Photo Credit: Bloggokin

Android.  Android users rejoiced, and iPhone users mourned the loss of their exclusive relationship, many enraged that their “Instagram Club” had been ruined.  Twitter wars ensued and articles were written.  However last week’s Instagram drama hardly seems significant after the bomb that dropped yesterday afternoon.

In case you haven’t heard:

Facebook bought Instagram for $1B.  Yes, BILLION. 

So now all the “iPhone snobs” that were in a huff about simply having to share “their” application with those Android users, must now come to terms with the fact that they are using a product owned by the big box retailer of social media – Facebook.

According to the official announcement made by Mark Zukerberg, not much about Instagram will change aside from the fact that he is now the owner.  Users will still be able to share their photos with other social networks such as Twitter and Foursquare.  Facebook sharing will not be mandatory.  So what exactly is the difference for users?  I asked a few of those “iPhone snobs” and got some interesting responses.  “I know it’s still the same.  But there’s just something about knowing Facebook owns it that makes it feel … dirty”.  Or my favorite, “If Wal-Mart bought Trader Joes would YOU still shop there!?”

Less than 24hrs after the official announcement, an Instagram search of the tag #Facebook brings in over 120,000 individual images of users’ visual protests and perfectly filtered anti-Facebook messages comparing the acquisition to an attempt at world domination.

A little extreme, no?  After all, aren’t they just social networks?

Controversy over the acquisition seems to stem mainly from the social implications of social media platforms.  It speaks to the fact that many people feel the social networks and applications they use reflect who they are and what they stand for.  The theory of the Extended Self frequently leveraged by brand marketers states that possessions, purchases, and buying habits reflect and contribute to the identity of the user.  Consumption habits acting as an extension of the consumer’s identity are seen in loyal brand devotees and brand tribes defending one product over the competition – have you ever wondered why Apple users are SO committed; why it seems that if you say anything pro-PC, you’ve insulted more than just a piece of hardware?

Two months ago, judging and stereotyping Pinterest users was the hot topic of the moment.  Social networks are big brands in today’s constantly connected society.   Which ones you use say just as much about you as your decision to buy an iPhone over Android, or if you choose Starbucks over a local café.  The viral angst from the Instagram community concerning who can join their network and who owns it shows that as social media becomes an ever increasing cornerstone of our daily lives and more niche networks gain mainstream popularity, the medium may hold more meaning than the content.

Google’s sponsored ads featured on it’s search results pages reaped $36 billion in sales last year, 10 times that of Facebook’s ad revenue of $3.2 billion. While a Facebook Search Engine is still slightly more than a rumor, to think that they would rule out a feature that blurs the lines of social and direct search requests would be naive.

But how successful can a Facebook Search Engine be if they’re up against their colossus competitor, Google?

Here is why a Facebook Search Engine might NOT work:

• They are not Google.  Seriously, have you tried to search on the existing Facebook Search Engine, only to give up and go to Google?  Google not only changed the game back when there were many search providers over a decade ago, but continues to innovate and make our search results more relevant, i.e. semantic search.
• Facebook’s core is social. Habitually users go to Google to search, they go to Facebook to hangout. Deviating away from what made Facebook successful might be a risk, and could jeopardize the social ecosystem it worked so hard to create.
• Google created and has mastered PageRank.  The algorithm that propelled Google as the top search engine has been developed over the years to provide users with the most relevant search results.  This sophisticated way of establishing domain authority, external sites linking to a site, indexing capabilities resulting  in relevant search queries cannot be easily replicated.

Here is why A Facebook Search Engine might work:

• They are Facebook.  They did supplant the Facebook of it’s time, Myspace.  They also over took Google’s Orkut in places like Brazil growing to over 800 million users.  Just like Google they changed our behavior online and contributed to how we discovered information online.  Just like Google, Facebook has become a cultural phenomenon.  Over a decade a go, terms like “Fanned”, “liked”, “Googled”, were not a part of our vocabulary.
• If you already could, you would search on Facebook directly.  Although Facebook is inherently a social network, this appeal can be leveraged to provide users with an alternative to not only discover information, but also search within the platform.  Facebook has a stickiness factor that Google must envy.  Users will spend an average of over an hour a day on the social network while they may spend only minutes on Google’s search engine,
• Google may have PageRank, but Facebook has the Open Graph.  Introduced two years ago, the web has embraced this feature.  Who wouldn’t want to have their site content to be liked and shared with other users who discover it within the platform?  Additionally, the Open Graph has evolved to include more passive actions, including listening to music, reading, using an application, etc.  Take this data and couple it with the reach of a user’s social circle within the platform and you have a plausible scenario that may provide dynamic and super relevant search results if a search was performed.  This is exactly what Google’s Search Plus Your World is trying to achieve in a user’s search experience.

