Early adoption window: SchoolFeed

Perchance to dream.

I love when new social networks ramp up. there's always a window where you can really gain from using whatever social connectivity they build in. The problem with the whole social thing is once something is popular there's the TMI problem and the value of your post is too watered down (For me anyways) to reach the masses.

The same thing happens with PPC advertising. Once Google dominated the market, Google AdWords became useless unless you have a Wal-Mart sized budget. Right now you get way more bang for your buck out Microsoft Ad Center.

I suspect the same thing will happen with Groupon and those avenues also. But as i digress, I must digress and remind how often i digress....

But i Digress.....


So what were we talking about?? Oh Yeah The window of opportunity on new social networks. So there's this new thing going around, probably seen the notices on facebook. One of the many "Bring me back to High School" Websites. This one is called SchoolFeed.

Schoolfeed is better than the rest i must say. In shorter time it's been more meaningful than the rest. Here's where you want to capitalize: The interests selections. This plugs you into "feeds" based on your interest selection. Well if you happen to be marketing something, do it here. The feeds are new, unpopulated (relatively speaking) and currently the social connections are configured so that total strangers with similar interests see your posts.

I also run a new little side thing called Roving Recordings that was bourne out of my love for the live local music scene and videotaping it.

so any-who I have posted not even three videos to schoolfeed.com and i am getting interest from people all over the country. Now that's meaningful!

Just a heads up. As this takes off the value of the feed will go down.

Labels: http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

posted by Adam Signore @ 1:01 PM 0 Comments

The declining value of a "Like", Rising value of a "share"

There has always been a hierarchy to Facebook's viral aspect:

1. Getting a comment - This was great as it automatically did two things
• Posted your fan page status on that persons wall
• WHILE creating discussion
2. Getting a share, which posts to all their friends without discussion
3. Getting a like, which essentially did the same thing, minus a little multimedia
   

With the recent layout changes that include the real time activity box on your upper right hand side of your wall, the like which really only appears there, has been pushed down even further. Essentially for a like to have value all the "likers" friends would really need to be looking at that box at the same time for it's existence is short lived. The stream of activity pushes it to an quick grave much the same way the twitter stream will.

I officially declare the like dead, but that may be premature.

All that said I will reiterate something that is always open for discussion: Share or comment. I say comment because, hey facebook is social, social is discussion and discussions are interesting.

So as always, try to post in a way that elicits comments! (Why people often use inflammatory statements to get the ball rolling).

A short post today. Get over it!

posted by Adam Signore @ 7:10 AM 0 Comments

Link Juice, The most important meal of the day.

The juice behind SEO and an oft missed opportunity (for some).

In a phrase: Inbound links
AKA: Link Love, Link Juice, etc.

What is that you might say?? Well put simply it is when someone links to your website.

Sounds simple enough but of course these days nothing ever is. Here's a little old school info about a method of getting inbound links that has zero value (if not negative value).


Are you a website owner who has gotten an email from redeem_points_peggy@mail.ru saying something like:


Hey if you put link to my website on your website I'll do the same?


Personally I am hoping the answer is no but my hopes have been getting crushed for years so why start being correct now.


Back in the old days a link trade worked as Search Engines would infer your websites value by simply counted the links pointing to your website. This laid rise to the "Link Farm" where a savvy website owner could buy them pesky inbound links.


Well it didn't take long for the Search Engines to figure out the game and since then it's really been about the quality of the inbound link. Now to finish up on the link exchange scenario with a little math:

1. You have a "valued" website, the exchange requester has a "valued" website: End result = Juice sort of cancels out.
2. You have a "greater valued" website, the exchange requester has a "less valued" website: end result = Juice sort of flows downhill to them.
3. You have a "less valued" website, the exchange requester has a "greater valued" website: end result = Juice sort of flows downhill to YOU.

Quiz time: What types of websites do you want to get an inbound link from???

OK, that was so easy i won't even answer the question, but obviously you might be asking what types of websites have the best value?

Well there's generally an accepted list (in quasi order):

• Education Institutions (i.e. Dot edu)
• Established news outlets (local news/newspaper websites too!)
• Established blogs
  
• Established Wiki sites (ding!)
  
• Established Press Release services
• Other websites that are influential on your "Topic"
• Any website that is not a link farm, spam source, adult content, etc.
  

So how do you get an inbound link from these sites, well that's not such an easy question to answer. But here goes:

You can always contact website owners and request a link, but I think you can see a couple issues here:

• People are pretty busy and you can imagine this request will go over like the Hindenburg. I mean seriously what's in it for them??
  
• You might get somewhere but you'll surely get a reciprocal request (See math above)

Pay for a link:

• Welcome to my boom stick! Google and company are pretty good at figuring out what these are and it can potentially have a negative impact.

And the best is always saved for last. Create compelling content:

• This will make others in your industry stand up and take notice. They naturally want to link to you because it's also good for them. But it is a difficult, long road to hoe but reaps the real rewards.

OK, so I'm sure by now you are wondering where is this oft missed opportunity you speak of????

Well it's an opportunity that comes easier to some than others but in my years of experience it is almost always missed by all. If your lucky enough to have an dot edu or established news outlet contact you to do an article on your recent art exhibit, by all means do the interview but press (pun intended) for a link back to your main (or desired) web property. Press hard. Say "It's really important to Adam" if you must.

Dohhhh alert:

Be savvy about the link back you request for. If you are an artist, musician, author, who has multiple internet properties (or a single website with sections) make sure to link back to the correct one. Especially if you are linking back to a single website. Don't just link to your homepage. The ADD web surfer gets easily lost and you want to help them find relevant stuff!

