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I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools.

The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include:  Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.

Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:

“Tools are only as effective as the expertise of the person using them.”

I think that’s an important perspective, because some online marketers use a small handful of tools but their expertise is very deep. Therefore, they get a tremendous amount of productivity from them. Others use many, many tools without deep expertise in anyone area and as a result, effectiveness may be lacking. Once you find a handful of tools that work for you, get really, really good at using them. At the same time, always be open to trying new tools as they come along.

Ok, let’s start off with SEO Tools:

1. RedFly GoogleGlobal Firefox & Chrome Extension – See SERPs in other countries
2. Netcraft - Hosting, DNS, site uptime and many other features
3. MajesticSEO – Link tracking, research and analysis. Export links by country code (TopRank uses MajesticSEO
4. Copyscape – Find copies of your content elsewhere on the web to avoid duplicate content issues
5. Google Webmaster Tools – How does Googlebot interact with your website. Check for crawl errors that could affect inclusion and ranking of your content
6. Firebug – Firefox extension for reviewing code, look for hidden text issues that could affect search engine penalties
7.  Google Page Speed - Check the load time of your web pages. Slow loading pages are not your friend and certainly nothing Google will reward you for
8. Pingdom – Monitor uptime of your website. If your website is down neither customers or search engines can get to it.
9. Xenu Linksleuth or Screaming Frog to spider your website
10. Open Site Explorer – Download data and segment anchor text for identifying good/bad inbound links
11. KISSinsights – Find sales objections and test them with a super short survey
12. Fivesecondtest – Show an image and see what people think of it. Analyzes most prominent areas of your design
13. Google Website Optimizer - A/B test your page designs
14. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Official keyword research tool from Google
15. Spyfu – Perform competitive PPC and SEO keyword research
16. Alexa - Wide range of traffic and keyword information about websites
17. SEMRush – Get competitive SEO and PPC keyword information on websites found on Google.com and many other country domains
18. KeywordSpy - Keyword research tool
19. Wordtracker - Keyword research tool
20. Wordstream – Keyword research tool
21. Keyword Discovery – Keyword research tool
22. Socialmention – Social search tool allows you to download to csv file of social keywords and influences that you can pivot to see what what kinds of mentions are you getting, on what kinds of social media sites and how it compares to the competition.
23. Analytics SEO – page load time, pages indexed, ranking overview, reveal potential keywords, next opportunity keywords, reporting.
24. Sistrix toolbox – Tracks PageRank over time, ranking, position, search volume, traffic index
25. Searchmetrics Essentials - Suite of SEO and social media tracking tools
26. GTmetrix - Compare multiple sites for their page download speed
27. Link Research Tools – Link research and profiling tools
28. Keyword Density - DaveN tool providing a wide variety of data points about a website according to a specific keyword phrases
29. maxmind – Geographic ip detection down to the city level
30. wipmania – Geographic ip location tool

Social Media Automation Tools (Some are a bit Grayhat SEO)

1. Evri – Social content aggregator
2. Trapit – Topical news aggregator that leans your preferences with AI
3. Strawberryjam – Shows the links your social network shares the most
4. ifttt – Rules based automation of actions through social channels/media sites
5. Paper.li – Crawls links contained within RSS feeds, Twitter lists you supply and creates an online newspaper that auto-tweets the most popular twitter handles that share
6. Pearltrees.com – Tool for aggregating content and sharing content with a rich visual interface
7. Tweetguru Multi – DM up to 12 people on Twitter at the same time
8. RSS Graffiti - Pull in RSS data feeds into a Facebook page automatically
9. Tweetadder – Auto follows people on Twitter (um, kinda spammy no?)
10. Socialoomph – Schedule social content and status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
11. dlvr.it - Takes a RSS feed, filters content based on rules and publishes to Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
12. Odesk – Not a tool but a resource to outsource redundant tasks. Use for research, writing small content, etc.
13. Socialenhancer – In beta: Auto reply to tweets by keyword. Export followers for analysis
14. Tweetdeck – Twitter management tool
15. Hootsuite – Twitter, Facebook and other social channels management tool

There you go. I hope you find these tools useful. Some are quite old and some are new. Some are a bit iffy in terms of being more mechanical than meaningful for social engagement. Take care when checking them out. Tools can be a bit of a time suck so think about what your goals are, what tasks do you want to achieve. Look at these sites if you have time or ask other SEO and Social SEO professionals about them to decide what you want to try or test out.

