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The Ties Between SEO And Social

I had an interesting discussion recently with one of the top SEO (search engine optimization) vendors in the country. We were discussing the impact of social media and how it might help his business. And as we talked it was astounding how intertwined and mutually beneficial these two vastly different areas can be to each other.

Admittedly, at first blush these two disciplines could not be more different. SEO is based on numbers and clicks and lifting response through largely proprietary and secret techniques. Social media marketing is all about engagement and brand interaction and complete transparency of our efforts.

"Where is the connection," you ask? Look to the"keywords."

The Bridge Between Disciplines

SEO obviously lives and breathes by keywords. You find what people are searching and you nurture those search words and terms with careful optimization and linking. But that's exactly where the synergy between social and SEO lies. SEO feeds an understanding of the social conversation by constantly being in touch with what is being searched. And social feeds SEO by enhancing the conversation around these topics and identifying conversational trends more quickly.

Okay, even my head hurts by what I just wrote, so let's simplify things: Content is king, no matter what advertising media you use. And both of these disciplines center their efforts around having deep, rich, focused content.

Brilliant!

These two disciplines feed each others content needs. Social has the pulse of real-time conversation and can influence and grow that conversation if properly managed. It then feeds trending keywords into the SEO funnel not after it hits Google in a week, but as it's happening. SEO can then build out these keywords further upstream and beat the search trends by being optimized ahead of the curve.

Then going the other way, understanding a brand's keyword strategy allows SEO to feed the social conversation with insight into what customers really want to talk about. So in a fluid manner the social practioner has a pulse on what the actual search needs of the customer are and can guide their efforts appropriately. The result is increased exposure for the social conversation centered on the brand, which feeds back again.

The Birth of a Discipline

I think I may have even coined a new term for this: SCO or Social Context Optimization.

Now I'm the first to admit that I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm just identifying the trend. But having a name and an insight helps to codify the process. And we now add a definitive ROI metric onto the social efforts being performed, while enhancing the value of SEO consultation. Anyone want to go in with me to pitch it? I'm ready. ;)

Treating Apps Like Ads

Our friend Ben Kunz makes some pretty astute observations over on his blog, Thought Gadgets, today. The subject is the ubiquitous app craze that has driven the number of applications in the iTunes store to over 85,000 choices.

Naturally every marketer wants a piece of this action. It's an obvious play. Whether it's a sponsorship deal or a functional brand interaction, if users want apps we want to give them apps. But all this hype comes with a price.

Disposable Development

The trouble is app overload. Even if you just want to get noticed in the iTunes store, you're competing against 85,000 other relevant (and often irrelevant) selections. Even breaking it down by categories leaves you with a staggering number of choices. And then even if your app is chosen for download, the actual use of the app might last five minutes. Extended engagement with the customer is near impossible.

But Ben makes a few great points about this. You should read his entire post, but here's his thinking in a nutshell:

"It doesn't matter if usage falls off from your mobile app because -- just as you refresh ad creative -- you can launch a series of new apps for pennies next month as well. If apps are almost free, and have a short life, then instead of viewing them as one-off software utilities, consider them as sequenced media placement."

Even if a person downloads the Target app and plays with it for ten minutes one time, they've probably interacted with that ad vehicle longer than any single ad placed in a magazine for the brand. And the interaction cost next to nothing to produce and distribute. Brilliant!

Aiming For More

At first I was gung ho and, "Go Ben!" over this analysis. This is a pure genius way of looking at mobile applications, breathes new life into the medium and helps us position why we need to be in the space. But I had to wonder after a moment whether this also highlights an endemic problem with advertising by the numbers.

Don't get me wrong, I still think Ben is right. But shouldn't we always be striving for something better? Can't an app be something more? Here's how I put it in my comments on his blog:

"...apps are no different than any advertisement. 99.9% are effective for a split second of interaction and then disappear from the conscious mind to fester in the soup of subliminal brand image mucky-muck going on behind your eye-balls.

But every once in a while, if your ad is just good enough or funny enough or true enough or what-have-you-enough, it will spark conversation and go viral. People will talk about it. And just like gerbils shot out of a cannon (RIP, Cliff Freeman + Partners) it will be talked about for years to come.

