Recently in Social Media Optimization Category

This was my first trip to Omniture Summit, with my expectations and excitement growing significantly during the two weeks leading up to the trip to Salt Lake City. As it was stated in the Twittersphere, this was going to be “THE” web analytics party of the year.  The Summit most certainly lived up to this name.

 

Everyone wants to use Twitter; everyone else tells you that you should use Twitter; most people don’t understand Twitter; some people have a vague understanding of Twitter; often the usefulness of Twitter may vary depending on who you talk to.

While there’s not enough space in this article to fully explain the in-and-outs of Twitter, I do want to give you a few tangible examples of how we use Twitter to benefit our company:

1.    Networking – Twitter has a very useful search feature. You can use http://search.twitter.com regularly to search for people that are talking about subjects in which you have an interest. Once you find them, engage these Twitterers by following them and striking up a conversation by @Reply-ing to their Tweets.

Think of this as doing what you do when you go to a conference. You walk into a room full of strangers and wander around until you hear a conversation that interests you. Then you mosey on up and try to add something to the conversation. If you say something smart, insightful or funny, you just created a relationship upon which you can build.  Twitter works the same way; you have to engage the other person and strike up conversations that interest them. Many people make the mistake of simple writing about what they had for dinner and expect thousands of people to magically follow them.  You have to be proactive to take advantage of the social component of Twitter.

2.    Self Promotion – As you try to find people that interest you and strike up a relationship, others are doing the exact same thing. Tweet about your successes, your services, your products, your insights. Try to make it entertaining and try to differentiate yourself from the crowd through humor or by having strong opinions or just by being awesome. Be mindful of the verbiage you use and try to use words that people would actually search for. By doing this you are letting people find you and your business.

3.    Customer Support – many companies are now offering customer support via Twitter. Even those companies that don’t have a corporate Twitter account will often have employees that are regular Twitterers and are more than willing to help you out. The advantage to Twitter is that it’s a public forum which creates accountability. There is added incentive for a company to make sure they resolve your issue or answer your question because everyone else can see the conversation. We have a handful of vendors where their traditional email support may take days to reply, in every case they resolve issue we post on Twitter more efficiently. It’s like magic.

 

We’ve seen many benefits including:  Invitations to be speakers at conferences, requests to host webinars, guest blogging opportunities on industry sites, improved customer service from our vendors, new business opportunities, finding new employees and much more.

Think of Twitter as a new way to get to know someone. It’s a lot more engaging than email and in many ways it is like meeting someone in person and building a normal relationship with them via conversation and sharing interests. Every savvy business person knows the benefits of creating and maintaining good relationships with your customers, peers, vendors, prospects etc. Twitter can help you do that more efficiently than most other technologies.

 

 

 

Stuart Butler and I were recently interviewed by a reporter for a local dining guide about the latest techniques in web design, pay per click, SEO, social media, and email marketing for restaurants.

 

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Twitter is a fast moving world and what you say can easily be missed by your loyal followers.  But just how fast moving are your followers’ twitter streams?  Thanks to the URL shortening service bit.ly we now know the answer is just a brief five minutes.

We asked the author of @thewholeworld, who has about 2,500 followers, to run a series of three tests promoting various funny videos or articles.  What we found was surprising; nearly all traffic to those links was within five minutes of the tweet.  After that… nothing.

The three adjacent graphs show the 30 minutes following a tweet and the activity generated from the link.  What this illustrates is that while a tweet lasts forever in search.twitter.com, it only lasts for a few moments in the eyes of 99% of your followers.  If you have a follower who is not watching their twitter stream when you tweet, your message falls on def ears since you're likely going to be off of their 1st page.

So, based on this, how effective is twitter at spreading the word and what can you do to make the most of the technology?

1. Its not mass market communication.
   If you're tweeting with the expectation that the world is listening, you're wrong.  Only a handful of your followers who are online right then know what you've just said.
2. Join the discussion. 
   This proves that a simple one way broadcast can easily get overlooked by your followers.  It's a far better strategy to join the conversation and talk with those you're following (and likely vice versa) than to just stand up and shout. 
3. Tweet, & tweet often. 
   There's an old advertising adage that goes, "you market to a parade, not a standing army."  Nowhere is this truer than in the twitterverse.  If you're not constantly communicating and spreading your brand, you're missing out.  That great message you just tweeted, won't be seen five minutes from now.
4. It's a relationship, not just a sale.
   Twitter is all about relationships and being an active part of the community.  If you're hoping to just jump in and tweet every now and then, you're not building a relationship and missing the most valuable part of Twitter.  Yes, there's money to be found and made on Twitter, but it's not in the traditional fashion.  Before you can expect to cash in, you've got to build the relationship with your followers.
5. You can probably promote an amazing deal. 
   If only a fraction of your audience will ever see that last tweet, you can feel relatively safe to experiment with some pretty great deals.  Let's say you're a hotel, try to promote a 5 minute deal to your followers for a 5 dollar room.  Anyone who calls or books in within five minutes through a unique URL would get an incredible deal.  Anyone who didn't will wish they'd been following you or paying more attention.  The result.  You get great word of mouth, likely new consumers and build a great relationship with your followers.

The moral of the story is that twitter is like any social event you've ever attended.  You can't expect the person you've just met to know what you told someone in a previous conversation.  So get involved, have fun and make connections with your consumers.

 

Aside from the daily grind at Fuel Interactive, I'm a powerhouse dad blogger who's used to seeing big two-digit numbers of visitors on my blog, www.therogueparent.com. Like most site owners, I imagined the day my site would cross into the three digit world of over 100 visitors in a single day, but my previous high of 60 was well short of cracking Alexia's top sites.

