Social Media Marketing Secrets - #3 Video

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Video, video and video are three most important words to web marketers. Yes I am riffing off of the three most important words to retailers (location, location and location), but there is little doubt online video is online marketing’s next big thing. ** Put video on social networks here **



What is online video?
Online video covers a lot of ground such as:

• Videos a company places on its web site.
• Videos a company places on social networks.
• Video a company places on Television.
• Video a company places on mobile platforms.
  

Web Site Videos
In my last gig as Director of E-commerce we successfully placed video on product pages tripling conversion (conversion is webspeak for customers taking a positive action such as buying or subscribing). I don’t like messing with product pages. Product pages are too close to shopping carts. Product pages require very careful experimentation and testing. Improving product pages can offer a BIG benefit, but the opposite is also true. Lower abandonment rates even a little and an e-commerce web site makes more money. Our first effort to add video to product pages failed. We started with a long (five minute) loud video and watched conversions tank. The first video didn’t last a week.

Next we wrote a two-minute script about product features and customer reviews. The script was factual – no selling except by our customers (in the quoted reviews branded as coming from our “buzz team”). It is easy to appear to be shouting on a product page. Most customers visiting product pages are close to conversion, so a light touch is best (true for all web marketing). Web sites can’t directly sell anything anymore. Consumers are jaded and cynical. Your site may earn trust eventually by making few promises and more than keeping any promise you make. Best to create a platform where customers sell each other.

We hired a female narrator asking her to keep her voice smart, interested and engaged but factual. We wanted to avoid the “used car salesman” problem. We also decided NOT to feature a person. We hired a hand model. Featuring a person would be hard to keep the QVC salesmanship out. We didn’t want to deflect attention from the product. The product was the star.

Testing, script writing and shooting (with an excellent firm in Virginia RHED Pixel) took a year. First holiday selling season results exceeded expectations. We understood limits of what we knew. After a year of testing we knew how to increase conversions by placing a specific type of video on product pages. Placing video on the home page or category pages was something we knew NOTHING about. I left before we had a chance to test video on category or home pages. There is a video formula to increase conversions for every major web page and for every business. Video is compelling and will increase conversions if used correctly. There is little question that every web site must develop a successful video formula.

Online Video Aids E-commerce
Many of those using online video to drive e-commerce and sales initiatives find it highly effective at increasing customer engagement and time spent on the brand website (53%), as well as sales conversions (35%). Twelve percent say online video in e-commerce helps reduce product returns, customer service calls and shopping cart abandonment.
Ref: Marketing Charts Brand Managers Use Online Vide

Videos for Social Networks
If your company isn’t creating and placing videos on YouTube fire your marketing team. YouTube comes with arcane rules and regulations like Google. Understanding what works on YouTube will take time, but your company MUST create and play videos on YouTube. The product videos we created in my last job could go on a YouTube “channel”, but product videos can’t be the main thing. YouTube is about strange pet tricks, stupid human tricks and mash ups of everything possible. Enter the YouTube world with standard marketing (only) and your company looks out-of-touch and stupid. Create some “viral videos” for YouTube; viral videos are videos, usually humorous, people want to share. Once you’ve created viral videos you may balance your YouTube “channel” with other videos (such as the product videos we created). Plan on creating three to five videos specifically designed for YouTube’s sensibilities.

Videos will take over Facebook too. Facebook’s culture is different than YouTube’s. Your company can mention every video you’ve created, but company’s will find creating videos with a Facebook sensibility important. Facebook replaces YouTube’s gag humor with intimacy and tribal community character. Your Facebook followers feel connected to you and your brand. Anything you put on your Facebook page should further the relationship, further customer conversations your company is having.

Social networks are conversations not lectures. When you place videos on Facebook and YouTube expect followers and comments. Some comments will be helpful, others venial and mean. Listen carefully, respond and make sure responses live on many social platforms. It is important to understand how to respond to a social media criticism.

