If there was any question before, last week’s Google announcement that content from your social graph would now be included in your search results is another big proof point that brands need to be thinking about social media as a major contributing factor in their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Over the last few months Google has increasingly handed coveted “first page result” spots to social content. It started with their real-time integration of Twitter results, and now it’s with the open beta of their social search experiment.
Why is this critical for companies to recognize and incorporate in their SEO? Because your corporate website, no matter how well it’s ranked, is being quickly overshadowed by all of the social content g your brand. Now results are filled with a slew if blog posts, tweets as they happen, and the links a person’s friend shared about the brand on Facebook.
Don’t worry, though- brands don’t have to be left in the cold. They do need to start engaging consumers in social spaces, producing content of value, and making their content sharable. That way the valuable information is getting shared and enforced by advocates and being included by Google in the spaces reserved for the user’s social graph.
While brand teams are working harder to make their advertising valuable content for their potential consumers, social media sites are working to turn their social media content into valuable advertising. Sites like Digg that harvest user generated content have historically found advertising challenging because the unpredictable nature of the user contributions; Digg’s new ad format Digg Content Ads is solving for this, though, by letting brands curate historical articles into a topical banner ad that is a win for everyone involved. (more…)
While bicycling at the gym this morning, I decided to do some brainstorming on the value of social media marketing programs from a revenue driving standpoint. Many of the reasons I came up with would improve revenue by decreasing costs, increasing cost-per-consumer, and boosting lead-generation:
Building relationships with your consumer will increase retention rates and ultimately increase revenue per person
Harnessing feedback will improve the quality of your product at lower R&D cost and potentially reveal new market opportunities
Identifying and addressing customer concerns will stop bleeding more quickly and with less casualties
All of these things will improve brand reputation, which in itself will improve the share of time a potential consumer considers your brand
Creating advocates will generate free earned media impressions and often in places you can’t buy
Advocate voices to their own social graph are the strongest and most trusted advertising method and will often generate the highest conversion rate
Advocates spread the message inside social networks, where effective advertising is hard to come by, where consumers are spending more of their time and increasingly starting their commercial inquiries
Generating content through conversation will increase the natural search results and ultimately traffic that flows to your destination
This is important not just for Google but to create content in real time search engines, which are only going to increase in search share
Dell and Starbucks may be possible case studies on how these ring true, and I may try and map them in the future. The next steps would be to lay out tactics to accomplish these objectives and define ways to measure the impact. What are your reasons for social marketing? How is social marketing increasing revenue? Am I looking at this the right way?
On Tuesday I attended Social Media Boot Camp, a half day conference put together by SocialMedia.com, with the focus on actionable social media thinking. I was looking forward to the conference specifically because Fred Wilson and Ian Schafer would both be speaking there, but virtually all of the presenters did a great job at delivering case studies and strategic thinking that made the 4 hours incredibly worthwhile. Lately I’ve been seeing collective communal intelligence around social media take a step forward beyond the initial chaos of social media to moving towards deeper understanding and more defined courses of action. For the benefit of the UsableClicks community, here are 15 key insights and themes that were discussed at the Social Media Boot Camp: (more…)
Over the last year there has been an increased focus on brand’s needs to openly embrace the consumer. Brands that have fostered an open dialogue with their audience, have been celebrated as understanding the culture shift and stepping into the modern times of marketing, while brands that continue to dictate to their audience and ignore the feedback have been demonized as likely to fail in the long run.
There is a lot to be said about the best methods for brands to embrace social media and making the transition to consumer-friendly communication, but right now I am interested in taking a look at what caused the culture shift itself.
I am a Senior Strategist at SS+K. I handle digital & social media strategy for a number of clients. I also keep a personal blog here. View Kevin Skobac's profile
If there was any question before, last week’s Google announcement that content from your social graph would now be included in your search results is another big proof point that brands need to be thinking about social media as a major contributing factor in their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Over the last few months Google has increasingly handed coveted “first page result” spots to social content. It started with their real-time integration of Twitter results, and now it’s with the open beta of their social search experiment.
While bicycling at the gym this morning, I decided to do some brainstorming on the value of social media marketing programs from a revenue driving standpoint. Many of the reasons I came up with would improve revenue by decreasing costs, increasing cost-per-consumer, and boosting lead-generation:
View Kevin Skobac's profile