SMM : Bruce Clay Blog
February 8, 2012Ask Him What NOT to Do: Woody Harrelson’s Social Media Smackdown
Know your audience. It’s a truism we assume every big name actor is familiar with. After all, their success depends on spectators buying into each performance. So how is it that an Oscar nominee forgot this basic tenant of the actor’s handbook? Did Woody Harrelson fall victim to apathy born of accolades and forget to research his audience before agreeing to this latest turn in the spotlight?
Unfortunately for Woody, he’d never before performed for an audience so unforgiving as Reddit, the Academy and north-nosed critics included.
As members of the marketing community can attest, knowing your audience is an important principle for more than actors. Unfolding in real-time, Woody last week demonstrated a major social media faux pas which could have been avoided had he followed the basic principle of understanding his audience when interacting with communities online.
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February 7, 2012
The Many Ways Virtual Communities Impact Our World Offline
Technology has sufficiently crept into every nook and cranny of our lives. From the way we brush our teeth to the way we move about town to the way we interact with people, it’s a part of who we are.
I recently led a discussion along with Jen Lopez, community manager of SEOmoz and author Becky Carroll at the Emerging Media Conference in San Francisco. The three of us, along with the audience, talked about how social media and virtual communities impact our lives in ways we could not have imagined prior. It was an exciting and engaging conversation that allowed us to explore social media and virtual worlds outside the realm of marketing.
And, since the topic is fresh in my mind, I thought I’d share some of those concepts with you today. Let’s dive into some of the research on the virtual world’s impact on the physical world, and explore how these virtual communities have impacted our relationships and what we should do with these discoveries.
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January 11, 2012
10 Biggest Facebook Marketing Mistakes of 2011
Welcome to 2012. It may rock for you, especially if you don’t make the same social media mistakes people did in 2011. If you’re doing any kind of marketing on Facebook this year, try not to make the same following 10 mistakes that are, unfortunately, all too common:
1. Overestimating the Importance of Facebook Pages
Less than 1 percent of page fans ever go back to your page. You can create a custom tab and set it as the default for non-fans. So, your custom tab might be seen by non-fans, assuming they didn’t already like your page from a Like box on your website or the Like button on a fan-growth ad.
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January 6, 2012
How to Choose Social Media Share Buttons
Social share buttons are a great way to spread the content you have deeper into networks across the Web – but which social share buttons are right for your site? Sometimes, the “catch-all” approach to buttons that we so often see isn’t the best route. You know, those widgets that produce a bunch of buttons for social communities for the sake of trying to reach everybody and their mother. Oftentimes, this can just confuse readers or make them think more than they should have to in order to share the content they like.
There are several approaches to how you can identify which social share buttons you should include on your Web pages. One is checking traffic sources in your site’s analytics. Another is knowing who your target audience is and where they are hanging out socially online. And yet another is assessing the importance of individual social share buttons as metrics in whatever goals you have for the business.
Virginia and I recently decided to do an analysis of the social share buttons on the SEO Newsletter article pages, since they hadn’t been refreshed in quite some time. I’m going to share with you what we uncovered about some of the social share buttons, what we plan to do with it and how you can better assess the social share buttons on your (or your client’s) site.
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December 19, 2011
How to Maximize Your Social Media Presence with Minimal Effort
Audience: In-house marketers
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
It’s a fact of life that sometimes only the people who work in a company’s marketing department actually ever know what’s going with the company’s marketing strategy. New ideas get implemented with the rest of the company being none the wiser. And if your organization is like many others, internal social media strategy trickled in a little at a time, seeping through the cracks, but never quite fully soaking in.
This often spells missed opportunity for in-house marketers to leverage the many channels available to them throughout the organization to help them reach their goals.
I, myself, am in the beginning stages of performing a companywide analysis of potential missed opportunities in the way of social media promotion. We want to take full advantage of all the communications and channels we have available to us to let people know that we also want to connect on our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, and of course, our blog.
In this post, I’ll tell you how I plan to tackle the research and make little adjustments that can have impact on our social media exposure in the coming year.
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December 15, 2011
Don’t Be Shy: How Social Media Exposes Your Naked Brand
This is a tale of two celebrity twits, er, tweeters.
The first was once heralded as the star who welcomed Twitter to the mainstream. However, @aplusk’s presence as a microblogger was snuffed out in humbling fashion.
Quick background: the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal came to light, taking beloved Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, down with it. Ashton Kutcher’s tweet in support of the coach was met by public backlash. In turn, Kutcher claimed ignorance and ceded control of his Twitter account to what we can only assume is an antiseptic PR team.
The second celebrity was instantly recognized as a Twitter natural. His entrance into the community was rewarded by 100 retweets of his very first post. @Alec_Baldwin’s microblogging presence came across as open and genuine, until a scuffle with some airline attendants pushed the endearingly volatile personality AWOL.
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December 7, 2011
What Cults and Brands Have in Common: Devoted Followers
Audience: SMB owners and Internet marketers
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Call me superficial, but I notice brands. One that’s made its way onto my Christmas wishlist this year is yoga wear Lululemon Athletica. Behind the funny name are stylish cuts and flattering fits adorning all the ladies at the gym.
Yeah, I caved to the peer pressure and bought a couple $50 tank tops whose main role will be to soak up my sweat, but I’ve got no regrets. That little logo transfers to me a status of cool, self-aware and dedicated to self-improvement. It’s usually illegal to buy that kind of sexy.
Still, I realize I’ve fallen for fancy branding magic. So when a Quora thread on why Lululemon is so popular popped up, I wanted to know. What mind tricks are happening that Lululemon’s signature silver omega sign is becoming as popular as the swoosh in some athletes’ circles?
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November 16, 2011
The Endurance Contest: Tips to Maximize Social Media Staying Power
If the name of the social media marketing game is to reach as many people as possible in a number of communities, then the strategy must include maximizing the longevity of that content before it is forgotten and relegated to the past. To say that things move fast and people and brands share a lot [...]
November 10, 2011
Social Media Measurements & Signals — PubCon Vegas
Back from the PubCon lunch and regretting that pizza. ROI = meh. But enough about the results of eating greasy foods; let’s talk ROI on social; something that is always on the minds of businesses. We’ve got an awesome panel for you, so let’s get to it.
Monetizing & Optimizing Your Blog — PubCon Vegas
We’re back for another PubCon liveblog session; other than needing a strong coffee on top of the espresso I had earlier, I’m doing exceptionally well for Day 3 Vegas. In this session, we’ll hear about how to make that blog work for your success. We have a three-person panel that’s going to share with us some tactical tips for monetization.
