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.

Reddit Schools Woody on PR

Last Friday afternoon Woody announced he’d be doing an AMA, or “Ask Me Anything” ━ a Q&A format popular in the Reddit community where notable individuals offer to answer all questions.

Reddit is one of the most popular social sharing communities, with active and highly vocal participants. A quick look reveals a common lexicon and de facto etiquette. Upvotes move submissions closer to the top of the list so they’re more visible to the community. Images are like candy. Atheism is a favored philosophy. “TIL” is shorthand for “Today I learned.” Members subscribe to subreddits in order to focus on categories of personal interest. And comments generally unfold in a manner consistent with high schoolers in the quad.

Think what you want of it, but let’s be clear: when you’re a guest, you respect the rules of the house. When the dust settled, Woody and watchers came away with lessons that businesses and brands of all stripes can learn from.

Lesson #1: He tried to make the rules. Right off the bat, Woody struck out. When the first question accused him of having a fling at a high school prom, Woody said: “First of off, its not true, and second off, I don’t want to answer questions about that. Lets focus on the film people.”

As several commenters pointed out, Woody hadn’t signed up for AMAAR, or Ask Me Anything About Rampart. “You talking only about your new movie makes me not want to see it. Woody. Don’t waste us redditors’ time; do your research on Reddit first if you are going to do an Ask Me Anything.”

Lesson #2: He was too self-promotional. Online communities aren’t averse to promotions and marketing. People recognize that these present opportunities which allow them to get close to their favorite celebrities and brands. Your favorite artist comes out with a new work, and you’ll get to see them in the public eye as they work to promote it. It’s a give-take relationship we’re all familiar with. However, it felt like Woody wasn’t willing to give outside his own narrowly defined comfort zone.

Lesson #3: He wasn’t genuine. No one believed it was actually Woody answering the questions. Brands should treat their online reputation with at least as much care as the offline one, considering your online exploits are highly traceable and have a very long shelf life. Before you say anything, especially in a public forum, consider what you stand for as a well-rounded brand. Be prepared to go beyond the company line (in Woody’s case, beyond the subject of the movie) and give up some secret sauce. We’re all multi-dimensional. Offering access to only one dimension will earn a flat response.

Assuming Woody’s out a PR agency, I’ll give him some free advice.

Before you talk to Reddit, you should know at least everything in the article linked here. Brief highlights:

• Redditors don’t take deception lightly.
• The lifespan of a story on Reddit is quick, never exceeding more than 24 hours.
• Redditors’ interests are exteremely broad and front page stories range from politics to technology to design and pop culture.

When performing for any online audience be sure to:

• Research demographics and psychographics.
• Identify personas or facets of the audience.
• Speak to their motivations and values.

Know your audience is a simple maxim, but Woody could have benefited from an even more basic one: the Golden Rule. A little respect for his audience and last Friday’s fiasco would have led to more fans instead of fewer.

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.

The Virtual World’s Impact on the Physical World

We’ve reached a time where there’s certainly no shortage of people studying the impact that virtual worlds are having on us as individuals and as a society. According to research by professor Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University, half a billion people spend about 20 hours a week “wearing” avatars.

Avatars are the virtual representation of a person in a virtual world, and these virtual worlds include everything from massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life to Farmville. You could even go so far to say that people wear avatars in their various social communities as well – representations of their physical selves in the virtual world.

Now, the term “wearing” is an important nuance, because reports from the same professor show that people tend to essentially act different than their true selves depending on how different their avatars look from them. For example, if a person’s avatar is better looking than that person, the person’s avatar tends to be more outgoing in the virtual world than this person might be in the physical world.

To take it a step further, these behaviors online can actually impact a person’s behavior offline. Embedded below is a video that presents some of professor Bailenson research, but I’ll sum it up. Stanford University conducted tests where participants would have avatars created to resemble them. They would hook these participants up to special equipment and have them move about the room while the avatars mimicked their body movements in the virtual world that was projected before their eyes.

