The Right Social Media Marketing Components for an Agency?

For the past few months, I’ve been rethinking what it means to have a Social Media Marketing line in a Strategy-focused Interactive agency. As Alisa Leonard-Hansen from iCrossing says, there’s technically no such thing as Social Media – it is just that the web is social. So where does this leave us:

1. Clients asking about “What to do with Social Media?”;
2. Clients rushing towards Social Media without understanding it or identifying the right metrics or modeling the ROI;
3. Continued media fragmentation while also continuing need to integrate across CRM, Social Media, Mobile, Search Marketing, Display, Online Video, Television, etc.

Very head spinning stuff. So I created a PowerPoint to take my first crack at this question. The answer will evolve as a process, since the Internet (and now Mobile) are moving at light speed.

Please check it out and let me know your feedback – where I’m right, wrong or whatever else.

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Below is my presentation, which attempts go beyond the usual “Social Media” is the new SEO “linkbait” and also talk a little about the DAO (digtial asset optimization) of social media assets for SEO. (Mouthful, I know!).

If you have any questions, don’t hestiate to contact me – email or a comment below.

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While there has been much discussion – including here – how “Social Media is a Conversation”, it is clear that marketers need more concrete and less theoretical lens to view Social Media. Basically, “how does this make me and my boss look good?”

This is Social Media. But which is PR? Or Marketing?

First, we need to cast off the idea of Social Media as some hippie “Joining the Conversation” thing. It’s more of like the behavior of users or a characteristic of a website. But to make it concrete let’s call Social Media a Platform, just like how the Internet is a general platforms from which you can conduct advertising. There are lots of channels/tactics within a platform.

Above is a fairly comprehensive chart of Social Media by Brian Solis, which defines all of the various components that make the Social Media Platform. Understanding the “Social Media Platform” is important, but we also need to start thinking about the next stage:

Social Media. I get it. But what does each Social Media channel do? And who should do it? What’s the goal and ROI?

Looking at the graph, there are only many channels but many ways it can correspond to different areas of advertising. For simplicity sake, let’s focus on Marketing, Public Relations, Customer Relations and Community Building – looks pretty limiting.

In the rest of the post, I’ve sketched out a basic model of how to approach 10 of the channels/tactics – document sharing, link baits to microblogging – but ultimately, you should do the following:

Print out a few copies of Brian Solis’s Social Media Prism chart, bring the PR, Customer Service, Marketing, and Evangelist folks. Go through each channel and brainstorm how it could apply to them and their goals.

To help you guys start, I’ve started jotting down a few thoughts below. There are plenty more Social Media channels to explore and more creativity ways to exploit opportunity in a way that gives you ROI and not just “joining the conversation.”

Social Media Channels: Which One? For What and Why?

1. Widgets on Facebook to iPhones to the Google Homepage
Marketing, Public Relations, Community Building

This is an easy one. Widgets are basically mini-applications so they’re capable of being anything. From sweepstakes, to viral marketing, to letting users get in touch with other users and providing instant reviews on services or products.

2. Blogging: Blog Outreach
Public Relations, Customer Relations, Marketing (SEO Focus)

Blog Outreach is connecting with bloggers to understand their feedback on a product or service, as well as, help spread news (usually via seeding viral content) and for my purposes – SEO. Blog Outreach is something I’ve done over at e-Storm for SEO purposes with some great results for the SEO campaign.

3. Document Sharing – Sharing Online Documents, Presentations
Thought Leadership, Branding

Document sharing communities like Slideshare.net (PowerPoint sharing website) is a perfect place to reach the B2B Audience – other business people who are looking for knowledge in specific areas, case studies, industry trends and presentations from conferences. One can find all sorts of material from Social Media/SEO/PPC presentation from yours truely to Morgan Stanley’s annual report on the Technology Industry.

There is also an SEO benefit as you can use leverage SlideShare.net’s authority to get your content ranked well. Your content will be under SlideShare.net, but it will still be your content in front of users in the top 10 search results.

3. Linkbait – Creating & Sharing Content to Encourage Viral Lift
Public Relations, Branding, Link Building for for SEO

Linkbait – creating content that will be virally picked up and discussed – is basically one step above “viral videos”. It is about creating viral content – videos, tools, content, photos etc – that will be talked about, Digged, Blogged about…and hopefully linked to. As you may know, the more links pointing to a website, the better the chances the website will rank well on Google. Heck even Google says Social Media is great for SEO.

4. Blog Community
Customer Relations (Developer Community/Brand Loyalty)

A few companies, such as Ugobe (former client), which creates a sophisticated dinosaur robot called the Pleo, has created a community for Pleo owners which allow them to exchange their Pleo dinosaur experience with each other through their own “Plogs” (basically, Pleo blogs).

A company that provides a product that customers will have a strong connection to (like Pleo owners treating their robot dinosaurs like real pets) would be an ideal environment for allow users to connect and share via an internal blogging community.

5. Blogging on Corporate Blogs
Customer Relations, Public Relations

The United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to Marriot CEO Bill Marriot now have blogs. Blog are officially the mainstream for interactive marketers and public relation folks. They perform as a non-traditional communication tool – SEC recently declared that you can make official financial statements on blogs – that goes beyond the stiffness of a press release. And more interestingly of all, people are generally allowed and encourages to leave comments, provide feedback, and link to them.

6. Microblogging
Customer Relations, Public Relations, Marketing

Microblogging services like Twitter are a fast paced version of a blog and chat room rolled up in one. As I’ve written on previously, Zappos, HR Block, and Downing Street (UK equivalent to the US White House) have effectively used Twitter as a way to not only “microblog” new happenings but interactive with the twitter community.

Payoffs can be measured as real ROI, as Dell made +$1 million in sales via Twitter, or in terms of branding and reputation where disgruntled customers can be readily and transparent addressed (See Comcast example on the New York Times).

7. Social Networks: Advertising
Marketing, Branding, Engagement

Putting display ads on Facebook is not a Social Media plan. And ditto for placing ads on blogs, that’s still just good old fashioned ads.

It is as innovative as putting a banner ad the iWon search engine in 1999 (You guys remember iWon, right?). While Social Networks are known for having horrible CTR, Facebook SocialAds and MySpace Hypertargeting at the best hope for marketers and those with shares in social networks.

However, Facebook’s Social Ads and other new forms of social network advertising do show signs of promise when well executed as part of an integrated campaign.

8. Social Networks: Engagement
Customer Relations, Public Relations, Marketing

This can be anything from having a Facebook Page that you actually make active or something like the Expedia campaign, which had the lovable Expedia Gnome leaving comments on MySpace users’ profiles.

9. Social Networks: Presence (Creating Profile, Fan Page)
Public Relations, Customer Relations

United States Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome have frequently updated Facebook profiles. The Gavin Newsome staff have used Gavin Newsome’s profile active with news on Mayor Newsome’s upcoming events, videos of recent talks and even updates on his status message (to reflect his position on relevant news stories).

10. Wiki Collaboration
Customer Relations (Developer Community)

Wiki can be an interesting way of “crowdsourcing” a company’s help and support page or at the very least augmenting. Central Desktop, a project management SaaS tool, is one company that allows its users to contribute guides on new ways to use Central Desktop.

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Last Sunday after brunch, I happened upon a sign in Noe Valley in San Francisco which said “Fuck Mormons” in bright pink (fuchsia?) colors that was a response to the recent Prop 8 Gay Marriage ban that was passed in California.

Click to See URL Referrals for photo (24-36 Hours)

I uploaded the photo to Flickr on Monday. That photo made it to SFist.com (a local website covering San Francisco) and quickly sparked an intense discussion of over 100 comments. In a mere 2-3 hours, it made it to Reddit, Facebook, Stumbleupon and other social media websites quickly generating over 800 visits (as of now, over 1,800 people have viewed the photo).

Click to Google Search Results. Achieved in 3-4 Hours.

What’s also interesting is that SFist became ranked within the top 10 Google search results for “Fuck Mormons” within 3-4 hours of the posting going live. But yet as of today, SFist has fallen off the top ten ranking, with SFCitizen and Reddit’s coverage of the sign in the ten instead.