That is until I discovered the power of social marketing first hand through an integrated promotional campaign to launch my latest post, "All Bands Should Take Names from Photoshop," to internet stardom.  It all began around the lunch table when we were discussing the great potential band names hidden inside of Adobe Photoshop such as Gaussian blur, angled strokes and the great gamut warning.

After writing the post and sharing a link on my typical parenting sites such as HusbandsandDads.com, parenting type magazines and others, we took the campaign social by tweeting, Digging, Stumbling and Facebooking the post.   What happened next is not a big deal to the Amazon.com's of the world, but a gigantic success for a small blogger like me.  The adjacent graph shows how my user sessions went from an average of 24 per day to a peak of 717, an almost 3,000 percent growth.

Five Steps to Launch Your Site into the Stratosphere of the Blogosphere:

#1: Write Something People Care About

I've been posting parenting insights, product reviews and commentary to the Rogue Parent for about eight months and never saw much more than 50 user sessions on any given day.  That is until I wrote about something people cared about, if not just for humor's sake.

Lesson one when writing content: if no one cares... no one cares.  You may have the greatest post in the world about the perfect way to carve a face in a bar of soap, but if no one is interested, it's not going to get read much less picked up socially.  Once you have something others like the social benefits are amazing.

#2: Start the buzz on Twitter

Twitter is an amazing resource that gets completely overlooked by those who have never used the service.  If you've tried Twitter, give it a shot.  Thanks to the following twitter people my post was promoted to over 11,000 people:

• @briancarter shared the post with 6,500 people
• @lookadoo shared it with 575
• @pdimaio shared it with 90
• @iodine74 shared it with 150
• @dawnMHSH shared it with 320
• @thewholeworld shared with 1,200
• @chuckobama shared with 2,100

#3: Tell Your Friends on Facebook

For me, this only accounted for a little over 100 people; though on average a Facebook user has 164 friends.  The goal of this element of the campaign was to get my friends to comment on my profile to spread my influence to their network.

#4: Hit the Social Bookmarks

This is the social networking 101 aspect of my launch to parent-blogger stardom.  Several people Dugg my post and many more Stumbled it.  This was my single biggest source of traffic to the site and continues to drive users to the site.  If you're promoting an article, site, or anything web based, you've got to make sure you spread the word on the social bookmarks.

#5: Share With the Like Minded

Got something that the people on a message board would like to see, make sure you let them know.  A simple, "New article on the hidden band names in Photoshop, check it out." Can do wonders for traffic and start the viral snowball of traffic.

There's countless more ways to spread your message virally through video, linking, email and more.  These are just five of the ways you can make a big impact.  Though one thing I've found is if you want it done right on a big scale, call in the professionals. 

As a director at an advertising agency that manages social media campaigns, I was recently brainstorming recipes for social media success. Every formula I came up with included personality.

In Social Media, Personality is Key
You can be controversial, funny, or intellectually stimulating. "Bland" loses. "Unique" wins.

Ask Yourself...

• Do you have a personality or personal brand?
• How well developed is it?
• How well are you conveying it with social media?

Read the rest of Personality in Social Media here.

My powerpoint presentation and audio from the "Social Media: Big Sexy Buzz" panel. How to combine blogging, twitter, and digg-like social voting sites to get more readers and followers.  Plenty of laughs. Watch, listen, and enjoy-- click on the green play button below:

 

UPDATE: This opening has been filled as of 8/26/2008.

Join our cool team!  Just saying that because that's what cheezy companies say that want you to think they're a cool, team-oriented, fun environment.  But we actually are cool, team-oriented, and fun.  Really!

Fuel Interactive has an entry-level opportunity in the exploding field of search engine marketing and optimization.

You will work directly with the Director of the department, another Search Marketing Specialist, our Web Analytics Specialist, Account Managers and other team members.

Fuel Interactive is a rapidly growing internet marketing agency partnered with one of the top traditional marketing agencies in the Southeast and another long-standing successful technology company.

We need a sharp individual interested in on-the-job training and working hard in a quick moving environment. You'll learn cutting edge internet marketing techniques and tools.

What's the Job Like?

One Search Specialist says, "it's cool working in an innovative industry not everyone knows about." It's not easy work. He says, "I've read and studied more in the last two months than I did in college." Search is always evolving and requires constant learning.

But Search is a growing field. In these times of economic downturn, getting a job in this field is "true job security in troubled times." While employers in other industries are laying people off, Fuel has been hiring like crazy.

Responsibilities and duties include:

* Following up on SEO research, build relationships with other sites, help build links to client sites
* Mining of multiple data sources to develop keyword lists
* Creating and editing text and URL's for SEO
* Gather and organize data/research from various websites to aid in SEO and PPC efforts
* Pay Per Click and SEO reporting
* Campaign management- on the job training provided
* Similar activities for Online Reputation Management and Social Media Management programs

Skills needed:
* Ability to handle multiple tasks and work independently
* Must be attentive to detail, good spelling a must
* Proficient with Excel- importing, sorting, cleaning data
* Good written and oral communication skills, team player
* Ability to prioritize, multi-task and dependably deliver results
* Ability to quickly learn new software tools
* Analytic and quantitative abilities

Pluses:
* Experience with AdWords, Yahoo PPC management, SEO, blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Google Analytics, Omniture, Urchin, HTML, CSS, CFM, PHP, ASP
* Sense of humor, or just the ability to pretend you have one
   
Location: Myrtle Beach, SC

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!

Fuel Interactive begins its series of man on the street interviews with Lauren, asking her about the perils of RSS, and how she feels about the government invading her privacy through blogs, logs, and twitter.

xx