aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Anyone active in social media knows, with certainly, the compounding annoyances of those who utilize mainstream social communities to network inappropriately. In a rapidly expanding universe where procuring a few influential “authority” players’ support can deliver oodles of traffic, valuable links and scads of motivated customers to the door, it’s clear why sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Digg are rife for potential abuse.

Though unwritten there are implied rights and rules of engagement regarding friendship, set and enforced by the mob’s wisdom. I think we should make them official. Read the rest of this entry »

Since it’s debut last year, many of us have invested countless hours in Sphinn, SearchEngineLand’s “social news” community site for search marketing professionals. When the SEL team first released Sphinn in beta, I clearly remember thinking “CRAP, one more flippin’ site I need to keep track of to stay current on a daily basis.”

I had no idea whatsoever the depth of lessons to learn and (most of all) benefits to my writing.

In consecutive conversations @ SES New York with both Danny Sullivan and Kevin Heisler (it IS small world after all), I surprised myself in articulating what I’ve come to believe is the true booty for those months of total immersion in the “social news” model. The holistic nature of the revelation seemed to catch both gentleman off guard in-the-moment so I made a mental note to share the thinking in these threads. So here we go…

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A social media “front door pitch” means directly contacting folks to promote something only when you already KNOW with certainty that the future-friend (target) you’re engaging WILL love what you offer. While manipulative, the interaction serves all parties.

The ability to identify the passionate interests of community site-users is a modern media miracle. Conversational marketing is the true promise of demographic research embodied and a pillar of social media. That’s the beauty of SMO. The specificity of networking site tools facilitates stunningly detailed research into the habits of individuals for friend-making and holistic exploitation.Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you embrace it or not, social media is here to stay and affects your brand. Social media marketing must be part of your overall marketing effort. Ignore the blogosphere at your peril.

Moderator Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board and Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, General Business, IBM, began the seminar by stating that the Social Media Track was new to Search Engine Strategies conferences. She introduced the powerhouse panel:Read the rest of this entry »

Never underestimate the screaming-obsessive lowdown fanaticism of a committed social site user who’s really pissed off. From Digg’s famed Bury Brigade to the vulgar rhetoric of the StumbleTroll Wars, marauding packs of member-vigilantes gang up to violently flame those they consider trespassers.

The engaged are extremely invested in their community, to the point that participation is woven into the very fabric of day to day lives. Regardless of the specific site or community model, one nuclear complaint seems to piss off invested participants the most: bad content.Read the rest of this entry »

As first reported over at Collective-Thoughts, StumbleUpon has finally reacted to terrible press and user complaints by adding a line-item “flag” system to SU reviews. Now users, who feel as if they have been subject to TOS violations, can flag abusive reviews as spam, violent, hostile, or vulgar.Read the rest of this entry »

I am an avid social media community member. I am also a search marketing professional, profoundly grateful to friends, associates, clients. With achievement and mistakes, I’ve always been proud of my avatars. I’m also well aware of the technical and tactical gaming activities that some “aggressive” gray and black hat SEM technicians employ to push ROI for clients.Read the rest of this entry »

Those of us old enough (or studied politically) know that this headline invokes John F. Kennedy’s immortal Inaugural Address- January 20th 1961. His words ring true today with astounding clarity and resonate throughout the fabric of society as an entitled generation of global citizens selfishly asks, “what’s in it for ME?” Nowhere is this clearer than in social media circles, where an ishy minority of self-centered users muddy the waters for the authentic.Read the rest of this entry »

<Rant> Imagine our surprise to learn that, earlier this year, StumbleUpon trolls were publicly calling for my death.

Our blog is known as a search marketing “advice” publication, so here we’ll share a sadly funny SEM factoid. Some of the most successful aimClearBlog posts were written about and drove OODLES of traffic from StumbleUpon, to a great extent from negative SU reviews for posts about SU.

I mean SU sent us an incredible amount of visitors since our start in March. In retrospect and after researching, we were surprised to learn that quite a bit of buzz-traffic came from those in SU who were totally critical of the fact that I had the AUDACITY to WRITE about SU, truly my favorite social media community. Some individuals employed nasty rhetoric & even suggested that I kill myself…really.Read the rest of this entry »

It’s all the mainstream chatter & rage: “The Facebook graph this” or “social graph THAT.” Serving ads to this mystical diagram of human interactions (and the profiling-variables offered by fledgling ad platforms) are the voyeuristic dreams of heat seeking guided missile marketing freaks. “Points” on the Facebook graph, available to marketers for profiling customers, are still limited though exciting.

The FB self-serve tool itself is a multi-layered lens peering into Facebook’s noisy black box village, a happy harbinger of social ad platform things-yet-to-come. I thought we’d take a look at what attributes are actually available today on a node of the first do-it-yourself social graph ad serving platform and share a tasty bit of the interface.Read the rest of this entry »