Has SEO evolved to handle the explosion of Social Media?

Posted on: January 20, 2011

Michael D. Harris Jr asked on LinkedIn:

How has SEO evolved to handle the explosion of Social Media?

Are there any specific guidelines reagarding social media? Also, are there any Top Selling books that talk about the subject that I can recommend to colleagues and friends?

I don’t think SEO has evolved to handle Social Media, I think they are separate and distinct.

Search engines (Google particularly) LOVE blogs, twitter, and facebook. They get indexed almost immediately, which isn’t ever going to happen with a website even if you spend $10,000 a month on SEO. But while social media is “search friendly” it should never be market driven. IE, don’t use it to hawk your wares – you’ll just drive away the people you want to draw closer!

Social Media should have as its goal the forming of a community around you or your product, or in the case of Facebook, creating a space in an on-line community in which you can interact with the larger community.

Social Media is really only about making yourself (meaning you, your company, your product, etc.) known, taking care of clients’ needs, perhaps being humorous, and always, engaging. Giving, rather than getting.

We all presume that if we do Social Media well, we will be rewarded by the fact that if we are better known (and well-liked) eventually it will lead people to our doors and they will buy something.

I’ve found that it isn’t always so. You do really need to have something people want badly enough to buy no matter what you use (SEO, SMO – social media optimization, google adwords – whatever).

But there are those amazing success stories of people who have gotten book deals AND movies, not to mention reality tv shows because someone spotted a blog, or a funny twitter account. (Really, I know of two twitter accounts that are now on tv. Go figure.  Read From Twitter to Hollywood, another success story)

I write about getting traffic and touch on what to use and how in the series I’ve listed below in the web resources box – “If you Build it, Will they Come?”

 

 

And . . . this answer was chosen by Michael D. Harris Jr, President/ Publisher Ardynn PR, as the best answer submitted.

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Categories: linked in Q&A
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Reputation Management (a/k/a Damage Control)

Posted on: January 17, 2011

Start Reputation Management Before You Need It

There are systems that you should put in place before you’re in trouble . . . true damage control comes with being prepared, not trying to put out fires as they pop up. The worst instance of the need for damage control was the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf in 2010, but they made it worse with their efforts to downplay the level of contamination.  Then Tony Hayward, chief executive, visited Venice, Louisiana, to apologize for the disaster (the worst oil spill in American history) and said “no one wants this over more than I do.”  But he added the remark,

I would like my life back.

Damage control for their damage control

That faux pas actually made it to the number one spot in “the year in Briefing’ in Time magazine’s person of the year issue for 2010, along with John Tyner remarking on his “junk”, Hillary Clinton denying another run for the presidency and Pope Benedict XVI acknowledging fault in the child-sexual-abuse scandal.

Talk about bad company.

Cinéma vérité, better known in Los Angeles as Reality TV

I use both Google Alerts and StepRep for some assignments I’m working on – the most amusing are for a couple of C-List Los Angeles actresses (who shall remain nameless, less I shoot myself in the foot here) who have more bad press than good. And, who shudder every time they think a producer or casting company may ‘google’ them before making casting calls.

There are probably a dozen instances of reality tv catapulting people into prominence (and with that, a successful career in entertainment) but there are even more instances of reality tv ‘stars’ being vilified in the press.  The very nature of reality tv, to show the viewers how absurdly the reality personality lives, encourages the very worst press coverage.  Actors who think they will use reality tv as the path to fame and fortune seldom realize that path is wrought with peril – particularly if they really do live the drunken debauchery they portray in their particular reality series.  When the reality tv ride comes to an end, and they don’t have, and can’t get, a decent gig, all that ‘hot’ press they got for their last job may not be the answer to moving to A-List (or even B-List) status.

Get Rid of the sleaze or Replace it with some Sparkle

Unfortunately, getting rid of the avalanche of bad publicity is never an easy task, however, in this day and age of blogs and social media it is possible to actually push the trash to back pages by simply overwhelming the media with better info.  A blog that is indexed by Google will, in pretty short order, have every page listed at the top of search results.  Ditto with Facebook and Twitter: they are indexed almost immediately, and a search for an actor or actress will bring up the fresh content first, moving the bad PR to page 2 or 3.

There is such a thing as “bad publicity”

It is simply a matter of getting an organized view of the trash talk and working the tools to get ahead of it.  Way ahead.  We can do that.

