The Social Marketer

Google the other day quietly unveiled what is to be their in-house answer to Digg. Since they opted out of outright ourchase of Digg, (more than likely because they felt; rightly so, that they could do a better job anyway) there was much speculation about what Google would do. Well, here it is.

Kudos to Chris Lang for bringing “Google Reader Adds Friends List, Sharing, Bookmarking and Blog Recommendation Engine” to our attention.  In his post Chris goes into much detail as to how Google will be using this new capability, and what it may mean for those of us who use social bookmarking services, want to keep up with Google, or who merely want a sane alternative to the capricious whims of Digg.

Some of the more interesting items to me include the ability to add individual pages (posts) to your Google Reader, amd then share them with your friends, which you can now import from Gmail. They even provide you a sweet little bookmarklet to make the task ever so much more simple. It also appears that your Google Reader profile will take on more significance, and that Google may even use this to base rankings upon. More to come on that one. However, it is interesting to note that does follow links that appear in each shared post. It uses the permalink to the blog post and also links to the domain in each shared item.

Another tool for the toolbox!

~Keith

If you’ve tried or considered social marketing to groups, such as those found on Yahoo, Google and any of the various other Web 2.0 sites that have the facility, then you won’t be surprised to learn that there is quite a diversity of opinion as to whether or not this is a complete and utter waste of time, or not!

On the surface, it looks like a great idea - a rabid group of devotees in your niche, all salivating to see what wonderful things you’ve got to sell them!

WRONG!

In fact, you coming in without first developing relationship, trust and some value among the congregants therein, would almost certainly be a disastrous entrance!

Instead, if you were to locate such a group as this, take the time to become a valuable contributor before even adding anything in your sig file, much less promoting a link; you might very well be rewarded with an authority aura, one that  will lead to so much more than the odd sale here and there.

Think beyond the quick hit!

~Keith

If you’ve been trying to market your brand, products or anything else via social bookmarking, then you may have found out the hard way that if you get a wee bit zealous with bookmarking your links you may end up getting either your account, or worse, your IP address banned by the offended service.

Most of the time you’re not even really trying to game anything, but simply trying to market as aggressively as possible, and in doing so run afoul of the site’s terms of service. Here’s some tips to avoid being kicked off these various sites, and still get the job done at the same time!

• Make sure not to “discover” your own sites, if possible. Have a friend submit it the first time.
• Don’t only bookmark your own stuff. Make sure you bookmark other sites you find interesting as well, particularly in your niche.
• Consider creating your own bookmarking network, made up of friends who will bookmark each others sites. Don’t get too large or advertise, for obvious reasons. After all, this is what friends are for. This is why you been developing following on all these social sites, right?
• Consider outsourcing your social media marketing. This definitely keeps it at arm’s length!
• Focus on a select  few of the bookmarking sites, taking into account their relative value to your niche. One of the things that will get you ejected is aggressively bookmarking your dating site on a hard news site. Doesn’t fit. Find appropriate venues.
• At least glance at the site’s terms of service. That way, you’ll know where you’re treading on thin ice!
• Don’t rush out and bookmark every blessed post you make. Be selective, show your best!
• Be an active part of the community on the bookmarking site if there is one, (and there usually is) as active contributors who are giving into the mix do very well, and create followers of their own.

The bottom line here as you may have guessed is to use a healthy dose of common sense, and not to treat these sites like a spammer. You may very find that you can translate this to a healthy dose of unique visitors to your sites.

~Keith

Well, yeah, it does. But only to the extent that you’re interested in search engine rankings and organic traffic. Some of the social bookmarking sites carry a pretty heavy weight, and are definitely worth the link juice you’d be getting were you so fortunate to get a link from them. (Not that it’s that hard…) 

Others, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and others are valuable despite the nofollow tag they append to your links simply because there exists the possibility of immense traffic from them should your content become popular on these sites.

So what it boils down to is this: you need to decide as part of your social media marketing strategy which of these social bookmarking sites you want to go after, and do so aggressively. Half measures count for next to nothing here. We’ll talk tomorrow about just what I mean when I say “aggressively”. There are ways to be aggressive without getting yourself in hot water, and we’ll talk about those.

~Keith

One, if you’re not making Google the focus of your search engine optimization efforts, you’re making a mistake! According to Hitwise Google’s share of search now is at 69.17%. Whether this number is real or not, (some think it’s low!) it’s clear that that at least for the moment, the big G is really the only show we’d like to attend! Yahoo hovers just under 20%, while MSN has tanked to about 5%.

The other item is that Google apparently is toying with the idea of ranking your searches. This is part of a Google Labs experiment, and it’s really not clear just what their eventual aims may be, but the output does look very Digg-like! Take a look at the article on TechCrunch and see for yourself!