Around the middle of Janurary, Google rolled out “Search Plus Your World” (hereon called SPYW), which means that logged-in users will get their organic search results augmented with socially shared content and markup, ostensibly from Google+. Danny Sullivan already wrote up two pieces about that (Google’s Results Get More Personal & Real-Life Examples of How Search Plus Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy), which cover the changes brilliantly, so I suggest reading those, before carrying on.
In case you didn’t read them though, the important points are that when you’re logged in, you’ll see:
Normal web listings, as they would normally be
Normal listings pushed up or down, by your search history, and/or social connections
Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos, and
Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you
There’s a bigger picture here though, and to see it we have to move beyond what Google+ is, and on to what it represents, bearing in mind Larry Page’s recent statement:
This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.
That sounds like Larry trying to channel a bit of the late Steve Jobs. A unified, beautiful product, and if you don’t like it, get out.
The Pledge
In magic, every trick has three parts: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. In the pledge, you’re shown something ordinary, like a deck of cards or a book. You’re asked to inspect it, to check it’s real. The point is of course, whatever is going on is so subtle that you won’t see it, even when looking. In the turn, the magician takes back the item and makes it do something extraordinary. A card gets shuffled in the pack, and the magician blindfolded. The book is shredded and the person put in another room. The places are set for something amazing to happen.
And then we get the prestige: the card is inside the bottom of your shoe, or the magician has had someone else write down a word, and it’s the one you chose. The part where everything defys the laws of nature and is put back together.
So what’s Google’s Pledge? Well, it’s to build a search engine. Lots of people were doing it back when they started. But they did a good job, and removed the clutter, and build a good product and refined it and many years later, here we are. They’ve monetised it well, and become a verb and done all the things that aspiring Valley companies aim to do.
The clever part though, was not stepping on too many toes along the way. By (pretty much) staying a search engine (although what they searched got bigger), Google quietly trundled along.
The Turn
And then Google got weird. Forays in to social, sponsoring of projects that had no real basis in searching for things. Gmail, a great product for email, but bearing no real relationship to search arrived. And the Android came along. Again, an interesting product, with no relationship to search. And most recently, Google+.
With all these projects, it looks like Google’s trying to compete with dominant players in an important space – with Gmail it was Hotmail and Yahoo, in the case of Android, Apple (and iOS specifically), and with Google+, obviously the target is Facebook.
But here’s the thing, saying that they’re trying to compete with those services misses the point. In waiting for the prestige, people keep forgetting that Google swapped the order of the trick around. But the trick takes so long to pull off, everyone forgot that they were told what would happen.
The Prestige
You can actually see what the prestige will be, over on Google’s About page…
Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Our goal with search has always been to provide the most relevant results possible. That’s why for years we’ve been working on social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your social connections no matter what site it’s on. Search plus Your World doesn’t change who has access to content, it simply helps people rediscover information they already have access to. We’ve taken special care with our new features to provide robust security protections, transparency and control for our users.
Google doesn’t care about social, or mapping, or your inbox, or even search really. Google cares about information; specifically storing it and holding it in a format that’s useful, so when you go to look for something they’ve got the answer, and ads to show you alongside it.
The Future
Google will continue to expand in to everything. They’ll push new technologies in every sector, so as they take off, it’ll fund their insatiable appetite for information. They’re working on driverless cars which will be vastly safer and more environmentally friendly. And of course, they’ll be able to suggest restaurants to you on the journey, and know your travel patterns and be able to advertise to you better because of it.
Google aims to be the Dyson of information, sucking everything in and, when you need them, giving the perfect advert back. A profitable way to run a search engine, certainly, but the best one? I’ll let you decide that for yourself.
Put simply, it’s the hottest new thing in social media. Pinterest, despite launching little over a year ago and still available by invitation only, has recently seen a phenomenal growth in popularity and usage; according to Quantcast, in March last year approximately 50,000 people in the US were signed up whereas in October that same year the figure was 600,000 and showed no sign of slowing.
