Monthly Archives: August 2009
Where’s Social Search Leading Us?
By: Jimmy Six Bellies
The social Web took another giant leap forward last week with Facebook’s launch of their real-time search tool.
For PR/Marketing peeps, this is big news as the site now provides another conversation and content tracking tool on the world’s largest social network. Status updates, photos, links, notes, videos and pages which you’re a fan of are now searchable up to 30 days prior. The search tool will certainly improve with Facebook’s purchase of Friendfeed and I echo Steve Rubel’s thoughts about the overwhelming potential brewing here (keep an eye out as I would anticipate that Facebook will soon be making their public content sharing tool available to everyone).
Sally Falkow also recently touched on the topic of social search, harping the importance of relevancy within social media and it’s overall impact on search results. Google is amazing and they’re only going to get better. No longer can a company rely on tricking out keywords to impact search results. As Sally notes, “It’s about the relationship, not the technology.” That degree of relevancy and focus on human behaviors and user intent is only going to continue to shine through.
As an example, I want to point out a tidbit of work-related research that some colleagues from CA conducted. Long story short, they created a “Donors Are Sexy” campaign in an attempt to see if they could use particular keywords and “sexy” marketing to try and motivate people to register as organ donors. One of their videos has generated over 32k views, but overall results have shown a lack of registration action prompted by the campaign. In addition, searches around mainstay issue keywords such as “organ donor” and “organ donation” show the videos buried in the results. Why? Relevancy.
From a PR/Marketing perspective, it’s going to continue to be key to develop and craft authentic messages that effectively connect with our target audience and are as relevant as possible to their interests. Progressive search tools will of course help us to continue to seek out key influencers and niche audiences to deliver our messages.
What’s your take? What’s the next step for social search?
-Scott
*Note, I’ll be back in early September. Similar to Dave Fleet, I’m completely unplugging for a bit to take in the sights, sounds and culture of Sweden, Norway and Denmark! Open to any travel tips and must see recos. Cheers.
We Have a Facebook Page. Now What?
You’ve done your research and determined that it makes strategic sense for your company or organization to create a Facebook page. You’ve checked out a couple good Facebook business and marketing guides and have the basics in place.
But now what?
Time and time again, I see Facebook pages created and then left static with no plan in place. Facebook is an excellent way to help you connect with your target audience but you need to keep in mind that it is another tool and channel for communication – not an end all, be all resource for accomplishing all of your communications goals. Before you hit that publish button, be sure you’re considering the following items to make effective use of your page:
Admins
Yes, Facebook pages do take work. Depending on what you plan to do with the page, setup time can range from 1-3 hours for a nicely designed page. Beyond that, plan to assign 1-2 people as admins on the page to handle content uploads, status updates, advertising and other outreach. Depending on how aggressively you’re using your page, plan to allot 30-45 minutes a week to page management.
Content
I’d recommend uploading at least some of your photo/video/event content prior to publishing. You can always link back to publish a particular photo album for example, but if you want to help build your fan base from the beginning, it’s best to already have engaging content in place.
Once your page is live, think about how you can repurpose existing content. Do you have a good YouTube video you can link to? A landing page on your site where you’d like to drive traffic? If you don’t have a constant content flow, think creatively about how you can help bring existing content to fans.
Advertising
Facebook ads can be a great, budget-conscious way to build up your fan base. Think about setting aside a small budget to run a series of ads to your target audience. If you’re using Facebook ads to build a fan base, keep in mind that you can naturally help spur word-of-mouth since news feeds announce a new fan’s commitment to your page.
Think Beyond the Page
Using the static FBML application, you can set up custom tabs on your page (excellent for developing a “Welcome” tab, tailored landing pages to tie in with Facebook ads, etc.). Each of these tabs also has it’s own unique URL. Get creative with how you use your page to tie in with other communication outreach efforts. For example, Stanford University has had a lot of success situating office hour sessions directly on their page.
Integrate
As is key with any social media platform, make sure you integrate a link to your page wherever possible. Once you cross the 100 fan mark, you’ll be able to soak up a clean, vanity URL which is nice to pass around. Until that point, I recommend using a custom BudURL which will also help you track clicks on the link to your page. The Facebook fan box widget is another great way to integrate your page activity onto your website.
Connect & Interact!
Above all, provide your fans with engaging content, ask for feedback, and position your page as a resource for interaction. I would recommend not doing more than 2-3 status updates on a regular basis so as not to overwhelm your fans’ news feed. Use the link buttons to provide a nice visual component to your update that will help captivate attention in the news feed and focus on posting updates mid-day to early afternoon when users are most active on the site. Depending on your updates and especially if you’re a nonprofit, status updates are a great way to discover new advocates and supporters that you can then connect with directly with a message.
Beyond that, play close attention to your pages’ insights to track and trend how fans are engaging with your content to determine content for future updates. Now, go get your fan on!
-Scott
Excellent Free Social Media Resource Guides
As we all continue to barrel down the social media discovery path, more and more case studies and best practices are surfacing to help guide our learning curve. Over the past few months, some excellent comprehensive guides have been created to help us all along. These guides are emerging at a crucial time especially as platforms such as Twitter struggle to retain new users due to a lack of upfront user guidance.
Here are a few resource guides that I would highly recommend checking out:
I realize I’ve already mentioned both these guides, but it’s worth another mention. Key for any marketers looking to figure out the baseline purpose and intent of utilizing Facebook as an effective marketing tool.
About Face – A free white paper on Facebook pages (By Advance Guard)
Free ebook – How to Use Facebook for Business (By HubSpot)
The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook (On Mashable) – good idea for PR folks to check out what’s being presented to the the journalist side.
Very timely move by Twitter to launch their own guide and the Mashable guide is equally as stellar, linking to past posts on the site with plenty of great graphics – love you for this Mashable!
Twitter 101 for Business (By Twitter)
The Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions (By Mashable)
YouTube already does a great job of laying out their own internal guide, but here’s a great resource for maximizing the new channel layout.
How To: Customize Your YouTube Channel (On Mashable)
Blogging
This is tough to list resources for because the fact of the matter is that your best solution to learning how to blog is to immediately subscribe to Copyblogger, Remarkablogger and Problogger and read every post each of them have ever written. Time consuming? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
SEO
Yes, a bit older guide (published Nov. 13, 2008) but stands the test of the time and is definitely the most user-friendly SEO guide I’ve come across.
Search Engine Optimization Guide (By Google)
I realize I’m just hitting on the main platforms here so feel free to add your suggestions with links to additional guides below!
-Scott