Your points are valid, but they also highlight the dilemma of all advertising. "Launching a series of new apps for pennies" meets the standard "good enough" operating procedure of most advertising. But we should always be striving for better. The economics are right for shovelware, but that doesn't make it good for the brand."

I still think we need to have Ben's realistic approach to what an app is achieving. It's a branding vehicle that stimulates legitimate user interactions, it exceeds other ad vehicles in terms of engagement and we get it all for a fraction of the cost. But it's also a forum where a creative idea can shine. And to date, the ad industry has largely missed it's opportunity to show its worth in the space.

An Open Letter About Social Media Marketing

If you're trying to sell social media plans within your organization or to a client, you know the pitfalls. There's a lot of fear and misunderstand about what it's all about. "How does it fit into our organization?" "Where do we start?" "How do we get there?"

The following is a email I recently wrote designed to boil social media marketing down to a nutshell. This is not a plan or an action list. This is about understanding the role social media can play and presenting a simple model to underpin the efforts.

I hope it clarifies some of your own thinking. And be my guest to lift and use any part that may help your own efforts.

The EMail

Thanks for taking the time to consider the social media marketing ideas we've been discussing.

The hardest thing to understand about social media marketing is that it is not a "media" in the traditional sense. You can't really buy and run ads, because as soon as you do you've turned the effort into brand advertising or direct marketing. In fact, the least effective communication schemes are those that "use" the social medium to push out communications. I may work (for a time) but it's left the social space and entered the promotional space.

Social media marketing is instead about creating, enhancing and empowering venues of conversation, where your customers can do the talking. It's about making your advocates into the stars, with you playing a supporting role. So really a better term is "conversational marketing." And that's what we're aiming to achieve — the creation of positive conversation surrounding the brand.

To get there, we embrace the following model:

  1. Listen - Everything starts here...Internally and then later externally we listen to the conversation first
  2. Plan - Before we say anything, we take what we hear and make our efforts fit the needs of the conversation
  3. Respond - Based on the imperatives of the plan, we take a supportive and responsive role...we are here to empower
  4. Post - Pushing out information only happens if it makes sense and empowers the customer

We may never start a blog. We may never tweet. But if we stick to this model, we at least have a methodology for dealing with the social space and know for sure what our involvement will be at every turn.

We'll lay out our ideas for getting there when we talk, but as you can probably guess from the model, it all starts with listening. We listen to your team, to your customer service reps, to your legal team and management team — basically we create venues of conversation throughout the company, applying the principles of conversational marketing on the internal organization first. From this will spring the all-important Corporate Social Media Policy document, identifying the social players who may already be out there in the organization (there have to be a few bloggers, tweeters and forum users out there) and a plan of actions for taking this to the field.

So, more details to come. We're looking forward to learning a little more about your own goals for this effort. But hopefully this will give you a basic understanding of our philosophy, and how we can help enhance retention, loyalty and advocacy for your brand by fostering an authentic and ongoing conversation with your customers.

Bob Knorpp
The Cool Beans Group

All Aboard The #Fail Train

Maybe our patience is wearing thin. Maybe we've been through one too many phone trees and been dealt with by one too many surly, underpaid customer service clerks. Or possibly we just see the immediate results of companies responding so apologetically to scathing YouTube videos and angry Twitter tirades that we think this is our shortcut. But whatever the reasons, customers are starting to realize that the traditional customer service channels are not as satisfying as venting publicly to their social networks.

Clearly there's something cathartic about sharing our frustrations with others. And obviously we could fill a library with customer service failures. But my question is, "Is meeting customers in the social media space the answer, or only ignoring the problem?"

The Primary Customer Service Destination

As with most of the more interesting conversations your humble host of The BeanCast has these days, this one began on TwitterLen Kendall offered the following retweet and then a short comment at the end:

RT @mzkagan: Does venting consumer outrage on Twitter actually work? You bet.http://post.ly/3mUp (Until it becomes to common?)

Now if you follow the link down, it eventually ends up at this Slate article and showcases stories about how some customers are finally finding customer service satisfaction by publicly exposing the failings of a company. Taken in context, it's all pretty impressive. Customers get out of the feedback loop and get results. Companies get a way to publicly show that they can listen. All's good. But Len's side point sticks with you, doesn't it? What does happen when it all becomes common?

