Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

6 Reasons Social Media Campaigns Should Include Flickr

By Emily Johnson, Media Relations Specialist at Walker Sands Communications

The photo-sharing site Flickr is a valuable but often overlooked social media platform. Here are six reasons why marketers and communications professionals should add Flickr to their campaigns:

  1. People are visual. With Flickr, you’re able to tell a story in a way you can’t through other mediums. Let’s face it—people like to look at pictures. Plus, the change of scenery images offer is nice. We stare at text all day; mix it up to create more ways to engage with and inform your audience.
  2. You can share your photo stream. The Flickr community is not the only place where people can see the photos you post to the site. Flickr makes it easy to share photos across all social media platforms.
  3. It’s good for searches. The tags you assign to your photos are used in search, allowing people with your interests to more easily find you, enabling your audience to grow beyond those who already know about your brand.
  4. Higher picture quality is important. Photo quality is much higher on Flickr than any other social media platform. On Flickr, you will have fewer grainy images, and your presentations will be much sharper.
  5. Creative commons provides protection. Flickr offers a safe platform for images via creative commons, which means you pick the stringency of your copyright. This feature can give you peace of mind that others aren’t using (or misusing) photos without your permission, which is something you don’t always get with other social media platforms.
  6. You can start discussions. Flickr allows you to create groups and comments, just like all other social platforms. Although the focus is photographs and videos, people are still interacting with each other and could be interacting around images and videos of your brand or client.

So the next time you plan a social media marketing campaign, don’t forget the value that Flickr can bring!

Posted in Emily Johnson, Flickr, Interaction, Marketing, Photos, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Video | Comments Off on 6 Reasons Social Media Campaigns Should Include Flickr

Social Media: Still a Mystery to Most Small Businesses

By Amy Howell, CEO of Howell Marketing Strategies

Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t ask me about social media for business. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are all new media tools that can help bolster your Internet or digital “footprint.”

You can read all about how social media is ramping up the conversation by doing a simple Google search. But the more important question small business owners want answered is how to use social media to boost sales and get the phone ringing. I call it “turning on the water faucet.” Social media for businesses should mean one thing: free tools that can strengthen your organization’s SEO (search engine optimization), help get your message out, and engage with customers and prospects.

Now these tools may be free, but the time you must spend executing the work can be extensive. A lot of writers just re-hash what’s already been written, so what I find most helpful is to share what we help clients do in the trenches every day. Below are the main barriers to using social media and why it remains a mystery, followed by how to get started and what to do first.

The barriers for most small businesses using social media are:

  • Time and education: It takes time to read and learn about the ever-changing, growing tools online, and most business owners don’t have extra time to devote to this. I hear it every day, and as a small business owner myself, I certainly understand this constraint. Small businesses have limited resources and must focus on revenue development and all that comes with running a business. Social media can help a small business tremendously, but most owners have not had time to get up to speed.
  • Lack of resources: It takes a dedicated effort to employ social media tools. Most companies can hire help, but many simply don’t have the extra resources to do so.
  • Reluctance to embrace new media: A lot of people are just flat out skeptical of social media. There are legitimate reasons to ignore it, especially if you are in a regulated industry (banking, insurance, finance, etc.), as some governing entities such as the SEC have policies against any use of social media for work. I think that will change soon, as I’m already seeing some large organizations issue new policies on social media use.
  • Generational: Most people would be surprised to know that the average age of a Twitter user is between 40 and 55. Age isn’t an excuse to avoid social tools, but it is often an explanation.

How to get started if you want to add a social media strategy to your marketing toolkit:

  • Read, read, read. There are some excellent blogs (like this one) and other resources online that can tell you all you need to know. There is no “magic wand” that will do this for you. If you really want to jump in, you have to do the reading yourself. You can hire it out of course, but the ideal results spring from the business understanding social media and embracing it, even if it means only monitoring at first. Let’s take the Judy McLellan Team for example (@JudyMacTeam on Twitter). Judy hired my firm to help with a real estate marketing and PR strategy that included the use of social tools. At first, we did some of the tweeting and posting. But now, you can find Judy out selling homes while using her iPad and iPhone to tweet and spread information about her listings.
  • Pick one tool and learn that first. For me, it’s Twitter. Once I understood Twitter, I moved on to learning about some other tools. I think by mastering one tool, small businesses can see results faster. Let’s take Cheffie’s Cafe (@Cheffies on Twitter) as the next example. We helped Cheffie’s Cafe spread the word by using Twitter, along with traditional PR during the previous few months. A good Twitter strategy is key to a successful PR campaign.
  • Look at what your competition is doing. Get online and do a little research to see what your competition is up to in the social space. Let’s take OrthoMemphis, a successful orthopaedic practice in Memphis that adopted social media long before its competition did. We have helped OrthoMemphis (@OrthoMemphis on Twitter) use social media tools to not only market their sub-specialists (knee, hips, and shoulders), but also to launch OrthoStat, its acute care walk-in clinic. Combined with direct mail, PR, and patient communications, Twitter and Facebook have been tremendously helpful.
  • Get a social media policy in place and communicate it to your organization. There are some great examples online and free resources available. I suggest any small business that wants to use social media tools have a policy in place just like a media policy. Talking online is like talking in the newspaper, and it’s important to have a strategy and know the dos and don’ts of posting online. Good examples are Coca-Cola, Kodak, and Intel. (A list of these can be found on my blog.)

The smaller the organization (or flatter), the easier it is to employ social media. Even though they may have more resources, larger companies are often more bureaucratic and have more red tape. Larger companies are also usually slower to “get it,” and we have found that companies without all the red tape can move faster and are often more decisive. Social media gives the little guys a leg up and is a great way to have a big voice online.

Posted in Amy Howell, Blogs, Commitment, Competitors, Customers, Engagement, Facebook, Finance, Google, iPad, iPhone, Lead Generation, LinkedIn, Marketing, Prospecting, Public Relations, Retail, Revenue, Sales, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Small Businesses, Social Media Policy, Strategy, Tools, Twitter | Comments Off on Social Media: Still a Mystery to Most Small Businesses

Four SEO/SMM Strategies to Get Your Blog Listed on the First Page of Google

By Marci Reynolds, Director of Operations for Global Help24 at ACI Worldwide

Business blogs have become critical tools in any social media marketing tool box, and they are an excellent medium to share expertise and build your business brand. But just creating a blog is not enough. You must also focus on blog SEO (search engine optimization) to ensure that it receives top placement in Google, Bing, and the other search engines.

I began blogging in 2009, when I launched The Sales Operations Blog, and in 2011, I launched a second blog called Rat Terrier Mom. What do the two blogs have in common? They both appear on the first page of Google for multiple search terms and get the majority of their traffic from organic search engine links. Social media marketing nirvana!

Here are four strategies that I recommend and have leveraged to get my blogs listed on the first page of Google:

  • Focus and differentiate the content on your blog. There are thousands of blogs on the Internet, so if you want yours to stand out and appear on the first page of Google, it must offer something unique. Before I started The Sales Operations Blog, I did some research on blog competition and the popularity of search terms related to my content. I found that there were thousands of blogs on “how to sell” but very few on sales support. I also discovered that the phrase “sales operations” was one of the more frequently used search terms related to my topic. So before launching your blog, check out the competition, do some research on how potential readers search for your content, and attempt to focus and differentiate your blog.
  • Include a power search term in your domain name. Google does not like cute, it likes relevant. For this reason, I chose the domains SalesOperationsBlog.com and RatTerrierMom.com. (Okay, Rat Terrier Mom is a little cute.) When choosing your domain and blog name, select a frequently used search term that aligns with your content. In my domain research, I have found that many of the most popular words or phrases alone are already taken, but if you add the word “blog” at the end, most of them are available. For example, B2Bemail.com is taken, but B2BemailBlog.com is still available. Check out GoDaddy.com to research domain options.
  • Identify and leverage the top 20 search terms in your blog content. Use Google Adwords or a similar tool to identify the top 20-ish search terms that readers use to find content like yours, and then use this intelligence throughout your blog. This includes your post titles, post content, categories, HTML image labels, and in-post HTML tags. Note that the search terms should enhance your high-quality, interesting blog content, not actually make up your blog content. In addition to using the Google Adwords tool, monitor the “real time” search engine terms driving traffic, as reported in your WordPress dashboard. Copyblogger is an excellent resource for tips on keyword research and blogging SEO.
  • Keep the content fresh. As part of your social media marketing plan, publish high-quality, relevant blog content, ideally once per week. There is a direct correlation to the frequency in which you publish content, your ranking on search engines, and your website traffic. Add your Twitter stream or another user’s topic-relevant Twitter stream to the home page of your blog. Every time a tweet is posted, your blog home page will get fresh content. Add a specific page to your blog that includes links to other similar, recent online content. Refer to the Other Sales Ops Articles page on The Sales Operations Blog for an example.

