Obama’s recent inauguration seems to have a lot of business people thinking seriously about social media. Obama’s ability to digitally connect with millions of people to achieve campaign goals (Eg. record fundraising) seems to have a whole lot of people thinking about how they can use social media in their business.

However, despite Obama’s amazing online achievements, it may be questionable whether he’s the ideal social media role model. Indeed, some industry insiders have even gone as far to say that he has implemented broadcast marketing techniques. So, who should budding social media pro’s look to emulate in the social stratosphere? Simple; if you want to become a social media rockstar… act like a rockstar!

photo credit: alonis

Meet Lily Allen. She’s a rockstar. A lot of you probably already know her. After all, she’s been known to cause the odd headline or two. Aside from her music, Lily is perhaps best known for her potty mouth and public drunkenness. Lily may seem a strange choice as a benchmark, because she’s clearly not a role model! In terms of character she’s a long way behind Obama. But she knows a whole lot about connecting with people via social networks!

You see, Lily Allen is one of the original MySpace rockstars. While she wasn’t exactly the epitome of a struggling musician before she joined MySpace in 2005 (she already had a lowly £25,000 record deal) it was her ability to connect with and create a huge MySpace fan base that propelled her towards international stardom. And it’s the way in which she achieved this feat that all businesses can learn from. Let’s take a look at the factors that helped contribute to Lily’s meteoric MySpace fame:

Exclusive Content

Rather than using MySpace solely to redistribute her music, Lily embraced the full range of functionality offered by MySpace to deliver exclusive content to fans. At the forefront of the exclusive content is Lily’s blog, which has become one of the most infamous in the global music industry. Indeed, it was nominated in the 2008 NME awards for the category of best band blog.

The blog itself hosts strong opinions from Lily on a wide range of issues including:

• Double standards in the media
• Explanations of her controversial (and drunken) antics
• Wardrobe malfunctions
• Flame wars with Perez Hilton

The list goes on… Most of the content is far too controversial to be applicable to a business environment. But on a more conventional level, Lily also uses MySpace to distribute exclusive multimedia content including:

• Behind the scenes footage from album cover shoots
• Photos of music video shoots
• Original covers of popular songs such as Britney Spears’ ‘Womanizer’
• Everyday video footage of Lily in her home
• Photos from her personal life

The broad range of exclusive content gives fans greater insight into who Lily is as a person, thereby building deeper connections. In the pre-MySpace days, this level of intimacy was impossible. But the Internet has forever changed the way people publish and consume information. Lily has embraced new forms of media to truly give fans a window into her life. Likewise, businesses wanting to leverage social channels need to follow Lily’s lead and deliver meaningful content. Recycled press releases won’t cut it. Indeed, most businesses need a complete transformation in their communications practices. Rather than approaching the channel with the question ‘What do I want to say’, businesses need instead to ask ‘What do my customers want to hear?’

Personality

If there’s one thing Lily Allen can never be accused of it’s a lack of personality. Indeed, her mouth has continuously got her in to trouble since her swift ascent to fame. Whether it’s feuding with fellow musicians, pissing off Elton John or justifying topless romps, Lily has stood by her controversial actions and words. Indeed, her strong personality and ‘eff you’ attitude is perhaps her most endearing quality to many fans. It makes her real. It makes her interesting. And her fans love it, as can be seen via the comments on her MySpace blog:

“It’s great to see a true down to earth celeb, who can voice an opinion and not have someone make their decisions for them! Keep doing what you do Lily, you are fabulous!!”

“Lily, its great to see you being so real…work it out, girrrly…I adore you and your music. Your personality makes me love you more. Eff the media, I dont care what they say.”

“I think you’re great, lily. You’re talented and funny and very entertaining. I love that you respond to crap in the press in your blog. It’s nice to hear your side of things.”

While Lily’s personality is likely to be too controversial for most businesses, the lesson is simple. Personality builds interest and advocacy. Conversely, marketing/ corporate speak turns people away in droves. Businesses that succeed in social media manage to create personality around their brand. While it might seem difficult, even the most boring of products can be successful in social media with a little creativity and personality.

Balanced feedback

Lily’s MySpace page is predominantly home to her legion of fans. But, with outspoken opinions and occasional loutish behaviour, she also attracts her fair share of critics. Naturally, some of her detractors are drawn to her blog to respond. But rather than try to stifle negative commentary, it seems Lily allows all comments to be published (a little spam moderation on her wall wouldn’t go astray though). As much can be seen from a couple of the comments below:

“Oh babydoll…you can’t be drinkin’ like that when you’re in front of the camera all night. I’m sorry ”

“On the aforementioned YouTube video, Elton John referred to you on camera as a “rude, vile pig.” Somehow, I don’t think that “friends” would make such comments.”

