Posted on Mon, Nov 02, 2009
Putting together Daily Bytes for today, I found several pieces that offer information and insights that can help you frame your web marketing to do lists for this week such as 1) checking that you are focusing on the most important factors for social media optimization 2) exploring new tools for managing your Twitter presence and/or your entry point into Twitter and 3) checking out services that can help you monitor your social media participation. I hope you find them as helpful as I have for my own to-do list for this week as I continue to build BizWorks360 and this blog.
The List of Important Ranking Factors
Sometimes when I read articles on search engine optimization, I begin to have those overwhelm feelings that I would sometime have in Calculus or Statistics classes before I unearthed the underlying logic that brought it altogether. Well this very short and useful piece listing important ranking factors for SEO from Search Engine Optimization Journal does just that for SEO. To do’s for this week from this post: check with the appropriate professionals in your organization or check yourself if you are focusing on these factors.
Twitter, Customer Service and Good Brand Management
Valeria Maltoni, leading blogger and social media expert, always writes great posts. She should be on everyone’s RSS feed. Today’s post goes beyond great and provides one of the best posts I have read yet on resources for companies to look at as it relates to building a presence on Twitter, monitoring it and leveraging it for customer service. To do’s for this week from this list: check out the free tools and services available to better support your Twitter engagement and/or your entry point into using Twitter for your business.
Webinar Recap: Foundations of Listening and Engagement
Radian 6, one of the leading social media monitoring services and referenced in Valeria’s piece above. They host “twebinars” that are helpful to prospective and existing clients. I had hoped to join last week’s webinar on the Foundations of Listening and Engagement last week, but wasn’t able to. This recap is helpful and the webinar presentation is available to download and includes notes to provide context to the slides. Also, this week Radian 6 is hosting another webinar with Kodak’s Chief Blogger Jenny Cisney. I got to hear her at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston in early October and thought she was terrific. To do’s for this week from this post: review last week’s webinar and sign up for this Thursday’s “twebinar” with Jenny Cisney.
Posted on Tue, Oct 20, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes focuses on the start of the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, 10 proven social media applications, how to measure social media results and how to get started with SEO.
Web 2.0 Summit Starts Today
The term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly in September 2005 when he and John Battelle began hosting what has become the annual Web 2.0 Summit. Each year’s gathering brings together thought leaders and executives working in the internet. This year’s Summit goes from October 20 – 22 and will include many internet and business luminaries, including CEO’s Tim Armstrong (AOL) Brian Roberts (Comcast) and Jeff Immelt (GE), amongst other leaders. In this post, Tim provides some insights on some of the great things that could come out of this year’s summit and I will certainly be paying attention to summaries of what Marc Pincus, Founder and CEO of Zynga has to say today about what he deems to be the third great internet business model This post also provides a link to Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, which Tim wrote in advance of the Summit. I will be watching for coverage of the Summit and providing links to noteworthy news on this blog over the next few days.
Ten Proven Applications for Social Media
The Online Marketing Blog provides an overview of ten ways businesses can get started in social media. There are also some relevant links to further information, including Top Rank’s social media roadmap presentation.
Is Social Media Marketing Measurable? The Big Debate
According to the Social Media Marketing Report, a survey of over 800 social media marketers, marketers want answers to the question: How do I measure the impact of social media? In this post, The Social Media Examiner seeks to provide some of its own answers to this debate. There is some good insights here. On the subject though of Social Media measurement, I strongly recommend reading Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI presentation.
How to Get Started with SEO
Having a working SEO strategy is mission critical for all businesses – large and small. This blog post from Small Business Search Marketing provides tips on how to get your strategy going either by hiring an outside consultant or on your own. There is a lot of great information in this simple well-written post which I will be using myself!
Posted on Wed, Oct 14, 2009
Daily Bytes today focuses on how to optimize your video content for SEO, improve your landing pages, and train social media Jedis in your organization. It also looks at The Pentagon Channel – a cool mix of online video and social media.
Tips to optimize your video content
The use of video content on business websites continues to explode and can be very effective in promoting a business. To make it more effective, businesses also need to adopt some basic rules for optimizing their video for search engine visibility. This post from eConsultancy provides a great list of pointers to help make video SEO a lot easier for your business.
7 Tips for Creating Landing Pages
If someone goes to your landing page, they are definitely interested in learning more and potentially buying your services. If your landing page isn’t simple and to the point, it is a lost opportunity. In this post, the Kherize5 Blog provides 7 tips for creating winning landing pages.
