How Social Media and SEO are Converging

It is easy to make the argument that between 1998 and 2008, search is the technology that generated the most value for consumers and businesses.  It organizes a virtually limitless body of knowledge and information, makes decisions faster and easier, and discovery of new ideas and content possible on a global scale and increasingly in real-time.
As we have written on this blog numerous times, social media have begun to transform the ways in which we acquire new knowledge and use information. Today, our friends on Facebook, our followers on Twitter, our contacts on LinkedIn, and our "true friends" on email are all working in concert to decrease our dependence on Google for relevant information, news, deals, and funny videos like the now famous "Double Rainbow" (14MM Views and counting...):

Given this accelerating trend, SEO best-practices are starting to converge with the activities many of the most savvy social media marketing experts recommend. The best example being that of link building. Quality links are the gold standard in SEO and are also the most coveted links among social media marketing experts. What's more, the tactics companies use to secure these links look more and more like PR. Today, good PR firms not only understand their ability to generate quality links on behalf of their clients but also are increasingly sophisticated in their approaches to measuring their impact. If your PR firm is clueless about SEO and/or social media, it's time to move on...
What's coming next on the SEO-Social front is the deployment and utilization of on-site sharing capabilities combined with Open Graph tags. The more marketers can do to enable and accelerate organic sharing and the more they utilize open graph tags to "describe" the contents of the shared content in a standard format, the greater their marketing programs' impact in terms of both viral spread and SEO.
What are your thoughts?

Like button dissected

At first blush, Facebook's like button seems so innocuous.  Let's open up the hood and see what makes it tick, and hopefully we won't have too many nuts and bolts left over when we put it back together.

First off, the like button is a way to spread the Open Graph.  And not just any open graph-- Facebook's version of it (Facebook has a couple of custom bits).

The like button is an embedded iframe, and the contents are served from Facebook.  This will make it hard to prevent "likejacking", but that's a discussion for a different day.  Since everything is served up from Facebook, implementation is quite simple.

One thing that Facebook says isn't strictly true: you can implement the like button without Open Graph tags.  However, it's likely that it will cause problems in the future (so just do it).  Implementations should be carefully considered; it is highly likely that Open Graph tags will be influential in SEO, and definitely will expand to other social networks for grabbing metadata when sharing and linking.

Okay, so we have Open Graph, and an embedded iframe.  What happens when you click the like button?

First, understand that every like button has a corresponding Facebook Page.  If the page does not exist beforehand, it is created when the first user clicks the like button.

When you click the like button, you are essentially "following" this Facebook page.  This gives the owner of the page the ability to publish to your News Feed.  This is the interesting part for marketers; if you like a page on my site, that now gives me the ability to communicate with you via Facebook.

One thing to note: since the Facebook Pages are not necessarily set up beforehand, you should always establish ownership of the Facebook Page that will be created.  And, you guessed it, this is done through Open Graph tags (or at least Facebook's extension to it).

Since most users will not understand that the Like button does open up a communication channel, it is recommended that some thought be given to users being surprised (and not necessarily in a good way) by messages showing up in their news feed.

Digital Power Tools

Much has been made of the convergence of Search and Social of late. Generally the frame of reference is somewhat limited – the implications for Digital Advertising. The challenge to Marketers, though, is bigger than simply to adjust allocations of the 1%-8% of total ad spend that might flow to Digital.

Search + Digital constitute Digital Power tools for consumers – and game changers for Marketers trying to reach them.

Can you imagine buying a car, planning a vacation, shopping for a new Fridge without tapping the on-demand expertise afforded by Search and Social platforms? It’s a question we don’t even consider, because Search and Social Media are woven right into our buying process. If I was in the market for a baby stroller 20-years ago, I would have polled neighborhood parents and friends with young children, formed an opinion, reviewed Yellow Pages listings, and visited a store or two. Today, I’d still talk to friends, but I would also visit a half-dozen of the top parenting social sites and immediately access the expertise of the planet rather than rely on the smarts of my immediate community. And while I’d certainly launch a few Search queries, I’d be far more interested in the road-tested opinions of real parents than the lab-refined predictions of Google’s algorithm.

The only shocking feature of this narrative is that while my behavior as a consumer bears scant resemblance to patterns of years past, Marketers cling to the same old playbooks with marginal adjustments at best.

But Madison Avenue keeps right on ticking…

Digital Power Tools afford massive innovation opportunities for Marketers, too, but with isolated exceptions, Marketers have responded by finding new places to advertise and rarely finding alternatives to advertising. In other words, with each unit of ad inventory proving less effective, the “logical” response has been to buy more inventory. Beyond digital, even, “innovation” has focused on inventory creation, so we now can enjoy advertising on pizza boxes, coffee cups, dry cleaner bags, park benches, bathroom stalls, etc. Just this week I spotted a cement truck spinning for ESPN Radio as it poured a fresh stretch of Seattle sidewalk. How innovative, I guess.

Think Different:

The fundamental implication of Digital Power Tools is this: the historic asymmetry of information (primarily about true product cost and quality) has been obliterated. 15-years ago a consumer dared into an auto dealership with far more fear than information. Today, she struts in with the deal she wants in-hand, ready to strike a deal on the terms she wants or head elsewhere. That’s a massive power shift. And yet, have auto manufacturers fundamentally changed their go-to-market strategies? Not so much. Generally, they have simply tweaked their 30-second spots to sound a mite bit more buyer-friendly.

