Social Media Buzz

Video and Podcast Optimization Session at Philly PodCamp 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:27:00 +0000

Philly PodCamp was a great event, the horrible weather didn't stop all the social media enthusiasts from gathering in Tuttleman Learning Center at Temple University in Philadelphia .
I attended a few sessions and one the first one was "Universal Search, Podcasts & Video" by Li Evans.
Li talked about tips and tricks on how to optimize your video and podcast for search engines.
The Basic Video and Audio Optimization Rules are:
1. Select relevant and eye-catching title
2. Put important keywords in the title if it will be a part of your URL
3. Tag videos properly on video sharing sites
4. SEO your video description just like you would SEO your webpage and make sure you 5. Always provide pod/video transcript and make sure you optimize it for your keywords, include header tags and do your usual SEO spiel.
6. Provide people with a code so they can embedd your video easily to their blogs/sites
7. Give your video some link juice - link to it from all your web properties if you can
8. Use hyphens as opposed to underscores or + signs for video file names
9. Use multiple feeds for multiple file types (mp3, wav, etc)
10. Create and submit Google Video Site Map
11. Use automatic submission site like TubeMogul.

Your LinkedIn Profile: Keep It Professional

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:23:00 +0000

I always kept my LinkedIn profile strictly professional. It has always been reserved only for people I either had worked with in the past, or people I crossed paths in the Industry I belong.
I really liked the feature that you have to select the position and/or the company from the drop-down box, or have to actually add the job to your "LinkedIn Resume", and it's like a whole new story. I have a little over 100 contacts and never raced to become 500+ superstar. The 500 past and current colleagues? Gee, you're either a hell of a job hopper or had worked for huge corporations and added everyone from the executive team to the tech support people.

Some people even post their email address to the profile, since an email address is required to be added to your network. Also I often come across the message on personal blogs "I believe in networking power, connect with me on LinkedIn, my email address is xyz@comapny.com!"
Interesting enough, I came accross the List of Social Computing Strategists at Enterprise Corporations.
As you can see the majority of these Industry leaders have less than 300 LinkedIn contacts in their networks. And I am sure they receive dozens of connection requests daily and they know WAY many more people in their respective industries, and they do have MANY friends, but they chose to be selective and only add those they had a professional ties with.
To me LinkedIn profile were more like an addition to your resume and employment verification at the same time. I still get amused when HR department requires people fill out these obsolete employment applications with a last 3 places you worked and 3 references. Just look at my LinkedIn profile and please spare me from all these useless paperwork!
To my surprise LinkedIn claimed 47% of the UK's web users are mixing their social and professional lives by accepting networking invitations from "frolleagues" - basically from your friends or from the people you really had zero professional interaction, just know them socially outside the work.
It was nice to find out that the majority of LinkedIn users (73%) feel the same way and they wanted to keep them separate. However, 36% of workers feel an obligation to accept friend request from colleagues, even though they don't really have any professional relationship with.
"It's becoming increasingly important that we keep our professional and social lives separate and manage our online reputation as effectively as possible," said a LinkedIn spokeswoman.
So I would only add people I worked with, for everything else is a Facebook.

Social Media Camp NYC Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:18:00 +0000

Social Media Camp that took place on August 7th, 2008. About 200 social media enthusiasts gathered @ Sun Microsystems headquarters in Midtown and again, much like all un-conferences it was a great success. Unfortunately there were no wi-fi and I couldn't blog so I rely on my tweets to re-capture the event.

Sessions I Attended
Online Community Best Practices by Jay Bryant
This presentation is a great resource for any online community manager out there. Jay shared the tips and advice on how to grow and promote the community using tvguides.com as an example.
There are 5 ways to socialize the brand:
1. Understand the culture
2. Integration
3. Participation
4. Trust
5. Leadership
Interesting enough, Jay pointed out that organic search is responsible for 30% of all traffic and stressed out the importance of SEO in the community promotion process.

