Online Marketing Blog

The Social Media Cheat Sheet

This new infographic from SM2 (a social media monitoring platform) provides a handy guide to social media for business.  The infographic provides tips and pitfalls for using the top 9 social networks for business including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

A Valuable Lesson From Randi Zuckerberg: Online Privacy Is Complicated
One mis-click and you may find yourself sharing information or images you had wanted to remain private.  Randi Zuckerberg – sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got a taste of this herself on Christmas day when a personal family photo was accidentally shared publicly.  What advice does she share with other users?  Randi states: “always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly.”  Via Gigaom.

In last week’s post about myth-busting social media, I asked what other marketing tactic or channel has attracted as much conjecture, blind advocacy and malarkey.  Only SEO can compare to social media when it comes to the volume of misperceptions and out-dated information posing as “best practices” online.

They say that the only things you can count on in life are death and taxes. Also, that search engines will change.

Google runs over 20,000 experiments per year and at any given time, 50-200 different versions of Google’s core algorithm are helping billions of searchers find what they’re looking for.   Add to that, personalization by location, past search history and the influences of the social graph and you have one of the most complex and fast changing systems ever created.

Repeat after me: This holiday season, I resolve to take into consideration the increasingly mobile and visual preferences of my customers or readers, and to create and repurpose content to meet their needs, on whichever platform they use to connect with my business.

Recently, TopRank’s Alexis Hall and Lee Odden have each shared with us a few figures that underscore the importance of video in a modern day marketing strategy:

• Sixty percent of executives will watch a video before reading a word of text on their screen.
• Forty-two percent of executives have made a purchasing decision based on an online video.
• 500 years worth of YouTube videos are shared each day on Facebook.
• Over 3 billion hours of video is consumed monthly on YouTube.

The team at TopRank Online Marketing would like to wish our online community a very merry holiday season.  I for one get very nostalgic around the holidays and count down the days (starting in October) until I get to gather with family and friends to share a meal and make new memories.

For many families, part of the holiday tradition includes singing carols and watching Christmas movies from their childhood.  There is one song in particular that gets stuck in my head every holiday season is The Twelve Days of Christmas.  For a fun spin on a classic we bring you some of our favorite tips for the 12 Days of Social Media, Content Marketing & SEO.

On the __ day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

It’s customary to share a year in review post listing the top blog entries over the previous 12 months. When you publish 5 times a week, every week, there’s no way everyone that periodically reads your blog will see the best posts.

In 2012 we had a little more of a mix of contributors from TopRank staff and a few more guest blog posts than in years post. That’s a great thing, because our agency has some of the most talented digital marketers on the web and hearing from them is important to get a flavor for our agency.

We’ve covered some impressive ground this year, writing 220+ posts, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors from search, social media and links from blogs and industry websites.

Happy Holidays From TopRank Online Marketing

We celebrate and appreciate the opportunity to have you as party of our online community, and look forward to our mutual success in 2013 and beyond.  You can now “Optimize” your own holiday card!  The first 5 people to comment on this post or share a tweet of their TopRank holiday card will win a free copy of Optimize by Lee Odden.

Make Your Own Holiday Card!

Google & Facebook Take on Patent Trolls
Google recently joined forces with Facebook, Dell, and Intuit to try and restrict the validity of certain patents issued by the United States.  This filing is meant to determine if a company should be able to secure a patent for an “abstract idea” concerning financial intermediation implemented with a computer.  Via Inc.

One of the most common issues companies seem to grapple with as they get pulled, kicking and screaming, into a content focused world of digital marketing is content creation.

Of course, anyone with half a brain can create information, but “content” implies usefulness or utility. Content has purpose and content marketing is meaningful information designed to be useful for a certain audience with the intention of inspiring an outcome or action. A lot of companies are creating information, not content, under the label of “content marketing”.

Giselle Abramovich recently posted an interesting article in Digiday, Why Brands Struggle With Content Creation, that really represents some of the most common issues brands like Nestle, AARP, Kellog, Cisco and Capri Sun have with content creation. This post will outline those common challenges and share tips on how to fix.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have your own army of word-of-mouth marketers, standing by for deployment at your beck and call?

A handful of brands have been able to count on their most loyal fans to act as brand advocates for years. Remember the die-hard Coke vs. Pepsi fan wars in the 80s and 90s? There was no convincing a fan of one he should try the other; he would shout his preference from the rooftop to whomever would listen.

Social media has taken these brand advocates of days gone by, given them each a megaphone and shot them full of espresso and steroids. Your most loyal fans are now exponentially louder, more influential, and able to spread the word about your brand just as quickly as they can thumb-type a status update or tweet.

Marketing trends come and go, but what other “shiny object” topic has caused more debate than social media?

On the one hand, recent studies cited by eMarketer show that two thirds of the U.S. internet population will belong to a social network by 2013. On the other hand, a study by Harvard Business Review showed that 29% of the 2,100 organizations surveyed felt it was difficult to see the benefit of social media for their business purposes.

It’s true that with something as large, fast changing and ubiquitous as the social web there will be zealots and dissenters as well as the comfortably numb. The fact that opportunists make unsubstantiated claims as self-anointed social media experts doesn’t help matters when it comes to understanding social fact from fiction.

Dave Cynkin & Rick Calvert Photo Credit: New Media Expo (NMX)

In college I had a diverse group of friends, people that represented different interests and common experiences which made my time during those years a lot more fulfilling. Even better was that these different groups all came together fairly regularly for a themed event at a local watering hole. Connecting with diverse interests in a meaningful way has been a tremendous business advantage to this day.

When I attended my first BlogWorld conference in 2008, it was a similar experience in that there was a convergence of different groups: from new media/bloggers to public relations, to internet marketers to brands and business owners.  The common experience of using blogs and digital content as a communication platform has brought a lot of people together in a way like few conferences have. I’ve made some of the most meaningful connections for my business and personal growth through BlogWorld, now known as NMX.

8 Deadly Sins of Site Design

This recent infographic from Nexus Themes targets 8 common mistakes that drive customers away from your website.  These sins include:

• Bad Navigation
• Too Many Ads
• Bad Content Structure
• Obtrusive Use of Audio & Video
• Registration Requirement
• Boring Content, Boring Design
• Poor Legibility
• Lack of Frequency

Yahoo Has More Users Than Gmail – Introduces A Faster, Cleaner Email Interface
Yahoo has begun pouring effort into updating their email platform across all platforms.  A more modern design is being implemented in hopes of attracting users to actually use their Yahoo! Mail account, instead of using it as a repository for junk mail.  Via Marketing Pilgrim.

With 9 out of 10 B2B marketers counting on content marketing tactics in their mix, it’s no wonder content marketing is getting so much attention on blogs, in traditional media and on the social web.

Along with the increased popularity of content, opportunists have begun aligning themselves with the topic of “content marketing”, even though their offering is only remotely related. As it was with websites in the 1990′s, SEO in the early 2000′s, social media over the past 5 years, so-called experts have begun pontificating advice based on thin air, obscure experiences and self interest.

To help our readers distill the signal from the noise, here are 3 myths about content marketing and how they are busted to give companies a clearer picture of reality when it comes to effective content marketing.