“… represents the view of the vast majority of businesspeople today — they aren’t ready to drink the Kool-aid on social media sites just yet (maybe never)”

Oh my, where to begin? It’s going to be a rant, so bail now if you don’t want to hear it.

First, I have to applaud Mr. Mariotti, he spent a good deal of time rationalizing his fear of Social Media. The 10 “reasons” he has put together carry some smidgen of merit however there are NO deal breakers in his list. Only items it sounds like he does not want to deal with or find solutions to. He’s right when he says “Nothing good comes easy.” but it does not seem like he is interested in applying that credo here.

The real kicker for me was this comment …

Real business people realize that this social networking trend is superficial.

I could probably fire off a list of “Real Business People” who have invested millions into building the foundation, framework and institutions of Social Media and I doubt they did it because they were looking for a tax write-off. The growth of the industry alone should be a clue that this is not some flash in the pan. As I have stated in other articles and in presentations I have given, if you are not on the Social Media wagon train as a marketer yet, you may be too late. I have personally made 10’s of thousands of dollars through my efforts in Social Media and I know others who are using it much more effectively than I am. I would not qualify that a “superficial”.

I do think however this article might have been great if it would have focused more how online and offline marketing differs. Most of his points could have been tweeked towards this topic and it would have been a very good read. He does bring up issues that we deal with daily in Social Media marketing, however when the value is fully understood you don’t give it up so easily. Most of his issues are easily overcome with a bit of research, training or social interaction with people dealing with the same types of issues. (hint .. hint..)

So, I read down to the bottom of the article and had to see the author Bio. Wouldn’t you know it, Mr. Mariotti looks to be an Old School Marketer. I am not surprised, I speak to many marketing departments and I can always tell the folks who are scared of this new “trend” in marketing. They don’t understand why they have to change, they don’t want to change and fight it tooth and nail. This is fine in my book, its kind of like “Marketing Darwinism”, only those who evolve will survive. Soon a new stronger, faster and more social marketer will take their place.

If you read this Mr. Mariotti please don’t be offended at my rant, I know it seems targeted at you specifically, but you were just the catalyst. I see this type of thinking all the time and I never seem to understand it and your article hit a nerve if you couldn’t tell. By the Way (BTW), your response(s) to the comments on the article you wrote are one form of Social Media, so I guess you changed your mind about participating …

No, I am not talking about the fact that a good percentage of users tend to mirror their tweets on other services like Facebook or FriendFeed. Individual Twitter pages are showing up in the search engines in multiple variations. Both secure versions and unsecure versions of the pages are currently being indexed.

Here’s a Google Search with will show you a number of these listings.
site:twitter.com https://twitter (you may need to check a couple of pages)

I understand that Twitter was built in only a couple of weeks by a couple of guys trying to see what they could do with Ruby on Rails. but, this is a fairly common duplicate content issue that should have been identified and fixed by now.

I doubt anyone would care about this except anal SEOs like me. But I got a huge laugh out of this and wanted to share. If your page happens to be one of the ones indexed as “https”, somewhere there is probably a link to your Twitter page using the “https” version of the URL. Find this, eliminate or fix it and your “problem” should go away in time. The other possibility is that the good folks at Twitter will read this and fix the issue for you.

BTW – You can follow me at Twitter.com/JohnCarcutt
(note the non-secure link)

It’s not news that Superbowl advertising is the holy grail of marketing. This year’s Superbowl was the 2nd most watch television program in history (following the Final Episode of Mash). It’s not just a fluke that some of this year’s ad spots have ties to Social Media online or that all of the ads which ran during the game can be found officially collected on the largest social media site of all, MySpace. The influence of Social Media on the Superbowl ads does not stop there. In one case, Social Media actually influenced the content of an ad, and not necessarily in ways the producers expected.

During the prelude to Superbowl XLII, Doritos launched the “Crash the Superbowl” contest. This contest allowed voters to select an artist to appear on Doritos 2008 Superbowl commercial. The contest was promoted heavily within social communities such as MySpace, Facebook and others. It took some serious trust in these communities to place a 2.6 million dollar investment on their member’s shoulders. This fact alone is a powerful testament to major brands embracing Social Media, Bravo Doritos.

The winner of the contest was a young girl named Kina Grannis. Kina is not a stranger to social communities online. Prior to her Superbowl appearance, she had already been “famous” online due to her highly popular song about the social news service Digg.com. Take a look at this music video she published on YouTube which gained over 200,000 viewers in only 2 days …

The song “The Digg Song”, became an instant hit in the Digg community, and Kina earned the name “Digg Girl”. When community members discovered that “Digg Girl” was one of the finalists in the Doritos contest, they rallied and begin a dedicated effort to boost her chances. Well, I can’t say (and I don’t think anyone can) that the Digg community was the specific reason she won, but I am absolutely sure her status in the Social Media communities prior to the contest helped her dramatically. Kina herself made sure to give thanks to those communities on her personal website after her win. The Digg community is certainly happy she was selected to sing during the Superbowl.

