TJ32 – Social Media: Mobilising Your Organisation Through The Brand of Your Employees with Alex Coté

Hey! What’s up listeners? This is James Reynolds, your host and welcome back to Traffic Jam! The show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online, now I don’t know if you can detect it in my voice already but I am feeling very, very happy today and that’s because after weeks of frustration and I finally fixed the issue of the broken iTunes feed. Yup! That’s right! We’re finally syndicating again to iTunes so welcome back to you if you’re an iTunes listener. I am super happy to have you back here with me on the show and as always super grateful that you’re taking the time out of your extra busy day to listen in to Traffic Jam.

I should mention, if you have been away for a while, you should go and check your iTunes player because we’ve had several great episodes in the past few weeks I’d hate for you to miss out on so if you are an iTunes and that is your preferred method of listening, do check your iTunes player to see what you might have missed.

So let’s go back to today’s show. In the hot seat, I have got Alex Coté who’s the guy behind the new and very innovative social media application called Cloze. I will be talking to Alex about how to engage the collective voice of your employees so that in turn they can engage in social media your customers and prospects. I asked him how to identify key profitable relationships on the web that will not just drive traffic but will also drive sales. And I also asked him about how you can use productivity tools like Alex’s application to leverage the time that you use on social media much more effectively.

That is of course coming up in the interview section and right after that I’ve got this week’s news in traffic which as you’ll know as a regular listener to Traffic Jam is a roundup of everything in the world of traffic generation in the past seven days. Then following that is the one minute traffic tip which, let’s face it, really needs no explanation – it’s exactly what it says on the tin and then to end the show, we have the Traffic Jam jam and rather appropriately, this week, the band that Alex has chosen also has the word Jam in its name. Does that give you any clues? Well, you might just have to wait until the end of the show to find out.

Okay so that’s the roundup of what you’ve got coming up. Let’s not wait any longer, let’s get started with the interview, and I’d like to introduce, Alex Coté from Cloze.com.

James: Hello Listener! I am James Reynolds and right over there across from me in the old inter-webs is Alex Coté. Alex, how are you?

Alex: I am doing very well. Thanks for having me James!

James: Well it is great to have you here! You of course have this app called Cloze which I have been test driving based on David Amerland’s recommendation. I’d love for you to share with our listener what the app does and how it all came about.

Alex: Sure! I’d be happy to do that. Cloze is one of those products that was born out of a need of my own and my co-founder Dan TRUDY as well. Both of us, busy professionals, out on the road travelling a lot going to events and meeting and all that kind of stuff that fills your day, getting bombarded through all the different channels that we use for business; you’ve got multiple email accounts, social media, the rise of using social media for business, all of these going together, very hard for you to keep track of all the people that you need to keep track of for business and for personal life so with Cloze what we did is we brought it all together in to a single app and what makes a difference is we bring it together but we also do analytics on it so we figure out through an algorithm that we have who matters to you most. So rather than seeing the content that’s last in, you see the content from the most important people first. So we kind of flipped it on its edge and said we’re going to focus on people, not time but people, and the relationships that you have with those people so we have an inbox called key people and what you see in that inbox after you hook up Cloze and we do our magic is the most important people in your work life and personal life are at the top and we give you some what ways to customize that if you want to ramp somebody up – or not. Dan and I we spent a lot of quality time as we are on a start up together so our scores are higher with each other than our wives. So we allow you to do that and rearrange how you keep touch with people but hopefully you communicate with your wives in person and not electronically so it’s not the measure we’re going after but that’s the mission of Cloze. Give you one place to go, put it in the palm of your hand in your phone. It’s also available on the web but you can get it on Android, iOS and iPad, iPhone, Android devices, and the web too so wherever you may be you can tap in to all of your relationships, all of your contact information but really also what’s important is what they’re saying on those important channels so it could be a Tweet, it could be an article that they have shared and it gives you a real good reason to engage and keep those relationships moving forward.

James: Yeah, and this app has got a pretty pricey price tag as well, right?

