Shaun Low

I’m a regular reader of Fred Wilson’s blog. Fred posted an article today that he is planning to clean house on his blog. He will remove many (if not most) of the widgets that adorn his site.

There was much rejoicing!

I can understand why Fred installed all these widgets in the first place. He’s got a natural curiosity and he’s a venture capitalist by trade — and invests in this stuff. There’s no better way to get to understand a technology or trend than to actually use it.

But, I’d argue that very few of his blog readers appreciate the widgets (except, perhaps the people that developed them).

Benefits Of Widget Removal And A Cleaner Blog

1. It focuses readers on the core content, which is (hopefully) why they’re there.

2. It makes pages load faster. Think of the bandwidth saved across the web!

3. Search engines like Google appreciate fast-loading sites (and possibly reward them with higher rankings).

4. It makes things simpler and more likely to load across a variety of browsers. (Yes, yes, I know things are supposed to work — but they often don’t)

So, if you’re a blogger, follow Fred’s lead and clean things up a bit. Your readership will thank you.

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About the author:
Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.

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Sara Holoubek has a good writeup today on the latest with Google’s social graph API in DM News. She writes at the end:

Assuming that we do solve the technical ability to fairly map the
social graph, marketers will be waiting in the wings to append a set of
names with this connection data (who, what, how, when, why). Marketers
will, however, need to rely upon the techies to get there, and given
the backlash from the Facebook Beacon introduction, my guess is that we
will all be a little gun shy.

There’s a crucial difference, so far, between what Facebook has done and what Google’s doing (a difference I’m sure Sara appreciates, but these blasted columns can only go into so much detail).

Facebook is letting marketers turn consumers into corporate mascots without the consumers’ knowledge or consent.

Google is offering a way for marketers, publishers, and anyone else to build new applications allowing people to connect with each other.

Marketers can use Facebook for more benevolent means, but they need guidance making sure they’re adding value for their target audience rather than simply using their, well, users.

I’m also sure Google will find ways to empower marketers to do evil as well, or marketers will find ways to do evil with Google’s API anyway, but as of now, evildoing’s not an inherent part of the system.

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About the Author

David Berkowitz is Director of Strategic Planning for 360i and oversees the Search Informed Marketing firm’s Emerging Media Practice. Every Tuesday, he pens the Search Insider column for MediaPost, with over 100 articles published to date. He often speaks at events covering marketing, media, and technology; his previous engagements include Ad:Tech, Consumer Electronics Show - Digital Hollywood, MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit, and many others. He has also blogged extensively with MarketersStudio.com, MarketingVox, nowEurope, AdTechBlog, and others.

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Last night during the big game, I joined a large group of marketing and social media types to share some live thoughts about the Super Bowl ads through Twitter (sending them to the @superbowlads user account).  The aptly named “Twitterbowl” consisted of lots of folks live rating ads and sharing some feedback about the ads live during the game.  Voting on ads in real time is nothing new … however doing it and reading the thoughts of my other contacts during the game was an interesting way to experience the ads.  Though I would have expected a more sophisticated commentary from the group as a whole, being marketing people and all.  Many folks seemed to just be rating ads on entertainment value as opposed to whether or not the message actually made sense for the brand, but it was still a fun experience as part of the game.

Aside from realizing that people can really have completely opposite views of what makes a successful Superbowl ad, it was also clear that all of us love to have our opinions.  Everyone decides what is most entertaining for them, but since this is a marketing blog, I’m going to go with my own top 3 Super Bowl ad list based on strategic value for the brand.  So, here is my list of the top three 3 strategic ads that were creative, engaging, messaged properly and could actually have a real impact in terms of sales (and only one of them made the USAToday Top 10 popular ads list):

1. Tide “My Talking Stain”:  This spot was easily relatable (everyone has had that stain they couldn’t do anything about), funny, and generated awareness for an under appreciated product  In the Twitterbowl, most folks loved it, and it will easily have the recall when anyone is walking the grocery market aisles and sees it.  The only downside?  The word in the Twitterbowl was that their marketing site (www.mytalkingstain.com) went down under all the traffic.
2. Under Armour “Under Army”:  Any company that is number 3 in a competitive industry has perhaps the most to gain from a Super Bowl ad because it positions them on equal footing with the other two.  For Under Armour, this meant taking the reigns from Nike and Adidas with their “Under Army” spot, which they did brilliantly.  Not to mention it was one of the rare Super Bowl ads that (gasp!) has something to do with football.  Ironically, it wasn’t popular in the Twitterbowl - but for the masses and Under Armour’s target audience, I think it was spot on.
3. Audi “Godfather”: Audi’s spot was a big deal in marketing circles before the Super Bowl even aired because it represented a rare entry from Audi into the Super Bowl mix.  The ad itself was a brilliant parody of the Godfather that positioned the new __________ as the ultimate in new luxury.  Anyone want to bet what percentage of the boomer males watching the game were picturing themselves in that car?

