Making the time to execute on a social media strategy can rattle even the most experienced marketers.  Unlike traditional marketing, social media marketing can present many different challenges and distractions.  According to a study by eMarketer 73% of marketers say finding the time to create content as their biggest marketing challenge.

I recently ran a poll of @TopRank Twitter followers to get a sense of how they spend their time online.  I asked “If you had only 20 minutes a day to spend on social media what would you focus on?”  Some of the answers we received were:

• @henryroominates – “I would try to connect with powerful Twitter users and Tweet content from my blog.”
• @SebastianX – “I’d read my Twitter Followanyday List.”
• @Paco_Belle – “Look at 2-3 Twitter lists, couple circles on G+, scroll Facebook timeline & look through my RSS feeds for new things.”
• @Paramountbuzz – “Engaging others…doing it now.”
• @GreenDolphin_ – “My RSS feed, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.”

If you are involved with implementing social media marketing, you know that 20 minutes a day just won’t cut it.  On top of implementing social media tactics, there’s also the task fo staying current. Lee’s post “11 Ways to Get Smarter & Stay Current in a World of Social Information Overload“ outlined how much time can be involved using social tools to collect, filter and curate social media marketing knowledge.

Avoiding Shiny Object Pitfalls

Reuters estimates that the average worker loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions.  To avoid wasting time begin by prioritizing your week.  While it’s true that unexpected issues can come up plan for the best and the worst.  If you have 3 hours per day on average to complete tasks related to social media strategy what will you get accomplished in those 3 hours?  If you were only to have 1.5 hours per day what would you want to get accomplished?  Proper planning will lead to improved productivity and efficiency.  Also, take some time to determine what your top distractions are and eliminate them.

Optimize for Productivity

Focus on what will have the largest impact on your productivity. Determining what time of day you are most productive, and which activities are most significant will help you to stay on track.  Are you an early riser, night owl, or somewhere in between?  Creating a daily schedule and routine can significantly improve your productivity.  You will also want to keep in mind statistical data which points to the best times of day and days of the week for engaging in social media activity.  A recent infographic by KISSmetrics on “The Science of Social Timing” provides valuable insight into the best times of day to share or engage on sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Some of the findings include:

Twitter

• 5pm – best time to Tweet for re-tweets
• 1-4 per hour – most effective frequency of Tweets
• Midweek & Weekends – best days to Tweet
• Noon & 6pm – best time to Tweet for increase Click Through Rates

Facebook

• Saturday- best day to share on Facebook
• Noon- most effective time to share on Facebook
• .5 per day – best sharing frequency

Tips for an Optimized Focus

Now lets talk about some no brainer “don’ts” that the many of us “do”.  Let me know if any of these sound familiar to you:

• Your best friend is having problems with their significant other so you keep your phone close, just in case…
• It’s baseball season and your team is playing but you don’t have the day off, thank goodness for internet radio right…
• You have email anxiety which forces you to check email every couple minutes because you never know what you might miss…
• One of your colleagues is obsessed with chatting online and pings you every couple minutes with a question or joke…
• You’re scheduling Tweets, posting on your personal facebook page, and reading Psychology Today all at the same time, because after all you are a master multi-tasker…

I too have often thought that I could do everything at once.  A balancing act acquired from years of having too much to do, and not enough time.  I considered multi-tasking an art form and a higher form of organization than my counterparts who only focused on one thing at a time.  I could not have been more wrong.  In recent years I’ve had to buckle down and force myself to devote all of my attention to one task at a time.  I’ve found that the quality of my work has improved and the level of my stress has decreased significantly.  Some tactics that have worked for me include:

• Closing my email when I’m working on social media tasks
• Close all Internet windows and tabs except for the one I need to work on
• Disabling chat or closing chat windows to avoid distraction
• Pick 15 minutes a day to indulge in activities such as checking personal social media profiles, responding to texts, or chatting with friends.
• Spend 30 minutes to an hour each morning reviewing emails and responding, do the same thing before leaving at the end of the day.
• It is significantly easier to stick to your schedule if you are working ONLY on the tasks you have scheduled in the time allotted.

Tools for Optimizing Your Time

Depending on your available time and social media content strategy, there are many tools that can help you accomplish more with less time.  Below are three different types of tools that social media marketers can use to get the most out of their time:

Curation Tools – good for quickly gathering and automatically sharing content

• Scoop.it
• Storify
• Pearltrees

Social Aggregators & Management Tools –  follow and engage with multiple platforms

• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• Here’s a list of 22 social media management tools

Social Bookmarking – effective means of organizing and storing social bookmarks

• StumleUpon
• Reddit
• Delicious
• Evernote – not a bookmarking tool exactly but very useful for curating

Next Steps

I’m sure you’ll agree that focus and time management are something that most of us can relate to.  Based on what was covered in this post, consider the following questions and determine what you can do to better focus on the tasks at hand:

• What are your top 3 social media goals and do you have a plan for reaching them?
• How much time can you dedicate each day to using tactics to reach these goals?
• What steps can you take to improve your focus while completing social media activities?
• Which type of tool: curation, aggregator, or social bookmarking can you use to help save time?

If  you are looking for additional tips on Optimizing your SEO, social media, and content strategies be sure to take a look at the new book: “Optimize: How to Attract & Engage More Customers By Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.”

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Optimize Your Social Media Schedule: 4 Tips for Avoiding the Social Media Time Suck | http://www.toprankblog.com

As someone who has been successful with creating content that goes hot across social channels I’ve come to appreciate the art and challenge of crafting sticky headlines. In fact, crafting headlines is equally if not more challenging than leads and even content itself.

Something many bloggers have down, but communications professionals aren’t always fluent in, is the art of crafting headlines specifically for social news sites/users. While there is no one formula for success, I’m going to share 5 things I’ve learned from experience as a blogger, social news user, PR pro and marketer.

