Social Media

May 13, 2008

Corporate Blogging Isn't About the Media

I came across an interesting post today while perusing Sphinn. Search Engine Optimization Manager says the number one reason traditional corporations shouldn't blog is because they don't understand media. Hold me, my head hurts.

There are three things very wrong with that statement:

1. If your company doesn't know how to use the media to spread your message, then you're dead in the water anyway. Either learn or close up shop.
2. Blogging isn't about engaging the media. It's about engaging and empowering your customers.
3. It's 2008. What the heck is a traditional company?

The logic behind the post is all very confusing, especially when the author suggests that blogs are only suited for "Web-based" companies and that if you're one of those traditional types you should stick to the "more appropriate" press release model. Right. Because a blog and a press release are the same and accomplish the same goal. Only not. Come closer so that I may I hit you.

The sooner you realize that your corporate blog isn't about you or your company or the media and that it's about your audience, the greater your blogger experience is going to be. Sure, blogs allow you to do lots of great things -- to put a face on your company, to do reputation management, to deal with negative feedback, and to strengthen the focus of your site with new ideas and content -- but you're not doing any of that for yourself. Not really, anyway. You're doing it for your customers. To make them trust your brand and improve their experience with you, so that they're more likely to associate themselves with you in the future. All of this will help you in the long run, but your short-term objective is to appeal to them.

If you're looking at your blog as a tool that you're going to use to promote yourself or your business, just stop. You're missing the point. You're not going to engage or excite anyone by talking about how great you are or what you're up to. A blog is not a press release and if you try to turn it into one so that you can be "more appropriate" you're going to enrage the audience you meant to empower.

I also really question who these "traditional" companies are the author mentions anyway. I assume they're talking about companies who provide some sort of offline service and who have been around for years and years. Someplace that just reeks of stodgy old money. You know, like airlines! Only JetBlue and Southwest are two companies pioneering the whole corporate blogging thing. They must not have gotten the "write a press release" memo. Don't they look silly?

If you're a "traditional" company that doesn't understand how to leverage the media, then I suggest you learn. I don't think this Web thing is going to go away. Nor will social media. You don't want to be the great content that fails because you don't know how to submit or promote yourself. Instead of hiding in your corner because you're unfamiliar, try embracing it. You don't have to jump into blogging, but I think you do have to enter the social sphere in some form.

The author is right on one point, though. You should definitely know what your end goal is before you start. You want to know how this will help you connect with your customers, whether you'll be adding to the conversation, and if customers even care what you have to say. That's all solid advice. However, I'd shy away from discouraging people from jumping into the conversation simply because they have no media experience or because they don't fit the presubscribed mold. It's like bashing Shel Israel for attempting to stray away from the short video model. Be a little daring. Go blog something. Step out of your comfort level. Stop being so "traditional".

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/13/08 at 2:25 PM | Comments (4)

May 12, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

The Social Networks Get More Social

Something must have been in the water this past weekend because Google and the social networks have decided to be just a little bit sweeter to their users.

Both Facebook and MySpace revealed portability options that will allow members to take their information off the site and use it in conjunction with other trusted sites. MySpace's program is called the Data Availability initiative and will allow users to share their public photos, videos and text on sites like Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Photobucket and beyond. Similarly, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, a program which will allow members to take their Facebook identity and use it across the Web.

Google isn't making user information portable, but they did launch Friend Connect to help site owners add social features to their Web site with just a small snippet of code. Google thinks of Friend Connect as a "shortcut to connections you've built up somewhere else". It will work with OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. Good stuff.

Looks like the future of the Web and social applications will be all about letting people create one Web identity and then giving them the ability to take it wherever they go. We like.

10 Percent of People Say Design Is Part of SEO

A frightening article over at Web Designer Wall signals that only 1 out of 10 Web designers think design should be a consideration to search engine optimization. I suppose that's actually not too surprising considering that 24 percent of people didn't even know what search engine optimization was. Oye.

The article, geared towards design professionals, goes on to explain what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and how certain design and architectural elements may impact the spiderability of your Web site. It's one of those posts you want to bookmark and then send to clients when they get mouthy. I mean, confused. ;)

Seriously though, it's a bit frustrating to see that so many in a related field have no idea what SEO is and continue to make it an afterthought. Search engine optimization should be a part of your site design process from the very beginning. We actually believe that you should know your keywords before you even begin designing. For a good rundown of how we look at SEO design, you can take a read through our How To: SEO Web Design post from a few months back. It explains how knowing what terms you'll need to target is going to determine how your site is structured, how your navigation will come together, how deep it will be, and will influence nearly every design decision you make.

Third Annual SEM Scholarship Contest Launches

Andy Beal has revealed that the 3rd annual SEM Scholarship Contest has officially kicked off and it's promising a prize package worth more than $10,000. Yowsa!

To enter, simply submit an article on your favorite Internet marketing topic between the deadline of May 23rd. From there, the finalists will posted on the Marketing Pilgrim and the five that receive the most traffic will go before an expert panel of judges. Have I mentioned I'm on that fine panel? Yeah, I don't know how my name got there either. :)

It's a great chance to give back to the community and help some new search marketing faces find some recognition. We hope to kick off the third edition of our SEO Charity Contest soon, as well. Good to see so many people fighting for SEO education. Kudos, Andy!

Fun Finds

Matt Cutts tells us what Google knows about spam and says, on the record, that search engine optimization is NOT spam. All hail, Matt Cutts!

The always smart Kim Krause-Berg says the key ingredient for SEO and Web Design is true passion.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/12/08 at 5:06 PM | Comments (1)

May 7, 2008

eMetrics Keynote - The Coca-Cola Marketing Metrics Journey, Part Two

Ready for a keynote? Well, good, cause one's about to start. Jim Sterne welcomes Tim Goudie from Coca Cola. This keynote is labeled "part two" because Part One was given about a year and a half ago in Washington DC at the eMetrics event down there. Tim's here to update us on what's been happening over the past 18 months.

Tim has been involved in brand marketing since day one. He knows the importance of metrics and measurements. He's going to talk about the global perspective of digital marketing.

Metrics is about knowing exactly where you are. If you're running a business and you don't know how you're doing, it's because you haven't planned ahead of time to know where you are. The consequence of not knowing where you are results in disaster. He shows some examples of people who ended up in disaster because they didn't know where they are or where they were going. They're historical references and one of them involves cannibalism. It's a bit early for that, isn't it? I haven't even had my coffee yet (though I did have a cupcake!).

In July 2006, Coca Cola started building a Web site called The Coke Show. They were trying to get people to upload videos and share UGC. People wanted to share, create and be recognized. The site got so heavy it could hardly move. Consumers weren't taken to the point where Coke thought they would be. The site kind of flopped but Coke learned a lot.

He also talks about MyCokeRewards.com. It's all about loyalty. You can register and build your profile. It was the first time Coke had used precision marketing. It collects data about your customers and then dishes out particular content that they've either asked for or visited on an ongoing basis. It's powerful, but it's expensive. The impact of the program was that it lifted all the pack sizes. The average lift was 15 points over the average consumer.

DesignTheWorldInCoke is a new site to support the upcoming Olympic Games. They unveiled it in 32 markets at the flip of a switch. They've been able to learn as they go.

Metrics are ridiculously political

People will fight and die over numbers. They don't want their numbers exposed. You can overcome this by creating an even playing field. Find out the top KPIs. If you're going to have a constant set of KPIs, stick them on the dashboard so that everyone can see them. It creates a wall of shame or fame and tugs at people's Type A tendencies to be on top. Publish your metrics widely so that everyone has access to the data. Never ever believe that the metrics are neutral. You have to ask why you want that data and what people are going to do with it. Are you going to use it to improve things or do you just think it's pretty?

You need to make sure the executives know that you can't just turn off the metrics. You have to invest in the system.

What is the business that you're in?

Tim's organization is about selling bottles of a beverage. He doesn't care about how many visitors come to their Web site or how many uniques the new marketing campaign will bring in. He wants to know how many cases of Coke it will help them sell. You have to make sure your metrics go back to the fundamental objective of the business. That's how you're going to get your buy-in. It has to go back to the bottom line and how you're going to promote what the business is about.

You need to be where your consumers are and you need to get your organization to think about where your consumers are spending their time and how they're consuming media.

From Web Metrics to Business Measurement

Coca-Cola created a framework that looks like this:

1. Brand Health: They have a tool that measures Brand Health all day, every day.
2. Brand Advocacy: It's the next level of commitment. Would someone refer your product to their friend? Would they recommend your Web site? They're monitoring that. [Tom opens up a bottle Coke. Heh]
3. Volume
4. Media Value: What's your reach? Your frequency?
5. Marketing Productivity

Our Challenge:

[He takes a swig of his Coke. Product placement, FTW!]

You have to measure offline data with digital behavior. You want to link them together. If you know who your consumer is and how they're spending their time, you can dish back messaging that becomes more and more relevant to them. You can't always measure everything you want to measure.

Listening to your online customers. Not every business is the same. You want the data to build the relationship with the consumer, not just to store it.

Tracking Brand Health Online

Coca-Cola put a brand survey on their Olympics-related Web site to see how/if its helping brand health move in the right direction. They focus on brand health because there's a built in assumption that brand health is a good indicator of future consumption.

Go External: If you don't have the skills internally, find them externally. Find someone who can help you with tagging, optimization and interpretation and dashboards.

There's a whole new set of digital applications that are emerging. Things like mobile marketing, widgets, social networks, etc. Imagine if you could deliver a message to a consumer at lunch time telling them that there was an offer waiting for them at the McDonalds located around the corner. That's useful.

The problem is there's no such thing as a mobile cookie. Have you tagged your widget correctly to map those transactions? That's the type of information you need to know.

Find internal patrons of your will die: Find someone who believes in metrics. Find people who understand how metrics can be used and leveraged. Find an executive whose eyes light up when you talk metrics.

Distributing the data: Having the data is one thing, knowing who to get it to and in what format is another thing. You need to give your executives pretty data. It needs to be in a chart or a graph and use color. Management level people can dig a bit deeper.

Leveraging the data: The most important learning for Coke has been that it's okay to have red dials and switches and data, but if you don't have the people to manage it and determine who gets what data, it doesn't matter what kind of car you've bought. If you don't know how to drive it, you've just wasted it. You need to have the right resources on the ground. You need to map your web behavior back to your users.

Key Learnings

• We are evolving in the digital space.
• Metrics are ridiculously political.
• From metrics to business measures.
• Go external.
• We're learning.
• Find internal patrons.
• Dashboards.
• Distributing the data.
• Leveraging the data.
• Educate yourself.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 7/08 at 10:42 AM | Comments (1)

May 6, 2008

Reputation Management in a Social Media World and On Your Site

Hey, hey! Time to talk reputation management and social media with Katie Delahave Paine (KDPaine Partners) and Steve Bernstein (PayPal). Let's do it.

[Or not. We're having some technical difficulties so the session is starting a bit late. Amuse yourselves. I'm cruising Facebook.

Okay, it looks like we're ready. Yey!]