Of course, I am tough on these ads because I am putting the often forgotten lens of strategic value over deciding what was a good creative execution.  If we just looked at entertainment value, which I am sure lots of polls are doing today, the winners were probably a few of the Bud ads and the Pepsi Night at the Roxbury spoof.  Worst ads?  They have to be the Gatorade/Vitamin Water/Sobe combos (seriously, can anyone tell them apart?), the CareerBuilder nasty exploding heart ad (they should have stuck with the monkeys), and the singing Comcast ads (which, thankfully, most of the country probably didn’t see).  Big props to Dell and Lionel also, for being the only advertiser (that I could tell) to actually be part of the Twitterbowl. 

Oh, and it was a great game to watch too … congrats to Giants fans everywhere.  If it can’t be the Redskins, it might as well be the Giants doing the NFC East proud.

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About the Author

Rohit Bhargava is the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com

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The only thing constant about search engine optimization is change. You must adapt if you want to stay on top. Social, news and bookmarking sites and services have changed the game. If you’re still living in 1998 as far as your SEO, get over it. Adapt or you’ll find yourself disappearing from the search results.

In the good old days, Seinfeld was still new in prime time and getting high rankings in the search engines involved tweaking the title and meta tags on your web pages and joining link farms to get thousands of backlinks. You’d submit your site or page, sit back, wait and do some more tweaking in a few days or weeks after the spiders had crawled and indexed.

This is 2008 and things have definitely changed.

Spidering is almost immediate in Google these days. Posts to your blog or web site can show up in a few hours. In 1998, few had heard of blogging and hardly anyone was doing it. Now, the combination of a quality blog and Google’s high speed indexing can be a potent combination for good rankings.

If you don’t have a blog, get one now. You’re missing out on an opportunity to contribute great content to the web as well as gain quality links and reputation, which lead to good rankings.

There’s more to getting good rankings than just posting to your blog, however. You’ve got to leverage social media and bookmarking to really be effective. This means joining social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and so forth (See my post S E O 101 - Social Media Optimization).

Once you’ve registered with the various social bookmarking sites, you need to get the word out about your blog posts. It would help to have social network friends to help you with submitting your posts to the different properties. Doing it yourself is generally considered poor taste.

In addition, Michael Campbell over at Internet Marketing Secrets suggests this recipe for success:

1. Post to your blog. Be sure your post title is targeted to your keyword phrase.
2. Submit an excerpt from the post to sites like Digg and Propeller.
3. Bookmark the excerpt pages on Reddit, Stumbleupon and del.icio.us

4. Ping the bookmark RSS feeds using a service like Pingomatic.

Be sure your excerpts include your targeted search phrase.

Michael’s strategy basically creates a funnel that drills back down to your original post. When you post to your blog, that designates you as the originator of the content. Submitting excerpts not only gets your content (though in the form of a keyword rich snippet) into the likes of Digg and Propeller for immediate traffic, but those individual excerpt pages can then be bookmarked in StumbleUpon or del.icio.us, where traffic lasts longer (Note that del.icio.us results are being tested in Yahoo serps, another bonus). These bookmark sites generate RSS feeds that you can feed into automated feed updating services. All of these are spread out across the web very quickly due to Google’s high speed indexing and are made available for sharing, resulting in widespread visibility that leads back to your original post.

Again, it would be best to follow these steps from accounts other than your own. If you have a work account or a family or friend’s account that you can use, I’d go that route. Tooting your own horn is just plain inappropriate in the eyes of the social networks. Guess I’m just a stickler for proper social etiquette!

Combine Michael’s suggestion with your regular social networking (getting friends and fans to plug you in the social networks) and you’ve got a pretty powerful one-two punch, circa 2008.

So, ditch the link farms and get your blogging and social networking skills in order. Create good, quality content and share it. Being social is as fast as, well, Google these days!

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About the Author

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.

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The recent revolt over at Digg over the social site’s algorithm change brings me to one conclusion:

Welcome to my world.

What got the Diggers so upset is a change to how stories are ranked, primarily by influential Diggers who continually rank well. What frequently happens is that these Diggers have friends who automatically “dig” their articles to help push them to the top (Hey, we all do it. Some of us just have a lot more friends).

Digg apparently decided that this was cheating and started giving less credit to folks who repeatedly promote the same Diggers. This means these influential Diggers have to get a lot more votes from a lot more people, including a wider variety of folks.