1. Work backwards - content first, then headline

If you’ve got an idea for a piece of content you think will be popular or if you’v done your homework and researched the types of content that resonate on social channels, great – the hardest part is done. Now jot down a title as a work in progress and create your content. After completion, bearing you know you’ve knocked out a winner, challenge yourself to re-create the headline specifically to resonate with your key audience. You’d be surprised at how much easier this is than working on the perfect headline up front. Having great content in front of you, then selling it through a sticky headline is always easier than writing it staring at a blank screen.

2. Leverage archetypes/formulas which work for others (especially outside your niche)

Smashing Magazine has made page one of Digg more than 200 times, frequently using the same headline formula (number + adjective + design-related item + sticky message – i.e. 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen). Why would they change something which is causing users to instinctively share posts like crazy? Also, don’t be afraid to use archetypes that work in categories external of yours – especially if no one in your niche is using them.

3. Headlines should be outrageous, engaging, emotional, useful, counter-intuitive or remarkable – not to the world, but to your community

Your headline doesn’t have to make sense to everyone. There isn’t enough space to do that and still fit within something like a Tweet (only 140 characters + 20 character tiny URL) or Digg headline (60 characters). What it should do is conjure one or more of the adjectives listed above to the influencers – or 1%’ers as Jackie Huba calls them – of your community. To achieve this you must first understand your community – ideally by being a member yourself and able to empathize with them.

4. Don’t just create content, actually use social news sites

You can’t understand social communities at the level necessary to permeate them consistently with your content/headlines without being a member of those communities. This is not optional, and if you’re a blogger or marketer who merely creates content but doesn’t participate you’re missing half the picture. Learn the hot buttons of the popular, macro communities and you’ll get a general sense of how to craft headlines for social news. Then, drill down and become a member of more targeted communities relevant to your niche to learn what resonates with specific groups.

5. SEO intersection – frequently forgotten, always vital

A by-product of news stories which go popular on the social web is links. Content created goes popular, gets a ton of links up front and as a by-product the engine juice delivered helps create authority for that page. If the content is really good, it will continue to receive organic links months or years after it’s been posted due to visibility from search engines (and create a ranking that’s self-reinforcing). In other words, social news success can be long term: a story that’s successful has the potential to be a high visibility entry point to your site for years to come even after the initial wave of buzz.  Craft two headlines for your stories to help achieve this: 1 for search engines (title tag) and one for users (page title).

Conclusion

As social Diva Liz Strauss has pointed out, it’s not just about the headlines – you also need equally remarkable content to back it up in order to achieve any kind of worthwhile goal such as attracting subscribers or sales leads. But the importance of using clever headlines to help your content stand out in the first place is vital.

As the firehose of real-time social content speeds up, the value of well-crafted headlines will increase. And the truth is, tips can only help so much. Writing headlines is more art than science. The best path is to consider it an iterative process, experiment with different structures, study your analytics and find what works for you.

What are your tips for writing effective social news headlines?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | How to Write Compelling Social News Headlines | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

Building Blocks

The strongest social media plan involves a mix of the below materials.

• Democratized Social News sites These tools allow online marketers to interact with a community by voting on content and submitting their own content to be voted on by others. Examples include Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and Newsline.
• Editor-Controlled News Sites Sites like Yahoo! Buzz accept and display user-submitted content that fits in with their editorial guidelines. These sites generally have a high profile and can generate huge results.
• Social Sites These sites are a great opportunity to build and interact with a network as well as publish original content in a variety of forms including links, news, photos, videos, and more. Examples include Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn.
• Micro-Blogging Sites On Twitter, Plurk, and Friendfeed, you can submit interesting content in 140 characters or less. This can act as an instant megaphone, allowing you to broadcast strong points of interest to a large audience.
• Social Bookmarking Sites Marketers can submit interesting URLs to sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious and Blinklist to drive traffic to specific pages. These sites are also good for research in terms of finding out what type of content interests your audience.
• Social Content Sharing Sites Youtube, Flickr, Yelp and DeviantArt all allow you to post specific types of content, from video to photos to reviews. These sites can help marketers build brand messaging and reach new, relevant audiences, and can also show up in universal search results.
• Wiki Sites Wikis are another good way to dominate the search results, as they often rank highly. Use wikis to post original content and edit existing content while reaching a new audience. Wikipedia is the penultimate example of a wiki site.
• Social Question & Answer Sites Marketers can both post questions to other users and answer existing questions on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers. This can grow brand reputation and authority and is also a good way to conduct audience research.
• Niche Sites Social sites that target a very specific niche, such as Corked for wine enthusiasts, allow marketers to reach a highly relevant audience.

Blueprints

Creating a successful social media campaign requires a well-thought out and detailed plan. Take the proper steps to ensure your social promotions are sturdy and effective.

• Background Research Find out where your audience is online. Look at the content they themselves are submitting on these sites for ideas of what interests them. Also, identify thought leaders to target in order to spread your message to a broad audience.
• Brainstorming Generate as many ideas for promotions as possible. Look at what has worked previously and build upon that without copycatting. Filter your ideas wisely in order to find something that will feasibly work for you.
• Idea Research Follow up on your ideas to see if they will work based upon what is already happening in the social media you are targeting. Be flexible and adapt your ideas if something won’t work. Don’t force a bad idea.
• Story Production and Formatting Ensure you’re writing in a viral writing style. Avoid marketing speak and obvious sales-oriented messaging. Use videos and photos to enrich your stories.
• Schedule and Launch Know the times in the day, week, etc. your audience interacts on social sites. Tie promotions in to holidays and major events to generate timely interest.

Building a Foundation

Interacting with a social community is the key to building a strong foundation for your social media marketing campaign. “It’s called social for a reason,” Cameron Olthuis points out. Be sure you are socializing within a community and following its guidelines.