What are some of your favorite SEO tools? What tools do you use to improve efficiency and automate redundant tasks when it comes to Social SEO actions? Would you like to see us do more reviews of tools?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | 45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon | http://www.toprankblog.com

I thought I was sooooo clever. To promote our upcoming PBI Boston Conference, I had the perfect theme...the absolute anthem…the killer headline. It read: Please come to Boston for the springtime. Up it went on our office whiteboard....

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The addition of digital agency services is something that every local media company should consider in 2012. - “The Local Digital Ad Agency: Emerging Opportunity for Innovative Media Companies,” the Local Media Innovation Alliance, December...

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If your social business designs reach beyond getting quick marketing hits, this point cannot be over-emphasized.

Your ultimate objective is not the “like”.

The end destination is not for someone to follow your page on Twitter or on Google+. It is not for your employees to fill out their profile on the company social network. It is not to add people’s LinkedIn profiles to your CRM system and call it social. It is not to get people to click the link and read your blog post, believe it or not.

Those are mechanisms that further your business objectives. They’re the supporting goals and tactics that absolutely must tie into the big picture to be worth a salt, and they are not the big picture in and of themselves.

Do you see the difference?

I’m surprised I’m still writing posts like this, and it’s nothing that hasn’t been said before, truthfully. So why am I bothering?

This is the kind of thinking that’s fundamentally dismantling conversations that could be taking social business discussions so much deeper, making them agnostic to the ever-changing media and adaptable to an evolving business model. Our love for and easy focus on the quick, visible click so quickly thwarts conversations that can and should be talking about much more foundational concepts: building a social layer into our entire business based on the intent to improve communication and collaboration across the board.

It’s also why contests as incentives to participation – i.e. “like our page for a chance to win a $500 gift certificate!” or “fill out your company network profile to win a Panera card” – so often end as suddenly as they begin, and cause the “this social media thing doesn’t get any return” comments. You’ll get a flood of participation that gets you excited, until it dies. They’re cheap highs, designed to give you the illusion that you’re heading somewhere with blinding momentum, yet most businesses are still lacking a fundamental vision of where “somewhere” really is.

If your business planning and discussions start with the “why” behind your desire to be a more social organization and focus on how social can and should enable every aspect of your business, ultimately if a goal becomes getting more attention for your Facebook page, you’ll understand the driving purpose behind it and have a plan for keeping those contest entrants connected after the fact. (If you’re *really* smart, you’re going to create a campaign that’s designed around prospect profile and not just a spike in eyeball volume, but that’s another post).

All of the presence tools are the visible tip of what should be a deep and broad social iceberg under your company’s surface.

And if they aren’t? If the discussions we’re having in our company or with our clients are about “how do we get more likes?” and we aren’t diplomatically but firmly explaining why that’s the wrong focus for social initiatives and insisting that a valuable program must start with a different conversation, we become part of the problem.

The maturity of social business is about a return to sound strategic principles while adapting to the implications and opportunities that accompany a more open and connected way of working, inside and out. A realization of those values is the end state. The tools are just one (small) part of the means.

When we are courageous enough to insist on those priorities, in that order, the picture of successfully social companies will become much clearer indeed.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Social Business: Far Beyond The Like

THE BOOZE BIN

 By Laura Petrosky (@aushunmon)

 Skinnygirl, the ready-to-drink, low-calorie cocktail brand from ex-Real Housewives of New York reality star Bethenny Frankel, is introducing its first low-calorie wines to the U.S. in March. After selling 595,000 cases of the brand’s margarita, sangria and white cranberry cosmo last year, Beam Global Spirits & Wine (who bought the brand from Frankel) is planning to leave a not-so-skinny impact on the wine market.

