francisco

my notes: This is a comic book store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They review all the new comics that come in, and it’s great for customers looking to pick up new titles.

my notes: It’s awesome and he totally and completely owns search results for fishing guides on that lake because he has hundreds of posts about his previous trips. You can get to know him by his writing and see what the average guided trip is like from the posts.

This is how you do it. This dude rules.

SEO tries to fake this. The real deal is so much better.

my notes: This guy is my hero. He’s the poster boy for this talk.

This is a fishing guide in Texas. Every time he takes someone out on his boat, he takes photos of their catch and tells stories of their day on the lake. He’s been doing it for every guided trip for the past two years.

It’s a great blog and you get an idea of what he’s like and how much fun everyone is having fishing with him.

my notes: Their blog is amazing, giving in-depth reviews and previews of products they carry, stories from their travels, and essays of their thoughts on the industry.

It demonstrates their expertise and definitely helps sales as they answer questions about new products often.

my notes: This is a bike shop in arkansas

my notes: Complete with blog showing recipes from their menu and news from the restaurant, written by the head chef. Some of these posts have 50+ comments each on them, as people debate the recipes.

Also, consider how awesome (and some would say crazy) it is that a restaurant gives away its recipes, and the patrons love it and show up in droves.

my notes: Here is a restaurant in Bangalore, India.

my notes: Here are comments on their recent post about layouts, with advice from other theater owners and customers.

my notes: The blog is great. He’s had posts on everything from what food they planned to serve to which projector they picked and why. The most recent post shares the layout of their expanded space and how they plan to use the square footage.

my notes: There is this art house movie theater in Missouri. It’s run by a husband and wife team, as their side job at first. He loves film and loves the web, so his theater’s site is fantastic. You can see what is playing, promotions, showtimes, all on the front page.

While theaters nationwide report decreased ticket sales from high def plasmas and DVD watching at home, this theater has seen so much growth in its 2 years of being around that they are expanding the theater to a larger building. This theater is successful even in a town with competing multiplexes.

my notes: I thought of a few examples myself, but I also opened it up to my twitter friends to offer up more.

my notes: Another way to demonstrate expertise: take questions you hear during your day-to-day operation and post them on a blog

“We’ve been hearing a lot of customers asking about salmonella outbreaks as it relates to pet food lately...”

my notes: Keeping customers in the loop about any big upcoming changes is a great way to keep them informed (and perhaps ready to buy more products after your big changes).

my notes: Even if you run a shoe store or a pet store or a cake decorating business, the details of running the business is pretty interesting to outsiders and customers.

If you changed suppliers after hours of research, go ahead and tell your customers on your blog. They’ll appreciate the thought behind it and see you demonstrate your expertise.

my notes: So you have a shoe store, and a blog, now what?

Go ahead and cover what it’s like to run a shoe store! I swear this can be exciting to your customers.

my notes: If it’s forced, you’ll eventually give up, but if it’s part of your normal day, you’ll be able to keep it up

my notes: Figure out a way to work your social media app of choice into your daily life, so it’s not a chore tacked onto your to-do list.

If you have an email list for customers, simply copy the latest newsletter to your blog.
If you type up daily menus for your restaurant, post it on a blog

my notes: There are lots of options, figure out how they can translate to a web presence for your business.

my notes: Try out a few different apps and technologies until you find one you really like.

It may be twitter, for its ease of use from a browser or phone
It may be facebook, where all your friends are
It may be blogging because you like to write
etc...

my notes: I want to talk about approaches and ways to make this work for your business.

my notes: Your business is the important thing in your professional life, sometimes it’s ok to be cautious on your first approaches online

my notes: It takes a long time to live down an early screw-up so you should tread carefully as you move your business to an online presence

my notes: SEO is expensive if you pay a firm to do it, and in the long term it’s a waste of money because the information is basic and Google’s algorithms change frequently.

my notes: So your keyword-loaded, metatag labeled, highly efficient-for-robots site becomes ranked higher -- what good is that to regular people visiting your site about your business?

Does it still make sense to them? Often the answer is no.

my notes: There are people here and zillions of guides online telling you how many times to mention a keyword in every page if you want to do well for searches on that term.

That approach seems preposterous to me, since websites are meant to be read by humans.

my notes: There are basics of SEO that make sense.

Don’t make your entire site in flash, don’t use HTML frames. Use simple HTML and make obvious titles, etc.

The rest (keyword loading, link building, etc) is garbage and to be avoided.

my notes: First, Search Engine Optimization because it’s everywhere you look these days and everyone is talking about it.