Alex: Yeah, it’s free so it’s a lot of value for free and we will be coming out with some premium options very soon actually but yeah, it’s free and it’s got a lot of users on it and it’s been out for about a year now, we launched the iOS version on February of last year, 2013.

James: Very cool! It seemed like a great opportune moment to get you on Traffic Jam because we just came off the back of two interviews that really heralded the importance of social connectivity. There was the interview I did with David of course which talked about the people-driven semantic web but I also had on just before that a guy called Mars Dorian – a really kind of creative genius – I am giving him that term because his stuff is fantastic, out of Germany, who’s built his whole brand really on the connections he’s made and a really strategic, targeted network and I think both David’s show and the show I did with Mars both highlighted that. In fact, where we’re at now we don’t need millions of website visitors, we don’t need thousands of customers or thousands of connections, we just need to have the right high value relationships. Would you agree that that’s really the case of where we are at right now?

Alex: That’s a hundred percent accurate. If you think about what you bring to a company, you bring your skills but you bring your relationships as well and those are the two big things. We’re almost free agents these days. We come and go, people don’t stay in companies for very long anymore. There isn’t the lifetime employee in a lot of cases. And so companies, they seek out people who have these strong relationships, who have these strong networks. When I started Cloze, Dan brings on a ton of technical capabilities and his relationships in that world; I bring my relationships and my skills in marketing and PR but I also bring my relationships in that space so we do go to launch, we show up in the right places. We were in Wall Street Journal, we were in Time Magazine, we were in Tech Crunch and so my relationships and my ability to navigate there very important to getting an app off the ground but equally, Dan’s relationships on the technical side in getting everything going on that side – his relationships with investors and others, all come together in one package and so employees are very much the same way in all levels and ranks. How are you bringing those in? How are you talking to the outside world? This is something that I am getting more and more involved with as we’ve launched a different product in this space. How do you get employees also engaging and speaking about your brand and making sure that they are talking about relevant content through their social channels because if you think about how you get checked on, the first thing you do you get engaged you check out their LinkedIn profile, you check out their Google+ profile, what are they talking about? Is this relevant to me? Do I know this person? Do I want to get to know this person better? A lot of that happens electronically these days and those relationships can get you very far and so how do you build those? How do you mature them? As David’s side of the world in the semantic world I think we’ll have a shift of social media I think you really do want employees sharing a lot of that content out there because it does help rank and get content that you are creating as a marketer out in the right audience.

James: Yeah! I am going to give listeners a bit of a taste of who’s coming up and I don’t normally do this but I think in the context of the conversation we’re having here it’s very relevant. Upcoming in the next show or two we’ve got Eric ENGER and Mark TRAPHAGEN coming on. They’re the guys from stone temple consulting. I was listening to an interview that they are doing with a friend of mine Ryan Hanley the other day and really one of the major decisions why Eric hired Mark and Mark being extremely well known in this space, was the connections that Mark brought with him to the business and the natural authority which now he held which essentially was right over in to Eric’s business too and I guess this is really the concept that you are talking about, right? The social concept – the power of the employees that you have within your business.  

Alex: Absolutely! And because each one of those collectively has their own personal brand and as you start to bring all those together collectively, that starts to become the brand of the business and that’s really changed the model; marketing, top executives, PR, we always try to control. More control, the better right? And so let us funnel everybody in to this sterile and controlled advertising, controlled PR channel, we are going to route you to very strict phone and web channels. Social media really changed that. Where do people vent now? Write to Twitter. Boom! I’m going to hit him hard, I want my response, I’m not going to wait. I’ve got a problem, I am going to complain, I am going to complain in whatever service it may be. But then the flip side of that, they’ll also do the other thing; they’ll say hey this is great service, everybody else should use it. So they go to their friends and family, they go to their trusted friends for that content, the control is gone. So as a marketer, as a senior marketing running the business, you better embrace your employees and help them help you in a lot of ways. Leverage those personal brands because often times there are experts within the organization that do have a significant following and if you’re not looking in to that as a potential to get some leverage and to get some new customers, get them understanding and get them talking is the biggest thing and not just the traditional events and that kind of stuff. You need them out there because they do shape your own brand as a business. 