With an initial production of 200,000 cases, three low-calorie California wine blends (including a red blend made primarily with Syrah, a white blend made primarily from Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio, and a rosé blend featuring Grenache and Syrah) priced at $15 each will target the fitness- and health-conscious female wine drinker. The market is there: Women buy roughly 80 percent of “everyday” wines, while they only make up about 60 percent of wine drinkers. And the brand promise is enticing: Merely 100 calories for a five ounce pour of Skinnygirl wine.

 

Beverage marketers have long known that even peeps who watch their waist size want to have a good time. When was the last time you walked into a bar and could not order a light beer or a skinny cocktail? Even marketing wine as a lower-calorie option is not new – most glasses of wine only contain 125-150 calories, per say. Clever marketers such as beverage giant Diageo capitalized on this when they noticed an uptick in consumer interest in healthier beverage choices without actually changing their winemaking styles. After a new ruling by the U.S. government in 2004 allowed beverage makers to place information about calorie and carbohydrate content on its back labels, Diageo started to market its high-volume BV Coastal, Sterling Vintners Collection and Century Cellars brands as “low-carb.”

Moscato, a grape variety naturally low in alcohol content, has become increasingly popular for its lower calorie count compared to its taste or food-friendliness. Numbers don’t lie: In 2011, Moscato achieved by far the largest year-on-year gain in U.S. wine sales, up 73 percent in value and volume compared to 2010.

 Highlighting an existing product feature because it fits into a current lifestyle trend is one thing, but tweaking the product to fit the demand is different. Many American winemakers and marketers have reported an increased interest in wines in the 11-12 percent range, as opposed to 15-16 percent. That’s why, in 2004, Napa Valley’s Beringer Blass Wine Estates launched White Lie Early Season Chardonnay, the first reduced-calorie wine from a major vintner since the 1980s. By harvesting grapes early in the season, they were able to control their sugar content.

 And now there’s Skinnygirl. As a consumer, I applaud more variety to choose from. As a wine lover, however, I hope that people will continue to choose wine based on taste, not calories. The craftsmanship that goes into producing a stellar bottle of wine is too important to ignore just because one glass of vino has 125 calories compared to another that has 100. When it comes down to it, omit something else from your diet – like dessert – and still indulge in that great bottle of wine.

 Images courtesy of CelebrityChatta, Eater, RedOrbit.

One of the keys to growth is finding new applications or new ways of helping customers achieve their goals. All of this begins with having a strategic conversation with your customers about their goals, challenges, and opportunities. Digital print...

If you need to find out how your audience is receiving your work, it's worth considering how you've structured the interactions around criticism. Sometimes a customer has a one-off problem, a situation that is unique and a concern that has to be extinguished on the spot. More often, though, that feedback you're getting represents the way a hundred or a thousand other customers are also judging you.

Some random ideas:

• If you defend yourself to the customer, quickly explaining precisely why the policy is the way it is, why the product is the way it is, you are pushing the criticizer away because you're telling them they're wrong about their opinion. And they might indeed be wrong, but it's certainly not going to encourage more feedback.
• If your front line people restate the criticism in their own words and are grateful to the customer for sharing it, everyone will benefit. You can always choose to ignore the input later.
• If there's no way for your staff to easily send the criticism up the hierarchy, it dies before it reaches someone who can do something about it.
• If senior people follow up with the customer with specific acknowledgment and thanks, you multiply the benefits.

Not every company needs to do this right to succeed (Apple succeeds and does not one of these things--and as far as I know, Bob Dylan is in the same camp), but if you believe you can benefit from a cycle of feedback, it's worth a try.

Back in November, I launched Paul Castain’s Social Networking Playbook which is a 90 page social networking E-Book I put up for sale here on my website. While I sold quite a few . . . the sale of the E-Book wasn’t the pay off! That was never...

The Academy Awards are considered to be one of the biggest entertainment draws of the year, sometimes called the “Super Bowl for Women.” True, female ratings have been down. Overall ratings too. Last year’s viewership was down about 10% from the year prior. And they haven’t been doing all that well with those yearned-for younger viewers either.

As to that last point, last year the Academy went with the youngest co-hosts in its history – Anne Hathaway and James Franco – who received very bad reviews and didn’t bring in the younger, hipper viewers, who, one can only suppose, were supposed to have identified with them. The Academy was going with Eddie Murphy this year, but he bailed and Billy Crystal stepped in. Well, what can you say about that choice? Mr. Crystal, a 9-time host, can entertain with the best of them. But he’s 63 so not precisely a poster child for that coveted 18 – 34 year engagement Madison Avenue’s always looking for.