Damage Control Tools

There are several methods of keeping up with what is being said about you or your brand that are better than taking the time to ‘google’ yourself or your company. Google Alerts is a great tool, but can be overwhelming if you aren’t precise in your settings. Google tells you you can monitor the web for “interesting new content” but the people I know use it to monitor it for interesting new content relevant to them.

Google Alerts suggests

  • monitoring a developing news story
  • keeping current on a competitor or industry
  • getting the latest on a celebrity or event
  • keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Designing your Google Alerts

Once you’ve set up an account to get Google Alerts, enter your topic, and choose the level of results you want to receive:

  • Choose from news, blogs, realtime, video, or everything
  • Choose to get the results as it happens, every day, every week
  • And then it is the volume you are willing to receive. Your choices are All and only the best

StepRep: reputation intelligence for small business

An alternative to Google Alerts, is StepRep, who advertises as “reputation intelligence for small business.” I use StepRep as a supplement to Google Alerts.  StepRep gives you all the data that Google Alerts does, and gives you the opportunity to go through their findings and mark your personal content along with things that are not relevant to you or your search.

I was dismayed to find the number of people named Traci Gregory on the internet. Not that it seems such an unusual name, but I had to go through a lot of data that was irrelevant to get to the instances of my Traci Gregory.

Start Now, Before You Need It

Set up your alerts on either service (or both) and think of all the worst phrases you would hate to see in connection with your brand.  Think also of what you’re going to do on your blog and your website if worst comes to worst and you’re fighting some really bad press.  You can’t catch it all, and you certainly can’t contain it if you haven’t got a plan.

But you can call me; or send me an email: traci@tracigregory.com

 

Related Articles in this Series: Reputation Management Part 2: Who is talking about you in Social Media?

Other Surprising Moments in the Press

Former Pres. George W. Bush, and brother Jeb

From Twitter to Hollywood, A Success Story

From Blog to Book . . . to Movie!

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Categories: Reputation Management, Social Media
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How to make a background in the New Twitter

Posted on: December 31, 2010

Don’t you get tired of “your” pages getting changed up by the people who actually run them?  With Facebook’s profiles and pages, it is almost a full time job keeping up with them and revising your well thought out work to fit in its new space.

I’ve finally acknowledged that there is a “new Twitter”, and while the background image I had before was cool, you can only see a small part of it now.

I have to have a new Twitter background for the “new Twitter”.

Luckily I found the dimensions of available space on Mashable, and was able to set it up easily.  Then I played around with it for just a few minutes to get something I liked that would work in most resolutions.

The available space is a mere 113 pixels in the left hand column.  There is a margin of 40 pixels across the top of the screen that will be used for twitter’s ribbon of commands.  So here is what you have to work with:

DownloadI’ve placed a png file of this in the downloads if you’d like a cheat sheet to start with.

On my screen, with 1680×1050 pixels showing, my background looks pretty good when posted on twitter:

You can see the image, my website url, the locations I’m in, and graphics to denote that I have a blog, facebook, linked in and twitter.  Historically I’ve written out the links on twitter backgrounds (you don’t get a clickable background, just a photo) but if I google myself, facebook, twitter, and linked in all come up on the first page along with my website.  Probably will work the same way for you, you’ll just have to do the self-involved google yourself thing and find out.

While I’m happy with what I’m seeing, everyone doesn’t have the monitor I have, so I want to know what happens on other computers (and I don’t want to walk all over the house using different ones . . . I want to resize the screen on this computer so I can take screenshots to compare the differences).

Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s IE all have an add-in that will allow you to resize your screen and see just what it is that other people see. Comes in very handy when a client has just seen something on a computer that is older than most of my children and calls me screaming that it doesn’t look like it did this morning on his computer at the office. Duh.

You’ll see that with each successive downward screen sizing, the white space surrounding the actual twitter columns narrows to nothing, and then my little 113 pixels start to disappear as if eaten by pacman.

As if seen on a 15″ Laptop, 1366×768, reduced to 36%

And, the worst ever, 1024×600, also reduced to 36%

Time to really work on that bio!

Here’s where it pays to remember that your bio, along with your background image is going to sell people on following you, or turn them away.

