SEO & Search News Report
Since Social Media Optimization is an increasingly important part of SEO strategies, the 52nd edition of the weekly SEO & Search News Report is dedicate this edition to this topic.
Here are some of the most interesting stories about Social Media of this week:
Online Influence Tied to Search, Social Media Use
According to a new research report, “Engaging Advocates through Search and Social Media,” released today by Yahoo! and comScore Networks, not only is social networking’s influence on marketing growing, but particularly vocal individuals are having more of an effect than ever.
Dubbed “Brand Advocates,” these are consumers who spread opinions via word of mouth, as well as over social networks, instant messaging, chat, photo sites and blogging. Such advocates have at least at least a two-to-one rate of converting an actual friend or family member to buy the same exact product or brand they support, according to the report.
“The Internet has irrevocably changed word-of-mouth. There’s no turning back,” Madansky said. “Social media is woven into [advocates] daily lives as well as their purchase processes.”
The study found that Brand Advocates are slightly younger, more educated and spend more time online than do non-advocates. It also states they conduct an average of 48 searches per month, compared to 39 searches for non advocates; and 76 percent of advocates use search engines to research products prior to making purchases, compared to 64 percent of non-advocates. Researchers believe that as these advocates are investing more time and effort into their own decision making process, they are more compelled to talk about their purchases with others. (via ClickZ News)
How Social Media Affects Search Marketing
Social Media was also the main topic of the Search Insider Summit last week in Palm Springs, organized by the media trade magazine MediaPost. Participants discussed how social media impacts search. In the column “SearchInsider” on Mediapost, David Berkovitz reviews some of the issues:
- Conduct blog search audits to review buzz about your brand. Blog search engines such as Technorati, Blogpulse, and IceRocket are great places to start. You can also try searching blog sites such as Blogger. As for the general search engines, Google Blog Search does a far better job at indexing current blog entries than its main site. Searching any of these sites can give you great dirt on your company, competitors and industry. They can also trigger some marketing ideas.
- Social media spawns search engines. MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, and Wikipedia are some of the newest engines. You can even consider the Xbox, which connects users online for multiplayer gaming, as a new potential search device, especially if it becomes an onramp to gamers’ online experience. Could XLO (Xbox Live Optimization) emerge as a new strategy?
- Social media is forever. This is one of the scariest concepts in general for how search will change our lives, and it’s especially prevalent for social media. It’s impossible to predict what the Internet will look like in fifty years, but I’ll make two bets: like TV, many of the basic tenets of the medium will still hold true decades from now (including, for the Internet, the ease of self-publishing, pervasive hyperlinks, and convenient access to porn), and secondly, it will have a very long memory. It’s quite possible that in 2056, analysts of General Electric will be able to see what people were saying about it in our era, and my grandkids will find cached pages of contents of my MySpace profile.
Digg.com Paces Social Media for Two Years
Digg hit a milestone this week. They received the one millionth story submission, a piece appearing on MediaPost about a pending redesign of the Wall Street Journal. A couple of interesting facts about the success of Digg:
Yahoo Social Media: Paying the Price for Being an Innovator?
Yahoo has been arguably the Internet leader over past years, however stock price is down 35% this year. Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch writes that Yahoo was an innovator in social media but had a timing issue allowing MySpace, Facebook and YouTube to dominate the market.
In 1999 Yahoo bought GeoCities for $4.6billion and eGroups for approx $400 million, according to Thomson Financial. Both of these entities are based around community, i.e. social media. It appears that they just came too soon for the market - broadband was a relatively new concept making downloads painfully slow and the products were built for the first generation of Internet with no tags to invite friends, vote or the standard prompts and services that we are now seeing.
Bambi concludes that Yahoo have simply paid the price for being the first mover and not utilizing their portfolio to the best degree. This means that others have been able to learn from their mistakes.
Top Trends for 2007: Explosion of Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, More Sophisticated Search
The magazine “Business to Business” compiled a list with the top 10 marketing trends for 2007, based on interviews with marketers, ad agencies, media companies, analysts and industry experts. Here are some on the trends (edited):
Web 2.0 explodes
Marketers will embrace Web 2.0 applications in their quest to connect with customers and build loyal communities of users.