Which brings us to Brand Keys annual Academy Awards Engagement study. The way we approach the business, “entertainment” and “engagement” are two, very different things. Just like movies and advertising are two different things. One is there just to entertain. The other is there to convince viewers to behave positively toward the brand in the ad. You know, buy something. At the very least think better of the brand. Not to just sit there and laugh or be amazed at blue-screen special effects. In these days of fragmented media and titanium-strength consumer gate-keeping, this has become something of a tough assignment.

Attaining real brand engagement is more than just identifying an audience and blasting funny/exciting/sexy commercials at them. You don’t want to know they were just amused, you want to know they were engaged. And much as some marketers would like to believe it, the Academy Awards has not yet reached the lofty Super Bowl heights where people tune in to see what the advertisers are doing as much as for the show itself. No, people tune in to the Academy Awards for the 5-W’s: who’s wearing what and who wins! So it really is more important to know if your $1.7 million for that 30-second spot was a good investment.

We do that by using a validated process to fuse emotional and rational aspects of category and brand, and then quantify how exposure to the advertising caused the viewer to “see” the brand as better meeting the expectations they hold for their category Ideal. You know, see if they were engaged or not, and not just that they saw the commercial. This can be done predictively for virtually anything you can show or tell a respondent, but in this case we were looking at whether the combination of the media environment i.e., the Academy Awards, and the advertised brand created an engaged consumer by measuring if the combination of brand and media platform increased (or decreased) a brand’s equity.

And yes, before the critics start carping, entertainment and engagement are not necessarily mutually-exclusive. But if you’re a marketer and are given your choice between one or the other, you should always vote for “engagement.” Attaining both means not only was your creative top-notch, but your strategy was, as well. And just because a venue seems exciting and has the potential to generate an audience doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand. In fact, last-year-advertisers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Living Social – all brands that ended up on our 2011 “Entertainer” list – are not back for 2012. Coincidence? We don’t think so.

This year’s study was conducted among 1,200 men and women, 18-59 years of age, screened for advertiser category involvement, and who indicated a top-box intent to watch the 84th Academy Awards this Sunday, February 26th. Results for the 14 specific brands reported to be advertising this year were (alphabetically) as follows:

Engagement Winners: Entertainers

American Express Kraft
AT&T JCPenney
Diet Coke McDonald’s
Disney Pictures Met Life
Hyundai Sprint
Paramount Pictures Travelocity
Samsung
Stella-Artois

Anyway, last year – also based upon our predictive engagement assessments – we offered up some odds on who would win the Academy Awards in the “big” categories, and did pretty well. Please note we provide these for entertainment value only. If you’re looking to engage in real bets on the outcomes, you’re on your own. Just like advertisers without engagement metrics.

Best Picture

The Artist 5:1
The Help 7:1
Hugo 8:1
Midnight in Paris 10:1
Moneyball 10:1
The Descendents 11:1
Tree of Life 12:1
War Horse 15:1
Extremely Loud... 20:1

Best Actor

George Clooney 2:1
Jean Dujardin 3:1
Brad Pitt 6:1
Gary Oldman 10:1
Demian Bichir 11:1

Best Actress

Viola Davis 2:1
Meryl Streep 3:1
Michelle Williams 5:1
Glen Close 10:1
Rooney Mara 20:1

Best Supporting Actor

Christopher Plummer 2:1
Max Von Sydow 4:1
Kenneth Branagh 7:1
Jonah Hill 20:1
Nick Nolte 25:1

Best Supporting Actress

Octavia Spencer 2:1
Melissa McCarthy 4:1
Berenice Bejo 5:1
Jessca Chastain 10:1
Janet McTeer 11:1

Best Director

Michel Hazanavicius 3:1
Martin Scorsese 4:1
Woody Allen Gerber 5:1
Terrence Malick 7:1
Alexander Payne 10:1

Good luck to all the nominees and the advertisers, too. Clint Eastwood once noted, “There’s a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven’t. You just do the best you can."