Agencies Role In Communities

View SlideShare presentation (tags: networks social communities online)

Do City-TLDs Provide the Basis for City-Based Social Media? by Thomas Lowenhaupt
The session was dedicated to the concept of the Top Level Domains for the cities, particularly for NYC as the start.
The audience came up with some great ideas on how NYC and its residents can benefit from having .nyc domain name for different purposes.

"Content is King, but Quality is The Queen" by Rob Blatt and Chris Cavs.
The discussion spinned around of the importance of the quality of pod- and video-casts. The question whether professionally done videos are more likely to go viral was left unanswered. Yes, Internet is flooded with "look at me" videos where everyone with webcamera can produce them a dozen/day. However, will the professional equipment help if you don't have a well-thought idea behind it? Or the random shot videos or Chris Crocker's phenomenon rule?
Personally I don't consider myself an expert in this particular topic so I was just observing and learning.
I found this "Quantity vs Quality" article by Chris Cavs very interesting.
And maybe yes, in ideal world I would totally prefer a professionally done video with a great original idea and a killer screenplay. Sigh.

"Twitter 101" by Howard Greenstein
Howard started the session by asking the question “How do you use Twitter for business?"
Some responses included:
1. To gather information
2. News
3. The dialog with Industry's leaders
4. Community participation
The interesting question came from the audience "How do you make friends on Twitter?"
To sum it all up:
1. Create an account
2. Find out if people you know are already on twitter and start following them
3. Locate people that talk about the topics you are interested in using http://search.twitter.com and start following them
4. Start participating in the conversation - offer an advice or help if needed
5. Talk about something you are expert in
6. Install twitter on your phone and respond to your friends timely
7. Get addicted :)

"How To Deal With Big Social Networking Sites"
This session was hosted by Jason Kinner, CTO of Ringside Networks
Jason talked about how to make your website integrated with the major social networks.
Ringside Networks enable you:
• Connect your website members to the Social Web
• Connect members to friends on your website, Facebook, or any OpenSocial site
• Connect social applications to your website, Facebook, or any OpenSocial site
• Connect your social applications to your content, data, and systems

Sessions I Wish I Attended

"Customers, Clients and Social Mediators, When the Wiki Becomes CoLaboratory" by Loretta Donovan

What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism by Howard Greenstein

What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism

View SlideShare presentation (tags: 3 world oldmedia newmedia)

So a big Thank You to the presenters and organizers of Social Media Camp for making this event great.

Social Media Camp NY

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:30:00 +0000

I am looking forward to Social Media BarCamp tomorrow. Hopefully I will be liveblogging and meeting lots of cool social media peeps.

Social media foe Agencies

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:03:00 +0000

I am attending Agency Bootcamp in NYC!

Visit Agency Bootcamp

If You Google Knol

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:08:00 +0000

So, we are all excited - Knol is here.
The official URL is http://knol.google.com
I just entered Knol in Google and the official page of Knol can not be found. Yet :)

Just a thought about Google results relevancy

How to Stay Productive With So Much Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:18:00 +0000

How to stay productive with SO MUCH social media by Jared Goralnick at PodCamp Boston.
Jared opened his speech with a video of Gary Vainerchuk about how to cut the noise.

Social Media Tools to save your time:
Jott.com - transcribe your thoughts to the email

Transfer your voice mail to text messages (GotVoice, PhoneTag)

Textexpander or texter - custom keyword abbreviations to insert frequent phrases

Timesnapper or RescueTime - track your activities and time with screenshots and text filters. Compare your productivity with coworkers.

Mailexpire or Mailinator - sign up with temporally email addresses

BugMeNot - if you don't feel like signing up

Stop clicking next in your Google result - increase your number to first 100

Change your contact preferences - get rid of unnecessary notifications and alerts.
Stop Email Auto-Check

Once you reach the number of people in your network that following them all and responding to their messages becomes unmanageable - jump out and turn it off.

