Blog - SMO

In this ever-changing world of social media, it's important to keep up with what the "cool kids" are doing online. Or are the "cool kids" spelling that with a "k," now, as in "Kool Kids?"  I don't think we're supposed to call them "groovy" anymore, but I have noticed a resurgence in the term "hipsters," thanks to the occupy-everything movements. 

Well, whatever you want to call them, it's a good idea to keep up with the techniques that work.  Back in the good ol' days (circa 2009-2010), it was considered rude or in bad form online to simply use a social networking profile as another one-way broadcast medium.  Only huge corporations with established name recognition like Coca-Cola or people who were just impossibly cool like Hollywood stars could get away with having gazillions of followers or friends and not really following anyone back. 

However, as people tried to gain name recognition by "mutually following" everyone on the web, they found that their networks became full of people who were doing the exact same thing, and no one was really getting a lot of benefit out of it anymore.

Mashable started a good discussion on this over the weekend, specific to Twitter, but the concept also applies to Facebook or Google Plus or Pinterest, or whatever industry-specific social network you might be using.  It's important to remember what the PURPOSE of your social network is.

So what is the purpose of your social network?  Is it to drive traffic and links back to your blog? Is it to target your prospective customers, and give them a convenient way to communicate with you?  Is it to actually develop a meaningful relationship with old friends from school? Is it to build your online reputation so a Google search for your name returns positive results in your current job search?

As you can imagine, the people you will want to include in your network will be different depending on your primary reason for social networking.  If your only goal is blog traffic and links, then probably the old method of gaining as many followers as possible will work for you.  If you are trying to build direct communication with your potential customer or client base, you might want to limit your "mutual" following to people in that demographic.  If you're social network exists for personal reasons, you might want to increase your privacy settings, and network only with people you know personally.  If you're wanting your online profile to look great in a job search, you'll need to maintain a public profile, and be very careful about what photos and comments you let those old friends from high school tag you in  ;-) 

I've been exploring a service this week called Scoop.it, which is an online magazine curator - with both free and premium versions (see pricing and features HERE).  For an individual or very small business, the free version is fine to start with.

Above is a sample of what a magazine by Kathleen Poulous, called "Content Blogging" looks like. 

This service is wonderful for those who like to share large volumes of links with their followers or friends on a daily basis.  Instead of a dozen separate links to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., this service allows users to "curate" links from anywhere on the web or within the Scoop.it community into a very neat, professional-looking magazine.

To begin using the service, you simply join the community and follow the easy instructions to start a topic (with a unique title).  There is an optional widget download, or you can simply add links manually.  The system will pull photos from the link and allow you to choose one - similar to the way links are shared on Facebook.  If you want to include a post (microblog) directly in your magazine without a URL, you can do that, too, and even include your own photos on any of your posts if you like. 

Once your topic has some posts, you can share those individually on your blog or social networks, or share the whole magazine.  Your followers can subscribe to your feed and receive your updates in their news readers or by e-mail.  You can also be sent summaries of the items in your magazine that you can use to forward to an e-mail list if you like. 

This is one of the things on the web that really and truly is "easy and fun," so go ahead and give it a try.  You know you want to. 

After reading 10 Things All Entrepeneurs Fail At by TechCrunch's James Alutcher (and resisting the English teacher inside of me wanting to correct the grammar mistakes in the title), I thought of a couple of mistakes I've made and seen others make when putting their new business venture on the web in the form of a website and/or a social networking profile.

The first is underestimating the importance of an online presence.  I went through my local coffee shop's drive-thru earlier this week, and while I was waiting in line, I decided to look them up online.  I was stunned to see that they really have no online presence.  They're in a few directories developed by other people, but they don't have a website or any sort or any social networking profiles that I could find.  Needless to say, I'm working on a proposal (I wonder if they would let me do the job for free mocha frapps...hmm).  But I digress.