The overall impact of Social Media on the Doritos marketing efforts for the Superbowl was profound. First their decision to use Social Media as a platform to discover their featured performer and then the targeted influence Social Media had on the selection of that very performer. Social waves are being felt throughout the entire realm of marketing and they are only going to get stronger.

If you’re still on the fence about Social Media, have someone push you off.

Let be sure we are all on the same page before proceeding. I am speaking about the practice of asking your friends if they will promote one of your articles or blog posts in the social media arena. For Example, when I am done with this post, I shoot and email over to some of my close friends in the industry (or not) and asking them to Digg it, Sphinn it or add it to any number of social media sites. Is this practice wrong?

My first instinct was; it’s cheating so it should be wrong. That passed very quickly and I started to give the issue some real thought. Right away I zero’d in on the term “social”ť in social media. While site producers claim they don’t like people manipulating their systems, in reality it is using the systems exactly as it was intended to be used. The basic idea in most cases is the sharing of content with one another and interacting in some form around that content. I would not call it manipulation at all, it’s more like “advanced usage”. But some won’t be convinced that easily so let’s break it down a bit.

The Reasoning for Unethical Social Behavior

1. It disregards a sites terms and conditions
   Counter: I would like someone to show me a T&C at a social media site that prohibits friends from sharing each other’s content. Here, I checked a couple of the bigger ones:
   • Digg.com Terms of Use – #9 under User Conduct has the text “participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services”ť If your friends like your content and they vote for it, the results are not “artificially altered”. Most of #9 deals with duplicate accounts and the buying of Diggs.
   • Del.icio.us Terms of Service – Nothing even close
   • Sphinn.com Terms – Yeah, can’t find it here either
   • StumbleUpon Terms of Service – It’s a rather long document, so I may have missed something but I couldn’t find it here either.

   So Digg has one that could be construed either way as it is rather vague. So to be safe, tell your friends if they do not like the content to disregard and do not Digg. There, you’re covered.

2. It can give an unfair advantage
   Counter: In a “social”ť environment you can’t penalize someone for being the “most social”ť. If a person didn’t have many friends this strategy would not work. It only becomes an advantage when a profile has many more friends than another. Unprompted, the more popular profile would still maintain more activity as a rule, so how is it unfair?
3. Manipulates the system and results
   Counter: I guess I don’t understand how it can truly be “manipulation” if you are only using the product as it was intended to be used. Yes, you are being more aggressive in your usage but does this mean it is wrong. If the developers of a site wanted to put restrictions on the activity levels of users they would and any attempt to override those restrictions would be “manipulation”ť. Until then, it’s just aggression.
4. It’s an abuse of knowledge and relationships
   Counter: I see an argument which emphasizes the advantage one would have when you have the largest circle of friends and know how to leverage them. Again, I don’t think in a “social”ť environment you can penalize someone for being the “most social”ť. The knowledge portion of the argument does not have any merit either, it is common sense if your network is bigger and you use it, you have an advantage.

I was planning a similar list for the other side of the coin, but this post is too long already. Let’s just say that requesting a friend to promote your content socially is no different that asking a buddy to be added to his blogs’ link list. If you have a relationship with that person, it is not unethical to share your content with them and ask them to help spread the word.

I say this in full confidence that my White Hat is still clean.

Understand the Specific Social Environments

As the phenomena of social media reaches into the deepest nooks and crannies of the internet, specific social market segments are starting to define themselves. Knowing where and how these different market segments will make the most impact is of key importance. This means as you identify targeted social communities, you will need to evaluate these communities based on their specific effect on your current strategy. It is a bit more granular than just finding a community which focuses on “investing” if your client is selling stocks.

It is still a function of targeting, however, you need to look beyond keyword or market segment targeting and evaluate behavioral targeting as well. All social communities behave differently. Each will have unique rules imposed over a rule base which is common among many social communities. Additionally, these communities usually attract relatively like-minded participants who will normally use a common thread of social interaction. These unique rules and common interaction traits will combine to give each social media community its own social behavior fingerprint. A successful social strategy will evaluate these fingerprints and only utilize the communities which will best support the goals of the campaign.