For years the big thing was counting eyeballs. Then it was hits. Now it's engagement. The biggest piece of this is to understand that measurement and engagement mean different things to different people. If you're trying to sell something, engagement means 'did you move someone down the conversion path?' If you're just trying to get some influence out there then its comments and links.

How do you measure the impact of all those various communication efforts?

Six Steps to the Perfect Measurement System

• Define your goals
• Understand your audience and what motivates them
• Define the metrics
• Determine what your benchmark is
• Pick a tool and undertake the research
• Analyze results and glean insight, take action, measure again.

A proposed engagement index:

Output: The activity
Outtake: What do people believe about you
Outcome: What do you want them to accomplish

It's the combination of those three things that define engagement. You can't just do one without the others.

Katie says they're also trying to measure the impact of social media networks. You can see your share of discussion on Technorati and YouTube. But what does this all mean? Is there a connection between YouTube content on the Presidential candidates and their share of votes? Does it impact the outcome?

Katie analyzed the traffic patterns for Obama and John Paul and found that they dominated YouTube. Then she analyzed the amount of videos for each on YouTube and the extent that they were commented on, viewed, etc. She found that there was a direct correlation between the activity on these videos and the voting patterns. [Yes. I am so sure that YouTube is directly influencing people's voting. What?]

Components of an Engagement Index

• Involvement: Web site visits, time spent, page view
• Interaction:: Comments, reviews
• Intimacy: Sentiment, positioning
• Influence: Likelihood to recommend, brand affinity, forwards, links.

You also have to test relationships, taking into account control mutuality, trust, satisfaction, commitment, exchange, and command.

Measuring Facebook

Katie throws out some stats:

Engagement in external blogs = 13 comments
High engaged admissions blogs = 35 comments per post
Good momentum on social bookmarking sites = 1 submitted item every other day
Average positive = 50 percent average, negatives 9 percent

Most of the content shared on Facebook is video. Traditional news media plays a much bigger role in sharing information than people think. Thirty eight percent of people get information from sites like Flickr and YouTube.

If you think you're going to put a video out there and control it, forget it. 86 percent of watched videos come from individuals, not corporations. If you're corporation trying to release video, hide that you're a corporation. Otherwise it will be rejected. [It will also be rejected when people find out you were trying to hide your identity.]

Takeaways

• The reality is if you want to be popular, be video and don't be corporate
• Traditional media is much more important than you think
• If you want o reach incoming Freshman, you have between March and Aug to get your message out
• In terms of tonality, neutral is the norm.

Engaging allows you to join in the conversation and correct bloggers who are saying bad stuff.

ROI: Trying it all back to the bottom line

• Define "R" - what's your mission
• Define how you contribute to that mission
• Define the 'I' - what's the investment

Steve is up next. He's going to talk about qualifying the quantitative. My fingers are crying sweet baby emo tears. Why all the long words?

Why did PayPal start getting site feedback?

They had the "what" but they needed the "why". They could see in their data that there were people going down the same path a few times. Why were they doing that?

If you go to their site and click on "site feedback", a comment card will pop up. The two most important parts of the card are "Would you recommend this site to a friend?" and the abbreviated net promoter score. Whatever that is. Basically they want to force people to make a decision. They're looking for trends over time.

Maximizing the Value

• Data is worse than pointless if you don't use it
• In an ideal world, each comment would be read, and actionable comments would always be acted upon or at least considered for action.
• It's more than just labor-intensive, that's just hard.
• Quantifying the Qualitative: Qualitative research is thought of as focus groups and interviews. They're free-floating and are about discovery. Comment boxes are kind of qualitative because people can right whatever they want, but you can quantify it because you're presenting the exact same experience for everyone.

Comment Categorization: Categorize comments by themes and traffic them to appropriate product management teams. There are many commercial categorization tools available to help you do this. Comments typically categorize well because they're one-dimensional.

He takes every comment and normalizes it using porter stemming. You want to clean it up by taking out stop words and put everything in the same tense. Then they use trigrams - a three word phrase - to move through the content and count all the three word phrases that appear. It gives you a histogram of each comment and lets you "cluster them into galaxies". You can find commonalities.

And that's it. Wow, that was a somewhat confusing session that failed to deliver. Bummer.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 6/08 at 6:24 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

SMX Social Media Coverage Round Up

As Lisa heads home from Long Beach, it's time to take a look back at the last two days of furiously liveblogged and twittered sessions. If you missed a minute, here are nine recaps to get you all caught up. From tips and tricks from the best in social media marketing to Danny's clever attempts to draw in more attendees to the inevitable "Jason said WHAT?" Moment, it's all here. Relive the fun of SMX Social before the conference hall empties.

See you in Seattle!

Day One:

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Keynote - Social Search: The Human Challengers

Day Two:

• Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM
• Micro Communities
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

Posted by Susan Esparza on 04/23/08 at 4:11 PM | Comments (1)

Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

Chris Sherman is taking over moderator duties with speakers Lise Broer (Wikipedia), Jonathan Hochman (Hochman Consultants), Matt McGee (Marchex) and Jeff Muendel (Netconcepts).

[This will be the last session we're covering for SMX Social Media. After which I'll be getting back in my little Aveo and heading back to Simi Valley. Hopefully my stomach will make it that long. And I won't die in SoCal traffic. Tune in tomorrow to see what happened! :)]

Up first is Matt McGee. He's my favorite person in search. And like, ever.

Matt's going to talk about Yahoo Answers. He says that there are lots of stupid people in the world, many of them are in Yahoo Answers and he loves it.

What is Yahoo Answers?

It's the number two question and answer site on the Internet, behind Wikipedia. It begins with and revolves around your profile page. You get to put a link to your Web site on your profile page. It's a nofollowed link. Actually, all the links are nofollowed, which means Yahoo Answers is a traffic-building exercise, not a link building one.

Just the Industry Facts:

2008: US traffic to Q&A sites is up 118 percent over 2007.
Traffic to the top five sites: 52 percent are female. 45 percent are 25-44. Time on site up 44 percent. The average user spends more than 9 minutes on the site.

Yahoo Answers has 74 percent of the market share in the question and answer category. It's the #2 site in Reference category. It has a 56 percent year over year growth.

Professionals are welcome. Helpful marketing is okay. Spammers are not.

Benefits of Yahoo Answers

Referral Traffic: For Matt's blog, SmallBusinessSEM.com, Yahoo Answers is the 4th source of referral traffic, provides the highest source of new visitors, and has the lowest bounce rate.

Search Traffic: He wrote about [merchant circle]. His blog posts ranks on the first page and right below it is someone asking a question about Merchant Circle on Yahoo Answers. In the Yahoo Answers post, someone's answer points to Matt's blog post. Google sent 5,000 page views and the Yahoo Answers post sent 4,200 page views to that entry.

Matt shows how well Yahoo Answers pages rank in the search engines. It's also a good way to get long tail search traffic.

Yahoo Answers pages are crawled deeply. Google has crawled 64 million pages. Yahoo has crawled 282 million. MSN has crawled 1.2 million.

How to Use Yahoo Answers

• RSS Feed Rule; Every category and sub-category has a feed. Search results too.
• Sort Wisely: You can sort by date or by the number of answers. Matt likes to sort by date to find the older questions. Find the ones that have the lowest amount of answers and then gives a good answer. That helps to boost your profile when you're voted as having the best answer.
• Sign Your Name
• Don't Spam

Matt ends and then asks if there are any Yahoo people in the room. When no one raises his hand, he says he has an extra slide. Hee!

Easiest 10 Points Ever

Answers are classified as "open" or "in voting" or "resolved'. What you want to do is look for questions in "in voting". Then you look for your answer, click on "vote as best answer" and if no one else bothers to vote, you get the best answer and an easy 10 points. Nice.

Jonathan Hochman is up next to talk about Wikipedia.

He talks about how the History tab provides a lot more transparency than other social media sites. Yeah, whatever, it's still Wikipedia. ;)

Because Wikipedia ranks first for everything in the entire world, their articles have a big influence on public opinion.

Wikipedia and Marketers

Yes: Answering questions. Interacting with editors. Donating images. Reporting problems. Requesting changes.

No: Advertising. Writing about yourself. Spinning articles. Astroturfing. Badmouthing. Paid editing of articles.

Don't Be a Dick

Don't be a dick is the fundamental rule of all social spaces. No definition of being a "dick" has been provided. This is deliberate.

If a significant number of reasonable people suggest, whether bluntly or politely, that you are being a dick, the odds are good that you are not entirely in the right. Be civil to other editors and they may help you.

Top 3 Newbie Mistakes

1. Promotional Usernames: Don't use a business or product name.
2. Copyright Violations: Pictures need a free license. Cannot copy and paste text from most sites.
3. Conflict of interest editing: Don't write articles about yourself or your clients.

In order for there to be an article on Wikipedia, the subject has to be notable. That means independent media have to have written about it before. Something published on a random blog isn't reliable, though something published on Search Engine Land is.

Someone wrote an article for Matt Cutts and it was almost deleted because no one cited any reliable sources. It ended up being kept. Again, that's totally my arm on Matt's Wikipedia page. Success!

Don't spam Wikipedia. IP addresses aren't anonymous. In fact, there's no such thing as anonymity on the Internet. Avoid company embarrassment by establishing policies at your office. Make sure employees aren't fiddling around with the site.

Reputation Management: In articles about yourself you may watch for spam and vandalism, and revert. You may request removal of unsourced or slanderous statements. You may discuss concerns and request changes on the article talk page.

There's a Watch List feature that allows you to monitor certain pages.

The Power of Wiki:

1. An educated market is a better opportunity.
2. Free content and high search visibility build memes
3. The community helps you do the work.

Wikipedia is about spreading ideas. The SEO Wikipedia article gets views 5,000 times a day. The article on waterboarding is ready by 500,000 people per month.

If you're not paying attention to Wikipedia someone may put something bad about your company in your profile page. And that page will rank very highly in the SERP, which the offending snippet possible being shown.

Jeff Muendel is up.

Getting your edits to stick on Wikipedia:

• Develop a profile that looks like you are an upstanding member of the community: The age and history of your account matters. So do any awards you may earn. Your user and talk page should be engaged.
• Incorporate content edits when adding a link. It makes it harder to revert your edit.
• Communicate with the main editor of the article before adding an external link that you think is valuable but could be looked at with suspicion and removed.
• Add links within references rather than the external links section: Links are like footnotes. You want to work your link into the article in a way that supports it. Reference links that go to a login page may be looked at as spam.

Creating New Wikipedia Entries

You want to be logged in with an account with a solid contribution history. Make sure there is no connection between you and the article subject. Use lots of references, particularly ones that are from mainstream media sources.

References serve two purposes: external links that will sick and links that will establish authority.

Have the subject of the article weigh in via the Talk page rather than making the change yourself.

Getting over the notability hurdle

Use Google News Search for finding reference articles. Articles with just a passing quote aren't good enough. They need focus.

PR firm? Get them to help land an article even if it is with a small newspaper that profiles your company. Awards can help establish notability, press releases don't. It is okay, though not idea, to use articles that aren't available online.

