Executing a Content Strategy for Buyers Rese With digital media and search, you need to think about a whole new set of considerations when you write content if you want to appeal to buyers who are researching and evaluating products or services. It's not just thinking about the top keywords and inserting them in your copy. As John Battelle writes in a post that revisits his own database of intentions, there are many more nuances to content and optimization today. Tools This is another way of looking at how social media integrates with what we do and how we market and sell. 1. Do you see how the evolution is playing off online to off line? Writing content for the researching eye Which can be the roaming eye. Generally, the stumbling block for many businesses is obtaining recommendations straight on. Video and audio testimonials get you more attention than written case studies these days. Checklist for social: What you learn through interactions in social media is also customer intelligence. Checklist: © 2010 Valeria Maltoni.
The Twit Cleaner - Clean the garbage from your Tweetstream 12 SEO Authority Building Tips By now you know you need to focus on authority, your own, as well as relationships with other authorities. But what are the best strategies for developing authority? From an SEO perspective, building authority only works if you have some sort of web presence for people to capitalize on. For the purposes of this column, it's assumed that you have a blog, a social media presence, or both. Actually, you want to have both, because blogging and social media can reinforce each other in powerful ways: Search engines try to measure personal (or organizational) authority the way people do. In this column, the words "authority" and "influencer" will be used somewhat interchangeably. Behave Yourself! The first set of considerations relate to how you're perceived. Gain Trust You can't be thought of as an authority if you aren't trusted. Be Consistent If you establish a strong position on something, think long and hard before changing it. Show Expertise and Value Be Natural and Authentic Be Social Be Seen!
How Companies are Using Social Media to Make Better Decisions Mat Fogarty is the Founder and CEO of Crowdcast, a leading provider of collective intelligence and prediction market solutions. You can read more of Mat's posts on the Crowdcast blog or follow @crowdcastinc. Collaboration and crowdsourcing are the realities of today's public Internet, and the trend is now gaining real traction in the workplace. Smart companies increasingly understand that their richest source of insight, ideas, data, and information is within their own employees. Just as so many of us look to the Yelp community to figure out where to make our dinner reservations, companies are increasingly looking to the employee crowd for the knowledge and insight to make better business decisions. Enterprise Social Networks “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” — Lew Platt, Former CEO of HP As the social enterprise builds momentum, the big question is: How will companies effectively tap the employee crowd to become more productive? Prediction Markets
Top 5 Budget Social Media Monitoring Tools Viralheat – our favourite low cost solution In the run up to Monitoring Social Media 09 I’ve been checking out some of the free or low-cost social media monitoring solutions. I’ve been hearing that many of the top marketing agencies still use free monitoring tools: but which ones? And how do they compare to the high-end paid-for solutions like Visible Technologies, Brandwatch etc? SocialMention (Free) Often described as the social version of Google Alerts, SocialMention offers a really user-friendly interface. The big problem with SocialMention is that you can’t save your searches and come back to them. BrandsEye ($1 month) BrandsEye is more of an old-school reputation management tool than a social media monitoring service. Trackur ($18/month with free trial) This is one of those services that, thanks to it’s founder, Andy Beal, get’s a lot of online promotion and coverage. Ubervu (Free) Viralheat ($9.99/month)
The Twitter Spot in Your Brain These days, you can’t go online without bumping into someone styling himself as a social media guru, a Facebook expert, or a power user of Twitter. And, if you check their online profiles, they actually do have thousands of friends and followers. But are these real friends, or did the supposed expert socializers simply crank up an automation software to rapidly build their follower base? A new study has found that individuals with larger amygdalas (an area of the brain usually associated with fear and other emotions) have more friends and more complex social networks. Magnetic resonance imaging scans found a positive link between big amygdalas and the richest social lives. What is not yet known is the nature of the cause/effect relationship. While you likely won’t be able to get an fMRI scan of your next social media expert’s brain, this is fascinating research – it actually demonstrates a link between the size of a specific brain structure and differences in human behavior.
10 Steps for Optimizing the Brand for Social Search inShare4 Facebook recently overtook Yahoo as the second most visited site in the United States. And in doing so, Facebook along with other social networks set the stage for a confluence of social and search that fundamentally changes who we, as a society, discover and share information, and in turn, where our attention is directed and driven. Source: Mashable Make no mistake, attention is shifting away from traditional destination sites and instead, it is fixated on personalized attention dashboards that funnel social feeds, the activity and focus of social graphs into one clickable view. For media properties and brands, optimization combined with targeted and enterprising social networking now plays an instrumental role in capturing the attention and essentially defining the action of our customers, peers, and the trust agents and authorities who influence them. Referral traffic is quickly migrating away from traditional search to social networks, and in some cases, at alarming rates. 1.
Twitter Email Alerts - Tweet Scan In the innovative world of Microblogging, one site aims to organize it all. Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Status.net-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, and JSON. For more information check our API page or read our Blog Benefits of using Tweet Scan Email Alerts: Find lost or multi-user replies. Services indexed by Tweet Scan: Tweet Scan is a Sterry IT, LLC project. Trends in Branding - Introduction - © SALT Branding 2010 Santa goes Digital-Mobile-Social No longer does the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Santa Claus usher in a holiday season of window displays. Today’s consumers start their holiday shopping research online and closer to Halloween, nearly a month before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They use digital, mobile, and social media to shop both in stores and online – digital technology has changed the holiday shopping experience. But how are retail and other consumer brands adapting themselves to the digital-mobile-social marketplace for the holidays? Read More Managing Brand Value with Color Picture going through a day without color – picking out a monotone outfit, choosing among similar items at the grocery store, trying to find your car in a crowded parking lot – and imagine what our favorite brands would be reduced to without color. Mind the Gap The recent re-re-branding of the GAP brand raises some interesting questions about the power of crowds vs. the power of the brand itself.
foursquare Testing Analytics Tool, Dashboard for Businesses - me foursquare will give business owners their chance to check in — to a new analytics tool and dashboard that will give them information such as who has checked in to their places of business, when they arrived, the gender ratio of their customers who have checked in, and what times of day are busiest, The New York Times‘ Bits reported. The geolocation-based service will also make staff pages available to businesses, easing interaction between employees and customers, according to Bits. foursquare has been testing the analytics tool and dashboard with 30 small businesses, and it plans to gradually roll it out to another 900, Bits reported. foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told Bits the tool will incorporate more analytics and insight in coming months, adding that there will be an opt-in, opt-out setting in the privacy panel to give foursquare users the option of keeping their information private.
Social Media Monitoring: Who's Making Money? Luke Brynley-Jones talks with Philip Hofmeyr at Social Media Measurement & Monitoring (photo: Benjamin Ellis) So who’s making the money in social media measurement and monitoring? I was on a panel asked this question at the Measurement & Monitoring Meetup on Friday. Yet it’s actually a burning issue for many of the suppliers. But are they making money? We’re just not there yet in terms of credibility and investment. I guess that leaves the Consultants. On that note – Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt, two of the best social media monitoring consultants around, will be in the UK at the end of March 2010.
New Media Trend Watch - Provided by the European Travel Commission Report: Location Sharing Is Coming to Facebook Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. How Will Facebook's Users React? It will be interesting to see how Facebook's users - who are famously averse to change - will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. From Facebook's Privacy Policy: Location Information. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Will Facebook's Users Care? It will be interesting to see if Facebook's users are even interested in sharing this information. Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?