Adopting a new Web 2.0 user-generated content site or social network is a scary premise. We all have our personal favorites and with so many new contenders being introduced on a daily basis it’s nearly impossible to get noticed above the ruckus. If you don’t believe me, subscribe to the Mashable RSS feed for a couple of days and just try to keep up with it. So, short of coming up with an incredibly unique and mind-blowing idea it’s a good plan to make sure your new entity is compatible with established big wigs. In fact, making sure other applications can integrate with yours is a good rule of thumb no matter what level of popularity you’ve achieved. APIs and development platforms have created the current era of the mashup (web application hybrid) and with so many great marriages even at this early stage - it’s a wonderful sight to behold.

I am a big Facebook user and Wordpress devotee, so I have been pleased to see the two behemoths playing so nice together recently. It keeps one from having to undertake the time-consuming process of updating certain aspects of their web presence from scratch in multiple locations. Although I love keeping in touch with friends via FB, I also spend a lot of time maintaining my personal blog and in terms of updates, photos and other snippets of content there is a lot of potentially redundant overlap between the two. Here are a few of the tools I use to cross-pollinate the two worlds in the best interests of protecting my fragile sanity.

• Import Facebook “note” comments into Wordpress: If you syndicate your blog into your Facebook profile via RSS, as a great many of us do, your FB friends are able to leave comments on each and every “note” (as the posts are called once they are imported). Having two sets of comments for the exact same post is a little silly on the best of days. This WP plugin pulls comments out of FB notes and adds them to your real blog, to sit seamlessly beside those that have been left on the original post, on a post-by-post basis.
• Integrate your Wordpress hosted blog into Facebook: I don’t actually use this plugin myself, as I do not host my blog with Wordpress, but for those that do it’s definitely an impressive mash. It’s more of a two-way street than many of the apps, with benefits to populating both platforms. Publish posts, bookmark, check stats and more.
• Insert Facebook photos into Wordpress posts: This is the first of two very useful photo-related plugins. Additions to your ‘write’ dashboard after activation allow you to browse your Facebook gallery remotely and add thumbnails or larger sized photos directly to whatever post you happen to be writing. Hopefully the author will update it soon because judging from the comments it isn’t working with the most recent versions of WP. Somebody please pick up this ball and run with it - it’s almost, almost an awesome plugin.
• Migrate entire Facebook gallery into Wordpress: This is an exceptional plugin, written by Aaron Harp, that allows you to incorporate your entire Facebook gallery - lock, stock and barrel - into a static Wordpress page of your choice. You can also update exported galleries as you make additions to the parent FB gallery whenever you want - with the touch of one button off the ‘manage’ tab. I am surprised that this plugin hasn’t caught on at a larger scale, and I encourage Aaron to keep developing similar items as he’s obviously darn good at it.

If you know of a worthwhile WP / FB application that I haven’t listed here, please let me know and perhaps I’ll write a Valentine for it too. Or better yet, write your own. To date there aren’t very many of them and you could earn yourself some considerable notoriety should you so desire. How about a WP plugin that displays your FB “status” in your sidebar? Or a way to improve on and customize the FB sidebar badges they provide with information from specific apps you have installed (Flixster, Bookshelf, etc.)? The possibilities aren’t endless, but they’re out there. Get mashin’!

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My sister sent me this video - presumably because she’s secretly mocking my profession of choice. This clip doesn’t make me want to navigate over to this handsome bastard’s site as much as maybe… take a shower. Based on the comments on the post-specific YT page, I am not alone.

If we, the public, were called upon to perform a service to this gentleman by offering constructive criticism to his efforts, I think it would likely go something like this:

• Spell your ultra-long URL properly on your splash screen. Unless of course a bluerpint is actually some kind of Belgian beer that I don’t know about.
• There is a tuxedo rental shop somewhere in Minnesota that is missing a men’s jacket size 14.
• Remember back in the late 1990’s when LLCool J would wear one leg of his sweat pants rolled up? It never really caught on, and someone should tell Gary here that the ‘one lapel flip’ won’t fare much better.
• Rodney Dangerfield called. He wants his tie knot back.
• I have seen hostage videos in which the subjects looked more comfortable. Is there a rabid grizzly bear on a chain just off camera? “Right, who’s doesn’t?” Strasberg is turning in his grave.
• The Shakespeare beard should be limited to sex offenders and poet laureates. Oh eye of newt and tongue of frog and link of Digg! Hast thou forsaken me?
• The dual eyebrow raise-head jerk move might be a precursor to a more serious neurological disorder. I kept waiting for him to yell “cock farts frigging slut monkeys!” at the end of every sentence.