James: Yeah, well I’ve got two traffic agencies so I am very close to typically the marketing departments in my client’s businesses and I would say that it’s quite typical but either the marketing department or some sort of provider typically manages inverted commerce, the social voice of those businesses, is that the right approach? I am guessing what you’re saying it probably isn’t the right approach, right?

Alex: Yeah, I mean there is going to be a component of the brand talking but I look at it as kind of a faceless brand, right? You don’t really know who you’re talking to on the other side of that inc. in your incorporated social media account and I, as a person, would rather engage in a person; I would rather talk to you not talk to your social media, your company social media handles. I want to know who’s the person behind the curtain and if I look at it from just a pure amplification perspective, if I had got 10,000 employees that would be 10,000 people talking about my company internally exposing that great inside culture outside. Share those experiences because you are just going to touch other people naturally and I think it is much more human. We talk about the humanization of brands, you really want to embrace it and say look I do want my employees and they may not be PR pros but they may speak more naturally and they’re going to engage in a different level and they will tell the truth and I think we are seeing more and more respect for brands that are more transparent and are willing to say when things are right, when things are wrong, they’ll jump on it, but also get those people that are at the lower ranks engaged because frankly it’s just a better place to engage. I think you’ll get the truth whatever that may be without the spin more often and you’ll feel you can solve your problem much quicker if you do have issues.

James: Yeah, but I guess it is going to be easier for a business like yours or mine which is not really necessarily a huge – thousands or hundreds of thousands – a size of business in terms of staffing. How would a bigger company get staff members involved effectively that is going to give them some form of control effectively? What would be your advice?

Alex: Yeah, that’s a very good point. It does matter on size of organization so as I talk to people, as I talk to smaller organizations, a client that is starting to use us that has hundreds of thousands of employees and you look at the range of problems, it’s really different. Social media, we’re on 10 years plus now so organizations when they first started writing these policies they don’t use it for work, they don’t watch you on Facebook, they don’t watch you do that stuff and as they keep going they think we’ll figure this social media thing out – you stay out of it. That’s obviously changing; the policies are getting rewritten which also means retraining and so there’s lots of implications there on that side so what I have been recommending is if you’re going to be changing policies you really need to start at the top here; you get your senior team, you get your top executives and others leading the way on how to use social media on behalf of the business. But as part of that, marketing can help you do some simple things, and this is what we’re doing with a new product of our called Circulate It; we’re providing a very simple conduit that stays in the existing workflow of the employees where a marketer can curate interesting content, tee it out for them essentially and then send out a daily newsletter – here’s 4 or 5 things that you can share with your social network; it is relevant to the business, two-thirds of it is not directly about the business but it is about the industry and it helps shape their personal brand so it gives a benefit back to the employee but with a single button they can share it back to their LinkedIn account or to their Twitter account, their Facebook account – they look like they know what they are saying, they’ve done it in a controlled way, they’ve spent about a minute at most, they click one button and it’s out. It gives them the path and then as you start to evolve that you can share interesting content that is a little different but it starts in to the routine of saying okay I am going to share stuff in to social media and then what they’ll start seeing is inbound content and things start to happen. People start reaching out, they like something, and maybe a prospect shows up, ah! Interesting, this social media thing works! So if you walk it through simply, don’t try to boil the ocean, put a bunch of huge tools and go OC, keep it simple, keep it in the existing workflow, you’ll get a lot of value in starting to get those guys going without having to do a boil the ocean kind of project. That’s my approach and that seem to work for a lot of people.

James: Yeah, and are businesses seeing value or is there some sort of element of idea towards embracing social because I still speak to businesses who would just like, I am not getting involved. We do not want our brand out there, we do not want our staff members out there talking about our brand. I still sense the least where I am talking in the Middle East, it might be a little bit developed from where you are in the US but there are still companies that are frightful of really getting involved in the social web. Would that be the case?

