Posts Tagged ‘smo’

Capturing the attention of Your Web audience

People will go to great lengths to capture the attention of their web audience and they will do it in

variety of ways.  a viral video becomes viral because it evokes an emotional response when viewed be it humor, fear, pain or compassion.  but you’ll need to hone in on a topic that gives these types of responses in order to be successful in viral video.  Let’s talk about how you can do that.

Idiocy sells. Talk about or video something that’s ridiculously dumb and you’ve got a good chance of going viral.  Whether it’s people making fools of themselves intentionally or not, people just love to watch humorous stuff.  With videos, you have an easier way of showing your funny story compared to a blog or even a podcast because people don’t have to imagine it being funny.  They can just see it.  With all that being said, humor sometimes really puts things in perspective.

Videos that show people getting hurt have a strong potential for going viral because of the inherent emotional ties evoked when viewed.  What is it about people getting hurt that compels others watch?  Maybe it brings to light a reality that it could somehow happen to us.  Maybe it’s the horror of watching something death defying.  Maybe, just maybe there is some thrill we get by watching people get hurt.  This always reminds me of the “rubber-neckers” on the freeway that cause traffic jams.

bringing people to justice is also something people love to watch.  People love to see the happy ending when the good cop defeats the bad cop.  People want to know that cheaters and liars (who happen to always show up in our lives) are always brought to justice.  Seeing video like these bring out the “noble cause” side in all of us that justice is served and peace can now come back to the good people of this nation.

Topics that are considered secret or taboo are often good candidates to go viral as well.  Little known facts or real life stories generate talk because there’s just something mystical about a secrets and taboo.   

all of these situations evoke a particular emotional response that compels us to comment on the video, blog about it or somehow transfer this clip of information into the hands of the next person and it goes viral.  The stronger the emotion, the faster the viral transfer takes place.  Put some emotion into your video and get the buzz going!

Photo credit: viewzi Video x3 View by Chris Mancini

ITConversations: Conversations on ROI ideas Social Media and Social Networking Systems

There are subtle differences between online marketing that leverages
social media to carry its message and the methods of traditional
marketing. With online marketing, even though you’re not re-inventing
the wheel, you’re still riding on a different vehicle. When marketers
forget that, they land themselves into trouble. The gestation period,
for one, is much longer in online marketing efforts. building a MySpace is not the goal. Getting people to use it and draw their attention to your product is your goal.

One
of the biggest areas that they goof up on is not having respect for the
platform and the audience that they’re trying to get the attention of
by launching campaigns that do not speak to the demographic. Simply
utilizing screen real-estate to make people click on your advert and
download a white-paper is cost-prohibitive and isn’t worth the social
media effort and investment.

The two essential formulae to
success with online marketing are — building a community and carrying
the message back with the metrics collected. Essentially these are two
different functions requiring diametrically opposite faculties of the
brain. They must be done by two different people. Creating a community
must be left to an evangelist who thrives on the human factor. This is
the most difficult part. Creating a website such as MySpace or Facebook
where people put their pictures is not rocket-science. You have to have
an evangelist work for you to build a community around your product and
then exploit the attention of your audience once a community is created.

In
this talk, Giovanni Gallucci, a search engine optimization and social
media expert, a speaker, blogger and co-founder of Dexterity Media,
spills out the secrets of a successful online marketing philosophy that
leverages the communal strength of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook,
etc. He contrasts social media against traditional marketing by
providing case studies of companies that succeeded as well as those
that’ve failed at it.

Click here to go to the IT Conversations site to listen to this episode of Talking Portraits.
 

Improving Customer Loyalty via Online Videos and Podcasting

Strengthening ties with your customers will be an ongoing process that you will need to streamline.  When you have an organized way of contacting your consumers, you can focus on the important part of your relationship like sending compelling content.  Podcasting (this can be audio or video) is a great way to enhance your relationships with your clients and keep them up to date about what your business is doing.

