Three Primary Goals of Social Media

To build a social media strategy around specific goals instead of simply launching a presence because “everyone else is doing it.” Today, I’m going to map out the three primary goals most social media outreach campaigns fall into. If you’re still trying to figure out how and why to get involved in social media outreach, consider these three categories and ask yourself how they might apply to your business.

Three Primary Social Media Goals

When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually either aimed at:

1. Building/Strengthening the Brand
2. Driving Conversions
3. Increasing/Monitoring the Presence

Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals.

Let’s take a closer look at these three areas and how they might apply to your social media efforts.

Goal #1: Build the Brand

When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them.

These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors unless you have an exclusive product. Otherwise, you’re forced into the unwinnable battle of competing for the lowest prices and the fastest shipping.

Think about the things that make your company different from your competitors; your Unique Value Propostion. This is the thing you want to use social media to built awareness of.

If you’re a service professional, target a specific niche and build a blogging and Twitter strategy around that. Demonstrate your expertise in working with a certain type of client and then seek out those types of clients to have conversation with. Look for new ways to connect with them and encourage your current clients to socially share your articles with their networks.

Goal #2: Drive Conversions

One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you’re looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions are an easily trackable goal in the realm of social media.

Sit down and write out a list of all the potential actions someone might take while engaging with your company’s web site or while interacting online.

Obvious options like buying your products or becoming a lead spring to mind, but don’t forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, retweeting a blog post or downloading a white paper.

Read over your list and think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts.

Goal #3: Increase Presence

Finally, we come to the goal most often associated with social media outreach efforts; increasing the conversation about your brand. After all, social media is all about the conversation. It’s about the only space in the world where consumers talk to each other and to companies in an environment that can be tracked, sorted and followed-up with. This makes social media a prime outlet for PR driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them.

Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you’re launching new product and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, it’s all trackable.

When it comes to the conversation people might be having about you online, ask yourself a few questions.

• Who do you want to hear talking?
• What do you want them to be saying?
• Who do you want them to say it to?

These are your starting points for setting up key goals within the realm of increasing your presence.

You’ve Set the Stage, Now Start Building a Plan

Looking at your business with each of the above goals in mind helps you set the stage for your social media efforts. This post isn’t aimed at telling you what to do, I’m simply trying to get you to figure out why you want (and need) to do it.

If you’re small business looking to take your social media efforts up a notch (or maybe even just get started,) take the time to define at least two goals from the categories above. Once you’ve identified your desired outcome, you’ll be a lot more ready to start mapping out the path to get there.

Understanding the Three Primary Goals of Social Media

How Should You Price Your SEO Projects?

Research is always the first step! Decide what niche you want to focus upon… ideally, one which is not heavily populated. In this case, it’s better to be the large fish in a small pond, than the small fish in a large pond!

Analyzing the competition on the search engines will help you to identify those areas of professional services that are in high demand, with little competition. Those are usually the areas in which you can most quickly establish a prominent presence. From there, you can extend your reach to encompass a wider area, building upon that stature.

Lay out a plan, identifying the ultimate and intermediate goals, and the tasks to be undertaken to get you there. Establish milestones by which you can gauge your progress. You should do this for your own SEO efforts, as well as for the benefit of your clients. Examining those areas in which you failed to achieve an intermediate goal or milestone will afford you insight as to the causes.

Explain clearly to your client what the intended tasks, goals and milestones are to be, and by what metric they’ll be measured. Begin the actual project with a written agreement, agreed to by both parties, that fully describes the responsibilities of each party, so as to avoid conflicts later.

The results of SEO services cannot be guaranteed 100%, but they can be measured. There are, however, many variables that are beyond the SEO’s control. Attempting to bill your work on an hourly basis is not wise, at least until you have a track record to justify it. It’s usually better to bill per task, with achieved milestones being the metric.

