Posts Tagged networks
Written on August 20, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
There was a time when a story on the front page of Digg was the holy grail for any web publisher. But in more recent months, the average Joe has moved on from the once and powerful bookmarking site because of the monopoly caused by power players in the game. Then Facebook and Twitter rose in favor and it looked like Digg had met its match. Until now.
Digg is rising up from the ashes with a new version that emphasizes social connections and sharing and de-emphasizes the importance of hitting the front page. Will it help them regain their former glory? I’ve had a look around and it’s a good start.
The new Digg is currently in beta but you can find invites if you look around on the internet. When you log on to the new site for the first time, you’re put through an “onboarding process” designed to hook you up with important followers right away.
First you’re asked to choose from a healthy list of big names in a variety of fields. TechCrunch, Engadget and Mashable are just a few that show up in the technology category. Choose your favorites and these become part of your “Top News” feed.
Next, and most importantly, you’re asked to link your Digg account to your Twitter, Facebook and Google Connect accounts. Here you’ll be presented with the Digg accounts of people who are already in your networks so you can easily find and follow them, too.
Now, when you visit Digg, instead of a homepage of links from people you don’t care about, you’ll land on your own Top News page with Digg links from everyone in your network. Digg takes this a step further by adding a special icon that shows how many of your friends dug a particular link and that can be expanded to show you who ticked the box.
The major difference here is that everyone’s top stories will be related to their own interests, giving web publishers a better chance of having their links seen by a wider audience. When you dig a story, that link moves to the top of the home pages of your friends, if they dig it then it moves to the top of their friends lists and so on and so on. The “hottest” news as determined by the clicks of your friends, land on a leaderboard that resides in the sidebar of your home page.
When it comes to submitting news, the process couldn’t be simpler. You insert the link in the blank, the story populates the fields and all you have to do is pick a category. Boom, you’re done. You can also load your RSS feed into Digg so each of your stories populates automatically and is ready for digging. This is a feature that Daily Radar has been using in their blips sites and it’s a real boon for anyone trying to pull traffic. The only downside here is that an autofeed makes it easy to load a lot of junk into Digg which was less likely when you had to load each post by hand.
So, what’s the verdict? The new Digg is the best of Facebook without all the status updates and game nonsense. It’s strictly links and comments and that means it’s cleaner and easier to use. The new system for digging links looks like it will give everyone a fair chance at making it to the top of some list, even if it is only the one you share with your mother and two best friends. If you’re like me and you gave up on Digg some time ago, sign up to receive an invite to the new Digg. I think it could be a real contender in the social media marketing world.
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Cleaner, Easier, I Dig the New Digg
Written on August 14, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Thursday, I posted a guest post all about personal branding. I talked about how you can leverage a personal brand to build links. I truly believe that personal branding has tremendous opportunity for business development. But then yesterday, I saw the above tweet. My friend Stephanie reminded me that not everyone wants to “be famous”.
And that’s just fine.
The biggest failure of social media in our society is the myth that everyone should be famous. As a result, the networks and platforms are overrun with over zealous fame seekers that just end up contributing to the noise rather than making music. Making music is an art form, yelling at the top of your lungs isn’t.
Those in social media that have the strongest personal brands, do so because they have the following characteristics.
- They offer quality content.
- They don’t fit the mold.
- They have awesome conversations.
- They don’t care about being famous.
- They create beautiful music.
Over the last several years I have worked hard at building my personal brand. I think it’s an important part of my business and I want my business to succeed. But, quietly on a secret blog that no one knows about, I write poetry.
Poetry isn’t what I do for a living. It doesn’t build links. It doesn’t improve my ROI. It isn’t about my social media strategy. It’s just something I do for myself and anyone else that happens to accidentally find it. I don’t care about being the best poet on the web. Or selling my poems. Or even being recognized as a poet. I write for the sake of writing.
If you are having trouble developing your personal brand, maybe it’s because your priorities aren’t right. For example, when you blog, blog because you truly enjoy what you are writing about. When you tweet, tweet because you find value through sharing or engaging. When you meet folks in person, do so for the sake of making a new friend. Do all of these things and more for the sake of yourself, not for the sake of being famous.
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Cup of Joe: To Be Or Not To Be?