What the study revealed was this: positive behavior can be reinforced in the physical world if the participant could visualize and experience a particular scenario in the virtual world. Let me explain:

• Scenario one: Participant mimics jogging and sees the avatar of him or herself jogging and losing weight at the rate of one pound for every four knees lifted.
• Scenario two: Participant eats junk food and participant experiences the avatar’s body expanding.

The result? In the weeks following this experiment, participants ate healthier and exercised more in the physical world as a result of being able to visualize the consequences on themselves of that behavior. The same worked for retirement funds, where the participants would begin to save money for the future if they could make a connection with their future selves by seeing a computerized aging process on the avatars that resembled them.

This is one very inspirational example of how we could find new ways of using these types of virtual realities to impact personal growth in our everyday lives. The Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect are examples of companies who are creating games for this very purpose.

But, for every positive, there’s a potential downside. Spending loads of time in these virtual worlds and being more connected to people than ever before has some consequences.

I think perhaps one of the most powerful demonstrations of how accessibility and connectivity in this new era of social networks can affect us negatively is the following story of a young woman (and several others) whose course in life was completely altered in less than three hours following a short video that was innocently posted to YouTube. You have to see this presentation from Tom Scott at Ignite London:

So the question here is not if virtual worlds and communities impact our lives, but how can we capitalize on the positive and seek solutions to some of the most negative impacts? Just like many of us are deeply involved in making our communities a better place, we should take these lessons and try to figure out how can we make these virtual communities better, improve our lives and minimizing the harmful risks.

How Relationships Are Different Since the Advent of Online Social Communities

So we know that how people choose to spend their time in these virtual worlds and online communities can impact lives, but let’s take a look at the relationships forged in those online communities – are they any less real? There’s not a simple answer for that. These are real people, making real connections – but … and there is a “but” here: the depth of how far they go, I believe, is limited.

You can’t always make a genuine connection with someone online. In person, you see how a person behaves and interacts with you and others; you can look into each other’s eyes, share a smile, an emotion, an experience, camaraderie. Sure, you can feel connected to someone online, but how connected?And do these online relationships strengthen or weaken our relationships in the physical world?

How Virtual Communities Impact Offline Relationships

Being connected to these virtual worlds and communities impact our experiences in the present time. Look around you next time you’re at an event, at dinner or just taking a walk. People are buried in their phones, in their virtual worlds. Sure, we’ve learned how to become more social online, but at what cost? Are we socializing less when we are together as a group? Are we missing out on a the world around us?

Now, it would be a stretch for me to attribute the decline in social skills with the rising of technology, but I can tell you that when I see all those people sitting across from each other at dinner, with their heads buried in their phone updating their Facebook status or texting, it disappoints me. We lose out on the present when we let the virtual community win.

But, with the aid of these virtual communities, we’ve also been able to have richer experiences. Take this example: You’re in Vegas for weekend on vacation. You decide to check-in to a location-based service like Facebook Places or Foursquare to let everyone know where you’re at that. To your surprise, you see that a friend of yours is in the hotel next door because of his check-in. And you and your group and he and his are now able to connect and spend time together that night, which would not have happened without this technology.

These kind of stories happen all the time because of the luxuries our virtual communities afford us. And beyond just letting us find and connect with the people we know in the physical world, they give us added layers of relevance to our experiences. We can unlock best-kept secrets of the places we visit, score relevant deals and get to know other regulars of our local hangouts – all of which would not be possible without these virtual communities.

In the business world, virtual meetings have made it possible for companies to cut down costs on travel and save time; on mental health, many with depression or anxiety disorders have been positively affected by becoming a part of a larger narrative in the online multiplayer games; on the way we receive news and information, social media has made it possible to transmit it faster and further than ever been before, changing the way journalists do their jobs; and social media has totally changed the way politicians campaign, with our current president leading the charge in this area.

The Differences Between Virtual Communities and Offline Communities

It’s really fascinating to see how virtual communities force us to behave in ways we perhaps would have not prior; on the flipside, virtual communities tend to take on characteristics of the way we behave in the physical world as they progress. Take Facebook for example. You post an update, everyone sees it, no matter who is in your friends list – whether it’s Aunt Bee or the person you’re casually dating. And while Facebook continues to make tweaks to its network’s rules for a better experience, you still have to conform to the social norms of that virtual community — even if it’s not how you’re used to acting in the physical world.  This is an example of the virtual community impacting how we would normally behave.

