Written on March 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo
A typical situation for many marketers when it comes to social networks is this: Setup LinkedIn profile, check. Corporate LinkedIn page, check. Facebook profile, check. Facebook Fan Page, check. Twitter account, check. Corporate blog, check. Check check check!
But where’s the buzz? Where are the fans, friends, followers, comments, links, traffic, search engine rankings? Where’s the customer engagement? And the most pressing question of all: What is all this social web participation doing for our company and our customers?
Showing up to the game doesn’t mean there will be an audience. This is as true with the social web as it is offline. The problem that marketers have with attracting interested customers and growing their social networks often stems from approaching social participation tactically and without a plan. Testing and experimentation is great, but if what you’re doing is something that has a cost and is to be accounted for, then you’d better have a plan and objectives. How can you score without a goal?
Here are 5 tips to help business marketers energize and electrify social network development:
1. Decide to start
You must start by deciding what business objectives you intend on meeting as a result of social network involvement. Once you’ve clearly identified objectives, then you can create a strategy that outlines which tactics make the most sense to reach and engage your audience.
Common objectives for companies to develop online social networks include:
- Create connections with those interested in the type of solutions you offer so you can better meet customer needs
- Build out a channel of distribution for promoting content
- Connect with existing customers, create a place for them to connect with each other
- Initiate discussions around product for new ideas, enhancements, focus group
- Extend reach to influentials in your market for publicity
- Tap into active user base for content
- Facilitate conversations about your products & services to aid in new customer acquisition and/or upgrades
- Create a communication channel that reaches employees for internal PR
- Build up the personal networks of executives for thought leadership with journalists, analysts and key bloggers
2. Know your customer
If marketers spend their time on the social networks dujour without really knowing where their customers are spending time, then of course there will be a disconnect between experience and expectations. Picking friends, at least initially, on social networks should be very intentional, not random. Understanding customer preferences towards information discovery, consumption and sharing along with which web sites they prefer is essential if a marketer wants to connect in a meaningful way.
3. Be real, be useful
There are a lot of buzzwords like “transparency” and “openness” that describe the need for marketers to be “genuine”. Oops that’s another. To be real is being honesty in your intentions. I’ve seem highly respected marketers make absolutely idiotic statements about transparency, taking it to the extreme. Ignorance is bliss I suppose, but there’s not much money in it.
The core principles of understanding the needs of your customers and then finding a way to meet those needs in such a way that is helpful and that at the same time leads to product sales, need not be elusive. Approaching a social network blatantly announcing that you’re a marketer and that you will be marketing so buy some product dammit, isn’t being transparent. It’s being stupid.
Identifying yourself as a representative of a brand, product or service and communicating your intentions both in words and helpful actions is what I mean by “be real, be useful”. Those good deeds create trust and relationships. They create word of mouth and a certain gravity of popularity for your brand with your own identity as the proxy. Fans, friends and followers “happen” because the word gets out that your brand promise is meaningful and being followed through on.
Developing relationships can be hard work. People already know this through the relationships they have in daily life. Yet it’s very common for corporate marketers to initiate online social networking efforts only to become disillusioned at the lack of immediate sales results. It’s important that social web participation for a company become a part of what the company is, long term. Not an “add on” marketing tactic.
4. Recognize and reward
When developing an active social network, participants will demonstrate certain behaviors that are more desirable than others. For example, standing up for the brand when a troll appears or mashing up content in a creative way. They say people will work for a living but die for recognition. This is a key concept for electrifying your social networking efforts. First, understand what behaviors you want to reward. Participate and identify those behaviors that will influence the kinds of outcomes you’re looking for. Recognition can be active and passive. Active recognition is to reach out and recognize specific behaviors publicly and/or privately. Passive recognition is built into the social CRM system you’re using or the platform within which customers participate. An example would be points based systems that provide rewards or more access based on accumulating points for completing certain behaviors such as comments, ratings, contributed content, etc. The key to “Recognize and Reward” is for the recognition to be deserved, genuine, relevant and consistent.
5. Monitor, measure, feedback loop
All the good intentions in the world won’t result in relationship and business growth from social networks unless there’s management of content and curation of interactions with the outcomes from participation. It can be as simple as noticing “5 of this” or “10 of that” tips blog posts yield 200% greater engagement scores (comments, retweets, inlinks, etc) than posts that focus on a single, general topic.
Web analytics along with social media monitoring and a CRM component can facilitate the feedback loop to know whether customers are responding in the ways that you’d hoped. Simply focusing on fans/followers, comments or sales can leave out some of the essential pieces of why some efforts fail and others succeed. Social media monitoring tools are essential for upfront research, ongoing monitoring and after-action results measurement.
