Social Media

A Conversation About SEO, Social Media and Content Convergence

A few months ago, I sat down with Steven Sefton, Digital and Social Media Director for Think Zap, to discuss a variety of topics including the changing face of marketing; where different verticals fit; how the UK and North American markets are different; where influence marketing is heading; and much, much more.

Below, you can find part one of that chat (which originally appeared on The Social Penguin), centred around the shifting face of marketing, and how demographic buyer differences between the UK and North America impact tactics.

I hope you enjoy, and you can find the concluding part here.

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Are companies truly embracing social media (or at least?seriously considering it) or do many still think it?s a fad?

Danny: No, although it?s much better than it was just a year or so ago. The problem?remains poor information and conflicting advice. ?Be everywhere?, ?be focused?,??blog?, ?don?t blog?, ?social media is owned by marketing?, ?social media is?owned by everyone?. And on, and on, and on?

When you have that kind of confusion coming at you from all angles, you can see?why businesses are unsure on what to do next. Combine that with the continued?and very wrong assumption that social media is purely for relationships, and you?can?t ? shouldn?t ? measure ROI on it, and I?m surprised any businesses are even?considering social!

The good thing is, there are some very smart people trying to change the?conversation and move us away from the warm fuzz mindset that so many?consultants are clinging to as their business model. The trick is in getting these?people heard, versus those with the easy soundbites.

What was the last social media campaign that was a success in your eyes?

Danny:?I?m going to cheat a little here, and share the one we used as the case study in the?opening chapter of our book.

MV-1 Canada was trying to launch their dedicated,?as opposed to retro-fitted, mobility vehicle into Canada.?With limited budget and?no market penetration, they used our model of influence marketing, combined?with social campaigns as well as on-foot outreach, and gained a 20% market?share in the first 12 months of sale.

For anyone that says social media doesn?t?equate to real business ROI, I respectfully suggest they think again.

They say social media and digital in the UK are lagging behind our northern?American friends. Do you believe this?

Danny:?I think it depends ? there are some great agencies and consultants in the UK.?People like Shannon Eastman, Paul Sutton, Andrew Burnett and more like them?are paving the way for some really great forward thinking.

And in Canada, I?d say?many businesses are lagging behind their American and UK counterparts, often?because of the longer buy-in cycle that many Canadian businesses have, as well?as the reduced budgets compared to their US counterparts.

It?s like most things?? there are great examples and there are poor examples. I think the greater are?starting to outweigh the poorer, and these countries are getting much closer to?each other.

How does social media and digital work compare in general by brands and?agencies from the UK to Northern America?

Danny:?I find the UK is still very much focused on email as the lead social marketing tool,?versus say an influence campaign or a social marketing one across networks.

This ties into UK social users preferring email as their primary means of?communication from retailers, versus social channels.

Buying signals are also very different. UK consumers are still very much geared?towards connecting with companies for discounts and low-cost goods, whereas?in the NA market, consumers need more data and information before they?commit to offering up their contact details. It?s a very two-way thing.

This means NA marketers need to have a far more tangible offer than a simple?discount or special offer, while UK marketers have a slightly easier buy-in. This?would suggest the loyalty factor would be something that NA brands focus on,?versus the stack-?em-high, sell-?em-cheap UK marketplace.

Many companies are still finding it hard to merge the different departments?within an organisation. How can companies manage the link between PR, Social?and SEO?

Danny:?By understanding they all need each other. There are still too many silos?within businesses of all sizes, not just the bigger organisations. Companies?that understand this and break down these silos are the ones that enjoy bigger?success, because they understand the strengths of a fully integrated approach.

Different consumers use different methods to research, connect, purchase and?review. If you?re still focusing on one core method over another, you?re going to?miss these nuances and then wonder why your conversions sucked.

Understand that all three disciplines work better when aiming towards a?common goal. Let?s face it, it doesn?t really matter which department you feel?should lead ? every single one?s goal should be both the short and long-term?success of the business. Gelling currently silo?d departments together isn?t just?common sense, it?s business acumen sense.

How do you see SEO, social and content converging in the future?

Danny:?There won?t be any divergence ? there shouldn?t be today. It?s all marketing, pure?and simple.

SEO ? traffic to a destination for the goal of conversion (marketing).
Social ? building two-way conversation for brand awareness that evolve?into customers (marketing).
Content ? thought leadership and advice for the purpose of attracting?readers to your destination to evolve into customers (marketing).

