Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Once upon a time, I called myself an SEO consultant and became one. I really didn’t realize how many people had become active as social media folks until I saw how many services we’re being offered. It seems there’s plenty of new people calling themselves social media experts. I, for one, welcome my newly well employed work from home bleary eyed breathren. I hope your consulting careers are long and glorious ones. If you’d like to chat consulting or just swap some usernames - feel free to drop me a line.

Inspiration:

• Cool home offices
• twitter host
• Wasting Pagerank
• Social media narcissists

Just wanted to do a quick post on the proliferation of twitter spam. It seems there is a group of people that are spamming twitter using people with a decent amount of followers and adding underscores before and after their names. Watch out for people like _stuntdubl_ or _stuntdubl following you - this isn’t me! Thanks to the many folks who let me know about it. If you run into this - just send a message to @spam on twitter and include the name and transgression of the spammer.

Fortunately, my imposter has been deleted, but I’ve had LOTS of smart people wondering if it really was me. This tells me that the spam is probably pretty believable, and likely needs to be stopped (I even had one person congratulate me on my spamming - Note: I am not a spammer - and don’t encourage this behaviour). The email you receive looks fairly convincing, as you don’t notice the underscore (see below)

Below is an example of a twitter underscore spammer squatting on Rand’s name. Don’t let it happen to you, and don’t fall for it either.

This has been a twitter public service announcement:) Thanks again to everyone who let me know right away what was happening.

Don’t be a failure at your social media marketing. Your message and how you distribute it is very important to your brand and future success. You’ve got on the cluetrain, and decided it’s time to start embracing social media as an important part of your marketing mix.

You’ve seen and heard the success stories, but you’ve been floundering with no traction for the last 6 months. You’ve figured out what social media is. Before you reappropriate that budget, take a look at what you’re doing wrong - or better yet, know the common problems and how to fix them from the start.

1. You Chose the Wrong Channels

You’ve seen the stats on facebook and myspace. They are HUGE. There is massive reach the size of google. This does not mean if you make a profile company for Chevy, everyone will be their friend and buy more cars. There is a HUGE disconnect between wanting to USE social media for marketing, and embracing it for better communication with customers.

How does a campaign that is on television only get a couple thousand friends on facebook? Improper distribution. I hope the *cough* branding was worth it.

Solution: You choose your social media channels by finding where the customers who want to talk about your company are talking. If they are NOT talking about your company anywhere, then you need to find common topics that a given community is interested in.

Example: If you have a site about young tech males - digg is definitely your place. If you have a site about cooking and gardening, you’re going to have to pander to young techie males on digg, or you’re going to need Kirtsy.com. Find the community that your customers are most likely to hang out in. Then maybe explore a few bigger ones, and try to find a few of your people out of a crowd.

2. You Used the Wrong People

Just because your web designer twittered once and had a myspace profile from day one, does not mean that he understands how to market on social media. Just because your advertising agency knows how to market in print, does not mean that they understand how digg, reddit, and stumbleupon work. Yes - your SEO got you some good rankings, but he’s only getting you 5 diggs on the content you’ve spent weeks preparing. Not exactly the big win you were hoping for.

If you’re using the wrong people you’re toast. We all figured out the hard way what the website looked like when the network admin created it, and how well it ranked when the print designer posted the all image version. Don’t let someone who plays on twitter while they’re at work try to run your viral marketing campaign.

Solution: Firstly, it helps to find someone who’s actually DONE what you’re trying to do. Yes, they may be more expensive, but you won’t pay for the service two or three times learning these same lessons in failure.

3. Your Content Sucked

You wrote a top 10 list. So did 3 million other sites. It wasn’t entertaining or resourceful, and you forgot to use even a single linkbaiting hook. Even the best social media promoters out there won’t be able to promote pure crap. Being one step better than crap is not remarkable either. Your content needs to be on another level to get referenced throughout the web these days. You’re not going to get buy with a $30 article from elance, and expect it to get 1,000 backlinks.

Solution: Spend some time and research. Run some of your keywords on Aaron’s awesome keyword tool, and see what was successful. Take that idea, and make it three times better. Then edit the hell out of that idea, and improve it another couple times. Then cut out all the garbage you added as filler, and add one more round of good stuff. Be sure that you don’t use words like "good stuff".