One of the most vivid examples of Web 2.0 technology is Second Life, a virtual world created by technology company Linden Lab, in which users create online identities and interact with each other. Several companies, including Sun Microsystems, Reuters and Wells Fargo have set up online storefronts and identities on Second Life, where they sell products and services to other Second Life visitors, test concepts and products, and hold virtual events.
Other Web 2.0 applications that will gain traction in 2007 include user-generated videos, blogs, wikis and social networking. According to a November study by the American Marketing Association, 49% of Internet users said they would seek out shopping information on social networking sites, and 29% said they would buy products on such sites.
Boom in online video ads
Online video advertising will really take off next year, with spending on online video ads increasing by 89% over this year to $775 million, according to a report by research company eMarketer. By 2010, spending on online video ads will reach $2.9 billion, eMarketer projected. “At some time early in 2010, $1 in $10 devoted to Internet advertising will go for video placements,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. Despite the surge in spending, online video ads will make up only 4.2% of total online advertising in the U.S. next year, eMarketer predicted. But new technologies are advancing the use of online video.
Measuring engagement online
In conversations with ad agency executives, marketers, industry associations and researchers, everyone is talking about engaging the user. The most commonly used metrics for online video ads are length of time spent watching; number of stops, pauses and restarts; and interactivity, such as entering information into a request field.
Agencies are also developing new metrics for their clients to use in evaluating user engagement on Web sites.
Avenue A|Razorfish, for example, uses a metric it calls page IQ (interactivity quotient), defined as the number of unique visitors who take some action on a Web site (clicking, scrolling down, entering information) divided by the total number of visitors to the site. Another metric the agency uses is scrolling analysis, which measures how far down the page users will go to view content.
More sophisticated search - localization and socialization
Search continued to lead growth in online ad spending this year, accounting for 40% of total online advertising revenue in the first half, according to the “Internet Advertising Revenue Report” from IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. EMarketer said search will continue to account for more than 40% of online ad spending through 2010.
According to Forrester Research, 79% of marketers have used or piloted search marketing programs. “Soon, advances in search technologies will allow marketers to identify users based on local and social attributes, which will eventually lead to more sophisticated targeting techniques,” Eric Eller, senior director of product marketing for Advertising.com, a display ad network that also has a search marketing division.
Online tools & social media for customer acquisition
According to BtoB’s “2007 Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey, acquiring new customers is the No. 1 marketing goal for 2007, cited by 62.3% of respondents. To do this, as well as to drive sales, marketers will use a host of lead generation tools in 2007, including new techniques as well as tried-and-true methods. A study by MarketingSherpa found that free trials, webinars, white papers, blogs and podcasts topped the list of the most effective lead generation tools used by business technology marketers. A separate study by Direct Impact Marketing found that 65% of b-to-b marketers selected e-mail, blogs and Web analytics products as their favorite lead generation tools.
Social Media Optimization at SES Chicago
Of course Social Media Optimization was also a topic at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago where Baron went. Here is some SEM advice taken from the blogs and websites which wrote about the conference:
From BlogTalk on WebProNews:
Andy Hagans advice how to make it to the top on sites like digg? Be a consistent user. You can’t make a dent on a social media site with just one posting.
Rand Fishkin, the guru of link baiting and social media campaigns, pointed out that you still use all the traditional techniques of marketing and PR - figure out who the audience is and give them a piece of content that will resonate. Rand described the Digg.com audience as bored, young, tech-savvy college kids sitting in their dorm looking for something they consider to be interesting content. If that’s your target audience, go for Digg. For non tech stories, getting posted to Reddit or Newsvine is a much better bet.
From Lee Odden
Andy (Hagans) was the last presenter, taking a direct and to the point position that he was not interested in building or contributing to social news or bookmark communities. He is there to use them as tools to make money and that’s it. The audience responded with applause, which you don’t see that often at conferences.