Protecting Your Investment

Make friends; you're going to need them. Maintain activity on your profile by regularly making edits that are undeniably selfless.

"Administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on site." - Brad Patrick, WikiMedia

Use the Watchlist to keep an eye on pages that you have an interest in and for pages that up for deletion.

Don't just rely on the Wikipedia watch function. Use a tool that emails you when changes are made. Trackengine.com and changenotes.com are both really good.

Lisa Broer is up next.

How Wikipedia Really Works

They meet in a crypt beneath Wall Street. Mortgage bankers, Microsoft, Matt Cutts and Osama bin Laden are all to blame.

She's kidding.

A lot of the SEO world has been trying to figure out how to get a presence on Wikipedia. She's seeing a lot of ineffective strategies. Like people who blatantly spam.

Upload to Wikipedia Commons when you can. It ensures you're getting in front of everyone, not just a specific country. The US version of Wikipedia gets about 50 percent of the traffic. The remaining countries together receive that other 50 percent.

http://stats.grok.se -- Will tell you the monthly traffic for any Wikipedia article.

You can click on the "check usage" tab to see how images are being used and how many page views they're getting. If you have a client with an outdated photo, you probably want to fix that.

If you get onto the main page of English language Wikipedia you will be getting 5 million page views a day.

The picture of the day on the Wikipedia Commons will also get a lot of attention.

Where pictures get featured:

From Commons: feature picture candidates. COM:FPC
From Wikipedia: Featured picture candidates WP:FPC. Picture peer review WP:PPR

It's okay to crop and correct photos.

Lise says power users don't exist. She's recording a Skypecast tomorrow at 11:30am PST. It's an open room if people want to listen.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/23/08 at 3:56 PM | Comments (1)

Micro Communities

Time to learn about micro communities. Teaching us will be speaker Rand Fishkin. I promised Rand I'd be super nice to him. Apparently I was a little snarky when I recapped his session yesterday morning. You know it's out of love, Rand. Really!

Hee! Danny's baiting the people at the Real Estate conference outside to come into the room. He's ranting (read: yelling) about low property taxes and how this session is the place to learn about real estate. My stomach hurts from the giggling.

Rand is up. He says he has no humorous slides in this presentation. He'll have to entertain them with his jokes. He hopes I'm okay with that.

What are micro communities? They're niche portals where communities gather together. They have social networking features that allow you to influence people and the potential to promote your brand. Rand says Llama Larry can promote his llama blog in llama land.

Why go Micro?

• Traffic vs. Relevance: You can have lots of users where only a few like llamas or a small community where everyone likes llamas.
• Accessibility: You have a louder voice in a smaller community.
• Brand building opportunities: You can brand yourself as a llama expert.

How to Discover Micro Communities

• Through the Web Search Engines: He means the Google. You can find small groups for handmade goods or artists communities.
• Social Media Discovery Blogs: Any time you go out and you find a blogger who writes about your topic, see which communities they point to.
• Social Media & Web 2.0 Lists
• Recommendations & Networking: Listen to the influencers in your community.

How do I determine if a Community is Right for My Business?

Look at membership numbers. If there are only 25 people, that site is probably not worth as much of your time as a large group.

Topical focus and relevance. Not every real estate network is going to be a match for you. There may be sites for real estate webmasters, real estate foreclosures.

Look at the feature list to see what the site is really about.

A Journey Through Dozens of Valuable Micro Communities:

• Scrapbook.com: It's for scrapbooking! No one would ever classify that site as Web 2.0. It's one of those sites you'd have to go looking for. They have forums and blogs. Forums are a good place to do micro community-influencing.
• Fast Company/Inc: Geared to business professionals and businesses themselves. SEOmoz has done work on both those sites. They told them to reward participation. If you participate, the links in the profiles page become live. They're not nofollow'd.
• Comic Sketch: Comic book site. You can go there and make your own comics.
• Xing: People search network. Namez is very similar. There can be value in these places if you're reaching the right communities.
• 9 Rules Network: Heavy into blogging sphere.
• StyleHive: It used to be just a blog but it's a social community now. Fashion-based. Reaches a demographic that is really hard to reach on the Internet - online women shoppers.
• BuddyTv: Rand is on their board of advisors. It's a site around television shows. There are little areas for each programming. He talks about how he proposed to his fiancée. He says if you don't like a show, tell him and he'll propose to his gf on it. Then they'll cancel it the next season. Hee! [So it's Rand's fault Veronica Mars is gone? Death! --Susan]
• SpyMedia: It's a hybrid between evil and Flickr. Evil means paparazzi. You can go in there and people talk about photos that will be used in tabloids or news articles.
• Associated Content: Users can submit content, AC will promote it and you can get a lot of traffic.
• Education.com: SEOmoz worked on it. It's a large site for parents with school-aged children. Have a lot of community sharing stuff.
• NowPublic: Launch business news that's happening.
• News.YCombinator.com: One of Rand's favorite micro communities. It's a startup project in Boston. The News site is where a lot of the startup people congregate.
• AdultSwim: The Cartoon Network's late night version. Great for the late night snacking demographic.
• TravBuddy: A travel site. Meet other travelers, look up hostiles, view blog entries and photos, etc.
• BountyFishing: Fishing community. Have a forum, offer prizes, etc. Excellent fisherman are put on the front page. Rand spends 10 minutes making fun of Canada. Danny is turning red. He's afraid the entire country now hates him. Then Rand starts talking trash about the U.S. Oh brother.

Rand keeps rattling off micro communities. I'm sure they're all great but I'm not going to jot down all their names. There's little point and I'm not trying to make this the Longest. Entry. Evar. If you're looking for a micro community, go throw your keywords into Google or see which communities the bloggers in your topic area link out to. [I think the SMX twitter feed got them all, if you're curious. --Susan]

Some of the others he lists later include: WebMD, DeviantArt, Yelp, SportsShooter, Threadlesss, Cork'd, Imbee, Virb, Wayfaring, CouchSurfing, Wikihow, Etsy, Shoetube.com, Draftmix.com, LibraryThing, Tulia, PeerTrainer, DonorsChoose, ThinkVitamin, ThePoint, AllRecipes, ActiveRain, BestStuff, RedefineGod, GoogleGroups, and about a million more.

Question and Answer

How do micro communities feel about corporate presence on their Web site?

In general it's not welcome, unless it's done with a very human face. He would not create a profile at Sphinn called SEOmoz and then go in and try to promote SEOmoz's stuff. He would create a profile for himself and then participate in that manner. A lot of it is common sense.

StyleHive loves it when the fashion industry folks come in and leave comments. Rand says he often goes and leaves comments as Tim Gunn. Make it work, people. Hee!

What sites are good to create your own turnkeys? What's the best platform to use?

Danny says Sphinn uses Pligg and he highly does NOT recommend it. They had to hack it to death. They may just build their own platform. Drigg is good.

Randy says you have to know there will be a lot of limitations. When you get into a lot of customization, it's better just to build it from scratch. SEOmoz built theirs from the ground up.

If you're going to create a social network, make sure the popularity of your site can handle it. You don't want to have a social site with 0 people in it.

What are some good blogs to learn about SMM?

Danny talks about Search Engine Land's blog roll.

Rand mentions TechCrunch and Go2Web20.net

Is there a directory of micro communities?

Rand says there's one inside SEOmoz Pro.

What do you look for when hiring a SMM person?

Find someone who has a culturally fit with these communities. You don't want the PR guy with 20 years of expertise. Look for the plugged in person. Ask them what they vote for on Reddit or Digg. If they have answers, they're probably the right person for the job. He ballparks their salary around $40K-$60K.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/23/08 at 2:30 PM | Comments (3)

Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM

Danny is once again here moderating with speakers David Berkowitz (360i), Rob Key (Converseon) and Adam Sherk (Define Search Strategies). Please note that at first I thought it say Adam worked for Shrek. Bummer.

Up first is Rob Key.

Social media has risen as community becomes the center of the Web experience. There are dozens of communities - blogs, RSS, wikis, etc.

The Rise of New Tribalism

Offline we speak the same language and listen to the same music. But in the online environment, this is changing.

Mass media, shared experiences and language is the glue that holds together a society. Through culture, people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. While cultural theory has been largely applied to the offline world, the growth of online communities puts a new twist on the concept.

As communities diversify, new cultures and languages emerge. Key drivers of culture and language speciation:

• Isolation
• Group membership
• Time
• Migration
• Technology discover

Words die out and new words emerge. It's the concept of neologism. Then there's that text language that no one understands. More acronyms like kpc, fyeo, gal, etc.

When you have culture clash, it can be in a very overt way. Like Michael Rockefeller who graduated from Harvard and when to Borneo. He disappeared and later someone claimed to have found his shrunken head. Um, what?

You may have not have had your head taken off, but you may be held hostage...in Second Life. He shows avatars being held hostage in an American Apparel store in Second Life. If you're not taken hostage, you may be ridiculed. He talks about Sony and the fake blog and videos they created. Gamers outed them because they realized the language they were using wasn't authentic.

He talks about how Microsoft was exiled from Wikipedia when they went in and started editing pages.

We believe that as marketers and brands increasingly penetrate social media communities, backlash will grow in many venues. Driving factors, such as tagging and increasing personalization will further diversify.

Karmic Communication

The effects of all deeds actively create past, present and future experiences. Ask not what the community can do for you, but what you can do for the community.

Eight Princes of Karmic Communication (Coincidentally, at SES NY Rob called these the Principles of Effective Social Media Engagement.)

• Listen first
• Participate after
• Make friends with community elders
• Understand and respect community mores
• Lead with altruism; come bearing gifts
• Discover a community need
• Learn the linguistics
• Value and cultivate the relationships
• Leverage appropriately, and over time.

The Second Chance Tree Reforestation Project (in Second Life)

There are 7 million registered accounts in Second Life. A study found that 72 percent of their 200 respondents said they were disappointed with real world company activities in Second Life. Just over 40 percent considered these efforts as a one-of not likely to last.
How do go into that environment as a marketer? Here's what they did: Became active members. Understood who the elders were. Established relationships with influential early residents. Identified a theme that resonated with the community. Became a certified developer in 2007.

They've created 10 species of trees that have been forested in SecondLife. People can take trees and plant them in Second Life and then the same tree will be planted in real life.

The environmental community really bought into what they were doing. Second Life did as well. People started creating Flickr accounts documenting the trees they created. They dedicated the trees to people who had passed away. CNN and the Financial Times picked up the story. It also won some awards.

Adam Sherk is next.

Corporate social media marketing takes multi-department coordination. There are a lot of stakeholders involved. Who's controlling it? Marketing and PR? The SEO team? Is IT on board? Legal gets concerned. So does Design. There are a lot of balls in the air.

Common Pitfalls:

• No Strategy
• Lack of support/resources
• Poor coordination
• Inappropriate content
• Lack of understanding of the communities
• Hiding your affiliation
• Being overly promotional

Path to Success:

• Selling upper management on the concept
• Getting buy-in from all key departments
• Instilling a "give to gain" philosophy
• Finding the right people to manage the efforts
• Giving them what they need to be effective
• Testing
• Oversight
• Measuring results

Things to consider: How will you sustain your efforts over the long-term? What happens if your brand ambassador leaves the company? What about employees who have their own personal profiles? How will you deal with negative responses and reactions?

