INSIGHT blogArchive: August 2009

Archive for August, 2009

How does Social Media benefit SEO?

28
August
2009

Social Media sites and links have strong SEO and organic rank value

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

Over the last couple years of both pitching and listening to pitches about corporate social media, I’m often surprised by how organizations focus on the “buzz” or brand benefits around social media without noting the obvious technical benefits for that organization’s search engine optimization.

We know that keyword phrases, site architecture, relevant content, and links make up for much of a website’s rankings (http://www.sherpastore.com/Benchmarks-Metrics.html and 1000s of other sources).  Out of traditional SEO, we see that both on-page elements of a website like keywords and content factor as well as off-page elements like inbound links.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing value inbound links from other websites as “votes of confidence” for the website they are linking too (http://www.seocrunch.com/factors-in-seo-link-value/).  Time and consistent results have shown that inbound links make up a majority of a site’s page rank value, and that each type of inbound link has different merit or weight for the referenced site:

Overall Ranking Algorithm

Overall Ranking Algorithm

  • 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain

  • 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page

  • 20% Anchor Text of External Links

  • 15% On-Page Keyword Usage

  • 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data

  • 6% Social Graph Metrics

  • 5% Registration and Hosting Data

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors/

So what is the bulk of social media engineering? (besides the important, high-level concepts like awareness, community, resources, reputation management and the rest…)  Well?  Social ends up being a lot of properly research keyword phrases imbedded in optimized content on open, crawlable sites with tons and tons of contextual, relevant links from powerful domains.  Social media is an ever increasingly important component of holistic, natural search.  One of the best things an organization, association, group, or business can do to improve their web presence is to introduce a social media strategy that keeps SEO in mind during the strategy, execution, and analysis phases.

Search engines and search sites today are putting ever increasing value on authoritative social and multi-media based sites.  Links from video sites like youtube.com and posts on sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, or Delicious are beginning to become incredibly important for any organization competing for their own space on the web (http://www.bestrank.com/blog/how-social-media-can-help-improve-organic-search-rankings/).

So remember when you are articulating your new social outreach program to your client or internal management team, you can remind those decision makers that your social and new media strategy will help measure and monitor the brand, it will help you communicate, understand and grow your audience base, AND… when executive properly it will improve and solidify the SEO value of that website.

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Retailers Trying To Use Word of Mouth Marketing

25
August
2009

Retailers are hoping to utilize the power of viral marketing to help them reach new potential customers.

Ryan Moss
Media Coordinator

Retailers have been using email marketing for quite some time now to keep their existing customers informed and hopefully attract new customers. Now more and more retailers are adding "share" or "forward to a friend" options to their emails, hoping that their existing subscribers will help them bring in new ones.

Retailers have been using to two different techniques to encourage word of mouth marketing. The first is adding a "forward to a friend" (FTAF) button, which according to data from Smith Harmon, has been adopted by 41% of retailers surveyed. The other option, which is less popular right now, is adding a "share with your social network" (SWYN) option. Of those surveyed, only 6% said they provide this option. The study also showed that 7% of retailers offered both options while 46% offered neither option.

FTAF is clearly the more popular option right now, but many people believe that SWYN is on the rise. Within SWYN there are several different social networks that retailers make available. As seen in the chart below, the most popular one by far is Facebook.

Adding these functions to your emails is a tremendous idea and is something that should be done by all companies and organizations, not just retailers. When finding either a forward to a friend or a share with your social network tool to incorporate with your email newsletters, there are several different options out there including our own tool, JumpReach. Our solution provides robust analytics that allow you to see the detailed results of your sharing campaign and it also makes it easy for your existing subscribers to forward your message by allowing them to access their address book for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Outlook and LinkedIn to select which contacts they want to share with. In conjunction with our JumpReach solution, we offer a FREE Assessment in which one of our Product Specialists will discuss how your business can enjoy the benefits of viral marketing.

106065 Retailers Trying To Use Word of Mouth Marketing

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Facebook, Back in the Game

18
August
2009

In an effort to better compete with Google and Twitter, Facebook purchases FriendFeed

Christine Pepin
Media Coordinator

Social media, social media, social media.  Everyone’s talking about it in some way or another and there is no doubt this conversation will continue to evolve for quite some time.  In the meantime, the major players in the online space are working eagerly to sprint ahead of the dialogue and predict the new “must sign-up tool.”  Last week, Facebook released that it had bought FriendFeed, a service that allows users to share updates with friends as well as aggregate the updates from other social sites such as Twitter, Gmail or Facebook. 

