71. Social news / bookmarking
http://news.ycombinator.com, http://delicious.com, http://stumbleupon.com and
http://reddit.com have historically performed best for us, but you should test results
76. Sharing-incented community
The brilliant strategy by http://www.urbanspoon.com made them one of the biggest players
in the local restaurant business and got them acquired by IAC
77. The brilliant strategy by http://www.urbanspoon.com made them one of the biggest players
in the local restaurant business and got them acquired by IAC
78. Design like an “Award Winner”
Check out http://google.com/search?q=css+gallery for tons of great galleries and inspiration
97. Our future success as consultants and
providers of productized services in
the world of digital marketing lies in
our ability to see what’s next.
Don’t just market for today’s
landscape.
Keep abreast of it.
So you can keep ahead of it.
The ones you own fit beautifully, but… well, you know.
You head for Hointers, a hip new store in Seattle that sells jeans.
At the door, you download the app
You enter your size and other preferences into the app.
You use the app to scan the QR codes hanging on the jeans that interest you. When you’re ready to try on some jeans, the app directs you to a dressing room.
Your slacks – in the size and color you want slide down a chute and wait for you in a neat pile. Your phone tells you which dressing room is yours. Try them on.
You try them on and decide you need a different size. Entering the new size into your app, you toss the unwanted jeans into a bin in the wall and the new size appears magically through a chute in the same wall, depositing the correct size neatly on a ledge. You try them on and they're perfect. You order up another pair in black.
Slipping both pairs of jeans into your knapsack, you head out of the store to join friends at the local coffee shop.
And head for the door.
You didn’t steal anything.
As you exit the store, you've been automatically charged for them and the amount has been entered into your personal budget so you can keep track of your clothing and other expenditures.
Good! You're still under your clothing budget this month, you note as you settle in for coffee with friends.
The amazing part of this scenario is that most of this process already exists in a store in Seattle, WA. What will the role of a salesperson be when they are no longer needed to find the item you want in your size or color and check you out at the counter? Will they return to being the arbiters of taste? I doubt it.
Behold the app, IsItAYes?, by none other than the former marketing guru of MOZ, Joanna Lord. With Is It A Yes, you snap a photo of you wearing an outfit you're considering buying…
and send it to a select group of friends that you have preconfigured on your phone. They've probably included you in their apps, too.
They send back immediate peer feedback about whether this outfit is a good idea. Or not.
For the family wedding, you send photos of the items on you or still on hangers to your mom and your sister... another group on your app. More appropriate peer review of what you're about to buy.
Buying lingerie for an evening with your spouse? No one need provide input if you're a private kind of guy..
We are creatures of packs.
We want peer input, we respond to peer pressure.
Many like to shop in groups, but don't have the time to coordinate that.
Many like to shop in groups, but don't have the time to coordinate that.
Mobile apps are helping get the best of both worlds - efficiency with peer input when and where we want it.
How about this scenario?
We all know about the refrigerator that will inform us that we are running low on milk. And we all wonder whether we will need to place the milk in the same spot every time in order for this to work. But as marketers, consider this scary scenario...
The refrigerator not only knows that you're running low on milk or it's out of date and needs replacing,
it orders it for you and when the food delivery guy shows up,
it unlocks the front door for him, receives the new product, and locks the door behind him, providing you with video of the event and the time of delivery. The charge of course, has already been completed to your credit card.
… and locks the door behind him
providing you with video of the event and the time of delivery. The charge of course, has already been completed to your credit card.
The charge of course, has already been completed to your credit card.
As marketers, how do we market to the public to convince them to change the brand of milk they buy when they no longer order it or buy it for themselves? Ever!
The next big thing isn't about social media this or mobile media that.
It's about the Internet of Things.
The future of the Internet is not a QWERTY keyboard designed to slow you down
and a pretty picture (the screen) to show you what just happened.
t's about refrigerators ordering your milk for you.
t's about replacement hips that are intermittently connected to the web, providing regular feedback about its operation to your personal physician. "Oh. Excuse me. I have to leave this meeting early. My shoulder has been recalled; it's malfunctioning. See ya later, guys."
providing regular feedback about its operation to your personal physician.