You’ve lost all that white space that used to be your “twitter billboard”, so now you must edit your bio and make sure that it is a full-fledged sales tool that makes people want to get your tweets. It is the only thing you’ve got and at 140 characters, it better be good.

But, by now you are an artist: after all, you’ve been getting your message across in 140 character tweets! Surely you can manage the best of shameless self-promotion  in that space.


Other Posts on Twitter

How to exploit Twitter: A Sample of the best use of Twitter info

Is there too much Twitter?

Tweetadder: Build your Twitter following with like-minded people

Friend or Follow: Test Your Twitter

Tweetbeep

Additional Resources:

Get the Mashable Twitter GuideBook

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Categories: twitter
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Social Media Bottom Line: What do you get, and what does it cost?

Posted on: December 30, 2010

Since we’re fast approaching 2011 and everyone looks at what they did this year and what they are going to do next year (and what it is all going to cost in time and money) we thought we’d do this piece on decision making for your social media brand.

There are multiple considerations; if you are looking to establish a social media plan, you could start here:

What are you trying to do?

  • Generate sales leads?
  • Promote your brand?
  • Get “into” social media?  Pointless, really, without an end result in mind.

How are you going to make this happen?

  • Who is going to do the work? Are you willing to do it yourself?  Assign it to an employee?
  • College Intern?  Bad Idea . . . really bad idea.
  • How long are you going to actively promote your social media campaign before you go to simply maintaining?
  • Longer is more costly, but what effect are you going to have on your goals if you throw money at your project for 30 days? None. And you’ll have that negative effect on your pocketbook.

We’ve learned that social media is beneficial in a cumulative fashion.

You aren’t really going to get hella results if you work on Facebook and Twitter for 30 days and then throw in the towel. Save your money if that’s your plan.

These are the services we offer, and typical pricing:

P/Mo or P/Un
Design a blog and launch, outsourced $1,000-$12,000
avg $3K to $5K
Design a blog and launch, some outsourcing $1,000-$8,000
avg $2K to $3.5K
Redesign an existing blog (3-6 mos) $1,000-$5,000
avg $2K to $4K
Create & introduce a new Twitter presence, outsourced $1,000-$7,500
avg $2K to $4K
Create and introduce a new Twitter presence, & provide ongoing training for company $1,000-$6,000
avg $1K to $3K
Re wicker an existing existing Twitter presence (3-6 mos) $1,000-$4,000
avg $1K to $2.5K
Limited coaching to improve Twitter success $1,000-$4,000
avg $1K to $2.5K
Design a Facebook Page and deploy, from the ground-up, outsourced including interaction with readers $2,000-$9,000
avg $2.5K to $5K
Design a Facebook Page and deploy, with limited training on interaction (3-6 mos) $2,000-$7,500
avg $2K to $4K
Design specific Social Media Strategy; outsource all content creation through all channels (min of 2, probability of 4 or less) $3,000-$20,000
avg $4K to $7K
Design of specific Social Media Strategy; outsource limited content creation; may include in house training (4-12 mos) $3,000-$15,000
avg $3K to $6K
Simple review of current Social Media Strategy with recommendations on how and where to improve your recognition $2,000-$10,000
avg $2K to $5K
Social Media Consulting Specific Topics $50-$500/Hr
avg $75 to $200

If these Consulting Fees make you a little weak in the knees, consider the preparation made before you see them or a proposal. Research about your company and what you are doing, perhaps research into your competitors and what they are doing.

For your eight hour consult, I could realistically have up to 40 hours invested at the end of the day. And that doesn’t include travel time, whether it is across town, or across the country.

Keep these in mind as you review your needs and your budget. If you’d like my assistance for your social media campaign, please email me for a custom quote.

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Categories: Social Media
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From Twitter to Hollywood, another success story

Posted on: October 7, 2010

James Hibberd reports in The Hollywood Reporter that CBS is now producing a second television show based on a twitter feed.  This one is Shhdontellsteve, and is purportedly a guy tweeting his roommate’s comments on everything.

And, it is funny.

Steve’s Mom “friend-requested” him after seeing The Social Network. Steve: “Should I deny her? Or can I let her sit in friend request limbo?”

10:41 AM Oct 4th via web


CBS TV Studios and Katalyst will produce the project. Andrew Waller and Mike Gagerman are the writer-supervising producers. Ashton Kutcher, who has an astounding 5.8 million followers on the popular social media site, and his producing partner Jason Goldberg, along with Karey Burke are executive producers.

