7 Social Media Resolutions to Enact Right Now

#1: Locate influencers

There are a couple of reasons why it’s good to have some influencers among those you friend and follow across the social sphere.

First of all, when you build a genuine relationship with an influencer (genuine relationship – not one that you force just because you’re hoping they’ll do some favors for you), you are, in essence, making a friend. Friends help each other out, so whatever you can do to help, you will. And if you’re lucky, your new friend – connected as he or she may be – will help you out too. This means collaborating and promoting each other, but it also means being around during the “down time” – checking in to say hello and see how they’re doing.

So yes, there is the possibility that they could help bolster you.

But you also stand to learn quite a bit from them. Influencers didn’t get to be known as such because they stood back and listened to someone else do the talking. They step up and share their knowledge. Let yourself learn from them.

This is not to say you need to start trying to connect with every big name you hear. Do some research (personally, I’ve been loving commun.it lately as a free tool to help me identify influencers) and find out who the influencers are in your particular niche. Just because a person doesn’t have several hundred thousand followers doesn’t mean he isn’t influential – and it’s often much easier to make a connection with someone who has fewer followers.

#2: Be polite

Whether it’s in blog comments, Facebook comments, or Twitter updates, if you want to be taken seriously as a professional, you should always be polite. Say please when you’re asking for re-tweets. Say thank you when someone shares your content.

These is not a complicated resolution, meaning that it’s perfect for a social media newbie, as well as for a more seasoned veteran. Oh yes, social media vets – I’m talking to you. Sometimes you get a little too comfortable in your space and you forget your manners.

#3: Be kind

Technically, yes, this could be the same resolution as being polite. But…

There are a lot of bullies out there. There are a lot of people on social media who have found success and suddenly forgot what it’s like to just be starting out; to be the little fish in a big pond. These people could be as knowledgeable and noteworthy as anything, but it still won’t change the fact that they aren’t always nice.

I recently read C.C. Chapman’s new book, Amazing Things Will Happen. C.C. is a pretty well-known guy by this point, so I would understand if I reached out to him and didn’t get a response. That’s never been the case, however. In his book, he notes that it only takes a few minutes to send an email – and even less time to send a text or a tweet. But it can make a big difference.

The point? Don’t ignore people just because you think you might have gotten “too big” for them. While it’s true you might not always be able to respond to everyone, you should try to at least acknowledge them.

#4: Let your personality shine

You can’t fault anyone for wanting to be careful when it comes to social media. After all the Twitter mishaps we’ve seen lately, especially, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

While you should be well versed in your brand voice, it’s also important to let your own personality shine. Understand your boundaries and the impact that your words might have, but be who you are. It’s much more interesting to follow someone on social media when they show a human side and make some jokes than it is to follow someone who is monotonous or shows a poker face all the time.

Be smart, but be yourself.

#5: Devote a little time each day

To really make an impression on social media, you need to participate, and you need to be there regularly. If you’re not, you’re out of site and out of mind.

We’re all busy, but what separates those who are successful at social media and see its value from those who aren’t and don’t is the amount of time they spend on it. Even devoting 15 minutes of your time in the morning, 10 minutes over lunch, and 15 minutes in the evening can make a sizable difference. If you don’t get out there and get involved, you’ll never build the kind of following and have the kind of interaction you want. Without that, social media will surely seem pointless to you.

#6: Become a regular in a Twitter chat

There are so many Twitter chats happening every day. Find one within your niche and use TweetChat to follow the conversation. This will help you to find people (including influencers!) who have similar interests and concerns as you and connect with them. This is often a good way to start talking to some of the same people regularly, thereby increasing your chances of organically building relationships.

This also helps you to learn from a wide variety of people, share ideas, and network. Bonus: if you’re ever lacking ideas for new content, I’ve found that participating in these chats can be really intellectually stimulating, and they almost always inspire some ideas for a new blog post.

My personal recommendation is the very popular #blogchat, which is held every Sunday night at 9pm (eastern). If you can keep up with #blogchat, you can keep up with anything. Nothing like diving right in!

#7: Stop making it all about you!

We’ve all encountered those individuals and businesses who, for whatever reason, are hell-bent on sharing only their own personal news. “Here’s our company’s top 5 blog posts, written by us, in the last 6 months.” “Here’s my personal top 10 favorite tweets of all time.” “Here’s what my company is doing today. And tomorrow. And next week.”

Your clients and customers probably do want to know what you’re up to – to some extent – but making everything all about you all of the time makes it hard for anyone new to get in. It seems too much like a members-only club.

This year, resolve to stop putting all of the emphasis on personal and company news, and place it on your clients’, customers’, and fans’ interests. What do they want to learn? What do they need to know in order to have an enriching brand experience? Thinking about this will help you to tailor your social content.

