More and more businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re getting everything right.  Here are 5 things that keep marketers from getting the most from their social marketing programs.

1. Running your social marketing without a strategy or a plan. Social media is maturing, but is your approach to it? You should build a plan for your social marketing like you would for any other marketing discipline. Your plan should include the strategies and tactics, branding, messaging, content, tools, resources and goals that will help you make your social media presence a successful part of your marketing.

2. Operating in a silo. 7 out of 10 marketers in a recent BtoB survey said branding is their top goal for social marketing.  Funny, but the reality often seems like the exact opposite. Many companies seem to run their social media programs like a separate sideline and tactical program handled by an intern or entry-level marketer. This is a mistake. Instead, you should incorporate social media into your integrated marketing programs. Be sure to project a consistent brand in all your social media channels (and across all marketing channels) in terms of design, positioning and personality.

3. Using social media as just another marketing “me” channel. Twitter and other social media are not just another corporate press release wire for your PR team or product announcements. Can you say boooring? Too many B2B companies use their social channels to push out one-way PR announcements and top-down messages.You can instantly set your company apart from competitors by delivering interesting and valuable content and engaging in two-way conversations about topics that really matter to your target audience.

4. Neglect your following. I’m always surprised when I run across companies’ social media accounts that push out plenty of tweets and posts, but have relatively few followers — let alone engaged ones – even after years of maintaining an active social presence.Like it or not, your company’s reach and engagement with its following help drive your Klout score, a key measurement of your social media influence.

You wouldn’t drop a major email campaign to a dozen contacts, nor should you do the equivalent on your social channels. Just as you work at building your email list, you should invest time and resources in growing your list of quality followers, fans and likes.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to tackle it, you can outsource this task to social media experts. For example, Avenue L Marketing built up a client’s Twitter following to more than 500 in a matter of weeks. For another client, we grew the quality and number of followers gradually over several months, from around 400 followers to 1,000. Here, atAvenue L Marketing, we increased our followers (@MarketingIntel) during the past year to over 2,500 as of this writing.

5. Obsessing about the score.  Yes, metrics can help you track your progress, but you don’t focus too much on them. Your social media presence should be making an impact and contributing to the success of your marketing campaigns.  Sure, pay the proper attention to your Klout and other metrics delivered by your social platform, but don’t go overboard. They’re just numbers after all.

Don’t make these 5 mistakes in your social marketing. Build your social media plan and constantly fine-tune it based on what works and what doesn’t.  Get help from experts to optimize your social presence and invest in growing your target audience of followers, fans and likes. It’s smart to keep an eye on key performance metrics but stay focused on improving your content and increasing the engagement of your audience.

What other tips would you add to this list of social marketing pitfalls? Would you please share your experiences and perspectives on social marketing?

It was about shouting your brand from the roof tops in a one way conversation.

The louder you shouted (the more dollars you spent on mass media) the more money you made.

In essence it was simple.

Today it is a two way conversation with a variety of multimedia on a multitude of global social networks, that starts with engaging the customer with content that involves interaction of some type and then selling the product or service.

In the past engagement was very hard to measure because media was a one way conversation whether that was television, radio or print.

Today you can instantly see in real time if the content you publish or marketing message you promote is working as you view people liking, sharing or commenting online on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

Engagement Starts with One Click

Facebook has made the first engagement easy to spot as the ubiquitous “like” being the first indication of your brands touch point and resonance with a fan.

After that the relationship becomes deeper as content is shared with friends and comments are left on the Timeline. The more time and effort displayed by the prospect indicates the building and budding relationship.

Facebook has recently changed the way brands interacted with their fans online by totally revamping the new user interface for Facebook and renamed it “Timeline”.

It provides a larger canvas for photos and images and a larger cover photo to showcase a businesses brand along with many other features and functions.

Is the Facebook Timeline Increasing Engagement?

When the timeline was announced, the screaming of users and brands was deafening as they had to rebuild their Facebook marketing strategies and learn to navigate the new user interface.

Generally no one likes change!

A new study by Sotrender (an online tool for analysis, reporting and optimisation of Facebook), provides some interesting clues as to whether the new Facebook Timeline is working well for business and brands.

What Metrics Haven’t Changed

The study revealed after analyzing 130 biggest UK company profiles and almost 5 thousand posts that the following metrics didn’t change.

None of the following metrics changed significantly in the after-Timeline period:

• page posts per day
• content type distribution
• percent of engaged users per fanpage
• average number of likes, comments and posts per active user
• average response (likes and comments) per post
• cross-page engagement (percent of page’s engaged fans also engaged on other pages)

They discovered that two things had changed significantly.

What Has Changed

The study by Sotrender discovered these two statistically significant changes.

#1. Posts live Longer

Before the timeline’s introduction, users made half of their comments in less than one hour. Now the posts half life has extended to 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Also 80% of all comments are made in 8 hours and 30 minutes (2 hours more than before Timeline.)

Takeaway

If company writes too often, the new posts may cannibalize users engagement of the previous ones.

#2. Bigger Engagement

The other change that was noticeable was that the Facebook timeline has increased growth in post engagement by 13%.

Prior to Timeline the average post stimulated the activity of 158 fans. This has now increased to 179.

Takeaway

Don’t stop providing regular multimedia updates to your business Facebook page timeline. It has increased indeed increased engagement.

What About You?

Have you found the new Timeline increasing or decreasing engagement on your Facebook page?

Have you changed how often you update your business Facebook page?

How have you adapted to the changes?

Image by www.larrabetzutik.org

Infographics have been popping up all over the digital media marketing world, covering everything from social media marketing trends to the basics of inbound marketing. Not all of these infographics are great, and some of them even veer towards extremely boring.

However, there are some that can truly change the way that you think about digital media marketing and inspire new ideas for marketing your small business to the online world.

With that hope in mind, here are three of our favorite digital media infographics. For more awesome infographics, check out our Pinterest board!

3 Digital Media Marketing Infographics That Will Rock Your World

The Inbound Marketing Explosion

Infographic: socialmouths.com

What rocked our world?

• 54% of businesses are increasing their inbound marketing budgets each year- Obviously, something is working.
• Small businesses are the biggest adopters of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is cost-effective enough to work with so many different business models (it’s cheaper than traditional, less effective methods!)

The Anatomy of Content Marketing

Infographic: visual.ly.com

What rocked our world:

• Word of mouth is the primary factor in 50% of buying decisions. This means that social media is hugely important to any digital marketing strategy.
• Companies with blogs get 97% more inbound links than other sites. Why would you ever miss out on this opportunity?

Social Media Statistics For 2012

Infographic: www.digitalbuzzblog.com

What rocked our world:

• Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%. This means that you should always take the time to come up with original and engaging Facebook posts.
• 73% of people think employees overshare on social media- Keep those posts meaningful and interesting to avoid seeming too promotional.

It has always been that headlines sell and draw in a reader since the printing industry took off. Writing the headline is a craft in itself. Newspapers and magazines are sold in their thousands every day from the front page headline alone, and that hasn’t changed with online content either.

Making people click

Why did you click the link to this post? Was it because you were curious about what makes a good headline? Are you a blogger who has trouble writing titles? You are looking to be educated, and if I was to video myself doing a silly little dance you’d also be entertained. Thankfully for all of you, I’m not going to go that far! We’ll just stick to educating (today).

How? Why? What?

These are always good words to begin with when thinking of a headline. They lead nicely on to a subject matter of interest to your targeted reader. Here is an example of each:

• How to get more people to retweet your tweets
• Why there is an explosion of social media use happening right now!
• What is the secret to Richard Branson’s success?

Of course they do not always have to follow the above formulas, there are plenty more and writing a headline is only limited by your imagination. One of the best local newspaper headlines I remember was ‘Badger terrorises family’. How could you not want to grab the paper and find out what was going on?

The other successful method that you see is list headlines where you create content in a list format. A great thing about this type of content is that it pretty much writes the headline itself. Whether you are going to write about ‘10 things to do in Portsmouth’, ‘5 reasons to post news content’ or ‘5 tips to become more productive’, you have a great headline ready to go.

Attaching emotion to your headline

Review of new maths education book for kids

How does the above headline grab you? If you are a parent it may arouse some interest, but otherwise it’s a bit flat, no better than the category it will be placed in on a website selling such a book.

Improve your child’s maths with this new home schooling book

I would like to think the above headline is a vast improvement on my first effort, and if you happen to be a teach at home parent you would really think “Yes, I want to find out more about this book to improve my child’s maths” and click to read the post.