Creating New Jedis With Social Media Training
Social Media Explorer offers a guest post today from Kaitlyn Wilkins, a Vice President wwith the 360 Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide who is currently leading Ogilvy’s global social media training initiative. In the post, Kaitlyn talks about the some tips for social media training in organizations. It is rigorous and purposeful and she is building a new team of Jedis who are very fluent in the use of social media. Hopefully she is also helping out the Yoda’s in the organization as well so they can better manage the Jedi troop! All the same, her tips on what social media training takes are very useful to any organization pursuing this path.
The Pentagon Channel merging television and Web-based content
Marketing thought leader, author and blogger, David Meerman Scott, visited the Pentagon this week and learned how one of America’s most established and conservative entities is merging television and web-based content in The Pentagon Channel. David promises to provide more examples of “brand journalism” in upcoming posts. In the meantime, enjoy the video and the post:
Posted on Thu, Sep 24, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes focuses on how building your own platform can yield significant benefits versus renting eyeballs, managing social media fears, why companies need social media and building quality links for small businesses.
The platform vs. the eyeballs
Coming from the media world, I so understand the concept of eyeballs. I have spent much of my career building channels and/or business development strategies to garner eyeballs that advertisers will pay for or “rent” as Seth Godin points out. Godin points out that this paradigm has changed with the advane of new media where companies no longer need to rent an audience from media gatekeepers, but can build their own platform. He also argues that the long term cost/benefit equation is far more advantageous than renting.
The Top Six Reasons Companies are Still Scared of Social Media
This piece from Social Media Today lists the key and I will add relevant fears, including: 1) employees will waste time with social media, 2) haters will damage your brand, 3) losing control of the brand, 4) it costs money, 5) fear of being sued and 6) fear of giving away secrets. Having had someone who worked for me that spent a little more time on Facebook than he should have, I understand these concerns. Yet the genie is out of the bottle with social media, and the question is how to manage these fears. This post is excellent in both explaining the fears and providing valuable links to posts and articles that help on the fear management front.
Why Your Company Needs Social Media
The last post dealt with your fears. Now onto WHY your company needs social media. It boils down to the three things businesses have always focused on: sales prospects, customer service and sales retention. As this article from Search Engine Journal points out, you can do all of these more effectively than ever with the support of social media tools. The article also provides a number of social media management tools.
Small Business SEO: 10 Tips for Building Quality Links
Most businesses focus on the fact that they have a website. That is only the beginning the key is building your website so that it ranks with search engines [something I focus on a lot when I am not managing clients or writing this post]. At the same time, the whole subject of SEO can seem very esoteric to every day business people. This list from Kherize5 Blog is simple, practical and very useful to building links and improving search rankings.
Posted on Tue, Sep 22, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes looks at the 4 R’s of SEO, an index of social media policies being adopted by some of America’s most important corporations and organizations, the monetary value of caring in building your business and the success of a real-live entertainment property on X-Box Live.
4 R’s of SEO: Robots, Ranking Relevance & Results
I really like this piece from SEOmoz. It distills the SEO behemoth into four building blocks and provides clear recommendations to ensure better optimization. So if you are managing your own SEO as I am, it is very handy. And if you are working with an outside vendor, it can help you manage their services better.
Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations
In working with my clients recently, the subject of social media policies has come up. It can be both a curse and a blessing for companies as well as for employees. I am very appreciative that Mashable has provided a link to the social media policies that have been put in place at some of America’s leading organizations, including IBM, Microsoft and Dow Jones. Mashable secured this link from the website set up for the soon to be released book Social Media Governance by Chris Boudreaux. It is also interesting to note that as of this writing, this article posted by Mashable on Sunday has now been retweeted 1181 times.
Guest Video: Gary Vaynerchuk Talks About Relationship Building
Gary Vaynerchuk, who took his family’s New Jersey wine business form $ 4 MM a year in revenues to $ 50 MM plus, through adept use of social media, boils down his success in this video interview on the blog Left the Box to a simple concept “caring”. It is a short and powerful interview in which Gary offers this wise adage: you have to give 80 % to people to get 20 %. It sounds like a lot, but when you look at his bottom line results, it is a good calculus.