• Network & Be Social Make new friends, join groups and generally participate in the community. This should be a continual process.
• Be Genuine, Authentic and On Target Stick with what your audience wants.
• Provide Value Give users something they can use, in the form of advice, expert tips, inside information or something entertaining.
• Let People Act Naturally Allow users to play with your content and have fun. Don’t force a specific interaction.
• Listen and Respond Look for both positive and negative reactions by monitoring content once it’s live. Respond to users and improve content accordingly.

The Fake Façade
Neil Patel outlined what he calls “The Dark Side” of social media marketing with some less-than-wholesome tips and tricks marketers can use to generate social media results

• Screwing People Impacting a competitors reputation by submitting useless content from a competitor’s site to social news or bookmarking.
• Social Media Rings Creating a ring of people to vote up your content. This quickly becomes a “dark” practice when abused through overuse.
• Social Media Applications Tube Increaser and Twitter Friend Adder allow marketers to automate adding large quantities of friends to their accounts.
• Forced Actions Patel mentioned iframes code, which is useful for ‘forcing’ people to automatically subscribe to content such as your YouTube channel just by visiting.
• Blog Links Certain blog formats, such as WordPress, can be hacked, allowing marketers to insert their links.

Patel also advised visiting several “light” reading resources, including SEOmoz.org, Techipedia.com and our very own TopRank Online Marketing Blog.

Create a holistic social media campaign by ensuring you’ve put time and effort into the three major stages outlined in this session: the proper building blocks, a strategic blueprint and a solid foundation. Continue routine maintenance by building your profile and interacting regularly within social communities. Conduct regular inspections of your progress by searching for your content on Technorati, Google Blogsearch, search.twitter.com and other monitoring resources. And while going to “The Dark Side” may have its appeal, following social media marketing best practices should generate solid results.

Check back with the TopRank Marketing Blog for more on Pubcon, and don’t miss photos from the conference at TopRank on Flickr.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | PubCon: Understanding the Complex Social Media Marketing Playing Field | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

These highly organized, more defined social networks have made it possible for marketers to establish a brand presence among their consumers. Kendall stated that social media optimization should be integrated into any comprehensive, cross-platform marketing plan.

Kendall also pointed out a few new ways in which marketers can enter the social sphere. Services like Ning.com allow users to create their own unique social network. Many social networks allow brands to create applications, in the form of surveys, content sharing and more. Companies can enter the blogosphere with the help of Socialspark.com, which connects companies with bloggers who will right about their goods and services for a fee.

Li Evans, director of Internet Marketing at KeyRelevance, highlighted the varied benefits of using social media. Many people mention linkbuilding, but “Links are by products of social media,” Li said. While good social media practices will result in links, Li and the other panelists highlighted several important uses and benefits:

• Talk to your audience Use social media to interact with your consumers in a more ‘natural’ setting outside of focus groups and surveys.
• Gather information Find out what the public thinks of your brand. This can be especially useful to gather feedback when a company has recently implemented changes.
• Create brand ambassadors By directly engaging consumers with your brand, you can create a legion of devoted brand followers who will spread the word to others. This can also result in increased links.
• Give consumers a voice Allow consumers to collaborate with your brand in order to strengthen your products.
• Manage your reputation Directly address any negative brand noise on the web, and monopolize your search engine results pages (SERPs) with the additional content you’ve created. Many social media profiles will rank in SERPs for your brand, and images and video can show up in universal search.

However, before you enter the social world, do your homework. Li highlighted variety of different online users, from creators of content like bloggers, to joiners of social media, to spectators who merely read and absorb online content. She pointed out the importance of knowing where your audience lies in this spectrum, and planning your social media activities accordingly.

Once you’ve identified where and how your audience is using social media, you can begin to enter these networks and interact with them. David Snyder, Search Specialist at JRDunn.com, gave several useful tips for engaging consumers ‘socially.’

• Create optimized profiles Your username should relate to your company or product and be phrased in a way that is familiar to your consumers.
• Create original content Your social profiles should contain creative, thoughtful copy that provides value to your consumers.
• Use keywords In your tags and descriptions for photos, videos or other content, use keywords to ensure these items can show up in universal search.
• Be authentic All three panelists underscored authenticity as a cornerstone of good social media practices. Consumers can recognize a fake instantly, which can have dire consequences for your brand.

As the three speakers in this session indicated, social media can offer many benefits to the marketer savvy enough to use it correctly. Its potential uses move beyond mere linkbuilding to consumer research, reputation management and more. By following the rules, marketers can not only gain entry, but flourish in these social spaces.

Stay current with the SES San Jose conference by checking in regularly with the TopRank Online Marketing Blog, and view more photos from the TopRank Team at TopRank on Flickr.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | SES San Jose: Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

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?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Are content owners adding in social buttons because they provide value to their users? Or are they just taking up space and virtually ignored?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Reader Poll: How Do You Interact With Social Boomarks? | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

Blogs, social news, networks and online video are low cost and fairly easy to implement. They can also work well with your other SEO efforts.

9 Industry rules of SMO
1. Know your audience – analytics
2. Create original content – try new things
3. Increase your linkability by creating evergreen content worth linking to
4. Make tagging bookmarking easy. Example tools: ShareThis and Sociable
5. Help your content travel through RSS, email subscriptions, newsletters, embeds, mashups and e-books.
6. Reward and thank people that comment, that link and traffic sources.
7. Be real and genuine – if you’re not, users are savvy and can tell if you’re just spinning or marketing
8. Participate – Not only on your own site, but also with other sites. Especially if it’s a major traffic source. Don’t just “take the traffic”, participate on social news sites and participate.
9. Make SMO part of the process and best practices. Develop a social media strategy and use the tactics wisely.

One if the big problems with people optimizing social media is a short term perspective. A short term strategy is misleading.

A long term strategy will show a spike and then a drop and then another spike and drop with about 20% of the traffic retained. The “Digg effect”.