But what’s interesting, is that data show the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 – this is just 30 less than Dunbar’s number, a theory by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, which states that there is a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. So, this is an example of our social norms impacting virtual communities.

Then along comes Google+, which understands that we don’t communicate the same way with Aunt Bee as we communicate with the person we’re casually dating, and allows us to create virtual social circles that mimic how we interact in our daily lives. This is a great example of the virtual community can develop to comply with our social norms.

But no matter how you slice it, participating in virtual communities makes our interactions more public than ever before. Social media researcher Danah Boyd once said that our interactions in the physical world seem more private by default (although there’s a lot of factors involved on whether or not that’s actually true), but in the online world, that sense of privacy is immediately dissolved and makes anything said potentially very public and immortalized.

It’s taken time for many people to come to terms with that. So the way we behave in our virtual communities may never fully coincide with the way we behave in our everyday lives.

But what does seem to be happening is virtual communities as a whole first impose their rules on us, and as time goes on, we begin to impose our will on it, making the experience more fluid between our relationships in our virtual communities to our relationships in our physical communities.

So, Where to Next?

We know that more and more time is being spent in these virtual worlds. And we know that this time spent has the ability to either negatively impact or positively impact us in our daily lives. Communities are communities, whether online or offline. And virtual worlds are proving to be very real.

So, my question is, how can we better spend our time in those communities? How can we use social communities online an extension of our communities here in the physical world? How will we, as a society, use these virtual worlds to make a difference?

It’s all still very new and these worlds are still developing. But, as the creators of these virtual worlds, we have a choice in how we shape them. How will you make a difference?

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.

But if they did, they’ll never see your welcome tab; fans always go straight to the Wall. On a daily basis, fans may see your posts in their news feed, if your posts are interesting and get likes and comments. Your Facebook page is not another website for you. It’s a social email. Pages are not as important as posts and EdgeRank.

Also, you don’t have to have a page to do Facebook marketing. You can use the advertising platform to get more targeted traffic to your website. Fan marketing (marketing on Facebook with a business page and fans) requires quality content and attention to detail. If you don’t have the time to do that, you might want to try just ads first.

2. Caring Only About Numbers of Fans

It’s amazing how many people only look at how many fans a page has, not how many it’s reaching with the average post (I like to get that info from PageLever, but you can also export your stats from your Facebook page Insights to Excel and average it yourself).

Since so few people go back to pages and most fans will only hear from you again through your news feed, EdgeRank and reach are critical. You must get interaction to remain visible. The stats are discouraging — many pages are only reaching 5 percent to 10 percent of their fans per post. And that raises real fan acquisition costs by 10 to 20 times!
Getting a fan does not give you a captive, forever-attentive audience. It gives you the opportunity to keep them interested. Your posts had better be engaging, or you’re lowering the value of your page every day.

Is ROI important to you? You aren’t just trying to be visible and engage, are you? You probably want people to become business leads or buy something. If your fans aren’t people who fit your target customer profile, they may never buy.

Contests may produce numbers of fans but not qualified buyers. If you run a contest, make sure your contest qualifies them in the process. For example, if you sell mountain bikes, make them send you a quick story about mountain biking to qualify for the contest. Or take what you know about the best buyers and target those kinds of people with Facebook ads to grow your fan base.

3. Thinking You’ll Get Enough Fans from Your Email List

On first look, it seems obvious you’d want your email subscribers to become fans of your Facebook business page. And you do. But what’s not obvious is that even if you contact them repeatedly and incentivize them to do so, you’ll be fortunate to get 25 percent of them to do so. The reason why is simple math: even if 30 percent open your emails, and 10 percent click, not all of them will follow through. You never get 100 percent response to anything online. Multiple steps always cause a drop-off in compliance. You’re going to need other sources of fans, like Facebook advertising, a Like box on your website, and perhaps contests.

