Welcome to HOD Viral Online Marketing

Sponsored by JenKaneCo, well known social media evangelist Brian Solis recently gave a presentation to an enthusiastic group of marketers in downtown Minneapolis to introduce the concepts behind his new book:  Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. The following is an overview of his presentation:

Relations vs. Relationships

There’s something interesting that’s happening right now on the web:  relations are starting to matter more than relationships.  The key lesson for marketers, and what the rest of this overview discusses, is that people will engage around content that compels them in networks where that content spreads.

We are all going to have to shift from relationships to relations:  having more, thinner (but still relevant) connections is starting to matter more.  As a marketer, this shifts the power balance.  People are connecting around psychographics rather than demographics, and this means four degrees is the new six degrees of separation.  In plain English:  we’re all becoming better connected and users are vitally important to the equation of how information spreads.

A way for your marketing to succeed is to take the approach of a sociologist, an anthropologist and a philosopher rather than a traditional marketer.  That’s because it is people who are in control of the ideas that spread.  The web has changed things and marketing and PR have changed along with it.

Context Becoming as Valuable as Content

The challenges go deeper than marketing approaches.  When you join a company, you’re not given a Facebook page and Twitter account like you are an email account.  You already have those things.  And companies aren’t sure what to do or how they can leverage their own team members to increase their digital presence.  Your team members are vitally important because “content being king” is evolving into an era where context is king (yet, content still remains quite the powerful queen).  Context is proven to show who you are connected to and why around every conversation.  Your team members are a key ingredient to providing context, their actions equating to a type of social currency for your brand.

Speaking of content, how people react to your company’s content (something now public) equates to the stature of your community.  Reputation, trust and relationships are earned through these reactions and how you connect contextually is the experience prospects seek.

Content and context define the future of successful marketing.  You’re no longer marketing to individuals, you’re now marketing to “an audience with an audience.”  And every time they react to something you do, it shows the power of relations vs. relationships.  But without remarkable content and relevant context, you can never reach “an audience with an audience” effectively because you’re missing part of the equation of why people share ideas.

Getting Started

One of the easiest things to do is see what’s happening right now.  An approach that can be used is a “30 day window” to see a snapshot in time of what’s happening around a brand.  For a brand unsure about how much conversation was happening around their products – a sample search can reveal a staggering amount of messages across social platforms.  In many cases it’s a shock and can result in disbelief from management teams.  A social media monitoring service should be required for every brand to monitor the situation in an ongoing fashion.

Getting at least a snapshot is a good first step, and ongoing monitoring is even better, but equally important is to consider the data in perspective.  Or to put it simply:  share of voice vs. share of conversation.  Share of voice only gives you a partial view as it assumes everyone is talking about companies in a given industry.  A more relevant approach is to look at share of conversation.  As an example, consider  Old Spice – in the discussions on the social web regarding “body spray,” how well did they do?  While the overall conversations and reactions generated, putting it into context truly provides meaning of share of conversation.

Share of conversation matters more than most consider.  People are actively using the social web as part of the decision making cycle, and so this is the socialization of more than just marketing, but business as a whole.

Conclusion

How are you adapting to the socialization of business to help move these things in the right direction?  You need to extend divisions so that they are responding to consumers at the right point to become trusted and a part of the community.

All companies need to realize the fact that they are now in the media business, and that every company is now a media company.  This strategy is potent enough several companies embracing it have developed brands of media so popular they’re putting out best-selling books.  The influence they have over their markets is that big.

Influence is the ability to inspire desirability and measurable action and outcomes.  It is more than a click or more than a view.  As marketers, creating content and context to ultimately form influence is how to achieve long term, sustainable social media success.

For more on getting started in social media, consider creating a social media roadmap to plan your social media strategy.

The sheer volume of social media marketing and search engine optimization advice posted online can make it difficult for companies to make sense out what direction they should take. There are many models and approaches to leveraging  optimized content for discovery through search and how to develop social networks to engage customers and promote content.  It comes down to fundamentals and I think the following Four pieces of the Social SEO puzzle can help companies of any size get started in a more meaningful way on their journey towards becoming productive on the social web.

Listening, Content, Socialize and Measure could just as well be represented as a cycle, but I think the forward direction is important because you can’t reach outcomes without action. Any good social media marketing effort needs to begin with some kind of Listening program. That means using social media monitoring tools to collect, sort and manage social content according to topics being monitored.  Content is the glue that makes search engines work and content is a critical part of the social sharing experience within social media. Speaking of sharing, socializing with other like-minded individuals as a personal experience can fold well with brand interactions as long as the needs of the buyer persona has been reconciled with business objectives. Successful efforts within the social web can be measured, and should be, in a variety of ways.  Measurement justifies objectives and it’s important to identify the right tools for monitoring real time and web analytics.

