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Truly understanding the Impact of Social Media for Business

Monday, July 20th, 2009

by Jonathan Marshall

Today, everyone seems to be talking about Social Media, and companies are rushing “to do” social media, much like a child in Toys R Us when they see a shiny, new toy on the shelves. Businesses are trying to figure out how to leverage it for marketing, increased and more personal customer interaction, and PR. They’re hopping on the Twitter wagon, making Facebook fan pages, uploading videos/pics to Youtube and Flickr, and building social communities in hopes of joining the Web 2.0 conversation. Jason Burby from ClickZ had a great example of social media advantages/disadvantages that I referred to at the bottom of this post. Thanks Jason.

A few succeed, but depending on industry, many pour a lot of resources into these efforts and don’t have much success. The biggest concern is they haven’t defined what success might look like for themselves or their customers and potential prospects. This is where the problem starts. Defining specific site goals is important when initiating an on-site behavior measurement plan (Web analytics). Companies that don’t have documented and thorough site goals really struggle when it comes to prioritizing initiatives and measuring their site’s success. These shared site goals are critical to understanding your site performance’s and impact.

The same holds true when you initiate specific goals in order to understand the impact of social media on your business. You must define what success means to you, because it will be different for everyone.

Consider how you can leverage social media’s enormous reach for your business, but make sure that you understand that you can’t control social media. This is where most drop the ball if they hadn’t already with setting up specific social media goals. You can’t force your goals on people talking about your company, products, and services. When defining your goals, consider what success also means to those interacting on the Web with your brand, whether it’s on your site or not. Like I said before, success will be different for everyone, and after you understand what it may mean for your target, you could end up changing your definition of success, maybe a few times.

When it comes to defining goals and identifying ways to leverage social media, you must understand the difference between social media that you own, and social media that you don’t own. You own the social media that you promote on your site, your Facebook fan page, your Twitter account, and similar communities you or your business may use. You don’t own what other people are saying on their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, reviews on other sites, and blogs.

Too often, companies are only focused on understanding how people interact with the social media initiatives controlled by the company. The conversations I hear are always about how many followers/fans a Twitter account/Facebook fan page has. And while it is important to understand the reach of those owned initiatives, the power is really in the chatter. The conversations that go on between your customers, including information and opinions about your company, products, and services online. That is what is important- analyzing how you are perceived by others, and then making changes or increasing efforts accordingly.

The secret for companies is defining ways in which to harness that positive power of comments while finding the negative comments and addressing them so that they don’t spin out of control and continue to have a negative impact on your business (short term and long term).

According to Jason Burby, a well-known example of this is the buzz that went on a few years ago on the Dell laptop batteries overheating and exploding. There was a tremendous amount of talk about it online before Dell acknowledged and addressed it. It ended up becoming a huge issue leading to recalls and the like.

If Dell had been listening across the Web at that point, it may have been able to identify the issue earlier and get ahead of the problem, working with manufacturing and recalling batteries earlier. It would’ve been seen as getting ahead of the problem rather than getting nailed for ignoring it.

Dell and others have learned from mistakes like this, but many companies still aren’t proactive in listening to what their clients are saying on the Web. To shift corporate thinking in this area, put a strategic plan in place to address these types of things.

How do you define success around social media? What is your strategy to leverage the positive mentions and address the negative (or potentially negative) mentions?

Once you have that in place, you can look at the different tools and listening platforms available to understand what’s happening outside initiatives you control. Make sure you look not just at quantity of mentions but also at quality measurements. Sentiment definition is a great way to help focus on quantity versus quality. Define your goals around these areas and plan your strategy based on that.

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Posted in Mobile SMS, Social Media and SEO, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Poor Man’s SEO explained.

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

by Jonathan Marshall

Tom Krazit from CNET wrote a great article about how large Internet companies spend millions on technology and outside consulting in an effort to get their Google rank as high as possible. However, if you are not an enormous company, unfortunately, you have to rely on the link exchange, or as Krazit calls it, “poor man’s search-engine optimization.”

The end of the article points out that even though link exchanges can be effective, they only work to initially get a company’s name out into the open: the real push necessary to make a Web site successful is when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites. Krazit goes on to explain link exchange, and SEO in his article below.

If you’ve ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you’ve probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: “Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links.”

We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what we do or few moral qualms about spam.

The idea is that if you can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site’s worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics, thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old, dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the Web’s dominant search engine.

But does it still work? And at what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation designed to game the system?

Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank of another site he owns using techniques that don’t run afoul of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he said. “To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling.”

PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google’s novel approach to site indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account the worthiness of the sites passing along the links.

This meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.

But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.” That, of course, sounds like something your mother would say.

In a Web as vast as this one, getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other’s work and help each other build up a following, but if you’re selling a product or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search results for things like “day-trading software” when you’re starting from scratch.

So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about Search Engine Optimization for Search Engine Land, says “if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

Duffield says he’s very careful to only solicit links from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the ancient game of go.

That was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.

“It’s not about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries,” Duffield said. “When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see the top three positions have this much page rank and this many positions, and try to beat that out.”

