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Crystal Light Challenged Getting Ready For Bikini Season

Posted on 24. Feb, 2012 by Lisa Loeffler in Blog, brand communities, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media case study, social media optimization, social media strategy, Video Marketing

Guest post by Lisa Loeffler, Research & Analysis Lead at Convince & Convert. She is also founder and principal of Genuine Media, a marketing agency that helps clients build their individual and brand reputation through social media.

It started out innocently when I saw Crystal Light’s new TV commercial last month.

After rewinding it a handful of times and rolling in my personal laughter I thought it was funny enough to share. I grabbed the footage on my iPhone and loaded it up on YouTube.

Watch the video now to follow along on this post.

Like many other social media marketers you need to know a bit about SEO. And after loading the video to my YouTube channel I ran through my mental check list to optimize the title, description, tags etc. I even added a poll question for a little extra fun in the video description: “If you were stuck on a deserted island, what would you want to have the most?”

The next day out of curiosity I checked the views. I was pretty surprised to have more than 300 hits in 24 hours and 50 visits to my website. Pretty good stats as Crystal Light’s YouTube video only had 1,490 hits and they’d loaded their video 13 days before I did.

Today, seven weeks later, I have approximately 36K hits with 116 likes, 42 dislikes and a lot of comments – many of which I’ve had to remove for their surprising illicit content.

I attribute my video’s success mainly to optimizing my YouTube video, because through some searches (in which I logged out of Google) my video usually comes up number one for the terms “Crystal Light Commercial,” “Crystal Light Bikini Beach,” “Crystal Light Plane Crash Commercial.”

Below you can see the difference in the meta titles, description, tags, etc. between Crystal Light’s and mine. Initially when Crystal Light posted the video, they had no link directing visitors to their Facebook page. This was added approximately three weeks after the video was uploaded around the middle of January.

Crystal Light Commercial lacking SEO optimization and campaign detail.

My Commercial, SEO Optimized:

Curious to see what other people were saying about the commercial, I headed over to Crystal Light’s Facebook and Twitter sites.

When I landed on Crystal Light’s Facebook page I saw this fan gate…

But not until after liking Crystal Light’s page did I see this fan gate…where Crystal Light asks viewers to vote on the commercial’s ending. You can read the ending here.

I checked their Facebook wall and discovered they were promoting the contest regularly there…

As well as on Twitter…

But as an initial non-Crystal Light Facebook fan landing on their welcome page I was confused.

I, and I’m sure several thousands more, didn’t see the Crystal Light Challenge campaign reveal until after liking Crystal Light’s Facebook page. I wonder if they lost other people in the transition, especially those who didn’t know they had to like Crystal Light’s page in order to participate in the campaign after being directed from YouTube, Twitter or just casually landing on their campaign page.

That’s why it’s always important to test your campaigns before they go live. If possible, utilize some people outside your organization and others who may not be readily familiar with your brand so you can gain more audience perspective.

Crystal Light Challenge Campaign Overview

What they got right:

• Shock Value. Don’t over think the plane crash bit – this video is fabulously funny!
• Takes you to the fantasy and out of every-day life.
• Creates controversy and passion. People love it OR hate it!
• Attempt at social media integration – but doesn’t hit the mark.

What they could have improved:

• Add CTA (Call-to-Action) at end of TV commercial to drive viewers to Facebook promo landing page
• Push out official press release or SMR (social media release) to tease it
• Promote “Crystal Light Challenge” commercial on website
• Enhance YouTube SEO description and tags
• Drive people to “Crystal Light Challenge” landing page with Facebook/Twitter Ads or retargeting program.

What they got wrong:

• Bury the promo behind the fan gate on Facebook. You can’t see the promo until you “like” Crystal Light’s Facebook page.
• Non-Fans who visit via Twitter are directed to the fan gate page asking them to join the Crystal Light community – Again no mention of the promo on fan gate prior to “Liking” page
• Poor SEO optimization of YouTube video
• Title, tags, description lack depth for optimized search
• A little too late: They initially didn’t have a URL to drive people to Facebook, but added the link approximately 3 weeks after video launch.

I’m sure Kraft spent thousands of dollars hiring a creative agency, scheduling TV airtime, developing campaign graphics and utilizing their social media marketing team. But they failed to take full advantage of the entire tool chest to promote their ad and just picked a few – Facebook, Twitter & YouTube.

If they had taken the time to integrate their campaign across more channels, they may have experienced media success similar to Old Spice – The Man You Could Smell Like.

Take away:

Don’t make art for art’s sake.

When you develop an advertising campaign for your brand, step back and take a look at all the channels you can re-atomize your creative content to grab the most eyeballs.

Incorporate a strategic blend of social media, SEO, your PR and social teams, website, email and other channels you think (through research and testing) will get you in front of your customers and potential new customers.

Remember to develop a list of success metrics for your campaign (comments, reposts, downloads, forwards, RTs, etc.) and standardize your list against future campaigns so you’re measuring apples to apples.

If you do…You’re likely to come up with bigger success and more profits.

