Reddit’s Self-Promotion Conundrum

Here’s where we get a little snobbish. Reddit has never been a good place to promote your own interests unless you’re a celebrity. That’s all there is to it.

This stems from a heartfelt plea from James Andrews. He made some incredible points. He deserves to be able to promote his new website, especially considering that it’s promoting indie bands, they get most of the money, and charities get money from the endeavor as well. Others with similar sites have been allowed to self-promote. Why can’t James?

The reality is this – for every “James” on Reddit, there are 100 others who would take self-promotion to the extreme. There have been so many times when people get busted either getting paid to promote or promoting their own websites. Even today, there are plenty of marketers doing it on Reddit. As much as we hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater, allowing people like James to be the exception would open up a can of worms.

With that said, we can promote whatever we want on our own website and his website is worth promoting. Check out The Goodpack.

Here’s his video.

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Why Social Media Won’t Die Any Time Soon

I remember the first “social media is dying” post that I read. It was early 2008 and MySpace was already showing signs of starting to implode upon itself. The article I read (wish I would have saved it) gave a very compelling argument about how social media was a fad and that privacy would eventually prevail once the glow of the “look at me” mentality that drives social media wears off.

It never did. It never will.

There’s no going back. Social media is the ultimate legal voyeurism into the lives of those we care about, whether we like them or not. We can see what our old high school friends are doing now. We can monitor the activities of our friends, family, coworkers, and anyone else of interest. We can keep track of the news as it’s unfolding, not told by a news anchor but told by the reactions of people we may or may not know.

Most importantly, it gives a permanence to our escapades that the majority of humans like. We want to show everyone the cake we made for our kids. We want to let everyone know that we’re at the big concert and they’re not. We want to show off our dog (because everyone has the most awesome dog in the world).

I used to be one who believed that social media would eventually be replaced. It will change, but the concept has grown on us and will stay in one form or another throughout our lives until a major event changes everything. That major event would need to be extremely major – a cataclysmic infrastructure meltdown that takes out the grid, a meteor, the end times, etc.

Even as technology evolves to the point of near sentience, we’re still going to be social online (or through whatever eventually replaces the internet). The cat is out of the bag. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora’s box has been broken down and tossed in the cardboard recycling bin.

For people, this is a good and bad thing. It’s good that we can communicate with more people. It’s bad that we’re no longer communicating as much or as meaningfully with the people who are close by.

For businesses, it’s a rockier road. There are too many factors that could take out the business benefits of social media long before the actual medium itself ever dies. This isn’t a warning to tell people that they shouldn’t be investing in social media for their business. It’s a statement of complete transparency; we’re one major hack, sustained outage, or obtuse piece of legislature away from Facebook crumbling to business-relevant dust.

It won’t be dying in the foreseeable future, but even something as sustainable as social media will eventually end.

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Why Soshable Went Dormant (and why it’s due for an eruption)

When I first started playing around with social media marketing back in 2007, it was new, fresh, and wonderful. I created this blog to keep my thoughts in order, to have a central point through which to post all of my content, and to build a brand that could eventually become a company of its own.

Things change. Directions change. Elements of our lives that we once considered to be important become secondary in the blink of an eye. For me, Soshable has been one of those aspects of my life that fell by the wayside. My focus on automotive social media marketing has allowed me the privilege of forming a strong company with a bright future that takes up way too much of my time and my former blogging stallion was put in the barn.

That is changing. The good part about having a company grow is that you can start to hire people to do much of the work that you had to do in the beginning. Things that took up all of my time when I started my company less than a year ago are now superbly handled by a team that makes me look good. Time is opening up. Needs are growing, but in different directions. It’s time for Soshable to erupt into what it once was – a place where I and other authors promote the best practices available in social media.

It doesn’t need to be a social media blog. It needs to be the social media blog, the one that it once was and that it can be again. Thankfully, it’s not like a boxer coming out of retirement. When a volcano erupts after being dormant for a long time, the fury is often greater than it every was before. That’s my hope. Bring the marshmallows. We’re about to spew some heat.

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Social Media Marketing: Another Thing to Love About Responsive Website Design

As a good chunk of the internet is finally starting to switch to responsive websites, let’s put another nail in the unresponsive website design coffin. For social media, consistency between mobile devices and desktops is imperative.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest can send a good measure of traffic to websites, particularly if appropriate campaigns are being run on them. Creating landing pages that are “social-appropriate” can be a challenge when there are two variations of a website running, which is the case with adaptive websites that present different pages for the same URL depending on the device through which they’re called. If the goal is to send traffic to the website through social media, responsive is an ideal solution.

Here’s an example of a good campaign that went bad:

By most measures, this campaign was doing well. They had a valid social media contest that (thankfully) didn’t require people to like the page in order to win. They were driving traffic to their website. The only problem is that the website did not have a corresponding page with the appropriate widget for mobile devices.

On the internet, a great number of people are using their smartphones and tablets as their primary method of surfing the web. On social media, mobile devices are more prevalent than desktop. If you don’t have all of your content available on both desktop and mobile, you have more of a problem than your social media marketing. If your content is not rendering properly on all devices, you have an even bigger problem. It’s definitely possible to have an appropriate website presence with technology other than responsive and I will be looking at such technology soon, but the safest bet is to go with responsive websites. Your social fans will appreciate it.