"Oh. Excuse me. I have to leave this meeting early. My shoulder has been recalled; it's malfunctioning. See ya later, guys!”
How do we market to an audience that doesn't interact with the product selection anymore?
How do we create desire for products in stores where jeans hang on racks one after the other for what appears to be miles and we need only enter a photo of the label of the item we are already wearing and enjoy?
How do we change the mind of consumers and present new opportunities for them to change their brand, product or style? After all, people tend to move in the path of least resistance and it's going to increasingly easier to make a selection once and just let it keep on rolling.
Well, there are ways. The most compelling way that I see coming into its own today is Brand Community Marketing.
We accomplished it through ALL the elements of inbound marketing. This includes SEO and email marketing as well as what we’d now call ‘traditional’ social media marketing.
That content Rand wrote for the readers of Newsweek in 2005? It STILL ranks for “beginners guide”
Info-graphics and illustrations help to make posts ‘go viral’ faster and wider. Info-graphics are not a ‘flash in the pan’ or ‘tactic of the moment’; they’re a long term strategy. As the volume of information we require to accomplish our daily work increases at breakneck speed, our propensity to want to absorb information through images, graphs, charts, and video will continue to increase. It’s a faster way to get the info in and digested than by words and numbers alone.
Pssst… these are the MONEY SLIDES!
Deep comment marketing is more than a thumb up or ‘Good job!’ comment. It means writing a thoughtful 2-4 short paragraph response and and entire blog post on your viewpoints on the subject at hand. Put the blog post on your website and invite people to read more on the subject in your ‘deep comments’ on the other blog site.
We track everything. Building great content is the start. Marketing it is the next step. Tracking and improving is the secret sauce to success. It’s not the sexy stuff, but it’s the secret to achieving results that far outpace your competitors. We used Export.ly to for this report on our facebook and twitter activity. Social metrics are now available inside the SEOmoz PRO platform, as is full integration with google analytics.
For social bookmarking, Ycombinator, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Reddit have historically performed best for us, but you should test results
Sigh… Rand and I spend way too much time on this particularly sticky site. Quora is a great place for establishing your credibility and expertise in specific subject matter. It’s a beautiful way to build a personal brand – and if several of your colleagues in a single company engage, it builds credibility and power for consultancies as well.
A lot of days on the road
This old SEO pyramid still stands firm today. I’m not suggesting you can ignore the basics. The web is still connected by links. It’s how we get from page to page and how search bots find and crawl our pages. Accessible, excellent content is still the foundation. Targeting the appropriate keywords is still how search bots will correctly rank your pages for the search terms you want, and link building is still the cornerstone of how search bots and readers, arrive at your website, crawl through it, and find what they’re looking for. Putting social media in perspective is one of our keys to success. We know we build to amazing stuff and do the basics first.
Don’t ignore the power of email marketing. We send out newsletters without calls to buy-buy-buy. They contain items of interest to members of our community. That makes them sticky – people WANT and NEED the stuff we’re including in these emails. If you’re not on the list, at the risk of sounding self-serving, I suggest you get on it. It’s free; It’s jam packed with the recent news in your industry; it contains solutions to current problems and it will save you a ton of time in locating info you need to know… and did I mention is was free? :D
The brilliant strategy by http://www.urbanspoon.com made them one of the biggest players in the local restaurant business and got them acquired by IAC …
We used the same idea with YOUmoz – we provide a platform where SEOs can promote their own businesses by publishing on the SEOmoz website.
There is no substitute for genius and elegance. If it doesn’t rock, don’t put it on your website. Good enough… isn’t.
There is no substitute for genius and elegance. If it doesn’t rock, don’t put it on your website. Good enough… isn’t. Never stop evolving.
TAGFEE is what runs moz. Think of it as our fuel, our oil, and our air. Every decision, large and small, is run through TAGFEE. “Is it TAGFEE” is a common question around the office. We hire for TAGFEE first, which is not to say we compromise in any way on the skillsets required to be exceptional and produce consistently exceptional work. It’s just that if you’re not willing to be and to work in a TAGFEE environment, you don’t get to stage two, in which we discover whether you’ve got the technical chops to handle the job. TAGFEE comes first, last and at every stage along the way. It is our rudder in the water.