I finally had the opportunity to play around a bit more today with it and saw that this may just be the tool that social networking fans cannot do without.  When I first started becoming familiar with Twitter, I thought “who has the time to make these updates, while still checking Facebook, connecting with others on LinkedIn, blogging, G-chatting and all the other factors of everyday-life?”  With the functionality on FriendFeed, it appears to be easier to do so with less clicks and time, as all these outside feeds can be streamed together to be used on one platform.  In real-time, updates can be made on the site, which looks ironically like Facebook; built with the same options to “comments, share or like.”

Facebook has done very well over the last few years capitalizing on their earning potential.  With all the personal information they have access to as well as their massive 250 million user base, advertisers that can afford it are flocking to get in front of the audience they can so accurately target.  Now with FriendFeed, they have even more site ad inventory where they can mirror their model.  Some have said that Facebook is aspiring to be the next Google.  I’m not convinced yet but the idea is possible.  Google has a way of diving its hands in anything it can, being an innovator and setting the bar for others in the online industry.  But maybe, Facebook is ready to set the bar just a smidge higher in the realm of social. Nevertheless, it’s a constant race and it’s clear Google is taking close watch. 

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Your Simple Social Media Cheat Sheet – Part 2

13
August
2009

Once you’re ready to join the conversation, how do you execute, manage, and adjust?

Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst


| Read Part 1 |

So, after deciding whether to test your social media efforts – whether it be in one venue, with one message, or with a limited audience – you’re ready to go live. Assuming that you’ve focused your campaign, it’s time to implement and move down the checklist:

  • How are you monitoring your social media engagement?

You have established your goals and ways to track them, but social media moves fast and you might have to adjust based on the response. Unlike the approach one would take with traditional mediums and check them at the end of the month, week, or even day, social media must be watched in realtime. The dialogue can change quickly and responses must be immediate. Whether you’re answering questions, handling problems, or encouraging fan/follow/customer participation, you must be active. Even if the objective is to gain long-term benefits, you must keep the effort on track or change course if you’re veering.

  • How will you build your presence up or down?

Whether you create a flicker of conversation or a groundswell of chatter, it’s as if you engaged a few people. How will you expand that effort if successful or long-term and how will you responsibly end that effort if unsuccessful or short-term? Social media participants don’t easily forget, so even when pulling a campaign off the grid, it must be done cautiously to avoid unraveling what is established.

  • How will you communicate the success of your organization’s social media initiatives?

Not everyone is going to understand why social media is a success (or even a failure), so be prepared to translate the outcomes. Track engagements, problems solved, coupons redeemed, or other numbers of engagements you decided to measure in the beginning. Also, building presences is valuable as well, so be sure to communicate beyond your ultimate goals.

  • Wash, rinse, repeat.

No matter how skillful or developed your organization becomes with social media, this process will always apply. Some steps might take longer or shorter, but they shouldn’t be omitted. As for that cheat sheet, here’s the quick list:

  • Determine what you want to accomplish.
  • Decide what each medium can do for the campaign. 
  • Decide the level of traditional, new, or a combination of media.
  • Determine your comfort in each social medium.
  • Decide to stay in-house or seek a partner.
  • Create a timeline.
  • Decide the duration and intensity.
  • Decide whether to test and at what scale.
  • Establish how to monitor the initiative.
  • Decide how to bow out or ramp up.
  • Determine how to translate internally.
  • Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now, jump in and see what your organization can do by being more sociable. 

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Online Marketing Campaigns Still Facing High Click Fraud Rates

12
August
2009

While click fraud rates have slightly decreased, advertisers must continue to be aware of this ongoing issue.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

Many of my previous posts have sung the praises of display advertising.  Banner advertising is great for branding, driving search, and supporting online conversion goals, but there is one major caveat to these programs: Click Fraud.  Many marketers define click fraud as any method of artificially inflating clicks or page impressions.  Some define it solely for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, however this is just as common with other campaign models such as Cost-Per-Thousand impressions (CPM).  You may ask yourself ‘Why would ad networks want to generate false clicks?’ Well, if the program is on a CPC model, then the advertising network garners revenue based on how many clicks are received. If a campaign is running on a CPM model, click fraud would help make an ad campaign appear more effective. Ad networks are not always the culprit either. Individual publishers within networks can also engage in this internet crime in order to increase their cut of the revenue generated. Direct competitors can also be the fraudsters, “spending” your money quickly in order to decrease your share of voice.    

While recent studies have shown that click fraud rates have decreased slightly in 2009, it still continues to be a major concern for online marketers as these bad clicks are increasingly coming from automated scripts.  There are companies who provide auditing services to combat click fraud, but they are not always going to be able to detect these malicious clicks 100% of the time as these scripts continue to become more sophisticated.  

Online advertisers must be aware of this problem and know the signs of when it is happening. Having a reliable analytics tool is the best step advertisers can take to not fall victim to this crime. Most analytics packages allow you to see geographically where most of these clicks are being generated or if specific keywords are receiving a surge in traffic. Advertisers must monitor and trend these metrics s to detect fraudulent clicks and making sure marketing budgets are being spent wisely.