Written on August 10, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
The very first maps on record are Babylonian clay tablets that were made around 2300 B.C.. Do you think the men who chiseled those graphics into stone had any idea that we’d be looking at those maps using an electronic tablet that scoops information out of the air?
The world is changing faster than ever, and no where is that more obvious than in the social media world. Sites that didn’t even exist five years ago are now world powers and it makes for a fascinating visual.
Ethan Bloch of Flowtown recently posted his 2010 Social Networking Map which was inspired by the 2007 Online Community map by XKCD.
Taken together, the two maps are a quick visual reminder of how the social media world has changed, particularly when you look at the top players. Where MySpace dominated the 2007 map, it is now dwarfed (and relabeled, Former Kingdom of MySpace) by Facebook.
The map, which is built to represent the proportional size of each sites user base is also full of commentary on our new social order. Off the cost of YouTube is the Isle of LOL Cats, the Cape of Hitler’s Downfall Remake Videos and Strait of Rick Roll. Foursquare floats on the Sea of Personal Information and scattered through the world are Google Information Gathering Outposts.
Beyond being a humorous look at the online world as we know it, the 2010 Social Networking Map can help you get your marketing priorities straight. Do you have ads drifting away into Receding Glaciers of AOL? Is your instant messaging system located in the AIM Tundra? And what can you learn from those ghostly entities in the Land of Defunct Social Networks?
On the 2007 map, the Wiki islands were just being formed and the IRC Isles lived on after Usenet. in 2010, IRC is AWOL and the Wiki chain has developed into a strong group of united territories.
What do you think the map will look like in 2015? Or 2020? Maybe by then, it will just be one big social media program that was designed on a cell phone by a 10-year-old who got bored during a school assembly.
Click here to see the full 2010 Social Networking Map.
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2010 Social Media Map Declares Facebook a World Power
Tags: a-cell-phone ,a-strong-group ,aol ,book ,former-kingdom ,google ,marketing ,networks ,online ,personal ,proportional ,social-networking
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Written on August 10, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
One of the many ways companies have engaged their customers, gained insight into a marketplace and conducted research for a variety of purposes has been through surveys. If you think that list of activities almost sounds like the reasons many companies engage in social media monitoring, you’d be right.
About 2 weeks ago I did a webinar with our client, Zoomerang, purveyor of online survey software on the intersection of surveys and social media. In that presentation I focused on why social media can play an important part of an online marketing strategy.
Companies incorporate social media into their marketing mix for a variety of reasons:
- Website Traffic
- Brand Awareness
- Engagement with Prospects
- Engagement with Customers
- Brand Reputation
- Prospect Lead Quality
- Revenue
- Prospect Lead Volume
- Useful Product Feedback
Social media communities like Twitter with over 100 million accounts and Facebook with over 500 million present an attractive opportunity for research, engagement and marketing. When incorporating surveys into a social media marketing mix, there’s an opportunity to make that intersection a part of your social cycle of interaction as pictured above.
For example here is how a company leveraging a survey for marketing purposes might incorporate their social networks with online surveys:
Put a listening program in place using social media monitoring software to get a handle on topics of interest to your community. There could be a variety of reasons to use a survey, from product research to identifying trends or for profiling customers.
Grow your network, grow your survey panel. In the context of online surveys, growing a strong social network across different channels is a bit like developing your own survey panel. As you grow your networks through participation and interaction, trust is earned.
Crowdsource ideas like survey questions. Ping your network with different topics of questions to see what people respond to. Leverage that feedback to construct the flow of your online survey and even some of the questions.
Ask for help. Those same, topically relevant communities can be tapped to help promote the survey at large, in situations where respondents don’t need to be a specifically defined list.
Recognize those in your network that helped come up with question ideas as well as those that help promote taking the survey. That public recognition is priceless, especially when it’s a genuine reflection of their contribution to a successful survey.
Promote. Being invested through participation and recognition, there’s a great chance many of those same network connections will help promote the survey results. Offer a first look at the survey report, an incentive for promotion and communicate the outcome of everyone’s efforts. Give feedback on what’s working and if you can, offer tools to make it easier to promote.
You can listen to the entire recorded webinar here along with links to other articles and howtos for incorporating social media into your surveys and surveys into your social media.
