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.
Building […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on November 11th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Social Media Smarts and social-media-marketing and Pubcon2008 and Social Bookmarking and Pubcon and SEO and Social Networking and Social Media and Online 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.
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 […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on August 20th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on social-media-marketing and smo and social-media-optimization and sessanjose08 and smm and Social Bookmarking and search engine strategies and Social Networking and toprank and Social Media and Online Marketing.
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 the New York Times and Minneapolis Star Tribune are always 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 and other tools and scripts that can be added to a website 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?
Sponsored By: Search Engine Optimization
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on July 11th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Social Bookmarking and social-bookmarks and social-news and Blog Marketing and Social Media and Blogging and Reader Polls and Online Marketing.
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.
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 […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on April 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on social marketing and muhammad saleem and social-media-optimization and web 2.0 expo and Social Bookmarking and Other Events and SEO SEM Conferences and SEO and Social Media and Online Marketing.
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 […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on January 30th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on erica forrette and delicious and Debra Mastaler and bill hartzer and peter himler and steven bradley and youtube and tris hussey and todd defren and technorati and Aaron Wall and Social Media Smarts and neil patel and dan perry and Social Media and Social Networking and Social Bookmarking and social media marketing and matt mcgee and twitter and linkedin and yahoo answers and flickr.
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 […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on January 18th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on marketing and small business seo and search engine optimization tips and search marketing tips and small business and social media marketing and Social Bookmarking and Social Media and SEO Tips and universal search and Blog Marketing and SEO.
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.
For more aggressive online marketers, waiting for visitors to find your content and then decide to […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on January 7th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on social media marketing and social bookmarks and Social Bookmarking and Blog Marketing and interactive marketing and Online Marketing.
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 […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on October 17th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on smxsocial and tagging and Social Bookmarking and smx social media and Search Marketing Expo and smx and Social Media.
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.
An “active” approach would be appropriate for situations where a web site does not continually create “promotable content”, ie content […]
Read the Rest of the Article…
Written by on October 16th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on social media marketing and Social Bookmarking and social media optimization and Social Media and Social Networking.