Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Seth Godin says it the best! Important to work "productively"!
Are you making something?
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/are-you-making-something.html(Sent from Flipboard)
Sent as a <a href="http://manishmandhyan.com/socialmediaconsultant" >social media consultant</a>
Friday, March 18, 2011
15 Most Engaged Pages On Facebook
How do you measure engagement on Facebook? New York startup Fangager has one way to do it, and you can see a ranking based on that below.
Fangager supplied Wired News with a preview of the 15 most engaging pages on Facebook, based on February 2011 activity; the consultancy plans to release a ranking of the top 100 later today.
These rankings show that simply having a large number of fans doesn’t translate into having a high engagement rate. That seems to correspond with many brands’ focusing on the number of likes rather than addressing how to get repeat visits that also involve more time per session.
We’re looking forward to seeing the full-sized ranking, and are pleased by the fact that Fangager plans to update rankings on a monthly basis.
What do you think about the 15 most engaged pages and how they compare to the ones with the most fans?
Friday, March 11, 2011
Interesting ebook from Google and Microsoft!
While the major technology companies may not always agree with one another, the minds at work within these businesses are certainly some of the brightest in the industry. While Microsoft almost certainly had some other intentions with their “Social Hackathon” in 2010, one of the major results was that technology wizards were able to show off their expertise. Now, that expertise has been compiled into an eBook, which is available free of charge.
The “Social Hackathon” was a panel sponsored by Microsoft (via Bing and Hotmail) that brought together industry experts from a number of major companies, including O’Reilly Media, Bing, Twitter, Google, and Facebook. The entire objective was to help the non-profit organization “DonorsChoose.org” figure out ways they could reach the internet audience. Subjects covered by the panel included everything from the advertising efforts (how to use social media, how to design the site, how to encourage repeat users) to the technical back-end (such as the core API strategy).
While the wisdom discussed may not apply universally, many good ideas for any company were discussed. To help others get access to this powerful information resource, the core concepts were compiled into a book titled The Goodness Engine: Driving Greater Social Impact in the Digital World by the company Deep Focus.
You can download that eBook or watch videos from the panel here.
[via the Bing Blog]
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Insights from Google and Microsoft Released in Free eBook
Excellent infographic on social sites and their importance to SEO!
Is Flickr good for SEO? Can Tumblr drive traffic? If these questions are part of your day-to-day work, hold onto your hats; here’s an infographic that’s actually useful for a change.
If you’re doing any social media marketing, here’s something for your to print out and hang up near your desk as a handy point of reference. CMO.com, together with SEO firm 97th Floor, have created this chart showing which social networks are best for various organizational, CRM and marketing goals.
For example, if you need massive pageviews for your site or a client’s site, Facebook and Twitter are just so-so for referring their users to your content. If you want to see really big clickthroughs, you should optimize for StumbleUpon and Digg. And if your goal is search engine optimization, don’t think that Facebook’s “no-follow” links are doing you any favors; instead, focus on Flickr and YouTube to see your desired results on Page One.
When you think about best-in-class social media campaigns and true leaders in social media marketing, you realize that most of the time, creative and successful marketing teams pick a specific platform for a specific reason; this chart gives you the tip of the iceburg when it comes to making the right choice for your own company’s or clients’ campaigns.
Check out the chart below, and in the comments, let us know about your experiences with marketing, CRM, PR and SEO across these various platforms.
Click image to view full-size PDF version.
Lead image courtesy of Flickr, rishibando.
More About: CMO, infographic, MARKETING, social media, social media marketing
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Thursday, March 10, 2011
Social Media Workflows Part 1: Awareness and Capture
Chris Brogan always says it the best when it comes to social media. As a social media consultant, I find this step, "Awareness and Capture" to be the most important and most fruitful.
Content Marketing 101: How to Get More People to See Your Content in Five Difficult Steps
There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the value of blogging frequently and interacting with your community. And there's a lot of great articles available on doing outreach for cornerstone content like in-depth guides, infographics, and free tools.
