Namaste Publishing Launches New Website

Boxcar Marketing has been busy in the trenches lately as we worked to re-launch the Namaste Publishing website.

Namaste Publishing is a small, financially successful Canadian publishing house with a worldwide presence. Known as the publisher for leading authors like Eckhart Tolle, Namaste has a solid reputation for publishing transformative, leading-edge books on self-help, spirituality, alternative health and personal transformation.

Namaste’s original website was built using flat HTML files and grew over the years as a disconnected collection of sites and blogs under Namastepublishing.com and various subdomains. Without standard navigation between interior pages, the site was difficult to navigate, and the key ecommerce functions required unnecessary steps to purchase products in the store.

Screenshot of the Original Design

Namaste’s online presence needed a radical reinvention and expansion. The team wanted a deeper long-term engagement with their community of fans, authors, spiritual leaders and staff. The project required a full re-branding and entire re-experience and re-interpretation of what publishing meant for the company.

Screenshot of the New Site Launched March 11, 2010

A re-design is more than just design.

Boxcar Marketing started with a month-long strategy session to convert Namaste Publishing’s business from a traditional publishing company to the leader of a global spiritual community. Jordan Behan of Tell Ten Friends Marketing Co. and Boris Mann of BMann Consulting and Bootup Labs contributed their expertise during the strategy sessions and subsequent social-media training sessions. Once the team established the goals of the project, we sent out an RFP to various vendors.

Namaste Publishing’s goals were:

1. To support and engage readers in an ongoing experience that deepens and adds richness to their understanding of the written materials.
2. To dispel the distance and ‘one to many’ dynamic between author and reader.
3. To distribute spiritual and inspirational information through new methods that are engaging, easy to understand, inspirational, fun and engage a wide audience.
4. To expand the commercial viability of the already-profitable online store without compromising the intentions and integrity of the informational and community aspects of the website.

As for technical requirements, Namaste wanted an easier system for publishing their content (events, blogs, store products), a more user-friendly online shopping experience, and support for online and offline groups that form around Namaste’s publications (book studies and interactive courses).

In order to reach these goals the project was divided into 3 distinct but interdependent phases:

Phase I: Re-Experience
Namaste Publishing and Boxcar Marketing worked with Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting on the information architecture, user experience, and interface design. Key to this phase, and taking the design lead, was Lift Studios, who provided the brand redesign (logos, business cards and other identity) and worked closely with us on the website redesign and desired user experience. 

Phase II: Store Renovation
Boxcar Marketing’s experience with publishers and online marketing primed us for taking the lead on the product page requirements that would remake the online store and improve usability for customers. (A separate case study on this phase is coming.)

Phase III: Community Expansion
Namaste Publishing’s connections to the global spiritual community are extensive and they wanted to build social web tools within the Namaste site, as well as actively participate in other online communities where their fans and customers gather.

Throughout the project Boxcar Marketing and Namaste Publishing established practices for building and managing online communities, handling digital and print online sales, establishing online courses, such as The Journey to Higher Consciousness, promoting events, such as Namaste Radio, and incorporating the publisher and author blogs.

Boxcar Marketing, along with our expert partners, did extensive workflow planning, which translated to detailed wireframes that drove design and development decisions. But, of course, we would be nowhere without the guidance and amazing work of our Drupal development team from Raincity Studios. Raincity Studios turned our designs and user experience requests into the dynamic, fully functioning website we launched this month.

Truly a group effort, thank you again to Todd of Corvus Consulting, the design team at Lift Studios (Haig, Cam, Frederick), the development team at Raincity Studios (Erik, Francis, and many other behind-the-scenes folks), and the inspiring team at Namaste Publishing (Constance, Howard, Mary, David, Lucinda, Nora and Kathy).

The accomplishments of this small Canadian publisher knows no bounds. The Namaste Publishing team are my inspiration. Thank you for a wonderful project!

(And like in any Oscar speech, any oversights in the shout-outs are mine alone. If I’ve missed you, please announce yourself!)

