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Beware... You don't want this guy to be your next web marketing expert.

I was reading posts in one of my favourite online forums when I noticed the signature line for one of the users: The Internet – Where anyone with a keyboard is an expert. Truer words have never been spoken and thinking of a recent conversation with one of my clients, I could feel my blood pressure start to rise.

But let’s start with my first reaction. It’s absolutely true (and in many ways wonderful) how the Internet has opened up the world and provided a soapbox for a variety of backyard experts. For example:

Wikipedia – the user-managed encyclopedia of everything.

Podcasts – allowing you to learn about everything from how to lose weight to overcoming your fear of public speaking.

YouTube – Now the world’s 2nd most popular search engine where you can watch and learn how to stop your dog from jumping, install a video card, or what not to do with a van, a ramp and a mountain bike.

The nice thing about these resources is that they are truly “caveat emptor” or “buyer beware”. But it’s easy to watch, read, or listen and make a judgment call as to how much validity you want to put in the “expert’s” skill, ability and experience. If you agree with their advice, take it. If it seems faulty, you may want to pass. Did you watch the bike video? The point is, it’s easy to make a judgement call on the “expert.”

The other reality of that signature line, however, is the part that makes my blood boil. Owning a pen does not make a someone a great author. Owning a camera a does not make someone a great photographer. Owning or watching a TV does not make someone a great producer (although I tend to be able to pick the fall line-up winners better than most TV execs). And owning a computer and some web design software certainly doesn’t make someone a great online marketer.

It’s frustrating having the same conversation time after time with clients or potential clients. “Why do you charge so much? My brother/ son-in-law/cousin/grand-niece/buddy’s kid can do it for free!”  My response? “Okay.” Creating a website isn’t that difficult and in truth,  almost anyone can do it. But more and more, your website is the “first impression” of your business that most of your customers will receive. Do you want just anyone to create that…and for free?

Today if you are in business, you have to be on the web. I used to tell people that if they couldn’t afford a professionally designed website that something, perhaps designed by their nephew, was better than nothing. Well, I’ve seen too many of those “somethings” and they bring about expressions: “that sure is something…,” “something in there has to make sense,” “I bet they had something else in mind.” A bad website can destroy your credibility. If you can’t afford a website, claim your business address in Google Places and other directories and add a short informative description. That is better than nothing and won’t leave potential customers wondering if the typos on your site are indicative of your lack of competence.

Now sometimes “the nephew” does get it right and the website looks great. But, there’s often another side to the story. It’s the inevitable follow up a year or two down the line. The business owner explains that online marketing “doesn’t work” for their business model. They didn’t get any leads through their website, the site is too difficult to update, or some other thing. The logic here is faulty. It’s no different than the 65 year old web Luddite who claims the “Internet is broken” because they can’t figure out how to buy a book from Amazon.

Successfully marketing a product or service online isn’t easy. While a “free” website may look great, it may not:

• Capture your unique selling proposition
• Include calls-to-action, telling visitors what to do next
• Organize information about your business in a logical, easy-to-digest manner
• Do one of a hundred other little things that make a website “sell” your business

And it’s definitely not going to be part of an overall strategy for marketing your business online. It’s the years of experience, testing, understanding of best practices for website design, online marketing, email marketing and now social media marketing that my team and I bring to the table. That’s why we cost more than your nephew, or cousin, or brother-in-law.

The Internet – Where anyone with a keyboard is an expert. However not all experts are created equal.

Twenty years ago, a simple document proposed a unified way for computers in a network to display information in a human readable way. It allowed you to easily move from one piece of information to another by simply moving your mouse over a piece of text and clicking it. This simple document, was the precursor to what we know today – hyper links and the World Wide Web. That document, published November 12^th 1990, can be found here.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – The Inventor of the Web

As a physicist working at CERN, he found that information was hard to access. In the mid 80s, the Internet existed solely as a large network of computers with CERN being one of the largest nodes in Europe. Even though computers using Internet Protocol were able to talk to each other, displaying the information to users was a problem. Reading one piece of information and then moving onto another was difficult.

HyperText and the World Wide Web

Information was structured in a hierarchy. If you wanted to see a paper written by Dr. Joe, you need to figure out which database that paper was stored in. You then needed type in commands and credentials to view it, typically in raw text. Let’s say that Joe referenced a report that his colleague John wrote and it was stored in another database. In order to access this report, you’d then need to connect to that database, type in some commands to find the paper and then it might show it to you using another program. The Internet facilitated the sharing of information but you can see from this example that there was no unified way to show it to you.

Berner-Lee’s document proposed a unified way to show information to the user and a way for users to reference other information easily. Information did not need to rely on a hierarchy anymore. All information could “link” to other information and to each other and there was finally a unified way for computers to show this information. This invention, combined with domain name registration and TCP/IP (both being emergent technologies in the 80s) gave birth to the World Wide Web as we know it.