Included in this resolution is also sharing others’ work more than your own. If you only ever show up to Facebook or Twitter once or twice every few months, and it’s only to promote yourself and your work, people are going to stop paying attention to you (they’re probably going to forget all about you, too).

Try to share others’ work more than your own. For some people, it helps them to set up some kind of system. For example, each day, maybe you share work from three other people, re-tweet three other authors, and share one of your own posts.

What are your social media resolutions for 2013? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

photo credit: marketing savant

Many of our resolutions seem to focus on things we won’t do instead of things we will. In business just as much as in your personal life, it’s important to look on the positive side of things. What can you do that will better you as a person? What can you do that will better you as a business?

Unfortunately, we can’t help you out too much with the personal side of things, but we can offer you some tips for moving in the right direction when it comes to your business.

At the end of 2011, experts predicted that 2012 would be the year for content marketing, and now they’re predicting that this trend will continue to grow and flourish in 2013. Many companies have begun blogging for business and creating content that will help to educate their markets, but much of the content they’re creating is rather vanilla. Sadly, there’s just not a whole lot of variety.

So why not make 2013 the year you take some risks with your content development? Instead of traditional blog posts every day, why not spice it up a little and add some variety? There are so many different kinds of content out there, but here are seven ideas to get you started off in the right direction.

7 Kinds of Content to Use in 2013

#1: Video

Video is white hot right now and can’t be ignored. Bear in mind that it shouldn’t completely replace the text of your blog, but it’s a great way to allow people to associate a face with a name. It’s also great for humanizing your brand. Instead of just reading your words, your audience can see how you articulate your ideas.

If you haven’t tried your hand at video content yet, it’s time to hop to it. You don’t even need a lot of fancy equipment (though if you try it out and decide you like it, you might find that you’re willing to invest in better technology as time goes on). A Flip Cam, iPad, or regular digital camera will do the trick in a pinch, especially if you’re just starting out.

Don’t forget about your computer’s built-in webcam, either. You can record using Skype, YouTube, or Google+. One of the great things about recording right from Google+ (a hangout, say), is that you can link your YouTube account to Google+. When you do this, not only will the video show up in your Google+ feed, but it will also show up on YouTube, meaning anyone who missed the live broadcast can watch at their own convenience. This will ultimately help you to attract a larger audience as a result of the wider exposure.

#2: eBooks

Maybe you’ve got this great idea and you’ve sort of been toying with writing a book about it. This is your year. After all, there’s no time like the present. E-books can be completely new, previously unpublished material, but they can also be an excellent repurposing effort. A lot of bloggers have found eBook success by simply pulling together a number of their best blog posts in a certain theme. They smooth it out and add some transitions, and before you know it, you’ve got yourself something comprehensive that can be sold on Amazon or other sites. Many writers use this as a way to monetize, while others make their ebooks available as free downloads.

So if you think you have something worth teaching and it’s a little too long for a blog post, don’t rule out an eBook as an alternative. They’re great ways to share your knowledge and position yourself as an authority in your field.

#3: Newsletters

Newsletters can be a wonderful way to share news and content with your customer base and others who are interested in the work you do. There are a number of ways you can use them, including the following:

• Company news (note that you probably want to mix this kind of news with other news as well so that you don’t appear to be self-obsessed)
• Industry news. If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of your industry, you might consider sharing some industry news to keep your readers in the loop, as well.
• Best-of content. What blog posts were your most popular last week? Which ones got the most social response and feedback? You can take those and provide links to the posts in your newsletters so that readers don’t miss your best posts.
• Original content. Got something new to add to the conversation? Perhaps a thought leadership editorial-style newsletter might be for you.

#4: Interviews

Interviews are a popular form of content because they’re so easily digestible. Readers like to know what thought leaders and industry big-names think about important issues, as well as what makes them tick and drives them to the kinds of success they have.

This kind of content is typically done in one of three ways. It can be done through text, as a blog post, in which the questions and responses are posted. It can also be done as a video (using Skype or Google+ Hangouts, for example), or as a podcast.

The bonus to posting an interview is not only that it broadens your horizons and offers your readers fresh and varied content, but you also stand to gain new readers from it. For example, when you post your interview with Sally, she might tell all of her Twitter and Facebook followers to check out the interview and link back to it. This brings new people to your blog – ones who might not have ended up there otherwise, and so they hold potential.

#5: Images

Generally if you’re using images as content, you should provide a couple hundred words to give the image some context. This framing post can also be important when it comes to helping the search engines decide what your post is about.