• Podcasting helps your audience become a part of your community.  Podcasting efforts helps your audience connect with you.  Most times, they’ve already chosen to participate in your business since they’ve elected to be on your RSS feed or have you transmit your media casts to them on a regular basis.  This is a perfect opportunity to draw them in even further and strengthen your customer loyalty.
• Podcasting provides alternate ways that consumers can participate in your business.  Get creative with this opportunity to keep in contact with your consumers.  Offer contests or giveaways.  Use this time to get your audience engaged even more.  at this point, you can take your relationship with your clients even further by describing added benefits of doing business with you.
• Podcasting engages your clients.  This is a good place for soliciting feedback and getting your clients to participate in your business.  You can poll your audience.  Offer a “what do you think” section or just offer ways to get them more involved in your business.
• Podcasting can be a way to reinforce your genuineness and sincerity towards you consumers.  People don’t like advertising in general, but this is your opportunity to show your customers your sincerity and appreciation for their loyalty.  This can essentially change the view of the way consumers see businesses.  Much like stock holders, they begin to take on some form of ownership with your business and you’ll gain a client for a lifetime.
• Podcasting affords you a way to have consistent contact with your consumers.  Consistency will be what you need to further your relationship with your client.  Even if it’s weekly or monthly, you should be diligent about reaching your client.  You’ll be building brand loyalty with every contact you make.

Customer loyalty should not be a fleeting thing.  Using podcasting ad viral video, you have available to you one of the best ways to engage your clients in your business.  When you are consistent in the process, you will reap the lasting results and watch your business grow!

Photo Credit: Víctor R. Ruiz

Maintain Your Connection with Your audience on Twitter

Relationships are so important to build when using social networking.  If you’re looking for a way to help you streamline your outreach efforts, Twitter can help you do just that.  as an easy to use networking tool, you can easily keep in touch with your clients and other audience members by sending them bits of news information.

Wondering if you can actually use something like Twitter?  Twitter has a 140 character maximum per message.  Even with this short amount of text, companies like The New York Times, CNN, the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel and The (Portland) Oregonian are using Twitter to send news updates via cell phone text messages or via instant messaging.

What’s also interesting to see is how other businesses are beginning to take advantage of “micro-blogging” that Twitter can provide.  It’s amazing to see even the journalism industry find ways to report late breaking news stories and keep them up to date.  It’s also interesting to know that the Los angeles Fire Department has it’s own Twitter page to update journalists.  Instead of listening to a scanner, they can get updated via this site.

With all this talk about how other businesses and companies are using Twitter, what’s more important here is finding ways for you to use Twitter in your everyday communication with your audience.  While you might not have late breaking news to report to your audience everyday, you can still do some consistent follow up with the hopes of it becoming a two-way communication.  Here are some ideas of how you can use Twitter in your relationship building.

1. Send news updates about your business, product or service.
2. Send promotional sales event information.
3. Have an interactive contest to encourage two-way communication.
4. Remember an audience member’s birthday.
5. Encourage interaction between audience members.

The concept of micro-blogging is catching on rather quickly.  Considering the popularity with text messaging already in the phone industry, it would follow that using a social application like Twitter will only enhance text messaging efforts.  Looking for just another way to make your iPhone even more useful?  add Twitter and find out how you can make use of micro-blogging.

Twitter is a great resource to help you maintain your connection with your audience.  What’s interesting to note is that while your “tweets” might start out being a one-way type of communication, you can eventually turn that into a two-way communication with the possibility of encouraging communication between audience members.  This can take your relationship building efforts really far!

Photo credit: ~C4Chaos

10 Ways to Make SEO and SMO Easier

There’s so much to learn when it comes to using SEO and SMO strategies.  Luckily, there are many tools available that can simplify life.  If the topic of SEO makes your head spin, then read on to find out how you can easily incorporate SEO and SMO strategies into your site.  While social networking sites can improve your rankings, SEO optimization is still a very necessary component of your site’s success.

