SES NY: Social Media Optimization
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 12, 2007 | Share This
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Day Three of Search Engine Strategies New York - the much anticipated panel, “Social Media Optimization”, opened to a mixed audience. Though nearly 3/4ths of the audience indicated that they “engage social media optimization activities for their company or as a service for other companies,” the majority of the audience seemed unfamiliar with the topic. Perhaps it was the candor with which panelists referred to bribes and Digg’s “worthless traffic”, but on several occasions I overheard dubious remarks coming from people around me. More on that later though…
Moderator Rohit Bhargava introduced Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz. Rand presented an overview of the benefits of social media optimization: rule the SERPs, control brands, gain link love, show communities that you’re a participant, get traffic from new sources, and influence traditional media. Fishkin thinks that social media is especially hard for SEOs to break into, because social communities notoriously perceive online marketers as spammers. Though SMO spamming exists, Fishkin believes that SEO helps social media grow more than it “manipulates” its content - and that as such, social media sites will eventually learn to embrace SEO. (As a side note, social media sites based on local content, such as Yelp.com, gained traction within specific cities specifically by building their pages to be search engine friendly). For SEOs, on the other hand, social media can help increase seach visibility by sending traffic and links. But, said Rand, marketers have to proactively manage their social media profiles. Though social media sites rank well, it’s not always positive content that shows up. Rand summed up with SEOMoz’s list of sites to target: Magnolia, Yahoo 360, LinkedIn, Newsvine, Squidoo, wikiHOW, Ning, Frappr, FURL, Wetpaint, Shadows, Shoutwire, 43Things….and more.
Neil Patel, CTO of ACS, discussed the use of Digg and StumbleUpon. Patel opened, “the first thing you need to know is that the Digg and StumbleUpon audiences are little kids” - in other words, they’re fickle and not likely to be interested in your marketing content. But, he said, advertisers can spin anything into something “diggable” with a proper title. A promotional ad for a tax service, for example, becomes “how to screw the government.” Patel ran through the most important factors to think about when submitting to Digg - votes, time, voters, submitters, friends - and gave a little insight into how the top 100 Diggers have such strong influence. Making friends, he emphasized, is extremely important. What Not To Do: Self-promotion (wait, isn’t that what he just told us to do?), add biased information, pay for votes, break community rules, spam. What To Do: Add tons of friends (tip! “instead of your real photo, put up a picture of a hot girl to make more friends!”), participate in the community, use great titles and descriptions, become a top user, and submit at the right time (11 am, PST, M - Th, to be exact).
Andy Hagans, “professional link baiter”, presented next on social media and link generation. Hagans gave us a case study: Network Security Journal, a client with Tech-oriented content, but a dry topic. Hagans reiterated Patel: “its all in the title”. Rule of Thumb: Can you imagine this title on a magazine cover? Furthermore, he said, make sure your content is focused and concise. Well-written content helps avoid the “Digg Bury”. Hagans presented the five sites he usually submits to: Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. Hagans recommended using social media link-baiting with some “old fashioned link begging” - aka sending personalized emails to bloggers. He suggested that all promotional efforts be done within the same 1 - 2 hour block of time.
The panel then launched into Q & A. After questions like, “do the search engines count this in their points?” to “how does the link come back?”, I have to admit I stopped paying attention. One interesting question did come up - “is it better to submit a link that comes back to your site, or is it better to send it back to social media sites?” If you DIgg your own video that’s hosted on YouTube, for example, is it better use that traffic to promote the video on your site or to promote the video on YouTube? Rand’s answer was, “it depends”. The remainder of the session was devoted to the details of who does and doesn’t have nofollow tags on outgoing links.
One thing that struck me about this panel, which I also heard in Chicago, was that everyone seems to have a different approach to the “best practices” of social media optimization. Fishkin likes submitting to a lot of second-tier sites to build aggregate traffic, Patel wants to focus on building the relationship, and Hagans uses SMO to build search visibility through link baiting. Though I can’t disagree with the utility of any of these practices, they’re difficult to scale without engaging in social media “spamming” - something the panelists even seem to admit, as they joked about sending iPods to bloggers in return for “link love”. It’s encouraging to see such a broad audience interested in social media, but I left with the impression that few will adopt SMO as a long-term practice. Until a more “enterprise-friendly” version of SMO develops, it will remain a marketing tactic best suited to organizations with niche offline communities and low budgets.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Blogging, Conferences & Events, Search: How-To, Social Media |