While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others. I see this happening withTwitter to a certain extent and now, with increasing frequency, with Facebook.

At the time this post was written, VitaminWater.com 301 redirects to a Facebook page for Vitamin Water. I’m all for trying new things, thinking out of the box, and experimenting. After all, I was one of the few people who liked the skittles redirect stunt. But it was temporary. When you redirect your website to a twitter page, facebook page, wikipedia page or any other page not under your absolute complete control, you are no longer your own master. A lot of web 2.0 companies have a spotty track record and have been known to make some really bad decisions in the past, and I’d put Facebook near the top of the bad decision makers list. Anyone remember the beacon fiasco,  holocaust denial incident, or recent privacy kerfufle? When you put all your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket you put the fate of your company under the guidance, regulations, and terms of service of a company that has shown increasingly poor decision making with alarming regularity.

Let’s be clear: Facebook wants to rule the web. If you don’t think the deactivation of several high profile Google engineers facebook accounts wasn’t a warning shot across the bow, you really need to open your eyes. Facebook and Google will be at war for the web very soon, and you don’t want to be collateral damage in that war.

Facebook should be a tool in your marketing toolbox … just not the only tool.

If you are looking for information on how to get more out of Facebook, check out this presentation from Brian Carter at Pubcon 2010. It’s really good.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Facebook Basket

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For websites that are going to participate in social media in a big way along multiple channels, I find it helpful to set up what I call publishing paths. These publishing paths require you to think about your content before you publish it, what is the best channel for it, and how to cross promote it.Some publishers take a different approach. No matter where something is published, it gets cross promoted across all channels. For example every blog post goes to twitter and facebook. Every youtube video or flickr picture will also wind up on the blog and cross promoted onto twitter. While this approach does guarantee maximum distribution and the most traffic, it doesn’t allow you to tailor specific content to each medium. It’s the difference between a shotgun blast and single sniper shot.

Let’s say your company has an event, and you take pictures and publish them to Flickr. Instead of  republishing all of those pictures again on the blog, I suggest picking the 10 or 12 best, publishing those, and providing a link back to the full set. The same goes for videos: don’t republish every video to your blog, only the best ones. Due to the length restrictions, twitter is best suited for short discussions. It doesn’t make sense to republish all of your tweets to your blog or facebook, but it does make sense to do a “best tweets of the week” style recap post.

IMHO the advantage of using a publishing path approach is you don’t overwhelm the people who want your content. Instead, you try to tailor as much of it as possible to the medium for maximum value. The one exception is for your A+ content and things like linkbait. The content that you want to have maximum exposure should be promoted across all of the channels. The people who happen to subscribe to you in multiple places will see this content and react to it differently. When you cross promote everything, though, it loses the ability to be seen as special.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Social Media and Publishing Paths

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The following is a sponsored post and part of new advertising option I’ll be announcing later today.

For this post we’re going to be talking to Michael Streko Co-Founder of KnowEm.com. For my readers who might not know, you can you tell us a little about yourself, and some of your experience in search marketing.

Michael Streko: Sure Michael. I started in search marketing four years ago when I was told by the owner of the company I worked for to “Make our website be found on Google.” I started reading and experimenting and was quickly able to achieve very good rankings.

I took what I had learned and began to build out affiliate sites for myself. A few months later, I was picked up by a head hunter and took a job in NYC as the director of search marketing for an affiliate network. I stayed there for over a year but left March 2009 to start my own company.

You and Barry Wise started KnowEm last year. Can you tell me about your company, what it does, and why that’s important for businesses and publishers?

Michael Streko: KnowEm is the original social media profile reservation service. In a nutshell, an individual or business will come to us and ask us to let them know where their name, brand names, trade marked terms, or intellectual properties are taken. Where they are available my team goes out and registers the name on their behalf. We also offer a protection service and sign your name up on new sites as they are launched.

Let’s talk about businesses and publishers who aren’t involved in social media at all, or who are only involved in a small way. How important is it for them to use your service?