1. Wordpress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugins by Sizlopedia (http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/08/21/wordpress-search-engine-optimization-seo-plugins/) gives a comprehensive list of Wordpress plugins available.  He also links to valuable WordPress information regarding these plugins and best of all, the list is current!
2. 8 Flickr Related Wordpress Plugins by Make Money with Your blog (http://wpthemesplugin.com/8-flickr-related-wordpress-plugins/) gives a list of plugins you can use to share stuff from your Flickr page – makes sharing easier to do!
3. 7 HTML 5 elements that will make SEO more enjoyable by a member of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/7-html-5-elements-that-will-make-seo-more-enjoyable) lists changes to HTML 5.  according to the article, this “could make search engine friendliness easier than ever”.
4. Google Web Toolkit – build aJaX apps in the Java language by Google (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) lists Google’s web toolkit components.  For you aJaX lovers out there.
5. SEO Tools by SEOChat (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/) lists common tools necessary for any website.  Find adSense, Google, key word, spider tools and much more.  The list is extensive.
6. 136 SEO Tools by SEO Company (http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html) has a bunch of tools that encompasses just about every aspect of SEO you could possibly measure or simplify.
7. Social bookmarks Creator by TopRank blog (http://www.toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks/) – this link takes you directly to a tool that creates a code to paste social bookmarks on your site.  The bookmark services seem complete, but with the number of emerging social sites becoming available you might have to end up manually adding a new site.
8. More Linking Tools by SEObook (http://www.seobook.com/archives/000289.shtml) – lists a few linking tools that may help with tracking reciprocal links.
9. Latest SMO Tools by adwordsadSensetools (http://www.adwordsadsensetools.com/-SMO-Social-Marketing-Optimization-.html) offers a long list of SMO tools for purchase and free.  Clicking on the links gives you a brief description of the tool as well as how you can avail yourself of these tools.
10. Key Word Selector Tools.  Here we’re listing two of the most highly recommended sites that offer key word selection tools.  Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) and Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/).  There are others out there, but these two come highly recommended by reputable SEO gurus.

Photo credit: John Griffiths

The Lab W/ Leo Laporte and Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.TV @ xTrain.com

Taping a session for The Lab with Leo Laporte with Cali Lewis & Neal Campbell of Geekbrief.TV at the xTrain.com studios.

Targeting Your Niche in Social Networks

Targeted, qualified audience members are what you want.  To make you social marketing efforts even more profitable, you will have to define what who your target audience is and who it is not.  anyone is not a qualified niche audience.  One thing you might consider as well is that a visit to your site does not necessarily qualify this person as “your audience”.  They have to do something on your site – purchase something or participate / interact with you in order to be considered your niche audience. 

There is a lot of refinement that a list has to go through before you develop the people who are your true leads.  You’ll use your social networking approach to fine tune your visitors.  as they download your podcast or embed their video on your site, you’ll refine that lead with added commitment or interaction requests.  The goal of your target audience is to produce loyalty in some form to your business.

You’ll want to use social networking strategies that pre-qualify your audience member.  a general “shout out” probably won’t produce the kind of targeted response you want.  If the range of customers you approach is too broad, you may find yourself frustrated by wasted time and resources. 

Once you get your prospect to respond make sure you can deliver your product.  Your offer should always inspire your prospect to get in touch with you and once they get in touch with you, what happens next?

1. Have a method to handle your social networking audience.
2. Deliver on your promises fast.
3. Start interacting with them.

as you go through this process you will find your true audience.  Sometimes you may find that one of your “seemingly audience” members spend a lot of time on your site.  They’ll make comments but don’t really convert.  The truth is that everyone is an audience member no matter where they are at in your business.  You’ll want to treat them with respect not because they need it but because you never know what can happen down the line.  In social networks, many people are masked behind the computer images and you don’t know what they are really thinking even when they seem to say what they are thinking.  Protect yourself and your business and don’t get caught in the negative audience members.

Take time to review your efforts.  Did you gauge the prospect accurately?  Was there anything that you could have said better?  How can you improve upon your content or outreach activities?  Self assessment will keep you on check to make sure you reach your target audience.

Social Media Pimp – HaPPY HaLLOWEEN

Have a gander at all the pics from our Halloween Party over on my flickr.cm account!

Is Social Media Made for businesses?

The advent of social media has made a strong impact on the way businesses market on the internet.  We’re seeing entire industries change to accommodate online users in this amazing internet phenomenon.  Could the online marketing industry be due for a change as well?  In a market that is seemingly created by end users for end users, businesses will have to reconsider previous ways of marketing on the whole. 