Sociable! by Shane Gibson and Stephen Jagger

This morning Crissy and I attended the Board of Trade Breakfast and the Manager’s Toolbox presentation by Shane Gibson and Stephen Jagger, authors of Sociable: How Social Media Is Turning Sales and Marketing Upside-Down.

Check out the First Chapter (PDF).

In their introduction Gibson and Jagger stressed that they are not social media experts, social media enthusiasts maybe. Why the strong opposition? Because they recognize that there are no more marketing gurus, only customers with megaphones.

There were a couple of other great quotes throughout the morning (none credited so if you know the source, let me know).

“If you think you’re a leader and no one is following you—you’re actually just going for a walk.”

“Social media is not a video game. It’s not about the number of followers, it’s about the quality of those followers.”

“Common sense is uncommon.”

“It’s not about the tools, it’s about the rules (of engagement).”

Both Shane and Stephen quips can be followed on twitter.

http://www.twitter.com/shanegibson
http://www.twitter.com/sjagger

Get Your Boss Excited About Social Media

We spend a lot of our time helping clients get social media marketing efforts and budgets approved by the decision makers—be it board members, CEOs or upper management. Social media is still new territory and many are hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon.

What we tell our clients is this: Social media is not a fad. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. If you’re not participating in social media your brand is missing out on valuable opportunities to engage with your customers or clients.

Below are some videos (via Path Marketing) to help get your boss excited about social media. It’s here, it’s here to stay and companies are having real success with it.

NOTE: Be prepared. Don’t build excitement without having a plan to move your efforts forward. Read Mashable’s 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration and have a social media marketing plan ready before you sit down with your boss.

Both videos are produced by Socialnomics.

What the Real Estate Industry Needs to Know About Social Media

Urban Development Institute Pacific Region hosted a breakfast earlier this month for the real estate community. The panel of speakers discussed the impact of online media on the real estate industry. Below are my notes from that morning.

David Allison, partner Braun-Allison, began the day with a quote that I often use, “start small, start now.” David can be found on Twitter with similar musings, but his presentation looked at many points that he makes in his book Sell the Truth, which is his roadmap to selling real estate.

Some of David Allison’s highlights included the 5 trends:

1. People want more info about everything. (MT: True. We want to know where our apple came from, if it is organic. We want to know if the coffee is fair trade. There’s lots of info we want to know about purchases that are in the $1-4 range. The real estate industry needs to provide prospective buyers more than a snapshot and a couple of bullet points and marketing speak if they want our $1 million.)
2. Dialogue is expected. (MT: Yes. Speak with your human voice, not your PR spin voice.)
3. People are searching for authenticity, transparency, and openness. 
4. Traditional ads are working less effectively.
5. Social media is growing.

What David Allison particularly nailed was that real estate marketing is about branding and word of mouth, and, if you want the sales, you have to win the cocktail conversation, meaning that you have to give your buyers the facts so that they are confident in their purchase and are able to defend (or sing its praises) when questioned by their peers. As I like to say, “advertising doesn’t tell me what to buy. Advertising tells me what is available to buy. My friends tell me what I want to buy.”

And that is the missing formula. How can real estate developers generate word of mouth through social media?

Allison definitely gets it, and each of the speakers talked about the ingredients, but no one really explained how to bring it all together. What do you add when? How much time do you allocate for each? How do you use social media in this business context? The audience was already sold on why they needed to add social media to the mix. And if they weren’t, the next speaker was Hanson Lok of Ipsos.

Lok had all sorts of interesting stats on who does what online and for how long, but most interesting to the real estate audience was the following.

When asked about where they hear about real estate:

• 39% of those polled said print sources
• 15% said online

BUT those numbers are how they first heard about real estate opportunities.

When we are at the research and decision stage:

• 46% report online as their source for finding information about a development
• 36% say a real estate agent

And when asked about what sources they trust:

• 34% said the real estate agent
• 28% reported online sources

Amielle Lake of Tagga Media also proffered some numbers. People report spending 2 hours a week on real estate research if they are in the market. Mobile gives you access 24/7 (assuming you have a smartphone).