But what there seems to be less of is specific how-to information on promoting more mundane day-to-day blog content that thought leaders are telling you to crank out. It's not practical to do an in-depth link campaign for every quick how-to blog post you create, so what can you do to promote your content on a daily basis?
Step 1: Create Syndication Channels
This is a bit more "social" than the headline implies: The first step here is to build social media followings and start to participate on social news sites. You can create syndication channels by:
- Building a Twitter Following - Identify people in your niche and people who are talking about your niche and follow them, retweet their content, and try to share some content you don't see anyone tweeting. There are tools to help but this is a pretty labor-intensive process, and it requires you to *gasp* actually act like a human and build relationships! [Ed. note: He said this would be difficult.]
- Getting Fans on Facebook - One of the most effective ways to do this is by running a Facebook PPC campaign and driving fans to your fan page rather than a page on your site. You'll have to dedicate some cold hard cash (often between $.50-$2.00 a fan) but you're basically creating a variation of an email list that offers less direct attention but additional viral growth possibilities. Not unlike Twitter, once you have fans to your page you'll want to mix the promotion of your own content with that of useful information from around your niche.
- Social News Participation - Find the social voting sites in your niche -- most niches, particularly even moderately tech-oriented ones, have a sort of Digg-clone where people congregate. Identify the most active participants and start to comment on their submissions, vote for their content when appropriate, and submit items yourself.
Leveraging relationships to build links and promote content is a lot of work, but it's also a very efficient way to spend your time and resources as it'll pay dividends in a number of different ways.
Step 2: Promote Your Content On Social Sites
Having done the hard work of building relationships via different social platforms, you can now use these as "syndication channels" -- spend a few minutes tweeting, sharing, and potentially submitting your stories. It's a lot easier than a dedicated outreach project for each post but can offer some of the same benefits, as you're getting your content in front of many of the linkers in your niche (assuming you did Step 1 right that is!).
Step 3: Tell Your Friends
One good opportunity that seems like it would have a minimal impact but actually pays legitimate dividends is just telling the people friendly to your company. The simplest form of this is to send an email out to everyone in your company or your department letting them know a new blog post is up. This is another activity that just takes a second, and if your employees share the content on Twitter and their other social networks the aggregate of this extra bit of awareness over time can create a nice extra tick of exposure for your content.
Step 4: Mini Outreach Projects
While you might not want to build a big list of possible link targets and execute a complex campaign, for certain content it's often worth blocking off 30 minutes to an hour to send out a few select emails to people you don't normally interact with -- for instance, if WordStream did a post about link building tips for non-profits, that might be a good opportunity to introduce the content to a few non-profit bloggers who blog about marketing. This isn't something you'll necessarily want to do for every post, but it's a good idea to keep in mind and leverage when you have content that fits with an untapped niche (I say untapped because it saves you from "hammering" your normal network with explicit link requests -- they'll be promoting a lot of content for you anyway via your syndication channels, which lets them pick and choose which content to put in front of their audiences. It's always a good long-term strategy to make it easy, convenient, and hassle-free for your friends to share your content.)
Step 5: Rinse and Repeat
Content marketing is a lot of work. SEO and social media are far from "free traffic" -- they require lots of investments on the people side of things, but keep in mind the benefits of this type of legwork:
- You build links and help your organic search traffic (increasing the amount of high-intent traffic to your site).
- You build relationships that are invaluable for you when you're promoting your product or service directly and not just the helpful content you're creating for the community (the best kind of product marketing/PR around!).
- You brand yourself and your company as a thought leader -- I can't think of a product or service on the planet that wouldn't benefit from its prospects perceiving it as a smart, thoughtful, helpful brand.
