December 2006

The Z-List is something that Mack Collier (Viral Garden) started and Seth Godin has added the list to Squidoo for voting. You can go to Squidoo and vote for your favorite blog. The complete list is below:
Strumpette
A VC
The Next Net
Successful Blog
Will Video for Food
Caffeine Marketing
Widgets Lab
Guerrilla Innovation.com
No Mans Blog
Viral Garden
MicroPersuasion
Viralmeister
Social Media Optimization
Coolz0r
SEO Black Hat
Creative Think
Movie Marketing Madness
Blog Till You Drop!
Get Shouty!
One Reader at a Time
Critical Fluff
The New PR
Own Your Brand!
OTOInsights
bizandbuzz
Work, in Plain English
Buzz Canuck
New Millenium PR
Pardon My French
Troy Worman’s Blog
The Instigator Blog
AENDirect
Diva Marketing
Marketing Hipster
The Marketing Minute
Funny Business
The Frager Factor
Mindblob
Open The Dialogue
Word Sell
Note to CMO:
That’s Great Marketing!
Shotgun Marketing Blog
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
darrenbarefoot.com
Two Hat Marketing
The Engaging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
Conversation Agent
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly
Jeremy Latham’s Blog
SMogger Social Media Blog
Masey.com

I am amazed at times that it has been a little less than four month since I launched this blog. Back in August Social Media Optimization (SMO) was a new concept from Rohit Bhargava and very few people were blogging about social media. Less than four months later every marketing and SEO trade show is guaranteed to have a panel or seminar on SMO.

Over the last four months I have managed to written 91 posts. Some of these posts I think have been pretty good and some were obviously written when I was under the influence of too little sleep or time. Of the posts I have written I think that these are my top ten posts of 2006:

Voting is open for Search Engine Journal’s Search Blog Awards. Thanks to the readers that nominated Social Media Optimization. We’re nominated in the Best Social Media Optimization Blog category.

Competition is really tough as the other blogs nominated in thgis category are: TopRank, Pronet Advertising, Seth Godin’s Blog, and MicroPersuasion most of which are on my must read daily list which makes it an honor to be mentioned alongside these other sites.

I have noticed recently that the Search Marketing Basics web site (www.search marketing basics.com) has been scrapping the content from this web site and posting it on the site. Since this post will be scrapped, I love the irony that anyone visiting their web site will realize that all they do is take other peoples content.

One of the best features of blogs is that you can easily reference the work of someone else and make comments, positive or negative, about that post. It is this exchange of ideas and viewpoints that makes the Internet what it is. What I dislike is when someone takes other people work and does not add in anything to the discussion.

One of the most overlooked segments of the social networking market is the shopping search engines. This is somewhat ironic because Amazon and eBay pioneered a lot of the concepts that are commonplace today in social networks.

At Amazon for example look beyond the items for sale and look at the personalization and community aspects of search that are interwoven into the web sites. Not sure what to buy? Then how about some recommendations based upon your previous purchases or from people with similar likes as you? Or how about product reviews written by members of the community or feedbacks on sellers to help you can decide on who to buy from? These features are all integral parts of the user experience at Amazon and have helped Amazon become one the top destinations on the net.

Up here in New Hampshire we are in the epicenter of Barack Obama mania. The Senator from Illinois who is unsure whether he is running for President already has a commercial on New Hampshire TV. None of this is that unusual with the New Hampshire Primary fourteen months ago. What I do find interesting is that the draftobama.org group that is paying for the TV spots, launched the ads on YouTube before they were shown on TV here.

During last week’s SMO: Social Media Optimization session at SES Chicago, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz made a interesting point about creating one profile for all your social media marketing campaigns.

During the session Rand spoke about how one of the benefits of social media marketing is the ability to control your brand message, and to some degree humanize your brand with consumers. Rand went on to recommend that that a company use the same profile across all the social networks so that is presents a consistent face to consumers.

Neil at Pronet has a good post about Aquafina’s MySpace marketing campaign. One of my points in my Social Marketing Not For Everyone post was that I do believe that household goods can be successfully marketed via social networks if the product or brand is associated with a cause or lifestyle that the consumer is interested in.

Aquafina is about as generic a product as you can find yet there marketing campaign is working because they have been able to associate their product with the independent film community.

Neil writes:

In a conversation last week, we were talking about the industries that are best suited for social media marketing. As part of that conversation, someone asked what industries are not suited for social media optimization.

Now in working on our list we had to put some parameters in place about what are the attributes of a successfully social marketing program. Two criteria of a successful social media marketing program is:

• Engages in a two way conversation with their audience
• Allows and encourages user generated content

Two commonly used tactics that are NOT social media marketing are: