Focus Group with Czech SMEs: Good practices in social media etiquette and placement.

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Four companies were contacted to participate in a focus group social media use and students placement practice.

After analyzing the answers from all four companies  it was evident that their responses could be divided into broadly two groups. The first group works exclusively with local companies and due to this, are not aware of the benefits of using social media to both attract & retain customers. We also identified a lack of awareness  in terms of how social media can be used to  attract & retain potential customers.

They are not necessarily interested in extending placement possibilities to foreign students because they don’t see the diversity this brings as a benefit that can help with their local clients. Another difficulty for this group is how to attract foreign students for placement or as interns to their company and their lack of ability to communicate in foreign languages.

The second group work with both local and international companies and because they work in the digital sphere these companies  are actively using social media as a tool  that works for their businesses and their employees are more internet savvy.

One of the companies in this group is owned by a foreign national but since half of the employees are foreign as well English is the official language of the office. The second company is very aware of how social media can help them due to their position in the new technology sector (They have designed a special program that enables TV stations to broadcast anything from live sport matches to films on hand-held devices like phones and tablets.)They already deal with all the major TV stations in their local market in Prague and are ready to expand to Europe and the rest of the world. These companies have a consistent presence across all the major social media platforms  actively selling and promoting products. They have offices across four continents , employing many foreign nationals & are willing to give a placement opportunity to the right candidate if approached.

In conclusion, the two groups are a fair representation of their regions. The first group is located  in a city called Usti nad Labem, which is about 100km from Prague. It has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, internet penetration & usage is not as high as in other regions and the standard of living is also one of the lowest in the country.

The companies in the second group are located in Prague – a cosmopolitan, capital city. Here they can take advantage of high internet penetration, high average salaries &low unemployment rates.

In summary, a company’s reaction to implementing best practice in social media etiquette as well as  the placement of students has a direct correlation with the products or services that the company is offering, the type of people that work there and often it’s location as well.

Artémat is social! – An Italian case study of using Social Media marketing to promote & expand a business.

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Artémat (www.artemat.it ) is a young company, which was incubated in Technest – Incubator University of Calabria, for two years. Artémat launched with the message “think different”, providing training in management and business creation through unconventional methods & tools – the Business Game!

Students, graduates and professionals practice their management skills, hone their decision-making and relationship capacity, develop a strategic vision, familiarize  themselves  with risk management & mitigation  as well as focus on acquiring a systemic knowledge of the world of enterprise and how to build relationships  that can be applied in real life scenarios.

In a short time, Artémat, gained considerable experience and became an industry expert in the “business gaming” event management field (for management enterprise projects), supporting young people at national level, thus ensuring that the company also strives to  build better communication channels with a young and dynamic audience as well as business professionals.

Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, represent, in that order, the channels most watched by fans of Artémat.

Artemat’s Facebook fan page has 3705 fans and 1,622 views from members of the network. The company also recorded most read article on its LinkedIn page (Artémat Srl), with 4,263 tweets, following 179 other entities and 143 followers on Twitter (@artemat). On Youtube  it has 1568 views and the most popular video of the channel Artémat.

The huge rise in social media usage means that businesses need to understand now more than ever, how to interact with fans, answer their questions, deal with negative comments and resolve disputes, how to adapt the right type of communication according to channel used, how to use the hash tag function on Twitter effectively in order to highlight keywords and ensure that users are able to find the business!

A business needs to stand out from the crowd and attract new fans: it may seem a trivial activity, but in reality it is a complex process and requires time and resources.

During the creation of a business game event, Artémat, like to ensure participants are actively involved: it will post photos in real time, as well as status updates and comments on the competition.

After the event, both within its business pages and across the website, Artemat immediately publishes an album with a description of the event along with any commentary. Artemat recognises how important it is to be constantly present, engaged and give more information to your community of potential clients and existing customers because it is critical to business success.

The company’s customers continue to follow  it on Facebook, beyond the project carried out together: they are always up to date on Artemat’s new products and this consistent presence on social media  often leads to new opportunities and ideas for collaborations or contacts that done does not expect.

For instance, after a Russian company that specialises in training, recently viewed Artemat’s LinkedIn page, it decided to include Artemat’s business game in it’s training catalogue.

 

How to use social media for business?

Blog, Business Culture, Newsletter Articles, Social media, Student placements

Learn how to use social media for business from one of  Salford Business School’s  latest business management courses. The course was jointly researched by the Passport to Trade 2.0 project team and prepared in collaboration with some of the leading digital marketing agencies in the UK.

This Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) can help businesses and individuals to make the best use of search and social media platforms. The course is called Search and Social Media Marketing for International Business and is applicable to students looking for placements abroad as well as businesses thinking about new trade links; it comprises the following twelve topics:

Before you start the course please complete this short MOOC entrance survey.

How to develop a personal brand online (1/12)

  • Whether you are a student beginning a job search or a business person planning a new business venture, personal branding can make a difference.
  • Learn about personal branding and why it is important for you.

How to use Twitter (2/12)

  • Learn the basics of using Twitter to develop an individual or business profile.
  • Remember to use hash tag #SSMMUoS to share your learning journey on this course so far!

How to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (3/12)

  • Learn the principles of SEO to ensure that your website and any social media profiles are found by individuals searching for your name, products and services.
  • These basic principles of SEO include keyword research, on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation.

How to use social media for international business development (4/12)

  • Social media networks break down the traditional country barriers, but do you know which networks are relevant for the country you are interested in trading with?
  • Find out in this video how to identify the relevant networks and what social media strategies you might be able to use on these networks.

How to use Facebook (5/12)

  • Facebook is currently the largest social media network in the world and it can benefit you as a business as well as an individual.
  • Learn how to develop a Facebook business page and see how other businesses use it and what strategies work for them.

 How to use YouTube (6/12)

  • YouTube was identified as the second largest social network amongst younger internet users as part of the Passport to Trade 2.0 project.
  • Learn how to optimise your video content in order to reach wider audiences for your profile.

 How to use LinkedIn (7/12)

  • LinkedIn is one of the three main professional social networks – the others being Xing and Viadeo which are also popular in several European countries.
  • Learn how to make the most of LinkedIn for your profile.

 How to use Google+ (8/12)

  • Google+ is the second largest social network as of January 2013.
  • It is one of the fastest growing social networks and one that has the biggest impact when it comes to search engine results integration for anyone who uses Google as their main search engine.
  • Learn how to make the most of Google+ for you and your digital profiles.

 How to use copywriting online (9/12)

  • Copywriting is a process of translating technical specifications and product descriptions into engaging and understandable customer focused text.
  • Learn about the basic techniques in structuring your online content here.

 How to stay legal on social media (10/12)

  • Everything and anything you do and say online can be potentially viewed by anyone who has internet access.
  • Always respect the law and familiarise yourself with new options offered to you through a creative commons licence which is popular online.

 How to use monitoring and reporting (11/12)

  • Whether you are an individual or a business spending time on social media – there has to be a return on your engagement online.
  • How do you justify your engagement on social media to your boss? Listen to the industry experts in this area and see what you might be able to measure in respect of your on-line engagements.

How to blog (12/12)

  • Blogging is a process of writing text and sharing content with others. It can help your customers or friends to keep in-touch regardless of social media platforms.
  • Think about the voice you might want to adopt and who your audience might be. Share your thoughts with us by writing a blog post about this MOOC.
  • Tweet us the link to your post on the #SSMMUoS Twitter hash tag.

Please complete the MOOC exit survey.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the following industry experts who helped and supported the development of this MOOC in Search and Social Media Marketing for International Business:

This course was supported by Business Innovation Project students on the MSc Marketing course at Salford Business School, read their reflections on the course: Luis Santos (from Portugal), Maria Camila Villa Jurado (from Colombia), Vanessa Van Huynh (from Vietnam) and Rebecca Lee (from the UK).

How to Make My Web Site International – Going Global

Blog, Business Culture, Newsletter Articles, Social media

International currency

I wrote my first HTML homepage back in 1994. Back then, we were just starting with Internet based chat (IRC), conversing to people in other countries using my old Amiga home computer in University Halls of Residence. Building a homepage seemed like the next logical next step so I ‘borrowed’ some HTML from a member of my class and the rest is history. ‘Shady’s Pages’ was a combination of restaurant reviews, photos, downloadable DOOM levels I’d made and all variety of other bits and pieces. I really wish I still had a copy of it on a floppy disk somewhere!

I found it completely fascinating that people as far away as Chicago and California were reading this stuff and even sometimes emailing me to tell me they liked it. Fast forward to the future and I still find it incredible that the media we create is consumed by an increasing global audience creating a worldwide conversation.