Have you successfully incorporated social media into some aspect of your online surveys? Did you find some uses more effective than others?
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Tags: a-great-chance ,a-media-surveys ,a-social-media ,a-webinar-with ,media ,networks ,online marketing ,online-surveys- ,prospect-lead ,social ,survey ,traffic
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Written on July 20, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, chat, marketing, seo
There are many tactics companies can implement as part of a smart Twitter Marketing strategy. Growing the initial following is important as is providing the budding community you’re building with something of value to keep coming back and to spread the good word to their networks. One such tactic that offers value and brings people together is the Twitter chat. I’ve been involved with about 5 or 6 different Twitter chats as a guest and they are a unique experience. In this post I’ll share my observations about what seems to work, some logistics and a few examples of some well-run Twitter chats for the marketing and PR verticals.
1. Pick a great hashtag – The hashtag ties your Twitter chat together. It should reflect the topic and be intuitive. Examples might be: #poetry #crmchat or #seo411 – Here’s a list of over 150 chats, topics and the times they run at: Twitter Chat Schedule.
2. Decide a format and schedule - Part of what makes a Twitter chat successful is that there is a consistent time that requires little reminder and also a format that’s easy to follow. There are a certain number of early adopters on Twitter that “get” how #chats work, but there are many, many more who don’t. They’ll see a sudden flurry of #chat handles in their friend’s Tweets and wonder what’s going on. Make it easy for the audience you’re after to join in and know when the next chat is happening. While there may be more, I’ve seen 2 formats standout.
- Free for all. This is where the chat is treated like a cocktail party and people start posting comments and questions and anyone that wants to, will reply. Its very much many to many and without the use of a tool like Tweetchat can be difficult to follow.
- Outside guests or experts. If you start the chat, you’re the moderator. One of your duties if you choose the format of bringing in a guest is to find guests that your attendees respect and want to hear from. Prep the guest with how you run your chats in advance. Use a template email or web page to communicate this. If your guest hasn’t participated in a chat before, they might need a little more guidance but once you’ve done one, the rest go pretty similarly. Prep the guest with questions in advance so they have an idea of what the specific topic will be. This helps them provide better answers more efficiently.
Promote the guest and get the guest to promote the chat. Tell the guest what your group responds well to and give examples if you can. This will provide some appreciated guidance for the guest and help give the group what they’re looking for.
3. Create a web page explaining your chat - While a Twitter @account for the chat is a good idea, it’s also a good idea to have a static web page somewhere that the Twitter account can link to. People should also be able to easily find the About #chat page through search engines, so get some other pages or chat members to link to it using the chat name. Explain what the purpose of the chat is, who the moderator(s) are, when the chat runs (including time zone), if the chats are archived and where, and make it easy for visitors to spread the good word about the chat by offering social sharing links/buttons.
This page can live on your blog, your web site or you can easily setup a page on posterous, wordpress or blogger. If you want to explain more than what is reasonable on a Twitter page, a web page offers more room. A Blog, Facebook Fan page or LinkedIn group that explains the Twitter #chat can also be used and several #chats mentioned below do just that.
4. Recognize #chat participants - Call out participants during the chat by retweeting interesting things they’ve posted. List all chat participants on the #chat web page. Offer a TweepML list of participants to make it easy for someone to follow everyone in one in a single click. You might also manage a Twitter list of past guests, another list for moderators and another list for most active participants. Possibly promote the Twitter list on services like Listorious. Besides ensuring quality questions, on-topic tweets and great guests, recognition is a powerful thing to do in order to grow a Twitter #chat group.
5. Archive the #chat - Saving the threads of discussion that occur during the chats can be very useful afterwards. This is especially true if you have a good guest and/or participants that come prepared. I like to have about 10-12 pre-written Tweets with links to useful resources prepared before the chat even starts. That way when people ask questions I can answer immediately. I’ve done this several times and it’s gone over pretty well. Look through the Twitter stream of the chat and archive the whole thing or just the most interesting threads into a web page. Archived Twitter chats are an excellent source of content for your blog. Over time, archived chats can be a very useful repository of information, attract links and create search traffic for your web site.