The unique idea behind this social networking site is that users share images, rather than text, making the whole thing a very visual experience. You can quickly and easily share images from all over the Internet and categorise them by pinning them onto boards (think ‘albums’). It’s also a great way of encouraging consumers to make a note of products that they like so that they return later to buy them – whereas they might otherwise forget about that gorgeous lampshade you’re selling, with Pinterest they can pin it to one of their boards and see a visual reminder of it every time they log in. Plus, with no privacy options currently in place absolutely everything that is ‘pinned’ is then visible to the entire community – with a followed link back to the original web page it was found on – so you may find that just one pin leads to numerous sales.
Inspiration for creating Pinterest boards for your Company
Who uses it?
The majority of Pinterest users are female and, of course, drawn to great imagery. Top categories include bridal, home decor, hobbies and food. A quick flick through the most popular images will show you that users are drawn to anything stylish and unique in design.
It’s not just the general public using Pinterest though; from Whole Foods to Southwest Airlines a cross-section of companies are jumping on the bandwagon and promoting not only their products but also their brand as a whole. Southwest Airlines for example have boards such as Destinations (photos of places they’d like to visit), Vintage (old black-and-white photos of airports and aeroplanes) and Travel Style (comfortable, stylish travel wear). It’s a way of giving the brand a bit more personality and interacting with the customers in a way that’s friendlier and more sociable than pushy advertising. Plus the profile also links directly to the website so users inspired by the airline’s nostalgic or breathtaking imagery are but a click away from a site where they can buy their own holiday abroad.
Top 6 Tips for Companies on Pinterest
1. Pin Images and Videos
It sounds obvious, but the best way to generate interest in your brand on Pinterest is to upload as much content as possible. The more images that you have, the more often your profile will be found and viewed. Pinterest also allows video content and with fewer videos than images on the site this stands a good chance of being seen regularly, so if you have any great footage – educational tips, funny adverts, etc. – be sure to get it on there.
2. Install the Pin It Button
The ‘Pin It’ button works much like a Facebook ‘like’ or Twitter ‘tweet’ button. Get the html code from the website and add it to all of your products, to encourage your visitors to share the images that they like without even having to be on the Pinterest website.
3. Be Creative
However, avoid thinking of Pinterest as purely an advertising space. Board upon board of your own products is unlikely to get many users repinning – which shares the image and the link on their profile – so intersperse your own images with other high-quality and relevant pictures. Do you sell lighting for example? Try creating a board with ‘colourful lights’ and mix images of your coloured light-bulbs with eye-catching and artistic photos of fairy lights or disco lighting. This lets users see both the effect of coloured lighting and then, if they are interested (which most likely they are if they clicked on your board in the first place), the products that will let them recreate it at home.
4. Add Prices
A quick but highly-beneficial tip is to write the price of products that you are pinning in the description. This will automatically add a little price tag to the image and cause it to show up in the Gifts category which is exactly where people will be looking if they intend to spend money!
5. Be Social
Pinterest is generally organised by ‘most recent first’ so once you’ve created your boards they’re not going to keep generating interest for very long. The key to making your venture into Pinterest a successful one is to interact with your target audience, just as you would on another social networking site such as Facebook.
Repin other users’ images onto your boards where relevant – they’ll receive a notification and will very likely browse through the rest of your board where their image has been shared. For best effect, do a little research and focus your efforts – a user is more likely to buy a chair from you for example if they have just posted a board entitled ‘Chairs I’d Love to Buy’. You can search boards as well as image titles. Don’t forget to make use of the commenting feature or to follow users either to incite them to follow you back.
6. Run Competitions
Pinterest works best when users are promoting your images, not you. Try running a competition where entry requires users to pin their favourite items from your website onto a board, or to repin images that you have already posted.