The first “from twitter feed” show “$#*! My Dad Says”, was launched last week.

AwkwardFamilyPhotos.Com has also been signed to become a television show.

So, my advice to you, if you’re funny, you’re golden. And Hollywood?  If you’re listening, I’m a hoot.

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Categories: Brand You
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Client Spotlight: Indulge with AniciaB

Posted on: August 20, 2010

Okay, I’ll admit it, AniciaB is my oldest daughter (See the family resemblance?)

So that is how I came to do her blog, IndulgewithAniciaB, which is about fashion, design and style as seen by AniciaB.

Anicia has a successful business as a designer, having done consulting for high profile clients like professional athletes, movie stars, musicians, and entertainers, but her publicist, Jerry Shandrew wanted her to widen her audience; introduce herself to the masses, so to speak.

So, our focus for Anicia was the blog, Indulge with AniciaB, updating and innovating her Facebook page; giving her true Twitter habits to focus her followers, starting a newsletter to garner email addresses, and incentivizing them to join, and finally, implementing the AniciaB YouTube Channel.

We worked on the blog design for four or five weeks, trying things we liked (and trying some things we found we didn’t like) until we found the combination of color and white space that she wanted. From there the design for Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and her newsletter were shaped to be complimentary to the blog, but innovative and attractive in their own right, and most importantly functioning at peak for her social media campaign.

Her staff had designed a very, very good plan for her blog, incorporating “Diva Deals” every week for pretty remarkable bargains in really pricey couture; giveaways for people who signed up for the newsletter and a serious publishing schedule for posts.

It was by far the best plan I’d ever seen anyone have before they started posting.

She began assembling a panel of experts who also contribute to her blog,

Dr. Thomas Alexander, another client of mine, writes on health and well being, and Deborah DePiano (the “face behind the faces”) a skin specialist who’s clients include Courtney Cox, Alicia Silverstone and Christina Applegate.  For AniciaB’s readers, Deborah shares the secrets that she normally saves for faces you see onscreen.

We are working the giveaways into her Facebook page, so her “fans” know they’ll see the best stuff there first, we’re adding  the special sale items to her Twitter stream, so bargain hunters will get those notices when they’re mobile and can take advantage of them immediately.

I enrolled her in Tweet Adder so she could focus on growing a twitter following that is interested in what she has to say rather than 10,000 followers whose main post is “I got 1,000 followers in one day using twitterpop” or some other shady twitteresque program. Why add to the noise? Anicia has a message to get out and she knows who her audience is. The point is to focus her campaign to those people who are avidly interested in style, couture, glamour and help them achieve their goals n every way possible.

She actively participates in the community she has created, responding to questions from her readers, giving advice on hair, clothes, party extravaganzas. We’re integrating Facebook apps into her blog to increase the interactivity of both and enlarge her community. The feed from her blog feeds links into Facebook, not just headlines, so her readers have developed both on the blog and on Facebook.

So, my advice to you?  “Indulge with AniciaB!”

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Categories: Client Spotlight
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Is there too much Twitter?

Posted on: June 22, 2010

You’ve heard me bitch about the noise that I find on twitter . . . the post Friend or Follow being an example of my efforts to clear noise on my twitter screen.

So in the hope of giving you more ways and means to sort through the twitter-chatter, here are some other Twitter tools to check out.

TweetChat

… helps put your blinders on to the Twitter-sphere while you monitor and chat about one topic.  You choose a hashtag and enter a TweetChat room.

I like the “put your blinders on to the Twitter-sphere” part, but a TweetChat room?

Twitterfall, a take on waterfall, I guess . . .

allows you to select a trending topic, which you can do via search, making lists of groups, and even drilling down to geolocation . . .

A tool I find really helpful for cyber stalkers who would prefer to roam the real earth, geolocation tags.

And after doing all this on Twitterfall, they say you can then login to your twitter account to view your timeline, mentions, and direct messages, subtly implying that their tool will get you mentions and direct messages . . . .

TweetGrid

is a powerful Twitter Search Dashboard that allows you to search for up to 9 different topics, events, converstations, hashtags, phrases, people, groups, etc in real-time. As new tweets are created, they are automatically updated in the grid.

