UK online reputation management
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So, our G2B@ blog is about 3 weeks old and the tag (under its title in WordPress) is ‘The podcast for business networking in Devon and Cornwall’.
A search for ‘podcasting Devon’ or ‘podcasting cornwall’ shows the podcast on page 1 of the natural search engine results both times.
Ok, I’m not going to get hysterical about it. But, hey, it does warrant a tiny bit of excitement when you consider that the blog was free and all I do is add credible links and a bit of useful copy every few days.
Last Thursday saw me give a 35 minute talk about podcasting to The Hub business network in Cornwall. The venue was the Maritime Museum in Falmouth and it was the first time I’d been to a Hub event – and the first time we’d been to the Museum too. Both were excellent. There were about 60+ people at the event (a great turn out for an event so far South) and the Museum, overlooking the Marina as night fell, was a spectacular venue.
The Hub do free business networking very well. They get sponsorship from a few key businesses to pay for food, wine and venue hire and it’s free to the public. A very simple, effective model where everyone wins. The picture, btw, is of me setting up 45 minutes before people arrived. Honestly 
Even if you don’t know much about advertising, it’s not hard to sense the size and scope of what’s happening online. You only have to look at Google’s AdWords (and Google’s growth as a business super-power) to feel how huge the sums of money moving about are.
Well, here’s something I came across via Ecademy today – the result of Grant Jackson looking at my profile (my ‘soon-to-be-rubbed-out’ profile since I can’t justify rejoining this year). InPageAds. A system to flash full-screen advertising in the ‘dead’ space between websites.
It’s one of those ‘it will either take off and change the way the Internet’s done’ or ‘it’ll die a death’ moments. My immediate feedback is lose the plan to use sound, Grant, or I’ll be joining an ‘InPageAdsBlocker’ developer community in an instant 
Alright, enough with the acronyms. Brian Griffin and I spent a very interesting and productive day as exhibitors at the Devon and Cornwall annual Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference held at St.Mellion in Cornwall. Because of the CIPD’s focus on learning and development, people related to ‘Selling Services with Integrity’ very differently compared, for example, to how they would at a generalist show such as Business SouthWest.
It demonstrates that exhibiting to a smaller, more appropriate audience dramatically changes the way a product is received. Obvious signs were the way people listened to the programme on the demo iPods: some stayed plugged in for up to 5 minutes at a time. That’s people listening to the content, rather than the sound.
That’s really annoying.
The pop-up describes the page rank meter in my Firefox browser as “Google’s measure of how important this page is”. So how much more well-used, linked-to, peer-respected, economically-dominant, paradigm-shifting and downright, overall important can Google’s home page be?
2 more?
Here’s a screenshot of a new podcast we’re just starting – a fun, business network-focussed weekly production. Its designed to give a summary of the region’s networking events and opportunities and showcase local Devon and Cornwall businesses.
Its designed to ‘make-itself-up-as-it-goes-along’ so it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Today I looked at a website for a client who’s offering a free two week trial – but losing 90% of the people who start to complete the sign-up process.
How often do we question why someone is actually there in that sign-up process? Do we assume that their motivation is to buy? I suspect that the 90% of my client’s visitors who bombed out were in fact using the ‘sign up process’ to look for information – and reassurance – that his site had failed to provide for them. If that’s the case, then focusing on the information up to that point as well as improving the ‘confidence’ element by grounding the site with real people, a sense of geography and interconnection with the wider world should see an improvement.
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