Michael Streko: If I had told you 6 years ago that a website with the simple concept of a 120 character updates would be used by major companies, individuals, celebs, and just about everyone one else who wasn’t living under a rock – not to mentioned featured in world wide advertising campaigns – you’d probably have looked at me funny.

The truth is, no one knows what the next twitter, facebook or myspace is going to be. But we want to help everyone be sure their flag is planted at that next large site. So far we have been doing a good job at it. We have signed up over 500,000 profiles to date and we expect that number to hit a million very shortly.

Our service is not off shored, which is why we have been able to become the large player in this industry. Nothing is automated. Everything is done by hand by our employees here in the beautiful state of New Jersey.

In your opinion what are some tips, tricks, or key ways people can get the most out of your service?

Michael Streko: Our subscription service – it’s by far the most powerful tool that we offer. We have a full time employee whose only job is to discover new social media sites. We display 350+ on the site, but our library of sites is well into the thousands. As I said before, you never know what the next “big” site is going to be, but we can help you get on there first.

Remember when MySpace was huge, and everyone had their top 8? Did you ever notice that originally your top 8 was determined by the order in which your friends had signed up for MySpace? I can remember three to four profiles that were on almost everyone’s top 8. Think of how powerful that would be for a brand or an individual trying to get their name out.

The service is also used heavily for ORM (online reputation management). You’d be surprised what 100 or 150 profiles created by us will do to the first 3 SERPs.

In your opinion is it a better strategy for publishers to try and be involved in as many social websites as possible, but not very deeply, or should they just focus on the bigger sites like Facebook and Twitter?

Michael Streko: Plant your flag everywhere you can. I cant stress it enough. Still focus on the mass sites – but you will find the smaller sites are more tight-knit and, if marketed to optimally, the reach can be great.

Let’s change gears. Last week I talked about something your partner Barry brought to my attention: the Google SERP’s now include results based on people you had friended on different services (aka your social graph). Does using a service like KnowEm to have presence in a lot of different places help you at all?

Michael Streko: I think its going to heavily influence Google’s algorithm. I mean, if you look at how they are presenting the social graph to show your closest contacts and what sites those contacts are on, you’ll notice they are actually detecting a lot of social media sites. Here are my thoughts about the way the algorithm is going to evolve.

So out of the thousands of people in my social graph, it turns out that:
20 of them search for the exact same term.
8 of them click the same organic result.
9 of them click the same sponsored link.

I then do the exact same search logged in. Don’t you think that the algorithm will pick up on what my social graph had clicked and alter the results presented? This is going to be true Social Ranking and, with the latest hires to the Google social team, I really believe that this is where the results pages are headed. They wanted this with search wiki – but it was a failure. This is the next most logical, automated way to achieve the desired result.

Let’s take out the crystal ball. What other types of information do you think Google will start taking from the social web? Do you think we’ll see Bing or Bing/Yahoo using this data in their algorithm at all in the near future?

Michael Streko: I think Google is going to start ad serving in the same way. This is a whole new road Google is going down and it will be interesting to see exactly where it ends up.

I think Bing and Yahoo both need to figure out what they are doing first before either should attempt anything like this.

Last question … what do you think is the biggest mistake companies make with social media, and what do you think they should do to fix it?

The biggest mistake is not putting a face to the name. We tell companies that sign up for our service to always use a real name with the profile. Social media is about being social. When I am communicating with a company, I like to actually see and know who the person is that I am talking to. I don’t like to think that I am speaking to a big logo. The more human you are, the more rewarding social media will be.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Anytime!

If you’re looking to register and claim your name, business name, or product name on over 350 social media sites, be sure to visit Knowem.com. As I said last week with Google’s social search now live, this is a very good time to make sure you’re involved in social media.

The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Interview with Michael Streko of Knowem.com

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Late last week Google announced it was graduating social search from beta and making it active for everyone. I got a heads up from Barry Wise of KnowEm a day later, and we spent some time talking about what this meant for marketers. I thought I’d share some of our conversation with you.If you have a Google profile (like I do) and have any websites associated with your profile, when you are logged into that profile, your SERP’s may be affected by this new change. Google opted everyone in by default, so there’s no way to turn it off (other than by signing out or using anonymous browsing). Google has decided to ignore the “&pws=0″ parameter flag that they ignore for personalized search, a decision I really hope they consider changing.