It’s free

In my opinion, the most important line of this proposal is this: “to provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone.” Lee was working at CERN and therefore, all intellectual property developed there belonged to CERN. This included the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTML and the browser developed by Lee. If CERN and Lee followed conventional software development wisdom, they would have charged royalties for any institution or individuals using it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams but insisted that his work by released into the public domain. This is huge. By doing this, new industries were created.

If it weren’t for this document (and its eventual implementation), companies like Google, YouTube and Facebook would never have been created. Blogs like mashable.com, gawker.com, smashingmagazine.com and your favourite site featuring pictures of cats would never have been possible.

A few notes

Technically speaking, Lee drafted his first memo on Hypertext in March of 1989. His boss wrote “vague but exciting…” on this draft but didn’t let him follow through with his idea. It wasn’t until Robert Cailliau, rewrote and submitted the draft in November 12^th 1990 that they were able to receive approval and funds to actually start the project.

We sometimes find that clients get confused between the “Follow Us” icons added to digital media and the “Share This” functionality that allows visitors to directly share web pages through social media. These 2 things are not interchangeable.

Follow Us

The sole purpose of Follow Us links is to build your social media following. The convention is to display the logos of all your social media networks on your website or blog in a consistent button format. The buttons are simple html links to your accounts, pages, and channels within the social media networks. This allows users to quickly add or follow you from their own social media accounts.

Don’t underestimate the importance of these buttons. Or, more accurately, don’t underestimate the extreme ineptitude of social media search functions. It is often much easier to visit an organization’s homepage and click on their Twitter link than it is to search and find them within Twitter itself. The same can be said of Facebook and YouTube. The easier you make it for people to follow you, the better.

Follow Us links should appear in a sensible intuitive place on a website. Ideally, in the same place on every page of the website. Our favourite spot is somewhere in a vertical navigation bar. Try not to bury it in the footer because it’s too far past the content for people to find. Putting it in the masthead runs the risk that visitors won’t notice it.

Don’t get into the minutiae of social media logos unless your audience is very active within the networks. If your audience isn’t on Digg, Reddit or Friend Feed, don’t overwhelm them with logos they may not even recognize.

Make sure you post regularly and make a solid effort to build up your following. Nothing is more counter productive than asking visitors to follow or fan you, only for them to learn you have a tiny following and you haven’t updated in months.

Share This

Share This, AddThis, TweetMeme, etc. are an entirely different ball game from Follow Us icons. They are not simple html, but require code (usually javascript) that performs a very specific function. They do not link to your social media accounts. Instead, they open up a social network, make sure the user is signed in, and “talk to” the social network code to create a custom post from the user’s account linking to a webpage specified by you. This is not easily done which is why one uses prepackaged plugins like Share This, AddThis or TweetMeme.

Share This functionality is wicked cool because it lets your supporters promote specific pages within your website or blog on your behalf. It’s complicated because it has to work with a 3rd party system it can’t really control (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and tell it what to do.

The Catch

It is not easy implementing Share This technology with anything other than a simple webpage. For example, including it in an email or a Flash page is a bitch. Why? Because they aren’t compatible with javascript. While it is possible to manually create a share this link by passing information to Facebook and Twitter through the html link, it’s capabilities are very limited. The cool part is it allows you to custom write tweets and Facebook posts on behalf of yourself. The drawback is it’s almost impossible to guarantee consistent results for a client. Think, “I tried to Facebook it from home and it looked all weird.”

This tech is being improved all the time to work within these limits. AddThis, for example, can be used with Flash. In my opinion, however, it’s not worth the hours of code tweaking and trouble shooting for more challenging media.

It’s my experience that if you don’t have someone who can quickly add the plug ins for you, straight social media promotion works just as well, especially since that’s where the majority of your share-inclined traffic will be coming from. Users are just as likely to retweet your bit.ly link right from Twitter as they are to use the Share This links on the page itself. The same goes for Facebook. If the content is cool, folks may be more inclined to just post it using the good ol’ cut and paste function than to use any fancy do it for me button. After all, the more things change, the more technology is a work in progress.

The Power and the Glory

Managed correctly, social media can significantly increase the traffic to your website. With a big enough following, anything you promote through your networks will get views – lots of views. So use that power wisely.

But before you try to promote something in social media, consider what people like to read and share, not just what you’d like to advertise. For example, we don’t put Share This links on our main website, only on our blog. Why? Because, really, does anyone care enough about our services to share them with their network? Hardly.

People like to share news, articles that teach them something, or opinion pieces that support their ideas. They likely won’t share a page about a product. But they might share a review about a product, or news about a new feature, etc.

Use social media for what it’s meant for and the rewards will be great: lots of your content being kicked around the social hemisphere. Bore people with your own agenda and people will think your Share This links are arrogant decorations.

Social networks are a funny place. See Angie’s top ten favourite things about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And while you’re there, get some valuable insights into viral marketing and using networks for social responsibility.