Overall, brands need to:

1. Identify what others are already doing in the space, and how successful they are.
2. Identify areas of opportunity and weaknesses within their specific vertical.
3. Identify what tactics a competitor is using to gain a competitive advantage.

What We’re Doing

We approach competitive research with these fundamental questions:

1. What is their link building strategy?
2. How are they leveraging social media?
3. Identify areas of weakness or opportunity in their strategy (notice whether they’re focusing strictly on their brand, or expanding into other social areas for maximum reach).
4. How all these facets work together: focus on their overall “marketing strategy” rather than segregating them into “search” and “social.”
5. Continuing the stalking with tips and tools.

What We’re NOT Doing

There seems to be this “screw the competitor” mentality out there, which can hurt your brand in the long run. If you’re working on competitive research and looking to improve your brand’s overall visibility, focus on learning everything about the vertical overall, your competitors, and open opportunities to excel.

It’s not worth expending negative energy to try to destroy a competitor when there are tons of holistic and sustainable strategies to compete in most markets. Do not use this as an opportunity to call out negative tactics that a competitor might be using. You want to understand the space and get a foothold where there’s an open opportunity.

Now, we’ll walk through the major components of gathering competitive research. Here are some quick links for referencing each section of this guide:

• Getting Started
• Link Building Strategy
• Social Media Strategy
• Continue Stalking Your Competitors
• Useful Sites & Tools

We’ll go into this guide assuming that keyword research has been completed across all categories of your website and a visibility score has been calculated so you can identify how your brand is performing across the span of keywords that you’ve researched and who your organic competitors are. I emphasize organic because often times brands confuse “brand competitors” with “organic competitors” when many times they’re not one in the same.

A “brand competitor” is dominant in the space and can be considered a competitor by the target demographic, or in online and offline marketing and branding efforts. It’s like saying Boscovs (Ha! Remember that store?) is a competitor to JCPenny’s because that brand might be “like” them, but they aren’t performing well enough to compete in the actual SERPs.

An “organic competitor” is one that’s performing well in the SERPs across either your whole industry space, or across certain categorical areas that you’re focusing on, including keywords that are money phrases or important to bringing traffic and conversions to your site.

Skipping ahead, we’ll assume that you’ve identified your top competitors performing well over your keyword sets as a whole. Competitive research should have some basic goals that can help focus your effort, before you dive in and get bamboozled by all the available data and avenues that you can travel down.

Analyzing Your Competitor’s Backlinks

Internet marketing has tons of different techniques and tactics, each with their own strengths and sustainability. When researching your competitors, backlinks are going to become your best friend. If you have access to a paid backlink tool such as Majestic or Open Site Explorer, I suggest running your competitors through there and extracting their backlinks, top backlinks and anchor text data.

Let’s look at a few areas in here without diving too deep down the rabbit hole.

Top Backlinks

Top backlinks are a quick way to see what kinds of partnerships or relationships your competitors might be building or leveraging that are quality and/or high authority.

When looking at the top pages, make note of what kinds of sites are considered to be “top backlinks.” Are they:

• News sites where they may be distributing press release information?
• Other prominent sites within the industry that they may have a relationship with?
• Are they reaching out to large publications or networks?
• HOW are they obtaining links on these sites? Are they contributing guest posts, or are they sending information through specific editors?

When sifting through their general backlinks:

• Are they contributing to blogs or publications as a guest author?
• Is content marketing a part of their strategy? If so, what types of content are they actually marketing out there?
• Is there an abundance of site-wide or footer links?

Anchor Text

What keywords are important to your competitors? Some brands still live by the “build tons of exact match for the phrase you want and that’s all you need to do to rank number 1” tactic. That’s unfortunate for them, but very fortunate for you when you’re snooping around.

• What exact match phrases are they targeting? Are they targeting them excessively?
• Are they ranking for the exact match phrases that they appear to be targeting? (This can be done with manual searching, or by using a tool such as SEMrush)
• What percentage of those phrases are coupled with branded terms?
• What percentage are strictly branded phrases?

Greg Boser wrote an excellent post on SERP profiling that has some incredible knowledge nuggets to aid in your competitive research.

There are many different tactics for building links and it’s important to identify what your competitors are and are not doing.

• Do they have a press release strategy?
• Can you find any links that look “paid”?
• Are they submitting their site to directories?
• Are they utilizing blogger outreach and content marketing?
• Are they building partnerships or sponsoring events with universities or schools that might contribute to .edu links in their backlink portfolio?

If you’re new to digging through data dumps, there are quite a few ways to make it sexy so it’s not such an eyesore, and you can find exactly what it is you’re looking for. If you set up your data into a table, you can segment the URL column and start sorting.

Press Releases

A press release strategy is an old, but still common, strategy amongst established brands. Not to mention, a mostly free one if you’re looking in the right places for publication. That said, it’s hard to build up the actual page authority of these press releases even though they’re (sometimes) sitting on domains with a high authority.

Analyzing these can give you a good idea of the dates that they’ve done product launches, promotions or made strategic shifts in business. There are plenty of free and paid press release services that you should look for in your competitor’s backlinks.

Sort your “Source URL” column for the domains below. These just touch the surface of press release sites but can help move the process along:

• Prweb.com
• Newswire.com
• PRnewswire.com
• PRlog.org
• Free-press-release.com
• i-newswire.com
• Onlineprnews.com

Directory Submissions

Niche directories can be useful not only for link building, but to actually gain clients/customers that might be searching for specific businesses. It’s true that not very many people search through directories to find what they’re looking for, but it doesn’t hurt to leverage these.

• What directories have they submitted their site to?
• Are they using brand or exact match anchors? Note: some directories are extremely particular in the anchor text used.
• Are they listed in niche directories?
• If they have physical locations, are they listed in local directories which can also serve as citations?

For industries/verticals with physical locations:

Because citations are so important in establishing authority and confirming that your business is “real” and located where it’s listed in Google Places, getting citations wherever possible is a tactic that you need to consider. Finding out where competitors are listed can be an excellent starting point for where to submit your business for citations.

Here’s a great list of 50 local directories where you can start queries for your competitors if the backlinks are too daunting to sift through.

Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach comes in many different shapes, sizes and colors, and the ability to build links this way requires competitors to leverage current relationships or build new ones. It’s apparent when brands are trying to link build without really having strong relationships in the industry, because the quality of the sites aren’t always the best or as relevant as they should be.

While some marketers (WARNING: big generalization) think that “any link” is a “good link,” that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

For outreach in general, look at:

• What’s the domain authority of the sites where they’re obtaining links?
• What’s the overall quality of the site and relevancy of the links?
• Is the same editor working with this brand or does it look like there isn’t an established and strong relationship with one editor in particular?
• Does the blog look to be catering only to that particular brand in its vertical? Could they have an exclusivity agreement with them?

Often times, editors are open to working with more than one brand in that particular vertical because they’re interested in bringing fresh news and industry updates to their readership. Unless they have an exclusivity agreement with that particular brand, they’ll be open to working with your brand, too, over time.

If you spend some time sorting and sifting through the backlinks, you’ll be able to identify sites where the brand might have contributed guest posts or reached out for brand coverage. If you  take blogger outreach tactics and reverse engineer them, you can start to get into your competitor’s heads and profile their marketing strategy.

When looking through their backlinks, you should be able to recognize industry blogs that they’re posting on:

Content Marketing & Promotion

It’s no surprise that content marketing is taking the industry by storm. It’s been an ongoing diamond in the rough that many brands weren’t taking advantage of in their strategy even though it’s been a tactic for quite some time now.

Because content marketing is becoming a larger and dominant part of the overall marketing strategy, it’s worth investigating what kind of content a competitor is creating and sharing. Understanding your competitor’s content marketing strategy both on-site and off-site can help kick start your brainstorming on potential topics to create by using what’s been successful and also looking at areas that haven’t been covered.

Looking into your competitor’s content strategy can:

1. Give you an idea of what topics are interesting to their target demographic.
2. Determine how socially successful these pieces were.
3. Uncover what networks their blog/site content is being shared on.
4. Identify areas of opportunity in content marketing that you may not have otherwise considered.
5. Understand what off-topic content was successful.
6. Discover if they’re creating content to share on-site, or on third party sites.

Infographics

There are a couple of infographic sites that you can search manually to see if a specific brand is submitting infographics on their own, if others are submitting infographics they’ve created and shared on their site, or what infographics are being created that integrate their brand.

Below is a snapshot of Visual.ly, an infographic aggregator and submission site. A lot of brands will host infographics on their blog first if they’re new to content creation and marketing, so try querying your competitors to see if they’ve submitted their work.