In the end, the steps to take for growing a social network for business must be rooted in an understanding of the customers and their needs combined with whatever it is you decide you’ll provide to meet those needs. Being useful by itself doesn’t turn an active network into achieved business goals. Provide opportunities for interested members of your social network to opt-in to a more commercial relationship when they’re ready. That could be as simple as moving from a Facebook Fan to a Webinar participant or Email Newsletter subscriber. In some cases it might mean becoming a buyer of products/services.
If your business has successfully developed it’s social network presence, what have been some of the roadblocks you’ve overcome? What insights can you share on best connecting with networks and growing your business as a result?
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Tags: customer ,game ,marketing ,Object ,online marketing ,personal ,seo ,social-media-marketing ,social-networking ,social-networks ,time
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Written on March 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Twitter is not content to occupy those little moments you share together when the boss is not looking. It’s not willing to put up with being used merely as a channel to share what you ate for breakfast!
Nope, Twitter wants to be @anywhere and @everywhere.
OK, so officially it just wants to be @anywhere–the name of its new framework–but you’ll soon see Twitter’s real plans are to be everywhere on the web.
According to co-founder Biz Stone you’ll be able to…
…follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page.
Yay, more noise! Ahem, I mean, valuable content being distributed throughout the web.
While @anywhere is not live yet, Twitter has an impressive line-up of sites that have agreed to participate, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.
How will @anywhere work? According to DigitalBeat, those annoying nifty hovercards that Twitter implemented on the web interface will be the carrier for the disease that will infect every web site in the world platform used for @anywhere.
Your 2-cents? Go!
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Twitter Launching @anywhere; Plans to be @everywhere!
Written on March 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book, marketing
While many of us in the marketing world tend to focus on how many followers we have and how to get more, for many Twitter users the other side of that coin is a real challenge: How do I find good people to follow on Twitter?
Twitter itself has underscored the challenge as far back [...]
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How To Find The Right People To Follow On Twitter
Written on March 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
I really thought this chart from Hitwise (via TechCrunch) was going to be a bigger deal than it actually is.
On the face of it, Facebook just overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S:
However, Google doesn’t get the benefit of traffic to YouTube; and Yahoo is a mere third, because Yahoo Mail or Flickr aren’t credited towards its total.
Considering Facebook does video, images, messaging, it seems this chart has been carefully crafted to create headlines. 
Continued here:
Fuzzy Math Puts Facebook Ahead of Google as Most Visited Site
Written on March 15, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
Anywhere there is controversy you will find many marketers who will opine and try to shine the lights on themselves about how wonderful they are and how much they help everyone else and how everyone should link to them in the controversy. But when the attention dies down it turns out few marketers hold true to their promises and stick with their principals.
It is usually the unsung heroes that make a difference, not as a cheesy marketing strategy, but because they believe in doing the right thing, even if it is at great personal cost.
Not sure if you remember the hoopla about Jason Gambert (professional douchebag) trying to trademark the word SEO, but many industry professionals were up in arms about it. In spite of some of the larger companies having big-jaws-a-flapping and in house legal teams, and the industry having perhaps some of the MOST USELESS AND SELF PROMOTIONAL cash flush “non-profit” trade organizations in the entire world (cough…SEMPO…cough), Rhea Drysdale was left to spend a couple years and $17,004.33 fighting the bogus trademark.
A few years back I spent about $35,000 to $40,000 fighting Traffic Power, and while it was painful back then, to this day I am glad I did it. But one of the things that surprised me back then was that for all the noise, few people cared enough to offer a $1 to help fight the good fight. Some friends helped in a big way…but I was still like $30,000+ in the hole and stuck dealing with a lot of stress.
Lets not leave Rhea with that feeling. 
Her Paypal email address is rhea_drysdale@yahoo.com. I just donated $566.81, and if about 29 more of us do the same, then we will help cover her legal expenses. Even if you can’t donate that much, every $ helps…given the size of the industry (and the alleged concern certain individuals showed) we should easily be able to cover 100% of her legal fees. Even at the $50 or $100 level, it will still add up quickly with your help. Please shower Rhea with links too…she earned them 
Update: Its worth adding that Jonathan Hochman collaborated early in this case with Rhea and choose a different legal strategy. He also spent about $10k fighting this battle but the court threw out his challenge on a technicality, so while many of the other industry supporters were nothing more than self promoters, Jonathan is also a good guy here.
The rest is here:
Rhea Drysdale - SEO Industry Hero
Tags: a-with-links ,attention ,book ,controversy ,doing-the-right ,industry-having ,jason-gambert ,legal ,marketing ,principals ,seo
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Written on March 15, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Yep, now you can have spam delivered in real time to your search results on Google or Twitter. This is just why we all clapped for joy when Bing and Google hooked up with Twitter for real time results, isn’t it?