You can’t argue with social media critics. Arguing is a no win game. You can let social media critics know you heard them and are acting on anything actionable they brought to your attention. When responding to social media critics are specific. Don’t say, “we will take your feedback under advisement” as responses like this sound like typical BS evasion. Say, “we appreciate your feedback on ** company name’s ** wifi policy and are in the process of a wifi review with a decision planned for Friday December 12th.” If you commit to making a decision by a specific time then make sure you follow up on or before your commitment. If you decide NOT to change whatever your critics complain about be appreciative, explain fully and share your decision process. Sharing information about decisions in an open and honest way is social media marketing must. Evade or duck and you provide fuel for social media critics hurting your company’s brand and prospects. Evade and duck and you wear the BIG A on your chest instantly condemned to any and all crimes. Your company must embrace a new transparency or accept being denounced and ridiculed on social networks (believe me this doesn’t help sales). The sooner you and your company realize your brand and prospects are in THEIR hands not YOURS the better your social media marketing becomes.

Videos for Television
Is television the new print? Advertising on television is expensive. The days when television or any single marketing source could carry a marketing message to the waiting masses is over. We watch less TV. We watch more Internet. If your company is brave (or foolish) enough to create television ads make sure to support your ads with web sites, blogs and social media. Create a short “behind-the-scenes” version of your ad, behind-the-scenes play well on social networks.

Why don’t ads play well on social networks? Social nets are conversations not lectures. Television ads tend to be lectures. Including a URL and simultaneously placing your campaign on YouTube, Facebook and other social networks breaks down the “lecture” problem (a little). Television ads will be in service to web sites not the other way around in the very near future. TV ads are conversation starters. Currently television advertising tends to be “brand lectures”. Few outside of your building care about brand lectures. Surround TV ads with social media marketing and you may find positive Return On Investment (ROI).

Videos for Mobile
Is your cell phone the next big thing? Many marketers think so, yet there isn’t a clear understanding of how to create mobile marketing. Cell phone need supporting mobile sites and social media. Chances are your standard site looks BAD on most mobile phones. Mobile sites need special servers and formatting at the least. They also need strong calls-to-action and a limited choice. Mobile marketing may be the next big thing, but understanding what works is developing as I write this. Keep your eyes peeled and don’t spend a lot of money on mobile marketing until the fog clears.

Video Limits
Search engine spiders don’t “see” video content. All web marketing appeals to people and algorithms (math). Since search engine algorithms can’t “see” or “understand” video content surrounding videos with keyword dense titles and descriptions is important. Google’s purchase of YouTube is good news for video marketing.

Your site is in trench warfare over its top 100 keywords. Video can help you win page one placement on Google. There are less video content competing for top Google page placement than written content. This “less video content” truth will be corrected soon. Want page one Google placement on a highly competitive term and your site is nowhere to be found currently? Videos are your best bet. Video can be a “beachhead” for search engine marketing (SEM). Page one listings make it easier to create more page one listings.

Helpful Resource: Brand Managers Use Online Video (Marketing Charts)

Need Social Media Marketing help?
ScentTrail E-Commerce Consulting can help your company's social media marketing.
Initial evaluations are always FREE
Contact Marty Smith
Cell: 919.360.1224
MartinSellingZoe(at)AOL(dot)com

Social Media Marketing Secrets: #2 Social Media vs. Social Marketing

My old boss Phil Harvey became one of the first advocates of Social Marketing when he used brand marketing strategies to help “sell” social good (see DKT International). Here is an excellent definition of social marketing from Wikipedia:

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote society's well being as a whole. For example, this may include asking people not to smoke in public areas, asking them to use seat belts, or prompting to make them follow speed limits.

Although "social marketing" is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an over-simplification.
The primary aim of social marketing is "social good"; while in "commercial marketing" the aim is primarily "financial". This does not mean that commercial marketers cannot contribute to achievement of social good.
Ref: Wikipedia

When your company puts a page on Facebook you are creating Social Media Marketing. Social Media marketing is the rage right now (read my post on Social Media Marketing Rules #1: How THEY get rich with YOUR content). Social Media is cool and important. Every company with a brand needs to understand and use social media marketing. As traditional forms of reaching customers continue to lose effectiveness even as costs increase Social Media Marketing becomes critical.