Stats that matter (Digg culture)
- Audience preferences – what social site best matches the kind of content you have to offer
- Popularity by container, keywords or by day. Shows a graph indicating what’s popular on Digg by category. The Tech category on Digg has been in decline for about a year. That should influence the categories you promote to.
Gives examples of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. In the case of Delicious, tech is on the upswing and if following the data, you can see if you’re promoting tech, it makes more sense to promote on Delicious than Digg.

Look at links by topic and track trends to see what the audience responds to. Same with links by keyword so you can make decisions about what words to use in your social news submission.

Also look at conversion rates by time to find the optimal time to submit and promote a social news item in order to achieve the desired outcomes.

When optimizing yoru site for social media, there are 2 things to keep in mind:
1. Content – Copywriting and design that resonates with the audiences you are promoting to.
Make your content pop – the 10 second rule. Write for regular readers, social media visitors and search engines.

2. Community – To be able to seed content to mavens and power users, you need to be involved with the communities you’re promoting to. Muhammad mentions the tendency for these users to reciprocate the promotion of content. In order to do that, you need to have something to offer and you can do that by being actively involved in the community.

Social media readers consumer content at a much faster rate. Site design and content organization should be laid out according to their information consumption habits of social communities being promoted to.

Tips: Titles and headlines, sub hjeadings, bold, bullets, underlined, quotes, images, charts, graphs and a summary of the article.

Check your content to make sure it’s original content, substantive topic and easily digestible.

With plugins (All in One SEO Plugin for WordPress) you can have different titles for the same post.

Social media titles:
1. Lists
2. Adjectives
3. Figures, facts, numbers
4. Indicating media type – photos, audio, video, interactive

Whichever title tactic you use, it’s important to deliver on what’s promised if you want to have impact.

Ex: 16 Incredibly Unconventional Hotel Rooms (PICS)
The formula: [Number] [Adjective] [Keyword Phrase]

4 Amazing Social media friendly site design tips: (my attempt at using Mahammad’s social title writing advice)

Things to avoid with your site URL stucture and hosting service
1. Hyphens or numbers in domain
2. Keyword stuffed
3, Any non dot come domain
4. Not self hosted

General site design tips
1. Take down the registration wall
2. Overselling ads
3. Minimize use of widgets
4. Show interest and participation with social community
5. Recognize
6. Access – Make sure you offer access to whatever conversion you are targeting

High value content above the fold
If everything above the fold is ads, you’re not delivering high impact content. [Doesn't this run contrary to the advice to provide easy access to the conversions you desire? What's the happy medium?]

People say social media readers have a high bounce rate, it’s not that these readers don’t want to read the content, it’s that the content is not designed for social media readers information consumption habits.

Community – actionable items
1. Relationships with the community can be instrumental to being able to seed and promote content.
2. The social media manual – Use common sense in your behavior, don’t just dump your content.

Ways to share your content for more exposure:
IM, email, share features inherent to social news sites, microblogging. Don’t use public forums and groups because the social news sites can easily see that a group is engaged in organized content promotion. [Muhammad didn't say not to create a group, he just said don't create a public one]

The Digg algorithm: Recent participation and rank of the person submitting, who has voted on the content after submission, the submitters voting content on the site as a whole, the category being submitted to and activity in that category, the speed of votes and diversity of voters, buries received for the user submitting, comments made and comment ratings. All these factors affect how the story being submitted is handled by the Digg algorithm.

Misconceptions people often have about the Digg algorithm:
There is not specific number of votes, it’s dynamic. The news item doesn’t HAVE to be submitted by a power user. The number of people you “friend” on the site is not important. There also isn’t a 24 hour window required. It’s possible for content to go hot 3-4 days after being submitted.

Social media and search marketing:
Social media efforts can interact and influence search engine optimization efforts. The visibility of content on search can be affected by social media visibility.

Interestingly, he gives example of a submission from a photo site that went hot and had 8 hyphens in the url

How do you calclate the ROI on SMO?
- Standard web analytics
- User engagement on seeded page as well as destination – comments
- Cross pollination effect – Hot on Digg then hot on Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc
- Actual conversions: registrations, subscribing, clicking on ads
- Link building overall and ranking on long tail terms
- Branding and mindshare – This is an investment. With the consistency of submitting quality content,

5 Essential Rules of Social Media Optimization:
1. Embrace technology, transparency and community
2. Do your home work – know the audience
3. Focus on niche communities
4. Create value rather than expect value
5. Encourage and reward interaction

Audience Question which I also had: You’ve given great examples using blogs. What are the opportunities for regular web sites to optimize their sites for social media?

Saleem: It’s easy for magazines to implement SEO – they’re already creating content. Wired, Epicurious etc do well. It’s harder for corporations to do it because you have to create content.

However, car companies are an example where they communicate with enthusiasts and give them unique access and content. That might not generate traffic to the corp site, but it does increase awareness and can drive pickups on other blogs that point to the corporate site or blog.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Web 2.0 Expo – Social Media Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

Dan Perry from Cars.com offers a tip on using Flickr. “Since you have the ability to change your Screen Name, and it’s independent of your username OR your Flickr web addresses, use your domain [name]. For example, my Flickr Screen Name is danperry.com. When someone finds a picture of mine, they see my domain.”

Peter Himler, who runs Flatiron Communications and writes “The Flack” blog provides a few quick tips on Twitter: “Fun to follow thought-leaders and journalists who often tweet their forthcoming thoughts on the site” and LinkedIn: “Been on it for nealry two years. Still wish it had the functionality as FaceBook. Good for keeping tabs on former colleagues and college friends.”.

Bill Hartzer, who is my opinion one of the most talented SEO/Social Media marketers out there, offers a few insights on LinkedIn and Twitter as well:

LinkedIn: With LinkedIn, it’s important to put your email address in your profile name. That way you identify yourself as a “linked in open networker” and you’re open to having others add you to their network.

Twitter: Like a lot of other services, it’s important to add or follow other people first and then most likely they will reciprocate. Find your favorite Twitter profile and view who they’re following … and follow them. Follow people and they’ll (hopefully) follow you. Also, when editing your profile on Twitter, you can add more than one link in your profile. Turns out that http: link URLs are treated as links.