The conversation on Twitter went further, though, eventually being joined by Alleigh Marre, who was dragged in because she posted the following while we were discussing:

Many brands learned this the hard way, "Twitter has emerged as a primary destination for customer comments/complaints"http://bit.ly/oiOV9

The link in the tweet goes to a Brandweek article, and highlights the fact pointed out above: "Twitter has emerged as a primary destination for customer comments and complaints." (The article is also short on insight and I have no idea what that chart from eMarketer is supposed to prove, but let's just go with the premise for now.) And if we understand this correctly, the point is that services like Twitter are not just important, but have become an essential channel for customer service.

The Real Problem Remains

Now the obvious lesson here is that companyies ignore the social media spectrum at their peril. The blogs and Twitter and Facebook and forums are where customers are turning to cause you as much headache as possible. Whether you like it or not, you need to be present.

What bothers me, though, is the underlying problem that seems to be ignored in all of this: Customers wouldn't feel the need to embarrass us en masse, if our customer service channels weren't so completely broken. And don't forget part two, which Len hinted at: What good is it to address social media as a customer service channel when we keep driving people to such venues with our lousy customer service?

I am a big fan of treating social venues as a medium for public customer service. Customer service as a whole is an under-valued branding tool, since we all should know by now that solving problems is how you turn happy customers into loyalists. And doing this publicly turbo-charges the value of these interactions. It allows the interested masses to experience results without needing to experience the problems.

But should we really be driving all our dissatisfied customers to this venue? And more importantly, to paraphrase Len's tweet again, what's going to happen when the "social" luster fades and our still-broken, lousy customer service is all we have left?

Be Social, But Also Fix What's Broken

The inevitable result of years of bad, one-on-one experience with customer service is what is happening now -- customer revolt. The case studies in the articles show that customers got fed up with long-periods of abuse and misuse at the hands of customer service reps and they turned to twitter or their blog for satisfaction. But what they are also hinting at is step two of this evolution, where customers won't even give your traditional customer service options a chance and will always and immediately go for the throat with a #yourcompanysucks tag on a vicious post.

Sure it's bratty. Sure it's unfair. Sure, the reasonable behavior is to exhaust your options with a company before trying to humiliate them. But they're not going to be reasonable anymore, because they know they'll get the run-around. They've lost faith in that option. And we, as companies, have lost trust.

So fine. We'll beef up our social efforts to meet the changing needs of the customer. But let's remember that we are probably the cause of our own problems. (Or at least the customer service discipline as a whole is the problem.) So unless we address fixing the whole system of dissatisfaction, our social efforts are like stopping a river with a Dixie cup. Because just as social customer service is a public way of showing off our good side, lots of public dissatisfaction works to the opposite effect for our brand. And all the good we do publicly is for naught, if the cable service guy shows up three days late and the phone operator tells the customer there's nothing he/she can do about that broken guitar.

Can We Blame The Audience For Agreeing

There was an interesting discussion going on this morning over on Edward Boches blog, Creativity Unbound. (For those of you who don't know him, he's the Chief Creative Officer and Chief Social Media Officer at Mullen, in Boston. And yes, I've invited him to be on The BeanCast Marketing Podcast, so expect to hear from him in the coming months.)

The basic question put out was, "Are we being too agreeable in social media settings?" In mass marketing publications and websites, debate can be quite inflammatory and event downright nasty. But Edward points out that the norm on Twitter or in blog comments seems to be predominantly one of backslapping and "good job!"

Obviously, with a premise like this, even the commenters who agreed tried to be a little disagreeable. None of us wanted to seem like foolish patsies, after all. But two things occurred to me after reading the post and follow up comments.

Social Networks Are Designed for Agreement

While debate does happen among friends, by their very design the social networks are predisposed toward forming circles of like-minded people. Same with personal blogs. It's unlikely you're going to waste time reading the opinions of an individual you don't agree with. So finding spirited disagreement in such circles is simply not the norm. Which raises the question of whether such environments are healthy if not matched to at least some mainstream engagement. As I said 

in my comments on Edward's post

:

"...the debate evolves further as to whether social networks are healthy ecosystems for ideas. We talk about Twitter replacing news sites for many of us, but are we better people if we only hear the news we want to hear, reported in ways we want to hear it?