Have rules in place for appropriate behavior regarding how employees can act. Sometimes they jump into a fight to defend you and just make things worse.

Case Study: The Daily Green

The studied the behavior of "Green Diggers". Who likes environmental content? They wrote an article about it. They also wrote an article about when the watch the lunar eclipse in the US. The article generated 3 times more page views in 2 days than the home page did the entire month.

Case Study: Good Housekeeping

Even sites you wouldn't expect can make the front page of Digg. Good Housekeeping did a photo article on Dog Star Wars Costumes. It's about finding content that would work on the social networking sites.

Case Study: TV Guide

Full-time brand ambassador hired to focus on regular monitoring and participation on social sites. Full transparency within communities. Network of "partner" sites developed for publicity efforts. Efforts tied into search engine optimization.

David Berkowitz is up.

He says this is the first time he's ever Twittered during a panel. He's not sure he recommends it but he was able to pay attention, as well. Heh.

A lot of what we're doing is finding these brand evangelists through chat, forums, blogs, social networking, social search, virtual words, etc. The tools/assets include widgets, video, promo/contests, unique info, etc.

How can marketers create and utilize assets to successfully influence the influential and turbo-charge the social media ecosystem?

Key components for successful digital word of mouth:

• Concepting: social media campaigns alight with marketing goals
• Creation: Widgets, rich media, microsites
• Communication: Digital PR, outreach to influentials across social media/networks

Blogs are the best tactic to jump start a viral campaign.

Case Study: HGTV

HGTV premiered a new TV showed aimed at environmentalists called Living with Ed. The goals were to attract a new set of viewers. Do a search for [living with ed] and it was filled with erectile dysfunction spam. Hee. They had to correct the problem.

They reached out to bloggers and influencers to bubble up a lot of their content to overtake the other ED content. Did a lot of social media work.

Six weeks later, their production site was in the number one and two spot in Google. The Cialis sites dropped to #52 and below.

When they did outreach, they were very transparent. They said it was being done by their company on behalf of HGTV.

Case Study: Heroes

NBC selected 360i to generate buzz for the return of Heroes and keep momentum from April through December. They worked across both the NBC agency, NBC.com, Universal DVD and NBC PR to identify the best digital assets for syndication, aligning with blot/site interests.

Target Audience: Influentials across TV, Entertainment, Sci-FI, Comic Books, Heros fan sites, bloggers, etc.

Assets: Digital comic books, widgets, videos, unique information, DVD, contests, etc. Many bloggers picked up ever asset pitched. Consistent assets kept blogs buzzing

Do create something worth for bloggers, find the right ones, and write them customized messages.

Question and Answer

What do you think a non profit company can do to get started in social media?

David:: Monitor what's going on. Using things from Google to BlogPulse to TweetScan to FriendFeed to see what's happening. Look up your brand and your issue. That right there will present some leads.

Rob: He was at a conference recently for non profits. What was successful about the Second Life Trees program was that they stayed in one community.

If you could only use one social media marketing site, what would it be?

Adam: It's impossible to say because everything has a purpose. It depends what you want to do.

David: In 6 months to a year he's hoping the answer will be FriendFeed. He likes how you can monitor a lot of different channels. Right now his favorite is Facebook.

Rob: He says massive multiplayer gaming is still in its infancy. He says Second Life because it allows brands to do interesting collaboration.

Danny: Facebook. He also likes LinkedIn.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/23/08 at 12:21 PM | Comments (1)

Effectively Leveraging Social Networking

Hello, hello. It's day 2. I have orange juice instead of coffee this morning. Lisa's still sick from yesterday. As usual, I blame Susan. I'm going to do my best to make it through today's batch of sessions.

Kicking things off this morning we have Barbara Boser (3 Dog Media), Cindy Krum (Blue Moon Works), Randy Woods (non-linear creations), and Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service). Danny Sullivan is once again moderating. This man is earning his paycheck this week.

Up first is Barbara Boser. Just as a fun fact, if you've never met Barbara, she's probably the nicest woman in the whole world. I'm just saying.

Marketing your Business with Facebook

Pages: You can build a page in Facebook for your business. She looks at DunkinDonuts page because its Greg's favorite. Aw. You can add events and people will get notifications. You can upload photos, start a discussion board, create a poll, etc. Polls are a good way to get answers about products your customers like. You're also able to let people write on your wall and upload their own media. When someone becomes a fan of your company, all of their friends will see that and can join too.

Facebook Social Ads: It's not yet that advanced. You can filter through by age, keywords, place, etc, and narrow down your audience. Good way to target. The ads show up in the users' news feed or on the left sidebar.

Groups: You can search for groups related to your business and then participate in the conversations going on about your company.

Events: Create event pages. People can RSVP and write on the wall.

Sharing: You can share blog posts. Every time you update, all of your Facebook Fans will be informed of that.

Beacon: A little controversial last year because of privacy issues. You put some code on your site and when a FB user completes an action on your site, it gets listed in their news feed.

Lexicon: You can put in a keyword and it tracks how many times Starbucks is mentioned on the Facebook wall across all profiles. Pretty cool.

Apps: If you're on Facebook you probably have a whole list of people wanting you to download an application. Once you join, people will see a link to your company. You want to create something that's viral and that people will want to share with their friends.

How Much Traffic Can I Get?

She talks about Neil Patel's Flixster Facebook application where it compares what movies you like to what movies your friends like. He got 16+ million visits from Facebook. Barbara says that number has already doubled. Wow.

Next up is Cindy Krum to talk about MySpace. Ew, MySpace.

She still believes MySpace has a lot of value if you're trying to reach certain demographics. It still has 80 million users worldwide.

MySpace Whoas (aka the good things):

Flying Dog Brewery: Local Denver brewery with a MySpace page. The have used their page to establish a company voice and personality. They're reaching out to a specific demographic. They're talking to people and creating a community around the brand. They also use it to notify users about events and products.

They're taking paper flyers and putting them on their MySpace page so all of their friends can see they're having a zombie dance party. Wow. A zombie dance party, eh? Snazzy. That flyer is also their new profile picture, which helps to draw attention to their profile.

They also use MySpace Events to promote all of their events. People can type in their zip codes to look for events and the cool things happening in their city.

They use MySpace bulletins. It's similar to the wall in Facebook. You can announce contests, release newsletters, offer discounts to MySpace users etc.

Companies can also put YouTube videos on their page or post the videos on their friends' pages as comments. Because that's not annoying. They've also used their photos as a catalog for their merchandise. They can't buy from the MySpace page, but they can direct them to their real site.

This has search engine optimization value. These pages rank well in the engines.

True: Web-based dating community. Creating brand awareness.

Link to quizzes, badges and fun games from their MySpace profile to engage visitors.

They have a Create a Date game where you can skew pictures of people and then send it to a friend. It's viral. They have a Date-O-Rama game to help you find and plan a date. They've also put an entry way to their site in the corner of MySpace. It gets people where they need to go.

MySpace Woes (the bad things)

Westwood College: There were a lot of people who had self-identified as Westwood Students. They wanted to create a community online. The profile would encourage communication between students and disperse information about classes, events, holidays, news, school closures, etc.

Your MySpace profile has to be a good representation of your brand. You can't just slap something up there. A cool branded profile takes a lot of time and skill - use CSS or MySpace's profile layout tool. Cool profiles have to be updated frequently.

You can't accept everyone who wants to be your friend. You have to manage them and make sure they're appropriate. Get rid of those with questionable photos. Make sure they represent your brand well. She talks about how sometimes friends' profiles change. They had a nice guy in a polo T-shirt join. He was really active and participatory. And then he changed his profile pic of a photo of him in S&M gear. They had to remove all his comments because he suddenly didn't represent them well. (Hmm, not sure how I feel about that, but okay.)

Communication needs to be managed. Will you respond to emails? Will all comments be approved? Will you participate in groups? What kind of blog communication is appropriate for your brand?

Travel Site: They wanted to create a travel widget that would be useful for travelers and travel bloggers. They needed something cool that hadn't been done before. They wanted a widget that would work in all social networks.

Not all Developers are widget developers. MySpace messes with your code. Widgets that work on other social networks may not work in MySpace. And Widgets that work in MySpace/IE7 may not work in Firefox.

Tips for Developing Widgets:

• MySpace converts HTML into its preferred object format before saving
• Links: All links are encoded. Links in Flash won't work at all.
• MySpace bans some widget companies
• Use Flash Version 9 & Action Script 3.0

You can also use Open Social.

Randy Woods is up to talk about LinkedIn.

He starts off with some disclaimers. He's Canadian. Everyone laughs. Most of his clients are in the US. He's also old. His company started in 1995. He's also a generalist. He talks about conference brain. Conference brain means you're hung over. Wow.

He says marketing is being defined in its narrowest sense - promotion. Social media is also important for the other elements of marketing - product and positioning.

LinkedIn - Why Bother

• About 20 million professionals
• Average income: 140,000
• Vampire free
• About 2 million of these at executive level
• 500 of Fortune 500 represented at executive level

Harvard Business School did a study on LinkedIn and found out that 90 percent of people on LinkedIn are relationship managers. Five percent are networks and five percent are contractors. All of the Fortune 500 people you're interested in are in the relationship manager piece. They're only talking to people they know already. They don't want to meet strangers.

But they do want their problems solved. They want to know before they engage with you that you can solve their problems. That's where the Question & Answer service fits in.

You can use LinkedIn Answers to reach influencers. The challenge is that the people you want responding to these questions are your most valuable employees. They're the people who don't have time to be cruising social networks. But if you use Yahoo Pipes, you can combine everything and put it into one dashboard. Or something. Yahoo Pipes is about 10 leagues over my head.

LinkedIn Answers means dollars in your pocket.

Case Study: 11 percent conversion rate for free traffic.

Four Things I Don't Believe:

1. Conversions Don't Matter
2. All Visitors Are Created Equal: I don't care about 20 million people at Digg. I care about the people who are targeted to our business.
3. Don't Write A Thesis: If what you're selling is expertise, you better make sure what you write can sell that.
4. Never Force Registration

Recap: Marketing is more than promotion. No one important wants to hear from you. You have to get their attention. LinkedIn Answers equals dollars. LinkedIn Converts.

Michael Gray will finish things off by discussing Twitter.

Twitter is a microblogging platform. You write short messages and share them with the world. Twitter is what happens between blog posts. Or conference sessions.

Why Marketers Should Care About Twitter

Using twitters as a permission marketing tool to reach bleeding edge customers. It works like RSS. It's pull technology. It allows you to protect/block your updates from people.

Twitter = Traffic

• Use Twitter to drive traffic to your Web site or blog when you post a new update.
• Use Twitter to share news, information, and links with your followers
• Use Twitter to help with your other social media efforts
• Use Twitter to drive conversions and sales
• Depending on your sector and quality of followers, Twitter can have really high CTR.