For most businesses, the natural instinct is to shield the brand from negative discussion. However, doing so detracts from the credibility of the medium. Tightly moderating user comments and only publishing positive feedback reduces the channel to little more than a glorified press release. In social media you have to take the good with the bad. It’s the nature of the beast. While criticism may cause some short-term pain, being open, honest & transparent in social channels is far more likely to lead to longer term gain. And for businesses, actually listening to constructive criticism may just teach you something about what customers want…

Direct Interaction

These days it’s difficult to find a lot of evidence of direct interaction between Lily and her fans within MySpace. But with almost half a million friends and hundreds of comments on most blog posts, scaling personal interaction becomes almost impossible. For the same reason, a number of the marketing industry’s biggest names rarely interact directly with readers via their blog (Eg. Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse). Of course, much like these marketing superstars, it’s likely Lily takes this sort of interaction out of the public eye. In an interview with musicOMH, Lily hinted at intimate direct interactions with some fans:

“Sometimes I get a bit worried, as I get things from girl fans who are going through a hard time and want me to pull them through it, and I feel a responsibility to them in a weird way as they’re relying on me to help them out. But I’m not a therapist! But I keep in contact with them and try and make sure they’re alright.”

A look at comments now on Lily’s MySpace profile shows endless requests from fans craving a direct response. While a brand is rarely going to engender the same level of passion from customers (Apple aside), there is no doubt customers appreciate direct one-to-one interaction. Just ask Comcast customers, who are beginning to rave about Comcast’s reach out program via Twitter. Alternatively, ask Ford fans and detractors alike, who Scott Monty connects with via a range of social networks. In a world where one-to-one connections have been phased out in preference of bulk communication, many customers value being treated as an individual. Or as Scott so aptly put it:

“It’s learning how to speak with your customers again”.

Amen.

The REAL lesson

While this article talks about a number of specific behavioural characteristics, there is one overriding lesson for businesses to absorb. And that is to be real. Lily is real. Lily is flawed, but people love her for it. Her flaws make her real, and that helps people relate to her. For businesses to succeed within the social web, they need to be real, flaws and all. Because people relate to people, not faceless/lifeless corporations.

Forget the PR. Forget the spin. Just be real. It’s as simple as that.

I bet you had already heard about Squidoo.

No? Well, in this case you are losing lots of good publicity opportunities for your blog, website, or business.

What’s Squidoo?

Squidoo is a web 2.0 platform designed to make it easy for web users to create web pages online. Imagine it as a platform for one-page-blog, where the owners get to share ideas and sell products online.

At the time of writing, Squidoo is one of the top 500 websites in Alexa ranking.

For years, marketers have been leveraging the power of Squidoo. Squidoo lenses (webpages) are used to attract website traffics, building one way links, as well as developing personal authority in certain niche.

Getting Success With Squidoo

If you are totally new to this, the best way to get started is to create your own lens. It is ultra easy to start making a Squidoo lens but before you begin, here are the best 20 tips for beginners.

1. Not keen in writing? No fear, fully utilize Squidoo built-in modules to minimize the writing task.
2. Good keyword research work is a must before creating a Squidoo Lens.
3. Good keyword research work is a must after creating a Squidoo lens, use the stats feature to check which keywords are referring you the most traffics.
4. Long tail keyword helps, include them in your lens tags.
5. Squidoo lenses rank well in Google, always keep SEO in mind while writing – use keyword in your lens URL, bold your keyword, include keywords in your title, make your lens description keyword rich… etc.
6. Squidoo disallow drug reviews and sales, so forget about writing your 101 tips on cheap Viagra shopping.
7. Implement Squidoo tags – use up all the 40 tags progressively.
8. Join Squidoo Groups that are related to your topics.
9. Be active in the Squidoo community – the more your profile get exposed the better your lens ranks in Squidoo.
10. Be friendly – there are tons of Internet marketers hanging around Squidoo and unlimited ways to partner up with the big dogs.
11. Set ‘Contact’ on in your profile so other Internet marketers can get in touch with you.
12. Submit your lens to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.
13. Squidoo marketing can be a quantity game, break your subject into smaller part and create more lenses on various sub topics.
14. Leaving meaningful comments on other lenses helps, try start with the Lens of the Day.
15. Keep your lens fresh, it ranks better in Squidoo.
16. Use “Poll” and “Plexo” to increate your lens interactivity.
17. Use “The Most Important Thing” and “Talk Bubble” modules to promote your primary ideas or products.
18. Squidoo lens gain Google PR fast, thus remember to link back to your related website or blog via keyword-riched anchor text.
19. The “Black Box” module is best to highlight your free email courses or ebooks, use that to capture more leads.
20. Use “RSS Feeds” module to promote your blog in your Squidoo lens.

Wrapping Things Up: The Best Of Squidoo…

The best of Squidoo is that it is totally free. By signing up with Squidoo, you get the power to create unlimited lenses online with no cost at all. More over, you can even earn money via Squidoo profit sharing.

With nothing to lose on the table, I don’t see a reason why you are still hesitating with Squidoo. Go start a lens today!

Bio: Jerry Low is the owner and operator of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased reviews of web hosts to help make your decision easier.

Forum Traffic Is Sticky

A few months ago while discussing social media referral traffic I displayed an image showing a few sources of referral traffic to this site. The image deserves another look here.

