Conference Coverage

Social Media Marketing & The Fallacy of Going Viral

Written August 26th, 2011 by

Last week I was a speaker at SES San Francisco on the audience choice “Like Me” panel.  The panel discussed the intricacies of viral marketing and the fallacies around it.  Viral Marketing is not really something that is cookie cutter in nature.  Most of the time the nature of a video, game or even fanpage or twitter account that has “gone viral” is completely by accident.

Instead creating a social media strategy through audience analysis and figuring out how to become not only a valuable asset to your audience, but solving some sort of problem or issue for them is the better target to hit rather than that ever illusive “Viral” moniker.  Viral is short lived and usually not the quality audience you are working to engage with.  Becoming an asset to your audience not only creates a loyal following but a highly engaged community as well.

So with that in mind, we wanted to share our deck from the session at SES San Francisco.

 

Video and Photos from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 22nd, 2011 by

There are conference attendees and then those bringing the Search Engine Strategies 2011 conference home to you as best they can. Nothing brings home the flavor of an event better than pictures and video.

Da Li Social’s CEO, Li Evans, is both a speaker and moderator for SES, as well as video reporter exclusively for State of Search. Her voice usually wears out but that doesn’t prevent her from sharing the sights and sounds from the conference.

Our good friend Li Evans, author of the book Social Media Marketing is speaking at the conference and is doing training sessions for attendees. She kindly agreed to give us an insight view on what she is doing there. With her camera she records how she experiences SES San Francisco 2011.

Li Evans her first report from SES – I was eating pancakes while she was making this video at Mel’s.

Li Evans Reporting on SES San Francisco: Day Two

A Speakers View on SES San Francisco: Li Evans reports

Li Evans at SES San Francisco (#sessf): her Wrap Up – Can you spot my cameo walk on?

Li Evans interviews Greg Jarboe and Eric Garulay at SES San Francisco – My favorite is the one of the “The Jarboe”.

Li Evans interviews Avi Wilensky and Christian Georgeou at SES San Francisco – Check out StatDash.

Li Evans interviews Christian Georgeou SES San Francisco State of Search – “I’m a Walking Genius”

And my beloved Canon Rebel:
322 Pictures from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco

The Jarboe on YouTube at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 19th, 2011 by

Greg Jarboe may be my most favorite speaker at Search Engine Strategies and in San Francisco he wow’d us with how to use YouTube as a smart marketing tool in the NextGen YouTube Marketing session.

The Jarboe and Li Evans

After a funny introduction by session moderator, Li Evans, teasing whom we loving refer to as “The Jarboe” about his love for the RedSocks, he stood and told us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – but we never think of it that way.

It gets 22 billion searches a month. (And its not a search engine). We spend all the time optimizing for Google and Bing, neglecting the reach of YouTube. It’s also the second most popular site in the world, with the first being Facebook.

YouTube gets 149 million visits per month.

Facebook gets 129 million visits per month.

Greg "The Jarboe" Jarboe of SEO-PR.com

Twitter comes in at 32 million, with Linkedin 21 million and Flickr getting 22 million visits per month.
Where should you be spending your time and money investing in social marketing?

The natural sequence by users in YouTube – people come to discover things. Who seeks what in which channel with what effect? People need to find the video first before they can watch it and then share it with others.

The trick to going viral is to be discovered and be shared.

Make use of the YouTube Keyword tool. It finds relevant keywords for you (but can be quirky sometimes so use your logic.) Use these keywords in your in metadata such as title, description, tags, (Google ignores tags but YouTube loves them).

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The Enabling Power of WordPress: Search Engine Strategies, San Francisco 2011

Written August 19th, 2011 by

According to session moderator, Matt Bailey of Site Logic, he’d been asking for an Search Engine Strategies session on WordPress for several years. He finally got his wish.

Matt Bailey

Wordpress – Power to the People was a well-attended session devoted to the thrust and agility of WordPress for web site building and management, from small business to enterprise ventures. As Matt indicated in his introductory remarks, WordPress empowers people by making it easy to make web sites. They can try new things and not need a technical background. Many thousands of people have built WordPress sites to create revenue in addition to their regular jobs.

First up on the two people panel was Chris Auman, President of Sanctuary Media Group. As a web site solution, he said, if you want a solid, safe, easy to use foundation, WordPress is that. It’s intuitive and easy to use. Some of the points from his talk included:

Chris Auman

Not long ago, companies who built web sites sometimes built custom scripts to allow their clients to update their own web sites. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t, they needed to hire help. This meant losing some control and created a dependency on others.

Wordpress began as a blogging platform. Being open source based, it grew and grew into the ideal foundation for most any type of web site.

Try the Sanctuary.com/wordpress-setup-guide

Benefits of using WordPress are certainly the ability to control your own content and marketing. There is no need for programming. The WordPress community is gigantic, so education and support are readily available.