And by Tuesday, the photo caused enough of a stir that the home owner was interviewed by a local news team from CBS 5, which asked him: “You’ve been following the discussion on SFist. While some comments support you, others are saying, ‘this isn’t going to help.’”

And apparently, some people thought it was photoshopped: “CBS 5 walked the neighborhood in search of the home. There have been concerns the photo might have been photo-shopped, but it does not appear to be the case.”

Yes, I’m kinda Internet famous now, but more important this event does have some interesting social media lessons….

Social Media Lesson

• Social Media travels fast. From a Flickr upload on Monday to a news reporter on Tuesday.
• Context is Everything: SFist editor Brock Keeling took a simple photo and turned it into a political question by posting the photo and asking if the sign was an appropriate response to prop 8. If it was uploaded to Flickr without any such questions, I’m sure news wouldn’t spread as fast (or far).
• Don’t underestimate traffic from “second tier” websites like Reddit, which brought more traffic than all other channels.
• Surprisingly, Facebook didn’t carry as that many visits to the photo as I thought it would, considering the size of Facebook.
• Google ranks news pages very fast, putting SFist within #10 for the “fuck mormon” keyword in 3-4 hours of the blog post going live. Yet at the same time, they got quickly outranked by Reddit and other local blogs covering the event.

Personal Feelings about the Photo

I wasn’t trying to be a citizen journalist or even trying to make a political statement. Additionally, I don’t want to make a political statement on this blog and would like to ask any commenter here to not do so either.

I took the photo because I found it humorous at the time and I’m surprised by the intensity of the discussion stirred by this photo. I hope everyone involved – from the home owners to their neighbors – are doing okay and I hope that photo generated positive discussions on political expression.

In any case, I feel that the photo is not really “mine” per se. Someone, somewhere would have taken the photo eventually and it is likely the same thing that happened to my photo would happen to anyone else’s. Obviously, the “F*ck Mormon” sign was exactly that – a sign – which by definition is made to be noticed by the public. And get noticed by the public it did.

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Which can be brokendown into specific tactics and channels:

I could go on, but I suggest you signup for SocialRep’s webinar and read Ron Frederick’s notes on it. I would love to get in touch with Chris Kenton, SocialRep CEO, and converse with him. I’m surprised I havn’t heard or bumped into Chris.

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Last week, I presented at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit panel on Reputation Management. The SMMS is a sister conference of Online Market World, which is held in San Francisco. Speakers at SMMS included everyone from Best Buy, Nokia and Wells Fargo (real companies!) to the vanguard of Social Media, such as Brian Solis, Charlene Li, and Tara Hunt.

Above is the presentation I gave at the panel. You can find my other presentations at:
http://www.slideshare.net/EmergenceMedia

And as always, any feedback, questions and comments are welcome and encouraged.

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With over 25 speakers from the social media world, the Social Media: The Marketing Summit will be kicking off soon the at Moscone West in San Francisco, October 1-2. If you’d like some discount codes to attend the event, let me know and I’ll get them to you.

I feel very lucky to join such a highly esteemed ensemble of experts and speakers such as:

• Shel Israel:  Naked Conversations co-author
• Tara Hunt: Author of Whuffie Factor, Citizen Agency
• Charlene Li: formerly of Forrester, co-author of The Groundswell
• Brian Solis: CEO of FutureWorks PR, PR 2.0 blogger
• And many speakers from major companies such as Cisco and BestBuy and Peet’s Coffee & Tea and Wells Fargo Bank.

I’ll be speaking with several panelists on the topic of Reputation Monitoring with several other speakers. More info to come!

And of course, if there is a certain issue relating to Reputation Monitoring you’d like to see us cover, please let me know and I’ll pass the word to all the panelists.

And last, but not least: Thanks to Lisa Picarille for inviting me to speak!

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Twitter – the mobile-based microblogging service – has become the new darling among social media marketers and internet geeks since the SXSWi conference in 2007. Lacking any kind of monetization model, Twitter seems a trendy but not sustainable company, like PointCast in the 1990s.

Maybe Twitter wont be around to see 2010, yet many major brands have moved in to communicate with consumers and the world via Twitter: H&R Block (Finance), 10 Downing Street (The UK equivalent of US “White House”), Zappos (Online Retailer) and countless others like BBC News to Yahoo’s Marketing Team and Amazon.com to the New York LaGuardia airport. Is this wasted energy by the PR/Marketing offices of H&R Block or even US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s social media team?

The short answer is: no.

But to expand more, let’s discuss two subjects:

1. Two Quick Reasons to Consider Twittering for your Brand
2. Case Studies on the 3 different types of Twitters:
   Conversational, News Item and Reputation Monitoring Twitter Users

Two Reasons to Twitter

1. Understanding Social Media Better

Just by utilizing twitter, these brands through experimentation are learning and understanding more about social media and their customers. Twitter may not have a business model yet, but reaching out and getting to know customers is part of the business process these brands need to have to survive. Be it blogging, facebook-ing or twittering – the same core skills in understanding how to reach customers are similar. Learning how to do it on twitter is a skillset that can be applied to feature social media mediums.

2. Keeping Track of the “Linkerati” (Highly vocal and connected influencers)

Despite the buzz and activity of Twitter.com, their membership of just over 1 million users seem a paltry sum compared to MySpace, Facebook , Bebo and others.

However, Twitter is definitely on the bleeding edge of early adopters, specifically the “Linkerati” (as coined by Rand Fishkin). The Linkerati are the special type of early adopters who are very vocal on the Internet – be it twittering, blogging or doing a Yelp/Amazon review of your business or product. Current Twitter members, due to their Linkerati demographic, may have a higher than average say on influencing your brand.

The 3 Different Types of Twittering Brands

1. Conversational Twitters: H&R Block, Zappos, 10 Downing Street

H&R Block, Zappos and 10 Downing Street are incredibly innovate in that they truly embrace twitter as a conversational & microblogging platform.

H&R Block

H&R Block reaches out to Twitter members complaining about taxes and assist as customer service for those dissatisfied with their H&R Block experience. And yes, H&R Block – a financial services company – even does the occasional fart-related humor on twitter.

Zappos

Zappos‘ twitter is run by the Zappos CEO. He covers daily events and going-ons at Zappos to askings for feedback on their new beta website and throwing a free shoe prize here and there. His comments go from the serious and jovial. The Zappos CEO is twittering as someone who just happens to work for Zappos (Steve from Zappos) instead of sounding like a press release channel for Zappos.

10 Downing Street

10 Downing Street, while a highly public and political office, attempts to humanize itself with mentions of everything from how a visit from George Clooney caused “quite the stir” with the 10 Downing Street staff to answering questions from fellow twitter members.

2. News Item Twitters: Amazon.com, New York Times

Both Amazon.com and New York Times utilize Twitter as another distribution platform to send their audience updates. For Amazon.com, this means pushing out news about their news sales (Gold Box), while the New York Times publishes their latest headlines. For them twitter is based used as a one way microblogging platform.

This is definitely not very *social* media, but it allows yet another route by which to reach their audience in a relatively low cost (same mechanism as an RSS feed) method. They are embracing the idea that they benefit from being present wherever and how ever people view and digest information, specifically their information.

3. Reputation Monitoring Twitters: Radian6 & GeekSquad

Finally, there companies like Radian6 and the GeekSquad, which while not necessarily on Twitter, they do monitor, track and respond to Twitter comments. Of course, tracking and responding to Twitter messages are more important than being on Twitter itself.

GeekSquad is fairly well known American at-home computer servicing company. Recently, a fellow blogger friend, Michael Brito, twittered about a poor experience he received from Geek Squad on Twitter:

Only a few hours after twitter, Michael learns:

A few hours later, I get an email from Robert Stephens, the Founder and Chief Inspector of the Geek Squad. He asked me what my issues were and that he would look into it. Let’s see if he lives up to his promise of personally resolving the complaints of those who read the The Consumerist(lol, not really a consumerist reader though).

Nonetheless, this is a great illustration of how a company can use social media to track conversations and (hopefully) take action. We will soon find out if the Geek Squad is going to create a loyal customer, with lots and lots of friends, family and acquaintances. ; )

Radian6 is a social media monitoring company, so no surprise here. Recently, a representative from Radian6 reached out to me and mentioned he saw my twitter on social media and wanted to know if I needed a demo.