You’ll notice that Webmaster-Talk and Teaching Sells arguably provided better traffic than either StumbleUpon or Sphinn.

Visitors from each bounced less and stayed engaged with the site for a good deal of time. I surmised on the original post the reason for the engagement here was based on my engagement there. Both are also forums.

Teaching Sells isn’t technically a forum, but it does contain a forum, which is where the above traffic came from.

Social sites like Digg have the potential to drive greater numbers than any forum, but they don’t drive the same quality, because they don’t allow the same level of engagement on your part at the site. Old school internet as they may be forums still allow you to show who you are and what you can offer better than your typical social site.

Networks like Twitter and Plurk are great for getting out short messages, but there’s still a lot to be said for having more than 140 characters to make your point.

Forums Are A Source Of Customers

Most people look for forums on similar topics as their site. It’s natural since your topic is what you’re interested in and you’ll meet like minded people who share your interests.

photo credit: me-2007

The people there will be peers and you’ll have have plenty to share and discuss. Your peers often provide a good source of links, a good source of blog subscribers, and a good source of people to partner with on future projects.

There’s another type of forum though, that can prove just as beneficial. It’s the forum where your customers spend their time. I’m a firm believer that marketing yourself is about determining who your customers are, finding where they spend their time, and building a brand in that space.

For me that’s meant participating in small business forums and that participation has led to more clients for my business than any other source.

Forums Are A Source For Market Research

The same communities that hold your customers are a great place to do market research. What better way to find out what your customers want than to ask them and listen daily to the questions they ask.

By listening to what your market is saying you gain the information you need to tailor your business to them. It’s easy to think we know what our customers want, but it’s no substitute for actually having them tell you what they want..

photo credit: Jacob Bøtter

Forums Are An Online Networking Group

If you own a small business I’m sure someone somewhere has suggested joining an offline networking group as a way to find new clients. You may have joined one and you may or may not have had success with it.

Forums, especially small business forums, can be the online equivalent of networking groups. It doesn’t take long to build a rapport with people working in other industries.

Through the relationships I’ve built I have a list of go to people when clients inquire about services I don’t offer. I know I’ve made it on the shorts lists of others as well, which has led to new business on both sides.

Again I hope you’ll forgive my romp through forum land and one last pitch for our new small business forum I recently helped get started. We already have an active community of great people with knowledge and experience across a variety of industries. We’d love to have you join us.

Do you still or have you ever participated on forums and have you found them to be a good source of business? In what ways have you found forum participation to be a valuable part of your business?

photo credit: creativecommoners

We shared a few details about what we did during the day as well as other mostly mundane information. Nothing about our conversation was particularly enlightening and neither of us is a changed person as a result of our talk, but in talking about ordinary things we strengthened the bond between us.

A number of years ago he was living in Manhattan and I was living in Danbury, CT. Both or us were single, worked all day, and came home to watch a little tv and unwind after the day. We’d call each other and watch a Knicks game together. He watching on his tv and me watching on mine. We said very little, didn’t need to other than the occasional comment on a play. Yet the phone line was open and connected us for a few hours each night a game was on.

Earlier today I was IMing a friend. She used to live here in Boulder and now lives in Florida. We discussed exciting topics like the weather and what we were going to eat for lunch. We said nothing profound and for much of the time neither one of us typed a word. She worked on her laptop and I worked on mine. Still the channel for communication remained open and helped to keep us close.

I Do Want To Know What You’re Doing Right Now

The most popular criticism you hear about Twitter is “I don’t care what you’re doing right now.” I said it often enough myself before giving Twitter a try. From the outside looking in, it does seem like a stupid idea.

• Do you need to know what I had for breakfast? – Raisin Bran
• Do you care what time I’m going to sleep? – around 2:00 AM
• Is it important to know what magazine I’m currently reading? – Dynamic Graphics

Does knowing these mundane details about each other help us in any way? Is there any point to sharing the information?

As it turns out these kind of tweets are one of Twitter’s great strengths as a networking service. Do we need to know? Of course not, but knowing the mundane facts about each other is what brings us closer together.

I can’t speak for you, but most of my day is pretty dull. I wake up, go to the bathroom, make myself a pot of coffee (presumably so I can go to the bathroom again), check my email and begin my day. Much of the details about my week aren’t too exciting. I’m not complaining. I’m very happy with how I’ve set up my week to week, but truth is most of us live rather ordinary lives.

Earlier I left a quick message on Plurk about how I was having difficulty writing today. I started this post and several others a few hours ago and while the ideas were all in the place the words weren’t flowing.

Did anyone need to know that? Probably not, but since most everyone who’s ever written anything has gone through the same it’s a point of connection between us. Anyone who sees my plurk and empathizes will feel a bit closer to me and I’ll feel a bit closer to anyone who replies.

We’ll continue to become closer as we reply to each other’s tweets or share links on Sphinn and StumbleUpon. Repeated replies to ordinary thoughts will create stronger bonds between us than anything else.

We are the minutia of our days and sharing that minutia is what connects us as human beings.