As a social media consultant, this is probably the basic strategy that I would follow. This would be a great building block to any online marketing campaign.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Google Maps Adds Twitter & Hotpot Functionality
Here’s what we know about Google Hotpot: It’s a lot more visual and functional than the previous Places setup; it’s getting more promotions than any other Google product right now; it’s integrated with all of Google’s other local featuers; It’s so “full-service” that data providers, such as Yelp, are getting upset; and it’s surprisingly social. Some of that social functionality can be seen through Hotpot itself, where users are able to set up expanded Google profiles, include pictures, connect with friends, share information, and more. However, we’re also seeing some strong social functionality in other elements of Hotpot.
Specifically, I’m talking about the most recent update to the Google Maps for Mobile application. Maps, which has previously come bundled with a Hotpot widget for quickly finding and rating businesses while on the go, now also features a Twitter-integrated sharing mechanism. Once you’ve gone to and rated a location, you can tweet all about it with a single click (you just enable “Post review to Twitter” from the “Optional” panel of your review), directly from the Apps interface.
It’s important that Hotpot is showing as an even more outgoing socialite, but it’s even more important that this is happening via Twitter. Google has shown a strong partnership with Twitter in recent months. Most prominently, Google users can now connect their Google and Twitter accounts. This allows for the recent social search element of Google, which sites that have been “tweeted” by friends higher up on the SERP, displaying the avatar of the friend who shared the page. All these Twitterificfeatures simply fuel the rumors that Google may just end up buying the micro-blogging service that Buzz failed to beat (or even, if we’re honest, really compete with).
[via Tech Crunch]
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Maps Adds Twitter & Hotpot Functionality 
Social Media Link Building
When it was finally confirmed that Twitter & Facebook links pass SEO value for search engine rankings, I must admit: I cringed a little. It’s not that I didn’t see it coming. It’s just: now that they have confirmed for everyone what many have been predicting for years, even the doubters are rushing to incorporate social media into their link building strategy. And that worries me.
Eric Ward wrote about this a couple years ago, calling the idea of using social media for link building: “Spam 2.0”. I think it needs repeating:
“…those of us who are in the link building business need to recognize and respect the distinct culture of social media networks. Social media is not there to be exploited for SEO. Don’t ask “what can social media do for my links”. That’s just spam2.0. Instead, ask, “what can I do to contribute to the conversation aside from link drops”. If you have nothing to add but company and/or client links, frankly, your wasting your time, and ours. If you worked for the engines, would you really trust anything about social links enough to incorporate it into a ranking adjustment? Maybe In certain cases, and for certain topics, but if you spend some time looking through the social apps, you’ll see they are polluted already by the usual suspects. “
Polluted now more than ever, I’m afraid. And I can’t see how that will be getting any better in the near future, especially on Twitter. So before you start revamping your Twitter and Facebook accounts in an attempt to advance your link building efforts, there’s some things you should consider first:
“Limited Situations”
Since Google admitted that they use signals from social media sites “in limited situations”, there’s been a handful of SEO’s who are rushing around to do testing in order to determine just what the actual benefit these links carry. What I believe they’ll find is this: Just because you have a twitter account with 10,000 followers and you link to your site via tweeting, it doesn’t necessarily mean that link is providing any SEO value. I might actually go as far as to say in MOST cases, they won’t.
The search engines are looking for signals of quality for the content in their index. How far a link spreads and how influential the users are who are doing the spreading (followers ≠ influence) are going to be the big factors for what (if any) value is being passed. There’s little doubt that a few will still find a way to take advantage if this value, but most spammers will be wasting their time. At least, that’s my hope…
Questions about PageRank
An area of confusion of this new advancement is whether or not links from Twitter now pass PageRank. The short answer is no, they don’t (they’re still nofollowed). Yet the question remains: will the link carry weight similar the way PR works? Or is it something totally different?
