Social Media Youth: Marketing to the Empowered Generation

By dan | April 21, 2007

It really wasn’t that long ago that I was in high school (10 -14 years ago). But since that time, the technology that is cheaply available to young people has exponentially increased in scope and ease of use. Teenagers today are incredibly empowered by technology, especially Internet-based technology.

As an example, as teens we occasionally went to the movie theater. But my friends and I knew and believed that we could not produce a professional-quality movie. Even if we could, who in the world would know about it? In fact, as young people, we learned to accept that we had little if any influence in many of the worldly forces that majorly impacted our lives: news, media, politics, etc.

Why bring this up? Because this new generation is growing up surrounded by platforms that allow and encourage active involvement. Tools such as social networking and social media sites. Because of that, they are growing up as participating contributors who determine their own role in the world. Teenagers today can produce a great-looking movie on digital video, and then distribute it to millions on YouTube. But moreover, social media has given individuals powerful yet inexpensive tools for self-expression.

Isn’t this a Marketing blog?

Yes! Here’s is the marketing point. While there is much debate on how marketers can best use social media technologies to influence consumers, there is a constant underlying backbone principle for success. So while new social media tactics will be continually created as newer technologies develop, here is what is certain:

Social media and social networking technologies
enable self-expression and social connection.

Marketers cannot go wrong by using social media marketing tactics that provide platforms for individuals to express themselves and connect with others in new desirable ways. If you design a social media marketing campaign that empowers your users in areas in which they have usually have limited power, you are supplying the fuel that grassroots viral marketing needs to take flight.

Are there any situations where this would not apply?

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Topics: Social Media, Brand, User-Generated, Community, social networking, YouTube, The AJAX Generation | No Comments »

How New SEO Ranking Factors Will Affect Your Blogging

By dan | April 3, 2007

Well, the votes are in. SEOs declare it is officially no longer 2005.

Web trends such as social media sites (which depend on user-generated content) have forced Google and other major search engines to reconsider how they rank the relevancy and authority of websites.

Not long ago, every SEO tip began with something like this:

“Create a targeted niche website. Focus on one topic, so search engines understand which keyword neighborhood your site belongs in.”

In the newly updated Google search engine ranking factors report on SEOmoz, influential SEOs overwhelmingly agree that we are no longer dealing with the same Google from 2005.

The biggest change in how Google ranks websites?
Most SEOs who were polled agree that a website’s global link popularity is the most obvious algorithmic change.

Ok…. what does this mean for bloggers?
It seems that Google’s algorithm update is accommodating to bloggers, review sites, Wikipedia, and basically any other site that displays user-generated content.

Personally, I see the increased importance of Global Link Popularity as Google’s response to the increased levels of user participation now found online. Many extremely popular, authoritative websites consist primarily user-generated content and do not focus on a single concrete topic.

Under older Google algorithms that rewarded niche topic websites, many popular sites containing large amounts of user-generated content would have never found their way to the top of the SERPS. By incorporating data about a site’s global link popularity, Google rewards sites that users visit frequently… even if the topics discussed on those sites tend to vary.

Most user-generated content - including blogs - is written in everyday language and cannot easily be contained inside a rigid niche topical focus.

Bottom line?
Google redefined the way it ranks websites to accommodate and reward bloggers & other sites containing user-generated content.

The updates reflect that Google strives to keep pace with the social web. Blog on!

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Topics: Social Media, User-Generated, linking, Google, SEO | 1 Comment »

Small Business Social Media: Just Get Involved

By dan | April 2, 2007

Over on SearchEngineLand, Matt McGee wrote an excellent piece explaining how a small business can start profitably utilizing social media to increase traffic, build their brand, and make sales. The article demonstrates that several simple steps can be taken that even bootstrapping small businesses can afford.

What’s on the list? Starting a blog. Commenting on other blogs. Sharing media. And more.

What’s the common thread? Community involvement. The biggest step a small business can take toward applying social media marketing to their website is to simply…. join the social web.

Social marketing enables small businesses to engage their customers and potential customers:

  1. on topics they they find interesting
  2. in the online spaces where they naturally congregate.

I agree with Matt that having a blog opens up a number of opportunities. But if setting up your own blog is to big of a commitment at this point, start joining groups and communities that your customers belong to.

And once you join online community groups, leave the hyped-up marketing spin back at the office. Your biggest benefit will come when you make yourself available to potential customers as the knowledgeable & caring expert resource of your industry niche.

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Topics: Social Media, Brand, Small Business, Community | No Comments »

Black Hat Social Media Marketing Is A Failed Concept

By dan | March 24, 2007

Social media sites, news tagging sites, bookmarking sites.

These services are powerful resources for marketing or brand-building your brand, but you just can’t step into them with the usual SEO mentality. I’m talking black hat tactics. The tricks of dark SEO that are meant to manipulate search engines by artificially inflating the perceived value of a site. Yep, that stuff won’t work on social media sites.

However, if you’re a white hatter, then social media marketing is just a natural extension of your SEO skills, an SEO 2.0 of sorts. More on this in a second..

