Monkbam Pro Audio Marketing Blog

I got my hands on an advance copy of Paul’s new book on social media marketing and just finished it on the train this morning. I loved it—it’s a wonderful introduction to this field and it is perfectly written to speak both to marketers who want to find out what the buzz is about, and also to those who run a business and want to take advantage of “new” marketing principles.

I know a bit more about social media marketing than the target audience, but I still found the book incredibly well laid out and there’s no question I learned a lot from it. Even those with a lot of experience in this field will find that the book helps organize the social media discipline and categorizes the myriad of tools used to reach customers. It puts the field into context and makes it accessible-that is why this book is important. It also looks at important topics like social media marketing metrics, how to pitch the idea to C-level executives, and how and why the field developed into what it is now.

Paul’s writing style is conversational and approachable. He doesn’t get up on a soapbox and preach—he engages the reader. It’s even more appropriate since social media is about engagement, not throwing a message down the pipe and hoping it hits a few people.

I like Paul’s point that social media is a kind of natural progression back to human interaction. Back in the day, there were no brands because you knew where everything came from and you associated people with those goods. When large corporations came by and broke the connections between the producers and the consumers, brands were needed to differentiate the products and restore that trust in the transaction. Today, it’s becoming easier than ever to reach individual consumers directly again. It’s the individuals within companies who blog, or Tweet, or are on Facebook who restore that trust in the transaction.

Social media marketing is important because marketers don’t control the message anymore. Consumers now have a large degree of control, and brands must be part of the conversation. At the same time, finding a unique way to connect with your customers through unconventional means can often be the cheapest and the most rewarding advertising.

Links:

More info on Paul Gillin and the new Secrets of Social Media Marketing book.
Paul Gillin’s social media blog.

Let me give you a bit of a background on why search engine optimization (SEO) is important: your website may be invisible to search engines, and that means no one can find you. My goal with these reviews is to give these great companies some guidance on how to market their websites better and make it easier for people to find them. For serious web nuts, this will be boring, and for web newcomers, it will be a bit technical. If you have questions or comments, leave one!

My first victim is going to be the company that makes my favorite modern mic preamp—the Great River MP2-NV. I’ve never met Dan Kennedy, but if he’s as cool as his products are, then he’s a very cool guy.

First, take a look at the source code for www.greatriverelectronics.com. They’ve tried to cram every single search term into the meta keywords tag. Even though the search engines largely discount this tag due to heavy abuse back in the day by spammers, it still should be concise and relevant. Keep the keywords relevant to the page content and as this is the home page, find the general terms that cover the product range that Great River makes, or find some of the top search terms within Google Analytics. Look under the “All Traffic Sources” subsection and then, “Keywords.” These are the words that people searched for and then found your site. By the way, you are using some type of analytics program, right? That’s priority number 1! You need to know how people are getting to and using your website. If not, it’s like not listening to what your customers say about your products, except here, you don’t have to ask anyone—the data is right in front of you based on every visit to your site since you installed that tracking Javascript within the <body> tag…

Second and still looking at the source code, go to another page and pull up the source for that page—the title is the same. It shouldn’t be—the title should follow the main themes of any and every page. For instance, the “About Us” page should be titled, “About Us | Great River Electronics”. The title is one of the most important tags you can easily control on a webpage, so make it count. The meta keywords tag should be relevant to the page’s content. The meta description tag should also reflect the page’s unique content—Google will often use this tag in their search results, so it makes sense to accurately describe what is on that particular page for deep searches.

Third, there are no H1 tags. Everything is done with the paragraph (P) tag. Google uses the H1 tag to help determine the main idea of a paragraph or as something “extra” important. You have to remember that SEO is about a lot of incremental changes, not one big idea. Tagging a heading as slightly more important can help, if you make sure that important keywords are contained in that tag. Again, good SEO is as much about good “keyword management” as anything else.

One thing that Great River has done is use keywords pretty well. Their products are mentioned, and even on the home page, “mic pre”, “microphone”, and “preamplifier” are all used. For someone searching for a mic pre but using different terminology, this is great thinking on GR’s part. It’s important (again) to figure out what the top search terms people use to find you. You can also develop some pages to grab the long tail of keywords too that drive less traffic on their own, but together can make a bigger difference. Some of the longer tail keywords for GR might be, “best mic pre ever made”, “neve 1073 mic pre”, or “Steve Albini’s favorite preamp” (I have no idea what Albini is using now). The main pages are great places to optimize for general searches that drive a lot of traffic, and deeper pages or an AdWords campaign are great places to optimize for the long tail of keywords.

Speaking of AdWords, GR should really be running an AdWords campaign for misspellings, at least. Take for instance a search for “mp2 mic pre”. It’s possible someone is searching for the MP2_NV but doesn’t know what the thing is really called. Either optimize landing pages for this search, or spend some cheap money on AdWords to guarantee you show up for this search. Having said that, letting your dealers do the job for you is good, as Sweetwater’s ad for the MP2-NV comes up when searching for certain related terms.

Site map. Have a site map and make sure that your important pages (especially landing pages when you make them) are within two clicks from your home page.

What’s a landing page? It’s simply a webpage that is optimized for a particular search. If someone searches for “Neve 1073″ which they undoubtedly will, have a landing page that is designed with SEO in mind to rank in Google’s top 10 results for that search.

Also, do a better job of “alt” tagging your images. Google can’t read pictures!

Do your best to see that inbound links don’t say click “here” and then go to your website. They should ideally be formed like this: mic pre or best microphone preamplifier.

