One way we can reach our customers is through social media marketing.

We are inherently social creatures. We work, live, talk, and play together. Social media is a blending of technology and talking to each other…anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Today we can reach our customers by earning people’s interest and talking with them when, where, and how they want! Social media marketing includes using tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Companies using social tools report more customers at the cash register and spending 60% less per lead than using traditional marketing. Using social media is proving to be good business.

Start earning more of your customers through social media marketing today.

Listen to the podcast of this here: How can social media help my business?

By the Numbers

As of 2011, 92 percent of US Internet surfers use search engines.

In December of 2011, 18.2 billion searches were conducted with the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. (Google alone had a staggering 12 billion, followed by Bing with 2.7 billion, and Yahoo! with 2.6 billion.

Google has about a 66% (yep, a full two-thirds) market share on searches performed.

Local Business Search

That means most of your customers and potential customers are using search engines…a lot. And they’re using it for everything from nationwide searches to, increasingly, local business. Search engines are now used to find local business information more often than the old surefire ways.

• 74% use search engines
• 65% use print yellow pages
• 50% use Internet yellow pages
• 44% use traditional newspapers

What does all this mean for your business?

It means that like it or not search engines are affecting your business. Your business needs to be listed in them and come up at the top of the results. Why? Because it pays to put your business where people are looking for it. People are looking for what you have to offer. If they don’t find you, they will find your competitor. Being invisible to a huge customer base costs your business big time.

This is true whether you are marketing in Kona, Hawaii or marketing in Fort Collins, Colorado. So, get out there, learn how to rank well, and do it.

Listen to this as a podcast here: Why do search engines matter to my business?

Online marketing uses the web to tell people who you are, what you offer, and how they can get it. Instead of offline options like newspaper, fliers, and radio, online marketing uses websites, email, social networks, and more to get and keep your customers.

Nearly 80% of the US uses the Internet! That includes everyone, kids through seniors. 97% of us use the Internet to research products and services in our local area! That means most businesses can’t afford not to invest a healthy portion into marketing online. It can cost you less and bring in more, faster. Of course, if you do the wrong things, it can also cost you an arm and a leg and give you nothing.

The goal with any marketing is to bring you more potential buyers and keep the ones you already have happy.  A good plan includes both online and offline marketing. The two build off each other, giving you more bang for your buck. Commit to using online marketing for your business today!

  Listen to the podcast of this here: Web Malama Online Marketing Minute: “What is online marketing?”

What is An Online Marketing Plan?

I believe that an online marketing plan is the way you intend to use the web, mobile, and other digital resources to support your business’s overall marketing plan. In that sense, it’s just one piece of the pie that may also include non-online slices like radio, print, television, and publicity.

This post briefly describes the pieces of a marketing plan as I see it.

Setting Your Online Marketing Objectives

The objective addresses the “big picture”.

How will I overcome my main marketing challenge(s)?

If your company’s main site-related challenge is figuring out how to use your website to help build client business, for example, an objective for your online marketing plan could be, “To enhance online client service as well as build site awareness and interest with clients.”

Set Your Online Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy supports your objective.

The strategy defines general approaches you will take to meet your objective. These are determined by understanding your business and your customers (research, SWOT, competitive analysis, market analysis, etc).

For example, strategies to support the above objective could include

1. improve online communication, information, and education
2. build awareness of and interest in your company on the Internet
3. communicate the Website’s existence and advantages to existing clients.

 Select Your Online Marketing Tactics

A marketing tactic is where the action takes place.

Also called marketing programs or action plans, they are the things you will do to bring each marketing strategy to life.