One of the first things people do now when they discover a new business, or when they're checking out a new business, is LOOK THEM UP ONLINE.  If they're a local business, people expect to be able to see the hours of operation and a map to nearby locations.  People are also hoping to look at a menu of the products, and maybe even a discount.  In many cases they'll be using their mobile devices to do this.  Any business that hasn't taken charge of its own online reputation by having at least their basic contact information listed online in an easy-to-find and use format is missing the boat. 

The other mistake we all tend to make when we're starting a new business, and caught up in the excitement of seeing our first website (and showing all of our friends), is that we might overestimate how much business we're going to get from that website.  Somehow we tend to imagine that there are millions of people just sitting out there with a void in the shape of whatever we're selling that are going to be so happy that we finally opened for business and put up a web page or a Facebook profile.  Maybe that will happen, but just in case it doesn't (ahem), it's important to remain realistic about the purpose of our website and the goal of our online efforts. 

Sure, if you really study and implement good search engine optimization and you have a business that is geared toward online commerce, you may see a lot of profit just from the online traffic you generate.  For most local businesses, however, the website and/or social networking profile is the new yellow pages ad: You must have one so that people will know you're legit, but the traffic you're going to get solely from there will be a small percentage of your overall profits. 

Have a great weekend, everyone!

On some social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, there are some folks who have become extremely competitive with how many people they can get to follow them.  Yes, in a sense it is a good thing to have a lot of followers if those followers are actually helping you further your purpose for social networking.  For those who believe the whole purpose of social networking is to see how many followers you can get, I'm afraid they may have lost sight of the goal.

The point is usually to grow a network of people with like-minded goals and interests.  Clyde McKendrick of Mashable posted a great op-ed this week on Why Brands Need Friends - Not Fans - on Facebook.  The article is specific to Facebook fan pages, which we have also covered at length here on WebRev, the overall concept is universal to social networking.

If people are just basically adding you to their list of "likes," then never visiting your page or profile or feed again, there is not very much networking going on. 

For me, personally, I know this to be true in regard to the people I follow and friend on the various networks.  I take whatever steps are necessary to filter out the "spammy" posts in my feed, and read only the posts of "real people" that I like to interact with. I've "liked" and even "friended" a large number of brands, bands, businesses, charities, politicians and celebrities (national and local).  If it quickly becomes obvious that whoever is administrating those pages or profiles is simply posting, rather than interacting, I unsubscribe from those friends or hide their posts in my feed.  I do, however, continue to read the posts of several brands and celebrities who do interact with their friends and followers.  I'm also more likely to send them links to news stories or information I believe they might find interesting (no, I don't spam them with my own blog posts - that would just not be cool).  

A good example of someone who I believe has a good understanding of how to make this social networking thing work is the Blue Whale of Catoosa.  For those unfamiliar, this is a Route 66 Landmark near Tulsa, OK (picture above).  The gentleman who is responsible for caring for the land the Blue Whale floats on has used Twitter (@bluewhalert66) and a Facebook profile  turned "Blue" into an online celebrity among the local population and also among people who have lived in the area and have moved away, but remember the Blue Whale fondly from their days in Oklahoma.

Blue gets into the spirit of all the major holidays online, and even recently donned a pink hat to support cancer research.  He stays out of politics, but is up on current events, and usually has an amusing take on them.  He's able to rally supporters and volunteers to help raise funds for his maintenance and up-keep.  He networks with other Route 66 businesses, like Pops in Arcadia, with whom he collaborated to brand Catoosa's own Root Beer, called "Catoosa Cream Soda" (very good).  He interacts with his online friends by responding to their tweets and posts, and commenting on pictures they tag him in. And that's a lot of people, because everyone has to get their picture taken with Blue!

In the process of amassing an impressive "following," Blue has also made a lot of online "friends," who are willing to donate their time and efforts in various ways to keep this adorably historic landmark a beautiful place for people to visit.

