Social Media Uprising

By now we are all just about sick of hearing about the MotrinMoms event that happened via Twitter in backlash to their ad. The thing that makes me so mad about this fiasco, isn’t the ad, its the response to the ad. There was silence from Motrin until they finally released an official, legalese style statement on their homepage. Social media is all about the give an take, and although their media was a traditional ad, it made it into the social media arena, and as such it has to be treated as such. Even though their intention was not to produce a viral video, they did, and they should have been paying attention. Shame on them for that! 

Time for a Social Media Consultant?

The good news is, this will not be the end of Motrin. The bad news, (maybe good news for one of you lucky folks out there) is that they need a Social Media Consultant. Shame on them for their first mistake, but if they make it again, the community will not be so forgiving. 

Social media enables everyone to have a voice, and for Motrin this proved to mean a whole lot of brand backlash, but will this cause them to run like hell from social media, or to embrace it for what it could have done to soften the #motirnmoms event? I really hope they chose to embrace, oh what could have been helped if this had been a two way conversation, which is what is meant for social media to accomplish.

Finding the Balance, or Not

I recently read a post from the Viral Garden that literally punched me in the stomach. Mack Collier explained that you’ve got to know when to “remove the perfect filter” in order to get a great idea out there. Wow. That is me. Every-time I write a post it sits in my “unpublished” space for days, while i ponder whether or not it is good enough. Eventually more than half of these not-good-enough posts go in the trash. 

These posts then become untimely, irrelevant, and ultimately useless. What a shame!

Finding the balance between that great post, and a mediocre post isn’t always the key to having a great blog. Each reader will have their own favorite post you’ve written, some reason they keep coming back. They’ve found value in something you’ve written, and most likely they are not hanging on your every post. Sure we all know they come back for the superstars, but they aren’t disgusted or even deterred by the ‘good’ or even the ‘mediocre’.

So stop worrying that every single thing you write isn’t the best thing you’ve ever written, and start to realize that the people who find value in some of the things you write will come back and wait for the next big superstar. You’ve already made them your fans, you don’t need to blow them out of the park every single time.

Search Engine Optimization

Today I atteneded the Texas Domainers and Developers Convention to listen to Bill Hartzer’s, (Vizion Interactive), SEO Presentation. Here is a rundown of his tips:

• Title Tags- Use title tags for every single page of your site. Within your title tag you should include your business name or something else that is relevant to your site.
• Inbound Links- Relative inbound links are key to ranking higher on search results. Inbound links must be from authoritative and relevant sites. (The speaker did not mention this, but a great way to get inbound links is through the use of trackbacks) 
• Keep Content Fresh- Create an RSS feed for your site, and update your content regularly. Blogs are a great way to ensure that your site is considered fresh and relevant. 
• No more Submitting your site- now-days search engines will spider your new site within minutes of registering a new domain name.
• Social Bookmarking- Add your own site to social bookmarking sites, del.ici.ous for example in order to get more inbound links, and to get your fresh content spidered more quickly. 
• Yahoo Directory Listing- This costs $299 but according to —- this can be very useful. He reccomends though that if you prefer not to spend the $299 bucks, you can simply register your site with the sites who provide the directory listings to Yahoo. 
• Keyword Research- Whether you are interested in Organic or Paid Search you must do your keyword research to find out what people are searching for that is related to you, your business, or your product. 
• Keyword Research Tools- Bill says that these tools are very useful, but that you must remember that each of these tools use different methods to collect their data, so you must be careful not to take one tool’s information as gold. 
  • Google Keyword Tool
  • SEO Book Keyword Tool
  • Wordtracker.com (paid)
  • Hitwise(paid)
  • SpyFU.com
• Keep Visitors Coming Back- Rather than park a domain name, keep content on the site in order to build your visitors. 
• Expired Domains- use a 301 permanent redirect on moved or expired pages. 

This was a decent refresher course in SEO, but I did not get anything new out of this presentation. All in all I was rather disappointed- the speaker mentioned that there were over “126 contributing factors” that search engines rely on to rank your site, but he did not expound on this except to say, go to google and look them up! I really thought this was what I would be learning. Wow..

Tribal Election Marketing

I finished reading Tribes, by Seth Godin over the weekend, and as usual Seth continues to inspire. We all ‘know’ what tribal marketing is, simply from our exposure to it, Apple, and Harley Davidson are based on tribal marketing. 

I love that I finished this book before reading Seth’s blog post regarding today’s election and the candidates tribal marketing strategies. Campaigning for a seat in a political office has got to be the most tribal form of marketing, and yet most of us over look it. I will not be as bold as Seth as to call the election one way or the other, (although I do believe he has gotten it right) but I will say that we will very soon learn who’s tactics have paid off, and why. 

What makes the Obama supporters so much more enthused (and therefore willing to donate millions) about their candidate than the McCain supporters? Obama got beyond his fear of being a leader, got beyond his fear of speaking up for what he believes in, and was able to inspire a nation to follow him. Obama also figured out what were the common, core beliefs of his followers and embraced them. Obama was able to successfully lead, to successfully inspire a tribe to follow him, to believe in him, and to act on their beliefs.  

The McCain supporters look much more frazzled, dangling, and non-united, with no real base to speak of. They are scattered. Worst of all McCain’s position is not that of a specified McCain / republican attitude, but that of an anti-Obama sentiment. He has done more defending than propositioning and leading. Sad. 

Just my 2 cents.

Neat little Firefox Plugin

I found this little firefox plugin that displays a sites favicon (assuming they have one) in your search descriptions.

 You can download the plugin here, but you will need to login/register to do so, because it is still in beta. 

By the way, I completely agree with Wylisa- every site should most definitely have a favicon. If you do not currently have on, check out my post on creating a favicon.