Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
time community engagement
I am not going to get into the definition of social media optimization because, quite frankly, I am tired of talking about it. I have been spreading the gospel of SMO for months now across my organization. However, if you have a blog or at least a web page with killer content on it, I hope you are utilizing social bookmarks. Why? Because social bookmarking will help your web content travel across the internet in an effort to achieve true “omnipresence”. Paul does an excellent job in his SEO Blog emphasizing the importance of using bookmarks on your blogs/web pages and even points you to some cool tools you can use in an effort to do so.
What caught my attention though was the following graph (source: addthis):
It concludes, that 18% of people are still adding web pages to their favorites which is still a great source of repeat traffic; and [...]
As I mentioned in a previous post, social media adoption is growing exponentially. According to Ad Age, citing a report by Brian Haven of Forrester, marketers are increasingly adopting social media into their overall marketing plans. Over the last 12 months, social media has grown to the point where 40% of marketers are using or testing RSS, up from 10% last year, and 34% are use or piloting blogs, up from 13% in the 2006 study. On the other hand; and where I think there is the most opportunity, Social networking has the slowest adoption rate of all social media distribution channels but still managed a healthy 20% increase in usage.
Technorati Tags: social media, social media strategy, Ad Age, Forrester
I attended a session at the New Communications Forum a few weeks ago called “Viral Marketing – It’s the message, not the Media” facilitated by Susan Getgood and a few others. Susan’s message intrigued me the most as she discussed the 5 C’s of Viral Marketing: community, compelling, comedy, charity, and contest.
Of course, these 5 C’s make total sense to me not only as a marketer, but as a consumer as well. We all know that viral marketing in the social media space is all about communities. In fact, I would argue that communities play a larger role than most people think, both online and offline. They can build a brand, kill a brand, make a career, break a career, influence elections, etc. Think about it; from an offline perspective, life is community driven through PTA organizations, church groups, sports leagues, stay-at-home mommy groups, and various school organizations (sororities, fraternities) [...]
I transferred my blog to this new domain in September 2006 and I am already gettin’ some love from Google and Yahoo (thanks to my utmost ethical link building techniques of course and my outstanding on-page optimization skillz – jk). For the terms “Online Marketing Blog” and “Internet Marketing Blog” I am on the first page of both engines respectively; right under the master blogger himself, Lee Odden who authors Top Rank Blog; a place where I go daily to learn new things. I do attribute some of this love to Lee since he linked to my blog a few months back (Thanks Lee). Now, let’s keep this in perspective here. Both terms ARE NOT that competitive and only account for roughly 3,000 search queries a month across Google and Yahoo; but hey, one thing about successful SEO is that you start with the less competitive keywords first and then work up [...]
Just recently, there has been some discussion between well known bloggers/marketers about the definition of social media, and whether or not it should be called something different. Regardless of the agreed definition or the term itself, I am just trying to figure out how to participate and engage my target audience. I do believe, however, that there are five distinct characteristics which seem to be consistent in the way social media is being used today. They are:
Participation
Openness, transparency and disclosure
Conversation
Community Driven
Facilitation (facilitating conversations that are already happening online)
Participation
It’s an undisputed fact that consumers today already participate in social media. One statistic that blows my mind is the Youtube growth rate from 2005 to 2006; where it grew a whopping 2,000% and now boast 25.5M unique visitors a month. There are a ton of other examples of sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Stumbleupon that are also exponentially growing in usage and [...]
One of the common themes of the New Communications Forum 2007 was for marketers to Shut up, Listen and Engage. Companies, brands and marketers no longer have full control of the messages they are sending to consumers; and now must embrace social media. One of the main takeaways that hit home for me is that consumers do not want to be marketed to; rather, they want to be communicated with. Social media is a channel that can make that happen. In one of the sessions, “Creating a Complete Social Media Strategy”, facilitated by John Bell of Ogilvy, he states that “consumers trust the people next to us instead of the authority”. The authority he is talking about is corporate websites that push their marketing messages in a one-way communication form.
However, it doesn’t make sense for marketers to just create a blogs/wikis/social networks for the propose of just creating blogs/wikis/social networks. [...]
A good friend of mine who I work with, and who also authors an SEO blog emailed me the other day to say that we made some “Top In-House SEO List” that the guys over at the Natural Search Blog put together. The article is very impressive and talks about the advantages of working in house; and goes into the standardization of titles, compensation levels, etc. within big organizations. I must say that I was flattered that I made this list; but it’s probably due to the company that I work for. Nonetheless, the amusing thing about is that I have already been approached by three SEO firms cuddling up to me…hmmm…wonder why? One firm (and I won’t mention their name because I never heard of them before) even went as far as complimenting my blog in hopes to start building a relationship with me. It’s quite entertaining.
Technorati Tags: in [...]
If you are running an SEO program and Paid Search at the same time, you better keep reading. According to Search Engine Land, the ranking of a particular website within the natural search results can be negatively affected by a paid search campaign. The report comes as a result of a patent filed by Microsoft; where the algorithm specified in the patent would filter the search results to remove any duplicate listings, such as when two domains point to the same website. Additionally, it can also remove a site completely from the natural search results when that website is also part of paid search listings on the SERPS. Well, then again, maybe there isn’t too much to worry about since Microsoft has roughly 12% market share of searches and is rapidly declining as we speak.
Technorati Tags: search marketing, search engine marketing, sem, paid search, pay-per-click, msn, live.com, seo, search engine [...]
