Community Organizer 2.0

This is the story of the “flip side” of online reputation management - when monitoring one’s online reputation brings an unexpected bounty of good news.

I won an award. A great, wonderful award. How did I learn about the award? A Google alert arrived in my inbox!

I always recommend that companies set up online “listening posts” for mentions of the company name, staff names, and industry keywords, at a minimum.  It is impossible to stay on top of all the chatter and noise online without them. If we want to know what our fans, critics and friends are saying online, we have to be listening to them. You never know when a critic will write about your company in their personal blog, mention an employee personally on Twitter, or talk about your organization’s programming on a host of online forums and social media networks. Unlike Domino’s, we don’t want to be caught unaware of a viral video that puts our company in a bad light.

What we cannot forget is that the flip side of reputation management is listening to the good things people say about your company online.

And that’s what happened to me two days ago. First, the Google Alert arrived at 10pm to my email inbox:

Google Web Alerts only offer a short excerpt of the online mention, which is not often enough to understand the context. It is advisable to click the hyperlink and read it for yourself.  I wanted to know more, so I followed the link back to WebHostMagazine.com and found this:

Wow. Pretty cool, I thought.

Two hours later, this TweetBeep (a type of Twitter alert) arrived in my email inbox:

So, of course, I traced the alert back to the original Tempus Group online “tweet” and found this:

Which prompted me to respond with this tweet to Tempus Group:

The lesson here? Don’t forget to set up your listening posts!  For monitoring Twitter, I use TweetBeep, Twitterfall, and a TweetDeck “search” is always open for “@askdebra.” I use BoardTracker to listen for keywords mentioned on discussion forums, listservs and chat groups. I use Google Alerts to catch any links or keywords scanned by Google, and I have set up a watchlist on Technorati to monitor certain keywords mentioned in blogs. I also created an alert on Socialmention to pick up anything that the other alerts missed. Of all of them, Google Alerts, Socialmention and TweetBeep are by far the most useful.

In fact without Google Alerts and TweetBeep, I would have missed a great honor and award!

Which listening posts do you use, and which are most helpful?

What if organizations took the time to create meaningful, strategic taglines?  Taglines help your organization clearly communicate its strategic goals, and if used properly, should inform all communications. A tagline is the clear, distilled mission: of the organization, or of a position within the organization.

Are taglines a replacement for who you are and your company’s mission statement? No. But, in this day and age of Facebook status updates, “what are you doing” Twitter updates and social networks, a tagline is the quick informational message about your company. A tagline is the shout out for what your company can do for others. It’s the “micro-mission,” if you will.

Can you translate your company’s tagline into short, powerful status updates that move your organization closer to its goals?

Taking this a step forward, why shouldn’t we think of status updates on our social media sites as a version of the tagline, but related to the immediate matter at hand. For instance, if your organization’s tagline is “Addiction can be overcome, one person at a time,” then a status update on Facebook might say “another person has joined our campaign to eradicate additctions!” or tweet “Good link to study about causes of addiction.”

Status Updates are not just throwaways. They are your strategic messages, in 140 characters or less.

Nancy Schwartz, host of the Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards writes: “a strong tagline does double-duty — working to extend your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base.” She invites nonprofit organizations to submit their organization’s taglines in a competition each year. The 2008 GettingAttention.org survey showed that 72% of nonprofit organizations do not have a tagline, or believe that their tagline performs badly.  Based on this information, she created the Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Report to help nonprofits build their brand in “eight words or less.”

Why write “we do good things” or “our 25th anniversary year” on your website, name tag or blog headline? Does it move your strategy forward? Does it engage? Does it move people to act?

Taking this idea one step further, the personal tagline is also important.  It’s the “micro-mission” of each employee at your agency. When employees (or volunteers) attend an event, update social media sites or write a blog post, they should be thinking about their personal taglines - it focuses the conversation online and offline. At the Breakfast with Jeff Pulver that I attended yesterday in Tel Aviv, Jeff asked everyone to write their name on a name tag and add a personal tagline underneath it. Some taglines were great (”Everyone Needs an Editor”) and some were…not very compelling (”I Love Games.”) A tagline is more than a conversation starter; people will glance at a tagline and decide if they want to speak with you or not. Or possibly read your blog. Or interact with your organization. You have eight words to get your message across convincingly.

I’m not saying that every single status update, tweet and microblog update has to be strategic and goal-oriented. Remembering your company’s mission can and should inform your status updates - and help you get the most out of all of the 140 characters allotted. Remembering your personal tagline can and should make your networking more strategic and informative.

Thoughts?

There is so much more to photosharing than uploading images from the latest event!