Ladies, please form a line to the left. This guy should really be teaching a class in social heartbreaking, being Valentine’s Day and all.

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What exactly is online brand reputation management (BRM)? Basically, negative or malicious press in SERPS (search engine results pages) can be combated by creating positive content or and knowing where to post or submit it. If the positive content is deemed by the search engines to appear on more integral websites, the negative rankings will be pushed farther and farther down the SERPs until that post by a disgruntled blogger is on page three and your good name has been restored.

Brand reputation management and search marketing were once very separate entities – but with the emergence of blogs, forums, social media and other user-driven content sites, they now must be performed in tandem. You don’t have to be a skilled programmer, or even know how to build a website, to get your opinions online anymore - This can be a very scary prospect for any company. If you’re not scared, you should be. Boo.

How do you combat a high-ranking negative reference to your name or company? Luckily, it is far easier to attain good rankings for a business or domain name because there is far less competition for these words than for the goods or services they provide. It is also reasonable to push down negative rankings for individual people’s names. But not always, obviously. If your client’s name is Gavin Wunderschnitzen, you’re laughing. If your BRM services have just been retained by John Smith, just give him his money back now.

The same blogs, forums and social media sites which can be used to negate or slur a brand, can be used to defend it. Here are some of my methods, and I look forward to your feedback and tips on the subject. Lots of folks are selling BRM as a service nowadays, but before you cannibalize a considerable part of your marketing budget because some 12 year old with a Bebo account and a crap in their diaper didn’t like one of their Christmas presents, consider the following Free BRM tips.

1. Well-written, newsworthy press releases are a great BRM tool for simultaneous direct traffic and SERP manipulation. Even if you’re using free PR networks, they will still make a visible impact if your targeted name or company is reasonably unique. Ask your client if they have any existing traditional releases that you can repurpose online quickly.
2. Build a Kiva.org lender profile page for your client. You’ll probably want to donate at least $25, but there’s no harm in building your karma while building your rank. Google seems to treat Kiva with very high regard. Hat tip to Dan Zarrella for this one.
3. Build Squidoo lenses and HubPages for your client. Use their name in the title and URL - as in both cases you get to pick it yourself - and it is static. This works absolute wonders, regardless of whether or not your lens on Sea Monkeys made any affiliate revenue last year. Oops, that’s mine.
4. Build a Blogger account for your client, and use their name in the title and URL. Don’t fret too much about content - use their mission statement or About Us page and split it into a few posts. Leave it to simmer and watch what happens.
5. Social Media/Networking sites with more of a professional audience - Your LinkedIns and your Facebooks as opposed to your Friendsters and MySpaces - will get indexed quickly and rise just as fast. Build profiles for your clients, post haste.
6. The next step is indexing - Now that you’ve built 7 profiles, a blog, 2 lenses and a hub what next? Get it all spidered lickety-split by linking to each from the sidebar of the blogger account you just created and then linking to that from your client’s site - or another juicy property that gets crawled regularly.
7. Build a custom RSS feed for the phrase you want to protect. Use the Yahoo! News tool to watch for negative stories or press releases, and a Technorati feed to monitor the blogosphere. This way, you can start to battle any negative mention of your client before they’re even spidered.

Those are my quick tips for the tightwad - and boy do they work wonders. For a more comprehensive guide which includes paid options visit Andy Beal’s take on Online Reputation Monitoring.

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I am a small fish in the Search Marketing Blogosphere, and I make no mistake about it. Let’s get that out of the way right now. SEM is a snowball, the Wild West, an unidentified organic lifeform frigging with colonists on LV-426 (nerd alert). One of the only ways to stay on the cutting edge of this strange new beast is to read a staggering amount of related blogs every day. It’s hard to get through them all, and taking a few days off leaves you with a backlog that makes it tough to try and put a dent in all the posts at all. My point is, I have to choose the personalities I spend my time with very carefully.

There are my trusted favorites, and my new fancies - all of whom have proven themselves to be sources of hard information and advice, and not just links to other people’s information and advice. Many SEO blogs point to other SEO blogs with little original content. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re looking for high-level industry happenings. But I have to concern myself with straight poopy poop dope, and little else. Practical tips and strategies that go into painful detail are what I need, and aren’t just general blabber about ’social media’ and how important it is right now. I have a housepet that could tell you that.

