Advocacy - the act of pleading or arguing in favor of something, such as a cause, idea, or policy; active support – according to dictionary.com. What are you an advocate for? Are you an advocate for your company? If not why not? I have been thinking about this of late. Word of mouth is so very powerful in generating new growth. I think that this is especially true in the small business community. I try to be an advocate for all my clients. I want them to grow and become better at what they do. I always am thinking of my clients first when I hear about any opportunities that might be a match for them. I would like to think that others think of me when they hear about an internet opportunity that might be a match for me.
- need a handyman – I know someone
- need commercial building work done – I know someone
- need your carpets cleaned – I know someone
- interested in home automation – I know someone
It has been my experience that the smaller a company is the more likely it is that employee’s are advocates for the company, and for other companies. Having worked in big, medium and small companies I found that my skill set was best utilized in a smaller business environment. I like doing a variety of things and have many different skills. Many times my clients do not even realize that I have a skill that they could use, until I am chatting to them about something else, and it will come up that I know how to do the task that they are in need of.
Search and social media come to mind when I think of skills that my clients might not know that I have. Social media is all the buzz right now. Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Flickr and all sorts of other sites. Ask me about it sometime and I will give you my 2 cents worth. I don’t think that just because you can means that you should — each business is unique and I try to speak to their needs. And not all social sites are a good match for all business operations. Search is a term that could have many different meanings for different people. Some might say search when they mean paid ads while others mean organic search. When clients are not sure of what they want it can be tough to speak to their needs. How do you handle this situation? I would love to hear about it.
Search has been around for a long time. Go back far enough and people most likely just used word of mouth. Yellow pages or something similar in your neighborhood served that purpose for a long time. Now with the Internet there are even more ways to search.
Most people are familiar with search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing are a few that are in the spotlight now. There are also many other places on the Internet that people go for search. Superpages, Dexknows and Craigslist are a few other sites. At this time it might be helpful to ask, how do you define search? For me, search is looking for a specific good, service or piece of information. What is a successful search? For me it is finding a useful answer to my question/search.
Here are some parameters that might affect search:
- How motivated is the person. - Is the person willing to try multiple keywords, sites and search engines? Is this a problem that needs to be solved right now? Is the person able to save information that they collect for a complicated search?
- How much time is the person willing to put in for the search. – Is this a search for a quick solution to my problem? Or is this a search that involves many iterations and they are collecting as much information as possible before their search is over. Are they willing to learn more about the search tools that are available? This might help in providing a better answer to their search question.
- The person’s knowledge of search tools. – Does the person know how to provide both negative and positive keywords? Do they know how to show more than X results on a page? Are they willing to try an advanced search? Do they know how to use search tools to search your site — for example: search term site:www.reumcomputing.com into the google search box — or does your site provide those tools already?
- The keywords used by the person. – Does the person know that different results may be show if they use the plural of their keyword? Do they know how to do a regional or local search? Do they know how to search for an exact match of the keywords?
- The search site that the person uses. – Different search engines use different algorithms to drive their search. Is the person getting good results from using the site that they are comfortable with? Are they willing to try other sites? Do they use different sites for different searches?
- The type of Internet connect that the person has available at the time of the search. – Is the searcher using a mobile phone? Or do they have a laptop or desktop with high speed connection? This can affect their ability to search.
- How well the search engine spiders have found what the person is looking for. – Are the spiders finding the site? Is the site using well formed data? Is the site displaying information that the spider can understand? Are the results time sensitive and if so are they getting timely results?
- How well the ads that are displayed attract the attention of the searcher. – Sometimes an advertisement will solve a search issue. If not there would not be ads on the search results.
- How well a page is able to display the information that is searched for. – If the page is a link farm or some other page that displays information that is not easily consumed by the searcher then the search will likely not be successful on that page. Can the person find the information that they were searching for easily on the page that they land on?
- How easy is it to point others to the search result. – Can a person easily provide a link to the information that they found to others? Many sites have very long url’s that might help in the spiders finding their site but make it very hard for people to send the link on to a friend. There are many services that shorten url’s to help with this issue. Does the person searching know about these tools? When they send a link that is shortened is it opened by the recipient? Many people are leary these days of getting links in email that they are not sure about. A url that has been shortened gives no clues as to where it is going. Some site need to have you only visit to become infected with malicious code.
With so many variables in search it becomes a non trivial problem to solve. Also, with some not understanding search, it can make the search problem harder to solve. I like problems like this. I would like to think that I understand search more than some, less than others. I also think that I am able to provide to my clients with a good search plan, especially in the regional search space.