marketing
Reading and Links for 2009-03-31
- What Social Media Means for Search
"The separation between search and social media is melting away, and a new paradigm is taking hold." - Skimmer, a lifestreaming tool
Definitely worth checking out, or at least keeping your eye on - Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric
I agree, but they might just keep Page? I think that keeps a nice separation of Friends and Followers (Use user accounts for friends, use pages for followers) - How To Monetize A Social Network: MySpace And Facebook Should Follow TenCent
Sshhh! Don't let the cat out of the bag. We know this very well over at http://www.workatplay.com. Micro-transactions are the hip new business model. - Steel Cage Debate On The Future Of Online Advertising: Danny Sullivan Vs. Eric Clemons
"The separation between search and social media is melting away, and a new paradigm is taking hold." - Customer Service is the New PR
"My takeaway is that this isn't just a CRM concern, but rather it requires close coordination between customer service and PR."
Knowledge is power.
Top 5 Worst Practices in Social Media Marketing
This is a follow up to my quick 5 minute presentation at the Vancouver Social Media Road Show 2009: Risks & Rewards for Marketers. In it, I only really had time to go through the 3 best practices that I perceive to be the most important.
Here is the original quick 5 min presentation I gave:
And without further delay....
The Worst Practices in Social Media
Forgetting about SEO & SEM
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is only one part of the inbound marketing equation. Don't forget about proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Being able to excel at all three will cause some synergies to form, thus amplifing efforts. I call this cross pollination.
Treating social media like traditional publishing
Traditional publishing is broadcast. Radio out, TV out, magazine out, newspaper out. Social media is a conversation and therefore is implicitly bidirectional.
If you are only publishing, you are not really participating and reaping the full benefits you might be able to.
Not being transparent and honest!
Don't be fake in any way. Don't even think about Astroturfing. Bullshit detectors are exceptionally well tuned on the social web.
Be clear about your intentions out in the social media wild.
Not making social media a company-wide collaborative effort
It is often that different departments and divisions try to create their own social media tests and campaigns. What results is a disparate group of marketing attempts with mixed messaging. A collaborative effort, sponsored from the top dogs, is best.
The basics of online personal branding
It is no secret that you have to be in charge of your own online personal brand: The image and message you convey to the world will stay with you forever.
If you put anything on the internet you can safely assume that it will be searchable and viewable forever.
With employers, vendors, friends, and potential co-founders all googling you, you need to be very aware of the all of the different channels in which your life is being streamed out over the internet (and off the internet).
Manage your privacy settings
Paid blogging critiqued - Reviewing ReviewMe.com
At first glance, ReviewMe.com looks like a great service. Pay reputable bloggers to post about your product or service and receive feedback good or bad. I decided to take ReviewMe.com for a spin as an advertiser and see if it was worth the dollars.
I decided to purchase some blogging reviews for my fitness site gimme20.com. I selected a number of fitness related blogs with reasonably high PageRanks and Alexa rankings. After all, product feedback only goes so far: It is nice to get a quality link sometimes.
Two fitness blogs responded to my request and decided to write articles on Gimme20.com. The first blog, Self Help Daily, wrote an excellent blog post, outlining negative and positives about our product. The article appeared on the front page (where latest posts usually do), and could easily be found by browsing the helpful menus in the right sidebar.
Tim O'Reilly's Economics of Online Advertising
Tim O'Reilly recently posted an article about the Economics of Online Advertising. Immediately, he cites a Mark Jacobsen article which discusses Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue. Do you really need that much?
Here is the math:
* At the $1 RPM (CPM/CPA/CPC) level achieved by most general sites, you need 4 billion page views/month.
* At the $5 RPM level achieved by demographically targeted sites, you need 800 million/month.
* At the $20 RPM level achieved by highly targeted sites, you need 200 million/month.
Most sites can hope to roll in within the $1 through $5 range. So these are scary figures to get to $50m. (Although, revenue isn't that important. I could get $50m revenue easily enough by selling dollars for 99 cents).
