Daily Bytes: Platforms, Social Media Fears & Musts & SEO
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.