Social Media Primer

There is a big push right now for internet marketers to engage in social media. I agree it is very important (and will eventually become a requirement to be competitive) but it should be done cautiously and probably with the help of people who are familiar with the social media culture.

Compared to traditional branding, social media moves like lightening. A misstep can reshape your brand in a matter of hours. And the old all highly positive BS that is acceptable in traditional marketing doesn’t fly here. If you or your boss is one of those who fears adding reviews and ratings to your site because a product might get a bad review, don’t wade any deeper into social media.

Like with reviews if it is presented too positively people will assume it’s fake. A realistic engagement, to the point of being a bit gritty perhaps, is often required. In social media you need to be real. You need to let people see some of the blemishes. The term that is used now is transparent. There can be some real risks in walking the line between true transparency and brand control. And control is the key here. In social media you have very little Keep in mind mistakes made in social media are not easily retracted.

If you chose to engage in social media you will need to monitor the space constantly. You will need to have Google alerts set up for all branded terms as a minimum and there are other monitoring services available.

Everyone in marketing will eventually need to be involved with social media but be very careful. Venture in slowly and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Stay Engaged All Across The Web

I was just writing an answer to an SEO question at LinkedIn and I thought it would be relevant here. So here it is…

The crucial thing to do is stay engaged all across the web. If you (and hopefully your employees) are interacting online with forums, blogs, answer sites, social bookmarking, press releases, social media, etc. then you are getting links (hopefully with relevant anchor text) into all the right places. But it has to be real…

The SEO Tip To Judge All SEO Tips By

This may seem ridiculously simplistic but here goes…Be Sure It’s Natural.

By natural I mean it should be done, or at least look like it has been done, by people for people without any regard for search engines.

From my very first experiences with search engine optimization I watched people try to trick their way to the top of the rankings. In the beginning it was things like keyword stuffing. But it didn’t look natural. It was obvious to me even then that if the SEO tactic looked like an SEO tactic it wouldn’t last in the SERPs. The problem with obvious black hat tactics isn’t that they are immoral. Google isn’t handing down stone tablets. The problem is that any tactics that search engines consider black hat are tactics they will be tweaking their algorithms to eliminate or penalize. When you use obviously marginal tactics you are painting a target on your web site. Even if they work initially they are guaranteed to be short lived.

Whether it is internal linking structure, site content generation, external inbound links, social media, or anything else search engines start to value for ranking purposes, it has to look natural.

I will give more specific examples in future posts.