I’ve had the pleasure to work on several international web projects over the years including for the British Council, who have offices and learners in every corner of the globe. More recently, I’m involved with the Passport to Trade 2.0 project which spreads the word about doing business in other countries.

I’m devoting this post to a few ideas about getting your message out to all the relevant parts of the world.

  1. Country specific websites – If you are serious about your website working in other countries, you can consider purchasing the relevant domain names for the countries that you are targeting. The domain names may contain a country specific site, or point to pages on your website devoted to that country in the correct language. This method is often employed by international companies, but can get to be an expensive and complex business though.

A more cost effective option would be to set up sub domains within your main website domain, e.g. countryname.yourbus.com or sub-folders, yourbus.com/countryname. With Passport to Trade 2.0 we set up Multi-User WordPress which enables us to create new sites for each relevant country in a sub folder style. Sub-folders can also help visibility in the search engines. Each country site has flags to the relevant countries, so for example, we have the following addresses:

Each country lead person has the ability to login to their own website and make alterations to it using WordPress. The decision about how you approach country specific sites will depend on the time and budget available and how important these are to your organisation strategically.

  1. Speed – Don’t be tempted to test your website on your desktop computer only and think it’s all loading quickly. If you are using a superfast broadband connection, you may be deceiving yourself. Remember that connection speeds can differ around the world and of course, many people may be accessing your website on their smart phones on a slower connection. Make sure your images and other media are optimised and are downloading quickly with not too many large items on one page. You can search Google for ‘website speed tester’, or take a look at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ – your website pages should load within a couple of seconds. The less graphics, photographs, embeds and scripts you have, the faster your site will load and the less likely someone will leave your site before it has even loaded. Make sure your target audience can access your information quickly and easily. If your website is too slow, people will switch off quickly and the search engines will also downgrade your website, reducing the global reach of your wesite.
  1. Standards –Make sure your website works in all of the latest browsers and a few older ones. That includes Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari on the Mac, Android and Iphones. There are several excellent mobile testers, standards and accessibility compliancy testers. Making sure your website is accessible to people with disabilities. This can also help your global reach and also help your website to be found in the search engines.
  1. Language – Again, this one will depend on your budget. Ideally, you would get professional translation of your content. In the age of ever changing content, this can of course be difficult and expensive. Perhaps you need to think about employing multi-lingual staff in your communications team, or translating the key pages.

Auto-translation is another option. The biggest one of these is of course Google Translate. This comes with a handy widget to add to your website to enable people to translate your whole site into whichever languages you specify. This is very handy as it means you don’t have to re-translate your website every time the content changes. Great, job completed! A word of warning though – whilst auto-translation is improving year on year, it is still no replacement for professional translation. You should also consider using clear language; this will help more people to understand it.  Consider using for example, Simplified English.

With Passport to Trade we also created a series of animations, using visuals that would be recognised and understood in our target countries. Using animation in this way can help to deliver key messages to your target audience whatever their language.

If your website calls for people to contact you around the world – make sure you have the appropriate staff and strategy so that your target audience can communicate with your organisation in their chosen language.

  1. Template – Try and avoid text embedded as a graphic. Web fonts services such as Google font replacement offer a simple way to use a range of fonts without embedding text as a graphic. Similarly, be aware that translating your site into other languages may make pages and boxes longer or shorter depending on the language. Your website template needs to be flexible enough so that it looks presentable no matter which language it is in.
  1. Access – You can use your website stats to see which countries are accessing your website and how people are interacting with it. How does your site look in other countries, is it accessible? Can it be found in local search engines? Does it load quickly? Clearly the best way to test these things would be to test it from that country or ask someone to test it for you. You can also use tools such as http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/en/checkit.php to gauge loading speed of your website around the world. If it is important that your website is accessible in countries like China, you will have to choose your hosting company carefully. This is due to certain providers and servers being blocked by The Great Firewall of China. There are websites available to allow you to check which websites are blocked such as: http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org. Check with your hosting company and use real and automated testers to verify that it works.
  1. Search and Social Media – In order to effectively communicate with your target audience, you will need to undertake some research to discover which social media networks are being used by your audience in different countries. The Passport to Trade project can help your research. The use of different networks varies significantly from country to country and group to group. For example, in some countries, Twitter and Facebook are not the biggest networks and in others, YouTube may be blocked.With the search engines, Google is often the most popular search engine, but this varies from country to country. Research into your target audience will help you to understand where you should be placing your time and budget in order to adequately spread your message from your website to the search engines and relevant social media networks.

