Tag Archives: seo

5 Blogs I Like to Read

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I struggle to write good content. I’m sure if you write a blog you probably have the same problem as well at certain times. I want to write stuff that you would want to read, but it’s tough. It starts with a compelling title and then goes from there.  I used to be able to write every day but that was when the social media space, which I wrote about heavily back in the day, was not as crowded and everything was new and shiny and so experimental.

I probably don’t blog as much because I also see a lot of the same content regurgitated as well. But that’s OK, because what’s old to me might be new to others.

I still think there’s a lot to learn in the space though-It’s just that I’m not sure if I can provide that information for you when there are so many really smart people writing different, fresh, wonderful content. There are lots of new perspectives and fresh ideas-just maybe not from me. With that being said, here are five blogs I read that you might not that still maintain some amount of contiguous freshness to them. I read a lot more than just these 5-but this is as good a start as any.

Being Peter Kim I know, most of you probably know who Peter is, but he’s not a me-me person and pulls no punches with his writing style-It might be why I like his blog and it might be why you will too.

I am a big believer in the intersection of search and social and you should be as well. I also pay a lot of attention to the e-commerce space. One site that I like because of the depth of each post as it pertains to the above mentioned topics, is Get Elastic

Tamar Weinberg is smart, she just doesn’t go around telling people that she is. I like the variety of what she writes about, I like the fact that she covers the digital space completely and I like her writing style.

I generally don’t have oodles of time to read long drawn out blog posts. Do you? I do like and want digital, relevant, consistent content in snackable bits though. You’ll like Viralblog

Want someone who gives it to you straight? I always do. Not only is there something about what Amber Naslund writes that has always grabs me but she actually is one of the few that really really gets what social is…

What I look for in a good blog nowadays may fly in the face of conventional wisdom but I look for personality in the writing and not necessarily in the title-but the title is what grabs the eyeballs. What we really should be looking for though is compelling content, variety and personality. I hope this helps make that process a little easier for you.

The catalysts of social media

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Earlier today I mentioned that I would love to use the words granular and linear when I talk to people about social media and marketing, but my mind doesn’t work in a linear or granular fashion. I’m more of a black and white type. I like to distill things down.

As I was walking my black and white dog this morning I was struck by a notion that really, what might be driving widespread social media adoption are 2 simple things.  Word of Mouth and Search.

A social network happens because of what? Because someone told us about it or we did a search. Pretty much, right?  Yes there may have been an accelerant( see traditional marketing) that drove us to the social network, but for the most part how we get there is pretty simple.

I have a client…

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I have a client who has been with me for quite some time now, and last week I got a really strange email.  It merely said.

Call me.

So you know what went down. I knew what was up. When I called him last week, he told me that maybe it’s time to end the relationship. But in a nice way. He told me that business has been way down and I knew that it had been, so it came as no surprise.

No amount of speaking to customers through various means of social media and optimizing websites was going to make their business pick up given the sorry state of the economy in portions of the rust belt. Though they are a national company, a good chunk of their business is in the Northeast. Plus they sell a frivolous type of product.

And yet, as soon as he told me that, the heart skipped a beat and the little sweat you get on your temples started to form and I immediately went into “save” mode. But there’s one problem with this.

He may be right, it might be time to cut the cord with one of my oldest clients.

I know it’s a sobering thought because no one wants to see their favorite client walk, but the reasons it might be time are many. For starters, what I set out to do for them has been 100% successful. I was brought on as an SEO and social media marketing consultant, and I’ve done everything and more for them. I’ve been their tech source for information and I really felt that I have indeed helped them.   Here’s a short list of “some” of things I’ve done for them:

  • Reworked/redesigned website for better customer engagement.
  • Created a major SEO campaign that optimized complete site for hundreds of  keywords all of which now rank organically on first 3 pages of Google.
  • Created a Flickr campaign to optimize their thousands of images and to contribute to Universal search results.
  • Created a blog that drives significant traffic and also ranks organically on first page of Google.
  • Created Facebook Fan Page-nominal success but contributed to overall brand awareness.
  • Created Twitter account that results in10% CTR and 2-3% sales on all links.
  • Responsible for online sales growth and higher average sales ever year except one. 2009…

So though he’s telling me the gig might be up, and he’s probably right, I’m sitting over here wondering what more can I do? Are there things that I have not yet tried that might get me a double, or a triple even, instead of  a weak ass bunt? Something big…Impactfull… I’m not so sure. Maybe…

The last thing I really want to do is take their money for not doing anything, but short of making the horse drink, I have led the horse to the proverbial ocean. Problem is, it’s an ocean, it’s salty and we’re gonna have to look around for an oasis and it might take some time, and might cost some money. Both of which are in short supply right now.

Will my client be better served by someone else with like minded skills? Selfishly I say no, but that might not be the case. I do know this though, they will not find someone with more value than me as it relates to what they deliver and what they charge.

So at the end of the day, as I peel through Peter Kim’s wiki, looking for that “thing” I haven’t done yet, thinking there might be some “other” things I could try, the reality is, as you know, that not every social media solution is the right solution for every client.

