Tanya Irwin at www.mediapost.com mentioned a recent survey indicating that nearly one third of Web marketers plan to increase spending significantly on social media, including blogs and discussion boards. This survey was conducted in September by Prospero Technologies, LLC (www.prospero.com).
According to their 2007 Social Media Survey, 59 percent of respondents reported that social media performance in 2007 met or exceeded their marketing objectives, boosting future spending expectations--with 31 percent planning to spend significantly more on social media applications in 2008.
The survey also mentioned that current challenges include integrating community-generated content with the rest of the Web site and understanding best practices for new and evolving technologies as well as keeping up with new social media technology advances.
This is the area that MarCom Broadband is getting alot of new business. Writing content, adding key words properly, and nd making sure the meta and alt tags have been done properly.
Regarding the types of social media applications currently in use, respondents said blogs and discussion boards topped the list. And for 2008, they say that discussion boards and blogs still top the list for Web and brand marketers followed closely by ratings and reviews and then social networking applications.
That's why we ghostwrite for our cients blogs, such as Rocco Basile's new blog on his charity work with Children of the City in Brooklyn.
Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
Powers of Social Media Marketing
Here's an interesting factoid. If your website isn't optimized properly, it's probably no more than a portfolio, and unless you just point people to it, nobody will find it. And if it is flash, it can't be optimized for the search engines. In fact, for expedience and time, it's probably much faster and more effective if you have a blog, or post information in social media sites like You Tube, or My Space.
We have a couple of new projects at MarCom, one of which will require launching and getting information out to the masses by early January. We need to build a simple website first, and even if my associate Mike did a key word analysis, and then optimized all of the new website pages (the meta and alt image tags), Google and the search engines would not necessarily start tracking the site for well over a month. Mike is a pro at website optimization.
One mistake is that many website are using same title tags for all pages and no description tags. And then I typically take a look at the content inside each of the pages, and make sure the key words are placed properly.
There is one pretty cool program that we often recommend to our clients. It's called PRESSfeed. This is a cost effect and easy way to put up a press room and post and show press releases within a website. But more importantly, PRESSfeed is a Social Media Marketing tool that creates RSS feeds for online content syndication and publishing as well as for better search engine visibility.
A blog on the other hand, is also a great online marketing tool. They are pretty easy to set up, and ready to go insofar as the RSS feeds. This blog, for example, is by Blogger. It's easy to set it up, choose a template, add photos, and add keywords, or as they say "Labels for this post."
Another tip is that social media marketing strategies must be well planned in advance. This means you need to map out a schedule and budget for posting PR Web releases ($360 each), along with traditional press releases on a newswire such as PR Newswire. You need to schedule blog posts. Three per week minimum is advised at first. And then you can always do a social media video to post on You Tube - and the 30 or so other video websites online.
In fact, we have a new client that we started about a month ago that we can now begin tracking in my next blog as a case hisotry. Stay tuned...
We have a couple of new projects at MarCom, one of which will require launching and getting information out to the masses by early January. We need to build a simple website first, and even if my associate Mike did a key word analysis, and then optimized all of the new website pages (the meta and alt image tags), Google and the search engines would not necessarily start tracking the site for well over a month. Mike is a pro at website optimization.
One mistake is that many website are using same title tags for all pages and no description tags. And then I typically take a look at the content inside each of the pages, and make sure the key words are placed properly.
There is one pretty cool program that we often recommend to our clients. It's called PRESSfeed. This is a cost effect and easy way to put up a press room and post and show press releases within a website. But more importantly, PRESSfeed is a Social Media Marketing tool that creates RSS feeds for online content syndication and publishing as well as for better search engine visibility.
A blog on the other hand, is also a great online marketing tool. They are pretty easy to set up, and ready to go insofar as the RSS feeds. This blog, for example, is by Blogger. It's easy to set it up, choose a template, add photos, and add keywords, or as they say "Labels for this post."
Another tip is that social media marketing strategies must be well planned in advance. This means you need to map out a schedule and budget for posting PR Web releases ($360 each), along with traditional press releases on a newswire such as PR Newswire. You need to schedule blog posts. Three per week minimum is advised at first. And then you can always do a social media video to post on You Tube - and the 30 or so other video websites online.
In fact, we have a new client that we started about a month ago that we can now begin tracking in my next blog as a case hisotry. Stay tuned...
Thursday, December 6, 2007
The 30 Percent Rule in Social Media Marketing
Here's a tip for those who are posting content online. When the search engines look at website content, they read left to right and bottom up and top down. Therefore the beginnings and ends of all your sentences are being scanned. If you have several identical documents online, say a press release posted on your website, and also on PR Web, the engines like Google will only count one.
However if you post two different types of release - each with content that is at least 30 percent different, search engines will count the releases as two separate documents -- giving you more credit toward rankings on the search engine pages.
Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. Their PageRank™, is a system for ranking web pages which plays a central role in their web search tools. As Google puts it:
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."
Therefore, whether you are writing an article, a press release, blog post, forum post, web content, or a white paper -- all about the same topic -- each ducument must be about 30 percent different. And don't forget to add your key words to each document.
MarCom Broadband has done hundreds of keyword analysis reports for out clients. You'd be surprised which longtail words do the best.
However if you post two different types of release - each with content that is at least 30 percent different, search engines will count the releases as two separate documents -- giving you more credit toward rankings on the search engine pages.
Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. Their PageRank™, is a system for ranking web pages which plays a central role in their web search tools. As Google puts it:
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."
Therefore, whether you are writing an article, a press release, blog post, forum post, web content, or a white paper -- all about the same topic -- each ducument must be about 30 percent different. And don't forget to add your key words to each document.
MarCom Broadband has done hundreds of keyword analysis reports for out clients. You'd be surprised which longtail words do the best.
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