A few of my archived chats include:
Now that I’ve shared a few tips that Twitter #chat editors or moderators should consider, here are some of the best marketing and PR #chats to check out:
- #blogchat – Run by @mackcollier, #blogchat is a long running chat that covers all aspects of blogging on Sunday nights from 8-9pm Central. View transcripts and other info here.
- #journchat – Run by @prsaraevans, #journchat is another long running weekly conversation (Mon 7-10pm Central) between journalists, bloggers and PR people.
- #pr20chat – Moderated by @PRtini and @JGoldsborough, #pr20chat is a weekly conversation (Tues 8PM EST) that focuses on public relations 2.0 topics.
- #socialmedia – @Marc_Meyer & @JasonBreed moderate the #socialmedia chat, which of course, is all about social media and occurs Tuesdays at 12 pm Noon EST. Each episode is also tagged with a number, such as #sm1 #sm2 etc. View the live stream here.
- #commschat – @AdamVincenzini & @EmilyCagle run this UK-based Twitter ‘communications’ chat #commschat Monday nights, 8pm (UK time) on traditional / social media, PR, journalism, blogging. See the Blog and FB page.
- #measurepr – Run by @shonali, #measurepr covers measurement topics within the public relations and social media industries that kicked off on February 2, 2010, and is held bi-weekly on Tuesdays from that date, from 12-1 pm ET.
- #prstudchat – Run by @dbreakenridge & @valeriesimon, the monthly #PRStudChat (I thought “stud” meant “manly” not “student” the first time I saw it) provides a platform for conversation between Public Relations Students, Educators and Professionals. See more on WTH.
- #imcchat – Moderated by @bethharte & @abarcelos, #IMCChat is a chat for all of those interested in Integrated Marketing Communications and runs every Wednesday night at 8pm ET.
What are your favorite Twitter chats for Marketing and Public Relations topics? What advice do you have for running or participating in a successful Twitter chat?
Besides the tips above, there are great posts on how to run and participate in Twitter chats on Mashable, from Mack Collier and here.
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Written on June 24, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide
by Jennifer Laycock
Earlier this week, I wrote a post about the need to build a social media strategy around specific goals instead of simply launching a presence because “everyone else is doing it.” Today, I’m going to map out the three primary goals most social media outreach campaigns fall into. If you’re still trying to figure out how and why to get involved in social media outreach, consider these three categories and ask yourself how they might apply to your business.
Three Primary Social Media Goals
When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually either aimed at:
- Building/Strengthening the Brand
- Driving Conversions
- Increasing/Monitoring the Presence
Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals.
Written on June 24, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide
by Mike Fleming
OK, so you get this previous post about ad testing and you set up some tests… now what? How do you measure the results?
One of the cool features of AdWords is the ability to make a report to observe almost anything about your account. In the case of measuring ad performance, you can create an (that’s right, you guessed it) Ad Performance Report.
It shows each ad you’ve created and any metric that you desire to analyze. You can export this data into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis as well, to make it a bit easier to sort the data and look at specific metrics for specific insights.
Once you are looking at the results of your ad copy test, you want to decide what is working best for your account. And the ad that is working best for your account is the one that is achieving your specific marketing goals the best.
So, first ask yourself, what is the one thing that I want my ad to do that is most important to my account performance right now? It may be to get the most customers possible, to lower cost per customer, or to get as many visitors to your site as possible. Of course, all of these would be great, but the winner of your ad test should be the ad that performs best for your main marketing goal.
So, you save that ad. But, you’re not done with the others. See what you can glean from them to create new ads to challenge your winner. Yeah, ad #2 may have been your winner because you are looking for the lowest cost per customer, but why did ad #4 perform over twice as good for CTR?
If you can figure that out and raise your CTR while keeping the cost per conversion low, you’ll improve performance even more.
Decide what worked and mix and match those elements in an effort to outperform the winner in the next test period.
So, you could take each of the specific elements of ad copy #2 and #4 and stick them into new ads to gain insight into the elements that work with your audience for different metrics.
Your 2nd test may look something like this:
New Ad #1 = Ad #2 headline, ad #4 description line 1, ad #2 description line 2, ad #4 display URL
New Ad #2 = Ad #4 headline, ad #2 description line 1, ad #4 description line 2, ad #2 display URL
and so on….