Yes, everyone likes to see themselves online, but Flickr is so much more than uploading images from the latest event. Flickr combines the power of visual storytelling with the very nature of a social network - engagement and conversation. Three arts organizations (Houston Ballet, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Luce Foundation Center for American Art) are innovating ways to use Flickr creatively, and in the process offering backstage passes to the organization, amplifying programming, and engaging stakeholders in real decision-making.

1. The Houston Ballet: Giving Fans a “Backstage Pass”

The Houston Ballet uses Flickr to offer a “backstage pass“  to all of its fans.  In particular, the ballet company offers its enthusiasts (and all Flickr browsers) visual insights into the organization’s activities and administration.

One of the more fanciful and wonderful Flickr photostreams comes from the Houston Ballet’s “Tour of Houston Ballet’s Warehouse.” What person doesn’t want to walk through the warehouse of the a famous production company?  Here is one of the photos:

This boat hangs from the ceiling of the Houston Ballet's warehouse

As described on the Houston Ballet’s Flickr Photostream, “this is a photo tour of our warehouse in Houston’s 5th ward. We hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at our productions’ ‘home away from home’ when they’re not in use at Wortham Theater Center.”

The Ballet also has another great “behind the scenes” photo shoot - making head casts for a scene in one of their ballet. Here is a screen shot of the Flickr photostream for the “Marie” head casts:

What does this do? It offers Houston Ballet fans added value for subscribing to the Ballet’s photostream. It makes them feel special, too. How often does one get to look into the closet of a major ballet theater, or learn how they put their sets together? The Ballet has made their photostream an unique web destination for exclusive “backstage” information.

2. MassMOCA: Adding Dimensions to Current Programming

The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA) uses Flickr to crowdsource a set of images for the Flickr Finds section of its blog. MassMOCA asks readers to upload photos of a specific topical nature to the MassMOCA Flickr site. They post a roundup of the best photos on their monthly Flickr Finds blog post. The photos usually relate to one of the concurrent exhibits. It’s a great way to create excitement around a current exhibit or an organization.

Here is a screenshot of a Flickr MassMOCA group message:

The blog post Flickr Finds: Tree Logic features selected photos from uploaded Flickr images of the “upside down trees” outdoor sculpture exhibit. Here is an excerpt from the blog post:

What does this do? It adds another dimension to exhibitions and creates enthusiasm on the Flickr and blogging platforms. It also extends the life of exhibitions and creatively engages fans. Lastly, it offers added publicity for MassMOCA: every photo uploaded to the MassMOCA Flickr group also appears on the photographer’s photostream and is indexed and tagged on Flickr as MassMOCA!

3. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art: Using Flickr for Crowdsourcing Decisions

The Luce Foundation Center for American Art is “an open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects from the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Here, our visitors can see works that would otherwise not be on view due to space restraints in our main galleries.” The Luce Foundation Center occupies 20,400 square feet of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum’s collection.  According to the Smithsonian’s blog Eye Level, the Smithsonian American Art Museum lends work out, often for 12 months to other institutions, leaving gaps in the display units. They write:  “for this reason, we decided to open up this process and ask our online communities for help. Using Flickr, we can share a photo of a case (in the Luce Foundation Center) that needs a replacement artwork, provide information about all of the other works in the case, and challenge people to search our collections in order to find an appropriate substitution.

What a wonderful way to engage stakeholders in the decision-making process and offer them a “backstage pass” to the  art collection!

Here is an example of one of their photos from the Fickr photostream for Fill the Gap campaign:

Case 34B from Fill the Gap photostream

This is a screen shot of a part of the the comment stream related to this particular case (Case 34B):

In the end, a piece was selected by the Foundation from among the ideas submitted for Case 34B:

Case 34B - Gap Filled!

What does this do? It creates an interaction between static works of art and the fans who love the art. It makes everyone a “citizen curator,” and a stakeholder in the outcome of the Fill the Gap replacement selection. It creates enthusiasm and publicity for the collection of art. Most importantly, it utilizes the crowdsourcing aspect of social media to engage fans, create deeper connections between them and the organization, and…select art for exhibition.

Think about using Flickr to offer “backstage passes,” crowdsource ideas, extend the life of your programming, or engage stakeholders in real organizational decisions. What are you waiting for?

Does your organization use Flickr creatively? Do you know of one that does? Let us know by referencing the organization (and Flickr site) in the comment section below!