Aaron Wall famously writes SEOBook and is involved with many other business ventures and online marketing channels, offers tips on YouTube and Yahoo Answers:

If you have a well read blog and want to use YouTube make a number of videos all at once and then beg readers to subscribe to your channel. Also, make sure to syndicate the videos on your own site AND add background information to the videos there to keep your site as the destination rather than turning YouTube into the destination.

With Yahoo Answers make sure you partner with a few friends to ask and answer each other’s questions. Put enough context to what you do to make it look good, but use aggressive keyword rich titles, and point some external links at the pages you want to rank well.

Erica Forrette from Adapt SEM and who writes the Adapt SEM Blog offers her inside scoop into LinkedIn:

LinkedIn Questions & Answers can be useful in figuring out new angles to take in messaging or tactics that you can use for your product/service. Since my company has a product that’s relatively new to the market, we’re always trying different tactics for customer acquisition and/or exposure to our brand in general.

On a few occasions, I’ve wondered about whether or not I should do “tactic X” as a marketing effort, so I put a question out there on the LinkedIn Q&A to gauge opinion or get insights on what other people think of, or have learned from doing, “tactic X.” Peoples’ feedback and commentary has often been incredibly helpful on making the go/no-go decision. I’ve even asked questions that are related to product features we’re considering adding.

The LinkedIn Q&A is like quick and dirty informal market research! Granted, totally unscientific research but I usually respect peoples’ opinions and get good perspective from these Q&As. (p.s. watch out for those blatant shills who answer a question and shoehorn a plug for their own product or service into their response. Blech!)

Matt McGee from Marchex and writer of the Small Business SEM Blog plus the originator of the SEMMYs (vote for OMB!), gives us the goods on Flickr and Yahoo Answers:

Join active groups (activity is more important than size) and share your quality photos with the group. Comment on other people’s photos and join discussions. Tag your photos wisely; I’ve seen Flickr photos rank for phrases that only appeared in the tags. Link from your blog or web site to your Flickr photos to spread some link juice over there.

Don’t waste time trying to navigate to all the categories and sub-categories that interest you; sign up for RSS feeds, instead. Yahoo Answers offers RSS feeds for every category and sub-category on the site, and for any search you do on the site, too. Sign your name and URL on all answers you provide; spammers only leave a URL, so you stand out more with your name included.

Debra Mastaler, aka “Link Diva” or “The Link Spiel” sheds some light on Technorati:

If you’re looking for a list of highly relevant and authorative blogs to approach/use for link building, set the search options to “a lot of authority” and search on your keyword. Add the RSS feed from the results page to your reader to monitor each time new results show. Look for additional tags (keyword phrases) by clicking the Technorati logo on the results page and start the process over again.

Tris Hussey who is now with b5media and is a long time blogger at “A View From the Aisle” offers up tips on Twitter and StumbleUpon:

Twitter – Twitter is a great way to announced time-sensitive events like radio shows, etc. Combine with Twitterbar for Firefox and you can post right from your address bar.

StumbleUpon – SU is one of the best sustained traffic generators I’ve found. Make sure you Stumble your friends’ and your posts to add them into the mix of SU users. Great compliment to Digg!

Neil Patel from Advantage Consulting Services and who writes the QuickSprout blog, gives us the lowdown on Facebook:

If you want to be successful on Facebook you either need a viral application and/or you will have to spend thousands on advertising. An easy way to think of a viral application is what features does Facebook lack or how can you improve on their current set of features. If you want to go the advertising route, you can pay companies like RockYou 50 cents for every installation they drive.

Steven Bradley aka “vangoh” from YellowHouseHosting and The Van Blog offers general social media marketing tips for just about any platform or channel as well as specifics for Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon:

General Social Media Marketing Tips:
With all social media sites I think it’s important to spend some time getting to know the community and learning the unwritten laws of the land. It’s also always in your best interest to see a social media site as something you contribute to and not something you take from. The more valuable you are to the community the more you’ll get back from the community. It’s also important to pick and choose the sites you participate in based on your interests and their connection with your site. You don’t need to join every site. Choose the communities you most enjoy and the ones most aligned with your site.

Del.icio.us:
One feature of del.icio.us I’ve only begun to experiment with is the ‘subscriptions’ feature. You might use it to set a subscription on your name or site name. Not everyone will use your name or the name of your site as a tag, but some might and it can be a way to keep track of who is bookmarking your content.

A better use is to track a topic you’re interested in, much the same way you would use Google Alerts.You can set up subscriptions around a keyword theme and see what is getting bookmarked. You can use those bookmarks as research for something you want to write or as a way to better understand what specific content on the topic is getting bookmarked and adjust your own content to make it more bookmarkable.

StumbleUpon:
One area of StumbleUpon that I don’t think gets used to its potential are the Groups. You can join groups on subjects that interest you and ask and answer questions as you would on any forum. Most of the groups I’ve joined don’t seem to be particularly active, which is why I think they aren’t being used to their potential. Of course I might have simply joined some inactive groups.

Involving yourself in the question and answer should allow you to build relationships with other stumblers and allow you to build your network.

These are some great recommendations from tried and true marketers, public relations and blogging professionals. What “Social Media Smarts” can you share?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Social Media Marketing Tips | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.”

What the article in Target Marketing and this post look at are creative content creation and promotion approaches to optimizing not only small business web sites, but any web site, using a holistic approach to SEO. I’ll summarize a few of the key points here:

Create a Content Promotion Plan – The base for optimization and link building is all about content. However, relying on search engines alone to find, crawl, index and rank your content in a way that will drive sales and improve brand visibility isn’t enough. More than ever, the masses are enabled to publish content on the web creating even more competition for top visibility within search. That makes it important to not only optimize your content, but to make an effort to promote it as well. Publishing great content is a waste unless you’ve developed channels of distribution outside of search engine crawlers.