Alex: Yeah, I think that’s always going to be the case. There’s definitely fear of losing control, there’s fear of what they might say. I almost believe that it’s an HR issue – you’re hiring the right people that you trust, you’re trusting them to say the right thing in public, you’re trusting them when they’re working with customers and prospects that they’re going to represent your company correctly. So there is a little bit of a common sense here. If you are hiring the right group, in theory they should be able to handle it so training is a reasonable expectation, if you lead them in the right path, they’ll generally do the right thing. I think some percentages of employees are just more comfortable and others will opt out of it, I think that is fine, I don’t think you’ll get a hundred percent. In certain industries too, there is a regulation by country especially in financial services, health care providers, there’s teachers and students and those kind of stuff, sure there’s other things and places that you need to how you are going to use social media or should you engage at all. But on the other side, if you are outside the regulated market, you can lead them down the right path and start going down there. I think the only way you are going to win in that kind of an environment though is you need to start small. Start with a small team and when you are getting success start tying it back to some kind of revenue, you can bring back the senior management and they start to see okay, there’s a reason to do this, we’ll start with our sales team, we’ll start with very specific groups and then we’ll expand it out because there is no way they can ignore the customer service channel of social media. It is almost impossible these days to ignore that channel. You have to address it. That’s not really a negotiable kind of thing these days. Once you are seeing something different. It is unusual to see a brand these days without some kind of social media channel.

James: Yeah and there is no better day than to get the wrong thing said on social media than to tell people that they can’t go on social media, right? If you just dictate to your staff members, no Facebook, no Twitter I think that is probably the surefire way to get the conversation that’s happening around your brand so you have got to embrace it.

Alex: It’s happening! Embrace it. I have one persona saying well we actually block all of these things at work. For the most part you are seeing a smart phone in action at a very high percentage they have it. It’s not like you are keeping them off of it. There’s them just opening their phone and they’re right there. So to me it sends the wrong message. As I work with consultants in various organizations, they’re ranking companies up that have not done that before, this kind of approach of let’s feed them a little bit of content here and there to show them the path, here’s the way to say it- there are a couple of options on how to tweet, you have to go with the basics, talk to some very, very large organizations where they are saying our sales guy is not even on LinkedIn yet. So there is that kind of consultative thing, we need these guys to actually starting the paths of their social media accounts and then they can advance along so depending on the type of industry you are going to see a lot of different variations there and you may have to take a step back, I think the thing that is interesting is that there is a marketing side of this but there is also an HR side of this. So you are starting to see HR saying we have social employees because it makes it easier to recruit and we understand that if the culture that we built internally is strong and good in all levels, employees will share that out back and we want them to do that, which is not what we would use to see in the old HR policies which would say sign this document, you’re not going to do anything in social media. Now you are seeing the flip side of those things, hey, here are the bounds, we do want you talking about the company business. Share the company party, share the great food selection that we have in our pantry whatever it may be, but share those benefits so that people want to come and work for that business and you get people coming in the door.

James: I’d like to talk a little bit about just the application itself and one of the features that I’ve seen in light is this ability for it to kind of rank relationships based on importance to you. How does the application work in terms of being able to help identify those key relationships that perhaps should be extending and working on as an individual or as business?