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Social Media in a B2B World

12
August
2009

Social media has become increasingly important in the B2B space, and lately is beginning to be recognized as a significant lead source.

Keith Vera

Account Manager

Social media has become increasingly important in the B2B space, and lately is beginning to be recognized as a significant lead source. All social media is centered on mutual affiliations or interests, providing large pockets of online communities that B2B companies should be leveraging for lead generation and branding efforts. Of course to capture interest in these communities, a company need to become an active participant that provides a lasting value through the different social channels. Below, we’ll take a quick look at how providing fresh content and ideas allows B2B companies to become more visible and valued to target audiences in the top social media channels.

  • Blogging: Blogging should be centered on industry specific topics, and need to be published regularly to help build and grow an audience base. Blogging can lead to solid lead generation as a loyal readership and “community” builds. Blogs should be used as a platform for company and industry updates, and stimulating thought leadership in any industry.
  • Facebook: Facebook has become an increasingly resourceful messaging platform for B2B companies. Creating company and product fan pages allows for tremendous visibility and also allows a company to communicate directly with its fans and evangelists. New information shared on these fan pages is also automatically streamed to fan’s Facebook news updates, helping to create a constant connection between a company and its community.
  • Linked In: LinkedIn should be utilized to close the social loop in a B2B professionals community, particularly as it is a business-focused network. Take advantage of LinkedIn group announcements and company status updates to automatically promote company messaging across linked industry groups and professional connections.
  • Twitter: Twitter is a great platform for pushing company messaging, news and events out to a collective audience. There is a lot of visibility to be gained by simply getting the word out about your company or products and services. Tweets can be at will or scheduled, and ReTweets with different calls to action are particularly effective as audience growth mandates more tweet volume to generate message visibility. 

Take a look at EyeTraffic’s social media specialist Blake Bowyer’s blog for tips on social media messaging 10 Pithy Social Media Tips in 140 Characters or Less. Don’t forget to Comment, and tell us how you’ve been leveraging social media in the B2B space.

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Your Simple Social Media Cheat Sheet – Part 1

11
August
2009

Put this in your pocket when your organization decides to build or develop its social media strategy.

Bake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst

We get this question a lot – What are social media? The two most comprehensive and appropriate answers are:

  1. Many things.
  2. What you want them to be.

For some organizations, social media are customer relationship management tools. For others, they’re marketing vehicles, pet projects, “necessities”, and platforms to serve countless other purposes that can be different between organizations and even departments within organizations. 

The one thing definitive about social media is that they can be powerful and valuable. So, no matter where you are in your social media maturity, there is a checklist that should be used to make sure you’re harnessing their value, not letting them run amok.

  • Decide what you want to accomplish with your media.
  • Decide what each medium can do for you. 

THIS IS THE MOST OVERLOOKED PART IN THE PROCESS. Often companies jump to the next step without considering what media can actually do for the organization and how well they can do it. For example, a small business might want to improve something – sales, image, customer complaints, etc. – cheaply and assume that social media, because they can be cheap, are optimal for that goal. However, social media might not be the place to reach a particular audience, communicate a particular message, or a number of other considerations that go unexamined.

  • Decide whether traditional, new, or a combination of both would best accomplish your goals.
  • Assuming social is a component, are you comfortable being in the social space? Are you ready to correct mistakes, put out fires, and engage in conversations you might not want to have? Will you develop a process to keep your social media under control?
  • Are you confident of the capabilities in-house to accomplish those goals with social media?

Again, traditional and new media are as different as they are similar, so aptitudes might not transfer between the two. ALSO OFTEN OVERLOOKED. What is it going to cost to develop those capabilities in-house? Is the potential even available?

  • Once you have the capabilities – either inside or outside of your organization – create a timeline on all related activities. How long will it take to plan, develop, execute, and measure your social media efforts? When will you know they’re a success? How much time will you give them to succeed? 

Just because activity on social media happens fast doesn’t mean your efforts won’t need time to gain traction.

  • Is this social media effort short-term, pulsing, or long-term?
  • Will you launch full-scale or do testing? 

A primary advantage of social media is that you can quickly and cheaply try different iterations of efforts to fine-tune what works best. 

That’s a little more half of the checklist. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 and concluding thoughts on how you can effectively fit social media into your organization.

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Twitter Went Down Today, Could You Still Engage?

6
August
2009

When social media has a glitch, make sure your organization remains in the conversation.

Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst

August 6, 2009, a day that may live in social media infamy. Even the fail whale wouldn’t emerge from the vast oceans of system overload.  Twitter refugees sought bursts of chatter and explanations on Facebook, but then it started acting up. Soon, the world of social media went black and legions of tweeting, Facebooking netizens sat at their computers and watched an idle cursor …

It was scary and, hopefully, it was also a wake-up call. Online and interactive marketers have convinced thousands of organizations and professionals to embrace social media. You will engage, you will interact, you will connect, and you will go viral. The promises are infinite and, if executed correctly, social media can launch you and your products into the conversation. The potential is true and attractive, almost irresistible.

