07 Sep 2010
The following post is taken from my article on Search Engine Watch a couple weeks ago. As long as these articles continue receiving relatively good responses on SEW (indicating they are of interest), I’ll also be publishing them here. Enjoy!
A search engine’s ultimate mission is to serve the most relevant information it can. But from a search perspective, the emergence of social media has essentially expanded what’s relevant.
While many refer to this subject matter as social media optimization (SMO), I prefer social search optimization due to the specificity. The end game is simple, and nothing new under the sun: maximizing the visibility of relevant content for those looking for it.
But First, a Real War Story
My good friend, Valerie, was recently looking for a job. In anticipation of the process, she updated her LinkedIn profile and did some house cleaning on her Facebook page.
Considering…
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10 Aug 2010
Who Are Your Friends (Really)
A few weeks ago, Paul Adams of Google put out a truly insightful analysis of our online social spheres. He explores how our online connections differ from our offline ones, how we identify friends (as opposed to connections), who we are truly able to keep tabs on, and how all of these things collide in the online space. He argues that targeting people based on perceived influence ignores that we are most connected with roughly 3-10 people who we truly trust. Based on this, it could better serve brands to focus on the breadth of marketing messages, and not individual influencer outreach, to actually impact the end consumer.
And Do You Listen to Them?
This is a scenario that is somewhat contrary to the way we build connections on Twitter. Twitter is not comprised of our inner circle. We are likely to have multiple degrees of separation from some…
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25 May 2010
I believe that you need to properly identify and reach out to individual influencers. It’s something we do for all of our clients. It’s an extremely important part of building relationships, and it’s a nuanced art. But people often miss the importance of understanding and reaching out to the groups or mediums most influential for a brand. Understanding the aggregate influencer is crucial to creating, honing and sharing content that really matters, and getting others to share it for you.
A Complicated Journey
When a brand creates a piece of information, that piece has a twisted, convoluted and often times unexpected set of adventures across the vast world of the interwebs. Once upon a time, this was the simple vision for the internet.
40 years later and things are not so simple. Interesting information about a brand can be shared on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, email, Buzz, text and a wide variety of…
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07 May 2010
ROI is consistently the hot topic in social media. Everyone wants to know the magic formula, the mathematical equation that will produce (justify?) effective online efforts. Metrics in any program need to be focused on an end goal, and those end goals can normally be found in quarterly or yearly strategic business goals. This should come as no surprise; any marketing effort should be focused on driving a bottom line.
There are ways, however, to put some measurement into your online activity. Our Entertainment Group Practice Director, Wendy Hofstetter, came up with a way to get at this. This method takes the standard ROI analysis for a media buy (think banner ads), and applies it to social media efforts. You will be able to show how much your brand would need to spend in order to buy the equivalent amount of impressions you are generating in social media, and determine…
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