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Robert Passikoff, President, Brand Keys

Sponsored by: The Blake Project, Strategic Brand Consulting

Content marketing is not new.

Brands have been telling stories to attract and retain customers for hundreds of years.  The difference today is that the barriers to entry (content acceptance, talent and technology) no longer exist for brands to get into the publishing arena.

From John Deere to Coca-Cola, the power of story has never been stronger, or more important for brands and its customers.

This History of Content Marketing infographic is based on the Content Marketing World Timeline Video from the Content Marketing Institute. Special thanks to CMI’s creative director Joseph Kalinowski for making this happen.

Sharing information is below.  Feel free to take this infographic and share it at will.

Embed this Infographic Into Your Own Site

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<a href=" http://blog.junta42.com/2012/02/history-content-marketing-infographic/ "> <img src=" http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/CMI_CM_History_medium.jpg " alt=" History of Content Marketing Infographic " title=" History of Content Marketing Infographic " width="620" height="1580" /></a> <br /> <small>Like this infographic? Get more <a href=" http://www.junta42.com/resources/what-is-content-marketing.aspx "> content marketing</a> information from the <a href="http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/">Content Marketing Institute</a>.</small>

Click here for a poster-sized image of this infographic.

The original post is titled The History of Content Marketing [Infographic] – Corporate Storytelling is Not New , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .

When Mike Tyson said, “everybody’s got plans…until they get hit,” everyone knew intuitively what he meant. Simply having a strategy is no guarantee of success.
 
Napoleon had a strategy till the Russian winter exposed its flaws. Pompey had a strategy until Caesar outfoxed him. The best laid plans are often laid asunder by the quirks of an uncertain and uncaring universe.
 
Winning, after all, isn’t a simple matter of merit, but one that is subject to the idiosyncrasies of chance and circumstance. So what to do? How can we pursue a purpose with vigor and meaning when we can never be certain about what fate has in store for us?  Here are six principles that will help guide you on your way.

1. Parsimony

When Steve Jobs came up with the idea for the iPod, it was “1000 songs in your pocket.” Herb Kelleher’s vision for Southwest was to be “THE low cost airline.” The iPod became the most successful consumer product of all time and Southwest has had 38 profitable years in an industry strewn with bankrupcies.

Both are simple, elegant ideas. However, what really made the difference wasn’t the initial conception, but what happened (or didn’t happen afterwards). Jobs and Kelleher understood that subtraction is more powerful than addition.

Jobs didn’t push for a launch date, but waited until a hard drive that could perform the task became available (it took about a year). Kelleher didn’t adopt the tactics of his competitors, even when they were successful, if they would undermine his cost advantage.

In other words, they followed Occam’s Razor, also known as the principle of parsimony, which states that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, don’t add stuff unless you really need to. When in doubt, leave it out!

2. Rigor

The bugbear of strategy is confirmation bias. Once we get an idea in our heads, it tends to stay there. Worse, we’ll tune into information that tends to support it and tune out data that contradicts it. As Solomon Asch showed with his conformity experiments, the problem only gets worse when a group of people believe the same thing.

What’s really essential is to ask, what do I think I know and why do I think I know it. As Richard Feynman once said, “The most important thing is to not fool yourself, because you are the easiest one to fool.”  Don’t believe everything you think.

That’s why it’s always better to do strategy in Excel, rather than PowerPoint. Headlines and snazzy charts might be easier to digest, but they represent opinions, not facts. You can’t test assumptions or apply statistical filters. If you are merely following the zeitgeist, you are really just operating in the dark.

3. Small and Scalable

Great strategies, like great innovations, start out small. They take advantage of one specific phenomenon. Like the fact that data storage efficiency doubles every year (i.e. Dropbox) or that links to a web page imply authority (i.e. Google). True insights are elegant, they tease the greatest possible truth out of the fewest possible statements.

Yet they are not small minded, they have the power to grow. Google’s PageRank wasn’t unique or extraordinary, in fact, many believe Jon Kleinberg’s HITS algorithm, conceived at about the same time, was superior. What made Google great wasn’t the sudden flash of insight, but how they built on it.

