Morrisville, NC – This morning, I had the pleasure of addressing Coffee & Connections at the Morrisville Chamber. My topic was Top 5 Twitter Tricks.

Twitter for Business

“Hi, I’m Hal Goodtree,” I began. “I’m the Publisher of CaryCitizen, based in Cary, NC.” It was 7:30 in the morning and I was getting more than a few blank looks. “Cary is a suburb of Morrisville,” I explained. That seemed to clear things up.

Twitter can be fun, illuminating, many things, but I wanted to highlight the benefits to business. “Of the four big social media tools – Facebook, Linked In, YouTube and Twitter – Twitter is the most important for business in February of 2012,” I said.

I asked how many in the crowd used Twitter. By a show of hands, it looked like about 40% were using Twitter. I asked the rest why they weren’t on Twitter – was it too hard or just a waste of time? Two hands went up for “waste of time.” The rest thought it was too hard.

But Twitter is easy, I told the group, and can very effective for business both in the long and the short term. For instant results, Twitter is the bomb.

Top 5 Twitter Tricks

These aren’t really Twitter tricks. More like Top 5 for Newbies, but who likes to be called a newbie? I used to be a newbie, but now I’ve graduated to Village Idiot. It know how bad it hurts to be mocked. So here’s my Top 5 tips.

1. Share the Love - This is really the raison d’etre of Twitter. Mention me and I’ll mention you. Make me look good and I’ll return the favor.

2. Hashtags - A Hastag is a number sign and a word/phrase such as #business or #chapelhill. Hashtags are searchable and help other people with similar interests find your stuff.

3. TY RT & FF - Twitter is only 140 characters including any link, so abbreviations allow you to pack more into a small message.

TY=Thank You, RT=Retweet and FF=Follow Friday

• When someone mentions you, you respond with “TY for the mention.”

• Retweets are when you republish someone else’s tweet - “RT @CaryCitizen: Publisher Hal Goodtree will be talking about Twitter at @MorrisvilleNC Chamber Coffee & Connections tomorrow.”

• Follow Friday is a popular convention of Twitter . On Fridays, you recommend other users you like, as in “#FF @CaryCitizen @MorrisvilleNC“

 4. Tweko - This is a power tip. Tweko (Twitter + Echo) is a service that rebroadcasts your tweet several hours after it is initially published. This is useful because people tend to check Twitter a few of times a day, not monitor it constantly. By rebroadcasting, you expose your message to a larger share of your audience. Tweko is free and easy – just sign up with your Twitter name and password, set a few parameters (how many rebroadcasts and how many hours in between) and you’re all set. Works automatically.

5. HootSuite - HootSuite is an alternative way to monitor your Twitter account (or accounts). It offers more functionality than going to the Twitter website. HootSuite is free and works in your web browser – nothing to download.

TY Morrisville Chamber

Thank you to the Morrisville Chamber for inviting me to Coffee & Connections. With any luck, they’ll get a better speaker next month.

Hypersign – Designing Content for Digital Signage

We did a couple of things for UNC, but the Hypersign portion of the project was to design content for a public digital display.

Hypersign is SaaS – that’s short for Software as a Service. It’s a fascinating platform you access via a web browser that allows you to control a display on one or more digital signs.

Users can choose from many different screen layouts. We decided to work with a template like this:

Users can upload pictures, text, video, PowerPoint slideshows or even grab an RSS feed.

Here is one of the panels we designed The other is at the top):

We also produced the two Main Panel slideshows in conjunction with Tri-Properties. Here’s the slideshow we produced for the History display.

The new panels are part of fabulous display located in the lobby to the Natatorium right next to the Dean Dome.

But it’s quite another thing when elected officials blog for themselves. We’re privy to their musings; we hear their voice. Likewise, the elected official has the opportunity to be in a conversation with readers.

Now that’s 21st century democracy.

Welcome LoriBush.org

CitizenWebsites, the business services arm of CaryCitizen, is proud to be the producer of LoriBush.org, the new blog of Cary Town Council At-Large Member Lori Bush.

Lori was sworn into office in December. She came to the job with impressive digital skills – she writes, she codes, she photoshops. A triple threat.

LoriBush.org is a mix of personal stories, community info and editorial content about Lori’s ideas and experiences as a public servant.

We wish Lori the very best and express our thanks for letting us publish her new blog. Check it out.

Other Cary Officials Who Blog

Cary, NC is called Technology Town for a reason.