Here are a few more details on each of these steps. I encourage you to think about how your company is implementing these steps in your own social media marketing efforts. Are you taking shortcuts? Are you following through? Have you found more important steps to follow?

Listening

An essential start and ongoing component for a social media marketing and optimization effort is to leverage listening tools.  As companies struggle to understand where the social web fits within their online marketing strategy, a social media monitoring program (listening) should be implemented immediately.  Collecting social web data, organizing and managing it is essential for tapping into the conversations, influencers and real-time marketing opportunities that abound in today’s internet environment.  While there are many things you can listen for with a social media monitoring effort, here are four key elements for Social SEO success:

• Social Channels - Which social destinations are your customers frequenting? Social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn? Or Twitter? What about media sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube? Forums, Blogs or Social News and Bookmarking sites? Social media monitoring will help you decide which social channels you should start testing and digging into deeper for participation, networking and promotion.  For example, why invest in videos if the majority of influencers in your category spend their time on Twitter?
• Social Keywords - Good social media monitoring tools analyze tags, comments, anchor text and other forms of text to identify keywords associated with the monitoring topic. That keyword insight can help identify topics of interest as they emerge and influence content strategy decisions as well as social media optimization. Social conversations influence search behaviors and if you can identify relevant concepts that are emerging in popularity on the social web, why not create and optimize content around those topics so you’re easily found via search engines?
• Influentials – A listening program will help identify the influentials within the topics you’re monitoring providing the ability to prioritize who to connect with. As Brian Solis mentioned yesterday, Influence is the ability to affect intended outcomes and if you can provide influencers with something of value to them and their networks, it increases the reach of your own message and content substantially.
• SERPs - Social media monitoring tools don’t track search engine results pages and that’s why you should. All major search engines purchase data feeds from different social media sources and incorporate social media content within search results. Therefore, it’s important to monitor search results for key terms relevant to your business and identify what social sources are being included.  If Google is showing blog posts above the fold for a competitive keyword phrase, it might be easier for you to get exposure by commenting on those blog posts with a link back to your site or making blog posts about that topic on your own blog.

Content

Content makes the Social SEO world go round.  One of the biggest growth areas in Online Marketing is the business of creating, optimizing and promoting content. Brands are becoming publishers, which isn’t really new, but becoming more common.  Big brands have funded TV shows, Radio networks and other forms of editorial ie content, for years. The ease of publishing online provides many opportunities for companies to engage customers with content. It’s no longer enough to simply publish features and benefits information on products and services. Customers want more.  Marketers would do well to create a content marketing strategy or as I like to call it, a Content Marketing Optimization Strategy.  Inventory content assets such as web pages, images, video, audio, rich media and file types such as HTML, PDF, MS Office docs, Structured Data Feeds and RSS to assess what can be promoted via social channels and be ranked in search results. Map search keywords to search engine optimization content. Map social keywords to social media content.

If content can be searched it can be optimized and a well planned digital asset optimization effort that works in sync with social networking and promotions can efficiently get content to those that want it and also facilitate better search visibility. That is the essence of Social SEO.

Socialize

With insight into the appropriate social media channels, influentials and a rock solid content marketing optimization strategy in place, it’s important to have a plan on how to connect with the communities where customers and prospects spend their time.  Three key pieces to socializing your marketing efforts include:

• Buyer Personas – Research what your customers do on the social web. What are their social information discovery, consumption and sharing preferences. What influences them to share and buy?
• Grow Networks – Time strapped marketers often fail to spend time growing networks. Some try to buy friends literally or through repeated incentives. Spend a small, but consistent amount of time growing networks organically. That might mean 10-30 minutes every day commenting, friending, following, liking and updating on a daily basis. There is no substitute for participation when it comes to growing a network that can have a real effect on your ability to promote content that gets passed on and on and on.
• Promote – Plan to develop a cycle of social interaction by reconciling the needs of buyer personas with business goals in your content marketing strategy. Grow networks that you can promote optimized content to.  Blogs can often serve as an ideal hub for this kind of content with spokes to the various social channels for content promotion such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc..  A cycle of social participation starts with creating & promoting optimized content & assets. That content gets noticed, shared & voted on, growing awareness.   The increased exposure attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, followers & links. Increased links & social  exposure grow search & referral traffic. Traffic & community help with research to develop & further grow your social networks for content & SEO.