Image types to consider:

• Infographics (very popular right now, but make sure you’re offering something of value!)
• Concept visualizations (helps to break down complicated concepts and present them in a more easily digestible way)
• Cartoons (make sure they’re relevant to your blog’s themes!)
• Charts
• Memes (also very popular right now, but make sure the theme and tone suit your business.)

Remember: images have to be done well in order to be effective.

#6: Guest blogs and/or user generated content

Invite readers to create content for your site through contests or other initiatives. This not only helps to build a sense of community, but it also helps you to keep your content calendar full without burning yourself out.

Also, welcome guest posts as you feel is appropriate. Whether this kind of content is chosen through an application process or you solicit for these posts is entirely up to you.

Finally, don’t forget to write your own posts to publish as guest posts on other sites, too. All in all, you will find that these techniques, too, have the potential to bring a new audience to you.

#7: Slideshare and Prezi presentations

If you’re working the circuit of speaking engagements (another kind of content worthy of an honorable mention), you’ve undoubtedly got some pretty great presentations to share. Make your presentations available by embedding them into your blog posts and writing some framing text to help intro the slides. It’s a great way to repurpose content, and readers appreciate that more visual aspect.

So there you have it: 7 kinds of content that you should try out in 2013.

What are your new years resolutions when it comes to your business? What kinds of content do you plan to try? What other content ideas would you add to this list? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

This isn’t bad advice, in and of itself.

But we aren’t all cut from the same blogging mold. Just because one very prolific person might be able to post to his blog daily doesn’t mean that’s a good (or reasonable) plan for all of us. If someone tries to tell you that you must blog daily or you’ll never be successful, run, run away.

It’s true that Google likes to see fresh content, but “fresh” doesn’t have to mean “daily.” It doesn’t even necessarily have to mean weekly.

Echoing back to my point that you should write for a human audience, it’s important to understand that, Google aside, readers want quality content. They want something of value. They want you to educate, inspire, or at least entertain them. They care about these things more than they care whether you were only able to publish posts on five of the seven days last week.

That being said, I do think that it’s important to write regularly (or, if your content isn’t written, then it’s important to create regularly). Does this mean that you might produce a lot of content that’s not exactly the highest quality? Sure. None of us is inspired daily, so it’s absurd to believe that you need to come up with a masterpiece every time. This is true of just about anything.

Working at it even when you aren’t publishing might sound silly. Why would you spend all that time if it might never see the light of day?

Because it furthers your skill. It gives you practice until your creation reaches the quality level you feel comfortable publishing. This is my second go at this post, for example. I wrote a complete post on a different topic, didn’t feel good about it, scrapped it, and started over. If you don’t feel comfortable publishing something and it isn’t what you want it to be, don’t publish it just to publish it.

When you put something out there with your name on it, it contributes to your brand (be it personal or company branding). Remember this when you fret over missing a regularly scheduled post.

Still, if you go MIA for a long period of time because you simply aren’t feeling it, the cold, hard truth is that your readers are probably going to forget about you. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that jazz.

If that’s becoming the case for you, take stock. Are you not posting because you truly haven’t created anything of value in months, or are you not posting because you haven’t felt like investing the time? Answer yourself honestly, and use that self-assessment when moving forward with your content development.

What if it’s not that you haven’t felt like investing the time, but more that you haven’t been able to find the time?

This is common. Things happen, we get tied up in other projects, and blogging starts to slide down our list of things to do. If this sounds like you, try building some writing time into your schedule every week, whether it’s once or twice for long periods of time, or every night for fifteen minutes. This regular schedule will help keep you writing and creating (remember, even if you don’t publish all of your content, this will keep you in practice and keep the ideas flowing, meaning you’ll start finding inspiration more often than not).

If you can use this writing time to get ahead, look at what kind of publishing schedule you can work with. So maybe you can’t publish a new post every single day. Big deal. But maybe you can publish once or twice a week. And maybe you can keep a few posts at the ready just in case you have a crazy busy week and want to keep your posting schedule.

Tip: Get an app for your phone or tablet (I love Evernote), or carry a small notebook in your bag for ideas. I use Evernote when I’m out somewhere and a Moleskine notebook when I’m at home and I get a great idea for a future blog post. I can jot down the idea and some comments about it, and then I have a reserve of topics for those days when my mind seems to go blank.

What it all comes down to is this: Be proud of what you create. When you’re putting something out into the world with your name on it, make sure it demonstrates what you’re capable of doing and shines a positive light on your brand. Sure, there are ways to maintain a schedule even when things happen that might otherwise derail you, and I’ve talked about a few of them in this post. But if you don’t think your content is quite ready yet or you don’t think it will provide as much value to your audience as you want it to, don’t be afraid to break your schedule here and there. It’s better to put out no product at all than it is to put out a low-quality product.