Social Bookmarking

You can also try manual queries on sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to see what content on their actual blog/website is being shared socially. This can give you an idea of what their target market finds interesting enough to share with others.

StumbleUpon is pretty annoying to search from the site (unless you’re just stumbling for the hell of it) so setting up a simple query in Google can help you find if posts or pages on your competitor’s sites are being added.

Adding the site: operator into a Google search will allow you to search for specific keywords or URLs within a site. If you want to search StumbleUpon for, say, Ikeahackers.net to see what posts have been shared off their site:

(enter your competitor’s URL here) site:stumbleupon.com

Free tactic

Once you identify the name or an infographic peice or linkbait article that was shared, you can also Google that title to see if you can identify the trail of other sites that have picked it up.

Paid tactic

You can also drop the original URL in tools like Majestic or Open Site Explorer to see what sites have linked to that particular piece of content. These can be sites that you add into your blogger outreach campaigns as well.

Twitter

You can also manually search individual links on Twitter to see where they’ve been shared. This is another way to check out the reach and scope of your competitors on other social networks. It can also give you an idea of users that you should start following and engaging with if you plan on reaching out and marketing your own content.

Simply put the URL of your competitor’s post in the search field on Twitter, and the rest will take care of itself.

Google Places

This is especially important if you and your competitors own a local business or have physical locations. Doing a brand query in Google, with the location set to whatever city their physical building is located in, can bring up a Google Places page.

1. Do your competitors have Google Places pages for their physical locations?
2. Are they gaining reviews/star ratings?
3. Do they have calls to action on other social networks or their own site to encourage customers to review them?
4. Are they taking advantage of the descriptions and categories area, which are areas annotated in the screenshot below?

Below is an example of sites that are leveraging their current customers and clients for Google Places reviews:

The above location is asking for reviews, while the company below is offering loyalty points for those that review them. This is not only helping to solidify their authority, but it’s also giving current clients/customers an incentive to visit them again.

When working as a search marketer, you may not pay as much attention to a competitor’s social strategy. With social signals and engagement playing a bigger factor is rankings, it’s important to sniff out what major social networks a competitor is participating in, and what niche networks they (or your brand!) might be missing out on.

Social media competitive research is a process that we spend a lot of time on at BlueGlass, so I’ll just touch on a few basic points for what to look for on some major social networks.

The Spot Check

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take one basic step that can help pave the way for the remainder of the social research. Do a quick spot check on their site. This can save time trying to find competitors on social networks since some don’t use their actual brand name for a handle.

This is a great way to tell what social networks these brands are extremely active on, and what they consider important to their own social strategy.

Are they allowing users to socially share the homepage in specific? In the image above, you’ll see that Search Engine Land is allowing users to publicly +1 their homepage.

Gaining +1s to your homepage not only allows it to show up within a user’s profile, shown in the screenshot above, but the amount also reflects in the search results below. It’s still unclear how much personalization and +1s are going to affect the search results, but a competitor who is encouraging +1s and sharing of their site might potentially have a lead on your brand that isn’t.

If your competitors tend to use the same name across all networks, you can also use tools like NameChk or Knowem to get a quick bird’s eye view of what other popular or obscure networks they’re using.

Social Factors to Consider

It’s important to understand the ins and outs of what they’re doing, who they’re following, how they’re engaging, what types of content they’re sharing successfully and more importantly: what is their reach and who is listening?

Really understanding how your competitors are leveraging social media successfully (or unsuccessfully) can give you a solid understanding of what your target audience will be receptive to. Once you’ve located the social networks where they’re most active, examine the following:

1. What are the networks listed on their site that they consider important to their strategy?
2. Are they on any niche networks that your brand could potentially build a presence on?
3. How often are they sharing and engaging on these networks?
4. What types of content are they sharing? Is it self-centered and self-serving, or is it industry related? Off topic?
5. For Twitter, what kinds of lists are they curating? Are they on any lists? How are they engaging?
6. For Facebook, are they taking advantage of all the features such as the photostrip, applications, tagging, etc? Who are their featured likes?
7. Are they leveraging these platforms to aid in any kind of promotions or contests they’re running?
8. Competitor’s YouTube channels can be an excellent opportunity to learn what topics the YouTube audience in your vertical respond to.

There’s an exponential amount of other factors to look into socially, especially with the personalization and changes that Google + is bringing to the table. The key takeaway from social is that all things equal, having a strong social strategy could be what’s giving your competitor a leg up over your brand.

Did you think that once you did your initial research, you were done?

WRONG.

You’re not. This isn’t a “said it and forget it” deal. Just like you, your competitors will be continuously changing and adapting their marketing strategies.

To stay on your toes, you’re going to need to consistently monitor what your competitors are doing. There are a bunch of paid tools that can be used, but I’ll go over some free tips and tactics that can be used for monitoring.

Tracking Search Queries on Twitter

Tracking a competitor’s brand mentions in Twitter can help you understand the conversation around the brand and their audience’s perception of them. Twitter has since pulled the ability to grab RSS feeds from searches, but you can use this URL and change out the blue query at the end for your specific search term. It’ll bring you to an RSS page where you can change the method to Google and have it pulled into your reader.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=blueglass

Saving Searches In LinkedIn

You can save any kind of search that you do on LinkedIn, so if you’re interested in keeping tabs on employees and who is joining/leaving the company, short of stalking their brand page, this would be an easy way to do it. Depending on who joins and leaves the company, you can get a good idea of the direction a company might be going in. For instance,  if Linkedin reflected that Apple hired the VP of Marketing at Pepsi, it might tip you off that they’re moving into a stronger product marketing cycle.

You can query the brand name under “people” and it’ll list everyone that has that particular brand listed in their profiles.

On the search results stream, click “Save” on the top right, and you’ll be prompted to choose a “name” and “frequency” for which you want to receive these updates.

Also, you can stalk their actual company page to keep up with new hires and departures.

Set up Google Alerts

Google Alerts is pretty overlooked, but it’s one of the easiest and quickest ways to keep many eyes on competitors. Track variations of your competitors’ brand names so you’ll be able to see where they’re gaining mentions, if they’re making the news for something positive/negative, if they’re releasing a new product or update, etc. There’s no limit to how many alerts you can set, so you should also set some for your own brand.

You can set the types of results you want to monitor.

As well as the frequency so you’re not getting more email alerts than you can handle. Plus, we all get enough email right?

Pull an RSS of Search Queries

Not many people know that you can pull RSS feeds from various services to keep track of certain search queries. Google reader (or any other RSS feed tracker) can pull these into one easy place for your viewing pleasure. Anything with an RSS feed can be tracked.

Using Google News as an example:

Enter in the search query you’re interested in. If you’re tracking strictly brand mentions, try different variations in quotes so you’re minimizing the chances of getting irrelevant results.

Scroll down to the RSS Feed button at the bottom of the SERPs. You can also create an email alert, but having it in an RSS feed allows you to view everything all at once. And plus, we all get enough email don’t we?

Grab the appropriate links to pull the feed into Google Reader. For Google News, you’ll want to grab the actual URL after you click the RSS feed button, as shown in the screenshot below.

Add the subscription into Google Reader.

Custom Queries

Of course, there’s also good ol’ manual searching.

You can use the search parameter link: to find all sites that are linking to the URL of your choice. If you’re looking for recent news, limit the date span to the past week or month to weed out irrelevant and dated results.

link:(competitor’s URL)

To tie up this extremely long post, here are a few other tools and sites that haven’t been mentioned above to help you research your competitors.

Social Mention

Social Mention  allows you to search brand mentions across various social and blog platforms. You can also setup email alerts or grab an RSS feed from there for constant monitoring of your competitors.

Ghostery

Ghostery is an awesome plugin that allows you to see what plugins, pixels, trackers, ad networks or tools a competitor might be using to gather private data. For one, it allows you to see what analytics platform they’re using, so you can get a good idea of how in depth their segmenting and analysis of traffic is.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is another great tool allows you to see what your competitor is using as a CMS, their framework, server, analytics platform, etc.

Conclusion

Be Where They Are

Look into forums, Linkedin groups, Twitter chats and other areas that the brands are participating in. Subscribe and participate so you can get a better view of what’s going on in the industry, and what they find is important to share and participate in.

Look for Opportunities

Finding your competitors weaknesses and their areas of success can open the door to strategic brainstorming to expand the scope and reach of your marketing.

Competitive research is an extremely lengthy, time-consuming and constant process. After reading this post, you should be  better equipped to research what your competitors are doing throughout the online marketing space, using  (mostly) free resources.

