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January 14, 2010 By smahoney Leave a Comment

Social media connects us in troubled times

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haitian_presidential_palace1

Harrowing firsthand accounts of this weeks earthquake in Haiti weren’t  first delivered by Katie Couric or Anderson Cooper. Instead, locals and visitors like  hotel manager Richard Morse used social media sites to provide a glimpse into the devastation around them. According to CNN.com, Morse described the aftermath of the 7.5 earthquake via Twitter. Other Haitians communicated through text messages, Facebook, video chat, and even a popular local online entertainment program. As the reports began to roll in from the traditional media, social networking sites were already abuzz with information about where to donate and how to contact loved ones. We still rely on the big news outlets to bring us in-depth and hopefully honest coverage of the day’s important stories. Still, the power of average people giving a name and face to worldwide news can no longer be ignored, thanks in large part to social media.

This is not to say that one should substitute Myspace for, say, NPR in their news diet. Mainly, social networking sites stay true to their primary purpose of telling you where P. Diddy is eating a burrito and what bikini your high school class president chose to wear on her vacation.  Undoubtedly, silly tweets from reality stars and dancing hamster videos provide their own sort of escapist relief.  Therefore, the power of the message whether it be for news purposes or for entertainment can’t be ignored.

Harnessing this power for social media marketing is where it gets tricky. On one hand, social media is a quick and easy way to give customers updates on the latest happenings at your company. On the other hand, too many rambling infomercial like posts can quickly cause a “de-friending” epidemic. Using a first-hand style of reporting can be a perfect way to achieve balance.  Stories like Richard Morse’s are powerful because they belong to someone real. Nobody enjoys receiving messages that feel like they’ve been churned out by an anonymous robot. True passion, humor, and information are easier to convey when the person composing the posts has distinct language and unique thoughts. Conversely, an honest dialogue with clients opens the conversation for an equal exchange of ideas rather than just a cold, calculated advertisement. People don’t mind being sold things, but they want to be acknowledged and appreciated.

Social media continues to grow and change. The messages transmitted  by these sites truly run the gamut from poignant to mundane. And there are still many who argue that social media is little more than a creative way to kill time.  However, when sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter are at their best, they are able to connect us to people we might not otherwise know, to give us a front row seat to world events, to make us laugh, and to slowly make our differences seem smaller.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: Anderson Cooper, CNN, facebook, Haiti, Katie Couric, Myspace, NPR, P. Diddy, Richar Morse, Social Media, twitter

October 13, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Search, social and mobile. Can’t we all just get along?

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could harness the power of search technology, mix it with all the top social media outlets and access it when you’re away from your clunky laptop?  Well if you own an iPhone, your prayers have just been answered. Digital marketing powerhouse iCrossing just announced the release of a crazy cool iPhone app called “Say What?. According to iCrossing, “Say What?” is

“a free iPhone social media monitoring application that enables integrated search of Twitter, Digg, and thousands of forums and blogs. Say What? can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.

This is the perfect solution for power users on the go who want real-time search data across multiple social media platforms right in the palm of their hands. According to a recent iCrossing press release, here’s how it works:

“Users enter a search term on a simple interface, and the latest conversations from each of the social media sites are returned in an easy-to-read format. Say What? displays the most recent conversations in aggregate, unlike searching social networks or blogs via a mobile browser.

Users have the option to dig deeper into the responses on a particular source, and a search history is saved so users can get easy updates for their regularly-searched terms.”

Between my Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and CNN apps, I may never have to take my face far away from the warm glow of my iPhone ever again.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: CNN, facebook, iCrossing, iphone, iTunes app Store, Say What?, twitter, WordPress

August 28, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Moving pictures speak louder than words.

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I was chatting with a friend who’s an SEO expert and we were discussing the value of video content versus the written word. We both agreed they both have their merits. But let’s face it, video gets the point across in a more condensed way and it infuses a tone that you just can’t get with the written word. The speaker’s mannerisms, way of talking and clarity all effect how you absorb the content. To me, that’s a good thing. But the written word also has benefits. For example, if you’re a fast reader you can easily scan the text to see it’s worthwhile enough for you to read the whole thing… doing that with video means waiting for the vid to download and hoping you can move the slider around with little technical difficulty. My friend and I discussed the power of each format and wondered if the moving picture was more powerful than ink. If you look at the newspaper business versus the news telecast business which one do you think more people prefer? As a test, I thought it would be interesting to wordify / transcribe a video and compare it to the video and see what you get out of each format. The article I have chosen is from SEOmozBlog Whiteboard Friday. Keep in mind that I did not transcribe the video word for word; I left out the conversational bits and wrote it so that you could get the context. Here is a direct link to the video or click on the embed below. When you’re done, scroll down for the text version. Happy reading/watching.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Generating Unique Content from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

—

Text

SEOmox.org. The Web’s Best SEO Resources.
Whiteboard friday: generating unique content
by Scott Willoughby  Featuring Rand Fishkin/CEO SEOmoz 8:18 sec

Rand Fishkin looked at both the start-up world and large established companies for this video.
He asked the following questions.
What makes content unique.
Why do I have to engage in it
And why do i have to do it.

Why do search engines want unique content?
Search engines want unique unique content because it helps their users.

Users who find repeated results get very frustrated. You see this a lot in the travel world. If you do a search for Kayaks you see the same thing on Expedia and Hotels.com…it’s weak because you get reviews that are coming from the same place. Not a good experience for the user.