What do you think?  Could you see yourself possibly using a Facebook search engine in the future?

For the purpose of this post, we will stick to how he would employ social networks for his clients, not his personal life, although that would be a fun post to do . We will speak generally to which sites he might employ and how he would leverage them, starting from the least complimentary social network to the most.

4. Linkedin – I was going to say something funny here, but hold on… Mohawk Airlines, a Don favored client in the past and a possible engagement in Season 5, could cater to executives and frequent fliers looking for an alternative to American Airlines. It would make sense that some Mohawk Airlines fliers were business professionals that used Linkedin to connect with other professionals. Remember, executives from all Fortune 500 companies are represented in this network. Creating a company page and consulting Mohawk sales reps to connect and engage in.

3. Twitter – Don thrived on coming up with slogans except, slogans alone would not be sustainable on this platform. Don and his team would have to adapt from the norm of just broadcasting a message that has mass appeal to having one on one conversations.  With all the mistakes big brands have made on this still fairly new platform(a la the recent McDonalds hashtag that went awry), Don’s clients could use some direction on how to best utilize a network like twitter.None of the brands to my knowledge had the appeal and cultural acceptance that a Starbucks has, so Don and his team would have to think about how to drum up conversations on twitter for brands/clients that don’t have that sex appeal.conversations on Linkedin with their potential audience would make a lot of sense for this client. This same strategy could also be employed with one of Don’s other favorite past clients, the Hilton Hotels, to target the business professionals they accommodated. Outside of those two clients, Linkedin would not be a high priority as most of Don’s pitches/clients were consumer facing.

2. Facebook – This would be a dream for Don, especially with the introduction of Timeline for brand pages. Most, if not all of his pitches relied heavily on the emotion that the advertisement drew from its potential viewers. Through a visual, a commercial, a short message up on an easel, Don executed on telling a story around the concept. This sounds exactly like what Timeline is intending to be for audiences of brands: the story of a brand through photos, videos, short updates that are formatted in a way that invites you to engage and discover the brand in a new way. However, there could be some challenges with past clients like Lucky Strike, who most likely would have a reputation management issue on their hands. The new direct message option for Timeline pages would help, but Don and his team would need to consider how to handle or consult on any negative backlash that they would receive using this medium.

1. Pinterest – This by far would be the easiest a fit for Don and his team to launch, execute on, and utilize. All the concepts messaged into images, videos, even text on images are a natural fit for Pinterest. And if you didn’t think a concept like the “flying beans” in the season premiere of Season 5 might fly in a real campaign, why not test it on Pinterest? A concept could easily be tested by introducing it via a power user and measuring it by number of likes, pins, comments, etc. If Don Draper truly embraced social, he might gravitate to a network like Pinterest the most.

Did not make the list but worthy of mentioning…..Social TV, really more of a marketing niche that combines platforms like Twitter and GetGlue.  With all the opportunities that advertisements have to tiein with the “television department”, Don would have an affinity to social TV analytics. Although Social TV is still in its infancy stage, check-ins on services like Get Glue and live tweeting during shows might provide insights into the audience watching the show and its commercials. Are there trends, sentiment, chatter that can be incorporated into future concept and messaging? Most importantly, is there any positive activity around the commercials that ran during the segments? This would hypothetically be easier to measure in a world that did not include time shifting capabilities like DVR, Netflix, Hulu, etc.

Of course there are a lot of variables to consider, and would be a interesting to simply take what we know about social media and drop it into the 60’s Mad Men culture. Each specific client might utilize one network more than another. How do you think Don Draper would use Social Media? Do you agree or disagree with my thoughts?

@rubenq

This class, which will be conducted Thursday evenings starting April 12th thru May 3rd, will review the latest changes to Facebook pages, “Timeline”, Facebook page architecture, Facebook content marketing strategy, audience messaging and segmentation, Facebook advertising, and lessons learned from other Facebook campaigns.

Ruben Quinones, Director of New Media, at Path Interactive will be instructing the course. Ruben regularly instructs the “Examining Social Networks for Brand Value” class, a core course for the Digital Marketing certificate program.

Ruben Quinones

“This is an exciting course for me to teach, and I’m honored to be introducing it with NYU. I think we are all realizing Facebook’s importance in our marketing programs, and I look forward to to sharing some of the best practices and techniques with others to give them insights to how they can better market their brands.” Ruben says.

The course will be located at the Fairchild Building, at 7 East 12th St. Visit the NYU SCPS registration page for additional details.  Path Interactive will also be facilitating facilitating Search Engine Optimization class in April with CEO, Michael Coppola.