Why A Good Social Media Strategy Needs Social Marketing
Many companies are ill equipped to host conversations with customers. Conversations are two sided. Used to doing most of the talking and little listening knowing what to discuss on social media can be a new challenge for many companies. An old boss described what many companies do as, “talking to themselves about themself.” Examples of “talking to yourself” marketing abound:

• Car Ads - Ever notice how all car ads are the same? A stunt driver drives the car at high speed on “closed” usually wet roads coming to a screeching stop in front of the camera with a tag like, “complete yourself, buy this car”. Car companies love to talk to themselves about themselves as Lexus demonstrates. Lexus Ad Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SqYJkQjwG

• IBM Ads - IBM’s main business is selling consulting services to Fortune 1,000 companies. The days when big blue used to manufacturer stuff is rapidly coming to a close. I’ve worked for several Fortune 1,00 companies and I can tell you how decisions are NOT made – by watching a television commercial. The decision to bring IBM in on a million dollar contract would NEVER consider IBM’s advertising. In fact, IBM’s ads could work against it. Smart people I used to work for would wonder why IBM was spending $50 or $100 million on such a foolish mission. IBM would probably say they want their brand to stay “top of mind”. Virtually 100% of the decision makers in the Fortune 1,000 know who IBM is, so you can get the meeting without the ads. IBM ads are the very definition of a company talking to itself about itself. What about stockholders? Anyone holding IBM’s stock watching them squander money on goofy brand ads should sell the stock since this kind of marketing is an indication of deeper problems (not knowing who you are or why it matters). IBM Ad Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-udGE8POcZk
  

• Intel Ads -I give Intel credit. Their “Intel Inside” campaign elevated a commodity to branded status and that was brilliant. Their latest ads show how dangerous humor can be. Your humor is my disaster. Intel’s “geek sheik” ads aren’t funny, but they are arrogant and nasty. Intel seems to be saying, over and over again, “we are smarter than you”. Intel’s first idea, creating a brand from a commodity, was the smart one. This “we are better” idea is insulting and suffers from the same “limited reach” problem as IBM. There are 100 people in the world who buy Intel’s chips in sufficient quantity to make life interesting. I doubt any of those 100 people like being insulted, in fact I can guarantee the Purchasing Director at Dell or Compaq wouldn’t like it one bit. Intel is talking to itself about itself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-8GVi2Fdi4
  

The first rule of Social Media is to protect your brand (see How your content is making THEM rich). The second is never talk to yourself about yourself. The third is have something contagious and sticky to say and don't forget to listen.

What To Talk About On Social Media?
Your customers want to know how you spend their money, your company's profit comes from their money. You may think, “how we spend our money is none of their business”. In a prior time you might be able to sustain such a “we know best” conviction. In an Internet enabled, flat, fast and connected time where everyone knows everything immediately and our decision process is changing you must transparently share. Your company should share until it hurts and then share some more.

We live in a time of manufacturing and marketing over abundance. There are at least three good choices for almost any consumer decision. Quality, strengthened by Total Quality Management and other similar programs, is good and getting better. Quality is so good it doesn’t matter. Quality is the cost of playing the game. If your product falls apart soon after its purchased then it won’t last. The connected marketplace kills shoddy products with angry forum posts, social media attacks and linked blog posts. Someone will take your URL and add “suck” and out rank your company in search engines as StarbucksSucks.com did for over a year. Engineering great quality in is the cost of playing the game.

Talk about quality today your company sounds hopelessly out of touch. Why are they (company X) reassuring me on a subject (quality) I assume to be fine? Now you are dangerously talking to yourself about yourself (or your company is). This is another important NOW marketing lesson – naïve and out-of-touch marketing messages hurt your brand (more on this in a blog post soon).

Today’s marketing means companies should take their favorite topics off the table. Talking the usual talk in the usual ways is dangerous. Lazy marketing falls back on a few clichés “superior quality” being one of the biggest. I use “quality” as an example of common company “talk to ourselves about ourselves” subjects. Others include:

• Design superiority (quickly becoming another cost of being in the game)
• How long we’ve been in business (when Banks can be destroyed in five minutes time takes on a new dimension where longevity means little).
• Customer Service – this is a minefield and better addressed and discussed by a company’s actual customers (don’t worry they will find forums, write blogs and twitter if your customer service is anything but amazing).
• Innovation – another “cost of playing poker” attribute that everyone mouths and few deliver. Usually a company is innovative in reverse proportion to how much they talk about being innovative.
• Product Attributes – three other competitors share the same product quality and attributes so don’t even go there.
  