As long as people like Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they’re following the spirit of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“Where it tends to get into tricky issues is where people are doing it primarily for payment,” Sullivan said. “Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that people would simply be buying links to do better.

While paid links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in general, saying it does not allow “excessive link exchanging” but failing to define exactly what constitutes “excessive.”

Other practices that are verboten include links to “bad neighborhoods” on the Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually identify.

For the most part, however, the practice is rampant enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. “If you start thinking too much about not getting caught, you’re probably doing things you shouldn’t be doing,” Sullivan said.

In an era where Search Engine Marketing is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over Google’s search index are those like Duffield trying to make something out of literally nothing.

While he needs to build PageRank equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link exchanges only work to get one’s name out there: the real boost needed to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites.

That’s when your search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said. “If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all over the Internet, what choice do they have?”

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Posted in SEO Facts, SEO News, SEO Tips, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Attention all SMBs: Internet Marketing, contrary to popular belief – is NOT FREE

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Frank Reed from Search Marketing Standard wrote a great article about SMBs (small and medium businesses) and the disconnect between understanding they need to make a serious push to increase their online marketing efforts, and then paying for those efforts. When it comes to discussing payment, they hit the brakes and start and start bartering. It gets ridiculous.

We deal with these clients all the time, and you can always immediately tell the difference between the ones who understand what they are paying for, and the others. It’s a circular song and dance that comes from SMBs about how they are aware they need to take a more active approach toward their Internet marketing strategies. Many get that concept, but unfortunately just understanding that fact is not enough. The other end of that unfortunately is the part that leads to the eventual breakdown of their business. This is where their internet marketing efforts usually stop, and it stops with this statement, “but I don’t want to spend any money. What can we do for free? At this point, San Diego SEO experts should pack their bags and run, because this mindset leads to a horrible business relationship, and ultimately doesn’t allow them to execute appropriate SEO training and strategies. Frank goes on to discuss this circular debate below- well said Frank.

I see this happen in Chamber of Commerce environments where everyone wants to meet you and buy you a cup of coffee so you can talk all about your knowledge of the Internet, but when it comes to the reality of “these things cost money,” you can hear crickets during the stunned silence. SMBs attend every free event that gives them the most generic advice, but when it comes to the point of paying for a real service that will produce results, they run like mice when the lights go on.

I know the economy is bad. I know money is tight. Does that mean, however, that you don’t need to still spend money to make money? Here’s some advice for all Internet marketing service providers and those looking for their services. As we rapidly approach that time of year when SMBs need to decide if they will again throw good money at their Yellow Pages presence, there needs to be some serious thought applied to this traditional advertising play. SMBs will be assaulted by aggressive sales people and then be put into the spin cycle about how they can get the best of both the online and offline world with the Yellow Pages offerings. Must … resist … the …. Yellow …. Pages … sales ….. pitch.

Everyone needs to stop, listen, and truly think. I am going to suggest something truly revolutionary. It actually may not cost the SMB anything more than is currently spent for advertising to effectively do Internet marketing! I call this process the “Budget Theory”. Maybe as an SMB you have been buying YP ads for ages and it’s just something you do. Well, this year, why not take that dead marketing spend [unless you can truly say that you are experiencing a real ROI with that YP spend, in which case it's not dead, so keep doing it] and apply it where you know you need to be — on the Internet. That’s right; say no to your Yellow Pages rep and start to apply that money to the place you really want to be.

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Posted in SEO Auditing, SEO Facts, SEO News, SEO Tips, SEO Training Events, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Strategies to Grow your Twitter Following

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Jeremiah Owyang wrote an interesting blog last weekend about strategies for increasing your Twitter following. His blog, Web Strategy, goes on to list four options for companies today, some bad, some good, but all educational. According to Jeremy, it’s difficult because companies that don’t have iconic brands with hundreds of thousands of adoring fans, often have to use a different strategy to get the attention of their target markets. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it happens all the time, it’s just business. If you’re a marketer, figure out what works for your business or your clients, and go from there. Check out Jeremiah’s blog below, and follow him on Twitter, I’m going to as soon as I publish this.

Twitter profile

Breakdown: How Brands Are Buying –and Earning– Followers on Twitter
As a result, we’re seeing some of the same method applied to the web and email as to the social space. Here’s three examples (again in outline form) that I saw this week.
1) The Sweepstakes Giveaway: Moonfruit becomes a Trending Topic