Oh, no? Hm. I guess we’re not the only ones. Search Engine Roundtable noted a Webmaster World forum thread complaining about the spam in real time search results. In the SER poll, 78% (as of the time of this screenshot) felt the real time results in Google are either somewhat or very spammy:
However, this may just be their perceptions: it may be less that the results themselves are spam and more than they’re merely unwanted, and therefore we consider them spam (like commercial emails that we really did sign up for but really don’t want to get anymore—except we didn’t get the choice to sign up for this addition to the SERPs).
Twitter, meanwhile, is doing what it can about spam on its site. The “trust and safety” unit at the company now employs 22 people, making it the largest division at the company. But it’s not just the blatant tag spam and mock-celebrity accounts they’re looking at. According to Ad Age:
The dirty secret of Twitter’s war on spam? A significant amount of it emanates from clumsy marketers that just don’t know any better.
So what do they flag as spam? They have automatic filters to catch accounts that follow a large number of Tweeple, unfollow them all, and then add more followers. (Follower spam.) They also have recently set up technology to filter links and check for phishing attempts. The team also handles hacking attacks and copyright/brand claims.
But even legit accounts can devolve into spammy practices, like keyword-based autoreplies. The rule of thumb? “[E]ngage the people you are trying to sell stuff to. If you are creating a dialogue with people and not just touting things because you want to make a buck, you are going to have a network of people that value your input,” says the trust & safety unit director Del Harvey. She says they’re constantly working on algorithmic improvements to catch more spammers and reduce false positives—sound familiar?
What do you think? Is Twitter doing enough to reduce spam—including the spam that filters into Google search results? Do you think Google’s real time results are spammy—or just unwanted?
Read more here:
Now Available in Real Time: Spam!
Tags: a-large-number ,about-the-spam ,division-at-the ,google ,making-it-the ,marketing ,people ,perceptions ,says-the-trust ,search ,webmaster-world
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Written on March 15, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book, marketing
The pre-agenda rate for Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced Seattle expires at the end of day Saturday, March 20th. Get your ticket to the conference exclusively for search marketing experts…and save $200. Register today!
Join us June 8-9 at Seattle’s Bell Harbor International Conference Center for an engaging and intimate conference. SMX Advanced is filled [...]
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Lowest Rate for SMX Advanced Seattle Expires This Week
Tags: a-rate-for ,advanced ,book ,conference ,expires-at-the ,full ,marketing ,original ,original-post ,seattle ,sem industry: community ,smx & smn alerts ,your-ticket
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Written on March 15, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, marketing
Not since the year-long courtship between Yahoo and Microsoft have I wanted two sides to just DO IT ALREADY!
What am I talking about? China and Google.
For the love of my RSS stream, either pull out or make-up–this is getting old! The latest? Google is “99.9 percent” likely to shut down its Chinese search engine–and try to serve China from outside of the country.
The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is sending a message that it will in no way yield to the censorship demands of Google. In fact, it’s busy telling Google’s Chinese partners that they should start preparing for Googlegeddon–aka, life without Google.
Google has a widespread network of Chinese partners that have set up their Web sites to link to Google’s Chinese-language search engine. The government’s warning was a reminder to operators that they are responsible for any content on their sites, even if it is provided by a third party like Google. Those companies could switch to services that are more accommodating to the government, like Baidu, the search engine that holds the dominant share inside China.
I’ve used the analogy the unstoppable force against the immovable object before, but this battle takes it to a whole new level. Unfortunately, Google’s fighting this fight on its back foot. I don’t see China opening up a can of censorship worms, simply to accommodate an American search engine. Do you?
Originally posted here:
Stalemate Between Google & China Now Just Getting Stale
Tags: a-from-outside ,a-third-party ,baidu ,censorship ,country ,google ,government ,love ,marketing ,microsoft ,person ,search ,search-engine ,unstoppable
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Written on March 15, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, seo
I don’t often jump into the world of SEO advice–there are plenty of excellent blogs that do that–but when Google’s Matt Cutts confirms that 301 redirects do, in fact, lose PageRank, well, that’s worth sharing.
Eric Enge gets the scoop–boy, is he gonna get a lot of backlinks from this–getting Matt Cutts to confirm something that I have suspected and cautioned clients for many years: 301′ing from an old domain to another, does result in PageRank decay. Here’s the quote:
I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).
So now you know. But, don’t stop there, read the rest of the interview, you may just learn some other propaganda SEO tips.
(via)
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Google Confirms: 301 Redirects Result in PageRank Loss!
