Online Marketing Blog

Clay Shirky, Author of Here Comes Everybody, kicks off SES San Jose 2009 as today’s keynote speaker.

He dives right in and shares a story about HSBC, which  launched a program to acquire new accounts from college students. In doing so,  some less-than-great details about the program like extra fees started to enraged those who had signed up.

Instead of students being upset, but having no way to congregate, an upset student decided to rally other students via Facebook starting a group called ‘Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-off!!!’.

Before the offline rally could happen, HSBC stepped in and tried to right the wrong specifically because – as Shirky says  – “Their customers had become organized. Facebook has become not only a social network, but a site of organization.”

In the course of providing consulting services and conducting training programs for companies on social media marketing & PR or a combination of SEO and social media, there are some common questions that have come up. I thought it might be useful for readers if I documented a few of them here along with answers.

“If we open up to comments, won’t people criticize us?”

This is one of the most common questions I hear. Companies have traditionally feared negative content posted online because bad news travels fast and most businesses aren’t entirely sure of how to deal with online criticism.

Even more of a concern is the fear that after creating social content for the purpose of building goodwill, positive buzz and influencing sales, an angry troll decides to use that platform for their sinister purposes.

Guidelines for marketing with social media aren’t all that new. In 2006 five members of the digital marketing community collaborated on 16 rules for “social media optimization”. Fast forward to nearly 2010 and social media has begun to take a more significant role in the marketing mix.

The original “rules” were posted by:

• Rohit Bhargava (1-5)
• Jeremiah Owyang (6 & 7)
• Cameron Olthuis (8-11)
• Loren Baker (12 & 13)
• Lee Odden (14-16).

Let’s revisit these 16 rules for social media optimization (SMO) and see which are still relevant.

1. Increase Your Linkability

Social Media Smarts: Interview with Lee Aase, Social Media Manager at Mayo Clinic

By day, Lee Aase is manager of syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic and by night, he is chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG). I first met Lee at a media relations conference in San Francisco a few years ago. He was kind enough to sit in on a presentation I gave to the public relations community on search engine optimization for news content. It was a pleasure to meet another Minnesotan at an industry conference and Lee’s savvy with social media was immediately apparent.

In the Q and A post below, Lee Aase provides insights into social media within the Mayo clinic, offers advice for other companies on his “MacGyver-style” testing , developing a strategy, winning management approval, measuring social media ROI and his work with SMUG.

Like many others, I scoffed at Twitter when I first heard of it. What use could sending short messages to people I don’t know be?  The mental leap from IM and Facebook status updates to Twitter makes it easier, but business use seemed pointless at first.  As I noticed more of my Search, Social and PR industry peers using Twitter, it seemed a good idea to test out.

While I don’t have a million followers, or even 100,000, I’ve found out that for my purposes, quality is the key and the 13k or so followers I am lucky to be associated with are appreciated a lot more. Being strategically useful and helpful builds trust, attracts influential followers (vs bots and spammers) and results in a new channel for social networking.  Individual tweets may or may not be useful, but when you add them up over time, a bigger picture emerges.

This afternoon I did a live chat with AdWeekMedia Connect, a social network for the ad agency set on the intersection of search and social media. Embedded below is the recorded chat stream:

Here are a few resources on the topic:

• Mashable: Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success
• IAB: Social Advertising Best Practices
• Forrester: Interactive Marketing to Hit $55B by 2014
• VentureBeat: Five rules of thumb for social media advertising
• eMarketer: SocNet Ad Spend to Hit Stride in 2010
• Wired: Is Social Advertising an Oxymoron?
• Knowledge Networks: Social Media Generates Hype; Fails to Deliver Marketing Punch
• Rohit Bhargava: 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

How to be successful on the social web? Be useful and helpful to others. Few people epitomize this principle better than veteran internet marketer, Tamar Weinberg.

I remember some of my first interactions with Tamar years ago, involving her making sure I had all my questions answered about something I posted on IM.  Tamar has blogged about search and social media marketing at 10e20, Search Engine Roundtable, Mashable and many other high profile web sites. A prolific and extremely hard working blogger, social media marketer and techie at heart, Tamar is also a “super user” of the social web. That firsthand knowledge of how to listen, engage and promote is clearly evident in her new book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web“, published by O’Reilly.

Last week we discussed some of the reasons subscribers are vital for an online marketing growth strategy. Those reasons included:

• The ~11% of web users who know to use RSS include the users savvy enough to be web publishers
• You’ll become a go-to area to link to
• Subscribers are your sneezers
• A base of well-connected fans could very well be the cornerstone of your social media marketing strategy
• Community is what makes sites worth visiting
• Subscribers will motivate you to create better content
• A consolidated network presence is the most effective
• Social proofing benefits
• Subscribers and a fan base make you less reliant on push PR

The notion of social web and how companies can engage is as multi-faceted as anything I’ve seen in my 12+years of marketing online. The many ways for companies to involve themselves using social technologies are as varied as the reasons they may do so. Whether it’s to better connect with customers, attract more media attention or crowdsource product ideas, social web participation can offer many benefits.

This understanding of different perspectives and methods leads us to a new TopRank Reader Poll that considers the many different approaches companies may take towards social media. As a poll, it’s only a snapshot in time, but the results will be of great interest to all who participate.   Please select up to 1 “best” answer:

DMA Social Media Smarts NYC Class June 2009 - Photo credit Scott Plumptree

In a past career of mine where the nature of the business required educating and evangelizing as a sales process, a colleague related a “vintage” story to me about phases in which new ideas or concepts are adopted by mass markets. It involved the introduction of the refrigerator in a time when ice boxes were the norm for keeping food cold.  The idea was to show how not everyone “gets” a new product because of how they make decisions, biases and fundamental resistance to change.

The story went something like this. Representatives from a refrigerator company made appointments with consumers and presented a compelling offer: swap the ice box for a refrigerator and make payments no more than what was being paid to the ice delivery man.

If you’re interested in building a flourishing online brand and web site that generates links and traffic organically as part of your internet marketing efforts, it’s important to develop an active base of subscribers and fans.

Subscribers and fans i.e. “a community” are a key ingredient of popular web sites. They are integral to increasing the reach of your communications steadily month after month. If you don’t have a passionate, interested group of people subscribed to your site now, put a plan in place to acquire them. Building an active community is a pillar of successful social media marketing.

Some of the top reasons subscribers and fans are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy include:

The ~11% of web users who know to use RSS include the users savvy enough to be web publishers

Client focused, dynamic, challenging, rewarding, did I say fast paced? Those are some of the words I would use to describe our agency at TopRank Online Marketing.

TopRank has continuously evolved over the past 8+ years to become a well known and authoritative brand in the Search, Social and Online Public Relations space.  Our clients include an engaging mix of companies ranging from start-ups like Marketo, a marketing automation software company, to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), to the Fortune 20 such as McKesson, a $100 billion healthcare services company.

As one of the leading internet marketing agencies in the Midwest, TopRank Online Marketing has a fantastic opportunity for an experienced Search Marketing Account Manager to join our team of dedicated, client-focused internet marketing professionals.  While plenty of advertising, public relations and interactive agencies are downsizing, TopRank is growing smarter with new team members. Could you be our next Superstar?