(Video) 4 Mistakes You Make When Posting Video on Your Blog

Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media optimization, video, Video Marketing

Guest post written by Rocky Walls, who has more than 10 years’ experience in digital content creation. As CEO of 12 Stars Media Productions, Rocky works with businesses to create video that’s so real and simple it changes audiences into relationships.

It’s no secret that embedding videos on your blog post is a great way to attract readership and conversion. However, using video to its fullest potential involves more work than slapping an embed code on an otherwise empty post. Here are four common mistakes we’ve seen along with some tips to help ensure that you make the most out of a video on your blog post.

1) No Indication That There is a Video in the Post

You should let your readers know right away that your blog post contains a video. You can accomplish this in two ways.

First, specify it in the title of the post. A good way to do this is to star the title out with “(VIDEO)” – this will let folks know right away that the blog post contains a video. Following “(VIDEO)” write your title as your normally would. For example, a good video blog post title would look something like: “(VIDEO) A Private Tour of Our Offices.”

Secondly, be sure your embedded video appears relatively close to the top of the post. If possible, you want to avoid the video appearing below the fold. Even if readers ignore the title of your post, they will see right away that there is a video on the post if it appears towards the top.

2) No Text Content

Too often we see blog posts that are comprised solely of an embedded video. It’s a good idea to give your readers some context before asking them to watch an entire video. Introduce your video with a few sentences, and then summarize the video in a paragraph below. If you’ve transcribed the A-Roll in your video, you can use some of that content to form the summary paragraph.

(Editor’s note: Here at Convince & Convert, we use Speechpad.com to transcribe our video interviews and the http://socialpros.com podcast)

3) No Customization 

Another common mistake is not optimizing the size of the video to the width of your blog. Whether you use the old embed code or an iframe from YouTube, the first line of the embed code will always start with <object width=”560″ height=”315″> – make sure that the width of the video doesn’t exceed the width of your blog’s content column. It’s best to find the width of the column and set your video width to just slightly less. Don’t be afraid to employ a little trial and error – set a resolution, check to see how it looks, and then make a tweak if its necessary. The height will always conform to the width by automatically adding black bars to the top and bottom of the video in order to maintain the aspect ratio.

You can also customize the code for other aesthetic value and advanced functionality, such as allowing/not allowing related videos and setting a specific start time. Check out this post from the 12 Stars Media blog that talks about ways to customize your embed code to optimize overall viewer experience.

Boost Your Digital PR & Marketing Skills with Social Media Optimization

Posted on 21. Oct, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, content marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, PR Conferences, public relations, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media optimization, social media seo, social media tools

By now you know I’m as sold as one can be on the intersection of Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing. It’s the essence of the core principles of information Discovery, Consumption and Engagement that I talk about in Optimize and at conferences like PRSA International in Orlando this week.

Information production, sharing and consumption is accelerating faster than marketers (or consumers) can keep up with. A lot of that information is user generated content from social sharing and networking sites. Internet Marketers have long been savvy about creating, optimizing and promoting content that’s findable and relevant for target audiences.  Marketers aren’t the only corporate departments creating content in need of an audience though.

Public Relations, Media Relations, Corporate Communications, Investor Relations and many other groups part of corporate MarCom publish content to the web. Audiences may vary, from journalists and reporters doing story research to investors and potential business partners. Increasingly, PR departments are publishing direct to consumer news content, ala “brand as publisher”.

My presentation at PRSA International in Orlando focused on how PR practitioners can realize the emerging opportunities for shifts in consumer information trends, how PR content can be optimized and socialized, tools to scale and practical social media optimization tactics to elevate search visibility of social media and social news content. Here’s the embedded deck from Slideshare:

Here are the specific SEO tactics for social media in this presentation and links to other more in-depth articles on those topics:

• Blog SEO Tips – Blog Optimization – also check out our Blogging category with nearly 8 years of blog marketing tips.
• Facebook SEO - Facebook SEO Tips: Optimizing for an Audience of 800 Million
• LinkedIn SEO – Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile to Improve SEO for Your Company
• Twitter SEO –  How to Use Twitter for SEO
• YouTube SEO – 5 Basic Tips for Video Optimization
• Google+ SEO – How Google+ Will Affect SEO for Your Website

Kikolani has some great social content SEO tips posted recently as well.

Also, here are the tools mentioned in the presentation:

• RavenTools – Paid tool. For basic SEO project management & reporting.
• SocialMention – Free social media search engine and social topic search tool.
• Google Keywords Tool – Free. Basic tool for researching which words/phrases are most used on Google and how competitive they are.
• Google Insights – Free. Shows trends and comparison of keyword phrase popularity (interest) over time plus geographic information.
• Ubersuggest – Free. Handy tool that makes Google autocomplete suggested search phrases usable. Works for Google.com and Google News queries.
• Scribe – Paid tool. WordPress plugin and standalone web service that provides real-time feedback on article keyword optimization.
• Majestic SEO – Paid tool. Think of this as a clipping report for links, including information about quantity, quality and type. Has a historical feature that’s quite handy for trending.
• SEMRush – Paid tool. Want to know what your site or your competitors’ sites are ranking for organically on Google? And their pay per click ads? This is the tool. Also has a trending and comparison feature.