Planning out content creation ahead of time much like a publisher creates an editorial calendar for a magazine will provide the search marketing team with resources in advance to creatively concept optimization, social networking and promotion ideas in advance. The effect is more robust distribution of your message to audiences that are looking as well as attracting links.

In the article at Target Marketing, there’s a practical example of this where a jewelry retailer promoted photos of their Christmas ornaments on image sharing sites to drive additional traffic as well as links.

Make It Easy to Publish and Promote New Content – One of the most common issues we run into when consulting with companies to improve their organic search marketing effectiveness is to implement a content creation and promotion plan. Many web sites are fairly static and there isn’t much “promotable content”. Even if the company wants to add content, they’re often tied down by content management system with limited functionality or having to go through an web side development firm to many any edits creating unnecessary costs.

For TopRank and it’s clients, the most effective way to add a search engine friendly content creation and management feature to a web site is to use blog software. That does not mean a blog in a journaling sense needs to be implemented, but rather leveraging blog software to manage content like an online newsroom, archiving newsletters, etc. That said, publishing a blog as we all know them is the ideal. There are additional competitive blog SEO advantages to publishing a blog as well.

The practical example given in the article references a retail fabric site that used a blog to archive its newsletters to start and then hired a person part time to write helpful tips and creative product announcements. The additional web pages and internal/inbound links generated from the blog have resulted in top 3 rankings on competitive phrases and increased sales.

“Get” Social Media – Before jumping on the bandwagon of social media promotion it’s important to understand how the various networks and communities work. Social media marketing is more about conversations and influence than it is about offers and conversions. Create accounts, make friends, comment and vote on content. See what kinds of content is going hot and getting attention and then start submitting the kind of content (others and yours) that the community responds to.

In this case, the example given from the article discussed a blog about puzzles and brain teasers that setup a Facebook group to introduce content from the blog to people who were interested in such content on Facebook. The Facebook group has grown steadily and continues to send traffic to the blog. After the article posted, a Twitter account was also set up for the puzzles site and uses it as a way to draw attention to (and links/visitors) to particularly interesting puzzles. Keep in mind, in both cases it was only people that showed some sort of interest in puzzles and that were active who were “friended”.

Unify Your Efforts With Universal Search – “Armed with a content plan, a blog to make it easier to publish search engine-friendly content and the beginning of an expanded social network, it’s now time to figure out what this all means for improved search engine visibility.” While each search engine implements the concept of universal or combined search results slightly differently and to a limited degree, the potential to gain benefit now as well as when the engines scale up the use of combined results is an opportunity.

The first step with universal search SEO is to take a step back and look at your search marketing effort from a holistic perspective. As you identify your target audience, goals and the messages to promote, take inventory of the electronic media or digital assets you have to work with. Match them up with appropriate channels of promotion. Incorporate your content promotion plan with search engine optimization efforts and implement an ongoing process of creative content creation, promotion and results measurement.

You can read the full story here: Competitive on a Budget: Promote content, socialize online and unify with universal search

If you run a small business web site or provide SEO consulting services to small businesses, what are some of the more creative online marketing tactics you’ve used? What trends do you see coming in 2008? Are you engaging in digital asset optimization?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Recession Proof Search Engine Optimization Tips | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

For more aggressive online marketers, waiting for visitors to find your content and then decide to bookmark isn’t enough. Building up profiles and networks of friends to introduce and share content with can drive great traffic that folds well with an active bookmarking strategy. Creating content and then purposefully sharing and promoting it with likeminded networks provides value to the community and also enhances content distribution.

However, with so many different bookmarking services it can be a pain to manage with spreadsheets and browser based favorites. Here are a few services that make the chore of social bookmark submissions a lot easier.

SocialPoster.com, provides a bookmarklet that makes it very easy to submit social news and bookmark submissions to a variety of services. You can segment them by the most popular services, by industry or just focus on Pligg powered sites. You can also use a frames option that makes it very handy and even quicker while still making each submission unique.

The folks at Squareoak have recently launched a similar service called Post Toaster that provides a simple, one page interface to a variety of social bookmarking services. You can sort here as well by services that bookmark, news and those that “do follow”. A good thing to know for SEO purposes.

Here are a few additional social bookmark tools and resources worth mentioning:

• Social Marker is a basic tool for 31 services
• 3spots offers a huge list of social bookmarking tools
• Robin Good offers a great explanation of where social bookmarking falls in the context of web content organization, which can be very useful knowledge for marketing
• Introduction to Social Bookmarking (My SES NYC 2007 presentation)
• Social Bookmarking and SEO (One of my DMA07 presentations during a post conference seminar with Joseph Jaffee on social media)

What social bookmarking tools to you use? Please share in the comments.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Social Bookmarking Submission Tools | http://www.toprankblog.com

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?

Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI, gave us definitions of social bookmarking and tagging. Social bookmarking allows users to store, organize, search and share information with other users. Tagging is a collaborative practice and a method to help others search for what they want to find. Tagging also can alert us to when new information is available.

A real-time example of this tagging effect happened just a couple hours ago during this session. At the beginning of the event, Danny Sullivan asked us all to tag our posts and images and videos with the tag “smxsocial” so they are alerted when new content from the conference goes live. So this afternoon, I saw the person ahead of me posting to his blog about the chairs we are all sitting in today at SMX Social. As soon as I saw my neighbor post this story to his blog, I sat and waited. Sure enough, 30 minutes later Danny gets up in front of the audience and says “I have never been to a conference where the chairs have been described as ‘butt-numbing’ before.”

Guillaume also outlined the benefits of social bookmarking and tagging for us at the beginning of the session. The top two benefits of social bookmarking, he stated, were helping a website rank better on search engines and can achieve a huge amount of natural links to the website. One huge benefit of tagging is that you can easily see how other users have tagged their content, and see which tags are most important. From here, you can see which tags are most popular, and how to incorporate those tags into your content to get it visible to the most people.