Tactics for strategy 2 in the above example (improve online communication, information, and education) could include

1. sharing experience and observations in your industry through participation in discussion boards
2. offering an email newsletter
3. listing/submitting your site to targeted search engines and directories

Online Marketing Tactics to Consider

Online lead-generation program

• Established process for handling inquires

Search Engine Optimization

• Natural search optimization
• Link building
• Search engine submission
• Posting content around the Web
• Participating in discussion groups
• Pay per click advertising
• Google AdWords
• Bing Ads
• Yahoo! Ads

Public Relations and Article Writing

• Press releases
• White Papers
• Newspaper, Magazine Articles

E-mail

• Footers
• Newsletters
• Auto-responders
• Auto-series

Website

• Keyword-focused content development
• Interactive product demos
• Contact form
• Calls to action
• Special offers
• E-commerce site

Social Media

• Viral strategies
• Blogging
• Video Ads
• Informational Videos
• Podcasts
• Webcasts
• Networks
• Microblogging
• Customer Listening

Paid Advertising Networks

• Banner Ads
• Text Ads
• Video Ads

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Why this post then?

Because after experiencing deadly slow post updating and post saving on a client site over the span of more than 60 days, we were finally able to track down that YARPP was causing saving or updating posts and pages to take more than a minute (sometimes up to 5 minutes or just timing out) each. In turn, this caused severe site-wide slowdowns and timeout errors for site visitors.

The Conclusion

For those of you who don’t need the detail below, the overall conclusion here is that while a solid plugin, YARPP may cause severe site-wide slowdown and crashing for WordPress installations running on an average server with lots of posts and lots of tags.

Site Specs

First, the site specs so we’re all on the same page:

YARPP Version: 3.3.1 initially, then 3.3.2 mid-way through timeframe
WordPress Version: 3.2.x
Pages: 90
Posts: 2400+
Categories: 50
Tags: 5,000
Server: Windows machine, running WAMP 2.0
Apache Version: 2.2.11
PHP Version: 5.3
MySQL Version: 5.1.36
Other Plugins Installed Affecting Saving Posts: 3
Caching: W3 Total Cache

Symptoms

We had a staff of between 1 and 3 people daily updating post categories and tags to ensure the visitors were seeing the best content for their reading, searches, general experience.

The staff experience slowness intermittently and unpredictably when saving or updating posts. This happened when updating a single post through the normal ‘Edit Post’ screen and also the ‘Quick Edit’ mode on the post list page. Trying to bulk edit more than 1 post using quick edit  usually resulted in a timeout and a blank screen or the never-ending spinning save icon.

On the front end, our site visitors would experience page hangs and slow page load times whenever a post save was happening on the back end.

Our teams experienced the same basic problem in different browsers, on different machines, with different setups, so the issue was clearly coming from how we had everything set up.

In Safari:
I’ll Hit “Submit” and the little ball next to submit will spin & spin & spin, I’ll move over to work on another window, look back, and it will have stopped spinning and will look as though I never clicked submit.

In Chrome:
I’ll click submit, the ball spins & spins… Then after a while it stops and there’s a very large 8 character column beneath “Title” that says something to the effect that “My SQL Server is gone…” generally I’ll click refresh and that clears it up for the most part…

Below the post’s title I’ll right click “View” and choose “Open in New Tab” and it’ll spin & spin then will stop with no content in the body of the tab. I tried refreshing to no avail, have to close tab and re-right click & “open in new tab” again.

Additionally, we were receiving odd errors in Firefox, Chrome, and IE, all with notices along the lines of the server having too much traffic, or the server sending a blank page, or the connection being reset.

Tracking Down the Problem

Turn off pinging

At first I searched through WordPress forums and Google for anything on “WordPress dies while saving” or “WordPress hangs while updating” or “Quick Edit posts hanging” and the like.

Most results on these pointed to some version of turning off pinging or notifying other sites on update. So, we turned off pinging for all posts and removed the pingomatic address from the general options. This gave no change in speed.

Permalinks Setup

Other results for searches on improving WordPress performance and speed generally or specifically when saving posts pointed to proper permalink setup. There’s a fair bit of documentation from WordPress and others that basically concludes, “don’t just use /%postname%/ for your permalink structure.” This is because of how WordPress handles redirecting.