Clients who choose WordPress based web sites enjoy the reduction in overall costs and the freedom to access their own site whenever they wish.

By its very nature, WordPress is lean, fast loading out of the box, crawled quickly, offers seo friendly URLs’s, is text-based , and uses HTML. There is no JavaScript.

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Social and Viral Tips from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 17th, 2011 by

Social marketing succeeds because humans like to share. The “Like Me! Social & Viral Content Tips for Making Your Brand Look Sexy” session on Tuesday at SES San Francisco 2011 had plenty of examples to back that up.

Li Evans

Li Evans, of Libeck Integrated Marketing, explained that a social campaign that goes viral is accidental. It’s nothing you can plan for (this was repeated by Greg Jarboe in a panel on YouTube today.) When thinking about a social media campaign, the goal is show everyone that you or your company are a valuable resource.

Some Social and Viral Tips

When posting to Twitter or writing a Facebook status that links to a web page or video, offer a brief reason about its value to your readers.

Sometimes the point of a social marketing campaign is not exactly about getting more sales or traffic, but rather, changing the perception of a brand. For example, you may recall Proctor and Gamble’s new Old Spice commercial’s featuring the muscled and gorgeous, Isaiah Mustafa. P&G knew the image of an Old Spice man was of an older man, or less modern. To change the perception, they created ads aimed at women by featuring Isaiah, Fabio and other male models. The response was spectacular. The commercials were placed in YouTube and women shared them with their friends. They didn’t sell products as much as it changed perceptions of the product.

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Social Marketing on a Budget Brings Millions in ROI: Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 16th, 2011 by

Social media solutions on a budget was the topic today at 11am for the Social Media track at Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco today. The biggest proof of a low cost approach that rocked was presented by Jeffrey Harmon, of OraBrush.

Harmon, the Chief Marketing officer for OraBrush, told his tale and shared several humorous videos about the surprise success of marketing OraBrush on a tiny budget. Invited by a 75 year old man, who had spent several years trying to market it, without success, Harmon believed he could create a social media campaign that would work. It began by the creation of a $500 video that was released to Youtube about the tongue cleaner product.

Prescribe If You Like Tongue

At the time of the launch of the first video, YouTube had offered a promotional program that where the video would be promoted for $30 a day. The hope was to sell $35 worth of the product for each day the video was promoted. In record time, they got 422.153 million views and in 6 weeks sold out of 10,000 units of the OraBrush. Some of his key points:

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Packed Crowds at Week of Digital Marketing Training: SES San Franciso 2011

Written August 16th, 2011 by

Li Evans and myself, Kim Krause Berg, are here in San Francisco for a week of intensive conferencing, networking and training in the search marketing industries. There are some interesting new things to note.

Firstly, not only is the Moscone Convention Center and the San Francisco Marriott hosting Search Engine Strategies this week, but other companies are offering training as well. Running alongside SES are the OMS Social Medea Marketing Summit, MMA, the EEC, the IAB and more, such as Bruce Clay’s Training workshop on Friday.

A group of SES Francisco 2011 attendees shares a Mexican meal Monday evening.

This Clickz Connected Marketing Week allows attendees of all the various training and conferences to mingle with each other. So for example, last night’s meet and greet at the Thirsty Bear drew a packed crowd of attendees with a wide variety of interests, careers and skills. This unique blending allowed for a nice depth of networking opportunities and permitted marketers to meet people in related fields.

Instead of conference handouts, booklets, printed schedules, and the usual, everything is put into a small 3 x 5 pamphlet that is attached to where the conference passes are typically worn. On the back of each one are QR Codes. The lanyards are sponsored by SEOMoz. While I need my reading glasses to read the tiny print, that’s worth the effort to save trees. The pamphlet is light, always handy (around our neck) and includes exhibitors, maps, speaking schedules, rooms, and in the back are the free lunch tickets.

For those who want a more robust amount of information, SES offers a free app to download in the iTunes app store, as well as Android and Blackberry. I downloaded it to my Android. It loaded quickly. The app gives you a “My schedule”, photos gallery, events, exhibitors, news, speakers, Twitter access and more. All from your Smartphone. Very fitting for a digital oriented crowd.

This year’s Connected Marketing Week gathers folks from the digital marketing industries and related fields (like mine, usability.) They expect 8000 attendees. The weather is in the low 70′s. And it’s San Francisco, with its trolleys and famous places to see. Flying in from the East coast I got to see the mountains along the way with especially gorgeous views over Colorado.

Will be working and blogging this week for Libeck Integrated Marketing, Cre8pc.com and Cre8asiteforums.

Top Takeaways from Blogging Strategies Summit

Written June 20th, 2011 by

I’m still processing everything I heard and discussed at the Blogging Strategies Summit last week. With fifteen sessions in two days, there’s a lot to process! Here are some points from the speakers that stood out to me.