"Get your value and then get away"

Monitor your brad with a separate account - Google Alerts, Twitter

Develop a filter habit and clean up your mailbox.

Create your own "Cone of Silence" - give yourself a time to focus and don't let anything distract you. Multitasking is not efficient.

Be responsive, not TOO available

Boston Podcamp 3

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:05:00 +0000

I made it to Podcamp in Boston, planning on attending Tuming Buzz into Business By Christopher Penn at 10:30 am. Also interesting sessions is SEO 101 by Greatest Living SEO Sri Nagubandi, maybe will stop by later.
Day 1
Christopher Penn opened his presentation by asking who knows what ARBITRAGE is. Two people in the auditorium actually knew the definition :)
What is MARKETING? is the next question. Very interesting audience replies. Marketing is the sharing of ideas summed it all up.
What works?
A very convincing snapshot of gmail Inbox with 25678 un-opened mail was very convincing.
Four people from the audience read a newspaper this morning. Nobody could remember what they were reading about. And thinking about all the money spent on the paper advertising.
So what is BRAND? A label? A logo?
Brand is an emotional aftertaste of a previous experience.
Brand has to be worth talked about. If product sucks nothing matters. You know you have a really good idea if you can't stop talking about it.
You need to have a STORY, not just a bunch of marketing messages.
If you can fit your marketing message in one Twitter post - you are on the right track.
Sales tunnel:
1.Audience (a crazy web 2.0 world) - sign up EVERYWHERE
Be YOU on every media vehicle
2.Get them to your website
3. Determine prospects
Start with your database, your mailing list is a first stop.
Find who already likes you and find people with similar interests.
4. Start the campaign
People communicate with you by creating UGC or CGC.
Use Google to find people. Once you found them - add them, develop a relationship with them.
5. Convert them
Networks - Website - Database.
All you need is to give people a clear call to action on your website and on any campaign you launch.
6. Customers
A problem with new media: WORD SPREADS REALLY REALLY FAST.
Don't neglect your customers.
7. Finding Evangelists
Give them tools that are easy to use. Make your URLs are super obvious. Give them widgets, graphics, free stuff, something to play with.
8. Measuring
Google Analytics rock.
CrazyEgg.com is a good way to track your visitors eyeballs.

Women Blogger Statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:24:00 +0000

The research from BlogHer and Compass Partners showed some interesting statistics:

35% of women aged 18 to 75 participate in the blogosphere weekly.
Of women online 53% read blogs, 37% post comments to blogs and 28% write or update blogs.
Of women bloggers 58% post entries at least weekly, and of those who actively read blogs, 80% do so at least once per week.
Why women blog?
65% do it for fun
60% to express themselves
46% to get information
41% to stay up to date on family and friends
40% to connect with others
34% as a diary
28% participate in the blogosphere in order to connect with others.

Special Coupon Newsletter: When It Goes Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:35:00 +0000

I have to admit I don't open retailer newsletters often. But this was a first email I ever received from Roly Poly sandwiches - the popular place to grab lunch since it's practuacally accross the street from the office.
Hey, it was $5 off any sandwich, considering the regular price is $5.95! I even forwarded it to my collegue and she got pretty excited.

To my surprise about 4 hours I received another email from Roly Poly with a subject line: Special Offer Correction from Roly Poly

Puzzled I had to click:

Well, congrats to Roly Poly team on saving the situation with a creative subject line: "Special Offer Correction" sounds just irresistible :)

However, the lesson learned: PLEASE prof-reed your newsletter before hitting that send button. I have been there, done that once sending out the press release with a misspell in company's name. I would like to get stats how many people brought these $5 off coupons to the shop and actually were given a discount.

WOMMA-U Conference in Miami

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:20:00 +0000

I just arrived to South Beach today to attend WOMMA-U.