Thus, all votes are not created equal.

As an SEO, I’ve been dealing with this for years. Votes from all sites are definitely not equal. I’ve had to diversify my pool of votes from other web sites every time a search algorithm changes. Link farms, Adsense pages and even links from once respected directories have all gone by the wayside as far as backlink votes. I have to search for and find ways to receive quality votes from a variety of sites in the form of links.

I’m not taking a side with either Digg or the upset Diggers, just pointing out that SEOs, who Diggers tend to scorn, share your pain.

Now, take an aspirin and adapt.

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Mahalo has begun allowing users to associate their profiles with their user profiles at MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, Flicker, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pownce.

This is pretty cool for people who would like to start getting their various social media efforts coordinated, and who wish to promote their work across multiple sites.

I previously mentioned Spock, a service that does something similar, only Spock is coordinating results and information without asking permission to create combined user profiles on people - something that some have found a bit creepy. Mahalo’s opt-in format is in contrast the noncreepy way to go about doing this sort of thing.

This looks like a useful self-promotion tool to me, and another service to keep in mind when doing social media optimization (”SMO”).

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This morning I read an article by the BlogOnExpo blog, which discussed “Why 100 Organic Visitors are better than 10,000 Social Media Visitors”

Basically, the article made an argument that the quality of “social media visitors” in comparison to the quality of organic visitors is notably lower. (While the reference to “social media visitor” in this case is quite confusing, I’m assuming it was meant to refer to “social media bookmarking” visitors like Digg and StumbleUpon users). In any case, if you are a skimmer, the main assumptions I got out of this article were the following:

• Social Media Visitors (Social Bookmarking Visitors) come once and probably never again.
• Visitors from social bookmarking sites are not as valuable as visitors from referrals or organic searches – length of time on site, page depth, and participation is lower overall.
• Overall Takeaway: Invest more time in your “organic” visitors than your social media visitors.

Coming from an angle of a social media agency, I can’t help but to think this is a short-sighted view – even if it is a fairly popular attitude towards the value of referrals from social media bookmarking sites. For many, these bookmarking sites seem to provide a boost in traffic, but nothing more over the long term.

Before adopting this same attitude, I would argue that the value of social bookmarking sites are strikingly different for every business model and every business objective.

To use ourselves as an example: around 50% of our traffic comes from referring sites – most of these being StumbleUpon users. While at first, it was tempting to write this off on the above assumptions – we’ve found that a large audience of StumbleUpon users have an overall interest in social media, and are actually the users that stay on our site the longest (at around a 30% bounce rate). In our case, this increased exposure into our target audience is beneficial.

This is where knowing where your audience is participating in social media comes into play. Understanding that social bookmarking sites have different audiences can mean more valuable referrals and an increase in brand awareness among an already established audience. For instance, a company that is targeting a highly technical audience with a new technology or product offering may find that tailored content (not spam) promoted to Digg can increase product and brand awareness. Another company that is trying to push a promotion to price-sensitive consumers may find that Dealigg is the way to go.

The takeaway? If you look at social bookmarking sites as all the same or useless for every business model - you will never find value. However, if you can find and participate in the social bookmarking sites where your audience is in, you may reap the rewards of more valuable referrals.

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About the Author

As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa McNeill outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.

Visit Ignite Social Media

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According to TechCrunch it appears Yahoo is integrating Delicious vote counts into the search results.

Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results

I personally feel this is a great idea. Adding that human rating factor can only help searchers decide what are the most relevant results to click. This also adds more reason for the online marketer to include a social media component in their package for clients. I wonder if vote counts are effecting where pages appear int eh results. From just looking at early results you would think no because you are seeing some pages with no votes easily out ranking pages with 100s of votes.

Yahoo bought Delicious back in late 2005 and some wondered what (if anything) they were going to do with it.

Remember they are just testing this and some Yahoo searchers are not seeing this at all.

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About the Author

Jaan Kanellis a.k.a IncredibleHelp is a search marketing expert located in the Cincinnati, Ohio. Jaan Kanellis is the founder of KBKMarketing.com, which provides organic and PPC search marketing to clients, agency partners and SEM companies. Jaan has been involved in online marketing since 1999 and authors a search marketing blog at JaanKanellis.com.

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The concept of opinion leadership - that 90 percent of the world is influenced by the other 10 percent - came out of a study conducted by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet.back in 1944. 

Chasing the Influencers is the search for that 10% and has long been a part of a PR and marketing.

In that early study opinion leaders are defined as people who are more influential within their social networks than others. Isn’t that interesting - within their social networks. The more things change the more they stay the same.