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Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion caused a stir in the SEO community last week by declaring that “SEO Shenanigans Pose a Clear and Present Danger to Social Media“, writing:

“I have recently witnessed a disturbing trend. Some respected experts are advocating launching social media marketing programs solely for the purpose of influencing search engines, rather than with the intent of fostering collaboration and genuine communication.

Having started this blog because I saw the increasingly link between SEO and Social Media, Steve and I are definitely on the opposite sides of the fence here. But, I think we can unite behind three central arguments:

1. We Marketers, Advertisers and PR People don’t make Social Media…
   What makes something viral or social is how involved the people get with the media. There are no such things as “Viral Vidoes” or “Social Networks” unless people use them. What we make has have to be interesting, authentic and worthy of being passed on to friends.
2. …But we can help encourage Social Media to happen easier.
   As PR, Marketers and SEO folks: our role is to only encourage “word of mouth” and social media participation, we cannot create it; that’s what “Social Media Optimization” is about. But to not to inform clients on the benefits of “Add to Del.icio.us links” or “Start a Blog to start a buzz” would be a failure of the part of the Agency. Of course, we must align tactics (Social Media) with goals (Building Community, Links) and the appropriateness (building real content people want to talk about) of the overall strategy.
3. Social Media and ROI: What do you tell the COO & CEO?
   In the end of the day, many clients ask “What’s the ROI on this?”. To say we’re going to use “Social Media to be part of the Community” will not cut it for many C-Level executives. Tell them that going long term on Social Media mans better SEO, Word of Mouth, Brand Awareness and Customer Service will make them listen.

Like Google Says: “The best way to create good links is to have good content”

A Google Ad: From Danny Sullivan’s Flickr Stream

As long as the SEO drive for “linkbait” (creating content to attract people to link back to the site) serves to create relevant and authentic Social Media content people will be interested in, the Community will benefit. The Community will quickly discern what’s worthy of being talked about, and what’s not. That’s the power of Word of Mouth and Social Media.

Read more on other points where I take a differing view from Steve:

1. Social Media Spam: Just from SEO people?
2. The SEO Community has been in Social Media as long as PR has, even Google encourages linkbait and writes on being Diggable
3. Social Media as SEO: Social Media is the Ultimate Search Engine Algorithm

1. Social Media Spam: Just from SEO people?
Steve is worried about how every SEO person will join Del.icio.us, vote on StumbleUpon and start blogs and twitters in some vague hopes of getting more links and getting better SEO. SEO spam is a real danger, but Social Media already has it’s own problems.

Last year, TechCrunch featured an article entitled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos“, which basically walked through a process of how to game and spam YouTube for viral video marketing success:

“Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video.We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this)”

…Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment.”

What this shows is that Social Media has always been targeted by shady Social Media Marketers and has always been under the fear of someone trying to “game” Social Media for publicity, branding, eyeballs on videos and links for SEO. Sony’s fake blog called “All I want for Xmas is a P2P” comes to mind.

I think it is unfair to point a figure directly at SEO alone. This is a Social Media problem.

2. The SEO Community has been in Social Media as long as PR has, even Google encourages linkbait and writes on being Diggable

Far from what Steve calls a “disturbing trend”, SEO’s love of Social Media has existed at least since 2005 (if not earlier). SEOMoz was one of the first companies talking about linkbait back in 2005: “Rand, How do I make Link-Worthy Content?“, “When Money Can’t Buy You Link Love”Even Google has gotten into the act with declaring in a UK ad that : “The more people you have linking to your site, the better. And the bet way to create good links is to have good content”

In the end of 2006, Stefanie at the Google Webmaster Blog, write in “Building Link Based Popularity“:

“Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build link-based popularity: Classically this involves optimizing your content so that thematically-related or trusted websites link to you by choice. A more recent method is link baiting, which typically takes advantage of Web 2.0 social content websites. One example of this new way of generating links is to submit a handcrafted article to a service such as http://digg.com.”

3. Social Media as SEO: Social Media is the Ultimate Search Engine Algorithm

As I’ve written about in the past, SEO is no longer SEO. It is Website Positioning Strategy. As noted in the Google Webmaster Blog and Google Guidelines, high rankings in Google comes from strong relevancy: building content people want to view and content people want to link to.

The more strategic goal of SEO is then the same as Social Media:

• Building an online presence (website to blog to ecommerce shop) with the Community in mind
• Building relevant content your audience wants
• Understanding how you can participate in that desired community
• Be present where ever your potential customers are: optimize for being on Yelp.com, Flickr.com – not just Google.com
• Making your website “optimized” for conversion: make it as easy as possible for visitors to buy, register etc
• Optimize your site to be portable, linkable, “mash-up able” with Social Media Optimization

Basically, the above asks “Can you build an online presence that is open, relevant and active in the community you want to be belong to”. If you can do the above, you will naturally be a strong leader in building an online brand, brand awareness, customer satisfaction and SEO.

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Along with the tidal wave of Social Media buzzwords hitting marketing and PR departments, “blogger outreach campaigns” is a big one. Blogger Outreach Campaigns are seen as the new “word of mouth” campaign, which is being looked at as a way to virally increase brand awareness and even help drive sales, all at a lower cost than other channels.

Moving Beyond a One-Time Blog Outreach Campaign

As David Wilson pointed out, Social Media Marketing is not a one-time event. David was using a Digg Article submission for an example, but the same applies for Blogger Community Outreach .

Don’t contact bloggers just when you have something to promote. Bloggers will catch to this very quickly. Just as your PR team keeps a steady relationship with reporters, keep a steady relationship with A-List, B-List and Upcoming bloggers and community beyond promotional emails: asking for feedback on your product/service, invite them for small get-togethers dinners, etc.

But companies will say: “But that takes too much resources to maintain blogger relationships, let’s do a one-time campaign”. Sure but keep in mind the following:

1. Blogs are apart of the your Brand’s Ecosystem
   For the brand Spirit Airlines, a blog post with the title “Do Not Fly Spirit Airlines” ranks 3 on Google and below it is a blog post on a very damning alleged leak from the Spirit Airlines CEO
2. Restoring a Brand is Difficulty and Lengthy
   According to BtoB, nearly 1 of 5 brands takes 2 years to recover from a crisis affect their brand image, sales or profits.
3. Customers probably Trust Bloggers more than you
   According to Nielsen, 66% of North Americans find Consumer Generated Media, like blogs, as reliable source of news. What are those blogs saying about your brand?

Conclusion: Social Media is Bigger than a Single Campaign

Social Media has opened up a whole new world for marketers and PR folks, which requires a long-term strategy beyond a one-off campaign: Community Marketing & Relation needs to be part of a companies normal PR and Marketing function.

Blogger Outreach campaigns have their place, but they must take place within a larger strategy of maintaining communications with bloggers and reaching out to those discussing your brand on forums, blogs and elsewhere.

See below for more details on those three points

1. The Community is Part of your Brand Ecosystem

When I’m asked by companies, “Why should we talk to bloggers or listen to what they say?” I make it clear that they, their brand and even their CEOs, are already being talked about by bloggers. They can join and help shape the conversation or let it shape them.

A quick search for “Paypal” on Google will show “PayPalSucks.com” as #2 on Google. I believe it was Dave McClure that mentioned that while PayPal was reluctant to promote a forum for their users to talk to Paypal, users were going to the PayPalSucks forum instead.
Stephen Spencer of CNET noted how Bloggers were increasingly present brand search results:

a. For Zappos

In the top Google Search Results, a search for “Zappos” presented “I Heart Zappos” blog post and a blog post by Start-Up Review rank top 10.

First Page Google Result for “Zappos”:
A business blog on Zappos and posting called “I Heart Zappos”

b. For Spirit Airline

Zappos received stunning reviews by the two blogs in the brand search, but not so for Spirit Airlines. A search for “Spirit Airlines” in Google led us to a blog post called “Do Not Fly Spirit Airlines” and a blog that posted an alledged leaked memo from the CEO, stating “Let them tell the world how bad we are” in response to a customer complaint.

A search for Spirit Airlines reveals some severe customer/PR relations issues.