The list of speakers include Rohit Bhargava, Joseph Jaffe, Carla Hendra, Andrew Lark, Jordan Corredera, Jeffrey Graham, Jennifer Gulvik, Fiona Pietruski, Jason Anello and many more.
My company, Adaptive Marketing, just became a member of WOMMA and I am looking forward to learn the best practices from the industry leaders.

Do You Look Good On Google?

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:20:00 +0000

Forget the old fashioned business cards, these days all the information you need to put on it is simply your name. While you are introducing yourself to a prospective business partner, employer or simply somebody who caught your attention, know that your name will be typed into Google the next business day or the same night to get a scoop.
Some people speed up the process.
I remember standing in the bar waiting for my friends to show up, when a stranger approached me with an attempt to start a conversation. He actually handed me his business card, but at the same time he said "Google me" pointing at my Treo. This is something I couldn't say no to as the reputation management professional :)

The stranger had a very unique combination of First-Last name so it was quite easy task. I have to admit that my new acquittance did a good job managing his online presence. From the top ten Google results I learned about his company, his professional credentials, his book available for sale on Amazon.com, and his awards and recognitions. Not bad for a person who doesn't know about the existence of social networking sites. He turned out to be a plastic surgeon.

Interestingly enough, he never took any steps to build his digital presence or reputation, but he looked his best on Google.

So sometimes it's just good enough to be a good person I guess :)

Harnessing The Power of Customer Loyalty

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:56:00 +0000

Starbucks has added the social networking feature to their site: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideas/ideaList.apexp
Now customers can submit their ideas and vote for creative ways to improve Starbucks products and services. This is what I call a successful social media branding strategy.

Yahoo Goes Open Source With A New A New Meta Data Standards

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:23:00 +0000

Search engine Yahoo will allow third parties to add extra details, such as ratings and reviews, to their search results. Its new open source application called "Search Monkey" will allow publishers to add information such as rating and reviews, images, deep links, etc. to Yahoo SERPs.
To me it's like the meta-data 2.0 (aka old age meta tags go web 2.0)

So the new set of meta-data for let's say a website of a online store may include ratings, price information and links for reviews and photos with the new tools. Yahoo plans to provide additional details on how the open search tool will work over the next few months.

Miami Social Networking Conference: The Power of Bloggers

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Day 1
Blogging: Understanding and Engaging the New Influences
Speaker: Richard Jalichandra - Technorati

Richard Jalichandra opened his speech by marking 4 years of the social media phenomen anniversary and noted that past 4 years done more for the Internet world than previous 10 years.

Internet evolved from Web 1.0 stage when everything was all about the pages to the Web 2.0 world when your audience seeks its own audience.

The speaker used several examples as bloggers were perceived by people and media. Back in 2002 the CMO of Technorati went to the streets of NY and asked people what do they think about bloggers... He actually used the movie clips of the responses and most of them were just a blank stare..

The funny example was the shoe shine guy at Grand Central. He actually responded with a perfect answer: “The big media companies will definitely get hurt.."Technorati came to shoe shine booth 4 years later to ask Kevin his thoughts about the present stage of social media and blogging. He was right on the track answering 'it's all about haters now. If you hate someone or something just go and blog about it..". Richard discussed the impact bloggers have on brands today. It's up to brand how to embrace bloggers and customers feedback. The strategy is that "control is an illusion" and brands go through stages before accepting that customers have more power than they thought.
The good example of customer engagement are companies like Sun who let consumers have unfiltered conversation on their home page.

Best practices for consumer engagement:

Let them play with your food (allow mashups and encourage consumers creativity)
Giving up the control and engaging is the key..

The Oficial End of Facebook Privacy: You've Been Spidered!

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:49:00 +0000

I got a google alert on myself last night and here it was: my Facebook profile popped up on the first page (number 6 actually if you Google my name).

So what people can learn about you from this link?