• Edit yourself mercilessly.
• Be succinct.
• Be entertaining
• Research and list better (and more) resources.
• Have a hook (or two or three)

4. Your Team Didn’t Believe in the Project

You had the right people internally, but they didn’t think it would work. They’d rather be playing guitar hero and ping pong instead of helping the project succeed. Social media isn’t quite as measurable as other methods, and the sales pitch really wasn’t all that convincing.

Solutions: You have to sell the project better internally. You need to convince your team that this is how you increase revenue from their efforts, and it is directly attributable to them. Beat "through the fire and flames" on medium mode (or watch a bot do it on expert), and put guitar hero down, and don’t pick it up again.

Explain to your team why this is the difference between success and failure of the company. This is important to the bottom line, and even though it seems like fun and games - it’s the driving force behind successful marketing right now. Everyone needs to be on board, and pushing in the same direction to execute effectively.

5. You Didn’t Execute

The number one problem that social media campaigns don’t succeed: POOR EXECUTION.

The site imploded when you hit the homepage of digg. Because you didn’t test all of your scripts under high volume duress, your webserver nearly melted, and wouldn’t serve pages. Half of the people trying to access your site had ridiculous load times, or never saw the content at all. Needless to say, those visitors didn’t subscribe for anything, or check out additional pages on the site.

Solutions: Fire your network adminstrator, because there’s no excuse for downtime. Find someone who understands apache a bit better. Cache your site, make sure all cylinders are a go, and PRACTICE. Release some b-material first to see how smoothly things go.

Start small and test. Increase your success through understanding and improvements of the larger social media sites by using the smaller ones to channel success and vice versa. If you can get to the digg homepage, you should probably be able to get a good amount of delicious bookmarks.

6. No one Trusted You

Your site is plastered with ads. You’re selling get rich quick schemes. Your web host went down. Your design sucks. There’s no contact information. There’s no pictures of real people. Everyone has seen your stock photos before. There’s no address. There are plenty of reasons people won’t trust your website. Social media transparency will magnify trust issues, and people will really take swings at your potential flaws. Don’t set yourself up for failure by having people not trust you.

Solution: Read Matt McGee’s great article about building trust, and improve your credibility. Take down your advertising for social visitors, and give them a single call to action that is simple and not asking much.

7. You Forgot about Search

You built a site for social media. You pander to the audience, and gave the fickle crowd what they want. You forgot to create sustainable content around topics that are of interest to someone selling something. You brought in a bunch of WEB GRAZING SHEEPLE who don’t actually consume anything except media. Your users spend all day on stumbleupon, because they can barely afford more than their rent, an high speed internet connection, and a laptop with the meager salary they are able to earn working throughfeeding their need to be entertained 23 second attention span.

You didn’t realize the main goal of your social media marketing was to help ultimately rank high for a high volume, high converting competitive phrase that drove your revenues through the rough for the next two years of sustaining the result.

Solution: Here’s the shameless plug. You need someone who understands social media marketing and other forms of search engine marketing to develop a comprehensive strategy for your online marketing efforts. You need a SMOSEO (social media marketing search engine optimizer).

Better yet - you need to learn about becoming a online media marketer yourself and understand how all forms of marketing can affect social media, search engine rankings, converting traffic, and what these services are worth. Educate yourself on becoming a better online marketer if you want to succeed yourself working on the web.

Resources I found while writing this:

Social marketing is the new search engine optimization. Reciprocal voting is the new reciprocal linking. It offers a fairly low barrier to entry, and the opportunity to drive a TON of traffic in a short period of time. Even more importantly, social media has become a cornerstone of the strategy for launching sites, or improving their link popularity.

What is social media and why do we need it?
Wake up and smell the series of tubes. Here’s social media in plain English. You’re banned from using the company email and internet until you read the Cluetrain, and can name at least 10 social media sites, and which 3 are likely to drive the most traffic. If you’re in a corporation that won’t listen, or change anything because of what lawyers say - you deserve your miserable cubicle dwelling existence for not standing up and pitching things better. I hope your 401k makes it out the door before your idiot executives bankrupt the company drinking fine wine and Cristal on their executive retreats to Tahoe. Redtape sucks, and generally only exists to screw people. Find a better company, and keep learning how to pitch the novel idea of treating your customers and web visitors with respect.