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The Two Categories of Social Media Marketing Strategies

When it comes to marketing (and just about everything else), there are right-brained thinkers and left-brained thinkers. The right-brain thinkers are more subjective and often more creative and would not like the concept of social media having two options. It makes it too black and white. Left-brain thinkers are guided by logic and wouldn’t necessarily believe that there are only two categories in social media marketing. In other words, neither type of person will likely agree with the assertion of this article, at least not at first.

One can make an argument that there are definitely multiple sub-categories, styles, and strategies that go into social media marketing, but there are really only two stances that businesses should take. These two categories can be called “outbound” and “inbound” social media strategies. They shouldn’t be confused with inbound or outbound digital marketing strategies. In the case of these social media categories, we’re being a little more straight forward than that.

An outbound social media marketing strategy is what most who believe in social media want to achieve. They feel that social media is a venue through which to reach people, communicate, improve branding, and expose the company’s messages. Its goal is to be aggressive and take advantage of the fact that the masses are using social media regularly. In many cases, customers are spending more time on social media than any other digital activity.

An inbound social media strategy is very different from a pure inbound marketing strategy. It can be viewed as a defensive posture, a way of covering social media without much time or effort. It’s about checking off the social media task box. This is the type of strategy that a business should employ if they either do not believe in social media as an appropriate marketing venue or they do not have the time and/or budget to put a true effort towards an outbound strategy.

Let’s take a look at each strategy in more detail.

Outbound Social Media Marketing

This is an “all in” strategy. It focuses on the beliefs that lots of people are on social media, that sites like Facebook have the data that can be used for hypertargeting them with the right messages, and that either ideas or website clicks can be driven through an aggressive advertising component.

In the case of car dealers, for example, social media offers a venue to target people who intend to buy a certain vehicle in the near future. By taking advantage of this data and putting the right messages in front of them, dealers are able to pull people in from social media sites onto landing pages on their website.

To do it the right way requires an investment. It can take time to craft the messages, monitor the profiles, and participate in conversations. It takes advertising dollars to get the message out to the right target audience. Social media in general and Facebook in particular is a pay-to-play model. The old concepts of organic reach are dead.

Inbound Social Media Presence

You’ll notice that I did not call it “marketing”. With an inbound strategy, a business is simply creating and managing a presence so that they are there without putting in much effort. It’s not a defeatist strategy by any means. For many, they have not found the benefits of social media or they’re not ready to invest what it takes to have a strong marketing strategy, so they simply get their social media covered.

This is important because people will visit your pages and profiles. Most businesses have buttons that lead to their social media profiles right there on their website. The search engines will often rank social media profiles and pages high on search results for the business by name. Making sure that your pages have an ongoing flow of content is important while not being too time consuming or expensive.

It doesn’t look good when people visit your social profiles and they haven’t had anything added to them in some time. It’s even worse when people are going to these profiles to converse with you or to leave a comment (such as a review) and it goes unnoticed. In extreme cases, Facebook pages can be “hijacked” by spammers leaving their links to unrelated pages. When this type of spam is found on a page, it can be worse than an embarrassment.

Why There’s No In-Between

Some will balk and say that there are ways to have a good marketing strategy without going all-in. They are wrong. The benefits of a toe-dipping, low- or no-budget strategy that is trying to do more than establish an ongoing presence are no greater than a purely defensive inbound strategy. In other words, you can spend very little time and money on a basic inbound strategy or you can spend some more time and a little money on an attempted lite marketing strategy and the end results will be the same.

The gap between a basic presence and a “good” presence is minimal. However, the difference between a “good” presence and a full-blown outbound strategy is huge. If you’re not going to go all-in, then you should focus on having a good presence rather than trying to work in a little marketing. It’s a waste of time and money to go halfway. Either invest into it or keep it simple. There’s nothing wrong with either strategy; they both have their benefits. Trying to be there in the middle, not quite bought in but more than just covering the basics, is a limbo that yields nothing more than keeping it all inbound.

It’s a lot like poker. On some hands, you’ll play it tight, particularly if you believe your hand is weaker than your opponents. On other hands, you’ll play aggressive, even going all-in when the time is right. The fish in the middle who are trying to tiptoe through hands are the ones that end up losing their chips the quickest.

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Businesses Need to Focus on Getting to the Point with their Advertising

There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Give me the baby. I don’t need the labor pains.”

This definitely applies to modern digital marketing and advertising. It’s actually contrary to certain trends. Faster internet connection, faster mobile devices, and a resurgence of multi-step digital processes point to the concept that perhaps we don’t need to be so focused on getting to the point, but the other factors point in the other direction. Most notable of these factors would be the fact that people have been forced to jump through hoops in the past and those who emulate this same process will not be rewarded.