So an obscure algorithm eventually became a quest to “organize the world’s information.” A small idea, in fact one that very few people understood at the time, became immeasurably big. Moreover, it did so without losing the kernel out of which it sprung.

4. Disruptive or Sustaining

In his groundbreaking book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen identified two types of innovations, disruptive and sustaining. A disruptive innovation creates a new business model while a sustaining innovation makes an existing model work better.

While every company needs to do a bit of both, it’s crucial to identify which type of innovation is primary for a particular business strategy.

Disruptive technologies don’t work as well by conventional standards, but change the basis of competition. A strategy based on disruptive innovation needs to find a new market among light or non consumers who value different things than existing customers. Research means very little for disruptive strategies.

Sustaining innovations improve performance by conventional standards, but can be vulnerable to changes in the basis of competition. They respond to the needs of existing customers and are therefore heavily dependent on a well researched marketplace.

If you can’t identify what kind of strategy your business is based in, you won’t know which tactics will help you achieve your goals.

5. Adaptation

No industry is static. Every business eventually gets disrupted and successful disruptive technologies become market standards which need to be optimized through sustaining innovations. As the business environment changes, business strategy needs to adapt.

Tim Kastelle makes the point vividly in this post about Kodak. While their industry was being slowly disrupted, they continued to improve their existing products. It wasn’t because they didn’t understand digital photography. In fact, they were pioneers in the technology. Their problem was that they were so focused on their existing customers they failed to recognize a nascent opportunity.

Apple, on the other hand, has become the world’s most valuable company by recognizing when disruptive technologies are ripe for improvement. They didn’t invent the first digital music player, the first smart phone or the first tablet computer, but they came in and made those products a whole lot better.

6. Organizational Viability

In every industry there are highly successful companies with widely divergent strategies. Coke and Pepsi, Microsoft and Apple, Fox and CNN. While a company’s history doesn’t determine its future, it does determine how a strategy can be introduced.

When IBM decided to make the PC, they understood that it would die in their organization. A business based on manufacturing and selling large ticket items to major corporations just isn’t set up to build consumer products.  

Understanding the dilemma, IBM’s management moved development of the PC to a new design unit in Boca Raton, Florida. There, they did things that would have been an anathema to the old organization.  

They used “off the shelf” components rather than designing everything themselves and developed an open architecture that let third parties add to and improve the product. The result: they launched one of the most successful products in history within a year.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Greg Satell, DigitalTonto

Sponsored by: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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A bit ago a fun texting prank went popular on Reddit called Cat Facts. It was then reposted enthusiastically, as viral images are, across platforms (the social web doesn’t happen in silos). Future Buzz readers already know how this works.

Here’s the image in case you missed it:

If the 100,000+ votes / comments on the original Reddit thread and hundreds of reposts didn’t give it away, people loved this.

Not just for the trolling aspect. If you read the comments on any of the threads many expressed their desire to receive daily cat facts.

With comments such as:

• I actually would like to have “Cat Facts” sent to my phone.
• Please tell me there is a real cat facts SMS service.
• who in their right mind would want to cancel such a thing?!

So much demand for Cat Facts was generated due to this one image that Google Trends reported the first significant increase in search volume for the phrase cat facts…well, ever:

So imagine you’re the site owner of the domain ranking highly in search for the term cat facts. Undoubtedly you benefit from this demand by receiving significantly increased inbound traffic.

This happened — CatFacts.org started to receive a surge in traffic. Except instead of embracing the free marketing generated by the Cat Facts prank and attempting to convert that awareness into an outcome, the owner responded with the following message in red:

This messaging would, unfortunately, put off someone who was seeking information on opting in to Cat Facts. While sure, many may have been looking to prank friends, plenty of cat fans were also now genuinely interested in receiving updates about cats.

Instead of posting a message saying “sorry, we don’t do this” and ignore the wave of attention generated (which would cause the flood of new visitors to bounce) the site owner could try an approach like: hey, while we’re not responsible for the fun Cat Facts SMS prank, you can still get updates on cats — right from us: enter your email (or other CTA) to get updates from CatFacts.org for free.

Try to match the offer with what the world was now suddenly interested in, then work to continue to grow demand. It could be a whole new channel to monetize for the site owner (who currently is monetizing the site via ads).