Focus on Goals First Technology Second

Too often a client or even a team member will jump directly into the how of the strategy and assume everyone was together on the goals of a project. More often than not, technologies to be implemented should be based on the goals or objectives of the campaign. Social Media falls into two basic “social classes”. On-site social media is the building of a community on your web property, off-site social media is participating in pre-existing 3rd party social media sites. The goals of your strategy will determine which of the two can be used in what quantities.

For example, if the goal of the strategy is to do brand building or content distribution, a strategy which focuses on off-site participation would be more prudent. This decision significantly impacts the technologies which would be implemented. On-site community building and combination strategies are also valid solutions depending on the goals. Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester Research, has published their method of systematically building a social strategy. Its called the POST Method and is the foundation of a paper Mr. Bernoff published in October of 2007 called “Objectives: The Key To Creating A Social Strategy“. “Post” is an acronym for “People”, “Objectives”, “Strategy” and “Technology”.

• People references the audience and its capabilities as well as its social habits
• Objectives is really about setting the goals for the activity
• Strategy focuses on how the activity will change the relationship between the client and their customers
• Technology is the how is it going to get done portion of the equation

If you are not comfortable or unable to pony up the $279 for the report, Mr. Bernoff recently posted a basic overview on his blog which goes in to a bit more detail than I did here. Read “The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy” for a first hand explanation.

Control the Message not the Reaction

Once you have your social communities identified, your goals solidified and your technology implemented you have finished the easy part. From my experience, it seems the trickiest part of the whole strategy is managing the participation process within the social communities. This includes both on-site and off-site communities. The basics are easy because they are logical and don’t require a large shift in behavior of the participant. Participate in the community on a regular basis, add value to the community, build relationships with existing community members and do not over self promote are the basic rules of social engagement.

Once you have built the trust of the community, you have the ability to promote your agenda from time to time. You have complete control of the message you publish and with your intimate knowledge of each community you should be able to craft targeted variants towards specific communities if required. If you send the same message to each community expect different reactions. It is probable that you will get negative responses to your message. This is the point most clients balk. I hear over and over again, “Delete that post” or ” Ban that user” or “Get that off the site”. Well, this is where the users starts to have problems and should adjust their own social behavior if possible.

Censorship is probably the number one sin in social media marketing. The power of this entire medium is it’s community aspect. Different people with different opinions who what to share those opinions with anyone who will listen. Companies who wish to engage in social marketing need to understand for the beginning that they will not be able to control the content related to their message that is published by other community members. Some of it will not be nice… its the nature of the beast. There have been many examples of companies and even social media sites themselves trying to control content, usually with disastrous results. Being a good community member means you listen to what others have to say, even if you don’t like it. This is especially hard when the community is on the clients own property. I always try and educate my clients and help them to understand that on your own web property, a small amount of censorship can cause greater problems than a ton of negative content.

A Typical Social Media Strategy

The “typical” social media strategy does not exist in my eyes. You can have a standard process to create the strategy, however, each client or project will have its own structure. Just like the social fingerprints we spoke of earlier, a social media strategy should be specific to the unique needs, goals and markets related to the client. If you have two clients in the same market with the same goals you may find yourself able to use the same social media strategy… however you should do some reading on “conflict of interest” first.

I guess the over riding message in this post is .. “When working with Social Media, focus on the “Where” and “Why” before you tackle the “How”… then keep it wide open.”

It’s not like we need another acronym in this business, but here it is; SMO or Social Media Optimization. It’s uncomfortably similar to SEO, but that is where the likeness ends (almost). Basically, SMO is a name applied to utilizing all the different forms of social internet content which have boomed in the past couple of years. When you created those “Digg-It” links or added that Flick’r content to your site you already started your foray into SMO. Wikipedia describes SMO as:

… a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites. For example allowing RSS feeds, easier linking, incorporation of third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos …

At this point optimizing for SMO has three main activities. First is the implementation of SMO features on your website, second is creating social friendly content and finally is the off site follow-thru.

Most of you have probably already started implementing social marketing features on your websites. If you have added tagging, or links to ad your articles or pages to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or digg you have begun. Even those RSS feeds you have been publishing come into play. Podcasts, YouTube feeds, and that Flick’r gallery can all be part of your SMO plan. If you can, advanced SMO plans also contain a number of items related to the creation of user generated content. Depending on your sites format, think about items like user blogs, on page commentary or tagging and even uploaded content in a variety of forms (pics, mp3s or vids).

When we talk about optimizing these features, as SEO’s or SEM’s we need to step out of our normal mode of operation and think about optimizing more for users than for search engines. These features are more about user interaction than search spiders. Think about usability and place these features in logic places. For example, it is probably not the best idea to place a “Digg-it” link next to the snippet of an article on your home page. People are much more likely to add the site to Digg after they have read the entire article not just the snippet. It would probably be more beneficial for you to place the link at the top and bottom of the entire article so they can link it while it is fresh in their mind. Thinking about how people will use your social features is the best way to start on page optimization for social marketing.

