You can’t escape social networks or social channels even if you tried to. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Orkut, Bebo, LinkedIn – give access channels for strangers to meet and attempt to become your friends.
As a marketer, social networks or web 2.0 networks and services give you an opportunity to reach out to potential customers at significantly lower costs compared to search engine optimization or paid advertising.
In my opinion there’s greater finesse involved, because if there are another 100 marketers using the same channel to reach out the the person, you have to fight to gain the person’s attention, even as they are being courted by 100 other suitors.
So the $64,000 question is how do you get someone’s attention without becoming annoying.
Can you painlessly win the social media love dance, without getting your heart (and sales conversion) broken?
Here’s an example of what I mean:
My facebook “friend add” request queue currently numbers in the 450+ range.
How do I decide if I approve a friend request?
First step, I look to see if we’ve friends in common.
Second, who are those friend? Casual acquaintances, close friends? Business partners?
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If there’s a personal note, it could gain a couple more bonus points…or be a major deal killer.
A reason like “I saw you on the network and I want to grow my friends list. Please add me” works well if you’re building a friendship profile, or looking for strangers to chat up on an instant messengers or IRC. It doesn’t work as well otherwise.
Another poor reason “I see you’re in affiliate marketing. Let’s be friends”.
Erm, my blog is listed there. I have videos up. Would it be too much to take a look at what I do, and invest a minimal amount of time and effort to find out more about me. And then decide if you want to be my friend?
The analogy would be, if you wanted to expand your circle of friends, would you find out more about someone, or would you go out in the street and randomly start talking to strangers?
I can’t say that talking to strangers might not yield results, but I’m fairly sure the hit rate is going to be significantly lower.
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So you’ve made it past the velvet rope, now what?
The love dance doesn’t (more…)
Till now, the Facebook social network has been an overall pleasant user experience for most users, especially if they’ve come over from the social spamming barrage common on MySpace.
Aside from being hit with 100 friend add requests from strangers and another 500 application invites, Facebook is a manageable social platform, especially since their moderation filters block out users who sent out a large volume of private messages and the number of friend add requests are capped each day. (Although it’s common to see innocents get caught in the crossfire).
So it was a pretty rare occurrence to see this on a friend’s wall (the defacto “bulletin board” for facebook users to send and receive public messages).
Given that most accounts have to go through some level of verification and you have to manually add friends (who then can post messages on your wall), I was curious to see what the message was about.
So heading over to the blogspot page, (more…)
If you use Pay Per Click (PPC) as a means of traffic generation for your websites, you’d have read blog posts by Revenuewire CEO Geordie Carswell over at the Revenuewire affiliate network.
It’s a loss for PPC marketers that Geordie will be stepping down as CEO on August 1st, though he will be continuing with Revenuewire on an advisory basis.
Geordie had published a number of tips and updates focused on utilitizing and optmizing Google AdWords since he started posting on the blog.
Perhaps as a sign of the changing of the guard, the blog format has been changed to something closer to an article directory – perhaps a sign that updates may not be as frequent either.
The Revenuewire CEO post will be filled by (more…)
This week I invited online retailer Buy.com’s Director of Marketing and co-host of their BuyTV program to come on the Friday Podcast.
Buy.com was among the first online merchants to launch an online program in 2006. Since then BuyTV has recently been syndicated on the G4 TV network.
Besides computer and consumer electronics, Buy.com offers other consumer merchandise with baby, shoes, sports, toys and luggage verticals.
On the Friday Podcast, Melissa and I talked about:
- How Buy.com founder and chairman Scott Blum conceptialized the idea of BuyTV in 2002
- BuyTV’s content development process and production process
- Optimization tips for video marketers
- How affiliate marketers can leverage on BuyTV’s video content to optimize their marketing campaigns
Check out the Friday Podcast here:
You can find out more by visiting:
Buy.com
BuyTV
MelissaSalas.tv
Longtime blog readers will recognize Austin, TX-based Laura Alter as the co-owner of laptop forum NotebookForums and might recall the launch of her blog last year.
Recently, Laura has been more proactive moving from the forum management/marketing side of things to becoming a SEO evangelist of sorts.
She recently organized an Austin SEM meetup, with a presentation on local search (aka geotargeted search engine optimization).
Optimizing your website for local traffic, especially if you’re mainly a geographically-fixed business like a hair salon or ice cream parlor can pay off with big dividends regardless of whether you go down the free search engine optimization route or the paid search route.
A number of factors work in your favor:
- Highly relevant and targeted traffic since the campaigns specially target consumers with specific needs
- Generally lower bids, as the pool of advertisers is smaller (even in a metropolitan area like New York City or Los Angeles – it’s a more viable prospect compared to facing bidders all over the world)
- Higher conversion ratios
- Ease-of-followup and greater opportunities to build a continuing relationship (especially if you employ email marketing and/or direct mail in your customer relationship management efforts)
Obviously SEM/SEO is not going to be your end point, it’s merely going to be your start point to generate leads. Building the relationship and establishing trust, credibility, asking for the sale and asking for the repeat sale are going to be the bedrock of your business building efforts.
For the local SEO side, here’re some slides from Laura’s presentation:
3 formats for localized SERP (search engine results page) display:
10 Pack
Authoritative OneBox
Integrated Map
I remember getting (more…)
A couple of days ago, Michael Gray AKA Graywolf posted a controversial post “Is the BlogHer Conference Guilty of Sex Discrimination” – lambasting the event for not including male speakers (although they were welcome to ask questions during the sessions and speak at open mic sessions).
While I won’t go as far as to call BlogHer founders Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins “evil and sexist pigs”, it’s worth looking at whether Michael is justified in his accusations.
I took a look at the BlogHer 08 brochure, a massive 50-page PDF including the conference schedule and speaker profiles and the lack of male speakers stood out.
Is it wrong for an event to exclude male speakers?
I guess it would be easy for conference organizers to point to speaker submissions or to a speaker email link and say that they’re opening the doors to male presenters. It’s another thing to go out and proactively seek out and invite qualified presenters outside of your normal demographic (eg: mommyblogger, seo experts, ppc specialist, daddy bloggers, etc).
A community only grows when (more…)