2. Does Your Customers Trust Bloggers More Than You?

Recently, Nielsen conducted a global survey on people’s attitudes towards different advertising channels. Unsurprisingly, Word Of Mouth is king and online banner is second to the bottom.

qasd

3. Your Reputation is at Stake

Dave Wilson recently wrote on a BtoB report that reveal that 57% of marketing executives say they do not have a crisis plan in place in case of any crisis that can lead to negative coverage, declining sales, or reduced profitability. And 53% have experienced such crises.

More telling is how long it took to recover from such crises

• 23% of respondents said it took three months to a year for their brand to fully recover from a crisis
• 13.3% said it took more than two years to recover
• 17.7% said they have yet to recover after two years.

As part of crisis plan, it helps to have the ear to the ground – understanding what bloggers, reviewers on Amazon and forum members are saying – to look out for potential crises and know how to handle bloggers and others when it happens. You need to keep your ear to the community.

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Move over SEO, Social Media Marketing has the Cash Now?

Talking with clients and those in the marketing industry, there appears to be an increasing interest in Social Media/Word-of-Mouth at the cost of SEO. Search Engine Optimization has been hot from 2004-2006, but we’re now seeing budgets being shifted to Social Media/Word of Mouth.

Is this true over your at agency or marketing/PR team? Leave a comment and let me know.

Some general observations…

Changes in the SEO Industry Landscape

• SEO and PPC resources are being shifted to in-house for corporations, with agencies working more as Search Marketing trainers and consultants
• SEO trends have become increasingly more reliant on Social Media; hence, terms like the “linkerati” coming out from the SEO world
• SES San Jose 2007 was an excellent example on the growing emphasis on WoM/Social Media/PR. SES had a whole track dedicated to Social Media.

Social Media Marketing & the Widget Economy

• Facebook and Widgets have hit the marketing mainstream with the O’Reilly report on Facebook making it officially the year of Facebook and widgets.
• San Francisco Bay Area hosted at least 4 conferences on Facebook and Widgets in the past 3 weeks alone: SNAP, Widget Summit, Graphing Social Patterns, CommunityNext Platform.

How will SEO adapt? Will it finally turn more into a philosophy of website design and positioning rather than a specific marketing discipline?

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Summary: Mayor Gavin Newsom & the Personal Brand

There has been a lot of talk on the need to develop the “Personal Brand” and to help build connections to the audiences, customers or even voters via Social Media.

While there is a lot of theory and experimentation, one great example of this has been the Facebook profile of Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco. This posting will breakdown and identify what the folks behind Newsom’s profile have done so well.

Quick Background on Social Media and the Personal Brand

Todd Defren and his SHIFT team have developed some interesting approach to apply Social Media as “connection builder”, such us with their Social Media Press Rooom (plus a must see powerpoint).

On the Personal Brand side, there is are two thought leaders I’ve been following Rohit Bhargava, who has written extensively on it, and Brian Solis who recently wrote on how to approach Facbeook as a “Personal Brand” builder.

Gavin Newsom’s Facebook Profile: Social Media Press Room and Brand Builder

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Facebook profile, or who we call “Mayor McDreamy” at our office, is the first live example I’ve seen of taking “Facebook as Brand Builder” in a well executed way. While the profile is of Mayor Gavin Newsom, it is positioned as a profile for “Act Locally SF”, which is the official campaign group for Gavin Newsom.
The profile makes it feel very transparent on what Gavin Newsom’s interests and passion are and what he is involved in through simple “Notes” postings, “Group” associations, video, photos – the whole shebang.
At the same time, it is also an active profile: As his friend on Facebook, I’ve seen his status message change at least once a week (e.g. “Gavin Newsom is Proud of San Diego’s Mayor”) and received invites to charity events that he is involved in.

Let’s further break down the components that make the profile work:

Using Groups and “Causes” Application:

• Shows what Gavin Newsom is compassionate about, give a glimpse beyond what he cares about beyond local issues, such as “Doctors without Borders” and “Free the Jena 6″

Using the “Kyte” Application for Video Distribution:

• Use the “Kyte” application, to show videos of Gavin Newsom that also link back to his own video channel on kyte

Using “News” and “Post Items” to Inform the Community

• “Notes” and “Posted Items” acts as fliers on everything from what events Gavin Newsom is attending to job openings/volunteer opportunities

Flickr Photos on what Gavin Newsome has been up to

• This one is pretty self-explanatory

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Following up with my last post on the San Francisco Symphony’s Bloggers Night, I’d like to discuss the PR/marketing perspective of the event. I’ll review 1) Quick thoughts on the Bloggers Night; and 2) What I suggest they do different in the next round.
I’ve done a few blog outreach campaigns, but “Bloggers Night” events are an interesting mix of old fashioned PR and social media.

Another Blogger’s Night: By Monster Cable

Indeed, I actually went to another “Bloggers Night” this week held by Monster Cable in the hip dot-com area of San Francisco, known as SoMa near the Adobe and Nokia offices. But more on that, some other time. Pictures of the event, here.

A Marketer’s take of the SF Symphony Blog Outreach

The Bloggers: SocialMedia.biz to MetroBlogging SF

There were approximately 10-15 of us, from Nick Douglas (of ValleyWag fame), Eddie Codel (GE TV), JD Lasica of SocialMedia.biz and some true local events only bloggers from Metroblogging SF and Civic Center.

While this may seem like a strange mix, I think it was the right mix though I wish I knew the “who” and “from where” of the Bloggers Night guestlist. Blogs that cover local events, Metroblogging and Civic Center, are the obvious “first tier” choices. But as the Symphony is looking to extend its current audience, it is worth going long and expanding from local news coverage in print to online blogs

Blog Outreach: Losing Control or Gaining Exposure

I spoke to several of the Symphony PR people, specifically Oliver Theil and Gary Ginstling. I asked them why they decided to do blog outreach.

1.All of them were very knowledge about what is going on in social media, citing blogs to Yelp.com as an alternative means by which a good portion of people (especially in the Bay Area) get their information.
2.Social Media will not replace the Symphony’s needs for coverage in the local newspaper, it will supplement it. People gather news in different ways. Some via Yelp others from the local Sunday paper.

“Tag” the Event, So You Can Track the Conversations

Something that all the bloggers asked Kevin Smokler, one of the key organizers, was “what’s the Technorati and Flickr tag for this event”. It sounds like an obvious issue, but the Monster Cable event had no such tags. No tags means it’ll be just a little harder to track conversations generated from the event.

Building a Better Bloggers Night Experience

1. Foster a Sense of “Community”

The word “community” is a tired word, but it is still an appropriate term. All of us bloggers were brought to the “Green Room” at the Symphony without introduction and honestly, I think some of us felt like an awkward random bunch.

A quick informal round of introduction would be appropriate, where all the bloggers could introduce themselves to each other and to the Symphony press team.

2. Build a Retention Program: Follow-Up, Feedback, Discounts

It would be interesting for the Symphony folks to do a simply follow-up with the bloggers. Not just a simple question, but also links to photos of the performance, online program materials – stuff would further make it easier for bloggers to post something up.

Also, I’m not sure if anyone who has blog posted on the Symphony has been followed-up or contacted by the Symphony folks. It would be nice for them to offer comments/feedback on our commentary on the Symphony experience.

Perhaps even offer discounts for bloggers who decide to go to the Symphony on their own?

3. Educating the Bloggers on the Product (Or in this case, the Music)

While I love Bach’s violin sonatas, I don’t know classical music as much as I should. I think a quick 5 minute education by Symphony folks would be much appreciated – nothing complicated, but a simple context as to the concert program (e.g. “why is this song famous?”) and its history.

This would help set the blogger’s expectations and understanding; hopefully, a positive enough effect to help further encourage enjoying and blogging about the event. Plus, we’ll get to sound smart when we write about it. :)

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Last Saturday, I attended the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference in Silicon Valley. The Conference, by Noah Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, brought together an interesting array of speakers to talk about Viral Marketing – from tactics, strategy, philosophy to viral marketing as Facebook widgets to community building.