Do you maintain a regular blogging schedule? How do you stick to it? Do you publish just for the sake of publishing, or do you break schedule when you’ve got a post that just isn’t going to cut it? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

image credit: johnstone fitness

“One quick thing.”

“Thoughts today.”

“Writing.”

“Motivation”

“Emerging victorious.”

These could be the best blog posts in the history of blogging, but I would never know it because I would never click on those titles to find out. It’s harsh, but true.

Some people have a knack for blog post titles – just a few words will hook the reader, and then. . . let the page views begin! These people manage to blend their keywords effortlessly and come up with something clever and witty that just begs to be clicked.

Others are able to get by. They can convey the point of the post well enough to let the reader (most important) and the search engines (arguably less important than the reader, but still important nonetheless) know what it’s all about. They can pull off keywords that don’t sound forced and, though they might not have the catchiest titles, they’re certainly not the worst.

And then we come to a third class of bloggers – the kind with really, truly awful titles.

What makes these titles so awful?

They don’t tell me much of anything about the post. They’re so vague and the language is so generic that I have no clue if the post will be of interest to me. Memories of what? A shared or common experience? Okay, I might read that. But your vacation? Well, unless I know you well and am personally invested in your happiness, I probably don’t care much. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. But again, I’ll never know because my interest wasn’t piqued. I’m not curious enough to make the click.

If we assume that the primary goals of your blog are to inform, educate, and get traffic (pretty standard), these generic, lackluster titles aren’t going to be doing you any favors.

How can you improve your blog titles?

Use Keywords and Phrases Efficiently

I recently advised you against writing like a robot, and I’m going to stick with that advice. That being said, you do need to know the time and place for your keywords.

Like, say, your title, for example.

Determine the keyword or phrase that most defines your post, and then use that in the title.

Bonus tip: If you’re posting an infographic, guide, whitepaper, video, or any other kind of content that you want to call out in the title, do it at the end instead of the beginning so that your keywords can appear as early as possible.

Do this: “Business Blogging Tips for Healthcare Professionals [Infographic]”
instead of this: “Infographic: Business Blogging for Healthcare Professionals”

Note that this made-up title is a bit stronger and more defined than something like “Medical Blogging.”

Consider Length

You want your post titles to be concise – within reason. If they’re too short – one or two words only – they may not convey what the post is actually about. On the other hand, if the title is too long, you risk the search engines truncating it. This is going to be a bad move from an SEO perspective.

So you need to find a happy medium with your titles. Try to keep them between three and fifteen words, or up to about 60 characters (some people say 75).

Ask Yourself if You Would Click on the Title

This is perhaps the most telling test of all – but you have to be honest with yourself. Before you hit publish, ask yourself, “If this title came up in my Google Reader, would I bother to look at it?”

If the answer is no, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Tip: If the answer is ‘maybe,’ it’s probably still time to go back to the drawing board. A definitive ‘Yes!’ is what we’re aiming to hear.

The Two-Step Post Title Test

Not sure if your title can compete? Figure it out in two easy steps by asking yourself these questions:

#1: Is it clear from my effective use of keywords what this post is about?

#2: Would I click on this link to read this post?

If you answered with two resounding yeses, you’re on your way. If you answered with at least one no, you still have some work to do. Tweak as needed.

Do you read blog posts with vague titles? What steps do you take to make sure your own titles best convey your meaning and content?

image credit: tricky tech

This isn’t terribly surprising. Content marketing has revolutionized the way we do business, from attracting prospects to converting leads to final sales. With all of the new technologies that are constantly emerging – particularly in the social arena – to help us fuel our content, how could we expect anything but growth?

Social, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role, especially as more of those who shunned such strategies until now begin to realize that social media isn’t merely a fad. It’s not going anywhere. The tools we use and how we use them might change, but the foundation is built.

As we’re all forming our predictions for the futures of content and social media singularly, I think its important that we also examine their relationship to each other and how that relationship will continue to grow and affect how we do business.

I’ve been blogging for over 11 years now. A decade ago when I was a college student with a LiveJournal, almost no one read that thing. Suffice it to say that it was probably pretty terrible, but was nevertheless important because I was learning the fundamentals of blogging well before many people thought it would ever become a professional skill.

(For example, the Golden Rule of Blogging: talk about yourself too often and in the most mundane ways possible, and no one cares anymore.)

There weren’t many ways to amplify my message (once I got one). I told my friends about my blog, kept a link to it in my AIM profile (we didn’t have Facebook yet. Imagine a college experience without Facebook!), and when I updated, I posted links in my away messages. It was all pretty old school.

