It occurred to me as I was speaking with a recruiter I’ve known for nearly a decade, that whenever new technologies come out - recruiters are one of the first of the business early adopters. Let me clarify - this is different than consumer early adopters, these are BUSINESS early adopters. Not the gadget geeks or technophiles, recruiters are a competitive and hungry bunch who are constantly looking for an edge. If Victor Conte (of Balco infamy) ever decides to create a substance that helps business people compete - recruiters will be the first to sign up. So as I was going over with him all the technologies they’ve learned to leverage over the years, it hit me that when it comes to new technologies that can impact the B2B space - recruiters are one the first to manipulate it.
Example number 1, email. As a business communication, I remember talking to recruiters who would ask me to “email” my resume long before anyone else I did business with was emailing anything. He and his colleagues recall similarly trying to convince contacts that emailing was safe and better than faxing. Ask yourself - (related to business) what do you remember emailing before your resume?
Example number 2, search engines. Want to penetrate a new company and get a contract to recruit for them? Hit the search engines and look for contact information. In fact, one of the first organized search engine related seminars either of us ever attended was an AIRS training on how to leverage search engines to mine for resumes and contacts at companies.
Example number 3, Linkedin. I analyze daily which social network or web 2.0 technology is going to have the biggest impact on business. If recruiters prove to be right again - Linkedin has already won.
After their recent valuation, it seems obvious that Linkedin is a hit. But for a while I think the only people using the site were recruiters and geeks. While everyone is focused on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and FriendFeed - don’t forget the sleeper Linkedin.
One of the most important aspects to building your blog is promoting comments. This is especially true of business bloggers, where stimulating a two-way conversation with customers is such an important benefit of a corporate blog. This is getting a bit meta - but I’d like to get feedback on evoking comments.
I often joke with other bloggers that the sure-fire best way to get blog comments is to talk about SEO (or celebrity divorces, but not for this blog.) Everyone has an opinion about the single best way to get more comments from your readers. In the past I’ve recommended things like bribery and simply asking. A blogger I work with recommends bloggers comment on their own posts.
What steps have you taken to get more comments on your blog?
Before you head down the path of implementing your own social media marketing strategy, there are numerous items to consider. Here is a list of things to check off your list as you move forward:
Demographics/Audience - who would you benefit from networking with? Industry veterans, customers, consumers? The better you understand who you are going after the better you can focus your efforts.
Scope/Size - Are you going to launch full steam, or just add a few sites at a time? How many people in your organization can participate and contribute? Much of the scope/size depends on your goals for adding this marketing channel.
Goals - Of course! If you’re planning on measuring it and improving it, setting goals is a critical step. Are your goals sales oriented, traffic related, based on network size, SEO?
Research/Planning - Before you launch a Facebook profile and build a group, is that even the right place for you based on these other items? Doing your research ahead of time will help keep the project tightly focused and keep planning on task.
Budget - Besides the time investment, are you prepared to invest in media to help boost your participation and network-ability?
Branded or Personal - One of the biggest decisions for business oriented social media marketing is whether this is a branded endeavor or one from a personal direction. Some firms (like Zappos) who can have their CEO participate can combine these efforts, but other firms have to draw a clear distinction.
It’s seems obvious, but having a strong plan is critical to being able to execute, measure and optimize your social media strategy. Twitter and FriendFeed may seem like easy fun, but the difference between them being a fun thing to do with your Blackberry or a business marketing strategy lies in these questions.
< a href=’http://blog.rssapplied.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/logo.png‘>Since Twitter owns the lion share of micro-blog participants, it becomes the benchmark for all new micro-blog communities that pop up. Plurk gets compared, Jaiku, Tumblr to some extent, FriendFeed, and now identi.ca. Twitter is a phenomenally addictive site, and as a social network it’s one of the most flexible ways to create and expand your network online. The often blogged about problem is that Twitter seems to be trying to self-destruct. It’s always battling with server downtime and latency, causing droves of people to complain, look for a new micro-blog community, try the new micro-blog community, and then go back to Twitter (because that’s where all the people are.)
Besides being the social network du jour, identi.ca has an interest opportunity because they are building the tool to be open source - meaning you can use the code yourself and build your own identi.ca derivative. What better way to beat Twitter than by giving everyone the opportunity to build one. The biggest issue here is that the reason everyone eventually goes back to Twitter is that it has the largest network.
Twitter provides a totally different perspective on why building and growing your online networks is so powerful. Twitter succeeds because of it’s network, in spite of it’s failures and growing competition. Social network users and new media early adopters can be a picky group - and are not typically patient when it comes to technology not keeping up with their demands - but because of it’s massive network Twitter survives. Keep in mind as you grow your blog and social network that content is important, but your network will make or break you.
If you are trying to market your blog, whether to help drive traffic to your business website or because your blog IS your business, mastering Google is important to you (and there are roughly a quadrillion people who can help you with that.) What I’ve noticed is often left out of many blog marketing plans is PPC. It may cost, but it’s a controlled cost and the only sure fire way to guarantee placement for certain keywords on Google. It’s also a fantastic way to see which keywords are worth your time for organic optimization, as Google Adwords gives you impressions statistics to go with conversion information and click-through-rate.