One of the most obvious scenarios where this continues to happen today is in the automotive lead selling segment of the industry. Companies have been generating and selling leads to dealers, finance companies, OEMs, and other vendors for nearly two decades now (yes, it has been that long). There’s nothing wrong with them and they have their place in the world to jumpstart sales and increase opportunities, but the system has flaws that go contrary to the trends. First and foremost, people are filling out fewer forms, particularly on the third party sites that feed them the leads. They’ve already been burned in the past when they filled out a lead form and were contacted by several entities that the lead company sold their information to, something that people are more sensitive about today than ever before.

Even if you take away this as a negative and point to the idea that businesses need more leads for this very reason, there’s still the concept of “cutting out the middle man” that people appreciate. If they’re going to look at a car, they want to be able to contact the dealership that has that car directly. Third party sites are great as a gateway and there are reasons that people go to them, but they are also usually the step before the final step – finding live inventory on a dealership’s website itself.

This is one of the reasons that LotLinx intrigued us so much. The service is one of the very few that we actually partnered with in order to offer it directly to dealers. They cut out the middle man. They take the traffic from these third party sites and brings it directly to the vehicle details pages on the dealership’s website. Rather than dealers paying for leads that may or may not be exclusive to them, they pay for traffic to their website from the same sources in order to generate leads that they know are directed at them and them alone.

As we continue to explore them and other services that “get to the point”, we’ll want to take into account what has happened in the recent past and where that points us in the future. That’s not to say that businesses and marketing companies should be guided strictly by trends. There are things that have worked in the past that will likely continue to work into the future. However, staying mindful of the way that people interact with businesses and the experience they want to receive will help businesses and marketers keep their advertising focused on the things that are important.

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Recycling Social Media Content is Getting Out of Hand

I get it. I understand the need for more content to serve to an ever-growing flow of content consumers. The art of recycling content is important, particularly on sites like Twitter where a piece of content can and should be used multiple times in order to get the message out to everyone. It’s a chronological feed, after all, and posting it once will only get it seen by an extremely small portion of your audience.

With that said, it’s getting out of hand. I have been finding posts that are months old and no longer relevant hitting my feed from car dealers around the country. There’s a limit. Old news is old news. In the case of the Tweet above, the article posted on Twitter by a Toyota dealer on March 30, 2014, is a link to an article from July 4, 2013. That’s too long for this type of news.

When recycling posts on Twitter, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Is it relevant? Old posts are find if there’s context that makes it work today. For example, posting an article about Tesla’s early days in trying to launch with dealerships would make sense to post considering their current stance.


• Is it timeless? Some posts, particularly advice posts that give the reader information they can use today, can be posted up until the point that they’re obsolete. An example of this would be a video that demonstrates how to change the batteries in a key fob. Until they change the way you open the key fob, it still makes sense to post for months, even years after the original.


• Is it nostalgic? There are times when old posts are even better than new ones. A picture of an old Honda ad from the 70s would play well to show how far the company has come over the years.


• Has it been posted very recently? This is one of my biggest pet peeves. If a post comes through today that is just a different wording on something posted yesterday, than it’s not acceptable. The exception: timely events. If you have a big sale or charity event this weekend, then posting a different variation of the same thing over and over again is acceptable and demonstrates focus on the event.

As more companies use content libraries to keep the feeds flowing, it’s important to keep in mind that the libraries must be refreshed. They must be pruned. In the case of the post above, it’s simply not acceptable. That was news for about a month. There is plenty of content out there in the form of current news about every manufacturer and the local area. Don’t get stuck beating a dead horse with your posts.

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Website Chat Should Shoot for Quality First, Quantity Second

There’s a disturbing trend I’m seeing in the automotive industry when I visit websites. Perhaps it’s been like this for a while and I simply took my eye off the chat ball. When I see chat windows that instantly prompt for the customer’s contact information, it makes me cry a little inside.

This isn’t what chat is supposed to be about. I’d love to have that debate with anyone. Chat is an alternative means of instant information. In other words, it’s more akin to phone calls than to anything else. If you believe in having a barrier of entry for your customers to chat, then you should have your receptionist answer the phone with, “Thank you for calling XYZ Motors. Can I have your name, phone number, and email address, please? No? Okay, thank you for calling.”

Click.

I totally understand how this came about. Chat companies were pressured to generate leads and that became the only goal. If you, as a car dealer, believes this, then I would contend that you’ve either been misled or you’ve lost touch with what chat should really do. There are two parts: lead generation AND customer service. Some people call the dealership to find out when the parts department closes. You don’t need their contact information in order to tell them a time over the phone just as you should not require their contact information to give them the time over chat.

Whether you believe it or not, here’s a fact that common sense should tell you: you’re making some of your website visitors unhappy by creating a barrier to inquiry. Some people (more than we all want to admit) will never give their contact information before coming in. Unless your leads have a 100% appointment ratio, a 100% show ratio, and your lead volume is at 90% of your total traffic to the dealership itself, this fact should be clear. Despite what the up-log says, your customers are not driving by randomly. They went online. They’ve probably been to your website.

With that understanding, why would a dealership want to put a bad taste in their customers’ mouths before they even decide to come by the dealership?

