Bruce Clay Blog : 5/34 : SMM
February 29, 2012SMX West 2012: Integrating SEO and Social Media
In this session, we’re facing a three-person panel of presenters who are going to talk about the integration of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Out panel is comprised of Tim Grenda of Matrix Direct, Jennete Banks from IBM CityOne Game and Jeff MacGurn of Covario. Let’s get started!
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February 23, 2012
Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Subscribe Button
The Facebook Subscribe function launched late 2011, and many have since adopted it as a way to share content and gain reach — further than they had been able to before. But, without access to hard data, some are questioning if it’s worth it to them, while others see it as a powerful way to market. If you haven’t made the decision on whether or not the Facebook Subscribe button is right for your business objectives, read on. We’ll dive into the “whys” and “hows” of the Facebook Subscribe function, and what people are saying they’ve discovered about it since it’s inception in September 2011.
Read more of Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Subscribe Button.
February 14, 2012
Social Media for Lovers: Lessons in Brand Voice
On my morning commute I flip between terrestrial radio stations, and today I caught an interview between Carson Daly and Christina Milian, celebs on the singing star-maker “The Voice”.
The interview was part of Carson’s morning show on an LA top-40s station, and while the station is part of CBS Radio, he freely uses the platform to promote his other hosting gig on NBC’s musical reality competition. Christina, is the newly appointed social media correspondent for The Voice and she shared her experience using Twitter on behalf of the show.
It turns out some tried and true lessons of love hold fast in social media. Isn’t that perfect, it being Valentine’s Day and all? 
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February 10, 2012
Is Pinterest the New Social Media Echo Chamber?
Move over, StumbleUpon. There’s a new aggregator in town. No longer will users aimlessly browse for random gems of content. That’s so 2009. Now, old math is applied to present content in a new way: content + interest = Pinterest.
Pinterest does not represent a revolution in content curation by any means. The newness of Pintertest comes in the form of content consolidation. All content, all the time. Every social media site under the sun has some way of allowing its users to easily share content with one another. So why are pins so interesting and why are online marketers, specifically, SEOs so giddy with excitement? I’ll give you a hint: it’s two-parts shiny new object and one-part traffic generation.
In January, Pinterest drove more referral traffic to websites than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined. And the growth shows no signs of stopping, but that doesn’t always mean more traffic for your site.
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February 8, 2012
Ask 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.
Read more of Ask Him What NOT to Do: Woody Harrelson’s Social Media Smackdown.
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.
Read more of How to Choose Social Media Share Buttons.
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.
Read more of How to Maximize Your Social Media Presence with Minimal Effort.
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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