That was about as social as the experience got for me, but I recognized, even as a 20 year old kid who just felt like writing, that there had to be a vehicle for that content. I certainly didn’t know the terms “social media” or “content marketing” at that point. There was only Blogging Darwinism.

But “Blogging Darwinism” is what’s led us to where we are now. The strongest content endures while the weaker content fizzles out. While many factors contribute to that, one that should absolutely not be ignored is social media. Strong content has a strong social presence.

We spend a lot of time optimizing our content in the hopes that it will rank high in the search engines. But depending on search alone can be risky. Investing at least some of your resources into social can make a world of difference when it comes to the success and future of your content.

“Jen-nay, social and content’s like peas and carrots.”

Okay, that’s not really what Forrest Gump said, but you get the idea. Social and content just go together. Without social media as an amplifier, your content is just hanging out, waiting for someone to happen upon it. It could go stale before getting many readers at all. Without engaging, high quality content to share, social media is just a place for people to talk about the delicious sandwiches they had for lunch and share pictures of cats.

What a world, what a world.

All of that mess, by the way, is what gives social a bad name and makes people say things like, “I don’t get it. Seems pretty useless.”

No one is an overnight success.

Keep in mind that people spend years continuously publishing fresh, relevant content and promoting it over their social channels, and yet they still see very little success.

That’s because there’s one more thing you need to remember about the happy marriage of social and content, and it’s very Hallmark-y: it all starts with a relationship.

If you’re tweeting out your blog posts but you only have 17 followers and most of them are people who know you and would probably read your blog anyway, it’s probably time to step up your game.

Join discussions and Twitter chats happening around a hashtag (#socialmedia or #smb for example). Find what’s relevant to you and your content on social media, and then start engaging with others in that space.

Nurture those relationships once you establish them. Support them and hare their content without being asked, and you might find that they’ll be happy to return the favor.

This process takes time. Sometimes the amount of time it takes is actually kind of maddening. We want to see instant results. We don’t have the patience, and we feel like, because everything else with social is so instant, this should be too.

Have patience. Stay at it.

Use social as a vehicle to drive your content’s success, and use content to help fuel your social strategy. The two are inextricably linked.

What are your predictions for the future of “social content marketing?”

photo credit: wall blog

Now putting my own opinion aside, I can tell you from experience that:

1. Putting social media in a vacuum doesn’t work without the help of other marketing channels.

2. Expecting social media to do all the “social work” for you will limit growth.

The point I am trying to make is that social media is used to compliment real relationships, whether you use it for introductions or relationship nurturing. I believe this is true for anyone, no matter what industry you are in. It just so happens that I’ve made it work for ME.

Instead of using the telephone to make introductions, which seems further away from best practice nowadays, you can now use the so called “social telephone”. It’s less obtrusive and gives people a chance to do some investigative work before they respond.

Here’s an example:

You are subscribed to a blog, and you really like the content that one of the authors creates week in and week out. Since, you like the content so much, you take great pride in sharing it with your followers/friends. They really like it too. The author gets exposure, and they appreciate your willingness to share their work. A relationship has been initiated.

For the next few months, you find some commonalities and begin to take the relationship to the next level. Sounds a lot like dating right? It is VERY similar to dating in fact.

Before you know it, you find that you are going to be in the same location as the author, and you decide to set up in-person meet up. The meeting goes really well. The two of you have some laughs and get to know each other on a much deeper level.

Eye contact, hand shaking, viewing each others’ facial expressions, maybe even a hug is icing on the cake when crossing the digital divide.

This is where real work and opportunities arise, only with real world contact. Give it a try. I promise you, won’t be disappointed!

I would love to hear some examples of your experience of using social media to compliment real world relationships. I might even put your responses into an e-book with your name and link to your website attached!

image credit: military times

In the strictest sense of the term, Facebook is a social network. Fundamentally, I understand this, but because it grows and expands and seems to be constantly changing – something that is not altogether unwarranted or undesirable, especially from Facebook’s standpoint – it becomes kind of murky.

Facebook was first about connecting with other students on your college campus.

Then Facebook was about connecting with students across college campuses in general.

From that came a slightly new purpose: re-connecting with people from your past (who were also on college campuses).

As those students became working adults who stayed connected to each other through Facebook, the next natural step was to open it up to everyone so that people around the globe could all be one big happy connected family. And it worked. Facebook soared past its competition and never looked back. According to Alexa, it’s the number two site on the entire web right now, coming in behind Google – a telling bit of information in and of itself when you consider Facebook’s future in search.