Alex: Sure, so the application works with some algorithms that work under the hood, those algorithms work either in the long term score or the short term score. The short term score is very useful in a business situation where you are just starting to know somebody so you and I are emailing back and forth to get this podcast set up. That relationship will be identified within Cloze, this is a new relationship, they’re responding very quickly, we understand to some level the type of content back and forth, we’re going to rank this high very quickly so you start to see so for you it will automatically start serving me information from your social media feeds that will start giving me things that you are interested in, I can see, oh, there’s the podcast from David, I can go listen to that, I can prep I know what’s going on, I get a pretty good picture of the person I am getting to know. Cloze does that automatically for you. It’s a multi factor algorithm so there’s multiple factors that go in to it, one of them is how fast you respond, the type of communication, is it instant messaging, email, what’s the speed at responses, does it take 5 days or does it take 5 minutes? Is it a private conversation or are we on Twitter and we’re private messaging each other back and forth or is it an email and I am cc’ed and you’ve emailed 300 people? Is the content between messages or is it always the same? Are you sending long email messages to me or me only responding with a single word back? Or not at all? So those types of factors go in to whether somebody is a real relationship or not and then what we do with the long term score is when we get to know each other and we communicate a long time across a lot of different channels, that score will grow very strong over time and it will also take a long time to fade, whereas you and I do not continue to get to know each other and not continue to communicate that short term score that I talked of will fade off very quickly and you’ll fall off of my key people and I may not see you and what will happen with that is we may not see and we have another filter called losing touch and I will see you on that list and say here is a list of people that I am losing touch with, here is some content from social media so maybe here is a reason that I can reach out and continue to build that relationship or maybe I can find something that I can react to so I send you an email about it, but this is in a way more naturally to keep those relationships going if you want to. So that’s the basics of scoring model. We try to make it very natural and not kind of touching the levels and scores and trying to manipulate it too much but when you come in you should see a very good representation of where your relationships are and for older relationships falls off, the score is pretty strong so if they reengage with you they pop right back in to your key people pretty quickly.

James: So how else Alex can the data be interpreted and utilized? You mentioned one example there with this losing touch category which would kind of prompt you perhaps to reconnect with people. Is there anywhere else that the data can be utilized to really to help develop and nurture relationships?

Alex: The data, because it is always changing, you are constantly in to the loop as to what’s happening across these relationships so what we are finding across these relationships is that they kind of try to organize these relationships, we have the ability to create lists on who’s on Facebook and twitter but within those lists tend to be groups you want to stay in touch with, it could be customers it could be prospects, it could be for my purposes, I keep track of bloggers and writers and different categories like tech media in the US, it could be local tech writers in our town here in Austin. All these different people are saying things all the time and from a practical perspective, unless you are in front of tweet decker all day long, you never see everything. So what cloze does is it keeps track and ranks all the content in there from all the different people so that when you can catch up again, it’s all there for you waiting in an organized relationship first perspective so it does not matter what channel they are on so that as I get off this call – I have been offline essentially – I can catch up and say what was happening? What did I miss? And just a couple of clicks across all your building channels which is basically your relationship obviously with a customer or a prospect situation, if you are in tune with everything they’re saying, that customer on the other side is going to say wow! This guys is really on top of this, I am impressed. Those little signals that you can make, retweeting something, liking something, commenting, replying, whatever it may be, are all little signals that help you build a relationship and if you don’t have a tool to keep track of all of this, it is easy to miss stuff and then you’re behind. And that just shapes how you look from the outside which comes back full circle to what is your personal brand out there on social media.

James: Before I do ask this next question I want to say that I have plenty of friends who work on public relation so the words that follow are Alex’s, they’re not mine – Alex, you say that companies should not be engaged in PR firms and PR is best done yourself. Why is that the case?