Measure

Success comes in many forms and with social media marketing and social SEO, it’s the combination of social media monitoring and web analytics that provides the most actionable value. Social media monitoring tools are not only effective for initial Listening, but also to determine the social effect of your optimized content marketing on the social web. Off site engagement can be monitored, measured and analyzed in combination with web analytics tools that provide insight into what social traffic does once they get to your web site. Leveraging monitoring and analytics to inform future content creation, keyword optimization and social promotion is essential for staying ahead of the competition and being effective at meeting customer needs.

Obviously, the implementation of such a simplified strategy can vary widely according the the purpose, but with so many companies unwilling to commit to developing an overall Social Media Roadmap, experimentation becomes a more reasonable alternative. Following a basic structure like the four steps listed above can help make a social media test or even a modest social media marketing program a lot more productive.

I’ve been familiar with Brian Solis as many have, for several years. We’ve done a few video interviews with Brian and he’s contributed to popular posts here like this one on social media marketing and this one on content curation.

I have to admit that based on his early writing, I thought Brian was overly confident about the opportunities with social media. When I finally met him in person at a Media Relations conference we were both speaking at, I gained a much better understanding and appreciation for the talents and insight behind the evangelism for what has become the most significant change to the web since the introduction of search engines.

As a successful author, speaker and owner of Future Works, Brian has many opportunities to face tough questions from clients, peers and conference attendees.  In the realm of social media, it’s not unreasonable to have a lot of questions about the who, what, why, where, when and how.

How to start? How to create a strategy? How to find customers and influentials? How to create engaging social destinations? How to promote without offending? How to measure? How to report?  Those are just some of the critical questions answered in Brian’s newest book, Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web.

I promised Brian to talk about Engage! here months ago, which was a no-brainer since we already did a review of “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations“. While I thought about a variety of perspectives to take on sharing my opinions of this book, nothing stood out until now. In the course of answering many social media questions on a daily basis, I’ve often referred Engage! to people as a resource. Therefore it makes perfect sense to share some of the top questions this book answers for marketers. Essentially, this is a list of 10 reasons why you should check the book out.

1. Where does social media fit in marketing and communications?

2. What social tools and technologies are available? What are their differences and how do they work for marketers?

3. How do you manage multi-channel social media participation? What tools are there for listening, publishing, promotion and measurement?

4. Search results can be optimized, how do you optimize social media?

5. How do you develop social networks and distribution channels?

6. What are social champions and how do we find, engage and develop influentials?

7. How do you develop a social media strategy?

8. What are the logistical and process considerations for planning, implementing and managing social web participation for companies?

9. How do we foster and manage social customer relationships?

10. How can we develop social media teams in an organization and create a model for social participation within our organization?

There you have it. Ten key social media questions that the new Brian Solis book, Engage! answers for communications professionals, business owners, marketers and social netziens all over the web.  If you have different or more questions than those listed above, by all means visit Amazon and get the book. If you need a person to walk you through the answers, then you can always talk to us at TopRank Marketing .

If you’re in Minneapolis tonight, be sure to come and see Brian present at Solera from 6-8pm.  For the millions of marketers that will not be in Minneapolis this evening, fear not. Vocus is hosting a free online event (Retweet: Engagement Means Business) all day tomorrow that features Brian Solis amongst others like David Meerman Scott and Deirdre Breakenridge.

The Search Engine Strategies conference from Incisive Media has really taken an amazing turn this year for the West Coast event. Not only have organizers moved the conference from San Jose to San Francisco, but SES is now a part of an event called Connected Marketing Week that involves a coordinated effort from a number of organizations providing a 360 degree digital marketing experience.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities and I think it’s a very smart move to change venues but also to evolve SES into being part of a much larger event. Involving other organizations will give attendees an impressive selection of content to choose from plus even more ways to connect with industry experts, peers, vendors and attendees in general. This year I’ll be giving a solo presentation on Aug 18th called, Content Marketing Optimization. Here’s the official description:

Content Marketing Optimization (8/17 at 3:00 pm) The core of any search or social media marketing program centers on content. Digital assets, rich media, web pages, MS Office and PDF docs as well as content created and shared by consumers all offer opportunities for optimization. If it can be searched, it can be optimized! Online marketing is increasingly competitive and brand marketers world-wide are seeking real advantages that will improve the efficiency and impact of their Social Media and SEO efforts. This session provides unique insight into content based optimization strategies and processes as well as tactics for sourcing, creation and promotion of optimized content on the social web.