See the problem? This list guts normal, comfortable and easy company to consumer conversations. Topics like these tended to be lectures not conversations. There is a long list of stuff you CAN’T safely use social media to discuss, so what topics does a successful social media marketing strategy include?

Social Marketing (helping others with company profits)
How does your company spend profits to make the world better? Social Marketing initiatives are great social media marketing. They are also good places for User Generated Content (UGC). Ask your customers where you should spend some of your money. Give choices between projects and programs, poll your customers and act on what you learn. Some companies create competitions rewarding nonprofits with grants while gaining GREAT viral, sticky content.

Example of a great social marketing competition: True North Inspiration

Note: True North is not doing well. Their “true inspiration” contest was a great social marketing idea. The snacks aren’t special and packaging is terrible. I suspect Fito-Lay is about to close up True North’s shop. Great social marketing can’t be the primary thing. Social marketing is cream not coffee.

Celebrity Scoop
We live in a celebrity culture. If Lance Armstrong comes to your Cure Cancer event then discuss it on every platform you can. Celebrity can increase legitimacy; so responsible marketers understand how to incorporate celebrity into marketing strategies. Celebrity can destabilize too. When I worked at M&M/Mars I met O. J. Simpson. M&M/Mars was thinking of making O. J. a celebrity pitchman. My friends who passed on that decision are probably glad they did. Social Media can help in good or bad times. Negative stuff about your company or brands is out there. Use social media to listen carefully and address negatives factually. Every company or brand has problems, but not every marketing team is smart enough to view problems as a tremendous opportunity. In a crisis celebrity prestige can help. If Oprah comes to your company’s defense who remembers negative stuff that started the ball rolling? The sad truth is we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, but finding ways to use our collective insanity (obsession) in your favor is what marketing is all about. Grit your teeth and spin celebrity gossip.

Process
Your company’s process is a product (read Process is Product). Flush out your tests, ideas and thoughts as early as possible to create engagement, commitment and advocacy. “What about secrecy,” I can hear some saying. Who has secrets anymore? The only thing you own is your process. Other intellectual property will be stolen, emulated or copied within moments. You don’t own a secret worth the cost of keeping it. Better to flush everything out there and let the market sort it out. Flushing process out gains legitimacy, creates an important feedback loop and gains speed to market. But, you may be thinking, if we give away secrets our competitors beat us to market. If that is true then your company has other problems, problems beyond this post. No one steals an idea. People wait until an idea pans out THEN they steal it. If you are nimble and smart you don’t care if they steal your ideas. Stealing is moot – you’ve already created benefit and moved on. Your competitors (the thieves) will always be a day late and a dollar short.

Awards
Take credit when your company wins awards. Don’t say, “We are great we won X award” on your Facebook page. Educate your customers about the award. Share links to the award granting source’s web site (a form of link love that should be repaid). Share what the award means to your company. This is a great place for “cross functional team” feedback. Get feedback on the impact of the award from every division in your company. You may find, I already have, you get the best sound bytes from troops in the field. Those troops and what they think may be the best social media marketing you do.

Testimonials / Problems
Zappos is smart. They understand our “no secrets” marketing time. They use Twitter to create one of the most effective company and consumer stream of consciousness I’ve ever seen. I asked Tony Hseih how he created such an advanced Twitter application and it is easy. You have your IT guys grab the Twitter API (application, program, interface) and in a few hours your Twitter feed is on the cutting edge of social media marketing (also on the cutting edge of customer service).

Benefits of being creating smart and brave social media applications such as the Twitter/Zappos feed are many. Zappos enlists customers as advocates while enlisting employees as problem solvers and real people. You see and feel the love Zappos employees have for their company. Their dedication to listening and responding is clear. The non-verbal communication of such a feed is monstrous. Zappos is proving it has nothing to hide and is willing to let anyone look behind the Zappos curtain at any time. The value of this kind of transparency in a transparent “no secrets” marketing time is massive.

Testimonials aren’t unique. Every smart marketer has them, but Zappos upped the ante by allowing real time feedback into its feed. By sharing, in real time, what it finds about itself Zappos simultaneously creates legitimacy for the testimonials and itself to create brilliant social media marketing.

