Archive for December, 2007
We Want Your Vote
The polls are open and voting underway at for the 2007 Search Blog Awards. We are very proud to have been nominated in The Best Social Media Marketing or Optimization Blog category. The other blogs in this category are:
- Search Engine Guide
- Pronet Advertising
- 10e20 Blog
- Dosh Dosh
- StuntDubl
- CenterNetworks
- Graywolf’s Wolf Howl
- Rohitbhargava.Typepad.com
- MicroPersuasion
- Performancing
- DanZarrella.com
- Techipedia
This is truly an all-star list of social media blogs and we are ecstatic that we are in such esteemed company. If you would consider voting for us we would be honored!
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Dec 28th, 2007
The Queen Does YouTube
If you are British, or have lived in a country that is part of the commonwealth, then Christmas Day means watching the Queen giving here annual Christmas Day speech. Expect this year instead of watching the speech on BBC America, I opened up my laptop and went online to watch the speech on YouTube.
The British monarchy has launched its own YouTube channel called The Royal Channel. The Royal Channel was launched on December 24th and it includes footage of royal-related events, including garden parties, funerals and a documentary called “Long to Reign Over Us,” about the monarchy. There is also the queen’s first-ever televised Christmas message, which took place 50 years ago, in 1957.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (5) : Dec 26th, 2007
Traffic sources for 2007
Earlier this week I wrote about my top ten posts for 2007. While I was researching that pots I thought it would be interesting to look at the kind of traffic that I got this year and where it came from.
Top Line Numbers
- Visitors: 49,947
- Page Views: 81,317
I launched this blog in Q4 of 2006, so I am pretty happy with the traffic to the site, especially since the topic of social media is a pretty niche topic.
Traffic Sources:
- Direct Traffic: 14.69% or 7,337 visits
- Referring Sites: 55.26% or 27,600
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Dec 20th, 2007
Top Ten Posts of 2007
December is always a good time to look back and reflect on the year. With this blog recently passing its 15 month birthday I thought it would be interesting to go back and look and what were the most popular posts in 2007.
The top ten posts measured by the number of pages views were:
- A Successful Facebook marketing campaign – 3,196 page views
- No budget for social media – 2,510 page views
- You have to do to more than once – 2,203 views
- A social network for the affluent – 2177 views
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Dec 18th, 2007
Five Steps To Managing Reputation Management
Last week’s reputation management post brought several emails about how to go actually go about implementing a reputation management program. With that in mind here are five steps that you can take to manage your reputation online (and control the search engine rankings also).
Create and manage a profile on all the major social networking sites
You do not need a profile on every social network, just on the more prominent ones. Reprise used 13 social networks and I think that is a good number to start with. Two things to keep in mind when doing this. One is to use the name of your brand/company/product as your profile name. The second is to make sure that the profiles are linked together to create your own reputation network.
Filed under Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : Dec 17th, 2007
Traditional Advertising versus Social Media Marketing
While shoveling our walkway this morning, my mind drifted to an article that I read recently in BtoB Magazine about the difference between traditional and social marketing campaigns.
With a traditional offline advertising campaign, the client hires an agency to run a specific campaign for a specific period of time. Most of the work is done upfront and once the budget is used up the campaign typically ends.
But that is not how a social media campaign works. In an online environment in which customers expect to have a relationship with brands and in which search engines insure that content never dies, a successful campaign may run for months or even years.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (3) : Dec 14th, 2007
We made the top 100 list
We received an email from Marketinglens.com that we had made their top 100 Internet marketing blogs list. Cue the streamers and band music.
According to their web site Marketinglens.com is constantly monitoring the top blogs and blog posts on Internet Marketing and they are currently tracking 203,874 blogs blogs. And they rank us at number 69!
All kidding aside, sometimes when you have a blog it is easy to feel like that you are in a vacuum and you winder if anyone is actually reading what you write. Appearing on these types of list validates that yes, someone, is reading what I am writing and I am thankful to socialrank for including us on their list.
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Dec 11th, 2007
Reputation Management, SEO and Social Media
Great article in Adage about how Reprise Media helped Adage writer Matt Creamer dominate the Google search engine results page (SERPS) for his name. The article is a terrific example of how a company or individual can use social media to control the first page of the SERPS for their name.
When I first started optimizing web sites I thought the goal was to get the top position on Google. Then I read a fantastic article on Blue Hat SEO about dominating the SERPS. Eli wrote that your goals should be to dominate the SERPS and own all ten positions, not just the top one. That article totally changed how I approach search engine optimization.
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (18) : Dec 9th, 2007
Social Media is the future for the travel industry
At least that is what the latest findings from EyeforTravel appears to show. In a report titled “Online Marketing Report” 79% of travel industry executives view social media as a long-term part of the online marketing mix. If you are in the travel industry the message is clear. User-generated content (UGC) and social networking is not a passing fad – it should be an integral part of your marketing efforts.
Starwood Hotels and Resorts was one of the first big hotel chains to try social media when it launched its “TheLobby’ feature. The results must have been promising because late last year Sheraton embraced social media, by making UGC the basis of their website.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Dec 6th, 2007
Using Social Media To Recruit
It has become pretty common for companies to create a presence on a social media web site as a means to attract new recruits. Whether it is Marine Corps having a page on MySpace or companies putting recruiting videos on sites like YouTube if you want to recruit the under 25 crowd to come work for you, you need a social media presence.
Putting up videos or MySpace pages are passive attempts at recruiting new employees. But are companies really investing a lot of time and effort into recruiting via social media sites? The answer appears to be yes. An article in the Economic Times covered an IT company called HCL Technologies where 7-10% of their overall new hires come from social media such as blogs and networking sites such as LinkedIn.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Dec 5th, 2007
