For the past several years we have been repeatedly harping on how social media is going to be ever more important to search engine optimization, visibility and clicks. Yesterday Google sent the clearest signal yet. The time for action is now. Actually the time for a social media strategy was years ago for many businesses, but let’s not quibble over nuance.

Yesterday Google released ‘Search Plus Your World‘, which melds Google’s new social network Google+’s search inline with Google’s normal search properties. And while some social has been appearing in SERPs (search engine result pages) for years, this level of prominence is so pronounced to actually draw fire from competing social networks like twitter.

To help understand how this impacts you or your companies visibility in search, consider that a searcher may see different search results if for example:

• They are using incognito or other browser privacy mode.
• Not logged into Google, cleared data, history and/or cookies.
• Logged in and has not cleared the aforementioned data.
• Logged in and socially active on other networks such as Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, et al.
• Logged in and have a Google+ account, unless they use the button to hide personal results.
• Have opted out of personalized search altogether.

In short, there are instances where your more socially active competition may show up in Google search results, and you will not.

Late last year, one week after the launch of Google+ Pages for brands and businesses, we ran a Google+ webinar and seminar where we asked our clients to wait for Google to fix ownership and notification issues before jumping in. Google fixed those issues in late December and we changed our stance to go, go, go. We are now urging those of you who still have not, to jump in. Need more proof? This has changed visibility of brands on Google.

Not sure how to get started? Let us help you with your social media strategy.

To highlight this point, the folks at Brafton have produced a fantastic infographic on the matter. The stats should open even the reluctant marketers’ eyes to the value of generating quality content. Businesses pay attention – “content is king!”

Still not creating content on your website? Can’t create content on your website? Not sure how, please investigate our Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, or Writing Services or  call us at 1-877-817-4443 or email us today.

Today I logged into SlideShare.net for the first time in a while with my Facebook account and within seconds, my Twitter feed was blowing up with “hey, why did you add me on SlideShare?” And, “I just got an email that you followed me on SlideShare, I didn’t know I had an account.”  Hmmm… I don’t recall this happening the last time I logged in, nor do I remember seeing an “auto-follow” option in any of my account settings. Looks like another forced opt-out “feature” to force “socializing” amongst users.

Lately, Facebook has received a lot of negative press for its opt-out only “feature upgrades”, yet here is another example that I’d like to discuss. Not that I have any personally revealing info on SlideShare.com, nor do I intend to, but I had no option, that I recall, to avoid blasting my friends/fans/followers list with email notifications that I was now following them. As a user of the service it left a sour taste in my mouth and leads me to think about my customers and if any of them are doing anything similar that might turn off their customers.

In this case, SlideShare offers a service that I require and I am invested in the ecosystem. Much like Facebook users, who are similarly (if not more so) invested in that ecosystem, getting upset is not going to make much of a difference and I’m sure there is a setting somewhere to disallow this “feature”.

Now, if I were evaluating a service for the first time, and not just a socially networked one like SlideShare, I may give consideration to how I intend on using the service, who I will be sharing my content with, what info I want to make available to the vendor/provider, what information I want my clients to provide and how others generally feel toward online privacy. If my first experience is “how/why did you add me/follow me” I might not come back at all. The old adage “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” is not cool when it comes to online privacy issues.

In fairness, most of my clients aren’t nearly as comfortable with the socially connected world I live in and would likely cease using such a service if they had a similar experience. As online marketers, we have to recognize that we are typically on the bleeding (or at least cutting) edge and most of those around us are not. As you’ve transitioned from traditional to online marketing, have you put up potential roadblocks to engagement? Have you built up walls that you can justify scaling but your typical customer might consider too much trouble? Are you facilitating engagement and by allowing customers to opt-in or are you trying to capture them with opt-out techniques that may cause them to disengage?