My favourite stat: 65% report that they will not share their phone with their spouse. In addition, lost wallets are reported within 26 hours, whereas lost mobiles are reported within 68 minutes.

Lake also talked about the conversation funnel, which provided some of the “formula” to generating word of mouth and using social media for real estate.

Imagine a funnel, or upsidedown pyramid. You have a lot of people you can reach at the wide mouth of the funnel. Here you are creating awareness, typically through online and print. But with Tagga Media, you can also add text codes to your signage and mobile websites for on-the-road property listing checks.

Moving down the conversation funnel is where you try to generate demand. Testimonials, word of mouth, share functions, price and time-based sales are your marketing tools here.

I’d suggest for creating awareness and generating demand that companies also consider share functions on their websites. I’d ask real estate developers to consider their property website:

• Is it easy for a spouse to share a found listing via email?
• Is the URL unique or is the site all flash based?
• What and how are you using Twitter, Facebook and email to regularly connect to those potential buyers who are researching for 2 hours a week?
• Do you have printable versions of the listings? PDFs or 1-page summaries?
• Can people favourite listings on your site or annotate page they want to come back to?
• Can you send them personalized notes through permission-based marketing?

Next step is, of course, measuring demand, and that is dependent on forward thinking in advance of a campaign. Do you know how many Facebook followers you had before your outreach? Do you have analytics installed on your site? Are you filtering out your own traffic?

Further down the funnel is the qualify stage. In real estate, this is online registration forms and in-person events. These points of engagement help determine interest level, and ideally lead us to the narrow end of the funnel, which is the sale, 1-to-1 conversation.

And that’s the one to many, and many to many funnel that leads to a one to one. But what happens after that sale? It seems, as an outsider, that once a sale has been made, the online conversation with that buyer becomes mute. And that’s a loss, especially if you follow Allison’s nod to winning the dinner party argument.

Look beyond what everyone else sees.

That small group of buyers can become your biggest fan. They’ve already bought in. Their word of mouth is golden.

If the property is in development, report on the construction through a blog and encourage buyers to log in and comment. Take photos of delivery and move in day. Celebrate that online. Ask for testimonials and post them publicly (with permission, of course). Use social media to create excitement and to entice the next sale. People want neighbours like them.

Chris Breikss of 6S Marketing weighed in with some tactical tools and how-to tips. Most interesting to me was some of the numbers related to engagement. It’s always hard to compare your campaigns to a competitor’s without insider knowledge of their budget, time, and strategy. But the numbers are interesting markers nonetheless.

In talking about Hootsuite, Chris showed us the weekly stats, 224 total clicks in 7 days, on his account.

He also presented a quick case study on Opus Hotel, which had good reviews but needed more reservations. Their Facebook campaign managed to generate some interest and they have 2500+ fans. They do ads to promote events, all of which target their desired demographic.

In the summer, they ran a campaign, “Sleep Where the Stars Sleep.” They invited followers to post to the Facebook page and between June 22 and July 24, they had 41 photos posted, 275 likes and 337 comments.
More case studies like this would have certainly helped the audience understand what to expect from social media. Regardless, it was a well-rounded panel with a lot of expertise to share. Thanks to those panelists and UDI for the breakfast event, and to Katherine at Sotheby’s for inviting me along.

What’s the Difference Between Organic and Campaign Landing Pages?

Ion Interactive held a landing page optimization webinar in August, where they highlighted the differences between organic landing pages and campaign landing pages. These differences are important to keep in mind when creating and optimization your own landing pages.

Organic Landing Pages:

• Are pages on your site.
• Need to appeal and work for everyone.
• Should be focused on the lowest-common denominator.
• Should be optimized for global, organic traffic.
• You have little control over the message.
• Work with closed-ended experimentation.

Campaign Landing Pages

• Are pages that are created for a specific purpose.
• Have a specific message and receive specific traffic.
 