The main thing to remember is that every channel affects the other. It’s not enough to only concentrate on competitive research in search without understanding what a competitor is doing socially as well. While there are instances where you want to drill down and look into very specific things, overall competitive research should encompass each facet of Internet marketing as a whole.

Remember, it’s important to research from inside the trees, and outside of the forest.

What are some of your favorite techniques, tricks or tools for competitive research?

As I started my research for this post, I ran the idea by my non-running sister. She gave me the following advice, ”just make sure you give readers tips other than trying to run a million miles a day… not everyone runs like a mad woman.” A million miles is a bit of a stretch, but point taken.

Here are a few ideas for the “I don’t run a lot” type of people on how to use social media to your advantage to stay fit at your desk job.

Getting Fit: The Modern Way

Determine Your Goal

When everyone at BlueGlass is sitting around brainstorming for a client, the first question presented to the team is a simple one: “What is the company’s overall goal?” The same should be applied to health and fitness. What do you want to get out of what you are putting into the time you invest in exercise? Do you even know?

Sites like FitLink are here to help. They have a very goal-oriented platform. After asking the user questions, they help you formulate your goal.

FitLink's About Me Page

The site then uses this part of your profile to set you up with other people with similar goals in your area. The site pulls commonalities from the profiles, presents the possible match, and you can then connect with your new fitness buddies.

Get (and Stay) Motivated

There are multiple social media platforms that are great for the motivational first step. FitLink actually has a button that says just that: “Stay Motivated!” You can even invite friends that are not on FitLink to support you in your fitness journey.

Daily Burn offers a similar feature. All the motivation you need is right at your fingertips, and this time, from people that have signed up to take on the task. The motivators on Daily Burn volunteer for the task, so they know just what to say. Think of them more as your coach, confidant, and personal cheerleader

Keep Track of Your Progress

DailyMile is an awesome website for tracking your workouts. You can put in all of the activities you do each day (running, walking, weight lifting, etc.), and it keeps track  for you broken down by daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly totals. You can also connect with other users and follow their activity progress as well.

Get Others Involved

The overall health and attitude of a workplace is an integral piece of the puzzle to success. Why not get others at work involved in a fitness competition? Everyone that wants to participate can sign up on a predetermined social platform, log their exercise, and see who comes out on top.

It’s very simple to start a campaign geared towards your specific goal. The picture below shows the DailyBurn community-wide challenges. You can also make private competitions between you and your coworkers or friends.

Another idea is to create an office specific hashtag on Twitter. By filtering your tweets and using the hashtag on all fitness-related posts, everyone you work with can see your progress. And if they don’t see you tweeting about your workouts, I’m sure they will be happy to #getonyou about it

Get Involved in a Campaign

There are a lot of fitness campaigns that are always active in communities around the the country. Since it is now November (how did that happen?!), the focus is all about the holidays, which means heavy food, sweet treats, and lots of eating. Or, you can offset all of those calories by getting active.

I just started a campaign with other bloggers from across the country called Pile on the Miles. It’s an easy (and fun) way to connect with others that are doing their best to stay healthy during the holidays.

Using social media makes it so easy to stay accountable. It’s almost like someone is watching you… 

Getting Fit: The Old-Fashioned Way

Don’t get me wrong, you can stay in shape at your desk job without social media as well. Here are a few quick tips…

1. Know when to unplug

When you get home at night, give yourself an allotted amount of time to step away from your computer, phone, or tablet,  and get moving! It really is OK to not have your email attached to your hip for a little while (don’t tell my boss! )

2. Take a few breaks during the day

Simply getting up from your desk and getting your blood flowing is good for you. Take a quick walk around the office, and then get back to work.

3. Mark it in your calendar

View your workout like any other appointment in your calendar. You are not going to cancel an important meeting just because you don’t want to go. By scheduling time for the gym (even if its only 20 minutes), you are much more likely to stick to it!

4. Park in the parking spot furthest away from the office front door.

Every step counts!

5. Take the stairs!

Every time you use the stairs rather than the elevator, you are torching extra calories, without putting forth all that much effort. A 160-pound person burns 29 calories in 3 minutes walking up the stairs. How about that stat?

6. Resist all of those office treats

This is probably the most difficult one. Working at BlueGlass has taught me to practice crazy self control! By all means, grab a sweet snack once a week, but indulging every day is not the best tactic to staying healthy.

Whether you work at a desk job, or you’re on your feet all day, everything in moderation is key. That includes what you eat and how often you work out. Do what you love, love what you do, and do it well

Disclaimer: I am in no way, shape, or form a health professional or a registered dietician. I am an Internet marketer. These are my own views and are not warranted to be taken as the only way to approach health and fitness. Please consult a doctor before beginning any type of fitness or nutrition plan.

This panel features Jon Henshaw, Co-founder and Director of Product Innovation at Raven, and Marty Weintraub, the president of AimClear. Loren Baker will moderate.

Jon Henshaw is up first.

If you have content that’s not in a good place, then it’s not going to thrive. You have to give it the right environment to grow.

Whoa, animated PowerPoint backgrounds. Cool.

There are two main things that he focuses on. One of them is keyword research. Based on that, you’ll have what you need to structure your website. Information Architecture is extremely important.

Once you figure out your site, you have to figure out how to code it. Living standard HTML gives us the ability to have semantic elements, meaning you can specify to a search engine or bot that this is your navigation, this is an article, etc. It not longer matters where you put things as long as they’re inside of the semantic elements.

Site speed is important to search engines, so he said to focus on caching, CDN, image compression and good hosting.

Once you’ve made your speed changes, there are tools to test how fast it is. GTmetrix, for example, will give you two different speed grades. If you have a site that’s been around for a while, use Google webmaster tools.

Structured data has been around for several years in the form of microformats and RDFa. The new kid in town is microdata, but it’s missing one thing — you have to know the schema. You can use schema-creator.org, which will help you get started.

Social Meta Data needs to be considered. Open Graph protocal is one of the smartest things you can do with your HTML. It helps you control what people are going to share.

There are a lot of little things you can do in your code that can go a long way.

Social sharing — buttons and comments — can make a difference. He’s not a big fan of the left bar full of icons that scrolls with you, but it works, so you might want to test it. Choose the services that relate to the people visiting your site. Do the things that are simple, quick and actionable.

His blog uses Facebook comments because there’s generally a spam issue, which makes it a pain to monitor comments. Facebook comments provide better content and they’re inside the Facebook experience, so comments show up on their walls/timelines. He finds this brilliant. Since they added it, their traffic increased 250% and they had a 99% decrease in “crapulence.”

+1 is here. You need to have it.

In regard to images:

• include the URL on images
• use keywords in the file name
• always use ALT text
• treat infographics like videos (include text)

He also mentioned Slideshare, which he said is a nice strategy to put targeted presentations on with links. StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is also useful because even if a small percentage of people thoroughly enjoys the content, they’ll share it.

And, “Bam! Done!” as Jon put it on his final slide.

Now it’s Marty Weintraub’s turn, and he’ll be talking about the ever-crucial blog headlines.

There are so many reasons why blog headlines are important. Aside from being a vital word tool for attracting attention, your CMS echoes post titles via internal linking.

And I’m not sure what just happened, but Marty’s doing a gerbil impression saying the gerbil is a “beady little freaking rodent.” Awesomely random.

“What you say about your content in the SERPs is everything,” he said.

There are three steps to writing headlines. His headline theory essentially involves these steps:

Write a literal, straightforward headlineàResearch the keywordsàJazz it up

Once you’ve tested availability, log the related keywords you saw in the research and tell everyone to use them when they tweet. Make sure to include words that are appealing.

Then look at the SERPs and study the publications that are in the SERPs.

Refine and decorate your headline theory. Move important words to the left. Generally don’t put brand names in the front.

He just called cuddly bunnies boring! There are lots of fuzzy animals in this presentation.

Note the semantic cluster. Communicate with the rest of your company. Tell PR and anyone else working with and posting the content to use different, provided keywords and not just the title.

You don’t always have to come up with hyperbolic things to put in blog posts. It doesn’t have to be complicated every single time. Sometimes you just have to solve a problem and give them a resource, and it doesn’t have to be flashy.

“if you invest a little time and figure this stuff out, you’re golden,” Marty said.

It can be really difficult to move the important words to the left of your blog title for many reasons, and that’s why he uses his Snappy Phrase Theory, which, as mentioned before, involves moving the KW to the left.

The trick to this theory is the following formula:

KEYWORD (colon) Explanation/snappy phrase with hyperbole.

It’s a great idea to crowd-source snappy phrases. For the second part of the formula, using questions can be good tactic because they ask people to do things. You can also use questions that are really answers. For example, “When SEO Works.” Other strategies include touting benefits and explaining negative consequences. (There’s lots of data that says the negative sort of pitches work.)