You can play on all kinds of emotions and personalities of a person; fear, passion, insecurities, eagerness, curiosity, anger, generosity or empathy. Using emotionally charged headlines can mean giving a snapshot of your content.

Conclusion

The worst practice I see is content that does not live up to the expectations of the headline. So ensure that if your headline insinuates you are going to help a reader, you actually do help the reader in some way. A good headline does not mean your content is worthy of being read, it just means you will have a disappointed reader if you do not deliver on its promise.

There are many elements to crafting an award winning headline. Just like writing good content, you need to think about the reader and what mentally stimulates them so they then click to read more.

As of October last year, YouTube announced a new initiative meant to create original channels to offer bite-sized programming to the perennially focus-challenged members of the short-attention-span-theater generation (those raised in a computer culture, with no memory of a time before email, texting, and social media). Whereas the older generation of adults was floored by the onset of cable TV, which brought us a slew of genre channels (MTV, CNN, and so on), the current crop of young adults is accustomed to a much faster pace when it comes to entertainment consumption. And YouTube is looking to capitalize on their penchant for short-lived, viral amusements.

Of course, they would probably like to strike a balance between older and younger viewers, and a channel like Spaces could do just that. Introduced by DBG (Digital Broadcast Group), which is currently the leading producer of digital content on the web, Spaces is at its core a home design collective. But with kitschy-cool programming, this YouTube channel provides anything but the stuffy fare you might expect. At the moment the channel has a dedicated host (Erika Storm Wasser) and four original series, including “I Live with My Mom” (what you’d expect – 20-somethings still living at home), “Your Place is a Deal Breaker” (dudes that can’t give up their tiger motifs, even if it means having a real, live girlfriend), “Profiles in Design” (featuring designers who create wallpaper to those that make bar furniture), and “OffBeat Spaces” (think the smallest apartment, a tree house, or Occupy shanty towns).

Clearly, the programming skews a bit younger, with fare for the just-out-of-college, urban renter. But stay-home moms and weekend warriors will find enough meat on the bone to get a few good ideas for their rural townhouse or small-space renovations (a dude that can work miracles with a 500-square-foot apartment will no doubt appeal to the woman looking to make the most of her postage-stamp-sized kitchen). The nice thing is that this is more than a simple regurgitation of programming that’s already out there (no whole-home makeovers complete with custom paint, king size bedroom sets, and designers that no one in the real world can afford to hire). When you click on this YouTube channel you’ll get doable designs from virtual unknowns (some of them clearly rising stars) as well as “inspirational, educational, and highly-addicting” programs, according to DBG’s chief creative officer, Joseph Gomes. And with segments that last less than five minutes you can love it or leave it in short order.

Google has just confirmed a new data refresh to their Google Penguin algorithm. After the initial release of Google Penguin on 24 April Webmasters have been scratching their heads wondering what is they have to do to adhere to these latest updates.

What Is Google Penguin?

Google Penguin is the name of the latest algorithm update that Google has released to target over optimisation and poor back link profiles. Since its inception a number of low quality content thin affiliate sites have been hit. Google has stated that this update was released to reward high-quality sites and purge the web of black hat webspam.

Matt Cutts confirmed this update at 5am GMT (10pm PST) on Friday which means that the majority of Webmasters in the U.S are still unaware of this update. So there’s not much news on how this has affected search results as of yet although Matt Cutts has stated that this update affects less than 0.1% of English searches.

What Does Google Want?

I’ve previously written a post regarding Google Penguin and given an in-depth plan of action of how these new updates affect websites and how you can overcome this new SEO terrain on B2C. You can read it here – Hit By Google Penguin? Here’s Your Plan Of Action To Get Back To Page 1!

What Should I Do Now?

Sites that we hit by the initial Penguin update should check their stats to see if any of their sites have seen organic fluctuation. Those of you that have been tracking your verticals should check competitor results as well to see how they’ve faired.

If you have been hit by this latest release of Google Penguin any need to go over your back link profile weed out anything that isn’t above the board and start engaging in content marketing and high-quality outreach. Start treating your website as a bricks and mortar business and not as a disposable entity and you’ll start to see an increase in your SERPS.

As ever the worst thing you can do when a new update is announced is to do nothing. Take action, visit forums, start engaging and stay on top of the game otherwise you will get left behind.

If, on the other hand, you already have a solid foundation and clear goals for your business, then all that’s left is to determine how blogging can help you accomplish those goals.

Here is a list of the five most common benefits of blogging. Do any of these match your goals for your business?

1. Demonstrate your expertise in a specific industry or specialty – By writing blog posts that answer your clients’ most common questions, you show that you’re a knowledgeable and trusted authority in that particular area. If this is your top goal, focus on writing “how to” articles.
2. Educate your clients about what you do and why they need you – A blog allows people to research you and your business before taking the next step to contact or hire you. By writing authentically about the topics that matter most to you and your clients, you give them a clearer picture of who you are and what they can expect from you and your services. If this is your main goal, provide a combination of client stories and personal posts, with the occasional theory or manifesto added in for good measure.
3. Add value to what you already offer your clients and broader network – Your generosity and goodwill speak volumes about who you are as a person, while the quality of your information continues to solidify your credibility. Through your blog you can reach and help more people. If this is your main goal, combine “how to” articles with connective content that adds interest and variety to your blog. There are even ways that blogging can help you give back to your community.
4. Gain wider exposure for your business – When the people in your network like and pass along your blog posts via email and social media, they simultaneously provide an endorsement and introduction to other people who are interested in your specialty area. If this is your primary business goal, be sure to blend all types of content so that you reach people with different interests and learning styles.
5. Keep your website fresh – Your network will keep returning to see what’s new, and Google and other search engines will reward you with higher ranking. This continues to reinforce the perception that you’re an expert who is up to date, and your blog is the destination for trustworthy and helpful information. Use my weekly blogging method to stay consistent and get into the blogging habit.

Before you get too far along (though you can stop and do this any time), fortify the roots of your blogging tree by clarifying the goals of your blog. The good news is that you don’t have to look any further than the goals for your business!

In order to understand this, you have to first understand how Circles and visibility works. You create circles with any grouping you want. You can have a celebrities circle, one for news, one for colleagues, one for family, one for your poker club or football team mates… How you organise your groups is up to you. Then you decide which people or brands you want to add to circles. Some people may go into more than one. By doing this, you are saying, “If I share anything with this circle, this person is allowed to see it.”

In another recent post I explained how you can control whether the people in your circles are visible to the public. This is a key component in how Extended Circles work.

The above diagram explains the idea of Extended Circles. The behaviour is not always the same though. Let’s imagine Harry has changed his profile settings to hide his circles completely from view. That means none of the people in his circles will apply to Extended Circles (according to Google’s own explanation).

Effectively, any user controls whether the people can be included in Extended Circles by controlling which circle members to display in their profile.

All things being equal, if you are able to see those in the circles of Harry, this is how the Extended Circles feature works.

• You post an item of content, and you choose to make it visible to Extended Circles.
• Anyone who has you in their circles will see the content on their own Stream.
• Anyone in your circles who does not have you in their circles will not see it in their Stream, but they would be able to see it if they visit your profile page to view what you have posted.
• Anyone in the circles of people in your circles will also be able to see the content on your profile if they visit it.

Extended Circles can also help Google to make suggestions of people to follow who may be relevant to you. They also can help Google make decisions about what to show people in personalised search results.

Anyone looking to use Pinterest for business can learn a lot from UVa’s Pinterest page. In the spirit of Mr. Jefferson’s love of lifelong learning, we are pleased to present a few key Pinterest tips.

For more great Pinterest case studies, check out our Pinterest for Business guide!

Pinterest for Business 101: The University of Virginia

Lesson #1: Know Your Audience

UVA does a great job of anticipating what its audience will want to look at and delivering those images in abundance.

One of its most popular boards, “Around Grounds,” showcases beautiful photographs of the UVA campus. Given its over 1,000 followers, this board obviously touches a nerve within UVA students and alumni

Another board good-naturedly embraces UVa’s prepster reputation. From JCrew scarves to orange and blue Sperry boat shoes, the Wahoo Stylin‘ board is any preppy Wahoo’s dream.

The main take-away from this lesson? Pinterest is all about its users, so make sure you deliver what your users will want to see

Lesson #2: Embrace Whimsy

Pinterest is not an overly serious social media site- it loves the fun, the humorous, and the unusual. Any business looking to do well on Pinterest should not be afraid to think outside the box.