• You have total control over the message, placement and the link behind the message.
• Should be optimized for your highly targeted, campaign-specific traffic.
• Need open-ended experimentation to get better conversion rate and quality. You need to test, learn, and adapt.

Campaign landing pages need to be hyper-local. You should be developing different, context-specific landing pages for different campaigns, different groups, different search engines, and different traffic sources.

For example, if you were advertising for a French language-learning series you would need to have a different message for your three different audience groups:

Students who are learning French because they’re required to: “Ace your French exams”
Travelers who want to learn French for a fuller travel experience: “Experience France as only a French speaker can”
Business People who are short on time: “Business French in 10 minutes a day”

Because your different audience groups would all buy the product for different reasons, the landing page that you direct them to should reflect their different needs.

For more on landing page optimization watch the webinar.

SES San Jose 2009

THE search engine marketing and optimization event of the year is here. SES San Jose is a 4-day training and conference series that covers PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization and usability. This year, the keynote speakers are Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director for Google AdWords.

Location
McEnery Convention Ctr
150 West San Carlos St.
San Jose, CA
August 10 -14, 2009

Cost
The conference runs August 11 - 13. August 10 and 14 are training days. A three-day pass for August 11 -13 costs $1995 - save $200 when you register before July 24.

Why Should You Go?
  1) It’s more and more important to know how to get your site to rank on the first page of search results. Less than 70% of users look past the first page.

  3) Search is very competitive and difficult to do right. The conference will demystify how search engines work and give you tools so that you can rank higher than your competitors.

  3) It isn’t enough to just do SEO. The conference will help you develop a search marketing and optimization strategy to increase your site traffic and measure results.

For full details visit the SES San Jose site.

Register here.

Still unsure if this conference is for you? Check out Search Engine Strategies’ Free Webcasts and Webinars to get a taste of what you’ll learn at the conference.

New to SES San Jose? Check out searchenginewatch.com’s article, SES San Jose Offers Conference Sessions for First Time Attendees

Live Optimization: Improve your SEO Clicks and Conversions

Everyone wants to rank #1 on Google, but how do you get your site to rank higher? MarketingExperiments held a web clinic: Live Optimization: Improve your SEO Clicks and Conversions, to explain how to better optimize your site for search. These are their tips.

There are two trends in search:
1) It’s getting more and more competitive to get to the top of search rankings.
2) If you’re not on the first page, you’re invisible - as of a 2008 study, 68% of web users never get past the first page.

5 SEO Factors You Must Get Right

1) Keywords
* They should be short and concise.
* Scour competitive sites for keywords that would bring in a lot of potential traffic.

2) Content
* Place keywords strategically within the content on your site
* You need 100 - 500 pages of content on your site to rank at the top (this is why blogs rank high).

3) Meta Content
* This is what Google sees; it is the code behind each of your pages.
* Titles and meta-descriptions (what searchers see on Google) are what matter.
* Page Titles: Don’t put the company name first, your site is already ranking high on your company name so you’re wasting ‘juice’.
* Use two key phrases in the first two positions in the page title. Use a word separator between keywords like a bar, dash or comma. Don’t use ‘&’, use ‘and’.
* Descriptions: It’s important to have unique meta descriptions on every page. It’s what searchers see on Google so it needs to be compelling

4) URLs
* You need your keywords in the urls of your pages.
* Keywords should be separated with a dash.

5) Inbound Links
* Often called ‘link juice’.
* These are one-way links from other highly regarded, relevant sites linking to you.
* It’s good to have inbound links coming from highly regarded blogs, articles, press releases, forms and directories.
* You need a certain number of links linking to all of your pages - not just your homepage.
* The clickable link and the descriptive text surrounding the link (anchor text) should contain your keywords.

For more information watch the full web clinic video.

Looking for related information? Check out Stickyeyes.com’s SEO Tips for 2007. This is a great article with excellent, easy to follow tips that still apply in 2009.