There are many, many more Social Media Optimization and straight SEO tools out there – certainly many more that are advanced, private or for enterprise sized sites. These are basic, easy to use tools that are free or low cost that Public Relations and Communications professionals can use to optimize their news and social content for better keyword relevancy. More relevant (and links) means better visibility in search and a better user experience.

Thanks to PRSA for another great International conference!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Boost Your Digital PR & Marketing Skills with Social Media Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

Get Optimized & Start Engaging: Essential Social Media Marketing Tips

Posted on 11. Oct, 2011 by AshleyZ in Blog, facebook, linkedIn, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social media optimization, Twitter

[Note from Lee: I am happy to introduce readers of Online Marketing Blog to our newest contributor, AshleyZ.  A human dynamo for getting things done, Ashley has literally hit the ground running and works for TopRank as a Marketing Manager. She'll be sharing her smarts here and  helping to elevate TopRank's Marketing to more impressive levels of awesome.]

The social web has opened the door to many opportunities for individuals to share their opinions on everything from the weather to politics to the really cute thing their dog just did.  Business social media users however, must take a much more structured approach to sharing information and interacting with their prospects and clients.

A haphazard approach to social media for business rarely works.  Why?  In order to remain competitive in the online marketplace it’s important to provide potential buyers with valuable information that they will not only absorb, but share with others.  What are some practical approaches that can be taken to improve content quality and increase both search and social media visibility?  I’ll give you a hint: social media and  search engine optimization. Here are a few tips on Social SEO that I hope you find useful:

Twitter: Get the most out of your tweets!

• Listen to the comments about your company, brand, and products as well as the things your prospective clients are sharing and following.
• Ask engaging questions that will allow prospects to share honestly and will show that you are listening.
• Respond to requests, comments (negative & positive), compliments in real time.

Facebook: Improve social network engagement with these simple tips.

• Be unique. Social media users are constantly bombarded with dull advertisements and mediocre content. Make sure that you present a visually enticing page that will catch their eye and follow that up with relevant and engaging content to keep them reading and interacting.
• Be a gracious host. People are not obligated to like your page.  By fanning you they are letting the rest of their network know that this is a company/product/cause/service that they support.  A small thank you can go a long way.
• Be Persistent. After you have put all of this effort into building up your page, gaining followers, and creating relevant content the worst thing that you can do is ignore your page.  Fans will be looking for fresh content regularly.  Engaging with your community on Facebook will pay huge dividends!

Photo Sharing: Get noticed by optimizing your images.

• Use compelling images. The image you include in your article can vary the reaction of your audience.  Research has shown that while text is still the first thing that people see on the page, the image is what will sell the story.
• Match image and content. By matching your image with the keywords contained in your url, tags, and anchor text, it will be easier for search engines to confirm that you are not spamming and that the images provided are relevant and of high quality.
• Too much of a good thing. A knee-jerk reaction can be to cram as many keywords as possible into your image alt text.  You must always remember these simple guidelines: text, captions, and file names should be short and descriptive for the most optimized results!

Grow Your Business Network on LinkedIn.

• Build the foundation. Search your professional network for people you have a strong business relationship with and connect with them on LinkedIn.  Be sure to ask for recommendations and include co-workers in your LinkedIn network.
• Optimize your profile. This is your landing page for Linked in, so make the most of it.  This includes links to your website and blog, utilizing proper keywords in your title and descriptions, and including a professional image that properly reflects who you are.
• Update frequently. Think of your LinkedIn profile the same way you would a blog, Facebook, or twitter page.  If you don’t want to commit to providing frequent content for another profile, link your existing feeds to your LinkedIn profile to keep your professional network in the loop.

We want to hear from you!

Why do you follow and interact with the companies and individuals that you do?  Are you intentional about your business social media activity? We’re curious what it is that you think makes a company worth interacting with.  As a business user, what do you do on the social web to better engage with prospects and customers?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Get Optimized & Start Engaging: Essential Social Media Marketing Tips | http://www.toprankblog.com

Social Media Optimization 3 Steps to Tweeting with a Purpose

Posted on 18. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement, social media optimization

Social media optimization gives you the ability to not waste bullets. Every tweet and status update has a cost associated with it. Perhaps not a direct financial cost, but a real, and at times considerable labor cost.

The time you spend tweeting and Facebooking and Google Plussing on behalf of yourself or your company is time you could be spending on some other form of communications or customer service. Alternatively, it’s time you could be spending watching Project Runway. Or hanging out with your kids. Or making fun of Lebron.

As Charlene Li said – and I routinely steal this line – “social media isn’t inexpensive, it’s different expensive.”

Smart companies are using social media optimization and social media marketing software to add some clarity to the value of their behavior on the social Web.

Getting smarter at social analytics requires three things:

1. A mindset shift on your part about social media optimization

You must embrace the concept that all tweets are not created equal, and there’s value in doing this stuff with additional rigor and analysis.