So as I make my bones as an SEM blogger, speaking largely at the moment into a vacuum, it’s time to decide what side of the road I want to stand on. I’d like to eventually be considered as some sort of twisted marketing resource, so my new SEO Tips category is thus born unto the Pony. I’m no knowledge hoarder, people. And with no further ado, here is the first:

The Yahoo! News RSS feed usually looks great when aggregated, as opposed to Google News which can look absolutely terrible. The Y! articles don’t usually double up from multiple sources, and the 100 word excerpts look like you painstakingly wrote them yourself. The best part is yet to come - the feeds are completely customizable. You can create an RSS feed, which is fully compatible with Squidoo, HubPages, Google Reader, BlogLines, etc. simply by typing in your desired keywords. Be sure to visit the feed customization page and bookmark it immediately (scroll down to get to the form). Here now are some practical applications:

• You can employ exact search criteria with quotes to pinpoint and filter content.
• Build a feed for your company or website name to monitor brand reputation around the web. Read it every morning.
• Use feeds on any number of social media sites where RSS is enabled for great updated content.
• Build Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, etc. about your company and filter in new Press Releases mentioning you automatically.
• Hook up easily locatable RSS feeds near the tops of your pages for easy syndication. This is a core best practice of social media marketing: make your original content easy to bookmark, vote, syndicate etc.

And, I’m spent. I sincerely hope that this - or some of my future battleground tips - set off a spark in your head that wasn’t there before you started reading. Although if you literally have sparks in your head, you probably have more important things to worry about.

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Like many of my peers (whom I am making a renewed effort to get to know since beginning to appreciate the wealth of cool people in the Search industry) my SEO/SEM inception began when I started a retail website. That first foray has long since gone the way of the Dodo, but I remember it fondly - as my resulting interest and education has kept me in cat food for the last 7 years. But how long will this all last? Here are a couple of snippets from my increasingly frequent self Q&As, which are starting to sound more and more like an exchange between Jack Torrance and Lloyd the bartender.

Should I get out of this racket because it’s becoming so flooded?
No - the deluge of half-cocked, irresponsibly guaranteeing, myna bird “SEOs” will actually make it easier for the people who relish it, have talent and stay at the forefront to stand out in a crowd. I might as well write you a <a href=”http://www.startupbusinessschool.com”>free business plan</a> while I’m at it. Use said deluge to your advantage, and as a daily motivating factor.

Has SEO really become ‘easy’ like so many people now claim?
No - There is no free tool that can take the place of experienced keyword and volume research. The creation of engaging original content takes patience and skill. Manual link-building never ceases to be monotonous. Social media is only relevant or applicable to some clients, and even then requires startling creativity in order to make any difference. Link baiting is second only to chaos theory in terms of unpredictability and luck.

I’ve had my doubts about the credibility and longevity of this career path I find myself on. And new questions pop up everyday when I’m doing my daily SEM blog reading. But my mind becomes settled quicker than an algorithm that’s realized it’s being manipulated when I remember where I can go if I don’t like it - back to the cubicle. This industry is undeniably exciting for a reason. It’s the wild, wild west out here, and I’m going to need another scotch.

“I’m the kinda guy… likes to know who’s buying his links, Lloyd.”

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People who run around deliberately trying to coin phrases are like people who refer to themselves in the third person - they should immediately be lined up against a wall and shot with paintball pellets from 3 feet away until they cry. But sometimes a new word or acronym just happens virally and becomes an unstoppable addition to vernacular. “SMO” (Social Media Optimization) is a great recent example. “Fo’ Shizzle” (?) not quite so much.

I have coined a phrase around my office that I quite like - so I’m going to put it out there and see what happens. I have a better chance of seeing a one-legged cat bury a turd on a frozen pond than to have this blow up, but I’m willing to try anything once. MVK (Most Valuable Keyword/s) is how I refer to a client’s tip-top words and phrase iterations. I like to see it limited to 5 examples, and that’s probably unconsciously due to extended use of the free version of Web CEO, but I’m flexible.

I now feel inclined to explain why I started to do this. I suppose the term was spawned out of a want of efficiency and consistent intern/employee comprehension. There are many ways to describe said 5 terms: the SERP wishlist, top target market terms, the short tail, the lake house, the Ferarri 5, the lantern-rubbings, etc. Before this gets too silly, I’ll wrap it up and await the flood of phrase coining traffic. At least I didn’t write another top 10 list.