The direct marketing agency Epsilon just released a new study by ROI Research revealing reasons why people most often unsubscribe from email lists, and the rates at which they unsubscribe. Not surprisingly, the most often-cited reason (67%) is irrelevancy of emails. The second highest reason (64%) was high frequency of emails, and the third most-cited reason (50%) was fear that their email addresses were being sold or shared. Conducted by ROI Research, the study is based on an April 2009 survey of over 4000 consumers in 13 countries.

Image courtesy of emarketer

Image courtesy of Online Media Daily

In essence, the reasons most email list subscribers unsubscribe boils down to:

• receiving messaging content that is irrelevant to the reader
• not understanding the needs of the customer
• mistrust of the company sending the email

If your company or organization uses email lists, then why not use social media to cut down those unsubscribe rates!

Social media platforms (Facebook, twitter, blogs, MySpace) create conversations, which tell you exactly what the readers want. Use the conversations with your customers/fans/clients/donors to inform the content of your email messaging.  Are certain blog posts shared frequently online, while others die the fate of the unseen post? Why is that? Do you receive lots of comments on certain topics or videos? Utilize the information you learn from your social media interactions so that email messaging won’t suffer from irrelevant content.

Social media relies on trust because it is incredibly transparent. Due to the nature of the medium, people search for information about you before following your blog, Facebook page, or joining your company’s social network. They’ll “out” you if your company’s activities are not completely transparent, and become your biggest fans if you are. Remember the controversy over the fact that some Twitter users have “ghost twitterers,” who post to Twitter under the actual user’s name? However, if they find value in the engagement, they will pass that value along and bring their friends to you as well.

Use social media to allay the fear, once and for all, that your organization will never, ever sell or share the names of its email list subscribers. Write a blog post about it. Create a conversation about why that isn’t your organization’s policies and how you value the privacy of all your subscribers. Refer to these conversations in your email messages and ask email subscribers to contact you directly online if they want to ask further questions about privacy.

Remember the “golden rules” of social media: Be Yourself. Be Transparent. Listen. Engage.

You can’t listen and engage in an email blast, but you can take the information from listening and engaging on social networks, and use that to make your email messaging relevant and valuable to your stakeholders.

Do you have other ideas about how social media can decrease email unsubscribe rates? Please share them in the comments!

Image by p_champie

Last week I gave an “introduction to social media” presentation to the Board of Directors of a multinational nonprofit organization.  This was the normal “what is social media” overview, a review and overview of the popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, blogs, etc.) and summary of how to get started in social media.  By the time I was 10 minutes into the presentation, I had heard three objections to using social media, and these objections kept coming at me throughout the entire time I presented. It has been a long time since I was in a room of people scared of social media. I’m going to take this opportunity to address their objections one at a time. At the end of this blog post, please tell me if you think I’ve satisfactorily addressed the concerns, and how you might add to these responses.

1. It’s not safe! What about the BU Craigslist killer? (someone REALLY asked this question in the presentation)

The”BU Craigslist killer” was actually Philip Markoff, a Boston University medical student who looked for massage ads on Craigslist and then attacked the women giving massages. In essence, how is this any different than if Mr. Markoff had responded to a newspaper print ad?  Did social media promote the massage ads? NO. Craigslist is not social media, but an online classified advertising site. In this instance, for massages. Is one of your nonprofit’s core services providing massages in hotel rooms? If yes, then you might have to worry. But if your core mission is about helping save the whales, or feed the homeless, or provide rehab services to veterans, then you really don’t need to worry.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their responses to this question, my personal favorite was from Teresa Boze, who wrote: “I’d tell them most household accidents happen in the bathroom… watch out for the toilet bowl monster.”

On a more serious note, if your organization promotes conversation on sites geared to teens, then you do have a responsibility to ensure that the conversation includes safeguards against teen predators. Just as in real life, if you bring teenagers together, there should always be a responsible adult present.

2. What if our biggest rival pretends to be us online?

Sheena T. Abraham responded (via Twitter) to this objection with “that’s why you have to build your own online credibility as much as you can, build trust with the online audience.” This is one great answer to the question! If an organization builds its own relationship online with its stakeholders, then this is what will likely happen when a rival impersonates the organization:

• the real organization’s stakeholders will notice and alert the real organization of the problem
• the phony organization will not have the ability to create a phony online profile because the real organization has already claimed its online profiles at KnowEm. The truth is that “it’s almost impossible to get your brand name or username back once it’s been taken” on a social media site, unlike buying back a website domain name, according to the KnowEm blog.

Secondly, listening for mentions of your organization online will alert you to this phenomenon, and your organization can quickly address the issue of the “phony brand name.” I cover this topic further in depth below.

Go get your social media online profile and begin to engage!

