Online Marketing Blog

Building and designing a successful social media campaign can be a lot like designing and building a skyscraper. You need to research the materials, lay a strong foundation, and continue regular maintenance to ensure your building, or social media promotion, doesn’t collapse.

In Understanding the Complex Social Media Marketing Playing Field, moderator Joe Laratro led a panel of social media marketing architects who shared their social media design tips.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, gave an overview of some of the various materials an online marketer can use when constructing a social media plan. Michael Gray, president of Atlas Web Service, created a strategic design plan for building successful social promotions. Cameron Olthuis, CEO of Factive Media, outlined best practices for interacting with social communities in ten steps. Neil Patel, CTO of Advantage Consulting Services, Inc., ended the session with a controversial look at “the dark side” of social media marketing.

Entering the realm of social media can be a bit like trying to enter an exclusive club. There are barriers to entry, codes of conduct, and unwelcome outsiders are quickly identified and ostracized. Yet, like an exclusive club, the benefits of membership can be great. Marketers looking to benefit from social media would do well to heed the advice of the three presenters in this SES session, moderated by Pauline Ore of IBM Corporation.

As Kendall Allen, digital marketing and convergence media consultant, pointed out, social media has come a long way since the advent of the Internet. Listservs, user groups and chat rooms have given way to the networking giants of Facebook and Myspace.

You don’t have to look too far online to see more and more people using social bookmarking services and news sites. Content publishers from blogs to mainstream publications like Minneapolis Star Tribune are looking for ways to make it easier for readers to save and share content.

There are a variety of tactics including social bookmark links, icons, multi-purpose buttons, browser add-ons, bookmarklets, other tools and scripts that can used to encourage visitors to promote content. The question is, how are people using them?

My first post from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is the second half of “Free Traffic: SEO/SMO 101 (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) with Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Muhammad Saleem of Advantage Consulting Services. Unfortunately, I missed the SEO portion and gauging by the crowd around Stephan, it went quite well.

Muhammad Saleem’s portion of the presentation focuses on Social Media Optimization and Marketing 101. I’ve not met Mahammaed in person before and he’s sporting a very cool goatee with a waxed moustache.

Saleem’s presentation focuses on 4 aspects of social media:

• Blogs
• Social News sites
• Social Networks
• Online Video

Many other tools don’t have that big of an impact/conversionrate for the “average” company.

Not too long ago I queried a number of online marketing and public relations peers ranging from Aaron Wall, Matt McGee and Neil Patel to Todd Defren, Triss Hussey and Peter Himler about sharing a few of their social media marketing tips. Out of that informal survey in combination with community specific solicitations came posts about marketing with MyBlogLog and Twitter.

However, there are many more social media communities and channels besides MBL and Twitter that I received tips on and from very reputable sources which you’ll find below. Enjoy!

Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications shared two of his own posts from a series on social media: Tips on using Twitter for finding and developing relationships and another post on using Del.icio.us for PR “edgework” or direct interactions with consumers.

In this month’s Target Marketing Magazine, a TopRank authored article on how small businesses can gain a competitive marketing advantage by leveraging content promotion, blogs, social media and universal search was featured. Recently there has been some dialog and commentary on certain SEM channels about upcoming harder economic times calling for SEO to be taken back to the basics: “Textbook SEO” as Mike Grehan would put it. I disagree with the premise that companies should stop experimenting with new tactics and stick with the fundamentals. Effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane.

“As search engines evolve with features such as personalized, social and unified search, so must marketers evolve — especially those on a budget.”

TopRank started using social bookmarking as an active/passive content promotion method several years ago. In fact, here is a podcast interview I did with Rok Hrastnik in March 2005 discussing SEO, tagging and bookmarking. We’ve also been fairly successful at promoting a social bookmarking tool for blogs over the past 18 months or so, gathering 50,000+ links.

Leveraging the social behaviors and technology of social news and bookmarking sites can be very effective as an active content promotion strategy.

For web sites with abundant content, adding such bookmark invitations to web pages and other media can form a productive passive bookmarking strategy by leveraging the volume of traffic and points of contact. The momentum of thousands of web pages on the web, each with an invitation to save and share, can drive traffic and links 24/7.

Read an interesting blog post lately? Save it. Want to share it with others? Tag it and make it publicly accessible online. Or maybe you just want a safe place to save an article you will get around to reading on your weekly dive into your del.icio.us account. No problem. Social Bookmarking and Tagging both have this covered for you.

Social bookmarking and tagging aren’t just about saving items for you anymore. Revert back to your preschool rules, and you will find social bookmarking is just “sharing” on a global level. How else can you research and trade information with thousands and thousands of people all around the world in an up-to-the-minute fashion?

When talking with so many companies of all sizes and types about marketing with social media, many are keen on the idea, but don’t have a clear idea of the best way to incorporate tactics like social bookmarking into their content promotions.  Anyone can throw up links to Digg, Del.icio.us and Facebook, but does it actually do anything?

The way I see it, two of the most practical ways to approach promoting content via social media sites such as social bookmarking and news would best be characterized as “active” and “passive”. In fact, there are many situations where both make sense.

The kind of promotion I mean is on social news or bookmarking service wheres you can submit a URL, describe and tag it, then others in the community can comment and/or vote.

After a few days home in Minnesota I’ve gone on the road again to the DM Days conference in New York. Just two hours sitting on the tarmac this time.

The DMA Search Engine Marketing Council has quite a bit going on between sessions on search marketing, informational events and there will be presentations on the DMA search marketing certification program as well by the coordinator of that program, Dr. Amanda Whatlington. There’s also a one day seminar here in NYC after the DM Days event, “Search Engine Marketing - The Basics” on June 27th from 9-3:30.

I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.

Here’s Michael Gray, aka graywolf, just before our session with Todd Mailicoat and Neil Patel on “Social Bookmark Strategies” where he talks about tips for conference goers. Coverage of that session can be found at The Lisa, Search Engine Roundtable, Small Business SEM and CenterNetworks.

I also caught up with Mona Elesseily from Page Zero where she talks about Yahoo Panama pros and cons. Also two new Panama enhancements: Quality based bidding and being able to opt out of Yahoo’s content network.

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It’s an interesting thing when concepts get defined according to the intentions and goals of a few influential voices. Take social media optimization and marketing (SMO/SMM) for example. What started as a set of tactics unique to their channels (blogs, images, audio, video) became a more closely defined set of tactics ala Rohit’s Rules for Social Media Optimization.

To me, social media is characterized by communities that allow users to do many or all of the following:

• Create profiles/accounts
• Grow a network of friends
• Submit content or collaborate
• Vote on content
• Tag content
• Comment on content

That’s the “social”. The “media” has to do with the platform as well as the content: blog, social network, wiki, news, bookmark, forum, discussion thread and text, image, audio, video for example.