We’ve posted quite a bit on the topic of content marketing, strategy and optimization. Here are a few for reference so you can get an idea of the type of information I’ll be presenting at SES:

I will also moderate a session on the challenges and opportunities with convincing business executives on the ongoing value of investing in search engine marketing. Search marketing is just one of many marketing channels CMOs and Marketing VPs are responsible for. There is often a disconnect in the language and expectations of input to outcomes and this session will reveal first hand experiences from agencies and in-house marketers.

The lineup on this session is very impressive and includes: Paul Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer, iProspect, Rich Lesperance, Director of Online Marketing, Walgreens, Laura Lippay, Partner, Nine by Blue and Vivek Chaudhuri, Director, Search Marketing, Digitas Health. The official description:

Selling Search to the C-Suite (8/19 at 4:45pm) Your CMO still calls and wants to know why your company isn’t number one for the most popular, random, non revenue orientated terms you have ever seen or heard about. Your entire day is spent answering questions about search. Search marketers and non-search marketers have traditionally had difficulty communicating in the language of their disciplines, often creating friction and unnecessary conflict. This very interactive session will explore how both disciplines can educate each other and explore such issues as the nominal percentage of marketing spend that is allocated to search.

Ron Belanger & Mike Grehan

This has been an exciting year for the internet marketing industry and my time as a member of the SES Advisory Board will always be appreciated. The connection between SES and TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog goes back at least 5 or 6 years as a media sponsor and our agency TopRank Marketing has had a very good experience sending staff to SES events. Additionally, I’ve been very fortunate to speak at at least 10 SES conference in different parts of the world and look forward to continuing that relationship.

One of the people I’ve worked with at SES and Incisive Media over the years is Matt McGowan. Matt has advanced quickly in the Incisive organization to Publisher & Head of U.S. at Incisive Media, which is the parent company to SES, Search Engine Watch and ClickZ. I reached out to Matt for attendee tips and for his insights on making SES part of Connected Marketing Week:

Please share a tip for conference attendees or sponsors on how they can get more out of participating with SES:

Put aside a few hours and really look over the agenda and the expo hall floor. There are a lot of options, so chose the ones that are most important to you and your business. Remember SES SF is part of Connected Marketing Week so the options are endless! All partners were chosen based on their focus on education. The bar was set high.

There’s an increasing amount of competition in the marketing conference world. What advantages are there to attending SES and/or Connected Marketing Week over other events?

Education. Most conferences sell speaking spots or put sales or commercial people on stage most of the time (yes, even other online advertising and marketing events). SES and the other partners involved in Connected Marketing Week do not (except for a few sponsored sessions which are clearly marked). We guarantee you will not be pitched. Instead, you will come away with pages upon pages of notes that will help you grow your company’s profitability.

What are you most proud of with the upcoming SES San Francisco conference?

Pulling off Connected Marketing Week was no easy feat. That said, I am very happy with the outcome.

Thanks Matt, we’re looking forward to it!

Adam Singer

No TopRank Marketing experience at a SES conference would be complete without liveblogging, so be sure to watch Online Marketing Blog August 17-19 when we’ll be posting about 2 times each day as well as Tweeting and putting up photos and videos to our Flickr and YouTube channels. Speaking of video, we’ll be putting up another post with videos of our live bloggers talking about their expectations of SES and the sessions they plan on covering next week. That post will share our blogging schedule for SES including which sessions we plan to cover as well as a request for your help to tie-break a few sessions.

We’ve taken nearly 1,000 photos at various Search Engine Strategies conferences and you can see photos from our past SES San Jose (now San Francisco) events here:

• SES San Jose 2005 – Thanks to Thomas, we have some good photos to share since our “official” photos have gone missing.
• SES San Jose 2006 – You’ll recognize a lot of these photos as they’ve been “re-purposed” by SEO bloggers quite a bit.
• SES San Jose 2007 – TopRank sent 5 bloggers to cover SES resulting in an all-time high in photos and posts.
• SES San Jose 2008 – This set includes slides, candids and shots of the last, infamous Google Dance.
• SES San Jose 2009 – A nice mix of candids and Search Bash.

If you’ll be attending Connnected Marketing Week and/or SES San Francisco, please be sure to visit the Content Marketing Optimization session on 8/17 at 3:00 pm. I will be presenting a lot of practical tips that you can use as well as a case study you haven’t heard before.