Why online legal wrangling is wild and weird

The internet is more integrated into our lives, but there’s still an element of wild west out there. Anyone with a little time and even less money can set up a site or leave oodles of comments that can make life difficult for you or your clients.

Thought you knew how the law works online? Most of us discovered it’s a whole new kettle of catfish when Mazin Sbaiti unveiled the fascinating world of online law at DFWSEM in September.

That’s where DFWSEM’s September speaker Mazin Sbaiti comes in. He’s like Batman, only without the secret identity and the gizmos and the billions and billions of dollars. Which…uh. Hm. So he’s nothing like Batman. But he is out there trying to make the ‘net suck less.

[Read more…]

His Email and Facebook Marketing Moves, That Is!

Andrew Choco had the crowd on the edge of their seats as he broke open new ground on coordinated email and social media marketing campaigns at DFWSEM in August.

Directive Consulting’s Andrew Choco flew into town last week from the OC to teach us all how to combine Email Marketing and Facebook Ads to create dynamite marketing campaigns – and boy did he deliver the goods! From creating custom and lookalike audiences in Facebook, to best practices for launching email and social campaigns simultaneously, Andrew gave the audience actionable intel they could take back to the office.

[Read more…]

Mike Esordi saves you money, makes you look great

Duotribe Founder Mike Esordi emphasizes the one key ingredient to design and branding success – consistency.

Playwright August Wilson said, “Style ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.” But how do you put your best style foot forward without breaking the bank? At July’s DFWSEM event, Mike Esordi offered some insight on how to get million dollar style on a $100 budget because he wants to make the internet a more beautiful place.

[Read more…]

Why your content needs data and where to get it

In May, Ruth Burr Reedy got deep into data for DFWSEM. But she was talking about your internal data. How to make it sit up, beg, roll over…basically how to learn all the fascinating things people do when they visit your site.

For June, Tyler Hakes was on hand to discuss how to use data to get people to your site in the first place.

First things first

DFWSEM sponsor Advice Local was on hand, and President Jeff Rudluff gave an overview of the upcoming speakers, but the biggest treat was news about State of Search. Not only are tickets selling faster than usual, not only have speakers been selected, but by virtue of growth, State of Search will be taking over the entirety of Gilly’s, even the largest room that’s seen acts as diverse as Blondie, Willie Nelson, and Faith No More.

Yeah. It’s kind of a big deal.

Additionally, if you’d been there, you would also have received a secret discount code available only to attendees to save you even more off the already low price of admission to State of Search. Advice Local had a treat to offer, too – 10 free tickets to Rocks Digital at the end of the month. There was also a hint of something secret and swanky happening for DFWSEM in November, now that State of Search has moved to October, but that has yet to be announced.

Tale-teller Tyler

Then Tyler Hakes took the podium, shamelessly flaunting his beard, and got to work breaking down where to find, as the cliché says, news you can use.

But first, a quick SEO primer for those who need a refresher:

• Links are good
• Good links are even better
• Links that generate traffic are the best

Links are good. They build domain authority, which increases search ranking, which generates traffic. @TylerHakes #DFWSEM

— DFWSEM (@dfwsem) June 15, 2017

Here’s the bad news, y’all, and we all know this song: Getting links is hard. You can go black hat, and be shady, and see how long you can escape Google’s all-seeing eye. You can go gray hat, which is marginally less shady, but you might hate yourself in the morning – and again, there is the looming danger of a Google penalty.

As for white hat SEO? Well, that’s hard, too. You can write the world’s most beautiful blog post and get a handful of hits. Rework existing content into something better and more efficient, and hear nothing but crickets. So what’s an SEO to do? Well, if Content is King, it needs an army of facts to rule.

Get your data on

People love data. They love it. They share it because it makes them look informed, because it’s genuinely useful, because answering questions for people is awesome. But getting data? That can be tricky. Not every business has the wherewithal to spend money on research or hire a statistician to work with the data they might be lucky enough to have on hand.

So go get some! Where? Check it out:
• Data.gov: Available to the public, this is information free to all Americans as it is paid for with our tax dollars.
• Google Scholar: Top-notch researchers at world-famous institutions publish academic papers every day.
• Facebook ad data: Look at your dashboard. See that approximate number of folks who’ll see your ad? Data!