 

Bring catnip. Your catnip is what keeps the community engaged. For Oscar Mayer, their catnip is the Wienermobile. Their community loves the Wienermobile, and is very active with posting to and commenting on Facebook and Twitter when they see the vehicle. From Marcy Massura. Picture by Cari McGee.

 

Allow all of your employees to learn. What if everyone in your organization could see this positive tweet that just came in? Let the accountant know that someone following the American Heart Association diet just tweeted about how well they are doing. From Charlene Li

 

Flag your superfans in your contact management system. Make sure that your support team also knows that these customers are your superfans and should be treated accordingly. From Baochi Nguyen

 

Let go of your content and make it easy to share. If you don’t make it easy to share, people are going to rip it off anyway, and you won’t get the credit. From Li Evans. Photo from D’Arcy Norman

 

Consider having a gender neutral persona for writing or commenting on blog posts. There are still many places online where the perception of gender influences interactions. From Christine Herron

 

Blogs don’t have limits to their character counts, which is a huge advantage over Twitter and Facebook. Use your blog to announce things in a new way, and not just reword your press releases. From Jessica Gioglio

 

Betsy Aoki shared this interesting graph from the Social Flow blog with the group. For those familiar with Twitter, it was great eye candy and interesting information. I wonder if the whole graphic (shown in the attached link) would serve to help “share the magic” with those who don’t understand your strategy, or if it would just add more confusion. Charlene Li made a point earlier the people you’re trying to explain your strategy to don’t know what you’re talking about, and it’s like trying to create a TV ad without ever having watched television before.

Blogging in Regulated Industries

Written June 15th, 2011 by

I spent a lovely morning in San Francisco attending a workshop at the Blogging Strategies Summit led by Li Evans today. The workshop was a bit of an introduction to SEO for bloggers, and Li covered everything from keyword research to asset metadata to link building, making me remember just how much of this there is for someone new to the field to learn.

One thing that caught my attention was two attendees asking about blogging in regulated industries, such as the financial services or healthcare industries. I’ve worked with paid search for banks where every piece of the ad text and landing page needed to go through a weeks-long approval process through legal, but haven’t blogged under those types of restrictions before.

Off the top of my head, I thought of a few things that could be done, including:

  • A list of the top ten worst excuses financial planners have heard for people not starting a retirement account.
  • A blog post about where historical figures have kept or invested their money
  • Republishing print marketing collateral (that has already gone through regulatory approval) in an online format.

With so much to cover, there wasn’t time to talk about this specific aspect of blogging, and we had to move on. When I got home, I decided to see how others have approached it and what resources could be passed along to these attendees.

David Meerman Scott writes about Putnam Investments and their activities in social media. Putnam writes a blog about retirement savings in the workplace that talks about public policy, but does not promote their products. There are some great notes and a diagram relating to Putnam’s content cycle and their social media efforts in this webcast summary on Rock The Boat Marketing. A link to the webcast is available. An interesting note is that they’ve reported as much as four times the traffic from their social media efforts as they do from traditional media.

Ron Ploof from RonAmok! published a case study of how Johnson & Johnson started their involvement in social media, and chronicles their progress through 2009. They started off with something that didn’t need much oversight from regulators — their company history. They then launched a corporate blog, and later an online health video channel on YouTube. Andy Sernovitz at SmartBlogs wrote a post about a Johnson & Johnson presentation about their use of social media, with links to the case study presentation and the slide deck.

Mark Schaefer writes on the {grow} blog about a friend in the financial sector that is facing a tough time using any type of social media due to all of the legal ramifications that exist. Mark walks us through a number of ways regulated industries can successfully use social media. There are some great discussions in the 53 comments on this post, and the attendees should be able to relate to the commentators if not pick up some tips to bring back to their workplace.

Thanks to Li for inviting me to attend her presentation, and to those two attendees for getting me to find out more about how regulated industries are using blogging and social media. I look forward to the rest of the conference!

Telecommuting, WordPress.com Style

Written May 6th, 2011 by

WordPress.com is more than the WordPress-hosted version of self-hosted WordPress. It’s also WordPress’s proving ground and the product of an intriguing workplace culture.

Several WordCamps feature a “How is WordPress.com Made?” presentation by an Automattic representative. The recent Seattle Wordcamp version of “How is WordPress.com Made?” was given by the ever perky Scott Berkin.

For those of us who work online or have busy email inboxes, this glimpse at WordPress.com’s project management practices was invigorating. It was as if I could hear the most of the audience imagine putting themselves in WordPress.com-style shoes, with a liberal dusting of a true believer’s sense of purpose. As Scott put it, blogging “closes the gap between ideas in my head and the rest of the world,” and helping that happen “is kind of noble.”

WordPress is a content communication engine.

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