But, what happens when social media fail? I don’t mean fail as in not work strategically, but not work AT ALL. It may seem like an unlikely question, maybe even an unthinkable horror, but it happened today. It was only for a short time, but it could happen again – tomorrow or a week from now. Ask yourself: how did you react? What were your online marketers doing? How does your company stay involved when the lights go out in the crowded room of social media?

That’s the problem with relying on one communication vehicle, or a handful in social media’s case. Research is released daily to support the adoption of social media, but it’s not smart to put the lion’s share of your eggs in one basket as some firms are doing. Even worse, these aren’t just eggs from the hens in the marketing department, but in the customer service and technical support arms as well. Many important functions of customer relationship management are being funneled into social media for good reason: they’re cheap, interactive, personal, and they can provide instant gratification. However, they can’t be your only option.

It’s easy to see why creating a Facebook page is a lot more appealing than opening a call center or launching a PPC campaign, but companies can’t build and sustain effective relationships solely through brief online conversations. It’s not only risky, but it will eventually lead to dissatisfaction. The reality is that, while the base of customers engaging on social media is growing rapidly, not every problem can be solved, not every coupon be served, nor every customer be reached through a tweet. All media, including the newer ones, are part of an integrated marketing effort.

In the end, social media is an answer, not THE answer. So, next time this happens and you find yourself staring blankly at the screen, don’t curse the fail whale because you’re the one lost at sea. 

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My Summer with EyeTraffic Media

3
August
2009

Principal Manager’s NOTE: I thought that our online audiences would enjoy a new perspective on EyeTraffic Media – and our recent growth. Therefore, I asked our summer intern to reflect back on the ten weeks he spent with our company. Enjoy! – George A.

Chris Cohen
Staff Assistant

Since June 1, I’ve had the pleasure of interning at EyeTraffic Media for a third consecutive summer. While I was looking forward to another opportunity of serving as the Principal Manager’s assistant, I was in for a pleasant surprise when Media Coordinator Ryan Moss asked me to help build the SEO/PPC campaign for the JumpReach product (powered by EyeTraffic Media). After two summers of having responsibilities primarily concerned with office management, I was thrilled to be given the chance to directly work with a member of a rising interactive marketing firm.

I remember when Mr. Assimakopoulos (who reminds me of Ari Gold from Entourage), to make sure if I was remotely capable of assisting with such a task, asked me what a search engine was and advised me: “Don’t say Google.” I guess I gave him a satisfactory answer because he gave the nod to Ryan.

Although I had the most basic prior knowledge of SEO & PPC advertising, I had absolutely no idea of how much work went into constructing an effective campaign. From keyword research, to Ad Copies, to Negatives, I felt like a deer in headlights with all of these new concepts. With guidance from the other members like Keith Vera, Robin Dvorak, Christine Pepin, and Stefanie Berliant, Ryan and I were able to build what we hope will prove to be a very effective SEO and PPC campaigns for JumpReach.

While that was probably the most demanding of my responsibilities, I was also asked to maintain the Wiki, upload additional contacts, and attend to office management needs. Quick shout out to the Office Manager, Surrae Holloway, for staying on top of me, but really making my time here enjoyable. Man she is tough!

It’s interesting to see how EyeTraffic evolves year after year. With our country’s recent economic struggles, during my time here I wanted to make an effort to observe how a small business remains afloat and survives. EyeTraffic has been able to do so with its dedicated team.  Mr. Assimakopoulos continues to motivate and seek new opportunities all across the nation. Account Manager Keith Vera stays on top of his game day in and day out, and Media Coordinators Stefanie Berliant, Ryan Moss, and Christine Pepin are outstanding team players. Congratulations to Ryan for winning the most recent D.E.L.T.A. achievement award for his hard work and dedication over the recent months with the new JumpReach program.

Robin Dvorak is another member of the EyeTraffic team who has been invaluable in her assistance. With a lot of experience under her belt, her ideas and instincts are and will be continue to be essential to the development of the company.

This summer I’ve also had to share the internship spotlight with Blake Bowyer. He has been a pleasure to work with as well, and has done an excellent job managing the company Twitter account and assisting with the day-to-day activities.

Each summer when I intern with EyeTraffic I really try to get something out of it. Yes, I do enjoy the relaxed environment, good food, and comfortable office, but I try to take something that I can use when I go back to school and eventually become part of the “real world.” By learning real interactive marketing tactics and observing day-to-day business interactions, there is no doubt that my time here has been well spent, and I will take lessons with me that will do nothing but help me down the road.

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