Most of the speakers ranged from the experienced serial entrepreneurs (Dave McClure: PayPal, SimplyHired) to founders of accidental start-ups (Eric Nakagawa of icanhascheezurger). The atmosphere was very much on the casual side, with some point reaching nearly 1990s dot-com humor with of Adam Rifkin of Booze Mail making a cocktail during a talk to clearly very sharp and serious with Keith Rabois of Slide.

Below are my notes on:

1. Widgets – Metrics, Key Points on Facebook Widgets
2. Notes from Keith Rabois, one of the most impressive speaker at CommunityNext (Definitely Read This)
3. Flickr Photos: Including PowerPoint Slides given by Speakers. Plus: All Photos of the event
4. Feedback for the next CommunityNext Conference

** General Notes by Theme **
The Power of Leveraging Existing Networks: iLike v. last.fm

• The long established music discovery service from 2002, Last.FM, has been quickly overtaken by iLike which grew quickly once it launched the iLike widget for Facebook. (Tom Conrad of Pandora)
• Leveraging Existing Off-site Networks: It is a simple feature for your product to ask if the user if wants to import her Gmail Address book (or Yahoo, etc) and see who else is on the site and to “friend” existing contacts.

The Appeal of Widgets on User Profiles – Unique, Media, not Technology (From Jia of RockYou)

• “It’s like the first day of highschool” and you want to show-off how you’re different.
• Think of Widgets as a Media tool and a product, not a technological gadget
• It is not about “being technologically cool” but “being cool to use”

Facebook v. MySpace Widget Marketing Channels (Flickr Slide)

• There are 14 channels (opportunities) for spreading widgets, such as from the mini-feed, refer a friend (shown when adding a widget) and the profile page. (From Jia from Rock You).
• MySpace channels were mainly focused on In-Profile, Profile Comments, Bulletin Messages (e.g. “Your Friend Daniel has added Widget X”), and Forums (not often talked about, but highly effective).

MySpace v. Facebook Differences, Openness (From Jia of Rock You)

• FaceBook: Users do not necessarily browse around by visiting profiles, they have more reliance on using the FaceBook Mini-Feed on keeping touch on their friends
• In FaceBook, you need to rely on the Mini-Feed to place your call to action, e.g. “Daniel Riveong has just added the widget ZYZ, you should too”
• In Facebook, a user can only invite 10 friends a day to add a widget, making the friends feel more special

UGC Challenges

• With Yelp.com: Debate the use of paid-reviews to seed reviews. How authentic is it?
• Use MyBlogLog, Friendster and Others: Spam. Black-Hat marketers will always look for cheap tricks to hijack a platform for spam marketing tactics.
• From Friendster: The need to constant “prune” bad content to help develop the culture of the community and thus the brand

Miscellaneous Viral and Widgets Metrics

• Booze Mail on Facebook was able to grow its userbase at 30% per day
• RocketYou achived 9 million users in Facebook in 1.5 months
• Friendster: For every 1 (Exhibitionist) profile, there is 5,000-10,000 (Voyeurs) viewers
• Development of Widgets: ranged from 2 days to 4 weeks, using 1-2 programmers.

** Keith Rabois of Slide **

Lesson 1: “Viral Growth is Really Hard”
A very, very good reminder that Viral marketing and growth (user adoption) is just not magic and not just putting a YouTube video of a “funny video” and expecting traffic. It’s a mix of luck and strategy.

Examples:
Only 1 really great viral video every 6 months
Facebook Widgets: LinkedIn and Yelp.com have 2 widgets each, all have so far failed to reach beyond 4000 users each.

Lesson 2: Knowing the Value of a User: Viral Marketing v. E-Commerce Projection
E-commerce (Online Retailers) have data on the “tangible of users”, and so there is no real need for viral marketing. They know how much they are willing to spend for each user.

In a space where the value of each new user value is unknown viral marketing becomes very attractive; it has potentially the “lowest marginal cost for user acquition”. It is the safe choice to go far, when you don’t know how much you should spend, so you spend as little as possible.

Lesson 3: Is PR helpful in Viral Marketing? Not Really.
Keith felt that the best PR is done in-house, based on his experience and from talking to others. He cites the story that out of 5-6 start-ups in a room, only 1 company raised their hand when asked if they were happy with their PR firm. Other speakers repeated a similar theme.

Lesson 4: Viral/Social Network Structures & Business Model Changes
Yelp was originally an “Ask a friend where to eat tonight” referral service. YouTube was more focused as a dating service, but changed after utterly failure in the Los Angeles market. Slides was originally desktop-based before going into the Widget space with Facebook.

** For Next Time: Suggestions for Improvements **

Noah, Adam and the rest of the CommunityNext gang pulled off a heck of a conference. So I’m providing suggestions here, but in no way are they intended to criticize either the CommunityNext team or their invited speakers. This is stuff both CommunityNext and the speakers will hopefully (I hope that is) find constructive and useful.

Overall, I think a quick 30 minute session on refreshing one’s presentation skill will go a long way in making many of the speaker’s performance. We all need reminders! Also, maybe invite folks from the Marketing Agency world too to talk about their experience, especially working with a client to understand the viral/social-media space…of course, I’m not suggesting merely me. :)

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If SEO is Multi-Disciplinary: Is In-House Better?

If SEO requires a holistic approach that integrates content development, PR, blog outreach, blog marketing, usability and so on – there is always the looming question of which is better: a well-turned in-house SEO team or the top SEO consultant with a willing client?

With the level of coordination and integration required, I’m leaning towards the in-house team. Although, I think there are currently more creative/top SEO consultants then there are top notch in-house SEO team. However, going in-house has been the trend for the past 1-2 years.

What Do Agencies Need to Do?

For those of us working on the Agency side, we need to ask ourselves: If our client’s competitors are a top-notch in-house SEO team, how can we act like our client’s in-house team rather than as outside consultants? What training is required? What cross-discipinary (PR to conten producing) stakeholder buy-ins is need? What Long Term planning must be done?

See the various Case Studies of a successful in-house Social Media Marketing campaign below:

Docshop (by David Willson)

“Sujan James Sujan Patel is responsible for driving organic and social media traffic to Docshop, a health information portal.

Getting web sites to link to anything health related can be an extremely difficult task, but Sujan has managed to add over 38,000 links this year!”

“Digg, and Stumble Upon are very good sites and can drive a lot of traffic but smaller niche sites can drive good traffic that is more likely to come back to your site. This is something I haven’t seen many marketers take advantage of.”

SEOMoz
SEOMoz built over 1,000,000 links in 33 months through the quality of its content, participation in the SEM community and timeliness. See Rand’s article here.

Link Building success through content:

Web 2.0 Awards – 72K + 30K = 100K+ links
Beginner’s Guide to SEO – 6.5K + 5.6K = 12K+ links
Page Strength – 4K + 3.5K = 7.5K+ links
Search Ranking Factors – 14K + 9K = 23K+ links
SEO Blog – 19K + 34K = 53K+ links

SplashCast (Via Jeremiah Oywang)
Splashcast hired to Social Media folks to active conduct community outreach via: blogging, sending trackbacks, commenting on other blogs, using Twitter, reaching out to bloggers for product launch and other methods.

“As a result of implementing this strategy before, during and after our initial launch, we had more than 1,000 publishers register for an account at launch, we doubled that in our first month to 2,000 and doubled it again in our second month to more than 4,000. SplashCast player loads are now aproaching 5.5 million.”

Of Blog Outreach: “That strategy lead to more than 250 blog mentions within 48 hours of our launch, for example.”

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Just recently I wrote:

If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?

Now, Google Universal Search makes us ask: What other channels do we need to optimize in (YouTube, Google Video, Google News) to get on the Google SERPs? A reverse question.

As state by David Wilson:

What GUS does in short is reduces the number of organic listings available on the home page. No longer is getting to the first page of Google good enough. Now you need to be in the top 5 or 6 positions as the rest will be taken by video and news.

Seems like we’re practically on the same page here.

SEO no longer means optimizing only one’s website, or links…it means being active promoting and staying relevant through a variety of channels and mediums. It means distributing your content on YouTube, Yelp, Wikipedia, Press Releases etc.

Google Universal Search really presents no new known challenges of SEO. It just brings the message home: Old SEO is Dead, New SEO is a form of Multi-Channel Content Optimization and Distribution.