3. Social media means a lot of work and we don’t have the staff time to do that.

I hear that. I’ve worked at nonprofit organizations with two staff people, with 20, and everything in-between. No matter how many staff people your organization employs, they will always be overtaxed, overworked, with no time to do social media. This will never change. It is the nature of not-for-profit organizations. A good social media strategy takes into account how social media will help your organization better fulfill its mission (engage with stakeholders) and create real benefits to the organization  (listen to members, engage with stakeholders, vet new program ideas, measure responses, etc.) With that in mind, how do you not have the time? Amy Sample Ward writes on Twitter that “organizations want a person or department to “own” the task/responsibility instead of seeing it as a tool to aid all departments’ work.”

Carie Lewis from the Humane Society of the US (she’s their Brand Ambassador) holds a 9-minute staff meeting every day to inform each and every one of the HSUS employees about “what’s going on that day - PR, what people are talking about on Twitter, etc.”

Wendy Harman, of the American Red Cross, writes that “We distribute a daily social media update email that contains a sampling of most relevant mentions.” Everyone must be involved. No more silos.

If social media activities let your organization to grow, soar, and be more efficient, then determine your staff time and resources and create a social media strategy that will accommodate organizational limitations.

4. There is no place in our organization for social media.

Organizations are used to placing departments in silos. The organizing department…organizes the community. The fundraising department… raises money. The research department…researches. Where is the “social media department?” The organizations that implement social media most effectively include everyone in social media, whether it is merely apprising them of the latest activities or including them in the strategy sessions. Social media is the entire organization’s “new website”…its composite brand identity. Every department must be involved in some way.

Amy Sample Ward again writes (via Twitter) to those that argue “there is no ‘home’ for social media in any of the organization’s departments, obviously I would argue there is home in ALL of the departments for it.”

5. People will attack us online with negative critique.

I have news for you: if you are worried about this, then they are already attacking you online. If your organization is worried about negative critique, then the best thing that you can do is to be where your critics are…online. The dissatisfied clients/customers of your nonprofit organization will find a way to critique your organization no matter what - via Twitter, blog posts, commenting on forums and discussion boards, and many other places. The very best action your nonprofit organization can do is create a social media presence, listen for any and all organizational mentions online, and develop an online presence. By developing a loyal brand following online, your organization is positioned to respond quickly to all negative remarks, and leverage the loyalty of your followers to pass along your online responses. For more detailed suggestions on how to engage in proactive reputation management, see a prior post on this subject.

The final thought comes from Danielle Lanyard via Twitter: “nonprofits were built on an old corporate model where nonprofits are defined by differences from competition vs. a collaborative model which is social media.” Social media leverages the collaborative experience, knowledge and information of everyone online to fulfill the organization’s goals. The knowledge gained, productive collaborations, extended organizational reach, and increased stakeholder (and donor!) engagement should far outweigh fears about using social media.

Thanks for reading! Do you have other suggestions for overcoming objections to social media? Have you heard these objections before? Are there other objections that you want to add, and how you have addressed them? I welcome your participation in this conversation!

Please also visit Amy Sample Ward’s blog,  who continues this conversation by inviting her readers to contribute their own Comeback Lines to Social Media Objectors.

Inspired to create a free resource for women who want to change the world through the web, Jasmin Tragas has just published the free eBook Worldshapers.

This is a story about the power of weak ties and one woman determined to make a difference. I met Jasmin Tragas online, and we have never met in person. She began to follow me on Twitter, we naturally shared ideas. I soon discovered her real passion is the crossroads of social media, women’s economic opportunities, and nonprofits - all of which interest me.  After a few months, Jasmin asked if she could profile me in an eBook that she was creating about the power of women to change the world through the social web. From a weak tie to an eBook…that’s the power of social media.

Jasmin believes in the power of social media to change the world. Her dream is to create a Trust Bank in the Philippines for a group of 15-30 women, where they will be given micro loans and training to grow their businesses in order to work their way out of poverty. In her role as a volunteer Opportunity Ambassador, she has pledged to raise $10,000 for Opportunity International Australia towards the Trust Bank in the Philippines. The obvious step for her was to utilize social media to raise those funds.

Inspired by the power of social media, she created WorldShapers, Extraordinary Women Making a Difference, a free eBook featuring the stories of 16 women using the web to make a difference. Jasmin writes, ” I created the eBook was to provide a free resource about women using the web for positive change. At the same time, I wanted to see if I could use this as an opportunity to raise funds for the microloan fund.” At the end of the book, she suggests that the readers can also change the world;  donate to Opportunity International, or any other worthy organization.