* Summary: This giveaway contest spurs word of mouth –results in opt-in “registration”
* How they did it: Moonfruit offers website building services, and is offering a new computer to those that tweet about the contest (see their official contest page), the only way to receive a product is if you follow their account (opt-in). Of course, this means the members are subject to future messages.
* This is the same as: Contests, WOM marketing, tell-a-friend.
* Benefits: Rapid word of mouth about a brand driving awareness and opt-in as people follow the account, likely a percentage of followers will convert and buy the service.
* Risks: This doesn’t build long term engagement with a brand, and it’s likely many will unfollow after the contest is over.
* Costs: 10 Macbook Pro (13″) which is $1500 each for a total of $15,000. If the follower count retains at 10k a day (it’s day 3 today) for 10 days resulting in 100,000 followers, that’s about $.66 a follower, not including marketing efforts.
* Results: Big wins. Moonfruit is a trending topic 3 days after the contest landed, there are thousands of retweets and tweets about the brand, as well as an increase in followers of about 10,000 a day (graph).Update: It’s now July 6th and the Moonfruit account has stalled out at 43k followers –it didn’t grow 10k as the first 3 days did. It’s also no longer a trending topic. Techcrunch Europe comments.
* My take: A natural extension of other marketing forms to Twitter. The giveaway prize matches well with the type of clientele the brand wants, and it’s certainly generating a high degree of discussion for at least 10 days. This really isn’t a new model, and we should expect more brands to offer these types of sweepstakes, however to make it better, the tweets should be more inline with the brand promise, such as asking the followers to tweet about “what website they love, or would build”

2) Buying Customer Matching Lists: uSocial Promises Relevant Followers

* Summary: Service called uSocial offers brand cost per action (CPA) advertising resulting in customer match
* How they do it: uSocial matches brands with suggest followers that have similar affinities, keywords, or profile information, BBC has the story. It looks like they will find matches, and suggest to twitter users that you follow that brand, (likely through an automated spammy system) till the reserve is met.
* This is the same as: What’s new is old again. This is very similar to direct marketers buying email lists of prospects that have similar demographic or affinity information. Martin agrees. Kevin Marks makes a good point that it’s not like email, as you can’t make folks follow them on Twitter. I suggest it’s the same, as you can’t get a user to open a spammy email.
* Benefits: They promise lots of followers within a few days, a very low cost.
* Risks: Brand damage. If the market finds out (it should be easy) that a brand isn’t earning their followers, they risk backlash and people unfollowing, or even worse, unfollowing.
* Costs: The lowest package (there are others) is $87 for 1000 followers–it breaks down to 8 cents a follower. If you buy the 100,000 follower package it drops down to 3 cents a follower.
* Results: I’ve not heard if this works, I’m sure someone will report back to me.
* My Take: Use as a last resort: If it looks to good to be true, it probaly is. The uSocial site looks like a ‘get rich quick’ site, the design comes across really spammy themselves. It’s likely brands that do buy this will likely act in a similar way, and I wouldn’t expect followers to stick around if they behave in a similar way. It’s likely a brand that goes for the quick hit doesn’t have a long term strategy to interact with their public market, and will use Twitter as a distribution point. However, brands that do have a community strategy, and have developed relationships using Twitter, could certainly benefit from the increased awareness to likely prospects –the only risk is that it may come across as spammy as uSocial makes recommendations.

3) Product Discounts or Specials: Dell Offers Followers Specials

* Summary: Some brands are generating followers by providing special deals to followers.
* How they do it: For some time, Dell is offering reduced priced or refurbed products on their Dell Outlets Twitter account.
* This is the same as: signing up for emails to receive discounts.
* Benefits: A low cost channel to sell products to an opt-in crowd, avoiding excess inventory.
* Risks: Can’t think of any, leave a comment if you have one.
* Costs: Inexpensive. It appears there is a community manager responding and answering questions, so the cost of this part time employee, or contractor, must be accounted for.
* Results: Dell has made the claims they’ve generated over $3 million in revenues from this single account. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket for this tech giant.
* My Take: Replicate. This is a great use of using the medium to obtain more interested followers that are requesting to be customers. The downside is that not every company has products to offer on a discount, nor the brand appeal. Brands should find ways to offer special deals to this highly viral community, offsetting the costs by weighing in the benefits of WOM and press coverage.

4) Auto Following Scripts and Services: Get followed by following

* Summary: A variety of services have been released that will find followers for your account to follow, then do an auto-follow script that will add them. The hope is that many of them will auto follow you back, out of courtesy, in order to increase follower amount. The downside? It can look spammy, and many who return the follow are often bots.
* How they do it: Similar to the Usocial service, they find followers (sorted by keyword, geo, name, etc) and start to follow. There’s a limit to how many Twitter will let a script auto follow per day. After a few days, the Twitter account will be following thousands of other accounts, and the hope is that many will follow in return.
* This is the same as: Cross linking and link farms. Websites a few years ago would share cross links in hoping of increasing their page rank –soon Google caught on to this and started to regulate. A whole industry of ‘link farms’ emerged, however some of the sites involved with this were penalized by Google.
* Benefits: Cheap way to get lots of followers.
* Risks: Brand damage by being somewhat spammish, and many of the return followers are likely bots just returning the follow. As a result, the returns for this may not be mixed: some new followers may be your target market, although not all will be the ideal individual.
* Costs: I’ve heard of package that can add a few thousand followers for around $25-$100, it’s just a simple script to run.
* Results: You will get lots of followers if you follow others –although you’ll have to live with the risks
* My Take: Easy come, easy go. While many popular twitter users go on a rampage to follow as many people as they can, I find the slow organic way of letting the right folks opt-in is the a better long term strategy. The Twitter founders Biz and Ev told me first hand they frown on people who do mass follows, at some point we should expect Twitter to clamp down on this behavior, just as Google did with link gaming.

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