2. Killer social media marketing software

You need the data ecosystem necessary to make relevant, judicious decisions about your social media behaviors.

I’ve been playing with Argyle Social for a few weeks (they are a Convince & Convert sponsor, so they gave me a free account), and I am hooked. The data they offer is extraordinary, and perhaps more importantly it’s easy to understand and access.

The guys at Argyle come from an email marketing background (like me) so they were raised on a diet of analytics, testing, and identification and isolation of meaningful variables. They are smart, data nerds first, and social media marketing software developers second. And the product is better as a result.

3. A commitment to actually doing something with social analytics data

Just because everything is trackable doesn’t mean you should track everything. The core challenge with social media optimization isn’t availability of data (with the possible exception of Twitter impressions data, as I ranted about here in my social media measurement post).

Instead, the challenge is knowing what the data MEANS, and what to DO about it.

Too many companies in social media tend to misapply breadth and specificity. This results in hand-wringing about the success of a specific tweet, when looking at your social behaviors over a much longer period is far more illustrative. It also results in companies evaluating the success of a particular channel (Twitter and Facebook, in particular), based on aggregate fans or followers, which has almost zero analytical or prescriptive value.

What is useful about good social media marketing software – and Argyle Social in particular – is that it is inherently set up to allow you to understand how your social efforts are trending and progressing by looking at them from a batched perspective.

Social Media Optimization Table

Here’s an example from their new, free white paper on how to set up social media statistics (check it out, it’s great). In this hypothetical case, a real estate developer builds multiple campaigns to create silted social analytics for his posts about trends, financing, news, and owning a home.

With this type of structure – and goals or conversion events plugged in – you can see important value patterns emerge over time that will help you use your social media marketing resources (most notably, time) more efficiently.

There’s several components of Argyle Social that work well for me.

• The ability to easily curate content using the browser bookmarklet. I can find an interesting blog post, and send it out in about 3 seconds. Argyle automatically attaches rich tracking codes.
• The unified inbox that shows me Twitter @replies, retweets, and DMs plus Facebook comments in one place. This of course is not rare functionality, as several social optimization packages have it, but Argyle Social’s version is as good as any.
• Scheduling of posts in advance is a breeze, even if you have multiple people working together as a team.
• I can create custom tracking URLs in a few seconds, even if they won’t be used in social media, and setting up conversion goals is equally simple (provided you can drop a small piece of code on your website).

Social Analytics Dashboard

Social Analytics Report for Me

But the social analytics dashboard is really the star of the show.

From there, I can at a glance see how I’m trending on clicks, goals, interactions, and subscriberson a week-to-week, month-to-month, or custom date range basis. Then I can drill down to look at specific campaigns, or even individual tweets.

Tweet-by-Tweet Social Analytics

Smartly, Argyle automatically combines the results of tweets and status updates that contain the same link. This is very handy for people that tweet new blog posts more than once (like me).

Knowing which campaigns to set up and what to call them is sometimes a bridge too far at the onset of a social analytics campaign. Argyle Social lets you assign particular tweets to a campaign after the fact, which is very useful for down-the-road analysis.

Free social analytics white paper

I’m getting better at social media optimization thanks to Argyle Social. My pal Jason Falls is a big believer too. Take a look at the white paper, and/or check out a free trial. Prices range from $149 to $499/month – there’s also an excellent white label version for agencies.

It’s definitely more expensive (in most configurations) than social media marketing software like HootSuite, but I think it’s worth the investment. If you want to embrace social media optimization – and eventually serious companies will have to – I think you’ll agree that it’s worth the step up.

Accelerate the Convergence of Social, Search, and Content

Posted on 14. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Arnie Kuenn, Blog, Book Reviews, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, Video Interviews

This is my video interview with Arnie Kuenn about his excellent new book Accelerate. It’s a playbook for integrating your social media, search, and content marketing. I wrote the forward for the book.

Video production, editing, titling by my friends at Candidio. If you need your raw video footage tidied up good, fast, reasonably priced, they are the guys.

Video transcription from Speechpad. Fast, easy, inexpensive.

Jay: Hey, everybody, it’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, and I’m joined today by a very special guest, Mr. Arnie Kuenn, from Vertical Measures, who is also the author of a fantastic new book called Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing

Arnie, thanks for joining me. How are you?

Arnie: I’m doing great. I think we should end right there.

Jay: That’s it. We’re done. We’re done. Thank you. Drive safely.

Jay: How’s the book doing?

Arnie: I think it’s doing pretty well. We came out of the gate with a pretty big promotion and managed to get ranked number one in our category the first week. It’s dipped a little bit since then, which is expected, but we’re out promoting it and I’m out speaking, and I’m sure the sales will stay smooth.

Jay: Fantastic. Well, congratulations, I know that that’s not an easy task putting it together, and marketing’s not easy, so good for you.

Content, Search, Social is a Three-Legged Stool

Jay: So the book is interesting because it actually is really one of the first books that talks very specifically about the holy trinity of search and content and social and how they work together. It’s a three-legged stool. You can’t really work without all of them. Tell me about that a little bit and how you got to that point.