Buzz words like content marketing, social marketing and yes, influence?marketing, are simply soundbites that take away from the simple fact that it?s all?still just marketing. That?s the hub ? everything else is the spoke that?s used as?and when needed.

It’s about how we use social search to define local SEO queries; how paid media drives social activity; how content educates and supports brand acquisition, whether that’s social ads, PPC, SEM, etc. There’s no separation – it’s simply marketing with a common goal.

Realise that, and we don?t have to worry about silos and how?disciplines will converge.

Don’t forget to check out the concluding part of this interview here.

image: Rubin Starset

Take the Reins (The Fear of Not Being Perfect)

To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. – E.E. Cummings

On Christmas Day, 2010, British charity worker Simone Back took her own life. It’s believed Simone had been experiencing relationship troubles and, as a result, felt she could take no more pain.

Gathering together a collection of pills from her medicine cabinet, Simone downed the pills and wrote her suicide note. However, instead of leaving it for those who would find her body, she posted it on Facebook.

The response was tragic.

Instead of concern and help, the majority of messages were of mockery and indifference.

She ODs all the time and she lies.
She does it all the time, takes all of her pills. She’s not a kid anymore.
She has a choice and taking pills over a relationship is not a good enough reason.

These are some of the messages that went back and forth on Simone’s wall as she was at home dying. While some of her Facebook “friends” lived within walking distance of Simone, no-one called or checked on her.

Out of 148 messages left on her wall after Simone posted, just one suggested getting her help.

Her last status update was posted at 10.53pm on Christmas Day. On Boxing Day, her body was found.

The Desolate Human Disconnection

There are over 1 billion users of Facebook. More than half log on every day. Almost half of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up, and 28% check the site before getting out of bed.

Facebook and other networks have created a cult-like connection to them. We need to be online, checking what’s happening, sharing our lives for all to see, painting a picture of who we want ourselves to be while missing the bigger picture that who we really are is more important.

This need for connection has resulted in the very opposite of what we set out to achieve in the first place. Instead of weighty connections and friendships, often all we’re really creating is an illusion of depth and relationships.

As Simone’s story highlights, the very people we crave connection with can often be the same ones who’re not there when we need them the most. In the meantime, the relationships we foster offline take a backseat and lose importance, as the social networks drag us (not always kicking and screaming) back to their domain.

We never take a break. Or do we?

Taking Back the Reins

A new Kickstarter project looks to change that damning indictment of being always-on but never “there”.

Entitled Take the Reins, and created by Australian actress Emma Barrett, the project aims to hold up a mirror to today’s society while asking the simple question,

The allure of Facebook and social media remains its ability to be social while sparing us all the embarrassing realities of society – but at what cost?

The story of suicide and social media?isn’t a new one?and, tragically, highlights the disparity between the potential of the medium as well as the despair it can foster.

Social media has the potential to be one of the greatest “achievements” in our lives. It’s helping to democratize countries, change the minds of governments, and pull people together for a greater single cause.

Yet it’s also creating this online nation of forced connections and faux friendships, in the search for the person we think we should be more than, even when that person is perfect just the way we are.

Perhaps Take the Reins can be part of the reclamation of our true selves versus the self we feel we need to portray. It’s got to be worth a try, no?

To find out more about the Take the Reins project, please visit its Kickstarter page where you can support and donate to make the documentary happen.

Update December 30 – Emma reached her goal of $15,000 and her project will be funded.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/81845434[/vimeo]

Why We Need to Take a Stand for Our Privacy

Over the weekend, I posted this status update on my Facebook profile.

Every day it seems I read a new privacy concern regarding Facebook.
From the Messenger App recording audio and video without your knowledge, to Facebook always resetting your Privacy settings to the default Public setting whenever an update goes through, to people appearing in Sponsored Ads without permission – it’s becoming equally tiring and concerning.
While I get the “You’re the product if you don’t pay” argument, I would counter with, “Yes, but product by its nature has a shelf life.” I’m thinking my shelf life with Facebook is coming close to its end.
I get the irony that, as a marketer who works with social data tools, I need peoples’ data to help make decisions. But that should be opt-in permissive data – freely available by that person’s decision, and not available through some questionable data sharing practice based on hoped-for ignorance by the users of that medium.
A lot of thinking to be had in the next few days – but the way it stands at the moment, Facebook doesn’t deserve the loyalty of its users (including me) that made it what it is, when the privacy of these same users is not something Facebook is too bothered with, regardless of their protestations.

