You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Social CRM’ tag.
The title tag is an HTML title element critical to both SEO and user experience that is used to briefly and accurately describes the topic and theme of an online document.
The title tag is displayed in two key places:
- Internet Browser – Title Tags display in the top bar of internet browsers.
- Search Result Pages – Search engines display title tags in their results along with another less important on-page factor, the meta description tag.
Importance for SEO:
Historically, the title tag has consistently been one of the single most important on-page SEO factors. Before search engine algorithms increased their complexity, the title tag was an easy way to try and determine the topic and relevancy of a page. As search engines evolved, their algorithms started to include additional factors such as link data, social media interaction and traffic/performance metrics. The title tag, however, still holds great value for on-page search engine optimization.
According to SEOmoz’s annual Search Ranking Factors survey of 37 influential thought leaders in the SEO industry, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword usage in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
Creating Optimized Title Tags
Title tags are one of the best return on investment SEO techniques because they are a low effort and high return task. Most blogging platforms like WordPress and Drupal either provide built in solutions or downloadable add-ons to provide access to create and edit title tags.
Optimization Tips:
- Be Accurate – Try not to wonder off topic with your title tags as they are used as a relevancy factor to describe a page in search engine algorithms. Stray too far off the path and you may look like you’re spamming, keyword stuffing or other manipulative techniques.
- Don’t Target Too Many Terms on One Page – A good rule of thumb is to try not to target more than a couple keywords per page. If you could create a standalone article on the topic, it should be its own page. This method allows search engines to more easily determine the topic and relevancy of your page.
- Optimize Your Length for Results Pages – Search engines standardize their results pages by limiting the amount of characters they show per element of a listing. Title tags are allowed a maximum of 70 characters is the maximum amount of characters before they display an ellipsis – “…” to signify that a title tag has been cut off. Your title tag may not make sense to a user if it gets cut off before the point is made, so be sure to check title tag length. Additionally, don’t go overboard with keywords and use common sense to know what looks too long.
- Keyword Placement and Order Matters – According to SEOmoz’s survey, the earlier the keyword is used in the placement of the title tag, the more helpful it is for ranking factors. Additionally, because it is near the beginning and likely not cut off at the 70 character limit, the more likely a user will see it and click on your search result listing.
- Try to Be Enticing – Your title tag is a searcher’s first impression with your page and sometimes brand. Leverage the title tag to not only optimize for SEO but also for user experience. Studies have shown that the message you convey in your title tag can get your more traffic than the search result listing ranked above you. Think of the following example – which one would you click on?:
Option A: Digital Cameras – Company Name
Option B: Buy Digital Cameras and Accessories – Limited 20% off – Company Name
Search Engine Result Pages
One last thing to note is that any keywords in title tags, meta descriptions and display URLs that match the performed search query will be bolded on the search results page. With searchers using title tags to determine which listing they click on, an optimized and enticing title tag can increase click-through rates and greater brand awareness.
This past Thursday and Friday I attended Lithium’s annual customer conference on Community Management and Social CRM: LiNC 2010. I have some experience in these areas not only because I’ve worked on products to support Community Management and Social CRM (a.k.a. CRM 2.0) but also because as a User Experience professional, my job calls calls for customer empathy and a deep understanding of their needs. When I worked at a small start-up, Zaq Interactive Solutions in Toronto and Montreal about 10 years ago we were pushing online communities and community management. This was well before marketers and other areas of the organization were ready for it and that’s why the business failed. More recently I worked at Yahoo! and I was involved in the research, design and development of their first social shopping product around deals where the desire for customers to connect was extremely clear.
As mentioned, the main topic of the conference was Communities and Social CRM. Of course now, thanks to twitter, conferences like this one easily generate their own time-based community. I tweeted constantly throughout the conference (under the wrong impression that I could win an iPad; contrary to what you might read below, sometimes user incentives DO work 
). The sense of community and the feeling that I belonged and was being heard was validated by responses, retweets and new followers. Even our complaints about the cold rooms made and impact and after a few tweets the temperature was promptly turned up.
Below is a summarization of what I heard and learned during the conference.
Your customers are everywhere. Are you?
Great idea and aside from sounding creepy it’s what you’re going to need to do. According to Patrick Riley, the Director of User Experience at Lithium:
- “Gen Y triggered the movement towards the Social Customer”
- “Now there’s more communication via social networks than email.