• Council Member Don Frantz has been blogging for a long time and is very readable.
• Cary Mayor Harold Weinbrecht produces a weekly blog choc full of details on Town issues.
• Add LoriBush.org to the mix of voices.

Need a Website?

We can help. Contact:

Jeff Strowe
jeff.strowe@carycitizen.com
(919) 538-5375

We’ve been doing it for our clients for four years. Now I’m going to explain how you can do it, too.

All About Content Marketing

Content marketing is really pretty simple to understand. It puts advertisers in the position of being general interest publishers.

An example will make it all clear: imagine you are a realtor in Raleigh. Instead of publishing stories about real estate and mortgages (like all the other agents do), you publish stories about Raleigh events, food and the arts.

Readers in Raleigh who are searching for stories about food etc. find your content and visit your website.

Frequency in Content Marketing

If you publish stories about a focused topic (like food in Raleigh) on a regular, consistent basis – say once a week – your search ranking will rise over time. This will help you best other realtors when someone is actually looking to buy or sell a house.

The Genius of Content Marketing

Content marketing expands your audience beyond people who are interested in your product right now. It has a long-tail benefit and produces a cumulative effect.

Main Beneficiary: Low Interest Categories

In the four years we’ve been doing content marketing, it’s become clear to us that the biggest benefit can be seen in low-interest categories.

High-interest categories generate their own excitement. Cars, food and gardening are all high-interest categories. People seek out stories on those topics.

Dentistry, real estate and law are low-interest categories. People only care when they have a specific problem or need.

As a marketer in a low-interest category, you are naturally always advertising to people with an immediate need. But the field is crowded by all your competitors. And it would be great to create awareness and brand recognition before the consumer has the need. Awareness and brand recognition positions you to harvest the fruit when it is ripe, to paraphrase my late, great biz dev mentor Sandy Sulcer.

I must write more about Sandy Sulcer one of these days.

Halo-Effect

Finally, content marketing creates a halo-effect.

For a dentist or a lawyer or a bed store, content marketing connects the business to wider public interest. But focusing on a niche (we know a realtor who blogs about youth soccer), the business can become the de facto expert on a particular subject targeted to a local audience. They become more than just a business – they become a valuable source of information to a particular community.

This halo of expertise in one subject (say soccer) burnishes the image of the realtor in a general way. “Wow, she really knows the community,” a reader is likely to say.

Getting Started in Content Marketing

Most advertisers are diverting dollars from other efforts into content marketing. If you are a realtor, that means examining whether or not you really need Realtor.com, ActiveRain, Trulia and Zillow. Post card marketing, Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising are also on the chopping block.

Unless you are a great writer and photographer with a lot of free time, you need to hire professionals. PR firms and ad agencies are getting into the act, and a new class of content marketers (like ourselves) is emerging.

We sell content marketing in packages – three months, six months and one year. The basic frequency is one story per week. Expect to spend about $3000 per year.

Measuring Content Marketing

The most exciting metric in content marketing is audience growth. Our clients like to see page views growth on a monthly basis, validating their investment.

Also interesting is entry keywords – that is, what people searched on to find your site. Content marketing greatly expands your entry keyword list.

In the longer term, actual sales can be correlated to the increase in brand awareness, recognition and website traffic. That’s why money is coming out of traditional SEO and into content marketing.

It’s not hard to see exactly when we began content marketing for this client:

Examples of Content Marketing

Here are three examples of content marketing.

North Hills Midtown Lowdown - We created this stream, but North Hills writes the content and self-publishes. NH is not exactly a low interest category, but they gain an edge over their competition by publishing newsy stories about what is going on in their community on a daily basis.

Julie Roland Realty – Julie creates tremendous awareness for her company by filling a void in general community news about Pittsboro and Chatham County. As we tell business leaders and municipalities on a regular basis, the newspaper is not coming to your town unless a chemical factory bursts into flames. You need to tell your own story. Julie is doing it for her corner of the Triangle.

The Better Sleep Store – Another client, beds and mattresses are the classic low-interest category. We gain an edge for BSS over the competition (both the locals and the nationals) but publishing regular community news about Chapel Hill mixed in with a humorously informative column about sleep and dreams.

Last Thoughts

Content marketing requires a sustained, focused effort. Set a budget, hire professionals and monitor your metrics to make sure you are achieving the desired benefit.

Write to me if you have a good content marketing story or a burning question.

The Journey of a Digital Immigrant

My first computer was a giant DECmate at Benton & Bowles in the mid-1980′s. I developed a database of commercial directors.