Zappos’s game changing use of Twitter: http://twitter.zappos.com/

Risk Something, Be Authentic
When you risk something authenticity comes easy. It is harder to create false personae when the mortgage payment is on the line. A particular risk may or may not prove rewarding, but the act of being willing to risk in a public forum is an important underpinning of social media marketing. You and your company will mess up. When the inevitable happens, best to admit wrongs early and share lessons learned. The biggest marketing mistakes happen when a company tries to cover up, trying to make itself appear infallible. Covering mistakes are bigger mistakes than almost any mistake you can make. Cover-ups are rife for reverse Oprah Effects – where your company or brand gets destroyed by a pack of hyenas. Better to admit mistakes and focus on (meaning SHARE) what you are learning.

These general rules should help your company or nonprofit avoid talking to yourself about yourself. There may be a hundred topics your company can and should discuss on social media such as Facebook and Twitter (though ten is a more likely number). The best way to find great social media marketing subjects is brainstorm it out, prioritize your work product and get some feedback. Getting feedback….now there is a GREAT use of social media marketing.

Good luck and don’t forget ScentTrail E-Commerce is available to help your company or nonprofit develop a winning social media marketing strategy and a ground breaking social marketing strategy.

Marty

Martin Smith
President, ScentTrail E-Commerce
MartinSellingZoe(at)aol(dot)com
Cell: 919.360.1224

Darwin And Web Site Development

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” may be the greatest idea ever thought. Darwin’s observation of natural diversity led to lifelong preoccupation. Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos Islands proved critical. Different isolated islands influenced species development in a variety of ways. Darwin gathered what he thought were different species of birds. In fact, all of the birds were the same species - Finches. Darwin’s mistake was easy. The birds looked different. The Galapagos birds adapted to food sources on their island. One Finch had a short tough beak to crack hard seeds. Another bird from a different island had a long narrow beak to penetrate flowers for pollen and nectar.

Darwin proposed the greatest idea ever thought with a hole in its middle as an excellent PBS documentary called What Darwin Never Knew explains. Darwin couldn’t sequence genes. He couldn’t confirm observations at the genetic level as modern science can. Now we identify the unique gene sequence accounting for inter-species variation. Modern science fills Darwin’s hole.

We see “natural selection” in web marketing and web development too. Web sites are organic. Good web sites change quickly placing value on traits that aid in survival. Attracting and converting web site visitors (traffic) are behaviors common to all web sites. Just like Darwin’s Finches, web sites adapt to their food source (revenue).

The web is also strangely similar to the isolated Galapagos Islands. Sites with common missions watch each other like hawks looking for field mice. When a site modifies its design or marketing approach competitors mark the change, test it almost immediately and, if the test proves positive, adapt the competitor’s change. It is almost impossible to create lasting competitive advantage in web offers or design. In a strange way, web sites WANT innovations copied. Copying means others believe in the innovation. Copying means an innovation wasn’t an anomaly. Copying justifies innovation while reducing its value; life is an ironic bitch sometimes ☺.

Ever notice how web sites of similar mission tend to look and sound the same? This is Darwin’s species modification taking place before your eyes. Reduction to the mean is another way to think of this pooling of web “genes”. Consumers play an important role in web development. Consumers shape the Internet’s gene pool. Every web manager watches web analytics like a hawk too. When a modification increases conversion or traffic it gets kept and copied. When an innovation hurts traffic or conversion it is quickly abandoned. Consumer reactions, if your web site receives enough traffic, can almost be judged real time. Web Managers can watch and tally the votes for their latest efforts instantly. In a matter of hours the jury comes in and innovation is kept, modified or abandoned. This is why “web time” is so much faster than any previous form of marketing.

There were few conventions to copy when I designed my first web site in 1999 (FoundObjects.com my first web site design). Home page, category and product pages and carts displayed a high degree of variability. Millions of transactions later “conventions” or consumer shaped behavior exist for every major piece of a web site. Variation exists, but variation is greater from island to island than site to site.

This means Amazon, Overstock and Target web sites look similar. These large e-commerce web sites live on the same transactional island with millions of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) and similar looks. Amazon et al. will be different from Chiat Day, Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. Advertising agencies like these are on a different Galapagos island where visual creativity is prized over transaction or “conversion”. The first task of a web developer is to understand what island the site they are working on belongs. Successful web developers should perform a critical analysis of common features, features common to successful web sites within their customer’s business (sometimes called a business vertical), before firing up Photoshop or writing a line of code.