Once these features are in place on your site, you need to motivate your visitors to use them. This is where your content comes in. At this point you need to think about unique content that is linkable and likely to generate interest in your field. The more interesting your content, the more likely people will use your social features to share it with others or to keep tabs on it for future reference. Here’s a similarity between SEO and SMO, your “Title” is the most important element on the page. In SEO the title tag seems to have more weight than other text on your pages and is displayed in search results. In SMO, the title of a document of page is the primary exposure on those third party sites which users have added you to. Having an attention grabbing title is VERY important in getting more people to save or tag your pages on social sites. This is commonly referred to these days as “linkbait”.

Ok, you have the features installed and you are writing great content, that’s all you need to do right? Wrong. You could stop there and let social marketing take its natural course, but you would be leaving opportunities on the table and not make the most of your social marketing efforts. A good SMO plan contains follow up. Each of the sites your users are submitting you to are by nature social sites. If you become part of the community yourself and interact with its members, your reputation will start to generate more trust in links to your site and more people will looking for information from you to tag or add. You interaction in the community will differ depending on the oppions available at the specific community, but one rule is global. Do not over self promote. As a member of the community, do you best to be a valuable member of the community and the rewards to your own site will come.

If you can master these three sections of SMO you will no doubt see how profitable social marketing can be. … and the once you taste the advantage over your competition you see how del.icio.us it really is.

Related Reading on Social Media Optimization:

• Search Marketing and Social Media by Jim Hedger at SiteProNews
• The Rules of Social Media Optimization initiated by Rohit Bhargava

The challenge to the SEO in this environment has become one of foundation building. These new UGC sites typically have an automated engine that facilitates the users content creation. This engine can be in the form of blog software, wiki software or any number of other types of content management systems (CMS). Out of the box, most of the engines are not very SEO friendly. If the SEO is lucky, they can get in on the ground floor of custom built CMS systems and help to direct the development team to a SEO/Search friendly end product. Otherwise, optimizing the sites built on pre-packaged systems can be very tedious. Most of the time it entails custom code and even some changes to the basic structure of the system. Your IT dept may not take kindly to you requesting custom coding when they spend the time and effort to pick the program that that worked best under their specifications.

Lets talk about some specific items that may help optimizing a content engine.

First, its rather obvious that a large portion (if not all) of these types of sites will be using dynamically generated pages. You need to do your best to make sure these pages are search friendly from the outset. Suggest creating a mod-rewrite tool to remove parameters from the URL strings. If this is not possible, make sure your Dev team understands that having more than 3 parameters in a URL is extremely detrimental to getting the pages indexed in the search engines. An additional issue with dynamic pages is that they are built off of templates. In a template, there are two types of code, static code (the template) and dynamic code (imported data). It is VERY important to make sure the dynamic data portion of the page is well over 50% of the pages’ code. Less than 50% and your sites’ pages are not unique enough, risking the dreaded “Duplicate Content” penalty. One of the easiest ways to help do this is with extensive use of CSS.

The technology used to build the dynamic pages is key as well. While most web scripting languages will be fine, some are still not read or understood my the search spiders. Stay away from anything javascript if at all possible. If you must use it, make sure that any javascript is located in external files and not directly in the page code. PHP, ASP and .net are all search friendly if used correctly. AJAX is one of the newer coding choices and from early impressions seems to be search friendly as well.

Most of the time it seems javascript is used to do flashy cosmetic trickery. Things like mouse over effects can now be done using style sheets. Using CSS to its full capabilities will be another major set to optimizing these content engines. CSS can be assigned dynamically which will give the user the custom feel they will probably want while keeping the underlying code sound and clean. Many SEOs use CSS to some degree already, but I can stress enough here that “Complete CSS integration” will be key to keeping these UGC pages indexed. Remember during template page brainstorms to be mindful of how content is used on a page. Will pages have headings, bullet lists, paragraphs of text, images? Meta tags should be dynamic, images should have “alt” tags etc. etc. Basic SEO must apply to these templates.

Since we are trending towards giving users wide control over the content they create, they will inevitably link out to other web pages. Since linking to bad neighborhoods can get a site in serious trouble, it would be a good idea to make sure your system includes the nofollow tag in all user created off site links. While this will eliminate some of the good having a fresh new stream of outgoing links could create, the risk out weighs the rewards.

There is allot to consider and any new project will have unique situations to resolve. But keep your eyes focused on best practice SEO and do everything you can to help the automated content engine produce web pages that are search friendly. UGC will do the rest.