It’s all been said before:

1. SEO as Website Positioning Strategy? – Updated
2. Quick Post: Editorialization of Google Results, And the Change in SEO
3. Google’s Personalized Search: How Much Should We Care?

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SEO is Dead! Well, maybe your Google SEO

Why is SEO important? Because the majority of people search on the Internet to find things…reviews, contact numbers, shopping etc. But what is Search? Google? Yahoo?

If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?

Is your SEO really just “Google Search Optimization”? Have you brainstormed with your marketing team to see if your company, product and/or service needs to do more?

The Linkerati: Where Are They?

Rand Fishkin has made much about how SEO folks need to make sure their linkbait (and ditto for Viral/WoM campaigns) needs to cater to the Linkerati audience, the savvy online influencers who create and forward content.

But moving beyond finding what appeals to the Linkerati, is the need to find out where are they online, We need to diversify our thinking on 1) how where/how they create content; and 2) how they find content.

Recently, ValleyWag noted that while the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati has stagnated “personal publishing is still growing, but the fastest growth is occurring on social media properties”, such as MySpace, Digg, Yelp, and Twitter. Indeed, a recent study suggests that “40% of all social networkers said they use social networking sites to learn more about brands or products that they like”.

Questions to Ask:

1. Where are my customers? Who are the influencers within those circles?
2. Where do they search?
   (Do they search on Yelp, Technorati, Digg or Del.icio.us?)
3. Have I distributed my content there?
   (E.g. Placement of Yelp, Blog on Technorati, Content on Digg, Bookmarked on Del.icio.us)
4. Is it searchable? Or, simply, Findable? Is it “optimized”?

Counter Point: Who needs the Linkerati? Web-2-What and Big Seed Marketing.

There is the question of how important the Linkerati crowd is in shear physical numbers and how important the Linkerati and influencers are in general.

In May’s Harvard Business review, Duncan Watts and Jonah Pertti proposed the idea of “big-seed marketing” as opposed to “Influencer”-based viral marketing, which:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.
…
big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread.

The Tiny Linkerati

According to a Pew Internet May 6 study, 49% of the US audience are those that have “few “tech assets” and limited use of technology”. The survey goes on to show how little of the US audience are among the Web 2.0 Internet savvy. They are so little of them. Is it worth the effort on being on Yelp, Twitter, Digg, MySpace etc to appeal to them?

Of Course, It Depends

It is important to understand that you can create online marketing success without getting caught in the buzz about about “influencers” or the Linkerati. It depends what market your client and your customers are in. Of course, innovation carries risk – but this is not to forsake the long-hanging fruit for risk taking and vice-versa. You need both.

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The past two weeks have been a busy week for me: Ad:Tech, Web 2.0 Expo, attending the Social Medic Club and helping a client ramp up their Blog Outreach program.

Speaking with folks from Ad:Tech and just surveying the marketing blogosphere lately, we are seeing three trends that are affecting the marketing landscape all the way from increasing importance of a CMO to the strategic changes required for SEO.

The Three Trends Affecting Marketing

• Longer Tail of Media Consumption
  Increasing variety of media (mobile, social networks, search blogs, Xbox 360) that people are consuming means more effort required for marketing/brand/PR integration and more requirements for a “grand strategy” vision.
• Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
  Increasing Trend Towards Measurement and ROI means that marketing will take high prominence in the C-level space, helping shape product development, internal culture and budgeting
• Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
  Social affecting all of Interactive Marketing Activities, diversifying the types of media being consumed and making marketers have greater engagement with the customer audience and moving from brand control to brand management.

Changes in the Evolving Marketing Landscape

• Raise of the CMOs (As Opposed to VP of Marketing)
  Elevating Marketing position as part of a revenue generating, rather than cost center; rebalancing the importance of the sales team vis-à-vis the marketing team.
• Evangelist becomes more integral to Marketing-PR
  Going beyond being a spokesperson, writing to the community (writing post, responding to comments) and generally engaging the community be it on Yelp, Amazon.com reviews or blogs or in-real-life (IRL)
• Executing the Social Media Program
  Need for Evangelists and Community Managers to execute Social Media Program to engage, manage and measure Social Media and Communities.
• SEM becomes Strategic Website Positioning
  How SEM (particularly SEO) is shifting from its early days of simple keyword analysis to integrating brand, PR, word-of-mouth, content strategy, usability etc. SEM or Strategic Website Positioning needs to coordinate under the CMO and with the Social Media Program.

1. Raise of the CMO (Not VP of Marketing)

It is common knowledge that when a business is adjusting to a difficult economy, R&D slows and marketing is chopped. Marketing is seen as an expenditure, rather than vehicle for sales. The increasing emphasis on measurement and ROI is changing that somewhat.

Marketing’s evolution to a more strategic role (from VP-level to C-level) is boosted by three trends:

• Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
  Thanks to better metrics and ROI measurement, Marketing is getting more respect as a revenue generator.
• Longer Tail of Media Consumption:
  Diversifying media consumption means more difficult in marketing integration and greater need for strategic direction in managing multi-channel marketing.
• Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
  Social Media is helping fuel the long tail of media consumption. It also has been pushing companies to integrate their PR/Word-of-Mouth/Marketing campaigns and change their internal corporate cultures.

Jon Miller writes most succinctly on the definition and greater responsibility of a CMO at the Futurelab Blog:

“To be successful, the CMO must play a role broader than just leading the marketing organization. The role must include driving revenue, leading innovation, and providing strategic vision. These growth champions must lead all four Ps – not just promotion but also product strategy, place (channel and distribution), and pricing.

Like other C-level executives, these CMOs must be rigorous in their financial planning and metrics, making revenue forecasts and justifying their budgets like the investment in the future that marketing spending really is.”

See Jon Miller’s article at:

1. ”Are You a CMO or a VP of Marketing?”, April 30, 2007
   http://blog.futurelab.net/2007/04/are_you_a_cmo_or_a_vp_of_marke.html

2. Evangelist

While we can debate the number of blogs or if MySpace is here to stay, Social Media has changed the Internet landscape just as the Internet in the 90s changed the marketing and business landscape.

Evangelist have been around before Social Media took off as the latest buzzword, but the importance of their role is increasingly clear if corporations are to have plans to thoroughly engage their online audience and communities.

Jeremiah explains that: “An evangelists role is to go beyond understanding and get others to ‘believe’ in your product or service. This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human communications, building trust. “

In Matt McGee’s “Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist”, Matt’s focuses on how even an evangelist can apply to small businesses in:

• To Write: “You need a blog to communicate directly with customers, and good writers make the best bloggers….In this day and age, you need to become a mini-publisher and that demands someone who knows how to write.”
• To Network: “finding customers and joining their communities and conversations. Good “people skills” are imperative to market successfully.”
• Do Public Relations: “This should include traditional media; press releases are still the way to reach out to those folks. But it should also include online influencers: important bloggers and important online discussion forums that cover your industry.”

Read more at:

• “Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist”, April 26, 2007
  http://searchengineland.com/070426-082409.php
• “Understanding the role of an Evangelist at a Web 2.0 Company”, October 07, 2006
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/10/07/understanding-the-role-of-an-evangelist-at-a-web-20-company/

3. Social Media Program

Jeremiah Owyang is on *the* thought leader when it comes to understanding how corporations need to respond to social media opportunities. If you’re not reading his blog, you should.

While he has written about the need for Evangelist and Community Managers, Jeremiah recently wrote on the technical needs of the Social Media Programs the Evangelist and Community Managers would execute, listing some important tactical level thinking:

Recognize the new influencers. Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.

Prepare for all scenarios. Create an internal process or at least discuss how to deal with crises. (such as exploding products, embarrassing situations). Draw from classic PR strategies, but realize that acting quickly in a human way, and not hiding is key.

…

Employees will blog, embrace. In addition to creating the corporate blog(s), be sure to recognize the natural employee bloggers that appear. You may find them in the product groups, support, and marketing departments. Have a discussion on how to include them in your strategy, even if it means to let them continue on their own. When it comes to trust, prospects and customers may trust employee bloggers that don’t have the corporate logo on their blog.

