Posts Tagged “SEO”

As I blog about new media, I am often struck by the irony of my social media “lifestyle”.  Many of my new “friends” have drunk the web 2.0 Kool-aid and spend most of their time on social media talking about social media.  From my conversations with them, you would think that these new media like Twitter and Facebook will change every aspect of our lives (heck, even Oprah is on Twitter now).  While I remain bullish about the potential of these channels, I have a bunch of concerns about long term adoption by pragmatists and laggards particularly in the B2B world.  Here is my logic:

Advertising based business models are weak: Regular readers of the ’slice know about the poor response rates of Facebook ads.  Without a strong ROI from this advertising, companies will eventually steer clear of this medium or prices will be driven down to a level reflecting its effectiveness.

Where are the doctors, lawyers and other “regular” business people? I can see them wanting a presence in the social media world but until these media can improve service delivery, increase sales or cut costs, it will be a nice to have experiment for some guy in marketing.

Customer conversations are great: Engaging them online is valuable but it is challenging to measure the impact.  We’ll see in the long run if customer satisfaction or retention rates improve from these online interactions.

Someone’s gonna pay: In many cases, however, we just don’t know who that will be.  I love what people like TipJoy are doing in the micropayments space but we still don’t have strong revenue models for many of these sites.

Call me old fashioned: One of the things that helped Web 1.0 explode was when business people realized they could sell more stuff by having an ecommerce site.  I’m still waiting to hear more of these B2B stories from the social media world.

So what does this mean?

We need to keep innovating and testing.  There is a great deal of option value in being a part of the conversations.  They are happening out there whether you like it or not.  Also,  I know this isn’t a very web 2.0 idea but repurposing and syndicating your content through these channels can have a positive impact on your search engine marketing and help you reach prospective customers. Just be don’t be an idiot, be relevant, and add value to the conversation.

The good people at Hubspot never let me down.

I was doing my early morning scan of Twitter when I came across a tweet with a shoutout to send “LinkLove” to anyone you want (ie friend, colleague or favorite blog).  After a short music video starring Hubspot’s resident triple threat Rebecca Corliss (singer, dancer and inbound marketer), I checked out the lovefest.  All you have to do to share the love is enter your Twitter name, your friend’s Twitter name and “their URL”.  Like all good viral campaigns, the made it “stupid easy” to share and it wasn’t long before my Twitter stream was full of their #linklove hashtags.

So why all the buzz about #linklove?  For those of use trying to build a business organically (OK, using inbound marketing as Hubspot would say), inbound links are gold.  When they come from a site with stronger page rank, this is even better.  I feel pretty confident that Hubspot has more Google page rank than 90+% of the people on Twitter (Hubspot = 6 vs. Tangyslice = 3) so the once the “linklove” pump is primed, this was highly likely to go viral.  Everyone wants a free link from a site with more page rank.

Or so they would think…  OK, I’m not an SEO expert (but I play one on television).  A closer look, however, reveals that linklove.hubspot.com has no pagerank (yet).  Thanks to all those inbound links i would expect this to improve pretty quickly.  Would it have been better to put it on www. hubspot.com/linklove instead?  Any SEO experts out there to offer an more qualified opinion?

A more cynical marketer might also suggest that Hubspot is getting the better deal as the value of the aggregate inbound #linklove links to likely exceeds the sum of the link building value to all of us “lovers”.  It doesn’t take an MIT degree to figure that it just doesn’t matter.  Unlike many forms of marketing, there’s no cost to giving somebody a link so in the end this viral campaign is fun and everyone loves a free link.

I once again take my hat off to these guys (Rebecca, Mike Volpe, Rick Burnes, et al).  Half the battle is coming up the idea for the killer viral marketing campaign and the other is making it happen.  They did both really well…  Congrats.

The coming year is likely to be challenging for most marketers as we are asked once again to do more with less.  While a smaller budget typically means fewer marketing programs, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have do scale back expectations.  Crafty marketers are always looking for innovative ways to get the same results out of a smaller budget.

This means relentlessly evaluating legacy programs and testing new cost-effective approaches.  Here are seven low cost/no cost marketing ideas to try in 2009:

• Review your organic search strategy and make adjustment to your keywords.
• Create a link building plan.
• Dust off that blogging plan your wrote three years ago.  Contrary to the pundits, blogging is alive and well.
• Start a customer referral program.  If you already have one, talk with a few of your top customers to understand what you can do to make it more attractive.
• Open a Twitter account for your company.  I know this is trendy but it is where the action is today.
• Brainstorm a word of mouth campaign to generate new leads.
• Review and refresh all offers on your website for free content, webinars or trials.  Now is the time to make them irresistible.

I know there are probably many more things you can do.  The point is that it doesn’t always have to be the standard paradigm of run a program, generate a lead and close the lead.  Inbound marketing is all where all the action is today and this requires more innnovation and testing.

So what new things are you testing in 2009?