Alex: Ah! I have a lot of friends in PR too and we debate this one. I am slightly biased by the fact that I am in leadership in startups is my entire career so you can use an agency, they do great things, they have an incredible network, they open doors that you may not be able to open on your own. But from my perspective as a startup founder who’s been in business for a long time so spending a lot of money with a PR agency can be a significant investment for a startup and can be a significant investment for a small company. Given the access we now have through social media and through email and through just understanding what the readers want through the questions they ask on social media, quickly getting in to their content, you can do a tremendous amount on your own and so you can build those relationships. You can introduce yourself to writers, you can comment on something that you have written about. They will start to know you and if done right, over time they will start to reach out to you. So what I recommend is, get to know your writers, understand who they are and cover what they’re covering on your space, and develop those relationships. Find them in advance, find them in different places, you can cultivate them over a period of time and you can get pressed, you can get covered. I am not a PR person, I am not professionally trained in the work in an agency, I do not do anything like that but I’ve got a very good lesson from the companies I have worked for over the years and I have been quoted in a lot of great publications but that’s because of these relationships through these channels I’ve built that they all have access now so it’s much, much further and all you have to do is set up an appointment do a briefing and you did not have those channels available to you they were very much managed by these agencies who had the phone numbers but nobody uses phone numbers anymore. Nobody calls, most is done through emails and most writers say it’s done through content and through emails. Depending on the shape, some of them really like to engage through Twitter. Tell me quickly, my time is precious, in 140 characters, why does your content matter? Who are you? Why do I care about you? That is great for press, people talk about the mechanics of a pitch, it’s short, it’s hard and you’ll have trouble doing it too but it does work very efficiently and that’s why it comes down to saying if you want traffic for your website, if you want traffic for your product, do the press yourself and get a significant amount on your own. Later as you grow, bring in the agency because you can’t, as an individual, do it all yourself, but you can do a lot on your own.

James: Yeah, I would advocate this, I have gotten great success with just emailing writers and journalists and saying, hey you’re writing about this topic, I really feel that I could add something great to this, bring more traffic to your website, bring more exposure to your publication and these guys having wanted content as they’re really struggling to find stuff and good people to comment and write content for their publications and are actually looking out for guys like you or I who’s got something good to say so it’s not actually difficult. It all just comes down to this building and establishing relationships again right? It’s really not that –

Alex: Yeah, build relationships and be a really good listener and so it’s knowing who matters in your industry, roll that down to 20 people at most and really listen to them carefully because you’ll find signals and try to be helping, not about your business most of the time and then when there is that moment where you have something else then you can engage something and say hey look would you like this news about my company and if  they can’t cover it sometimes they’ll point you to somebody else that will or they’ll work with you in a way to build it in. so once that relationship is established it’s going to find it much, much easier every single time when you ask them something, it’s like a sales call. It becomes a very cold pitch and they’re busy with other stories, you want to be in their mind on various topics and that can be done takes time and it does not happen overnight but you have tremendous access now but it is essentially free and it is your time you are giving up but from a pure business you know that you have to make them know about it and as they try it out that’s very important to the success at an early, early stage of the business. That’s why I strongly recommend that founders and businesses to do their own PR.

James: Yeah and I guess your app does help with it right? The ability for it to create groups of people that you can follow and engage with probably makes managing process a lot less time consuming than it perhaps could be.

Alex: Absolutely! And that’s like eat your own dog food as they say if we know the product very much we can do that. It’s very useful of keeping track various groups of influencer whether they are media writers and such and bloggers or it could just be an influential user of your product that talks in behalf of you and the brand out of the kit. All those people are important to the success of the business so the more you can listen and engage with them as often you can be and it’s hard you have to say I have to sit down and carve out some time to make sure I am listening but listening is half the battle, usually you find somebody good to engage with getting a note back out to them is pretty quick.

James: Yeah, well Alex I think we should be pretty close to wrapping things up but I always like to ask the question – is there any last piece of parting advice that you might have for Traffic Jam around the topics we’ve been discussing today?

Alex: Yeah, I guess my last two are: do PR yourself, use a product like Cloze to listen, listen carefully, keep track of those really important to you and use a product like Circulate to get the rest of your organization involved because they are your life blood, they can do tremendous things for you. Get your employees to engage in social media and you’ll reap the rewards.

James: Fantastic! And Alex, where do Traffic Jam listeners go to to connect with you?

Alex: You can find me on Twitter I am @AlexCote. I am regularly blogging at Blogs.cloze.com and you’ll find lots of good content there too.

James: Awesome! That listeners was Alex Coté from Cloze.com and of course you’ll find the links from his Twitter profile and all the links he mentioned today’s episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com.

Alex: Thanks James!