They consider themselves experts in a specific area of interest and are asked for advice in this area. (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955.) Now that sounds familiar - did I see a recent study that showed that word of mouth and peer reveiws are the top influencers prior to decision or purchase?

Opinion leaders select information in these areas and then pass it on to others. In the process of reporting to others they more or less consciously modify the items of information they transmit.

A study conducted at Hamburg University looked into what opinion leaders really know and if they have the competence to influence others. Their view? 

There might be different types of opinion leaders: those, who know a lot, influence others and are asked for advice; and opinion leaders with comparably low levels of information, but good communicative skills to compensate.

In Edelmans’ whitepaper on measuring social media influence they speak about “meme starters” and “meme spreaders”.

So what makes someone an influencer today?.

1. Knowledge - and that has not changed.
2. Good communication skills. Look at the Forrester Social Technographics Scale and you’ll see that only 13 percent are creators of content online.  
3. A platform and an audience.  The Internet has made it possible for everyone to have the power of voice, but some rise to the top.But we’ve moved from ‘how many’ to ‘who.’  The size of your readership does matter, but in many cases who you are reaching and how much they trust you matters more 
4. Good content is still the attraction.
5. Who links to you. Google pays attention to this and so does Technorati. And it is one measure of influence.
6. Activity in Social Networks. Search Engine Land has a post about social  media success that made me weary just reading it. Being an influencer takes a lot of work.

And there is one big caveat for PR and marketers in all this research - the Internet has changed what we know and how we access information. We are no longer willing to sit pasaively by and be fed marketing messages. Individuals who speak from the heart might be influencing their audience. It’s not likely to be done by a corporation.

	Read the PRoactive Report
	If you need a guide to the tricky waters of social media the PRoactive Report covers one aspect in depth each month

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About the Author

Sally is the author of Website Content Strategy blog: Information about the shifts in media consumption and the use of technology in marketing and PR so business can stay in touch with their rapidly moving audiences.

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On any given day, my blog comment spam filter throws more than 500 spammy blog comments into the digital trashbin.

I go through the remainder, and too a whole bunch more in as well. These are typically with the sender’s “website” listed as a squidoo lens with the lens title something along the lines of “/instant-money-bonanza” or “/5second-millionaire” and inevitably leads to a spammy/scammy page with a $27 ebook teaching you how to make $1,000,000 in your sleep, while sipping a margarita.

Right…

So if so many blog comments are ending up in the trash, especially if you have a vigilant editorial team checking the comment moderation queue, is it even worth taking the time to submit one?

Let’s expand this a little wider and include forums and social networking/conversation sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even Yahoo! Groups too.

The primary goal in social marketing is to establish trust, credibility and competence.

You need to be able to give out information that is reliable, accurate and shows what you’re talking about.

On a social scale, submitting a comment about viagra, or free pron! or anime hentai, particularly on a scrapbooking blog is going to be way off topic. The only solution is to delete this digital trash.

On the other hand, if you’re submitting a comment like “Nice work” or “Good job” or “Great post”, aside from feeding the author’s ego, it does nothing to stimulate the conversation.

What’s the person supposed to do?

Say “Thank you” ? It’s still the end of the conversation.

-

Now here’s where I may detract from other bloggers and writers…

I feel even as a reader, given the interactive and dynamic nature of the Internet, it is your responsibility to continue the conversation…

Huh?

That means if you’re choosing to participate in the conversation, you should strive to add some value to it - give a contrasting opinion (especially if you think the writer is wrong), cite how what’s being written about has been proven in the real world, give an example of how you’ve used, or failed to use a principle or technique being shared.

Even a one-way medium like Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookie podcasts (famous for their 22 minute duration) give an opportunity to interact through the blog comments section.

It’ll be interesting to see readers start doing their own audio rebuttals or responses.

[Shawn Collins already features an opportunity to post a video response to his video blogging on his Affiliate Tip blog]

Likewise, YouTube fanatics have been recording numerous video responses to each other, especially with popular threads like the  Cris Crocker-Britney Spears tirade. [CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE]

That particular clip has clocked up 1,957 video responses at last count.

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The bottomline in social marketing:

• Provide Value:  Value is a vague term, but any info which the writer or other readers will find useful can be defined as valuable.
• It’s a 2-Way Street: A discussion is when two or more people talk. It ends when someone stops talking. So keep the ball rolling.
• Be Open-Minded: Learning occurs when you’re exposed to something strange and new. If you’re not willing to listen to new ideas or different opinions, social marketing will not do much for you…

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About the Author

Andrew Wee is an Asia-based Internet Marketer focused on blogging, social traffic generation and affiliate marketing. Previously rated as one of Asia’s top technology journalists, Andrew covers breaking news and industry developments at WhoIsAndrewWee.com

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