Online Marketing Blog

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

There are two perspectives on creative link building that I’ve been thinking about lately involving creating content and resources that offer value and the sensationalism of content promoted through social news communities. My take is that link bait focuses on creating unique, useful and provocative content that people respond to by linking to it and sharing with others.

Digg bait, which is not limited to Digg but all social news and bookmarking sites, focuses specifically on the interests of social communities and what they respond to. With Digg bait, the power is not in the usefulness and value of the content, but the title and description of the news item, sometimes bordering on the sensational. Think tabloid style writing, “Elvis gives birth to alien baby”.

Over the past 6 months we’ve been doing a bit of resource aggregation regarding social media both as a practical application for marketing client content online as well as reviewing research conducted on social media usage. There’s not a lot of research out there but here are a few interesting reports:

• BIGresearch - Simultaneous Media Usage Study

• University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research - Inc. 500 Companies Fast Adopters of Social Media

• Yahoo! and comScore Networks Study Reveals Influential Consumers Can Be Reached Through Search, Social Media and Communication Tools

A few interesting tools I’ve been made aware of recently that online marketers could use for making their social media more interesting or different include the following tools to add text to images or video:

BubblePLY - Enables you to add narrative bubbles to video. From a practical standpoint, this is helpful for offering translated versions of a video.

Comeeko - Create comic strips from your photos.

I’m sure there are a host of other tools for mashing up and modifying original media. Feel free to suggest your favorites in the comments.

Today I’m doing an online radio interview over at RSS Ray on social media and search engine optimization. Our discussion will cover fundamentals of social media and how businesses, small and large, might use such tactics as part of their online marketing mix. We’ll also discuss blog marketing and press release optimization.

The kind of social media optimization and marketing that gets the most play these days is hitting the home page of digg or getting tons of traffic from Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, etc. Many of the SMO/SMM campaigns we run achieve these kinds of results, but it’s not the end goal. If you’re familiar with the services we provide at TopRank, you’ll know we take a holistic approach to search marketing and view things like social media on a longer term basis.

The super popular social bookmarks tool that Thomas created last year has recently been updated. We’ve been keeping him exceptionally busy with “client projects that are fun, interesting, challenging” for quite a while, but he was still able to sneak in a quick update and added several social news and bookmarking services.

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.

WebProNews has posted another great video interview, this time with Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel. In this interview, Mike McDonald of WPN discusses social media optimization and digg with Todd and Neil who presented on a SMO session at SES Chicago.

Speaking of social media, Neil and Cameron’s Pronet Advertising blog was awarded “Best Blog on Social Media Optimization” in Search Engine Journal’s recent Blog Awards. Barry does the best roundup of the blog winners over at Search Engine Land though. Note to Loren: Please take notes from Barry, it would be easier to find the good stuff on SEJ!

David Dalka on social media and an improved democracy: “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”

Trouble at Netscape, Trouble at digg? Graywolf and Calcanis share their insight.

MarketSmart Interactive closes it’s doors. That’s too bad because we used to get a good number of inquiries from their dissatisfied clients.

Google’s Blogger now offers free domain hosting or mapping for blogs.

FeedBurner’s BlogBeat blog stats now available. I spoke with Rick Klau about this at WMW Pubcon in Vegas but he didn’t give many details.

The WebProNews video blog posted an interview Mike McDonald did with myself and Stephan Spencer during the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference where we talk about marketing and public relations issues with blogs and social media.

Congrats to Mike, Chris and Richard on a great job with these videos!

The sheer irony of this post nearly kills me as I’ve had it in my queue to post for a few weeks now. In a presentation I gave at SES Chicago, a video interview with WebProNews and in previous blog posts, I have articulated both a naive confidence in the social news communities at being able to capably police spam as well as reasons not to spam social media in the first place.

This is a bit of a late post but I want to get it out there before it gets swallowed up by all the other half-finished posts in my WordPress control panel.

I am happy to say that the session on social media optimization with Neil Patel, Andy Hagans, Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat and I during SES Chicago last week went pretty well. Todd and I did not do PowerPoint presentations but we did get a few minutes to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about SMO.

Neil started things off with a very unique and humorous explanation of Wikipedia. Basically, “Don’t spam Wikipedia.”

This ClickZ track session on advertising with social media was moderated by Rebecca Lieb and included Gary Stein, Henry Copeland, Bill Flitter and Marc Schiller. I covered a very similar session on social media and advertising at Chicago ad:tech earlier this summer a lot more in depth than this post.

First up was Gary Stein who says social media is a way companies can expand beyond the reach of regular advertising.

Consumers are most responsive when you meet them as equals which is most evident with consumer recommendations. When you start partnering with your consumers and allow them to partner with each other in your presence, is when you can gain real value from social media.