Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
The longest-lasting online resource that I’ve come across for the nitty gritty of online marketing and business, WebmasterWorld.com, has just had a post on the front page of their site titled: No Need For Google, Myspace Works For Me.
It is in their subscriber’s section, so if you’re not a paying member, you won’t be able to access it. But, the discussion is a great example of how Social Media is being noticed at all levels as a potential avenue for marketing a product, service or business.
Here, “carlr,” outlines the success that he has had as a photographer through his MySpace profile, especially as compared to the success he has seen from Google.
“My commercial photography website has been launched over a year ago.. PR4 now and about 100 on-theme inbound links and no outbound links. Still sandboxed so i get 4-5 hits per day from Google - a joke. Oh well. I signed up at MySpace with a custom template with portfolio etc. It’s been a month only and got many calls from clients, a major magazine and i even unexpectedly met somebody for real in a bar.. “hey! by any chance.. are you …?”
In this age where we must as webmasters wait and pray to get a decent position in google before we get out of business, this is refreshing. Maybe some of you guys should have a look.”
The entire discussion is definitely worth a read for those of you who are paid subscribers. And for those of you who are not, I highly recommend that you consider paying for membership here. As someone who runs a website with a community of members over 60,000 members large, I can truly say that this is one of the best online communities out there.
I’ll also be at PubCon for those that might want to meet up - I’d love to talk to anyone and everyone who has seen success or failure from their Social Media Marketing campaigns.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
So, my submission for the Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship Contest is up and ready to go. :)
What I’ve found is that Social Media Marketing/Optimization is such a rogue discipline at this point, that there’s very little structure for how people are discussing its philosophies, principles, strategies and tactics.
In The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing, I discuss the five key forms of communication with your marketplace and how those conversations transpire.
The first three are:
- Declaration of Identity
- Identity through Association
- User-initiated Conversation
I’ll let you read the full article for #4 and #5 (it is a contest, btw :-P), as well as specific channels for creating a conversation with your market in these 5 ways.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
I’m not sure if this has been measured before as I would imagine the complexity to measure usability in this way might be a bit different than typical web-usability, but…
For those of you who are creating video ads and converting them to Quicktime or Flash formats, if you have audio that starts right off the bat (without a user initiating the video), I have a couple of notes for you:
- If you have it start automatically, you’re interrupting my browsing experience. Pop-ups used to do that.
- A lot of your ads, maybe it’s because I’m interested in marketing/advertising, I do want to see and am interested in them. Some of them, I’ve even sent to friends.
- If you (or your boss) insist on having the audio start right off the bat, you have less than three seconds before I stop your ad. That means, you have exactly two seconds to catch my attention. Don’t start with music. Start by telling me why I need to keep watching and listening.
Hope that helps. ;-)
Does anyone know of any research statistics for video advertisements?
Monday, October 30th, 2006
I remember coming across Fred Stutzman’s blog a few months ago and being amazingly impressed with the quality of his writing, his choice of language and the structure to his ideas.
I a recent post, he discusses considerations for Social Networks to monetize their offerings.
- Exogenous or alternative markets
- Brokering of trust
- The negotiation of community
For those who know me, know that authentic Trust is something something to constantly be striven for and never (if possible) compromised. Therefore, the idea of brokering trust is one I would definitely be interested in understanding better.
Obviously, nothing can replicate the trust that is built (or broker) through a shared experience, but I would certainly be interested in hearing how Fred would represent trust. If that can be accomplished (it has forever been, and will eternally be, an issue with Search), then it would be interested to see the value that would be placed on it by members of social networks.
It would also be interesting to see how the algorithms to measure and calculate representations of trust compared to that of search engines.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve done some nutty things in my life. And I’m not really going to talk about those things here or anywhere online.
But apparently Jeremy David doesn’t hold the same sentiment.
“I am going to do an experiment – open source my life. See what happens when a community of users has control over a person in the “real world”. I graduate with a BCom in August of 2007, so that gives us 10 months to figure out an effective and elegant interface, accumulate enough of a community to make it actually happen, and develop an infrastructure that makes this possible. In that time I will slowly transition control of my life over to this website. Sounds pretty intense, doesn’t it?