Understanding How Twitter Works:

Next to everyone's name is a star so that you can save it if you want. There's also an arrow to make it easy to reply to someone. If people reach out to you, make sure to respond back to them. The Archive section allows you to see everything you've ever Twittered.

Tools To Get More Out Of Twitter:

• Web Browser Based - Twitter, twitbin, twitterfox
• Desktop Clients - Twhirl, alert thingy
• Blog Tools - Twitter tools, Loud Twitter, Twit This
• Email - Twittermail
• Smartphone - twitterberry, itweet
• API - Roll it into your own application

Who's Using Twitter?

CarnivalCruise - Sends you to different articles
JetBlue - They're really interacting with people and their community. They're a great example.
AmazonDeals
Woot
TechMeme
Sphinn
Zappos
HillaryMomJeans
Maratriangle

More Tips for Getting More Out of Twitter

• Set up a profile with an avatar
• Have updates
• Don't follow people with a blank profile
• Always reply to your @ messages
• Twitterbots will follow everyone who follows them
• People will follow and unfollow depending on if you match their expectations.

Twitter Tracking and Twitter Search Tools

You can type a word into Twitter and it will tell you everyone who has mentioned those words. If you're a company dealing with the public you should be tracking your company name.

TweetScan

Quotably: Makes @ messages into a threaded conversation. Helps give you context to a conversation

He also points out the Twitter leaderboard.

Twitter Ranks

Jason Calacanis' Twitter feed ranks 4th for his name.
Barack Obama's Twitter profile has a top ten ranking for his name.

Question and Answer

Are there any legal issues to create a Facebook brand profile?

Cindy: You have to be careful of what you say, especially if you're not the brand spokesperson. As far as legal stuff, she's not sure. Treat it like you would treat any other marketing venue.

Age demographics of Twitter?

Michael's not sure.

Seems heavy handed to only let certain people by your MySpace friend. Do you think you're alienating people?

For her example, they were trying to create a community for a private college. They wanted to create a perception of what the brand was. They wanted to control the image. They didn't want people to think that people who went to this school were heavy drinkers or pot smokers. I have so many problems with that answer.

Barbara: On Facebook you can just be a fan and not necessarily have a friend relationship, so it's a bit different. Even if you're not going to use the social profile, you should claim the one for your company before someone else does.

Randy: In a broader sense, there just may be some brands for whom the social networking sites aren't appropriate. I'm not sure if that's a long term strategy.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/23/08 at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

Keynote - Social Search: The Human Challengers

It's a keynote. In the afternoon. Aren't these supposed to be in the morning? I'm so confused. And tired. Are you tired? Hopefully our speakers aren't.

This afternoon (not morning) we have Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), Steven Marder (Eurekster) and Jimmy Wales (Wikia Search) speaking. Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman will be acting as our lovable moderators. Danny Sullivan is giving me the evil eye. Then he told everyone to sit down and shut up. Lovingly, of course.

Steven Marder is up next. Or first, rather.

They're about the distributed play, not about creating a destination. They believe most Web sites have formed some type of community.

Eurekster enables publishes of various shapes and sizes to install branded and highly targeted search widgets and environments that harness the knowledge and behavior of online communities.

Value Proposition:

• Publisher control: Ability to customize feeds and source of content, choose how to monetize and create and manage Buzzcloud
• Reinforces publisher brand and improves user experience
• SEM/SEO Benefits: Syndication and distribution opportunity.

Swicki: Social Search Widget.

The swicki is a customized widget. It surfaces community activity including popular, suggested and recent terms. Drives Grabbing and Sharing. Multi-media search capability and tags. Drives user/community engagement.

Eureksters Social Search:

• Social media meets search
• Algo + Humans
• Blend of Intent
• Publisher-guided, community sharing

Social Search for Marketers: Leverages key characteristics of social media and applies marketers and publishers brand.

Steven shows the evolution of Eurekster, looking at pages from 2004, 2005 and today. They've always believe in Universal Search. They don't think people should have to ask for specific types of content. There is a need for a trusted relationship or expert source.
Potentially increasing search result relevance by applying the social graph to search
How to effectively apply the social graph to search? Socially connected ala Friendster vs profile.

How to create/surface additional high quality content? Need for community and collaboration. How can site owners establish feedback loops.

The social search marketing opportunity:

• End Users: Empowered to collaborate. Empowered to comment on and post results and to implicitly and explicitly affect search result rankings.
• Discovery via enhanced content" Access to another layer of quality content providing for an improved user experience.
• Leverage Community

Jimmy Wales is next to show us a bunch of screenshots of Wikia Search 0.2.

They're doing everything as open source software. They're releasing all of the code they're creating. All of the data they're also releasing under CC. They're doing that because search has been a black box for too long. It's a problem for a lot of social and political reasons.

First, enter in a search term. They provide the results - which aren't really good right now. They're only crawling a small subset of the Web. They're in Alpha mode, trying to do everything publicly and out in the open. They're developing features live. Anyone can add a URL to the displayed results. And anyone can edit that. It's all AJAX and live immediately. Anyone can append short comments to an entry or spotlight that entry. [Yeah, that's not going to get abused or anything. --Susan]

Other search terms may be related to the current one. Anyone can add related search topics the results and toggle between them. After time, results will improve but spam will inevitably emerge.

[You guys are missing about a gazillion screenshots that help to explain all this. Go do some searches on Wikia and see what he's talking about.]

How do you control spam? Everyone gets a profile page. They encourage the community. Everything people do on the site appears in their profile. It makes things really transparent and helps to weed out the bad eggs.

Lots more social features coming in the next month or so.

Rounding out the keynote is Jason Calacanis.

Mahalo is a human powered search engine. They pay people to maintain their search results. The pitch for human search is that it's spam-free and ungame-able. The fact is, it's kind of borked already. Props to Jason for using the word "borked" in a presentation. He shows how Mahalo results can be more relevant than "traditional" results. He also takes a shot at Ask.com. I'll give him that.

He mentions the second click service. They're looking at the behaviors that users do on the second click. They're taking that and surfacing it on their page. It's somewhat controversial. They've spent a couple of hours on the Paris Hotel Page and they go to all the different sites that they link to and they cross reference what those different sites are saying about it.

Mahalo launched a new feature today. It's a microformat. When you're on a Mahalo page, you can do different things with them - like Map them, add them to your address book, etc. It will help people. They also have a social network.

Every link that goes into Mahalo is human-edited. The only way to "game" it, is to create great content. This builds private trust scores.

SEO is a wasted industry. You're wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You're just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won't kick you out. It's a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.

Later on Jason says a lot of the people who hire SEOs don't deserve to be ranked.

Is Jason 1.0 returning? I think I actually just heard someone hiss when he said that. [Wow, Jason, really? I thought he was getting out of the link bait through negativity business.--Susan]

Question and Answer

The personalization stuff has been the holy grail. The downside has always been a scale issue. What you're doing works really well for the popular subjects but how will you scale it?

Jason: If you look at some other projects, the scale issue is something that seems like a real issue. The way Mahalo will scale is they'll spent 50 million to build Mahalo and then it will take 10 million a year to maintain. We'll probably have thousands of fulltime people working on it. The reason there are so many long tail searches is because search is failing. People have to type more words to get what they're looking for.

Steven: It's not that big of an issue. They're relying on publishers to do most of the work.

[Unfortunately, I got really sick during the Q&A portion of this session and had to leave. I apologize.] Just take care of yourself, Lisa. --Susan

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/22/08 at 5:53 PM | Comments (6)

A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging

This time Danny is moderating with speakers Guillaume Bouchard (NVI), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Services) and Neil Patel (Advantage Consulting Services). I wonder if Danny's throat is getting dry. All this moderating looks exhausting. Almost as exhausting as liveblogging it. I just bit into my "chocolate chip cookie" to find out it was oatmeal raisin. Fail!

Guillaume Bouchard is up first. Guillaume is up there talking in French. Um, help?

He shares a little blackhat Digg trick:

On Google

Site:digg.com/users/ "@hotmail.com"
Site:digg.com/users/ "@gmail.com"

Get email addresses for other Digg users so you can harass them. Sweet. [Please don't try this at home. Use your powers for good, guys. Oy vey. --Susan]

Social bookmarking allows Internet users to store, organize, search, and most importantly, share bookmarks. Popular social bookmarking sites include Delicious, StumbleUpon and Furl.

Every bookmarking site also uses tagging. Tagging is a collaborative practice and method of using tags to annotate and categorize content. Popular Web sites include Flickr, YouTube and Technorati.

Benefits of social bookmarking:

• Helps your site get indexed faster
• Achieve a high amount of natural incoming links
• Creates a presence in online social communities for your targeted verticals
• Builds traffic from alternative sources
• Influences traditional media

How to Tag Effectively:

• Check how other people are tagging the kind of sites you want to remember.
• When in doubt, pick the tag that is suggested or the most relevant in the tag clouds.
• Stay away from separating your tags with commas.
• Coordinate your efforts and establish a set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share with others.

Manual Tagging: Been on the Web for the past ten years. Create your own set of tags to represent your content. Works best with images and videos, encouraging high participation rates by allowing users to personalize and create their own tags. Featured on Delicious, YouTube, etc.

Automatic Tagging: Extracts tags from the content. Can incorporate all other users' tags in the automatic process. Does not benefit from the creativity of a human mind. A good example of added value: Facebook tags all of its features.

Problems with tagging: Abuse and Content Degradation

Content visibility is often created through the intentional misuse of tags and/or poor descriptions. As social bookmarking and tagging becomes more mainstream, the added incentive for manipulation will result in decreasingly reliable content, unless their algorithms get a lot smarter.

Social Media and Community Sites to Target

Technorati: Search engine for blogs that operates using a tag-based system. The most popular blogs are ranked by how many links/pingbacks are pointing to them. Set up a blog for your client, write several blog posts with high profile tags, and claim it through Technorati. Headlines and Rising post system allows you to make the home page of Technorati. Use the biggest social sites to drive traffic and increase pingbacks to your blog.

Flickr: Upload photos that are relevant to the industry you are trying to target. Select tags from the popular tags listings. If you want your photos to also appear in Technorati, tag them and set them to public. Encourage users to link to and comment on your photos using the same tags that you initially selected. Use the photostream on your blog and other public profiles. Add links to your profile and to relevant photos in comments. Participate and comment on popular Flickr pictures within your industry and share your findings with proper anchor text.

YouTube: Content submitted is more important than tags used. Original, yet amateur, mashup videos have proven successful. Use Digg and other social Web sites to obtain the highest amount of views and ratings possible in a short period of time. Participate by posting a video response to an already popular video. Share your submitted videos with friends. Use your own blog or your friend's blog to promote your video fast.

Facebook: Use it to create attractive and interesting corporate profiles. Develop a widget to distribute an application unique to your industry. Invite relevant friends with influence to join. Watch out for existing groups talking about your corporation that are not moderated by someone within your company. Moderation can be time consuming for larger groups, especially open ones. Plan your resources.

Michael Gray is up. He's going to talk about Delicious. It's one of the older bookmarking sites.

Delicious is a community-oriented social bookmarking tool. It allows you to store your bookmarks "in the cloud" on the Internet. It aggregates your bookmarks with other people and allows you to share them with your friends or the community as a whole.

