SEOh My F**cking God!

Session: Social Media Marketing, What is it and What is it Good For?

The SES website describes this session as “Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it’s Web 2.0, and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.”

Moderated by Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board & Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, IBM Corporation

Speakers:

• Erik Qualman, Search Engine Watch Expert & Global VP, EF Education
• Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras
• Vanina Delobelle, PhD., Global Product Director, Monster Worldwide

Vanina’s presentation was all about social media marketing basics. It would actually be a pretty good best practices document, but she didn’t delve into anything beyond an introduction. The point she repeated a number of times is “global is local.” This means that social media is very much a community atmosphere, so knowing your audience is more important (and probably difficult) than ever. She would know; Monster Worldwide does social media marketing in 20 different countries.

Erik Qualman opened by asking “How many people in here are on Facebook? OK. How many are on Twitter? How many have a YouTube channel? OK. How many people use YouPorn.” It was awesome how many people raised their hands on the last one.

One of the better points that Erik made was about Facebook apps. His company made one that tracked where you have been in the world. It was basically a brag about the difference places that you have traveled in the past. It was very popular. At some point, a random user contacted him and told them that they shoulnd’t require filling out information about yourself (name, email, etc.) in order to download the app. Erik and his company didn’t listen, and that same guy ended up making an app called “Where I’ve Been” which had been hugely successful (in terms of total downloads).

There were a couple of lessons learned here. First, listen to you audience. You likely don’t know better than they do, and this is a key point in many different types of social media. Secondly, you don’t have to be unique to be successful. Find a good idea and then rip it off. If you can do it better, or at lease improve on some shortcomings, there is no reason your app won’t be as or more successful than the original.

Later, Erik’s company built their own social networking site that he referred to as “The field of nightmares” because they built it and nobody came. His advice here is that building your own community straight out of the gate is probably a bad idea. At least at first, try to leverage the existing ones and learn about the community you are trying to participate in. If there is a niche that needs to be filled then you can move onto developing your own. But even then, be certain that you have something unique to offer.

Erik closed with a list of common questions that he is frequently asked.

• Were should I start?
  • It’s best to start with the big ones: Facebook and MySpace. Get to know the communities you’re trying to reach out to.
• When should I start?
  • Start now. Social networking is still mostly in wild-west-mode, so the sooner you get in on it, the better your chances of eventual success.
• Can search engines crawl social media/networks?
  • In a word, yes. There are certainly parts (like password protected profile pages) that aren’t crawled. But search engines are getting better at knowing how to deal with social media sites.
• Does Facebook PPC work?
  • It completely depends, but it’s worth testing. Run your test across all possible audience (don’t restrict to yourself to any specific demographic - at least not at first). And rather than sending them directly to the site, send them to your Facebook profile.
• What is the easiest way for my company to use Twitter?
  • Do some searches on your company name and see what people are saying. This will help you understand how your brand or service is perceived.
• What else is exciting in social media?
  • Search and where is it going is exciting because the search engines still don’t deliver the right content, but that capability is on the horizon. The example that Erik gave was: Imagine you want to purchase an SUV, so you start doing some research online. What if you could immediately see which of your friends bought it? What if a number of them provided feedback? We’ll likely see marketing budgets from companies like the one selling the SUV you want to buy going into promoting user generated content on networking sites - as in, they’ll pay you to write reviews.

Next up was Brent Csutoras, and in my opinion, he was the star of the show. His entire presentation centered around using social media to get links. It all starts with good content. If you have quality stuff, social media is an excellent way to increase the visiblilty of that content. If you use sm to spread the word and your content is compelling, you can end up with massive amounts of links.

So, where to begin? Let’s say you have your content, and this could be a photograph, a video, a top 10 list, a how-to article, etc. Figure out which communties are most appropriate for your content. You don’t want to submit an Xbox 360 game cheat to a baby boomer community, so know your audience before you begin. Also remember that there is a massive audience out there, and they want your content and are willing to link to you as the source. So the challenge is getting it in front of them. Being listed on the front pages of aggregators like Digg and Reddit is an automaitc indicator of authority. So the sheer act of getting voted into those top spots will mean that most people will automatically trust you.

