A search marketing blog for advertising agency, in-house & PR professionals
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 »
With just shy of 4 million users, StumbleUpon easily remains my personal social community software favorite for sheer elegance, maturity of the community, lack of grubby noise, useful tools, and delightfully idiosyncratic character. Still SU lacks mainstream appeal as many folks, just delving into social media, have never even heard of it. Incredibly, it seems many are leaving StumbleUpon for Facebook. Bummer… Read the rest of this entry »
At the heart of Facebook’s viral-extreme News Feeds are powerful profile settings which essentially default every user to becoming a massive social graph transmitter and receiver. However the more casual friends amassed in Facebook, the more irrelevant crap both parties need to wade through on the desktop every day. In order to justify keeping hyperactive casual friends, we’ve found it key to utilize on-board Facebook OS tools to filter out unnecessary Feed items. Read the rest of this entry »
Is it crooked pool to email, IM, Stumble, or shout at a friend to recommend content, if there’s a possible social media vote involved?
Recently my new friend Tamar and I hosted an amazing dialog amongst other search marketing pals in several comment threads including a triple Sphinn shot, sphunn OUT following one post each in Techpedia and aimClearBlog. Regarding this matter, I was paying careful attention to the difference in rules for rock stars and little people. Read the rest of this entry »
I Sphinn all day long in between running a busy SEM shop, blogging conferences, studying and living life (sort of). There have been a couple of articles decrying the supposedly black practice of Sphinn story promotion recently and I’ve quietly bit my tongue because the hue and cry has been way over-simplistic and alarmingly utopian. Not today…
The bloggers I respect most are BUSY. Some of them won’t find submissions unless they are pitched. I’m BUSY. Often really cool stuff would slip by unnoticed if a friend did not alert me to it. The propriety of promoting Sphinn submissions among friends is NOT a black and white matter. Read the rest of this entry »
The web is becoming increasingly more dependent on community-contributed and moderated sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. The audiences are engaged and the traffic valuable. It’s possible for OTHERS to accomplish fantastic things for your brand (if you’re truly “notable”) and it is possible to safeguard the entry from information “vandalism”. However if you screw up, your career and reputation can literally be ruined. This informative session with leading Wiki experts offered protocol, tips and tricks. Read the rest of this entry »
Name any interest area and there’s probably a social media site with exploitable Web2.0 features serving a community. These sites might be “micro” in size compared to large and well-known services like Digg, but they have passionate members who might also be a more targeted audience comprised of the exact folks you wish to reach. This session toured some of the many smaller communities which are out there and offered tips for finding them and evaluating potential value. Read the rest of this entry »
