A plaintive voice from the dark of space said, “I sprouted,” and a Diary of a Space Zucchini was born. For nearly three months, from January to late March, the intrepid little plant’s faithful followers shared his joys, triumphs and sorrows as he orbited the Earth in the International Space Station. They were with him when he discovered he was an astronaut, unsure of his role as a crew member but “ready to contribute” just the same. They learned of his embarrassment at being naked — he was growing in a clear, zippered bag with no dirt and not much water. They were even with him when he became ill from tainted fertilizer and feared he was headed to the “Great Compost” in the sky.

Who was the space zucchini really? He was actually astronaut Don Pettit posting as the plant on his blog, Letters to Earth. And while the voice was Pettit’s, the adventures of the plant were real. An experiment in aeroponics — growing vegetables in space with no soil and little water — the zucchini was one of several garden plants drifting around among the other ongoing experiments on the space station.

By now you must be wondering, why am I reading about a vegetable in space on a blog about content marketing? It’s because there’s something we can learn from him about social media: Social media is not about technology, it’s about people. The space zucchini’s first set of blog posts garnered 41 comments from readers. People, it seems, were following his story. They cared about him and wanted him to succeed. When his friends, Broccoli and Sunflower, were endangered, readers were on the edge of their seats. When his leaves mysteriously turned brown and started to wither, they wanted him to survive

Pettit could just as easily have told the world about his zero-gravity cultivation experiment in a straightforward manner. He could have simply described the aeroponics process and reported on the daily development of the plants, but I’ll bet he wouldn’t have attracted such a strong following if he had. Why? Because, despite the fact that we are surrounded more and more by technology every day, we still have millions of years of evolution behind us making us human beings. And as human beings, we long to feel connected.

So, what is the take-away from our little space story? If you’re thinking about creating a blog for your company — or even if you already have one — remember who you’re talking to. Find a way to reach out to people and engage their emotions. Precisely because technology can be so isolating, now more than ever, people need to feel real connections to stay engaged. Find a way in your blog to reach out to your readers and make them feel valuable and involved. No one reading Pettit’s followers really believed that a zucchini plant was talking to them from space, but because they were touched by his humanity, they were willing to lay credibility aside long enough to enjoy his adventures.

One of the things that marketing experts and advertising professionals learn early on about a target audience is that anything seen through a screen has a mystique to it. That is why television commercials for toys around Christmastime are so effective. Not only does the child get to see a new toy he may want, but the ability to hold on to something that was seen on television is a strong draw.

The Internet has that same kind of allure, and it is rapidly becoming one of the most popular advertising mediums in the marketing industry. When you see a product emerge through your computer, tablet or smartphone’s screen, your interest is piqued. But even television needs to be reinforced by using other forms of advertising. The same can also be said for advertising on the Internet. You will get your audience’s interest with an Internet advertisement, but you will generate sales by surrounding people with your advertising.

How do you surround people with advertising? You tie your Internet and offline marketing together and make it almost impossible for people to avoid your message. The key to a successful advertising campaign is a unified approach that gets the entire company behind what you are selling.

Print Advertising

You can enhance your Internet advertising with the print — and vice versa. Internet advertising is just one part of a comprehensive marketing campaign. When people open their favorite magazine and see the same color scheme, images and message on the pages that they see on your website, then it is almost as if your magazine advertising is legitimizing your Internet advertising.

A traditional way to get feedback from customers with magazine advertising used to be by asking the reader to send in a response card. The new way is to give the reader a website to go to where he can get more information on the product and submit opinions as well as answer product marketing questions. Tying together your print and Internet advertising is extremely effective.

The Complete Effect

When your entire company gets behind your online advertising, it drives traffic to your web presence and helps increase revenue. To tie your company into your Internet campaign, you need to include the website address in everything your company uses. Marketing materials, business cards, letterhead and envelopes all need to have the company website on it. The company dedication to Internet advertising will create the feeling that the web is a reliable source of information.

Internet advertising is a great way to reach millions of people all over the world. But if your company does not back up its Internet advertising with other mediums, then the Internet becomes an almost useless marketing tool. Legitimize and enhance your Internet advertising by making it just one part of your comprehensive marketing plan.

George R is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

With the recent launch of Google AdWords for video, the Internet chatter around the globe has focused on how videos can help content go viral and stay relevant. When it comes to incorporating search engine-optimized (SEO) keywords into videos and subsequently adding those videos to your content, there are a few things you must know. The following tips will help you to get started using SEO videos to help promote your content and keep it high in the search results.