About Path Interactive
Path Interactive is a leading New York search engine marketing providing results targeted campaigns for national, regional & local business brands. Path employs a unique approach to paid search management, organic site optimization, and social media marketing. Our  team draws its strength from a diverse mix of media professionals, whose expertise spans both the traditional and new media as well as experience in both local and national markets.

In these sorts of situations, proper keyword selection is incredibly important. If you allow consumer-oriented keywords into your account, they could use up large portions of your budget without providing any sales or leads. So, how do you find the keywords used by IT professionals and not by consumers?  Start by doing some searches.

Search The Keywords On Your Landing Page/Website

Read through the landing page, or, if you’ll be building landing pages based on your keyword research, any existing pages that describe the product/service.  What phrases are used to describe the product/service?  Search for some of the phrases and take note of both the ads and the organic results.  If both match up with the product/service you provide, then you have found a good keyword. If they don’t, then throw that keyword out. If you encounter a situation in which the ads differ from the organic results, you’ll need to investigate further.  We put a lot of trust into organic results, so if the organic results don’t match our client’s product/service, we will be skeptical about using that keyword, even if the client’s competitors are advertising on it.

Search For Your Competitors’ Ads

Especially if they have a well-established PPC campaign, your competitors can lead you to troves of good keywords.  Look for ads from your known competitors, but also search around to see if there are any surprise participants in your vertical.  Once you have a list of your competitive set, use tools such as Spyfu or AdGooroo to find out what keywords your competitors are advertising on. Carefully review the keyword lists provided by these tools to find the ones most relevant to your specific product/service; if your competitors use a lot of broad match, the lists might include completely irrelevant keywords.

Search Any Questionable Keywords

Once you have developed your seed keywords and are starting to build out your adgroups, be sure to do searches for any questionable keywords.  Once again, this is especially true for accounts that target a small subset of a large market.  Say that you’re trying to sell enterprise-level wireless router solutions. Would the keyword “wireless internet installation” be good for the campaign? One can imagine IT professionals doing that search, but one can also imagine many consumers doing it as well. Do a search for the keyword, and these are the results:

Both the ads and the organic results are targeted to consumers.  So, no, this keyword does not belong in the account.

“Hotel Wifi” is another keyword that could be searched both by consumers and by IT decision-makers.  Here are the results:

PPC Keyword Selection

The results here are mixed: the organic results are mostly aimed at consumers, with a few business-related results mixed in. The ads are also a mix, with ads aimed at consumers and competitors.  These results signal that the keyword is used by both consumers & IT professionals. Therefore, the keyword should be in your campaign, but you should be careful about how much budget it uses.

All of this searching does take some time. However, if you put in the time during the keyword selection process, your campaigns will start from a much better place, and you will save time and money in the long run.

Path Interactive is a New York PPC agency delivering performance driven results for regional and national brands.

That’s why business after business is joining Pinterest and using it to experiment as part of their social media marketing plans. Even if your business doesn’t have a Pinterest profile, chances are people have already pinned images from your site or blog whether you like it or not. (You can check for yourself by visiting pinterest.com/source/yourdomainhere.com.)

But what if it isn’t working?

If you’ve been pinning and pinning and you haven’t seen a corresponding increase in traffic, consider that you may not be pinning the right types of images. And if you don’t see any of your site images showing up on Pinterest organically, you may not be using Pinterest-friendly images on your site. There’s a science to the images that 10.4 million women on Pinterest salivate over, and it’s important to understand it.

Make Your Photos Pinterest-Friendly in Composition and Subject Matter

If you want referral traffic from Pinterest, it’s crucial to use Pinterest-friendly photos throughout your site. Incorporate striking photos in any area you want to draw traffic, whether it’s on your product pages or your blog. And please, for the love of all, don’t embed them in Flash galleries.

Even if you photo subject matter isn’t particularly striking (girl with a scarf, anyone?), photos with these elements will help improve your Pin-ability drastically:

• The Closer the Better: Though just as pretty, landscape photos tend to perform less well than highly detailed close-up photos, which can be more visually appealing and eye-catching.
• Shock With Colors: Deep or brightly colored image subjects are also more eye-catching. Choose images with a contrasting background and foreground, especially in colors that work well with Pinterest’s theme.
• Snap it Like You Mean It: Pictures should be as well-focused and well-lit as possible, since people don’t want to re-pin amateur work. The exception: stylized photos using Instagram or other special effects, which manage to look professionally-done even if they’re blurry.

In general, the most popular Pinterest photos will also have a few subject themes in common:

• They’re Nifty: Photos like Bed Nook or Beautiful Hair share new and exciting ways to do normal everyday things.
• They Capture Emotion: Pictures like Homemade Photobooth and the infamous Hands both evoke deep, heartwarming emotions.
• They Reasonate: Many photos that include text also fit into this bucket, as people re-pin phrases and affirmations that inspire them.
• They’re Aspirational: Use this test: if your photo makes someone say, “I want!”, it’s a good one. Many people pin photos of things they want or aspire to do, even if they may never get/do them.

