Marketing Mars

I’ve come across this time and again with several clients that I currently work with and there’s always been this conflict; both internally and with the client; on what are the right metrics to measure when you are using social media marketing?

I often get asked this question: Why measure metrics on social media at all? Well its simple, if you’re not measuring any activity thats impacting your business then why do it at all? But I digress. I’d like to however call your attention to the very fact that we need to define what real metrics are when it comes to social media marketing. Is it traffic, is it the number of conversions you get or is it the number of people who start talking about you.

Now let’s get to the bottom of this…there are 2 very distinct things to keep in mind when using the social media. You need to be very clear on what you’re using it for. Is it for PR or for lead generation?

What metrics would I measure if I’m using the social media for PR?

Firstly Social media for PR is a different ball game. Here’s where you’re trying to generate a buzz about your prodcut/service and/or brand. Here’ you’d ideally look at the following metrics:

1) How many influencers have I contacted?

2) What have they said about me - Understanding their tone - positive, negative, neutral.

3) How much has the buzz spread - this can be tracked by the comments, diggs, stumble upons etc

4) How many new links to your product/service has been added

5) How many conversions/Leads - Conversion/Lead definition is an absolute must.

Use tools like Attentio (www.attentio.com) to track and see how the buzz is working. This tool actually allows you to get to the right influencers. I’ll talk more of this in an upcoming post.

But very importantly you need to outline your goals and create plans around them.

What metrics would I measure if I’m using the social media for Lead Generation

The simplistic approach is to say “number of leads generated”. While I agree thats the bottom line, what you as a  marketer need to understand  SMM (social media marketing) is NOT like paid search. There is no on and off switch. Generating leads from the social media has a direct co-relation to what activities you are doing…so it becomes more of a Metrics Whining VS Need for action. How active are you in the social space is going to have a big big impact on what leads you get. Also more importantly, how effectively are you executing those activities.

Look at each social media channel and effective benchmark metrics. For example..if you’re doing something on YouTube..you don’t always look at the number of leads you have got from YouTube; its the number of people who have viewed your videos over time as a metric for how well you are engaging the YouTube community. For social bookmarking, tracking over time how many people have bookmarked your website and looking as what tags or words they use to describe it, is a good way to understand your brand’s presence online.

Now I’m not saying it’s not worthing tracking the metrics above to inform your marketing moves, but if you don’t track how it impacts the business, why bother? But, for the majority of b2b, small and mid sized businesses, ecommerce sites, it’s about visits, leads and sales. Since these things can drive traffic, I’d certainly advocate doing them. Most times a B2B sales cycle is 3-6 months. However, if you want to measure something further up the funnel that has a shorter time span to it you need to get knee deep in these.

So for those wondering where all the social media metrics are? My answer to you is to strategize for your clients and develop the campaigns that will generate metrics for those to follow in your footsteps. The hallmark of this mode of marketing will be creativity and authentic conversations with consumers. But at the end of the day social media marketing will build sustainable growth only so far as you’re empowering the community of your customers.

To take a page out of Michael Brito’s blog: Think POST

Have fun

Rand Fishkin is the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org).
Here are his tips on Social Media Marketing and how to make content go viral

• Research. Find out who in your industry has had success in this area, and of course who has failed. How have they made it work? Talk to your peers to find how they went about launching viral content and discuss it with marketing professionals who have experience.
• Brainstorm. Getting ideas together at this stage will be a lot easier because you already know what works. Pick some of the best ideas, execute them and show them to a sample audience such as a group of friends, or people you think can be critical of you.
• The Big Push. If your audience is ready to spread it then you have to come up with a strategy that will push the content out. This can be done by emailing bloggers, submitting it on social media sites, talking about it on your own blog, posting a Twitter on it, emailing influential friends. If you can take a campaign wide once or twice, the next time you produce something you won’t have to push it as hard because the audience already recognizes you. It will spread naturally.
• Only kill content if you are getting negative feedback or a lot of criticism. Not all publicity is good publicity. You don’t want to become an online laughing stock.
• Even if nothing is happening, leave it out there. Sometimes a year later it will go popular for no particular reason. That’s the great thing about the web - you can put something out there, think it has failed, and a few months later it turns out to be a big hit. It can be down to bad timing, or the right person not seeing it first time round.
• Keyword Research. One of the things you should always advise your clients is to execute their campaigns intelligently from a search perspective. The links they provide must have the right keywords, and the same thing has to be said when they’re optimizing their viral content - such as videos, pod casts, blogs etc.
• Make sure that it’s easy to link to your URL, that you have a link to it, share this, here’s a banner, here’s a badge - ie a piece of content you can talk about. It has to be easy to share and easy to spread.

Make sure the content is kept on your website so that people are linking to your site rather than going to YouTube for videos. Do this to make sure you are earning all the link benefit.

Source - Rand Fishkin Interview

Ever wonder exactly how many videos are taken down from YouTube because of copyright violations or other reasons?

Folks at the MIT Free Culture student group created YouTomb to document all YouTube videos that have been taken down.