Our favorite “out of the box” board on UVa’s page is “Thomas Jefferson’s Interior Design,” showcasing various artifacts and images from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Incidentally, our favorite among these pins is the Monticello Dollhouse. (Yep, it exists).

Another favorite pin has to be a student-made video entitled “Gettin Drunk Off Books”, a rap celebration of UVA’s libraries.

Scholarship at it’s finest, for sure.

These intriguing and light-hearted pins keep UVa’s board from feeling too serious, and keep visitors coming back for fun, interesting, and relevant content.

Lesson #3: Captions

Too many businesses Pinners neglect the potential that picture captions offer. UVA does a good job of developing some of its photo captions, packing information and personality into a quick sentence or two.

On Pinterest, users can search for pins by various keywords. So, if you have those keywords in your caption, your pin will automatically move to the top of the pile. It’s a lot like a simplfied version of SEO keywords- you want your captions to link you with viewers seeking your type of business.

The pin to the right is a great example of a strong caption using Pinterest for business.

The caption is brief, but it is informative and it gives users an option for further engagement- downloading U.Va. magazine on their iPad. It gives a glimpse of what readers can expect from the issue and essentially acts as a subtle call to action.

The is certainly some room for improvement within UVa’s captions. Some of them are a bit too generic, simply saying things like “Wahoowa!”. Captioning a photo of the football stadium with “wahoowa” does little to make that image more interesting or searchable. Captioning it with “Wahoowa! Football seasons starts in 4 weeks, get your tickets now to support the Virginia Cavaliers” opens up many search possibilites and provides a helpful call-to-action.

Your Pinterest For Business Homework: Take a look at your business Pinterest page. Are you catering to what your audience might want? Are you sharing creative, interesting, or humorous pins? Are you captioning your photos effectively? If not, it might be time to hit the books and make a few changes. And make sure to check out these other case studies in our Pinterest for Business Guide.

Class adjourned!

Blog Networks

Many webmasters were using blog networks as a way to achieve high rankings in the search engines. A blog network is a system that people pay to be a part of. Once an individual is a member, he can write short articles and include a link back to his own site within the article. Then when he submits the article to the blog network, it is posted on one of the blogs owned by the network. The blogs are all high PageRank sites and they try to give the impression that they are legitimate sites. This made it look like a page on the webmaster’s site was being linked to by one of the blog sites in the network, which usually helped improve its ranking. Recently, Google decided to de-index many of these networks, which also affected all of the sites that the blogs were linking to.

Notification

Webmasters who engage in unnatural linking practices recently started receiving notices from Google in their Webmaster Tools account messages. The message tells the Webmasters that Google has detected unnatural linking practices associated with their sites and that something must be done to fix this issue within in a certain amount of time.

Affect of Unnatural Links

There has been some confusion and debate about the impact of having these types of links associated with your account. At the very least, Google has discounted these links and made it so that they do not carry any weight in helping other sites rank. In some cases, webmasters claim that having these links actually lead to some sort of punishment by Google. Many of their pages went way down in the search engine rankings and some of them were actually removed completely from Google’s index. Regardless of whether the bad links just lost their value or actually ended up leading to punishment, they definitely had an impact on search engine rankings.

What to Do

If you are a webmaster and engaged in something that Google considers to be unnatural linking practices, you should do your best to alter toxic links as soon as you can by either changing the anchor text or removing them completely. Go through your inbound links report and remove any links that come from questionable websites. While it might be a lot of work, it will help your search engine rankings rise again. This recent act by Google proves that nothing beats high quality, contextual link building strategies to further your site in the search engine results.

The recent change to the Facebook Timeline layout emphasizes that focus on the image, with a large cover photo taking up well over a third of every user’s screen. For those using Facebook for business, this means that your cover photo is the single largest image that your customer will see. First impressions loom large for online users, so your Facebook timeline cover photo should be creative, engaging, and should send the right message about your business.

The Facebook terms of use do not allow direct links or call to actions in your cover photo, but there are ways to subtly promote further engagment with your business. These five Facebook business page cover photos do a great job of providing compelling images that also compel further actions from users. Check it out and get inspired for your own business cover photo!

5 Cover Photos That Spark Business Without Making Facebook Mad

Verizon Wireless

Verizon put their cover photo in their customers’ hands, asking Verizon users to take pictures with their phones and send them in to be considered for Verizon’s cover photos. Their current cover photo features a collage of many submissions, but we like their older photos that give credit to individual users.

Photo: Verizon (and Jose, of course)

With each photo, Verizon gives credit to their users while also subtly promoting the phone that each photo was taken with. This photo contest concept is a great way to encourage user engagement without being overtly promotional.

Uber

This swanky car compnay has a creative cover photo that manages to be both retro and informative. The faded purple map creates a compelling image, while the scattered car icons usefully point out where to find the company.

Photo: Uber

One thing Uber does not do is give more information in their cover photo caption. The cover photo caption is a great place to share call-to-actions. In this case, Uber could list the various locations of their businesses and how to contact each one.

Fanta

Fanta is known for their creative advertising, and their Facebook Timeline cover photo does not disappoint. Fanta uses an image from a current ad campaign, which is a great way to provide continuity within your various marketing platforms.

Photo: Fanta

Fanta’s information section encourages users to “like” the page in order to find out more about the interactive campaign.

Lawyers.com

While it may not be the most thrilling Facebok page of all time, the Lawyers.com Facebook Timeline cover photo does a great job of promoting its website’s current content. The image creatively references new blog posts, while the caption provides actual links to each post.

Photo: Lawyers.com

This a great way to promote your new blog posts without overtly including a call to action in your cover photo image.

Dynamics Online

For our last example, we decided to give a little love to fellow online marketing firm Dynamics Online. We like their cover photo because it embarces the human element of business, giving a face to what might otherwise seem remote technology.

Photo: Dynamics Online

A photo of your employes gives a friendly face to your company, perfect for the image-based community that Zuckerberg insists Facebook be.

For more great examples of Facebook timeline cover phoots, check out this Hubspot article.

Use Facebook to introduce a new product: Ford Explorer’s 2010 Rollout

Ford’s 2010 “Reveal” of its new Explorer model relied heavily on Facebook marketing, introducing fans to the car with videos, live chats, and other features.

Photo: Ford

Ford used Facebook to make its rollout a universal event, engaging fans from all over the world and uniting those fans around one event. Introducing a new product on Facebook is a great way to involve users in your business and get them excited about upcoming offerings.

Put your product in the hands of its users: Papa John’s

Back in 2010, Papa John’s Pizza asked its Facebook users to submit recipes for a new pizza and letting other users vote on the pizzas using the “like” feature.

Finalists make their pizzas: Photo- Papa John’s Facebook

The campaign promoted multiple social media interactions- liking Papa John’s Facebook page, liking and sharing different photos of user creations, and posting comments about various creations.

Give back to a favorite charity: Southwest Airlines and Make A Wish Foundation

Southwest Airlines put together an innovative Facebook campaign to benefit the Make A Wish Foundation. Every time a traveler used the Facebook “Places” app to check in at a Southwest-serviced airport, the airline donated $1 to the Make A Wish Foundation.

Photo: buzzom.com

The campaign raised signifcant donations for a great cause while also encouraging fans to engage with Southwest on Facebook. Facebook is a great way to mobilize your followers for a charitable cause, and to ensure that your small business is giving back to the community around you.

Everything’s social!

Just about everyone is investing more time, effort, and resources into social media channels, of late. The amount of interaction taking place online and through mobile is monumental, and still growing rapidly. Social networks are extending their reach and people all over the world are getting involved. To date, Facebook has nearly a billion users!

Whether you are a casual social media user interacting with friends, using social media to build up your personal network, or selling and making business interactions through social media channels, adding your voice to your profiles is a fun (and beneficial) new feature.

Well it’s about time social profiles let you add audio, isn’t it? Well, not exactly. Although the major social players like Facebook and LinkedIn don’t support audio built in to their framework, there is a new tool you can use anywhere a digital image or hyperlink can be used. The communication tool is called an Audible Name Tag, or ANT, and lets users record a message of up to 20 seconds to be included in your emails, social media profiles, and websites.

You can record anything from the correct pronunciation of your name to a full on personal statement. It’s a great opportunity to elevate your personal brand and to tell other people about something special such as a promotion, a particular cause you believe in and support, or an important event that’s going on in your life. The best part is, with the ANT, you can record and re-record as many times as you like – you could have a new message everyday if you wanted.

Example Audible Name Tag (Click to hear recording)

So what’s the big deal with voice?

We live in a world where personalization and individuality are a must. We’ve been expressing ourselves through our social channels, and now it’s possible to add an additional level of personalization – through our own voices.