Here are reasons why black hat SEO dies with social media. Well, dies is a strong word. Either way, web 2.0 is making the black hat payoff less and less rewarding.

Black hat SEO is meant for machines. The optimization strives to manipulate search engine algorithms. Social media sites, however, have much lower dependence on algorithms. Posts are organized by tags and categories created by human beings. Social media marketing, then, must focus on influencing people. And people are not won over by cloaking trickery and onpage optimization factors such as keyword density.

Much black hat SEO is focused on generating continuous first time visitors through search engines. These are people who most likely have never heard of your site, and you have no relationship with them. Usually, you are not looking for a relationship with them. Many black hat SEO tactics are largely focused making a quick buck from first-time visitors.

Since individuals search Google (not groups or communities) multiple search engine users can stumble upon the same black hat website without being warned, even if other searchers have had bad experiences at the shady site.

So each web searcher unfortunately must blindly click on each search result without consulting the experiences of previous web searchers. But social media sites, however, depend on community involvement as a method for promoting posted content to higher visibility. Social media users benefit from the comments or voting information of other members of the community. This interaction allows the community to pass its collective wisdom on to each user. The result is that a black hatter can only fool a small number of users before he is outed by the community.

Traditional search engines created an environment that rewarded crafty black hat SEOs and spammers. Social media is different. The community interaction which is built into the structure of social media sites provides only diminishing rewards to black hat tactics. It makes black hat tactics more expensive & more time-consuming with smaller paydays. Instead, social media sites reward promotion tactics that involve quality user-participation, building a reputation, and long-term consistency.

What about white hat SEOs? I agree with Cameron Olthuis. White hats should be able to make the transition to social media fairly effortlessly. Why? Because white hat tactics are largely based around writing highly-useful, in-demand content and providing website visitors with valued resources. And these should be the same goals of the social media marketer: know your audience and feed them what they want!

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Topics: Social Media, Credibility, Black Hat, White Hat, SPAM | No Comments »

TrailFire: Social Media Marketing Tool For Your Sales Page

By dan | February 21, 2007

While it is appropriate to ask whether we need another bookmarking service, I think TrailFire provides a unique value to online marketers. Yes, you can bookmark and share individual sites with del.icio.us, and that serves a very useful function. But TrailFire allows you to not only group bookmarks together, but actually create an ordered path for visiting the sites. Below I outline how TrailFire can be used to create powerful credibility for your product or service at the actual point of online purchase.

TrailFire could be extremely lucrative for online marketers.

Why? Often, an online sale is lost simply because the marketer could not demonstrate enough credibility to gain a potential purchaser’s trust.

TrailFire is a social media marketing tool that can lessen visitors’ resistance and buying hesitation in most online purchasing situations.

How?
What if the potential buyer happened to stumble onto information on reputable independent sites that:

I don’t know, but that sounds like a online marketer’s dream. The goal is to build credibility, and it’s the same reason why bloggers linkbait. Marketers usually avoid sending visitors from their sales page to independent websites, because the results are too unpredictable. Once a visitor exits your site, you lose the ability to influence him or her. The first site you send your visit to might link to another site that displays information that will ruin your sale.

But TrailFire puts all of this under the marketer’s editorial control.

How does TrailFire enable a marketer to do this?
As, a marketer, TrailFire allows you to:

  1. Hand-pick a select group of independent reputable webpages that support the sales information on your site.
  2. Order them as a sequential path so visitor are led through a specific path to reach your desired conclusion about your product.
  3. Explain the significance of the information mentioned on each website.
  4. Then end the TrailFire trail by returning the visitor to your sales page to make the purchase.

TrailFire allows the Internet marketer to select independent webpages that create a clear path of sales logic for your visitors to follow. With TrailFire you can safely benefit from the credibility of reputable independent sites, but maintain total control over which sites your visitors are sent to.

Now any Internet marketer can draw upon the dataset of the entire Internet to demonstrate to visitors why they urgently need to buy their product or service. Keep in mind that a TrailFire trail can include webpages from any source. This includes authoritative .gov & .edu pages.

Next to your TrailFire link on your sales page, you can even mention that this trail includes webpages from extremely reputable government sources, university sources, etc. It doesn’t hurt to frame the trail, does it? Why not give your visitor expectations that increase the likelihood of you making a sale?

What are your thoughts about TrailFire’s potential as a sales & marketing tool?

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Topics: Social Media, linking, Sales, TrailFire, Credibility | 2 Comments »

LinkBaiting: Marketing to Our Peers

By dan | February 20, 2007

Peter Young wrote a great summary and examples of linkbait hooks explained in Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing.

I think the concept of linkbaiting demonstrates that social media and blogging have created a new type of customer segment that businesses must recognize to remain competitive. Even if this customer segment isn’t completely new, the new social environment of the Internet has made this segment extremely important for succeeding in the social web.

Just to clarify, by customer segments I mean groups that your company directs marketing messages to:

I believe social media has created a new customer segment: our peer group (other active voices in your industry). We market to and strive to influence people who are in the same field as we are. Why is this now important to success? Because in a social network, your message to website visitors is no longer taken in a vacuum. More information is available to web surfers. Plus, merely obtaining a soapbox no longer implies that you are knowledgeable of legit.