I don’t know what else I can do but maybe just shake their hand, maybe give them a hug, thank them for being such a great client, and end it.

The Confluence of Social and Search

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When defining the next big think, I am never surprised how much mobile, search and social continue to loom on the horizon. In fact, if you look at what’s happening in Japan it would boggle your mind.

Three-quarters of Japanese social network users access the sites only from their mobile phones.

Couple that with Google buying AdMob for $750 million and you can easily see where this is all heading.  But as the barriers to search and social and mobile continue to be broken down, I cannot help to think that the following is not true to some degree…

Your success is determined by one thing

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I know this is going to ruffle some feathers, but right now your marketing initiatives, your social media efforts, your email campaign, your DRTV campaign and more- all of it will rely on one thing in the end. Consider the following scenarios:

  • You are going to launch a new product. You build a website but how are you going to drive people to the site? How do they find it?
  • You launch a new product with a new company, that no one has ever heard of before, how will people find out more about you, your company, and your product?
  • You launch a new social network, how will it grow? How is it found? You start a new blog and you want people to read your kick-ass content? How will they know you’re out there? You join a new social network, how do you meet others?
  • You launch a new brick and mortar business, how do you drive business? Newspapers? Radio? Magazine? What is a person’s first knee jerk reaction to your advertising?
  • Your reputation? Where can you find it? How can you find it? Do you know if anybody is talking about you, your company and your product?
  • Your friends? Your family, How do they find you? Old friends? How do they find you?
  • You need a new job. How will you get your next one?

I could go on. But I think you get the point. Everything. and I mean everything that you do revolves around…

SEARCH

Think about it.

search-engines

Social Media Pitch-Raise your hand if you understood anything I just said.

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This is starting to become a recurring theme of late. I pitch a social media project and spend the majority of the time explaining my vision and my passion for what the possibilities might be, and I get the blank stare:

seth_southpark

Except this time, they nodded their head as I was speaking. So the whole time I’m thinking.. “I’m building momentum”, but something tells me I better ask the following question just to make sure.

You guys know what social media is right?

Before they could answer, I though to say, “Better yet I said, Raise your hand if you understood anything I just said.” Now this is a group of fairly young, hip execs. 1 CEO, 1 CMO, 2 VP’s and 3 sales and marketing people. I got nothing.  So I had to scramble. I said the 50,000 foot view of social media is that of a MySpace or Facebook. They all nodded. I tried going deeper but it was futile. I might have used the term SEO but now that i think back, there is no way they knew what that meant. I did get this question though:

Can you get us ranked #1 for __________ in the whole country?

Uhhhh.. no I cannot, unless I worked for Google, I think I mumbled that. At the end of the day I walked away with a project but it’s not going to involve any social media components. I guess that’s the upside. Here’s the moral.

I need to to do a couple of things going forward. Here’s what they are:

  • I’m going to determine if social media even makes sense for the company I’m talking to.
  • If it does, I’m going to work backwards with any company or individual I deal with or talk to, and show them examples of companies that do what they do and how they use social media successfully.
  • I’m going to simplify my examples of social media and explain some tools that might make sense
  • I’m going to show the sizzle of social media
  • I’m going to show even more value and demonstrate the power of social media in regards to extending the conversation with their customers.

Now before you say I should have done this homework beforehand, perhaps I could have, but the homework I did do, was on what their business model was. And the potential it posessed for social media adoption.  My assumption was, “Every company has the potential” Maybe, maybe not. But as I head down this road even more, I’ll be able to determine if that is indeed possible.

You see, you have to understand, I’ve rolled out quite a few social media projects for my former company and it’s clients and their products, but now that I’m pitching the projects as well for my new company, all of a sudden it’s a whole different ballgame. One in which i was not completely prepared for.

10 Social Media, SEO, and Marketing questions/thoughts I had in Church.

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So I’m sitting in church and they’re passing around the collection plate. At which point I started thinking that clearly the church is hurting too because the little baskets are really flying down the aisles. Given that church is a great place to take stock of all things in ones life, I grabbed my smartphone and jotted down the following thoughts and questions.

  • Social media measurement and its associated metrics will change with the changing of external markets and it’s influencers.
  • As the economy changes, so do the rules of engaging the consumer and marketing to that consumer. They have to. They must.
  • Will or should social media engagement be measured differently in tough economic times? Yes?
  • Should or will the tone of marketing and social media marketing change?
  • Do peoples expectations of social media change during economic woes? No. because they haven’t set any precedents yet.
  • Do we change benchmarking for social media? My thoughts are we would have to, since there is zero empirical data to go off of.
  • How important does social media optimization and SEO now become? I think it’s huge.
  • If times were different would some social media startups have a fighting chance? or do they now have an even better chance of surviving? Which is it?
  • Will social nets thrive now or in the next 24 months given the current state?
  • Their success will be determined by what? The same metrics? Or can startups afford to be measureed by engagement only?

So I was still feverishly texting these into my notes section of my phone well after the collections had been taken.  At which point, I looked up and saw that I was getting some nasty looks from the following: the people in the pew to my right,  the people directly to the left of me, my wife, an usher, and my kids, who thought I was playing Bejeweled.