4. Thinking About Yourself Instead of Your Audience

Most of us are good at talking about ourselves and our own companies. And that’s boring. You want to see what percentage of people find you fascinating? Create a Facebook ad with just your face and name and no call to action. I’ve actually done that, and only about 0.05 percent of people will click on that if I include my major benefit to businesses. When I did an even more boring ad with my name and face, I got 0.01 percent. Only one out of 10,000 strangers cares about me. Not surprising.

5. Posting Content No One Cares About

You actually have to think about what your audience cares about and appeal to that. What do they need? What do they love? If you do Facebook advertising to precise interests, you’ll learn this along the way and can apply it to your posting ideas. All the typical rules of great blog posts apply. You have to have a good headline, it helps to have a list or numbers, and pictures and videos rock. By the way, photos are the most liked and shared type of content on Facebook. You should probably post a lot of them.

6. Posting Too Frequently (Quantity Over Quality)

Some pages post too much, and at the same time post things people don’t interact with. All this does is lower your EdgeRank quicker so you can reach fewer and fewer people more and more frequently. Is that really what you want?

It’s better to make sure you’re creating quality posts. Review your engagement for past posts to see what worked and what didn’t. Create surgically. By all means, experiment, but learn from your experiments. Use calls to action: ask for the likes and comments. Don’t be shy. More people will do it if you ask. Don’t post with a custom publisher if that prevents you from customizing your posts. Don’t post photos without some text and a call to action.

And if you are a company that has three or more admins who feel they can post whatever, whenever they want, you’re going to need to do some training, or revoke their rights and have it go through a point person who understands that boring posts lose fans.

7. Creating All Your Content Yourself

It’s a lot of pressure to create and post quality content every day. Something we learned from years of Twitter is that some of the most popular and retweeted folks are simply curating other people’s content. You can do the same for Facebook, for example, create a new blog post to quote and comment on popular, viral content (I would advise that, so you can get the traffic benefits). A product like InfiniGraph can help you find Facebook posts that already have proven likes, comments, shares and clicks.

8. Treating Facebook Like Other Marketing Channels (Twitter or Search)

Facebook has multimedia advantages over other channels. If you don’t use them, you lose in the news feed, because your posts are competing with everything else. Tweets are short, but Facebook posts can be long. Take advantage of that. Autoposting blog posts without commentary or a call to action is lazy and leads to loss of fan visibility. Don’t do it.

Facebook is not search marketing. It’s social. It has to be interesting. And you have to understand your potential customer better. Google is about what people want. Facebook is about who they are. You can sell your “what” to their “who.” But, it requires a change in your thought process.

It’s comparatively easy to sell headphones to people who search Google for “buy headphones.” But, it may be new to brainstorm people who already “like” techno music on Facebook and will want quality headphones, or those frequent travelers want noise-canceling headphones and probably already like “Gogo inflight Internet” and the topic “#frequent flyer program.”

9. Ignoring or Disparaging Facebook Advertising

Some people don’t like advertising at all. Some marketers and PR folks look down their nose at it. Some business owners try to avoid the hard costs associated with them. All of these people are missing out on The Biggest Marketing Opportunity in Human History. I capitalize it that way because I hear it that way in my head. I really think it’s that important.

You can target and segment 800 million people via 16 targeting factors for a minimum spend of $5.00. That’s a TV-sized audience with better targeting than AdWords (yes, there’s no intent but you can get around that with the “who” targeting approach I mentioned in the previous tip). Some say that, in its growth, Facebook ads will pull more money from TV than from AdWords. I think it will cause substantial shifts from each.

I’ve seen ecommerce sites make direct ROI from both Facebook ad spend for traffic and Facebook ads spent to get fans – the best strategy depends on your business. And if you want more awareness (which turns into more Google searches and purchases), Facebook ads have the cheapest CPM in the world. Facebook advertising costs roughly one-fifth of the CPC of AdWords and one-eighth the CPM. Ignore it at your own peril. Facebook ads in 2012 are like the AdWords ads of 2004. Now is the time.