So what’s TAGFEE? It’s having fun while bringing much needed info and industry support to SEOs around the world. Mozcation, Post-It Wars, and RogerBot are all demonstrations of the FUN concept at SEOmoz. Be sure you mindfully create representations of the message you’re trying to portray. Also note the consistency in the design for mozcation year over year. We work to continuously improve our designs, delight our mozzers, and keep things consistent enough that there’s a sense of transition, not a sense of loss or disruption.
Post-It Wars on Pine – one of SEOmoz’ engineers was noodling out a problem, playing with a stack of Post-It notes. He created representation of Space Invaders on a window pane. The next day… see Mario Brothers across the street? Post-It Wars on Pine was covered by the local news, Geekwire, and many more places in the coming weeks. The game spread up the street, hopped to the next street, Pike Street, over to 4 th Avenue and….
Around the world. Sometimes, we make social media news without even meaning to do so. That’s because TAGFEE is the basis. Would it be ok for you to plaster Post-It notes on your office windows? It’s the REALITY of a company that gets blasted out via the media. It doesn’t change the story – the story has to be real to get the ball rolling.
This year, Roger Mozbot became a little more real.
2010 – We attempt to raise money and share how we did it and how we messed it up. That was easy.
2011 – We blow it again. And share it again. That’s not so easy. We were hiring a CTO and our top candidate decided that we might not have the mojo to grow as fast as he’d like. He bowed out. In the end, I think we got a better CTO after he withdrew from consideration. So I’m going to ask you to be a bit “woo-woo” about this – that’s the technical term for trust the universe, attain a state of grace, give it up to God, and a thousand other platitudes spoken by so many around the world. My way of seeing and saying it is – trust your gut. Do the right thing for YOU and the ‘universe’ will order itself around you appropriately. If the universe if not ordering itself as you like, CHANGE what you’re thinking and doing.
2010. Jen doesn’t feel well. Corporate policy, having nothing to do with the quality of the product will affect brand viability… and social media spreads that words really efficiently, too.
Build the dot-org first. Keep it silo’d. Connect it when you’re ready. That’s what Accrinet is doing. Jeff created and runs this event and much more under the name Digital Masterminds. You have come to HIS HOUSE to hold the conversation about being who you are and what you do.
Your blog is your house. Give away what you would have given your left arm to have known about when you didn’t know it and needed it…. And share that.
These are all your houses… your summer house and ski chalet and pied a terre. When people come to YOUR house to have the conversation… THAT’s when it becomes interesting. That’s when it becomes valuable.
Be the center of the conversation. Since the blog must be of the highest order (Exceptional Work), we created YOUmoz to accept the ideas and research efforts of our community. We use ‘game theory’ to vote up and promote excellent posts to the main blog. Keep it fluid. Your community manager must have discretionary power.
As a corporation, be known for building personal brands, increasing skills, and providing a ‘ladder’, internally and externally, for all your team members. If there isn’t a place for a team member to grow inside your organization, they WILL move to grow outside it. Be supportive; pay it forward. It WILL bring you ‘more’.
Work backwards. Follow the money backwards. Understand what people who convert are doing on your website and determine where folks who ‘fall off’ get lost. Choose the right goals for your business. One size does not fit everyone: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-goals-of-seo-choosing-the-right-ones-for-your-business . Make sure all the component of your sales funnel are operating at peak performance. You won’t rank well if your landing pages are irrelevant or poorly designed. Bounce rates affect SERPs as well as waste conversion opportunities.
To become a thought leader, leverage thought leaders. Leverage other thought leaders to build content for your own website. Here’s a good example: http://blog.folyo.me/post/10723370923/how-much-does-a-website-cost The concept is simple; identify leading influencers in your space, recruit them to contribute something small, such as one or just a few survey answers. Then aggregate and share the data. They’ll help it spread.