Recently in Social Media Marketing Category
Did you watch The Oscars last night? It occurred to me that motion pictures are a lot like websites primed for organic search and social media. Movies as Websites Think about the meticulous attention to detail that goes into an Academy Awards caliber movie. It requires a compelling story - well written, skillfully performed, lovingly filmed and expertly directed. Likewise, a good website showcases its own products or services or solutions with wonderful copy, images and design. Movies are designed to sell tickets, rentals and DVDs. That's where the revenue comes from. Naturally, most of the marketing, promotion and publicity
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Continue reading Oscar Movies are Like Optimized Websites
I’m going to tell you a secret that people in social media marketing and social media optimization don’t like to talk about. Fame begets fame. If you’re a celebrity or popular brand then social media will be particularly easy for you. For those of us who are celebrities only in our own minds, you and I will have to work a bit harder to succeed with all this social media stuff. That’s okay. Social media marketing is eminently doable. You just have to smash a few popular preconceptions then roll-up your sleeves. Social media is not new. Facebook and
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Continue reading Spin Your Social Media Marketing Flywheel
Generating great link bait ideas is hard work. When link bait works it’s magical. Watching the page views, unique visitors and server load all go up at the same time is like watching the wheels spin on a slot machine right before it lands on 777. The difference is that a slot machine depends wholly on chance. With link bait, you have to earn your luck. To help me create compelling ideas I created this poster - 230 Link Bait Ideas. I stuck it on my wall, printed in tabloid format, 11 inches by 17 inches, but it looks good
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Continue reading 230 Link Bait Ideas
This post is about the nature of social media. The premise is simple. Your social media marketing needs a centralized location, a headquarters. Notice I did not write that you should centralize your efforts. That would be too much like those classic cartoon scenes in which the characters disappear behind skinny trees. When you hang-out in one place and one place only, online no one will hear you. Rather, I’m writing about one easy to find place on the web where anyone can catch-up on all your important information and find your company’s other online hangouts. Let’s explore this
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Continue reading Where is Your Social Media Marketing Headquarters?
Try singing the title to High Hopes and you'll understand... Everywhere you turn, Twitter. Every move you make, Twitter! Every breath you take, Twitter! Twitter Twitter Twitter! It's not just you. It's not just young, social-media addicts or those pesky internet marketing geeks (Wait, we're Internet marketing geeks, really good ones!). Oprah's doing it. Ashton's doing it. Heck, my fifty-five-year-old father is doing it, without protection! There's only one problem. You bore us. Stop using Twitter to announce that you're drinking coffee. Well, it's okay if your coffee beans come out of a Peruvian dingo's behind while eco-friendly non-migrant fair-trade
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Continue reading We've got High Tweets - We got High Tweets
Chris Abraham over at Marketing Conversations wrote an thoughtful critique of Burger King’s new Whopper Virgins campaign. I appreciate Chris’s opinion: The video is at times jingoistic and, frankly, a little embarrassing if you’re an American. Burger King went out of their way to find people in local clothing minutes from major urban centers in Europe. How exactly did they do that? Much of the video is just more ugly Americans pointing and giggling at the rest of the world. I also see Burger King’s thinking: This is a great viral piece. The effort alone - flying a broiler all
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Continue reading Whopper Virgins: Not Appalling. Not Brilliant, Either.
These days more and more companies are using social media to build influence on the web. It’s challenging. Many fail or give-up because social media sites possess a formidable barrier to entry, one designed to keep hawkish salespeople at bay. Web 2.0 or community sites reward genuineness just as they toss commercial behavior into the spam bin. So how can a business build a successful non-commercial "commercial" presence in social media? By being active, genuine, creative and, most of all, keeping the business angles on the back-burner. As an example of this, here is my Facebook strategy for businesses just
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Continue reading Killer Facebook Marketing Strategy
Becoming active in social communities and on blogs is an important element of social media marketing. One way to do this is to read blogs by others in your sector and in your target market’s sector, then subscribe to the leaders. Select a handful of bloggers with whom to build relationships. Comment regularly on their articles, plus, write and publish your own response articles. Who are the market leaders? I use four metrics to evaluate blogs: Recency - When was the last post made?If a blog is not active, it has left the conversation. Blogs come and blogs go, even
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Continue reading Identify Top Bloggers
Two fundamentals of building authority in search engine optimization are adding content and earning links. A terrific way to do both is to add link-worthy and vote-worthy articles. Votes come from social media web sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Digg. The more votes an article receives the more prominently it gets displayed on those sites. Prominence drives visitors and links. As a business, you probably want to appeal to your core audience or prospects. After all, that's where the revenue comes from. Unfortunately it is likely that most of your prospects will never publish content about your company or
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Continue reading How to Build Reputation & Branding with Articles
Twitter is a Popular Group Chat Client When Twitter came on the scene 2006 I was an early adopter. Chatting IRC style with the addition of subscribers and an archive was most compelling to me. I was quick to abandon it too. Back then you may as well have shouted, "Hello!," into a desert canyon, but without the comforting echo. Twitter reached a tipping-point (and I began using it again) during the 2007 SXSW conference when attendees used the tool to chat during sessions and figure-out which bar to convene in. At the same time conference bloggers lit the Internet
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Continue reading Twitter Secrets Revealed
