Welcome back Rankers. Trying to get a new piece of software today, well, it’s an old piece of software but it’s now available for Mac so it’s new. I used to use it back in the days pre twitter but since I’ve been tweeting a lot and people have been accessing the Youtube channel a lot they always ask me “what is the software that you use to record the show?”
Since about 2008 it’s been a thing called Screen Flow before that though, I was using a technology called Camtasia when I was on Windows. So from about 2005 to about 2007 I was using Camtasia. Well, there is now a version of Camtasia for the Mac and thank you to Daniel and Jessica from Techsmith for giving me a version that we can have a play with today. The other thing with the software that I’ve been using on a Mac to record the show, I would usually edit in Screen Flow and record with Screen Flow but then I would also have to take it into Imovie to do Titles. So I’m going to try to do the Title today all within the one piece of software which is Camtasia, like I used to in the olden days.
So moving right along. What’s happened this week? Lots and lots of things have happened. Hey! Iphone 4S launch today hey, zzzzzzzzzzzz. Didn’t we all expect something bigger than that? The other big thing that’s happened this week is of course Google Analytics Real Time. If you want to see real time stats look at this, we’ve got 0 people on our site right now. Unless I had this real time data I would not know that so there is no-one on our site right now. I’m going to sit here and watch it and see when they jump on. I was having this conversation with someone in the office last week actually the day before Google announced this and I said the thing about Analytics which I don’t like (well, there’s a few things, but one of the things) is that it doesn’t give me real time data. We live in a time of real time information and real time data and we know that when something happens you need to be on it in the social media space and in the search space now too. Look at Google since we’ve had Google Caffeine nearly 2 years ago, things are happening now in real time, things are getting indexed in real time. But Analytics hasn’t had that information. Now you can see when people jump on your site exactly when they jump on and exactly when they jump off and you know where they’re coming from and all those sorts of things. Possibly how they found you all in that real time environment. There’s been plenty of other real time analytics packages out there, in fact when I used to use Joomla Content Management system it was all pretty much built in. It gave you the closest to real time that I’ve had and then we had a thing called Wooprah come out in about 2009 which was a great real time stats tool. But the problem with these things is they all slowed the site down a bit. There was even one for Wordpress (whose name escapes me at the moment) but it basically slowed the site to a crawl. The problem with that of course is that it will affect your rankings. So I ditched all of those things and haven’t had a real time package because Google is going to punish you if your site is slow. So now that we’ve got Google Analytics and it’s real time, I’m a happy man.
The other thing that happened last week, in case you’re from overseas and didn’t hear about this particular story, there’s a company called Gasp here in Australia and they had a major major customer service social media moment which did not go well. If you just google Gasp Fail and you can just see our story is there on it and what happened. It was in the same week that I was doing the story on Online Reputation Management and it sort of tied in quite well. It made headline news here, it was across all the television stations, it’s still going on in Twitter, there’s still a Twitter stream happening on that as we speak. You can still see it there as of 2 hours ago but it has slowed down, we’re probably getting 1 tweet every few hours now but it was faster than my SEO stream. The shelf life of a social media disaster is nowhere near as long as things that are in Google. Yes, you should be responsive to social media disasters, you should be on the ball to social media disasters, you should be engaging in the same environments where those social media disasters are happening just like David Meerman-Scott says. If I just go back to the Gasp Fail, Gasp has had problems in the online space long before this particular incident and these other things are just going to stay there for a lot longer. Now the only thing, in my opinion, Gasp may have lost a few customers out of this whole social media faux pas but there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth, beating of chest, people getting upset. Yeah, the emails that went back and forth were pretty ordinary but they were also a bit funny and gave us all a bit of entertainment for a few days. I think in the long run it’s just opened up more people to their brand. There’s people today saying “Ah, Gasp is having a closing down sale, they must be closing down because of this social medial faux pas.” That doesn’t seem to be the case to me and if someone could confirm that, that would be great. I haven’t been down to Chapel St. to have a look but my understanding is the closing down sale is they’re moving from one shop to another shop on the same road. I don’t think it has affected the business in a really bad way. The reason I say that is these guys have been getting bad reviews for a long time and this is something you should be checking yourself, go and google your brand, have a look at your places entry. They don’t seem to have updated all their places entries, but look here, three google reviews, and this is what I’m talking about. In social media, it’s dying right down, it’s backing off, it’s not an issue anymore, it’s not news, it’s not making the headlines and the viralness has been stopped. We’ve got someone jumping on the band wagon here on the 3rd of October leaving a review and that’s when all of this was going on. 20th of June 2011 and I found another really bad review in a fashion forum for 2005 saying basically the same thing. Everyone hates their staff, they try to pressure sell and their product is rubbish. They’re not my words by the way, that’s what I’ve read online. That stuff’s been there forever, it just so happens that their brand was exposed to a lot more people who wouldn’t even have cared about their brand. This company’s not Pizza Hut, it’s not a mass market brand. I think Gasp could have played it a lot better, I think they should have been true to their word because they were quite arrogant in the way they were talking about who their products suit, their products basically only suit people who are celebrities, that was kinda the gist of it you know a bit snobby, all that sort of thing. I think they should have played that up even more and got people more outraged and talking about them even more. But they didn’t do that and they tried to sort of defend their position and it all looked a bit sad in the end really. I really don’t think that this social media disaster has affected or will affect their business. I could be wrong but I think what you need to be caring about is these sorts of things, because search doesn’t forget, social media does. That’s the difference. When people are googling your brand chances are they’re considering doing business with you, obviously not in a social media disaster time. But at any other time when there isn’t a social media disaster and you’re not in the news and they are googling your brand, they want to find out about you, they’re probably going to be making a purchase. That’s why great customer service is important because of search. Social media is great but remember there’s a bell curve to it and that’s what David Meerman Scott talks about, go and get his book, it’s a great book.
So, we’re using this Camtasia software, I hope it’s working, I think the shows going well, what do you think?
I want you to check out this site Noise 11, we launched it last week, it’s a great music site. Some of you may have known the crew that used to be Undercover, they are now Noise 11 so we’ve got this site live. Lots of video, I’m heading across to their offices this afternoon. Great interviews, a lot of great music that you just aren’t going to hear anywhere else. These are exclusive sessions at Undercover. Check that out it’s a great site.
Finally today, I just want to talk one more time about brand and be careful who you get to work on your site. The reason for this is simple. Got this Skype spam overnight, we’ve all had them, “please like my page capitalwestadvisors”. So we go to capital west advisors on facebook and we can see that their Likes here are the Paladin Cleaning Service, supplements for gastric bypass patients and Farmville and they are a “quality business plan writing and capital introduction services start-up and growth…..” really! your spamming me via Skype. I’ve tweeted them today but they haven’t responded. These sorts of things… you’ve got to think about your brand people. When you go into their site they’ve done a bit of work here on SEO, but you go and find out who are these people and they’ve got all their advisors names. So, then you look up say Seth and we can just google him and all of a sudden probably his Linkedin information is going to come up, hopefully. No. He’s certainly not on Twitter, but you wouldn’t expect him to be because he doesn’t understand that outsourcing your online marketing to the cheapest bidder is the best option. Look here, this guy’s an SEO rockstar, it says it right here and I don’t actually know what that means. But we can see he’s in India, can’t even spell his city name right so how do you expect him to look after your brand online.
That’s it for todays show. Go and have a look for Seth Schwartz o Google. I’m going to hook up with hi on Linkedin and say hello and ask why is he spamming my Skype because let’s face it we all hate Skype spam, we all hate spam full stop. Don’t do it. See you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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