Twittering on

Want to get noticed online? Join in the chat, says Luke Nicholas. Plus - 10 ways to raise your online profile.

Sunday, February 22 2009 || BY Lesley Springall

The online social networking world is ideal for his brand, says Nicholas, because the people using it are sophisticated, with high disposable income. More importantly, they like to be a part of the brand, he says. Through Twitter, he tells customers when and where he’s delivering his next batch of beer, so they can come and meet him, if they want to. It’s a very direct form of communication: “You give people so much information about your brand, they feel like they know everything that’s going on and they become empowered with that knowledge. And that makes the word-of-mouth even more powerful.”

Seaman says your most loyal customers sometimes know more about promoting your brand than you do, and clever businesses can capitalise on that. “Let them do the marketing for you. Pose a contest for the most intriguing YouTube video advertising whatever it is you sell, giving a prize for the winner! It’s all about doing things differently and creating something people want to talk about.”

In New Zealand one highly opinionated story about broadband, written by a management consultant client of Dwayne Alexander of Alexander Communications, was picked up by several blogs nationwide within a few hours of being posted on the New Zealand Herald’s online news site.

“He had five comments to his story by 7.30 in the morning, 12 before 10am, and 24 by the end of the day,” says Alexander. More importantly, Alexander’s client was contacted within 12 hours by an analyst and a group of lawyers, “all saying, ‘Good on ya mate. Let’s meet for coffee’”.

Given the global nature of the internet, online marketing works because many companies can find enough followers in one particular niche to make it profitable, says Alexander. The editor-in-chief of US magazine Wired, Chris Anderson, coined the phrase “The long tail” to describe how online firms like Amazon make their money through the sale of many individually low-selling niche book titles set against the high-volume sales of a few blockbusters.

It might provide the potential for significant returns, especially for smaller companies constrained by tight marketing budgets, but Alexander warns that bad news can travel just as far and fast online as good news, and it can hang around for a long time.

Google bombs or internet pranks are well known to the tech-savvy generation. Former Labour activist Rochelle Rees hit the headlines last year for planting a Google bomb under National Leader John Key. Rees manipulated the Google search engine to direct anyone who typed “clueless” into Google New Zealand to the National leader’s own website. Internationally more famous, a Google bomb was used to link “miserable failure” to George W. Bush’s White House biography.

Though there are now some organisations which claim they can remove information from the net, Alexander is sceptical. The only real way to tackle it is to make sure you get a lot more good news links to push the bad news to the bottom of the search engine results: “Everyone knows that few people ever look past the first or second pages.”

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