kuler #SocialChat: The Little Social Sites You Should Not Overlook On Monday, November 12, the #SocialChat crowd gathered to welcome Monica Wright (@monicawright) for a round in the hot seat to discuss some of the social media sites often overlooked by businesses looking to get a little more out of their online marketing. Monica Wright is a veteran online marketer specializing SEO and social media, and has worked with national and regional clients in a wide variety of industries including hi-tech, hospitality and tourism, and higher education. Her core strengths are building audiences and visibility using search and social channels, as well as diagnostic SEO. She shares her expertise by speaking at industry events such as SMX, SMX Advanced, PubCon and serves as Social Media Editor for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. For those of you planning to attend the SMX Social Media Marketing Conference in Las Vegas in December, Monica will be moderating a panel on social sites you shouldn’t overlook. Monica: Again depends on the blog.
Your Biggest Mistake in Measuring Social Media Success You think social media is a channel that it's not, because you want it to be. All those people right there for the taking with all their interests laid out for you in their profiles. All that talk that lets you know what they're thinking. It seems like the perfect place to make perfect customer matches. People aren't there to shop Why not? Therefore, the biggest mistake you can make is primarily measuring how the channel is doing in terms of advertising and transactions instead of how it's doing with conversation and sharing, which is what it is good at. Healthy relationships take time to develop But social media is about relationship, and if you want a healthy relationship, you can't start it off by asking the prospect to come back to your place (your website) and consummate your marriage (purchase). When you engage people in social media, they have likely shown no signs of being ready for commitment (ready for purchase) or being confident that you are the one they want to commit to.
Video: The Internet of Things The BBC has posted a new video discussing the Internet’s next frontier, particularly the Internet of Things. According to the description of the video, “In its early days the internet was seen simply as a way of transferring data across large distances but it is now playing an ever increasing part in our lives. David Reid reports on what is seen as the next big frontier for the web – called the internet of things – allowing you to use your smartphone to control your home heating, pay for parking and even monitor your own fitness.” Read more of our coverage on the Internet of Things, or watch the video here. Image: Courtesy BBC
Three Leading Arguments for Semantic Technologies Those involved with the semantic Web are passionate as to why they are involved. This passion and the articulateness behind it are notable factors in why there is indeed a ‘semantic Web community.’ Like few other fields — perhaps including genomics or 3D manufacturing — semantic technologies tend to attract exceptionally smart, committed and passionate people. Across this spectrum of advocates there are thousands of pages of PDFs and academic treatises as to semantic this or semantic that. Fred Giasson and I at Structured Dynamics feel we have done a pretty fair job of answering these questions. Yet, on the other hand, we have found dedicated customers and steady and growing support from the arguments we do make. It is also obvious that the arguments an academic needs to make to a funding agency or commission are much different than what is desired by commercial customers. “Semantic Technologies Enable Data Integration and Interoperability”
10 Oscar-Worthy Examples of Brands Newsjacking the Academy Awards While many people are critiquing the $1.6 million commercials that ran during the Oscars last night, we thought it'd be fun to take a look at something a bit less expensive and a bit more inventive -- the real-time newsjacking that occurred last night during the broadcast over one of our favorite social networks, Twitter. Newsjacking refers to the practice of capitalizing on the popularity of a news story to amplify your sales and marketing success. The term was popularized in David Meerman Scott's book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. No less than ten brands went into high gear developing tweets that riffed on the Oscar broadcast as it happened. 1) Charmin As the red carpet entrances occurred, Charmin wasted no time encouraging the stars to make sure they look down before they set foot on the carpet. Good luck to the nominees tonight. — Charmin(@Charmin) February 24, 2013 2) Special K A host can make or break an evening.