In the early 1990′s, I had an Amiga at home and an Apple Classic II at work. In 1995, I got my first laptop, a Powerbook 500.

I learned FileMaker and published a program called Directors Review, with hundreds of subscribers in the advertising production industry.

In 2000, I had a small hand in the launch of NFL.com. I was on staff that football season as the senior producer for television advertising, working under Executive Producer Henry Frenzel and Creative Director Bob Stohrer.

After that, I started to learn HTML, and build simple websites with programs like Trellix. In 2006, I retired from television to devote myself fully to a career as an internet copywriter.

I spent a year at Brooks Bell Interactive, tightening up my HTML, CSS and learning Dreamweaver. I got to write for great clients including AARP, Nickelodeon and Consumer Reports.

In 2007, I went back on my own with a big website project for a large medical practice in South Carolina.

I was still on my laptop, now a PowerBook G4.

In 2008, Goodtree & Company, Inc. was born. One of our first big projects was a massive sight for the development in Raleigh called North Hills. It’s like a city within the city, and we got to do cool stuff including interactive maps, lots of photography and content creation. It set the tone for all our future projects.

2009 saw the launch of CaryCitizen. For the first time, we built a property for ourselves – a hyperlocal news source about Cary, NC. It’s a town of 147,000 with a failing newspaper and a crying need for community news. Since then, we’ve grown circulation to over 60,000 a month, won a Knight Foundation Fellowship and got listed in the Columbia Journalism Review. We manage our own closed advertising space and it does pretty well, thank you.

Soon, lots of businesses and organizations were asking us to do their websites. From a branding perspective, it became pretty overwhelming to manage from either CaryCitizen or Goodtree & Company. Thus, CitizenWebsites was born.

Why It’s Called CitizenWebsites

As a TV Producer, I worked for national brands including P&G, Woolrich, The New York Times and GM. Now I work for local businesses.

Most have fewer than 100 employees. Everybody knows the boss. From landscapers to world-class developers, my clients are ordinary citizens. They’re not going to Davos or Cannes.

But they are the engines of the future, local powerhouses in a dynamic region that deserve the best branding and marketing, today.

I could still make television commercials. But that’s looking backward. CW is the next step forward. I write this from an Intel iMac.

I’m going to have a lot to talk about.

Cary, NC – After passing the one year anniversary of CaryCitizen, the editors all sat down together (a somewhat rare occurrence) to map out a strategy for Year 2.

Year 1 had been very good – 4% growth a week, 900 stories published, the establishment of our own ad space, 50,000 reads in September 2010. For Year 2, we decided to focus on making CaryCitizen sustainable. In a word, profitable.

That’s the theme of Hyperlocal 2.0 – making it a business.

The History of Hyperlocal

Wikipedia has a good definition of Hyperlocal:

“Hyperlocal content, often referred to as hyperlocal news, is characterized by three major elements. First, it refers to entities and events that are located within a well defined, community scale area. Secondly, it is intended primarily for consumption by residents of that area. Thirdly, it is [most often] created by a resident of the location…”

- Wikipedia [comments mine]

People began building local communities on the internet in the early 1990′s (before the World Wide Web) through bulletin boards and email lists. Remember?

Blogging hit the scene at the turn of the century (the millennium, actually). Blogger and LiveJournal launched in 1999. WordPress and MySpace launched in 2003.

The potential for Hyperlocal was there, but early blogs tended to be rants, personal diaries and niche communities.

Hyperlocal 1.0

Soon, independent publishers began getting organized to challenge traditional news organizations in the community info space. Church Hill People’s News launched in 20o4.  CarrboroCitizen launched in November 2006.

Traditional media outlets also experimented with blogging. The New York Times and Harvard were early adopters of WordPress. But traditional media has largely struggled with blogging in general and hyperlocal in particular.

Hyperlocals Gain Traction

Successful, independent hyperlocal publishers are emerging around the world. Blog engines may be the appliance that powers the enterprise, but this isn’t your Cousin Ralph’s Fishing Blog. These are serious news and information platforms, engaging large portions of their local community audience.

GoHyperlocal has a great showcase of some of the best hyperlocal publications on the web.

It’s taken more than a decade for community information to grow in sophistication from BBS to hyperlocals like Eastsider LA.

In late 2010, across the world, the talk has now turned to Sustainability.

Hyperlocal 2.0

Early adopters tended to be geeks or extroverts (I might be both). But Hyper 2.0 could be titled The Rise of the Digital Entrepreneurs.