Google is looking at the profiles associated with you and crawling who you are friends or associated with. Google uses that information combined with XFN tagging to decide what other results to show with your results. IMHO this is what the caffeine update is really all about. It’s about associating  social information and real time social activity with your searches and incorporating this information to hopefully produce a better result.

To show you how different the results can be, here are three different sample keywords from two different people:

[Michael Gray]

[Las Vegas]

[las Vegas Hotels]

Depending on how much overlap there is between your social graph (ie the people you “friend” on social websites) you may have similar or completely different results. It’s highly unlikely that two people will have identical results, unless they work at the same company and have similar social graph (an unintended consequence that will flummox search agencies to be sure).

I’ve said this many times in the past: Google considers personalized search part of their POD, and it’s a strategic goal for them from the top down. Like it or no,t it’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. People are getting different personalized results and now they have the possibility of getting two additional personalized results based upon what their friends are doing/saying online.

In my opinion if you aren’t involved in social media at this point you are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. You’re missing out on the opportunity to get yourself a SERP listing at the lower part of the page. To be honest I haven’t seen enough searches to know whether,  if you have an organic listing above, you might be locked out of a second listing below. However if you get a lot of social engagements that get talked about, shared, or retweeted by other people, that will definitely show up, giving you a second slot.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting to get involved in social media now is the time. However this sword has a double edged aspect. To get the most out of your efforts you’ll need to get involved and stay involved. Making a few half-hearted attempts isn’t going to bring you any results. Getting involved in social media may not be easy, but neither is balancing one one leg when you’re 8 months pregnant while performing wudang double sword maneuvers. But both can be done if you make it a priority and commit to making it work for you.

photo credit: dizznbonn

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Last week Google launched real time SERP’s, which included the possibility for twitter and facebook updates to appear in searches for popular information, news, or for someone’s name. The potential for libel and potential for spam has already been discussed. What hasn’t been addressed is the problems it can create for reputation management. Specificall, how it can create problems for everyone … everyone, that is, except Google Employees …

First off, we need a list of Google employees and their twitter handles. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it does have a number of  high profile figures, or people that I have met or interacted with:

• ericschmidt / Eric Schmidt
• marissamayer / Marissa Mayer
• mattcutts / Matt Cutts
• brianwhite / Brian White
• nathanjohns / Nathan Johns
• beahburger / Beah Burger
• reidyokoyama / Reid Yokoyama
• wysz / Michael Wyszomierski
• pedrodias / Pedro Dias
• susanmoskwa / Susan Moskwa
• thatadamguy / Adam Lasnik
• johnmu / John Mueller
• maileohye / Maile Ohye
• avinashkaushik / Avinash Kaushik
  cdibona / Chris DiBona
• iamjason / Jason Morrison
• jhuber / Jeff Huber
• joshu / Joshua Schachter
• kraneland / David Krane
• larrybrilliant / Larry Brilliant
• mikeleotta / Mike Leotta
• rklau / Rick Klau
• skamdar / Sagar Kamdar

That’s 23 high-profile, well-known, public Google employees, none of whom will have to deal with the problems of twitter real time results displaying in the SERP for their names. Surely that distinction is a coincidence. Now, if this were a real life discussion, the nearest Googler would chime in with the “correlation isn’t causation” reasoning, which happens to be true. The problem is I’ve heard that line one too many times from Google employees.  At this point, it seems more like a Mountain View version of Godwin’s Law. Google employees invoke it when they don’t like where the questioning is going, and they want to end the discussion.

See, we’ve still got those 23 employees with no real time twitter streams… Pulling the “correlation isn’t causation” reasoning is a bit like the Cardassian who tried to get Captain Jean Luc Picard to admit to seeing five lights when there were only four…

Click here to view the embedded video.