Given the foregoing, a wise approach might be the following:

• Divide your selected keyword and keyword phrase into two groups. The first, comprised of those with relatively low competition, can offer you the quickest results. The second, highly competitive words and phrases, will take longer, but once achieved, may offer you the greatest overall benefit.
• Once your client has seen that you can achieve massive improvements with the low competition terms, your credibility will be greater, and they will be more willing to allocate more time and money for even greater results.
• Your pricing for on-page and site structure optimization should typically be based upon the site size and intricacy. You should consider the amount of time and expertise level you’ll be putting forth, as well as your competition’s pricing.
• Off-page SEO costs depend more upon keyword competition, which means that you may be incurring additional expenses when chasing the more competitive terms. It is common for SEO companies to price various aspects of off-page SEO, by unit, such as a given dollar amount per inbound link from a blog, article or press release, or a directory listing. This allows you to bill incrementally, and easily adjust for changing requirements.
• Don’t be afraid to collaborate with other SEOs. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and if your client requires some service that is outside your current capability, you always have the option of subcontracting that portion out to another professional with more expertise in that area, or with more support staff available.

The quality of the end result is the most important factor, and it’s possible that sharing the project may ensure you of an ongoing contract.

Most SEO companies bid their projects for a six or twelve month term. If the optimization project is well done, maintenance efforts are considerably less demanding than at the outset. Your pricing should reflect that, if you value a long term relationship with your client. Emailing a monthly automatically generated report requires very little effort on your part, and does little to foster such a relationship.

It’s much better that you provide the client with the quality of service that will assure you of a long term client, and a glowing recommendation to their acquaintances. All else being equal, it is ultimately the client’s perception of value of your services, that will be the deciding factor.

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8 Villains of Social Media

Social Media Marketing sure isn’t easy.  It takes time to get to know the space you’re in, to network with like minded users, and to develop a strong content strategy that works within your niche and target social channels.

But to make matters worse, there are users who can (and will) make your road to success even more difficult.  So in order to prepare you for your journey, here are 8 of the most common villains you’ll encounter on your path, and how to defend against their attacks:

The Troll

Appearance:

An offensive or childish image

Favorite Social Setting:

Video sites, Anywhere comments aren’t actively moderated

Method of Attack:

The Troll comments exclusively with the intent of offending other users in hopes that someone will write a retaliatory comment.  The use of profanity, racism & sexism, wild accusations, and direct attacks are all a part of their arsenal.  It’s sometimes difficult to spot a troll as they can sometimes appear to be a Skeptic or Know-it-all.

Weakness:

The only way to deal with Trolls is to ignore them.  They rarely comment in places that are moderated; and while burying the comment may seem to work, it simply becomes a metric for how well their comment achieved its intended goal.  Ignoring them takes their power away.

The Disrupter

Appearance:

Default avatar/no avatar

Favorite Social Setting:

Blogs

Method of Attack:

The Disrupter makes comments that add nothing to a conversation because they didn’t take the time to read or watch the entire article/video/etc.   They also have a tendency to repeat an earlier comment because they were too lazy to read them as well.  These types of comments can be fairly disruptive to a good social conversation, and are quite annoying on blogs. The Disrupter can sometimes be associated with the Shameless Link Dropper.

Weakness:

Pointedly ignoring them by only responding to other (good) comments is your only defense.  Responding to a Disrupter will only further interrupt the conversation, not to mention: they’re unlikely to see it anyways.  Other users will notice that a well thought out comment that adds to the conversation is rewarded with a response, while these are not.  In rare (extreme) cases, the comment can be removed by the moderator.

The Skeptic

Appearance:

Vectorized image of their favorite science fiction character

Favorite Social Setting:

Social Bookmarking sites like Digg & Reddit

Method of Attack:

The Skeptic is usually the first to claim that something isn’t real.  To them, everything on the internet is fake.  All images are photoshopped, all videos are scripted, and all statistics, facts, and reports are made up by the people who have most to gain by them.  Also, all supporting evidence that the item in question is, in fact, real: is made up as well.  Not to be confused with the Know-it-all.