Serve your customers the information they want online without prejudice. Don’t force them to fill out a lead form first. A skilled operator should be trained to work with people during chat, determine if they’re a valid prospect, and gather the information the dealership wants DURING the chat process, not before. Will volume decrease? Maybe. Maybe not. I am no expert but I would imagine that the people who come into chat that wouldn’t have entered because of the lead information wall will be more likely to leave their information as their questions are being answered.

You don’t just want leads. You want good leads. You want great leads. Chat should be the best of both worlds, combining the dialogue potential of the phone with the information gathering of a lead form. If you make them fill out the form ahead of time, you’re pushing away many who want to have a dialogue first. This is a big mistake.

Some would say, “If they’re serious, they’ll fill out the form, first.” BS. There are plenty of serious buyers who want information but who have had bad experiences when they fill out lead forms. There’s a reason lead form submissions are on the decline. People have been burnt in the past. Get them into a conversation first, then pursue the lead when appropriate. That’s the right way to handle it.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “Mr. Chat Provider – tear down this wall.”

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Localize on Social Media or Else

Don’t worry. This isn’t one of those “feel good” stories about how social media is all about interacting with your local community. That part’s true, but you should know that already, right?

Today, let’s go over a quick explanation of how social media algorithms, especially Facebook’s, work and why you’re actually hurting your local page’s chances of being seen by having too many people outside of your local area liking your page. It isn’t just a matter of them not being interested in your content the way that locals will. It is an algorithm play that can actually prevent locals from seeing your posts.

There was a video that came out last week talking about the evil ways that Facebook advertising works and why it’s pretty much worthless. The things that the video discusses have been known by many in the social media marketing arena for some time now. However, we’ve also known that any poor execution or strategy will yield the bad results described in the video.

The redeeming quality of the video was that it highlighted something I’ve said many times: the algorithm plays on reactions. If you post something that gets interactions shortly after it’s posted by the some of the people who see the post, it’s more likely to be presented to more people. Conversely, if a ton of people see the post and do not interact with it, Facebook knows this and believes the content is not as worth as others. This is the game that Facebook has mastered and it works for the most part as long as your content and advertising strategies are strong.

One of our clients, Albany Chevrolet, posted the image above. It was pertaining to a national story about Chevrolet giving money to colleges that were participating in their environmental push. Rather than take it at face value and discuss the OEM’s initiative alone, we turned it into a localized story by highlighting the local university with the story.

It’s okay to take national stories and post them on social media, but try to put the local spin into it whenever possible.

From a reach perspective, you should be shooting for over 95% of your Facebook reach going after people within driving distance of your business. In this case, someone local will be more inclined to like the post rather than someone further away. As more people like it, more people will see it, which makes more people like it… etc.

Stop pushing for far-off fans. Stop allowing them. Put the emphasis on only the locals and you’re going to be in front of more of them.

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Facebook Ads Power Editor gets a Facelift

Those of us in the Facebook advertising world were greeted with an amazing new look and feel to Facebook Power Editor today. This is a pretty neat development for those who are new to the tool because it’s much cleaner and more organized than before.

While the changes were mostly cosmetic, it does allow for real-time monitoring of stats rather than constant downloading. That’s all. No big deal otherwise.

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The @Klout Website Gets a New Look and Feel, Shifts To Social Sharing

If you’ve been to Klout today, you’re probably in for a surprise. The social influence scoring company is shifting to a cleaner look and feel and going after the crowded (yet somehow underserved) social sharing industry.

Content curating has been a big thing in social media since the early days of Digg and Slashdot. Many companies have tried to enhance the way that people share content by offering suggestions, allowing scheduling, and measuring the impact. Now, Klout is going full force in trying to become the next great content curation engine.

You can still see your social influence score. Giving people endorsements through “+K” is now done on their profile pages by hovering over and clicking their topics of influence. There’s no prompt to do so like there was before.

More about this coming as we explore. In the meantime, here are a couple of screenshots:

Schedule Social Media Updates Through Klout

Good Ol’ Klout Score and Analytics are Still There

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Stop Ripping on @JCPenney’s. #TweetingWithMittens was brilliant.

It seems like a lot of bloggers and mainstream media publications are talking about JC Penney’s #TweetingWithMittens stunt on Twitter. Most are saying that it was a misstep. As they complain about it, they fall into the trap perfectly. It’s being talked about by journalists, Twitter users, and even other companies trying to get their own clever Tweets into the mix. The jokes on all of them. This campaign worked beautifully. When you consider that they didn’t spend millions of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl and are being talked about as if they had, the ROI is very apparent.

The biggest complaint I’ve seen is that it’s not like the Oreo brilliance last Super Bowl. That is irrelevant. Lightning didn’t strike twice and it didn’t have to. People are talking about it. Even while a huge chunk of people were embarrassed for their apparent “drunk Tweeting” escapades, they still talked about it. The only real mistake that JC Penney’s made is that they let the secret out of the bag a bit too soon. Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.

The goal of marketing, particularly social media marketing, is to generate buzz. People will talk about it. Some will complain that it was a dumb move. Others will say that it was funny. Even others will say that it didn’t work. Every time they mention that it didn’t work, it’s working. That’s the irony of the whole thing.