1 vs 100: A Case Study in Real-Time Entertainment
And now for a little entertainment . . . the industry I have worked in much of my career! Microsoft’s XBox is now in over 20 Million homes – a very significant footprint. And Microsoft has the potential to crack the code of real interactive TV. The success of the XBox Live trivia game 1 vs 100 Live shows that Microsoft is converting potential into reality. As this NewTeeVee piece points out about 1 vs 100 Live, it “combines one of the best aspects of a TV show – the moment of people joining together simultaneously to watch a live event unfold – with the best of a video game – interactivity and competition.” Learning more about 1 vs 100 Live has me ready to go out and buy the XBox this weekend . . . and my daughter is happy to hear that!
Posted on Thu, Sep 17, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes focuses on 10 Twitter apps that can be very helpful, how a Flip Video camera can be great for business, determining if your business is a good client for an SEO firm, and “recipes for the modern business”.
10 Essential Twitter Apps
To really harness Twitter to your advantage business wise and personally, you need to rely on tools. This post from iMedia Connection provides a list of quality tools, including two of my favorties TweetDeck and Tweetie. When choosing Twitter apps, be careful that you don’t choose ones that can lead to your Twitter account being spammed.
How a Flip Camera and My Blog Got My Business Over $ 20,000 of FREE Publicity
Mark Hayward, who runs a great small business blog as well as a thriving travel business in the Caribbean, is a guest writer for Pro-Blogger today and writes about his initial frustration with his blogging and social media efforts. Then one day, he received an email that would permanently turn around his frustration. A writer for the Islands magazine had discovered his niche blog while searching for Caribbean videos and happened on a Flip video he had uploaded to You Tube. The writer ultimately did a big story on how Mark had launched his business which provided him with $ 20,000 worth of free publicity.
Would Your Company Could Be a Good SEO Client?
This interesting article by SEO leader Aaron Wall in Search Engine Land basically says that you shouldn’t consider hiring an outside SEO expert until you have built your website organically. SEO and a website is like a good bottle of wine – it is a lot better after it ages!
Recipes for the Modern Business
Social media expert and leading blogger Chris Brogan provides a summary of 6 recent blog posts [a number of them featured in Daily Bytes] which together are a recipe for the modern business – whether your business is large or small. They are all good, but my favorite is the one of the ones I didn’t include recently in Daily Bytes – Driving to Sales. Chris says that he will be covering this topic more in the future and I will look forward to featuring these posts in Daily Bytes.
Posted on Tue, Sep 01, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes focuses on getting CMO’s and CFO’s on the same page, the building blocks of social media for business, business lessons learned in 2009 and SEO Competitive Intelligence.
A Meeting of the Minds
A post from Ad Age talking about how to get CMO’s and CFO’s on the same page when it comes to digital spending. The writer recommends this measurement concept for CMO’s to use with their CFO’s: bought media vs. owned media vs. earned media.
The Building Blocks of Social Media
Well known blogger Chris Brogan looks at the basic building blocks for putting together a business social media plan that takes into account the company’s goals, boundaries and comfort level. There are also some great insights on e-mail marketing.
10 Business Lessons I learned This Year
A fun and engaging post from Neil Patel that offers great philosophical and motivational insights.
SEO Competitive Intelligence: Learn From Your SEO Rivals
Very useful tips about how track what your competitors are doing with SEO and social media and how to improve your own visibility.
Posted on Wed, Aug 26, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes focuses on simple, but powerful social media recommendations from the Harvard Business Review, why teens aren’t on Twitter, what is a twitter ratio, and SEO content tools.
How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media
Some very simple and useful recommendations from the Harvard Business Review for how to manage social media in your business organization.
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens
Teens are definitely not using Twitter. The New York Times explores why not.
Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)
The raio of how many you are following to the number of your followers and what it means.
Two Types of SEO Content Critical to B2B Marketers
Creating keyword-rich FAQ pages and implement local or regional content pages are great strategies to boost your SEO.
Posted on Mon, Aug 17, 2009
The Proper Way to Pitch on Twitter
I couldn’t agree more on this post today from TwiTip - I am sick of DM’s from affiliate marketers promoting getting a 1,000 followers in a day. There’s a right way and a wrong way to pitch on Twitter, and this post provides some good tips on how to do it the right way.
Statistics Show Social Media is Bigger Than You Think
Read the post, but first watch the video. This was put together by Erik Qualman whose book Socialnomics comes out on August 26th. He provides back up as well for his many great stats, but I particularly love a few of them, e.g.
- By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
- % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
SEO is Not Really That Complicated
Some good basic common sense tips from Duct Tape Marketing and a plug for a Duct Tape Marketing affiliate LotusJump.
What Women Want From Social Sites
eMarketer provides useful stats from the recent study from ShesConnected, entitled “The Power of Social Marketing for Women Research Study”.