One of the coolest marketing blog measurements on earth has been degraded in our opinion. The AdAge Power 150 has been reworked in response to the loss of PostRank as a key component. Recently purchased by Google, PostRank shut down their API service. Collective Intellect, another key API used in the Power 150 formula, shuttered their API as well.  These sophisticated social signal aggregation and analysis API tools have been replaced in the AdAge Power 150 algorithm by a raw mashup of Facebook and Twitter which can be gamed. Yahoo Link data, and something called “Todd Score”  have been there from the beginning. Alexa is also part of the scoring system, a service which some suggest is inaccurate.

Hundreds or even thousands of blogs take (took) great pride in scoring their progress, in the online marketing blog business, by how they fared in the ‘150.  The metric kicked butt. aimClear Blog ranked as well as high 70’s and as low as 180 over the years, but that’s not the point.

What’s disturbing is that this particular incarnation of the AdAge Power 150, which presumably will evolve, is not in our opinion, fitting of its namesake AdAge Magazine’s, street credibility at this time.

PostRank is extremely sophisticated, a bleeding edge tool that aggregates and analyzes on and off-site social signals from numerous mainstream and emergent channels. Case in point: that’s the reason Google bought the company, ostensibly to leverage PostRank’s signal gathering and grading processes to support Google’s commitment to measuring social clues as search quality measurements. Removing PostRank from the Power 150 and replacing it with the current algorithm, seems a bit like threading a needle with a bulldozer.

We’re not alone in this opinion. Here are some comments from the AdAge Power 150 blog post, where the new “Do It Yourself” algorithm change was announced.

“There seems to be a major problem when blogs like {grow} have their correctly healed seat taken by a blog that has not been updated since 2009.”
-Justin Brackett

“… simply replacing Post Rank with just Twitter and Facebook is severely limiting the real reach of an article. What about considerations for the number of bookmarks from delicious or stumbleupon each article has had – or even integration with a klout score (given that the frequency and quality of posting is a significant factor in the score). I do hope that we’re going to see something a little more sophisticated than just Facebook and Twitter in the future.
- Paul Fabretti

“There are services like Triberr that artificially inflate the number of tweets a post receives, and Facebook’s weird Like option (where Likes of Likes count) mean that this metric is also skewed…“Seems a strange replacement.”
-Danny Brown

This post is in no way meant to be ungrateful to the AdAge 150’s creator, Todd Andrlik (Todd Score creator?), or manager, Charlie Moran. These guys, over time, have done the online marketing industry a great service by shining the mainstream light on blogs like aimClear. Our position in the 150 has brought us prestige and attention and we were proud of it. However, I’m sad to say, that we’ve removed the badge from our site. We just don’t believe in it as a standalone measure of being a great online marketing blog anymore. It’s tough to lose a friend the like AdAge Power 150.

Marty Weintraub is author of “Killer Facebook Ads” (Wiley/Sybex 2011) and CEO of aimClear®, an online marketing agency. He’s written extensively for respected Internet marketing trade publications including SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SearchEngineRoundTable, and been quoted in many others. aimClear Blog (aimclearblog.com) has been cited as among the Technorati Top 10 Small Business Blogs, Cison Top Ten Social Media Blogs, PRWeb’s 25 Essential Public Relations Blogs You Should Be Reading.

Whether the online marketing assignment is for a multinational company program or niche small business campaign, over the last five years RSS feed marketing by blog and associated content strategies have become essential SEO tactics.  Now more than ever it’s easy to see why. Without authority social users rebroadcasting links to a website’s content, the site risks seriously low discoverability in critical social, news and search channels. Obviously, compelling third-party users to rebroadcast your content, requires marketers to actually publish recurrent content!

This post shares programmatic tips and excerpted verbiage from aimClear’s business blog marketing plan product, which we’ve refined over the years to offer end-to-end content publication strategies and feed management for clients. It is the “sister” product to our community management services, and suitable for inclusion in contract scope-of-services exhibits.

When building a business blog marketing plan, the goal is to actualize the client’s natural footprint, in search and social spaces small enough to dominate and large enough to yield fruit. With thoughtfully-executed programs, marketers help sites attain crucial discoverability in tightly associated content areas. The plan’s goal is to blueprint the process to build turnkey, client-owned authority publications.

The focus is to:

• Create a reasonably attainable ramp-up plan
• Work hand in hand with other team agencies, especially community management and promotional groups
• Focus on data-driven, outbound blogger, publication, community, and other outreach
• Frame SEO expectations
• Set ongoing scheduling expectations
• Conduct and provide ongoing research to support content creation/goals/targets, and partner agencies efforts, I.E. community management, etc…
• Be the team’s ongoing eyes and ears, regarding inevitable paradigm shifts in search, social, (de)evolving channels, etc…
• Build in clear reporting expectations
• Include aimClear’s feedback on “sharing” materials created by other team members, in advance and forensically
• Plan interactions between team agencies production teams, in advance and forensically
• Define interactions between team agencies executive teams, in advance and forensically
• Accommodate other team-generated articles and other assets
• Specify the costs, all inclusive

——————————
aimClear will provide:

Month One

• WordPress or other platform feed development and/or assistance to team agencies, to adapt, implement and deploy team-provided design
• Advance and ongoing search and social research, to support feed content and  ongoing community management
  • Identify and recommend target bloggers, communities, publication and other targets
  • Identify and recommend, topics in accordance to MOM’s priorities

• One business day “retreat” with team and partner agencies’ teams to develop foundational feed and content concepts
• Create publication calendar and planning for month two launch

Months 2-12

• Launch publication
• Monthly publication calendar each for each next month, starting with month 3 calendar,  in advance on third Monday of each month
• Provide associated research and input for community management team at the time each content block is posted
  • Targets briefing
  • Demographic research
  • Ideas and recommendations

• Weekly check-in phone meetings, inbound/outbound briefings to/from partner agencies, at the production team members level
  • Topline results from previous week
  • Review upcoming week’s production schedule
  • Handle inevitable modifications of team’s priorities
  • Provide advance input and feedback on team-created “sharing materials,” videos, audio, infographics, etc…
  • Monthly in-person meetings, executive level
  • Review previous month’s results,
  • Provide feedback to other teams
  • Receive briefing on team’s upcoming priorities
  • Brief team on important developments, at the industry and mainstream communities level, regarding search and social paradigms
  • Discuss team-created “sharing materials. This line item is designed to support the team, in creating social media assets aimClear believes will work.