There you are, sitting on a goldmine of data. You can even take data from different sources and combine it. Now you need to do something clever with it. And that means defining your goal.

Don't. Do. This. #DFWSEM pic.twitter.com/JWAXsyqebk

— Stephanie Studer (@Editrix_Steph) June 15, 2017

No one piece of content can do everything. So decide what you want each particular piece to do. Looking to drive traffic? You want something easily shareable, so an infographic might be the way to go. Hoping to build links? That can be a larger piece, like a bigger chart or graph that’s difficult to compress into bite-sized chunks. Want to lure organic traffic? That might call for something evergreen and long-form. If capturing sales or leads is your goal…you did put a contact form on there, didn’t you?

Final thoughts

The data for great content is out there for little or no cost. And once you determine what you want to accomplish with it, you can tailor its use to your goals. Just imagine if you had some insight on how best to use design and styling to increase the effectiveness of your content.

You’re in luck, friend. On July 12, DFWSEM features Duotribe’s Mike Esordi. Design might not actually be Mike’s middle name, but it is in his DNA. That’s why we asked him to come show you how to create million-dollar site style on a $100 budget. Sounds like the sort of thing you might want to check out.

Stephanie Studer is a writer, editor, cook, and massive nerd who calls Dallas home. A social and content marketer, she’s deeply in love with all that language can do. She blogs at storytellingforsuccess.wordpress.com, tweets at @Editrix_Steph, and posts entirely too many pictures of dishes she’s made on Instagram. Don’t ask her about ukuleles or comic books unless you have nothing to do for the next several hours.

Google Tag Manager loves you and wants you to be happy

There are some things that can’t be measured. Love. Longing. The aching need for a cheeseburger. But you know what can be measured? What folks do on your site. That’s why Google, in its wisdom, created the Google Tag Manager (GTM). And that’s why Ruth Burr Reedy, in her even-wisdomier wisdom, hit DFW from OKC to talk GTM to DFWSEM.

It was a big crowd, but not quite packed. There was a seat for you. And are you ever gonna wish you were in it.

Opening Act

It’s fair to say Ruth is well-regarded, and that people were looking forward to her presentation with an appropriate level of decorum.

Y'all, @ruthburr is going to talk #Google tagging at @DFWSEM tonight & it'll be cooler than a penguin's ass. #theresagifforeverything pic.twitter.com/0p8SLjrXUU

— Stephanie Studer (@Editrix_Steph) May 10, 2017

But before she took the stage, some other excellence. First up, some exciting news from State of Search. (You have your ticket, right?) This year, it will also be State of Research, featuring the release of original research and information vital to your digital marketing needs. Keep your eyes peeled for more details, y’all, because this is going to be resplendent mojo. And speaking of resplendent, Justin Liles of DFWSEM sponsor Advice Local, who has truly resplendent eyewear, gave a short primer on how to clean up data, even huge piles thereof.

See? You wish you were there, don’t you?

Main Event

But it was when Ruth took the stage things really got fast and furious.

When you aim your browser at a URL, it toddles off and gathers up all the components of that site, assembles them, and presents them to you. All these component parts are called the Document Object Model, or DOM. Yes. Exactly like Vin Diesel’s character in the movies that go zoom and boom. The DOM is a tree-like directory of all the objects on a site.

If you want to track how people interact with all these objects – and you do – then you add tags, little bits of JavaScript that send out info about those interactions. The problem? They pretty much have to live in the head of your site, where they can cause code bloat and slow things down.

Enter GTM. It’s a box of tags that sits in your site head. You can add things to or remove things from the box without 1) bothering your developer, or 2) slowing down your load times.

So how do you get GTM goodness on your site? If you’re in WordPress, there’s plugins. If you have to bother your dev and get them to do it, at least you only have to bother them once, and then you can use Screaming Frog or a similar program to make sure it’s on each page. Then you can get to work.

But wait. A couple of things to consider before you go tagging.

• But wait. A couple of things to consider before you go tagging.
• Be consistent: Establish a naming convention so that tags make sense, making them useful for everyone.