Measurement. You’ll need to measure to prove worth in this new arena, get more budget and even get a raise. I’ve discussed this extensively, see all posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

See more under:

• “Strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program (Starting internally first)“, April 23, 2007
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/04/23/strategies-for-organizing-your-corporate-social-media-program/
• “10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations”, December 12, 2006
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/12/18/10-social-media-strategies-for-the-corporations/
• “Understanding the Community/Evangelist Role, and profiles of a few of my Favorite Folks”, March 26, 2007
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/26/understanding-the-technology-evangelist-role-a-few-of-my-favorite-folks/

4. SEM becomes Strategic Website Positioning

SEO (and with it PPC) has been steadily evolving away from the traditional SEO methods, with a full embrace of Social Media to usability to content strategy, with changes occurring in:

1) the further integration of PR-ish tactics like “linkbaiting”; 2) the embrace of social media in social media marketing; 3) changing the metrics from rankings and to relevant traffic and conversion; and 4) thinking about usability and conversion optimization, not just search traffic generation.

All of these new changes will be unfamiliar to someone from the early days of SEO, which mostly concerned itself with placing important keyword on the webpages.

We are now at the point of needing to recast SEM (SEO and PPC) as Strategic Website Positioning:

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

See more at:
“SEO as Website Positioning Strategy? – Updated”, February 26, 2007
http://www.emergence-media.com/2007/02/seo-as-website-positioning-strategy/

Closing Thoughts: A Warning on Social Media Fatigue

I still very much remember the irrational exuberance of the Dot-Com (Web 1.0) and know that not every SharkyBuisnessIdeaHere.com will not raise up to become an Amazon.com or an Ebay.

The audience, the social media audience, will suffer from “Social Media Fatigue”. People can only support and pay attention to a limited amount of the ever increasing variety of social media websites, video networks, Pligg (digg) clones and Twitters twittering and Myspace commenting.

At the same time, the Internet was not a fad and has brought about the behemoth that is Google made websites like Wikipedia and YouTube possible.

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What happened to Word Of Mouth Marketing?

In the online marketing buzz, “Social Media Marketing” is akin to the Internet business frenzy about “Web 2.0″. It’s what everyone is talking about, even this blog.

Via Marketing Pilgrim, iProspect has released a report, Social Networking User Behavior Study, which confirms the power of social networking websites:

• 1 in 3 Internet users state that social networks have influenced their purchase decisions.
• 1 in 4 Internet users visit the most popular social networking sites at least once a month.
• About 20% of visitors to social networking sites don’t search once they’ve reached the site.

Interesting numbers, but it may seem unsurprising (if not low) to those who are acquainted with Word-Of-Mouth Marketing (WOMM), which usually see numbers showing that 80% of consumers consider WOM as the most trusted source of information. Those are numbers frequently mentioned by BzzAgent.

Indeed maybe it’s time for those who want to do some Social Media Marketing, to get a refresher on Word-of-Mouth Marketing and how it applies to SEO…

Word of Mouth Marketing

Word-of-Mouth marketing can be a pretty expansive term that encompasses offline and online activities.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Associations (WOMMA) describes WOMM as:

“Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services [DR: sounds like Linkbaiting], and making it easier for that conversation to take place [DR: sounds like Social Media Optimization].”

Sounds familiar to “Social Media Marketers”, non?

See what the WOMMA describes as covered under Word-of-Mouth:

• Buzz Marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.
• Viral Marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.
• Community Marketing: Forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities.
• Grassroots Marketing: Organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.
• Evangelist Marketing: Cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.
• Product Seeding: Placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals.
• Influencer Marketing: Identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others.
• Cause Marketing: Supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause.
• Conversation Creation: Interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.
• Brand Blogging: Creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere, in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about.
• Referral Programs: Creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends.

Again, a very expansive list but also nicely overlaps with many things that Online PR folks and Social Media Marketing folks do, from blog outreach to linkbait.

Social Media Marketing as a Bigger Picture, Not an SEO Tool
So why does this matter? David Wilson said that at he felt SES and of the SEO World:

“The SEO field needs to stop thinking of social media optimization as a short-term tactic that they can use to game the search engines. Not everything needs to center around a company’s URL.”

I think if SEO folks and even the newly emerging Social Media Marketers take a lesson from the more established world of Word of Mouth marketing, they would have a greater sense of appreciation of understand SMM/SMO is part of a greater marketing/pr activity that “can be used to help their business improve customer satisfaction and gain market share.”

I highly recommend that all Search/Social Media Marketers read WOMMA’s Word of Mouth 101.

Note: My employer, e-Storm International, is a member of WOMMA.

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• Overall Strategy
• Messaging and Approach
• Making the Connection: First Contact
• After the Review Blog Posting

The full article is on the Emergence-Media Wiki (seldom used admittedly) to encourage everyone to contribute ideas to the “Blog Outreach: How to Pitch Bloggers” article. Here are some excerpts:

Build Your Relationships: Recognize Them Publicly
Lots of companies may send “thank you’s” for reviewing their product (good or bad) on the blogger’s website. But how many create a “Blog Mentions” page on their corporate website (or blog)? Think beyond listing the generic press releases under your “Press Room” section. As they say, give some “link love” back to the blogger (regardless of the review).

Be Clear with Your Blogger: On Reviews, On Embargoes etc.
The big Microsoft Vista incident with the free Acer Laptops was due to the lack of clarity and consistency on what conditions were bloggers given the review units. Bloggers are like lack amateur journalists, they may not know exactly what you mean by an embargo or what a review unit is. Be clear and consistent – but in human language, not legalese. Bloggers will compare notes and see if they received different emails, they did this publicly with Microsoft Vista with embarrassing results.

Know the Landscape Part 1: Look Beyond the A-Listers
It’s one thing to know the A-List bloggers, its another to know what mid-tier blogs they read. Just like in regular PR, you may need to hit the mid-tier bloggers (who are read by the A-List bloggers) before you get covered by the big leagues. Don’t be fooled by looking only at Alexa data or Technorati rankings, see who links to them too.

Please see the entire “Blog Outreach: How to Pitch Bloggers” article at Emergence-Media Wiki (seldom used admittedly). Everyone is encouraged to contribute ideas appropriately.

Not sure how well this whole wiki thing will work out, but it’s an experiment I’m trying out.

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Update: Fixed MS Word HTML issue. Thanks to Jake for letting me know.
Search Engine Optimization or Strategic Website Positioning?

Search marketing veterans have seen the shift of SEO tactics moving from keyword density and page title optimization to the leveraging of PR-like tactics to conduct link-building (building rankings by having others link to your website) and to now even more complex strategies. At this point is SEO still SEO or has it outgrown that name? Maybe it is time to look at the idea of “Strategic Website Positioning”?

The maturing of the SEO industry has resulted in many changes. The top four has been 1) the further integration of PR-ish tactics like “linkbaiting”; 2) the embrace of social media in social media marketing; 3) changing the metrics from rankings and to relevant traffic and conversion; and 4) thinking about usability and conversion optimization, not just search traffic generation.

All of these new changes will be unfamiliar to someone from the early days of SEO, which mostly concerned itself with placing important keyword on the webpages.

What Does Strategic Website Positioning Mean?

The Working Definition

The idea behind “Strategic Website Positioning” is not original. Businesses create websites with considerations of what the website should be to their targeted audience.

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

From this we can build further questions…

Community Positioning

• “What are similar people tagging (or perhaps tagging with similar words) – Del.icio.us and Google Search History” (SEOBook)
• “What are similar people reading? (Via My Yahoo! or Google Reader or MyBlogLog) – Graywolf recently highlighted how MyBlogLog can use your readers to show what community your site is in” (SEOBook)
• “What words are associated with your brand or site? What sites are associated with those words? What searcher intent is associated with those words? What else are they searching for?” (SEOBook)
• What Terms Are Your Competitors Using? On their website, on their copy, on their AdWords campaigns?

Content Building based on Community Positioning

Building on the above, but including:

• Content Funneling (See Emergence-Media on “Building Content for Branded and Non-Branded Search“)
  How is your website catering to your target audience in general product research, comparative shopping and purchasing mode? How can you be considered an authoritative source for each?
• What is the approach on new sources on online content like blogs and widgets?