If you focus and differentiate, choose a powerful domain name, include popular keywords in your content, and keep your content fresh (and high quality), there is no doubt that your blog popularity and traffic will climb.

I wish you good luck in your adventures in blogging and social media marketing!

Posted in Analytics, Bing, Blogs, Branding, Competitors, Content, Exclusive Content, Google, HTML, Marci Reynolds, Marketing, Metrics, Sales, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Strategy, Twitter | Comments Off on Four SEO/SMM Strategies to Get Your Blog Listed on the First Page of Google

Social SERPs: Social Media’s Growing Influence on Search Engine Results Pages

By Dana Todd, Vice President of Performance Innovation at Performics

In “ancient” times (circa 1999-2009), traditional search engines were a one-stop shop for people to search, find, consider, and purchase things online. Then social media emerged. Facebook—with the help of Twitter, Foursquare, and others—enabled people to search, find, consider, and purchase things online with a little help from their friends. Now people spend more time on Facebook than on Google. According to comScore, Facebook drove ten percent of all Internet pageviews in 2010.

Google and Bing are keenly aware of this new reality. To keep their users, they’ve recently adapted by layering social on search. And to stay relevant, they must continue to make search engine results pages (SERPs) more social. Google and Bing have started by incorporating various social aspects into their SERPs—from reviews in Google Place pages to tweets in real-time search to embedded user-generated YouTube videos. Google’s new +1 button enables searchers to “+1” (or “like”) search results, so that other searchers, like their friends, can see that a result was helpful. Similarly, Microsoft has partnered with Facebook to incorporate Facebook “likes” into Bing SERPs.

The effort to socialize search has resulted in SERPs that are controlled by 1) the brand owners and 2) the consumers—more appropriately called the “participants”—and by extension, their networks. In ancient times, brand owners exercised the most control over their brand’s SERP goodwill. Today, brand owners still control the SERP’s paid search ads (“paid content”) and can employ SEO tactics to boost digital asset visibility (“owned content”). But the participant has the most control over the SERP’s “earned content”—opinions, reviews, recommendations, social chatter, and videos.

There’s no doubt that the social SERP complicates search engine marketing (SEM); it requires brands to take a grassroots approach to reputation management—one that starts on the social networks. And brands must accept that their SERP goodwill is built with their customers’ participation and collaboration. When a person searches for a brand, they now see results potentially influenced by friends’ opinions, links, and experiences. Search engine marketing thus becomes word-of-mouth marketing.

The good news is, word of mouth can be influenced at its source—the social networks:

  1. The first challenge is building and organizing a meaningful number of participants (i.e., building the fan base). Twitter Promoted Accounts and Facebook Engagement Ads provide a creative platform to gain fans/followers through guaranteed reach. For instance, Redbox gained 269,000 Facebook fans in ten days using Facebook Engagement Ads (counting direct ad impacts only; nearly twice that number joined during the period measured, above normal baseline, which appears to have been influenced from seeing their friends join). Redbox incentivized people with ad copy that offered a free video rental to anyone who “liked” its brand.
  2. Once a fan base is established, the second challenge is mobilizing those fans/followers to talk positively about the brand—ideally in venues or channels that are indexed by search engines. This can be accomplished through incentives, promotions, polls, questions, or by creating highly sharable content. For instance, Baskin Robbins mobilized its 18,000+ Twitter followers on April 27th through its 31-cent scoop night promotion, which included a charity campaign partner. On April 27th, so many people were tweeting about the promotion that a Google search for “Baskin Robbins” showed a first-page link to 300+ real-time results.
  3. Third, keep it up. Sometimes the most difficult part of marketing is consistency and long-term commitment. Given that digital marketers consistently complain of being overworked and under resourced, it’s no wonder there are so many “ghosts of social media campaigns past” floating around out there. The companies that are succeeding the most in harnessing the powers of social media are distributing the workload between various departments (e.g., customer service, HR, PR, and marketing) and regularly inserting highly creative campaigns to keep the momentum going.