• Weekly and monthly reporting
  • Results impacting SEO
    • Links
    • Organic prominence
    • Traffic
    • Conversion,when team agrees on conversion goals
    • Technical SEO recommendations
    • Semantic SEO recommendations, including evolving social mashup tools, widgets, etc…
  • Results impacting social
    • Outbound referrals to social
    • Video views generated
    • On and off page engagement surrounding content (PostRank type metrics)
    • Written input for CM team

• Approximately 96 hours per month production, 3-5 content blocks per week (authors will use pseudonyms or, if agreed to by team, their bylines)
  • Minimum of 3 “features,” 450-900 words, well researched, targeted, etc….
    • Edutainment
    • Human interest
    • Topical and niche’
    • Non editorial reviews
    • Other
  • 1-2 serialized “convention” posts, designed to engage 5-8 targets each by aggregating content with added value
    • Link roundups
    • Video roundups
    • Important and complimentary news items
    • Conference coverage (travel and other expenses not included)
    • Featured bloggers, communities & companies (with team’s pre-approve)
    • Other as team concurs
  • “Package” (write setup, headlines, etc…)  and release team-created sharing materials
  • Rewritten releases, linking to original PRWeb and/or other releases
  • collateral promotions materials
  • Additional team-written materials as teams agree
• Approximately 16 hours per month executive publication management to provide thought leadership and management to the project
  • Internal leadership at aimClear
  • CEO to CEO phone and other strategic contact with team member agencies, in person and by phone

Feel free to use, excerpt and modify this language in your contract scope documents, with attribution, © 2011 aimClear ®.

As with many facets of technology, when it comes to SEO, the times they are (always) a-changin’. What was once advised by mostly technical means, search engine optimization has evolved to be noticeably impacted by more social elements, for example, blogs. Generating fresh content and comprehensive feed syndication are killer ways to help enhance your site’s overall SEO efforts, but never forget– “feeds” can be composed of so much more than simply blogs.

Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed, Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing and moderator Craig Macdonald, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Covario sought to wrap up Day 1 of #SESSF by feeding us tasty tips for optimizing blogs, but also opening our minds to think outside the blog and leverage other types of valuable, keyword-rich content to serve customers.

First up is Lee, ready to spill his Recipe for Blog SEO Success. (Note: cute analogy, but not so cute for a starving blogger at the end of a long day.)

While there is surely a structured list of SEO tips you can follow for content optimization, try to emulate the great chefs of the world: do they follow recipes down to the “T” every time? Nope, not really. There’s room for creativity. Lee advises we follow the guide he’s about to dish out,  but customize it in accordance with our own situations.

Blog SEO Prep

• Audience: Who’s coming to dinner? Who is your audience? As you plan your content, know who it is you are writing for.
• Keywords: What does your audience like to eat? Incorporate keyword queries that reflect your content. To know what works, you must do KW research.
• Content: What do you have in the kitchen? What are you writing about that’s topical? What problems are you solving for your readers?
• Blog CMS: Should we use the good china? Are you using Blogspot? WordPress? Custom CMS?
• Links & Social: Who can the guests invite? Are you implementing social share buttons? Cross-channel promotion attracts traffic and inbound links.

Tip: Match your editorial plan with keywords. Create different editorial plans for your search keywords, which advise blog content, and your social keywords, which advise social content.

Basic Blog SEO Tips

1. Title tag vs. on-page title– do these tags have the opportunity to be different? WordPress has a plug-in that will allow you to create one title for search engines and one title for people.
2. Implement keywords in the post URL (slug).
3. Create keyword-rich categories.
4. Thread keywords in copy, but use synonyms. Don’t be redundant in your verbiage.
5. Incorporate anchor text links to older posts.
6. Minimize duplicate content.
7. Encourage inbound links.

Flow of activity: socialize – personalize –> grow networks –> promote

Cycle of Social & SEO

• Create and promote optimized assets.
• You promote content, it gets noticed, it gets shared, you grow awareness.
• This increases exposure, attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, followers and links.
• This contributes to increased search engine visibility.
• Now you can mine all of this data for content you create and optimize for future consumers.

Blog Content SEO & Logistics

• Identify & train blog contributors on SEO (titles, body copy, linking out & internally)
• Create keyword & engagement guidelines
• Make content promotion part of the publishing process
• Provide feedback: search & social

Blogs can be very social things. You can syndicate automatically to Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can (and should) comment on other blogs, link out to other blogs, run surveys or polls as a way to engage people, respond to your own comments… these are all social activities. It’s not just about publishing your own content. You have to look at being social off the blog. Propagate the message of the blog off the blog so people can link back to you and boost your search visibility.

Your Goal: Socialize and be useful. Syndicate your content without duplicating it. Map it out, plan it out, time it, and execute!

The Benefits: Content sharing, direct traffic, social syndication, inbound links, build trust & authority, create and engage the community.

Cool tools:

• Keywords- Google Keyword Tool, SEMrush
• On-page Blog SEO – Scribe (automated)
• Comment Management- disqus, ECHO
• Link Tracking – Majestic SEO
• Social Media Monitoring – Trackur, Techrigy, Radian 6
• Social Management - Hootsuite, MediaFunnel
• Social Search – 48ers.com, SocialMention.com
• Engagement – PostRank, BackType

And wrapping up this adorable analogy, Lee’s Perfect Blog SEO Recipe:

• 1/2 cup audience focused keywords
• 1 well-optimized blog CMS (WordPress)
• 2 cups content & editorial schedule
• Stir – linkable content w/ promotion
• Shake- grow & engage social network
• Bake – ongoing keyword & content refinement through web & social analytics

Sally was up next with her Content Strategy for 2010. She began by citing the Impact of Real-Time Web acccording to readwriteweb.com: “The web isn’t about pages anymore. It’s about streams, feeds & syndication.” With all the social that we’re in now, the way people are into the real-time web, the way search engines have changed – your content strategy has to change, too.

Sally also cited Matt Cutts and the new SEO practices for a Google Caffeine world: “Sustainable organic growth requires a commitment to unique and valuable content creation on a regular basis and the wherewithal to deliver it effectively.”  In fact, Caffeine has been motivated by the social web and things going real-time. Search engines are constantly looking at all of the content put out there, and they’re nearly able to digest, index, and serve it up real-time. Blog posts are now being indexed in seconds. This is huge.

Moving Beyond the Blog
There’s got to be some system you’re feeding content through– that system may well be a blog. But the time has come to think about things over and a blog. Sally says you absolutely must blog. But there are other things you can (and should!) be doing, too.

• Tap into the real-time web.
• Make your content available in feeds.
• Make it easy to share and post to social sites.

There’s a reason why you put certain content on a blog– for sharing thought leadership, generating leads, etc. You blog in a certain, more personal voice, which is just one thing that makes it an appealing form of content. But don’t get stuck in thinking that a feed means a blog. Interestingly enough, Google’s definition of a blog is simply “a webpage with a feed.” There are so many other ways you can get all the value that you get out of a blog but with other types of content – just make sure it’s optimized.

SEO advice from Matt Cutts

• Create a blog and post content.
• Know the search terms your audience uses.
• Write good meta tags.
• Spotlight your search terms.
• Syndicate your content.
• Make sure you consistently generate fresh content.
• Work to get “citations” (an instance of someone mentioning you– this is not necessarily a live link) in the social web.
• Get relevant sites to link to you.

Link Building in 2010

• Get creative, be innovative, think about what people want.
• If you link this with your social media strategy, it all comes down to listening to conversations.
• Look at trends, observe gaps, pounce when opportunity arises, know what you can deliver, know what content you have, what you can create.
• Put it in a feed, put it out there, make it interesting so people say “OMG that’s brilliant!” and want to pass it on, link to it.