Then, when you do further analysis, you can filter the individual elements of your original ads to see which ones performed the best for each metric in all of the new ads as a whole. This will help you to know what elements are important to keep and which ones can be done away with.
In my next post, we’ll take a look at when the right times may be to analyze your ad performance results….
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Use Ad Testing to Help Reach Your PPC Marketing Goals - Part 2
Written on June 24, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide, seo
by Stoney deGeyter
There’s a time and a place for everything. The place for sweat pants to be worn is at home, not at the airport; the place for cigarette butts to be thrown is an ashtray, not out your car window; and the place for the Twighlight movies to be watched is on the corner of nowhere and never again.
When dealing with your online content you have to find the right keywords and the right place for them on the page. SEO 1997 was all about throwing keywords anywhere and everywhere on the page in hopes to claim those top spots on AltaVista, WebCrawler, Excite and the six other search engines you were gunning for. (Ahhh, remember the days!)
In today’s world SEO has meaning beyond getting rankings, ’cause, you know… people are gonna see that stuff. Your content has to read, not like a keyword laundry list but more like information that actually helps sell your product or services, or provide information the reader finds helpful to them.
Everybody has a job to do
Making SEO work requires the involvement of more than just a good SEO or a good copywriter. In fact, both have their role in finding and integrating keywords into the content of the page.
The SEO is largely in charge of keyword selection. It’s not the copywriter’s job to go out and do the in-depth keyword research or to be responsible for selecting the keywords that should be worked into the page.
Integrating the keywords into the content is the job of a good copywriter. The SEO hands off the keyword lists and the copywriter edits, tweaks, rewrites and adjusts the content so the optimized keywords have been worked into the content in a way that doesn’t destroy the flow or the goals of the page.
While each have their roles, there are times when the roles can overlap a bit. Many times the keywords “selected” by the SEOs won’t fit on the selected page. I always ask my copywriters to use their judgment on whether any given keyword, phrase or qualifier works on a page or not.
This is where the SEO and the copywriter need to work together. The SEO might see a way that the keyword can work that perhaps the copywriter doesn’t quite get. A little working together, some give and take and the SEO and copywriter should be able to come to an agreement whether a keyword can or should be used on a particular page.
The SEO also needs to be able to have input as to where certain keywords need to be placed on the page. Unless the copywriter understands SEO they may not get that some keywords need to be in headings, some in body content and some need to be used a bit more frequently than others. But again, the copywriter should have final say as to how those keywords are used in the content to make sure it really works.
Good content cannot be rushed
The process of selecting keywords and integrating them into content is not one to be taken lightly. This isn’t 1997! Give your team time to figure what the best keywords are and how to properly work those into the page. A good optimized page will take several hours for research and content writing and will go through a few edits.
When you allow the page to work its way through the development process you’ll get content that is search engine optimized, brings in targeted traffic, provides your visitors the information they need and helps move them through the sales process. Each keyword will have a place and be used in its place to get the visitors in the place you want them to be because they have the information they need.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.
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Put Your SEO and Copywriter in Their Place… So Your Keywords Will Be Too!
Written on June 3, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
Google’s AdSense For Mobile (Apps) Becomes Gateway To Other Mobile Ad Networks
Google announced that its AdSense for Mobile Apps program would start allowing publishers and developers to work with third party ad mediators. [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the “View Original Post” link below. ***
Excerpt from:
SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 3, 2010
Written on May 21, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book
Want to keep your searches from being seen when using open WiFi or other networks? Google’s introduced a new “secure” encrypted version of its search.
Anyone who has been to a bank web site will be familiar with the idea of encryption, where a little “lock” symbol appears at the bottom of Firefox or the top [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the “View Original Post” link below. ***
The rest is here:
Google Launches Encrypted Web Search
Tags: appears-at-the ,book ,bottom ,facebook ,firefox-or-the ,google: analytics ,google: web search ,link-below- ,networks ,searches ,the-headline ,top news ,wifi-or-other ,with-the-idea
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There was a time when a story on the front page of Digg was the holy grail for any web publisher. But in more recent months, the average Joe has moved on from the once and powerful bookmarking site because of the monopoly caused by power players in the game. Then Facebook and Twitter rose in favor and it looked like Digg had met its match. Until now.
