8 Tips to Avoid Social Media Disaster

Amber Mac's Keynote at SES Toronto 2011 was almost renamed How to Avoid Weinergate in light of the recent social media scandal named after, um, Weiner's weiner. The key theme of her presentation was authenticity and provided best practice on how to plan a corporate social media strategy and tips on how to avoid a social PR disaster.

Below is an outline of some of the key takeaways from her presentation.

1. Have a Social Media Policy

Social media sites have a home in today’s workplace, but each company needs to develop its own rules for its employees about how and when social media should be used at work.

Does anybody like writing policy agreement? Nope. So use Policy Tool, a free web-based policy generator that will write your company’s policy based on a 12-question survey. You can customize it from there.

Can’t get employees to read the result? Try making video privacy policy like this one from the Victoria Department of Justice.

2. Be Authentic

You don’t have to hire an actor to appear in your marketing videos. Let the company speak for itself.

Would an actor have been as charming as Blendtec Founder, Tom Dickson, using his high-end blenders to blend high-end electronics? Sales at the company (whose blenders will set you back $400) increased 500% along with their viral videos.

3. Be Original

Amber cited a number of original online marketing campaigns. Among them were Charmin’s support of Sit or Squat, an app that locates and assesses the quality of public restrooms so you always know where to go to go, Footlocker’s Sneakerpedia, an online authority on sneaker history, and Ben & Jerry’s Fair Tweets app, which adds messages to the ends of users tweets in support of Fair Trade.

4. Avoid Social Media Done Wrong

Dave Carroll’s viral “United Breaks Guitars” video has attracted over 10 million views on YouTube. Amber cited a recent study that concluded United Airlines had lost 180 million dollars and 10 percent of their share price as a result of the damage to their reputation. That’s enough to have bought Dave 80,000 of the Taylor guitars that United refused to replace.

5. Assess your Associations on the Web

Use Wefollow and Klout to assess the digital influence of the businesses and individuals you are building relationships with online. Remember, influence scores only tell you so much. You’ll need to do some research to discover whether someone’s influential message is one you want your brand associated with.

6. Keep up on Trends: What’s Hot This Year on the Web?

• Group buying: Groupon and others have become the fastest growing web sector. Watch out for Uforce, a reverse Groupon business model that allows customers to band together and propose bulk buying to businesses in return for discounts.
• Quora is a crowdsourcing question and answer resource that’s gaining traction. Your brand’s presence could position it as an authority on topics related to your products.
• Qwiki is a popular resource that gathers information for a search term and assembles it into a multimedia presentation accompanied by a spoken narrative. It’s a good resource for building infographics. Amber said she is addicted to exploring the different data visualizations.

7. Key Social Media Statistics

Here are some stats from the presentation that caught our eye:

• 66 percent of women don’t check in with Foursquare due to the “creepiness factor.” Simply put, many women don’t want to constantly publicize where they are out of concern for their safety. This might be something to consider if you're trying to find appropriate social channels for a brand with a largely female customer base.
• 35 percent of people use mobile applications before they get out of bed in the morning. No word yet as to how many of those applications are alarm clocks.
• On Facebook, only 10 percent of people engaged with a brand will interact with the brand page. Ninety percent of engagement happens in the news feeds. Success depends on your use of “the blank box,” so keep up with your updates! 

8. Recommended Tools

Here are some of the tools mentioned that will help you manage your Social Resources.

• For free Facebook monitoring, Amber talked about Facebook Insights as the best option.
• For monitoring all of your social media resources, she spoke about Radian 6 as the paid tool she uses.
• For a social media dashboard, she recommended Hootsuite.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2079684/8-Tips-to-Avoid-Social-Media-Disaster

Social Content Seeding for SEO

Social media budgets often takes a backseat to search. After all, it’s easier to measure the ROI of search, so marketers see it as a safer bet.

First, it’s easier to tie SEO and PPC directly to sales than, say, tweets or Facebook likes. Second, search offers an element of intentional targeting: whereas social users log-on to socialize, search users are actively looking for something – and probably that much closer to a purchasing decisions.

But the social evolution of SEO has brought search and social closer together. Specifically, now that social signals impact rankings, marketers need to invest social as part of their SEO strategy. 

After all, search engines look for these “social signals” because they want to show human beings the most relevant search results. And what better way to determine whether something is relevant to humans than by measuring how many other human beings have said that it’s relevant?

So now, you need more than just backlinks to rank. You also need tweets, likes, and other “votes” from social users to let search engines know that your brand is relevant.

