So the other day I had this idea. Why not build a tool that only shows the stories that went popular on at least two social voting sites?
I passed the idea by a few people. Mubashar Iqbal from Suffolk Software took that bait and quickly built the app.
While development is still in BETA, you should really take a look. I've been pleasantly surprised with the results and think you end up with a really strong list of articles.
Here's the site: SocialMediaPop.
What do you think of the results?
Today, it was made very clear, again, the importance of “conversation”. On one of the social sites, which features blogging, I frequent now and then a post was made regarding the “relevancy” of web conversations. The writer used several corporate luminaries to make the point that corporations should engage their audiences in an ongoing conversation, to which I whole heartily agree. He went on to describe a conversation that he was having with a “$60 Billion” global company which wanted assistance with education and related issues.
“The executives were surprised (that their Alexa score was lower than the social site that the post was made on) and indicated they needed to work on Search Engine Optimization to increase the traffic to their web site, so the blogger wrote. The blogger in question then responded “no, you need to learn how to have meaningful conversations and create relevant content that appeals to your customers, suppliers and employees.”
What makes this so serendipitous for me is that I recently read C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy’s “The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers”. Their book’s purpose is to establish a “…guide [for] business leaders in their search for new strategic capital, helping them to break out of their old entrenched ways and discover new ones” through conversations with the same audience the blogger in question suggest.
In addition, I am in the process of writing on the subject of how authentic leaders should establish both a comfort in social media conversations personally (which might include blogging or might not, but surely includes joining or even forming social networks that they participate in fully) and a framework for them to adopt. Therefore, this opportunity regarding conversations is a perfect topic for me to posit some of my ideas for testing. Read the rest of this entry
How many social media accounts do you have? I lost track months ago - and that's not including the seventeen niche voting sites that I convinced myself and other members of Hive that I was going to build. Last year. Fact is, I already have too many accounts to keep track of, let alone actually use. Nevertheless, my account list will still grow as my online friends explore new sites.
Earlier today, one of my colleagues AIMed me with a social voting link that he wanted me to vote up. I'm not a member of the site in question and I loathed the thought of signing up for yet another social voting site. However, part of my online functionality is to be "social". That means having the basic accounts on the most popular sites, plus accounts on a few niche sites including a few that I co-own. But I find that the more sites I join, the less I use any of my existing social accounts. There seems to be a law of diminishing returns, and I'm afraid my social effectiveness might decline. I'm loathe to join more, but some of my fellow bloggers get offended when I won't join the site they've just emailed me about.
Unfortunately, the fact is that being "social" is becoming an absolute necessity for online success for web workers, including pro bloggers. (Business Week has an extensive article on how social media will change your business, whether or not you're using blogs. A lot of this article is an assessment of how certain large corporations or even formerly offline consultants/ marketers are faring using various types of social media.) Read the rest of this entry
Breaking: Feedburner takes away all-time stats.
Breaking: Feedburner restores all-time stats.
Now that Feedburner all-time stats are back, you should go check how your remarkable content (e.g., pillar content, resource bait, traffic bait, linkbait, etc.) is doing. Is your linkbait failing on Digg? That's a refrain I've been hearing from some bloggers lately, especially after Digg's recent algorithm change. Someone I know had 220 votes on one submission and no home page (last I heard).
What to do you about failing on Digg, possibly because of your domain name being "tainted"? Cameron Olthuis suggests building mini-sites for posting the linkbait to.
But how does building and baiting mini-sites help the domain you're NOT getting diggs on? Go read Cameron's article. It's brief and to the point. And while you're over at Search Engine Land, check out Debra O. Mastaler's roundup of link building tools. You'll need these tools more than ever, thanks to more webmasters avoiding reciprocal links.
Another thing to possibly avoid: targeting a specific search engine. Though that doesn't mean you should not follow the changes in search engine algorithms.
Several SEO websites are reporting that Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us has blocked some search engine spiders from accessing certain links on del.icio.us. A couple of people tested this theory by trying Del.icio.us page accesses using a faked User-Agent value and were denied.
On the flipside, Andy Beard is blocking Googlebot. Specifically, he's blocking paid reviews posted on his site from being indexed by Google. He apparently feels that Google's preference for all of us to use "no follow" on any link that has been purchased is not the answer.
Paid reviews are, for some, a supplement to remarkable content. If you're just starting to build remarkable content, check out these proven headline templates.
Of course, remarkable content should include multimedia such as video. DailyMotion is now offering HD embeds, which you might want to use in a video marketing campaign.
Though no matter how much remarkable content you have, if you don't join social media sites to help promote, it's unlikely your site's profile will increase before blogger's depression sets in. On the other hand, you might make too many online friends and be overwhelmed with requests for social loving.
Quite a few times recently I have been asked why if I am ditching social media sites such as Facebook I am still putting so much effort into Twitter. Well, the simple answer is I get a lot of enjoyment and a reasonable amount of professional benefit from the service. You just have to know how ... Read the rest of this entry
Still suffering from some Post-Silvester pains?
And from a little blogging block like I do?
The power of reviews and social media is rising :-)
Have to share this one with you:
A traveler complained of cockroaches in a hotel. This is what the hotelier had to say in response to their review: Read the rest of this entry
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Networking is a huge thing for the problogger especially with the web becoming more social. Internet business is now closely mirroring the offline business world. Whoever has the most quality contacts wins. Whoever has the most friends gets the traffic, links, subscribers, and money.
Networking helps in many ways. Whether you need quality links, marketing advice, or someone to keep you accountable, networking can help you reach your goals while also making blogging much more enjoyable. We're social creatures after all. And blogging for bucks can be a lonely endeavor.
