How you can be an expert and get paid for it, the Demand Media way. If you’re an expert on any subject, you can become famous and get paid for it. Even if you’re just writing posts on the internet. That’s the message delivered today by Joanne Bradford, chief revenue officer at web media giant Demand Media. “Every expert deserves to be followed,” Bradford said. The problem is that there are sometimes too many experts. The key is to take content expertise and combine it with the data that becomes obtainable based on all of the data collected by web sites.
Bradford mentioned Jerri Ferris, who was a successful home and gardening writer. Then she became editor in chief of the company’s home and gardening site and now makes more than six figures. The eHow site’s Home & Garden channel uses an algorithm, like all of the Demand Media sites, that combines proprietary and third-party data to figure out what people are looking for on the web and which content they spend the most time with. “It is a story of reinvention,” Bradford said. Analysis: Google's Panda And The Insanity In The Search For Quality. Posted by Tom Foremski - April 18, 2011 Google regularly changes its algorithm and it's a smart move because all the companies that were trying to game Google -- and were succeeding in taking advantage of the some 200 rules that make up the algorithm -- get shaken out of the results. It's a quick way of finding the most egregious gamers of the system. And Google's recent release of its "Panda" algorithm update was designed to find quality sites and raise them in the search rankings.
But Panda is causing a lot of pandaemonium for all types of businesses, those that played by Google's "white hat" SEO rules, and those that didn't. The Panda update was supposed to punish sites with low quality content, such as content farms churning out millions of articles or videos of mostly mediocre quality. Sistrix, which sells software that monitors keywords and traffic, published a chart showing Demand Media's ehow.com as the biggest loser. But what quality content? {*style:<b>JimF: </b>*} </i></b>*} CouponFactory : Retailer, Restaurant and Small Business Coupon Management Tool - CouponFactory - Bentonville, Arkansas and Frisco, Texas. Does social media marketing actually work? Fewer than 1 percent of website visits come directly from a social media URL according to research just released by customer satisfaction analytics experts ForeSee Results.
The company surveyed 300,000 consumers on more than 180 websites across a dozen private and public sector industries. The referring social media sites covered were not just the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter, but over 40 sites including Flickr, Foursquare, Scribd, Stumbleupon, Meetup and Youtube.
It’s not all bad news for social media marketeers. 18 percent of site visitors (averaged across surveyed websites) report being influenced by social media to visit a website. However, there was considerable variation in the results for different companies. The social media budgets of marketers is constantly increasing as the survey data to the right shows. Companies themselves seem a bit confused about their objectives when it comes to social media.
How retailers and brands will evolve through social e-commerce. One of the big shifts in online shopping last year was the emergence of social e-commerce. Brands and retailers started to realize that social networks aren’t just a means to extend their visibility but also a way to pull in more revenue. The infrastructure of the Internet now enables the sharing of information among networks at a velocity and scale that has been impossible in the offline world. Consider the following statistics: 90 percent of people trust recommendations of friends above any form of advertising.U.S. Internet users spent 41.1 billion minutes on Facebook, surpassing Google 39.8 billion minutes for the first time (according to comScore).1 in 4 minutes spent on the Internet in the US is spent on Facebook.Facebook has 500 million users, adding over 100 million in the past 7 months, and 50% of the active ones log on daily.
A plethora of social e-commerce solutions have hit the market and are evolving as quickly as the social networking phenomena. Everything’s connected: Why all marketing will become social. We all know the Facebook story or at least saw the movie. A site for college kids to publish their pictures became an Internet phenomenon. But while grandma may now be posting what she ate for breakfast, the real revolution Facebook has created is for advertisers. Brands are salivating at the prospect of reaching the 500 million users who collectively spend over 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook. In 2011 and beyond, Facebook will become one of the most important marketing channels in the world. Already, Facebook is on track to generate more than $2 billion in ad revenues in 2010, far surpassing earlier estimates of around $1 billion, and will likely skyrocket past that figure in 2011, as more marketers shift budgets from TV, radio, and print to the social realm. And, it’s not just Facebook that’s having an impact on marketing.
So what will the social media marketing landscape look like in 2011?