As it turns out, I didn’t wait the few days I was planning on doing the thinking around my use of Facebook. Instead, I simply deleted my account for the simple reason that, at some point, we need to take a stand for our privacy.

We’re Better Than This

It’s been almost seven years since I opened my Facebook account. In that time, I’ve shared a lot of data about me personally, and recently my growing family. I’ve also allowed access to my data when certain third-party apps have requested them (though I did stop short at allowing access to my friends’ data).

I’ve tried to counter my growing concerns about the way Facebook uses and abuses the data we give them with varying degrees of justification.

It’s a free product so what right do we have to complain or question?
It’s only data that can be found elsewhere.
It’s only to allow ads in our streams, and we can always ignore these.

These, and arguments like them, have kept me logging into the world’s biggest network and continue to share data and, little by little, strip away any remaining privacy, imagined or otherwise.

Until the weekend.

Because this weekend all the doubts, all the growing concerns, all the facts that were staring me in the face came to a head, and enough was enough. This weekend, the mindset changed from “We simply put up with this” to “We’re better than this.”

We May Be The Product, But Every Product Has a Shelf Life

As I mention earlier in this post, I understand the irony of a marketer who uses social media data as a key part of strategic planning complaining about Facebook privacy. Pot, kettle, black, right?

And maybe it is. Then again, maybe it’s a sign of how questionable Facebook is in its approach that a marketer who needs certain Facebook data is taking a stand against the very data Facebook serves up – because it can’t be guaranteed that Facebook users have actually offered up that data.

Using the popular Facebook Messenger app I referred to earlier, did you know its ~~Terms and Conditions~~ Permissions include this specific language?

Allows the app to call phone numbers without your intervention. This may result in unexpected charges or calls. Malicious apps may cost you money by making calls without your confirmation.

Allows the app to send SMS messages. This may result in unexpected charges. Malicious apps may cost you money by sending messages without your confirmation.

Allows the app to record audio with microphone. This permission allows the app to record audio at any time without your confirmation.

Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This permission allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation.

As a digitally-savvy user of social media, that language scares the hell out of me. Now, imagine how many users that don’t care about this little social media bubble we inhabit know about these settings?

Can you honestly say the “We are the product” argument holds sway in the light of the terms above? At what point does “free” come to mean “[loss of] free[dom]”?

While we might currently be the product (Facebook won’t allow us to pay a premium to remove that product monkey from our backs), every product has a shelf life. When that shelf life is nearing its end, the parent brand can either renew the product or let it go to pasture.

In the case of Facebook (and other social networks), the product decides how long a shelf life it has.

Your Product, Your Rules

For me, that shelf life came to a close on the weekend. In the short term, it won’t mean squat to Facebook. It’s just one person among a billion.

But you know, even the smallest acorns can shake the mightiest oaks given the right conditions.

It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow.

But as more people start to read stories on the mainstream media channels, and more parents face the need to learn about social network privacy to protect their fast-growing children online, the nefarious privacy settings and language that the likes of Facebook use will be more evident.

Here’s hoping that learning comes before too many people find out the hard way that being the product Facebook-style is much more than just some legalese on a Terms and Conditions page – it’s essentially a target on your data forehead, and hunting season is always open.

Note – the Facebook Messenger app terms highlighted in this post would appear to be Android only at this point, which has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times at time of writing.
Note – In the comments, Facebook Production Engineer Jeff Ferland advised the Terms and Conditions referenced in the post are Permissions. The post has been edited accordingly.

image: opensource.com
image: infowars

Google Hummingbird, Content Authority, and How Atomic Reach Can Help

Last month, Google released the Hummingbird algorithm. Since then, many articles and blog posts have been written about its impact on key areas for publishers – SEO, Page Rank, web authority and, perhaps most importantly, content authority and marketing.

The link at the start of this post is from Search Engine Land and offers a thorough overview of what this new Google algorithm means. However, to give you a quick idea of what Hummingbird is, here are a few of the main points from the article:

It’s a new search algorithm that should provide much better and more contextual results;
There are more than 200 factors making up the Hummingbird algorithm;
It wants to increase focus on “conversational search”;
It is not an “SEO killer”.