This Week’s News in Traffic

First story this week is from TechCrunch.com and it’s a story about Gmail and it’s actually an interesting one I think for us marketers because Google are actually testing a completely different format for the display of email which initially they are trailing on the Gmail promotions tab. We’re all pretty used to a typical list view for our email in our inboxes that might have the sender’s name and of course the subject line and then perhaps a little snippet of text for the first line of the email. This new format is a grid style format that shows the subject line and the sender and a big giant picture. It’s completely different to the format that we’re used to but very, very interesting and potentially game changing for us marketers because in the new format if it is rolled out widely it will make the image you choose in your email equally as important as the subject line, if not more important. Go check this story out in greater detail in TechCrunch.com or if you want to try this new feature yourself in your own Gmail account you can participate in that test from today and during the test you can actually toggle between the old view and the new view for the promotions tab if you don’t like the new format but I kind of like it, it looks pretty cool and I think in terms of options for us marketers we can stand out and get a little bit noticed it will allow for a little bit more creativity in our email marketing which will be a good thing and certainly something I will be interested to test out myself if it is rolled out the bigger Gmail audience.

The next story I picked up from MarketingLand.com is the eagerly anticipated news that promoted pins on pinterest could be making its debut as soon as next month. With Promoted pins or better known with the simple terminology Pinterest ads, are going to share the same apparently as organic pins but with the exception of an organic pin tag displayed on them. The idea is with promoted pins the advertisers will be able to reach more than the active users in the platform than of course just their own followers and those that see their follower’s re-pins. So apparently, advertisers will have the option to buy on a CPM, that’s cost per thousand impressions basis or a CPC, cost per click basis and that will depend whether you’re running your ads for branding or performance related campaigns so I think this is good news especially for you guys that are in the e-commerce sector. I know there are a lot of e-commerce marketers getting great success with Pinterest so the ability to target more people on the platform will be warmly received.

A hat tip in the general direction to listeners I am very grateful for because they both left 5 star Stitcher reviews this week. The first comes from Jeff Brown who titles his review – I so need this. He then goes on to say the SEO, search, traffic, all things that make my eyes glaze over may be yours too. The thing is, if you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to have an understanding of how it all works. Enter James Reynolds and Traffic Jam. He makes it fun and entertaining, I am enjoying for the first time learning about these topics and that’s from Jeff Brown who’s the host of the read to lead podcast which on a side note I do recommend you check out – excellent guests including some ex-Traffic Jam guests like Chris Brogan so go check out his podcast, well worth a listen.

The second five star review comes from American Jim who says great information! This podcast offers a wealth of information that you’ll probably pay for with a marketing company. Looking to market your business product or yourself online, this is definitely a tool that you’ll go by so thank you to American Jim. I will be truly grateful if you too leave a review for the show because it really is the best way that you can support Traffic Jam and just like Jeff and Jim, I’ll make sure that you get a bit of a shout out.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so over 30 episode in to a traffic podcast, I do believe today’s tip is the first time I have actually shared a traffic tip related to podcasting. Much of a podcast audience on iTunes will begin from just searching in iTunes itself. iTunes is essentially a search engine so it does kind of make sense to make a little iTunes SEO. The approach to optimizing your podcast is much like optimizing your website. Select popular keywords related to your podcast and include those keywords in your show title and your show description. Of course you should appear keywords in whichever way you can however where you can include them naturally, you should include keywords if possible. The keywords that you may want to consider are the topics that you want to cover on your show but also if you have an interview style show just like mine, you can also include the names of your most well-known guests. There you go, a real quick tip to optimizing your show for iTunes so you get higher rankings within the search results.

So that pretty much brings episode#32 to a close. You can get the show notes and all of the resources mentioned on the episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com and then of course locating the individual show page for Episode#32.

To play out this week’s episode, we’ve got a track from 1991 of the debut Album called Ten and it’s by Pearl Jam. The track is called Jeremy and of course it’s chosen by my guest this week Alex Coté. I absolutely love this track; great choice and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now.