Consider this the announcement of Choose Jeremy’s Adventure BETA.“
Best of luck to you, man. Most people in college don’t take the chance of falling asleep first at a party, let alone let someone else make their decisions for them.
That is pretty rad, though.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
The Chicago Tribune’s article on blog usage is yet another mainstream acknowledgment of the popularity of Blogging.
Stats of note:
- 175,000 new blogs are created every day (mmm…SPAM)
- 12 million American adults = 8 percent of U.S. Internet users have a blog
- 57 million (39 percent) read blogs
- 55 percent of blogs are active, one new post in the last three months
- 11 percent of blogs, second-most blogged about topic, are about politics
- 37 percent of blogs are about “my life and experiences”
For those of you looking for a good primer for getting into Blogging, Robert Scoble and his wife outline Fifteen Ways to a Killer Blog With the Scobles.
She went to Robert and told him she had 40,000 visits that day, and Robert deadpanned and said “That’s because I linked to you.”
Nice one, Scoble. That’s just classic.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has posted a first draft of it’s Ethics Assessment Tool, a series of 20 questions for the purpose of understanding the risk associated with any form of Social Marketing (Viral, WOM, Blogging, etc):
- Ask these questions before launching any word of mouth marketing campaign.
- Get answers from your agencies and vendors, as well as from their subcontractors.
- Think about the risks to your reputation before you cross any ethical lines.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
“Can you make films? If so here’s your chance to win a trip to film a WFP School Feeding project in a developing country.
FightHunger: Walk the World is looking for an upbeat viral video that spreads the word about ending child hunger by 2015 – which is part of the first Millennium Development Goal.
Create your video (no longer than 120 seconds) and submit it to an online video service - we recommend blip.tv or ourmedia.org. (You may also use other services such as YouTube.com or Google Videos but make sure you understand their copyright conditions.) When uploading your video please use the tag “fhvideo”.
Read the contest rules before you submit your entry. The closing date for entries is 15 Dec 2006. Winners will be listed on this site on 29th Dec 2006.
To enter the contest first register and login to the site. Then submit your entry using this webform. If your video is accepted we will send you a confirmation email.”
To find out more about the contest, Click Here.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Note: These events are not in chronological order in order to lead up to a point that is relevant for the impact of Social Media Marketing.
Communities Dominate Brands cited an FT.com report, saying:
“The more fascinating were the two community sites, YouTube and MySpace. MySpace has a bit more users, at about 85 to 75 million…”
ComScore reports:
“Of note were the gains experienced by Wikipedia Sites and Youtube.com during September. Both sites were up 12 percent versus August.”
12 percent growth in one month?!
In the UK, HitWise says that Bebo is quickly closing the branding gap (as far as online searches) with #1 searched brand, eBay.
—–
So, the growth evidence is there. You have the numbers to show the impact that Interactive Social Media is having on Internet use. But how much impact can it really have on your (non-profit? for-profit?) organization?
Well, Project Red got a 7000% boost in UK market share from MySpace alone:
“(RED), the charity backed by Bono established to raise awareness and money to invest in African AIDS programmes. The campaign offers a good case study for brands looking for innovative ways to advertise on social networks.
Hitwise data show that the (PRODUCT) Red website experienced a 70-fold increase in market share of UK internet visits to become the #1 website in the Hitwise Communities - Humanitarian category last week, up from #73 the week before.”
—–
I just have one question: can someone tell me, what is a search engine?
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Rand Fishkin presents several great ways to kick-start your Social Media Marketing campaign.
Not only does he provide some high-level considerations to make as far as where and how your market interacts online, but also provides a great starter list of sites to begin searching for, and connecting with, your marketplace.
Each of these sites have different foci, unique benefits and demand attention to detail and a sub-strategy that considers the quirks and peculiarities of the userbase. For example, making it to the top of Reddit with a politically focused article is far easier than doing so at Digg (or Del.icio.us/popular).
Monday, October 30th, 2006
This list was originally only 5 items long, and first proposed by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy PR. True to the essence of both Social Media Optimization and Social Media Marketing, it quickly spread and turned into 17 Rules, with additions from all over the industry.