Obviously, they can get an idea how do you look like if you have your profile photo public.
The can see what networks you belong to (in my case it's my company's network and my geo local community)
And they can see your 5 random friends (probably it will rotate since spider crawls your profile everytime, but so far I have Danny Sullivan smiling face :)

As you can see my firs/last name combination is rather unique, but in case you need to find John Smith there's an option to look for all users meeting this criteria, but you need to be Facebook member to continue with advanced search.

So with all that how will it change our daily lives?

If you have facebook profile and you make it "public" it will appear in Google results (duh!)
People will see your photo - your avatar is displayed in search results! So please select it carefully since there are people besides your friends who are searching for you. For example it could be your prospective employer or mom of your girlfriend. Just something to keep in mind..
Your 5 random friends will be displayed. So the advise to choose your friends carefully goes a long way here...

What does it mean to search marketing?

If your company product or brand has facebook profile or page it will take a shelf space in Google SERP. It rarely can be a bad thing for both branding and reputation managenent. I really don't see any downside at this point, but I learned that any publicity is not always a good thing in spite of old saying!

Happy facebooking everyone!

The corporate blog: The new About Us section of the company's website

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:41:00 +0000

Having enough said about corporate blogging strategy I am not going to get into details what is a corporate blog and why your company needs one. Maybe it doesn't. But about 90% of corporate website have "About Us" section. What do you put there? Some basics like company's history, press releases, job openings, maybe executive bios for larger companies. I have seen photos, company's culture, the list of good deeds like sponsorships and donations, employees benefits and investor relations for publicly traded businesses.
Most likely they all be separate static pages. Sounds like a good all school of a "proper website set up".
Will it ever change? Can all the mentioned above find a home at the corporate blog? One of my favorite examples is Omniture Blog maintained by Matt Belkin. This blog is full of helpful information and tips on web analytics. I actually find it more informative than all copy they have on the website.
Another great example is CEO who blogs Jonathan Schwartz . This blog goes way beyond boring dry press releases and truly keeps the hand on company's pulse.
So does your CEO blog? Do you have enough news to post something about company's live at least weekly? In this case corporate blog is your new "about us" section.

Digg Sex Change Experiment or Bart Simpson Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:55:00 +0000

I almost always use my real photo for the profiles on of all these social networking websites, and I have no problem making friends and grow my network. But Digg has always been special to me. My Digg profile used to say "30 years old female" from NYC and my avatar displayed my smiling face. Being a Digg user since February 2006 I only made one friend. That's right, only one mutual friend. I've been trying adding people as friends but they never returned a favor. What I was doing wrong? I really tried to be a nice community player: dug stories, left comments and kept adding friends. OK, I admit submitting a couple boring press releases due to job related duties and maybe a couple of nothing special articles just to get nice rankings in Google for the selected keywords phrase stuffed in the title. Nobody's perfect. But without friends I felt ignored and bored. Nobody voted for my stories, I felt like complete Digg failure.

According to QuantCast the typical Digg user is a 18-35 years old male who also loves to visit collegehumor.com When you set up a profile on Digg you have several options to identify yourself: guy, girl, dude, lady, fellow, bird, chap, grrrl, gentleman, damsel, male, female, transgender, none of the above... While setting the profile I selected "female" from this impressive list along with my avatar that clearly supported my choice.
About a week ago I decided to perform the sex change operation on myself and went from "female" to 'dude" in 10 seconds or less. Also cool looking Bart Simpson was my new face. The result? 10 new mutual friends and my stories finally started getting some votes.

What's next? I guess I would have to submit some cool gadget related news to be finally accepted in male dominated Digg community. I am not complaining, don't get me wrong! I guess the lesson here is When in Rome Do As The Romans Do.

Happy Digging everyone!