Instead, we should use a structure that begins with a number–the post month, post year, post day, post id, or anything else that helps WordPress sort, search, and find the post more quickly.

This is great advice, but not applicable in my case because the site was already using a /%postid%/%postname%/ structure.

Optimize Tables

Then I thought, what if we’re just not keeping our database tidy enough? There are bunches of transactions going through every minute, maybe the tables just need to be optimized. So, I set up automatic table optimization of every table in the database every 24 hours. This gave us slight increases in speed, occasionally.

Follow the errors

Rather than continue to chase a ghost, I tasked the team with sending me actual error reports or screen captures or errors.

Timeouts

Sometimes we’d see a timeout error with a line number and reference to another plugin dying on issuing a php session id. Investigation showed that we didn’t need this session id in the admin area, so I updated the plugin to not make that call for admin pages. This seemed to help tremendously at first, but after a day we were back to the same incredibly slow post updates. At the least, the timeouts no longer occurred on that line in the plugin.

Generic Error

Sometimes we’d get a generic “Error while saving the changes” on the Quick Edit screen.

This didn’t help much, but at least showed us that there was still a real issue on hand.

MySQL server has gone away

Our real break came when we captured the following error:

WordPress database error: [MySQL server has gone away]
insert into wp_yarpp_related_cache (reference_ID,ID,score) (SELECT…[specific long query info here]
WordPress database error:[MySQL server has gone away]
insert into wp_yarpp_related_cache (reference_ID,ID,score) values (6779,0,0) on duplicate key update date = now()

All other MySQL processes were working and other queries were passing through, but occasionally we would see a stack of errors that always started with these two from YARPP.

After reading through the YARPP documentation, I decided to turn off cross-relating pages and posts, turn off considering categories, and turn off considering tags. This didn’t help in a measurable way. We were still seeing 2-minute post saving.

So, I deactivated YARPP. We saw dramatic improvements immediately. The server CPU usage dropped, and more importantly, saving posts went back to a normal speed of under 15 seconds. At the same time, as a consequence, the page-load speed for visitors also increased.

After about 10 days, the site performance and saving speed has been consistently good–saving posts at under 15 seconds per. We’re also able to bulk edit posts again.

Conclusion

While a solid plugin, YARPP may cause severe site-wide slowdown and crashing for WordPress installations running on an average server with lots of posts and lots of tags.

It’s true that this issue may be limited to my client’s particular site/server/plugin setup. There’s no doubt that other plugins were interacting with YARPP to contribute to the slowness. However, the number of forum posts on this issue, the newest default settings for YARPP of not considering categories, and notes from the author on the intensive calculations being performed lead me to believe others may have the same problems too.

Recently my graphic designer used a nice styling on a client’s webpage headlines–all words in the headline were one color and the last word was a different color.

It adds for a nice effect I think.

Of course, as the developer I’m the one who has the responsibility to bring that to life.

After a few quick searches on Google for phrases like,

• CSS Style Nth Word
• CSS style last word, CSS style first word
• php style nth word, php style first word, php get first word
• etc.

and getting results on how CSS doesn’t provide for this functionality–but does for just first letter–I quickly realized that I was going to have to roll my own.

Being in the midst of a big project, this is down and dirty code. There are likely faster or more elegant methods using regular expressions, but this gets the job done. I added in the ability to select a word by number or by specifying “first” or “last.” If you specify a word number that doesn’t exist (say a 4 word phrase is passed and you tell it to select the 6th word for instance), then just the last word is styled.

Enjoy, and please don’t hesitate to comment or send improvements my way.