How to Pitch Social Media Marketing Internally in 6 easy steps:

1. Create Positive ROI on keyword set for a PPC campaign.

2. Explain lifetime value of a converting customer that came from that keyword set

3. Sell the value of SEO as a long term, less expensive form of PPC on above mentioned keywords. Here’s some help.

4 . Demonstrate the need and importance of links to search engine rankings.

5 . Explain the value and process for obtaining links (and how much these would cost).

6 . Introduce the idea of linkbaiting and social media marketing.

I know, I know, that sounds a whole lot easier than it is when you’re facing the red tape in your company. Build your case slowly, and plot your strategy to be executed over time. More help to build your case below.

9 Reasons you NEED social media marketing in 2009

1. Your competition is doing it.
Most of the competition that’s doing it, you didn’t even know was your competition - UNTIL they started showing up for your best converting search phrases. Why are they showing up you ask? Well, they’re leveraging social media to build global link popularity and brand awareness. You’re customers know who they are now, and know that they’re faster, smaller, more efficient, and will keep them happy. They’ve implemented the technology to minimize overhead, and are treating customers better.

2. Your customers are using it (though maybe indirectly)
No matter how non-technical your customers are - social media impacts their consumption decisions. Social media’s impact on traditional media is increasing on a daily basis. Newspapers, television, and radio, are realizing that digg, reddit, and twitter, are sometimes even faster than the AP newswire. This impacts which news is presented in a traditional sense. The geeks, webmasters, the trendsetters, and other folks who are on the bleeding edge are now watching social media outlets and republishing to the channels that your customers are consuming from.

3. Your vendors and partners are using it
You know who’s NOT using facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit, myspace, stumbleupon, and other large traffic social networks well? Automakers and Banks. Luckily, they can get billion dollar bailouts.

Try getting your modem rebooted over the phone with comcast - then ping @comcastcares You can thank them and I for the time savings later.

Has your site been on the homepage of digg or reddit? Has your site been stumbled? Do you know what it is? Do you think your no overhead web based competition from the Silicon Valley knows what it is?

4. More Social = more Search.
More Search = More Customers.
More customers = More business.
Duh. The web is more de-centralized than ever. After we do our initial searches through the Google, we start looking for communities of likeminded people. Your best customers are the ones that are passionate and want to have a conversation about you, your product, or something related (news, pictures, whatever). You need to be there to have the conversation WITH your customers. Otherwise, they will have it behind your back. You might not be able to rank right away on search engines anymore, but you can get to the top of a news or industry specific site for a few days with good content.

5. Paid search prices are rising.
PPC consulting is still a great solution to improving your ROI, and decreasing your CPC - but the market is getting tougher. It is great to be able to buy your keyword phrase to your targeted audience - but everyone is becoming wise to that fact. Those awesome high conversion, high profit keywords are slowly having the ROI sucked out of them by rising click prices. This makes organic search a must have long term proposition. Any self-respecting search marketer is going to tell you that you need natural links. And the best place to get natural links is???!?!?! You guessed it Chachi - Social media linkbaiting.

6. SEO isn’t easy anymore
Man do I miss the days of buying run of site text links and ranking top for any search term. Like Jim, I would never buy links anymore (okay, maybe I’d TRADE for them if it was SUPER relevant). The days of the little guys ranking well in google is slowly coming to an end, and a glorious era will go down in history. Pretty soon, however, it will be big business as usual. Those same big businesses have a while to catch on to social media FOR SEO, but they’ll do that eventually too. Personalized search is the next big thing (and yes it’s now REALLY almost here). You need lots of people coming to your site, staying on your site, and bookmarking your site for later to prove that you deserve to be on top of the search results.

7. You can’t buy links anymore
The communists have won the war. We have declared defeat. Of course if you listen to SEO’s and search engineers for too long, you will think that there are NO links that pass value. Well, at least we can pay to create viral content, and pay for optimization in the distribution channel, and HOPE that people link to us. The content kings have one, and it’s time to get writing. You might as well start talking to your customers and actually giving them what they want. Since bounce rate is now a significant factor for search results, it’s gonna hurt you to dupe your users with crap content anyhow.