Your voice is something that defines your identity. It is uniquely yours, and can play a huge part in how you are viewed by others. Your pitch and tone of voice can convey a variety of different messages, whether you want to be seen as strong and persuasive, or loving and caring. How do you want your brand to be packaged? Adding your own voice can solidify your persona and image.

By allowing others to hear your voice, you effectively create familiarity and make yourself seem as approachable as possible. This can be particularly beneficial to those who want to create a strong personal brand, people who are in the sales or marketing business, or people with hard to pronounce names. Creating a little familiarity can go a long way.

However, in order to have truly effective copywriting, you need to go even beyond the specs of your own site. While I’m in the business of blogging for business, I’m also in the business of analytics. There are several tools that we at Content Equals Money (and other writing services) use in order to make sure that our copywriting isn’t just original, and it isn’t just well-written: it’s effective, too.

Welcome to the world of analytics. Just when you thought that getting the customer to convert was all about putting the right words in the right places (which it is); it’s also about your site statistics. Oh, and it’s about the right keywords, too, which is what I’ll focus on today.

There are a variety of different tools and resources on the internet that are great for figuring out how effective your copywriting is; and also for doing the research necessary to make sure that the keywords you use for your copywriting are as effective as possible. Let me take you down the rabbit hole of keyword research.

Keying into Keywords

The heart and soul of copywriting in terms of SEO is keywords. Now, Copyblogger will (very astutely) remind us that there is no substitute for great copy. That is, you need to actually have good writing. Keyword stuffing is a serious problem for many copywriters: directly, the “art” of using a specific keyword over and over again until the piece is so repetitive that it is unreadable. Keyword stuffing is bad, says Matthew Loop. Keyword stuffing is bad, says Blue Global Media. Keyword stuffing is bad, says Web Pro News. Oh, and keyword stuffing is bad, says Google.

Word to the wise: keyword stuffing is bad.

However, good keyword use is the linchpin of SEO copywriting. You’ll need to have the right keywords targeted so that when the consumer is typing in words to the Google search box, your site pops up. Oh, and companies that blog get 55% more web traffic. More web traffic equals more conversions, so you’ll want to use keywords in your copy.

Of course, the question is how to find those keywords. This is one of the most challenging aspects of creating a content strategy, but wise copywriters know where to do their research. Writing compelling copy for a product or service isn’t just about good writing (though good writing is important): it’s about finding the appropriate keywords and making those keywords work for you.

Do Your Research

We love SEOmoz. If you don’t have a subscription, you should get one. (No, we don’t work for SEOmoz or have any affiliation. Consider that a pro tip.) At any rate, if you head over to this post by SEOmoz, they offer some great tips on how to do appropriate keyword research. For those who don’t want to bounce around the internet, here are the deets:

Use Google. Simply head over to the website itself and do a search for certain terms that you think would be good keywords. What sites pop up when you hit “search?” Are they relevant to your business? Do they get you to your competitor’s websites? If so, that’s probably a term that you should consider trying.

Use Google AdWords or Bing Adcenter. You can buy a sample campaign for one of your targeted keywords. Choose “exact match” for that keyword, and then track impressions and the conversion rate for said keyword over a few hundred clicks. The picture will begin to show itself.

Use the Words

Now that you’ve got an idea about what sorts of keywords to use, you’re going to have to actually put them in your copy. Remember: keyword stuffing is bad.

But how do you know if you’re keyword stuffing? Frankly, if you can read through content and pick out the keywords, consider it stuffed. There really is no magic ratio for keyword density, though M3 New Media recommends that you should not have keywords at a density of more than 20%.

The best way to use keywords when you’re blogging for business is to make them a natural part of your content. Assuming that you pick keywords that are actually relevant to your product, you should be able to fit them in and not have to resort to written acrobatics. Good keywords lend themselves to good copy.

And good copy lends itself to conversions. Do your research, don’t stuff your keywords, and watch as your bottom line rises.

Let’s say you’re a product manager for a expansion-stage company. It’s hard work and long hours, but you’re working on a great product and the company’s growing. Only now, as part of that growth effort, the company is establishing a content marketing strategy, which is all fine and good except for the fact that you’re being asked for help. Compelling content doesn’t make itself, after all, and besides, who better to write about your product that you?

A few weeks later, you’re busy trying to keep up with the deadlines and tasks that were actually listed first in your job description when the marketing department reminds you of that blog post you owe them (again).

It’s not as if you don’t want to contribute to the business blog, or to the content marketing strategy, in general. The marketing team did a great job of explaining the benefits of turning the company into a trusted source of information for your customers – how that drives traffic to your site and builds awareness of your brand. You see the value. You’re on board. You just can’t seem to get around to writing consistent blog posts and, besides, aren’t there higher priority items on your to-do list?

When it comes down to it, there are three stumbling blocks that tend to get in the way of churning out blog posts with the same effectiveness and reliability you bring to the other aspects of your job:

• Finding Time
• Finding a Topic
• Finding a Way to Make It Fun

Here are tips to help you accomplish all three.

Finding the Time

Tip #1: Two Birds, One Stone

Writing a business blog can be demanding, but it really doesn’t have to be that difficult or time-consuming. One key to making your corporate blogging life a whole lot easier — without taking a large chunk of time away from the million other things you’re supposed to be doing — is to try to bridge the gap between your other work and your business blog as much as possible. In other words, try to sync your blog posts up with your projects and responsibilities as much as you can. Ideally, company blogging should flow from your existing work as much as possible. Here are a few ideas to try:

Case studies/reports: If you’re developing a report on a particular aspect of your company or product there’s almost no reason not to break it down into a series of smaller, individual blog posts. You can also try doing this with older reports that your company has on file. Just make sure to notify/ask the author and also confirm that there isn’t any material that shouldn’t be released. That said, in general, if your company is just sitting on content it should be put to good use.

Presentations: Similarly, if you’re already putting work into developing content, why not kill two birds with one stone? While you’re preparing your slides put together a post on the material. You may also be able to create a follow-up post that addresses any questions you received. Nothing’s stopping you from drafting posts that summarize and provide your take on colleagues’ presentations or company workshops, either.

The point is to squeeze as much value from the work you’re already doing as possible. But there’s also added benefit to it, as well. Blogging about what you’re currently working on gives you a chance to think more critically about what you’re doing. It can help you step back and consider things from a distance, perhaps even enable you to see things from another perspective. Writing down your processes and solutions also ensures that they are documented, so the next time a particular issue or project comes up you and/or your colleagues will have a guide or resource in place to make things easier.

Tip #2: Make a Habit of It

Take 15 minutes at the beginning of your day to devote to writing. Start out by just jotting down and keeping a log of ideas. If you get on a roll then keep going. If it’s not happening then stop once the 15 minutes are over. But no matter what, take the 15 minutes.

Finding a Topic

Tip #1: React to Something

The second major stumbling block employee bloggers often run into is one that torments anyone who works with words – writer’s block. The key here is that you shouldn’t worry about coming up with a brilliant and completely original idea for every post. There are plenty of ideas already out there, and reacting to and building off of them is far easier. Try one of the following jumping-off points, keeping in mind your audience’s interests:

• Industry news
• Product/service guides and reviews
• Examples of other companies, products, services, websites, blogs, and individuals who influence you and are making an impact on your industry

Tip #2: Write Something that You Would Be Interested in Reading

You’re hoping to write about something your readers will be interested in — well, what would you like to read about? Is there a particular problem you’re running into that you’re interested in finding a solution for? Write about it and ask your audience for answers. Or did you recently come across a new really cool tool that makes your job easier, or did you catch wind of a potential game-changing new company or platform? Tell your audience about it.

A common misconception is that employee bloggers strictly have to write about their company’s product. This can result in posts that are essentially sales pitches and are full of bad ad copy and. That’s certainly not what customers are interested in getting from a blog. Stephanie Tilton, principle consultant of Ten Ton Marketing, suggests thinking of common interests you share with your customers and coming up with ideas for topics from there. It’s all about engaging, not simply broadcasting a thinly-disguised pitch.

Finding a Way to Make It Fun

Tip #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Give Your Blog Personality

Blogging is only a chore if you think of it that way. It’s crucial to find ways to have fun with it, otherwise you’ll always dread your deadlines and you’ll never be truly invested. Think about what it is you love about other blogs or websites and try to incorporate a little bit of that into your own business blog. Find a way to incorporate a line from your favorite movie or a sweet graphic or photo. It’s your blog. Run with it. Focus on the aspects of it that you enjoy and you may just find yourself looking forward to the next post.