C’mon Google. Why are you polluting Dave Naylor’s SERP with twitter results but not your employees? Why are you polluting Lisa Barone’s results yet you don’t show your own engineers? What don’t you guys like about Tony Adam that makes you want to give twitter the ability to create problems for him?

What is it Google? Are the tweets of your own employees not quality content? Are they not trustworthy enough? Are they not relevant? Or is there a secret hidden agenda? If you want to talk about the benefits of real time tweets to the SERP for a person’s name, then you have to be willing to deal with the potential for having your own reputation management problems…

Put your money where your mouth is. And if you aren’t willing to, then put an end to the bad idea before someone does get hurt.
photo credit: Chovee

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Now that twitter lists have taken off and are being utilized, and in some cases are replacing RSS readers, I’m going to try to take advantage by experimenting with a new account @graywolfseo.Some of the common complaints I get are that I am chatty, meander about, post too many cooking, disney, or other non SEO related tweets. If that describes your feelings  then go ahead and follow @graywolfseo. The plan is to use it to post things from this blog and other interesting marketing, search engine, or social media links without being conversational. Lot’s of people think social media without the conversations is a social media fail, but I disagree, I think you can make it work.

So which account should you follow @graywolf or @graywolfseo? It’s up to you, follow both and if you find one annoying unsubscribe from it, my feelings won’t be hurt … much . There will be some cross posting but I will keep it to a minimum, there will be more links there that aren’t in the main account. Give it a week and let me know what you think.
photo credit: Katie@!

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

New Twitter Account @graywolfseo

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Now that twitter lists have been rolled out just about everyone, I’m going to actually agree with Robert Scoble and say twitter lists are teh awesome.

To be clear I haven’t gone as far as stopping to use my feed reader … but in the next few weeks I will be looking to move what I can out of google reader and into twitter lists. It’s not that RSS is bad, but RSS is too complicated for anyone but geeks to use, in fact I share Guy Kawasaki’s belief that if you can take the tech out of RSS and blogging it’s going to be better for everyone (shocking I agreed with Scoble and Guy Kawasaki in the same post, someone check for pods in the basement). It’s a matter of how simple it is to integrate into your life and workflow, twitter is a simple steak knife, an RSS reader is a complicated swiss army knife.

RSS is integrated into most blogging and a lot of publishing systems, it will still have uses, and will never die out. However if you are looking for social engagement not having a twitter account is probably a liability, especially when there are so many tools that make it easy to integrate the two.

That said twitter lists aren’t manna from heaven, and they aren’t without their problems, for example let’s look at the clueless Todd Ziegler. Todd showed his academic ivory tower mentality, with his post last week “using twitter lists to judge influence“, sorry Todd do not pass go, do not collect $200. Don’t feel bad you aren’t the only one who doesn’t grasp real world economics. Anytime there is something of value, and there is way to use it gain money, power, influence or sex from it, a black market economy will spring up around it. First people will create silly lists, then others will experiment to see if they rank in Google. Once that’s done, people will start trading favors to be on lists, systems will spring up making adding yourself to lists more efficient and scalable, and ultimately people will start selling placement on lists. Put it this way, once you are on 5,000 lists people will think you are important, and start adding you to other lists. It doesn’t matter that the first 4,950 of those lists where fake spam lists, once you have the 5,000 you are a self referencing authority and you are grandfathered in by your legacy status.

The really clever people will realize that twitter lists are also a powerful reputation management tool, used for good or evil. Because twitter is a pagerank blackhole, all you need to do is work the system to get enough high powered internal links, and you’re good to go. The problem is of course most people aren’t ready for this kind of power, it’s like giving a flame thrower to a 13 year old, no good will come of it. With great power comes great responsibility, and marketers have history of no self restraint and have elevated self-destruction to an art form. To put a fine point on it most of you don’t know when to STFU, destroying your own online communities in short lived blaze of glory, in an effort to gain a link or a bit of exposure.
photo credit: G. Rivas Valderrama

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Twitter Lists are Teh Awesome

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