If you're new blogger, networking is especially crucial because those early days can be discouraging. Maybe you've got some experience under your belt. However, your network is not working out as well as you had hoped for. You're not getting the links. Your current blogger friends are not responding to your emails. It's time to find better contacts.
Web apps and open source programs are not your biggest asset. Your biggest asset is your IM list, email addresses, and social media friends.
So where can you find quality bloggers to network with? Here are a couple places. Read the rest of this entry
Most bloggers realize the incredible power of social media marketing to send huge amounts of traffic to their blog in a short period of time. There is no shortage of social media sites available, which can cause some frustration over knowing which ones to use for the best results.
With all of the choices, is it best to focus your social media marketing on one or two sites, or will you get better results with scattered approach that includes a much larger number of social media websites?
Using all (or even many) social media sites effectively is just not possible for most of us. The time requirement for this approach is more than we’re willing to spend. With that in mind, the options are: Read the rest of this entry
When most people think about 'SEO', they think of link requests. While that is a basic part of SEO, it's also insulting to the practice of search marketing. IN comparison, it's a bit like saying that mathematics is about adding and subtracting numbers, or that playing the guitar is all about strumming a few strings.
Such views give an incomplete picture and oversimplify the subject to a point where it becomes open to ridicule. For me, SEO (or search marketing) has always been about figuring out what the search engines will want tomorrow, what their endgame, their main goals are and how they plan to rank websites in the future. As the algorithms evolve, my aim is to have my sites rank higher automatically through smart SEO and working on those factors that will be valued more and more in the future.
So what are the search engines aiming for? Beyond the strict academic citation model, an easier way to understand search engines is to study real-world social networks.
A social network at its most basic level is a collection of people you know and are in contact with. You share ideas and information, give and receive recommendations from your friends, and you can let your network stagnate or choose to grow it by meeting new people.
One of the most important ways of finding new information and meeting new people is through recommendations provided by people already in your network. Also known as 'word of mouth' marketing, this process works on the basis of unbiased recommendations from known (i.e. trusted) sources.
The sharing of ideas and information withing social networks (i.e. recommendations) functions on the basis of trust – you either trust the recommendations given to you by your friends and family or you don’t. The criteria for trusting these recommendations comes from those two metrics: whether the recommendation is unbiased (that is, no ulterior motive involved) and whether the recommendation is from a known source (so you can evaluate if that source’s judgment can be trusted or not).
If a recommendation is biased, it loses value (but isn't completely worthless). if a recommendation is from an unknown source (you don't have to personally know the source, you just need to know / have previous experience with that source and their recommendations), you can't trust their judgment (but maybe their argument is very compelling).
So how do you raise your search engine rankings?
The most valuable recommendations are those that are unbiased, compelling and come from highly trusted sources (that is, sources known to be trustworthy from past experience). With the right quality and quantity of recommendations, any service or product can beat its competition (provided the user experience matches the hype).
Replace ‘recommendations’ with ‘links’ and you have your answer.
Unless your crowd is a bunch of social media hounds, putting those little social media icons at the bottom of your posts doesn't achieve much of anything (accept maybe some PageRank leakage).
Want to run successful social media campaigns that involve your readers? Then tell them to vote. Again and again and again. You should even have a "Voting FAQ" that explains how your readers can get involved. Spell it out. Give them a cause to fight for. Make it simple. And soon you just might have a social media army.
In fact, the same goes for almost any action that you want your readers to perform. You're looking for subscribers? Then don't just put up a little orange icon. Give your readers instructions such as "Subscribe to this blog" - maybe even have an entire page dedicated to explaining exactly what subscribing is. You'll get more subscriptions when you give instructions.
The same goes for affiliate sales. Tell them over and over and over how good hosting company X is, and some of them will listen to your advice.
The same goes for donations. Ask them to buy you a beer, or your favorite Starbucks drink... in every post ... and you'll get some.
But if you're like me, you'll probably just slap up some icons, but a banner in the sidebar, and pray to the God of Automation.
Unfortunately for me, the God of Automation doesn't answer very many prayers these days.
If you're a fan of social news and bookmarking sites, you probably have a number of accounts scattered all over the place.
Personally, I bookmark content on Digg, del.icio.us and my personal favourite, ma.gnolia. I also use StumbleUpon extensively. Because I use so many different sites, I found that my bookmarks were scattered all over the place. Where was that WordPress tutorial I found last week - Digg or StumbleUpon? You get the idea.
I came across SocialPoster via the Pronet Advertising blog. It's a free service that allows you to make the same submission to multiple social bookmarking sites.
You submit the URL using their bookmarklet, then add a descriptive paragraph and tags. You choose the services you want to submit to (up to 40 available) and it generates a submission link for each one.
You still have to visit each site in turn and make your submission, but SocialPoster pre-fills most of the information for you. This makes it much easier to ensure your bookmarks are consistent across the various sites you subscribe to.
I think most of us here at Performancing have a white hat approach. But it won't do any harm to state my personal bookmarking policy.
Basically, I enjoy participating in these online communities, and I love to seed links to great articles I've read. My RSS subscriptions almost rival Scoble's!
I don't believe in seeding my own writing unless I've written something that I believe other people will enjoy reading. I probably bookmark 90-95% of other people's stuff as a reward for writing useful content and to help people with similar interests to find that useful content.
Don't use SocialPoster to spam social bookmarking sites - all you'll end up with is a helluva spammy account that no-one will trust.
Gerard McGarry is a music blogger for Unreality Music and a web designer for Scribble Designs.
There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and among the SEO crowd lately about the dominance of Wikipedia.
I blog in a number of niches, and it's startling to see how many different types of search Wikipedia entries rank highly in. On one hand, this scares the hell out of me, but on the other, it makes me wonder why wiki technology hasn't caught on in the mainstream. Read the rest of this entry
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