But you want to know something cool! Sure you do. Well the search engines can be thought of as an ADD web surfer (sort of). They categorize your website content by topic (which makes multi topic websites harder to SEO) and these link back might help them know you that much better and hook you up better (i.e. RANK HIGHER) for those juicy search terms that you should be already optimized for.

Schools out. Have a nice vaca kiddies!

Labels: inbound links, link back, link farm, link Juice, link love, SEO

posted by Adam Signore @ 6:51 AM 0 Comments

Facebook changes and the brave new lie of Social Media Marketing

It's now Friday 9/23/11 and we've all been buzzing about recent and planned changes at Facebook.

I've been keenly watching as these changes affect me directly, but I'm also enthralled to see how Facebook will annoy people. Blah Blah Blah. We've beat that to death.

Well today a former co-worker posted a link to an interesting article about one proposed change. It is on slate.com and called "Not sharing is caring". Great read on how Facebook is going to take away the meaningfulness of you "share". While that is a travesty for the users of facebook, I mean think of it: Everything you do being shared by default. Where's the value in your vote, gone i tell you... gone. R.I.P. like button.


This change has a great impact for facebook and a not so great impact for Social Media Marketers though. But you can count your chickens on this for some time to come: The act of going viral just got a whole lot easier!

OR DID IT???????

Actually it has gotten only more difficult (to track that is). What has gotten easier is the appearance of going viral. For the forced share, for some time to come, will give a leg up to the impressions your content gets.

Let's digress for a moment. Impressions are a one sided metric that most people judge incorrectly. while we are all happy to get 14 million zillion impressions, it doesn't really tell us how many people were compelled to act on our content. See the difference (Thanks Vince!)

So in days of old, a share happened because a person liked your content enough to be compelled to share it. The impressions created under this model were a valuable vote.

In this brave new world an impression will happen because you have a catchy title or tagline. What a user does with that impression is less likely to be understood and calculated. The value of an already one sided metric has gone down immensely. anyways, hopefully you are following other metrics to make sure a potential follows through the funnel to the intended goal.

Now I'm sounding the alarm and it may not all go down this way, but seems to me that for a while anyways we'll have a whole lot of meaningless "Going Viral" going on!

Labels: facebook, like button, share, social media marketing, viral, zuckerberg

posted by Adam Signore @ 8:21 AM 0 Comments

Is Google Dead?

posted by adam @ 6:56 AM 0 Comments

Untangling Social Media Connectivity Part 2

This is a follow up to a post called: "Untangling Social Media Bridge Services". That post's name being a meager attempt by your humble narrator to coin a new industry phrase. Oh well.

Well things have certainly come a long way since then and i have essentially been able to consolidate all those services via one pretty spiffy app called Hootsuite:





In one convenient place I can now take my Blog's rss feed (and my clients blog rss feeds) and pipe them to any social media properties I or my clients have. Here's a list of benefits:

• Replace Twitterfeed for rss distribution
  
• Replace Twuffer for tweet & fan page scheduling
• Don't need to logout and login to manage multiple client social media properties.
• for small monthly fee ($5.95) I can manage an unlimited number of feeds and profiles through a Pro account.
  
• Also links into MySpace, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc.
• Allows for unlimited configuring of connections between feeds/social profiles so i am configuring all my clients in one interface. Set it and forget it!
• The Pro account will also hitch up with Google Analytics for better metrics.

I could go on but i think you get the idea. I would say that the only drawback is that the interface can get a little overwhelming when you have a bunch of different clients loaded up but if your only managing one biz's social presence than this is not an issue.

I highly recommend it!

P.S. for nice consolidation of activity on all your social media outlets, check out Nutshell Mail.

Labels: facebook, social marketing, social media, twitter, twitterfeed, twuffer

posted by Adam Signore @ 12:23 PM 0 Comments

Facebook Page Owners, Your pages will be a changing!

Here Ye, Here Ye!

Well this probably isn't the biggest news around but Facebook will be forcing Fan Pages into the new Profile view layout. Like the proverbial square peg. Not really that bad but if your a fan of the Tabs at the top of the page get ready to suck it up.

There's actually some good points, new features and per Facebook mandate a whole bunch of Buggy items. Ah we do so love programming in the Facebook API, it's like the wild west. There's a new sheriff in town and his name is Reggie Zuckerberg! But per my mandate, I do digress.

Here's what we see as ultimately cool about the changes:

• FB did seem to listen and in the new layout are still allowing a default landing page. Important news for biz's that brand their page for new fans. But per the FB bug mandate on a few of my pages some tabs (now links under the logo image) do not show up in the list. History has shown that in a few weeks they'll just be there.
• The new layout is nice and looks like profiles allowing for recent images to be prominently displayed at the top.
• Custom App's that define a avatar for the App get a nice FavIcon style link in the new layout.
• As of yet though, the continued support for FBML App don't have a way to customize the FavIcon for the link. You get the ugly <> representation next to the link text. How bogus (and not an issue w/beloved Tabs). There may be a way to do this, more to come.
• The new "Use facebook as" feature.

That's right folks, you can now post to a FB user as your Fan Page! This is a pretty cool new feature. Look for it on the upper right side of the page under the Admins Facepile.

As someone who is doing a lot of custom facebook app development I am glad that we can easily brand the custom links for our app's.

It is quite important for Fan Pages to be able to highlight custom content to their fans. Custom content makes one fan page stand out over another.



Click to enlarge

Overall this is what i'd call one of the least painful forced changes that has come down the pike. I can certainly understand your imense trepidation about the upcoming changes but I'd say relax and go with the flow on this one.

Like you have a choice anyway (Check your page after 03/12/2011).

Not!

posted by Adam Signore @ 11:08 AM 0 Comments