8. Your website is only a billboard
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. Just ask all those big corporations who paid millions to have their beautiful flash sites built, and forgot to hire a SEO. You launched your site, and now you need traffic, or it’s been there for a long time, and you need MORE traffic and exposure. You listened to the search engines, and created great content! (after all, content is king!) But you still don’t seem to have much traction, and only your Aunt Frita, Uncle Merv, and 6 other people are visiting your site every day.

9. Great ROI on the Marketing Budget
With the DIY route and use social tools, social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of the web. Social media is building future communication empires at the moment with the likes of facebook, digg, reddit, digg, delicious, as the distribution points for web communication. They are the portals that every dot-bust era strived to be. Social media is seperating the old guard from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embrace the technology. Do you?

Bonus #10: It’s a distribution point.

Social media is a way to reliably disperse your message to a group of people who want to hear what you have to say. When you have something good to say - you TELL them through your selected channels. At minimum, companies are becoming aware that they need to have conversations with their customers somehow.

I had discontinued my linkbaiting service for a while, but after a few months of work on various projects, I’ve decided to offer a new and improved social media consulting service. If you’re shopping for someone to handle your social media campaigns that also has a knowledge of SEO, be sure to catch me and give me a card at Pubcon, or drop me a line through the site. Please don’t leave comments, as I haven’t cleaned up that wasteland in several months.

One of the most surprising things I learned while working on my viral content sharing report is that one of the most common reasons people send content to their friends is because they believe that otherwise their friends may not see it. People who mentioned this typically said things like "they might have missed it," "they might not have seen it on their own," or "some of my friends aren't up on the news." Almost 6% of the respondents to my survey specifically gave some variation of this motivation and I believe this percentage is merely the tip of the iceberg since users often do not fully understand all of the triggers at work in their own behaviors (as Dr. Clotaire Rapaille says "most people don't know why they do what the things they do.").

When we look at this through an evolutionary lens, it becomes obvious that there are selection pressures that dictate that if you know something important (like which berries are poisonous) you'd better share it with everyone in your community. The social exchange theory of proverbs hints at this, as does my research into email chain letters and urban legends.

Sharing content that other people might have missed also means that the friends you saved from ignorance are more likely to share key information with you, another popular motivation mentioned by respondents to my survey: reciprocity. One user specifically said: "I share, they share back, in case I miss something good," and another said "It encourages them to share with me too so I find even more things that I would otherwise miss."

Sharing content like this also shows the recipient that you were thinking about them and that you value them enough to make sure they're not left in the dark, relationship building of this type was specifically mentioned by almost 10% of respondents.

This means that for marketers looking for a viral effect, the "they might miss it" idea can be a powerful call to action. This can take the form of a subtle indication that the reader is in possession of valuable information that others don't have, or a more blatant "be sure to pass this on to your friends who might not have seen it."

This is a small part of the large data presented in the full report I did on the results of my survey, if you want to know more, be sure to read the rest of my viral content sharing report (and don't forget to pass this on to your friends who might have missed it).

Dan Zarrella is a social and viral marketing scientist, you can read his blog here or follow him on Twitter here.

B2B folks tend to struggle with social media marketing. After repeatedly being asked the question of how b2b folks can use social media marketing, I’ve come up with a handful of rules that apply. If you’re not willing to comply, chances are you should stick to direct marketing and cold calling people.

1. Get on the Clue Train
There is no good for having not yet read the Clue Train Manifesto. Don’t even attempt a campaign until you’ve read this. At bare minimum read the 95 Thesis points. Social media marketing is just the cluetrain come to fruition with some new technology. The logic and process remains the same. As much as AJAX, gradients, and mirror effects are really cool - that’s about all that’s different. This is now prerequisite reading for all social media marketing (if it wasn’t already). The concepts are not new, and their is very little real process.

2. Don’t be "that guy"
You know who I’m talking about. The wanker that is always trying to impress people telling them how cool he is. Cool people don’t tell you how cool they are. He’s the same guy trying to put a press release on digg, or wondering why his "industry news" isn’t compelling enough to garner traffic and links. Don’t be an idiot blogger. Just because you win a game of whip it out, doesn’t mean people will like you.

3. Don’t be "professional"
This is what we love about blogs and the internet. Despite sitting in front of a computer all day it makes us feel more human. We can experience emotions from people we barely even know, and it sure as hell isn’t from a "professionally" written memo that we could read in the corporate propoganda. It’s from humor, shared experiences, stories, and HUMAN emotions. Not from some corporate zombie wearing a suit, trying to figure out how to game the internet for higher quarterly earnings.