If they were truly ambitious, they could go a step further and fulfill the interest in subscribing to mobile cat facts, perhaps even turning it into an app.

The point of this thread isn’t about cat facts or this site in particular, of course. The point is the be opportunistic and flexible to take advantages of the serendipitous opportunities the social web sends your way. Know Your Meme was an entire site built around this concept, to the tune of 20 million pageviews per month (not to mention acquisition by a larger site).

Organic spikes in attention are almost always an opportunity. They shouldn’t be shunned, instead, you should capitalize on them to build equity for the future.

A Marketing Lesson From Cat Facts is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Written By Jeff Jacobson President, Xerox Global Graphic Communications Operations Like many in the graphic communications industry, I am counting down the days until drupa 2012. For starters, it will be my first official trade show as Xerox’s...

What are customers saying about your brand?

I recently attended a great presentation by Taylor Pratt (@taylorpratt) of Raven Tools at OMS in San Diego.  He focused on the importance of using content marketing for improved social engagement.

TopRank has been a long time and well-recognized advocate for the notion of customer centric content marketing.  Over the years we have seen SEO, social media, and content marketing industry change and grow at a rapid rate, so now more than ever marketers must create content to meet customer needs in order to execute a successful online strategy.  The social media game is not only evolving but the way that our audience consumes this information is constantly changing.

In fact, a study by NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey Company) found that 2 in 5 social media users are accessing their social platforms from their mobile devices.

As additional devices are released on the market content marketers should be aware of these trends and create optimized content not only for computers, and Internet enabled devices, but for their customers as well.

How Do Your Customers Access Social Media?

 

Pratt also provided some valuable information on the different cycles that content marketers should go through in order to effectively target new customers.

Discovery

Any time that you launch a new client what is your first step?  I’m going to bet that discovery is typically your first step post sale (or pre-sale).  It is essential that you take a similar approach with your own company when launching a new social media campaign.  Some of the  key items you should be looking for when running your initial discovery might include:

• Brand mentions
• Product mentions
• Keyword mentions
• Competitor mentions
• Influencer mentions

It is also recommended that you begin determining which social sites you should participate in, key influencers you want to get in front of, and topics that are trending or popular.

Listening

After you have discovered what is currently being said about your brand and your industry it’s time to really begin listening.  Attempting to jump head first into the deep end will not produce the results you are looking for.  Begin by tracking how your customers are using social media.  Are they sharing particular pain points or problems?  Are they looking for tips or advice in a certain way?  It is imperative that you interact with your customers in the same way that they interact with everyone else.  You may also want to determine:

• Where are they participating?
• What are they already saying about you?
• What is their activity level on each social network?

Planning

Pratt shared a very insightful formula for the Planning phase of the process.  First you want to identify your business objectives.  This could be anything from improving your customer service to generating more sales.  Other objectives might include:

• Improve brand sentiment
• Generate brand advocates
• Increase your brand reach
• Reduce your sales cycles
• Improve your product reviews or ratings

The second step involves identifying your organization’s value add.  Work to determine what sort of words your customers or potential customers are using when they mention your company.

Finally you need to define your level of commitment.  How often do you plan on interacting?  What steps must you take in order to create an engaging social media strategy?

Execution

When implementing your social media campaign it is very important that you as marketers consider how it will align with your other online marketing strategies.  The convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Measurement

When beginning to measure your brand awareness there are four particular KPI’s to keep in mind.

• Brand recognition
• Share of voice
• Engagement
• Reach

A recent report by the Altimeter Group provides specific formulas for calculating each of the KPI’s listed above.

Although there are quite a few steps involved in creating a customer centric social media strategy it is well worth the effort.  Have to fear, there are many reputation management and social media engagement tools at your disposal.  Some require a monthly cost while others are at no charge.  Some of the tools available on the market today include:

• Brands Eye
• Sysomos
• Trackur
• Social Mention
• UberVU (Raven Tools offers monitoring using UberVU)
• Sprout Social
• Radian6

Remember, one of the keys to a successful social media campaign is asking questions.  The more you know about your current and potential customers, the easier it will be to engage them online.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience | http://www.toprankblog.com

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