Site Update: Best Practices Are Out, Resources & Insights In
/ TweetWe’ve published some changes to the Website today that we’d like you to know about.
The Best Practices Page RIP
Not every Website can win awards or rank on a top Website list. The Best Practices page, part of RockTheBoatMarketing.com since its launch, was our way of acknowledging our readers’ flashes of brilliance or functionality on the investment Websites they direct. We imagined we’d build out the page as we continued to spot best practices. Well, we did a sorry job of refreshing the content and for the last year we’ve considered the Best Practices page the shame of the site.
Sharing Content Via The Resources Page
We’ve replaced the Best Practices page with a Resources Shared By RTB page--you can call it Resources. It’s not much to look at, but what we give up in design aesthetic we think you’ll gain in dynamic lists of content that you might be able to use.
We come from a long line of news article-clippers and sharers. Online and using social sites, we’re able to extend our reach to share the good stuff we find with you. As you'll see, we share via Twitter, Diigo, SlideShare, YouTube and Flickr (our photostream of signs of investment companies’ adopting social media is a direct descendant of the now departed Best Practices page).
Very little of the content we’re sending tweets about or bookmarking or favoriting etc. is content we originate, it’s largely content we come across that’s relevant to this business or interesting. Enjoy.
Search Data-Based Insights
What’s going on? Your connectedness online makes it possible for you to monitor and learn so much about what’s important to clients and prospects, including who they’re communicating with and the language they use.
Below is a video of how Gatorade marketing’s team monitors what’s being said. It’s slightly overproduced but tell me that you’re not impressed by how this consumer products company is “listening.”
Similarly, at the Tribune Company, writers and SEO staff are focused on the keywords that searchers use to find the news. Every one of its newsrooms has a dashboard with Google Trends and Google Hot Trends and copy is created or tweaked based on trending words and phrases. For more, see this August 2009 text interview with Brent D. Payne, the Tribune’s Director of Search Engine Optimization or listen to an SEM Synergy June 2010 interview with him (the interview starts at the 11:00 mark).
Gatorade and the Tribune and other companies’ hyper-awareness is what we believe mutual fund and ETF marketers will need to develop going forward and we spend a lot of time talking about it to clients. (See our recent post on the importance of anticipation and improvisation.)
We wanted to do something on this site to nudge you to continue to look beyond the internal influences at your firm and take advantage of the data out there that’s available to you. That’s the spirit of our new Insights page, which is nothing more than embeds from Google Insights for Search. We're showing search interest in the generic terms: mutual funds and ETFs. You might find some value especially in the Search Terms and Rising Searches. Or maybe you’ll use the links on this page to go to Google Insights to conduct your more targeted searches.
One other change: We've migrated the Rock The Boat Marketing blog from the Drupal platform to WordPress. We expect the move to give us more publishing flexibility, which should benefit you.
When you have a chance, take a look around and let us know what you think.
