Why the Internet is an Awesome Social Measurement Tool?

I have been reading an interesting book that I know some folks would find quite boring. I even think it is boring at times - as I am NOT a numbers person. But the point is that it is a good indicator of this business we are in called Internet Marketing. The book is called Click, by Bill Tancer, and it is about what millions of people are doing online and why it matters. Much of the book is about the fact that companies competing in the online space need to use competitive intelligence data - because that's what Bill does for a living at Hitwise.

This book has taken me awhile to read, unlike Paul Gillin's book called the New Influencers, which I couldn't put down. I think partly because I am not a numbers person, and Tancer is all about statistics, numbers and data. But yesterday I finally got to an ah-haaa moment when I realized that the point of the book will have tremendous value for some of our clients. In a chapter called "Finding the Early Adopters" Tancer talks about why innovation spreads from one idea to mass adoption.

Why for example did it only take YouTube less than six months to host more than 25 million videos and out rank Yahoo!? He says that the reason is probably because the first group to discover YouTube was called "Innovators." The Internet has always been made up of different segments. He knows this because his company has a tool that figures out what websites people were on before they clicked over to visit YouTube. Turns out allot of them were on sites like MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, and even Facebook.

But here is the really cool part. His data showed after about a month, the numbers started shifting and he was seeing traffic from web-based email accounts like HotMail, or Yahoo!Mail. Why? Because YouTube did a brilliant thing. Once a person posted their video on the site, the company let them email their video production with a link to their video to a friend! And when friends clicked on the video, it took them to YouTube, and the data showed that's where the new audience had come from.

It is the same reason why this target group started getting tongue rings and drinking Hussong's Beer. It was cool. And they shared the news with their friends. Other market segments include what Tancer calls the Bohemian Mix - that Claris pretty much describes as a bunch of mobile urbanites living liberal lifestyles - and are early adopters of entertainment and technology; Money and Brains; and the Young Digerati. You'll have to get his book to learn more about these guys. But my point here is that as a marketer, the trends we are seeing on the Internet can be measured better than any previous kind of marketing, ever.

The ways that we as a Los Angeles search engine marketing firm doing social media marketing online can track a campaign for our clients, are sprinkled throughout our strategies, and we are getting fabulous results.

Google's Social Meltdown

Today’s post is courtesy of my associate Mike Keesling… who is MarCom Broadband’s search engine optimization expert, and a creative guru out of TV production and advertising. We don’t always agree on issues related to marketing, but I will admit that he’s right more than not.

Said Keesling, “It was only a matter of time before Google came to their senses and re-evaluated using social media as one of their weighted algorithms. To me the whole proposition of giving any weight to social media was what we call in the trade, an ass idea. It's the same thing as comparing reality TV to something worth watching (and if you're one of the morons who sees nothing wrong with wasting hours on irrelevant people doing ludicrous things then please stop reading, right now! This article is not for you.) Let's face it, reality TV is impossible to achieve once you let people know there's a camera on them.”

I don’t agree, for instance with Mike’s next comment basically because I am seeing the content we build and place in article submission sites and blogs, linking back to our client websites, work. “Social Media has always been a lowest common denominator content form, lots of volume, all noise...in other words a bunch of crap.”

He continues, “Why on earth (no, not Google earth which is cool) Google ever entertained the idea that a site's SEO should be influenced by social media content is beyond me...it reeked too much of the blind leading the seeing eye dog. To me, the purpose of a search engine is to help you find the information you seek, the answers to questions you ask; and how and why Google figured that MySpace Content, amateur videos and the like could be of help in my searches is perplexing to me. To their credit, this misguided experiment only lasted about three months before Google silently gave up the concept.”

