James O’Sullivan’s Blog

I received an email from Trip Wolf today which used a complelling subjectline “The French are rude and the Americans are fat”!

Every culture has a stereotype and Trip wolf are attempting to gather information  from users on what each culture is really like. I’ve noticed one user has identified Ireland as having the most beautiful women! Of course I would have to agree

Last month I wrote a post about the email marketing funnel and the steps you need to take the optimise each step of the way.  I expect that this cheeky email subjectline will achieve high open rates for Trip Wolf.

SEO, (Search Engine Optimisation) is absolutely crucial to the success of your online business. There’s a whole host of companies offering their SEO services and charge an arm and a leg to give you advice on how your website should be optimised. My best advice in today’s ecomonic climate is to save yourself some money and do it yourself. SEO agencies position SEO as a complicated science which only they understand. That’s simply not the case. SEO companies come in, do a check of your keywords, optimise your content, give advise on website structure and code, and simply rattle off best practices that YOU need to follow. After all this advice the SEO company don’t really “Do” anything! They give you the advice but it’s you who needs to do the work to implement their recommendations! It’s you that has to build up the in-bound links, it’s you who needs to update your code with meta descriptions etc, it’s you who needs to code up the short URL’s and so on. In my opinion I think it’s daylight robbery.

If you want to optimise your website just read Google’s document on how to SEO your website.

and if that’s too much check out the really useful SEO cheat sheet.

Follow this and you’ve just saved your self a pile of cash to spend on Google ads or at your Christmas party

If you’re lazy go ahead and waste your money on an SEO agency.

Just came across the following website by Mingle2 - Free Online Dating site developed in San Francisco.

I personally love the campaign, it’s funny and has a great viral aspect which will drive traffic to their website. I think this campaign could have targetted keywords relating to Movember (the month formerly known as November) is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health. Anywho, well done to Matthew Inman of Mingle2.

Last night I attended BizSpark - a Digital Media Networking event at the four seasons in leafy south Dublin. The event was well organised by Digital Media Island and I certainly enjoyed the few pints of Guinness. There was a good panel discussion followed by presentations from locle and justroutes. During the Q&A session Michael Walsh from GlobalDMX made a very candid point that we(Ireland) are the backwater of broadband services. I certainly agree with his point, the government need to step up to the mark and deliver the infrastructure needed to support digital services in Ireland. One of the issues we have is users don’t understand what real broadband is and what services could be offered. It’s really a case of chicken and egg. I would call on hosting companies in Ireland to come together on this issue and lobby for greater broadband services. Another discussion point was the support for start-up companies and role Enterprise Ireland can play. Start-ups mentioned that they find it difficult to find the information they’re looking for and how they can find it.  However there is a project called M50 which aims to solve this challenge with speed. I personally find it amusing that the project is named M50 since the M50 is car park at the moment where people get highly frustrated! BizSpark was a fantastic event where I met some great people such as the lads from blacknight (Irish Hosting Company) and Iarfhlaith Kelly a freelance web designer from Dublin
There’s another digital media event organised my Connector next week which I’ll try to attend.

Congratulations to Barack Obama on becoming the 44th president of the United States of America. I’m not going to write about the election campaign since I’m not an expert in American politics and don’t pretend to be. However this has been an interesting election in terms of online campaigns. Obama ran an extremely smooth internet campaign which consumed almost every large internet communication channel. The Obama camp more or less owned youtube over the last few months especially in the last few weeks. Political experts are saying that the Millennials won the campaign for Obama and where better to target these users but online! The Obama camp ploughed millions into online advertising and profiles, everything from a twitter profile to a myspace account the Obama campaign was covered. This was a long running campaign and if you run a trend  on Google for Obama V McCain Google trend actually predicts the result of the election!

The obama camp truly embraced online media, they connected with their target audience by creating content which entertained as well as getting their message across. I guess it’s alot easier to run massive online campaigns when you have the level of funding Obama had! Nevertheless, my hat’s off to the Obama team on a well run online campaign.

