Ideas for Business

At the OpenCa.mp conference in Dallas this weekend I was able to re-connect with Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome and the Gnomedex conference (We’ve interviewed each other in the past). We both jumped out of the same airplane with the Army Golden Knights last week and are also speaking today about blogs at OpenCa.mp.

I caught up with Chris to talk about his take on SEO and social media.  He had pretty strong opinions about people who are too aggressive and not always relevant in the social connections they’re making.  This is what he had to say:

You can find Chris online by Googling “chris“. How’s that for the effect of links on search engine visibility?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Chris Pirillo on SEO & Social Media @ OpenCa.mp | http://www.toprankblog.com

After all has been said and done about link building campaigns and the importance of driving inbound links to your company’s website, many small business owners and marketers are still confused by link building. But is it really as hard as they’re making it out to be?

To be sure, there are a lot of things to think about when building links.

• Should I request reciprocal links?
• What makes a link relevant?
• Quantity vs. quality
• What exactly is a quality link anyway?
• Do directory submissions really help?
• Is article marketing still effective?
• Does blogging build good links?
• Link age
• Domain age
• Anchor text
• Title attribute
• Surrounding text
• Are image links effective?
• Forum links vs. blog comments
• Social media profile links
• Is social bookmarking really link building?
• Do press releases build quality links?

I could go on and on. There are hundreds more questions and concerns that could be brought up in the discussion of link building and many of them don’t have any real definitive answers. So I can understand how confusing it can be for someone just getting started.

It is sometimes better to think about link building in terms of the negatives – that is, what you should not do versus what you should.

• You don’t want to place your links on pages with thousands of other links.
• You don’t want links on websites associated with warez, malware or other evil creatures of the Web.
• Stay away from iframe links and nefarious redirects.
• Don’t pay people to link to you.
• Don’t do too much link building too fast (although, as a caveat, it’s fairly difficult for a small business to break this rule as “too much too fast” often means thousands of links in a short time frame such as days or weeks).
• Don’t engage in questionable link building tactics.

If you have any questions or concerns about proper link building techniques, read the search engine guidelines – particularly Google and Bing. If they say it’s OK then it’s OK; if they say it’s not then it isn’t.

Link building isn’t hard, but it isn’t exactly easy either. It is important. If you feel like a fish out of water when you try it then you might want to find someone you trust to help you with building solid links with benefits that last a long time.

The first content session I’m attending at OpenCamp is by Gio, aka Giovanni Gallucci, a longtime search and social media marketer based in Dallas. The topic is “Blackhat SEO” and the room is packed!
The session was cut a bit short due to technical difficulties with getting the conference started and Gio took it in stride and was both entertaining and informative – the right mix for a morning tech crowd.

Gio says “Black hat is simply another way to automate a time-consuming process. In other areas of marketing and life in general we encourage automation in order to maximize efficiency and get a leg up on our competitors”.

According to the conference session description, the nature of this session doesn’t allow liveblogging or tweeting, which i think is a load of crap, so I’ll liveblog it anyway.

Speaking of liveblogging, I am writing this on an iPad and the brilliant WordPress app deleted the first version, so I am writing now from memory on a notepad app.

The session is basically about what Gio does on a daily basis for his SEO clients. Based on insights from Woopra analyticz Gio says these are 5-6 social media sites you need to focus on to drive traffic and affect your search visibility:

- Media sharing: YouTube and Flickr
- Social Bookmarking: StumbleUpon
- Social Networks: Facebook & Twitter

When you undertake your social media marketing efforts, don’t let “little people” and naysayers hold you back. Gio gives Cali Lewis as an example with her growth of online shows and current success with GeekBeat.TV

As far as as Geolocation services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrrl, etc Gio says these are cute and fun, but that there’s not much measurable social media marketing value to them. (If you don’t buy that, check out Mashable.com for FourSquare case studies)

We’re 15 min into the presentation and thee’s no black hat SEO yet

YouTube lists are unreal for driving search traffic. Organize your individual videos into lists and optimize them. Find other videos that are highly trafficked and add them to lists that include your own videos. If you’re not creating video, you’ve got to get started.