GTM has, in Ruth’s words, “a ton of built-in templates for commonly-used tags.” So make use of them. They’re shiny, and they have the added bonus of being easy to remove later.

If you want to get really truly, Tokyo Drift-style wild, you can customize. You’ll want to be proficient in JavaScript for this maneuver and get your jQuery on, but just think of all that lovely data.

What to do with said data?

• Drive site redesign!
• Track form abandonment!
• See your users’ deepest thoughts and fears!

Ok, not so much that last one, but you can get useful, actionable data to study over time. And that’s what it’s about. Making use of the information available to you to make the web work better for customers, clients, partners – and yourself.

Speaking of data, next month DFWSEM will host Tyler Hakes who’ll talk about using public data to create amazing content. In the meantime, study Ruth’s deck. It’ll make you a better marketer, but we can’t guarantee it will make you a better driver.

Slide deck

Pearl Higgins wants you to kick narrative ass

Jackie Kennedy is famed for saying, “Pearls are always appropriate.” Jackie must’ve been onto something, because Pearl Higgins certainly came correct at DFWSEM’s April meeting — so much so that folks in the crowd seemed a little starstruck. There were ooo’s. There were ahhh’s. There were literal gasps.

Basically, if y’all missed out? Y’all really, really missed out.

First things first

Things got started before they got started. The pre-meeting happy hour at Twisted Root is becoming a tradition, even though some people go to the happy hour and don’t come to said meetings (*cough* Grant and Jackie *cough*). But once things started rolling at Noah’s Event Center, it was off to the races.

First up, thanks were gleefully tendered to sponsors Advice Local. Then on to the list of swanky upcoming speakers. We’re talking Ruth Burr Reedy here, y’all. Tyler Hakes. Mike Esordi. Andrew Choco. Matthew Barby. And, of course, State of Search on October 9th and 10th at Dallas’ historic Gilley’s.

Then Outspoken Media’s Pearl Higgins quietly and determinedly blew everyone’s mind.

Who tells the story?

Pearl grew up a little more Laura Ingalls Wilder than most folks. Her parents’ house was 200 ft shy of the line for cable tv — and for electricity. But your audiences aren’t that limited in their entertainment options. Gone are the days of the family gathering around the tv for one of three channels or everyone you know reading the same newspaper.

They’ve got options, y’all. So many, many options. Which may be contributing to a literal decline in the length of the attention span. One study from the New York Times indicates the average adult attention span is down to eight tiny seconds.

So, how do you make yourself memorable?

You could make the world hate you. It’s a choice. Comcast seems to be embracing that philosophy, and United is coming on strong. But are people going to want to do business with you? Hard pass on that option. Instead, why not impress people? Why not delight them? Why not embrace joy?

Yeah. She went there. Joy. Something gorgeous or funny or interesting enough to stick. And nothing is stickier than a story.

The sweet spot in the middle of this Venn diagram is story. Get there.

Who’s killing it

Who’s making things joyful out there? There are some brands really taking advantage of Instagram’s possibilities. The Netflix original series The OA has built a mosaic of mystery on their page. Ballentine’s has created an entire online whiskey magazine. And Land Rover built a multimedia journey into the aspirational outdoors with Solitude in Sawtooth.

How’d they do it? Drama.

Story is narrative, and narrative requires drama. Drama doesn’t necessarily require lots of room. Obvious places for story are About Us pages or Mission Statements. But have you got text on a button? Don’t be satisfied with a plain old “submit.” Have an empty shopping cart? Warby Parker reminds site visitors that an empty cart is a sad void that needs topping up. Even 404 pages can contribute to your brand’s narrative.

Everything is an opportunity for storytelling.

Now, this is only scratching the surface of Pearl’s presentation. Which you’d know if you’d been there. Join DFWSEM today and start getting the good-good in real time, y’all. What are you waiting for? We’ve got more stories to tell together.

Next month’s meeting

Stephanie Studer is a writer, editor, cook, and massive nerd who calls Dallas home. A social and content marketer, she’s deeply in love with all that language can do. She blogs at storytellingforsuccess.blog, tweets at @Editrix_Steph, and posts entirely too many pictures of dishes she’s made on Instagram. Don’t ask her about ukuleles or comic books unless you have nothing to do for the next several hours.