The only thing that was better was the Esurance post-Super-Bowl commercial that took advantage of the situation of being the first commercial after the Super Bowl. They saved $1.5 million and then turned to Twitter to give that money away. It was a strong play, but not as good as JC Penney’s simply because they paid millions and JC Penney’s did not. How much would it cost to get other major brands to Tweet about you? For JC Penney’s it cost the time of an employee and a pair of mittens.

Here are some of the Tweets. Notice the number of retweets. Notice the brands that Tweeted them. Remember the cost. Then, try to convince me that it was a failure.

Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this???

— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 3, 2014

Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0

— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 2, 2014

Hey @jcpenney need a designated driver?

— Kia Motors America (@Kia) February 3, 2014

Was @JCpenney Twitter hacked or is their tweeter drunk?

— Ad Age (@adage) February 3, 2014

.@JCPenney We know football goes great with Coors Light, but please tweet responsibly.

— Coors Light (@CoorsLight) February 3, 2014

Slow down, @jcpenney. Have some #Doritos.

— Doritos (@Doritos) February 3, 2014

Eat a #SNICKERS, you’re not you when you're hungry RT @JCPenney Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0

— SNICKERS® (@SNICKERS) February 3, 2014

Oops…Sorry for the typos. We were #TweetingWithMittens. Wasn't it supposed to be colder? Enjoy the game! #GoTeamUSA http://ift.tt/1nG0aIE

— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 3, 2014

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Let’s Call It: #SuperBowl XLVIII Is the Biggest Social Media Event Ever

There’s no need to wait around for the numbers. The race has already been run before the pigskin was kicked off. Super Bowl XLVII in 2014 is the biggest social media event of all time and will likely stay that way for a few years.

It’s bigger than the Oscars. It’s bigger than the presidential election. It’s bigger than the death of Michael Jackson. It’s bigger than last year’s Super Bowl. It’s probably going to be bigger than next year’s Super Bowl (which I’ll explain shortly). More activity will be posted on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and other social sites before, during, and after the game than ever before.

This year marks a true tipping point for social media. While it will continue to grow as a venue for communication, one thing will change. Overexposure of event tracking will actually peak today and then gradually level off. Unless next year’s game has a better matchup (and this one is pretty darn stout) with bigger markets like a Cowboys/Jets matchup, we will see a slight drop off next year.

The hype around the quarterbacks, the coaches, the teams, the marijuana coincidence, and the originality of the commercials will taper a bit going into next year’s Super Bowl. This is a strange prediction to be making, I know, but they thought it was strange in 2007 when I said that Facebook would eclipse MySpace. We won’t know for sure for another year but I stand by it.

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Should I have One Blog or Multiple?

When I first started in digital marketing back in 2006, I had a dream of helping people take over the internet realm for their particular niche. At the time, I had 4 automotive clients and with the thought that content and links were so powerful for SEO while social media was the future, I pictured a product where my clients were blogging several times a week and posting them on several different blogs that fit in with particular topics.

There was a huge flaw in this mini-dream. Who has time to blog? Sure, a business can be expected to put up 3 or 4 good blog posts a month, but 20? 25? As someone who blogs daily, it’s easy for me to sit here and say, “oh, it’s so easy, you just have to schedule 15-45 minutes a day to do it, and then…”

Easier said than done, right? There’s a reason that I haven’t watched a television show since the series finale of Lost and I now realize that most people aren’t wanting to add an additional hour or so to their daily workload. I get it. I rearranged that particular vision and decided to start offering the service rather than training people how to do it.

Then, I came across a dealership blog that blew my mind. They have been blogging for a long time and have accumulated nearly 700 blog posts. I was blown away. I knew of four other dealers that had put this sort of effort into their blog presence, and in all of those cases they had an individual or team behind it. This was different.

As I started reading through the blog, I realized that it was still using an older strategy. They were using it for SEO, which is fine, but at a certain point inbound links from the same blog to the same websites loses its juice. I realized that my vision of 2006 was finally finding an opportunity to be realized in 2014. Some dealers are blogging a lot and they could finally use my strategy.

One Verses Many

The only question that needs to be answered when deciding whether or not to focus on a single blog or multiple ones from a business perspective is bandwidth. The only thing worse than not having a blog is to have some that are ignored. If you can’t put up a blog post every week, there’s just no reason to have a standalone blog. If you’re blogging lightly, bury it somewhere on your website and use it strictly for additional content every now and then. It’s not a blogging strategy. It’s just more content.

Keypoint #1: If you’re once or twice a month, you don’t have a blogging strategy

However, for those who can put up a lot of blog posts – double digits per month – and stick with it, you have the opportunity to branch out and have more than one blog. Then, a choice must be made…

Should You or Shouldn’t You?

Blogs have multiple purposes for business. They can be SEO tools. They can be PR tools. They can be traffic drivers. They can be social hubs. They can be more than one of those at a time if you’re great at it. However, do not fall into the trap of trying to do everything at once.

One very strong, well-maintained, well-followed blog is amazing if it’s on the domain for SEO purposes. If it’s off the domain or on a subdomain, the effectiveness as an SEO tool wanes over time.