A Great Leap Forward:

With the altered balance of power between “buyers” and “sellers”, marketers face a profound challenge. In a world in which consumers received much of their product information from Marketers, Marketers could comfortably focus on their primary job of “Selling”. Digital Power Tools have armed Consumers with powerful information resources. The biggest challenge marketers face is to abandon outdated mental models built around uninformed consumers. In simple terms, this translates into a shift of focus from Media Efficiencies (getting the message out cheaply) to a focus on Consumers’ job of “buying”. Successful Marketing will aim to perform a service, to help consumers fulfill needs and desires. Marketers need to do more than change their ad copy. They need a whole new Playbook. And pumping display ads into Facebook is hardly the way to start.

Twitter Didn't Break the News About Discovery Gunman, People Did

I saw this Washington Post headline on Mediagazer today and it got me thinking about the way in which social media technologies are typically covered. Almost always, the coverage puts the proverbial cart before the horse. This is an artifact from the days in which broadcast media dominated and communicated information and messages in one direction only.

Simply stated, it is people, not technology platforms, that drive activity on social media. This fact is at the heart of what is so disconcerting to so many media executives about the rapid transformation their industry is undergoing at the moment. Years ago, "traditional" media companies lost control of the means of distribution of their product(s) and in recent years that control has been seized by individuals. Email, then blogs, then YouTube, then Facebook, then Twitter, and now Tumblr (?) have each in their own way facilitated this shift in control away from large media companies and toward the producers of the content/information and the individuals in the audience.

Putting a marketer's hat on for a moment, the implications for what this means for me are quite profound. I no longer can focus on a handful of points of distribution to get my messages out. I have to focus on getting it out via hundreds of thousands or even millions of points of connection and distribution. aka The Social Graph.

As this realization began to penetrate the consciousness of an increasing number of marketers, many made the mistake of assuming that the number of Twitter "Followers" or Facebook "Fans" was a useful proxy for the number of points of distribution for their messages. This was a bad idea and one that we see many of our customers moving away from.

Today, many companies that are objectively good at marketing are realizing that effective marketing in a connected, social world requires two things:

• People that are connected and influential (able to share and get others to pay attention even for 5 seconds)
• Content that's going to make influential folks feel like stars for making their friends/readers/audience think, laugh, feel, and/or take some action.

Nothing written above should be considered controversial.  Marketers have  known for ever that good content (copy, 30 second spot, etc.) is what makes advertising work.  What's different today is that it is far easier to see the difference between good content and the other stuff.  Watch what people do and who shows up.  Are people sharing it?  Is that bringing more new people to check it out?  What are they doing once they get there?  Are they passing it along as well?  Much like the impact that search has had on the way we look for and evaluate information, the social web is impacting dramatically the way we receive, filter and validate the quality of information.  Twitter and Facebook aren't causing this change, they are responding to and facilitating it.

A sharing tune-up for your pages

Here's a simple checklist to make sure that your pages are easily shareable, and "look right" when they get shared:

How do your sharing buttons look?

I'll admit, I'm not a fan of the "million tiny little sharing buttons" school.  Implement 3-4 sharing buttons, and unless you have a good reason, these should include Facebook, Twitter, and Email.  Make them a decent size; 32x32 pixels is a good starting place.  Unless user polling reveals a propensity to read the bottom line of the eye chart, that is.

Are there calls to action with regard to sharing?

When the user completes a process (e.g. a registration) is there a clear call to share this with a friend?  If you're blogging, this might actually need to show up in the middle of the page (since nobody reads past 400 words).

Are your meta headers working to your advantage?

There has been a lot of attention given to the Open Graph Protocol, and with good reason: this is what Facebook recommends for implementation of the Like button.  This includes a bunch of tags that attempt to provide a detailed description of a page or item on a page.

While this is all good, there are a few basic tags that every page should include, e.g:

<meta name="title" content="Did you have the baby yet?" />

<meta name="description" content="Trying to figure out whether Kasen James has been born yet." />

<link rel="image_src" href="http://didyouhavethebabyyet.com/images/logo.png" />

As an example of what this would look like on Facebook:

Social Media Funny Business

Humor achieves an artistic arc when it tugs at the truth as well as tickling our funny bone.

In this season when many of us take a brief vacation break, it seems fitting to share a laugh. But as Stephen Colbert so often does, there’s insight in his amusements. Social Networks – and Facebook chief among them – face a revenue problem.

To the extent that they pursue income at the expense of consumer privacy, they chase a diminishing return – building a flawed economy.

Have a laugh at the genuinely hilarious clip below:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Control-Self-Delete
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

[via TechFlash]

...and when you return from Summer Holidays, give a thought to the underbelly of the beast: Social Media will only ever become a meaningful marketing outlet when and if a scalable monetization mechanism emerges that is not predicated on trading Personally Identifiable Information for dollars.

Remember: as far as marketing dollars are concerned, Googlemania was launched by AdWords – not an algorithm. Similarly, the innovation required in Social Media is a fundamentally new economic model. Selling ads -- and selling out users -- is not Facebook’s path to riches.

Vintage Windows 95 Ads

Can you believe it's been 15 years since the release of Windows 95? It only took 13 floppy disks to install it to your computer. Here are a few of the ads from the launch campaign.

Which one is your favorite?

"Start Multi-Tasking"

"Start Connecting"

"Start Me Up"