Social Media Archives - Page 4 of 15

Social Media Conferences: Go, Gather, Gab, Gush

04/23/2013 By Jayme Soulati

This is a short and simple shout out to all you social media peeps sitting at home or in the cube with lack of energy.

I encourage you to register right now for the New South Digital Marketing Conference.

This shindig takes place May 17, 2013 in Myrtle Beach, SC, and presenters the likes of Jay Baer (that guy gets around, doesn’t he?) and…you better watch the video to see who else is speaking!

On a final note, social media conferences are #RockHot…you have to attend 1-2 annually to get the mojo up and at ’em!

10 Reasons To Attend Social Media Conferences

04/08/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Amy Howell of Howell Marketing w/ Jayme Soulati of Soulati Media

It’s the Monday after Social Slam, the Knoxville social media conference brainchild of Mark W. Schaefer of {grow}. I have attended three years running, spoke at the first, was a VIP at the second and attended “normal” the third.

You know what? It makes no difference if you attend a conference as someone special (depending on whose eyes are looking) or just yourself. You need to just attend already.

The energy, enthusiasm, ‘raderie, learning (yes, you’re bound to learn at least one thing or two), sisterhood in social are quite intoxicating. Here is my need-to-post-something-quick round-up of why you should attend social media conferences on this scale especially:

1. The chance to meet peeps face-to-face elevates relationship. It’s called relationship marketing (if you have to put it in those terms), and it’s amazing for your psyche.

2. Bloggers and peeps you Skype want to see what you look like and make that connection with a hug, laughs, a photo for the Wall of Fame, and a Facebook or Instagram post or two.

3. You get a Klout bump…ooh, did I say that; the channel everyone loves to snark about? Yep, I did…my score bumped 3 points sitting at the conference tweeting all the trending content from the conference.

4. You can learn. So many people are afraid to invest in tradeshows in fear of “I won’t learn anything.” Au contraire. The ticket price for Social Slam to register is still less than $100; the hotel is about $125; gas for a tank is about $50, and you can eat for $12. It was a sum total of less than $300 to participate, and it’s entirely a business expense.

5. Meeting the community is priceless. Enough said.

6. Ideas proliferate when slammed with that much information all day long; no kidding. You listen, you watch, you nod your head, you shake it in confusion, you get a book signed, you see a young upstart with such drive you want to be him (Christopher Craft, chief visionary of Nao Media); you chat with total strangers on an intellectually strategic level; you solve the world’s problems; you have immediate access and shoulder bumping with every single speaker on stage; and, you take video (watch this space for Soulati Media On The Street from Social Slam!) of one another engaged in all levels of business ‘raderie.

7. You get blog fodder; yes, lots of it.

8. You are inspired to create new products and services in your own business because of the ideas presented by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing and featured in his new book he autographed, The Commitment Engine, Making Work Worth It.

9. You fuel your social media channel with peeps you’ve only met via avatar and 140; and you compare notes on who’s not there with a little gossip behind the scenes.

10. You build your brand and earn new followers and blog readers and respect for what you’re doing in social as a leader, and you realize just how great it truly is to be in this sector building roads for those on which to travel.

Don’t ever think you’re too jaded or knowledgeable that you shouldn’t attend a social media conference; there is always someone to meet the first time, hug in renewal of relationship, and vow to connect with on a deeper level. Your own inspired creativity requires this type of engagement; the cost is well worth the challenge of leaving the office.

Thank you Social Media Club Knoxville and all the faculty, planners, originators, emcee, attendees, and sponsors for making this show one I will always attend in whatever capacity I go.

Attend the New South Digital Marketing Conference, May 17, 2012! Jayme Soulati is on tap as a presenter!

We Are All Toymakers And Game Players

03/20/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Nick Kellet, someone impressive you should know. Woah.

The best new shiny gadget launched this week to much fanfare; did you see it? It blew up Triberr and subsequently, the blogosphere. Or, is that the other way around?

What is this new toy that kindly brought to the hungry game players? Why, it’s– making them for eager readers to tick off and feel good about themselves.

At least, that’s what I read in one of the posts last night that was touting this new social game to feed the masses.

Apparently, people love lists, and the more you make them, the more they show up on the blog to read what’s on the list, to tick off what they already know, and to walk away satisfied that they are better off than the rest of the jamokes who had 1-2 ticks from a list of 10.

I can attest to that behavior…first off, when I write list posts (which I do all the time and seldom tout in the headline; I better change that up), more readers stop in.