Also, leverage the power of clichés; they work! Everyone already knows them and there’s an element of humor. Utilize memorable phonetics like alliteration when possible, too.

I wish I had captured more of Marty’s presentation, but I could hardly keep up. He ended by saying how he’s met lifelong friends at BlueGlass conferences.

“I think you are one of the coolest audiences in the world,” Marty said.

Session 4 is coming soon!

We may have chosen not to keep  friendships in which we must explain terms like engagement, memes, hashtags, and so on. Some of us may have even cut people out of our lives who use the term “viral”.  It is just too much pressure to change our language for people in our day-to-day lives.

However, there are some relationships that you cannot avoid.  When it comes to family, a lot of our relatives may not completely understand what it is we do with our careers.  This will never be the case for two of our newest members at BlueGlass, their mother is the infamous Annie Cushing.  But, it is still the case for a lot of people in our industry.

There are many times it’s important to be able to explain your job, not only with family.  It is necessary to explain what you have done at previous jobs at a job interview, on a date, in social situations, and at networking events.  This post is designed to give you suggestions on how to handle those tricky situations.

Situation 1:

Setting: Family Gathering

Father: “Son, what is it that you actually do? What is your job title?”

Son: “Well Dad, my title is Social Media Strategist and what I do changes on a regular basis because the industry I work in is ever-changing.  I am sure you have seen Social Networks focused on during sports events and news casts on TV and in the news.   It is my job to conceptualize how companies use those sites to interact with their audience.  So it is a “social” type of marketing that happens really quickly on these websites, you should join a few and follow some of your favorite companies and it will make a lot more sense.”

Situation 2

Setting: Job Interview

Hiring Manager:  ”Please tell me what you did at your last job as the Senior SEO Strategist.”

You:  ”Sure!  Being an SEO Strategist is definitely a multifaceted position.  My team and I consulted, managed and implemented SEO recommendations to our clients sites, ran daily reports, presented these reports in client facing meetings, used many keyword research and search analytic tools, implemented analytics onto client sites,  kept up with all of the algorithm changes, among so many other day to day duties.”

Situation 3

Setting: Blind Date

Date: “So, umm what do you do for a living?”

You:  :”Well, it is pretty complex.  I facilitate with the creation of many of the articles you may read online.  I also come up with concepts for nifty informational images that are usually sent around on Facebook or on blogs.  It is really hard to explain how I do this stuff, but if we make it to another date… I will show you. <wink>”

Obviously, your answer might vary depending on the level of intelligence of your counterpart.  Prepare yourself and do your research on who you are speaking to and how they engage on social networks before you talk to them.  Do they update their Facebook profile with a question they could have easily Googled? Do they have a custom CSS Tumblr blog?  There are a few infographics out there that show how different types of people use the internet.  If you are reading this post, you are most likely in the upper percentile. Good work and good luck!

Do you find it difficult to clearly explain your job to others?

– — – — – — –

Want to learn, network and have fun with some of the top minds in Internet marketing?  Hurry up and register for BlueGlass TPA taking place on September 26th & 27th!

For those of you who are new to BlueGlass conferences, the conference series was born from our passion to share, educate and bring together industry professionals in an intimate setting over the course of 48+ hours. That’s why we make sure that we serve all three meals and snacks to attendees (the food keeps everyone together!), hold nighttime parties (networking events) and go the extra mile to make sure that all of our guests have the best experience possible.

We’ve literally seen massive business deals made during our conferences (the BlueGlass merger was even officially finalized during a Search & Social conference in Tampa last Spring!) and more importantly, the building of long term industry relationships. I think I once heard an attendee compare a BlueGlass Event to summer camp — intensive learning and deep friendships that can last a lifetime.

The sharing of knowledge in the search marketing & social media industries is what BlueGlass is all about. That’s why we keep our blog updated on an almost daily basis with resourceful information that would usually be reserved for a blog like Search Engine Journal, or possibly not publicly shared at all. We LOVE educating this incredible community with what we’ve learned, what works, and what doesn’t.

That being said, I’m currently in the process of finalizing the agenda for BlueGlass TPA. With the group of speakers that we have including (but not limited to) Tim Mayer, Brian Clark, Jon Henshaw, Greg Boser, Simon Heseltine, David Snyder, Dennis Goedegeburre & others; we literally have a dream team of talent to build panels and discussions around.

Some of the sessions in the plan include :

• Link Building Tactics in a Post Panda & Aggressive Environment
• Convergence of Social Media & SEO : Google+, Facebook & Beyond
• Advanced PPC Tactics : Looking Beyond Adwords and Understanding Bing AdCenter
• Web Analytics & Conversions : Getting Deeper into Google, Omniture and Webmaster Tool Suites

But before announcing the Agenda next Monday, what we really want to do is hear what you are interested in learning about. What would YOU want to learn at BlueGlass TPA?

• Is it Google+ and it’s influence on SEO?
• Would you like to see PPC experts audit your AdWords campaigns onstage?
• Is there something entirely different you would like to experience at BlueGlass TPA?

We’re opening up the planning of one of our sessions to our loyal blog readers, Facebook fans & Twitter followers and asking everyone who reads this to please leave a comment below.

• What do YOU want to LEARN at BlueGlass TPA?
• What would be your dream Session/Panel?

Tickets are limited to 50 seats for BlueGlass TPA : Don’t miss out! REGISTER TODAY!

No, seriously. I don’t read; I search. I don’t browse; I search. I don’t scan; I search. I don’t even shop (wherever humanly possible). You guessed it … I search.

I even do all my Christmas shopping online. I just burn cinnamon candles and crank the holiday cheer from all my speakers to make me feel like I’m at the mall. It’s bad.

So to support my habit, I’m always looking for tips and tricks to shave time off of my search tasks.

One little trick I use is to create shortcuts that I can put right into my browser to trigger searches I do on sites I visit regularly. It’s so easy and time-saving you’ll want to send me chocolate-covered pretzels as a token of your appreciation. (And my birthday is in a couple weeks. How serendipitous is THAT?)

First, I’ll cover how to do this in Chrome and then Firefox. By the end you will be able to enter gs and then your keywords in your address bar to search Grooveshark in Chrome and yt to summon a YouTube search in Firefox. But this will work with any site that has site search.

Creating Search Shortcuts in Chrome

Step 1: Do a search on a site you regularly search. As I said, I’m going to use Grooveshark as an example because that’s where I go to share songs — to my friends’ great chagrin at times, I’m sure. But I also want to demonstrate this isn’t just for the heavy lifters like Google, Bing, and … yeah, that’s about it. I searched for the song Feeling Good on it because it’s my current obsession. [fans self]

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Step 2: Right-click in the address bar (officially called the Omnibar for Chrome) and select Edit search engines.

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Step 3: You’ll come to your Search Engines settings page, which you can also get to by going to Settings (via the wrench icon) > Options > Basics > Search > Manage search engines. You should see your shortcut in the list.

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Step 4: Now you can set your key that will prompt your browser to know which site to search. I’ll use gs, although you can use share, groove, jamz, whutevah. To change anything, just click and start typing. You can even set it to be your default search engine.

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Step 5: Now when you put your shortcut followed by a space in your Omnibar, you’ll see a search button with the name of your custom search engine. Then just enter your search terms and congratulate yourself for being a search honey badger.

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Creating Search Shortcuts in Firefox

Okay, I’ll skip the clever intro and just jump into the deep end of the pool since usability studies show you’re all just going to jump to Step 1 anyway. Pragmatists are ruining the Web …

Step 1: Go to the site you want to set up your search shortcut for. These are called “smart keywords” in Firefoxese. (You’re welcome.) Right-click in the search box, then choose Add a Keyword for this Search. This time I’ll use YouTube.

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Step 2: You’ll be prompted to create a new bookmark. I shave off all the extras from the title. I don’t really need all the SEO spam keywords in my bookmark. Now assign your shortcut. I’m a typophobe, so I make mine short. And I just store mine in the Bookmarks Menu since I don’t use it for anything else. (I keep my regular bookmarks on the bar.)

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Step 3: You can see where the browser has already pulled up the resulting URL for your search. (See the search_query=feeling+good query parameter?) This is before you even hit Enter/Return.

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Step 4: Voila! Your YouTube results page with the hottest music video in the history of music videos. Who cares that the video has absolutely nothing to do with the song? The videography is amazing and brimming with swagger.

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Next time I’ll talk about how you can use this with custom search engines for some high-octane search workflow. But one bag of chocolate-covered pretzels is enough. No, I insist. I don’t want to take advantage of your generosity.