Overall, Pinterest is proving to be a very popular and extremely fast-growing new website that, thanks to its unique set-up, opens up a whole new range of possibilities and allows you to promote your brand in ways that you may never have tried before. It may just be another passing craze or, who knows, perhaps it will be the next Twitter. Either way, right now it’s an excellent platform and I would encourage any and all companies to jump on the bandwagon quickly to take advantage of the fact that right now there is very little business competition on there at all!
In the good name of charity and amusing facial hair, willing members of the Strategy team have decided to form a Moustache Brotherhood and participate in Movember. It’s like November, but much hairier! It also offers an excellent opportunity for us all to be lazy and unshaven without fear of seeming lazy or unshaven. Fabulous
All of the team, apart from those who are blessed with hair follicles on their faces which prevent them from participating at a genetic level (or with too much personal pride (a rarity in Internet Marketing, but there are those among us who still care about how they look)) are growing moustaches. Big, hairy ones. Massive food interceptors which reduce their pulling power (which, if we’re honest, is negligible in most cases on the best of days) to zero. Monster moustaches which say, ‘Sweet mercy, look at me. I should not be allowed in the workplace for I am ridiculous, yet here I am, so you must worship me. Bow before me and pray for the end of Movember so I may be eradicated. And please stop laughing…’
Equal opportunities are very important at Strategy Towers, and we didn’t want the ladies to feel left out, so we gave them the opportunity to join the team and grow their leg hair in a bid to help us raise some dosh. This idea was received with the same iciness which saw the untimely demise of the Titanic, so as an alternative we suggested they might consider buying some fake beards so they could go all Life of Brian. I can’t understand why, but they ignored this most reasonable of ideas and instead decided they would simply point and laugh at our hairy chops. Such is the price we Mo Bros must pay.
The aim of this selfless act of stubble growth is to raise vital awareness and moolah for men’s health, most specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. I’ve set up a team called Strategy S E Mo (sometimes I’m so witty I amaze even myself) which allows anyone who wants to sponsor us the ability to release their unneeded copious wads of cash into the hands of people who require it and can put it to very good use. Please click on the following link to release the moths: http://mobro.co/StrategyInternetMarketing
Each week we shall be taking photographic evidence of our wondrous face foliage to share with the populace of Earth, so they can recognise our suffering for this most worthy of causes. I thank you all in advance for the huge amount of money you will be giving to charity in our support. Follow our progress on Facebook.
Cloaked in secrecy, hiding in the offices of many internet marketing agencies, reside sneaky Bowling Ninjas who, on the quiet, possess legendary skills in the art of Ten Pin Bowling. Sadly, not many of them have taken up residency at Strategy Internet Marketing. Still, not liking to admit to possessing the collective bowling prowess of an out of date tin of Spam, the team decided a mission was needed. A social event was planned to find out answers. Most specifically, one answer. An answer to the ultimate question:
Who at SIM could lob a lump of plastic reactive resin down a bowling alley and cause the most devastating carnage to the neat formation of pins so beautifully arranged at its zenith?
As questions go, this is one is the Daddy. Forget lesser questions such as, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ At least you can have a pint and force an answer from this bad boy.
The photos are likely to show that the bar sidetracked many lesser-willed Bowling Ninjas and destroyed their powers entirely. Most notably, Andy ‘Bluto’ Price, client manager of extraordinary ability, but bowler of unfathomable ineptness, who chalked up the evening’s most embarrassing total of 37 after losing all hand-to-eye coordination through an overindulgence of the sweet nectar known as cider. Oh dear.
Beant ‘Badger’ Bajwa developed an extraordinary bowling technique which defied gravity. While her bowl travelled more slowly than a sleeping Sloth which had had all its limbs amputated on a whim, she still managed to achieve a mighty score of 110! See photos of this amazing phenomenon and lots more on Facebook.