More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

According to YouTomb’s stats, the companies that have recently taken down the biggest number of popular YouTube videos are: TV TOKYO, Viacom, Warner Bros, World Wrestling and other media companies. “YouTomb is currently monitoring 157340 videos, and has identified 4389 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 13330 videos taken down for other reasons.”

To read more click here - TechCrunch
To know more about YouTomb, Click here YouTomb

YouTube’s new layout can give you a lot of information for your video.

You can now see the sites linking in to your video with the number of click through.

A great move by YouTube, makes our work a lot easier

Facebook will soon remove a limitation that restricts users to no more than 5,000 friend connections

The official reason as to why the restriction exists is that Facebook wants to make sure that people only add “real” friends to their account, and the restriction is on the high end of the number of friends that any one person could reasonable have. The unofficial (and actual) reason: scaling problems made this necessary.

But those scaling issues have been resolved. Facebook says that “less than 1,000? users have 5,000 friends today. There are around 70 million active Facebook users, so the number of users who are affected is around one thousandth of a percent. But a disproportionate percentage of bloggers and press are at the limit, so the issue tends to get a lot more attention than it otherwise would.

High profile blogger Robert Scoble is among the 1,000 Facebook users who’ve hit the cap, and has complained about the restriction in the past.

Facebook also says that the “Pages” feature is meant for people and brands that want to have a lot more “friends” than are allowed via normal accounts. An example is Barach Obama’s Facebook page, which currently shows 842,786 supporters.

But for many people, being a friend is much different than being a fan, and the level of interaction allowed is also significantly different. And the new Friend list feature, which allows users to classify and group friends, makes organization easier anyway.

YouTube has come out wiht a new analytics service named YouTube Insight, its a free software tool that lets video creators see detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site, giving them a glimpse of chronological and demographic audience trends.

YouTube Insight tools provide aggregate data on viewer behavior for anyone who uploads their own videos to YouTube, as well as advertisers looking to place advertising on the site.

Previously, YouTube offered video creators basic tools for tracking how many comments viewers make on their videos, average viewer ratings and the ultimate ranking of a clip relative to all other YouTube videos. Insight provides context on where viewers come from and when viewers watched a video.

Source - ITPRO News

Ok, so I put this together cuz I need to use it for a client, but I thought it’s pretty cool:

1. Treat the “Search Terms” setup on the alerts like it’s a real Google search box. It can include modifiers that will help you find specific things you might be looking for. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try this page on Google Search Operators. An example would be an alert like: [keyword site:www.thegamedruid.com] this alert would notify you every time a specific keyword was found on the Game Druid blog. Play around with some of the different modifiers… you may get some interesting results.

2. Set up an alert that focuses on the keywords you want to rank for. Such as: [”new social media tips”]. Make sure to put quotes around the phrase so you don’t get unrelated results. You can immediately see the value in a search like this because it will let you know who else is writing about that particular phrase, essentially identifying your competition. You may want to consider excluding your domain name from this search so your results don’t get too full. Here is the command: [New social media tips -www.marketing.kiranpk.cim]

3. Set up an alert for a phrase about your community like: [”Bangalore schools”] or [”Bangalore local events”]. This will allow you to keep tabs on what is going on in your community, and can often turn into ideas to write about on your blog depending on what is popular within your local community.

4. Search for customers. This one is the most undervalued of them all! What are your potential customers looking for? Are they asking specific questions online about your market? Take some time and think through this… then set up a few test alerts. Here are some examples: [”how do i find foreclosure properties in Bangalore”], [”how much is my FraZER Town house worth”], [”where can I find Prestige apartments for sale”],… In case you haven’t noticed, buyers and sellers are online. And they are actively asking questions about real estate in their area. The hard part is how to find them… that is where Google alerts comes in. It will do the hard work for you. Once you find someone that is asking a question, or needs help, simply go to the page and respond to their inquiry. Sometimes this might be a question on a Yahoo Group, or a question on Trulia Voices, or maybe even a question about a specific property on Zillow.com. Don’t be afraid to set up 50+ alerts for specific search phrases. These are real leads, and because of the specific nature of the query, you probably won’t get more than a couple alerts per week.

5. When setting up an alert for your website, don’t just put in your home page, try putting in specific URL’s for popular articles you’ve written so you can see who is writing about those specific topics.

6. For less important searches, choose the “once a week” notification option so you aren’t inundated with emails every day at random.

7. Spy on your competition. Try some alerts like this: [link:www.mycompetition.com], [”keyword” site:www.mycompetition.com], [allintitle:”keyword” site:www.mycompetition.com]

8. One last tip… this tip exploits the fact that most popular bloggers have Google alerts set up for their website and name. Start linking out to some famous bloggers and see what happens. In most cases you will see that person you linked to come around to your blog within 24 hours to check it out. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to people you want to connect with. You can build quite a reputation for yourself in a short amount of time by linking out to other bloggers you respect. This is hugely important to the new blogger trying to make a splash in the blogosphere.

I hope some of those tips helped. If you have any other ideas, please share them here!