I am honored to be among the 16 women selected for the book. I asked Jasmin why she initiated the Worldshapers project, if it has raised her target amount, and the “lessons learned” from producing and distributing an eBook.

Why did you decide to create Worldshapers?

“There are some amazing women around the world who use the web as part of their work with nonprofits and communities. I thought it would be wonderful for their stories to be shared in a free eBook so that people could be encouraged by their example. Social media gives us the ability to create inspiring projects like this - so why not? I also wanted to promote and raise funds for a microfinance project.”

Why did you choose Opportunity International?

“Their microfinance program provides jobs for people living in poverty, mostly women. Their program also provides training, develops relationships in the community and helps women to work their way out of poverty - a long term, sustainable approach to poverty - not just charity.”

What is your experience of raising funds through this eBook?

“Sometimes you receive a donation from someone who lives on the other side of the world, someone you have never met, or a work colleague you have only ever chatted with online and you think ‘wow! How awesome that this person just contributed $20.’ You feel a real sense of us making a difference TOGETHER.”

It seems counter-intuitive to produce a free book to raise money. Has it worked?

“Although I could have asked for a small donation for each download, I decided I wanted to keep it free so these stories could be shared around the world. My instincts told me that people wouldn’t donate after downloading the book, about $200 was donated during this ’semi-campaign’. I also put a link to my Chipin account in the eBook. I’m happy with the outcome - 1600 copies of the eBook downloaded raising $1300 - over 10% of my goal - but I’m still learning about fundraising using social media and wonder how much I could have raised if I charged for downloads.”

Which promotional efforts for the eBook have been successful? What has not worked?

“I try to keep things interesting, interactive and even a little challenging. In trying to raise money previously for Opportunity, I thought that a competition would be great, but it didn’t work as well as I hoped. It really helps when an influential blogger tweets about your project - a great way to create publicity and I’m grateful when it happens.”

What are the fundraising goals and how much have you raised?

“My goal is to raise AUD$10,000  by the end of this month, for a two year microfinance program. Currently $4,000 has been generously donated. Two companies made donations towards the eBook project (Incentive House and Seek Volunteer) so I was able to raise $1100 that way.  If I can raise half of my goal I can still partner with another Opportunity ambassador to create the Trust Group. But ultimately, I would love to see people around the world coming together to help raise the funds online. ” (To date, she has reached 50% of her goal.)

What would you do differently?

“I’m not sure I would do anything differently, even the events that didn’t work so well were wonderful experiences to be part of. I’ve met some lovely people along the way too. The most successful project was a blogging project - 13 bloggers wrote a blog post and Incentive House Donated $100 for each post. $1300 was raised in a matter of days!”

“Creating an eBook was a really rewarding experience and I would consider doing it again. Next time, perhaps I would ask for donations, in which case I think perhaps the content really needs to be more than just informative and inspirational. I think I would also need people with social media influence to help promote and endorse the book.”

Anything else you want to mention?

“Raising funds and creating awareness for Opportunity International Australia about microfinance has been such a great journey. I’m also very thankful for people like Gavin Heaton, Des Walsh and Matt Moore who provided social media advice at times.”

June 22 Update: Servant of Chaos has just created and uploaded a great slide show about Jasmin’s efforts to raise funds for her cause. The slide show details the many (and there are MANY) different social media platforms she has used and highlights her efforts on each.

Jasmin Tragas is a mother of three who works as a creative marketing and communications consultant for IBM in Melbourne, Australia. She writes a weblog about her experiences using social media for good, and another weblog about her role as a volunteer Ambassador with Opportunity International.

If you want to donate to this great cause, donate here.  Just a $4 donation (one cup of coffee) will make a huge difference.  Together, we can leverage social media to create economic opportunity.

I’m live blogging the panel discussion and presentation at Affilicon Israel 2009 entitled “Effective Link Building.” Why am I attending this panel? Because I hope to learn how too  use links to bring visitors to a website, for social media campaign success and to increase web traffic for many worthy nonprofits and businesses. I am not a link-building or marketing specialist, but I believe anyone working on the web should understand the basics of utilizing the web for business. And so should you!

First presenter is Gilad Sasson, Search Marketer, Nekuda. (More information from his presentation will be available at tools.algoholic.com.)

There are many (many!) tools that profile incoming links:  SEO chat (arranges results by page rank), Solo SEO (called Link Search Tool to find sites that can link to your website by clicking in a keyword), Majestic SEO, Seomoz.org (a great community for finding tools), Linkscape (a good tool to analyze links), Yahoo! Site Explorer (the best link exploring tool to allow you to see what sites link to other sites and is simple to use), Google Webmaster Tools (to verify what links drive the best traffic to your site), and many more.