Arnie: We used to be primarily an SEO link building company and found that it was pretty hard for us to do SEO and link building for sites that had really bad content, generic content and so on. So we ended up writing and creating a lot of content for our clients. Just one thing led to another. Of course, Facebook exploded a couple of years ago, and Twitter, and now Google+, and it’s gotten much easier to promote the content and use social media. So we were talking around here over the last year or so and just kind of the phrase “the convergence of search, social, and content marketing” came together. Somebody here – I’ll give a shout-out to Patty Adams – suggested I work on a book about all of that. I said, “No, can’t possibly do that.”

Jay: I was going to say, you still like her after she suggested that you write a book? That’s impressive.

Arnie: Right, exactly. She still works here. But anyway, a year later we have a book.

Content Needs to Be About More Than You

Jay: One of the things that I really appreciate about your book is that you’re very upfront about the notion that while companies need to create content, it can’t only be about themselves. You can’t just talk about your company and what you’re doing over and over, because you’re only so interesting. There’s a limit to what people will support. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Arnie: Yeah, I think the line I use a lot is, “It’s not about you,” as the vendor. As the company, “It’s not about you. It’s about your customer.” I think when I’m out speaking what I try to remind people of is to think about when they’re online, and when they’re on Google, Facebook, whatever the platform is and they’re out searching for information, how are they searching? What are they looking for? It’s generally not to find out what company has won the most awards or has the most employees, but it’s you’re trying to find solutions to your problems. You’re trying to find information, things that are going to help decide to make that purchase or investigate whatever service a little bit further. That’s what I think people need to keep in mind when they’re creating the content, is keep that searcher in mind.

Jay: When we talk about content, I think most people naturally go to the place of a written web page. Most people think about that as content in our world, but there are a lot of other places within your website that you can make a difference in terms of what you say and how you say it. One of the great examples that you use in the book is on eCommerce pages, that you can have a regular product detail page, or you can really use that as an opportunity to tell a story. I think Zappos is one of the examples that you use in the book.

Arnie: Right. I think Zappos, REI, Amazon are some really good examples. I realize they’re big, big companies and people naturally assume they have the resources to do this. But I feel like, if you’re in eCommerce and whether you have 100 products to sell or 10,000 products to sell, you do need to tackle what you can tackle. If you can tackle ten product pages a month and really improve them by maybe adding user generated content in the form of reviews, or comments, or feedback, video if you could, a how-to video, how to install this or how to size this, or whatever. But whatever you can do to, again, help your potential customer feel very comfortable with making this purchase, I think that’s what you should focus on. What I see happen a lot, and we’ve all seen this, is where maybe you’re representing somebody else’s product and they give you a data feed and you just implement that data feed like a 1,000 other sites did. You’ve really gained no advantage.

Video Content Still a Strong Option

Jay: I’m glad you mentioned video in that answer as well. I’m a big believer in video content, obviously, and I think you are as well. You counsel your clients at Vertical Measures to create video content and that you make some video content for your clients. Do you think that makes a lot of sense for most companies and will continue to be a good tactic?

Arnie: Yeah, absolutely. This is going to sound silly to say. I really believe in content for search, and this is the year of video.

Jay: It’s always the year of video. They always say that, and mobile. It’s always the year of video and the year of mobile.

Arnie: Theoretically if a video is optimized and done well, compared to any other piece of content, the odds of it showing up in the Google search results are 53 times greater than another piece of content. So that says something really, really powerful right there.

Infographic Explosion

Jay: It may be the year of the video or the year of mobile, but it seems like it’s also the year, or the couple of years, of infographics. I mean, everybody’s got themselves an infographic all of a sudden. I don’t remember infographics being this crazy a while back. You guys do a lot of search optimization. It must work, right, or people wouldn’t be doing it?

Arnie: Well, it does work. Infographics are nice, relatively short pieces of content, sometimes they get pretty large, but a nice snapshot and a nice easy way to digest content. So therefore they gather links, which is pretty important for SEO. The content gets spread, so sometimes it’s going to be a pretty good viral thing. I will say, and this is just strictly my opinion, I think it’s getting a little bit oversaturated. But if it’s done well, it can still be really, really good content.

Jay: Fantastic. Yeah, some of them I fell like, yeah, it’s a graphic, but it’s not necessarily info. It just gets a little bit . . . it doesn’t really convey that much, so it’s just a little bit lame. Obviously, there are other design considerations as well. Sometimes they’re really artfully done and really pretty and cool, and other times it’s not as good.

Arnie: Yeah, exactly. If you create a good piece that doesn’t have those two detractors, then hopefully it will engage and work for people. If it doesn’t have data, like you mentioned, or any info in the graphic, then it’s probably not going to work.

Link Attraction vs. Link Building

Jay: You talked about infographics being somewhat easy, at least in the last couple of years, to get people to link to. One of the things I love about your book is this notion of link attraction versus link building. Can you talk about the differences there and why they’re important for companies?