If the tips above aren’t enough to get the creative juices flowing, you can discover more ideas for blog post topics in OpenView’s free Ultimate Guide to Corporate Blogging eBook. And for the Content Directors and Managing Editors out there, here’s a link to my posts on Editing a Corporate Blog and Corporate Blog Promotion.

photo by: photosteve101

For many in the United States, we are headed into a holiday weekend. Sometimes, time away from the office, coworkers, and customers give us the perspective we need to come up with our best ideas.

To help you return to work after a long weekend or a few days off, here are some of the best recent posts about online communities and social business that you may have missed:

How to Engage Your Customers and Employees

Learn how to avoid diluting your customer or employee engagement efforts. Test these 9 pillars of online engagement against your social strategy to get ideas for improving your organization’s performance.

Tactics That Make Activity Go Up

Find out why successful online community managers don’t focus on doing things that makes online community activity go up.

Strategy First, Platform Second…Please!

One would think that as a provider of online community software Socious would downplay strategy and other factors that add cost and extend timelines for social community projects. It is actually just the opposite.

Having provided social software to mid-sized and large organizations for 10 years, we recognize the correlation between strategy and an online community’s success rate. We have even been known to turn away companies that don’t see the need for developing an online community strategy before implementing our online community software. Read this post to find out why it is so important to have a strategy before selecting a social business platform.

Case Study: Social Business in B2B Ecosystems!

Watch this short video to see how Premier, an alliance of 2,500 hospitals, uses online communities to collaborate securely across their network to help doctors, patients, and other partners get better results.

What Struggles Will Your Community Face As It Matures?

One of the most pervasive fears about online communities for businesses and membership organizations revolves around not knowing what to expect. Our most popular eBooks, white papers, and webinars educate executives about what to expect when creating an online customer or member community. Enter The Community Roundtable and this post. Through their research and community, they do a great job painting a picture of the nuance and hurdles that organizations face as they create and grow their online communities.

So sit back, enjoy the kick-off to summer, and raise a glass to becoming a smarter social business professional. Please share you takeaways in the comments below.

The Facebook Camera allows users a single scrolling feed of all of their friend’s photos, can upload several photos at once and similar to Instagram allows the user to crop, rotate and filter their photos unlike the previous version of Facebook’s camera application.

With the IPO and Zuckerberg’s wedding, Facebook has been hard at work making changes to better the company’s growing list of features. One question I have though is this—Will Facebook ever hit the ceiling? Millions of dollars in revenue are made by social media marketing companies who owe Facebook for most of their success. What else can Facebook do that would better the social media marketing community?

Zuckerberg has made previous hints at improving the mobile aspect of Facebook and let’s face it, the changes that Facebook makes can cause more waves than a belly flopping Orca. I would like to predict that Facebook will eventually expand out of the iPhone app business and create a brand of tech they call their own. Will there be a new phone or a new tablet PC that Facebook can call its own? Who knows what is on the horizon for this social media titan.

As these people learn more and more, it doesn’t take long before they learn about SEO. It’s by far the most popular free method to drive traffic.

The problem with SEO is that roughly 95% of search engine traffic comes from Google. So when Google changes its algorithms around, tens of thousands of websites fall into oblivion overnight.

Lucky for you- I’ve figured out how to prevent that from happening. Whether you’re just getting started with SEO or have been doing it for years- this book can help you out.

NOTE that this course is not extremely complicated, and the real “meat” of where to go from here is not extremely detailed. That’s because I think that SEO isn’t nearly as complicated as most marketers make it out to be! You just have to follow a few rules and you’ll be doing much better than most of your competition.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Why do SEO?

There’s a reason why SEO is by far the most popular free traffic method online. In fact, there are several reasons.

For one thing- it can create HUGE passive income streams. Once you have a website ranking at #1 for its keywords, it will make money day in and day out- whether you work on it or not.

Now this isn’t to say that you should never touch it again. It’s just saying that it won’t constantly need your attention like paid traffic campaigns do.

Another reason that people like SEO is its CHEAP. You don’t need a huge budget to get started. In fact, all you really need is a few bucks for your domain name and hosting.

Building backlinks, writing articles, creating videos- these take a bit of time, but no money (unless you outsource them). And since most marketers have more time than money, this is a good way for them to drive traffic.

Finally, search engine traffic is EXTREMELY targeted! These days, people go to Google when they have a problem. Weight loss, divorce, money, heart disease, misbehaving kids- Google has the answer to everything! You just plug in your question, hit the Enter key, and Google helps you out.

And guess what- if your website is at the top of the listings, YOU are the one who has the chance to help that Google user.

That sounds like a business opportunity to me.

But here’s the thing- the online world changes daily. This includes search engines, and how business owners can use SEO to drive traffic.

To prove that, let’s take a look at how SEO has changed over the years.

How SEO Used to be Done

When Google first came out, it was EXTREMELY easy to rank a website for certain keywords. This was based on both onsite optimization and offsite optimization.

Old School Onsite Optimization

It used to be that all you had to do was stuff your site full of the keywords you were targeting, and you’d get traffic.

For example, let’s say you were targeting the keywords “how to lose weight.”

If you typed that into Google, it was fairly common to come across sites that looked like this (no, I’m NOT kidding):

How to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight

….pretty ridiculous, right?

Well it didn’t take Google too long to figure out that a VERY high keyword density doesn’t deliver quality content to the reader.

So they lowered what is considered the “optimal” keyword density to 1% to 3% (depending on who you talked to- everyone recommended something different).

As for internal linking- that just wasn’t very important. You could link to stuff on your own site to keep the visitor there longer, but it wasn’t required by any means.

Your website didn’t need to be clean. You could have images all over the place, ugly colors, high bounce rates (meaning visitors didn’t stay long), tons of extra code, and a lot of other nasty stuff.

Hopefully you get the point- onsite stuff used to be easy. Over the years some of it got cleaned up, but only in the last few years has it really started making a difference.

Now let’s talk about backlinks

Old School Backlinking

It used to be that all backlinks were treated the same. The website with the most backlinks would win- despite what the website’s onsite optimization was like.

It didn’t matter if your backlinks came from forums, article directories, authority blogs, .edu sites, or anything else.

Even though this seemed fair at first, it got abused. Automated software made it VERY easy to spam backlinks all over the internet. Today you can purchase thousands and thousands of backlinks to your website every day for less than $100 a month.

And that stuff used to work PERFECTLY.

There were stories of marketers who would launch a site, throw thousands of backlinks to it all over the place, and have it ranking #1 in just days- if not hours.

Over time though, Google realized that this wasn’t delivering quality content to its readers. People would stop using Google because the results would sometimes be extremely spammy- not good.

So what happened next? Google decided to fight back with pandas and penguins.

Google Pandas and Penguins

There have been 2 main types of updates over the last 2 years that rocked tens of thousands of websites. The first type is called Google Panda, and the second (more recent) type is Penguin

Beware the Panda

Google’s Panda update was aimed at one thing- improving the experience of Google search engine users.

Because Google had figured out that visitors hated going to small, spammy looking websites with poor quality content, they decided to target sites that had these characteristics:

• Lots of low Page Rank (PR) backlinks
• Uneven backlink velocity (they came too fast or slow)
• Too many/not enough keywords
• High bounce rates
• Too many links from the same sites
• Poor onsite optimization (no internal linking)
• No or very few outbound links

There were other factors as well, but these are a few of the biggest ones.

Even though Google had been moving in this direction for a while, this solidified the fact that automated, spammy stuff didn’t work anymore.

Marketers who had been using SE Nuke, Xrumer, Article Marketing Robot, Scrapebox, and dozens of other software the gives automated backlinks lost their entire businesses overnight.

Meanwhile, other websites that had been built up “the right way” shot up in rankings.

While some marketers were crying their eyes out, others were jumping with joy.

But this wasn’t quite enough. Even though the Panda updates (which kept coming for a few years) had caused some huge waves, Google wasn’t done yet.

Enter the Penguin

Even though the Panda updates were huge, Google’s Penguin updates really shook things up.

According to Matt Cutts- Google’s spokesperson when it comes to SEO- the websites with a giant bulls-eye for getting crushed were those that were “over optimized”.

What did this mean? Well besides the factors mentioned above, probably the biggest change was concerning incoming backlinks’ anchor text.

In other words- if 97% of a website’s backlinks all had the anchor text of “how to lose 10 pounds in a week” or whatever- Google thought that looked fishy.