Weakness:

None.  Ignore them and they become right, provide evidence and they’ll continue to blindly claim you’re spreading the conspiracy (regardless how trustworthy the source).  Your best bet is to bury their comment and hope others will see them for what they really are.

The Shameless Link Dropper

Appearance:

No avatar, A Company logo

Favorite Social Setting:

Blogs, Forums, & Viral Content

Method of Attack:

The Shameless Link Dropper comments only to insert a link for the potential traffic and/or SEO value.  You can generally spot these from the short (usually complimentary) comments (e.g. “Nice post!”), the keyword rich user name (e.g. buy_viagra), second grade grammer skills (e.g. “This is good points”), and the general spamminess of the destination URL.

Weakness:

Strong comment moderation.  It’s also wise to have a comment policy that clearly states that link dropping is not tolerated unless it’s relevant to the conversation.

The Bury Brigade

Appearance:

Can be anyone

Favorite Social Setting:

Social Bookmarking sites like Digg & Reddit

Method of Attack:

Their sole purpose for signing in to Digg or Reddit is to bury submissions that don’t meet their standards of what should be on the front page.  In rare occasions these users group together to target power users who are “too good” at getting submissions to go popular.  They also have a tendency to fill out spam reports and report users & sites to moderators.

Weakness:

Power users.  Nothing frustrates the Bury Brigade like social bookmarking success.  And if one of these users dislikes one of your submissions, unless you’re a power user, you could be dead in the water.

The Whistle Blower

Appearance:

Smug photos of themselves

Favorite Social Setting:

Social Bookmarking sites like Digg & Reddit

Method of Attack:

Calling content producers out for anything they suspect is done for profit, for example: splash advertising, article pagination, SEO link bait, “blog spam”, promotional content, etc.

Weakness:

Extraordinary content.  Despite all of the above things being somewhat annoying to most users, you can get away with some of it if the content is remarkable enough.  The Whistle Blower will still probably call you out for it, but it will fall on deaf ears as (to others) the quality of the content overshadows the minor pet-peeve.

The Know-it-all

Appearance:

A slightly altered photo of Einstein or a mash-up of mathematical equations.

Favorite Social Setting:

Forums, EVERYWHERE

Method of Attack:

The Know-it-all rarely comments unless it’s to disagree with or correct the content producer or another user’s comment.  They’re generally great fact checkers and revel in correcting a specific fact, but would rather argue about opinions.  They also love to point out grammatical errors.

Weakness:

Strong (yet modest) arguments.  It’s nearly impossible to change the mind of the Know-it-all.  Your best bet is to respond to them with rational arguments that present a strong case in a modest tone.  Let their arrogance and opinionated argument work against them making you look like the rational, impartial one to everyone else.

The Emo

Appearance:

Anyone

Favorite Social Setting:

Anywhere

Method of Attack:

The Emo only attacks when disturbed, usually when taking a comment or criticism too personally.  An attack can come in any form or level of extremes depending on the individual & emotional reaction. A conversation between an Emo and a Troll or Know-it-all can be volatile.

Weakness:

Time.  Tread carefully when you upset an Emo.  You may think a quick response to defend yourself or perhaps even explain your comments is a good idea, but most of the time it only makes matters worse.  Depending on how upset they are, time may be required for them to calm down before you’re able to start up a rational conversation about whatever upset them.  And sometimes, it’s wise to just let it go…

8 Canonicalization Best Practices In Plain English

Canonicalization sounds like a process for recognizing sainthood, or maybe a training course in aiming large projectile weapons. But it’s actually one of the most important aspects of organic SEO. Good canonicalization means search engines crawl more pages of your site; it means that link authority and PageRank get consolidated, so you have a stronger link profile; and it means fewer broken links from other sites. Bad canonicalization gets you all that stuff, but with the opposite effect.

Canonicalization defined

The Ian-Lurie-mangles-the-meaning-so-computer-geeks-cringe-definition of canonicalization is: “every resource on your web site has a single web address.”

Every resource means every page, every image, every video, etc..

Single web address means there’s only one Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for each page of content, image, video, etc..