 Today I received an email from iProfile.org with a really interesting subject line “How to protect yourself against CV Identity Fraud” and have posted a report on the topic. I didn’t subscribe to iProfile.org emailing list and I would normally mark such emails as spam but this time was different. The email was informative and concerned a topic of major online safety importance - Identity Theft. iProfile provides a free service where you can upload your CV and protects you from CV identity fraud. You can protect your phone number through a masking feature but apart from that I don’t see any difference between this online CV tool and any other.

CV Identity fraud is fast becoming a major online threat to both job hunters and recruiters. What better way for a fraudster to gain your personal information to setup a profile and masquerade as you. Recruitment agencies and HR departments receive many external documents on a daily basis from unknown source. Their job is reliant on opening attachments and processing the information. However without proper understanding and protection of this threatening landscape they’re at risk of various malicious code attacks. This is why I believe online CV’s will be the preferred method of choice for both the job seeker and recruiter. iProfile and linkedIn definitely make life easier and I’m all for improved processes, efficiency and semantic data but there’s an art in writing a CV and I believe the presentation of the traditional CV tells alot about the job seeker. Standardising a format for everyone to use removes this insight.

The internet has changed the way consumers preceive your brand and one group of users can have a huge influence over your reputation. Loss of reputation means loss of confidence which we all know in today’s economic down turn with the credit crunch results in lost revenue. So what can you do to ensure that your reputation is maintained.

• Listen

To what your consumers have to say, communication is 80% listening.

• Talk

Speak to consumers in a way they can understand. Don’t generalise.

• Engage

Don’t just sit there, get out and build a relationship with your customers. Start with building trust, it’s the cornerstone of any good relationship. Develop and understand your customer segments and build a personal profile for each one of these to help visualise the person your engaging with.

• Measure

Continuously monitor what’s being said on blogs, forums, social networks, customer service reps, sales.. Sort these into negative, positive and most popular. Take you course of action and measure the impact of your actions so adjustments can be made accordingly. Tools such as trackur, buzz logic, and many more can be used to help you organise this information.

While on the topic of email I thought it was appropriate to congratulate google on their latest gMail feature - mail goggles. If you’re inclined to send drunkn emails during the weekend, google have the solution! You can now turn on a feature in gmail that will ask you to complete a mathimathical equation before you hit send!
If only I could have that feature for txt messages on my Nokia phone! Actually come to think of it maybe google have this feature on their New google phone! If not, my guess is that they’re already thinking about it. My hat goes off to google yet again, shows that the 80/20 rule really works

The email funnel is a great way to represent your EDM campaign and how you can make improvements. If your overall goal is to increase email sales then you need to optimise each step of the way to close that sale. What ever ESP (Email Service Provider) you use make sure they deliver all the neccessary key success metrics. I’ve put together an email funnel which I use to help visualise the success criteria for an EDM campaign and what needs to be changed to improve results.Bottom line, never make a change without measuring it.

Simply put email marketing is crucial for an online business. Get it wrong and it can affect almost every aspect of your business. email marketing has been around for a long time so there’s plenty of article out there to help you on your way. Apart from emailing the right customer list, personalisation, copy and email type (newsletter, transactional…) the following points should be followed.

Technical stuff.

• Close Tags
• Check that it’s W3C compliant
• Use ASCII
• Avoid CSS
• Width 500-600
• No Javascript
• No background images
• Don’t embed images, host them on a webserver
• Don’t embed forms

Typography and colour

• Use Ariel or any other sans serif font that is largely supported
• Use “Cool” colours: Blue, Purple and Green work well with both male and female users
• Don’t use a white font.
• Best practices
• Create a web version
• Test on various email clients
• Place important content on the top left
• Include add email to safe list
• Blocked images affect open rate so use images sparingly
• More links increase click rate
• Hyperlink all images
• Don’t SPAM
• Have a personality. Style, tone humour, emotion, attitude
• Have a clear call to action
• Use white space
• Forward to friend link
• RSS feed subscription link

Must have

• Unsubscribe link
• Company name and address

Test test and test

• Subject line
• Layout, colours, format – heat maps
• Offers
• Buttons, call to action
• Landing page
• Frequency