Ideas for Business

Twitter has been providing real time communication for a couple of years now. Facebook has flirted with it, but they’ve just upped the stakes. Quite frankly, I like this.

This could very well lead to some stiff competition. Facebook has far more users than Twitter and the ability to use Facebook for real time communication with privacy settings could attract even more users. What’s more, it could lead to some Twitterers abandoning that service to migrate over to Facebook. After all, Twitter is quickly becoming a haven for spammers and not everyone who joins Twitter really dives in and makes the most of it.

Facebook is real social networking. Twitter is being used largely for mass communication, so there is a bit of difference between the two. I still think that savvy marketers will, and should, use both. Even small businesses. The power of local branding can best be ascertained by using the two in combination.

Earlier this week I gave a presentation on the intersection of SEO, online PR and social media to a great mix of people (mostly agencies) at a SEMPO Arizona event. The SEO/PR/Social topic is an interesting mix due to the convergence that’s been happening over the past 2-3 years and of course, because it’s the essence of what we’ve been doing at TopRank.

Forward thinking companies are investing in social media for a variety of reasons, including gaining a competitive advantage through building relationships, creating content and capturing mindshare.  I think it’s safe to say that companies making investments in better connecting with their customers now, will have a distinct advantage over those that are resolved to “wait and see” with this social web thing.

TopRank’s survey of the Top Digital Marketing tactics for 2009 revealed 6 of the top 10 tactics as social media. Marketingsherpa’s 2008 Study of Social Media Marketing & PR reports social media as the top marketing budget line item for increase in 2009.

Why the optimism? Social media offers a variety of benefits:

• Build thought leadership
• Improve customer relationships
• Improve recruiting
• Reduce customer service costs
• Improve search engine rankings
• Increase media coverage
• Influence sales

Despite the optimism, the social web and the practice of better connecting with customers through social technologies is new territory for most companies. Traditionally, communications between companies and customers has focused on marketing, sales and customer service.

According to analysis of Peter Kim’s social media examples wiki, early adopters of social media are focusing on blogging, social networking, microblogging and video in the Retail, Consumer Goods/Services, High Tech, Media/Entertainment, Automotive and Financial Services industries. There are over 900 examples on the wiki.beingpeterkim.com site.

Even with the optimism and efforts at early adoption, social media implementation has been all over the board. Fake blogs, spammy and salesey behavior within social communities and overzealous SEO efforts have represented some of the stumbling blocks and social media fails.

SEO for most companies is tough enough. Add social media to the mix and many are lost. According to Marketingsherpa’s Social Media Marketing & PR survey, adoption of social media is low mostly because of uneducated/in experienced staff along with difficulty in measuring direct ROI. It’s hard to win management buy-in and budget without those resources.

Even when companies do implement social media or SEO tactics, they tend to do so independently or siloed from each other. Core objectives for social media efforts tend to focus on building community. In contrast, company SEO efforts focus mostly on generating leads and sales. The realization that implementing SEO best practices with social media content creation/promotion can actually extend social reach via search as well as compliment an existing SEO program is where the SEO and Social opportunity lies.

A good example of social popularity turning into good search visibility is Blendtec. The video where they “blend” an iPhone has over 6 million views, 6,000 inbound links and ranks top 10 on Google for the search phrase, “blender“.

What parts of social media content should you optimize with keywords? For situations where you are the one creating the content, optimize:

• Titles
• File names
• Descriptions
• Anchor text
• Annotations, show notes, transcriptions

In cases of consumer generated content, you can influence keyword optimization through the content management system and tools used by consumers to publish. Examples include: keyword rich categories built in (and required), suggested keyword rich tags, sorting top content using keyword lists, and many others.

Of course, SEO isn’t much without links and the ability to promote, share and attract links is one of the most significant SEO benefits from social media. The key thing to remember about leveraging social media for link building is to create content worthy of getting a link in the first place.  Then measure content stuctures, formats, media types and sites that work best and refine.

The kicker with creating great content is that no one will know you’ve created that exceptional content unless you tell them. So, promotion is very important as is the development of channels to distribute your content. RSS works well as does building out networks on relevant social media sites ranging from Facebook to StumbleUpon to YouTube.

Working search and social media tactics together can amplify many of the core objectives. The bottom line is that companies who make the effort and investment to figure out how to test, build expertise and mangage though a strategy, will achieve a distinct competitive advantage over companies that wait.

---

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Intersection of Search and Social Media | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Security is very important for any Web business or website. If you have a blog that runs on an open source platform like Wordpress, it’s even more important. Hackers tend to target open source systems to gain access and do bad things like drop spam files and so on.

If you want to stop spam from entering your comments area then you need to use Akismet, a WordPress plugin that stops 99.9% of the spam that tries to get through. But beyond that, you can make your WordPress blog more secure by using a password that makes it difficult to hack. If you use a simple password that is a dictionary word then you make yourself vulnerable to hacks and attacks. Make your password longer and more difficult to guess.

A good password should consist of numbers, letters, special chacters, and lower and upper case letters. A word like “wordpress” is not enough as that is easy to guess, particularly by a robot that runs through the dictionary automatically guessing passwords. If, instead, you added numbers and characters as well as upper case and lower case letters then you’d have a more secure password. For instance, “W3ord&p2rEss!4″ is a lot more secure and more difficult to guess. For every character that you add you make your password exponentially more difficult to crack.

Blog security begins with your password. Make it something that is easy for you to remember but difficult for hackers and robots to guess and you’ll be much more secure.

One often overlooked method of link building is to use press releases to drive traffic to your website, but don’t make the mistake of using press releases solely for link building purposes. That’s not their primary purpose.

Still, a well placed press release can be a big boost to your search engine marketing by providing one or more high quality, relevant links back to your website.

The first thing to remember is to only submit a press release if you have something newsworthy to promote. Your sale on corned beef next weekend is not newsworthy. Sorry.

However, if you sponsor a community Corned Beef Hash banquet and invite the entire community then that could very well be newsworthy and therefore worthy of a press release. But make your event attractive before you start promoting it. Invite some local talent to give a show, have one of your employees dress up as the Corned Beef Hash Man and waslk around your store’s parking lot giving out free samples of corned beef and other goodies, and throw in some unique festivities and even games with door prizes. Make it a huge event.

The more spectacular you make your event the more likely you’ll get people to come, and the more likely you are to get your press release noticed. Once you start promoting your event, write up a press release with the pertinent information in it and submit it to several press release distribution websites. Get your press release in the right places and you’ll likely find some news agencies picking up and running it as is or calling you for an interview. Those activities can lead to inbound links to your website as well as high quality traffic to your event.

Capitalism is an economic and social system in which trade and industry are privately controlled for profit rather than by the state Agree or not with the prerogative, at least Capitalism states its premise very clearly, well…that is of course, until things don’t go quite as smoothly as planned. The concept of a free independent market has [...]