Think outside of the blog! You could leverage:

• News content- every company has a story to tell! Think about whats going on in your industry, what’s going on with you.
• Articles and product info (“how to” is the second biggest search onYouTube)
• Updates & alerts

As Sally says, “You don’t have to wait for the world to fall down or some huge merger  to happen- you can create news.”

Cold-Pitch vs. Natural Convo
Sally’s advice: don’t cold-pitch content. Ever. Syndicate content and watch who talks about it, watch who picks it up. Then, contact the blogger- simply reach out to them. Thank them for sharing your content. This opens the door to a natural conversation. Start with great content that will spark a conversation based on the right KWs. This will help you all the way around – from SEO to social.

Distribute & Aggregate
It’s important to distribute your content and just as important to archive it on your own website. This way, when people come to you first, without finding you from social media or content feeds, they’ll see the same goods on your site – links to your Twitter profile, YouTube channnel, Facebook page, etc.

So what’s the ROI of content feeds?

• Get links
• Attract bloggers
• Feed content to social web = citations
• Boost organic SEO
• It stands to note that within 6 months, feeds often become top drivers of traffic to sites

Sally wraps up by reinforcing that you absolutely must blog– but look at what else you can do, what other interesting content you have that you can put in feeds.

credit: Drew Coffman

Using blogs for SEO is a strategic linchpin of many a marketers’ content tactics. Composing optimized headlines to title posts that are catchy, research driven and relevant to readers, is a classic search engine optimization mission.   This post offers two blogging SEO case studies, for constructing posts titles.

Blog post headlines are key on many levels. Most blog CMS (content management system) installations mirror the post headline as the HTML title tag, arguably one of most important SEO ranking factors, for the post detail page. Also when others link your posts, they tend to link out on the post’s title as anchor text. Therefore depending on the competitiveness of the topic space in the organic SERPs (search engine results pages), the first couple of words in the upper left of the post title are usually the main semantic weapons for the post.

Post Title

Title Tag in WordPress

Right at the beginning it’s a good idea to articulate a concept for a blog post in a longer sentence, so the idea is expressed fully without the pressure of having to build compact optimized titles whilst in first creative steps. I don’t want to be held back. The most important consideration is that this first working title truly be what the post is about, without compromise.

Let’s say the post is about “How a Single Google Analytics Custom Segment Can Revolutionize Your Reports.”  We start by identifying organic targets. Start by running various combinations of the most important words through a keyword research tool at phrase match or equivalent.

For this post, let’s test:

• analytics report
• analytics reporting
• analytics reports
• google analytics report
• google analytics reporting
• google analytics reports

The reason to test both short tail (“analytics”) and longer tail (“google analytics”) is because we want to know roughly what percentage of the analytic reporting space is specifically about Google analytics reports.

“Google Analytics-[technical-anything]” is difficult keyword space to crack at the top, with the likes of Google and Avinash dominating.  Specific technical terms are highly contested on the long tail.

We’ll need to be clever and discerning in our keyword research to ultimately land a page one unpersonalized ranking for our headline and post.  Like any competitive SEO mission, start by finding keywords with which it’s realistic to debut on page one or two. Remember that link building (internal and external), buzz and longevity will do the trick to raise the listing some with enough work to support great content.  Keep poking around and look further down toward the bottom of SERPs to see what’s attainable. The singular permutation of “google analytics report” is interesting KW territory because it’s not technical enough for Google to have targeted as heavily.

Measure the unpersonalized SERPs. It’s a good idea to look at how competitive SERPs are for the keywords under consideration. We use Majestic SEO’s tool and SEMmoz’s Linkscape for quick looks at SERPs competitiveness.

Yep, for a publication of decent authority like aimClear Blog, “google analytics report” is doable to rank at (unpersonalized) #3 or #4 with a little work after-the-act. This KW also may also portend users who don’t fully understand how GoogleAnalytics work.  They’re not searching the most technical of terms. Hmmm. Maybe the goal should be to hook these slightly less tech-savvy analytics seekers who want to grow. Perhaps they will become fans of aimClear Blog as they learn. Targeting this crowd makes sense because we’re consultants in the web analytics space, and ostensibly blogging to make friends and customers.

Now make sure we’re not missing highly specific keywords that might also be searched for with any frequency.

So let’s test:

• google analytic segment
• google analytic segments
• google analytics segment
• google analytics segments
• google analytic custom segment
• google analytic custom segments
• google analytics custom segment
• google analytics custom segments
• google analytic advanced segment
• google analytic advanced segments
• google analytics advanced segment
• google analytics advanced segments

The words “segment” and “segments,” in combination with “Google Analytics” seem attainable.  By the way, Advertiser Competition in Google’s External Keyword Tool speak to PPC advertisers. Sometimes this metric can suggests easier organic space as well.

You know the drill. Check SERPs competitiveness.  Here’s the singular expression:

(bottom of SERPs)

The word “goals” also showed up in our research.

“Google analytics goals” is not highly competitive but users search for it a fair amount.

Great!  The singular keyword “segment” and plural “goals” have only light competition at the bottom of page one. Now we know there’s some attainable SEO real estate available. Our research has provided insight to the blog title SEO process and we’ve found mid and long-tail phrase match keyword inventory.

Putting It All Together
As you recall, the initial post idea was “How a Single Google Analytics Custom Segment Can Revolutionize Your Reports.” Using the data gleaned by keyword research, let’s make some changes. The first headline idea was, “How a Single Google Analytics Custom Segment Can Revolutionize Your Reports.”

First, it’s not a “custom” segment I’m going to write about. The correct term is “advanced” segment. “Custom” refers to reports in GA.  Start changing the headline.

“How a Single Google Analytics Custom Segment Advanced Segment Can Revolutionize Your Reports.”

Now we’ll modify the post title based on the organic targets identified in our research.  We’re going to mash up “google analytics report,” “segment” and “goals.”

The word “advanced” is cool, but we’ve already ascertained that Google dominates this more technical permutation. We’ll leave it out of the title, and save it for the body of the post, no doubt to rank for long tail 4-5 word phrases that include  “advanced. The word “your” is not necessary and we’re striking “reports” because of the usage of the singular “report” earlier in the headline.

“How a Single Google Analytics Report Advanced Segment Can Revolutionize Your Reports.”

Add the word “goals” and we’re done!

“How A Single Google Analytics Report Segment Can Revolutionize Goals”

—————————————————————————————————-

BTW: For this blog post you are currently reading, we tested:

• blog seo
• blogs seo
• blog headline optimization
• blog headlines optimization
• blogs headline optimization
• blogs headlines optimization
• optimizing blog headline
• optimizing blog headlines
• optimizing blog
• optimizing blogs
• seo for blogs
• seo for blog
• blog search engine optimization
• blogs search engine optimization
• blog optimization
• blogs optimization
• blog title seo
• blog titles seo
• optimizing blog titles
• blog title optimization
• optimizing blog post titles
• seo for blog post titles

Sure, this is hard keyword space to get into at the top, with the likes of SEOmoz dominating.

