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We Are All Toymakers And Game Players

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Nick Kellet, someone impressive you should know. Woah.

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?

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Why Social Media May Not Earn SEO Benefit

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Flawsome.jpg 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.

Zuckerberg.jpgThe 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.

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The Happy Friday Series: Should Life Be Serious?

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Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

~ Brendan Gill

Read that again. Roll it around in your head for a moment. Let it sink in.

Brendon Gill (1914 – 1997) was a writer at The New Yorker for more than sixty years. I have yet to read any of his articles or books (though I have his non-fiction work, Here at The New Yorker, on hold at my local library), but that quote has always stuck with me. When Jayme asked me to write a guest blog, it was one of the first things that popped into my head.

What if life really isn’t meant to be serious?

What if we’re missing the whole point?

I was especially delighted with Jayme’s invitation to the Happy Friday Series because she and I met over a conversation about happiness. It was 2009 and, as part of my pitch to win a writing contest with a “good mood” theme, I put together a fundraiser. Jayme was one of the very few people who stepped up to participate. We were complete strangers, and yet she raised her hand and got involved.

All these years later (Has it really been FOUR years?!?!), we are still friends; and – apparently – we are both still interested in happiness.

Happiness is a funny thing. Everyone professes to be pursuing it, but so many people seem afraid to express it. There’s a strange stigma attached to happy people. I wrote about this in a post on my marketing blog about the power of enthusiasm, “Sadly, happy people are often looked down upon … We assume that they must be missing something. We’re suspicious of people who smile too much. What image comes to mind when I say ‘village idiot.’ How about the expression ‘grinning like the cat that ate the canary’? See what I mean?”

People who seem too happy are often labeled as being “not quite all there.” We are more willing to trust cynics and pessimists. Something in our culture has trained us to elevate the worth of opinions that are based in negativity and doubt the veracity of the happy.

  • Let’s stop that.
  • Let’s start a new trend of trusting happy people.
  • Let’s make it acceptable to show your happiness.
  • Let’s dare to be happy ourselves.

Can you imagine the possible ripple effect?

Here is a video I originally shared on the blog where Jayme and I met four years ago. It’s guaranteed to make you smile. I hope you’ll share it far and wide and set some happiness in motion today.

 

 

P.S. Here’s one more bit of Brendan Gill wisdom, “The first rule of life is to have a good time. The second rule is to hurt as few people as possible. There is no third rule.”

Go forth and be happy.

 

Jamie Wallace is an award-winning copywriter and marketing strategist by day, an aspiring author by night, and a mom and hopeless romantic 24/7. Find her at suddenlymarketing.com or on Twitter @suddenlyjamie.

 

 

 

Image Credit: Image of dog by J. Star

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Take Social Media Higher With Niche Networks

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English: Infographic on how Social Media are b...

English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Keeping up with the Joness is none too rewarding for companies, especially when it comes to social media adoption.

Most companies look at their peer group to identify what the nearest competitor is up to and then everyone is eventually following suit buoyed by the earliest adopters.

Many of the businesses that jumped in whole hog bright and early earned the most attention from consumers who wanted to engage with smart brands. Companies slower to adopt are finding it more of a challenge to tally likes, RTs, plusses, or followers.

But, all is not lost for the smartest and savviest social media adopters.

In 2012, users on the Interwebz grew 19.2 percent over 2011, according to eMarketer. There were 1.43 billion users on social networks, and we all know that Facebook boasts the first billion.

As adoption levels taper off, users are going to branch out into smaller networks that are more manageable. Inc. magazine shares a story about the pending 2013 backlash in social media adoption and the “emergence of smaller-scale, niche networks.”

Here are ways your company can benefit from the expected 2013 trend:

1. Shore up the big four or five channels and determine which few are the most beneficial relating to the strongest return on investment of money, time, team, and sales.

2. Stay the course with these, and begin to look around for smaller channels that are ripe for brands to engage with.

3. Understand your customers’ behavior and how they use social media. What do you know about consumer behavior patterns?

4. Study up on online behavior; there is a burgeoning field addressing human interactions online. Companies can benefit from this knowledge.

5. Develop programs that reward customers for their loyalty. Imagine a loyalty program on steroids. How many ways can customers be rewarded with simple recognition that ultimately costs the company pennies?

With loyal brand evangelists, companies can reward with a badge for a Facebook page or other profile page. Simple? Loyalty costs only as much as the creativity around implementing the program.

In the Inc. story, several mentions about smaller, niche apps becoming popular showcase where users are heading to get out from the clutter of 1 billion Facebook users:

Path
App.net
NextDoor
Yammer
MindMixer (I like this site on first impression!)

Also in the story, companies were advised to watch, listen and participate with a non-sales approach. The goal for companies is to jump to the next phase of relationship marketing and reap the benefits of the ever-changing online community.

 

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10 Reasons Why Google+ Rocks For Companies

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Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 8.56.06 AMThere has been so much bogus “Google+ is Dead” banter on the Interwebz, and I’m here to tell every savvy social media adopter that Google+ is the place to be.

Here are reasons why:

1. Google doesn’t have to find ways to monetize. Unlike Facebook, the struggling, always creating new monetization paths public company, Google already has a steady, proven method of making money.
2. Google+ is only the tip of the iceberg for companies’ ability to engage with truly innovative tools, storage, file sending, calendaring, free email and much, much, much more.
3. Let’s not forget the number-one reason — search. Yep, Facebook now has Facebook Graph Search that is supposed to change the course more positively for Facebook, but it’s in its infancy. Google has long established itself as the King of Search.
4. So this doesn’t become a Google vs. Facebook post, here’s one — Google+ communities are the game changer (oops, I guess there have been Facebook groups for a very long time that are successful, too). For brands seeking business audiences, Google+ has raised the bar high.
5. Google+ is not the place where high school buddies and families congregate; it’s where business peeps interact with others sharing solid material.
6. Google+ is not competing with a billion users. The early skeptics are MIA or just adopting. What that means for brands is the ability to get serious Plussers who seek savvy companies with a page built for Google+ engagement.
7. Google+ is seriously a happening channel, at the risk of Twitter. As Twitter sometimes feels like a graveyard (I know this for a fact), Google+ has activity all day long — high energy activity with real human engagement and not just a +1 or forward share.
8. Google+ Communities are now available for company pages. Because a person starts a page, that person should join a Community first to see what it’s all about. Then, with that comfort, launch a G+ Community oriented to the company brand, products, services, or subject matter. No better way to uild loyal prospects and customers.
9. Influencers bare engaging on Google+ all day. When was the last time you saw Chris Brogran on Twitter? Enough said.
10. Google+ is not just a passing fad. Just like early adopters to social media, companies getting on board will pave the way for higher levels of engagement. Please don’t miss the boat!

By Jayme Soulati

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