10. Ignoring Metrics and Analytics

Every bit of internet marketing is measurable and trackable. Both visibility and engagement should be tracked for your Facebook pages. Correlate interaction with posts and learn from what you’re doing by using Facebook Insights or PageLever. Go the extra mile and track not only the ROI of Facebook traffic, but also how your Facebook activities affect other marketing channels. Is Facebook increasing the number of searches for your brand? Is it increasing the overall conversion rate for your website? Add URL tagging for your Google Analytics. And can you install multichannel analytics to see where people first heard of you, even if they finally bought via Google.

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 Newsletterarticle 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.

The Social Share Buttons We’re Getting Rid of and Why

Here’s a snapshot of the social share buttons on our newsletter article pages: As you see, we have Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious. Looking at sitewide analytics, we saw that we did have traffic from all of those sources, but some more than others. And for many, there were specific stories behind the traffic. But, before we decided, we wanted to understand the health of the individual community and the types of audience it draws.

• Digg: While Digg does have a community within it that’s technology news-focused, its numbers were in steady decline this year as recorded by Quantcast.com. Even though the more than 4 million people per month reach is nothing to scoff at, we ultimately decided this community did not directly fit into our goals for content sharing. This was confirmed by the fact that none of our newsletter stories had been shared through our Digg button all year. In this debate in Reddit, it talks about the decline of Digg and the rise of Reddit. But, we weren’t sure Reddit was right for us either, so we did some research on them, too.

• Reddit: Reddit’s user-generated news links draw a fairly steady audience in numbers  month over month (about 14 million users) and the community does have a targeted SEO category within the site. Our analytics showed that we did see traffic from Reddit – but, the answer was no when we looked to see if anyone was sharing our newsletter stories from the share buttons. In fact, the spike in traffic we saw from Reddit last year occurred from a guest author we had on the blog who was an active Reddit user. And so we concluded that active Reddit users will share information they find useful as they come across it, but that it’s going to be more far and few between with our audience, and so a share button is not warranted here.
• Delicious: This bookmarking site reaches a smaller audience than the prior two, and data on Quantcast.com shows that the typical visitor goes to Cooking.com, watches Food Network and uses Realtor.com. – not necessarily our target market; but, the site does have a dedicated technology and science category. There were rumors of Delicious shutting down in late 2010, but it has since been sold to YouTube founders by Yahoo!, and active users have risen significantly since then. For our goals, however, it didn’t look like a social share button for Delicious was something we wanted to pursue.

At this point, we were ready to delete the three social buttons we just discussed from our newsletter article pages, but we performed one final sanity check to see if any of them factored as strong social signals in the search algorithms. As far as we know, they don’t, so in the end, it didn’t look like any of these turned out to be significant to us.

The Social Share Buttons We’re Adding and Why

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a growing network that presents a lot of opportunity for people to share content (more than 1 billion referrals per month, according to data in this post on visualizing the StumbleUpon audience). StumbleUpon itself offers many resources for people to target and grow their intended audience, and has also been known to be a factor in content “staying” power. For us, it made sense to keep this button and further explore how we could maximize our presence in this community.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an often-overlooked network that’s proving to be more and more important as a place for professionals of all industries to share ideas and content. If you’re feeling lost about how to best use LinkedIn for business, check out resources like “RockTheWorld with LinkedIn” – a webcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

Facebook

I don’t think much of a case is needed for this one. Facebook is where the eyes are, and is the volume leader in social networks. Not to mention certain search engines have reported using Facebook signals in its algorithm for search results. Looking in our analytics, we already receive a ton of traffic from Facebook. Bottom line: It’s probably never a bad idea to have a Facebook Like button on your Web content so it’s sharable there. If you want to learn more about this button and how it works, check out, “The Facebook Like Button, Dissected.”

Twitter

Again, it’s hard to argue against the idea that a Twitter share button is good for pushing out content. With 80 million users (according to an October 2011 stat by Quantcast), the microblog Twitter is an ideal place to share good content and have it spread quickly. On our blog, Twitter is a popular way our audience shares content, and it’s considered a social signal in certain search algorithms. You can learn more about the power of tweets and retweets on rankingon SEOmoz.