The best tool is having a great site with good content that adds value to your site!

Useful activities (not tools) to build links: social networking links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), directories/article submissions, comment on blog posts, associations and clients link to your site, create badges/widgets, internal links and putting “no-follow” tags on your site to help search engines understand what pages are the most important pages on your site.

Ophir Cohen (CEO, Compucall) uses Google Alerts to notify his company whenever new content is being indexed by Google relevant to what his companies are looking for regarding links. This offers fresh, new information that you can utilize. (My note: a great tip is to use Google Alerts for any real-time information that your organization needs).)

Amir Yarkoni, Co-CEI of Easynet search marketing: think of links as an “unbiased vote of approval” for your content and product. Google searches the content you want people to see on your site, but links are votes of approval.

Links are an unbiased vote of approval!

Also think about being creative to develop a certain utility (a document, a widget, etc) that will naturally create an interest in others to link to your site.

Elroei Buchman, CEO of K-Logic is the moderator of the panel.

Gary Beal (@scubagary) - Managing Director of VanguardSEO also on the panel.

Ofer Dascalu, CEO of WiseImpact is also on the panel: There are at least 1,000 free link building tools - pick one or two at most and begin working with them. Don’t spend too much time on tools! There are no real “secrets” - just begin working. Advice is to create a one-year plan stating your link strategy and work on that the first year.  Most important is to have a long-term plan, pick a strategy, do it all year.

Question: what is  one case study of creative link building? Answer: Ophir Cohen. He had a client with attractive content who wanted to launch a new product. He approached leading bloggers (such as Wire.com, BoingBoing) by sending them packages with brochures, DVD, and models of new product. He communicated with the key bloggers. One of the bloggers was granted “exclusivity” to publish the information about 12 hours before anyone else could publish it. (12 hours is a big lead time online.) He then became a ‘de facto’ affiliate of the product, and approached his friends and news sites with the information. Result: about 100 new links, considerable website traffic, and the effect has lasted almost a year after the launch of the campaign.

Gary Beal suggests searching SEOchat to look for the forum about LinkBuilding 101 - it’s a great discussion about basics of linkbuilding.

Another example of an effective linkbuilding campaign: one of the clients of Easynet wanted to leverage its existing customers in order to gain links. How to do this? Analyze the customer’s client base and look at their returning customers. Easynet sent a personal message to all of these returning customers asking them to write a review of the new product. Most of the reviews were great reviews because they were happy customers.

Many social sites like Facebook. Twitter, and others have great authority, are very powerful and create higher rankings for websites as a result of the linking.

Another case study: a translation service put part of its software for free on the internet that anyone could use, linked to the service’s website.  It was free, easy to use. These pages helped many people with translating keywords. They sent the free service to many translating sites and potential users. Many, many people linked back to the free translation pages.

Mistakes:

Link profiling is trying to create an unnatural set of links to your website. Example: if you are selling hot widgets and 89% are pointing to the same page then that is a bit fishy. Using and repeating the same anchor text is bad. It’s easy to detect because all the “new” links are originating from the same text. Try to develop the most natural way of linking. (Confession: I am not a website developer and didn’t really understand this part of the discussion so my notes are naturally unclear.)

Buying links from sites not relevant to your own. Don’t just buy links to buy them. Will the links add value to the user?

Don’t host all of your sites on the same server. Don’t use the same network ID. Google will figure it out.

Really check the site you are trying to get links for and find out if it has a good ranking for the terms that you target!

Remember: the amount of links that you add to your site should seem “natural” and not out of the ordinary.

Question is about shorter versus longer links - (like tiny URL or bitly). It’s more for viral use, but not for permanent links. Make sure that the service that you are using is using a “301 redirection” to make sure all your links go where you want them to go. Check whether or not short URLs expire.

My takeaways:

1. Inbound links are important to your website: they help your website reach higher web search ranking and that can only help your organization/business get exposure.

2. Social media use (commenting on blogs, posting on twitter, etc.) is a great way to gain natural links. A real life example: yesterday I followed a discussion on Twitter about nonprofit CEOs on Twitter. I then tweeted that I had recently posted about the same subject. A nice benefit was that my blog post then received an inbound link from the blog pots about CEOs that Twitter. The unexpected benefits of social media in action!

3. Understanding the importance of inbound links when designing social media campaigns can really help a campaign succeed.

Do you think about inbound links? Did this post help you at all? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image by luc legay

I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 session entitled “Social Media Strategies.”

The first speaker is Sam Goldfarb of TradiMax. His company specializes in Facebook marketing.