And it kind of does, when you think about it. How many people are going to link to an article they found with anchor text like that?

Instead, a more realistic anchor text profile would include lots of other keywords, like how to lose weight, lose weight fast, lose 10 pounds, how this guy lost 10 pounds, this article, etc.

Something else that Google looked at was this- where is most of this website’s traffic coming from? Is it ALL coming from my search engine? Or is it also coming from guest posts, Facebook, articles, videos, press releases, and lots of other places across the internet?

Again, this makes sense. A popular website will get traffic from TONS of different places- not just Google’s search engine.

Meanwhile, a website that has been over-optimized may be receiving tons of traffic from Google, but none from other places. The Penguin didn’t like this, so these websites got CRUSHED.

The Aftermath

Tens of thousands of websites have been hurt by the Panda and Penguin- but some actually prospered.

Now that we’re done with the history lesson, let’s get into the REAL meat of this report- how to build a rock solid SEO foundation.

Rock Solid SEO

If you spend a lot of time researching SEO, you’ll find little tidbits of this information spread out all over the place.

For example, you’ll find clichés like “quality before quantity”, and “don’t build your business on the sand of SEO”.

While those are both true, they really aren’t that helpful. Instead, businesses using SEO need to have everything laid out to help them build rock-solid websites that only go up in the SERPS- never down.

To help you do that, I’ve broken this down into 2 different sections- how to recover from these updates, and how to build new websites with these updates in mind.

How to Recover Your Website from Oblivion

If these updates have killed your current websites, there are a few things you should do:

• Start driving traffic from other places- i.e. YouTube, document sharing sites, press releases, **REAL** blog comments, guest posts, and article syndication. Paid traffic can’t hurt either (it doesn’t have to be hundreds of clicks per day)

Remember that Google likes popular, high quality websites. If your site is getting visitors from all over the internet, that looks a lot better to Google. And before you start thinking that “Google can’t see everything”, remember that Google owns YouTube. It sees when people click from YouTube to your site… or, when they don’t.

1. Look at your site’s bounce rates. Are they extremely high? If so, add some videos for visitors to watch. Make your articles longer and more engaging. Put tools on there for them to play with.

• The key here is to do everything you can to make your visitors stay longer. The longer they’re reading your site/watching your videos, the more Google will think “oh, people do like the stuff on this site”. Go for high quality content, not just quantity.
• If possible, change the anchor text of your incoming backlinks. Since this usually isn’t possible, greatly vary the anchor text coming in from here on out. Use similar keywords, but don’t keep using your main keyword every single time.

As mentioned earlier, this just looks more natural. If a bunch of bloggers are linking to something on your site, what are the chances that they’re all going to use your main keyword as their anchor text? Extremely low, a.k.a. it doesn’t look natural, a.k.a. don’t do it.

• From now on- diversify, diversify, diversify. You want to drive traffic through quality backlinks from multiple sources with varying anchor texts. That’s the name of the game with SEO from here on out.

And you know that? This kind of SEO is going to be rock solid for a long, long time. As the internet changes, it will constantly be battling spam. You don’t want to be a spammy looking, over-optimized website. Instead you want to look like a solid, helpful site that visitors LOVE, keep coming back to, and sharing with their friends and family.

1. To keep visitors on your site a lot longer, do plenty of internal linking between pages and posts. Wikipedia does this, and it makes it MUCH easier to find what you’re looking for at times.

So for example, let’s say that you have an article talking about how to train a German Sheperd how to sit. Well if you also wrote an article explaining how to train your German Sheperd to fetch, you should link to that! The person may be interested in reading that, too.

• Hop on the social networking bandwagon. Facebook and Twitter are the big ones, but you can use reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, Pinterest and more. Since the internet keeps moving towards the social aspect, go with the trend!

How to Build a New Site

This is very similar to recovering a new website from oblivion. The advantage with a new site is that it isn’t tainted yet! So even though you may be competing with older sites that have more backlinks, if those backlinks are spammy or all have the same anchor texts- you might beat it in the SERPs.

So when you build new sites, here’s what I recommend:

• Build a site with a brand-able, easy-to-remember name. People probably won’t remember something like “howtotrainyourGermanSheperd.com” as easily as they’d remember “TrainYourShep.com” or something like that.

Remember that you want to build a solid business- not just a search engine optimized site. You’re going to be driving traffic from EVERYWHERE- and telling people to go to “HowtoTrainYourGermanSheperd.com” just doesn’t look as good.

• Drive traffic through your backlinks. The old school method of backlinking was to find websites that Google knew about it people didn’t necessarily look at very much. Forum profiles, Ezinearticles, etc.

Those just don’t work as well as they used to. Instead, you have to put backlinks where people are hanging out. Write guest blog posts on authority niches then link back to your website. Put up some good videos and create a YouTube channel- again, linking to your site. Write quality articles and get them syndicated across the web.

Google doesn’t want to just see that you have quality backlinks. They also want to see traffic coming through those links. That makes your site look popular, so they rank it higher in the SERPs.

1. Vary your anchor text. Since you’re just starting out, this will be very easy to do. Use keywords that are similar to the main one you’re going for, but not the exact same. At least, not all the time.

So if you’re targeting the keyword “how to get your boyfriend back”, you can use keywords like

get your boyfriend back, how to get your man back, get your boyfriend back fast, win back your boyfriend, win your boyfriend back, etc.

By doing this, you don’t look nearly as spammy to Google. You’re still saying the same thing (so people will click through to your site), but you are doing it in a more natural, legit way.

• Build links with increasing velocities. By that I mean that you start slow- a few links a day- and quickly increase it.

A lot of the SEO pros swear more by link velocity than quantity or quality. They say that as long as you are following what looks like a natural pattern, Google will love you for it.

So for example, maybe for the first week you put up 3-5 links a day. The next week, you put up 5-7. The next week it can be 7-13 per day. Then you just keep increasing it, until the point that you are building dozens or even hundreds per day.

**Note that this doesn’t work as well for older sites with tons of backlinks already. Google has already seen your link velocities bounce all over the place, so it’ll be harder to get this to work quite right.

• Use social networking sites from the get-go. Facebook, Pinterest, reddit, Twitter- all of these things build solid backlinks to your website. You can drive traffic through them and it makes your site appear as an authority. Plus if you get some loyal fans, it is VERY easy for them to share your site of fan page on Facebook and Twitter! Meet them where they’re at- that’s the name of the game.

Conclusion

Driving traffic through SEO doesn’t have to be difficult. People make it difficult because they are focusing solely on SEO, but that doesn’t make for a well-rounded internet business.

The key to SEO today and for the future is this- create quality content and drive traffic through backlinks from various websites using varying anchor texts.

If you simply do that, your business will grow! You’re building multiple traffic streams, making your business more brand-able, and will ultimately increase your SERP rankings at the same time.

So what are you waiting for? Go build some rock-solid SEO for your website!

The answer appears to be a resounding yes, if views of online video advertisements are to be believed. Every year, we know that people love to share funny super bowl videos, and increasingly they use social networks to do so. But there’s more to it than just sharing humor. Video is interesting and engaging, and people remember what they saw.

I’ve been saying it all along: video increases retention. That’s why marketers as well as online trainers use it. Viewers know it, too, as they are more likely to click on a video, even knowing it’s an ad. The underlying promise of social media, that people are more likely to take an action if they are prompted by people they know, seems to be working.

A recent study from eMarketer and Visible Measures reveals that views of video ads in social channels are up. Way up. First quarter to first quarter growth in views nearly doubled from 2011 to 2012. This is for videos that people know are ads, and they actively have to click to view.

This means several things: That more people are sharing video ads, people like to self-identify through sharing, and that people are willing to trust brands because their friends do.

It also suggests something a bit interesting to content marketers; people like honesty. An ad is an overt brand message asking people to take action, while a lot of marketing content is covert, sometimes a thinly-veiled ad, and sometimes a truly useful thought-leadership piece meant to help the viewer (or reader) learn something new, while associating the content with a brand. The fact that people click to view something they know is an ad is very telling.