Talk about stalking ability . . . you do not need a twitter account to use TweetGrid.

It was designed to be a “drive-by” service, meaning that anyone can use it without needing to register or log-in first. Just open TweetGrid, choose a grid layout, and off you go! You will, however, need a twitter account to tweet from TweetGrid, but anyone can use it for searching twitter.

On the off chance that you may have wrongly presumed any of these are affiliate links, let me assure you they aren’t. And really, do you think they’d pay me for this kind of press? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Rock on, Kiddos

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Categories: twitter
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Friend or Follow || How to Test your Twitter

Posted on: April 4, 2010

The Website Friend or Follow is a great tool if you want to build your Twitter following, and tweak the tweets you follow . . .

The best thing they do is tell you who of your followers is not following you . . . Quite revealing, I might add. When I put my personal Twitter ID in their system the numbers of people who aren’t following me anymore was staggering . . . and I’ll admit, I was a little miffed at some of the people who weren’t following me anymore. Seemed personal, you know? I’m not interesting enough for you?

I’m really (really) talkative in person, but I tweet sparingly.

Maybe they thought I’d stopped altogether and that’s why they stopped following me.

At any rate, when I saw the 750 people NOT following me, you can bet your ass, I’m no longer following them. Well, there are a few people I’ll still follow.

Brian Clark, CopyBlogger, for instance, is someone I won’t give up – I love his blog: copyblogger (You may have guessed, huh?) [follow Brian on Twitter; read him at copyblogger]

The BBC, The New York Times

. . . ummm, they haven’t heard of me yet, so I’ll keep them, too.

My Fans page shows the people following me, that I’m not following . . . not a huge number, well under a thousand, and my goal is to grow it to 5,000 in the next month.

And lastly, 1,143 people I follow follow me.

Really, can we keep up with the tweets of 1,143 people? Or even 1,000?

Of course not. The goal is to have thousands of people following you, your web guru-ness, and learning those things you have to offer.

More Twitter tools for the next few days. There are a ton and they will all help you be the best tweeter you can be!

Rock On,

Trace

PS – Unfollowing those 750 people took days, by the way . . . incredibly boring activity.

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Your blog represents . . . You

Posted on: February 5, 2010

Your blog is the most personal thing you will ever show the world.

Present anyway you want, most of the people who see it will never see you. If your blog’s job is to promote you and generate revenue, then you are going to meet people. Via phone, email, or in person.

And, any way you look at it, if your blog is your paycheck, you want to present the very best, most professional image possible, as well as showing off the edge you have on the work you do (and that includes displaying some “edginess” in your presentation). So, are you going to buy one of those canned websites that everyone else in your profession has? Google “mortgage broker”, or “real estate agent”; you’ll get a thousand iterations of the same brand because sales people know they have to have a web presence, but they don’t have the knowledge, or time to hone their skills, so they load their credit card information into a self-replicating web-site purchase engine, get their log-on and password and put in their contact details, and maybe their photo, and sit back and wait for the business to roll in.

Come on, do you really think that will work webmagic for you?

I know it is easy and I also know it isn’t always cheap. But even if it was cheap and easy, would it be in anyone’s best interest? Probably Not. Making a splash on the internet, really creating buzz for your business, giving your pages GoogleJuice? For that you do need time, along with the knowledge of not only what you need but how to get it, some money, but probably not as much as you’d think to launch a blog and make it powerful enough to create webmagic, managed social networking for the best viral marketing campaign you can create. And don’t forget,while you’re doing all that, you need to create fresh content for your blog readers, as their numbers grow.

So you need on the short list, Linked In, Facebook, Twitter.

You need to start publishing those articles to e-zines, and you need to make sure you feed is available in at 57 variations for everyone out there because you never know what they’ll want. Well not 57, but sufficient choices. an RSS feed, an email option, do you want to also use Atom? Decisions, decisions, but hurry, cos those articles are still waiting . . . .

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Categories: Blogging
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twitterfeed

Posted on: March 25, 2009
I just signed up for http://twitterfeed.com to add my blog posts to my twitter. Sweet!
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Categories: twitter
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Download Chapter 1 of tweet•ease:The Essential Guide to Shameless Success on Twitter just for sharing a tweet about it!


Share it on Twitter or Facebook, and Chapter One is yours.



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