Most social news and bookmark communities loathe explicit marketing efforts. While there is entertainment value in alluding to being a SMO spammer at a conference, there is another set of considerations when actually implementing a sound marketing strategy using social media.
In one of the first ‘famous’ blog post about the new term ‘social media optimization’ (SMO) , Lee Odden was also the one who published the first “New Rules for Social Media Optimization”. Here is an excerpt:
- Increase your linkability
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mashup
- Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
- Participate
- Know how to target your audience
- Create content
- Increase your linkability
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mashup
- Know how to target your audience
- Create content
- Develop a SMO strategy
- Make SMO part of your process and best practices
Social Media Optimization is SEO with PR
Jason Jee Miller from WebProNews published another great summary of the Social Media session at SES Chicago – and gives a good explanation what he thinks SMO is:
Similar to SEO, SMO applies link and traffic building concepts to the online social networking scene - except with a little more PR built in. At the end of the day, it’s not just about traffic, it’s about branding and consumer associations.
Simply: they see you, they like you, they trust you, they buy what you’re selling.
That takes time and effort, but this is the way (lasting) businesses have been built since the first Neolithic grunt traded a shiny hunk of metal to another Neolithic grunt for one of his famous mammoth-flavored toothpicks.
He also lists which social media sites were especially recommended at the conference:
- Flickr: upload industry-relevant and useful photos of events, conferences, developments
- Newsvine: create a profile with keywords that will become your Newsvine subdomain; submit news stories, comment on popular stories, create connections with regular users
- StumbleUpon toolbar: a voter-driven Firefox plug-in that brings up random sites related to user-selected topic areas. Some may doubt the overreaching benefit, considering Firefox is still largely geek-utilized, though it is growing in browser market share.
- MySpace: connect with well-linked-to users to build your visibility
- Yahoo Answers: create a profile and start answering people’s questions; the better your answers, the higher your profiles on the site.
Getting the Bubble Generation To Buy From You
The Social Media Optimization Blog has an interesting post about core user of social media, the so called “Bubble Generation”. First of all: the what?
The bubble generation is the group of consumers between the age of 15 and 29 and they are arguable the first global community of consumers, connected by the Internet, social media and mobile telephony. There are about 40 million US members of the Bubble Generation, and about 500 million members worldwide. Armed with disposable incomes, this group is the target demographic for most companies. Reaching them via traditional media is easy. Getting them to buy from you is a lot harder which is where social networks come into play as they are the ideal platform with which to interact with this generation of consumers.
The blog refers to an insightful article by Tom Hayes titled “Five Reasons the Bubble Generation Won’t Buy From You” how you would go about successfully marketing to the bubble generation. Three advices (in short):
1. Don’t Rely on Traditional Media
The Bubble generation could also be called the “always on” generation. The combination of instant messaging, text messaging, downloadable music and time shifting TV habits means that if you rely on traditional media to reach this audience, that they will not hear you. Passive traditional marketing is ineffective. Customized and personalized engagement is in.
2. Use Peers and Celebrities as Spokespeople
As a result of the customized and personalized marketing messages, Bubble Gen consumers rely on peers and influencers for buying decisions. Peers and to some degree celebrities are viewed as trusted sources of information and thus are able to get through the barriers that the Bubble Gen erect to keep out commercial messaging. That is why social networks are so important to marketing to Bubble Gen’s because it allows marketers to appear directly to the influencers in a community.
3. Interact and Engage
There is nothing worse to the member of the Bubble Gen than a drive by transaction. They don’t want to give you money just to buy a widget. They want to engage and feel connected with not only the product but also with the community at large. Price is a secondary consideration to the Bubble Gen compared to the “cause”.
And last but not least: Danny Sullivan’s new search blog has been launched
The founder and long-time editor of Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan, moved on (as reported in previous news reports) and officially launched his new search blog on Monday, Search Engine Land. Check it out!
P.S. I also recommend to listen to Sullivan’s search news podcast, the Daily SearchCast. It’s informative and entertaining at the same!
This SEO & SEARCH News Report was created on December 16, 2006 by Marc Baumann and sent as a weekly newsletter to the staff and management of Shopzilla.com.
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