This built-in trust can even lead to media play outside the web (newspapers, magazines, etc. The example that Brent used was Wired magazine’s reporting on Digg stories). The ripple effect continues because other sites and Blogs who then write about you leads to higher-quality traffic that is likelier to convert. This residual effect that can last weeks if not months (as opposed to the Digg effect which is very brief).

At this point, Brent showed a picture of Matt Cutts smiling. The great thing about back links from social media efforts is that they are all completely natural. Google has stated so many times that they discourage paid linking and aim to penalize those sites that pariticpate in it. Links from social media campaigns, if executed properly, can be a get-rich-quick success story (in terms of back links).

There were recently a couple of social media phenomena. If you didn’t see them on Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon, somebody likely sent them to you in an email. I know that I saw them several times the week that they were circulating around:

and…

Each of these hit the front pages on Digg and Reddit (and likely others, though he didn’t go into detail). Brent was able to get approximately 130,000 visitors back to the target page for each one. And each on baited about 8,000 completely organic inbound links from very high value sites. He figured that this equals approximately $300,000 dollars worth of paid links.

It’s not just the funny stuff that works well. He has gotten articles and top 10 lists about tax codes and other seemingly boring topics. One client wanted to promote urinals, so they made a list of the 20 most expensive urinals ever created. The point is, with a bit of creativity, there is a way to make practically any topic viral.

TIPS:

• Make sure that your site is social-media-friendly.
• Pick communities that you or your business can relate to.
• Do research on what has worked in the past. For example, if your company sells dog collars, search for social-media types of syntax like, “Most dog collars,” or “Dog collars are,” etc.
• Dont’ forget that ultimately it’s about your content. So allocate the necessary resources to the creation of high-quality content.
• Lean and understand how to submit and push social campaigns.
• Most importantly, be prepared for what to do with your success if a campaign hits big. What are you trying to achieve, and how are you going to deal with the traffic, leads etc. if they come flooding in?

Question and Answer Section:

Q: What does a new company do to get into SMM and selling a product/service?

• BRENT: You are not going to be able to bullshit people and get away with it. if you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to social media marketing, pick one community and stick to it. Social media cannot be one of the ten things you are going to do that day - it pretty much has the be the only thing.
• PAULINE: the problem is that it’s so time and resource intensive. It takes so long, and the challenge is showing what the benefits will be. How do you sell a service with no concrete ROI to your CEO? Showing value can be really hard. Also, a quick tip: “Bring wine” to your social media participation. That is to say, you wouldn’t go to a party without wine, so make sure to bring something of value to the community.

Q: What is the best way to get involved with Twitter? And is this the most successful or useful social media community?

• BRENT: Use Greasemonkey’s tools. Also, Twirl is pretty great (desktop app). Another piece of software called Tweet Pro searches keywords and adds automatically adds friends.

Q: Social Media tends to make reputation management harder, so what can be done about this?

• BRENT: You don’t have a choice. But at the very least, you can get involved and try to steer the conversation in a favorable direction. Also, give people free stuff and they will almost always shut up or change their tune.
• ERIK: If an online conversation gets out of line, try calling these people on the phone Sometimes good old-fashioned talking is what’s required.

Vanina: If you get a bad comment, respond.

• BRENT: Yes but only sometimes. If a bad comment is buried or otherwise relatively unnoticeable, just ignore it. You can also help to vote it down on certain sites. If the comment is really flagrant or inappropriate (or if you are getting flamed), then report it to the community itself.
• PAULINE: I agree. The community will normally take ownership of unreasonable behavior.

Q: Where is social media going? What are the next steps.

• ERIK: Like he stated earlier, Erik sees social media moving more into recommendation-based advertising.
• BRENT: People will be given more power (Huffington Post, for example, allows you to publish directly on the site), and search engines will become smarter about indexing this content. Bigger companies and brands will eventually start to wake up to the fact that if they don’t participate in the online conversation, they will get creamed. So more big companies will become active.
• PAULINE: Social media will be bigger thatn search. Eventually, search will be seen as the stepping-stone on the way to social media’s dominance. It will change the way we all participate on the Internet and find information.

-Drew

Tags: Digg, Reddit, san jose, ses, SMM, social media marketing, StumbleUpon