To to get in on the action, know the primary attributes of a highly-shared video ad:

• Simplicity. An online video that is meant to be shared must be short and to the point. One point. Sometimes I see a link to a shared video that is 7 minutes long, and I hesitate to watch it. But 30 seconds? 60 seconds? That’s easy. I have that kind of time. And the point should not be too convoluted. An ad is often saying “buy our tasty pretzels” and nothing more. Your video should explain what you do and one reason you’re the best at it.
• Entertainment. Most people want to be entertained by something humorous or uplifting before they will share it. The sad truth is that most of us can’t always create something that viewers will deem sharable based on its humor. It takes agencies a long time to perfect the perfect punch line, and more than half of their attempts flop. At the least, you should keep your message light-hearted and friendly, without getting into detail or being negative.
• Quality. It’s been said that the quality of writing, video capture and editing doesn’t really matter. I disagree. Even the most raw branded online videos are carefully crafted to appear that way. The fact is, if the images are grainy, then clever writing and timing makes up for it. You should start with a script and read it aloud, then create a storyboard based on that timing. This will flesh out the production, and help you determine how to edit and produce the final video.
• Usefulness. This is the ‘Why’ part of your video. Why are you producing it? The reason to create a video is to inform your audience about something in an appealing and memorable way. They need to know something you have expertise on, like tactics and ideas for their business or personal needs. They need to know why or how your products will deliver on those needs. If you give people something useful, they will share it with those they know are like-minded.
• Purpose. Finally, the real reason your audience shares a video; the purpose. The video is more than a message about a product – it is built on principles shared by your audience. They’ll share your videos if your purpose matches something they believe. Maybe your business offers luxury products, clean technology, exclusive service, or hip and fun design. Whatever it is, your video should be dripping in it, so your viewers can relate and share it.

Video is one of the killer apps of social media, and clever ads are only part of the story. Social media users also share videos that are interesting in other ways besides being a funny branded advertisement. These tips will help you maximize your social media presence and gain mindshare from people who like to associate themselves with your clever, funny, well-written, useful and clear content.

Image: Brain Sins

Yesterday it was announced that Karma, Facebook’s new gift app, will be instrumental in its e-commerce success. No doubt social data is an incredibly powerful e-commerce tool yet there are many reasons both for and against for arguing that Facebook will become the dominant e-commerce force.

First off, here are 5 reasons that Facebook will dominate e-commerce.

1. Captive Audience: Facebook already owns the lion’s share of social media eyeballs and as platforms proliferate, more and more users will buy through the social network they know.

2. Social Search: As consumers become increasingly overwhelmed by amount of information and advertising available to them, they are turning to their peers (as opposed to Google Search) for purchasing recommendations, choices, and sharing.

3. Seamlessness: The ability to find, buy, share and be rewarded for what you buy is being baked ever deeper into the Facebook platform reducing the need to ever leave.

4. Real + Virtual: Facebook’s ability to sell both virtual goods and physical products using virtual and real world currencies creates a stranglehold on the growing merger of the on and offline world.

5. Targeting: While advertisers clamor for great and more dynamic advertising real estate within the platform, Facebook remains true to the wishes of its users by designing the size of the ads and leveraging data driven targeting.

Yet, with all this great opportunity, Facebook faces 5 equally compelling challenges:

1. Saturation: With almost every imaginable intersection between a person and product now covered within a single platform, users may tire of Facebook once advertising overwhelms the experience.

2. Mobile: Much discussed before and after the IPO, mobile remains a great challenge for Facebook despite the purchase of Instagram, Karma and Glancee.

3. Competition: Rest assured there are dozens of platforms designed purely for mobile consumers that are currently in stealth mode and primed to be the next Facebook.

4. Pollution: Shopping is an important but small part of the relatedness between people and the more that Facebook co-opts that relatedness for commerce, the greater the risk that the connective tissue it rely on will atrophy.

5. Shareholders: It is one thing to reinvent the way commerce is practiced and another to balance the competing demands of users and shareholders.

Stacked side by side, it’s easy to see why the jury is out on the future of Facebook especially in a mobile-centric marketplace. But their dominance and iterative business strategy bode well for continued success, as long as they never lose site of the fact that they must serve their users first.

Do you think Facebook will become the dominant e-commerce force? Or will too much advertising be its undoing?

Maybe it’s because I’m a small town country girl at heart, but I really want to see the family business succeed and become the lifeblood of my community again. I believe it can happen, but what it will take is educating small business owners about this shift in business and how to use their social capital as their competitive edge.

About a year ago, I started a Twitter account for my town – @ClermontFlorida. My goal was, and is, to use Twitter to unite the community to show off how great it is to live there, and to promote the small businesses in our community to give them a leg up. I think towns and communities that aren’t representing their area on Twitter and trying to bond their community are just plain crazy. They are missing out on an extremely simple and effective way to bring money into their local economy, keep businesses open, develop a sense of community pride among residents, and bring back that small town feel.

The typical @ClermontFlorida tweets consist of some news items, but mostly it is retweets of what people are talking about and out doing in our community. Anyone that follows the Twitter account would immediately understand why we are so proud of our community. We have a National Training Center where Olympians like Tyson Gay are currently training for this years Olympics, one of our residents was just inducted into the pro bowling Hall of Fame, we are the hub of the wakeboard and wakeskate industry with many pro athletes training daily on our lakes, and we always have triathlons and cycling competitions hosted at our Waterfront Park. We are so much more than a small dot on the map to the left of Orlando, and I think the Twitter account has helped people see that.

The other great opportunity that is open to a “tweeting town” is the ability to guide a visitors experience. If someone tweets that they are visiting town, I’ll send them a friendly “welcome to the area” tweet and suggest a restaurant to try. You’ll also often find updates from local businesses and what specials and events they have going on, and there’s always tweets from happy customers of local businesses to share. Even if that business doesn’t even have a Twitter presence, those positive reviews are still reaching their target audience.

So how can you make your town a “Tweeting Town”? Here are some lessons I’ve learned along the way.

1. Don’t tweet headlines, tweet first hand stories

I could tweet news articles about Clermont, and I did that for a while, but honestly, it was boring content. Stories like if a school uniform policy was passed or what the rotary club was up to is not exactly relevant to most people and is too long and formal for most people’s attention span. If they want that news, the best place for that is the newspaper and they know that.

But, what has really been successful is retweeting messages from people who are out in the community right when news is happening, and news that would probably never make it into the newspaper but is still interesting. For example, there is a guy in Clermont that actually bought one of those jet pack machine things that goes over water. Someone tweeted a YouTube video about it and it’s the coolest thing! You probably wouldn’t see that in the paper. Unless maybe it was the president of the rotary club.

2. Set up Twitter Searches

This is where most of the content I post comes from. I set up and saved searches for Clermont, for certain popular businesses, and for the names of lakes in the area. It’s also gotten to the point where when people mention Clermont, they use the Twitter handle, so I can immediately retweet their message. If your town has a common name, you will have to be a little more advanced in your search, and you will need to work harder to train the community to use your handle or a hashtag when they mention the town.

3. Have high content standards.

Definitely don’t tweet any and every mention of your town. If I did that, the tweet stream would be filled with a bunch of whiny teenagers talking about “getting out” or spam tweets from companies who really don’t get Twitter. Make sure you set your goals going into it, and the type of content you will and will not tweet. I will retweet some negative comments from time to time if I feel like it will foster a sense of community and build a stronger bond, but mostly I retweet those who are positive and love our town.

4. Help People

There are times when someone is looking for a referral for something like a good dentist or a house to rent. Usually I will connect them with a business that I know is on Twitter so that they can start a conversation with them. There’s also been times where people will tweet the account asking about a plume of smoke they see and if it’s a brush fire, or an unusual amount of traffic and if there is an accident nearby. I’m able to research it for them ASAP and get the info out to the rest of the community. Also a lot of the times I’ll retweet a question and someone else who follows the account will answer (perfect opportunity for a business).

5. Promote local businesses

This is my main goal with the account, but it’s a lot trickier than it sounds. I want all the posts to be engaging and not read like an advertisement. A lot of the times that is the only way businesses know how to use Twitter. I only retweet messages that are relevant and relational, because I know that if people only see ads, they won’t come back.

6. Photos, photos, photos.

Post as many photos as you can. 1) Because people can identify the areas in the photos and feel a stronger bond with the account, and 2) because it’s one of the most engaging pieces of content you can post. I am SO proud of the collection of photos that have been posted over the past year on the @ClermontFlorida twitter account. It’s a perfect display of life in our community, and you can see why we love it here. Aren’t our sunsets incredible?!

Do you live in a “tweeting town”? I would love to hear your stories of how Twitter and social media has helped to build a stronger sense of local community. Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Plugins

WordPress is so diverse these days; the types websites you can put together are varied. From directories, eCommerce and straight-forward blogs, to image based themes, Q & A style sites and magazine themes. Plugins add to that diversity. If you’re already using WP you’ll know how easy it is to add a new plugin to your website. It’s simply a case of search, upload and activate. So here’s a run down of my favourite plugins – some of which we use here and some we have used on other projects.