Secondly, when I see a is famous for, and he is off the chain when he does these, I read each to see if I’m engaged, aware, have it, done that, already in the works, and I’m happier that I’m not behind the eight ball as much as the rest of those poor readers. Then, along comes who insists on being a big tease, just sayin’.

— We Love Lists

So, have brought you a new shiny plaything, and everyone is rejoicing because “Facebook is boring,” said one Triberr mate last evening, as I was catching up on my stream.

Is Facebook boring? Hmm, shall we make a list? The Top 10 Reasons Facebook is Boring, comes to mind.

Do you automatically see the impact List.ly is going to put on blog fodder? Those bloggers without ideas of what to write can head on over to the new toy. Mind you, I haven’t gotten there yet, but I sure will. (Correction: Since I wrote the post and fixed it up to publish, I have my first list building on List.ly!)

That’s the beauty of being a social media game player…the first to pass Go wins. Maybe I still win if I’m the 100th to pass Go?

Why Social Media May Not Earn SEO Benefit

03/19/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Whoever thought that social media is the sole solution for a failing SEO campaign is bound to face more disappointments. Although social media is highly recommended and lauded by SEOs and marketing experts, it is not an SEO tool that will immediately function with just one click, producing concrete results a few seconds later. The benefits that some websites have indeed experienced did not appear overnight.

Although the majority will still say that social media is useful for SEO, and for sure you yourself believe it to be true, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the flaws of social media so that you and your SEO company can do something to circumvent them.

Flaws in Twitter

Social marketing experts favor Twitter because it seems to be the most effective in influencing the SERPs and getting a newly published page indexed by Google. This is true to, as proven in so many experiments. However, there is a clincher: In most of the experiments conducted to test Twitter’s influence in Google SERPs (including one conducted by the SEO giant SEOMOZ) the tester requested people to retweet a link for an experiment. People complied and within hours, the links have been retweeted hundreds of times. Within hours as well, the links were later found on the first or second spot in the SERPs.

This tells us two things: one, Twitter can do your website a lot of good, and two, you need to have the cooperation of your Twitter contacts and the public in general.

There’s actually a third lesson here too: Twitter activity is only significant if Google uses its direct, real-time data. When Google turned off the Twitter Firehose in 2011, the massive amount of activities that went on there went largely unnoticed by the search engine.

So, how do you deal with this flaw? The first thing obviously is to use Twitter more as an engagement tool than an SEO one. Second, when you compose a tweet, leave enough space for Re-tweeting.

Flaws in Facebook

Considering that Facebook has the most number of members, you’d think that it will have a wealth of information sitting in its archives waiting for users to have access to them. It’s actually false on the first, and a “we’ll see” on the second.

The content posted in Facebook is very limited; you’d be hard-pressed to find valuable information from its users. Actually, at present it’s quite impossible to search for valuable content in Facebook. The search bar on top will only conduct search matches for user accounts, not content posted on timelines and shared among users.

Besides, active users socialize in this website. That includes companies, websites, and blogs that have Facebook accounts. If ever they do post significant content, they can only do so by posting links to articles and web pages outside of Facebook. The site is also riddled with privacy settings, and they can meddle with your search queries.

The most you can benefit from Facebook search is if the search is an exact match with your account name or your About page.

Facebook intends to level-up its search feature and is set to introduce its Graph Search (which is powered by its partner, Bing). The Graph Search will not function like a regular search engine like Google. Rather, it will consider social signals in generating search results.

It will only post results that are popular within your community and the groups that you belong to. Many recognize this as similar to what Google+ was first meant to do: incorporate social signals into your search results by virtue of the +1 function.

The Graph Search is yet to be launched though, and while that may be an improvement for an SEO-minded Facebook user, the totality of its benefits are yet to be seen.

Flaws in Google+

As mentioned above, Google+ is the social arm of the search engine. It is supposed to be the provider of social signals so that Google will be able to present users with more personalized results. There are two problems here though:

First, there are too few Google+ users compared to the numbers present in Facebook and Twitter. It needs to grow more in order to be a reliable measure for social signals for websites vying to rank first in the SERPs.

Second, the social integration of search results will only work if the user has a Google account, and if he/she is currently logged in to it when he conducts his search. While there are advantages in getting personalized searches, many users still prefer to see actual, organic search results.

Having said that, with Google giving weight to authorship by displaying pictures of authors next to their post (if they have set up rel=author), and talk about author rank becoming a crucial ranking factor in 2013, it looks like Google+ may become more powerful as an SEO tool.

So, if you have a blog on the web, it will be a prudent move to set up your authorship profile to make the most of Google+.

About The Author

Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media Inc, a Vancouver company that provides SEO services to businesses across North America.