The Takeaway: Pinterest-Friendly Means Content Production on Another Level

When blogging for your business or doing product shoots, don’t settle for just any picture. Spend the extra time to edit your images, so they don’t sell your written content short.

Because it turns out, images are often easier to sell than words. As Pinterest continues to explode in usership and referral traffic potential, it’s important to start thinking not just about the content you produce but about the visuals you use to promote them. Those businesses that devote time to making their properties visually appealing will see massive gains in social sharing and general brand awareness.

Scan through the Path Interactive Blog for more industry insights on social media marketing, such as Top Ten Foursquare Campaigns, our Super Bowl Social Media Sentiment Infographic, and the Path exclusive video: “Sh*t NY Social Media Experts Say.”

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Like a snowflake, every website is different. Excellent SEOs know that every site must be researched thoroughly and tailor their efforts to that company and vertical. The strategies used to rank smaller websites, even if they’re in low-traffic but high-competition verticals, won’t work for big companies. Enterprise SEO brings with it a set of challenges — and opportunities — different from those associated with smaller sites. Big companies and large websites require a comprehensive enterprise SEO strategy and implementation. Without an understanding of effective enterprise SEO, it’s easy to get buried in an avalanche of technical problems and ineffective efforts. Read on to find out 5 ways to ensure enterprise SEO success.

1) Fix the Foundation

In addition to researching the business and competition, it’s vital that your enterprise SEO company conduct a thorough technical audit. Pouring resources into a site full of broken links and other technical SEO problems is like trying to fill a leaky bucket. Dynamically generated URLs and new product pages can create thousands of broken links and duplicate content. Developers and SEOs have different priorities and it’s up to the SEO team to make sure the site is coded in a SEO-friendly manner.

2) Institute a Communications Protocol

Enterprise SEO involves many stakeholders. With the company’s own executives and marketing personnel and external design and development agencies involved, as well as the legal concerns and need to get approval for content and design changes, it can be difficult to negotiate the different players and concerns. Creating and getting approval of a communications protocol will help ensure that decisions are made in a timely fashion and by the correct parties.

3) Make it Scalable

When a site has hundreds, even thousands of pages, it’s not possible to manually optimize and link against each page. Successful enterprise SEO hinges upon creating a scalable strategy. Here are some ways to create scalable SEO strategies for large website.

Template Metadata: Even if you managed to manually optimize thousands of titles and descriptions, it will be nearly impossible to get marketing and legal to review and approve each one. Thus it’s important that you create a template to generate unique metadata. Product titles and geographic modifiers can be used to create unique metadata quickly and effectively.

Optimize Elements: Even a huge enterprise SEO team will be unable to optimize thousands of pages. And there’s even less chance that a company will be willing or able to run thousands of edits through their legal team. One way to get the most reach out of your optimization efforts is to optimize elements that are used on multiple pages. Adding keywords and targeted links to a footer is a quick and effective way to spread desired phrases and anchor text across the site.

Link Against Categories: Successful enterprise SEO depends upon identifying the pages upon which link building should be focused. For most large websites, the best pages to link against will be category pages. A few of the reason category pages make the best targets for link building campaigns:

1. They are more likely to be updated frequently with fresh content
2. Links on the category pages to subpages are often targeted (the anchor text contains a keyword) and if not, it’s usually possible to implement this change
3. The pages that link off the category page are relevant to that page’s content thus creating more valuable links
4. Link juice will flow from the category pages, meaning linking against one page will have the effect of raising the rank of multiple page

4) Trust But Verify

Make sure everything that is supposed to be completed by another team is completed. While someone else may be responsible for that action, you are responsible for your SEO efforts. As mentioned in point number 1, if there are problems with the foundation, it’s hard to build a solid house. Considering that a few keystrokes can un-index an entire site, or duplicate an entire site, it’s best to double-check that all requested changes are carried out and carried out correctly. It’s not an issue of competence; everyone is busy and things can slip through the cracks. Having a proper communications protocol allows you to know whose responsible for fixing something and allows you to follow up on improper implementation in a timely fashion.

Enterprise SEO is a serious business. Sites with thousands of pages and products can stand to make or lose large amounts of money if they’re search rankings rise or fall. Large websites can’t be approached with the same strategies one would use for smaller sites. Successful enterprise SEO requires an ability to strategize and execute large-scale SEO initiatives as well as great project management skills. When contracting a NYC search engine optimization company for enterprise SEO projects, make sure they have extensive experience doing search marketing for big companies and large sites.