Lara Fabans Talks About Cybermarketing

I met Lara Fabans via Twitter. According to her blog she’s “Just another Silicon Valley girl who thought she'd escape after college but found deep roots in her hometown.” But when you look her credentials it doesn’t take long to find out Lara Fabans was paying attention when she saw the Internet unfold. With a BS/EL from CalPoly and more than two decades of online experience, Ms. Fabans has seen and done a lot in the realm of cyberbusiness and marketing.

It runs in the family though. Her dad was employed by Apple for 15 years, purportedly the wireless guru who developed the iPort. As in most homes, what dad does gets taken for granted. Says Fabans, “I was never impressed with him until he told me that THE Douglas Adams had called him to ask some things about wireless technology.”

Though her blogspot lists her interests as wine, knitting, heavy metal, motorcycling and Sponge Bob, her life centers mightily around cyberspace as she visits or partakes in up to 300 blogs a day. For this reason I decided to pick her brain a bit about marketing in the social networks now known as Web 2.0….

ennyman: A lot of companies are desirous to take advantage of the explosion in online social networking, but don’t know how to break in. Are there any techniques or tools that you have found especially helpful to marketing professionals?

Lara Fabans: The first step of any marketing campaign is to ask yourself: Why are we doing this? I've seen some groups/companies/people who just want to be on the bleeding edge and sign up just to sign up, but there's no real plan behind it.

Guy Kawasaki has been very successful with Twitter. He is in the business of disseminating information, and he can do that quickly and easily by copying and pasting web links into Twitter. He follows everyone who follows him. News stations are posting links to their web pages with breaking news. Why are they successful? With Guy, you closely follow his tweets because you know it's going to be useful. Therefore, if I were going to do some form of PR, I'd get Guy on my good side and ask him to tweet to my story or blog. He has become a marketing channel. The news stations are trying to get people to go to their websites. Thus, if you see a news story that piques your curiosity, you will click. And once you're at their website, you will see their banner ads. You'll click around at other interesting things. And maybe you'll register for a newsletter.

FoodNetwork tried to use MySpace for the prior season of Next Food Network Star, and I feel the campaign fell flat. They were trying to get people excited and discuss the show and the contestants. It became the MySpace brand rather than the Food Network brand. You'll notice that this last season they had everything on their own site with video blogs, regular blogs, etc. and people commented. Once they were on the Food Network website, there were strategic links to take people to the online store which is very good for business.

Facebook seems a bit untested. I think there's a large potential, though. Buca di Beppo's has a fan page where people can chat about how much they love the food, but it may not be something that someone thinks about visiting every day. At least they put "Visit us on Facebook" at the bottom of their emails. Iron Maiden put together a fan page and made a huge mistake. They sent an email to all of their fans with what could be considered spam. It had nothing to do with Iron Maiden, and I'm sure they lost a lot of fans after that one. They didn't post an apology that I saw either.

When you make a mistake, you need to address it immediately and not hope that it will just go away. The mistake itself will go viral and everyone will know. A company needs to have a solid plan for dealing with gaffes and outright mistakes, and ensure that someone addresses things promptly.

Surprisingly, Pizza Hut seems to be on the forefront of Facebook. They have an application page where you can order pizza to be delivered right from their Facebook page. Talk about making things easy! And what a cool thing to tell your friends. They weren't trying to be cutting edge because everyone else was. Pizza Hut was cutting edge because it worked for their business model. They also have a phone application that works the same way. They're reaching out to people so people can get what they want Pizza Hut in as many ways as possible.

So to break in, start with a blog and get people to comment. Ask your friends to ask questions if you have to. Then figure out who has a similar business model, and see what they're doing. Is it working for them? If not, why not? How can you learn from their mistakes?

ennyman: Among other things you specialize in online marketing and SEO.

Lara Fabans: I got my first email account in 1987. I was able to read most of the USENET newsgroups every day. I am an internet junkie. I'm still heavily into email, but I am getting quite addicted to Facebook. I need to learn to parse Twitter better. I read about 300 blogs a day on a variety of interests.

I love helping build up companies. It's probably the engineer in me that analyzes and systemetizes their business and marketing processes. But I love it all.

One thing that's been interesting is the SEO vs. SEM. I think a lot of companies fall under the spell of SEM, and don't look at the real statistics. Most people don't click on the sponsored links. There are a few simple things that you need to do consistently to have a better SEO including your title keywords, the first few sentences, how often you add more information, etc. And that's where a good online marketing consultant can help out. Your frequently updated content could be new articles that you obtain or have someone write, or it could be a blog. Some people repeat the same keyword instead of realizing people search on keyword phrases of at least 3 or more keywords. Finding synonyms for those words and phrases improves your rankings.

What can be frustrating is that SEO requires patience. Sometimes it takes 4-6 weeks before you see the results, but if you get impatient and stop adding in fresh content, you go back to square one. A really fun article on someone who was trying to bury something about herself is on the Wall Street Journal. It's a cool read.

Definitely google your name and your company some time. (Ok, and Yahoo! it and MSN it. Each search engine has different algorithms, and most people think of Google, but what if the majority of traffic comes from MSN or Yahoo....then you'd better update your strategy and optimize for those instead....which brings us to...)

ennyman: What are the most important things businesses need to understand about creating a “sticky” website?

Lara Fabans: This is where your analytics come in and you find out where the majority of the people are coming from and how many pages they view before they leave.

I love doing the analysis and can sit there fixated for HOURS studying this.

What? You're not tracking this? You probably are but don't realize it. Most websites have logs, and you may have to ask your host where to find them.

Something else to track is repeat visits. If I'm going to your website every day and viewing 8 pages, that's pretty darn great. I'm obviously buying what you're selling on that website since I keep coming back.

If you're just selling products and not being a provider of information, you need to find out the stickiness of your sales funnel. There's statistics out there as to what you can usually expect from a well tuned sales funnel (of course, I don't agree with using generic statistics...I believe in figuring out what yours are, and then seeing where we can improve it). If you're losing 75% of the people in the first step, then you know you've got to set up some tests to find a better way to get people through the sales process.

ennyman: You have an E.E. from California Polytechnic and a Masters in Information Technology from AIU. When marketing yourself, what do you consider the core strengths you bring to the table as a consultant?

Lara Fabans: My ability to systematize the current state, analyze problem areas, and identify multiple solutions. Then we go for the low hanging fruit while we build up the back end. Nothing I do is random or spurious. I spend a lot of time finding out about your business, where you're
trying to go, how you're currently going there, and if it's going to do what you want it to do for you. I want to help you fix your biggest pain, remove your biggest roadblocks, and pave the way to success.

ennyman: This looks like plenty for today, so we'll continue later. In the meantime, your website is....?

Lara Fabans: http://www.lodestone-cs.com/

Thanks, Lara. Till next... The best to you in 2009.