Facebook Facts: users upload 850 mil. photos/mo, over 200 million users, and FB spends $25 mil yearly on server space, 50% of users are over 30 years of age, big companies are using FB. The number one brand? Barack Obama. An older brand, Coca Cola, is #6.

Mentions that there will soon be a payment system on Facebook - it’s social, and not yet public. When you buy something on FB, your friends will be notified. He tentatively is calling is “social PayPal.” (My note: Can you turn off the social sharing part?)

Second speaker: Miriam Schwab, Illuminea, speaking about Five Things Social Media is NOT.

1. It is not a ticket to millions of leads. Example: Twitter has 32.1 million users now (up from 1 million a year ago). If you are on Twitter you do NOT have a “direct line” to everyone. Ashton Kutcher, the most popular user, has only 1.9 million users. You have to compete for interest on Twitter and you have to connect, and compete for attention.

2. It is not for everyone. For example, if you are trying to market to other Middle Eastern countries besides Israel, Internet penetration is very low. You have to know where people are online, and if they are online at all.

3. It is not free. Not really. Time is money and it takes a lot of time to create, promote and respond to content.

4. It is not the “end of the road.” Geocities used to the hottest thing. (Lycos used to be the hottest search engines!) Facebook just surpassed MySpace. The web is fleeting and changing.

5. It is not enough on its own. Example - Skittles has a website that is only embedded social media sites. Skittles video goes to YouTube. Skittles chatter goes directly to twitter comments. Does it help them achieve their goal.

Third speaker: Oren Todoros, HYPick. Video blogger. Speaking about the Social Marketing Arsenal.

Can a brand be social? Yes. Example: WD40 brand has its own Ning community at we40uses.com where people upload lots of photos and discuss the brand.

You should do what you love - anyone can use social media well talking about what they love.  Gary Vaynerchuck (wine review blog) speaks about wine on video daily. iJustine a.k.a. Justine Ezarik is a freelance graphic/web designer and video editor, who became the AT&T spokesperson. Locals that leverage new media: Kfir Pravda (Pravdam.com), Hillel Fuld (technmarketing.com), Ayelet Noff (blonde2dot0.com) and Ezra Butler (1938 media.com) - they all do what they love and do it on social media.

New Media Methods:

1. Guy Kawasaki Approach: accumulate as many followers as possible while being nice enough not to be a spammer.

2. Targeted Approach: follow who you want, targeted approach, become an industry leader.

If on Twitter:

Use Ping.com to simultaneously post to many site, use wefollow.com to find followers, tweetlater.com to time tweets later, or tubemogul.com to upload a video once and it broadcasts to all video tube sites.

How to track the conversation?

1. Use Friendfeed.com to build a customized content feed based on your friends

2. Google Blog Search/Google Alerts - search Blogosphere

3. Boardtracker.com - what people are talking about on message boards.

Social media is SOCIAL and NOT Sales. Learn from others, socialize with your base, get involved in other blogs and sites with comments, and don’t forget You Tube is a very large search engine.

Predicted (by Oren Todoros) Up and Coming Social Networks:

1. Multiply.com: focus on sharing media

2. Blip.fm - music sharing

3. Qik.com - life casting/video streaming

4. Seesmic.com - video based discussion

5. HYPick.com (Oren’s network)

Own your Brand- search on namechk and take it on all the sites.

Other panelist: Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe, who added value to the panel discussion.

The Future of Social Media Predictions: next stage is aggregating activity into one place.Google Wave is also considered to be the next stage - it is an email updating/embedding and conversation tool for sending/receiving email in real time. Google Wave is still in demo.

Image by Denis Collette

I’m live blogging the presentation by Monty Cahn, Founder and President of Moniker.com, SnapNames.com and DomainSponsor.com. He is speaking about online branding, building traffic from domain names, and domain name registration.

SnapNames catches expired or dropped names. If you see a name that you want, you can put a reservation on it and be one of the first to get the name.

Moniker manages 3 million names worldwide. Moniker’s customers are investors in domain names (his customers own, on average, 100 names per person). Moniker also sells domain names through a third party so the seller doesn’t know who is buying. Vice-versa as well. Sells premium domain names as well. Hosts weekly show, Domain Masters on webmaster radio FM, about people who have successfully made money off of domain names sales.

Why Domains Matter:

177 million domain names registered worldwide. Continues to grow: 16% growth rate last year. Domain names are ranked by size: .com, .cn, .de, .net, .org, .uk, .info, .nl, .eu, and .biz.

The sales and aftersales of registered domain names continue to grow at 20% a year.

Why? Domain names are an asset - they are donated to charity, written off on taxes, sold and bought. Growth of social networking (everyone wants an unique identity), growth of broadband cable networks.