The focus is now on how to monetize the effort and the audience. Without sufficient capital flow, no business can be sustainable.

Grant organizations, notably the Knight Foundation, have expanded their programs to attract more for-profit ventures. That’s important for community-based publications, because non-profits cannot compete with established media giants. This year’s NewsChallenge specifically has a category for ideas that focus on sustainability.

Hyperlocals have the focus (their community) and the passion (most are launched with sweat equity). GoHyperlocal has a great chart:

The challenge of Hyperlocal 2.0 is to find the resources to take community news to the next level – equal players in the information space.

What’s Needed to Achieve Success

1. Manage Your Own Ad Space – It’s (relatively) easy to manage your own ad space with an open source platform like OpenX. Don’t accept outside ads – they only yield a fraction of the total revenue and can also abuse access to your audience with hidden tracking programs.

2. Hire a Sales Department – This is the missing piece of the puzzle for most hyperlocals. A look at most traditional media players in my area shows about a 50/50 split on labor for editorial and labor for sales. How many hyperlocals have even one dedicated, full-time salesperson.

3. Diversify – Banner ads will never pay all the bills. Hyperlocals can add revenue by selling related services, such as building websites and publication platforms for business and community organizations.

4. Video – Television news is on no former ground than traditional newspapers. Video content is costly to produce, but hyperlocals can create it for far less than TV stations. A well-produced viral costs about $1000, likely 20 or 25% of the cost of a TV news story. And the answer is not to fire the workers, but to make use of cheaper tools like high-def consumer video cameras and editing platforms like Final Cut Pro. The reporter has to be the producer and editor. That’s how you do it. TV stations are every bit as vulnerable as newspapers to the growing wave of community journalism. I predict Hyperlocal 3.0 will be titled The Fall of Local TV Stations.

5. Unlocking Sponsorships – Newspapers and TV tend to ficus on crime, mayhem and scandal. Hyperlocals do well to take the other tack. By focusing on the positive things happening in any given audience (schools, sports, government), the hyperlocal builds the community. This is strategically important for economic development in the region to ensure the information is not unfairly negative. Hyperlocals must unlock the support of regional business leaders by making the case for a home grown voice.

What Do You Think?

Are you running a hyperlocal or studying the evolution of journalism? I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at editor@carycitizen.com.

Cary, NC – There are a lot of helpful tools for analyzing your website – broken link checkers, SEO analyzers and so forth. Website Grader from Hubspot is one of the best (and most popular).

Website Grader uses an amalgam of proprietary tools to analyze how well you communicate with search engines, your audience and other websites. The result is a score that summarizes your website’s effectiveness on the web.

There are no costs or fees, but you do have to give them your email. I’ve gotten a few notes from them, mostly informative. I can unsubscribe at anytime.

Try it on your own website: Website Grader.

Scoring High

The range goes from 0-100. A high score means you have an effective website – good search visibility, good structure, good audience.

The report will pinpoint things that can be improved.

I’m happy to say that CaryCitizen scored a 99 out of 100. So how’d we do it?

#1: Be An Authority

If others see you as an authority, they link to your website and your stories. Incoming links constitute 75% of Website Grader’s score.

Write interesting stories about your community, especially things that have been ignored by major media. Good pictures are important too. Label the pictures properly (use a desciptive title such as “Cary Baseball” instead of a number like “DSC_1067″).

Send your stories to the people and organizations you cover. Ask them to send it to all their friends. And relatives.

Now people are linking to you. Your search rank rises. You retire rich.

#2 Get Indexed

Does Google know you’re publishing tons of great stuff? Website Grader will tell you. It will also tell you how many pages have been indexed.

Get credit where you deserve it.

#3 Avoid Fake Link Love

At CaryCitizen, we get 20 or 30 requests every week to “exchange links.”

Don’t do it.

Call it “link promiscuity” or “link prostitution” (or anything else that comes to mind), but it probably doesn’t help (and may hurt).

Linking connects sites of similar content. One would expect common keywords between the linked content. Link love is not a quickie hook-up of convenience in the dark of night.

Google makes its living delivering relevant search result. Efforts at gaming the system like Fake Link Love always work out badly.

#4 Other Factors

Other factors, like Twitter mentions, blogging grade and length of domain registration are evaluated as well. It all gets cooked together into your score.

Evaluate your own site at Website Grader. You can also see how CaryCitizen scored by clicking on the badge.