Social Media Assessment

• How Visible are You in Social Media Websites?
  How “popular” are you online? Do reputation management? See how communities, blogs, reviews and del.icio.us describe your website?
• How do you want to Participate in Social Media Websites?
  Do video promotions? Community building? Virals? Podcasting?

Search Engine Positioning

• Getting on One-Box Search (See Google on Travel searches, Website Searches)
  Are you using Google Base to get listed on Google’s Real-Estate Seach?
• Getting on Vertical Search like Technorati, Oodle, Kayak, *Shopping Search Engines*
  Beyond the big search engines Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask, what about the specialized vertical search engines?

Greater Marketing/MarComm/PR Integration

• Sharing “Keywords” Knowledge:
  Does some department have consumer studies on what words people use to describe your product?
• Integrating Offline Ads with Search:
  What’s your slogan, hook, that song playing in the background of your commercial. Is that integrated into your search strategy?

Conclusion: SEO Needs a Conceptual Reset and Reboot

I could go on and on, on the list above. They are not hard and fast categories, but they are the type of questions that need to be asked. They maybe best laid out in a mindmap (see Emergence Media’s SEO Mindmap from last year).

There are many folks trying to tackle what the new SEO exactly is. Todd Mailcoat has placed it forward as “New School SEO”, pointing to various other tactics that beyond traditional SEO: Social Media Marketing, Video Promotion, Community Participation et cetera. Aaron Wall has looked at the community (a more precise type of link authority and PageRank) as the next possible area where more search engines will determine relevancy.

Whatever it is, conceptual we need to rethink how we think of SEO. It’s not just about using WordTracker to do keyword research anymore, so our frame of thought has to change too. “Strategic Website Positioning” is an attempt to reset that thought. Once we figure what exactly SEO will be, there comes the next step: How do we explain it to our clients?

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Last week, it was announced that Google will automatically sign-up Google Account users to additional services by default, including “Personalized Search”, which will gives users unique Search Results (SERPs), basing rankings of websites on past search history and other behavioral data.

So now, what ranks on Google will depend on each Google user, ending the notion of different people being able to see the same search results. While people are asking “How will SEO change because of this?”, another question also needs to be asked is “How much will this effect the average Google Search?”

For example, Nick Wilson puts heavy emphasis on using leveraging Social Media to optimize for Google’s Personalized Services, but how many Google users are actually using social media with Google (E.G. Google Reader)? This is a question that needs to be considered before making changes to how you do SEO.

The Google Personalized Ranking Variables and the SEO Tactics

Here’s a quick recap on the new variables that will effect organic rankings and what SEO needs to do to address them. See Nick Wilson’s SEL article for more.

• Google Search History:
  What it is: Keeps a log of all search queries were conducted and what links on the results page (SERPs) were clicked on
  How it effects SEO: Page titles need to not only help a webpage rank high, but be attractive to be clicked on
  SEO Tactics: Page titles need to concentrate on CTR as much as getting the ranking.
• Google Personalized Homepage
  What it Is: Like Yahoo’s “Personal Homepage”, but with the ability to add various widgets and RSS Feeds
  How it may effect SEO: 1) What widgets are being used; 2) What RSS feeds are being subscribed to and clicked on
  SEO Tactic: 1) Create helpful Widgets; 2) Do Blogging; 3) Engage in promoting Widgets and Blogs via linkbait, WoM etc
• Google Reader
  What it is: Google’s fast raising web-based RSS Reader
  How it may effect SEO: What RSS feeds are being subscribed to, which one’s are being read and to what frequency
  SEO Tactic: 1) Do Blogging; 2) Engage in promoting Blog via linkbait, WoM etc
• Google Bookmarks:
  What it is: Bookmarking tool, like Del.icio.us etc
  How it may effect SEO: What pages are being bookmarked by the user
  SEO Tactic: 1) Create “Bookmark worthy” content and tools; 2) SMO with “Add to Google” Links; 3) Do WoM, Viral, Linkbait etc.

How much will this change Ranking for Google?
From everything I gathered, Google’s new move will only effect those logged into a Google Accounts when doing a search, so…

1. What percentage of users is this?
2. How many of these users use the advance services like Google Reader, Bookmarks, or Personalized Homepage with widgets and RSS feeds? The features that are now used in ranking?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any readily available satisfying answers for Question #1, other than there are ~51 million Gmail users (so at least that many accounts) and there are ~103m US searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, these statistics doesnt bring us any closer to how many searches were done under a Google Account. And we can’t even deduce users did all 103 million searches per day.

However on Question #2, the use of Google services, even popular services like Google Reader, while fastly growing, are not market leaders (in traffic terms) as of yet. And Google Bookmarks is a virtual unknown, while I would assume Google Personalized Homepage’s more advance features are only slightly more used.

So what about and who should be worried about the new system?

• Search History is one service that is guaranteed to be used, so attractive titles and descriptions are a must to increase CTR.
• If your website is targeting tech-savvy, early adopters (who are likely to use Google Accounts) than you should worry about Google Reader, Google Personalized Homepage Widgets and so on.

Of course, as part of SEO, one must think about blog marketing, widget creation and social media marketing (all what Nick Wilson emphasized), but right now for Google, it doesnt seem to be necessarily needed until services like Google Reader are more popularly used.

What are your thoughts on this?

___________________________________

UPDATE from February 14, 2007:

I just remember I’ve previously written about this topic in “Google Co-Op, Custom Search and the impact on SEO”, which declared:

“In short, if a website is badly position with the audience, has little content, not crawlable by search engines, not attractive enough to be linked to – than you have a problem with search engines, coop or no coop, personalized or not. If, however, the websites has all this issues addressed, than generally it will be well positioned not only on traditional Yahoo, Google search engines but also in personalized searches as well.”

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Taking a Look at mywaves: A YouTube/iTunes on Your Mobile?

This week I attended presentation on new mobile technology at SF New Tech Meetup, organized by Myles Weissleder and Joel Sacks. There were several mobile technology starts-up presenting: ComVu, mywaves, Pinger, Zypsy, and Veeker. You can read a full description here. It was a very interesting event with very interesting companies presenting with VCs and other mobile tech companies in the audience.

But this post will focus on mywaves, a very interesting company bringing video sharing to mobile phones, letting folks transform video podcasts/mobile videos into mobile video channels with sharing and editing capabilities.
What is mywaves

mywaves is a very young company with a public launch in December last year, yet has a very mature and well-developed interface and with over 17,000 channels of content.

mywaves Capabilities

• YouTube-ish & iTunes-ish in approach:
  Like YouTube user to upload videos and let mywaves figure out the proper video encoding process, and like iTunes you can subscribe to channels easily.
• Users can create a “channel” by uploading their own videos (from mobile or PC) or via RSS feeds.
• Has basic video-editing, allowing you to add pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls. This allows users to make their own ad-system for their videos or their video channels.
• The web-based interface, Lounge, has a very clean iTunes feel
• No mobile software is required for viewing videos (though there are phone compatibility limitations)
• Currently ~17,000 channels are featured, but more can be added easily via RSS or simply uploading videos to a new channel

Business/Marketing Opportunities

• Online video content provides can shift their videos into mobile, quickly and easily
• Like with YouTube, create sponsored channels for promoting mobile video videos
• Video owner’s control over pre-role, mid-role and post-role function allows quick path to monetization, assuming large amount of subscribe – and that pre/post rolls work :)
• Integrated “Three Screen” Campaigns: TV Screen, Computer Screen and Mobile Screen.
• Become an early entrant into the Mobile Video Viral marketing, with buzz potentially moving far faster than web-based videos like YouTube

While this is a young market and the mobile market is not quite “Mobile 2.0″ despite the buzz, it is interesting to imagine how fast mobile viral videos could spread compared to web videos. People have their phones on them all time.

There are still kinks to work out for sure. When signing-up, I encountered some strange issues and I still have difficulty getting my Blackberry Pearl 8100 working with mywaves properly. However, mywaves looks an ambitious company and one to look out for.
Note: This postings are based on the SF New Tech Meetup notes I have taken. If any of this is inaccurate or should be take down, please shoot me an email and let me know.