Tools: tubetoolbox.com (Now we’re getting into the automation and almost black hat stuff). With YouTube ToolBox, Gio says you create a message in 2-3 sentences, mail merge their username and then create multiple versions of the message with different content and the same call to action. Then you can schedule the sending of messages to YouTube users that have been harvested at the rate of about 20 messages per hour. Something like: Hey “username” I saw that you commented on a video about XYZ and wanted to let you know about another similar video and would love your opinion.”.

I have to note, using automation tools like this must be done by someone that REALLY knows what they’re doing or you will suffer consequences. Managing risk vs. reward is important and for the record, my agency doesn’t use automation in this way.

The key to getting YouTube videos ranked high is activity on YouTube. with Flickr, you can add comments with a link back to your content.

Take advantage of current events. Gio shows a video of ComicCon geeks talking about how comic are not geeky anymore. Thee’s some irony to a code geek making fun of comic book geeks.

When going somewhere offline to get photos or video for content, blend in. Gio tells a story of buying a cowboy getup to blend in at a rodeo or maybe it was somewhere else like that where there was a concentration of cowboy types.

Keep it fresh. For example, make a presentation the day you give it.

Tool: tweetaddr 3.0. Using this tool makes it appear as if you’re communicating with Twitter via a web browser (when you’re not and actually using an automated follow tool).

“Can’t is not an option”. Gio gave an example of a how a school with only 200 kids earned 68,000 votes on a list of top schools.

“Show up and just get it done”. If you look like you’re supposed to be there, no one will bother you. (Regarding collecting content or promoting online content in the offline world).

Tool: Bookmarking Daemon – Put in your social boomarking accounts and it will randomly pick your content and promote it.

According to the room monitor, that’s all the time we have. You can find out more about Giovanni on his blog: Blog.gallucci.net and get a copy of his social media manifesto at: gallucci.net/smm

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | OpenCamp Blackhat SEO with Social Media | http://www.toprankblog.com

Cynthia Boris makes a good point. If you can’t measure the effectiveness of your social media then why are you using it?

This is the dilemma of the modern marketer. Social media has proven to be an effective marketing channel for a lot of marketers. But so has television. That doesn’t mean the medium is a proven marketing channel for everyone who uses it. Any marketing channel requires a knowledge of its use that consists of strategies and tactics that have worked for others and that might work for your situation. Without a solid grounding in marketing principles and your market niche, your chances of succeeding in any marketing channel are pretty slim.

Even then, having the ability to measure your results is necessary if you want to gauge your effectiveness. And that’s what social media has lacked for the most part.

Yesterday, we talked about a new addition to ShareThis – social media analytics. And Twitter has had third-party analytics tools available for it for quite some time. Many marketers report they use traditional tools like Google Analytics and Omniture. These are fine. The bottom line is to use something that will give you a visual on how your marketing efforts are panning out.

Remember this maxim: What you don’t measure you can’t change. So measure your results and the next time someone asks you why you are using social media, you’ll have an answer.

Army Strong Stories is a program to draw attention to the real life and experience of being in the Army through soldier stories communicated via media socially. Recently Greg Swan of the Minneapolis Public Relations firm, Weber Shandwick, that is behind the Army Strong Stories campaign contacted me with a compelling opportunity to create my own Army story: “Would you like to go skydiving with the US Army Golden Knights?”

Who are the Golden Knights? In 1959 13 men joined together to form the Strategic Army Corps Sport Parachute Team, to compete in the communist dominated sport of skydiving. The team performed so well that on June 1, 1961 the Army maded them an official parachute team and the Knights (men and women) have been wowing audiences at air shows ever since.

Greg is a well known “social media guy” and works with the Army account for his agency. At first I was uncertain about the jump, but after looking at the competitive skydiving team’s website, YouTube channel and blog, I decided it was worth checking out.

One thing Greg didn’t know when he invited me was that I spent several years on active duty in the military. We later discovered I was stationed on the same base in Alaska as his Grandfather. My experience as a small town kid from Minnesota being exposed to a completely different world of the military allowed me to grow and mature in new ways.

My short experience with the Army exposed me to structure, challenge and reward in combination with raising my awareness of teamwork and a sense of purpose that was instrumental in the development of  things like character, integrity and confidence – All essential for success as an entrepreneur and business owner.