I’ve always said that social networks are only as good as the people you follow, so I try to engage with people who disagree with me as much as with those who agree with me. But I think you raise a very good point that broader news sites and open forums still very much play an important roll in our social efforts. If we don’t pay attention to the broad audience, how can we draw people to the micro audience?"

Edward's post highlights the fact that relying too heavily on social media for engagement with our audience, creates a vacuum that can be unhealthy if not tempered with broader thinking and engagement.

Vanilla Posts Get Vanilla Responses

For me, though, the more important take-away from this discussion is an understanding that I can't blame my audience for agreeing with me, if I'm not challenging them in the first place.

Let's be honest: If we're among friends, we tend to fall into certain patterns. We feel comfortable around like-minded people, so we share thinking that fits the venue. We're also driven by pleasing our audience to keep them following us or reading our blog posts. So how can we blame our audience for being too agreeable if we're not pushing their comfort zone and making them consider new ways of thinking? Again turning to my comments on Edward's post:

"I think...this also highlights the often shirked responsibility held by bloggers/posters/whatever. I hear a lot about keywords and SEO and posting content that drives traffic. But it’s the rare blogger who challenges their own thinking, explores ideas that may be counter to the thinking of their audience and occasionally admits that they were wrong. The quality of the content is what drives the debate. We can’t blame the audience for agreeing with us when we’re posting “vanilla” ideas."

To truly get the most value we can from social media tools, we need to be part of a conversation. But too many of us confuse conversation with push messaging, followed by audience feedback. We have to remember that conversation doesn't always begin and end with us. Sometimes it needs to be sought out. And sometimes it means saying things that will spark debate.Dangerous stuff! But then, if we're not willing to risk a little danger in the social scene, why are we even bothering in the first place? Because in the end if we're not engaging in real, two-way conversation, it's just the same old push strategy in a new venue.

Thanks again to Edward Boches for sparking this particular conversation. You can follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

Results At The Expense of Value

I know I must have written or talked about this somewhere before. But today your humble host of The BeanCast engaged in an interesting discussion about balancing results and brand. And it led to some new thinking.

My Twitter conversation with Lois Geller (yes, THE Lois Geller, who you really should know...and for God's sake read her books), centered around my old harp about whether we too often rely on "what works" at the expense of "what's best."

Short-term results at the expense of long-term goals — I'm certainly guilty of this. You probably are as well. We live in an immediate society. We want to know something is working and we want to know it now. Particularly in advertising and marketing professions we are almost never praised for our long-term achievements with our campaigns. We are rewarded for what we've done today and for the promotions in front of us.

In the case of our discussion earlier today, the subject was specifically about direct marketing. But really this truth applies to branding, PR, interactive and social campaigns equally as well. Everyone wants to know that the buzz is high, that the response is a landslide and that the ROI equals truckloads of money. And let's face it, all those things are important and are part of our job descriptions. But I sometimes wonder if we go a little overboard on the mathematical evaluations of our campaigns.

Trusting Our Guts As Well As Our Brains

I know it's a little idealistic to say that sometimes we should trust our guts, but there it is. We really should trust our gut a little more. Because as tempting as it is to say, "The white envelope is clearly our best bet, because it generates that sweet spot between production costs and response to generate maximum profitability," it's still generating no lasting value for the brand. It's a friggin' white envelope with a logo. It may get opened and it may get results, but it turns our brands (and, frankly, the shops that produce these envelopes) into commodities.

The same is true of branding. As much as we want the broadcast spot that generates the most buzz on the USA Today Ad Meter, yet another crotch shot that makes us laugh does nothing to build the long-term character of our product. (That one's for you, Bill Green.) It's makes us a beer commodity, even if we're a corn chip.

Numbers Make Lousy Storytellers

I believe in results and I believe in measurement. I stake my career on these things, so I want everyone to understand that I haven't suddenly smoked crack and gone off the deep end. But it's worth considering that numbers have never, and never will, tell the whole story of customer engagement. As storytellers they suck, because they're always skipping to the end of the book and devaluing the plot line that got us there. This is a shame, because the story represents the long-term interests of the brand, even while getting us to the immediate fiscal needs of the quarter.