But while some of the team tried to fathom how Beant’s bowling technique managed to defy the laws of physics, a battle was underway. Alex Van Halen had laid down the Bowling Gauntlet of Challenge by winning the first game with a whopping score of 129 (I told you we didn’t have many Bowling Ninjas in residence at our establishment). But low, the red mist fell on the Meadow of the Ten Pin. Those among us of a more competitive nature began lobbing bowling balls with ruthless ferocity. Pins were smashed and for a while Woolly Mattmoth and Alex Van Halen were in contention for the most coveted of prizes – the Strategy Internet Marketing Supreme Bowling Champion Trophy. But then they saw hunger and madness dancing a crazed tango in JC’s eyes and realised that if they didn’t let him win they might be out of a job.
And so, the mighty JC won the prize with a monster score of 161. The trophy now sits safe in his office behind a protective electric force-field so none may steal it. Every now and then a smile caresses JC’s lips as he remembers the sweet taste of victory. But how long can the trophy be kept from the rest of the team who are hungry for revenge and an opportunity to revel in victory? That question can only be answered on the next Quest of the Bowling Champions.
Just a quick post for all you developers out there – I’ve quickly hacked together a function for getting the number of shares of a url on Google+. I can’t be the only one out there who needs this, so I thought I’d give back to the community with it. This implimentation is in PHP, but it shouldn’t be too hard to understand and port.
TL;DR: Whilst it might be very efficient to get lots of poor outsourced content written on the cheap and pushed on to article sites, it’s nowhere near as effective as great content published and promoted properly on your own site, when it comes to attracting link weight, traffic and brand awareness.
Due to the recent Farmer update, there’s been a lot of discussion about various link building methods in of late. Based on the discussions I’ve seen going on, I’ve decided that it’s time to come out of blogging retirement, and for the first time in about two years, weigh in on the debate.
The Three Axis of Everything
Before we get in to the details of how to go about building links that have real, long term, lasting value, we need to recap slightly on the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Efficiency:accomplishment of or ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time and effort
Effectiveness:adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result
Notice the difference between these two. It’s entirely possible to have a process that’s exceedingly efficient, but that has very limited actual effectiveness. So how do people get trapped in these forms of processes, where they’re being efficiently ineffective?
Well, with just about everything in life, we have to choose the amount we’re willing to invest in each of three things, which determine the results of all our efforts:
Time
Cost
Quality
The more important each of those is, the more the others have to suffer. It’s at this point that we see why some organisations fail to do linkbuilding (or any other area of execution) well; their prioritisation is incorrect. In an attempt to reduce cost and time invested, quality suffers drastically.
The Devil & Idle Thumbs
Unfortunately, due to a lack of good education, a moral requirement to do something for the money being charged, and the ease with which certain things (like outsourced, low quality article marketing) can be done, it lets people get in to a situation where they’re happily busy doing things, irrespective of the efficacy of those activities.
This effect is unfortunately compounded by the way linkbuilding works, with repeated links from a domain having ever decreasing value. Thus whilst submitting to the same batch of article sites will initially produce useful returns, over a sustained period it will eventually lack the necessary utility to see that growth sustained. (In my experience, most sites will need to look at other methods to of linkbuilding after around 18-24 months, depending on post frequency and site strength)
To truly produce sustainable, long term growth, with solid benefits that will aid the site for years, we have to look beyond this approach, and move on to something a little more creative.
4C & CBEL
It’s at this point that we turn to two methods of linkbuilding that provide markedly more value and long-term traction. At SIM, we refer to these as 4C and CBEL – Creative & Compelling Content Creation and Community Based Engagement Linkbuilding. We’ll look at these in more detail separately.
First up, linkbuilding through great content:
4C: Creative & Compelling Content Creation
Welcome to the internet. There’s a whole bunch of interesting stuff here. And a lot of boring stuff too. Can you guess which of the two camps of content people view and link to the most? If you can’t, or you guessed wrong, please send an email to i_shouldnt_be_allowed_near_computers@muppet.com.
When it comes to content, the key tends to be putting yourself in the position of someone completely different, and then going looking for the tiny ponies.