It turns strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. is there a better purpose to networking? The little things make a difference and the ordinary strengthens friendships.

Maybe it sounds stupid and pointless to share mundane details about what we’re doing at various moments throughout the day, but the truth is I do care what you’re doing right now and I hope you care about what I’m doing too. We don’t necessarily need to know, but knowing will bring us closer together.

Consider the image below of some recent referral traffic to this site.

Stumblers clearly didn’t spend much time here. Most bounced immediately. Sphinners stayed a little longer if not a long time. The large majority still bounced. Visitors from both Webmaster-Talk and Teaching Sells on the other hand didn’t bounce nearly as much and spent considerable time on the site. Why the difference?

More Engagement There Leads to More Engagement Here

The answer is pretty simple. It’s about my own engagement on those other sites and the familiarity the visitors who came here had with me prior to visiting. It’s about brand.

While I do maintain a presence at StumbleUpon the mass of the people who found their way here did so when this page randomly appeared after stumbling. They didn’t visit because they specifically wanted to see my content. They weren’t planning on spending time here in advance. They just happened to find there way here.

Referral traffic from Sphinn likely had a little more familiarity with me and so stayed a little longer and bounced a little less. The numbers still aren’t to brag about, but that can be explained in part on the post visited, April’s This Month In SEO, which might more likely be bookmarked than consumed right away.

Now consider both Webmaster-Talk and Teaching Sells. Why did people from both sites spend so much more time here? It’s because both are sites where I’ve spent a considerable amount of time engaging with the community. Visitors from both were planning on spending time here before they arrived.

My brand and engagement is stronger in those communities and consequently the communities were predisposed to engaging with me here.

Social Media Extends Brand Reach

The ability to build your brand through social media is perhaps the greatest marketing value you can derive from it.

I’ve never been to any of the Barnes & Nobles in San Francisco. But having become familiar with the store in other cities I wouldn’t hesitate to walk into one in San Francisco. If I was in San Francisco and wanted a book I’d seek out the store. My experience at one store is transferred in my mind to the other stores.

Having become familiar with me and my brand at Webmaster-Talk and Teaching Sells people had no hesitation spending time here. They sought me out based on an experience I provided on those sites. I’ve extended the reach of my brand to those communities.

Not everything needs to happen on your site. Part of the conversion process can take place elsewhere.

The Value Of Social Media

Most of the value in social media is indirect. You may have one popular post bring traffic from StumbleUpon, see similar numbers to those shown above, and come to the conclusion there was little value in it. That’s not the case.

There may not be direct and measurable value in a single submission, but there is value. A series of submissions to the same social site will likely lead to less bounce and more time on your site. Why? Because it takes more than one submission to build your brand.

One submission people don’t know who you are. Five submissions over the course of a month and they begin to.

When developing a social media marketing strategy think long term. Think about how you want others to perceive your brand and act accordingly.

Social media provides an opportunity to extend the reach of your brand without having to spend a fortune. You still need to do the building, but the cost is minimal in comparison to the alternatives. A quick spurt of traffic from a popular submission looks great in your stats, but it’s the longer term where the true benefit of social media is realized.

• Macbook Air laptop
• Professional version Shopping Cart solution
• Cash that can be applied to affiliate networks and marketing
• An iPod Touch
• 3 Free months of SEO Training from Aaron Wall

There are more prizes to be found on the contest announcement page at the forum.

The contest is based on a system of points, which you can earn in a variety of ways and you can find the rules here.

$25,000 in prizes is certainly good reason to join, but there’s more to the forum than the contest

Why Webmaster-Talk?

About a year ago I reviewed Webmaster-Talk and outside of the obvious changes like new forums and a new Marketplace that resulted from the merge what I said in the previous review still holds true.

Webmaster-Talk has generally been a welcoming community where newbies and experts alike are treated well. The staff takes a strong stand against insults to other members and we do what we can to keep things civil. I’ve made a lot of friends through the forum over the years and expect that will continue in the years ahead.

Design, development, and website administration answers have always been a strength of Webmaster-Talk. If you’re having a problem getting a site to look or function the way you want just ask and in a matter of hours someone will likely have offered a fix. Monetization strategies were a strength of EarnersForum and the two forums overlapped where marketing and seo are concerned. The combined Webmaster-Talk forum is now a one place stop for everything about creating, marketing, and profiting from a website.

I’ve found people with varied expertise over the years at the forum. The new members from EarnersForum bring the one area of knowledge that may have been previously lacking. This is really a good mix of forums and a good mix of members.

Forums are no longer the sexy social networks, but they are still one of the better social mediums when it comes to connecting with other people and even when it comes to driving traffic. My stats will back up that Webmaster-Talk is consistently one of the main referrers here and I know quite a few of you reading now first found your way here through one of my signature links at the forum. The combined WT and EF forums can now boast over 56,000 members, which is a huge audience for you and your site.

Give Webmaster-Talk a look. It’s free to join, though you will need to join to be eligible for the contest. You have a month until the contest ends which will be more than enough time to decide if you enjoy the community. I suspect you will like it and hope to see you there.