So what I'm saying is, always be investing. Even if the mailer can be cheaper or the spot can be funnier, be looking at what is really being communicated to the customer. Because these intangible impressions are what are building the foundation of every communication that comes after it.

Free Means Changing The Currency

If you've listened to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast this week, you've already heard me rant about this idea. But we all know I don't get over ideas very easily. So I want to explore "currency exchange" a little more.

To bring everyone up to speed, Brian Morrissey proposed on his blog that free services, like FriendFeed, intentionally make a contract with their users that says, "We will give you free access to our service, in exchange for you populating our site with content." And while at first this seems like a great idea, we find again and again that the company proves their concept, sells their concept out to the bigger fish in the pond and leaves the users hanging out to dry.

For me, this highlights some basic truths about the concept of "free." And no, I'm not debating whether Chris Anderson's book, Free, is legitimate thinking. I'll save that for another time. But Brian's post does clarify for me the following two points:

The Free "Model" is Not Universal

When we hear about the idea of giving away stuff for free in order to attract business elsewhere, there's this tendency to image we're talking about "sampling." Giving away free samples is indeed a solid business practice. You give away product in hope that the person will come back and pay the next time.

But this model cannot be overlaid on top of a "free service" business. Because when you offer a free service, there is no real path to profitability and people come to expect your service to always be free. (Online news is a perfect example.) Even if you offer premium service upgrades, those are really completely separate propositions. So the model for a free service business needs to be completely different.

Now let me say, this isn't a bad thing. Giving away a free service is a brand builder -- at least until your market becomes saturated with free offerings in your space. (And again, news is a prime example.) But it's clearly not a path to making money.

Free Services Only Work With Value Exchange

Which brings up the second insight I got from Brian's post: The only model that makes business sense for a free service is where the business gets something of value from the customer.

I called it a "currency exchange" in my comments on Brian's site. You as a business offer access, tools and bandwidth, then ask for access to the time/content/activities of your users in return.

FriendFeed seemed to understand this much quicker than Facebook and Twitter have. And Google has built an entire empire on it. You can offer a free service only if what your users are contributing can be resold in some manner. So for instance in the case of Google, content managers use Google tools in exchange for Google's access to their content and/or site traffic data for search purposes, and searchers use Google in exchange for the knowledge of their search preferences for resale. We users look at it as "free," but really Google is taking value from our activities, so it's anything but free.

Now the point was brought up on the show that Facebook, in buying FriendFeed, can't hope to make Google-style dollars from the acquisition. And I agree. But the data they hope to get from the FriendFeed version of Internet content aggregation is still much more valuable on the resale market than anything they currently have. It puts them in a much better position than Twitter, which can only aggregate random thoughts.

But no matter how you slice it, the acquisition of FriendFeed is acknowledgment by Facebook that their key to survival depends on leveraging more of a value exchange from their users. And I think it's time we stop thinking of these services as free and start understanding what this value exchange really means -- and whether we're giving away more than we bargained for in the transaction.

Branding Yourself Online

Mahalo really ought to pay me for all the promotion I'm doing for them recently.

Oh wait. They kind of are paying me. At least in Mahalo dollars. Not sure exactly the exchange rate on that, but whatever. I find it to be a symbiotic relationship no matter what the value of their imaginary currency. I need ideas to write about and talk about for The BeanCast blog and marketing podcast. They need answers to questions. Perfect fit. Like peanut butter and jelly.

So today I found a question about personal branding online. And it made me realize that there's an assumption out there that self-promotion and branding online is a science -- find the right keywords, do the right SEO and we can make anyone famous.

But while to a certain extent formulas can work, the people and products and brands who rise to the top and stay there always seem to have what in marketing we call a "USP" or Unique Selling Proposition. (Also known as Unique Selling Point.)

Success Takes a USP

Take Chris Brogran for instance. He offers savvy advice on social media and was one of the first to do so. He's a brand leader. Then there's Leo Laporte who offers access to the smartest minds in tech, blogging and podcasting. He was one of the first to do this and he does it better than just about everyone else out there. Even Justine Ezarik (iJustine to most of you) has carved out a niche for smart product reviews with a liberal amount of skin and cleavage.