I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.
I made a lame joke in my mind about how the horse is there, but it’s not the one wearing the blinders. And then I pictured what would happen if the horse pooped in the middle of the floor of the Apple Store, because I am nine. I laugh to myself. The woman next to me looks up from the 17″ laptop in a judgmental fashion, probably because she could feel the immaturity radiate out of my body. She looks back down and Facebook looks back at her. “Great, the one thing she notices is me being a moron.”
Play it cool, Frank. Play it cool.
THERE IS A LITTLE PONY IN THE APPLE STORE. What the hell? A beautiful little pony, with a flowing mane, the likes of which my sister would have killed to get for Christmas when she was 7 or 8. And, NOONE is looking at this thing. I wondered: if there were kids in the Apple Store, would they notice? “Yes,” I say. “Yes, they would.” Kids have a magnetic connection to animals. But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny. And if you have a child, you probably can not afford Apple products.
But, if a child were here, they would see the pony, because when you’re a kid, you notice everything, because everything is new. My niece is like this. “Did you see that that dog loves that other dog because they got their leashes tangled up outside and then they laid down beside one another?” Or, “Once you have a baby, you can’t put it back, can you?”
It’s in this way that you need to look at your company. You need to step back and see the interesting details. Here’s a few quick examples of interesting stories told through creative ideas:
1. Video
TV’s are fairly boring, when you get right down to it. It’s a box that lets you watch pictures. So to successfully market a new television requires some out of the box (pun most definitely intended) thinking. There’s two separate approaches we can look at here.
Firstly, we’ve got Sony’s famous Balls and Paint adverts. I’ve embedded them both below so you can watch and see what we’re talking about, in case you live under a rock.
Balls
Paint
Both these adverts created huge mindshare when they arrived, due to their amazing visual impact, and the frankly absurd lengths Sony went to to create them. This was reflected in the search volume, which you can see in the graph below:
On the more low-budget front, video can be used very effectively when combined with a strong emotitive pull. Humour and incredularity work fairly well. As a couple of examples of sites that have worked this angle to great effect, let’s take a look at Zero Punctuation and XXXX
Zero Punctuation
That video was Liked on Facebook more than 54,000 times, and received more than 1,100 retweets. It would seem therefore that being consistently funny is a fairly good way of getting people to notice you. On to the incredulity front, we have:
The Cog
The Cog, by Honda, is a wonderful example of something that could be done on a relatively small budget in terms of actual cost, although this is obviously the high end. However, it’s not hard to see how someone could adapt the Rube Goldberg style to something with a much smaller budget.
2. Embeddable Content
Embeddable content, such as video or imagery is nothing new. However, there’s lots of ways that you can use the fact that people share and re-post things to your advantage. We’ll take a look at the example of infographics here, to get you started.
The trend for making infographics has really blossomed over the last 18 months or so, and unfortunately has produced a lot of really bad content. As such, before we go in to some examples of great infographics, I’m going to define what makes them great:
Visual Impact: if it doesn’t look amazing, no-one’s going to want to share it
Data Clarity: if you can’t understand the data being presented, it’s of no use
Intuitive Visualisation: it should be immediately obvious, even when doing a squint test, what’s going on
The Point: by definition, an infographic needs to make a point, or it’s going to be dull
Sharability: make sure you’ve got embed code, and retweet and Facebook Like buttons going on
So with that out of the way, let’s take a look at some people who consistently produce amazing infographics:
These places should serve to inspire you. Anyone can product something a poor infographic. A great one takes somewhat more skill. So how should you go about getting on together?
Well, I’d say first off hire a designer. If you’re not really good at visual design, you’re not going to be able to pull off something slick enough to get the kind of attention you need.
If you are doing it yourself though, we need to address the other points. Data clarity is vital in infographics, especially as you’re often going to be dealing with large data sets or numbers, which can’t be easily represented in a traditional way. Think about ways you can abstract the data, to make it more relatable. Could you show energy used by a light bulb as the amount it costs, rather than the wattage per hour? How about showing money as wheelbarrows full of notes, instead of numbers? Think outside the box.