A URL looks like this:

http://www.mysite.com/

Or, it could be: http://www.mysite.com/blah/foo.html.

Or, it could be: http://www.mysite.com/blah/foo.php?meh=123.

Or… Oh, you get the idea.

Note that I said ‘page of content’. That means that a single article, product description or list of articles should appear at a single URL. You should never have multiple URLs for, say, one product description, or one article.

Some of the absurdly bloated content management systems and e-commerce suites out there make canonicalization a challenge. But it’s worth it.

Consequences of bad canonicalization

Here’s an example of ‘bad’ canonicalization: Let’s say I’ve opened a games store: Ian’s Nerdvana (I owe Dave Barry for the term ‘nerdvana’). My store’s home page lives at:

http://www.iansnerdvana.com/

But it also lives at

http://iansnerdvana.com/

and

http://www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html

So what? People will find the home page at all three versions. They won’t know the difference, right? Well, yeah. But search engines will. Googlebot sees the three above URLs as three different pages on the web. That has two consequences that hurt SEO.

First, you lose link authority. If blogger 1 comes to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’ and links to that page, blogger 2 lands on ‘iansnerdvana.com’ and links to that URL, and blogger 3 lands on ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ and links to that page, Googlebot sees three links to three different pages, and applies 1 ‘vote’ to each one. These three links could have sent three authoritative signals to Googlebot for my site’s home page. Instead, they’re split into three weaker individual votes for three different pages. It’s as if Ross Perot or Ralph Nader were sitting in front of my site, siphoning off votes. It’s link love mayhem.

If I weren’t such a loser, I would’ve set up my site so that my home page ‘lived’ at one unique URL – ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. Then all 3 bloggers would have linked to that page, and Googlebot would instead apply all three votes to a single page. If I care about link authority – and who doesn’t, I ask you? – then that’s a far better outcome.

Secondly, search engines won’t crawl your site as deeply as they might. Search engines allocate resources for each crawl. No one knows exactly how, but it’s safe to say Googlebot won’t just wander around your site until its found every page. At some point, it gives up and leaves. If multiple pages on my site have multiple URLs, then visiting search bots waste time tracking down all of those different versions. That’s time they could spend crawling other unique pages, instead. So fewer unique pages of my site end up in the search index, and I have fewer chances to rank.

Don’t feel bad, though. Even SEO agencies screw it up. Here’s one with their home page at both ‘www.site.com/’ and ‘www.site.com/index.php’. Oops:

Best practices

You can avoid the heartbreak of bad canonicalization, or at least minimize it, by doing a few simple things:

1. Use 301 redirection to ensure that your home page is only found at one URL. If you don’t know how, read Stephan Spencer’s column about rewrites and redirects.
2. Link consistently to your home page from within your own site. Use a single URL for your home page. Don’t mix in instances of ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ with ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. If you aren’t doing this properly right now, a quick change may have a big impact on SEO.
3. Don’t use tracking IDs in internal site navigation. A lot of sites add stuff like ‘?source=blog’ in their navigation. That lets them use their analytics reports to track user movement within, to and from their site. Instead, learn to use your web analytics referrer and navigation path reports. If you must use tracking IDs, change your software to use a hash mark (a ‘#’ sign) instead of a question mark. Search engines ignore everything after the hash, so you’ll avoid confusion.
4. Don’t use tracking IDs in organic links from other sites. If you get a link on another site, and want it to help with your SEO, don’t put a tracking ID in that, either.
5. Be careful with pagination. Many sites have pagination, where visitors can click a 1, 2, 3 etc. to jump to later pages in search results, product lists or articles. That’s fine, but make sure that the each page has a single URL. For example, if page 1 of the article is ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html’ when I click the article link from the home page, make sure that the number ’1′ in the pagination takes me there, too, instead of to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html?page=1′.
6. Set up preventative redirects. Make sure that ‘iansnerdvana.com’ 301 redirects to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’.
7. Exclude ‘e-mail a friend’ pages. Most content management systems that have ‘e-mail a friend’ options direct the user to a unique page that has the same form and content. But every instance of that page has a unique URL like ‘ID=123′, to tell the server which product or article to forward. It’s canonical higgeldy-piggeldy. Use robots.txt and the meta robots tag to exclude these from search engine crawls.
8. Use common sense when building your site. Think, man/woman! If you need to change the header, footer or other page element based on where on your site the visitor came from, do it with cookies, or by sniffing out the referring URL. Design to do this ahead of time.