For example: even if you happen to be getting the link benefit from a tweet, it has been speculated that it may not only be temporary, but also page specific. In other words: you may not be able to pass value to the rest of your site like you can with links that carry PageRank. Just an FYI: I have little to back up this claim; further testing is needed to determine how this new signal actually works.
It’s not just about Twitter & Facebook
Social media link building doesn’t stop at Twitter & Facebook (I have plenty of evidence to back up this claim). There are literally hundreds of social media sites & tools to take advantage of for their potential SEO value. The problem is, even more so than on Twitter or Facebook, it’s not about adding a link and walking away.
You can submit to spam hundreds of social media sites and get little to no value from it. Even if your content is appropriate and of acceptable quality, you still need to have some influence and a network of users for it to spread. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.
Getting REAL link value from Social Media
Some social media bookmarking sites award submissions a direct dofollow link. Sometimes it’s only in certain situations, like if the submission has become popular by being featured in a main category page or hitting the front page. What I’d warn people about, however, is that it’s not the links from social media sites themselves that should be focused on. For one, the PageRank value, if it’s passing any at all, doesn’t last long. Second, similarly to how SE’s are treating links from Twitter & Facebook, if they’re to take quality signals from these other social sites as well, it’s all about how far the link spreads, and by whom. Third, the link from the social site itself isn’t where the real SEO value comes from.
So where does this REAL link value come from? It’s all about getting high quality linkable content in front of as many relevant webmasters & bloggers as possible:
- Network on appropriate social media sites & within relevant subcategories (this means being social)
- Focus on creating high quality linkable content designed to spread (e.g. link bait)
- Submit and promote your content to get it in front of webmasters
- Webmasters provide natural links to your content
Regardless of the added value Twitter & Facebook links pass, it’s also a great place to do this type of promotion. In fact, when successful on Twitter, I’d argue it can be the best. And I would still take the links you receive for having created content of value over the added power of a Twitter link any day. But it’s a nice bonus!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Social Media Link Building 
Will the revamped Google Profiles create a "buzz"?
We know, if only because Google representatives have told us, that Google is eager to take part in the world of social networking. While Google has a titan’s grip on search, strong presence in media, and a number of other valuable features, their social projects have thus far been lackluster at best. However, Google has been slowly moving in a social direction. This includes using projects like Hotpot to figure out how people determine who their “friends” are. More recently, we can see Google’s social side through the expansion of their “account profile” section.
The new profile, which is attached to Buzz, allows users to put substantially more information up on the web. This includes:
- “10 words” that describe the user.
- An introduction.
- “Bragging rights” of things you’ve accomplished in your life (Google gives the examples of “survived high school” and “have three kids”).
- Occupation, employment, and education.
- “Places I’ve lived,” which allows users to visually map the locations where they’ve found a home.
- “Home” and “Work” contact information, which will not be made public.
- Relationship status.
- A “looking for” field that allows you to declare what types of relationships you are interested in.
- Your gender.
- Your pseudonyms or other alternate names.
There’s little doubt that this information creates a far more full and rich profile than what we’ve seen before, even showing the foundation of different networking types (with a user’s relationship status and occupation mimicking the concepts of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other prominent social networks). Of note, Google users can set this profile to private or public and will now be able to remove Buzz entirely if they prefer. To delete Buzz or to add/change any of the features mentioned above, simply visit Account Settings > Edit Profile through the new Google interface.
[via ZDNet]
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Expands Profiles, Steps Toward Social 
Facebook Comments on your site! Have you tried this yet?
Last week Facebook released a new social plugin that web publishers can use to power comments on their websites. Here are two benefits of using it, according to the official Facebook Comments page (which is where you can get the plugin as well):
Social Relevance: Comments Box uses social signals to surface the highest quality comments for each user. Comments are ordered to show users the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked or active discussion threads, while comments marked as spam are hidden from view.
Distribution: Comments are easily shared with friends or with people who like your Page on Facebook. If a user leaves the “Post to Facebook” box checked when she posts a comment, a story appears on her friends’ News Feed indicating that she’s made a comment on your website, which will also link back to your site.