For presentation, the graphic should have a clear visual flow, and it should be immediately obvious what the meaning behind the visual is. For some great examples of this in action, go download these slides from Extreme Presentation. That’ll give you some ideas as to how you can represent concepts visually without having to explain them in depth.
Finally, make sure you know what you’re going to try and get across. Is it just presenting data? Is it showing a point of view? Is it to quickly convey information which you’re going to expand upon below, like this post does? Know the purpose, and then build the infographic.
3. Great Writing
Nothing beats great content. Look at the best blogs, and they’re all where they are because they consistently produce great content, with a large percentage of that being written, day in day out. Again, knowing the audience is key. Sites like Engadget, The Beeb and SEOmoz all get the attention they do by having a tightly aimed focus on their audience.
The key point to note here is that the audience doesn’t have to be restricted to a small area. Whilst SEOmoz only deals with the digital marketing community, Engadget is tailored to anyone who loves gadgets and the technology industry, and the BBC aims at just about everyone. What makes this work isn’t the tight focus on writing around a certain topic, but writing for a certain audience. This means that you can have breadth in what you write, as long as it’s tailored to what your audience wants to listen to you talking about.
For some guidance on how to go about writing great content, I’ve included some resources below:
Obviously, this isn’t an extensive list. There’s widgets, images, licensed content… Lots and lots of things you can do to create content that people will want to grab and put on their own site or talk about. It’s really up to your imagination at looking at what your industry shares, what it likes, what there’s a need for, and how you can product content that satisfies those criteria. However, before you can do that, you need to create that content, which is what we’re going to look at now.
Creating Your Own Content
Pretty much irrespective of what the content you’re creating is, the process that you’ll go through is the same: Brainstorm, Execute, Promote, Analyse. Each of these parts breaks down into a distinct set of processes, so we’ll look at them one by one, and see what you can do to make them as efficient and effective as possible.
The Process: Brainstorm
In this first stage, you’re going to be sitting down and coming up with various ideas. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll imagine that we’re working for a site that sells clothing, and who’s lead product is jeans. The first thing you need to do is map out everything you can think of to do with jeans. So that might include:
A brief history of jeans
Famous things featuring jeans (adverts, tv shows, celebrities?)
Various styles of jeans
Current issues/news stories related to jeans
Fashion trends over time, and how they’ve impacted jeans
The history of famous jeans-related brands
Current/future jeans-related fashions
Denim usage outside of the fashion industry
…and so on. For each of these you should then be able to generate a few ideas related to that topic, for a potential link building campaign. For example, for the brief history of jeans, you might want to do a jeans related infographic, along the lines of 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee from The Oatmeal. If, like me, you spend way too much time on teh internetz, then this shouldn’t take you too long. You’ll be able to tell if this is the case, because you’ll know where this is from, and find it funny:
Having created your list, it’s time to whittle it down. There’s an element of research that you can do into this, looking at what the community that you’re targeting likes. The best way to go about that is to try and find where the community hangs around online (is it on Twitter, social forums/sharing areas like HackerNews, certain blogs (and if so, which ones and who writes them), and see what’s gotten links and attention. Pay attention to stickied forum threads, greatest hits/most visited/best of style blog posts, YouTube videos (sorted by view count), power users on social sharing sites, the number of inbound links to particular pages… What you’re looking for are the key influencers in the community, both from the point of view of the people who have influence, and the topics that influence the discussion.
By running a process like this, you can ensure you’ve got the best possible chance of getting a good result for your efforts. In the end though, you’re going to have to take a gamble as you can never truly guarantee what’s going to take off (unless you’re known enough in the community already that you can leverage that into promotion).