Writing pithy prose in lieu of long-winded meditation gives readers a visual legend for content: the outline is fully visible, the end in sight, and thus the task seems reasonable. If you want to master the beauty of concise, meaning-full writing, there are tricks to help you.

1. K.I.S.S.

Nothing is a better case-in-point than “Keep it simple, stupid.” Don’t over-think simple ideas, and don’t expound on concepts 90% of the population inherently understands. Write for your audience, and write as though you’re paying $3 per word to publish.

2. Proust

Though Remembrance of Things Past is an ironic example for brevity, at approximately 3,400 pages, there is something to be learned from Proust: implementing multi-sensory reading cues multi-layered thoughts.

The writer need not explain the associations with 100 words: he or she can trigger them (e.g., “gingerbread;” pause to think about the word: do you smell the warm aroma, feel the texture of gingerbread men, and remember a Christmas memory of stringing them on a tree? Find triggers to leverage to create experiential text, rather than dense text.)

3. Economy

It’s easier to cut-up another’s writing, to see how many words could be removed. Try this on a blog, or a more difficult sample, like a newspaper. Eliminate every word possible, both by rearranging order, and by finding precise words.

Once you can reduce another’s prose by 40%, you can start tackling your own. It’s a fun game, if you have a nerdish disposition, and a useful tool, if you want an audience to effortlessly glean your meaning.

4. Forget College

Remember the rules you learned in school on grammar; probably from a hipster who desperately desired to be British? Forget that noise.

If you are writing for web, you are writing for busy browsers who don’t want to dig through eight pages to find a point. Pithy, pointed statements are an art as dignified as poetic British prose, and less poser-esque.

5. Manzoni

With one image, you can revolutionize the world. Landslide effect can work in your favor if you select an image that conveys additional layers of meaning, pushing a thought process to critical mass. Again, there’s no reason to spell it out if you can show it, or trigger it.

CONCLUSION

Be brief, and they’ll love you. Think of all of the events you would have enjoyed more if they’d ended sooner: anticipate the duration of your curtain call.

Disagree? So does Jordan Kasteler. Check out his post, Is Social Content Brevity Better? Think Again! for a different opinion on the value of text length.

If you want to learn to write text that will have readers frantic to respond, then employ these psychologically-driven messages. Here are the second five of the 40 secrets to create powerful prose, which are applied by content czars, divas, diplomats, and vendors, alike. Over the next six weeks, I’ll be giving away the remaining 30 secrets to improve your content creation game.

SYMBIOSIS

If an acquaintance gives you a gift—even something you hate and resent—you are twice as likely to reciprocate, or support that person. Thus, if Trump sends his Trump Steaks to vegan friends, even though they would hate the gift, they would be twice as likely to vote Trump for President, 2012.

Give your audience something, whether it’s a secret, widget, or valuable link, and they’re twice as likely to ‘like’ and buy from you. Even though an audience would prefer to be given a valuable tip or application, giving them anything creates that vacuum of reciprocation that makes people feel guilty, and prompts a positive response. Think: how much more likely are you to get the kids a small toy immediately after they’ve drawn you a picture. To learn more about the value of widgets, check out Overlooked Linkbait: The Value of Widgets by Jordan Kasteler.

Create a symbiotic support cycle:

• Give the audience a valuable link, insight, or widget
• After giving something away, subtly request reciprocation in the form of a well-placed ‘like’ button, a comment box to be filled-in, or a sales pitch
• Keep in mind how awful it feels when someone expects a present from you on Christmas: similarly, you do not want to create a situation where readers feel expected to respond, or they may resent the freebie you presented

PRESUMPTIVE GIFTING

Taking the previous section into consideration, would you presume an audience would be more or less likely to reciprocate positively if you imply they absolutely will reciprocate? Studies have found that suggesting a link between their reciprocation and a freebie will not affect a readership’s behavior, whereas an implicit assumption about their reciprocation actually increases the likelihood of positive response by more than 40%. If you’re convinced this is a good idea, check out Patrick Winfield’s resource in his post, Ultimate How-To: Buttons, Tools, and Badges

Sound complicated? All you need to do is suggest that a freebie is given in advance as a small ‘thank you’ for the audience’s feedback. Adding guilt to the situation in the form of an ‘if you/then I’ scenario results in no increase in feedback or ‘like’ count.

Create a symbiotic support presupposition:

• Before posting the free advice, widget, or tip, write a thank you to the readers, telling them the gift is a signifier of appreciation for commenting—the gift given as an implicit, advanced sign of trust that they will comment makes the readers feel good about themselves

RESPONSIVITY

Engaging readers is not enough when the average reader has 93 articles pending at any given time on Google Reader. Although the last post suggested thoughtlessness, or leaving a reader without a decision, was a best bet for responsivity, there is another approach.

Asking an open-ended question that has a positive spin on the topic will substantiate the reader’s belief of his rightness, making him more committed to his answer. If you want a reader to vote, then asking a questions such as, “Why do you believe voting is important?” will lead the reader to substantiate the importance of it in his mind. People asked this question before voting day were 25.2% more likely to follow through and vote.

Create a symbiotic support cycle:

• Place a presupposition, like the importance of voting, into a question
• By merely asking himself the question, the reader complies with the presupposition and ignores it, focusing instead on the reasons why he agrees, rather than if he agrees

CONTRACTUAL READING

Though having someone sign up for RSS feed is pretty neat, it might result in just another ignored feed, and an even less responsive audience (as they are no longer required to seek you out, it’s easy for them to take posts for granted). How can you keep your readership involved?

Having a reader sign up for RSS feed by typing a request and clicking ‘send,’ makes a reader feel contractually obligated to read it. Because there is an assumption that someone, a real person, must read their request and input their information, readers feel obliged to follow-through with the contract by reading the feed; in fact, interaction is 32% higher!

Create a written contract:

• Even if your feed subscription is automatic, including a text box for special notes, or requesting a reason why a reader is subscribing, leads to much higher participation rates
• Similarly, readers believe that their comments are being read and considered. If they do not receive responses, they often feel the contract has been broken on the writer’s end, leading to resentment and disengagement from the writer’s feed

SUMMER FLIP-FLOP

This favorite tactic is very useful with stubborn readers, and is often used on talk shows to allow celebrities to backtrack without looking foolish. No one wants to be perceived as a flip-flopper, making decisions on whimsy and changing viewpoints like knickers. How can you relive that sense of guilt a reader may feel if she realizes a previously-held belief is inaccurate?

Creating a conditional exception allows a reader to believe that a previously-held conviction was accurate, whereas now she would be wise to update her belief to suit the new circumstances. This is easier than it would seem.

For example, a reader thought (at first blush) that Mr. Frump would be an excellent president, but then news broke that he had exaggerated claims on the record; suggesting to the reader Mr. Frump was no longer an excellent candidate would give the reader an out. She could choose to believe that this one incident was the determining factor, which rendered Mr. Frump inadequate. Once people have opened this door to changed beliefs, they can easily be encouraged to re-think their entire position on a topic.

Create a conditional situation, which makes exceptions acceptable:

• Understand the reasons your audience has a previously-held belief
• Find a new condition for the situation that is a game changer—it could be something negative about a past belief, or something positive about a belief you want to move the audience towards
• Using the ‘game changer’ as an excuse to change beliefs, suggest that the new circumstance results in a new best option

TL; DR

Psychologically-driven messages increase sales and responsivity. Employ these five content creation tips with subtly, and with due respect for your audience: manipulating readers to respond in a certain way can backfire, if you attempt to manipulate them into doing something they don’t want to do. What does that mean? Like hypnosis, only a willing participant will be responsive to writerly suggestions.

The first post in this series was Create Content More Alluring Than Mata Hari. Next week the third of eight posts will be published, Create Content More Antagonizing Than Trump.

• Brian Solis
• Chris Brogan
• Jenn Stafford
• Jason Falls
• Lee Odden
• Mari Madden Luangrath
• Marty Weintraub
• Michael Brito
• Mu Saleem
• Scott Skurnick
• Selena Narayanasamy
• Tamar Weinberg

Brian Solis is the author of the best selling book Engage!,  regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web. Brian is also principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture.

When I refer to Digital Darwinism, it stems back to the answer of this very question. I  was tasked in the mid 90′s with a series of initiatives that required linkage between online marketing and online sales through earned media and engagement. I had to find answers that didn’t  yet exist. I found something pretty interesting along the way. Traditional media offered satisfaction in terms of reach, but did not necessarily yield instant or even tangible results. It’s then when I learned that constraint forces creativity.