Shareable Content 101

It’s one thing to place social buttons on all your pages. But if you want to get your content (e.g. product pages) tweeted, liked, and bookmarked, you need to understand what motivates user to do so. There are a number of reasons users share content, but they usually do so because it’s: 

• Useful/Informative
• Interesting
• Unique/Original
• Inspirational
• Funny/Entertaining
• Surprising/Shocking

Depending on what vertical you’re in and what kind of products/services you sell, your content can probably be made to fill one of these roles. For instance, there are also a number of elements on a page that a user can be induced to share.

• The Product/Service
• Product Description
• Product Reviews (UGC)
• Product Images/Video
• Price

The point is that marketers should be able to find some element on its pages that can attract social signals. For example, if you sell quirky gadgets, you’ll want to make it easy for users to tweet, like, and Digg them.

Conversely, if you sell everyday products that users can buy any number of other websites, you might find creative ways to write product descriptions so that they’re more likely to catch the users attention, causing them to share it. Similarly, you might open things up to user reviews so that your page is more frequently updated with additional keyword content that users will want to share with their network.

So optimizing your content for shareability involves identify what elements of your content have the most sharing potential. Then you ensure that your sharing button are integrated in a way that users feel they’ll be sharing that element – and not just the page in general.

Facebook Seeding

The idea behind seeding content on Facebook is to build a strong base of engaged fans so that when you share a link on Facebook, more people see it, which results in more likes and shares which do support the SEO of that link and its domain.

Now, building an engaged following on Facebook is something that requires ongoing community management. But there are two things you can do to boost your fan acquisition on Facebook.

1. Design a welcome/splash tab that dares users to like your brand. This will point clearly to where the Like button is, and gives users and incentive to click it (i.e., a call to action).
2. Drive traffic to the page using Facebook Ads. Through Facebook Ads, you can target users according to a variety of demographics and send users to a customized landing tab (such as your welcome/splash tab). This will allow you to drive an influx of new fans to your page, and further grow a following of users that can send out social signals about your content. 

Social Contests 

Another effective way to attract social signals is through social contest. By running social contests, you can generate immediate social signals and build your following – both on and off Facebook.

The idea behind a social contest is simple: offer users a chance to win something cool if they follow you and share your content with their network. Social contests can also be run on Twitter, Facebook, or through a blog.

• On Twitter: You can ask that users follow you and retweet a link. The retweeting will help a link go viral, and the new followers will mean a bigger reach to potentially share more of your content in the future.
• On Facebook: You can ask that people like your brand and then write on their wall. This gains you another fan to possibly like your content in the future and whose friends will see has interacted with your brand twice.
• On your blog: Users can enter a contest by leaving a comment and tweeting or liking it. Posts with a lot of comments often gain PageRank and support your overall rankings. And leveraging their personal networks helps you attract more comments.

Social News Sites

Now, people do a lot more on Twitter and Facebook than just share content. They also do everything from interact to broadcast personal updates.

But there are other online communities (such as Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon) that are designed specifically to share content. This makes them ideal channels for seeding content and attracting social media links that directly support your SEO.

When content is submitted to one of these sites, users can vote it up or down. When a user votes it up, it gets a link on that user's profile page. Score.

If enough users vote for a piece of content, it appears on the home page. In the case of Digg or Reddit, both have a PageRank of 8. That means a link from a trusted site. Super score!

Then there's all the traffic that actually gets pushed through to your site. This usually leads to additional residual links, such as from bloggers and tweets.

Of course, you can’t just submit your product pages and expect to go viral. Rather, you need a two-stage approach.

• You have to create compelling content that’s going to resonate with these communities. It might be a Top 10 blog post, an infographic, or a video, but it has to something that meets the “sharability criteria”, doesn’t try to sell anything, and was created just for that audience.
• You have to go out and promote that content. This means being social. It means creating profiles and building them up so that you have contacts and access to influencers. It means giving more to the community than you ask of it.

An interesting benefit of these social users, moreover, is that they tend to share over more than one network. So while if one of these users are willing to Digg or Stumble your content, they’ll probably like or tweet it, too.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2075480/Social-Content-Seeding-for-SEO

3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success

Social media marketing has entered a new era. Brands are no longer content to simply experiment with a Facebook page and a Twitter account and “hope for the best.” With social media marketing budgets on the rise, marketers need their social campaigns to drive bottom-line sales, measurable brand benefit, and improved customer lifetime value.

The maturation of the social media space has created the need for simple, standardized measurement techniques that clearly show whether social campaigns are working to deliver real brand impact and actual sales. Unlike the online advertising industry, which has standardized on a few key metrics (CPC, CPA, and CPM), social media success measurement is still in its infancy and continues to suffer from a lack of common metrics standards.