Our friend Lee Odden claimed the short tail “blog optimization” space a long time ago. SearchEngineLand and SearchEngine Journal are also in the space.

Once again, begin by identifying a SERP where it’s realistic to debut on page one. Bear in mind that internal and external link building, buzz and other SEO ranking factors will grow this page if the content is awesome and y’all work hard. Look further down the SERP to see what’s attainable. The bottom of page one seems attainable for “blog optimization.”

There’s little statistically relevant keyword inventory for the “headline” and “title” space as pertains to blog optimization. Still, we’re not afraid to head out on the long tail. The readers we’ll gain by long tail SEO are few but highly focused.

Finally, let’s identify another long tail keyword target that is most likely attainable just by using the keywords on the page, let alone the blog title.  [This debuted on page  one for blog title seo.]

In this case “using blogs for SEO”  seems to be a reasonable SEO target.

photo credit: kanegen

Here at aimClear, we’re proud of our in-house authors. Like many publications we also open our pages as a community platform to host guest bloggers. Sometimes guest posts are written by industry professionals whose practices are perceived by some as controversial.

Wait. Let’s stop right there. “Controversial.” That word can carry a negative connotation, one of altercation, agitation, even acrimony. But on the flip-side of the coin, “controversy” can be a beautiful thing. Controversy when hosted on a public, unbiased, progressive platform, such as a third-party blog, can function as an open invitation for conversation- healthy debate, passionate exchange of perspectives and core occupational beliefs. Other times, visitors with an unrelated agenda attempt to ruin the discourse.

As with all of our articles we hope such conversations germinate in the form of lively comment threads. We all thrive when readers absorb content and feel moved to take the experience to the next level by engaging the author or other commenters– right then and there. Harmonious, supportive comments are always nice… but sometimes there’s nothing better than a spicy swap of opposing points of view. Hell, we’re no strangers to a fight.

I may be stating the obvious but, when we publish a guest blog post, aimClear is not the author, or some schmaltzy endorser. We’re not saying we love or hate the blogger or topic. Think boxing: we’re not the referee breaking it up. We’re not the coach dabbing sweat and holding the spit bucket. A good blog editor is the Master of Ceremonies offering the mic. We’re hosts.

To emphasize, we’re careful to conclude each guest blog post with the same standard disclaimer: Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily aimClear. It’s crucial to note that our mission with guest blog posts is to provide a neutral platform where industry professionals can explore their perceptions, practices and principles, even… or especially… when they may be taken as contrarian.

Two weeks ago, aimClear published a guest blog post by Dennis Yu called, How To Make 45K a Day Scamming Facebook Ads. That’s a contrary sort of title, no? If you’re unfamiliar with Dennis Yu, note that there are differing opinions surrounding his work as an affiliate marketer.  We have no opinion.

Back in November of 2009, Jeremy Schoemaker (@shoemoney) published a blog post that really dug into his personal and professional experiences with Dennis Yu (not all sunshine and pussy cats). This was totally Schoemaker’s prerogative as it’s his blog and he can certainly write about any topic of his choosing. The post accrued 210 comments, many of which disparaged Dennis and thanked ShoeMoney for the heads-up. This may not have been the friendliest post or comment thread, but the relationship between one and the other, the relevance, was obvious: the post was about Dennis Yu… the comments were about Dennis Yu.  Everything was above board and everybody stabbed everybody else in the front. Bravo!

On the other foot, Dennis’s guest post for aimClear Blog explored the anatomy of alleged Facebook PPC ad scams. It did not address his professional work, his personal life… in fact, he barely used the words “I,” “me,” or “mine” at all.  The post was about marketing! The thread amassed over a dozen comments, agreeing with the post’s perspective or opposing it… a.k.a. healthy conversation surrounding an apparent controversy. Bravo again!

That said, one comment in particular offered genuine criticism speaking to the alleged Facebook ad scheme discussed in the post.  The commenter even shared that he had a sketchy past himself.

Spliced between the penultimate sentence and the final sentence of this comment, Harrison decided to add, “For all of you please see [this],” including a link to the ShoeMoney post, “to see the real dennis” (his capitalization, not ours).

Really, Harrison? Was that necessary? Doesn’t almost every affiliate and their mother know about ShoeMoney’s post? Why do our readers have to know Shoe’s vision of “the real dennis” in order to understand the main points and intent of this blog post? What value did your external dropped-link resource contribute to the topic at hand? That’s like saying you need to know about Michael Jackson’s trials to dig the song Billy Jean. Bunk!

After aimClear President, Marty Weintraub, allowed the comment, our publications manager (moi) asked herself a few salient questions and decided to trim the comment, removing the “take a look at how Dennis sucks” afterthought and irrelevant link to the ShoeMoney post. We no found redeemable merit in attacking the author. Out of respect, Harrison was notified via email.

Shortly after, Harrison left another lengthy comment, pictured below. We removed additional language  where he went into some detail regarding experiences with Dennis Yu and, uh, shared unrelated matters  regarding Dennis and Harrison’s mom and dad. We also thoughtfully pruned parts where Harrison reproached Dennis’s participation in various ventures and flat out called him crappy names, all the while proclaiming that he himself was simply “trying to help [us and aimClear Blog' readers] not fall for [Dennis's] con and just feed his reputation with free publicity.” Fail!

We contacted Harrison, again to let him know we had edited personal attacks out of the comments thread and publicly made note with an inline bracketed message. That’s just how we roll, above board.

Marty even inserted a short and general disclaimer about aimClear Blog etiquette as a separate comment. This was out of respect for Harrison and our readers. We do this in the rare occasion when we feel compelled to remove user generated content.

While we don’t reveal private exchanges that take place between our staff and readers, suffice to say that multiple individuals raised the concept of freedom of speech-impinged to us via email.

To those confused persons who believe this matter to be a freedom of speech issue, y’all could learn something from limited-time-only Miss California, Carrie Prejean. Horrified by the aftermath of her controversial (there’s that word again!) response to a pageant question about gay marriage, Ms. Prejean argued to the point of tears that her holy first amendment, her freedom of speech, had been ripped away.

Newsflash, hotshots: freedom of speech is “the right to speak, or otherwise communicate, one’s opinion without fear of harm or prosecution,” and that’s prosecution in the legal sense. If we were the government, and you typed that comment, and we trimmed it here and there, then you might consider your freedom of speech impinged. But we ain’t. We’re aimClear.

“Freedom of speech is not a blanket guarantee,” Marty pointed out the other day. “For instance, it is against the law to engage in hateful speech that results in a mob being incited to murder, even if the victim is a pedophile. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater and it’s against to law to liable, which means saying disparaging things in public that are not true.”

Here’s a simple run-down of our blog comment-expectations, in the ever-eloquent words of Marty Weintraub (who was visibly upset) for you and the “sniveling immature monkeys who think they know about American law:”

• “If you take issues with the alleged facts, call us out. We’ll publish your comments right away and admit if there’s been a proven error.  Our blog is replete with appropriate redactions, apologies and respectful discourse. Otherwise, fuck off.”
• “If you have issues with any content’s tone, hoist the flag, pal, and we’ll step right up.”
• “If all you want to do is publish some out of context bullshit case study to prove that someone sucks, go somewhere else because we’re more ethical than that.”

The Editor’s Take
To my mind it boils down to this: had the blog post been a flagrant touting or damning of Dennis’s character, Harrison’s comments would have been applicable, and therefore, remained intact.  By truncating the comment, we weren’t defending Dennis Yu’s  honor like some knight in shining armor- we were preserving contextual relevance.  We barely know Dennis Yu but the post raised what still seem to be serious issues regarding Facebook’s ad platform.

If a blog post addresses marketing tactic, blog comments should address the tactics, and not question the personal constitution of the author.  This is not “Law and Order.”  You’re welcome to tell us we’re wrong. Tell us the assertions are off the mark. But discuss the freakin’ point at hand as opposed to using our pages as your personal pissing posts.  Take your petty playground name calling outside and grow up, please. </rant>

photo credit: idovermani

After an invigorating keynote speech from Charlene Li I hit the ground running. “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds” was moderated by Joshua Palau, of Razorfish and included a brilliant panel of  industry-blogger thought-leaders:

Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD
Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed
Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
Jim Hedger, Lead Blogger, Webmaster Radio

Watlington took the podium first and gave a brief look back on SES conferences and the blogging sessions. The first blog session was five years ago in an unglamorous position. It was the last session on the last day. The panel didn’t think anyone would show up but they ended up with a full room.

Don’t blog just because everyone, even your competitors are doing it. Avoid the “me-too” blog. It’s essential to create unique and vital content for your business otherwise you will be lost in the shuffle. Focus on business content, not your personal life.

Watlington has noticed the impact the recession has blogging. Companies don’t feel they can keep up and stay focused with a limited budget but your blog must be an integral part of your marketing plan, not a pet project. Move the blog from the “experiment” mode to fast track implementation with a content strategy.

It’s All About the Content
Develop a long-term battle plan, peek into your company’s future and amp up what is interesting.

You absolutely must have analytics and assess them.
Build your keyword list and live by it- but revisit it regularly to discard stale keywords.

Address comments in a timely manner and encourage deeper reading, link to your friends.

Leverage Readers
Use social media to announce and expand your reach. Treat each post as a mini PR campaign.Track and analyze your success.

Blog Ranking Case Studies
Dixon Jones provided excellent case studies on how blogging gives you the ability to rank for popular keywords.

Post Secret started as a space for people who have a secret and want to share it but not with anyone they actually know. Seems kind of silly, but it’s immensely popular and now they have a wealth of backlinks and domain links. PostSecret now ranks for the intriguing singular keyword: “secret”.

David Naylor is #1 for “UK SEO” but how did he get there? He continually posts with provocative and interesting content. Because of this quality the number of links has steadily grown.

The anchor text related to his blogs are amazing but only 3 links say “UK SEO” verbatim. But he has 6 comic blogs saying Dave Naylor UK SEO.

Bloggers- spread the linklove! Linking to relevant and similar sites is essential when blogging. Bloggers love reciprocal links and other bloggers notice if you link or not. You have to spread the love to get love.

The Necessity and Importance of Feeds
Next, Falkow focused on feeds because there is useful content on your website which wouldn’t be appropriate on a blog but should still be broadcast and available.

The best way to socialize your content is with news feeds (RSS). Google’s definition of a blog: “a webpage with frequently updated content” and as Matt Cutts said: having a blog is important for ranking in Google SERPs. Do the math.

RSS feeds not only notify your subscribers and other bloggers to your content search engines love feeds and notice how active they are. Aggregators of feeds such as Technorati and Google Blog Search have a community which feed off this content who in turn post these links to their social web. All these people have their own audience creating a snowball effect.

Odden segued from discussing optimization and broadcasting to the tactics of achieving links:

8 Blog Link Tactics

• Quality out means quality in- high quality content is important know your audience
  
• Link Out- spread the love
• Make a big ass list.
  
• Get on “other” lists- tell them to consider yours on these list blog comments
• Make a killer tool that makes it easy to share and bookmark
• Write guest posts (link to lisa and derek here?) like associations and other promenent blog- let them know you’re availabl
• Power up ReTweets -ad that RT badge and make it EASY
• Network OFFLINE- Use socail media to connect with people online and augment it with LIVE networking

BONUS TIP: dynamically embed a hard link to the post in you RSS feed

Broadcasting Sound
WebmasterRadio’s Jim Hedger was last up and dove right into benefits of feeds for other formats besides text. “The fine arts of wide-casting to a narrow audience and narrow-casting to a wide one”

This panel is full of great bloggers, but they are all about text- Hedger is all about broadcasting sound. Being in this industry, it’s all about narrow-casting and knowing your audience is a big key to success.

Webmasterradio is a major voice in the SEO community. They’ve been around for 5 years and have compiled 10,000+ unique historic files. Each file has a unique topic, with its own page, imagine the SEO that goes into optimizing and maintaining this massive wealth of SEO data?! Wow. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

• In 2008 Webmasterradio recieved 2.1 million unique listeners: 53% from distributed podcasts like iTunes
• 32% on-demand directly from webmasterradio.fm
• 15% listen live
• Since 53% of their listeners are off site- distribution is everything.

The takeaways from this session in a nutshell: create unique and vital content, have a content strategy, link out to get links in, you must have a feed, know your audience and know where and how to distribute your content.

“Blogging’s going to be around for quite awhile so we better get good with it.” -Amanda Watlington

The first mal-practitioner of Twitter was @jonestshirts which sells blank t-shirts in bulk and uses twitter to drive traffic to their website jonestshirts.com and encourage repeat customers.

Evans- You have 150 followers and are only following 12- why not your followers? Create that relationship and don’t just use it as a RSS feed.

Lieb- When you acknowledge someone with links and pictures that person will RT as a “hey- look at me!”

Slegg- You need more info on your bio and customize your background. Using a customized background is SO important. Don’t just use as a promo feed- engage.

Evans- In terms of the blog: vary, include “funniest t-shirt” post. You may not be selling it or trying to promote it but it’s in the same category and may be of interst to your visitor. Also, add categories.

Slegg- If you’re having problems with spammers on your blog, Akismet- is awesome at stopping SPAM in WordPress

Evans- You can also use CAPTCHA to make sure the commenter is a person.

The next brave volunteer was @WebGuild, which organizes information about stuff that happens in the webspace and writes a feed which goes to Twitter. @WebGuild uses Twitter to drive traffic to the website, they get about 10,000 unique visitors on a good day-12% coming from Twitter. Not bad.

Evans- Do you tweet yourself as YOU?

@WebGuild- No.

Evans- You need to.

Slegg- It looks just like an RSS feed threw up in Twitter. You need to re-write to create interest.

Evans- Follow these people back to see if they RT and thank them for it. When you start to put conversation in Twitter you’ll get better feedback.

Question: Corporate Tweeters- should they tweet under the company twitter profile or personal accounts and names?

Evans- It depends. For example, @Zappos- it’s Zappo and a name or initials, but it depends on the company.

The next account up for critique was@BCTravelGuide an account attempting to drive traffic to BCtravelguide.ca and its blog. Wait, where’s the blog? Unfortunately, Lieb had to squint and scroll and squint again to find the tiny blog link in the footer. But it didn’t end there- clicking on the footer link brought Lieb to a page which then had yet another step- three links within two sentences pointing to the same place with “Blog” “here” and “come on in” as anchor text. Not kidding. Ouch.

Slegg- Again, Twitter feed same RSS

Evans- It looks sporadic, but the Bio looks pretty good.

Slegg- This doesn’t look engaging at all.

Evans- It doesn’t look like you understand who your customers are and it looks like you just heard about SEO and just threw it at the wall to see what sticks.

On to the blog critique:

Slegg- The other blog (jonestshirts) didn’t have categories- you have WAY too many categories

Lieb- And organic food? Why is that there?

Evans- It looks like SEO “tricks” and looking at it- it looks like spam.

Lieb- Yeah, it looks like keyword stuffing (Yikes)

Audience Question:I know people are using a lot of automating (Panel groans) but I want to become a thought leader and get a qualified audience @MedicalMktg.

Evans- Get something like TweetDeck or Sessmic Desktop as a tool to manage conversation.

Look at hash tags and friend people who are talking about trending topics in your industry.

RT people’s stuff.

Find a good link on a blog? Tweet it.

Slegg- Follow thought leaders, they have a big audience and RT their stuff, they may follow you back.

Lieb- It could be visually more stunning and use hashtags, makes it easy to follow you.

Evans- Fix you bio.

Lieb- As an author, on Twitter I’m flattered when people recognize me. When you Tweet a good article look them up to see if they’re on Twitter.

Evans- Your company is Health Care Success but the account is @MedicalMktg change that to HCSucces. You need to brand your Twitter handle.

Slegg- Looking at this, I would be sure it’s a spam account.

The next patient at the clinic was @WyoTech, the official auto mechanic tech school of the NHRA with multiple campuses across the States. They are using Twitter to connect with students and hopefully attract new ones.

Evans- I see you do a lot of links. What exactly do you do?

@WyoTech- We’re a trade school.

Evans- You need to hold a real conversation.

Lieb- Your bio needs a little copy-editing, there’s random capitalization of words.

Evans- Go out and look at hashtags where your campus is at and tweet about the city too.

Social media is not easy it takes time to develop conversation and find valuable people to engage.

Lieb- Campuses and schools are really socially oriented, you may want to have different accounts for different campuses. Tell them where to find good pizza in your area or what’s going on in the area.

@WyoTech- We’re one of the official schools for NHRA

Evans- YOU SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THAT! Not about the drivers but about pit crew- “look at how fast the pit crew changed that tire!”

@WyoTech- Where do I find hashtags?

Lieb- People make them up.

Evans- There is an argument about not needing hashtags but if you want to follow them- they’re being used in Flickr and Facebook, so it’s a good idea.

An automation abuser @MarvinTowler is passionate about motivation and kickboxing as well as the personal assistant to Jack Canfield, author of the famous Chicken Soup books. He wasn’t actually present (good thing too…) but he asked his friend to have his account critiqued.

Evans- Hmm- from API… looks like spam. Get rid of that.

Slegg- And all these quotes? How is this applicable to your followers?

@MarvinTowler Rep- He replies in DM

Lieb- DMs don’t count as engagement

Lieb- What’s he getting out of this?

@MarvinTowler Rep- He’s about motivating people, passionate about kickboxing and personal assistant to Jack Canfield.

Slegg- But how can he follow 20,000+ people? This isn’t useful.

Lieb- It’s like getting a phone and wanting everyone in the phone book to call you.

Evans- Change his bio.

Slegg- Unfollow all these people and go out and find people that interest him.

Evans- Looks like he read a lot of SEO stuff and tried to implement all of it. There is no strategy.

Be real, tweet and engage.

Don’t be too discouraged in tweeters, the next three are on the right track.

@fairchildsemi from engineeringconnections.com

Evans- I do like your background, but I don’t see a lot of conversation

Slegg- You have a fair amount of followers and that’s good. Start engaging them.

Lieb- You’re not using a shortening service. That’s suicide on Twitter because it will cut off URLs that won’t fit.

Evans- You should be tracking how many clicks the tiny urls get- Bit.ly allows you to look at this
Stay away from URLs that put bars up and doesn’t change it back to regular URL

Cli.gs (in seesmic desktop) filters out the bots that click links (the first 25-50 clicks are bots)

On engineeringconnections.com:

Lieb- Last post was august 3rd- that was a little while ago.

But I do like you have other executives and employees blogging about things are more pertinent to your business.

Slegg- I did see you posted the B2B opportunity- you missed the opportunity to say “hey come visit us at…!”

@FairChildSemi- So we should tweet before and during not just after?

All- YES!

Slegg- You’re missing a great opportunity.

Evans- I would use more pictures on your blog.

Lieb- Blog entries with pictures get higher readership.

Slegg- Set up basic categories.

Evans- When you give people too many options to share- they don’t. Choose a few and choose the ones where you’re community is involved. Engineers aren’t sharing industry links on MySpace.

@WhitePages

Slegg- Looking at your Twitter feed- It looks like Bit.ly threw up on your page.

Evans- It’s about branding!

Look at your background in different screen resolutions so people aren’t missing out on information.

It looks like this is being typed, but every one has a link and that looks like promotion.

Lieb- The teasers can be a little more “teasey”

Slegg- You are engaging with your audience which is really good.

Lieb- You have a low number of followers and following how long have you been doing this?

@WhitePags- We just started a couple months ago.

Lieb- Well, slow and steady DOES win the race.

Evans- On your bio you have a bit.ly for the url, change that.

Slegg- Don’t just have it publish the headline, it’ll get cut off and it looks spammy.

@Savings and savings.com

Evans- I see you have the Facebook page and website- do you want them to go to your website or Facebook page?

Slegg- You’d be better off tweeting every once in awhile saying, “hey, we’re on Facebook, too!” But this is actually a really good Twitter feed.

Lieb- I’m liking the writing, it’s really engaging. I like the call to action, you’re asking users to submit deals.

Evans- The name could indicate spam, but if you look at the feed there IS real engagement.

On savings.com/blog/blog.html: (yes, the panel commented on the URL too)

Slegg- I like the use of photos.

Evans- Include “recent comments” it shows visitors that people engage.

Slegg- Have “blog” be one of the tabs.

Lieb- Don’t let the “tech guys” push you around.

photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 2 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

The most important news to come out of  ‘Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page. However the value is no longer divided up amongst the remaining followed links on the page. Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings.

No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs. Here’s what we’re telling our clients:

Internal Linking & noFollow

• Don’t panic! Google dialed in the change a year ago and nobody noticed. Even Matt Cutts noFollows hundreds of internal links on his blog including his subscription form and “comments” #anchor links.
• Link-count matters at least some of the time. The new PageRank sculpting is about not placing unnecessary links on a page to extraneous or duplicate content, as opposed to noFollowing links. Sadly, at times this sometimes may seem incongruous with usability. This usability-sacrifice may  hurt the Internet IMHO.

  Forgoing gratuitous internal linking to pointless or little used pages does not mitigate the critical need to create a keyword-rich, diverse and colorful internal link graph to compliment global navigation. Just don’t build tons of extraneous crap-content and associated navigational links,  which could dilute the power distributed by other links to important content.

• Don’t hide links. Google’s already told us that they read javascript and that the links can pass juice. iFrames in conjunction with robots.txt may work to mask links. We’re telling clients not to bother. Today’s effective cloaking is tomorrow’s red-flag penalty. Really the days of PR sculpting by hidden links are over.
• Arguably, it still makes sense to send Google sparse clues that some pages should not receive internal link energy. We think it’s still fine to noFollow privacy policies, registration forms and other obviously inconsequential pages that webmasters’ truly don’t want to waste site strength on.
• If you have already noFollowed internal links holistically on your site, Google says you won’t be penalized. It’s not necessary to remove existing noFollow attributes that are not gratuitous. Because Google was steadfast in their PageRank sculpting recommendations for the last year, we’ve made some conservative noFollow suggestions to clients.  It does not appear that any damage has been done. In fact, sites we’ve been working with are thriving. This is congruent with what other SEOs are reporting.
• Reciprocally, we don’t recommend adding many if any new noFollow internal links. It’s a good time to watch and wait, while focusing on re-tooling sites to “sculpt” link juice by better architecture using more meaningful links that lead to more to valuable content.
• Some or all sites may be ranked differently than by traditional theories. The algorithm is complicated and, outside of Googlers, most analysis regarding black box factors is speculation. There are credible theories to suggest that some sites may not be evaluated by the PR bean-counting approach.In fact there is reliable evidence (watch the whole video) to indicate that, at least for some sites, there is a pot of link power applied to the entire site and hoarding excess domain juice could be a negative.
• (Not a recommendation) If you’re feeling snarky, radical, and you’re not the Washington Post, consider making unnecessary navigational links copy and paste instead of hot. For instance, look at the date archives on this blog in the left hand sidebar.We don’t offer them as clickable (hot) links anymore  because we don’t want to dilute the link-count on the page.

  We hope any user motivated enough to view our date archives, won’t mind the the copy/paste. Sadly, welcome to the new copy and paste era of web navigation. Without noFollow, that’s just what you get.

External Linking & noFollow

• Don’t panic! This is not a very big deal.
• Outbound links are simple to think about. As a rule of thumb, only follow links you can vouch for from an editorial perspective. The obvious intent of eliminating noFollow benefits for outbound links is to impel webmasters to police their own links. This is good for SEO. It’s known that linking to quality sites provides an organic boost to the link-source site so linking out to other respected sites is a great thing to do. However, choose outbound links wisely and link out to high quality relevant and top trusted sites when appropriate.
  
• The new rules present somewhat of a conundrum in regards to user generated content that contains links. Link-count in user generated content could be a problem. There’s been much written about what the effect of long comment threads, with many noFollowed links, might be.

  Many believe that Google “knows” the footprint of popular blogging platforms like WordPress and will somehow compensate. There are those respected webmasters who believe that all approved user generated content links should be followed.

• Many webmasters don’t use WordPress or other common and recognizable content management systems to handle user generated content. Since we don’t trust Google to tell webmasters what they need to know straight up, maybe we should remove the links from our comment-threads as opposed to noFollowing UG links or eliminating comments.

  This is not a “recommendation.”Users would still see the anchor text along side the non-linked URL for easy copy and paste. This will reduce the link-count on the page to potentially mitigate any potential dilution factor, should Google not recognize WordPress and compensate. It would be great for Matt Cutts to provide some honest clarification to this point before fear of the new algorithm guts webmasters’ willingness to engage their readers.

• It might make sense to apply this principle to other outbound links on the page. Maybe Twitter links and other outbound links in widgets should no longer be hot. Thanks Google …welcome to the new copy and paste navigation paradigm.

The social Internet is about conversations that propagate virulently and index at various speeds.  Twitter, the fastest feed community of all,  can be easily leveraged to “proof” marketing concepts for slower social channels the same way SEOs use PPC (pay per click) to prove organic landing pages.

Read on for a tactical starting point to use Twitter’s flashpoint sharing environment to test your linkbait, promotional messages, calls to action, friend-making and branding.

To gain perspective, set a Google Alert a couple of days early in an emerging dialog, and marvel at the pure genesis of a few blogs spawning organic global dialog. Monitor the topic’s Twitter stream at the same time for a jolt. The speed of conversation is radically faster.

What’s interesting about the blogosphere and some other social channels, is the relatively slow speed at which content propagates.  Though it only takes a few minutes for posts from authority publications to be be indexed by Google,  that’s a long time…too long for effective multivariate message-testing.

Over minutes and hours people share, react, engage, bookmark, think, write more blog posts and the whole thing moves along over days and weeks. Later sympathetic viral chatter can flare about, banging around various channels.  Blog buzz, though much faster than traditional media channels,  is not a real-time machine.

While it’s possible to test individual blog posts and make changes as viral waves wash over time, anyone who’s ever tried changing-out blog post headlines, layout and copy in reaction to to well…non-reaction, knows that blogs and other web pages are clunky–hardly platforms for real-time social media marketing tests.

PPC Testing to Prove SEO Funnels
Like slower social channels, SEO is also difficult to run multivariate tests on because pages get indexed relatively slowly. That’s why it’s great, when possible, to test organic landing pages with PPC. Overcome the relatively slow GoogleBot organic process with PPC testing, in order to gain a large enough sampling quickly enough to preview organic conversion.

PPC artists are famous for guerrilla ad-message and landing page testing. They grind every shred of possible conversion out of each paid click by quickly driving users past a grid of different landing pages. Volume and speed matter for testing, because marketers need a large enough user-sample, driven from specific keywords in order to gain enough insight to sharpen conversion.

Why Use PPC For SEO Multivariate Testing?

• PPC moves much faster, is precise and controllable.
• Quickly funnels, conversion, design, etc…
• Validates marketer’s instincts or proves pages, action calls or messages that do and don’t work
• Quick method to get the user-volume needed to proof concepts and conversion

How to Test Social Using Twitter

That fact that a channel is “social,” does not mean it necessarily moves faster. StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, LInkedIn, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube all have their unique viral rhythms, all slower than Twitter. We’d rather plan for slower channels by testing the populace’s reaction in Twitter’s petri dish and refine the approach prior to broader sharing.

With a little technique, some first-degree-of-seperation-tweeps and a ton of respect for community, feedback to test headlines and messages is immediate.  Twitter allows social media marketers to parade test messages past a larger sampling of users, very quickly. The speed of conversation provides any number of opportunities for savvy social media marketers to test.

Viral proliferation essentially occurs when others traffic your message because it’s somehow provocative. Friends of friends of friends rebroadcast to others and recommend content where they have authority. It’s the power of one to exponential results.  So what do you want to know when testing social?

