aimClear Search Marketing Blog

SES Toronto Keynote speaker Tara Hunt is a lovely enigma–part rock star, part trailblazing thought leader and one hell of a Twitter addict (@missrogue).

No matter what characteristics you ascribe to Tara, one thing is certain; she’s  been hailed as one of the most respected & savvy customer centric online community marketers this side of North America.

Recently in advance of her SearchEngineStrategies engagment, Tara was kind enough to answer a few questions regarding community marketing & her recent book The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business. Here’s what she had to say.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

More and more companies are meeting the sexy social media scene with open & loving arms, and rightfully so. Social media is an easy way for brands to distribute content, openly engage an audience and showcase their charming personality.

This SES New York 2009 session will take a look at a few companies on top of their game and the social media tools they use to pimp their brand. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s delightful that our favorite social media marketers are so giving. In the daily SEM social content stream we’re all each others’ playground friends, mentors, students, scientists, satirists, freaks and thought leaders.

There’s so much to learn from each other in various social channels, to stimulate and further advise content ideas. To me, the most important social marketing skill is a willingness to share unconditionally.

Today we posed the question: “What do you think the most important ‘values’ are for social marketing?” It was slightly loaded in that the word “values” means something different to everyone. Here are the answers from some of my favorite industry folks. I’ve linked to their Twitter profiles and highly recommend following their tweets. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part 2 of our ongoing series, “Avatar Theory, Common Social Media Participation Models.” We’ve been gathering information confidentially for weeks from marketing peers regarding methods, objectives, risk, ROI and anecdotes as they relate to their social media activity on behalf of clients.

There’s a remarkable lack of agreement as to what’s cool and what’s not. We’ll be sharing commonalities in what we discover, leading up to my SMX East NYC presentation on the “What Is Ethical in Social Media Marketing” panel. It is not our intent to endorse or dismiss anyone’s practices, merely to present information which supports forming your own opinions as to best practices and ethics.

The Walled Garden Forum Rat Avatar is a social media persona designed to monitor the chatter stream of community corners not indexed by search engines. Usually flying below the radar by not revealing a corporate affiliation, this avatar model is only a reporter and does no selling whatsoever.  The hallmark is intelligence gathering. Read the rest of this entry »