As you can see, there’s still a lot of ground to cover even for a website that looks good and has been around for years. There’s much more that you can do aside from what I’ve covered here, but even doing these things will help a good website do even better when it comes to search results. Search results drive traffic, and great products don’t always sell themselves.

This has little to do with pro audio marketing or design, but it does have a lot to do with better sound. I have always liked taking things apart and perhaps my favorite things to take apart are guitar amps. I fell in love with their relative simplicity after I had built two SSL G4000 compressors from Jakob’s Gyraf plans. These things aren’t even that bad, but it’s that bad when you have never really soldered anything successfully before. Building these compressors was a challenge that taught me a lot about the different components and what they did, and how to troubleshoot.

I went to taking apart microphones after this and successfully fixed a bunch of problems with an old SM2 I had, replaced some bad components in a couple of Schoeps 221bs, and fuddled around with the headbasket on a U87 when the locking tab was missing on the body and I rotated the head enough to snap a wire going to the capsule. So, it all worked out after a few beers on the kitchen table and patience.

When a friend brought his Fender Bassman 135 over to the studio and asked if I could fix it, I had never even seen the inside of one of these. The Bassman 135 was built in the 70’s and had the linear transformers that reduced distortion, among other things. It was not a loved model for a while, but people are starting to pay more for them now that they’re getting older and the stigma has given ground to vintagicity. Forget for a moment that this word I made up sounds and looks like some contagious disease only girls would get.

After opening up the amp, there was all this room and the components were HUGE! I really couldn’t help admiring how much room there was to work, kind of like looking under the hood of an old Land Rover compared to a Saab 9000. You could do things without moving 30 other components. It was cool, and the beginning of my appreciation for guitar amps.

I fixed the 135 and bought a Super Sonic shotly after. This is a new Fender amp, but it sounded good to my ears at the time. I played a couple years with this amp and still have it for live shows, but here’s what happened in the meantime: I bought a decrepit 1966 Fender Bassman head and it changed my life…sort of. I had always wanted one since I walked into a guitar store at 10 with my dad and he said, “I used to play through one of those.” I didn’t understand at the time that what Fender puts out now with all of the vintage copy models  is not at all equal to what the vintage models actually were. Even the multi-thousand dollar models that are billed as “clones” are not anything like the originals. People who pay those prices simply haven’t heard an original, as much as I hate to be joining this group of vintage nuts. It’s the same for microphones—new stuff is useful, but it does not have the sound. So what makes sound, and why is old stuff generally better?

Well, not all old is better. The well made old stuff is generally better than the well made new stuff and only recently (in the mic world at least) have people reverse engineered the old stuff enough to come close to the sound. That also means a $6K mic from Wunder Audio, so you pay for what you get. But, back to guitar amps for a moment. For guitar amps, the transformers were wound differently and the coupling capacitors were made differently and had mojo. Of course, there are many other differences too that a tech nut will point out, like the voltages are different in different circuits at different stages, less feedback was introduced into the output, and so on. I’m not here to get too nutty, but I would welcome comments from those that can get too nutty, because I’m interested in learning. I’m talking about listening to specifically coupling capacitors and which ones don’t sound like crap.

A list, then, from Best to Worst and why:

1) The Fender Blue ones (or Astrons/Spragues) that were found in the late 50’s to mid 60’s amps. They sound the best and I’ve replaced the entire circuit of that Bassman five times over with different brands when I was restoring it and there’s no comparison. Using these in the “new” 5E3 Deluxe I have that was handmade by a cool dude, the Blue caps just completely gave the high end a smooth finish and took away the gloss and shrillness that was there before. In the Bassman, it sounds full and the soundstage is bigger. The sound has a nice roundness to it, but not too bell-like and bright when it had the Orange Drops.

2) Jupiter Vintage style film/foil caps. These are new manufacture and I’m awaiting a shipment of them now. The reviews are great, comparing them to the old Fender Blues, so the first project I’ll try them on is a Fender 5f6a Bassman that was rebuilt from the 90’s reissue model back to the original 50’s circuit. It currently has some Mallorys in it, so I suspect the difference will be quite big.

UPDATE: Got them last night and put them in the Deluxe. It sounds good, and I’ll be doing some testing soon. They seem to sound as full as the old Blues, and there’s no question that they are definitely in the same ballpark. I’ll be writing a fuller review of the caps and company soon, hopefully. The full review coming as a new post, because these things are THAT good.

3) The Orange Drops (715P or 716P) Polypropylene. These aren’t bad for new capacitors, but they have a big low end and a bright high end. The midrange is slightly subdued. They can have a little too much on the top end and perhaps this is due to the scooped mids, kind of like a lot of R&B records. When I replaced the Orange Drops in the Deluxe with the Fender Blue caps, the difference was incredible. It went from a bit brash and spanky to the smooth grind I want from a Deluxe when I plug my Tele in.

4) The Mallory 150 series. These are made in a similar way to the Fender Blues in that they are foil wrapped, but they sound far away from what the original Fender ones sound like. These are known for their midrange and while they may be a good compliment to the Orange Drops within a circuit, I have come to hate these. I replaced the caps in my Super Sonic with the 150s and while the tone is okay and more detailed in the midrange, I can’t deal with the upper mids emphasis that these caps have. So, those will be changed sooner than later. I’ve got a bunch of these—who wants ‘em?

So, who else has opinions on good caps for guitar amps? I’d love to hear opinions on what you’ve tried and your comments on the differences in sound. It’s all subjective for the most part, except the stuff that is pretty darn obvious.