Arnie: Yeah. That’s actually been quite an evolution at Vertical Measures. As I mentioned earlier, our roots pretty much are a link building SEO company, and five or six years ago, link building was much, much easier than it is today. We could reach out and just talk to people about maybe, not just necessarily link exchanges, but here’s an interesting site. I see you link to others, or maybe you would link to this one. We could get yeses pretty frequently, or where there are other ways to go out and get links. Today it’s much, much more difficult. Webmasters and website owners are much more savvy. They understand the value of links. So we’ve been kind of on this theme for the last 18 months to 2 years of trying to get our clients to understand it’s really about link attraction. The whole idea of link attraction, is just taking the time to produce a really nice piece of content that people will want to link to as a part of their whole editorial process on their end.

Which of Your Children Do You Love Most?

Jay: Social wasn’t even an option back years ago when I started doing SEO and things like that, and now in some ways it’s harder and in some ways it’s easier. When you think about the holy trinity of search and social and content, what I find is that companies say, “Okay, I believe you. I believe you that these three things work together and that these three things are important. Tell me which of these things we should do first?” How do you answer that question?

Arnie: Yeah, that’s a good one. What the reality is, is probably everybody’s jumped into social first.

Arnie: If I had my druthers, a totally clean slate, I would say you’ve got to get your content squared away first. Even if it means creating three, four, five, ten really rock solid pieces of content on your site so that you have something to go out and promote and direct people towards, that’s what I would do. Now I suppose there’s a case to be made for it’s got to start engaging and building followers and all that, and I think that’s true. I think in social media what you do want to be doing is providing good advice. But eventually, you do have to have something pretty rock solid on your end to direct people towards.

Content Marketing Measurement

Jay: How do you know if this kind of stuff is working? There’s a lot of – I don’t know about black box – but there’s a lot of stuff that you do in your business, that I do in my business, that other people do in the search, social, content triangle where they’re not really sure what it is that’s going on. How do you measure that? How do you put a report in front of a client that says, “Look, this is effective”?

Arnie: Ultimately what we talk to our clients about is what is it that they want to measure? Do they want to measure their rankings, which hopefully less and less clients are interested in rankings and they’re more interested in traffic, and then hopefully quality traffic that’s converting and whatever a conversion might be. It might be a completed lead form. It might be the sale of a product or signing up for a service.

Jay: Well, the book is amazing. One of the things I love about it is it’s very tactical, very practical, very do this and then do this. I think if you have an interest in this topic, and you should regardless of the size of your company, it’s a book that you will keep on your desk and you’ll have all kinds of flags in it like I do here to refer back to because I learned a lot myself. And, I wrote the forward!

It is Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing
from the man Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures.

3 Phases of Social Media SEO – Where Are You At?

Posted on 07. Jun, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media optimization, social media seo, social SEO

As Google puts the squeeze on traditional ranking signals and subsequently, Search Engine Optimization tactics, the growing emphasis on social signals has many SEO practitioners getting more serious about social engagement.

While search marketing has been a key part of our consulting practice since 2001, our Online Marketing agency’s work with Public Relations and blogging since 2003 has helped us develop an appreciation of the influence and engagement outcomes possible with social media pretty quickly, vs. solely as a promotion channel for links. That sentiment is growing rapidly as of late with many traditional SEOs.

You too, may have noticed an increase in SEO practitioners (both agency and client side) singing the song of Content Marketing and Social Media. As this shift has occurred over the past few years, I’ve observed a series of phases of approach. According to your situation and market, your mileage may vary with these characterizations, but maybe you’ll see something familiar and get a clearer picture of where your SEO and Social Media integration is headed.

Phase 1: SEO With Social Profiles, Sharing Widgets & Blogs

Many Search Engine Optimization pros started their social media adventures with bookmarking and news services like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit.  Promoting content to these channels, especially through “power users” could inspire content to go hot, hit the home page and attract spikes of traffic. The increased exposure attracts more links and subscribers.

Social bookmarking services and profiles within social networking sites allow for users to include links back to their own websites creating a potential source of link traffic and light signal for search engines. Many of those links were subsequently made “nofollow”.  Such links are simply a matter of filling out forms and ultimately no more impactful than directory submissions.

Blogs are used to publish content in a more search engine friendly way than most CMS are capable of and commenting on other blogs provided great links until they too, were made “nofollow” by most bloggers and blog CMS.

Success is measured in SEO terms: links, rankings and traffic.

Phase 2: Social Media Optimization

Coined by Rohit Bhargava, SMO has had different meanings for different people.  Marketers develop the social profiles they’ve created into more robust sources of information with some building out of social networks. Developing social channels helps to create an audience to promote content to in the hopes of attracting links.

Blogs are often the hub to the social media spokes for optimized content promotion for traffic and link acquisition. Attention to building blog subscribers and email lists is stressed.  There’s an honest appreciation for creating useful content for specific audience segments and a developed skill in the art/science of content formats, types and writing headlines that inspire sharing.

Success is measured primarily as SEO outcomes like links, traffic and conversions. Social KPIs like fans, friends & followers are monitored as well as basic engagement metrics like comments and interactions. But those metrics are more about “social proof” than social ROI.