Direct navigation is one of the most important vehicles to drive traffic to your site.

Choosing a domain name:

Defensive Strategy: By registering a key word or name in an industry, you can block a competitor.

Offensive Strategy: look at most popular keyword searches associates with your product/service, category top keywords, mistyped brand and domain names. Tip - have friends/staff type the brand name 50 times on the computer and register any mistyped names.

Buy and redirect! Popular example: Books.com redirects to BarnesAndNobel.com. You can by new brands to redirect, rebrand your business, or create a sub-brand for your company.

SEO Impact: if you have a top-ranked site in Google, competitors have to spend a lot of money on ads to get the same traffic.

When register a domain name - register for at least 3 years. Google will look at your registration and how long you are invested in the name. Renew for multiple years for higher SEO. Alternatively, buy a domain name that has been registered in the past with an older registration date. An old name will offer instant advantages in terms of page ranking, traffic, inbound links, etc. Look up at archive.org to find out if a domain name has been used in the past. The stronger and more relevant the keywords, the higher the page rank you will get.

Make sure the domain name is not blacklisted with Google! How to find out: look at archive.org to see if there is bad content from the past. You can look at previous page ranks through the Google Pagerank bar. Also, check Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

The big winner in a “tie breaker” between you and a competitor are the keywords in your domain name. Think about two word domain names that are “long tail” names that drive traffic, such as LookYounger.com for directed and qualified traffic. Long tail names convert views to customers at higher rate than others.

What is the value in registering another extension? #1 extension is .com,  and most people will search for that extension first, unless coming from a country of origin such as Germany or UK. If you are doing business outside of the US, buy those country’s domain extensions as both offensive and defensive strategies.

Never launch a brand with a dash in the middle (e.g. books-local.com). However, for search engines MSN and Yahoo, the dash does increase SEO ranking.

Use fun, humor and interactivity to generate “free” viral traffic. Buy the domain name that is associated with your viral campaign. Example: mytalkingstain.com (Tide-to-go stain remover).

How to acquire a domain name? If not available, look at online auctions (keywords that are coming up for $60 for sale, etc), live domain auctions, online listing services, expired and deleted domain services, private brokerage and stealth acquisitions.

Remember: cover your brands whenever and wherever possible: Misspelling, word and phrase variations, singular and plural, foreign languages (you may want the variation of the word in another language where you have a lot of customers), dashes/hyphens for search relevance, register various extensions.

I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 conference session on Video Sharing and Ranking. Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe is the speaker for this session. He tweets at @arikcz.

If you upload your videos using TubeMogul to all different sites, to syndicate the videos, then you will double your views.

Here are some very interesting statistics:

Video audience attention span:

• after 20 secs, 20% leave
• after 1 min, 50% leave
• over 2 min (75% leave), and
• only 9.5% stay for a video over 5 minutes.

Make it SHORT and DRAMATIC. Implications for advertising? Do it within first 15 seconds.
Life span of a video: 35% of views made it first 4 days. 50% of views in first 14 days.75% if views in first 44 days. Most of the views are in the first two months.

Takeaway: Viral videos are a RARITY. They rarely snowball to gain more and more. “Evergreen” video (generate same number of views continuously)  are just as rare.

How do make the video viral? No “magic bullet.”

What constitutes an “actual view?” As soon as it loads.

Ingredients:

• Make awesome content
• Choose a right thumbnail: the small picture to be displayed
• SEO the tags and metadata: don’t be stingy when adding tags and metadata
• Promote it like crazy

Content:

• Make it short
• Inject interesting “passable” content: humor, celebrities, animals, cute kids, and sex

Promote:

• Let it bubble to the top
• Web 2.o: submit to sharing  sites
• You can utilize guerrilla marketing tactics
• You can “buy” views (he didn’t explain this very well)
• Use a through-broker to go viral

Landing pages: with video works better than without. Rich media improves click through rates (flash).

Optimize videos by analyzing traffic sources. Look at where people drop off the video and test the video with revisions to see if people will drop off less  than previously.

Case Study: etoro

How did they get 2.9 million views on their video: Forex Tracking Online? There is no sound on the video. The speaker thinks that they used an affiliate to market the video. Here is the first:

Then they made a funny video, that included humor and sex.

Spent 20K They used KetaKeta to market it and got 160K vies. High cost, but high branding impact and B2B. Hard to track the ROI.

Summary:

• It’s really hard to make a viral video. If you want to, follow the tips above.
• Video marketing is still brand oriented
• Video does improve landing page conversions for a product
• Still in the exploration stage.