So that’s it, just a few things that I have picked up about going global since my first homepage graced the world. Remember to keep things simple, test and tweak responding to new information and reaching new audiences.

The slides from the presentation to accompany this post are below.

By Alex Fenton

 

What is SEO? Learn SEO basics – MOOC review

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My name is Luis Santos and here are my Search and Social Media Marketing for International Business (MOOC) reflections. The topic I was specifically interested to learn about was “What is SEO and SEO basics”.

Some of the crucial SEO components that were mentioned in the MOOC are:

Keyword research & identifying your keyword competitors

During the first stage of this process, it is recommended that you research the keyword that you want to be ranked for in relation to your online presence and business prospects. In other words, you will need to find a combination of the most appropriate keywords in order for search engine users to identify your social networking sites or your business website.

Using my own online presence optimisation as an example, the field that I am interested in is digital marketing, web design, and website content management. In addition there were a number of keyword terms that I considered using for the four criteria of keywords- Relevance, Specificity, Competition and Popularity. These terms were inappropriate to optimise my online presence because: “luis santos” was too popular; “luis seo” was too competitive; “luis digital marketing” was not specific, “luis web” was not specific enough.

As a main recommendation from Aleksej Heinze (search and social media marketing lecturer) realistically your keyword research has to be based on 4 particular elements:

Keyword specificity

(1) Keyword specificity in relation to my prospects and objectives “luis web design” is more specific than “luis web”.  Moreover,  “Long tail” keywords (three+ words) are often considered more useful than “short tail” keywords (one  or two words). Therefore finding the most appropriate keywords for my online presence certainly required some intuition combined with science – i.e. data from Google AdWords keyword suggestions tool.

Keyword relevance

(2) Relevance to desired outcomes and objectives of my online presence. During my keyword research process it was easier to use keywords with high volume of monthly searches in order to get more traffic… but it was inappropriate because they did not match with the objectives of my online presence, therefore these had to be discarded.

Keyword popularity

(3) Popularity levels ensure that the final selected keywords are searched for by others. There is little use spending time and energy optimising for a term that no one ever searches for. There are also country specific variations to these figures; I only searched at UK data during my optimisation because at that moment I was interested to only work in the UK digital industry.

Keyword competition

(4) Regarding keyword competition I tried to consider how simple / difficult it would be to compete in the search engines.  On the other hand, it can become very expensive to compete for particular terms, therefore it was important to consider how essential some keywords would be in relation to my online presence.

Alternatively, after some research regarding different keywords I thought that probably “luis web design” was the most appropriate and reasonable keyword to get more  chances of appearing in the first page of search engines. Subsequently, on my social networking sites it was applied on-page and off-page SEO techniques.

The SEO Results

Now when if you search on Yahoo & Bing for “luis web design” my Facebook page and my blog appear on the first search engine result page.  My LinkedIn and Twitter accounts are on the second page of SERP (see the screenshot below)

“Luis web design” as a keyword on yahoo engine result

 

When I searched on Google.co.uk for “luis web design” all 4 social networks are on the first page of SERP: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest (see the screenshot below)

“luis web design” as keyword on google search engine result

 

As you can see the results are completely different. The reason behind this may be due to the fact that, search engine robots track links indexed or interrelated with websites, for that reason the more high quality inbound links the more traffic and visitors you can get (Mediacollege, 2012; TopRank Online Marketing, 2009).

In my opinion Bing and yahoo might have more accurate link building searcher or reader than the Google, or Google is more familiar with reading and finding social media networking sites. Last of all it might also be for the fact that I have not optimised my profiles for the Bing / Yahoo  search crawler.

Ultimately, enrolling on this MOOC will provide you with an insight into how to start developing your online presence.

Thanks for reading, best of luck with your optimisation and do share your thoughts on how you got on selecting a keyword!

Some references you might want to follow up:

TopRank Online Marketing (2009)” 10 link building tools for tracking inbound links”, online marketing blog, Top Rank. Accessed on 17th august 2013 and Available on ; http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links/

Mediacollege, (2012) “Inbound Links (Backlinks)” search engines: Optimization, free educational website, mediacollege.com, accessed on 17th of August 2012, available on: http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/search-engines/seo/backlinks.html