Key Point #2: On-domain blogs are great for SEO, off-domain or subdomain blogs are not if used by themselves

If you’re blogging often, you have a choice to make.

1. You can put everything on one blog, build up a following and traffic, and use it as either a strong content pull if your blog is on your domain or as a separate searchable entity if it’s on another domain or subdomain.


2. You can split it up into more than one blog and focus on multiple niches. You won’t be able to build as strong of a following on any one of them, but you may be able to get an overall stronger following on the whole network. This can be a bit more beneficial from an SEO perspective for links and social signals, but that is a minor play and should not be a big consideration.

Most in the search and social arena love the concept of consolidation. Some definitely promote diversity, but usually for different reasons. This is a complex question and the real answer lies in an analysis of goals, assets, and integration with other strategies.

Key Point #3: There is not a set, agreed-upon strategy with how to handle blogging – everyone is in a different situation

If you have the luxury of being able to blog often or can hire someone who can, then it’s important to analyze everything you have going in order to select the right strategy. Rather than go too in-depth on the possibilities (that would be a 4000 word blog post itself), I’ll open it up for questions here. If you have a specific situation you want analyzed, comment here or reach out to me.

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/should-i-have-one-blog-or-multiple/

Defined by the Quest: The Three Types of Marketing in 2014

One of the most amazing parts of my job is spending time reading, watching, and testing the practices of others. It’s conceivable that the true secret to my success over the years has less to do with creativity and more to do with listening and deciphering. You have to listen to the channels like Google and Facebook. You have to listen to your customers. You have to listen to your customers’ customers (if you’re an agency like me).

The annoying part of my job is sifting through the recycled techniques and reinvented terminology that surrounds so many marketing practices. In most cases, it’s the same old things repackaged into a different form or applied from a different angle. Those are valuable, but not gamechanging. Still, it’s important to go through them all in order to find the hidden or not-so-hidden gems that arise. The best practices I’ve found over the years haven’t been on the pages of Mashable, Search Engine Watch, or Social Media Today. The real winners have come from some of the least likely sources.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get to the point. There are three types of marketing. Despite all of the various names – push and pull marketing, social media marketing, gravitational marketing, search marketing, influence marketing, content marketing – the easiest and arguably most pure way of looking at it is to tackle everything from a perspective of venue and intent. Where are the people going and what are they doing when they get there? It’s important for me as well as business owners to look at it from this perspective because the collision of the various marketing types is forcing a holistic marketing model to outperform niche marketing techniques or specialized strategies.

In other words, if you look at venue and intent, you can craft your overall marketing strategy much more easily. We look at it as following the quest – what are they doing, why are thy doing it, and how can we be there to help them choose our clients. When people buy your products, they are fulfilling a quest. No, they’re not slaying an actual dragon, but if they’re on a quest to buy a car, then your dealership selling them a car is the culmination of that particular quest.

Here are the three types of marketing for 2014 (well, early 2014 at least – it changes so quickly) that we like to tackle:

Fulfilling the Quest

This is the easiest to understand and often the hardest to achieve because of the simplicity of purpose. Everyone knows that if someone is interested in buying a car, they’re probably going to go to Google, Bing, or one of the various classified sites to start looking. They might go to review sites and OEM sites as well, but for the most part they’re ready to seek the fulfillment of their quest, they’re going to try to look for cars.

Search engine marketing of all types, whether it’s SEO or PPC, gives you the opportunity to drive them to your website so they may fulfill their quest. They aren’t searching for Honda dealers to have fun. They have a purpose. They’re in buying mode. This is where you have to be in order to help them fulfill their quest.

Renewing the Quest

More businesses are starting to do this. Many of them tried to do it in 2009-2012 and failed miserably. Part of it was because the venues such as Facebook, banner advertisements, retargeting, and other forms of “passive” marketing arenas weren’t developed to the point that they are today.

Now, the goals have come full-circle thanks to the overall availability of the internet. Mobile devices have made checking social media sites and reading websites the common activity when there are no activities to do. As people ride a bus, wait in line at the bank, or even perform other mundane activities like watching television, they are also surfing the internet. They aren’t going to Facebook to buy things, but they’re open to the concept. They’re open to having their quest renewed.

When they go to Fox News to see what’s going on and the retargeting ad pops up in front of them, they are reminded that they are still on a quest even if they aren’t actively on it at that point. When the business they visited last week pops up on their Facebook news feed, they get that reiteration that they still need to buy something. It might take a dozen instances of seeing a brand and its message before they actually click through, but the statistics are showing that it’s working. Not every sale is made through Google. In fact, some of the most important and actionable clicks come through other venues when they’re not in active buying mode.

Creating the Quest

Of the three, this is the one that’s ignored the most. It’s the hardest to do and the least rewarding when not done right. However, it can be the most rewarding when companies are able to make it sing. This is one that we focus on in particular because in our industry, nobody is doing it right.

In many ways it’s like good old fashioned advertising. No, it’s not like the commercials that we see on television today. Think along the lines of the early days of television when brands were built by establishing a problem that people will see in the normal course of their day and then having that problem solved either in the middle of the initial marketing effort or after further research.