Social media is enabling people to abandon their searching, critical thinking, and problem solving skills in favor of allowing their peers to assist them.

I won’t argue against that, but I will say there’s a big difference between enabling something and automatically leading to that something. A home gym enables me to tone and grow muscle. My waistline is proof that it’s not a forgone conclusion.

You could make the argument that searching isn’t critical thinking either. After all searching is really about asking a question and having someone else answer it for you. The critical thinking component comes into play when deciding which answer is the one you trust and in the queries you devise to find that information.

As I said in a comment on Roderick’s post:

There will always be some who prefer to find information themselves and there will always be some who ask others for the information. In the end we all still have to make our own decisions on what we think is right and wrong.

The same people who turn to social media as a way to avoid thinking for themselves would find a way to avoid thinking regardless of the existence of social media. Sure a wealth of sources can help facilitate a lack of critical thinking for some people, but it’s not the cause of their lack of critical thinking. Those same people likely view one and only one search result. They likely ask the person sitting next to them prior to searching.

Some people avoid thought at all costs. There always have been and there always will be tools to enable that. The tools are not to blame, though.

A few months back I posted how critiquing someone else’s writing can improve your own. You can choose to follow the advice or not. In the end it’s a tool and it’s up to you to decide what to do with that tool. You can choose to think critically about writing or you can avoid the issue completely. In both cases the responsibility or blame is yours.

Social media is also a tool. It’s up to you to use it in a way that helps you grow or not.

Unless you’re reinventing the wheel, it could be argued that anything you do is avoiding thinking for yourself. When my car has a problem I take it to a mechanic to solve that problem. It doesn’t mean I’m losing the ability to solve problems. It simply means I don’t want to apply my problem solving skills to that specific problem.

How Social Media Fosters Critical Thinking

Social media is about community and conversation. If you genuinely participate with social sites you’re engaging in the discussion and debate going on. Debate is about critical thinking. Someone raises a question and it challenges you to think to prove your point. Your point challenges the next person in line to think harder in order to prove their point.

If you go to any forum the majority of questions could have been answered with a little bit of searching either on or off the forum. But that doesn’t mean the forum impedes critical thinking. There are many threads devoted to the back and forth debate. Ultimately the forum and social media are tools that can be used in positive ways and negative ways. Either can make it easy for someone to avoid critical thought as well as making it easy for someone to engage in critical thought.

We live in an age of information. In fact we’re all on information overload. There’s so much information available that any of us could walk through life without ever having to think. At the same time all of us can take that same information and think about it, make our own decisions about it, and add our own thoughts to the conversation.

Many problems cross our lives our lives daily. We can seek aid in solving them from others without losing our ability to solve problems. You might say that getting an easy answer through a social site can help critical thinking by allowing you to focus on those problems you wish to solve without letting other problems distract you from your task.

Roderick’s post derived from a post by Jeremy Zawodney. Jeremy pulled a comment from one of his previous posts that said in part:

I find that the people who work for me will, if I’m available, use asking me something as a substitute for thinking

Again it does happen. But is asking someone a question an automatic substitute for thinking? I don’t think so. Isn’t that the whole point of society. None of us can specialize in everything so we rely on each other to answer questions in their areas of expertise while we focus on getting better in our area of expertise.

Problem solving is a general skill. Solving a problem is a specific skill. You can ask someone for a solution to a problem without losing your problem solving skills. You can also ask someone to solve your problem as a way to avoid developing problem solving skills. The choice is yours.

What do you think? Does social media lead to a loss in critical thinking? Does it inhibit problem solving any more or less than anything else?

I’ve seen a number of posts over the months about Twitter and had signed up sometime awhile back, but a few recent posts convinced me to start tweeting.

• A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• 75+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter

It was probably the weight of all the posts I’ve seen in recent months, but they all reached a tipping point within the last week.

I’m only a few days into Twitter and won’t even pretend to be an expert. In fact I’m barely sure what I’m doing at the moment, though I am learning and I do see quite a bit of potential in microblogging.

Early Impressions of Twitter

In no particular order here are a few thoughts on why I might need to sign up for Twitters Anonymous before long.

1. Easier to make connections – Something about the nature of the tweets removes a few barriers to networking. You don’t have to get someone to open your email. You can send a tweet directly @ them, though overusing this feature is surely a quick way to find yourself on the outside looking in. Tweeting also seems to be a good way to strengthen connections you made elsewhere.
2. Listen in on the conversation – Even if you don’t manage to connect with some you can still listen in on their conversations. Sure it’s a bit voyeuristic. but it can also be a great source of learning.
3. Quick feedback – It doesn’t take long for people to start responding to something you say. The feedback loop is very quick. Ideas you tweet can spread far in a short amount of time.
4. 140 char limit – Forces you to remove needless words from your writing. For someone like me who tends to write very long posts, having to keep tweets brief will hopefully refine the style of my blogging voice in a positive way.
5. Place to store random thoughts – A lot of random thoughts cross my mind during any given day. Most are long gone before I can make any use of them. Twitter offers a place to store and share your thoughts and the feedback loop above will give some clues about which of your ideas might spread and be well-received.
6. Branding – It’s another place to get your message out. Anywhere you maintain a presence is another place to build your brand.
7. Find information sooner – Twitter has a real time feel about it. Someone can share a thought and within a few seconds you can be acting on that thought. Being able to get to information a little sooner than everyone else has a lot of advantages.

