The PubCon folks offered up some great training in Austin, Texas on July 21st. Some excellent speakers were lined up who presented some excellent search marketing information. There were two tracks offered: “SEO: Organic Search Optimization” and “Social Media Marketing.” Jen and I hung out in the Social Media track and weren’t disappointed. I took away a lot of action points I will use when I get back to the office next week.
Here are some takeaways I got from the presentations. Because there was so much good information, I’ll only give the top ten or so points from each presentation.
Google Social Media Reputation Management – Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur and coauthor of Radically Transparent
- Don’t wait for a crisis before you start working reputation management. An ounce of prevention works well to head off problems before they begin.
- Use your .org domain to highlight your charity work, use .net for other info. Use branded domains and subdomains. All this helps generate positive web pages.
- Make sure you grab your branded URL on Facebook (need to have at least 25 people “like” it first).
- LinkedIn is good for individual reputation management. It’s great to get as many employees as you can to sign up and list themselves as employees to help the company’s profile.
- Twitter works well, but make sure you engage. Every so often retweet nice mentions others make for you.
- Use Flickr and YouTube to host images and videos. Fill out the profile pages, use good descriptions for media using keywords. Embed the videos in your site instead of hosting them yourself to get double juice for reputation building.
- Use Wetpaint.com to create your own wiki pages instead of trying to play in Wikipedia. You control the pages here, on Wikipedia anyone can edit the story of your brand.
- Set up an account on AssociatedContent.com and try to get some articles written. The profile alone can be worth the effort for reputation building.
- GetSatisfaction.com is a legitmate site to set up a help desk/question answering page which can help with good links, good indexing AND customer service.
- Consider asking customers/partners to set up profile pages on their sites. Ask for YourDomain.com/yourname and offer to provide the content.
- Consider sponsoring conferences and other events – especially those which have sponsor profile pages on their web sites. Speaker profiles help quite a bit, too.
Twitter & Facebook Optimization – Dan Zarrella
If you’re not familiar with Dan’s work, I highly recommend you follow his blog. He is doing some great research into how social media tools work and how people use them.
- Put a bio in your Twitter profile. You will get more followers. Use the 160 characters to your advantage. Make sure you also add a link to your web site/blog and a picture.
- Don’t follow too many more people than follow you. Take your time building a network. (Remember: Crock pot vs. microwave)
- Statistics seem to show 22 tweets per day on average is the max before people might think it’s too much and unfollow you. Of course, quality is better than quantity.
- “We” or “us” tweeters show to have more followers than “I” or “me” tweeters.
- If you put a bit.ly link in your web browser address bar with the plus sign at the end, you can see the stats on that link. This is a nice, quick shortcut.
- “Link Fatigue” – if there are too many links going by in your Twitter stream, you won’t get as many clicks on your links. It’s best to avoid the crowd and tweet your links later in the week or on the weekends.
- About 20% of tweets have links in them. Over 50% of retweets have links in them.
- Bit.ly shortened URLs are retweeted far more often than other URL shortened links.
- Retweets contain “rarer” words. Don’t say the same thing that others are saying.
- News tends to get retweeted more often than “small talk.”
- In order to learn how your customers use Facebook, ask them. Set up a survey, learn how they use it, and market to them that way.
- Use quantcast.com to get demographic data on your web site.
- If you can get more people to “like” something on facebook, you get more social proof that your content is good.
- Articles with “video” in them will get shared more in Facebook than on twitter.
- Positivity gets share more than negativity on Facebook.
- Simple and plain tend to be more sharable on Facebook.
Targeting Twitter Influentials – Brett Tabke, CEO of PubCon
This was an expanded version of the presentation Brett gave at the SEO Meetup I wrote about in “Location, Black Hats & PubCon” a couple weeks ago.
“Human beings have used every available method to communicate we have ever been offered.” – Unknown
- How PubCon Thrived Using Influential Tweeters:
- Prior to 3008, they spent around $65k on PPC ads over four years with zero tracked sales.
- In 2008 spent around $75k on traditional marketing in 2008 with moderate success.
- During the traditional high signup time in 2008 there were no signups, and a small number of people were asking for refunds. This was due to all the bad economic news hitting right about then.
- They did some surveys and found people sign up for conferences based on recommendations by trusted sources. In other words, word of mouth.
- They looked to reach out to people to tweet and retweet to recommend the conference. Spent far less money and had better results
- It’s an excellent case study on social media success.
- Promos work great for retweets. Discount codes and coupons are great retweet bait.
- Find out when your target is on Twitter and tweet then.
- Look for influential tweeters by checking Klout.com.
- Track your retweeters and thank them.
- Tweet other people’s stuff 15 times for every 1 about your stuff.
Social Media Conversion – Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist
- Advertising was designed to simulate work of mouth, when when of mouth was very inefficient. It’s no longer inefficient.
- The Not Social Funnel (paid media):
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Action
- Earned media (do something well and people will talk about it):
- Use
- Opinion
- Talk
- Predictive Metrics, predicts what might happen. Definitive Metrics, Tells what happened. This is measurable
- Social networks give people the ability to talk to each other. This is easier to measure than the old-school word of mouth.
- Landing pages need to mimic the look of the ad which brought the customer there. Otherwise the people ending up on that page might feel a disconnect and not follow through.
- Social Landing Pages: Blogs.
- Educate your readers to increase use.
- Let comments influence opinion
- Gives visitors a way to talk, to join the conversation
- Help pages can be great landing pages for conversion. Think: public customer support
- Social is very measurable, but you may have to use a number of tools to measure the different media.
- Check out Austin, Texas-based Spredfast for social measuring. Also automates outgoing social traffic. Swix is a free alternative.
- Content-oriented social marketing
- Create a piece of content
- Devise a way to measure the effect on the bottom line
- Market each content item as its own product
- He gets a high email subscription rate from the link on his SearchEngineLand profile page. This correlates with what Andy said this morning about boosting reputation management via profile page.
Site Clinic & Q&A
There was a lot of great information tossed around during the site clinic and Q&A at the end of the day. Three attendees offered their web sites for scrutiny and all of the speakers looked over their sites and offered some great constructive criticism and tips for improving their sites and social footprint. I was updating this blog as they were talking. Now I need to help Jen work on her Just Keeping Busy site. One change I made was to the permalink structure, option to organize by category name instead month and year. This helps the site’s content age a little better.
More Training in November
There will be a Masters Group Training before the PubCon in Las Vegas on Monday, November 8th. The limited class size and in-depth training make it well worth attending. You can sign up using the banner on the left (Disclaimer: I am a PubCon Affiliate). But, if you’re going to sign up you better act soon because Brett let on that there aren’t many slots left for the Masters Group Training.
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Great tips, Elmer!
Thank you, Mike. I’m glad you found them useful.
Great notes! I feel like I was there.
Thanks, Tammy. It was well worth attending. I’ll fill you in on some details later.
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