The reason that it’s so hard today is because of attention span. We have seconds instead of minutes to get the message out through most advertising and marketing venues. There’s no longer time to tell a story…

…or is there?

The art of creating the quest is about putting the right content on the right venues that will reach people and establish a need whether they’re in the market right now or not. With this particular article already breaking the 1,000-word mark, there’s not enough time to go into it in detail. We’ll do that next time. Instead, watch the following video that shows two commercials that worked well in their day. Today, having a minute-long television commercial isn’t practical for most businesses, but taking advantage of the various channels online to accomplish the same goal and better is something that we know will move the needle. It’s hard. That’s the point. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

More on that next time. For now, here’s the video:

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/defined-by-the-quest-the-three-types-of-marketing-in-2014/

The Social Media Resolution

Let’s keep this one short and sweet. If you run a business, you fall into one of four categories:

1. Those who are using social media and seeing mixed or minimal results


2. Those who have used social media in the past and stopped because they saw mixed or minimal results


3. Those who have never really bought into social media


4. Those who are killing it on social media

It’s easy for me to say that the last option is the one that just about every business should be striving towards, but the reality is that if everyone was in category four, it would actually mean that everyone was in category one. Despite the vast nature of social media, there is still a finite amount of room on news feeds, Twitter streams, and other visible portions of social media for businesses. It’s for this reason that I am glad most fall into the first three categories – it makes my job for clients much easier.

With that said, there definitely needs to be more in the last category and the likely reason that there aren’t is because so many fall into the second category. Whether on your own or through a vendor/guru hack, you’ve lost faith in social media. That was actually okay in 2012. It became less okay in 2013. In 2014, successful businesses will make it into category four or they’ll find it harder to keep their status as a “successful business”. Everything is migrating to include social as a major component. If you rely on organic search to drive traffic to your site, for example, you may will soon find that your traffic is dropping if it isn’t already. Google and Bing are betting high on social and they’re leaning towards social signals and page/profile quality as major components of their algorithm.

Search is just the start. This is the part that amazes me the most. There are local businesses that are spending thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars on digital advertising every month but they can’t seem to justify a couple thousand dollars to dedicate to a killer social media presence and integrated search engine optimization components. It’s the most trackable, tangible form of digital advertising and marketing – the smoke and mirrors required to try to prove value are gone (at least for some vendors/gurus). Make it real or go home – that’s what we’re faced with today.

In 2014, make it a priority to re-evaluate your position. Take a pitch or two. Read some blog posts. This isn’t about buying into a trend, though that alone should be pretty obvious. It’s about reading the writing on the wall – I see so many individuals who are active on social media, yet are unable to see the value of social media for their business. It’s not your fault. You simply haven’t been shown the real deal.

Find the real deal about social media. Your business success may depend on it.

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/the-social-media-resolution/

Thankfully, My Powerpoint Broke in the Middle of My Social Media Presentation

Do you see the darkness in the background? That’s a presentation being done without the accompanying Powerpoint. Sixteen minutes into an hour-long presentation, the power on my computer ran out.

I had forgotten my power source at home so an hour before my presentation, I was in Staples buying a new one. It was supposedly compatible and seemed to fit the computer, so I ran with it. We were in a rush and as I prepared to start I didn’t check to make sure it was charging.

It wasn’t.

It was the best thing that could have happened. The remainder of the presentation after the initial awkwardness of standing in front of an empty theater screen was better than it would have been had the presentation not failed. The reason is simple. I was forced to go back to what I knew without assistance of a visual – analyzing individual business situations. Rather than go through the tips and tricks that business owners could use for their social media, I interacted with the audience to find out their specific needs. The point, I believe, was made in a better way than had the presentation gone without a hitch.

Any business can use social media. Any.

Here’s the video. Be sure to give it a thumbs up, if only for the sheer fact that I had to go through 45 minutes without my presentation.

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/thankfully-my-powerpoint-broke-in-the-middle-of-my-social-media-presentation/

The Pinterest Plugin that You Need on Your Blog Right Now

I’m not a big fan of redundancy, especially on social media. Under normal circumstances, if you have good plugins and widgets properly placed on your blog, there’s no reason to have others. If you want to annoy me with a blog post, put an inline plugin, a floating plugin, and another one at the bottom. Oh, and throw in a “Share It” widget just in case three ways to share weren’t enough.

After years of fighting, I’m actually going to make an exception to the one-place-to-share-them-all rule. I have two Pinterest plugins on my blogs now and they’re both useful. I have, of course, the standard inline plugin. Some like the floating plugin and that makes sense, but it slows the page down a bit too much for my liking and it often isn’t visible on all devices even if your blog is responsive. I follow the unspoken rule of 5, 5, or 5 sharing options (no more, no less) and I prefer the big-5 for my particular blog (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn) but there are variations to this rule that replace LinkedIn with Tumblr if there’s no business-reason to share your site. Reddit is an obscure option of you have truly viral content of general interest or if you’re the mast of a popular niche.

