Part 2: Social Media Advocates – ‘The Social Media Plan’

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Social Media InfluencersContinued from ‘Creating Social Media Advocates‘ – Part 2.

Where to start with your social media plan?

Now that we’ve gotten through the myths of social media, we can turn our focus to developing the plan on how to turn our online audience, including customers, into our evangelists and advocates.

Where to begin? Take your social media thinking back one step and figure out what you want your champions (advocates) to do to build loyalty and drive traffic, sales, conversations, etc. to your site or social presence.

Do you want them to give up video endorsements, spark or respond to conversations on the web, be the first adopters of a new product, provide support, produce written reviews, etc. This all aligns with the objectives you set for champions – what you want them to do!. Read more

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Google +1 Button – Another Facebook ‘Like’?

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Updated: May 27, 2011:  Google +1 & Search Rankings

As we eluded to in the below post we published on Google +1, the affect of the new social media ‘recommendation’ button will impact search results. Matt Cutts confirmed what Google said when the +1 button launched: Google will use +1 activity to influence its search results. “It’s definitely a signal we’re paying a lot of attention to,” Cutts said. “It has tons of potential. It looks very promising.”  Google is expected to offer the +1 button for website owners in the near future.

Who is Matt Cutts? Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google.

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Google +1 Button

Great. Another new social media tool marketers need to put in their marketing arsenal.  Taking Facebooks ‘Like’ head on, Google recently launched the new Google +1button.

Google’s new +1 button is similar to the social function of Facebook’s ‘Like’, to let you recommend a piece of content to your digital social circle of friends, family, visitors, etc. that you find is worthy of mentioning.

Similar to Facebooks ‘Like’, Google +1 button aims to allow individuals a way to make a recommendation, or in some way ‘advice’ on something that you feel is important to share and that others will find helpful. This builds on the value and power of personal referrals, or more technically, ‘personal collective intelligence’ to make referrals and recommendations on products, brands, content, etc. vs. the now old-aged corporate ‘drive-the message-down-the-throat’ push-message approach. Read more

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Part 1: Social Media Advocates – Myths

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Social Media Myths

Continued from ‘Creating Social Media Advocates‘ series.

Before getting into the ‘tools’ or ‘strategies’ of successfully building and harnessing the power of a social media strategy, let’s first begin by looking at some of the most common myths of social media. The point of here is to get over the typical myths and cliché’s of social media, and start with the essentials of understanding where to begin and what influencers can do for your social media strategy. Read more

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Creating Social Media Advocates

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Social MediaAt least a few times a week I receive the same, or similar, types of questions about social media. It’s either “How blogging /Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn, etc., work for my business?”, or “I’ve tried Twitter, or tried Facebook, and it doesn’t work. Is it all just noise?”

Two very common questions that I’ve finally found the time to address….or I’m just tired of listening to myself repeating the same points, and figure just send them to a link to read themselves. In either case, I’m going to cover a these questions, and a few other common social media questions, in a 2 part series of creating social media advocates.

Part 1: Social media myths
Part 2: Creating a social media plan

In the interest of  ‘not another hype about social media’, the plan is to discuss social media myths and the reality of social media, then get into what you should tackle when developing a social media plan.  Some have heard me preach – you fail to plan you plan to fail. Same applies to social media…and most of marketing, so I’ll also cover how to build a social media plan. We’ll also look at how to measure certain social media metrics – such as measuring a Tweet, and cover a recent case study on how social media is being used today..successfully! Read more

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SEO Octagan: Google vs Content Farms

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There has been a lot of buzz this past week about Google’s latest algorithm update, labeled the “Farmer Update,” performed in February 2011. This algorithm update from Google aims to take on content farms; spammy, low-quality content sites that have been crowding their search results.

“Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible…This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on…”

The Google crackdown affected 11.8% of search queries.

Read more

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Google Page Rank – Schooling the Scholars

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A common tactic of increasing page rank to improve organic search results is to align your site with authority sites in your business vertical, industry or just plain gorilla PR sites. This is all worked into Google’s algorithm to help determine a sites reputation, thus position in Google’s SERPs (Search engine result pages). One recent event however to strategically manipulate this comes from Overstock.com. I tip my hat for the effort.

Overstock.com’s tactically brilliant yet ethically deficient plan to game Google’s search engine has blown up in its face.