• Does anybody care? Is the subject matter or presentation interesting to others topically engaged– or only me?
• Will my friends, their friends and folks I don’t even know rebroadcast? We’ve all recommended content that went thud. I want to know if the content or message we offer is worthy.
• Is there are combination of words and/or concept, more likely to catch attention?  I’d much rather find that out prior to making a large investment of time sharing in different places.
• Does my avatar’s circle of friends have enough authority to zealously get a message they care about, out to a broader audience?
• What do various interest segments respond to? How can we tap into the interest group to make friends and influence others by inspiring with brilliant perspective, wit, insight, etc…
• Are the headline and description I wrap my content recommendations up in, likely to do the trick? Sure the content has to be great, but what packaging works when I recommend.

Recently aimClear Blog featured a post about creating a reputation monitoring dashboard which got a ton of attention, links, rankings,  buzz and resulted in a cool new client. The inception of the buzz was in a series of retweets, the headline concept of which we had tested days before, on another writer’s blog posts about reputation monitoring. Using one of our avatars, we did multivariate headline testing to determine what types of messages inspired rebroadcast.

Once we understood that bookmarks like “Don’t get caught with your pants around your ankles” or “bend over, the TwitterJacks are coming” worked we settled on the “wrapper” for release to slower channels. We already knew it would work, like dry tinder for lighting a fire, because we had proven the idea. It was easy to come back a week later, armed with a well thought out post, match to fuse.

Be Creative In Testing
Micro-blogging breakout Twitter is an incredible incubator for testing social messages.  There are many methods to probe and test ideas. Using tools like Tweetdeck, it’s easy dial into conversations surrounding just about any keyword combination, second by second, real-time, as opposed to hours and days. Use your participation in focused conversations to refine  instincts surrounding what’s worthy viral material.

• Retweet others recommendations, testing different wrappers
• Reply using the @ sign to folks you just met, add perspective to the conversation and measure how the approach you take affects reactions in the topical community you’re participating in.
• Make lists of Tweets that are massively rebroadcast and analyze what works amongst various interest groups.
• Be willing to throw ideas, even those you’re attached to, away once empirical evidence proves it won’t work.

Twitter is one of the ultimate social research tools, providing incredible insight as to a segmented communities likelihood to rebroadcast. Much the way search engine optimization jockeys look to PPC to achieve necessary user volume to quickly test, leverage Twitter’s hair-trigger rebroadcast paradigm to vet social media marketing message prior to broader sharing, blogging and bookmarking.

The ever increasing popularity of social media sites YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook  reveal the necessity for brands to  connect with their customers in these arenas. This SearchEngineStrategies New York session will touch on  advanced tips for increasing online brand awareness & brand equity protection in a shaky economy.

• Moderating the session
  Fionn Downhill, CEO & President, Elixir Interactive

• Panel Speakers:
  Kevin Cobb, Interactive Brand Manager, EMBARQ
  Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization, Facebook
  Ron Diorio, VP, Product and Community Development, Economist.com

Fionn Downhill
Introduces the session as a part of the C level track. The session will be about providing support for C-level decision makers who need to move on digital assets.

“Just when marketers thought they had it down, along comes video search, web 2.o, social media & universal search.”

There’s no doubt that as the landscape changes there’s a need to adapt with it.

Kevin Cobb of EMBARQ
Kevin kicks things off with an ice breaker. Something embarrassing about himself – “When I walk I tend to hum.” I don’t find it to be that embarrassing. Maybe that’s because I’m all about the hum and walk myself.

Kevin proclaims to be a passionate social media advocate. I’m right there with ya Kevin. So…How to Build Brand awareness:

Create a presence in an online community where customers and prospects are already engaged. I think YouTube just might be one of those sweet spots.

Interesting YouTube facts:
- 4th largest US site
- 2nd most popular search engine
- 1:4 searches – YouTube

Hundreds of thousands of customers are seeking product info on Youtube. They needed to see what the techies were doing.
- We found that many are looking at technology product reviews
- Technology videos on YouTube prompt conversion!

- 27% of viewers that watched product review videos were more favorable towards the product after doing so. Take the time to test your ads! (Multi Variate testing)

Videos to Address Customer Service Issues
Looking to address the top 10 customer service issues
Online Outreach
- Call centers (Who’s calling? What are they lookin for?)
- We found videos to be a great way to connect with customer on service issues
- Continue to interact/use feedback loop

Objectives synched with brand promise
- Channel objectives:
- Build promise: practical ingenuity
- Brand pillar: customer focus
- Brand personality

Getting the word out
- Integrated online media campaign/communication plan : The 48 seconds contest

The idea: it takes 50 seconds to load a page with dial up. On the other hand it takes 2 seconds with high speed Embarq). The question to users was, what would you do with the extra 48 seconds? Users were encouraged to post the most creative 48 second videos.
- Created incredible buzz for the brand

There’s a simple reason why this type of marketing works, and that’s the difference between one way and two way communication. Give your customers the chance to interact with the brand and you’ll be amazed the trust  and engagement your brand will recieve.

Tim Kendall of Facebook
Building your brand on Facebook

Tim will share the Facebook elements he sees to work from a marketing perspective.

He notes two main elements:
1) Ads
2) Marketing Tools
- Marketing tools are the foundation before you even start thinking about running ads

How consumers have historically found information
- Directory(phone books, local ads, etc)
- search (search engine marketing)
- UGC + social context (social communities)
- Helps individuals discover the world through the lens of your friends.

The Filter Factor
- Massive amounts of content
- Friend’s filter by way of content endorsement

The power of social distribution

Find them before they search:
- 2 groups: demand fulfillment, demand generation (10 x bigger)
- demand fulfillment – Want to by a camera – Search google
- demand generation – Really interested in photography but not ready to buy a digital camera

With Facebook you have the ability to identify a 22 year old female interested in learning to play the piano. The ads are highly targeted and teamed with great ad writing can be a high powered conversion machine.

Free marketing tools amplify your message
- pages – feel more like a profile, users can fan the page and get continuous updates
- events
- applications
- share & connect (across the web)

How do they go about promoting?
- The stream of endorsements among friends is propagated real time.

Ron Diorio of Economist.com
The Economist fully engages web 2.0. It’s a lifestlyle brand.

The content seeks to inspire rich discussion and is geared to be a highly intellectual community.

The brand extends offline with Meetup.
- Opportunity for fans to meet in real life and discuss and debate key issues, from the magazine

Fan Translation
- Economist is now translating the magazine. They found that a group of fans in China were translating the Economist content while upholding the brand. The instinctual move was to call up the legal department, but instead they entertained the question, what would happen if we sat back and let them translate the content?

- They’ve found that the translations are expanding an untapped fan base as well as sending new subscribers to the publication.

- A similar situation happened when somebody created an Economist Facebook page. The page received over 90,000 fans before being offered back to the Economist brand.

Utilizing the free tools that your users are already engaged in, is a sure shot way to reduce the cost of reaching new customers & users.