You get the picture. Self promotion online takes finding a niche that is either unfulfilled or is assailable, filling that niche with a better offering, and then building out a content strategy to meet this need. Or in other words, it takes a USP and a dedicated follow-through.

Keywords and Content

So we identify the niche. We create our USP. Where do we go from there? What I say is start with the basics of keywords and content.

An online brand is only as valuable as the content we put up. So it only makes sense to build that content to match as closely as possible the things our audience is looking to find through some solid keyword research. This is how we fine tune our niche and create content that is interesting and relevant. And it makes the process of continually optimizing our content more fluid and natural.

Just remember that our content is the true key to loyal followers and search rankings. The deeper and more rich our keyword-optimized content is, the more likely we will be found by our audience. And I'm not just talking about content on our own sites. We have to do this everywhere we engage online. The object is to be everywhere our audience already is, creating pathways back to our sites.

Oh Yeah...You Need Talent

Finally, (and probably the most important element) we can't ever under-estimate the value of personal talents. Whether you want to be informational or just a flake, the Internet is essentially an entertainment medium. So for God's sake, be entertaining.

The most entertaining presentations of content always get the most views. Why do you think that even NBC, the third-place network, still trounces PBS in the ratings? It's because that content is optimized to reach the highest potential audience base, and a premium is put on the entertainment and production values.

You need to ask yourself, "Am I able to maintain the interest of my audience on a consistent basis." I can tell you from first-hand experience, the process is a lot of work. But you can't hope to play in the space without an eye toward the entertainment value of your content.

So those are my thoughts on personal branding. I'd love to have you share some more below. I think this is an interesting subject that a lot of us are still muddling through.

The Interplay Of Recency, Frequency and Strategy

Have you seen my new Mahalo Answers widget running on the homepage? Yes, when not recording The BeanCast Marketing Podcast or helping clients to marketing glory, I'm still completely addicted to being a know-it-all over at Mahalo.

But Mahalo can be a valuable experience, because every once in a while I run across a question that I think will be of interest to the readers here. This week, that (not-quite)question was:

"I am in an inside sales role and often send emails to follow-up my telephone conversations. Our company policy has been to send emails within 5-10 business days. However, I think that it would be more effective to send emails immediately (or at least within 24 hours). I am looking for objective research as to the best follow-up policy (please include links)."

What struck me most about this question was that it highlights a common misunderstanding in sales. Too often we think only about timing between contacts or the frequency of our contacts, without adequately addressing our communication strategy first. My answer (with some editing now) was as follows:

"Your question is a complicated one. But let me start by saying for further research on the subject, the marketing principle we are talking about is "recency." So searching "email" and "recency" together yields a lot of interesting data. Please note also that the term "recency" and the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) model applies usually to customer buying behavior, but is also applicable to how and when we communicate with the customer
Now having said all this, I would first look at your strategy before deciding on increasing your recency. The reason behind your follow up is just as important as the timing. For instance, if your current follow up is just an "ask" letter, a week to 10 days later is probably a good recency. It's about reminding them, but not being intrusive. However, if your goal is to cement relationships and prove that you listened, then sometimes an immediate follow-up is warranted.
Case in point, you're selling your widget and you note during the conversation several key areas of pain that your prospect is experiencing. It would be wise to immediately send a non-promotional, personalized email that reflects back what you heard and lets them know you will be actively seeking some answers. Then a day or two later another email should go out with those answers and a reminder that you are available for further questions. Then put them in the 10-day reminder cycle unless they contact you before then. This plan ups both the frequency and the recency, because it is high-touch and personalized.
I also recommend testing. All the best research and advice (like mine above) can say one thing, but none of this research was done with your customers. Regularly break out statistically relevant test groups and see how they react. See if your test cell does better than the control group. If it does, run an ROI analysis on it to see if the new approach is cost justified. And if it still passes, roll it out as the new control methodology and come up with something new element to test against it."

My point in all this is really very simple. Recency and frequency are tools that only measure numbers. Strategy is the tool that measures relationship value with people. They can work well independently. But it's when they all work together that we find the real answers to how and when to connect with our prospects and customers.