Again it’s still new to me and each of the above points has likely already been said in more detail by someone other than me. Once I’ve gotten more used to how Twitter works I’ll be able to expand on some of the thoughts above. For now those are my quick and early impressions.

If you’re interested in learning more about Twitter I highly recommend Caroline Middlebrook’s Big Juicy Twitter Guide, which I read through last weekend. Caroline if you see this how about a PDF version of the guide?

Caroline has some great tips for using Twitter and links to a variety of tools you can use instead of having to go directly to the site. I chose to use the Twitbin extension for Firefox since I always have Firefox open. There are several other tools and you can also send and receive tweets from your phone via SMS.

Vanessa Fox has also written a great post complete with podcast with helpful advice and links to more resources.

My extremely quick guide is to simply sign up and start following some people you know or some people who you think will have interesting things to say. If you want to follow me you can find me at twitter.com/vangogh. I can’t claim to be the most interesting Twitterer to follow at the moment, but I will try to get there soon and if I know you I’ll gladly follow you back.

Andy’s list of 75+ Marketing gurus is a good place to look for more. The list has now passed 200 mark and counting. If that seems like too many people to find and follow try the tool Rob created at Seocracy to start following a lot of people at once. Thanks Rob.

I’m guessing my quick infatuation with Twitter will fade over time, but hopefully as it does I’ll have become a more mature Twitterer and will be contributing a lot more signal than noise.

Bringing The Web To You

Before getting to the other way to look at social media let’s run through a typical scenario for a new website. In the beginning there’s a networked web around you and your site sits a little bit lonely in the middle. You’ve just launched and are proud and celebrating. You show your site off to friends and family and are generally excited, but soon the realization hits you that you’ve told everyone you know and still your site is mostly unknown.

This is all displayed by the crude drawing below where the green rectangle represents your site and the blue rectangles represent the interconnected web around you.

Being the enterprising person you are you spend some time learning about search engine optimization and start to build links into your site.

Before long you get to a place where the picture looks something like the image below. Once again there’s an interconnected web, but now some of those other sites are linking to yours. Ideally you’re getting a fair amount of traffic flowing to your site through the links. The links into your site have also been traversed by search engine spiders and your pages have been indexed and are starting to show in search results bringing additional traffic to your site.

This is a good time to remind you about brand and what brand is. Chris Garret wrote a series of posts on branding a few months ago including one where he defined a successful brand. As Chris mentions:

A successful brand comes in two parts:

1. Recognition
2. Feelings

Many people see recognition as the key to branding, but the second part of the definition is far more important. The feelings and associations others make about you and your business are what ultimately leads to sales and leads. Recognition can be expensive to build, but you don’t need a lot of money to build the feelings people have about your brand.

Back to the image above you probably noticed a bright red circle drawn around your site. That circle represents your sphere of influence. For all the links and ranking you have you’re still mostly influencing people directly on your site. Your sphere of influence is where you’re creating the feelings and associations with your brand. The links and search results will help with your brand recognition, though until you have a lot of both, your recognition will remain low and you still need someone to visit your site before they form an opinion of your brand.

You can continue along the path set out above for awhile, slowly building links to your pages and hoping others start to notice your content and link to on their own. As you build more pages and gather more links you start to pick up more traffic through search results. Little by little your brand recognition grows. It’s a slow process and it’s easy to run out of ideas on how to build more links into your site.

Enter Social Media

Along comes social media and you hear about all the traffic some have gained when their content goes popular for a time. You know you have good content and you’ve heard how linkbait, especially when combined with social media, is the road to quickly gaining hundreds or even thousands of links to your content.

The image above might be where you are in your thinking about social media. Your specific thoughts about social media marketing may very well come from this image. Your site with some links in and nearby the big social media sites that have the potential to send more traffic and links your way than anything you’ve seen before.

Most of the talk around marketing through sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us is about how to get your content to go popular. It’s about how to write titles that get dugg or how to make your content more bookmarkable. You’ve probably read about building networks of friends who can help push your content to the front page and building a power profile so content you submit has a greater chance of going popular. All fine and good tactics. Nothing in this post will advise against finding ways to get social media to send you traffic, but notice how the end goal is to get social sites to send the web to you.

Now lets look at things from a different direction.

Giving Yourself To The Web

Everything above has been about bringing the web to you. It’s been about finding ways to pull people into your site where you then convince them to buy something or contact you about your services or subscribe to your blog or any other conversion your hoping to achieve on your site. It’s been about bringing people to you so they can form associations about your brand and recognize your brand in the future.