Large brands are able to license powerful social media analytics software and hire agencies to help them measure social programs with accuracy. However, many smaller organizations are unsure of how to best measure their social marketing programs.

• What should we measure?
• How do we measure it?
• What does success look like?
• Out of the many numbers we could measure for social media, how do you determine which are the key metrics you should measure now and in the long term?

The answers to these questions are complex, but every company can get started with social media measurement by focusing on three simple metrics.

These metrics won’t tell you everything about the impact of your social media programs, but they will establish a low-cost, repeatable standard you can use to gauge success over time.

1. Total Online Community Size (sCRM)
Assuming your business has invested in a solid brand community presence on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and launched a few managed blogs, measuring the total active size of your social CRM program is the simplest key metric to regularly evaluate.

Absolute size isn’t as important as whether your program steadily growing over time. The sCRM metric offers insight into the value you’re creating for those communities, as well as size of the ‘captured audience’ that has granted you permission to receive regular messaging, deals, and content.

sCRM = #Facebook Fans + #Twitter Followers + #blog unique users + #YouTubeChannel subscribers + #all other registered managed community members

To do: Manually collect figures from key channels; calculate weekly or monthly; save figures in basic spreadsheet; produce sparkline graphs to depict trendline. Bonus points: calculate same numbers for top three competitors and compare monthly.

2. Monthly Referred Social Traffic to Site (sTraffic)
Many large brands use sophisticated social content sharing tools to exactly track social media link clicks, content pass-along, and other deeper metrics. However, you can start simple and focus on the total unique site traffic coming to your website from links shared through blogs, forums, and the key social networks. You can get this with a simple query through your Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics, or other website analytics tool.

sTraffic = monthly website Unique Users via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, owned and 3rd party blogs, and forums

To do: Export absolute sTraffic # and % of total site traffic from your site analytics tool to a spreadsheet, then produce month-over-month sparkline graphs to depict trendlines.

3. Social Monthly Impressions (sMI)
Measuring the true reach of your brand in social media is a daunting task; it can take the best analytical minds weeks and a variety of tools. But estimating your ‘social monthly impressions’, while an imperfect science, can help provide a sense of how pervasive your brand is across the Web.

sMI = #mentions of your brand on blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. within a given month.

To do: Monitor brand mentions on a regular schedule (daily/weekly) using a free alerts tool like Google Alerts. While not necessarily comprehensive, this offers a regular digest of the individual instances of brand mentions in blogs, mainstream news media sites, and on large public social networks like Twitter.


Advanced Approach: Evaluate and select one of the many social monitoring tools to track total pervasive brand mentions, or take a look at emerging tools offered by companies like Simply Measured and SocialMention.

Whatever your level of social media marketing efforts, if you measure these three numbers at least once per month and track their relative movement over time with simple sparkline graphs via spreadsheet charts, you’ll be able to regularly observe the benefits of your social investments.

While it’s not a one-size-fits-all complete social media analytics solution, tracking sCRM, sTraffic, and sMI will get you started on a basic ‘measure it to manage it’ program for your core online social community initiatives.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2073592/3-Key-Metrics-To-Measure-Social-Media-Success

Social Media Marketing Basics: Think First

Social media marketing is new. Social is great -- it's free and it's a pot of gold that only takes a few days to set up and not more than a week to get results.


Just look at all the books on Amazon. Look at the number of results you get in Google when you do a search for "social media success." This is it!


The above is what you might read from a so-called "guru" who really doesn't know what he's talking about.

In reality, successful social media marketing costs money, takes time, and requires hard work. And do you think it's new? Think again.

For many search marketers and social media experts, this may be obvious, but many marketers just starting with social still feel that they are starting something new and forget to take two critical steps: thinking and planning.

Social Media Marketing is Nothing New
Let's start with the feeling that being social is completely new. Really? You think so?

The essence of using social marketing has been with us for centuries. Jesus Christ probably was one of the first who realized that he needed others to spread his words. He had 12 followers at first, but those 12 eventually reached millions -- and he didn't have a Twitter account.

People have been social for ages. If you go to a specific restaurant, for instance, chances are someone within your social circle pointed you toward that restaurant.

So being social is nothing new, and as a marketer you have to realize that. Social media is a tool that can help you "do" your marketing, but you have to have the basics right: you want to find your "apostles," the people who will spread your message.

Let's zoom in a little on two things marketers should know when it comes to using social media full force. These are two things you can take from "old" marketing methods, but some social media marketers tend to forget.