1. Include SEO videos within your content. Find videos on YouTube that are SEO-specific to your topic. For instance, if you are writing a blog post to promote your local craft store, then find a how-to craft video on YouTube that is optimized with SEO keywords. This will add another piece of relevant content to your package as well as help readers to find your content quickly and easily.
2. Create an SEO video that links to your content. Take it a step further and make your own SEO video. When you post this video to YouTube, include a link to a specific website or blog post that deals with the video topic. This is another way that interested readers and your target audience can stumble on your content.
3. Study the data about your video. Be sure you understand the numbers. For instance, a video may have several thousand views on YouTube — but that doesn’t take into account unique views. Utilize TrueView and other programs to make sure you know specific information about your videos.
4. Create a video that applies to a variety of content. By creating one video about general topic, you can utilize this video in several different content pieces. For instance, you could create an informative video about dog health and nutrition, then subsequently link that video to specific content about different types of dog food.
5. Choose the best SEO keywords for your video. Sometimes, you might include three to five keywords within a traditional written SEO blog post. If you are creating an SEO video to go with this post, choose the strongest and best keyword to incorporate into the video. This will help to maximize your video’s relevancy without cramming keywords.

Whether you are hoping to use SEO videos to increase your online presence or to kick off your latest ad campaign, it’s certainly worth nothing that incorporating videos into content is almost a surefire way to increase your hits, clicks and amount of time spent on your page. Adding videos to your content (which is already enriched with SEO keywords) will make your content more relevant and more interesting to the reader. By increasing your search results on websites such as YouTube in addition to traditional search engines, you will be able to maximize the impact each content piece has both in terms of visibility and also in terms of dollars. So when you’re looking to create your next content page, don’t forget to look past the words and think about the sights and sounds of videos.

Catherine C is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

Facebook is upping their game with reporting truly useful user statistics for business pages – logging into your administrator screen offers new data points to explore nearly every week. It’s easy to get caught up in the growth statistics of your account by measuring your total “Likes” and add the potential reach of your account with their “Friends of Fans” number. As a result, you might decide Facebook is the best outreach tool ever. However, dig a little deeper and you will either be delighted or distraught at the real numbers that detail user engagement.

The statistic of doom or delight is listed under “Reach” in your insights page. Scroll midway down to get to the “How You Reached People” graphs and check out the unique users by frequency for the last month (set the timeframe at the top of the page). This tells the true story of how many of those thousands of fans and friends of fans you’re actually reaching. The little numbers under the bar chart can be re-interpreted as:

• (1 ) Probably just stopped by for a coupon code or a funny photo someone shared
• (2) They don’t really care what you have to say, talk to the hand
• (3, 4, and 5) Newbies or drifters … maybe they just don’t log into their account daily
• (6-10) New fans or semi-engaged fans, there’s potential here
• (11-20) Score, they’re paying attention!
• (20+) These people love you, man!

An Example of the Numbers Breakdown

Total likes for our brand page – 13,005 with 6,570 hard-won likes only resulting in 1 point of engagement in the last month. Only 1,404 of the people who like our page were what we would consider actively engaged at 11+ points of frequency in a period where there were 35+ opportunities for them to see and interact with content from us. Ouch.

If you’re focused on increasing your Facebook reach, now is the time to benchmark your ratio of engaged users against total number of fans and start testing status updates, polls, and photo galleries that get user comments and shares. If you’re ready to drop some cash in advertising, coupons, or product giveaways you can run offers in Facebook ads or grab a third party app (required in the Facebook terms of service) and run a contest you can use for status fodder and create a buzz that spreads from your current fans to their friends.

Seeing the weight of those unique users by frequency bars drift to the right is going to be more valuable over time than racking up page likes with people who don’t stick around and interact with your brand. Build that engagement now and capture their interest before they forget they ever liked your page in the first place. If you don’t it’s likely your content will never make it into the display algorithm for them and you’ll always have their “Like” but not their love or brand loyalty.

You’ve just finished your latest content marketing blurb but feel it needs a little bit more to help push it to the win. Welcome to the world of stock photography. Unless you’re a graphic designer or pro photographer in addition to an award-winning author or just a mommy blogger, you need help when it comes time to create graphics for your white papers, newsletters, blogs, and Facebook fan pages. Instead of spending your free time trying to create that perfect photo or graphic, and getting frustrated along the way, stock photography allows you to utilize the talents of experts who do that for a living. Then, with a small licensing fee, you can add their hard work to complement your content services. As long as you don’t require exclusive usage, the licensing fees for royalty-free usage rights start at a dollar or two – lower if you do more volume with the sites and higher if you require higher resolution images.