They're taking advantage of something called "group wisdom". It allows people to understand and interact with their community. It allows you to use your bookmarks without being tied to a physical computer.

How to Add a Bookmark

Download the toolbar. Once you have it and submit something, it grabs the URL from the page you own and pre-populates the title for you. You can add keywords, notes and tags. They'll recommend tags based on the content. It will also show you popular network tags.

Keywords and Clickability in Titles: Choose titles that have clickability and keywords.

Bad Title - Cool Ice Brawls.
Good Title-- 25 most Outrageous Hockey Fights.

People will use the title as the anchor text when they link to you.

Tag Clouds and Popularity: The smaller the word, the less people are using them. The bigger the word, the more people are using them. Red words are the one you're using. Learn what tags your community uses.

Find and make friends.

He shows the home page and all the different sections. We see the how popular pages appear on the home page. Shows the tags they used, how many people bookmarked it, how many have bookmarked it recently, what the popular tags are, etc.

You can monitor particular people or tags. A lot of the prominent bloggers take everything they put in their Delicious account that day and link to it. Steve Rubel does that. It's a good link building tool.

You can also use it as a research tool. You see how people are tagging gardening, what kinds of gardening stories have gone popular, see title patterns, etc.

Getting the Most Out of Delicious

• Set up an account and become familiar with it.
• Research your topic and get ideas for content.
• Identify key people, mavens, and early adopters in your sector and try to connect with them.
• Launch your content, help sculpt the title and suggested tags.
• Help your content spread and grow without being pushy or overbearing.

Spam is not Delicious

• Become a member who contributes before you start submitting.
• Don't create sock puppets.
• Don't mass vote from a single IP.
• Don't gang vote or use voting blocks.
• Your account won't get banned but they will make your bookmark votes worthless.

Michael says that yesterday him and Danny went to Disneyland and Michael ended up with the High Score on Buzz LightYear even though Danny beat him 2 out of 3 times. Hee.

Neil Patel is up next to talk about StumbleUpon.

Who uses StumbleUpon? There's a lot more males than the average site. There are actually more 45-54 year-olds than any other demographic.

Why should you care: Over 12,000 visitors in one day. Traffic keeps coming. It doesn't die down. It's also really good for branding.

How to leverage it:

1. Install the toolbar. It gives you the Stumble button and you can hit the thumbs up to say you like it or the thumbs down to say you didn't like it. You can also send stuff to your friends.
2. Add Friends: You can only have 200 mutual friends. Use them wisely.
3. Submitting a Story: A lot of thinks "can fly" on StumbleUpon. Everything is run from the toolbar. There's no one home page. When submitting you want to create a good title, but it's not as important as it is on some other sites. You also want to add a review. Once you put your review, you set the topic and add your tags.
4. Leveraging Your Friends: You can send stuff to your friends. If you send him something, he can't use the SU toolbar again until he views what you sent him. You have to rotate your friends.
5. Friends Vote: You have to keep dropping and adding friends to keep up the effectiveness of their votes. So keep someone for a few months and then drop them and pick up a new friend. Nice, Neil.

Question and Answer

Within these social sites, a lot of them frown upon adult information, are there any sites out there that don't have an issue with at all?

Neil starts talking about YouPorn and rattles off stats with enough certainty that it makes me worried.

Guillaume mentions RedTube (I think?) and SpankWire.

Danny is googling [adult digg] and says he found some stuff.

Neil recommends going to TechCrunch and searching for [adult].

Tips on how to make your social profiles more visible in the search results?

Michael: Link to it.

Should you use the same username across different social networks

Guilamme: As long as you mix client work with nonclient work, it's a good thing. Michael will tell you if you want to play around and use it to stalk people and cause trouble.

Neil: A lot of it is branding. If you're using your account ethically, then you want to use the same name and the same user icon across the sites.

Michael: You always want to register your brand name on social sites. Even if you're not using them, just so no one else can.

Does StumbleUpon produce links or just traffic?

Neil: It produces both, but more traffic than links. If you want links, the content has to be more-resource and not time sensitive.

Michael: Traffic does really well on StumbleUpon.

How do you keep up with all the RSS feeds, social bookmark sites, etc?

Michael breaks things up into Things I Want To Read, Things That Are Important, Things I Want To Scan.

Guillaume: They split it up between people. Every week they have a lunch and learn where they share what they read. Everyone brings together their best blog posts they found and what they learned. Share the workload.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/22/08 at 4:39 PM | Comments (0)

Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites

Mmm, lunch was delicious. But dessert was flan. Flan is not dessert. As Danny says, dessert means there is chocolate involved. Word.

But we're back now and I'm expected to act like an adult and not tell you how yummy my food was. So I won't. Up front we have Danny Sullivan moderating with speakers Neil Patel (Advantage Consulting Services) and Chris Winfield (10e20).

Neil Patel is up first. This should be entertaining. And I bet he'll use the phrase "blah blah blah" at least twice.

What is Digg? It's a social news site. Get a lot of votes and you'll get on the home page. Great visibility.

Value: The average story gets 129 links and over 15,000 visitors in an hour. Great branding. Neil tells a story about the first time he was in the WSJ and how he didn't know what the WSJ was or where you could go to buy one. Oh, Neil... [It's not his fault, he's too young to remember print newspapers.--Susan]

Audience: Lots of 35-50 year olds compared to the average Web site. It's not just 18 year olds. Predominately male. If you want to get on the home page, appeal to the male audience.

Requirements: You need content, pictures, video or audio. Aren't pictures, video and audio all considered content, Neil? Blended search, much?

Important Factors: The number of votes, time, voters, submitter, friends.

Unwritten Rules: No self promotion. You can't pay for votes. No spamming. No SEOs allowed.

Fun Facts: Neil says that SEOmoz did a post and then offers up some stats. I'm not sure how the stats are connected to be SEOmoz. Or maybe everything is just connected to SEOmoz these days? Here are the stats: .7 percent of all stores get to the home page. Top 100 control 56 percent of the home page. You can't control what people say.

That's it. Neil didn't say "blah blah blah" once. I'm totally let down.

Chris Winfield is up. He has 125 slides. Cries.

I don't think I have ever realized how thick Chris' New York accent is. Holy Jesus. Hee. :)

Why do you want to have your content on social news sites? You want to reach people who don't know about you right now. You can influence people. You can get your message in front of them. There are millions of users. Social media is a good way to get traffic. For links.

Digg: It's the big boy in social news networking. It's "democratically"-driven news. Guillame Bouchard starts coughing dramatically. Hee! There are over 1 million users and 25 million visitors a month. Similar to Reddit, Propeller, etc.

It works by users submitting articles, images and videos. Content is promoted to the front page based on popularity. Lists work. The Ten Commandments was a list. Topics that work well are technology, politics, heath or business stories. Press releases, anything that looks commercial and anything that smells of SEO do not work.

Tips - Distinguish yourself. Don't use the blank avatar. You want people to notice you. You want to be known for commenting. Find active friends. Use shouts but use them sparingly. Mix up your diggers. Don't always have the same people Digg your content.

Advantages for marketers - They have amazing traffic. Typically between 10,000-60,000 visitors in a 24 hour period. You get in front of thousands of new people. It gives you the ability to influence people.

Study for a vacation packages company

They wanted to get high quality links, brand exposure and to start a "conversation". The challenge was that it was a commercial Web site. They sell vacation packages. They came up with something that relates to the company but is still appealing to Digg's audience. They made a list and incorporated cities through the world to make it personal. They used pictures, videos and cool facts.

When they submitted, they crafted a good title. Wrote a personal and opinionated description. Over 20,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. From there it spread to other social networks and influential blogs. They had 200 new email list signups. 75,000 visitors to that page from Google in 9 months.

Reddit: People post things and you can vote them up or down. Reddit uses a Karma ranking system. On Reddit there are no descriptions so your title has to sell the story completely.

Tips - Build up some Karma before trying to push your own content. Make sure your story shows up in reddit.com/new before trying to push it, otherwise you look like a spammer. Sub-reddits can be a good way to get exposure. Many top Diggers get their content to submit to Digg from the Reddit home page.

Niche sites: Great way to build targeted links. Pick sites that match what your niche is and become a contributor there. Small communities mean it's easier to get to the home page. It will take less votes. It's also much easier to be caught.

Sites worth targeting: AgentB, ArmchairGM, Autospies, Daytipper, HackerNews, Hugg, Wordsy, Sphinn, TeenWag

Foreign sites: Worth a quick title and description translation and submission. Meneame.net, TapeMoi.com, Scoopeo.com, Yigg.de.

Editorially Controlled Social News Sites: Join and submit your links. Fark.com, ebaumsworld.com.

Tips for Success:

• Promote great content
• Build your networks
• Take extra time on your headlines
• Manage the comments. Don't be overly positive.

Tools for promotion: Twitter, Pounce, instant messenger and have good hosting!

Question and Answer

Is it okay to submit content to social media clients without disclosing that you're doing it on behalf of someone else.

Neil: It's the same thing as PR. You don't get PR firms saying, "hey, that guy is in the Wall Street Journal because we put him there". People get into the Wall Street Journal because of their connections. There's no disclaimer there. Same thing goes with the social sites. If people know which content is up there because of money and connections, they'll have a problem. As long as they don't see it, they're okay with it.

Chris: It gets back to "is it really something good"? Is it good content? If it's not good content then it doesn't deserve to be on there. If you're providing value to that community with something worthwhile, then yeah, it should be there and you shouldn't have to say why it's there.

Thoughts on the algorithmic change at Digg?

Neil: What happens is that back in the day, these social sites weren't as advanced as they are now. Back then, whoever was using the site the most often would have authority. What happened is that people were controlling too much of the real estate and it wasn't as democratic. Digg adjusted the algorithm looking at voting patterns. They changed it to where friends' votes don't help as much as votes from random users. If you're a power user, a lot of times you have these large groups of friends who always vote up your stories. It's not as effective.

Chris: Digg is going much more mainstream. If you look at the home page, you'll recognize most of the URLs on there. It makes it harder for smaller blogs or commercial sites to get on the home page. They want more mainstream content.

How much do the shouts affect the threshold?

Chris: With the Shout feature, it definitely affects the threshold, especially if you shout every single story. A lot of people end up getting banned because they abuse it.

Neil: With the shouts, it goes back to a lot of algorithmic changes. You're shouting to your friends. Those votes help, but you still need a lot more votes to get on the home page because friends votes are somewhat devalued. The value is that the more votes you get, the higher you appear, the more random people will Digg your stuff.

If you're not a great writer, should you hire a fulltime copywriter

Chris: Chris says it's not worth hiring a full-time writer. You can find people to do it freelance. He recommends looking at Problogger's job board and finding people who are actually involved with social media.

Neil: Neil says to participate in the community and get to know the top users and pay them to write for you. Neil says people used to buy him TVs and iPhones for his social media submission. Oh my Lord! He likes to make "friends' with other users his own age (22) and appeal to their poorness. If someone admits to having college loans and no job, Neil knows it'll be easy to pay that person to vote stuff up for you.