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Social media marketing is so painfully new, and there is such an unfocused buzz around it, that it is easy for the laybusinessperson to get completely overwhelmed. Is there any difference between SMO and SMM, for example? How can MySpace and Digg both be categorized as social/new media when they are fundamentally so very different? And, more importantly, how can I claim my own plot and start prospecting?

The strokes are very broad right now, and subcategories that are going to help the layperson understand the new landscape are emerging. The best breakdown I’ve found is Ben Wills’ Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing - but I will try and form some original thoughts for the less experienced. Marketing 101 tell us to identify our target market before even getting out of bed in the morning. So boil it all down and think about which new media outlets your targets are most likely to be converging at. Let’s look at a few of the juggernauts.

• MySpace: The high school cafeteria of SMO, MS is a great way for marketers to reach teens and young adults. If you go about your marketing too blatantly, however, the community backlash could leave you running for the nurse’s office. Developing a persona related to your product and giving away free stuff via ‘bulletins’ has worked well for me personally in the past.
• digg: A social voting site, digg allows its community to thumbs up or thumbs down pages and articles submitted by others in the network. It is tough to get ahead in digg, with lots of duplication and very fickle power players. It’s no wonder that their demographics are described as “25-34 year olds with incomes greater than $100k per year”. That’s a very valuable audience, and if you can figure out how to crack the nut with great content submissions (top 10 lists do very well on digg) you’ll be laughing.
• del.icio.us: A social bookmarking site, del.icio.us is especially good for research and collaboration. Anything you store and tag can be utilized by friends, colleagues or the entire network. Typically an older crowd with less direct marketing potential than other SM sites - but if your site features good, original and objective content, tag it and get it up there.

MySpace’s audience might be completely useless to an accounting software firm. Likewise, an article about a band, comedian, Halloween costume coupon or movie will get buried quickly on a social voting site like digg. What’s good for one business in terms of social media may be completely irrelevant to another. First, understand what is out there and then focus on one or two SMM outlets or strategies that relate best to your business objectives and target market. There is no clear roadmap to capturing and selling to these huge built-in audiences, but it is definitely worth your time to try.

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The World Wide Web is absolutely starved for content. I mean, collectively we just can’t get enough of the stuff. Spiders devour it, webmasters have to keep feeding the spiders, bloggers have to manufacture content daily or risk losing their audience, press release sites have to keep populating their distribution networks - it’s a feeding frenzy akin to that scene at the end of Piranha 2. So from a marketing standpoint, it pays to know how to throw as many bikini-clad coeds into the surf as possible. One of the ways to ensure some successful visibility for your original content is to understand the difference between a press release and an article.

Online press releases are meant to relay newsworthy information about a company, product, service, event, etc. They are more often than not self-serving, strategic marketing tools. This doesn’t have to be a negative connotation, as many businesspeople want to stay current on happenings within their own company, industry or to keep an eye on competitors. If your press release is hot news, i.e. you work for Mozilla and your release is entitled “FireFox 2.0 Released Today”, in addition to PR networks you may also stand a change in SMO tagging sites like Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us. If you manufacture rollerskates in Toledo, and your release is entitled “ACME Rollerskates Hires New Product Manager”, then maybe don’t bother. Skip ahead to the articles section.

Popular press release sites and distribution networks include PR.com and PRWeb.com and both paid and free submission options exist. It’s worth it to pony (no pun intended) up the money for increased visibility within the networks and to get yourself a hyperlink (not part of the free option) in the process. Totally free PR services - which include hyperlinks - do exist including OpenPress and PRLeap.

Online articles can be about almost anything. If they are written well, and perceived by readers as an interesting and objective source of information, they can spread online like wildfire with a little help from our new friend social media. SMO success depends greatly on your subject’s position and article title. People love lists, and personally I have had great success positioning client-related articles with Top 10’s and the like. Don’t angle your article around the premise “Why You Should Buy Air Conditioners From Us”. Put one together called “How to Store Air Conditioners During Winter” - or better yet, “Top 10 Tips for Winter Air Conditioner Storage”. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Here is a great list of article release sites and distribution networks. Articles are great fodder for Digg and other social media sites due to their versatility and the potential for creative license above the boundaries of what has to constitute a press release. Before you submit an article to the various networks or a social voting site, post it on your own website via a news page or blog. If you’re taking the time to produce original content, repurpose it on your own domain. And again - don’t write an article that is blatantly marketing your company. Write an objective resource that relates to your product or services and then attach a subtle URL to your site near the bottom.