Since then, Facebook has become a number of other things, and what it is seems to depend upon who you are. For some, it’s a site to play games. For many, it’s a place to do business, whether directly (as through the Marketplace app), through lead generation, or by way of networking within a community.

It’s a place to bond over common interests and connect with your favorite celebrities, musicians, writers, and public figures.

It’s a place to rally groups of people for a common cause, a la the Occupy movement.

Forget to buy someone a birthday gift? No worries. You’ll soon be able to buy gifts on Facebook to celebrate just about any occasion.

A few months ago, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Mark Zuckerberg referred to Facebook as a mobile company, though they were drawing the line at actually creating a phone. He also alluded to the fact that search could be in Facebook’s future as well, so add “potential Google competitor” to that list.

It’s a photo-sharing site. It’s a hub for apps. It’s a place for personal branding (though it should be argued that many, particularly the college students for whom the site was created, do a terrible job of it). With recent changes to the amount of characters allowed per status update – a move almost surely made to keep up with Google+ – it’s even becoming something of a microblogging platform.

And now it’s a place to find a job.

Facebook’s versatility is really quite impressive. It seems that it can be all things to all people.

Or can it?

This gives me some pause. You’ve heard the saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” While some might argue that Facebook has mastered social, I’d argue that social is ever-changing, and therefore perhaps difficult to truly master. But the sentiment still has some validity. If Facebook spreads itself too thin while trying to meet everyone’s needs, it’s not unreasonable to think that something would be lost – perhaps even some quality. We already hear the “cries of the anguished” every time changes are made, purportedly with our best interests in mind (so it’s really not a surprise to learn that Facebook is not, in fact, a democracy after all).

At what point will we see the “Walmartification” of Facebook? It becomes a social one-stop shop – okay, but at what cost?

There are over a million jobs posted to Facebook already, and yet what we’re seeing there isn’t really a place to find a career. It’s a place to find an after-school job for an hourly wage. Will the target user change there? And if it does, what does that mean for LinkedIn in the future? After all, it’s much easier to have one social profile to end them all than it is to create one specifically for professional purposes (or so say the Millennials).

What really strikes me about the jobs board is how it stands in contrast to what seemed to be Facebook’s vision for itself not all that long ago.

If you recall, it wasn’t long ago at all that Facebook had made some pretty significant changes to its privacy settings and capabilities. In doing so, Zuck and company encouraged us to allow certain parts of our profiles to be opened up for maximum sharing potential. It was, after all, about being social. Then they implemented Friends+ onto pictures, making it incredibly difficult to not share beyond our privacy settings. During this time (and even since that time), Facebook was pretty widely criticized for encouraging its users to share more than they were comfortable with sharing.

If we’re to use our Facebook profiles to apply for jobs, what does that do to the “open up and share, share, share” mentality that was thrust upon us not so long ago? Furthermore, if we’re now being encouraged to really clean up and tone down our profiles in order to apply for jobs, what does that do to the authenticity of our “social selves?” Sure, we all hopefully know to keep it clean and put our best faces forward on Facebook, even if we think we’re only sharing with our friends. We know that nothing is ever totally private (again, hopefully). But many of us like Facebook because we can relax a little bit there. To the people who value that ability, using Facebook to find a job may not be worth it. Especially not for $7.25 an hour.

Interestingly enough, many of the jobs posted are geared toward the population of users that would most need to tone things down and stop oversharing: high school and college-aged kids looking for temporary or part-time work. Even those who are recent college grads might need to think about this.

It’s certainly interesting to see how Facebook is growing by leaps and bounds. But all of these growth spurts deserve a critical eye before jumping right in. I’m not completely sure how I feel about the Facebook job board, to be honest. But I do wonder if, even though Mark Zuckerberg is a strong leader, having a hand in so many projects will ultimately lead the site to a distorted vision of itself and what it wants to be. If Facebook’s vision of itself gets lost along the way, what becomes of our vision of it?

Got a comment? I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

photo credit: wired magazine

When it comes to content development and content marketing, there’s no way to ignore SEO. It might not be your area of expertise, but if you’re doing any sort of online publishing, it’s imperative that you learn the basics.

Turkey is great, but keyword stuffing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

A little nod to Thanksgiving here in the States, but it’s also true. This is perhaps the absolute most basic principle of SEO that every online content creator must know: keyword stuffing is never okay.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, keyword stuffing is when a writer repeatedly inserts the terms for which he wishes to rank into the same document. The result is that the content sounds horribly repetitive and unprofessional, unoriginal, and uninspired.

In that same vein, if you catch yourself trying to make keywords fit and it doesn’t sound natural, you’re guilty of keyword stuffing, too. This is roughly the equivalent of pounding a puzzle piece into place even though it’s clearly not a match. You just want to see the end result (which probably isn’t that good if pieces are haphazardly jammed into place).