That’s ok though, because If I’m thinking of these things,  maybe marketers, social media marketers, start-ups and even GOD might be too! Though divine intervention as a variable into any metric is a given, right?

Your SEO mantra

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I read the blog post the Yin Yang of PR and SEO by Lee Odden and I’m going to sum it up right here:

If a digital asset (text, image, video, audio) can be searched on, then it can be optimized.

No go forth and prosper

19 things you should know about your world

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  1. Did you know that China has over 253,000,000 internet users which amounts to about 17% of the world’s users?
  2. Did you know that China will eventually become the #1 English speaking country in the world? Or that
  3. The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s …is greater than the total population of North America.  In India, it’s the top 28%.  Translation for teachers:  they have more honors kids than we have kids. 
  4. There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.  Which speaks to a post I did about tech trends.
  5. The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years.  For students starting a four-year technical or college degree, this means that…half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.  It is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.
  6. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs . . By the age of 38
  7. Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain.
  8. According to the U.S. Department of Labor . . .1 out of 4 workers today is working for a company they have been employed by for less than one year
  9. More than 1 out of 2 are working for a company they have worked for for less than five years.
  10. According to former Secretary of Education Richard Riley . . The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.
  11. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist .
  12. The U.S. is 20th in the world in broadband Internet penetration.(Luxembourg just passed us.)
  13. 1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met
  14. The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day.
  15. The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet
  16. More than 3,000 new books are published . .
  17. It’s estimated that 40 exabytes (that’s 4.0 x 1019) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year
  18. The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years
  19. 47 million laptops were shipped worldwide last year

 

Many thanks to  Karl Fisch  and Scott Mcleod  who compiled alot of this data, which in the end, really gives you a sense of how very large this world is and how very small you are.  

 

 

 The only constant in life is change. Don’t be static.

SEO and SMO are conversation starters.

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Last year Jason Calacanis wrote a blog post how he thought that SEO and SMO were bullshit. Now I know in some parts Calacanis is approaching demi-god status and in other parts he’s villified to no end. Hell, he has 35,000 followers on Twitter, which is a fairly significant number of people who put a lot of stock in what he says. I’m one of those followers too. But that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything he says.

I had been thinking about the role of SEO and SMO in internet marketing lately and decided to do a cursory search and that’s when I found Jason’s article. It’s not the driving force behind this post but it does give it some legs since Jason and others have deemed some of what is done on the level within SEO and SMO circles as unacceptable.

Over the last year and half and even before that, I have engaged in some pretty healthy SEO as well as SMO for clients. And it has worked. I utilized what was available and knew what I was doing. According to Calacanis that would make me a snake oil salesman. Talking SMO then, Calacanis said the following:

Anyone who hires an SMO firm is an idiot. The whole point of social media is TO BE REAL NOT FAKE!!! Just be yourself and participate… that’s all it takes (and note, participation is not just putting in your own links, it’s voting/commenting on/submitting other people’s content too!).

To which I have to say that “SMO is the process of realizing that being authentic and strategic within a social media marketing context or environment can be beneficial.

Here’s a generic example. I have a demographic of women smokers in their mid 30’s for instance. They  happen to use Facebook. So I create a widget that provides them a way to maybe quit smoking and track the results and share them, which in turn drives them to a blogsite, a branded microsite and a branded community. To get this ball rolling, I’ve also seeded/posted articles related to all of these sites and the product and the campaign on Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Technorati, Propeller and say Reddit. All of these linked together creates a tremendous opportunity and buzz for these users to not only meet, but also to share, and perhaps learn more about a product dedicated to them. Does this mean that what I have done is black-hat or disingenuous? No. Does it mean that I have taken certain elements, linked them together and have enjoyed the linky-goodness via SMO and SEO? Yes. Am I bad? Am I evil? Am I hiding? Am I not being “transparent enough”?  Why can’t I let these social bookmarking sites know about a product launch?

Want a good example?  Buddy Media created the Check your Dudeness app for Facebook-Couldn’t this be construed as some element of SMO? They’re taking a product, a branded one and using social media to promote it. Is that gaming the system? No.

We need to get away from the fact that what the system allows us to do, does not neccessarily mean that we are up to no good, or that we’re not being transparent enough. Ok I get it. I don’t need to be told over and over and over again to be transparent and authentic. Yes there is a difference between black hat seo and white hat seo as well as black hat smo, no doubt about it. Just check akismet for aspects of that. But.. most of your brand marketers are only using the tools that are available. I can show you at least 130 examples where companies used certain aspects of social media to promote or further their brand exposure using some of the above mentioned sites and tactics. This doesn’t mean that they are operating behind a cloak of deceit.

Listen, there is a big big difference between gaming the system and utilizing what is provided to promote your product, your brand, and your company. It truly boils down to how you use it. I’m all for engaging in conversations but someone has to start the conversation. The better you are at starting a conversation, the better your chances are of someone listening and responding back. Maybe we should be looking at not how to be transparent and authentic, but more on the proper way to enagage and start the conversation.