What about rel=canonical?

The canonical tag is a neat little gadget that’s supposed to let you tell search engines the correct URL for any page. So, by adding <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.iansnerdvana.com/”> to any page, I could tell visiting search bots to index just that version, and to direct all link authority to that one URL. It sounds ideal.

It’s not. First, Yahoo! and Bing don’t yet have confirmed support for it. Second, you can’t rely on tags of this nature, as search engines may change their minds later. Google’s done it. So don’t stake your SEO strategy on it. Third, why not do it right the first time? In addition to SEO benefits, a canonically clean site should run faster, present fewer maintenance headaches and place less load on server and bandwidth resources.

Let’s get canonical!

So, get out there and start cleaning up your site. Canonicalization fixes are generally simple, have a broad impact and let you fix multiple SEO problems at once. You’ll get more link authority, deeper site crawls and better rankings. What’s not to love?

Why You Should Adopt HTML5

HTML5 continues to grow and gain adoption across the web, as many marketers have discovered the advantage of HTML5 to extend video to a wide range of platforms (as mentioned in my April 22 post, Are You Ready for the New iPad Era with HTML5?). According to TechCrunch, nearly two-thirds of web video is already encoded for HTML5. As HTML5 keeps evolving, many limitations continue to be overcome. One of HTML5’s biggest benefits for marketers is its native video support. HTML5 videos can be built directly into supporting browsers, which enables publishers to deliver full-motion, high-quality video faster. There are also direct video SEO benefits.

HTML5 improves search engines’ understanding of the structure and content of a video and provides greater accessibility. HTML tags like the “section” tag, which enables marketers to explain the topic of page sections, and the “nav” tag, by which a mobile device browser can make a link, help search engines more accurately categorize content and links.

Similarly, simple browser coding makes HTML5 videos more searchable and indexable. At the Google I/O conference on May 19, Google announced it was joining with other web companies in launching webM, an open web media format project, and open-sourced VP8, a high-quality, web-optimized video codec the company will contribute to the project under a royalty-free license.

According to webM, VP8 delivers high-quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today’s broad range of web-connected devices. VP8’s efficient bandwidth usage aims to deliver lower servicing costs for content publishers and high-quality video for end users. The codec’s relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high-quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation expected through the open development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web. With VP8 and other codecs that can be supported by an HTML5 player, marketers can assure their content will be viewable on virtually any platform, from iPads to Smartphone devices to web browsers.

So why should marketers embrace HTML5? A better question might be “why shouldn’t they?” given the many benefits offered by embracing the technology. Let’s consider a couple of advantages demonstrated during the Google I/O conference by Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell.

McDonell unveiled a magazine application in development that featured HTML5 video running within a frame of text. The visual capabilities alone are impressive, but the Sports Illustrated project also demonstrates how HTML5 enables more web-friendly graphics and greater interactivity. The video also illustrates how HTML5 video ads can provide a more dynamic user experience.

As McDonell says, “the advertising can be so good in this context that it can become content itself. It can help you evaluate products and when you’ve made your decision, it can help you find the place to buy them,” as seen with the WonderFlex L300. Rich video runs seamlessly with text, which broadens the possibilities for the creativity of “print” ads, combined with the accountability of online media. The format of HTML5 provides instantaneous playback on all-access video and low power consumption, while drag-and-drop capabilities enable users to customize their experience. The search capabilities showcased within the Sports Illustrated video also give users more access to videos from multiple sources.