The Process: Execution
This is a harder part to explain, as the method that you use to execute varies wildly based on your content type and distribution channels, budget and timeline. However, the principles behind how you should execute are fairly consistent, so I’ll try and guide you through those, and then you can apply them to whatever your content type is.
Firstly, the most important thing is the quality of what you’re producing. There’s a subtlety here that deserves attention though, which is that what you perceive as quality, might not be the factor of quality that your audience cares about. So whilst to you, it might mean depth of content, to your audience it might be production value. Nailing this comes down to understanding your audience, and what they value. This is where the research you did during the brainstorming section comes in handy, because you’ll be able to see across the various types of content you found that went big before, what the community values. Is it in-depth content, is it amazing presentation, is it evidence-backed claims, is it a humorous or sober tone, is it a pretty face or a “real” person? These are the questions you need to answer, before executing, to make sure that what you produce matches the expectations of the audience you’re going to put it in front of. So we know that we need to deliver quality, and how our audience defines it. What else?
Well, the second key point is sharability. Again, this is research-led, as you need to understand where your audience are, how they share. It’s pointless having Reddit, Twitter and Facebook voting buttons on your site if you’re targeting silver surfers, as they share via email. Similarly, you wouldn’t target a tech crowd by using Send to a Friend email buttons. Knowing your audience and how the community with each other is vital to reducing friction, and enabling them to share you content as easily as possible.
Thirdly and finally, we need to consider timing. If you’re launching something to do with jeans (staying with our earlier example), it’d probably help to tie it in with something like London Fashion Week, where you can ride off the back of the promotion of that to help get your content out. Look for natural news events that you know will arise over the course of time to coincide with your content where possible, as if something’s already on the mind of your community, and you’ve got a hook in to it, it makes it more relevant for them, thus more useful, thus more likely that they’ll take the actions that you want.
The Process: Promotion
As with execution, a lot of the ‘how’ behind the promotion of your content comes down to what the content you’ve created is. For example, if you made a video, you’re going to want to get it on a video site, like Vimeo or YouTube. If on the other hand, what you’ve created is an infographic or a piece of long-form content, then a video site isn’t going to be of much use. There are however some guidelines that we can look at again though, to give our content the best push possible. So first up we’ve got:
Suitability. Video for video sites, humour for channels that appreciate it, more series forums/sites for places that appreciate a more business-like tone and so on. Make sure that your chose distribution channels match the types of content you’ve created. You’re only really able to stray outside of this is you’ve really, amazingly exceptional content, in which case the community will pick it up themselves; you don’t want to try and seed at these sorts of places.
Second, watch out for the reaction to the content. If people don’t like it, stop pushing it quickly, and come out and apologise. Acknowledge your mistakes when they happen, and the community will thank you for it. On the other hand, if something’s clearly getting good traction, engage and do what you can to keep that going and watch it snowball. But in either case, you’re not going to be able to make sure you get the best community reaction possible, if you’re not engaging there and watching the discussions that take place.
Finally, don’t be afraid to call in favours. If you’ve previously done some guest blogging for an influential member of the community, ask if they’d care to take a look at whatever it is you’ve done, and if they like it to put word out. Understanding how to leverage your relationships, without being too cheeky or overbearing is vital in the early days, as until the community start to view you as a trusted source of content, you’re going to have to build credibility, and having people they already regard as trusted experts talking about you can expedite that.
The Process: Analysis
So you’ve done your research, created your content, and the community has loved it (or not). Time to do a post-mortem. Try and gather as much data as possible on who shared, you liked your content, who didn’t, what times people shared, what methods the community used to distribute your content, where they engaged, where conversations happened… Everything you can possibly get to ensure that however well this piece went, next time it goes better.
Doing this will require a lot of monitoring to be done whilst the promotion is going on, so make sure all hands are on deck for that 24-72 hour period, so that you’ve got people checking the channels you previously identified. Also, make sure your developers are around, as if you get really high server load, you may have to scale fast, and they’ll need to know that that may happen, so they can prepare for it.
The key to this is remembering to do it whether the campaign worked or not. If it fails, you’ll learn a lot about why it failed – was it that people didn’t share in the way you thought, the content didn’t engage them, no influential people talked about it etc? Or if it worked, why it worked, where could it have worked better, what bottlenecks were there and so on. Whatever happens, this is a vital step to ensuring that things go better next time, which too many people skip. Don’t’ be one of them!
CBEL: Community Based Engagement Linkbuilding
You’ll notice that a lot of the content creation section above talked about engaging communities, researching communities and becoming known in communities. However, you might not know about how to do those things, so that’s what we’re going to look at now.
Many people miss this key aspect – it’s not a case of if you create it, they will come; it’s if you create it and they know about it, and like what you’ve done, then they’ll come. But to know what they’ll like, and to be able to tell them, there’s some work to be done. That in mind, let’s take a look at some channels we can use to engage a community.
Note that not all of these methods are applicable to all audiences, so make sure you first go around and see what methods a community uses.
Blogging
A lot has been written on the subject of blogging, both from the point of view of how to do it and how to promote your blog, so what I’ll do here is give you a brief introduction, and then provide some links for further reading.
The first key point is to understand the difference between writing to your subject, and writing for an audience. You can have breadth in what you blog about, as long as you’re ruthlessly focused on writing about subjects your audience are passionate about. As such, if you run a blog on lifehacks, you can probably also talk about diet and nutrition, fitness, and to an extent, technology. Why? Because these are all things that your audience will also likely be interested in. It also serves to break up the flow a little, and add some variety to the conversation, allowing you to better get a view on who your audience are, and where you should take your blog over time.
The second is ensuring that you don’t write unless you have something to say. It’s better to blog once a fortnight than every day, if what you put out on the slower schedule is gold-plated amazingness every single time. Look at A List Apart for instance. Low content production level, but ultra-high quality. Quality trumps quantity.
Finally, watch your stats. See where people come from. If you get a link from another blogger, thank them for it. Engage them. Develop relationships with your readers, and with other bloggers in the niche. Those relationships will prove key later when you want to promote content, or want guest blog spots, or if you need a guest blogger (if you’re going on holiday for example). As with all these methods, it’s all about asking yourself what you can do, every day, to be useful to those around you in the community.
Everything Everywhere – an example of remarkableness and engagement garnering attention
Social Site Presence & Etiquette
Different communities like different forms of social sites, and engage in different ways. For some, it’s all about Twitter and Facebook, with others people hang out on blogs. And with still others, it’s forms of forums. There’s an element here of making sure you’re known so that you can promote content effectively. However, I’d emphasise again that that’s a secondary benefit from the primary motivation, which should be to be useful to the community.
For instance, if content only gets voted for when it’s been seen on certain blogs, then you need to make sure that you’re known on those sites as a good commenter, so you can forge a relationship with the bloggers of that site, so when you product your content you can leverage that relationship into helping to push it viral. However, the reason you should have that relationship is because you want to be useful to that blogger. Do not go around pretending to be useful only so you can get something back. You get back what you want, as a result of being focused on others. Leave your self-interest at the door.
Reputation Monitoring
As a last point for community engagement, set up Twitter and Google alerts, and anything else you can get hold of for monitoring mentions of your brand online. That way, whether someone has a good or bad experience, you can jump in. If it’s good, thank them for their custom or comment or whatever it was, and reinforce that good will. If they had a bad experience, acknowledge it, and offer to do what you can to fix it. It won’t always work out well, but do what you can. As a whole, people will appreciate it.
Edit: Tom from Distilled just informed me that RM isn’t available anymore. With that in mind, I’ll post sometime soon on reputation management, and how to set up your own services for doing it.
Wrap-Up
I hope this has been useful. If there’s anything that’s been raised here that you’d like more information on, feel free to get in touch with me by email (pete@this site’s domain name), and feel free to share and talk about it over at HackerNews or on Twitter.