Nice.

For Neil: Have you ever had trouble sleeping at night?

Neil: I sleep like a baby!

Hee!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/22/08 at 2:48 PM | Comments (0)

Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites

After a quick break, Danny Sullivan is moderating with speakers Brent Csutoras (BrentCsutoras.com), Jane Copland (SEOmoz) and Cameron Olthuis (Factive Media). I almost want to misspell Jane's last name as "Copeland" because I know everyone else does. I guess I'll spell it right. Jane is my favorite Mozzer, after all, but don't tell Rebecca, okay?

We're getting a demo of SocialSpark. I'm not blogging this.

Danny asks how many people read Search Engine Land. How many use Sphinn? How many have been to SMX before? And how many read SEOmoz? Um, hello? Which one of those doesn't belong? Sigh.

Up first is my buddy Jane Copland. Danny calls her Jane Copeland. See!

Linkbait is Web-based content created for the purpose of attracting attention and links. It achieves increased visibility, brand recognition, returning visitors, brand association and increased links. Linkbait posts can rank very well for their targeted terms. Links to just one page can help strengthen an entire site.

"Traditional" linkbait is quite easy to produce. She talks about the winners of the I Look Like My Dog contest and In Case of Zombies, Break Glass. The real trick is to create highly-relevant, link-worthy content. Relevant subject matter, nicely presented and that uses a traditional linkbait format.

Why do social media sites pick up linkbait content so easily? Because it's easy to digest.

Tactics for Creative Relevant linkbait

1. Envision potential industry oddities.
2. Consider the issues faced by your potential customers
3. Subtly encourage the use of keywords and people will link to you with the "right" anchor text.
4. Present your regular content, but in a creative, unique way

Want to "hide" your linkbait from regular users but still reap its benefits? You don't need to link to the bait from the site's home page, but make sure to link to the home page from the bait (hee). One "danger": Your bait becoming an indented result in the SERPs.

Real life examples:

WeddingPaperDivas.com got smart with some linkbait featuring 9 "geeky" weddings. The site sells a range of wedding invitations and everyone linking to this page will want to use the words "wedding" or "weddings".
AlphaDictionary.com's "Are you a Rebel or a Yankee?" speech test should have included a results badge that people could display. Instead, they opted for the very 1.0 "Send to Friend" option.

And before Jane goes, you should know.

1. Linkbait's goal is to attract attention and not all attention is positive.
2. Of her dozen "real life" examples, seven of them were found by surfing Reddit and StumbleUpon.
3. Great linkbait will usually get the attention it deserves, but if it doesn't, it still serves as fresh, unique content.

Brent Csutoras is up next.

All other things come with links - branding, traffic, sales, etc.

Categories of Linkbait

• Top 10 Lists: Extremely effective. They're starting to get a cliché where the "top 10" tends to be negative. You won't have as much success as you could have 6 months ago. He suggests mixing it up. You can get the same point across by saying the Ten Best Ways To Do X instead of the Top Ten Ways To Do X.
• How-To Baits: Be helpful. Make sure it is easy to read and visually appealing. It has to be worthwhile. It's only effective if people care about what you're explaining.
• Current Events: You have to act fast and be accurate. You don't have time to run it through your PR department. Bad information will get your content killed.
• Offbeat or Extreme: There's nothing more effective. Everyone loves something that's weird. It's also the hardest to get approved by your company. You also have to make sure you're not breaking the social site's Terms of Service. Violating that can get you banned.
• Image/Video: Images and video engage your audience. Use them within posts and be unique. Images posts will jump twice as fast to the front page as text content because they're less intimidating.

Crafting a Social Linkbait

Research: Content creation is the most important part of your linkbait campaign. Your content has to perform. It has to get the links. Use Google to search Digg and Reddit by using a site search. It helps you dig (heh) into the content a little deeper.

Title and Description: The most important thing you can do with your content is title it appropriately. You can create titles that have the keywords in there even if they're not necessarily related to what you're trying to push. Don't get too clever or crafty with your titles. Make it short and sweet and to the point. It should be focused and have a point so that it tells people what your content is about immediately. Capitalizing the first letter of each word can help it stand out from the crowd and get someone to click on it.

Interact and Share: Once you create the content, you're going to submit it to a social community. You're going to think you're done but you're not. You have to follow your piece and interact with it. If someone comes in and buries it, you have to make sure that doesn't start a trend of others doing the same thing. Follow the comments, participate. Get your friends to leave positive comments. Once you actually submit to a social media site, you're no longer worried about anything but votes. If you have to throw in a link to more information to get users excited, do it. The social news site all say they hate gaming, but they provide options that allow the activity. Like Diggs, "shout" feature, for example. These features are in place for a purpose. Use them.

Social Media Tips

• Relate to community
• Check what worked before
• Offer a summary
• Use Images
• Be link worthy
• No spelling errors, jargon mistakes or bad information
• Limit Ads - social media is not about conversions. It's about links, branding and reach. Not converting.
• Submit at the right time
• Don't dupe
• Digg Effect

Be social. Get involved. Go out into the communities and learn from them.

Next up is Cameron Olthuis who is looking mighty tanned. I'm jealous.

He's going to go over case studies. He speaks fast and kind of mumbles.

He talks about how he got Kevin Rose to link to him. Apparently it's surfing related. Volcom put on a contest for anyone who could do a kick-flip on a surfboard. Cameron saw that no one had submitted that content to Digg. They blogged it and submitted it.

Cameron asks how many people are liveblogging this session. Seems like I'm the only one. Cameron gives me the link and anchor text he'd like me to use on his article. Hee! I was too busy laughing to write it down but you can find the volcom kick-flip article on Cam's site. (Happy, Cameron?) He says he got the link from Kevin Rose when they talked about it on Digg Nation and linked to it later.

Batteries: They had a client who sold batteries and needed to get him links. They brainstormed how to come up with ideas. The first thing he did was to go to Delicious, Digg, etc and typed in his keyword to see what the social community has found appealing. He can go through a list and see which have the most bookmarks and get ideas for content based on that.

They decided to create an article called 20 Tips To Get More Juice From Your Laptop Battery. The content was successful because it was a list.

Tips on Submitting Content

• Use a power account: This makes a huge difference.
• Submit at optimal time: Tuesday - Thursday around 10:30am PST
• Good title and description
• Proper category
• Use images or video
• Leverage your network to get more Diggs: Keep it natural, don't send people directly to Digg page, mix it up, only 1 Digg per IP, spread it out, have a few people comment and shout it if you have to. Almost nothing gets to the home page by itself anymore.

Takeaways

• Come up with really good ideas that will be useful to your target audience
• Format your content so its social media friendly
• Properly submit with a good account
• Leverage your network properly
• Wash, rise, repeat
• Collect links, smile

Cameron says every time he gets a good link he likes to smile. Hee.

Question and Answer

Danny calls me out and tells everyone that I'm liveblogging and name drops the URL. He says I twittered that Bruce Clay's liveblogging wasn't getting enough attention. I never said that! Lies! Blasphemy! [Thanks, Danny! --Susan]

How can you get your site in Yahoo Buzz?

Danny: You have to be special. You have to know someone.

How do you feel about Digg, Reddit, etc buttons on the post page?

Cameron: He does it on a case-by-case basis. He doesn't include them on all the posts. He only puts them on article he's really trying to push.

Jane: One of the saddest things you can see is a site that uses Digg buttons on every post when most of them have 0 or 1 Diggs. It gives the indication that the site really sucks. You have to choose on a case-by-case basis.

Brent: You don't have to show a Digg user a Digg button. Digg has made a huge effort to start promoting the use of buttons on their sites. They're very big right now about page views. He thinks that means they're trying to sell. He believes the highest value Digg comes from someone who clicks on a Digg button.

How much do you charge to get content on a viral site?

Cameron: He hears people do a flat rate for a campaign, not per piece. He throws out a number: $5,000 and up (a month) for a social media campaign.

Brent seems to agree with that.

Linkbait for images: Are there any copyright issues?

Brent: He's not a lawyer. He doesn't know. If someone tells him that he stole their image and they want it taken down, he'll do it. It's hard to put ownership on an image. (Um, is it?) People do it until someone asks them to take it down.

Jane: Use it until you get asked to take it down. She's never been asked to take anything down.

Danny adds a touch of common sense by saying just because you found it on Google doesn't mean you can take it. Right on, Danny. [Yeah, I'm not a fan of the "it's not stealing until you get caught" camp. Just use your own images or ask for permission, okay? --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/22/08 at 12:11 PM | Comments (3)

Social Media Marketing Essentials

Hey, hey, kids I'm in Long Beach for SMX Social Media Marketing. Our first session today is titled Social Media Marketing Essentials with moderator Danny Sullivan and speaker Rand Fishkin.

[I'm here a good 90 minutes early due to my overachiever status. I'll keep you updated on the rocking music. Up first, Tears for Fears/ Everybody Wants to Rule The World. Now they're playing Cruel to be Kind. Okay, there were more songs but I didn't know them because I'm young. And that concludes the music portion of our program. Next up, search!]

I'm a little nervous that the Internet is going to crash in here. It's wicked slow and the room is only about half filled at the moment. Let's hope it makes it through the day. Otherwise I'm just talking to myself.

Danny's kicking us off. He says he's the main ringleader. He's doing the housekeeping. He asks everyone not to use the wireless so it doesn't crash. Um, except me, right? Danny explains the question process and what paper is. He says it's thin (the paper) and that you can put it in an envelope. Kind of like a Macbook Air. Hee!

Okay, up now is Rand. He's very smiley and jittery. He says his presentation is 120 slides. Oh dear.

The goal of his presentation is to wrap your mind around all the things that social media can do for you as a marketer, your clients and your Web site.

What is Social Media Marketing?

What are the goals of online marketing as a whole? Web site traffic, conversions and sales, page views and ad exposure, brand awareness, positive brand association, and business development and networking. Social media can help with all those things by interacting with participatory communities on the Web. It can help you create and promote viral content. You can leverage these sites for technical goals. It allows you to reach key influencers using blogs and social news portals.

Rand is getting rambly. He seems way excited to be here. And maybe over-caffeinated.

Why is engagement with social media valuable? SMM supports branding and mindshare goals. It bolsters search engine marketing goals. It even helps with traffic and conversion goals. It brings lots of people to your site and if you target the right people, it will bring people that convert.

How has social media become so important? He shows a study from UMass Dartmouth that shows how social media participation has jumped 668 percent over the past year. Yowsa.

Brand advocates have emerged online as primary influencers, with at least a two to one rate of converting actual friends or family member to buy the same product or brand.
Brand advocates are incredibly valuable to marketers because they are better connected consumers with a larger sphere of influence. Social media is key - Study findings showed that Brand Advocates are taking full advantage of social media tools and actively leveraging them for product purchases.

34 percent of key influencers in the US read blogs. In Japan, it's 91 percent.

How do people find the blogs that they read? Links on others blogs (67.3 percent), search engines (19.6 percent).

How do you choose the blogs that you read? Quality of the writing. Huzzah!

How does SMM help with SEM?