Good web developers understand innovation and emulation are important. Emulation can gain immediate acceptance. Innovation may confuse. A new web site has many battles. It is best to use emulation to help some functions feel familiar. The closer you get to money the more emulation is important. As consumers get closer to giving a web site their Visa or MasterCard they want assurances. They want to know their transaction is secure. Wild innovations in carts can be needlessly jarring, confusing and conversion lowering. Carts are great places to look like everyone else. The cost of cart innovation is greater than its benefits.

Yes web site shopping carts have variation, but shopping cart variation is around a mean of compliance proving the rule. Some carts step you through different pages while some stay still, but all seek to create reassurance and a sense of security. This is “variation around a mean of compliance”.

Don’t read this post as Martin saying innovation is bad. Quite the contrary, innovation on the margin is expected. You may discover the next big thing. Playing with the crown jewels risks more than you can gain, a sucker’s bet. Innovate in offer, design and tactics. If I still managed multi-million dollar web sites I would be innovating around video. I tested videos on the product page as Director of E-Commerce and product page videos more than doubled conversion. It took a year to find the right formula, but once we found it rolling video to every product page we could afford as quickly as we could made sense.

We needed to do similar investigations for Home and Category pages. Video can hurt conversion. This was one lesson from our first attempts to add video to product pages. We had to find the right formula, but the larger truth is video makes a more compelling conversion environment than text and graphics alone. You have to have text for search engine spiders, but who reads anymore (other than algorithms). How video will work best on your Home, Category and Product Pages I can’t answer. Test, test and test some more to find your formula. Finding it may even give you weeks or months of competitive advantage before your hyena competition is on you. Remember Michael Corleone in Godfather III, “This is the business we’ve chosen,” and innovate at the margin, understand what island you are on and its “emulation” traits and watch competitors and web analytics like a hawk. When in doubt ask yourself WWCDD (What Would Charles Darwin Do)?

Social Media Marketing Secrets: #1 How YOU are Making THEM Rich

Social Marketing: The Rush Is On
The rush is on. Companies big and small are rushing to use social media in a frenzied hurry reminiscent of lemmings following each other off a cliff. I’ve been a pro-social media preacher for a long time, but responsible use of social media for marketing requires understanding secrets.

Today’s Social Marketing Secret is how your social media efforts help enrich Mark Zuckerberg (owns Facebook), Biz Stone (Twitter) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia). Enriching powerful Internet innovators may be inevitable, but your company needs to understand Social Marketing Secrets in order to break off some benefit. Zuckerberg, Stone and Wales have created powerful applications that define what the Internet is, applications that are now part of the web’s “background”.

Their Platform = Their Juice
I’m going to have to use some geek terms to explain how your efforts enrich others. Platforms are worlds of code such as Facebook designed to capture, house and project data. Platforms require scale. Build a platform and have no one use it and you’ve sneezed in the desert with no one to say “bless you”. Build a platform like Facebook with over 300,000,000 users and the distinction between your software and what is “web” or “Internet” is so tiny it is meaningless.

There is no free lunch. Why do you think creators are willing to seemingly give way millions of dollars of code for free? Scale creates revenue. All those searching eyeballs are connected to wallets and checkbooks. When a “free” platform can introduce revenue models without losing its audience it enters the pantheon of “freemium” marketing. What, you might wonder, are these platform creators selling?

You and the content you provide is what these Internet marketing geniuses package and sell with varying degrees of grace and skill. When you create content on a social network you are creating an “arbitrageable” event. This is arbitrage as practiced by investment bankers. Investment bankers spend most of their day packaging businesses and ideas, ideas and businesses. When you Tweet you add to Twitter’s content and Twitter’s content is valuable. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr are investment banks that know how to package and re-package your content.

Platforms know more about search marketing than most. Platform creators know the search engine marketing rules such as:

• Frequently undated content is more powerful than the same amount of content put up once and left alone.
• More content is always better than less content.
• Content development requirements are so great no company can afford to pay for all the content needed so User Generated Content must rule the day.
• Search engine juice is a form of currency and must be guarded like gold.
  