There is a reason that there’s relatively low competition when it comes to ranking for some keywords: they’re nearly impossible to fit naturally into your writing. Still, you’ll see people try to make a go of it, writing things like, “when you’re shopping for dentistry Surrey England….”

Normal humans don’t talk like that. Please don’t write like that, either. You want to season your content with keywords, but you don’t want to over-saturate it. Most of all, you want it to sound natural.

Here’s something to consider: yes, search engines are going to be a source of traffic. You hope that they’ll be a pretty major source of traffic, in fact. But don’t forget social media, either. Posts that are shared across social channels and linked on other people’s blogs can also bring in a sizable amount of traffic. Don’t focus so much on search engine optimization that you forget about social optimization.

Which is to say, again, that you should be hyper-focused on creating quality content. Not content that is quick to write. Not content that might please the algorithms but sounds like it was written by robot lords.

Quality content.

That’s what’s being shared on social sites. And as luck would have it, that’s also what’s rising to the top of the SERPs.

5 Hallmarks of Quality Content

• Well-written, often with a conversational but informative tone
• Author has a strong command of the language in which he’s writing
• Keywords are used evenly and are neither densely placed nor jammed into unnatural phrasing
• Links included lead to reputable sites as opposed to spammy ones
• The content seeks to promote thoughts and ideas more than a self-serving agenda (keep in mind that a little bit of self-promotion is a-okay, but be open about it. Don’t try to trick people with misleading anchor text or other shady practices)

On guest posts

Guest posting is a great way to build backlinks, so it’s no surprise that so many bloggers are constantly in search of sites where they can offer content. Unfortunately, not all of these bloggers will have truly quality content to offer.

Keep in mind that you are ultimately responsible for the content that is published to your site. Be smart about who is permitted to guest post and make sure you check out all guest content before it goes live to ensure that it’s well-written, high quality, and relevant to your site topics. This will help keep you in the search engines’ good graces.

What steps do you take to avoid having your content sound like it was written by a robot? Do you bother with lots of SEO techniques or focus more on writing naturally to inform? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

image credit: squarespace

• How much of an audience has the company built to view content?
• Is their brand recognized in the marketplace?
• Is there historical data that has provided a benchmark for solid business results?
• What are the goals of paying to promote content? Is it Sales, Revenue, or Cost related?
• What is the time frame in which you need to achieve your goals?

Sample Scenario

A company has just started forming a social media plan. They are widely recognized in the marketplace, but their audience doesn’t know that they have a social media presence. Historically, they’ve relied on third parties to spread their content like news outlets, so they have some historical data on brand awareness, leads, sales, and customer retention.

Based on their monitoring research, they have found that the product category that they sell is being spoken about in blogs, forums, and Twitter, but they aren’t being mentioned. Much to their liking, they already have a ton of blog content based on the conversations that are already happening. They want to increase sales leads originating from online sources by 50% in 12 months.

My Suggested Strategy

Based on this information, I can now be fairly confident that they will need a strategy that involves paid promotion as a tactical element.

The strategy:

Increase sales leads by providing relevant blog information

Tactics:

• Listen for product and industry related keywords in a monitoring station
• Participate in conversations on social channels mentioning industry and products. Provide links to relevant blog posts.
• Develop blogger outreach program for guest blogging.
• Optimize blog for producing leads (Note: Nichole Kelly rightly points out that social media leads are often earlier in the buying process, so they might need to be nurtured with e-mail content)
• Produce long form content for lead generation (e-books, tools, checklists, etc)
• Develop e-mail nurturing workflows.
• Sit down with sales team and figure out proper criteria for passing over marketing qualified leads.
• Deploy paid promotion of blog content on forums, blog newsletters, banner advertising, blogger affiliate programs, and Promoted Tweets.
• Determine monthly budget of paid promotion based on monthly leads goals.

What do you think? This is still fairly high level, as there are countless other details that would need to be taken care of.

photo credit: venturebeat

For a long time, Black Friday shoppers would get up around three or four in the morning to kick off the holiday shopping season. They’d head out into the dark to wait in line outside their favorite stores, which would typically open around six. People strategized and scoured the Black Friday ads, determined to find the best deals.

But in the past few years, there’s been an undeniable shift in the way Black Friday works. Instead of opening up just an hour or two earlier than usual, businesses are beginning to open their doors at insane hours. It was a big deal when some retailers started opening at four in the morning. Now four is considered too late. In 2011, stores like Target, Kohl’s, Macy’s and Best Buy opened at midnight. Wal-Mart opened at 10 pm on Thanksgiving night.