Of course, there’s the other side of the coin—the negative social media conversations that can make their way to the SERPs. Once again, these conversations can be influenced at their source. Savvy brands today employ social listening tools to uncover what people are saying and quickly address customer issues/gripes before a negative conversation spirals out of control. In many cases, these “fixes” become part of the social SERPs and can help offset any negativity. This becomes important in presenting balanced information for consumers and search engines. (Recently, there’s evidence that Google is using sentiment analysis that may weigh against a site or asset based on negative reviews).

As search becomes more social—and social drives more search—influencing participants to engage in positive social media conversations around brands is fast becoming the most important tactic to fund. Social media itself links customer experiences seamlessly from device to device, and it is thus of significant value as consumers move through the screens of their lives and express their intent through more search tools than just Google and Bing. Winners in social media can more easily be winners in mobile search and barcode/QR code search, Internet television, news search, and beyond.

Posted in Bing, Branding, Cause Marketing, Collaboration, Conversations, Customer Experience, Dana Todd, Facebook, Facebook Engagement Ads, Foursquare, Google, Incentives, Listening, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search, Polls, Promotions, QR Codes, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Results Pages, Sentiment, SEO, SERPs, Social Search, Twitter, Twitter Promoted Accounts, Word of Mouth, YouTube | Comments Off on Social SERPs: Social Media’s Growing Influence on Search Engine Results Pages

Search Engine Optimization Versus Social Media Marketing: A Battle that Doesn’t Need to Be Fought

By Rob Croll, Professor at Full Sail University

Successful organizations know that their customers now “find” them online in many ways, including Google searches, Facebook pages, customer review sites, social shopping sites, and more. Some interesting facts and figures:

  • More than 16 billion searches were conducted worldwide during October 2010, according to data from comScore.
  • More than 250 million people use Facebook on a daily basis.
  • Twitter claims more than 50 million tweets per day.

That’s a lot of online activity, happening in a lot of different places. For organizations trying to maximize their effectiveness, it can be difficult to prioritize. Factor in limited budgets, and it’s easy to fall into either/or arguments, particularly regarding search and social marketing.

The arguments for search engine optimization (SEO) typically include that it’s often more targeted, that searchers are actively “looking,” and that traffic from search frequently converts better. The arguments for social media marketing typically include that it’s better at building longer-term relationships with customers, that it gives you more control since it’s not reliant on search engine algorithms, and that the social aspect allows for customers to engage with and evangelize brands.

However, any argument over which is better—search or social media—fails to consider the inherently symbiotic relationship between the two. In today’s world, focusing on one to the exclusion of the other is folly for most organizations. Of course, the relative merits of each differ depending on the goals of the organization and, more importantly, the objectives of the web user.

In a post called Comparing SEO and Social Media as Marketing Channels, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz noted that “search is an intent-driven activity. We don’t search casually (much), we search to find answers, information, and goods and services to consume.” Visitors who arrive at a site from a search engine are specifically looking for something. Generally (though not always), these searchers are further along in the purchase decision-making process and thus potentially more valuable, at least in the short term.

Social media marketing, however, brings potential customers of a different type. These visitors expect more dynamic content and more opportunities to engage and interact. Even if they don’t have an immediate intent to purchase, these potential customers represent a longer-term opportunity for organizations. If they feel positively about your brand, they may share that enthusiasm within their own circle of influence, expanding the reach of your marketing activities. Building a relationship with them also greatly enhances the likelihood that they will do business with you in the future. For example, studies show that individuals who have been exposed to a brand message in social media are more likely to click on an organic search listing for that organization.

Finally, consider that results from a searcher’s social graph now appear in the search engine results directly. These social results typically include an image, which increases the likelihood that they’ll be clicked. In an article on Search Engine Journal, Bill Sebald gives an anecdotal example of getting search engine traffic for keywords for which his blog didn’t organically rank well. That traffic was being driven by what he calls “the eleventh listing”—the “results from people in your social circle” on Google.

It’s clear that the relationship between search and social will continue to grow in the future. Search engines have been seeking to incorporate more social signals for some time now, and the momentum shows no signs of slowing. With advances in technology and shifts in consumer behavior, it’s time for marketers to look at search and social media as two critical—and inherently interrelated—components of their overall efforts.