Michael Gray shares those thoughts on tagging when we discussed the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. He pointed out where to find how other users are tagging their items as well as how other users are tagging the items you have also tagged. To best utilize tagging, you need to do your research and find out how people are going to tag the content. In del.icio.us, where spaces are seen as ends of tags, different users could tag the phrase “New York” in a variety of ways, such as “newyork” “new.york” or “new+york”. Find out how people are tagging and how they are searching, and use those tags. You can then increase the amount of visibility your bookmark will get from these sites.

Neil Patel spoke next on how to best use StumbleUpon for social bookmarking and to benefit from StumbleUpon from a marketing standpoint. His steps are outlined below:

- Install the StumbleUpon toolbar. Seems simple enough, but if you think you can get away without the added “clutter” on your browser, you cannot fully leverage StumbleUpon for your benefit. From this toolbar, you can easily stumble website submitted by other users and vote on them. A thumbs up vote will increase the amount of other people that page is shown to, which increases traffic to the website.

- Add friends. A lot of friends. They can be in your interest group, they can be top users, however you want to do it. But this is called social media, folks, so be social about it.

- Vote on sites on a regular basis. If you are just surfing the web during your lunch break and you see an interesting image or story, stumble it. If it hasn’t been submitted yet you will be able to fill out a submission page for this site. Add a good title, description and popular tags, and the site you were just looking at will be seen by many, many users to drive traffic back to that site.

- Use the “Send To” feature on your toolbar. Here you can send the site you stumbled to your mutual friends. Then, before they can stumble anything else, they need to look at the site you sent to them. This can increase traffic by quite a bit, as long as you keep up your network and have a lot of friends to send it to.

So, with tagging and social bookmarking in the marketing arena, the idea is to save items that other users will find interesting and will hopefully see it and save it themselves. This increases traffic and links to those web pages that have been saved, and if you have enough good, interesting and beneficial content saved on your account, you can be seen as a top user, and then almost everything you save will be seen by many. And if you want to make it relevant to yourself too, go for it.

Editor’s note: For an easy to use tool to add social bookmarking links to your web pages or blog, be sure to check out the social bookmarking tool. 

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Session: SMX Guide to Social Bookmarking and Tagging | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

An “active” approach would be appropriate for situations where a web site does not continually create “promotable content”, ie content that provides unique value and is amenable to being saved or passed on to others. Active social bookmarking would involve a strategy of creating such content for the purpose of promoting it on social news, bookmark and networking sites that allow URLs to be shared.

Of course the content will never succeed if it does not satisfy users. Creating a top ten list of has been suggestions will never fly.

Community involvement is a necessity with an active approach, especially through building up of a profile(s), growing a friends list and interacting/contributing via editorial, content submissions, commenting and voting.

“Passive” would be a strategy for organizations with abundant content, such as online publications, sites with original product reviews, blogs, news, how to resources and certain types of user generated content. When there is a significant amount of promotable content, then the passive approach is to discover the best bookmarking and news communities for the kind of content being published and optimize the content management system templates to display “bookmark this” or “share this” invitation links.

These sorts of links are common now on major newspaper web sites like the Wall Street Journal blogs (economics blog) and on information rich consumer product sites like HP’s (digital photography) site.  When a popular site contains abundant promotable content, then those tens of thousands or millions of visitors are exposed to some very valuable win win options for interacting with the site’s content.

Readers are given an easy way to bookmark content to be revisited later or to share it with friends on a social network. At the same time, the web site has a community of enthusiasts generating links 24/7.

Of course, there are special promotions or stories from such content rich sites that are worth promoting, so it would make sense to engage in outreach via blogger relations, microblog platform announcements (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) as well as leveraging the  networks of friends on the respective social media platforms who share interest in the story topic.

Most of the social media promotions we’re involved with use both active and passive social media content promotion. For those companies that want to experiment, a passive approach using social bookmarking buttons on web pages or blog posts can give an idea of how the readership will interact.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Is Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Passive or Active? | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

My session is tomorrow am right after the keynote which is all about social media, “Next Gen Interactive: How Marketers Are Optimizing the Power of Social Media to Connect and Deliver Results”. It’s an interesting idea, a keynote presentation about social media to a group of direct marketers. We’re just making great headway with search engine optimization with this community, so helping everyone get up to speed on the notion of social media should be a great experience.

The biggest challenge the DMA’s Search Engine Marketing Council faces in this regard is how to best provide insight and actionable information in a context direct marketers can relate to. The good news, is that we have several long time search marketers on hand to help with panels such as “Popularity Online: Winning Search and the Social Media Contest“. The session includes includes Heather Lloyd Martin, Detlev Johnson, Mike Moran, Jeanette Kocsis and myself.

My small part of this session will deal specifically with social news and bookmarking services as one thing direct marketers can do now, to start exploring social media channels. The SEO sessions we did at last year’s DM Days went pretty well, so I would expect nothing different this time around.

If you’re in New York this week and going to the DM Days event, contact me via the form on this blog, I’d love to meet some direct marketers or search marketers with an interest in social media.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | DM Days New York 2007 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | SES New York Day 3 Videos | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

In the search marketing space, it seems that social media marketing has been increasingly defined narrowly as what I’ve called “Digg Bait“. In other words, using social news sites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit and services like StumbleUpon to generate traffic.

I suppose these channels are simply overshadowing the other types of media in the world of social media marketing because marketers have been successful using them. However, companies out there looking to understand what social media marketing is, would do well to consider the big picture and not focus on one channel.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Social Media Marketing – Get it Straight | http://www.toprankblog.com

New services added:

• Google Reader
• Diigo
• Netscape
• DZone
• Squidoo
• Looklater
• RecommendzIt
• Segnalo
• StumbleUpon
• Mr. Wrong

Several of these should have been added a long time ago, but hey, we’re busy helping clients.

If you’ve used the TopRank social bookmarks tool in the past, you may want to “freshen up” your links with Google, Netscape and StumbleUpon. Hint hint.