So what caused this shift? There’s probably a lot to be said here about consumerism, but I can’t help but to think that social media has played a crucial role. Businesses now release their Black Friday ads across their social channels in early November and spend the next few weeks generating hype about their deals. By the time the day actually gets here, buyers know that they must be there as soon as the door opens if they hope to score one of the most coveted items available.

And why make buyers wait until six in the morning when you could open at four?! (Please note the sarcasm.) Better yet, why open at four when you could open at midnight? After all, if you want to keep up with your competition, you can’t open later than they do. And if you’ve ever spent any time perusing those Black Friday ads, you know that the same product is often offered at several locations, and at similar prices. The draw, then, becomes who opens the earliest, who generates the most buzz about the product, and who has the best all-around deals on other merchandise that customers might want.

Text messages, Twitter updates, and Facebook posts keep shoppers completely current on all of the Black Friday news and deals coming out of their favorite stores. Indeed, it was widely reported that these platforms played a pivotal role for Black Friday 2011. Not only that, but the customers themselves are updating their friends on all of those channels. It’s a kind of social media marketing that’s absolutely unavoidable unless you spend the entire day “unplugged.”

Check out some pretty interesting numbers in this infographic from Social Annex:

Social media is driving Black Friday engagement in a pretty aggressive way. The hype and the sense of urgency it creates is driving buyers to prepare earlier and earlier every year. This increased engagement and excitement leads to something that many consider to be kind of terrible: stores know, based in part on social media reaction, that people will line up to buy. A regular 12-hour retail business day simply won’t do. If you extend it to 18 hours, you can make more money. But wait – your competition is opening for 24 hours? You better make it 26. Wait – how about 28?

So they set these hours and send out their ads earlier and earlier every year. They start building hype on social media sites, which further extends their reach – especially on the day itself when shoppers will be following them for updates, as well as retweeting them and talking about them to update their friends on all-things Black Friday.

From a business perspective, that’s kind of awesome, right? But here’s the problem. Thanks, in large part, to social media, Black Friday isn’t really just Black Friday anymore.

It’s also becoming a Gray Thursday.

This year, Wal-Mart’s Black Friday “Event #1” starts at 8 pm Thursday night. Target is opening at 9 pm.

This “Gray Thursday” is the problem, and despite my love of social media, I feel like it’s created an extra-greedy monster out of every business who plans to open so early. While you’re in line at dinner time, tweeting, “OMG there are SO many people lined up outside Target!!!” there are employees who aren’t with their families, but instead, heading into that building several hours before opening to get ready for the onslaught.

So yes, from a business perspective, social media is doing something awesome for profits. But what’s it doing to employee morale?

Employees are fed up, quite frankly. And businesses who value social’s reach in promoting their Black Friday events would do well to remember that social media famously organizes groups of people wishing to rally for a cause. The Huffington Post reports that some Walmart employees are using social media to plan a Black Friday strike, fueled in part by the chain’s decision to open at 8 pm on Thanksgiving.

Quick personal anecdote: both of my parents have worked retail for my entire life. Over the last couple of years, Thanksgiving has ceased to be a real holiday in my house. Around noon or shortly after, my parents will go back to sleep for the rest of the day, then get up around 8 or 9 pm to go to work all night for Black Friday.

I’m certain this is the case with many families. Thanksgiving Dinner is eaten for breakfast. The family holiday is ceasing to exist. We’re moving from Thanksgiving Day to Gray Thursday.

So I think this raises an important question. Yes, social media marketing is fantastic. Yes, it really helps us to extend our reach, especially on days like Black Friday. And yes, many businesses will sit down and figure out the ROI of social media for that specific day. They’ll see how well it worked, and then attempt to out-do themselves with it next year. Individually, there is nothing wrong with any of that. But at what point do we say that enough is enough? At what point do we, as businesses, value our employees and their families more than we value social media’s reach, marketing techniques, and, ultimately, money? We all want a profit, but we’ve shifted to kicking off the holiday season in a decidedly Grinchy fashion.

There has to be a better way, as Christine Crandell suggests in this article on Forbes. She suggests brands use tools like Media Logic’s Retail Social Juice Index to better gauge their social engagement and interactions, allowing them to provide the experience that shoppers want and generate revenue in a better way than “outlandish hours and gimmicky promotions.”

There are, of course, other factors at play that contribute to this problematic Black Friday/Gray Thursday shift. And while I really do love social media and think it’s a wonderfully beneficial thing for businesses, it’s hard to deny that the 24/7 nature of it isn’t a major contributor here. But that’s just the way I see it. Maybe you’ve got it differently?

What’s your experience with social media and Black Friday?