Phase 3: Integrated Content, SEO & Social Media Plan

By now,  SEOs are more likely to identify as Online Marketers and understand the key to a killer social SEO strategy is content.  Audience categorization becomes persona development which guides content marketing strategy.  The keyword research expertise from SEO is factored into Editorial Planning of web and social content.

While content is planned for certain outcomes with segments of the community, it’s an adaptable online marketing strategy that allows for opportunistic content marketing and social promotion based on social media monitoring and trends. Social media savvy isn’t just for Marketing and Public Relations, but as much of the organization as possible.

Anyone in a position to create content, engage with customers and prospects online has basic skills with search and social keyword glossaries, social search and social networking on behalf of the brand.

To maximize the relevance of the Content Marketing Plan, search keywords and social topics representative of customer interests are factored into scheduled editorial for web, social and mobile content.  Content creation and promotion is coordinated across functional areas like Advertising, Public Relations and Marketing as possible.

The findability of content is improved through keyword and social topic optimization. Social content that is easy to find through search can help grow the social network.  As the network grows, so does word of mouth for inherent promotion of useful content that attracts links, shares and comments. Those social signals can be gauged by Google in combination with other SEO ranking factors to improve search visibility of brand web properties.

It would be realistic to add other phases, but I’m trying to be more practical with this post. I think this approach of an adaptable, customer-centric and content focused strategy that leverages topic optimization for both search findability and social engagement is where many online marketers will find themselves sooner than later.

What do you think about these phases? Phase 3 is a tall order to fill and I think many marketers will see a blend as their reality. If you have an appreciation for the impact coordinated Social SEO & Content can have, how would you characterize your organization’s approach?

I’ll be elaborating on these phases and more later this morning at OMS Minneapolis in a session called “Develop a Killer Social SEO Strategy“. I hope to see you there.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
3 Phases of Social Media SEO – Where Are You At? | http://www.toprankblog.com

Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success

Posted on 26. May, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media optimization

At BlogWorld Expo in New York this week I presented a session about Dominating Your Niche with Social Content and SEO.  It was crammed with information and I know there are many online marketers looking for practical advice on business blogging and blog marketing that didn’t attend.  Based on the blog marketing we do here at Online Marketing Blog and in the consulting that I do, here are  7 practical steps online marketers can take for social media and SEO success with a blog.

All marketing efforts should start with a goal and means for measuring success, so I do not get into specifics on those tasks in this list, but focus more on the content and promotion.

1.  Social SEO Personas

While blogging evolved out of personal expression, business blogging is less about corporate egocenticism and more about empathy with customers. Customer centric content for blogging is more relevant and does a much better job of engaging. In the way that direct marketers segment customers by key characteristics, online marketers that blog can create buyer personas to create more relevant experiences for their readers.

Personas are customer profiles (preferences for information discovery, consumption & sharing) that represent groups of customers that a brand wants to engage and do business with.  Information from Personas drives keyword research & optimization, content plan and promotion. More about persona creation here. So one of the first things a blogger should do after defining objectives and general audience, is to understand who they’re trying to reach by developing personas.

Collect data through reader / customer surveys, analytics, social monitoring and other tools to form a profile. That profile represents topics, behaviors and preferences that can translate into search keywords, social topics, social channels, editorial calendar and promotion plans.

2.  What is your unique selling proposition?

When people (or search engines) visit your website, is the primary topic crystal clear? With the increased competition in search and for attention in social conversations, it’s essential for blogs to stand out.  Being able to articulate your Unique Selling Proposition helps distinguish your content the value of your blog content for people and search engines. The screenshot above shows a blog that is crystal clear in it’s focus. The result is reflected both in popularity and search visibility (#1) for highly competitive phrases like “digital photography“.

Developing a Unique Selling Proposition for your blog (h/t SEOBook) is pretty straightforward: Identify the key benefits of your blog’s content and how you will address customer/reader pain points. As you communicate your USP, be specific, concise & show proof. It’s also important to live your USP so that it’s a key component of your messaging.

3.  Search & Social Media Keywords

Personas and your USP represent the intersection of customer interests and the goals for your blog. In order to activate your blog content for effective discovery via search and social media channels, it’s essential to create a search phrase keyword glossary for Search Engine Optimization purposes and a social media topic glossary for Social Media Optimization.

SEO Keywords: Resources like Google’s keyword research tool are a great start for finding which words and phrases are in demand, relevant to the content you’re publishing on your blog. It’s tempting to be egocentric and use whatever language you want, but if there is an expectation to attract significant search traffic and an interest in using language that resonates with a community in search of what you have to offer, keyword optimization of content is very appropriate.

Social Topics: Social topic tools that work like a SEO keyword tool are very rare and a to really get into useful source information, there’s a lot of manual research necessary. However, to get started, tools like socialmention.com offer a list of social keywords (bottom left of search results page) that can be downloaded as a CSV file for use in your Social Topic Glossary. Social keywords represent topics of interest to the people your blog is intended to reach and engage. By researching these topics and the specific language the community uses to express their interest, your blogging can be more effective at being relevant and shared on the social web.