The Code:

//returns a span with the class specified around the word specified within a phrase
//@text (str) is the text to look within
//@nth (mixed) is the word to style, either an integer or "first" or "last"
//@class is the span class name to apply.
function style_nth_word($text, $nth="last", $class="nth-word"){
   $words = str_word_count(htmlspecialchars_decode(strip_tags($text)),1,"’'()");
   $count = count($words);

   if($nth == "first"){
     $get = 0;
   }elseif($nth=="last"){
     $get = $count-1;
   }elseif(is_numeric($nth) && $nth > 0){
     if($nth > $count){
        $get = $count-1;
     }else{
        $get = $nth - 1;
   }
 }else{
   return false;
 }

  $words[$get]=('<span class="'.$class.' word-'.($get+1).'">'.$words[$get].'</span>');

return(implode(" ", $words));
}

Usage:

General Usage

<?php echo style_nth_word("Stand Up Paddleboard Rentals", "last"));?>

WordPress Page/Post Title Usage
(You’ll want to pass the unfiltered, or raw, post title. Otherwise formatting issues with punctuation can occur.)

<?php echo apply_filters('the_title',style_nth_word($post--->post_title, "last"));?>

Output:

Stand Up Paddleboard <span class="nth-word word-4">Rentals</span>

Here’s how the site widget looks in real time:

The site concept is simple: post good pictures of Hawaii to help people discover, be inspired, and be refreshed–daily.

The site is built on WordPress and integrates tightly with MailChimp for e-newsletter subscribing and sending. Just publish a new post and an email with the post’s content is automatically generated and sent to the list.

The site is also integrated with Facebook so that new posts automatically create a status update to the site’s companion Facebook page. Additionally, all posts can be “liked.”

I hope you enjoy it!

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The solution was pretty easy, but took some thinking through. Here is the answer to save you some time if you need it.

1. Get the date from your MS Access database. If you’re using PHP to do this, you’ll likely use the odbc_exec($connection, $query) function and the odbc_fetch_array() function.
2. Convert the MS Access date format into a UNIX Timestamp using PHP’s strtotime() function.
3. Convert the UNIX Timestamp to MySQL Timestamp using PHP’s date() function and proper formatting.

In all it will look something like this:

$q = "SELECT startdate FROM datetable WHERE ID = 1";

$rs = odbc_exec($conn, $q);

while( $row = odbc_fetch_array($rs) ) {
   $date = strtotime($row['startdate']);
   $date = date('YmdHis',$date);

   //do whatever you want with the date that is now in MySQL Timestamp form
 }

One tricky part is that if you look at a MySQL Timestamp within the MySQL database itself, it will often have a form like ’2011-06-08 12:03:01′ with dashes and a space. Don’t let this fool you. If you add dashes and a space you’ll get a MySQL error for improper formatting.

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There are also unbelievable amounts of complexity, nuance, and unadulterated bull. What’s a person to do?

Instead of all that, let me give it to you plainly.

Your priorities for using social media successfully are:

1. Audience
2. Content
3. Brand

Simple, right? You can call it the ABC’s if it helps, just keep the C second.

First, keep your audience in mind–always. They are the folks you’re serving, your customers and potential customers, the reason you’re in business. They should be the ones constantly in mind as you go about creating content and positioning your brand. Ask yourself, “Who are they? What do they care about? How can I help them?”

Next is content. What is your audience going to get from whatever social media you’re putting out? Is it valuable to them? Does it entertain, answer questions, give an emotional high, save them time or money? Whatever it is, it has to be valuable to your audience. If it is, they’ll use it and spread it to others for you.

Branding is third. If you’ve kept your audience in mind and created valuable content you’re already quite a ways down the road toward a good brand. After checking that whatever you’re putting out fits your audience and is valuable to them, make sure it meets your brand standards. Does it sound like you? Does it look like you? Will your audience immediately recognize it as you?

And that’s it. Keep it simple.

Image via Wikipedia

Although I normally focus on online marketing, print is still an important part of the marketing mix. I thought I’d take a quick look at yellow page phone books because 1. they used to be the gold standard, and 2. they now have online versions.

