Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

You are just starting out.  Brand new website.  Brand new product.  The midnight oil has been burned, energy levels are high. But…. visitors to the website are low.  Social media followers grow at an infinitesimal slow pace, and you wonder if you are doing it right.  Chances are, you are.  Stick with it.

This is from the veritable hubspot team on the success of a landscape gardening firm.  Some may think it would be hard to blog, facebook and tweet about lawns but this is how they did it.  And what I really like is that they show the results comparing some of the things they did before and after.

On the health side this is a great article on how a doctor uses google to market and recruit patients. A website is not enough.

Reshaping your sales effort

According to CBC news last year Allfacebook.com estimates three Facebook account users will die every minute. That’s 1.78 million people in 2011 with accounts in limbo. Adam Ostrow (editor-in-chief of Mashable) gives a 5 minute talk at TED:

Many of us have a social media presence — a virtual personality made up of status updates, tweets and connections, stored in the cloud… What happens to that personality after you’ve died? Could it … live on?

For some more links on ‘What happens to social media when I die‘ see HCSMANZ’s site which has gathered some good info and discussion

Although Google Buzz is being phased out (and merged with Google+) businesses can now add themselves to Google+

From the Google Blog:

For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.

A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.

Direct Connect from Google search
People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.

Maybe you’re watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic. Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (like +Angry Birds). We’ll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.

That sounds like a good SEO opportunity to me!  HubSpot also do a good write up on Google+ for business and how to add yourself.

More great resources from Hubspot. This time a five minute video on how to create a facebook page. Not only that – but once you have created the page, Hubspot gives you an idea of what and how to post AND how to measure what you are doing.

Here are the 5 steps:

1. Choose a Classification
2. Complete Basic Information
3. Fill the Page
4. Take Advantage of Features
5. Play and Track

They also include a freebie ebook – How to use Facebook for business

Sound familiar?  You need to have software know-how.  Learning a bit of html doesn’t go amiss, plan content, network, attend trade events, learn new platforms, recruit and train, publish and join the conversation… At some point, surely, these roles will more become defined – but until then, ‘Jack of all Trades’ kind of fits….