The SEO Keyword and Social Topic glossary provide guidance towards editorial plans and specific phrases/topics can be mapped to content for search and social media optimization. It’s a great management tool that keeps SEO and SMO efforts accountable.

4.  Create a Content/Editorial Plan

Keywords inform content and documenting an Editorial Plan for your blog can ensure that content is true to the goals of the business and interests of the community that reads it. An content plan also offers ideas and guidance, months in advance, which is priceless when bloggers hit creative roadblocks. This is inevitable, and after 7+ years of blogging myself, I can’t vouch enough for the guidance of an Editorial Plan.

Keep in mind, such a plan is a guide – not a set of hard and fast rules.  It’s effective to schedule recurring themes with posts, like “Thought Leadership Monday”, “Practical Tips on Tuesdays”, “News Roundup on Fridays”. But it’s also important to allow for wildcards, because opportunities will come up spontaneously based on events within your company or the industry that require blogging. And you don’t want to delay publishing important news or a reaction to news, just because it wasn’t planned for that day.

The Editorial Plan defines the application of keywords in topics to be covered, categories, titles, tags and how/where/when the posts will be promoted. It also allocates for the future repurposing of appropriate blog posts.

5.  Search & Social Media Optimization

Optimizing content for search on websites like Google and optimizing social content for ease of discovery and sharing within social channels is essential for reach and engagement of blog content. Optimizing for search & social media is the one two punch of blog marketing. If SEO efforts are initiated with an existing blog, then a SEO audit would be completed, including a review of the blog templates and configuration, existing content, internal links and links from other websites. If you’re starting a new blog, then SEO would be baked in to the editorial plan via the keyword glossary.

Optimizing for search is about helping search engines do a better job of connecting readers with your content. It’s not about tricks or manipulations. It’s about providing search engines and people what they need to find, consume and be inspired to share your blog content.

Optimizing for social media is about search as well, as in the search that’s possible within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But SMO is also about optimizing content editorially to resonate with social audiences. It’s about ease of discovery and sharing through things like feed distribution and widgets that make it easy to ReTweet or post to the reader’s favorite social sites.

SEO and SMO are about making life easy for both search engines and people to connect with, interact and share your blog content.

6.  Links: Internal and External Acquisition

Links between pages and links acquired from relevant websites in the industry provide a good user experience and strong signals for search engines when they crawl, index and rank web pages. Following best practices for internal linking is one of the most impactful things a blog can do to help website realize SEO benefit.  For example, a tips blog that cross links the keywords relevant to specific products being sold gives readers and search engines a quick and relevant way to move from editorial about how to use and get benefit from a type of product to a page that actually sells the product.

Attracting links from other relevant websites as pictured in the diagram above is essential for attracting new visitors to your blog, directly and indirectly because of the effect relevant links have on search engine visibility.  What’s important to remember is that links to your blog home page are important, but relevant links into specific category or individual blog posts is essential  External link sources that are relevant to broad topics that link to your home page or category pages provide the user (and search engine) with a very relevant connection.  Links from niche sites to your specific blog posts do the same.

There are myriad ways to attract links for blogs ranging from commenting and guest posting to creating content that attracts links from other bloggers and the media.

7.  Content Promotion

Content isn’t great until it gets shared. A lot. That doesn’t mean a blogger should aggressively promote every post. It does mean that when a particular post is especially promotable (you would know this because you planned for it in your Content Plan) then it warrants special attention.  Blog content can be promoted in a variety of ways and effective promotion is tied to the quantity and quality of the networks you’ve built. That includes readers and subscribers of your own blog, an email list, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn and other relevant sites where people with common interests interact and share.

Some content promotion is automatic, like RSS feeds, syndication of blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or content syndication partnerships. Other content promotion might be tied to the content itself, like using industry thought leaders to crowdsource insights into a topic (your keywords) of importance to your readers. Those participants will often help you promote the post. You can also reach out to your network and suggest or share relevant posts they might be interested in. Commenting and being social on/offline are also effective promotion methods.

The bottom line with content promotion is that great content that isn’t promoted vs. mediocre content that is promoted in a relevant way, will often lose in terms of traffic and therefore meaningful engagement with a greater number of readers. The amount of content being published on a daily basis creates levels of competition never before experienced, so promotion is essential to stand out and get noticed. But it has to be content that’s WORTH promoting.

Summing it all up.

The implementation and refinement of these steps is a work in progress. The web continues to change in terms of technology and how people use it. It’s essential that companies follow an adaptable online marketing strategy when focusing on the social web and search engines. Opportunities will reveal themselves in web analytics and social media monitoring and the promotion efforts outline above apply to those real-time marketing situations just as well as tasks included in a Content Plan. Hopefully these guidelines are useful to you and if you need more specific information, you’ll likely find it in blog posts we’ve published in the past. At TopRank Marketing we do this kind of consulting on a daily basis so there’s a lot of rich information published in our archives.

What other types of insight about blogging and blog marketing would you like to see? What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve had (and maybe overcome) when it comes to implementing blog marketing tactics like those mentioned in this post?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success | http://www.toprankblog.com