The image below is the beginning of another picture of your site, your brand, and social media. As with the images above your site sits on the left with links flowing in. I’ve removed the web around your site to simplify the image, but in concept it’s still be there. To the right once again are the social media sites. The green rectangles inside represent your social media profiles. You can see there’s also a bright red circle around your profiles, because these too are now part of your sphere of influence.

With social media you’re not confined to influencing people on your site. The content you submit and the comments you make all have the power to influence someone and they also lead to associations forming about you and your brand. An important part of building your brand is to present a consistent public profile. If you want to be seen as open and friendly it’s best not to engage in flame wars on a public forum. The message you send becomes inconsistent and confuses your brand.

Think about the profiles you’re currently building. What do they say about you? Are they consistent with what you say about yourself on your site? Are they consistent with what others say about you? If your profile contains 10 pages of content you’ve submitted all pointing back to your site how do you think that reflects on your brand? If you continuously submit content you wouldn’t genuinely recommend so that the owner of that content will submit yours what does that say about the quality of your recommendations? If the content you recommend is garbage why should I think your advice will be any better?

Are you building your brand with your social media profiles or have your social media profiles become spam.

Growing Your Social Media Brand

You grow your brand on social media by becoming an active participant in the community, making intelligent comments and recommendations, and being a good citizen as defined by the community. As you do others will encounter your profile more and perhaps add you to their network of friends. If you’ve recommended great content in the past it’s natural to think you will again. The more you add to the community the more influence you have over over the community.

Another less obvious way to grow your brand on social media is to link to your profiles. The same way links to your site provide more entry points to your content and more search traffic, links also provide more entry points and search traffic to your social media brand.

Early in the year some were asking the question should Google include pages from Digg in search results?. The issue revolved around the idea that Digg was only presenting a snippet from the main content and why should Digg get the traffic instead of it going directly to the original site. One point in the issue is that the originating site might not have the authority to get the content ranked. Digg does have that authority and in a sense provides an entry point for content that might not otherwise have been able to draw traffic. Digg allows your content to ride it’s back in search results.

Notice in the image above I’ve added links into your social media profiles, which causes them to grow increasing your sphere of influence within the social media site. Your own site might not have the authority to rank a page for a given query, but your social media profile might be able to rank for that query.

While looking for a post on YOUmoz earlier I searched for ‘branding youmoz’ (no quotes) and found something interesting. A page from my del.icio.us profile is ranking 6th on Google and 4th on Yahoo. My profile also ranks #1 in Google for the phrase ‘my del.icio.us profile’ since I generally link to it with that anchor text in my This Week In SEO posts. Neither of the above phrases is particularly useful, but I hope you can see the potential for generating traffic to social media profiles.

The image above is showing everything tied together. You have your site with incoming links from the greater interconnected web around you and you have your social media sites also with incoming links from the web. Your site and your profiles are connecting sending traffic to and from each other and search engines are driving traffic to your brand in different locations.

In then end it doesn’t really matter where someone first encounters you. Many of my clients found me after a search engine sent them to one of my forum posts. The post promoted my brand and created positive associations that led to a call or an email. By posting consistently with the image of your brand you can reinforce the feelings your brand instills in people. By riding the authority of social media sites you can grow your sphere of influence and increase the recognition of your brand.

A couple of days ago I asked if MyBlogLog was still relevant to the SEO community. The response to the question was pretty much as expected with people not really using MBL as much as they might have a few months ago. I still use the site and thought I’d explain why I still log and and out of MyBlogLog most days and how I see it as beneficial for my blog.

You can tell from the title of this post how I use MyBlogLog, but before getting to the how and why let me point you to David’s comment from my previous post.

I too have fallen away off the MyBlogLog bandwagon even though I was an advocate before. I have too many communities (no way to sort and group as far as I can tell). Also has gotten very spammy with people’s comments; come see my blog, yet the don’t even look at mine.

I agree completely with David’s assessment. There isn’t any good way to sort through your communities or the communities of others. The same can be said for your friends and the friends of others. The only way I can see to look through either is to display them all and check them out one by one. I also agree about the spammy comments. I don’t need to see people pushing their site at me without at least taking the time to visit here. It’s spam pure and simple.

In another comment from the previous post Kristine brought up the traffic MBL may send

As to whether or not it brings me traffic, that’s hard to say. I’d say it probably hasn’t done a whole lot, but I’m not really sure what would be better.

MyBlogLog doesn’t send a lot of traffic here either Kristine. Here are the numbers for the year.

Assuming I haven’t forgotten the basic math I learned in elementary school that’s a 118 visits in almost 9 months or about 13 visits a month. Hardly worth writing about. Admittedly I’ve never promoted myself much through the MyBlogLog. I’ve seen others mention they receive a lot more traffic through MBL than I have and I suspect if I was so inclined I could increase the numbers above. I’ve never been all that inclined, though.

My guess is most people see MyBlogLog the same way David and Kristine do. MBL doesn’t really foster community and for me at least it’s not driving meaningful traffic.

Branding Your Blog With A Cookie

There is one way I think MyBlogLog provides benefit. It can be used as an aid to branding your blog. There are two main components of branding.