A story is making the rounds this week which is being pushed as "new" news, but actually isn't.  Well, sort of.  Let's start at the beginning.

I long time ago in a land far, far away (ok, it was about ten years ago, and this all happened in the Internet)...Google and other started crawling blogs and every started figuring out ways to get their own blogs to the top of the search engines in a field of study that would become known as "SEO (Search Engine Optimization)."  One of the techniques for gaining "points" on the search engines was to get people to link to your website, and eventually bloggers figured out they could trick the search engines into thinking other websites were linking to their own site by going on other blogs and posting links back to their own blogs.

So Google, which by then had become the mother of all search engines, and industry standard, changed its "algorithm" to not read javascript or AJAX script, which rendered most blog and website comments useless for search engine marketing.  Over time, Google has continued to fine-tune its algorithm to be able to read and index blog and website comments without counting the back-links to the blogs, giving an unfair advantage to bloggers who are just trying to "game" the system by linking all over the web to their own blogs rather than writing quality content that other people want to link to.

The big news of the week (so far) occurred when Digital Inspiration happened to discover that Google is now indexing Facebook comments, and then Google software engineer Matt Cutts confirmed the change on Twitter.  It is unknown right now whether there is a window of opportunity for SEO aficionados to grab some back-link "juice" by linking to their own blogs on Facebook.  If so, it will only be a "brief" window, as Google is pretty good at quickly recognizing this sort of tactic and shutting it down.

Now, more than ever, it is important to be aware that literally everything you do online is likely to show up in a Google search - even commenting on a friend's Facebook page.  So don't post anything online that you wouldn't want the world to know.  Also, now more than ever, it is important to realize that what your friends post on your blog and your website and your social networking profile (even as a comment) could reflect as much on you as it does on them, so moderating comments may no longer be an optional activity.  In fact, it's now more important than ever.

Mashable published an infographic last week (click the image below to see the larger version on Mashable's Website), illustrating how the millennial generation uses mobile.

As you can see, for the purposes of this report, the "millennials" are ages 18-34.  If 18-34 year-olds are part of your target demographic for your online business (or your web page for your local business), then you need to realize that when they visit you online, they'll most likely be doing it on their phone or tablet.  Therefore, you absolutely must have a mobile-friendly web presence.

The quickest way to find out how mobile-friendly you are online, simply use your smart phone (or borrow one), and view your website and the linked social networking profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  If you don't like what you see, here are some quick ways to become more easily accessible by mobile.

Use QR codes.  We wrote about these cute little things back in May, and since then I've been seeing increased usage of them.  Over the weekend, I saw a plumber with a huge one on the back of his car - it was brilliant.  I'm sure if I'd been a millenial (I'm about a decade too late for that), I'd have been able to get my phone out in time to snap a photo of it for this blog, or even better, look him up on the web.  See What is a QR Code and do I need one? for more information on how to get one for free.

Either have a mobile version of your website (optional), or make sure your regular web page is "flex width" and that you've minimized the use of Adobe Flash.  You want your web page to shrink to fit a tiny screen when necessary, so readers can view the entire page from right to left before they enlarge it to read it.  It will be far less confusing for them.  Also, most mobile browsers don't really play nicely with Adobe Flash, so make sure your mobile users have an alternate way to get any important information that does not involve using the flash player.

Make sure you have a feed for your regular updates.  If you post your updates in a blog, make sure you have a feed for that blog.  If you post them some other way, make sure you have a feed for those updates, because people who like to access their favorite websites on their mobile devices often do so using their feed reader.  Check out the WebReb "Feeds" archive for more information about feeds and feed readers.

Make good use of mobile-enabled social networking profiles.  Twitter was developed as a mobile technology, as was Friendfeed, and Facebook does a great job with mobile, so if you have accounts on these sites, be sure to link to them from your website, and keep them updated.  Many of your regular readers may choose to access your update using their social network if they find that is easier. 

What are your experiences with incorporating mobile technology into your online marketing strategy?