I searched for online destinations that served as a magnet for communities of potential customers. I soon found them in the form of forums, boards, and groups. However, I quickly realized that I was ill-prepared to engage…I was approaching the opportunity as a classical marketer and that’s the last thing the community was ready to embrace. It was then that I realized a series of epiphanies…first, I needed to become the person that I was trying to reach. Second, the only way to inspire and guide a community was to become the expert they sought to provide insight and direction.

It was then that I realized that the future of marketing was through unmarketing…the ability to introduce value, solutions, answers, to those connected customers who would then serve as the influencers and advocates for the greater market.

Chris Brogan consults and speaks professionally with Fortune 100 and 500 companies like PepsiCo, General Motors, Microsoft, and more, on the future of business communications, and social software technologies. He is a New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents, and a featured monthly columnist at Entrepreneur Magazine. Chris’s blog, is in the Top 5 of the Advertising Age Power150. He has over 11 years experience in online community, social media, and related technologies.

I started my social media marketing company in October of 2008, but opened the doors to New Marketing Labs on January 2009. The idea was simple: help Fortune 100 (and eventually 500) companies learn how to execute social media presence, content marketing, and awareness efforts. We started with companies like Citrix Online, and then worked with all kinds of wonderful organizations like Molson/Coors, and The Henry Ford Museum, plus Pepsico, Sony Electronics USA, and more. What did we do? Mostly, we made content and tried to drive that towards sales.

Jennifer Stafford is the Social Media Manager at HomeAway.com, Inc. She oversees social media efforts for HomeAway globally and manages day to day activities on the social media accounts for HomeAway.com.

Prior to her current position she managed in-house SEO programs for VacationRentals.com, a HomeAway site, and GEICO. You can find her on Twitter @jennstafford.

After working in SEO for several years it became clear that there needed to be a better internal integration between SEO and social media, so after coming to HomeAway I started working with the PR team to determine the best way to get a social program up and running. Since the travel industry is inherently social, we knew that we needed to have a presence in the social space, so in 2008 I started creating Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for the US HomeAway brands. That gave us additional opportunities to engage with customers and distribute content that we produce, which helped several internal departments. Over the next year and a half, we grew our accounts by testing various content types to find those that had the best engagement, interacting with customers through those channels and testing social ads to drive fans.  Since I was still working on SEO full time it was definitely a balancing act between SEO and trying to build our social channels.

In 2010 I was asked to coordinate the social media efforts for our first Super Bowl campaign which opened the door in terms of working on a project with lots of visibility in the company.  The campaign was very successful from the social media standpoint and that eventually gave me the opportunity to transition from SEO over to PR in mid-2010 to start building our global social media program full time.

It’s been a great move for me since there is such a natural fit between SEO and social media. After working on a second Super Bowl this year, the company is continuing to gain visibility in the travel industry and I’m excited about where we’re going with our social program in the future.

I am a social media consultant, speaker and educator focused on helping business owners learn social media marketing and use social and digital marketing strategy for their communications efforts. My blog, SocialMediaExplorer.com, is typically rated among the top-20 marketing blogs in the world by AdvertisingAge.

In my role as a social media consultant, I have the privilege of serving medium- to large-size corporations as a strategist. And my learning community, ExploringSocialMedia.com, serves medium- and small-business people looking to learn social media marketing.

My start in social media marketing actually came almost a decade after my start in social media. I used blogging and social networking personally for nine years, fanning the flames of a fledgling fiction/non-fiction humor writing career … er hobby. When I transitioned out of college athletics publicity and communications and into a national advertising agency in the role of public relations account manager in 2006, I looked around and said, “Why aren’t we talking to our clients about social media, blogging and social networking?” No one knew what I was talking about and my career in social media marketing was born.

Lee Odden is CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor of TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog, rated a top social media blog by Social Media Examiner and leading marketing blog by Advertising Age.  With over 13 years of online marketing experience in B2B marketing consulting for clients including McKesson, PRWeb, Marketo and StrongMail, Lee has been cited for his search and social media marketing expertise by numerous industry publications and books including Mashable, MarketingProfs, BtoB Magazine and Social Marketing to the Business Customer by Eric Schwartzman & Paul Gillin.

I consider blogging to be an important part of social media so I guess my start in social media marketing began with a blog late in 2003.  In 2005 I began experimenting with social news and bookmarking services as a way to promote the blog and RSS feed, which was purely a promotional and link building effort.  One of my staff created a social bookmarking tool for blogs in 2006 that made it easy for websites and blogs to add social sharing buttons and increase their own traffic. That tool attracted over 100,000 links giving us a nice boost in search visibility and a glimpse at the power of social sharing.

The impact of publishing content to Online Marketing Blog, commenting, social sharing/promotion and off-site social engagement made it pretty clear that social channels would continue to grow in importance. For marketing, it’s a simple formula: find a way to give publishers & influentials on the social web what they want in a way that rewards you with mentions, links, engagement and relevant traffic. For engagement, it’s about  knowing customer information discovery, consumption and sharing preferences and behaving in the most relevant and meaningful way to reach mutual goals.

Experimentation and seeing results drive my social media participation and best practices learned first hand have been very powerful for sharing with companies that want similar outcomes. I’m currently active publishing content on TopRankBlog.com, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook as well as a number of other niche social sites. Process and tools make all that efficient so I still have plenty of time for other business responsibilities.

Mari Luangrath is currently growing her third entrepreneurial venture, Foiled Cupcakes, Chicago’s only online order and personal delivery cupcake company. Starting the gourmet business with her own capital and using social media marketing as her only form of advertising, Mari has proven her expertise in relationship building using online networks and word-of-mouth marketing.

A sought after international speaker and featured national mediaoutlets including the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine,Crain’s Chicago Business, Investors Business Daily, Business Week, theChicago Tribune, NBC, WGN, and several trade publications, Mari’sauthenticity and passion towards business strategy and networking hasresulted in an impressive client list, including Bank of America, theChicago Cubs, The Food Channel, Harpo Communications, NorthwesternUniversity, the Wrigley Company, and over a hundred Fortune 500companies.

Social media fell into our laps, quite honestly. We launched our business primarily using Twitter without knowing a single thing about it – all because our website had to be completely recoded, so we had nothing else to do. And by connecting with new people who found our story interesting, we haven’t had to use a single traditional marketing initiative yet. All of our business growth has happened organically via word of mouth referrals and online buzz. To date, 93 percent of our business has come from social media leads and we’ve surpassed our initial revenue target numbers by over 600 percent.

Marty’s online marketing experience dates to 1992, the dawn of the interactive era; however, his career has spanned more than three decades working in traditional and online marketing channels. Marty has been described as “not your typical agency type.” A “social media maverick” and “more innovator than follower.” aimClear has become internationally recognized for its work in demographic research, especially as pertains to search, Facebook, and LInkedIn.

Like many social media marketers I’ve met, my introduction to social media marketing was fanatical participation in early channels myself.  Back in the day I obsessed with Newsgroups and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I reached out to people all over the world, especially in academia, where the Internet germinated.  My first social media research multivariate testing undertaken was probably Yahoo Personals in the early 90s’. I noticed that certain pictures, headlines and body copy seemed to resonate better with the ladies. I had long pretty hair. You know the rest.

In 1995 I was the Creative Director for a CBS affiliate television station, literally registered their domain, and built their first website.  Because I had a broadcast TV station’s news audience to play with, there was a much larger sampling to work and test than most Internet marketers of the day. As a result we got feedback that was years ahead of it’s time, socially. Even back then it was pretty easy to incite engagement by inviting comments, chat, and other audience participation surrounding regional news. Having a larger audience was the key and I learned fast.

Looking back on those times, I was incredibly lucky to be a first generation community manager with thousands of engaged users. We dealt with all the same sorts of issues CMs handle today, ranging from gratuitous spammers, delighted and angry users.  We were able to parlay early online “social media” adoption into mobilized news consumers, better ratings and advertising revenue that was actually noticeable.  The experience was an awesome setup for the social media professional life that I’ve enjoyed now, for over 15 years.

Michael Brito is a Vice President at Edelman Digital where he leads the digital team in Silicon Valley. He is responsible for providing strategic counsel to Edelman’s top tech clients. He often writes in his social media blog and just finished writing his first social business book, “Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook for Social Media in the Organization”.

It started off in 2005/2006 when the term social media began to grow in prominence. I was working at Hewlett Packard at the time managing search marketing, both paid and natural. My manager knew that it was of interest to me since I just started writing in my personal blog. At the same time, there was also a mandate from senior management for marketing teams to figure out how to use social media to connect with customers. My job was to evangelize the value of social media to internal marketing and communications teams.