LinkedIn: No Booze Mail Allowed

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:58:00 +0000

LinkedIn is known for being resilient to all web 2.0 temptations, so hearing “We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want" from their CEO wasn't surprising at all. Also often being called "first professional social networking site,"LinkedIn denies even being a social network.
Well, I would agree at certain point, I treat my LinkedIn profile page just like my resume: keep it up to date but really don't check it out unless there's a reason to. It's a nice tool for professionals to keep in touch with colleagues and collect endorsements and references. My friends never contact me via LinkedIn and frankly I don't have anyone in my connection list who would know me outside of workplace.
Linkedin does have some social elements to it: "Answers", comments, introduction through network and the ability to add your photo. All the above are features let you add some colors to plain boring resume page.
During the seminar "Effectively Leveraging Social Networking" at SMX Conference I learned some interesting facts about LinkedIn:
Did you know that average income of LinkedIn user is $140,000?
Also I had no idea that LinkedIn pages don't have "no follow" tag so basically by asking the people in your company linking to the company's website you can really boost it's rankings.

Anyway, LinkedIn will probably stay the conservative, strictly professional website that will be Internet version of your CV, but it will be interesting to see the stats for this year. Last year LinkedIn had an astonishing growth rate of 164%

Blast From The Past

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:56:00 +0000

When I wend to Mashable to get my daily dose of social media news today I was stumbled upon the headline "iWon is about to add a social network to its site" Wow! I remember iWon.com from my dot-com fun days. I learned that it was acquired by Ask and probably it's how they survived in early 2000. Now do they seriously hope dominate online gaming world by creating a place for people to hook up? Hmmm... Good luck! I am getting tired of new social network launches every 12 hours or so...

Measuring Corporate Blogging ROI

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:40:00 +0000

The bottom line of any business is to make money. The constant challenge social media professionals like myself meet every day is to proof that all the wonderful and fun things we do for our employers and clients actually worth their money. We're all in the search of one perfect formula that will put a price tag on social networking efforts and will calculate the ROI of all online community initiatives we lead.
The question "what this blog is doing for us?" comes up on pretty much every meeting with the Senior management and you always think"gee, where do I start?"
I came across a wonderful article about ROI of blogging with a great summary of what blog is doing for you and how you can measure it.
The most common benefits are:

increased brand visibility
savings from customer insights
reduced impact from negative user-generated content
increased sales efficiency.

Nielsen Co., To Launch Social Network Community

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:28:00 +0000

The World's biggest researcher The Nielsen Companie is launching 'Hey! Nielsen,' a social network to act as a buzztracker for what in the entertainment world is hot on the web. The idea is to tap into the wisdom of crowds--or more specifically the wisdom of the "IN crowd" who wants to be webchatting about all the hottest TV, music, movies and web videos.

Hey! Nielsen is currently in beta testing, open only to Nielsen company employees--here's what the site looks like: http://www.heynielsen.com

It's expected to go live by the end of September. The site is a collaborative work of every division of Nielsen Co, including Nielsen Media Research, Nielsen Entertainment, ACNielsen, Nielsen's business media, wireless and interactive units, and social media analytics firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

The company has also launched The Blog to keep everyone in the loop on the progress of the site development.

Social Media July 2007 Statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:44:00 +0000

ComScore released numbers pertaining to social networking's worldwide growth. Now, Nielsen/NetRatings' PR team has released its latest set of figures that track how quickly the top social-networking sites are growing. The results are divided into three different categories of social media: social networks, blogs (and blog platforms) and video sites.
Looks like LinkedIn stays red hot with 260% growth. Club Penguin who had a same 260% flew under my radar completelly since it's children network. But it's very interesting trend.

Mobile Social Networking is the Next Big Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:39:00 +0000

According to Juniper Research, end-user-generated revenues from social networking sites as well as dating and content delivery services will rise from $572 million in 2007 to more than $5.7 billion in 2012.
This will make social networking services the dominant force in market growth for mobile user-generated content.
Social networking itself is forecast to account for 50 per cent of this total.

Word of Mouth Marketing in Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Nataliya) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:35:00 +0000

167 facts and stats about Word of Mouth marketing and Social Media. Totally awesome deck!