Linkbait can be a very effective tool for search engine optimization. Social media is important for marketing your small or large business in 2009. The sky is blue. Women have secrets. Thanks for nothing, Dave. We’re actually dumber for having listened to you just now. You’re so very welcome, and do you know of a bank in the vicinity where I can cash your seminar check?

Preach vs. Practice
You learned absolutely nothing from that first paragraph which you didn’t already know. Simply telling someone to consider linkbait, link building or general social media as a means to drive both direct and eventually organic traffic to their site is like lending them your car and forgetting to give them the keys. A big heap of useless nothing. Don’t be that guy. The interwebnets are already flooded with them. And for God’s sake don’t pay them to tell you all those things. Ask for specific examples of their own linkbait work that can actually teach you something practical about applying the strategy to your own business. Don’t let them get away with simply talking about those damned blender videos again.

One of the reasons I am a fan of Montreal SEO maven Gab Goldenberg’s blog is that he provides real-world examples of work he has done for actual clients. As a result he is never even in the running on those days when I get so overwhelmed by my Google Reader backlog that I decide to start culling the RSS feed herd. I thought of possible ways in which I too could provide something particularly helpful today and dug out six of my previous linkbait project URLs. I’m not saying they’re ground-breaking or even especially good - but I did learn a lot from them and maybe you can too.

What is Linkbait?
Simply put, linkbaiting is the creation of something online which you feel has the potential to go viral. “Going viral” means a piece of content is so engaging, funny, helpful, life-saving, disturbing or a combination of all five that people feverishly pass it around amongst their friends via IM and email. Scores of bloggers link to it because they want to share it with their audience. It becomes bookmarked naturally in tons of social media sites. The benefits are twofold. In the short term the popular webpage gets tons of direct traffic and brand recognition. In the long term the domain encourages many one-way incoming links which is a crucial factor the major search engines take into account when deciding where to rank your site for specific keywords.

Here are some great articles regarding the construction of effective linkbait if you’d like to read more on the basics. I’d rather spend my bloggy time today showing you some real and original examples of linkbait I myself created - and then looking into the reasons they worked, didn’t work or could have been improved upon. I didn’t make these with enormous production budgets or teams of semi-conscious, hungover marketing interns at my disposal - but I did use my imagination with some degree of tangible success. Perhaps this article should be called Linkbait Ideas for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses. Perhaps this article should be skipped altogether.

Linkbait Best Practices
I tried to follow the golden (and vague) rules that I’d been reading about since the term “linkbait” was originally coined. Use media. Make it informative. Make it funny. Put it in a “top 10″ format. Include prominent social media submission buttons. Include an “email this to a friend” form. Make sharing easy. Consider paying off some prominent Diggers (did I say that out loud?). Put it in a subfolder on the client’s domain without any branding and then move it under the main template after it has been live for a few weeks to disguise its true marketing purpose. Sacrifice a chicken and pray. Read up on Chaos Theory.

Original Linkbait Examples
I’m going to link to these 6 examples using the specific keyword phrases they were designed to draw traffic for. This is partially because I’d like that strategy to be abundantly clear and partially because this is my blog and it’s my perogative to keep flogging these pieces even years after they were created should I want to. A good, timeless piece of bait can continue to draw relevant traffic indefinitely.

Valentine’s Day History
A client wanted to drive traffic for terms related to Valentine’s Day because they sold many products specific to the holiday. Product terms (”valentine’s day cards” etc.) were understandably extremely competitive. There were some related terms, however, that were far less contentious yet still had reasonable relevant search volume attached to them. I had a glance at the day’s Wikipedia entry and was fascinated to learn how many truly awful things had transpired on February 14th over the centuries. The dim, filthy lightbulb in my head clicked on and thus “14 Horrible Moments in Valentine’s Day History” was born.

• The Good: The piece definitely went viral, doing well in networks like Digg and Reddit, attracting many natural links from bloggers and was even linked to by some high profile news sites. It continues to attract lots of seasonal traffic and new incoming links to this day.
• The Bad: Not much - this was definitely a success and made the client very happy.
• Lesson Learned: The vague advice I’d been hearing was true - Decent linkbait can indeed drive tons of direct, relevant traffic and have considerable ongoing SEO benefits lasting years.