Yes you could create a company using other people’s software (OPS), but every effort enriches them. You must bring some search marketing juice back home if you want to enrich your company even a little bit from social marketing. Remember, they are and will always be better at search marketing than you, so don’t attempt to compete. Instead of competing understand the rules of the game and break off a little search marketing juice for you and your company. Here are a few ways to make your social marketing efforts create traffic and juice for your company:

Build links back to your home site.
This suggestion can be tricky. They control the game, so too much linking back to your home site will be seen as spamming yourself and you may be put on double secret probation. A relevant link every now and again will not get your account suspended (more on this later).

Create highly linkable content.
This is easier to say than actually do. Topical content, news breaking content and controversial content are all examples of “linkable” content. Take a junk bond approach – develop LOTS of content, see what sticks and then double down.

Build A Content Network
The Beatles were right. You get the love you give. Link love is a basic web currency that you should spread around carefully. Indiscriminate linking makes you look spammy and can cause search engine penalties, but well researched content link partners reinforce your business’s core search engine identity and can only help.

Understand PageRank
Not all web pages are created equal. Google weights page importance with an algorithmic device called PageRank. PageRank is a value from 0 to 10 with higher scores indicating more rank. Pages get rank by being linked to from “authoritative” sources. Authoritative sources are pages with high PageRank or groups Google loves such as .edu (colleges and educational sites). Many downplay PageRank’s importance. I do not. PageRank is one of the few instruments we have to understand a page’s place in the vast sea that is the Web. PageRank is a valuation system, a model. It isn’t the only predictor of success. It is possible to have high PageRank and not be on the first page, but all things being equal I would rather have high PR than low. Also, social networks generate high pagerank making links from them valuable. Developing high PageRank and judiciously placing it around on your pages and others creates a positive virtual cycle (think of this as a snow ball rolling down hill getting increasingly bigger).

Think and Act Globally, Lose Proprietary Thinking
If your company is going to become a Google source then your concern must extend beyond your Stock Keeping Units (SKU’s). You need to understand and communicate the big picture. You need to act, think and write globally. Your company must lose its proprietary stance. Google experts understand their vertical’s world and how their products fit into the world at large. Search engines want the most relevant content. Search engines don’t care if you or your competitors provide the most relevant content. This makes your job, if you are a marketer, understanding EVERYTHING about your brands, your competitor’s brands and how they impact people and the planet. If your competitor does something good you should report it. Content should never tear down, as this is a form of spam. Content should always build up. If your competitor scoops you best thing to do is report it and get on your horse.

Process is content.
Companies think big thoughts, cook and then come out with some new widget. Time is the problem with such thinking in a search engine enabled world. By the time you get to “big thoughts” to market your search engine marketing smart competitors scooped the market out from under you. Better to share everything all the time making your creation process content, gist for the mill. Share your process and listen to your potential customer’s feedback you get, react to that feedback in some public way (site, forum, blog). Do this and you build an instant market for your new widget. What about secrets, I can hear someone asking. What secrets are those? Get used to the idea there are not secrets anymore and share anything and everything all the time. The benefits of sharing outweigh the costs of letting any cats out of bags.

User Generated Content (UGC) is a must.
Learn from your platform suppliers. They know the cost of creating content needed for PageRank 8 and 9 sites is too costly. Jimmy Wales understood no editor-based encyclopedia could survive in an Internet time. Things move too fast, so users must provide most of your content. Reviews are a good example of how companies harness UGC and its power. Reviews, handled correctly, can add to a site’s relevance and pagerank. Reviews are organic. Reviews help create “live” content. Remember it is better to create x content over time with y uploads. Create the same x content with a single upload and your site will not seem as relevant to search engines as the more frequently updated site. User content is valuable for many, many reasons I can’t go into here (such as making a site seem warmer and less intimidating), but UGC is a MUST so make sure your site thinks of ways for your users to contribute.

Following these simple ideas doesn’t change the massive power social media platforms control, but you will break off a little piece for your company. The best thing to do to harness social media power is hire ScentTrail Marketing as a consultant ☺ because there is no way to explain all of the ways to protect your interests without knowing your vertical, web set up and capacity. Should you use Facebook et al.? Absolutely yes, but be sure to be SMART about how you create and manage your brand in the world of social media giants.

ScentTrail Marketing Consulting
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Martin Marty Smith (my CV on LinkedIn)
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