Online marketing agencies will have to rethink their standard marketing techniques and get creative in order for their clients to compete in the realm of SMM.  Essentially, current perceptions of tactical media buying have to give way to strategic media channel planning.  No longer is it about buying advertising time and creating a compelling ad, but rather, it’s become about creating a marketing strategy that establishes a deeper, emotional connection with consumers.

With so many social media avenues becoming available on an almost weekly basis, online marketers must now create a tailor made plan to that is specific to the technology, product or service being sold (even if it’s for free).  This will require knowledge of what types of media are out there and how they can be used.  an online marketer must know the difference between two media sites that are seemingly the same type of site.  They must know that using a social bookmarking site such as Digg will produce different results than using StumbleUpon.

The focus on the customer must be stronger than ever before in order to use social media sites effectively.  Online marketing agencies must learn the “rules” of SMM in order for their strategies to be effective.

Online marketing agencies also learn how to integrate all aspects of the social media strategy to produce the desired effects.  Mastering this skill will become a quality in demand for any successful agency.

Targeting consumers must be done with more care and precision than ever before.  With the variety of media that’s out there, broad spectrum SMM tactics just won’t work.  Like we said earlier, it’s not like general advertising.  Having accurate and up to date demographics on both consumers as well as social media sites will become increasingly necessary and vital part of any strategy.

accountability takes on a new role in social media marketing.  Social responsibility must be at the forefront of any good marketing strategy.  The online agency must know how to respond and teach their clients how to respond in this quick paced environment.

Social media is definitely changing the scope of the marketing industry.  Thought of initially as just a fad, SMM has proven that it’s here to stay.

Photo credit: Jim Hedger.

MySpace is Still the King of Social Networking

Facebook has been getting a lot of press these days.  an up and coming star in mainstream social networking, Facebook offers its users many functional applications that MySpace doesn’t, but is it enough to take the lead?  are we witnessing the beginning of our first social network face off?  Now who’s “king of the mountain” – is it MySpace or Facebook? 

MySpace has dominated mainstream social media for years.  alexa page rankings shows MySpace still outranking any other social media site, but Facebook is not far behind.  Having a unique audience of a whopping 61.3 million users annually, the strength of MySpace is preeminent.  Facebook’s annual unique audience tallies at 19.5 million which is nothing to sneeze at as well, but still nothing in comparison to MySpace.

Facebook still has a long way to go to toppling this king, but here are some reasons why we think that MySpace is NOT going down anytime soon.

Money talks and b@?&!*%t walks.  Censored for your reading pleasure.  MySpace has done well with “branding” themselves.  amongst the youth, MySpace is still the place to be when talking about the internet. Granted, more and more often you get rolled eyes from the little social networking $41#$ that make them so charming at that age when you mention MySpace as if to indicate "MySpace?!? That’s soooooo March!" They’re also recognized by leading fortune 500 companies (Coca-Cola) as a premier place to advertise. 

When the general public thinks about social media – they immediately think about MySpace.  Sorry Facebook – you’re not quite there just yet.  It’ll be hard to talk about social media without talking about MySpace.  Even people who’ve never been on the internet know about MySpace. 

MySpace has the credibility to host alongside MTV in the presidential elections chat.  That’s a huge accomplishment for any social media site!  No site can boast about working with the likes of MTV or any station for that matter.  Now that’s power.

MySpace has built up their online communities to reach out to a vast number of groups.  These groups can be characterized by age, location, work place, and just about any type of group on the net can be found on MySpace.  In comparison to the newer networking sites, they just haven’t had enough time to build their web reach the way that MySpace has and still only serve a small niche group of people. 

by the way, did we mention money?  He who gets the advertising revenue first laughs first (or should it be last?  Who cares?  They’re getting the money!) Of coourse, with today’s Microsoft/Facebook partnership announcement more and more indicators point to Facebook teabagging MySpace sooner rather than later.

Facebook is making a great play for the top, but it still has a long way to go.  However, social media is still a young phenomenon.  On the internet, anything can change in an instant.

Photo credit: Stpiduko