Just don’t ask me why I didn’t entitle this post “Top 5 ways to Write a Successful Article” or something. Obviously, I need to start taking my own advice. And to stop watching Piranha 2.

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Let’s face it - I’m a little long in the tooth to be using FaceBook. But, as they’re attempting to increase their value, FB has opened up the network to people without .edu email addresses. So here I am, an SEO/SEM enthusiast, getting to know all about ‘the Book’ and maybe feeling a little creepy about it in the process.

FaceBook is a social media network - a very functional and cool one, and Social Media Optimization has become an important facet of Search Engine Marketing. Social Media is hitting the online marketing space faster than a speeding RSS feed. The concept continues to evolve, and more and more internet marketers are looking for the next major way to fully leverage Social Media strategies for clients, products and services. Here is a site I made devoted to explaining SMO in greater detail.

SMO has the ability to attract and engage customers and web traffic in a way that organic search results and ‘Sponsored Listings’ on a search engine never will. The emerging field will grow with the same speed that social media itself has grown, as new tools and practices are shaped into coherent SMO tactics. If you use social media tools like a blog, Squidoo or HubPages for marketing purposes, then your focus should be on attracting potential customers or clients to visit your site in order to participate in relevant conversations about your products or services. SMO is about increasing the volume and richness of those interactions.

So, since we’re here, let’s talk about FaceBook. Aside from the obvious banner advertisements, how else do you see the network being used for marketing purposes - especially since it is now open to the public? And will the backlash from faithful members unappreciative of the new wave of intruders and marketers spell the end of the network’s credibility and popularity? I think it very well might.

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The SMO tag is so new, you can still see the mark where the delivery room doctor slapped it. The attending physician/blogger in this case was Rohit Bhargava who stated earlier this month: “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs“. So well done for coining a phrase - but I think most folks are still a bit foggy as to what SMO actually entails.

Social Media Optimization has been defined in similar ways by a variety of noteable bloggers - so today I’d like to look at some of these definitions and then try and boil SMO down into my own degree of rational original thought. Best of luck to me. So again - what is social media optimization? How does it differ from SEO and SEM? Let’s look at the early ways in which search engine marketing pundits have attempted to pigeonhole and explain the new phenomna.

Mark Nenadic writes: “When it comes to communicating online, there is a definite unique technique that surpasses them all, catering specifically to Internet Culture“. At the bottom of his recent article on WebProWorld, the author then does exactly that by providing readers the opportunity to add the article to social tagging and voting networks like Del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo & Furl with one simple click.

So the ‘catering’ aspect involves encouraging visitors to give you increased exposure through these social networks by making it as easy as possible. They’ll hang themselves if you give them enough rope, or something. Maybe I should have kept that analogy to myself. Regardless, Mark definitely practices what he preaches by including these quick links that make it easy to pump his content into news and link networks.

Lee Odden shares this opinion: Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the “template” level of document creation and as part of information distribution. Minor things like encouraging social bookmarks and rewarding incoming links as a standard practice across the organization can go a long way. I have already written an email to our development team here at SpiderSplat, asking them to include these sorts of shortcut links at the bottom of every post, and I suggest you do something along the same lines at your own company. Don’t cover your mouth when you cough. This can be considered the bare essence of SMO. Make it easy for the virus to spread, and do it by default everyday.

According to Hans Peter Brondmo: “1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it.” This is where the social element of SMO comes into focus, and contribution takes different forms. Squidoo and HubPages fall under social media because of the community and cross-pollination behind them - however lenses and hubs can only be edited by one ‘master’. WetPaint and Wikipedia, on the other hand, enable multiple authors to add to or enhance the same user-generated sections. Both models have their pros and cons, but both should technically be considered as new social media outlets due to their ability to get search engine and site-specific denizens buzzing about a subject almost instantaneously. Start a rumor, plant a seed and see what happens. You don’t have to do all the work anymore.

Whether you’re building a page with focused topic on BlueDot, submitting an older press release to Digg or finding a way to build a MySpace page for your company with a straight face - you’re participating in social media optimization. It’s a broad stroke and a very general term, however I do hope I’ve helped some people get their head around the newborn SMO acronym. Even though I’m not entirely sure if I have.

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