- Increase your linkability
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mashup
- Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
- Reward helpful and valuable users
- Participate
- Know how to target your audience
- Create content
- Be real
- Don’t forget your roots, be humble
- Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
- Develop a SMO strategy
- Choose your SMO tactics wisely
- Make SMO part of your process and best practices
- Don’t be afraid to let go of a message or idea and let others own it.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Hello, my name is: Ben Wills.
Work History
I’ve recently made the decision to move into online marketing consulting after spending almost four years at KeywordRanking.com/ WebSourced/ MarketSmartInteractive and the past year working with Andy Beal to start Fortune Interactive, both search engine optimization/marketing companies. At both companies, my role was in the operations side of the company, designing and improving the services for our clients and our internal processes to do so.
At KeywordRanking.com, I saw and helped to lead the service and operations growth from myself, a Vice President and an intern handling very basic SEO services for a couple-hundred campaigns, to over 75 people directly managing over 1,200 search marketing campaigns. Some of these projects were quite impressive to the extent that I’ve never known of larger campaigns to be executed; This included designing, developing and implementing a search marketing campaign for a B2C Fortune 500 company that operated in over 35 countries and over a dozen languages. It was amazingly complex and I’m quite proud of the team that saw this through.
At Fortune Interactive, we were able to apply some very valuable lessons that we learned at KeywordRanking.com to a new company with a potentially great technology. Within the first nine months, we grew to over 20 people and hit many significant milestones in terms of profitability, customer retention, technology development and an amazing level of service not before seen in the industry. I say that not out of arrogance, but from a level of confidence that comes with understanding your competitors’ businesses and offerings.
It’s About the People
I’ve always known (thanks, Dad) that business, and life, is about the people your surround yourself with. Period. Between both experiences over the past five years, I can say with great certainty that I now not only know this as information one might carry with them and discuss at a cocktail party, but that I know this with a level of conviction and defensibility that is only gained through a great range of experiences. That said, as aware of one’s youth as one can be, I look forward to further developing this understanding.
I’ve seen the great things that can happen when passionate people are set free to leverage their own unique talents to reach a unified goal. I’ve seen how there not only comes the satisfaction of accomplishment with this, but also the fulfillment of being a part of something larger than yourself that pushes you harder toward a greater achievement than you could have imagined on your own.
For this reason, it may seem a bit enigmatic that I would make the decision to work independently, and for that reason you would be right. However, I will continue working with amazing people. Only now, I will not only be working with them on projects, but also in a new capacity…
Social Change…Not Just for Web 2.0
Social media is not just a Web 2.0 revolution. This is a social revolution. This change is not only impacting the way that we interact online, but this same fundamental change is occurring in the ways that we volunteer our time and talents, collaborate for the purpose of commerce and education, make political decisions, involve ourselves in our community and in the ways that we manage our businesses.
Call it a Tipping Point of the Flattening of the World that allows us to tap into the Wisdom of Crowds during a time when we face the largest Paradox of Choice in the history of humananity. If that’s what you want to call it, then, by all means go for it. Regardless, it can’t be ignored.
My passions lie in business, sociology, philosophy, ethics, morals, communication and how the Internet is changing the human race (both for better and for worse). Being involved in online marketing allows me to work with many other businesses of all shapes, sizes, forms, purposes, etc, and authentically become involved in understanding their market for the benefit of their business in ways that I would never be able to do so, otherwise.
“For the Sake of…”
A small part of me used to believe that I missed “my time” to make a difference in the 60’s and the 70’s. I wanted to be a hippie and change the world. I wanted to be a part of a revolution.
But I now see that this is the best time for anyone with a similar desire to do so. I do believe that business, with its eternal evolution and emphasis on continuous performance and improvement, can change the world by setting new standards and practices for our performance outside of the workplace. And I also believe that the Internet gives anyone who wishes to change the world the ability to do so with a greater chance for effectiveness than ever before.
I love the idea of Social Media and Marketing. I love its complexity, its necessity to uphold extreme ethics, its peer- and merit- based natural organization and its ability to communicate today’s message to the audience of tomorrow.
I sincerely hope that I am able to bring value to your organization, and I look forward to sharing with everyone our thoughts and seeing where this crazy train will go. :)
Ben
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