4. Have a personality
No - not a personality according to the company bylaws and mission statement. A REAL personality. Even large corporate websites had a personality in 1996 - the personality of the one person in the company that could build them. How come when MORE people were added to the mix, the sites got LESS personality? Don’t be the CEO that doesn’t get the web, and is scared to experiment. What’s wrong with a little corporate punk?

5. There’s No Magic Bullet
Social media applies to everyone. Yes, even b2b folks. The question is how? The answer is - in speaking to your customers/clients/vendors/partners/friends on a one-to-many basis. The magic bullet is in figuring out how to do that. There is no process. There is no direct correlation to productivity or efficiency. There is no solution that will raise revenue in a quantitive fashion for next quarter. What there *IS* - is the opportunity to speak to other humans like humans, and have them appreciate you doing so.

There is not a process for social media marketing. There is only opportunities. How you approach and execute on the opportunities will determine your success. How well you understand linkbaiting will determine how many links you get.

6. Pander to the mind of your audience
Great marketers know this. It’s not really rocket science. Speak to your audience. Don’t TALK AT THEM. Talk WITH them. Give them something to talk about. Speak to them on a personal level. Entertain them. Cater to their egos. There’s not much that is more powerful than the ego hook.

Remember also - you are pandering to TWO audiences - 1. The audience that is your distribution point (digg, reddit, netscape, myspace, facebook, etc. etc.) and 2. Your usual audience. You have to get through audience number 1 to effectively get to audience number 2. Make sure to know BOTH audiences, and craft your campaigns to be effective to BOTH groups, and the crossover between them. This, as well as a lack of creativity (and willingness to stretch relevance) are the two top reasons that I have seen people fail at social media marketing.

7. Don’t be afraid of failure
If you sit around debating every decision in a committee meeting, your little competitor is going to kick your ass. That’s the beauty of the web (at least right now) - it’s small, it’s fast, it’s efficient, and it gives the little guys a fighting chance to compete on big playing field if they use these assets to their advantage.

If you’re worried about getting fired - you’re never going to create anything cool. If your company is always worried about offending someone, or what the legal team say - you’re dead, and you’re likely on a long, painful decline.

8. Stretch the relevance
This should probably be number 1, as it’s the most important, but I wanted to make sure you were paying attention. I have a good friend who could really stretch the relevance of a link. Not too many people could think that a fish oil link would be relevant to a motor oil page, but when you’re thinking laterally, this is the type of results that you will get. It worked for anchor text, and though it was a stretch, there was some marginal relevance there. Think to this extreme, then scale it back - but only a little.

This is THE most important part of social media marketing. You MUST stand out. It’s scary - you make yourself and your company vulnerable, but it works. And when it works great, it is an amazing thing. When it doesn’t work, most the time nobody notices most times, and you might only end up offending 3 of the people you didn’t like anyways.

Example of stretching the relevance:

You need to attract engineers to your website since they are the decision makers. You build a trebuchet builder. Whoever pitched that project deserves a huge raise because they have giant brass balls. I can picture the meeting now as they describe building a flash game that will generate zero revenue, but "be really cool" for engineers. The fact that it was produced and launched is truly a miracle. The results in links alone speak to it’s success for those that understand their value. I can only imagine how many engineers sent it to their buddies and wasted hours at work on it instead of playing tetris or doing ACTUAL work.

Summary:

You will kill all your creativity if you second guess, and put everything through committees. If you have no creativity, you will fail at social media marketing. You could always pay a consultant to come in and do it for you if your scared, or need someone to blame the fallout on (I’ve got broad shoulders, or friends with great ideas - we generally work in our bathrobes - though I do have a few suits for meetings, I still prefer jeans and retro jordans).

1. Get on the Clue Train
2. Don’t be "that guy"
3. Don’t be "professional"
4. Have a personality
5. There’s No Magic Bullet
6. Pander to the mind of your audience
7. Don’t be afraid of failure
8. Stretch the relevance

Other good articles on B2B Marketing:

• Dating tips for B2B marketers
• Social media and B2B - thanks for the inspiration Michael - been meaning to write this one.