B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the art of attracting, engaging and inspiring communities on social networks to discover, consume, share and act on brand social content.

 

92% of companies today consider social media important for their business but keeping up with the latest best practices, social media platforms and changes in the industry can be a challenge for brand marketers. Recognized as a top social media blog by Social Media Examiner and many others, TopRank solves that challenge by sharing social media marketing best practices, industry news, interviews, book reviews and liveblogging of presentations at industry conferences.

 

Browse our social media marketing articles to find the answers to your most pressing social media questions.

 

Marketing with Social Media

Leveraging Social Media
This is actually the first session that I covered at the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference, but I did not get a chance to clean up my notes and post until now. It was a good session about a topic that is very close to the consulting practice of our PR and marketing agency.

Part of the ClickZ track, this session was moderated by Rebecca Lieb and included Gary Stein of Ammo Marketing, Scott Meyer of About.com, Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, a new social networking service and Brian Monahan from IPG.

First up is Gary Stein who introduces the notion of “clique-through”, which means to use social media to spread your message deep but not wide. The “clique-through” approach is to get specific segments to adopt a particular message. It offers more long term value than the “lightning in a bottle” associated with buzz marketing.


Marketing with Social Media

ad:tech Chicago – Advertising with Social Media

ad:tech Chicago is coming along nicely. Coverage of the conference by Online Marketing Blog as well as DMNews and iMedia Connection is keeping those who were not able to attend well informed. Here’s the next installement of our coverage:
Any discussion about social media and social networking is going to involve MySpace. This session did exactly that with some aspect of MySpace being included in just about every speaker’s contribution to the session.

Rather than a presentation format, moderator David Carlick of Vantage Point Venture Partners introduces “Social Media: The Dynamics of the Genre and the Opportunities for Marketers” as a Q and A session.

Carlick starts things out talking about MySpace as a way to explain social media and social networking. He shows a MySpace news clip: MySpace most popular site over Yahoo and Google. The challenge with MySpace is how to leverage advertising.


ad:tech Chicago – Advertising with Social Media

Feeding Journalists With Deli.cio.us

Todd Defren posts a nice rundown on using del.icio.us for an online PR initiative for bzzagent. Deli.cio.us is used to create content of value to journalists covering WOMM – the word of mouth marketing industry of which bzzagent is the focus.

What are we doing here? Providing any writer who is interested in WOMM with a customized research page containing the top news in the space, including first-hand reaction — on a daily basis — by a WOMM industry pioneer. For media types, et al., who subscribe to the RSS feed of that del.icio.us page, that’s a daily dose of Thought Leadership!


Feeding Journalists With Deli.cio.us

PRWeb Tags it Up

PRWeb is at it again with a new announcement on the addition of Technorati and PRWeb tags to the PRWeb news wire and press release distribution service. The press release, “Holy SHIFT! PRWeb Plays Tag with Social Media” comments that the new features will make it easy to add Technorati and PRWeb specific tags to your press releases.

The SHIFT Communications’ social media release was in part a motivator for the new services as the release from PRWeb states:

“If you spend the time to create a press release following the template
outlined by SHIFT Communications, all you have is an electronic
document unless you have a distribution platform that supports its
features. PRWeb is that platform,” said David McInnis, CEO and Founder
of PRWeb.


PRWeb Tags it Up

marktd.com is Digg for marketing

Piers Fawkes from PSFK sent me a heads up on his latest channel, Marktd which is a library of marketing articles weighted in importance by users. It works like digg or del.icio.us where users submit articles and others vote on them. Articles are displayed as “New”, “Latest” or “Top” based on votes. The categories range from BtoB to Word of Mouth with some Public Relations in between. But nothing about search marketing. Perhaps that’s a category that should be added?

Submit your marketing stories to Marktd.com


marktd.com is Digg for marketing

Yahoo Updates MyWeb

Yahoo MyWeb

Yahoo SearchBlog has announced the update of the Yahoo MyWeb service. The MyWeb blog also offers feature details including:

  • Top Tags and Interesting Today
  • Finding Friends
  • Searching
  • Export

Yahoo continues to push further into the realm of “social search” and the implications for search marketing is significant.¬† The editorial relevancy that comes with the links as well as tags from the web at large promises to make searching a much different experience than it is now. Hopefully quality is one of those characteristics. But how will search marketers change what they do to help clients take advantage of the changing nature of search relevancy?


Yahoo Updates MyWeb

Defining Tagging

This is a re-post, with minor edits, from my blog, Blog on a Stick. I felt that it was worthy of posting here too.
-Thanks Thomas

For those that are just jumping into the blog world, or the Web 2.0 world for that matter, there is a new idea out there called tagging. Much like folders or categories, it’s a way of keeping things organized.

Lets start out simple with folders.

On your computer you have folders. Maybe a documents folder for paperwork, pictures folder for pictures and so on. You’ve probably even created your own folders. “Christmas 2005” or “Work Documents” The idea is to keep your files organized on your hard drive. Simple enough.


Defining Tagging

The Power of the Link

Last night a PR manager from the New Yorker emailed me about the Terry Semel interview, so I watched it and put up a link to the actual video. I emailed a few SEO related bloggers about it and thought nothing more. (other than the interview being great insight into Yahoo).

While the bloggers I emailed did not mention the video, a few other sites did link to the blog post I put up about it including Digg.com (front page right now) and the Financial Times.

While I’ve had other things hit Digg and grow traffic as part of a SEO program, this was 100% natural. There was no suggested email to a large network of friends with digg accounts or anything like that. Not that I would ever do THAT.


The Power of the Link

Blogs RSS, Podcasts – Pubcon Boston

This session covered Blogs, RSS and Podcasts with moderation duties performed by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink.
First up is Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. “The Art of the Feed”.

The “elegance” in RSS is in the distribution possibilities: Desktop reader, email addon, web browser and mobile devices.

The art of RSS is evident in blogs, sites, pdc, vblogs, rss search engines and web 2.0 applications. (press releases via PRWeb)

Build your RSS feeds right the first time. Considerations:
– What do you want to feed? (content sources)
– How many feeds?
– How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh?
– How much content should you include in each feed entry?
– What kind of content will the feed include? test, audio or video?
– How will you ping the feeds at first and then on each update?
– How to measure performance?


Blogs RSS, Podcasts – Pubcon Boston

10 Creative Traffic Building Ideas

Traffic, everyone wants it and is trying really hard to get more people to their site. Good news, there are creative ways to bring people in without doing a lot of work.

1) Social Bookmarking. It’s been around long enough that some people know all about it and have a tendency to just search del.icio.us or Furl for what they want. Social sites are basically like a user defined search engine. Are you listed? Make sure to bookmark yourself every now and then and add social bookmark links to your blog posts and/or web pages so others can bookmark you too.


10 Creative Traffic Building Ideas

Introduction to Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarking is a way to archive what you find interesting on the web. The popularity of social bookmarks has waned with the growth of social networks but there are still several bookmarking tools in use.

Here’s a presentation that introduces the basics of social bookmarking and how marketers can take advantage of these tools.

Are you using social bookmarks to archive information on the web? Do you use social bookmarking as a marketing tactic?


Introduction to Social Bookmarks