- “3/4” people on the web are tied to social networks. They’re also very conversant with the various technologies available to them.
- “Users are 4x more likely to contribute on mobile devices vs. desktop because they’re the most engaged. And Facebook mobile users are 6x more likely to contribute.
And consider this: “From first call resolution to first contact resolution, there’s a lot of stuff that’s gone on before that call.” – Paul Greenberg
Users want to be heard, recognized, and loved
The community feeds people’s needs to be understood, recognized, and valued. Letting the customer get control of their experience with the company is the core of everything. Customers want appreciation, not swag. Bragging rights are meaningful and receiving props from other community members is the kind of recognition they’re looking for.
While introducing the concept of Customer 2.0 at an Inside Sales conference last week, my colleague shared a truth in marketing video that sums up the above point about user recognition perfectly. Customer: “I’ve changed, we don’t hang out in the same places anymore. You don’t listen…”
There’s a shift towards transparency to gain customer trust
In Social CRM the company is “the man”. A lack of transparency making it difficult for customers to get the information they want affects loyalty. You should be brutally honest with your customers and speak in your own voice.
According to BestBuy the corportate culture and employee adoption is key. There social media engagemnts align with core philopsophies to empower employees and drive the customer experience. And Scoutlabs, recently acquired by Lithium, thinks every person in the organization should be in tune with the customer. They focused on making their system really easy to use because the voice of the customer doesn’t just below to marketing.
All superusers are not equal.
Superusers are your most valuable customers. They represent the “1” in the “90-9-1” principle. They are more likely to contribute to community sites and do positive brand marketing (via blogging) and defend your company on your behalf. At the conference, one of our prospects (and current product uses) asked to speak with me about my company’s user community. InsideView doesn’t have a formal community yet; that’s why I was at the conference checking out Lithium. I asked Matt (the prospect) why he would join our community and he said it’s because he’s so passionate about our product, SalesView and that he’d like to help out others with their experience with the product. These people do exist, you just have to find them. They come in 4 flavors:
- connectors
- critics
- creators
- collectors
Connectors help you sell. Critics give rich, actionable feedback. Why focus on these superusers who represent about 1% of your customer base? Because 1% of customers / trendsetters drive 15% of sales” (unknown source).
But don’t just focus on them. The real opportunity to grow your business is between the 9 and the 1 in “90-9-1” principle.
Don’t make participating in the community like work
Community contribution shouldn’t be like work. Or it won’t work. Adding labels and tags to make community content searchable is not something users want to do. The company can do that. Use your community to validate content. They’ll tell you if it’s wrong. And keep in mind that it’s much easier to start knowledge in conversation vs. on a blank page.
The Net Promoter Score is only the beginning
How do you measure the success of your products and services. We’ve been using the Net Promoter score for years. But we’ve been stopping short. Paul Greenberg asks what’s next? If step one is asking a customer how likely they would be to recommend the product(s) or service(s) to a friend, step two is “did you recommend…?” (that’s right; observed behavior is the only trusted measure), step 3 is “did they become a customer?”, and step four: “were they profitable?”.
Different types of customers require different types of communities
There are 3 types of communities:
- 911 – break / fix
- 411 – learn and improve
- 511 – explore and discover
The users of these communities display different underlying behavioral patterns and it’s important understand what they are.
Overall it was a great conference where much was learned. You can see all of my conference tweets using this search. I’ll leave you with one of my favorites:
–
Beth Goldman
Manager of User Experience
Yesterday marked the one year birthday of the SalesView Buzz tab. The Buzz tab launched on May 11th, 2009 as the first Twitter integration for CRM (including Salesforce, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite CRM.) While the launch was received with a great deal of enthusiasm by media and analysts (after all, what journalist wasn’t smitten with Twitter in the Spring of 2009?), the benefits of having Tweets about customers and prospects available directly within CRM were not immediately obvious to many B2B sales people.
Similar to the adoption pattern for our Facebook mash-up and LinkedIn integration before, customers and prospects started to identify and leverage actionable sales intelligence from the social media stream. One of my favorite anecdotes comes from a meeting with the VP of Sales at a key customer account a few months after we launched the Buzz tab. As part of our regular quarterly account review we walk customers through recent features & enhancements. This included the Buzz tab at the time so we had him bring up the SalesView Buzz tab (i.e. Twitter & Google blog search) for his own company.