Google +1

While many might argue that Google’s social network, Google+, is only used by a niche community (comprised of lots of techies), one report predicts the network will reach 400 million users by the end of 2012, if it continues at the pace it’s going. The fact that the community is comprised of lots of tech people works in our favor; for businesses in other industries, it’s worth exploring whether Google+ and its +1 button is the right place to share content. When a person +1s content, it not only shows up in the Google+ community, but the endorsement can also be seen alongside search results. And as many of us know, these types of endorsements are becoming increasingly important for many reasons. Many are speculating what the Google +1 button will mean to the future of search. For us, we’re going to stick it out with this share button and see where it takes us.

How Do You Know if a Social Share Button Will Work for You?

There’s a million things that a person could examine in order to validate the use of one social share button over another. In fact, I could probably write a 10-part series on this if I really dug in. The important thing to remember is, whichever direction you choose, don’t just shoot in the dark.

Take the time to understand who your audience is, where they are spending their time online, how people are coming to your site and the long-term health of the social community before making decisions about which social share buttons you want to include on your Web content pages. The more choices a reader has, the more likely it is to cause analysis paralysis. And the messier your Web page might look with all the social share button clutter. Give fewer, more targeted options to make it easier for your visitors to choose and share content.

And test! Don’t just put a button up and then ignore it for the rest of your life. See if it’s working for you by extracting the important data to measure social share button success and their impact on your content goals.

Do you have thoughts on this topic? Please share with us below!

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.

1. Analyze Internal Communications

A great first step is sitting down with each of the departments in your organization (and you can simply do this with individual employees if your company is smaller), to find out who they talk to and how they communicate daily.

Then brainstorm ideas on missed opportunities for directing those people to social media channels. Everyone in the company has a chance to touch someone important to your business, including:

•  Sales
• Customer service
• Account management
• Technical staff
• Creative staff
• Accounting (yes, vendors are an important alliance, too)
• Executive staff

This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Depending on how each department or individual operates, the social media promotion will fit in differently.

For example, the sales department might start directing more traffic to your company blog for more information on your business’ area of expertise, or perhaps they’ll hand select articles that your company has written on a particular problem the prospect is currently facing. This is both helpful to the prospect and the sales funnel.

On the other hand, your customer service people who handle calls all day can take those opportunities to plug any promotions or contests that your company might be having on any given social medium.

The point being, if you’re an in-house marketer, it’s important to know where these missed opportunities exist companywide, and to secure wins with minimal efforts that integrate seamlessly into the activities these employees are already performing.

2. Assess Outward Communications

Take stock of every device and piece of collateral (digital or print) your department creates. Then do the same for every department and/or staff member (if a smaller company). Where are your missed opportunities to promote your social media?

This includes things like:

• Print collateral
• Web pages
• Power point presentations
• Newsletters
• Business cards
• Emails
• Press releases
• Multimedia like podcasts or videos
• Client documents and deliverables
• Social media (yes, promote your various social media through your social media!)

This is just crossing your “t”s and dotting your “i”s on your company’s day-to-day communications. Then you have to ensure that each new campaign you initiate also ties the social media into it. For example, if your company is heavily involved in industry conferences or tradeshows like we are, you have to think about how to work in your social media exposure into that marketing plan.

Well, those are my quick-and-dirty tips for optimizing your company for social media promotion. I’m sure we all have missed opportunities that can be seized with little to no impact on our daily routines. What are your ideas?

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.

Learning from Mistakes: Celebrities (and Brands) are People, Too

Your business has something in common with Ashton and Alec: they’re brands. Celebrities and people in the public eye hold our attention and influence our perspectives, whether or not we intend for them to. So when they make mistakes, we’d do well to notice and learn from their lessons.

These social media identity crises come with an important takeaway: the authority, loyalty and respect granted your brand relies on transparency.

If you ask me, it was cowardly for Baldwin to delete his account after the snafu. Sure, he may have gotten carried away railing against American Airlines in the aftermath, but frustration with airlines and that dumb rule about turning off your electronics is one we’re all familiar with.