And he wraps it up with this summary… “Apparently, Google fell victim to the Web 2.0 hype. Newer does not mean better, and much of Web 2.0 is the same-old, same-old with a new name or acronym to describe an existing practice or concept. I find no fault with Google; in fact I commend them for being one of those rare corporations in the top spot that is not willing to rest on their laurels, and is always trying to raise the bar. When you do that, invariably you will have some ill-advised choices, I just think Google could have spotted this one as a lemon before they ever 'went to press' with it. As it came down in the real world, it served solely to justify more idiots putting up more crap.”

Content. Content. Content. The Future of Online Marketing

It’s growing more and more important for companies to produce content for the Internet. We have one emerging technology client who recently asked how we can product 500 pages of content for their website so they can compete with their competition. Easy. Start writing. BUT there are some tips that you need to be aware of first.

The first and foremost challenge, and there’s a reason that I am saying this, is that you MUST know your customer. Content marketing is all about producing content that addresses the concerns of your customer. Your Internet content can and should include web pages, traditional press releases, PRWeb releases, articles, white papers, blogs, forum posts, and podcasts. Content marketing is relevant information delivered by a company to a targeted audience with the goal of changing behaviors. The Internet offers plenty of opportunities for placing relevant content. But it MUST be optimized properly first, or Google can't rank it for when a customer searches for what they want to know using key words and phrases.

First you need to dedicate one person or group to the editorial content you create. Whether this is an internal communications specialist or a contracted team of social media marketing and SEO experts like MarCom Broadband, you must create great content for customers and prospects – and you need to have someone who knows how to optimize the content with your keywords perform their magic.

Next, invest in a good design team. Your customers deserve to enjoy looking at your website and reading your material, so make sure to use designers who have a good understanding of user behavior and preferences.

Use microsites – you don’t need all of this content on your main domain. Vertical portals or microsites are a great way to add content to a site. But for Google and the search engines to be able to read these pages, make sure they are meta-tagged properly and that they don’t go any deeper than three clicks. Make each micro page on one topic, and optimize each page with relevant key words.

I always say that I can take one single topic for a client, and write and use content for that topic – six ways to Sunday. Have fun.

Content is King in Online Technology and Globalization

A new report by Forrester Research says, "most companies get involved in social media in a haphazard way - a blog here, a podcast there - with no coherent web content strategy based on audience needs."

MarCom has been ahead of the curve in online technology because we have been focusing on technology and software companies over the last twenty years, and those companies are the ones that developed online technology. Now it's going global, and other industries are catching up fast.

One of our more recent clients is in another field - the medical industry. The Wiley Protocol has a fabulous content-rich website - www.thewileyprotocol.com. We started working with the company in December, 2006 and the first thing we did was a keyword analysis. The company specializes in bio-identical hormone replacement therapy - a hot topic these days among 40 plus women, and now, the US Senate thanks to a new law circulating that could limit compounding pharmacies. Their audience is pretty clear cut. Consumers, doctors, and compounding pharmacies. This means we have content being developed to use, as I say, "six ways to Sunday." On the website, in press releases both online and offline, newsletters to consumers, doctors and pharmacies, at trade shows, online in articles, blogs, forum posts, podcasts, radio and TV shows, and more.

The company's website designer used the open source content management product called Joomla. It's free, and actually pretty easy to use. The first problem we encountered was that because Joomla uses Global tagging, it's challenging to optimize the site's Meta tags and pages. But my associate Mike Keesling is going to be able to do it now that we were trained in using Joomla. Next we needed to be trained for an hour on how to write, edit, add images and disseminate one of two newsletters via Joomla. Not to mention how to use the mailing management tools for the lists of those who signed up via RSS feeds. After an hour of training this weekend, I edited my newsletter draft and then didn't hit SAVE, so I lost it all. Today it took another couple of hours to revisit, rewrite, and I still have to figure out how to add my images. Learning these tools to save time is money in our business.

We look at all this as an investment in our future. There are other more customizable content management tools such as www.enthusiastinc.com - and this company's version 2 will be set up for easy optiomization. But the bottom line these days is that as marketing practitioners, we all need to invest the time in learning how technology and globalization is changing our trade, because it's not going to stop growing and changing any time soon.