The biggest sources of imagery are the oldest and most expensive, and are more geared towards selling photographs, not typically meant for the web, but certainly available for use there. These include Getty Images, Corbis Images, and Sipa Press.

More typically for Web rights, one looks for the microstock photo sites. The micro here stands for micropayment, where the artist makes money through volume. As long as you don’t care that you are using the same image as someone else, they can sell the same image to hundreds of advertisers and sometimes make more money than if that same image sold once through the more traditional, old school agencies. Again, Getty is a big player in the microstock realm through its 2006 acquisition of iStockphoto. Shutterstock and Bigstock also play in this space, as do Fotolia, and 123RF, among many others.

Picking which site or sites to use can be tricky. If you are looking for something like Adobe Flash animations, that will limit your choices. More typically though, you choose on price and selection. iStockphoto is the largest supplier in the group but you can’t just buy one photo cheaply from them. Instead, you buy credits and one credit does not equal one photo. If you truly only need one photo, they are an expensive option. Your best option though is to just explore the different libraries and look for reviews online. More typically, you’ll scan the different libraries and find that perfect image to complement your newsletter, and worry about price later. With microstock, prices are low enough that you waste more time searching then you could have earned doing other tasks during that same time. Now, with the added images, your marketing content looks that much better.

John Z is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

Unless a person is deep in search engine optimization work the concept of social signals and their use is probably lost on something to do with saying the right things in professional meetings and events. However, in reality social signals are now becoming an important tool in improving website traffic and search ranking.

Background

Two of the big search engines, Yahoo and Google, recently disclosed that they were reconfiguring how they determine search engine rankings. Social signal measurement is to be used going forward. This metric involves the interplay of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and how users are connecting specific website links to their network lists. It represents the next generational evolution of traditional HTML linking and driving traffic to a specific website target.

As a result, companies and marketers are now worried that the impact of social signal measurement will affect a website’s new position in search engine results. Too little social signaling and the assumption is the website will now fall down to irrelevant search result pages where online searchers hardly every go (most people just click on a link in the first two result pages of a search engine).

Considerations

The challenge of social signals, unlike other influences that can be used to boost a website’s ranking, is that social media connections take manual time to create. As a result, someone has to physically write up the social message, connect a link, and post it to the social media system. Doing so takes time, energy, and personal commitment. Social signal-building is not impossible for small businesses or writers, but it does come with some serious parameters. This caveat is particularly important if a business outsources the social signal work instead of taking care of the linking personally.

First, other efforts such as marketing and back-linking and traditional search engine optimization (SEO) should not be left by the wayside. The overall focus is to increase comprehensive use of the website. The more traffic that references the website, then the more important it must be from the search engine perspective. Social signal-building is part of a comprehensive plan to achieve better search engine ranking and traffic for a website destination. It does not work only on its own.

Second, search engine parameters and measurement factors will change from time to time. A business or writer should not assume what works today will still be the criteria in the future. So ongoing maintenance of the website to maximize a search engine’s review needs to be performed. Otherwise, a website could easily be relegated to the status of content farm or worse, irrelevancy.

Third, the website content needs to be updated regularly with new material and linking. If the website material is stagnant, it will score far less in search engine rankings.

Tom L is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

Social media networks offer essential tools in building brand awareness for your business. A Facebook page or Twitter account can offer a company exposure to countless potential customers outside its natural geographic boundaries. These are not the only social media networks a company should be using for marketing purposes. If your company is not taking advantage of LinkedIn, it is ignoring a powerful marketing tool in the social media realm.

LinkedIn has emerged as the leading business social network with more than 100 million members worldwide. A company that joins LinkedIn and creates a detailed profile will see immediate benefits. Their page will get listed in search engine results and give the company a brand new outlet to offer news and updates or to promote products and services.

How can LinkedIn build your business? Simply put, it can open doors to new customers, new employees and new relationships with peers in your industry.

One way to make LinkedIn work for your business is through linking your profile to the company blog and other social media accounts. It will help increase your number of followers on those networks and make it easier for everything from blog posts to tweets to reach a wider audience.

Getting involved in specific LinkedIn discussion groups related to your industry is another great way to build brand awareness. You can build up a network of contacts through these groups. Some contacts could become future business partners. Others could form a talent pool from which you draw future employees. When you create connections, make relevant ones. All connections on a LinkedIn company page should ultimately serve the purpose of building your business.