I’ve lost even more respect for Kutcher for converting his account to little more than shell for the spin machine. Understandably, Kutcher may have been feeling pressure to save face, with news of his affair still fresh in the tabloids. That he’d shy away from any negative press, we get. But to patently admit that all future communications will be passed through a faceless third-party whose objective is upholding the PC? Not only is it boring, but it smacks of deception.

Coming out of Mashable this week is an interesting interview with video, social media and wine go-to guy Gary Vaynerchuck. Gary slaps so-called social media “experts,” explaining that what really counts is getting it done.

As always, it comes down to reality and transparency. A successful brand isn’t built on talk, it’s built on results and authenticity. You can’t come across as real if it’s clear your communications are going through censors. The public loves to forgive mistakes, but we can’t overlook your cover-up. What’s your brand have to show for itself? And please, don’t leave out the naughty bits.

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?

You Say Cult, I Say Culture

Turns out Fast Company profiled Luluemon in 2009, and revealed the company founder’s secret sauce to building a coveted brand included three key ingredients:

• The Secret, the self-help guide centered on the power of the law of attraction
• Lessons from motivational business guru Brian Tracy
• And the Landmark Forum immersive self-help seminars.

Ooooeeeeoooo… Although slightly suspect to much of the mainstream, you can’t deny that the above each have an impressive following marked by near fanatacism.

It was the mind-washing success of Lululemon and a few other brands that sparked one marketer to research the psychology of cults in order to see what they had in common that engendered such fierce loyalty from followers.

Excerpt from The Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin

A peek at the table of contents of the resulting book, The Culting of Brands, hints at what’s inside. Telling chapter titles include:

• We love you
• You belong
• We’re in this together
• This is what we believe

Very interesting, indeed.

To be clear, this isn’t an admonishment. I’m just mentioning a method I think is worth emulating. I proudly belong to a few cult-like groups myself (I’m a member of the cult of CrossFit and the church of Apple) and think that reproducing the stickiness and loyalty these groups espouse is a worthwhile goal.

And in case you’re wondering what’s keeping Lululemon company on my Christmas wish list, you can bet The Culting of Brands is on there.

So the next question is, are you building a brand with cult psychology? Don’t be shy.

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 of content online is an understatement. The question, then, is not only about the longevity of content, but where to put it and how to maximize its endurance.

It was Hunter S. Thompson who wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “It was time, I felt, for an agonizing reappraisal of the whole scene … It was no longer a race; now it was an endurance contest.”

It’s true that Hunter S. Thompson was writing about a motorcycle race at that point in the book, but the principle as it relates to social media and sharing content are the same.

Social media is not a race. If content delivery was boiled down to winners and losers solely based on who shared content first, then the Internet would exist in stark contrast to what it is today. Social media and content delivery are about who has the staying power, in other words, endurance. When deciding where to share content online, take into account these three considerations to help optimize your media’s lifespan.

Which Social Platforms Lend to Long Lasting Content?

We all know the obvious answer when it comes to content delivery. Because of the sheer number of people on Facebook, it has become the de facto network in which brands can engage their audience. Marketers will naturally aim for the biggest target. Considering 50% of the US population has a Facebook page, sharing content is a no-brainer. But Facebook isn’t the only player sitting at the Poker table with a pair of aces to boot.

Facebook fulfills the criteria of providing a platform to share content, but can content last? Twittter functions much the same way when it comes to content, except in a much more frenetic way. If you’re like me and follow a lot of people, tweets leap up my page like frogs in a dynamite pond. With most social networks transitioning to a feed-style interface, information happens at a rapid pace. In other words, if you share content, most of the activity comes at the 2 minute mark.

Obviously, any content syndication strategy must include targeted media sharing across a variety of social networks because, while people may revert to one as their main site for media consumption, they will use different sites for different reasons. Let us not forget Linkedin, Google+, YouTube and MySpace. Understanding the nuance of each site will help you target your audience, even though the reach of the content might pale in comparison to the number of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Bookmarking as an Endurance Driver

One  category of social sites that cannot be overlooked is social bookmarking like Reddit and StumbleUpon. And much like Linkedin and other smaller, more targeted networks, they do not have the user base that Facebook has, individually or collectively. As I said before, the fact that Facebook or Twitter has so many users can become a liability for content syndicates. Content comes at user fast, which doesn’t help part of the real reason content is shared in the first place: engagement objects that drive traffic to your site.