Mr. Fishkin mentions a site like Oyster.com , which contains very independent, lengthy reviews of hotels and travel related content.  The search engines want these unique kinds of results and they are very very good at identifying them.

if you think you’re going to pull the wool over the eyes of the search engines, think again. Search engines are very good at looking at a page’s structure, identifying elements that are in common navigationally and picking out the completely unique pieces of content inside the page and then being able to determine what percent of content inside the page is unique then deciding if that makes this a worth while page.

Some pages can have tons of content, and just a little bit of unique content and it gets picked up as being very important. Again, search engines are very good at picking out those sorts of things.

Spammers used to take content, run it through an English to French translation, then a French to Arabic translation and then an Arabic to English translation and then claim it as completely unique.

These days you’ll see spammers getting much more advanced by using things like Amazon’s mechanicalturk.com where they pay writers to rewrite content sentence by sentence a penny at a time. But be wary of this method because the search engines are working on how to identify that sort of thing.

Mr. Fishkin suggest that human beings are pattern oriented creatures  and they have patterns that they build and if search engines can reverse that method they can try to figure out who is trying to spam.

In terms of the user experience you create with unique content..it is a serious upgrade. Finding something that is interesting and unique is valuable for your visitors and the search engines look at this as a good thing.

There’s an unfair advantage that some outlets get just by their presence and size. For example, if you wrote an article that then later got picked up by CNN, guess who would get the credit for it? It’s on your blog, it’s on CNN, guess who will get more links? CNN will because they most likely will have a much larger audience. The engines want to find who is the original source and they also want to make sure the duplication doesn’t create a “citation worthiness” where only the rich get richer and no one who is unique and interesting and small is getting value out of that. They also want to find a lot of diversity in those results. You can take a search results page and listing one through four are all the same…it’s miserable. Nobody wants to see exactly the same thing. They want to see those unique takes.

Finally, Mr. Fishkin covers some strategies in order to take advantage of the unique content demands that the search engines require and figure out how you can scale that and create content for your business. These kinds of content fall under three categories.

1. The first is Editorial. What is editorial? It’s Mr. Fishkin making this video. It’s a blog. It’s coming up with content yourself or hiring out journalists or copywriters to write content for you. Outsourcing it to South East Asia or Eastern parts of Europe where you can find affordable writers to write content for you. Or using sites like oDesk or those types of services. You can have lots of unique content written by humans and it is considered editorially built content. That brings us to the second kind of content.

2. The second kind of content is machine-built content. This kind of content is usually data-driven. Results you would see Inside an Expedia or Farecast (which is now Bing travel). Folks like payscale.com and salary.com do this in the job world. Simplyhired does this around searches for a particular job and how well the market is rising. They take data sources and produce automated kinds of content. You have to be careful with this.  It’s a good strategy because it is scalable, it’s useful and not too expensive. Keep in mind engines can have issues with the uniqueness of the content.  Sites like (one of Mr. Fishkin’s clients) zillow.com create data which becomes content. Users find the data useful.

3. The third kind of content is user-generated content. UGC is some of the best kind of content that you can generate, but it’s tough. You have to build a community, incentivize the content creation and you have to get them to do it for free. You have to get people to contribute. Some examples of this kind of content is Wikipedia, digg, readitt and Youtube. UGC is very powerful, and very scalable but difficult to get to get growing in a large network scale manner.

Rand recommends that you sit down and strategize which kind of content is appropriate to your business. For small sites, editorial makes sense. If you are trying to go big and dominate a niche or industry, you will need machine-built and UGC or maybe all three forms of content depending on your strategy.

It pays to have that strategy in mind before you set out to create content instead of while you’re doing it or even after. Strategize and pick the solution that’s best for you.

—

OK, as you can see, it’s a lot of text considering that I left out a lot of the conversational words. I first viewed the video and then went back and transcribed as best as I could. I have to admit, watching the video was a more pleasant experience. I was also surprised the video was a little over 8 minutes long. It seemed much less. Maybe that’s because the experience was so effortless, whereas reading (or writing) took some effort. Who likes to read when you can sit back and absorb? What do you think?

Filed Under: Search Engine Marketing, Video Content Tagged With: bing, CNN, Digg, Expedia, hotel.com, mechanical turk, oDesk, Oyster.com, payscale.com, Rand Fishkin, Readitt, salary.com, search engines, SEO, SEOmoz, simplyhired, Vimeo, Wikipedia, YouTube, zillow

July 24, 2009 By Brandsplat 1 Comment

Suckling on boob tube increases during recession.

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suckling

According to an interesting post in Online Media Daily more Americans turn to electronic media (internet and television) during times of recession. The reasons range from having more free time on their hands, seeking an alternative to paid entertainment options, and the ever-growing need for economic information and advice. It’s interesting to note that more people who have broadband in their households get their economic information from web content whereas in households that don’t have broadband, the internet ranks third behind television and print. It’s also interesting that people are using television, print and the Internet simultaneously to get a clearer picture of the economic landscape. I fall into that category. In fact, I have CNN on right now as I multi-task between blogs and newsfeeds. But I must admit, my newspapers are still in the driveway. Who has the time?

Filed Under: Weekly Five Things You Might Have Missed Tagged With: CNN, Online Brand Marketing, online media daily, web content

BRANDSPLAT creates articles, blogs, social media, and all written content in the voice of your brand. Our clients include entrepreneurs, personalities, mid-size companies, and some of the world's biggest brands.

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