You can take matters into your own hands by creating your own LinkedIn group specifically related to your industry. This lets you build a network of professional contacts on your own terms since you can set the parameters for belonging to the group. It also gives you a chance to initiate discussion topics, answer questions, promote your company and build a strong reputation within your industry.

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to build your business using LinkedIn is to obtain recommendations to put on your public profile. These can be from customers touting your products or services. Recommendations can also come from suppliers or business partners who have worked with your company on past projects. One thing recommendations will do almost immediately is build your credibility with potential customers and business partners. They will see your company as an industry leader that can get the job done

Once you have established your business in LinkedIn, your company will take several steps forward. Sales will increase and your customer base will grow. Your influence will expand and result in helpful professional relationships within your industry. There is no limit to what using LinkedIn as a tool can do to grow your brand. For that reason, there is no reason to neglect using it in your social media approach.

John C is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

While surfing the Web the other day, I stumbled across a recent article from the Newswire section of the “Sacramento Bee” announcing that BrightEdge, a search engine optimization (SEO) platform company, had just been awarded a patent for one of its SEO processes. The patent covered a unique process that measures a company’s share of “voice” in its particular industry across multiple types of media, including social media, blogs, mobile content, and video sharing. Reading this, my first thought was, “Can they patent an SEO process?” Two other questions quickly followed: “Can that kind of patent be enforced?” and “How will this affect small businesses using SEO techniques to optimize their own page rankings?”

My curiosity had been piqued; this topic definitely warranted some research. Here’s what I found:

Can They Do That?

The short answer it, yes, they can. While the BrightEdge patent is, according to Lemuel Park, CTO of the company, the first-ever awarded to an SEO platform company, SEO patents themselves are not new. The first patent filed – though not awarded – for a page-rank process, was way back in 1997. Other, more recent, patents include one filed by Google in 2005, protecting the search engine giant’s process of retrieving information based on historical data. Business Wire, owned by Warren Buffett, was granted a patent in 2011 for a process that would optimize the timing of press releases to ensure that they were efficiently found and followed by search engines.

Are These Patents Enforceable?

That, unfortunately, is a question that has yet to be answered. Technology and its real-world applications are often several steps ahead of our lawmakers. Some SEO patents are rather nebulous in their descriptions; small changes in wording could make two nearly identical practices seem very different in the eyes of a judge. Other processes are already in general use; it would be hard for a company to prove exclusive ownership of techniques that have been around for years. SEO techniques also change rapidly in response to evolving search engine algorithms. A process that works today may be worthless long before the patent paperwork is finalized, making the question of enforcement moot.

How Does This Affect Small Businesses Using SEO Techniques?

That depends on how the patents are interpreted. If they are only applied to the outright sale of the processes – rather than their actual use – then they won’t affect in-house SEO practices. A company won’t have to worry about whether the process is patented or not unless they try to sell it or want to acquire it from an outside provider. The real downside, as I see it, is that choices will be limited. If a wide variety of processes are patented, each by a different company, then no one will have access to all of them. Businesses wanting to use the most up-to-date SEO practices will be forced to choose a single provider who may only offer one or two of the best options. Other processes, patented by competing companies, will not be available to them.

As you can see, I’ve raised more questions than I’ve answered. This, however, is fascinating stuff, and if you own a business that uses SEO of any kind, it bears watching.

Kate C is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

Most of us have heard of an instance where a divorce case party got nabbed for indiscretions on his or her Facebook page. However, from a marketing perspective, one might not see an immediate concern to watch what is written on a social media site since it is all business. “How could someone get in trouble for writing about business,” would be the natural reaction. However, while social media resources and tools continue to be cheap, easy ways to access large amounts of people quickly for any kind of brand messaging, these sites are also becoming valuable tools for investigations as well.

From an investigation perspective, a business user of social media needs to understand there are different ways that written material on a social media site can get caught up in an investigation. It can be part of a civil lawsuit, an internal administrative review within the business or a criminal investigation. In each and every case, where the use of social media is involved, lawyers have learned to seek all related records because more often than not what is written can be used in a case.