Some large websites and blogs are already testing the plugin, including TechCrunch. In fact they started using it right after the official release, and today the have a post summarizing the results and feeling so far. You can read it here: Facebook Comments Have Silenced The Trolls — But Is It Too Quiet? (by visiting the post you’ll be able to see the Facebook comments in action too).
In the past couple of years we have seen at least half a dozen comment systems and plugins emerging on the web, but I don’t think any of them became the de facto standard. Facebook Comments might.
Why? Because the previous plugins and platforms only offered small benefits to the web publishers (e.g., easier logins, connection with Twitter, etc), while the Facebook plugin has two big advantages which might swing the pendulum in its favor: a) it reduces the number of trolls around because people need a real identity to comment and, most importantly, b) using it might actually increase your traffic because every time someone leaves a comment on your site that comment will also be published on the user’s Facebook stream.
Have you guys spotted the Facebook Comments plugin around? Are you considering to use it on your site?
Original Post: Now You Can Use Facebook To Power Comments on Your Site
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
iPad 2 Rumors: Which Were True & Which Will Wait for the iPad 3
Since the launch of the original iPad, we’ve been keeping you apprised of rumors surrounding the iPad 2.
Now that the iPad 2 has been unveiled, we can officially start speculating about the iPad 3 — because as far as the Apple rumor mill is concerned, it’s never too soon to start gossiping about gadgets.
First, here are the rumors we ended up seeing come true with the iPad 2′s announcement:
- Dual-core processor. The iPad 2 gets a custom A5 dual-core system-on-a-chip that’s allegedly twice as fast as the original iPad’s processor. The graphics performance is also said to be up to nine times faster than the iPad’s.
- Lighter and thinner “than a supermodel on a diet.” The iPad 2 weighs in at 1.3 pounds and is 33% thinner than its predecessor –that’s even thinner than the iPhone 4.
- Multiple versions at launch. The iPad 2 will be available in its standard metallic hue as well as a white version, and it will launch on AT&T as well as Verizon — sans the improvised MiFi setup this time.
- Front- and rear-facing cameras. The Mac photo app PhotoBooth is included.
- Larger speakers. Can you hear it now? Good.
And now, here are the rumors that ended up being utterly false but which might — we said might — resurface in the iPad 3 bubbling cauldron of hypothesis and conjecture:
- Retina display.
- Wireless synching
- Flat (as opposed to curved) back.
- USB port. However, the iPad does support HDMI output.
- No Gorilla Glass. But the new covers, Apple says, should help keep your iPad 2′s screen intact and pristine-ish.
- A 7-inch version.
Did any of the facts (or out-and-out lies) about the iPad 2 surprise you? Let us know in the comments what you expected from this device and what changes you think we should see from the iPad 3.
Definitely pleased with the iPad 2 and its ability of HDMI video output. Request to Apple and Steve Jobs: Surprise me with iPad 3 !
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Facebook VP Explains New Comments System [VIDEO]
Facebook launched a new public commenting platform Tuesday, but the company didn’t do too much commenting about it in public. The exception: Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, who spoke at the Webtrends Engage conference in San Francisco.
In the video below, exclusive to Mashable, Rose explains exactly what will change with the Comments plug-in. First of all, the important friends in your social graph will appear a lot more prominently. And secondly, the plug-in allows comments you make on a third-party website or news page to appear in your Facebook news feed for the first time.
What do you think? Is this a prudent move for the company? Will the Comments plug-in dominate commenting on the Web and cause trouble for other comment software makers? Let us know your thoughts — where else? — in the comments.
Keyword Research: Analyzing the Important Factors that Contribute to Online Marketing Success
Perhaps the most important aspect of any online marketing campaign is the KEYWORD RESEARCH. If this is not done correctly, then your entire campaign can fall flat.