Rand talks about Adult Swim and the bomb scare they created when they put posters all over the city of Boston. Rand says it got them a lot of national press...not that he's recommending using terrorist threats to link bait. Right, Rand. Sure, you're not. We know how SEOmoz works. :)

Rand is now doing his Cartman impersonation. What is wrong with him today? For serious.

Rand attempts to define TrustRank. You have a bunch of trusted seed sets and you take a look at who they link to. There's no spam in the trusted seed sets themselves. However, there's a little spam where they link off to and it grows exponentially as you get further away from the original trusted seed site. That makes sense.

Rand is the king of tangents today.

The search engines look at historical and personal data. They have data to track search engine manipulation. They can look at search history, toolbar data, IP host addresses, etc. They use things like Vision Based Page Segmentation.

The Results? Spam detection gets more powerful. The searchers are happy. Google gets more market share because they have less spam.

The engines are also about predicting what searchers want. They know if you're looking for Python, the program, or python, the snake. They're ranking fresh content very quickly. Search engines like to measure a site's worth through links. You can analyze content and user behavior, but for the vast majority of searches the engines want to show sites that have the highest number and most editorially given links.

Businesses need things. But those are able to give them want a reason and not everyone on the Web is linking. The linkerati is a really tiny subset of the whole. But that's who you have to reach. Essentially, they're the site owners with the proclivity for sharing content. They have preferences for what they're going to link to. It has to be cool, humorous, useful, breaking news, interesting, and ego boosting.

Supply = Linkerati
Demand = Site owners

The linkerati hold the goods but no one is allowed to pay them...directly. This forces us to an inevitable conclusion. It creates a disconnect between sites likely to produce editorial links and those who can supply them. You have to ask who these people are, what do they want and how they spread content.

Where can we conduct SMM?

• Social News Aggregation portals: Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Sphinn, Meneame (Spanish portal), TechMeme, Newsvine.
• Social Networking Communities: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc
• User Generated Content Web sites: YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Yelp, etc.
• Popular Blogs: TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Gizmodo, Huffington Post, LifeHacker, Gawker, Mighty Goods, etc
• Social Bookmarking Sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Ma.gnolia, Yahoo MyWeb
• Niche and Topical Participatory Sites: Slashdot, Fark, Truemors, NowPublic, Upcoming.org
• Long Tail of Blogs, Forums and Group sites
• Mainstream Media Portals: NY Times. Google News, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Wired, MSNBC

What Should I Take Away From SMX Social Media? [Ooh, does that mean we can all just leave now if Rand is already giving us the takeaways?]

Techniques to succeed in SMM to communities and influencers:

• You should have good ideas for viral content.
• Know Social Communities that may be relevant to your business.
• Get a massive competitive advantage over your anti-social peers.

Question and Answer

Will Google ever have a problem with linkbait?

Let's say you are a dirty, dirty spammer and you get content on the top of Digg using completely black hat tactics. If you were to do that and get to the top of Digg, Google would be really upset. Not really. He doesn't think Google will care if you spam to get to the top of Digg because it doesn't help you get to the top of Google. It only becomes valuable to Google if people link to your content at Digg. If you spam your content to the top of Digg doesn't mean you're going to get a lot of links. His feeling is that social media marketing is one of the most natural ways to build natural, authoritative links in the world (eh, really?). Because even if you spam, you still have to get the votes from "real" people in order to get value from it.

Danny: When people started talking about link baiting, Matt Cutts has repeatedly said that link bait is a great way to get links.

Are there some social sites that are better at getting the news media to pick up your article?

Rand says Digg is a very good place to get the mainstream media to pay attention. He says that stories that go popular on Reddit will hit mainstream media three days later. Blogs are also really good. Journalists are reading tons of blogs and subscribing to them.

Smaller social sites: How much emphasis is put on the submitter account?

Rand says there are very, very few sites where anyone can do as well as the top submitters. If you are well known to the rest of the community, you have a distinct advantage over everyone else. Rand talks about Sphinn and how the more well-known people get their stuff promoted more often.

How much weight do the search engines give links from social media sites? Do some sites have more weight?

Flickr used to be a great place to get link juice but now there are nofollows. You can put a link on your SEOmoz profile and get juice, but only if you have 100 comments. Way to pimp, Rand.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/22/08 at 10:28 AM | Comments (1)

April 21, 2008

Gossip Girl Drops The Social Media Ball

Twitter followers will know that both Susan and I are passionate Gossip Girl fans. Despite being closer to 30 than 20 (sorry Susan, but it's true), we just can't seem to get enough of that silly little show. And tonight, after what seemed like years and years of writer strikes, we finally get a brand new episode! There's much excitement!

Or at least there was until I realized there's no way for me to actually watch tonight's episode. I'm driving down to SMX Social Media later and online was the only viewing option I had. Sadly, the CW has decided to plug up Gossip Girl's online viewing stream. Lame.

Why do the brands I love always disappoint me? Don't I get enough of that in my real-life relationships?

The decision to kill Gossip Girl's online stream came when the creators realized how popular the online version had become.

"The CW is trying to avoid being a victim of its own success: "Gossip" has proved to be a big draw online (http://www.CWTV.com), with each episode said to be generating hundreds of thousands of streams. Episodes routinely rank among the most downloaded on iTunes, which also will continue to offer new episodes."

Wow. So hundreds of thousands of people are swarming to your Web site to watch one of your hottest shows and you've decided this is a bad thing and will now actively prevent them from doing so? Does your show ranking among the most downloaded on iTunes really keep you up at night? If so, your stupidity hurts me.

BuzzSugar is conducting a poll to get reader response to CW's decision. As I write this, almost half of respondents (48 percent) say if they can't watch Gossip Girl online they won't watch at all. Only 19 percent think the CW's decision was a smart one. Audience alienation is delicious.

It's amazing to me that big brands, especially those television related, still don't get it. We really need to get away from the days of measuring things like pageviews and rating points. These are grandfather stats that have way less relevancy today. You should be looking at engagement, time spent on site (though even that's not perfect), and brand awareness. It's disappointing to see the CW take such a myopic view here. I mean, let's not give viewers a compelling reason to tune into the television airing or reward online fans, let's instead try to stuff the genie back in the bottle and devolve a few years. Maybe if we distract people, they won't realize we just took a whole bunch of stuff away from them. Good plan. People like that.

I wonder when brands will realize that they are far better off embracing the Internet and their online brand evangelists than trying to corral them onto the roads they want them to take. You can't police the Internet. You have to embrace it.

And the CW, like most major brands, is not. There are more than 500 Facebook members who list Gossip Girl as an interest. There are more than 500 Facebook groups. There are six Gossip Girl applications, 27 Event pages about tonight's new episode, and 25 Fan pages. Not one of these groups, Fan pages or applications is an "official" offering green lighted by the folks at CW. They're letting members use their logo and brand however they'd like and not at all entering the discussion to make it easy to monitor. Missed opportunity. I haven't checked the other social networking sites, but I'd imagine I'd find the same thing; lots of fragmented brand evangelists just looking for a place to connect. Why don't you get a clue and give them one?

Encourage your audience to interact with your brand the way it suits them. Not everyone is going to take the same road. Trying to force them through the same door is going to alienate them and leave them with bruised elbows.

And if someone could tape tonight's episode and send it to me, that'd be stellar. Thanks.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/21/08 at 11:27 AM | Comments (1)

April 17, 2008

Making Widgets and Gadgets Work For You

Back from another classically Ad:Tech lunch, and it's time to talk about something we've been hearing a lot about this conference. Widgets! I'm seated right up front so that I can get every word. Also so I can see. Someone remind me to order new glasses, I'm blind as a bat here.

Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research) is moderating this panel consisting of Hooman Radfar (Clearspring) [Coolest. Name. Ever. - Lisa], Jane Felice (comScore, Inc), Ed Davis (ESPN Digital Media Community), and Kent Schoen (Facebook).

Lots of people here are already using widgets or are planning to use widgets. Like 75% of the audience.

What's the difference between a widget and a gadget?

Ed: Widgets are separated into two categories: public consumption or private consumption. It is meant to be consumed in a browser or on a desktop? Does it tap into the social graph or not?

Hooman: Gadgets are a specific branded term--it's a Google thing. The real distinction is between a widget and a social platform.

Kent: We call them applications and we focus on the platform. It's to be able to leverage a core set of functionality. The goal was to open things up and recognize that we're not the only ones with good ideas out there for connecting with customers. Why are you getting into this in the first place? What are your goals? That will help define your strategy. In some cases it's just about getting the brand out there, but more often it's about the brand doing something for the user. Think about what you want to get out of it and on what time horizon. Make sure that you're allocating enough time to get to your goal.

Jeremiah: We look at why people use widgets and it's a very different reason than why they use a search engine. So, why widgets?

Jane: Content based widgets extend your brand's reach and you get to place your brand on other sites instead of just being limited to your own. You get to engage the user. There's plenty of ways to monetize them which isn't to say that everyone is.

Ed: The case for widgets is that our users, sports fans, come to us for information but they spend time in other places too. We look at the Internet as our playground, or at least we can be available. Is it just our site or everywhere? We want to be available. First it's about offering something good for the user.

Hooman: Widgets are a platform for folks to reach audiences where they are. You need to extend your presence outside your site. You should reach your audience and go where they are. It's paramount. You need great compelling content to do so and widgets do that.

Kent: The opportunity that we saw was to give people a chance to bring their content and experience to our users. We want to give users the opportunity to decide how they want to be presented to. There's a decision to be made about whether or not you want to have an immersive experience.

Jeremiah: It's about reach and it's about fishing where the fish are. Why are you creating a new site when there are 80 million people on Facebook waiting for you?

Jane: Measuring widgets is an evolving thing. There are no standards, lots of different kinds of widgets. They look at measuring engagement. There are challenges with measuring them because they're not in just one site or location. The viral widgets, we don't know where they're going to end up.

Jeremiah: What makes a widget successful? What are the pitfall and challenges?

Kent: In terms of success, you have to ask what you're trying to get out of it first. It's easy to say its only numbers adopted but that might not have been the goal. It could have been about just targeting a niche. What's going to be success for you? Does it need to be millions or just a couple hundred thousand?

Hooman: Agrees wholeheartedly. They measure across networks. If you extend your reach by 30% is that success? You might not need a million, you might only need 1,000. If you're a movie, you might not care about longevity. After your movie opens, if no one else adopts, then it doesn't matter.

We've had the benefit of running hundreds of gadgets. The biggest issues are cross-platform capabilities and measuring across platforms. Some of them don't even give you numbers. You need to know what you're allowed to do, what the policies are and they change.

Ed: You have to be clear that it only works if people like what you do. If a user doesn't find it valuable and doesn't take it and put it somewhere, it's a failure. So you have to be sure that your widget gives value to the end user. Right now people seems to think that you can just do a 'rising tide lifts all ships' sort of thing and it doesn't work like that with widgets. They have to provide some premium content to the user or they're not going to use it.

Jane: Measurement is always a challenge. Connecting it from the widget to the impact later. If a widget was sent out into the world and a month later there was a rise in queries on those terms,