To effectively move toward implementing HTML5, marketers should determine whether their videos are ready for the platform and choose the appropriate codec. Google has built enough momentum for VP8 by simultaneously announcing support in most browsers and by most companies that the format can’t be ignored. Marketers should also be sure to design videos with enhanced content in mind. Using the appropriate tags ensure that videos get properly indexed and stay searchable. Tying in all relevant content to the video subject matter, like related articles or photos, will help make the video content more interactive and customizable, as seen in the Sports Illustrated video. Enabling social media capabilities will also allow users to share content, thereby further exposing the content to more users and additional screens. Of course, it’s also important to keep in mind some standard SEO video best practices like including optimized text, page titles and descriptions in any HTML5 video object.

Considering the growing prevalence of HTML5 and the accessibility it provides, it’s important for marketers to adapt to this evolving video format and take advantage of the new capabilities in order to keep up with competitors and stay visible with their audience. By serving consumers at every possible touchpoint through the adoption of HTML5, marketers can ensure that they stay accessible and engage consumers on every available screen.

Geo-Marketing Security Expectations For Businesses

We have discussed the security risks of local business listing hijackings in the past.  One of the comments made about these security discussions is why do the geo-listing websites like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and up to 60 others insure the security to avoid hijackings?  Of course the question to be asked is why should they provide the security service for a free marketing tool that will benefit the business?

Geo-Listing Security

Many of these websites do have some level of security built into the process of claiming an existing listing or adding a new listing.  So far, these security processes have included sending a post card to the existing address with a pin code; a computer calling to the business phone number with the pin; or in some cases a manual review by staff working for these geo-listing websites.

On May 27th, Google announced that community edits of local business listings was no longer be allowed to go without staff review.  An excerpt of their announcement states:

“We recently made a change to Google Maps to require all community edits to be reviewed before they are shown. In the past, some “pending” edits were shown immediately on Maps and only moderated (and sometimes denied) later on.

We’re taking this step to ensure that changes to Google Maps pass the high quality bar our users expect, while preventing SPAM and other problems from showing up before being reviewed first.”

In summary Google is stating all community edits made to unclaimed local business listings will have to be approved by a Google representative before they are sent live.   Supposedly, this means no more worrying about a competitor hijacking your listing and stealing your customers. It definitely means it will take longer for information to reach the local consumers through web searches and mobile searches.

While on the surface this may sound like at least Google is addressing the security issues of local business listings, the announcement did not discuss the security of data coming from third party sources through API’s.  Certainly third tier business directories have no security and their data is sold upstream or makes its way to other database across the Internet with wrong information available for the consumers.

Why the high expectations for Free Geo-Marketing services?

I am certainly concerned about the security issues around local business listings, but I cannot expect these geo-listing websites to provide security for my company.  The reason I do not expect them to provide this security is because they are providing the marketing service for free.  Why should any business assume that a free service should have high level of security?  We could certainly say “you get what you pay for”!

The issue for businesses lies in the book titled “Crossing the Chasm”.  This book discusses innovators vs. early adopters vs. late adopters.  The questions to businesses that have seen the Internet add, mature, and change technologies are:

• How long are you going to continue to wait to adopt Geo-Marketing technologies to help you generate revenue?
• Do you feel like you’re always behind the eight ball with the Internet?

A business cannot possibly understand how to use the various Geo-Marketing technologies well.  For this reason you need to consider securing professional help and engage in these marketing technologies sooner rather than later.  Plan these technologies progressively over a 3-year period.

Additional incentives for early adoption of Geo-Marketing technologies

There are three critical points that businesses need to consider now and not wait until the 11th hour.

1. The first and foremost we already discussed, which is hijackings.
2. Now let’s add that for your business there may be multiple duplicate listings that need to be cleaned up, merged and/or deleted to not confuse the consumers when there are multiple listings for your business.
3. Lastly, consumer reviews especially negative ones can potentially have an adverse affect on your website’s search engine ranking positions as search engine adopt consumer reviews as an additional data point to decide who is in the top ten for a search.