If you are really making money online, you will know that SEO is one of the best way to make money online. First of all, it’s free. Secondly, it can generate a very targeted traffic to your website. Imagine a group of thirsty people coming into your drink stall. In this post, I am going to talk about the 10 instructions of Search Engine Optimization that is not known to many. Following these instructions can be very helpful in your placement in SERPs.

Instruction 1 : Selecting keywords that are worthy

Doing research for the keywords will be very handy. It is very useful to know how much traffic it can bring to your website in the future when your website got rank highly in the SERP. You also need to know how much competition you have in the keyword so you can estimate how much work you need to do.

Instruction 2 : Create great content

Your website will not succeed if the content is only meant for the search engine crawlers! You need to fill your website with great content so you can get repeating visitors and increase your sales. Keep adding great content and edit the previous content if necessary.

Instruction 3 : Use search engine friendly website design

Search engine spiders cannot read javascript, or see images, or fill up forms in your website. Make sure that you have a good website template that will help you handle all these. Remember, try to aviod long and lengthy URLs.

Instruction 4 : Getting relevant links

Back linking is one of the critical techniques in Search Engine Optimization. It is known that Google is ranking based mainly on this. The more websites linking to your website, the better it will rank. However, not any links will do. You need to find the relevant websites and link up with them. Imagine having a link from an insurance website to your automotive website. The back link is totally off the theme.

Instruction 5 : Having good out links

Out links are links that links from your website to others. Make sure you hyper links the right content to the right website. For example, if you are talking about SEO, make sure you link up the right terms to the right website.

Instruction 6 : Having good and original meta tags

Meta tags is like signboard for your website. Before anyone comes to your website, they will see your meta tags first (Most of the time). So create a good and original meta tags. Basically, there is only one meta tag that you need to worry of, which is the description. The tip to write good, original meta tags is to write everything that is relevant to your website in less than 160 characters.

Instruction 7 : Understand your competition

How fast you can succeed in getting to high ranking of SERPs depends on how hard you work and how much competition you have. While you can control how much you work, you cannot control how much competition. Also, you need to analyze your competitors’ method of ranking but do not copy from them.

Instruction 8 : Getting high rankings is not the end.

Just getting high ranking is not the end of your make money journey. You need to ask yourself what you can get from the high ranking. While many companies are interested to increase sales with Search Engine Optimization, some are interested in getting targeted traffic.

Instruction 9 : There is no SERP placement guarantees. Full stop.

SERPs are totally controlled by the algorithms of the search engines. There is no way someone else can manipulate it so easily. Google has dozens of PhDs working on the algorithms so do not expect a small company can out win them so easily.

Instruction 10 : Find an expert, if needed

There is only 2 ways to learn Search Engine Optimization. Learn from your own mistakes or learn from other experiences. If you have the time to do experiments yourself, do it yourself. It’s free anyway. However, if you want to start now, it’s better that you consult some experts.

Search Engine Optimization might be the best, free way to make money online, however, you need to play by the rules. Or all your effort will go down into the drain.
I hope these instructions will be handy for you!

A concept that I find some clients have resisted is the use of long tail keywords and long tail copy in their website. The concept seemingly goes against common sense and intuitive interest in being found for some of the most desirable keywords.

But, effective SEO strategies are about creating winning strategies. In some cases (actually in many cases) optimizing for the most desirable keywords for a business can be quite challenging. Everyone wants to be on page one. But, often page one is filled with mature, keyword rich, link rich websites. Penetrating the page one list can be difficult at best and impossible in many cases. So, we must go after winning strategies.

How do we do that? Long tail keywords, that’s how…Consider this example in our industry.

If we want to be search engine optimized for “Internet marketing” there are more than 79 million results in Google! Considering the age of www.findandconvert.com and current content and link count, the reality of ranking even on the first three pages for “Internet marketing” is nill in the near future. Consider that we are an “Internet marketing company” and not everyone searching on “Internet marketing” is necessarily searching for an Internet marketing company like Find and Convert. So, if we optimize for “Internet marketing company” we’re still dealing with a very competitive keyword that has over 13 million results in Google.

As I browse the results, there are many Internet marketing companies with geographic descriptors in their titles such as “Philadelphia Internet marketing company” and “Dallas Internet marketing company.” So, a winning strategy for us is to optimize for “Internet marketing company Florida.” There are only 635,000 results in Google for this phrase. Obviously, the search volume for “Internet marketing company Florida” is lower than the broader phrases mentioned above. But, the likelihood of someone who finds us for this phrase being a qualified opportunity for Find and Convert is pretty high.

If this “long tail keyword” stuff sounds a little like shooting with a rifle, or being laser focused (or whatever cliché you prefer) that’s exactly what it is. Consider that long tail keywords allow you to write copy to accommodate it with relative ease. It’s easier to write content about specific topics than it is about more general topics. It’s also easier to rank well for various combination of long tail keyword phrases such as “Florida Internet marketing company.”

Go for a winning strategy with long tail keywords supported with long tail keyword copy that will drive the most qualified traffic to your website.