Custom BBQs
In the middle of Summer 2007 I was asked to create a linkbait piece designed to attract grill and barbecue related keywords to a client’s bbq review section. I wondered if I’d be able to find photos of some custom made rigs having recently seen a homemade beer keg smoker at a friend’s house. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. Yeeee Haaaa! You’ve got a pretty mouth.

• The Good: Although it had a disappointing social media run, it resulted in quite a few links from blogs.
• The Bad: In retrospect the subject matter probably had a very limited audience. Again, failed virally.
• Lesson Learned: If possible focus on a subject related to your client’s goods or services with the broadest potential appeal - men and women, old and young, kids and adults. And never, ever launch a linkbait the day before one of the biggest holidays of the year.

NCAA Buzzer Beaters
This time last year March Madness was upon us and I had a client with a lot of tournament tickets to move. Being more of a hockey/football fan I researched some popular online NCAA discussion topics and quickly decided a list of “buzzer beaters” would be a good idea. I’d yet to use videos for a piece and got myself all excited about it. Everyone from the Director of Marketing to the CEO approved my final piece which took several days for me to write, research, collect and code. Then the NCAA (who were partnered with my clients in some respects) refused to let us use it. “Why on Earth did you even show it to them?” I remember asking them in frustration. I ended up using a revised, non-video version of it on my own semi-related hockey fights site. Cause hockey is a sport too, get it? I really just didn’t want it to go to waste. You can see the original video linkbait preserved for all time on my personal blog.

• The Good: It was a good exercise in incorporating video into linkbait and I was able to repurpose it as an NCAA article (with SEO-friendly links) on several blogs and free article directories without alerting any ambulance chasers.
• The Bad: It was nipped in the bud. Also, I found out that the client-side resource who offered to help with my bulletpoints and research completely plagiarized them from another website and had to re-write the entire thing the night before it was supposed to launch.
• Lesson Learned: Let the CEO, Directors and lawyers see your proposed idea before you spend 20 hours putting it all together. Also, with a little re-writing many linkbaits can be repurposed in text form for alternate uses.

I have three more examples to share with you if you’re still awake, but regret I must get back to my company duties for the rest of today. Namely - plotting my next big viral failure success. Stay tuned for part two and I would love it if people shared their own linkbait creations with everyone right here in the comments.

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Is it a business directory? Is it a business networking site? Is it an overzealous hybrid destined to over-extend itself and die on the vine? For our purposes today we’ll refer to them as “biz sites” and it can’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the wide range that are available. They’re free to use, easy to sign up for and potentially helpful to your company or agency in a wide variety of ways you may not have realized.

Although LinkedIn and Plaxo have an imposing headlock on the B2B and B2C business networking space, there are a lot of others jockeying for position whom you likely haven’t even heard of - let alone begun to utilize. Although taking the time to register your own company or that of a client on these “2nd-tier” networks probably won’t result in the flood of direct traffic, leads or new contacts that the major players may have driven - there are still very tangible and numerous benefits to taking the time to build yourself a presence on each. These are listed in no particular order as I recommend them all as part of any comprehensive ORM or SEO effort:

Social Networking Sites for Business

1. My Cubicle Space: Their stated mission is to provide a search engine platform where any business can promote their product or service in a creative way to the fore front for millions of people. Free to use and includes press release submission, blog and keyword targeting capabilities. HQ: Watertown, MA.
2. Ryze: Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special networks related to their industry, interests or location. The local features are particularly impressive and should be perfect for businesses with physical store locations or service areas. Both free and paid options exist. HQ: San Francisco, CA.
3. Ziggs: A definite fore-runner of the emerging LinkedIn competition, Ziggs allows you to build a profile, network, post jobs and other classifieds and is strongly marketed as an online brand management resource. HQ: Boston, MA.
4. Naymz: Naymz’s solid tagline “Empowering Reputable Professionals” relays their understanding of ORM’s massive importance. If you maintain a decent “rep score”, based in large on how many people you get to vouch for you and therefore refer to the site, they will create a Google ad for you with a budget of $10. HQ: Chicago, IL.
5. FastPitch: Billed as a “professional social network”, Fast Pitch has added an impressive amount of useful features during their short existence including a press release submission option, blogs, event calendars a helpful tour, some early integration with other social networks and the ability to see a list of other online members. HQ: Sarasota, FL
6. Spoke: I like the fact that Spoke features rotating member profiles on their home page. They heavily tout the lead-generation potential of their network as a strength, possibly making it more apt to attract those with B2C lead generation as opposed to networking priorities. HQ: San Mateo, CA
7. Zoom Info: One of the more established sites on this list, Zoom Info has been around since 1999 and according to the home page has over 42 million people and 3 million companies as part of their database. The site is clearly defined for three specific purposes: searching for people, searching for companies and searching for a job. Personal profiles are free to create and company profiles are apparently coming soon. HQ: Waltham, MA.
8. Konnects: No identity crisis here. Konnects is a B2B networking site with a very human-oriented feel. Lots of headshots, rotating newest member list on the homepage and a big focus placed on physical events. Free to sign up and you can request via email a “group” for your organization which I am assuming means an eventual quote on a branded community. HQ: Tacoma, WA.
9. Upperz: The “social network site for professional use” has a long way to go before nipping away at anyone else’s market share, but the latest member blog postings and media gallery featured on the front page are a bit of differentiation. A serious lack of company (I can’t tell for the life of me where they are head quartered) or feature information puts Upperz on my “maybe someday when I have a lot more free time” list.
10. Direct Matches: It sounds and frankly looks a lot like a dating site, but Direct Matches is aimed at business people. Their mission states that they are the first site to “deploy a multi-matchmaking system that helps people locate everything from business contacts to finding friendship and dates online”. I spoke too soon. Perhaps they are over-reaching but the dating angle is certainly unique - and potentially the basis for an equally unique sexual harassment suit. HQ:
11. Xing: The “first Web 2.0 site to go public” definintely looks the part. The clean design, mobile capabilities and numerous mentions in top trade publications make it 2.0 all the way. Purporting to transcend all countries, languages and industries - Xing is definitely a must for professionals who do a lot of business internationally. HQ: Hamburg, GER.

Business Networking Sites for Direct Traffic
How many of today’s most successful web entities started in a dorm room? What is small time today might be huge tomorrow and even if you don’t start immediately having your door beaten down by contacts and customers who find you via Zing - you never know. It’s also important to take into consideration where some of the new or lesser business networking sites may have a strong foothold internationally. Even if a given biz site is only big in Asia it’s still going to provide you with a brand new link. Considering the supplemental benefits we’re discussing today I believe they are worthwhile if well designed and well intentioned - regardless of a site’s current popularity.

Business Sites for Search Engine Optimization
Unless you’ve been exiled to Siberia for the last two years you know that building one-way, incoming links to your website is an enormously important facet of SEO. All of the aforementioned sites allow you various levels of link inclusion. Some limit you to a URL, some automatically link the URL with the company name you input and others allow for the embedding of links in HTML-friendly summary sections allowing you to craft the hyperlink text to your target keyword specifications. A few hours spent creating presences on all of the aforementioned sites is going to be of better SEO value than a week of submissions to crummy “directories”.

Business Sites for Online Reputation Management
On many of the sites I list below you can get your company or personal name into the URL, header tag, title tag or a combination. As these three elements are held in very high regard by search engine algorithms, biz sites can be tremendously helpful for online brand reputation management. If someone Googles the name of your company, for example, and finds your dedicated page on Spoke - that could mean a negative blog post from a critical customer being pushed down to the second page of the search results for a potential one.

Do you use a similar biz site that hasn’t made our list? Am I using terminology or descriptions that can be tightened up (one of the things that perplexes me about this space is how to properly categorize the different sites)? Do you represent one of the sites listed and want to provide a little more info? Please let me know and we’ll keep this post evolving. Get networking/SEOing/Reputation defending and I look forward to your additions and comments.

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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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