When I first got into the space, my intentions were to figure out how to use social media to acquire new customers and sell products. It wasn’t until a few years later that my attitude began to shift more towards community building and advocacy. While I understand that there has to be business value for engaging in this space, I realize that a keen focus on the social customer has more long term value than just one time transaction.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media marketer and a consultant who has worked for both Fortune 500 companies as well as startups. In his spare time he contributes to Mashable, Read/Write Web, Search Engine Land, CopyBlogger, ProBlogger, and other publications on the topic of social media.

Most recently, Muhammad was the Director of Social Media Strategy at Chicago Tribune and helped them start their own consulting arm (435 Digital) before leaving to return to the wonderful world of consulting. You can follow him on Twitter or join him on Facebook.

It was back in late 2005. I was home from college for the summer and I picked up the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” from my brother’s bookshelf. The book fascinated me and while I was trying to learn more about the concepts in the book I also accidentally stumbled onto Diggnation (the podcast for Digg.com) which had just launched. Through the podcast I was introduced to Digg (where the stories discussed on the podcast are selected from) and was instantly hooked because of the the huge (albeit accidental) overlap of concepts discussed in the book and executed on Digg.com.

After this initial exposure, I started to write about these social media concepts (such as collective intelligence) as I was learning about them myself. At this point not many people were writing extensively about social media so I managed to develop a pretty decent following (from a lot of people who have since then established really great brands of their own). My interest was purely academic (I was pursuing a degree in economics and was ready to join the banking sector post-graduation), and it wasn’t until Neil Patel started reading my blog and offered me a job at Advantage Consulting Services (ACS) and the managing editor role at Pronet Advertising that I started delving deeper into the commercial application of the concepts I had been exploring.

Pretty soon I was managing all the social media marketing responsibilities for ACS clients and learning a lot about the industry (both good and bad) in the process.

Scott Skurnick is the Executive Director of SEO and Social Media for Edmunds.com, located in Santa Monica, California.  Prior to working at Edmunds, Scott held various online marketing positions at Circuitcity.com and Officemax.com. He also spent nine years in Mexico City working in the Tequila Industry, where he got started in Internet marketing in 1995.

Follow Scott on Twitter at @sskurnick.

To be honest with you, there isn’t an exact moment I can pinpoint as my starting point in Social Media Marketing.  I’ve been leading the SEO team at Edmunds.com for six years and the position seemed to naturally morph into a more social role.  At first I was more interested in the potential for link acquisition, but I quickly realized the true power of Social Media — which is the ability to have a dialogue with users.  At Edmunds.com, we’ve been communicating with our users online since 1997 when we introduced our Forums.  We later launched our “Answers” product in 2007 and haven’t looked back. While we use the term “Social Media” because that is what the industry calls it, we prefer to just say that we interact with our audience.  The delivery mechanism may have changed over the years with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., but at the end of the day the message is still the same.

I’m very fortunate to work for a company whose product is inherently social.  People love to talk about cars and enthusiasts can never get enough.  Buying a car is one of the largest investments a person makes, so people will absorb as much information as you can give them.  Twitter and Facebook are great channels for our brands because people love to reach out to friends, family and experts when it comes to their cars.  We love hearing from our users and we make sure to answer every inquiry that comes in.  Another great thing about running Social Media at Edmunds is the fact that it isn’t an experiment.  We view Social Media as a viable means to help promote our brands and interact with our readers and we are making the necessary investments to have long term success.   Connect with us at: @edmunds & @insideline_com

Selena Narayanasamy currently handles all social media outreach strategy and production for client campaigns with BlueGlass Interactive. Her professional journey started with Search & Social as a social media and SEO analyst, as well as a contributor to Search Engine Journal; an AdAge top 10 search blog. She soon moved to Director of Social Media Outreach when Search & Social merged with others into BlueGlass, working closely with all other divisions of the company. She is experienced in multiple areas of Internet Marketing. You can follow her on Twitter.

I got started in social media marketing accidentally, but on purpose.  I was practically born with a computer in the womb so I’ve essentially grown with the internet since the very beginning. Remember the Tandy? Yep, so do I. Procomm Plus, DOS… I grew up with all these old school things. Writing has always been a passion of mine- starting with writing children’s stories from younger than 8, to journals, to online diaries (remember Live Journal and Open Diary?) to keeping grounded while moving to Belgium for my dad’s job. Writing was always there. Eventually I moved to blogging with the WordPress platform.

I have a strong love of technology. As such, I was always an early adopter to social networks and various platforms.  While in college (7+ years ago), my night time hobby became blogging (evolving from the Live Journal and Open Diary days). It was my outlet for all things geeky since I’ve always loved to write. I slowly built an audience, was working with and learning various social media platforms, and learning basic SEO in my own time to help my blog gain visibility. I was slowly becoming obsessed with tracking my analytics and seeing what platforms were sending the most traffic that I was sharing my links on as well as the demographics and other stats. I was studying how brands and individuals were utilizing social media and following trends. I continued doing this on the side; offering copywriting & consulting services while finishing college.

After a grueling job hunt resulting in a Financial Advisor training job with no pay 1.5 hours away that I hated, I decided to chase my passion- social media, blogging and SEO. I found Search & Social and bugged Loren Baker for a job as an SEO and social media analyst. That was it. I WAS HOOKED. The analytical and creative side of me that was begging to work in symbiosis got its chance. I really dove into the social media marketing world and was in an environment that moved swiftly and kept me on my toes. That, along with SEO, really hit that analytical and creative note with me. And that is how I accidentally, yet somewhat purposefully, got started in Social Media Marketing.

Tamar Weinberg is a social media strategist specializing in high level strategy, blogger outreach, viral video marketing, and general Internet Marketing. She is also the author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web (O’Reilly), a primer to social media marketing. Additionally, Tamar is Mashable’s Community Support and Advertising Manager.She blogs about her thoughts on social media at her personal blog, Techipedia.

I’ve been involved in social media since 1992. Back then, I was engaging regularly in online communities before most people even realized that it was even possible. I knew back then that I wanted to do something in computers, but I just didn’t know what it would be just yet. I dabbled in different types of computer-related disciplines: computer programming, even majoring in Computer Science in college; system administration; and technical support.

The “getting started in social media” question is a funny one because it has its roots in 10e20, the company that is now part of BlueGlass. I was hired back in the day as the company’s “Web Host and Technical Support Administrator.” Around that time, social media marketing was just being born. Given my experience in the social media space, it was a natural progression to start working on social media marketing campaigns.

Today, my role has evolved as the industry has evolved, and my focus is strategy and execution to everything in between. I’ve been concentrating on community management, video marketing, content creation and promotion, training, and anything else that a brand needs to be social on the web.

How did you get started in Social Media Marketing?  Please feel free to share your stories in the comments below, I would LOVE to hear them all!

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Your diet cannot consist of purely artificial ingredients.  You need to mix in organic, earthly foods for long term sustainability and optimal health.

Pixie sticks (AKA paid search) can induce short term awesomeness & sugar highs; a nice buzz. But in the long run, you need to be strategic in how often and where you consume these to avoid health shocks (aka, not getting enough ROI from your campaigns or really having great enough results to justify having this in your spend). You can’t necessarily only eat pixie sticks and survive.

Healthy stuff (AKA social strategies) can be a little intimidating at times- no instant shocking results. But if you keep at it, in the long run you’ll see the benefits and results you want. You have to learn how to spice it up a bit- get rid of the dull stuff and cook something that really stands out.

Sometimes you’ll see brands that swing to one extreme- they become very keyword focused and neglect the social aspects of any strategy, or they become completely engulfed in social but aren’t doing any search marketing.

The key is to find a happy medium and use strategies that compliment each other. Like corn beef and cabbage.

When building out a brand strategy, you shouldn’t focus solely on the quick lifting strategies on badgering the hell out of one keyword because you so desperately want to rank for it. There are lots of other factors and techniques that can help you build your brand, and brand presence- you need a healthy mix of both.

In other words, it does’t pay to put all of the same exact (COLORFUL EASTER) eggs into one strategy basket and execute.

Since my normal fashion is to write extremely long posts, I thought I’d keep this one a tad bit tighter… especially since going into detail about these would probably take a good chunk of time off your life. I want to give this a quick overview to show you how a social strategy can help you in organic search results as well as how a paid strategy can actually compliment your social efforts and vice versa.

Holistic Approach

A holistic approach is never bad- it may not give you instant results in a short amount of time like a paid campaign might, but it’s great for you in the long run.

You want your brand mentioned naturally. You want your links shared naturally. You want others to friend and follow you naturally.