The popular online discounter had struck deals with several universities, offering students and faculty 10% off in certain categories in exchange for a product-based link from campus websites. Google has been known to rank sites higher if they are linked to from the authoritative vantage point of .edu domains.

Smart move by Overstock? Not so fast. Google’s been coming under fire for the sneaky ways that content farms and some e-tailers are trying to rank higher on popular search queries. One can argue whether Overstock’s ploy was white-hat or black-hat, but the correct answer is that the closeouts specialist was donning a gray hat here.

Google doesn’t like to be embarrassed this way, so it’s penalizing Overstock’s organic results by backing out the PageRank gains resulting from its .edu campus invasion.

As Rick at Fool.com elegantly put it, ‘I guess the scholar just got schooled”.

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Kim Kardashian – Twitter Advertising

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What better way for a professional socialite as Kim Kardashian to stay connected with her followers, and build her personal brand through Twitter and Twitter advertising.  The same can apply to your local business, whether is online or offline.
Apart from Google AdWords PPC or the collaborative Microsoft Ad Centre between Yahoo and Bing (MSN), placement advertising, ad buys on social media websites as Facebook,  LinedIn and now Twitter are also gaining importance in a campaign buy.
Similar to Facebook Advertising, Twitter also provides an advertising platform with access to millions of eyeballs immediately. Twitter advertising can be quite effective for gaining mass exposure, as its one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world. In addition, its direct response medium that most followers or users of Twitter will receive the ads through their web browser, email, retweets to social profiles and directly on their iPhone, Blackberry or Android. Read more
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Social Technographics – Your Social Media Reputation

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Google now taking front stage with improving relevancy of search results by looking at what others are saying about your brand, is one of the latest advances of applying SMM (social media marketing) to SEO. It just makes sense – hold a sound reputation among your personal social circles and within the markets, should be part of the equation of delivering ‘quality’ search results.

Taking a step back before applying SMM to your Search strategy, one must first understand how they can effectively measure the impact and investment of a SMM strategy. Fail to plan, plan to fail. The same applies here with a social media strategy execution.

Though among all the anticipated conversations, comments, sharing, tweets, etc. that you seek to crowd source to others to build your brand or products online reputation, its important to first understand how you’ll measure all of this within your SMM strategy. Read more

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2011 Twitter Marketing Tips

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Twitter - Internet MarketingTwitter, among Facebook, are those hot keywords we see from clients quite often who want to build into their marketing mix…yet let alone understand what it is or how its useful. Everyone is one it, everyone is using it, but how its used is another story among businesses. While we find the use of Twitter and Facebook used sparingly among client internet marketing strategies, there is a fit in the mix to compliment other online marketing programs – Search, SEO, direct marketing, branding or even an arm of a seasonal marketing campaign. So for those Internet marketers, or business owners, kicking off 2011 with SMM (social media marketing) at the top of their marketing list, we’ve provided a few Twitter tips to help you consider where and how the dirty blue bird will fit within your plans.

Now remember, Twitter is one of those media’s that really does not have a specific approach for every business but rather a variety of approaches that businesses can take depending on what is right for them. It’s a business tool to reach your market and audience. While the jury is out if Twitter is just a lot of noise with no one really listening, we have seen it work for clients who can build up a solid loyal following – quality over quantity.

Tip #1:  Twitter & Promotions
Got promotions for your business and not sure how to exactly go about pushing the message to the market? Sure a targeted email blast is a given, but Twitter is also a great way to go.  Not only does your audience pick up the promotion immediately on their Blackberry or iPhone, but Twitter posts now appear randomly in search results giving you an increased chance for visibility. Hint – think ‘local’ (ex. Vancouver cupcakes 50% off). Read more

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SEO Insider – Yahoo Clues

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Yahoo has recently launched a new tool called Yahoo Clues. It is basically a keyword tool designed to give an insight into the demographics of people searching for the keyword along with the popularity of keyword over a period of time and additional keyword suggestions.

Yahoo CluesYahoo Clues shows the graphical representation of change in keyword popularity over the last one month without giving any exact numbers. Its main use lies in the predicting searches by gender and age, income level and geographical location. The Search Flow at the bottom of the page can also prove to be useful in determining user’s search pattern. It basically shows you most probable previous and next user searches for a given keyword. You can enter two keywords to compare them.

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