Target Audience
The "old style" marketer looks at a potential target audience before doing anything. Somehow many marketers who want to do social marketing don't seem to care about that, they look at the tool first: "We need to Twitter, so let's Twitter!"

As a marketer you shouldn't dive into social media right away. Think first. Find out who you're targeting -- and make sure you aren't looking at your potential audience one-dimensionally.

Your potential clients are one part of your target audience, but don't forget about those apostles who will spread your message. The goal of targeting your apostles is to inform your potential clients, not to necessarily turn them into clients.

Where?
Something "old school" marketers always look at is where to target people.

As said, many marketers think they have to go social and immediately open up a Twitter account and create a Facebook page. But for who and for what?

Again: think first. Where is your target audience? Are they on Twitter? Do they want to see you on Facebook? Or maybe you should be focusing more on LinkedIn, for example?

This is a different kind of "where" than "old" marketing, but it's still there.

Summary
In short: marketers shouldn't treat social as if it's a completely new ballgame. Yes, there are new elements to it, but the mindset has been around for centuries. Keep that in mind and social will become a lot more effective.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642198

Top 13 Social Media Ranking Factors for SEO

Depending on who you speak to, search engine optimization (SEO) is either largely influenced or not at all influenced by social media. I'm sure everyone has their own opinions, case studies, and sites that show greater or lesser correlations between their social media engagement levels and their natural search results.

If you were to carry out an investigation into whether social media was a big influencing factor, which metrics would you want to monitor in order to base your insights on more empirical data?

Here is a list of 13 ranking factors below. Feel free to use these and any others you can get your grubby SEO mitts on!

1. Number of Followers (Twitter)

You'll need your own corporate Twitter feed, which brings its own problems around brand protection and also the potential for dealing with customer service enquiries, but the more followers you have, the more authoritative your Twitter persona and the more value will be associated with your URL (assuming you have remembered to link to it).

2. Quality of Followers (Twitter)

The best followers are the ones with their own communities of followers. The more high value people who follow you, and retweet your stuff, the better.

3. Relevance of Followers (Twitter)

It's one thing getting followed and retweeted by Stephen Fry with over a million followers, but it's also important to get the same response from accounts that are more specific to your industry. Someone with "fashion" in their description who retweets your "20 percent off the new spring collection" offer is equally valuable.

4. Number of Retweets (Twitter)

Most likely as a ratio of tweets to retweets -- the more your content is reproduced by others the more authoritative it is. Obviously the more followers you have, the more likely you are to be retweeted. However, it isn't just about retweeting other people's content or dishing out promotions. It's about engaging in conversation with people in the industry.

5. Number of Fans (Facebook)

You'll need to create your own corporate profile on Facebook, which brings the same potential banana skins as a corporate Twitter feed, only multiplied numerous times due to the sheer level of engagement of people on Facebook. However, if you decide to engage with customers and potential customers on Facebook, the total number of likes your page receives will add value to your URL.

6. Number of Comments (Facebook)

A large number of likes, but little engagement, is a sure sign of someone gaming the system. People will tend to like you if you talk to them. Successful Facebook pages include a lot of content written by other people.

7. Number of Views (YouTube)

An obvious one, but any content you upload to YouTube should link to your site in the description, and the more times it is viewed, the more value will be attributed to your video.

8. User Comments (YouTube)

YouTube is also about engaging with other YouTubers and commenting on popular videos. The more you comment, the more link juice is passed back to your profile.

9. References From Independent Profiles (YouTube)

Using YouTube can bring in some really good authority if done brilliantly -- if your link from your video passes some value, imagine how much more value would be passed if you could get other people to parody your work and include links to you from their profiles. The prime example remains the Cadbury's Gorilla, but there are lots of interesting mini-campaigns trying to leverage the above.

10. Title of Video (YouTube)

Any references to your target keywords in the title of the video will help ensure that any authority passed will be relevant to a specific theme. Keywords should also be in the tags and or transcript where possible.

11. Percent of Likes vs. Dislikes (YouTube)

Easy one. The more liked your content is, the more authoritative it is.

12. Positive vs. Negative Brand Mentions (All Social Media)

Use a tool like Radian6, or a free tool, and ensure that you have significantly more positive brand mentions than negative. It won't be 100 percent accurate as these things don't pick up on sarcasm. But Google has already made investment in this area in 2011, so it's well worth monitoring.

13. Number of Social Mentions (All Potential Media)

Total visibility across all social media shows that your content is important to all people and not just a result of a large special offer for Facebook/Twitter users. HowSociable is a simple way of giving yourself a rating here.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642048