Future versions of Firefox to block third-party ad cookies Online advertising continues to grow by leaps and bounds, but that doesn't mean that life is easy for players in the digital ad ecosystem. In fact, the thriving online ad economy is increasingly complicated. Unfortunately, things are only going to get more complicated. Nuclear first strike, but against who? Despite the fact that Firefox has seen its marketshare decline in recent times and another major browser, Apple's Safari, already blocks third-party cookies from ad networks, Mike Zaneis, SVP and general counsel at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), posted a tweet calling the Mozilla move a "nuclear first strike." In theory, it's easy to see why those representing the interests of advertisers, including advertisers and ad networks themselves, would react so negatively to Mozilla's announcement: blocking third-party cookies by default would make life more difficult. Going native
New: Save Your Google Search Settings & Take Them With You That annoying thing when you do a Google search on your desktop computer, then you’re searching again on your laptop an hour later, and maybe searching on your iPad an hour after that … and you have to redo your search preferences each time? Or maybe you’re searching in Chrome one minute, but you switch over to Firefox to run some other searches, and then you end up doing some searches in Safari, too? And your search results look different in each browser because the settings are different? Those are over and done with. Google has announced that searchers can now save their search preferences at the account level. Until now, search settings were only handled at the browser level. As long as you’re signed in to your Google account, your saved search settings will follow you from browser to browser, and from computer to computer. It looks like the new feature is available now. Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Accounts & Profiles | Google: Web Search | Top News
Facebook Most Effective Social Marketing Channel for SMBs (But They Want Social Media Help) Facebook is overwhelmingly the most effective social media marketing channel for small businesses, with exponentially more saying it’s better than Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and all other social networks. The numbers come from the Constant Contact Small Business Pulse survey, which had replies from 728 small business and non-profit participants in April-May 2012. To get a sense of what kinds of businesses replied, consider that 74 percent of respondents have 10 or fewer employees. Overall, respondents listed email marketing as their most effective marketing activity — 83 percent listed it as an effective channel, and both B2C and B2B companies did so in very similar amounts. Only 49 percent rated Social Media as an effective activity (56 percent B2C and 38 percent B2B). (click for larger version) That chart’s pretty stunning. In the bigger picture, though, social media remains a challenge for small business owners.
HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO Sometimes, your site will need some downtime, so you can fix things or update plugins. Most of the time, this tends to be a relatively short period in which Google will most likely not attempt to crawl your website. However, in the case that you need more time to get things fixed, chances are much higher that GoogleBot might come for a visit and be confronted with a website that’s down. So how do we prevent Google from deranking your website? HTTP status codes and you For those not familiar with HTTP status codes, here’s a brief summary of the ones that apply to you when dealing with site maintenance: 200 OK. Please note that Google will consider pages returning the 200 HTTP status code, despite there being an error (or very little content) on the page, as a “soft 404” in Google Search Console. Read more: ‘HTTP status codes’ » Telling Google you’re busy To overcome this potential longer loss of rankings, you need to return a 503 status code whenever working on a particular page. Pro-tips
How to create the perfect infographic Once a fun and useful way of presenting data in an easy-to-digest format, infographics have been overused to the point that their reputation is close to ruin. And yet the truth is that they are still a brilliant way of gaining shares and, more importantly, links back to your site. Our regular infographic roundup remains one of the most consistently popular posts each week. The trick is to avoid churning out an ugly, unreadable infographic just for some cheap exposure, and concentrate on creating something genuinely valuable for a specific audience. We've previously blogged five free online tools that can help with this process. At Distilled’s LinkLove conference infographic designer Claire Stokoe gave a talk on how to create the perfect infographic, and it turns out that the fundamentals aren’t that difficult. The five basic steps are: Find some data. Unfortunately not all SEOs have intentions as pure as Ms Nightingale's, but here’s Stokoe’s process for creating the perfect infographic.
5 UX Improvements to Increase Conversions Just like bricks and mortar retailers, winning at ecommerce comes down to providing your visitors with the best user experience (UX). From the shoppers point of view, the best experience can be a simple as finding the lowest price, even on a poorly designed site with otherwise bad UX . But, generally speaking, a better overall ecommerce UX translates into more conversions, better conversion rates and – ta da – higher sales. The problem is that creating a better UX can be a complex task with seemingly endless options, each of which must be researched, tested, implemented, including for different buying personas, color combinations, page designs, product layouts, calls-to-action, etc., etc., etc.. The good news is there are many easy (relatively) and proven ways to improve your UX, and, in turn, your conversion rate. Page Loading Speed: This is number one for a reason. 14% – No guest checkout option – People don’t want to open an account, they just want to buy from you.