I want to talk about why I think it’s generally a bad thing for your business.

my notes: There may be short-term gains to be had say, spamming your colleagues, but run the risk of turning off more people than you turn on.

If you’re shooting for an overnight success by any means necessary, you might end up with an overnight failure instead.

my notes: First let’s talk about why you’d want to be authentic.

my notes: So why do this? Why go to all this trouble and put in this kind of careful, considered work?

if you do things right you’ll find:
You become the default expert on your business’ topic, in your area, and online.
You have informed customers that trust you.
You can increase sales from the online exposure.

my notes: It’s a long, slow road to doing things right, it’s taking the high road, but it’s also about taking a long range view of your business. It’s not about overnight success -- because very few successes follow that path.

There are lots of short term gains you can make if you don’t mind the risks of alienating customers or getting bounced out of google.

my notes: We’ve all met fake people that are trying to promote their business. Don’t be That Guy.

Instead be a helpful member of your community. Be honest, be upfront, and you may find it pays off.

self-promotional marketing often walks a fine line between annoying and enterprising, and not everyone in this room will probably agree on where to draw it, but be safe and stay inside it.

my notes: Here is how to be un-authentic with your customers, in descending order.

Email spam, then spam comments on blogs, then using a PR agency to spam bloggers are all ways to annoy customers and the internet at large. Don’t do this.

my notes: You set off on a path of authentic communication by doing a few things...

You will hear the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” quite a bit these days and even at this conference. It’s mostly about getting better results in google by any means necessary. It’s about as far as you can be from being authentic. (we’ll go into more detail about this later on).

my notes: An authentic user of social media uses what works for them. Posting a link to your flickrstream in twitter on facebook in your livejournal is kind of missing that point.

Don’t go overboard because you’ll find yourself spending most of your day updating every network instead of working.

my notes: Over time, a long slow approach is going to ensure staying power in the marketplace and a successful business

Today I’m describing how to ride that yellow line...

my notes: I see two obvious approaches

You can focus on a short term goal, quick grab, high risk for return option (blue)

Or you can shoot for long slow growth, low risk, hard work, high road (yellow).

my notes: so you want to increase your businesses visibility online, demonstrate your expertise and increase sales. What approaches can you take to achieve those goals?

my notes: Most of the point of being in business is making money and increasing your visibility and demonstrating your expertise to customers is certain to help do that.

my notes: You want everyone to know why your business is special and better than your competitors.

my notes: There are millions of websites about millions of subjects, so how can you stand out?

my notes: I talk to a lot of small business people looking to do something online and they all want the same thing

my notes: The keyword on my talk title is “Authentic” and I want to first define what I mean by that.

Of course I mean honesty, a sense of good ethics -- things that we all live by in our daily lives, but that sometimes gets lost when life moves online.

A lot of people will talk about shortcuts to quick success and once in a while, you might catch a useful tip from that, but I’m here to tell you the long hard road of doing things the right way will always win out.

my notes: MetaFilter has since grown into a real honest to goodness business, with advertising revenue accounting for about 90% of revenue. I have three full-time salaried employees on staff as well as myself working on it full time. This is a screenshot of MetaFilter’s last 30 days of traffic. Five million people looked at about 13.5 million pages on the server.

So that’s me, let’s move onto the meat of my talk here today.

my notes: About five years ago I started a little blog called PVRblog to cover interesting TiVo news, reviews, and hacks, stuff I was emailing friends already or posting to my personal blog.

It was my first commercial success and kind of kicked off me doing blogs as a business.

my notes: And I spent three and a half years helping build Creative Commons, a copyright non-profit aiming to foster sharing online.

my notes: After MetaFilter started to take off, I also worked on Blogger.com for a year, just as it was taking off.

my notes: To give you some idea of who I am, I want to do a quick introduction to my previous work. At the end of 1998, when there were just a dozen or so blogs, I had the idea to make a blog pointing out interesting sites on the web, but I didn’t think I could do it alone, so I learned to program enough to build a multi-user system. I thought 4 or 5 people along with myself could post 1 or 2 links a day and we’d have a pretty good group blog.

Today MetaFilter has approximately 40,000 active members, about 250,000 posts and somewhere around 5 million comments to date. It’s one of the largest blog communities online.

my notes: Hi, I’m Matt and this is my talk on communicating effectively with customers using blogs and other forms of social media, with a stress on being authentic. I’ll explain more of what I mean by that in just a minute