I recently added the jQuery Pin It Button For Images. I have held off for a long time because I’m not crazy about it graying out the images upon hover and I don’t like that it’s an overlay, but I relented and haven’t looked back since. It works. People are pinning more. More importantly, they’re pinning the right link rather than pulling it from an archive or pinning the individual image itself. It’s light on the load and does have a nice little protection of not allowing your images to be right-clicked and saved.

One might ask why I wouldn’t eliminate Pinterest from the standard sharing section. The image button does not have a count and is only visible if people hover. Some people like doing all of their sharing from the same basic area, so they both stay up. Most importantly, it doesn’t work on all mobile devices.

The best part of the button on the image is that it acts as a good reminder to visitors. On a desktop, it whites out the image and displays the Pin It button when they hover over any image with their mouse. This is a prompt, a call to action, and it actually works very nicely.

Pinterest is quickly becoming one of the most important social networks when it comes to search. Some would say that the inclusion in Bing image results was the last surge of importance necessary to put it over Twitter on the effectiveness scale. Regardless of where you place it exactly on the social signal list, it’s definitely in the top 4. It helps with search engine optimization, period.

The traffic that can come from it can be pretty useless if you’re not selling items to a wide audience, but it’s still a good bulk play. Depending on the topic, it can be the second best traffic-driving social network showing up on analytics.

Nobody knows exactly where Pinterest will go and how long it will stay so important in the whole scheme of things for both search and social, but for now, you might as well take advantage of it while the ride is still hot. This plugin is an easy win.

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/the-pinterest-plugin-that-you-need-on-your-blog-right-now/

Google +Post Ads Take the Social Network Out Onto the Web

The next age of advertising is right around the corner. With Google’s announcement of +Post ads, we now have a venue through which to advertise and garner true interaction from people as they surf the web. Think of it like Facebook advertising that reaches beyond Facebook – WAY beyond Facebook. With millions of websites out there that display Google ads, this expands the business footprint of Google’s social network in ways that Facebook will likely never be able to touch.

+Post ads take Google+ posts and display them on various websites. The example they use from their pilot programs is Toyota who used these ads to promote the launch of their Corolla earlier this year. They took Google+ posts and put them as ads on automotive sites like Autotrader as well as non-automotive sites that likely had a demographic or retargeted preference towards Toyota specifically or automotive in general.

Rather than just a plain banner that took people to the Toyota website or a landing page, the ads were interactive from the websites themselves on which they were found. If someone wanted to interact with the ad or Toyota in some way, they didn’t have to leave their website. They could comment on, +1, or share the post directly from the website without having to go to Google+.

This opens up doors for businesses to be able to truly interact with people much in the same way they’re doing on Facebook right now. The difference is, of course, that it’s not a walled garden. People will see the ads on many of the websites they visit and be able to engage with companies directly rather than having to click thru or visit the social network itself.

The possibilities are limitless. The potential is high. If Google stays true to this direction (and there’s no reason to believe that they’d make a fatal pivot) then this is going to be one of the most powerful forms of advertising that businesses can use. Small, localized businesses will gain the most benefit if they handle it properly, but big brands will be able to get traction with their own launches and offerings as well.

We will keep you updated. In the meantime, it’s time to get your Google+ pages in order, active, and worth your customers’ attention. Here’s the video describing Toyota’s trial:

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/google-post-ads-take-the-social-network-out-onto-the-web/

Inbound Links are the Food that Fuels Your Marketing Body

There was a cry that was heard amongst many in the search engine optimization world on April 24th, 2012, as if thousands of SEOs suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. It was the day that Google Penguin broke link-building…

…or at least that’s what many thought. Some of us, the ones who were focused on quality rather than quantity, the ones who would work a couple of hours to get one strong, contextual, organic link rather than building tens of thousands of bulk links in the same period of time – we came out better off than we were before the algorithm change.

Google reiterated the importance of inbound links at this year’s SXSW convention and those who survived the SEOpocalypse have found that the right types of links are more powerful than they ever were in the past. Link-building has, in many ways, been replaced by link-earning. You don’t generate links anymore. You generate and expose the content that is worthy of being linked to by other websites (not to mention being shared by individuals, but that’s an entirely other body part to discuss later).

If we’re going to treat search, social, and content marketing strategy as a living organism, then inbound links would be the food that fuels the body. From a purely SEO perspective, it’s what generates the authority that Google and Bing holds so high on their ranking algorithms. As long as it’s done organically and there are no nefarious tactics used in the process, there’s very little risk involved. The upside is huge.

From a social perspective, links can drive the traffic that is necessary to get people in front of your content. Assuming the content is good enough to get links, it’s probably deserving of social media shares as well. Those shares continue to help with search engine rankings but they also help with the purely social marketing area as well.

Last but not least, it does give your website credibility in the eyes of consumers. When your website is featured in a respected website, your potential customers who see the link will be impressed. It’s subtle, but it’s also very powerful.

In the near future, I’ll be going over each of the other parts of the marketing body. In the meantime, take a look at your content and inbound link “earning” strategy and ask yourself a question:

“If I were a website visitor and came across this content, is it valuable enough for me to want to link to it from my site?”

via Soshable | Social Media Blog http://soshable.com/inbound-links-are-the-food-that-fuels-your-marketing-body/