Yellow page phone books seem to have been losing relevancy over the past decade or so. Dex’s own advertising recognizes that more and more often yellow pages are being used as doorstops and booster seats than finding a business.

Last night my wife became frustrated looking for a local business’s phone number and business hours online: “I can’t believe this place. They let their website expire, they don’t have any directory listings, and they don’t even have their number or hours on a Google places page. How am I supposed to find them?”

We thought for a minute and realized that we could use the phone book, call them up, and hopefully get a recording with their hours. We called this the “old fashioned way,” complete with air quotes and a funny voice.

So, how much are people using the yellow pages nowadays? How many people are using the yellow pages to find and decide on using your business? More importantly, is it worth it for your business to pay to be listed in yellow pages?

Recent Yelp Research

Yelp (@yelp) sent me an email this morning with a survey report from some of their business users. I’ve pasted most of the email’s content here (I didn’t see an online version of it to share):

Last week, we presented a survey to gauge how business owners feel about yellow page phone books in the digital age. Only 24% of our 3,500+ respondents said “Yes” to the question, “Are yellow page phone books still relevant?”

That’s quite a find. Here are some others:

1) Most business owners don’t think yellow page phone books are useful to them:

“Yellow page phone books are useful to me as a business owner.”
Agree – 11%
Somewhat Agree – 17%
Somewhat Disagree – 19%
Disagree – 52%

2) Only about 10% of business owners use yellow page phone books more than once per month; 3 out of 4 don’t use it at all:

How many times per month do you rely on a yellow page phone book to find a local business?
“Zero” – 75%
“Once” – 14%
“Between two and four times” – 8%
“Five or more times” – 3%

3) Very few business owners believe customers find them using a yellow page phone book.

Estimated percentage of customers who find me using a yellow page phone book.
“0%” – 43%
“1-25%” – 47%
“26-50%” – 5%
“51-75%” – 3%
“76-99%” – 1%
“100%” – 0.1%

The conclusion: Business owners have clearly observed the shrinking relevance of yellow page phone books. As we continue to move away from printed phone books, online and mobile directories will continue to grow as the customer’s choice for local business information.

I think that Yelp’s conclusion is pretty accurate (yes, I know that these results serve Yelp and come from an audience already using the Internet as a tool so the results can’t be projected to everyone). Many of us simply don’t even think of the yellow pages as an option.

Local Search Usage Study

TMP Directional Marketing and comScore released an annual joint “Local Search Usage Study” (I couldn’t find a primary source link for this still up) on 10/9/2008 that found:

• 30 percent of respondents still rely on directories as their primary local business research source, despite a 3 percent decline from 2007 to 2008.
• Traditional Internet Yellow Pages sites such as Superpages.com, YELLOWPAGES.COM, Yahoo! Yellowpages.com, etc. account for 60 percent of local IYP business searches.
• Local Search sites such as Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, etc. account for 40 percent of local IYP business searches.

That’s 60% using Internet Yellow Pages and 40% using search engines as of 3 years ago. To me, that’s a compelling argument for still being listed with a phone book company, if they are giving you an online listing in addition to paper.

Survey Says!

It makes me wonder if a question like, “How do you find a business” was asked on the game show “Family Feud” today how far down the list “Yellow Pages” would be. I’m guessing it would be something like:

1. Search Engine
2. Online Directory
3. GPS
4. Ask someone
5. Phone book

I believe that phone book companies see this as well. Which is why if you own a business you’ve likely received a few dozen calls from them trying to sign you up for their new online services. You also see it in advertising that focuses on being available online or in print.

My Conclusion

My conclusion is that because phone books offer online versions, yellow pages are still an important factor for many businesses. If you get listed in the physical book, you’ll be in the digital directory as well. You’ll still need to decide if paying for a listing is worth it though.

You should be sure to list your business in massive, massively used, free directories like Google Places, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, CitySearch, and Yelp in addition to any local online directories you’re aware of.

Bottom line, you need your business to be listed where eyes are looking for it.