Our friends at Search Engine Land uncovered a recent infographic from StumbleUpon, which makes a strong case for sharing content on their site. It seems that StumbleUpon shows the greatest longevity for content shared on their site as opposed to Facebook and Twitter.

According the infographic, the half-life of a link, meaning the point at which a link will garner half the engagement it will ever achieve, is astounding. Facebook links have a 3.2 hour half-life and Twitter links have a 2.8 hour half-life. A page shared on StumbleUpon has a half-life of 400 hours. Which one of these things is not like the other?

Do not mistake this for a commercial for StumbleUpon. Certainly we can take that figure with a grain of salt. I am merely advocating a sometimes-ignored resource that could be a sustainable long-term traffic driver to your site.

And isn’t that really the goal, from an SEO perspective, at least — to achieve an increased amount of traffic? This is why StumbleUpon reports 50% of all referral traffic from social media sites.

Think about it this way. It’s like a long-tail keyword. You know that Facebook will drive a certain percentage of traffic to your site based on the amount of people your content can reach, but that influx of traffic is short lived according to the research we’ve seen. Placing content on sites like StumbleUpon (in addition to Facebook) will allow you to not only maximize content reach, but also to deliver sustained traffic increases.

On the Flip Side, New Content is King: Google Gets Fresh

Google recently released an update to its algorithm in the past few weeks unofficially dubbed the Google Freshness Update. The update effectively rewards sites based on the newness and relevance of content as it relates to trending topics, recurring events, and frequently updated information.

This is another fine-tuned attempt to provide more relevant results to a search query relative to a particular population of sites. In a perfect world, we would hope for Google delivering the best product it can. Though, in Google’s attempt to create that perfect search world, they’re holding content creators’ feet to the fire by requiring a constant flow of new content. Earlier this week, a list of 10 major changes to Google’s algorithm, including the Google Freshness Update, was released to the public.

This brings to the forefront a number of possibilities, both in the creation of content and its delivery and syndication. Yes, you can and should create new content to drive traffic, but you should keep in mind that content can be designed with algorithmic immunity. In other words, create content around topics that don’t change or change very little over time. Consider reincarnating old content, updating the information, and syndicating it in different forms. Yesterday’s blog post could be today’s infographic. This is the essence of evergreen content.

Content creation and syndication doesn’t have to be a one way street. Content is cyclical, rather than linear. It can be re-purposed and redistributed using social bookmarking as a springboard for sustainable, long-term traffic increases as a part of an overall social media strategy. Old is new, as they say. Fortunately for those of us in the SEO industry, change is the currency of the land, so there’s no shortage of newly created content. If you’re not creating content at a pace relative to your competitors about the topics of the day, then may Google have mercy on your soul.

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.

Sarah Carling from Obsidian Edge is up first.

There are very few sectors where you will see a direct sale from a social media avenue. It’s very rare a person sees a link and decides to buy right there. She always goes back to TV campaigns, those have never been 100 percent trackable.

The key to measuring social is to look at the metrics that can define value to your website.  The following slide shows some of the things she measures:

The value of social media is unclear an many cases, but it’s important to know the value of it, not just the ROI. Change looking at your data from last touch to first touch.

Adam Proehl from NordicClick Interactive is next. He is going to talk about finding influencers and measurements and tools.

Measuring signals takes time and time is money, but the tools are free usually.

Influencers — where to begin:

• What is my objective for reaching the influencers? Example: business development; brand awareness; “feel good” for current customers
• What type of influencers do I need to reach? Journalists, bloggers [he got a significant piece of business from a liveblog session that mentioned his name], board members, old school networkers who aren’t online

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.

First up is Adam Riemer. He is going to talk monetizing your blog using affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is basically selling something you don’t  own to people you don’t know.

He kicks off with this slide:

How to choose a program:

• Coupon code box
• Adware
• Sales funnel
• Leaks
• Trademark bidders
• Responsive and knowledgeable managers