NoFollowr

Brilliant – I can’t say enough about the guy that designed this – Joel Birch. It’s so simple. NoFollowr allows you to turn your external links (links to other websites) to nofollow. Placing a a tick or a cross next to the link which is only visible to administrators when logged in, NoFollowr doesn’t need the page to be refreshed to work. You simply click the tick, to turn it into a cross and you’re done. Very, very nice. Not sure why this is only rated 4 stars at the plugin directory – it’s my personal favourite. When I first downloaded it, I went through over 100 pages in under an hour. Download it now!

Crazy Egg

More than just a WordPress plugin, Crazy Egg is a very effective tool that allows webmasters to track the views and clicks on their website. Simply sign up for one website (max 10 pages) and set the project timescale and you’ll see the progress over time. So useful for allowing you to see if you have the content and call-to-action in the right place on your home page, or perhaps the newsletter sign up form? Simple add the plugin on your WP dashboard and go back to the site and you’re ready to go. Love it.

Wufoo

Another plugin that is more than just a plugin. Wufoo provides an excellent service which allows users to build quality forms and surveys. An example of which is our design services order form here at Social Colleague. Slick and easy to use, Wufoo is a firm favourite of mine.

SEO Smart Links

A great plugin which reduces the time you spend adding links. SEO Smart links simply adds an internal URL to any keyword which matches a page on your WordPress site. Allowing you to build internal links quickly and efficiently.

These are only 4 of the vast array of WordPress plug ins available, do you recommend any? Drop a comment below.

See the world’s best SEO software services go head to head for rankings in our “top SEO tools table“.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a huge role in helping to drive over 50% of global Internet traffic. That’s why you should care which SEO software companies “walk the walk“.

Each SEO website is ranked according to their:

• Page speed performance (Speed)
• Google PageRank (PR)
• Chrome Audits performance (Audit)
• Fully Loaded score (FL)
• Google position in SERPs (search Engine Results Pages) for “SEO company/tool/service” (SERP)
• Alexa Rank (Alexa)

Top 10 SEO software & tools sites ranked by their own website SEO performance

It’s important to note that as comprehensive and powerful as many of the SEO metrics used to create these rankings are, they are not infallible or absolute.

The rankings are also subject to change. All it takes is a solid website and SEO audit, backed by a bit of technical Web and SEO skills and anyone can improve their blog or site’s SEO, visibility, traffic and ultimately revenue.

Rank Name Speed PR Audit ^* FL SERP Alexa 1 SEOMoz85 6 15 82 1 337 2 SEMRush 85 6 14 85 2 790 3 SEOBook 86 6 17 86 1 1097 4 Link Assistant67 5 15 67 1 2631 5 searchmetrics68 4 17 69 2 3333

^* Added all the outstanding SEO issues weighted by priority. Lower score is better.

Testing and improving your own SEO

Hopefully seeing the SEO performance of these top SEO services has inspired you to take action and start reaping the rewards (more traffic, more conversions, more money) that high quality SEO can offer.

Recently, Google released the Penguin update to its search algorithm and this has caused quite a shakeup in the world of SEO. You must ensure that you only implement “best practice” SEO techniques if you want to avoid being penalized by the search engines.

Here are some of the best articles that teach you how to write SEO content, optimize your site for SEO, or hire the best SEO consultant to give your blog or site the SEO lift it needs:

• How to test SEO: Top free SEO tools to easily check the SEO of any page
• 10 step assessment: How to hire an SEO consultant or Internet marketing company for your business
• The top five SEO services for small business, 2012
• SEO Blogging tips: How to use Google analytics search data to inspire new content
• Panda & Penguin friendly SEO: A business guide to recovering from Google’s algorithm updates
• Five money making SEO tips for small business online stores

Recommended SEO resources

You might also consider the following SEO experts, blogs, and resources to help guide your SEO learning and implementation:

• Matt Cutts – head of the webspam team at Google
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Danny Sullivan – editor of SearchEngineLand.com
• VerticalResponse
• Siteprebuilder SEO
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Watch
• SEO Chat

Honorable mentions

Share your thoughts on SEO companies that you think I should include in this comparison. There are plenty of great SEO sites out there, and if one or two have good enough scores to get on the table, I’ll add them…

The Sizzle: Facebook IPO. The Fri-Up: Cannes. The Sauce: The Greeks.

The Sizzle:

• Zuckerberg sees stock tumble amid lawsuits
• FC Barcelona kicks off eBooks to Africa charity campaign
• Google’s patent trial win ‘near disaster’ for Oracle
• Cookie use deadline approaches

The Fri-Up: Social Brands 100

It’s that time of year again when Brandwatch alongside our partners Headstream, reveal our definitive list of social brands in the Social Brands 100. Close to six months of tracking and analysis has gone into compiling this year’s list and at Brandwatch we’ve managed to dig deeper into our social data than ever before. This year we’ve been able to drill down to a per post level in consumers’ online interactions with brands.

We have ascertained how interactions are made and the value of each of those interactions on Facebook and Twitter. In order to do this, we’ve used an algorithm developed specifically for the Social Brands 100 project which counts and weights reach, response rate, timeliness, page engagement, type of content, and online presence.

If you have been nominated and have made it into the top 100 (full list here) then keep your fingers crossed for the big reveal on Tuesday. If you didn’t make the list or didn’t know about the Social Brands 100 ranking, you can still demonstrate your social status in front of the best in the business by taking up residence in our newest data visualisation, the Social Brands 100 wormery. You can easily get involved by tweeting the hashtag #SB100 to bag yourself a wormhole. Click here to enter the wormery.

Here’s a bit more about how our wormery works….
The Social Brands 100 Wormery visualises the conversation around Social Brands 100 (#SB100) by using Brandwatch’s “Top Tweeters” component. Each worm represents one Twitter user and the number displays how often they’ve tweeted about Social Brands 100 (we started collecting the data in May 2012). The “Top” tweeter is the user who has tweeted the most about Social Brands 100, and “New” signifies the tweeter who posted about Social Brands 100 most recently.A full report on the Social Brands 100 will be launched at our Social Brands 100 event in London on Tuesday 29th May. The report will also be available from the Brandwatch website on Tuesday as the winner and full ranking is officially announced.

Until Tuesday, we’ll see you in the wormery!

The Sauce

Something for the weekend:

• The Leap
• Slinky treadmill manoeuvres
• In a nod Eurovision, lets watch Daz Sampson ripping it up in ’06!

Hope you enjoyed the Friday#, have a great weekend.

If you haven’t already joined us on twitter – we’d love to see you there: @brandwatch

If you want demos on how to use our latest improvements to optimise your reports and social media monitoring it’s all on our blog.

If you’d like any support with using Brandwatch’s social media monitoring tool contact contact@brandwatch.com

Search runner-up Bing almost beat Google to the punch but the knockout effect lasted less than a week. Introducing a beautifully revamped search engine, which takes into account your social graph, and announcing that “search goes social”, Microsoft succeeded in producing a “wow” reaction, with pundits reaching an almost unanimous consensus that the new Bing is revolutionising search.

And it certainly is… in a way. But heavyweight Google responded to the challenge without delay.We’ve been speculating about the upcoming changes in the search engine’s mechanism since the company’s SVP Engineering Amit Singhal issued a spoiler about Google’s leap towards semantic search. And with a recent announcement on the Google Blog, these changes are now a reality… at least for some lucky folks across the pond.

Google’s Knowledge Graph in a nutshell

With the launch of Knowledge Graph, Google is vowing to make search more intelligent and relevant to the individual user. Google argues that by recognising context, its search engine understands the world just as people do, thus enabling users to find the right information they’re seeking. If you’re looking for Taj Mahal, for instance, you’ll be asked whether you’re referring to the monument or the musician going under the same name.

“The words you use during search refer to real things in the world, rather than a random string of characters,” explains Jack Menzel, the company’s Product Management Director, and hits the nail on the head with this argument.

Another prominent feature of Knowledge Graph is the introduction of a panel on the right-hand side of the search results, with a succinct summary of the information related to each query. What is more, by serving up related results, Knowledge Graph helps you understand the relationships between things and allows you to explore the broader topic.

So it looks like – with Bing’s move towards social, and Google’s launch of Knowledge Graph – the world of search has entered a brand new era in which context, social engagement and knowledge discovery will define our search experience.

The two search behemoths have set the ball rolling. All we need to do now is to wait and see exactly what impact these developments will have on website visibility.

What do you think? How will the changes introduced by Bing and Google affect SEO?