As it turned out, one of the most recent Tweets mentioning his company was a person looking for competitive product recommendations:
- “We’re evaluating marketing automation solutions – (our customer) vs. (competitor #1) vs. (competitor #2). Thoughts?”
TA-WEET! Yes, that was a hot lead and yes he was impressed. The icing on the cake was that within a few minutes the VP of Sales had logged in to see the Buzz tab for himself and by that time someone had already responded as follows:
- “Definitely (competitor #1)… we went through the selection process over 1 year ago and have been happy since.”
TWUH-OH! He interrupted our meeting to make sure the right sales rep followed up on this lead immediately, before his competitor (or their fans) could further slant the conversation to their favor.
Now obviously you will not always have hot leads like these land in your lap but this example does speak to how important a customer acquisition channel Twitter has become. As with other traditional and emerging channels, it provides new ways in which to listen and engage with the new, social customer (a.k.a. Customer 2.0) . The nature of Twitter, which is real-time and entirely public, requires that you sales reps keep an ear to the ground at all times, lest your competitors should be the ones to pounce first.
I work at sales intelligence leader, InsideView and we’re in the same building as Zynga at 444 De Haro Street in San Francisco. I used to be addicted to FarmVille, playing it daily on Facebook. I couldn’t handle the pressure and responsibility of my e-farm and stopped playing a few months ago. I call it a vacation and imagine some day I’ll be back on that farm, tending away. Despite my lack of use, it looks like Zynga is growing like crazy. I see their staff around the building every day looking pretty happy to be at work and often wonder what goes on behind the doors of their many offices. So I decided to do some research in our own product, SalesView.
Within minutes I found these articles from ITProPortal, The Money Times, PCWorld, cnet news and more outlining the possibility of Zynga bailing out of Facebook and starting their own social gaming network using SalesView (see image below). From there I found even more commentary on the subject, including Michael Arrington’s post on TechCrunch.
I quickly became concerned about the idea of adding yet another website to my list of social networks. Would social network aggregators like FriendFeed, Netvibes, TweetDeck be so popular if people really wanted to have more destinations to go to on the internet? Social content needs to be “where I’m at” and if it’s not I need a damn good reason to go there.
But as a social news aggregator, this is great for InsideView. The more decentralized information there is about people and companies the more important it is that there are tools out there to show the right information in the right place at the right time. And we can do that.
–
Beth GoldmanManager of User Experience
beth.goldman@insideview.com
The Altimeter Group’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang recently hosted a Webinar called “Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.” The discussion revolved around an emerging trend in Social CRM platforms, including the business implications of choosing to acknowledge and interact with your customers rather than allow conversations to carry out without your organization’s knowledge or participation.
At the heart of the Webinar lived the fact that customers are using social technologies to share their voices, and companies are having a very difficult time to keep up. As a result, organizations are turning to Social CRM technologies to engage their customer base in both praise and complaint.
Altimeter defines Social CRM as a means to “understand where, what and which conversations are happening, and how to engage in conversation.” Social networks have become the customer’s virtual soapbox to share all information and commentary about their favorite, or least favorite, companies – a scenario that must be acknowledged and dealt with appropriately by company representatives.
If you are pioneering your company’s Social CRM initiative, or have been tasked with finding a solution for customer engagement, the Social CRM Pioneer Group is a great resource for more information and feedback from experts.
Wang and Owyang point to the importance of “listening before talking,” noting that by doing so an organization can identify top influencers, rank top conversations, prioritize top channels and gauge the tone of conversation. InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti discussed the relevance of listening before talking in a Sandhill article earlier this year, stating “In a prospect-driven buying process, sales reps need to actively listen and develop a conversation with prospects.”
Social media has led to a demand for immediate response – with Social CRM, companies can be among the first to respond to a public complaint, rather than getting lost in the eventual mass of commentary. Look no further than last year’s United Breaks Guitar scenario. Within hours of posting a video complaint about the airline mishandling his musical equipment, millions of viewers had shared the homemade PR nightmare. With an active Social CRM platform, United could have potentially calmed the waters with a fraction of the public interest.
Several additional notes from the Webinar:
- For companies, real time is not fast enough: Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do, in order to keep up. Example: Although Motrin responded to angry moms within 24 hours – it was too slow.
- Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social: No matter how many community managers companies hire to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of active customers. They need tools, and they need them now.
- Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed: Support problems can quickly became a PR nightmare (United Airlines guitar incident) – had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could service the disgruntled customer better.