Also, without the Army college fund program, I would not have been able to afford a University education. So, while it was by no means a career for me, my personal experience with the Army left me a different person, better in many ways, than before I joined. It is with that backround and my interest in the Army Golden Knights’ use of social media that I accepted the offer to jump from an airplane for the first time in my life yesterday.

Disclosure: The U.S. Army paid for my transportation and accomodations in Addison, Texas where the jump occurred and I agreed to write a blog post however I wanted.

Meet the Army Golden Knights

The competitive skydiving team of men and women that make up the Golden Knights are the best of the best skydivers in the world.  These men and women have many thousands of jumps under their belts and participate in competitions all over the world, making them truly unique individuals and part of a very elite group.

I watched videos on YouTube of the Knights in competition as well as the tandem jumps I would be taking. These videos included VIPs like President George W. Bush, celebrities like Vince Vaughn and well known Digerati like John Pozadzides, CEO of Woopra. This gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect. As a marketer, I’m fully aware of how effective video can be at telling a story, but being able to watch videos of the Golden Knights do what they do was equally impressive as it was confidence building in that I would be in good hands.

The Golden Knights Use of Social Media

The Golden Knights have an official website as well as a blog, YouTube Channel, Flickr, Facebook & Twitter. Several of the Knights also maintain their own Twitter accounts and blogs.  The content published on these social channels gives potential candidates great insight into the life of a competitive skydiver.

• Official site
• Blog
• YouTube Channel
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Facebook

The Knights are a publishing entity like no other I’ve seen. On the day of our jump, nearly every Army Golden Knight had still and/or video cameras on their helmets. SFC Dave Herwig was busy all day editing videos as they came in for uploading to YouTube and posting online.  The Knights clearly see content and engagement as the key to getting the word out and social media channels are a perfect distribution and community building platform to that end.

Skydiving with the Army Golden Knights

I was not jumping alone of course, there were several other digerati types like Chris Pirillo, Cali Lewis, Trey Ratcliff, Dave Curlee, Scott Ellis, Vi Kim Vu, Frederick Van Johnson, George Ruiz, Jay Batson, Pelpina Trip, John Pozadzides, and Giovanni Galluci jumping as well. Our itinerary called for us to get breakfast and meet early in the morning at the hotel and walk over to a soccer field area where the jump would occur.

This event never would have happened without Carolyn Sullivan from Weber Shandwick & SFC Dave Herwig from Army Golden Knights aka Army social media guy

SFC Mike Elliott starts off by giving a pre-jump briefing

This puts jumpers like Frederick Van Johnson, Vi Kim Vu & Pelpina Trip and the rest of us at ease.

Next we suited up as Scott Ellis has done here

Then we headed to the plane used specifically for tandem jumps

The Army Golden Knights showed their stuff

A perfect landing just 20 feet from the spectators. Amazing accuracy from 2 1/2 miles up.

Media savvy Army Golden Knights are well-equipped to document their jumps on video and photos

After the jump, off came the yellow jumpsuits, which were hot! Rachel, Pelpina & Cali

Major Smith & Lt Col Martin made sure everything ran smoothly.

For more photos, I’ve put some up on Flickr and Facebook. When the Army and Weber Shandwick share the video taken of my jump, I’ll post that here as well.

I have to say, this experience was a blast. The men and women of the Army Golden Knights are true professionals and it was a priveledge to have the opportunity to do a tandem jump with them as well as learn more about what they do.

Thank you to Greg Swan and Carolyn Sullivan from Weber Shandwick for making the offer. Thank you to the U.S. Army for having me along and for all that you do for our country. Thanks to the organizers of OpenCa.mp as well for such a great event.

Here’s a pre-jump interview Cali Lewis of GeekBeat.TV did with Mike and Dave of the Golden Knights that will give you even more info about the Knights and the event:

Next up: Speaking of which, OpenCa.mp and all the WordPress, Drupal, .NET and Joomla! education you can shake a stick at is where I’ll be this weekend. I’m presenting a session on Social SEO for Blogs after Brian Clark and Chris Pirillo give their presentations on blogging. It should be a great event and be sure to watch for a few liveblog posts on some of the sessions.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Jumping Army Strong on Social Media & the Golden Knights | http://www.toprankblog.com