So back to our question above – why does it matter for a business’ marketing? Being proactively careful on what is written can keep a business out of trouble before it begins. No message from a business that goes outside the office can be considered casual. Every written statement produced reflects back on the brand and the people running the business. As a result, if a business has a Facebook page or Twitter account, but doesn’t pay attention to what the assigned media staff is doing, it could find itself in hot water with an upset party. Typical complaints tend to be objections to what was written or worse, conversations that were hidden about inappropriate actions but available on the site’s records. In either case, when that upset party’s lawyer gets a hold of the material through discovery, it’s a safe bet that the material will be used against the business to win a settlement or judgment.

In some cases, snarky messages and casual statements can be used to reflect the business’ attitude as a whole when it has inadvertently injured someone with its marketing activity. A court can easily decide on a harsher punishment just because the lawyer showed everyone “what the business staff was really thinking at the time.”

There is also no immediate “delete” button once a discovery demand is served on a business. The information and records have to be provided, including from the social media site if they exist. So the best way to avoid this problem is to avoid the inappropriate statements in the first place. All communication should be vetted by the business’ management before being posted. External party concerns or complaints should be routed offsite to a complaint department rather than engaged on the site. Above all, don’t put the office joker in charge of the twitter posts. You might as well give him a gun pointed at your business’ collective head.

Tom L is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.

Do you ever feel like everybody you know is on Facebook? It’s not just your imagination. December 2011 reports show that Facebook has more than 845 million active monthly users, and nearly 60 percent of them log in daily.

That means your Facebook business page has a chance to reach almost 850 million users each month.

Do you have feel the pressure yet? Don’t let yourself get too worried; creating and maintaining an impressive Facebook business page is not as difficult as you might think. There are hundreds of different ways to make your business page rock, but we’ve decided to focus on five of the most important ones:

Include Information About Your Company

Some folks argue that Facebook is the new Google. What does that mean to you? Customers skip the search engines and go straight to the popular social networking site to find information about new products and services. Don’t let them leave without finding what they are looking for.

Make sure your company’s Facebook page includes information about hours, locations, services and products. You should also include interesting tidbits about your company, preferably ones that are worded differently or not found on your website. And don’t forget contact info like phone numbers and email addresses, as well as a link to your website. All of this information belongs on the “About” section of your profile.

Update Your Page Frequently

When was the last time your business posted a new photo or status update? If you can’t remember, it’s been too long. Customers like fresh content. They don’t want to visit your business page and find a bunch of stuff from 2009.

Be careful, though. It’s easy to neglect your page, but it’s also easy to get overly excited and post status updates multiple times an hour. If you post too often, fans will get annoyed and stop subscribing to your updates. If you don’t post often enough, fans will get bored and leave. Aim for at least one, but no more than five, status updates and photo uploads per day.

Reward Your Fans and Subscribers

Some Facebook fans will “like” your page just because they love your company. They expect nothing in return and are happy to follow a brand or product that they have had a favorable experience with. Others have a “What’s in it for me?” attitude. These are the ones who will leave if they don’t get what they want.

Keep everybody happy by rewarding your Facebook fans with special discounts and promo codes for your products. Include printable coupons and information about contests or sweepstakes. Encourage fans to upload photos of themselves using your products and make sure to comment on each photo.

Post Interesting Updates

A Facebook business page is free advertising for your company, but that doesn’t mean every single thing should be about your product or business. Your fans don’t want to read post after post about how they should buy your stuff or subscribe to your services. It’s okay to plug your products from time to time, but do it discreetly. Also, make sure that your status updates are interactive and encourage feedback. Here are a few samples:

• We love our new flavors of Super Tasty Pasta Sauce. Which one is your favorite?
• Spotted: A lovely lady in our new heels and a pair of skinny jeans. What do you wear your heels with?
• Our yummy frozen dinners make it easy to get dinner on the table fast. What will you do with your extra time?

Respond to All Customer Complaints

When customers talk, they expect you to listen. The 2010 Customer Experience Report shows that 58 percent of people expect a response when they comment on a social networking site such as Facebook, but only 22 percent of consumers actually receive one. When you do respond, make sure to do so in a timely manner; 42 percent of consumers would like to hear back from your company within one day.

What happens if you fail to respond and turn an angry customer into a satisfied one? Seventy-nine percent of angry consumers spread the word to family and friends, and 82 percent of customers have stopped using a product or service after one negative experience. Also, keep in mind that complaints left on your wall are visible to the public. Responding to issues in a timely manner shows customers that you care, even if they didn’t make the complaint. It doesn’t matter how many beautiful photos you upload or contests you have if your customers aren’t satisfied, so address all issues and complaints as quickly as possible. Your customers are waiting – and not always patiently.