You should definitely do your research first so you don’t wind up spending $10-per-click, but there is another factor that should help you consider this option - the “multiplier” effect. The “multiplier” effect is what happens when you can get your organic listing and paid listing on the same page - especially the first page - where the increase is greater than the sum of the previous individual listings. If you’re familiar with more traditional advertising, it’s like instant “frequency” leading to greater likelihood they will respond to your ad. A solid long-tail strategy could benefit you by keeping costs down and improving click-through-rate.
There is an interesting post at Mashable about how social media may be affecting the value of Google’s PageRank system. The author, Steven Hodson, has some interesting thoughts (I’m paraphrasing) about how social media could really change the game and further empower consumers to dictate the popularity of something, shifting some power away from Google’s PR. He seems to be making a case for a tech entrepreneur to take on Google by leveraging social media, and he may be absolutely right. My take away from the article is a bit of a tangent.
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful and trusted forms of marketing. Google originally empowered consumers to take control and become more educated consumers. It empowered small businesses to compete with large multinational corporations. Now blogging and social media are connecting people into larger and more accessible networks, making each consumer more powerful (both good and bad) than ever before by making “word of mouth” easier to broadcast. Social networking has taken away geographical borders from networking with like minded people. Blogging has provided a fast and simple publishing platform to consumers to help them share ideas. When you combine them all, new media has given consumers an unbelievable power to direct brands and products into new directions through instant feedback. Combined, their strengths are magnified but I don’t see them as competitive.
As a marketer, and someone who enjoys working with entrepreneurs and small businesses, social media provides an opportunity to take control of a brand at a grass roots level, and guide it in a controlled direction. It requires careful and deliberate participation, transparency, and embracing the idea that solid networking is not about selling but about participating and providing value. You can’t force a viral campaign, and you can’t push your sales agenda on Twitter. What you can do is participate in new media in a way that leverages the benefits of search engines, social networks, and bloggers to build your brand the old fashioned way - through word of mouth and a solid reputation.
Google and social media are perfect for each other, and I don’t see them as competitors as much as having distinctly different agendas and purposes. Mr. Holden provides some thought provoking ideas, and maybe I’m being short sighted, but I see them as more powerful together than they are apart and I can’t forsee that changing.
Think you’ve posted your blog to every blog network there is, but you want to boost traffic? Diversify your networks and add podcasts, youtube, and social networks. Adding podcasts to your blog can open you up to a significant network, leading to new traffic, readership, subscriptions and leads. Want to diversify further - add video and post to Youtube and Vimeo and the long list of video podcast networks. This leads not only to a diversity of marketing channels and networking opportunities, but has also created diversity of content. Content diversity is one of the best ways to keep and grow readership of your blog.
With content diversity and wider distribution, building your network of other bloggers and social media sites becomes easy. Start small and steadily improve your blog traffic\ with these 10 sites:
If you weren’t participating in Digg, Kevin Rose announced today a reason why you should start. Digg is going to learn about your “Diggs” overtime, and begin to provide better intelligence about other Diggers that might be interesting to you. Digg calls this The Recommendation Engine, and it launches in Beta this week. Here’s more about this new feature:
Why does this mean Digg is a more valuable social tool for you? Because by Digging articles that are relevant to your business frequently, it’s a great way to build your Digg reputation and increase exposure. Digg is one of the most powerful social sites out there, and is frequently one of the top referrers in a social media campaign. With this new Recommendation Engine, it’s likely to get even better. Make sure you are Digging, and do it often.
You make great web design products. However, the fact that Flash is invisible to search engines makes it a detriment to anyone who values the web as a business channel. Which by the way, is everyone.
Adobe has finally decided to work with Google and Yahoo to make Flash something spiders can crawl and search engines can index. Granted, it still isn’t going to be as highly optimized as XHTML/CSS, but it’s a great start and Adobe has needed this. For the record, I love Flash. If you want to make something engaging and attractive, there is nothing like Flash. But like you, I would like to leverage the trillions of searches to help grow my business and make a living. I’ll forgo some glossy interactivity for online marketability - and I’m clearly not alone.
Their are two important things to take away from this announcement:
1. Even Adobe has realized that search engine visibility is absolutely crucial.
2. You can finally begin to add Flash components to your website.
I’m a huge fan of what can be done with CSS and HTML, but I’m glad to hear Adobe finally got the word that Google and Yahoo were here to stay and decided to play nice.
Zappos is one of the top retailers on the web, selling loads of shoes and building a stellar reputation for customer support. Great support has been a mantra of the organization since inception, and recent changes to the company marketing strategy simply reinforce this. Zappos is successful, because they embraced the web early and didn’t try to force it into old business paradigms.
Zappos success, and the success of Barack Obama (democratic political candidate for President) have something in common. They understand the difference between using the internet to drive traffic - and harnessing the network effects of communicating online. Both are heavily invested in social networking - many, if not most Zappos employees have a Twitter account. Obama and his team created groups and profiles on every major and minor social network, and leveraged Youtube extensively to spread the message. One of the most successful viral campaigns of the last few years, Will.i.am’s “Yes we can” video may go down in history due to it’s viral success.
What this company and this candidate understand, and what you can take away from their experience is that being visible on the web through SEO/SEM is very different from this all inclusive web strategy that includes blogs, blog outreach, social media, video and personal networking. When you wonder if all this Web 2.0 “stuff” is for real, think about the first term Senator from Illinois who defeated the Clintons on his way to running for President.
Since Twitter owns the lion share of micro-blog participants, it becomes the benchmark for all new micro-blog communities that pop up. 