1. The associations people make with your name
2. The reach of those associations

MyBlog Log isn’t going to help much with the former, but it’s easy enough to use to help with the latter. Every day before my usual travels through the blogosphere I log in to MBL and back out. I log in to get the cookie from the site that tracks my travels. I log in only because I delete the cookie later in the day when I no longer feel like being tracked and need to grab it anew.

While I’m there I do look at who visited recently and check the stats quick, but the main reason for logging in is to get a cookie. All told the time spent is less than a minute and I could reduce that time to nothing, by holding on to the cookie at the end of the day.

You still see a large number of blogs using the recent visitors widget. Not as many as you saw six months ago, but the widget is still commonly present. I think about half the blogs I visit daily are using it. As long as you visit a blog with the MBL cookie your avatar will appear in the widget. Every time it does is another opportunity for someone to notice you.

I don’t know how you would track your avatar recognition, but I can tell you I notice them. When I see the same avatar a few times I get curious and while I won’t often click back to MyBlogLog the avatar does make an impression. I’ve noticed that same avatar in forum posts and in the bio on blog posts. I do end up paying more attention to the forum and blog posts once the avatar has made an impression on me. There are even a few blogs calling me a subscriber that first came to my attention through a MyBlogLog avatar. I suspect there are others with the same experience.

Some blogs will also display your avatar next to your comment should you leave one on a post. It’s another way to connect the avatar to your thoughts and to you.

As a blogger I tend to notice the avatars of the people visiting here. When MyBlogLog had more buzz a few months ago Michael Jensen of Solo SEO created The Missing MyBlogLog Tools to get more out of the site. Periodically I use the Show All Visitors tool to see who’s visited my blog recently.

Not everyone who visits your blog regularly will comment. Being able to see who’s visiting through the avatars can give you some added information about your readers. I do pay attention to who visits and have been thinking of some way to thank those people to let them know I appreciate the time they spend here. Without MyBlogLog I would have no way of knowing some of the people who are visiting.

Besides regular readers you can use the recent visitor widget to see if someone visits when you link to them. Most bloggers will usually follow a link back to your site, but the avatar helps show who does and even how quickly. If part of the reason you linked to someone was to try to get their attention here’s one more way you can measure your success.

Many of us know each other only through our avatars. How many people do you come into contact each day that you’ve never met in person? When you think of them what image comes to mind? Is it their avatar? MyBlogLog gives you a chance to get that avatar in front of more people. And when you consider the minimal amount of effort you have to spend to make that happen it makes sense to me to log into MyBlogLog regularly.

Suggestions For Improving MyBlogLog

I’ll be the first to say I find little on the MyBlogLog site itself to keep me logged in for any length of time. From the first the site came across as most people there were far more interested in promoting themselves than they were in connecting with other blogs or bloggers. The site doesn’t really make it all that easy to find blogs you might be interested in or connect with others in any meaningful way.

If Yahoo is smart they would change that and make it easy and fun for people to interact with each other on the site. There are more than enough social networking sites for Yahoo to use as an example. Bloggers are a conversational group by nature. It’s what we do and if you give us better tools to connect with each other it’s likely we will.

MyBlogLog could add better search features and better ways to organize communities. Maybe a way to search individual posts instead of only members and communities. How about something as simple as a tag cloud to view communities?

I’d like to see more ranking of blogs. Instead of displaying the communities you’ve joined randomly in your profile why not display them in the order you visit most or which you spend the most time visiting? Why not display the members of a community the same way? Whoever visits a particular blog the most has their avatar showing as the first under that community.

More prominence and more visibility should lead to more clicks and more traffic. Bloggers are friendly, but we’re also competitive. If spending more time on your blog means I have a better chance of getting people to visit my blog I’ll probably spend more time on yours. Besides a MyBlogLog algorithm gives us one more algorithm to try to figure out and talk about and teach each other about. Think of all that publicity for MyBlogLog.

Why not offer the the pro stats for free. Yahoo would profit more from all of us checking our stats than they likely do now from getting a few to pay for them. Yahoo have you noticed how Google gives everything away for free? Have you noticed how that keeps more people tied to using Google’s search engine?

How about opening up the site to developers. Does MyBlogLog have an API? If not why? Give developers a way to improve the site and they will. Look what it’s doing for Facebook. Since the majority of MyBlogLog members have blogs why not offer a way to find guest bloggers or guest blogging gigs?

I agree that MyBlogLog has lost whatever cachet they once had. I’m surprised it’s dropped so low on the radar, but I’m not surprised it’s dropped. I still think MyBlogLog has potential for bloggers to extend the reach of their brand, though that will dwindle if MyBlogLog loses more of its user base. Hopefully Yahoo will begin to make improvements to the site now that it’s been integrated with Yahoo IDs. Yahoo is not winning the search war, but they do have enough social properties to keep people on Yahoo.

Do you think MyBlogLog can attract the community back? What would you like to see them do? How would you like to see MyBlogLog integrated with other Yahoo properties?