Internet Marketing Strategy 2.0

Jake Sorofman, Research Director at Gartner, highlights in his blog the key traits of effective online communication:

1) It’s human: it speaks with a conversational voice, from one human being to another. Thought isn’t hidden behind stilted corporate speak, chest-thumping claims and pompous language.

2) It’s neutral: perhaps not wholly objective, but it holds fire on the hard sell in favor of issues-centric storytelling that supports a brand’s point of view without always making the brand the hero.

3) It’s simple: attention spans aren’t what they used to be and competition for that limited attention has reached a fever pitch.

4) It’s visual: It’s also easier to consume when you’re already up to your eyeballs in dense text.

5) It’s curated: you don’t have to create all of your own content. Leverage happens when you organize and annotate third-party content that helps tell your story or sell your point of view.

6) It’s conversational: communities talk back to sustain the dialogue in the form of comments, reviews, ratings and new content of their own that defends or argues against your point of view.

7) It’s organic: it’s published fast, often in response to unpredictable moments."

My comment: I think that most of these seven points are pretty accurate though I personally do not think that being neutral and simple are always strengths when it comes to effective online communications.

I guess it depends on the situation, but, in my humble view, I will likely favour more companies and individuals that a) take a stand and a side on important issues and b) that are not concerned with providing simple, superficial, easy-to-consume content.

Being organic, as intended here, is also something that in my eyes will not be a key absolute advantage point for companies, but it can definitely be in many cases a plus point.

Good points. Rightful. 8/10

Original article: http://blogs.gartner.com/jake-sorofman/forget-big-data-here-comes-big-content/

Gartner's 2013 Social Marketing Survey:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/digital-marketing/social-

marketing-survey.jsp

(Image credit: Creating content - Shutterstock)

Nick Eubanks has an excellent case study on SearchEngineWatch demonstrating how a content-based web site, built on an existing publishing platform, can reach high levels of traffic without doing any pro-active link-building activity.

Here's the gist of the story: "Useful content and a solid, well-researched roadmap is the best way to acquire organic traffic.

If your content is serving a purpose, is accessible, and is easy to consume – your readers will build all of the links you will ever need, and your online presence will flourish as a by-product.

Put in the time, do the research, build your own websites, talk to everyone you can, TEST, and you will start seeing improvements in your organic search."

Rightful. These guys got it right. 8/10

Full case study: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2254983/From-0-to-1.4-Million-Visitors-in-6-Months-A-Lesson-in-Building-Organic-Traffic

Patrizia Pappalardo, a young Italian startupper, just reminded me of a useful Google web service, especially for those in the US and Canada, which has gone unnoticed for many for over a year.

Called Google Consumer Surveys it allows you to run customer surveys on just about any topic you want in a unique and innovative approach.

It works like this:

a) You create online surveys to gain consumer insight

b) People complete questions to access premium content

c) Publishers get paid as their visitors answer

d) You get nicely aggregated and analyzed data

Google automatically aggregates and analyzes responses, providing the data back to you through a simple online interface. Results appear as they come in, not days or weeks later.

In addition to raw data, charts summarize responses and insights highlight interesting differences. Using the DoubleClick cookie and the respondent’s IP address, Google Consumer Surveys infers demographic and geographic information for each response so you can easily segment by age, gender, location and more.

Check this white paper: Comparing the Accuracy of Google Consumer Surveys to Existing Probability and Non-Probability Based Internet and Telephone Surveys. (PDF, 631 KB)

FAQ: http://support.google.com/consumersurveys/answer/2753080

Pricing: http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing

Examples: http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/examples

Case Studies: http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/case_studies

Find out more: http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

Michael Brenner has put together a useful list of the top 30 news sources you should be following if you are interested in online business and marketing news.

Useful, resourceful. 7/10

P.S.: In my humble opinion, this list is tainted by the author placing the magazine he writes for (Forbes in this case) as the top one in the list. As a curator this is something I suggest to avoid like the pest as it instantly taints your supposedly impartial collector skills with a way too evident marketing effort, which dents significantly into the credibility of the overall list and the on the reputation of the writer.

In my effort to help others recognize effective curation from simple-minded content marketing efforts I feel quite important to highlight such small details, as even though they may appear of no relevance to some people today, they will have enormous importance - in my opinion - in the near future.

Full list: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2013/02/27/curate-this-30-sources-to-keep-you-updated-on-business-and-marketing/

How to SEO-optimize your Facebook official Page? Here is some good basic advice from John Haydon at SocialFish. Eight key things to work on now, that can make a big difference when people search on Facebook with Graph Search functionality.