Posted in Branding, Engagement, Facebook, Google, Marketing, Relationships, Rob Croll, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Shopping, Targeting, Twitter | Comments Off on Search Engine Optimization Versus Social Media Marketing: A Battle that Doesn’t Need to Be Fought

A CIO Takes On CMOs and Social Media Marketing

By Colin Osburn, Chief Information Officer at Parts.com

As a technologist, most everything I do has a technical bent first, with true ROI close behind. I realize that technology and finance to a marketer are like sunlight to a vampire, but steadily more and more of the marketing types appear to be following the technical and ROI trend. Metrics, reporting, automation, and justifying that mind-numbing campaign are all things that marketers are doing presently, while showing true technical aptitude.

I’ve had a real taste of why marketing and I are such distanced bedfellows. Running a national automotive parts Web site is complicated. A lot of technical effort goes into the operation and improvement of our search function, images, text, etc. Our customer base is earned through large partnerships, SEO (technical in its automation), and complimentary business lines. We even launched a short-run TV commercial this year for the first time in the company’s history.

It’s readily apparent that everyone—from small businesses to mega corporations and all the MLM shills in between—is jumping on the “new wave of technology” known as social media. To any decent technologist, this “new wave” is the same stuff we’ve been working with for years, but it’s in a new box with a bow.

All manner of Internet black magic that I can find, I heap upon our willing CTO to do a test run. I’m always looking at the newest technology for application to our business model. Automated sharing toolbars and widgets? Yep. Banner ads? Of course. Social media? Absolutely.

But I should have mentioned we do not have a CMO on staff. (Either that, or I disabled his account and forgot about him.) That means the technologists and sales executives are running the show. That also means we got exactly the results from all of these new implementations that you would expect:

  • The banner ads are completely pointless. I intend to remove them.
  • The toolbar never gets used, and no one shares anything.
  • The forums are dead.
  • We get very little response from our e-mail blasts.
  • We keep Facebook and Twitter because they keep the brand public. We also keep them because it’s a new type of customer service.

The Parts.com site is designed for commerce. We make money when someone buys an auto part. Pretty direct. We haven’t added articles and sticky reading-style content because our user base comes to our site for a very direct task and wants to do it quickly. The same people most likely do participate in auto enthusiast forums and spend a lot of time browsing “car porn” (photos of hot rods, tricked-out cars, and classic vehicles), but not while they’re buying a part. We also have a disproportionately large number of auto dealers who use our site, and the service manager isn’t interested in reading something while trying to get the customer’s part overnighted.

We have Facebook. We have Twitter. But I refuse to attach our brand to MySpace. We have hundreds of friends, and there are a lot of people talking about a lot of things, 99% of which involves the buying and selling of cars. It’s pretty damn hard to get people hot and bothered about a camshaft replacement or that hot new discounted windshield replacement. Have you figured it out yet? We’re not just commerce, but commerce as a subsection of a larger vertical. And that vertical has plenty of content and places that provide it. So we implement what we can as fast as we can and tweak, wait, watch, and adjust.

In reality, some key points came to light for me over the past year:

  • CIOs and CMOs need one another. That’s so painful to admit.
  • Marketing helps those awesome new technologies become ubiquitous.
  • If you don’t have a marketer on staff, this is a good time to start talking to your network.
  • Technology for technology’s sake works some of the time, but not enough to generate an ROI that keeps the monthly revenue high.
  • Content sites will almost always make more on the items I listed, from social media to banner ads. Commerce sites will overall make more on a direct revenue basis. Build a widget, sell a widget.
  • Commerce sites can make progress with these social media tools, but they should not bet projections on them.
  • Being a subcategory makes you look for the “why” a lot sooner. Dell and Ford kill it on social media and “new wave” commerce sales because they are the market. We sell parts. There’s a huge difference.
  • Take what you can get. Better customer service and communication has been a real win for us with these tools, even if we don’t make millions on banner ads.
  • The Get Satisfaction site is a real winner for us because it enabled us to learn from our customers what we need to know. (Facebook has helped us with that as well.)

To be continued…

Posted in Advertising, Banner Ads, Branding, CMOs, Colin Osburn, Content, Dell, E-Mail, Facebook, Finance, Ford, Forums, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Measurement, Metrics, MySpace, ROI, SEO, Tools, TV, Twitter | Comments Off on A CIO Takes On CMOs and Social Media Marketing