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.

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.

Links: To Buy or Not to Buy

Now that Google has taken the gloves off against websites and firms that they consider in violation of link building protocols, we must pause to reconsider our link building strategies. Initially, Google indicated their policy was to disallow, or even penalize, any paid links as well as websites who purchase paid links. Google may be the purveyors of the one of the world's most advanced linguistic parsing algorithms, but my associate Mike Keesling of MarCom Broadband's SEO expert found their statement to be full of holes.

Would a website be banned or penalized because they had paid for a Yahoo! directory listing? Aren't Pay Per Click (PPC) ads essentially paid links? Would Google really penalize their own adwords users? In the following months, Google has zigged and zagged through this semantic minefield of their own making. Google clarified its Yahoo! Directory position, saying that since inclusion was not guaranteed until approved by a human this did not constitute a paid link. Google clarified its PPC position by saying these are ad buys so they also do not constitute paid links. All well and good, but we are still confused.

If one buys a link on a site that sells them, couldn't this also fall under the safe harbor of being an ad buy? Who determines this and what are the guidelines? The definitive answer is probably many months away. In the meantime, one certainty is that the value of reciprocal links has actually gone up (provided the linking partners are legitimate and within the same or related business categories or markets). How long this bump in reciprocal links lasts is anybody's guess at this point.

So what would Mike recommend? For reciprocal links, choose your linking partners carefully. Make sure their page rank is the same or better than yours. Make sure they aren't blackballed by Google. Look at potential partners websites ... Do they look and feel like a legitimate company website or do they have the barnyard smell of a link farm?

For directory listings (one of the best places to get one-way inbound links) exercise the same smell tests just described. Double up on the inbound links you can control--press releases and article submissions. Mike said he would take a pass for now on the pay per link or pay per blog post outfits. Figure it's at least 50/50 that these will be next to feel the wrath of Google.

"In a weird way, I welcome Google's position, stance and actions against paid link builders--Link building is the most pain-in-the-butt of all SEO practices and this allows people who hate building links (like me) to slack off on it for a damned good reason," said Keesling.

Showstoppers Webinar on Social Media, Blogging and Podcasting

Yesterday's ShowStoppers Webinar, "How to Engage Bloggers & Podcasters to Boost Buzz and Generate Coverage" was a success with over 159 signed up, and more than 90 attendees. Maybe some folks got stuck in traffic as it started at 11AM EST, but 8AM on the West coast. Our host was a long time colleague, Steve Leon, cofounder, partner and producer of the fabulous ShowStoppers press events.

There are always lessons learned when woking with new technologies. This was one of my first webinars. I really enjoyed the process, and look forward to even better future sessions. We used GoToMeeting (http://www.citrixonline.com/) and had several dress rehearsals. This was key, because the first time, I learned that the entire webinar needed to be very conversational. We had a PowerPoint as a guideline for the participants, but the goal became not to read from it. This gave us plenty of time in advance to come up with questions for Steve our host, and to set up the function for participants to email in questions. Lena West, one of the speakers, was a great guide as she has set up many shadowblogs and crisis PR blogs for major clients.

Here's another tip ... It's really important to silence all of your telephones prior to doing a webinar. I use Vonage, so I went online and disconnected the call waiting function, and voicemails. I put a do not disturb sign on my door, and closed all windows. Don't use a mobile telephone, or the speaker function on your direct land line. This is important in our case, as the webinar was recorded, thanks Lena West, who is a columnist and blogger for Entrepreneur Magazine and an Infoworld blogger. She is also CEO of XynoMedia, a New York-based social media strategy firm, serving high-growth companies and PR firms.

Let's go back to the basics here and review the inportance of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. A site’s ranking in a search is essential for directing more traffic to the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives. It requires:
•Participation
•Openness, transparency and disclosure
•Conversation
•Community Driven
•Facilitation (facilitating conversations that are already happening online)

That said, our webinar focused on just a couple of the tools that are used in social media marketing -- blogging and podcasting. Lena had some great tips for PR professionals insofar as pitching bloggers -- lessons I too have learned in a recent blog and podcast tour for a diet book. KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. One paragraph, links to the press releases, or website info. Lena made the point, fiercely... if she wants more info, and is interested in covering your pitch, she will contact you. Period. Do not send attachments, long press releases, or long anything, for that matter. Bloggers and podcasters are really busy. And as my associate Mike Keesling said, who used to work at a news station in Hawaii, he got hundreds of pitches per day and only had time to read the headline (subject in email) and a couple of concise sentenses. So if you cannot consolidate your email pitches into a couiple of sentences, then you are hosed.

If you want to read more tips, I strongly suggest that you download Lena's little eBook of invaluable info on pitching bloggers and podcasters without ticking them off. Go to
http://www.xynoMedia.com/showstoppers to download your copy of The Blogosphere Cluebook: How PR Agents & Publicists Can Effectively Engage Blogosphere Influencers Instead of Ticking Them Off by Lena West.

Enjoy.

Sources:
PowerPoint: http://www.showstoppers.com/webinar/bloggersandpodcasters.ppt
The Webinar: http://www.showstoppers.com/webinar/bandp.mp3

Article Submissions for Social MEdia Marketing

Lately it seems pretty clear that the media don't really need PR folks pitching to them. We still do, however, most media are Internet savy enough to research their topics online and find articles about companies out there on the Web. And so that means that we, as marketers, need to make sure that our clients are also out there - accessable even by the media. What does this mean?

You start with a good press room on your website with press releases that include your key words embedded in each release. You add a press kit with documents that describe what your company is all about - that means press releases, company backgrounders or profiles, frequently asked questions (FAQ), product or services profiles, and customer testimonials, etc. Each of these documents too must be key worded.

Next you post your press releases by the wire service companies, and write articles and post them throughout the web in article submission sites. Its important that you not "copy" any documents that are posted. The rule of thumb is to change the content of each artcle on the web about 30 percent because Google will not "count" duplicates.

Just like in the old days, people said retail was all about location, location, location -- well, search engine optimization and social media marketing is all about content, content, content on the Internet.