These are some of the main takeaways/concerns – for the bigger picture, I recommend checking out the SEL post for more details.

In short, though, Hummingbird is excellent news for publishers and content creators that care about quality over quantity, and should theoretically help improve the web when it comes to information and data.

However, for many businesses, brands and publishers, understanding what that quality content may look like can prove a challenge, which is where Toronto-based Atomic Reach comes in with its content authority software.

Content Marketing and Scoring Engine

I met up with the Atomic Reach guys a few weeks ago, and I’m impressed in where they see quality and targeted content fitting in the bigger publisher picture.

They understand the difficulties of creating content, whether that’s a blog, podcast, video or more, and their content scoring engine looks to help publishers overcome these difficulties.

This comes in the shape of three main areas.

Get Scored

By creating an account with Atomic Reach, you can either score your existing content to see how relevant it is for your target audience (based on goals you set when creating your account), or upload a draft version. Their algorithm then scores it based on natural language processing, to “measure the content’s quality, relevance and performance potential prior to publishing.”

Discover and Share

Within the Atomic Reach dashboard, you have the option to select the topics and industries that matter to you, both as a content consumer and a content creator. This allows you to connect with like-minded audiences that are right for your content, as well as discover the best time to share for maximum impact.

Measurement

Measurement is everything, and everything is measurement. Or something like that. I’m a huge proponent of measuring all that can be measured, and Atomic Reach is no different. They track audience engagement, website performance, and social media reach amongst other factors. They can then help you make adjustments based on your content goals.

By covering these three core bases, the goal is to ensure you not only have the right content for the right audience at the right time, but your metrics will either confirm this is happening, or advise how to make it happen.

Using Atomic Reach to Work with Hummingbird

One of the ways Atomic Reach can help you benefit from the recent Hummingbird update is by helping you craft the kind of content authority articles Google looks for – those with reference links, facts, statistics and content that helps your audience with what they need to know.

Atomic Reach shows you exactly how you’re performing in this area, with a breakdown of what you’re doing right versus where you can improve. This can make for some very informative (if a little scary!) reading.

As you can see by my analysis, I need to work on increasing post length based on my revised goals (which I have been doing recently); be more aware of my grammar and spellcheck; and improve the links on my posts, both internally and externally.

This analysis can only help me be a better content creator which, in turn, can only help me follow the kind of content improvement that Google is looking to enable for the social web with the Hummingbird algorithm.

Additionally, as more publishers connect within the content community area of Atomic Reach, the more content you’ll be able to reference and potentially partner with, providing you with instant resources to use for your own content (and vice versa).

It’s a smart way of not only improving your own digital presence, but finding potential partners/clients/content providers in your own industry and within audience segments you haven’t yet reached.

What Atomic Reach Still Needs

As I mentioned earlier in the post, I’m impressed with what the guys over at Atomic Reach are trying to do, especially now more than ever, given the Hummingbird announcement from Google.

There are some areas I’d love to see fleshed out, though.

More in-depth reporting. Granted, I’ve been messing with the free version, and there are three versions available – Blogger (the one I tested), Brands and Publishers – so it may be there are more in-depth reports available for the premium version. But it’d be great to know who my most vocal sharers are, who they influence, and how that helps my content goes beyond my first line of content sharing (my immediate community).

Content scoring for podcasts and videos. Currently, Atomic Reach is for written blogs only. However, they did mention that video is something they’ll be looking at, based on natural language filtering, so that could be coming, which would really change the game.

The ability to measure without having to sign into the Atomic Reach dashboard. This is more from a blogger point of view, versus a brand one, but currently you need to run everything through the Atomic Reach admin area. It’d be great if there was a WordPress plugin (much like the Scribe SEO one) that analyzes and advises directly from your blogging dashboard.

These are just some of the ways the product could really be fleshed out into something that publishers of all shapes and sizes could use.

In fairness, though, Atomic Reach is still in beta, and has a major update due imminently, so it may be some of these suggestions are already being worked on, or are covered by different versions.

Either way, the potential for Atomic Reach is huge, and – having seen it in action at the company itself and within my own account – I definitely recommend checking them out if you’re in any kind of serious content creation market.

Update April 2nd 2014: There are now a bunch of apps, including a dedicated WordPress plug-in, available for Atomic Reach.