In short, social media has made your reputation become increasingly important for business success.

The web’s current structure of social media networks reward reputable sources that supply information. Niche authorities.
By being recognized, referenced, and praised by your peers, your message to your consumer audience is given much more weight. You become an authority.

Since gaining peer recognition can boost your business, our peers have become a major customer segment. Plus, peer recognition obviously also boosts your search engine ranking. And high search engine rankings (usually) confirm someone’s niche authority.

Linkbaiting is a common method for marketing to our peer group.
Links are the new currency.

Thoughts?

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Topics: Social Media, linking, Peer Marketing | 1 Comment »

Successful Brands Must Become Social Media Architects

By dan | February 20, 2007

Recently Sally Falkow published an article on Smart Social Media Thinking. And I agree that many companies have failed miserably in their attempt to jump on social media marketing. Unfortunately, many more companies will lose money or brand equity improperly marketing in a web 2.0 environment.

Many big, established corporations see opportunity in social media markets, but are still stuck in an “old world” mentality: thinking they can muscle a user population to get the results they want. Yahoo has been restructuring to make it easier for advertisers use social networks.

By uniting existing social networkers who have similar brand preferences, Pontiac was able remove much of the brand-equity-related risk that comes with user-generated content. Another benefit of this tactic is that all of aggregated users were already comfortable with social networking technology. I would imagine that many consumers are still lacking technology familiarity, which limits a brand’s ability utilize social media marketing in some markets.

The Current Content Abundance

With the recent rush of new content posted online by website users, we now have an abundance of content available to us online. I believe any new service that can organize this content in new useful ways can secure some social media market share. Andy Monfried mentions “data points, actions and behaviors that are NOT being utilized at all” in current social media networks.

Simply by aggregating & sorting existing content in new useful ways, companies create value for users and can increase their own brand equity. I suppose one goal for brands sponsoring a social network is to aggregate content that is both beneficial to users AND creates a favorable image of your brand.

The good news is that basic human nature makes people want to connect with each other. And each human relationship produce synergies - positive or negative - that wasn’t present before the individuals connected. Advertisers can strive to connect people whose relationship will create synergy that increases the perceived value of the brand. So the ideal byproduct of the user-to-user social relationship, will cause each user to strengthen his/her individual relationship to the brand.

Which types of relationships produce synergies that create an environment of increased value for your brand? This could be a relevant question for advertisers researching their entry into social media marketing.

Launching a Social Network is Like Firing a Missile, Not Flying a Helicopter

Once the social network “takes off”, good luck trying to guide it or steer it in new directions. Brand-sponsored social networks have had little success manipulating online communities for brand benefits. Users can sniff out a marketing pitch very quickly (though advertisers are getting trickier), and they will turn on your brand in a minute.

How Brands Can Safely Exert Control

Any brand that creates an online community has incredible power in deciding how that community is initially designed. By strategically designing the social media network, a brand can create an environment that strongly encourages the types of user behaviors that will increase brand equity. While designing, ask questions like:

Consider a master chess player, planning their next 20 moves in advance. By anticipating user behavior, it is possible to design the social media service that encourages the desired user behaviors. In the same way, a brand could design the social network’s framework for user interactions, so that built-in sociological or technological barriers discourage user behavior that will reduce brand equity.

Another analogy is like perfectly placing an entire room of dominoes, so that every one gets knocked down simply by pushing domino number one. Just like with dominoes, once you allow user interaction, the whole process is out of your control. However, by taking the time to ensure that each domino is perfectly in it’s correct place, you can confidently start the process knowing that you will achieve the desired result.
This video shows 4,000,000 dominoes get knocked down by a single finger.

Think about a Christopher Guest movie, like A Mighty Wind. His movies are perfect examples of:

How are his movies written, directed, and shot? (I will now attempt to summarize, but I don’t claim 100% detailed accuracy of the exact process. Here’s the shorthand of it:) The characters are given detailed backstories. The script is written so that each scene in planned out, but no dialog is provided. Each actor simply “acts out” how their character (with his/her specific backstory) would act in the situation created in each scene.

How does this method apply to building a social media service? Design the social user environment so that the natural interaction of users produces your desired brand results. Once the environment is carefully crafted, bring the users into the environment. Then just allow them act and interact naturally within your structured environment.

His movies allow actors to completely improvise throughout the entire story, but in an extremely structured environment.

All of the above factors are explicitly designed to create a successful result, while allowing the actors (think social media users) to retain complete freedom and act naturally in any given moment.

This is one way that brands can be successful using social media networks.

-dan

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Topics: Social Media, Brand, User-Generated | No Comments »

Embrace the Marketing Mutation!

By dan | February 17, 2007

Marketing Mutation: Marketer’s adaptation caused by the ongoing process of relatively permanent changes in the online environment that reduce or eliminate the benefits derived from previously effective marketing tactics.

This blog is dedicated to how online marketing strategy copes with the rapidly changing online environment.

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Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »

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