As a reminder here are the distinguishing features:

• Add as few or as many bookmark services as you like
• Provides text links or to save screen space, a drop down menu
• Works with most blog templates
• Works with static web pages
• Does not send visitors to a 3rd party site

The benefit of adding social bookmarks to your blog template or article pages on your web site is to make it easier for readers to share your content with others on social news sites and to make it easier for them to save links or bookmarks to good content using their favorite social bookmarks service.

Unlike some of the other services that launched after the one Thomas created, the TopRank social bookmarks tool will not send your visitors off your blog to a 3rd party site where they can pick the bookmark service to use. The TopRank tool creates links directly to the social news/bookmarking services without any intermediary.

Should you add 35 different social bookmarks under each post? I would not recommend it. As Neil suggested recently, pick the social news and bookmark services that seem to resonate the best with your readership and pick those to display. For now, Online Marketing Blog will continue to display a variety of links to illustrate the tool.

If you have any feedback or enhancement suggestions, we’d love to hear them!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Social Bookmark Tool Updated | http://www.toprankblog.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cameron and Neil write an excellent blog at Pronet Advertising.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | SES Chicago Videos – Neil Patel & Cameron Olthius | http://www.toprankblog.com

Of the many motivating factors for the use of social media press releases, there are two driving forces that stand out: The changing needs of the end consumer and increasing ease of use for the media.

Due to the increasingly social and sharing nature of the web and the increasing importance of press releases as direct to consumer communication tools, it is important for marketers and public relations professionals to adjust their message format and delivery to correspond with the needs of today’s web savvy audience.

Another motivator for using social media with news releases is that editorial resources at many publications are running thinner than ever and expected to do more with less. Social media press releases provide links to additional resources that are helpful for story research and they also package information into formats that are easy to use for quotes and citing references/statistics. Images, audio and video also add impact to the release.

Facilitating news distribution and consumption by utilizing social media elements provides the social media savvy Internet audience with information in a format that is familiar and more functional than a traditional press release. Encouraging the sharing of news via social bookmarks, social news, image and video sharing as well as subscribing to news via RSS provides the news publisher multiple options for meeting the information consumption needs of consumers as well as the media.

In essence, a well written and produced social media press release will make it easier for a journalist to write the story they are tasked with and in a format that is increasingly popular with end consumers.

A few examples of social media press releases:

With video (from Eric Ward)
Anasoft Introduces an All New 3-D Screensaver Just in Time for Halloween

An interesting use of PRWeb
Chevy Presents a Great Opportunity to U.S. College Students

And the one that started it all:
SHIFT Communications Debuts First-Ever Template for “Social Media Press Release”

While additional media and formatting improve the impact these releases can have, the real opportunity with social media press releases is the integration of SEO tactics. As a robust and “social” source of information, the social media press release is of great value, but optimizing that release from a keyword and content perspective provides a distinct competitive advantage.

Think of it along the lines of making a great looking web site. If no one can find it, it’s not worth much. By optimizing the web site to make it easier for searchers to find, you maximize the medium. If you create a robust press release using social media AND you optimize for news search engines, then you’ve made it easy for both the media and end consumers to find your news. That’s the one two punch of social media and optimized press releases.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Why Use Social Media With Your Press Release? | http://www.toprankblog.com

“All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired‚Äôs San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital.”

Congrats to Steve, Alexis, Christopher and Aaron!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Social Bookmark Service Reddit Acquired by Cond?© Nast | http://www.toprankblog.com

There’s a difference between ease of submission and getting to the first page of a social news or bookmarking site, where the most benefit is. The communities of those social media sites provide a self policing effect against most types of SM spam. I agree, that making submissions easier may attract abuse, but it will be noise hanging at the bottom.

Any experienced search or social media marketer knows there are ways to initially “boost” articles on social media sites, but that can only go so far. In most cases, the articles hit the “popular” list (del.icio.us) or first page (Digg) based on merit, not manipulation. ie, it’s pretty tough to “fake” the number of votes required to get that kind of placement. And even if they are faked, there is the self policing editorial process of the community and algorithmic detection of “group voting”.

Example: A friend of mine let me know he posted to Digg a blog post I wrote recently, “Blogger Relations 101“. I took the initiative to then use the form Digg provides on it’s site to invite about 10 people to look at the article summary at Digg. Some of them voted, some of them did not. Within 3 hours the post hit the Digg front page after getting more than 150 votes. The post also hit the del.icio.us popular page with ZERO effort from me. Within 5-6 hours there were over 2500 new unique visitors to my blog all because of one blog post. New traffic continues to roll in. This article would not have gathered attention if it did not have merit.

Another angle on the use of social bookmarks is in the context of the social media press release format. However, social news and bookmark communities (at least now) are not prone to voting for press releases. They vote for articles in mainstream media, blog posts, web 2.0 applications or videos for the most part. This may change, especially as the new media press release format improves and gets used more often.

Anyone concerned about spamming social media should consider that social online communities have built in social and technical self policing mechanisms that are continually evolving. That doesn’t mean the system can’t be gamed, but it’s not exactly the wild west either. The success of social media is directly tied to the quality of content and user experience. Spamming social media directly contradicts that and users are quick to point it out and “bury” or “kill” efforts to do so.

In a way, it’s like spamming thought aggressive search engine optimization or press release spam. Results are short lived, if at all, risky and more often than not, not worth the trouble. Great optimized content is what drives long term value and results anyway. I think the same goes for social media, press releases or any other kind of content. What do you think?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Spamming Social Media | http://www.toprankblog.com

The result? Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon were the clear winners. I seem to remember something a while back about how StumbleUpon Rocks.

Personally, I like tend to use del.cio.us the most for work and StumbleUpon for more recreational surfing. But I have found some excellent resources for work that way.

This information is pretty handy for when you creating your social bookmark links.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Social Bookmark Services Feature Review | http://www.toprankblog.com