If you’re engaging with your fan base correctly, you’ll get tons of natural social signals and links that can help how you’re ranking organically. Social media and blogger outreach are both great ways to achieve the above, and a nice sound strategy.

Benefits of Social in your Strategy

• Allows one-on-one engagement with clients and consumers
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• Accrues natural mentions
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• Builds strong relationships
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• Subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) lead generation
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• Ability to gain useful user data, demographics and analytics for further targeting
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• Builds your brand presence
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• Allows your brand to engage with other similar brands- opening up partnership opportunities
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• Running contests through social media can acquire natural mentions and visibility
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• With proper monitoring, it gives brands a channel to react immediately to positive/negative brand news
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• Availability of plugins that allow you to integrate social onto site/landing page (Facebook connect, etc) and on the post level (Retweet, like, etc)
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• Tapping into a social circle of trust- others have a tendency to share from friends and family

All of the above, when done correctly, will lead others to you – increasing fans and followers, shares, retweets and likes without implementing any kind of paid strategy.

It’s been drilled in our heads time and time again about the benefits of social, and I can’t reiterate this enough. Social is something that’s extremely important to utilize- and can actually have a positive effect on your rankings.

It’s become well known that social has an impact on search but it’s important to preface with this because not everybody realizes how search has changed over the past years. Once upon a time, the search engines showed absolutely NO social signals. Then slowly, they started appearing and getting fed in- causing us to wonder how much authority and power a social signal actual has.

You’ll notice tons of different signals.  They each carry different weights in their own respect:

• Retweets
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• Links shared on Twitter
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• Facebook Shares
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• Facebook Likes
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• Google +1′s (really? I wish this had a better name)
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• Diggs
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• Stumbles

Blah blah blah, the list goes on. Let’s focus on the top three. Retweets, links shared on Twitter and Facebook shares actually do effect rankings positively AND they also are integrating pretty seamlessly into search.

You’ll notice below that this chart shows the correlation of social media based factors with higher rankings in the top 30 results of a Google search (credit: SEOmoz- Social influence on search rankings). Data doesn’t lie, and while this may come to a shock to some people who aren’t truly convinced that social carries weight in the search world, it gives you something to think about when planning out your strategy.

Social in Search

Facebook & Bing

Yeah, I’m beating a dead horse, I know. But I want to be sure to include this as not everyone reading this might have noticed. Here’s an example of a search in Bing Social, while signed in, to show shared links from Facebook. You’ll note that links being shared in an environment that once acted like a wall between search and social are actually being indexed.

Facebook allows for natural sharing to occur because there’s a certain level of social trust that exists in here.

Sharing Links & Curating Twitter Lists

Links shared through Twitter also have an impact on rankings, and those are judged by various factors such as authority, followers, context, ratio of links to tweets from user, among other things. One thing that I’ve noticed (and I’ve only seen this with Red Bull so far) is that if you’re curating lists, or on curated lists, it’ll show up underneath the first query. For example (and please ignore the fact that I didn’t put a space in between Red and Bull. Clearly, I need one right now):

So assuming this rolls out to everyone and isn’t just being tested, curating lists will not only have an effect socially (it’s a great way to reach out to other brands and users and give them some recognition) but it will also be pulled up in the SERPs as well.

You’ll also notice (and I think this FINALLY rolled out to everyone) that when you’re searching in Google, if a connection on Twitter shared a link, it’ll pull this in under the result- one more way for a brand to appear in the SERPs by being active on their Twitter page.

Utilizing Social Media & Blogs for Outreach

Blogger Outreach

This area, in my opinion, is under appreciated and deserves more credit than it gets. Having been working with some extensive social media outreach campaigns (among other things) for a year + now, I started to realize that the benefits of achieving brand mentions was amazing, however, not always very certain.

Google’s algorithm can smell someone building links with intent- which is why outreach is such a beautiful and natural way to acquire back-links and exposure. When tons of links show up with the same keyword (as a bad link builder would do) it raises a red flag, however, with outreach, people are genuinely interested in sharing your brand, your news, your product, your SOMETHING, and have no other intentions except that.

One of the nice things about outreach is that when a blog links out to a brand, they’re either going to be using a branded keywords because it’s easiest- helping out the brand in the search arena without necessarily intending to.

The other way they would go is to link a phrase relating to the brand or what they’re linking to- and chances are, if they’re not using a branded keyword the majority of their phrases won’t be identical; looking extremely natural.

‘Use Facebook as Page’ capability

Something new that has been released recently is the ability for a Facebook page to actually reach out, as itself, to other Facebook pages.

When you’re using Facebook as your brand page, you can:

• “Like” other Facebook pages, as your page
• Comment on other pages status updates, wall posts, pictures and links
• Have a personality behind the brand that isn’t tied to one person in particular
• Share relevant links as your brand on other Facebook pages
• Introduce your brand to others through natural engagement
• Utilize Facebook questions & polls

Just a side note on community pages: Make sure you don’t have multiple pages. Community pages are automatically curated and you’ll have no access to the insights for this and no control. You can request that these be rolled into your brand page so you’ll gain fans that come along with it.

Social Media for Customer Service & Outreach

Another thing about Twitter- I’ve noticed some great customer service. And there is no doubt in my mind that social media customer service is a very effective strategy, And while this may not have an impact directly on search, it’s still something to point out.

Sear’s BlueCEcrew actually sticks out in my mind. Not because I Googled something and found them, and not because of a PPC ad, but the fact that they:

• Responded to an open ended tweet I sent out, asking about a camera (not picture below as it’s in a different thread)
• Gave me some advice as to different makes or models
• Circled back with me two or three months later to see if I found that camera

To me, this type of company branding (excellent social media customer service) has more benefit than a link ever would- a great, natural way to engage with possible customers. And because of this, I’m writing about them and linking to them.

Paid Strategy

PPC in the Search World

PPC campaigns are great. You may be saying to yourself, “oh, well I rank number 1 or 2 for such and such, why on earth would I want to run a PPC campaign and waste money?”

Running a PPC campaign can give you great insight into both your new and old target market. You can run a/b split testing to see what’s more effective and you’re also getting that extra impression on a searcher’s brain when you show up not only on the first page, but also in an ad.

When you have an active social channel and are in tune with the conversation around your brand, you can also slowly introduce tailoring your PPC copy to react or respond to these conversations.

PPC in a Social World [Collision!]

WHAT are Facebook ads doing disrupting our little happy social family? Being awesome, that’s what.

Facebook ads are a great short term strategy (that could turn long term) to target users. The nice thing about having these ads coexist within Facebook is that when you’re setting up your advertising campaign, you can actually see the “reach” and scope of your advertising within the set platform. You aren’t necessarily putting out an ad because someone was looking for it, but tapping into their likes, interests and other factors to gently nudge them and say “HEY. You might like this too”, introducing a sense of familiarity.

People like the familiar.

Remember up above when I said PPC campaigns shouldn’t necessarily be a lone strategy, and you need other supporting ones going on in order for it to be fully effective? If you’re advertising within Facebook for a FB page, you definitely need to make sure that your page is in order- you need to be engaging with your users on your wall, sharing images or links, polls, using Facebook Questions, and just being active in general.

If you’re not using your page effectively, your ads are going to be a waste of money and while you may get a ton of impressions and possibly clicks, you’re going to lose your users at the “like” button.

For instance, I started up a Facebook page (which will remain anonymous because I’ve been pretty strapped for time to build it out and I’m not gonna lie.. it sucks) and since I’ve run a FB advertising campaign on an extremely active page before, I decided to see what would happen if I was using a really small budget on a page that wasn’t built out or engaging- but was still an interesting topic that could potentially attract likes because of its uniqueness.

My CPM was cheaper than my CPC, and because of the cost of CPC, I would have only been able to obtain 5 clicks due to the really small budget I was experimenting with. I decided to go with CPM because I knew a click wouldn’t necessarily mean a conversion, and if I did by chance get clicks, I didn’t want to limit that to a certain amount per day when I could have a high amount of impressions for cheaper.

It turns out that I got a decent amount of clicks (more so than I would have been able to with CPC) by using CPM, however, nobody converted into an actual fan because the fan page didn’t have much going on.

Whereas on a bigger and more engaging page, the conversion rate was a lot high from those clicking. It just goes to show that advertising doesn’t always work if you aren’t taking care of your brand socially and really putting time into it.

So, this post was longer than I anticipated. For that, I apologize. I would have made this into a two part-er but I feel like there wouldn’t be an opportunity to really show the benefits of using a multifaceted strategy. Don’t put all of the same eggs in one strategy basket- make sure you intertwine strategies and have them coexist together. After all, what would ham be without mashed potatoes?

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