Useful. Well illustrated. 7/10

Full article: http://www.socialfish.org/2013/02/how-to-improve-your-facebook-page-seo.html

If you keep investing time on optimizig your site for Google, or investing in link building efforts of all kinds I suggest you give a good read to this article.

Wriiten by Awini Anburajan on Buzzfeed: "Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013...

...While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

BuzzFeed tracked traffic referrals to over 200 publishers in the BuzzFeed Network, a group of sites that carry BuzzFeed's tracking code and include the Huffington Post, Daily Mail, NewsweekDailyBeast, Time, Sports Illustrated, Us Weekly, and Rolling Stone. Collectively the sites represent an audience of more than 300 million people globally.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period.

While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%."

And check this: "In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers."

Are you ready for this?

Insightful. Informative. Must-read. 8/10

Full article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/aswini/where-did-all-the-search-traffic-go

Sharing images with quotes, or using them for your Facebook or Google+ cover has become an effective method to provide fans with a visual symbol that represents one of their ideals, something that they deeply connect to and that they want to carry and wave to tohers as their own "flag".

The consequence of this is that appropriately selected images and texts, that truly represent the "spirit" of the community, receive much more "likes" and are instinctively shared by a much higher percentage of fans compared to other types of social status updates.

Here are three great free tools to create such visual "social flags" in a matter of minutes:

1) QuotesCover.com - it provides you with tons of ready-made quotes, provers and citations that you can further edit and personalize - it lets you customize fonts, positioning, background image, and throws in some nice touches as "soft-focusing" the background, adding drop-shadows to your text, or emphasizing specific words. Output ready also for status updates, e-cards and prints. Ad-supported. 9/10 - www.quotescover.com

2) ReciteThis.com - it helps you find a relevant quote by providing you with a number of preset genres, it makes it easy to edit it and then it offers a set of 33 pre-designed "visual cards" from which you can pick the one you like best as a support for your selected quote. You can preview the look of any pre-designed card with your quote by simply hovering your mouse on any such card. Ad-free. 7/10 - www.recitethis.com

3) Quozio.com - it allows to grab any text from any web page or to type your own quote, before offering a set of 38 predesigned templates that integrate a background photo and a particular font for your text. You can test and preview all available designs and then select the one you like the most. Ad-free. 7/10 - www.quozio.com

Will Critchlow has a good, in-depth analysis of SEO metrics and how to pay attention to those that really count.

If you are into KPIs, testing, measuring and keeping progress under precise, measurable tabs this is definitely a good resource to check.

Informative. Instructive. In-depth. 7/10

Full article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/meaningful-seo-metrics

Google Story Builder is a great and very easy-to-use tool that allows you to create video clips that playback a story you have built between two or more characters with simple text phrases.

The final video can be shared directly on Google+ on shared as a link anywhere you like (unfortunately, no preview or thumbnail is shown when I have tried to share a video created with StoryBuilder on Facebook).

A great tool.

Free to use. (it looks like you don't have even have to register or log in to use it).

Try it out now: http://docsstorybuilder.appspot.com/

Simon Penson, founder of Zazzle Media, has a fascinating article on the future of SEO, that I have been wanting to highlight for some time. He argues and provides good supporting reference to the idea that Google is moving away from primarily leveraging links and anchor text to evaluate web site relevance to the use of semantic analysis of text co-occrunces to determine it.

He writes: "Imagine being able to outreach awesome content without having to look for links.

Simply make people aware of what you are doing and get them to talk about you.

It’s how it should be and it would have a profound effect on the type of content you might produce and brand-marketing activity you might pursue."

The article is rich in valuable references and tools for anyone interested in exploring this topic.

Game changing. Resourceful. 8/10

Full article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/semantic-web-and-link-building-without-links-the-future-for-seo

If you are looking for a good systematic path to to test and analyze the optimization level of your web site for major search engines, this guide by Neil Patel does an excellent job of providing you with 23 specific steps to follow.

P.S.: As a free bonus to the readers of the article, a $5,000 downloadable template is promised to track in an orderly fashion your SEO Audit collected data, at this URL http://www.quicksprout.com/files/audit.zip. After having checked the contents I have found a series of interesting examples of audit data reports for a specific site, but nothing that would resemble what I'd call a template for me to collect my SEO Audit data. Maybe a small readme file could provide some guidance to how these files should be best used or interpreted.)

Useful. Resourceful. 8/10

Full SEO Audit guide: http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/02/04/how-to-perform-a-seo-audit-free-5000-template-included/