Social media ROI was the topic of a recent Twitter chat I participated in, and to say it was entertaining would be an understatement. The subject of measuring social media always seems to stir up controversy as part of the group proclaims social media ROI doesn’t exist, can’t be measured, and is as mystical as a unicorn, while the other camp retorts with, does so and can too. In the heat of the debate few ever stop to consider the value of social media, which is different from ROI.

While the ROI of social media is at least as trackable as other traditional forms of marketing, a higher standard seems to be set for it due to a general lack of awareness and the current stressed economic climate. And while I don’t want to get into tracking listeners to leads, viewers to visitations, and reading to reward, we need to accept that most businesses really are not tracking traditional marketing to any real depth, either. In fact, all too many businesses were until recently happy to continue to place value in a book where the main selling point was based on distribution, which was tantamount to tossing it out of the back of a truck. Distribution does not equal usage. Those same people now demand social media be measured down to every follower, like, connection, tweet, post, and QR Code scan.

Now I could go into a bevy of methods, tools, metrics, and KPI (key performance indicators) for doing just that, but rather than starting with the ideal, how about we start with something practical? I want to empower you with a simple three-step process so you can START measuring social media now and leave the door open for a lengthier post another day.

Three Steps to Start Social Media ROI & Value Measurement:

1. Have visitations to and leads from your website (online properties) increased?
2. Is customer satisfaction, client/customer engagement, and issue resolution better or worse?
3. Have you seen an overall lift in revenue, project acquisition, shortened sales cycle, or reduced cost to acquisition?

If the answer to any of those is, I don’t know, then the issue isn’t likely with social media or the tools to measure it. The evidence isn’t always buried as far as we would like to believe and may not require expensive analytic packages.  Sometimes we just need to step back and look at the books.

Contact us for help with your social media strategy or consider attending our NetCentered Marketing Webinar Series.

Picture by Rob Boudon

In Bieber’s case, he had something to deliver and was able to break through. There’s no doubt it took some hard work on his part, but there are a ton of people out there that are delivering quality content on social media channels who get missed. If you’re using social media, how do you attract attention to your content?

An important key to social media optimization is organization. If you can’t find a way to organize the flow of information from social media inputs in a manner that allows you to:

1. digest what information you need to find,
2. share that content with relevant contacts, and (hopefully)
3. promote your content through those contacts to others in their social media networks,

your content is not going to get the attention it deserves.

Google Plus gives people a new chance to organize their social media accounts. If you haven’t heard about Google Plus, it’s a new social media platform from Google that does an excellent job of integrating different Google services and platforms into a single format. Here’s a great “cheat sheet” for the uninitiated!

A key concept to Google Plus is the use of “Circles” to organize your friends. Circles are very similar to Facebook’s “friend lists” and grouping mechanisms on other social media outlets, but they’re more prominently displayed and you can add people to a circle without their specific permission (for now) – so you can see any of their “public” updates, but not content they’ve restricted to one or more of their circles.

Circles present an excellent opportunity to get organized and digest social media content, promoting content to specific audiences, and respecting your various audience groups to avoid deluging them with information they might not find relevant. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t post something to all your contacts about what you’re doing, but limit the regular traffic to contacts interested in those content areas.

By organizing contacts into circles you can coordinate how your process social media messages by setting up circles for key contacts, thought leaders, family and close friends, folks in your community, social media addicts, etc. If you’ve already gone through this process with Twitter or Facebook, you can mimic those circles or just start from scratch.

Getting your social media organized should start with two simple questions:

1. What do you want to read about?
2. What do you want to write about?

There are a number of “luminaries” that are able to quickly digest and promote quality content. Organizing these contacts into a circle provides you a quick and easy reading list that gets you the latest and greatest information about your topic in one location. By sharing and interacting what they produce you create opportunities for more interactions with these social media “publishing houses” that could open up opportunities to have your own content broadcast through their channels.

Then you have your own fan base to think about – the whole concept of circles derive from social circles that we all run in… I have friends that cross many of these circles, others that really only belong to one. I do know that all of my friends from college in Washington, D.C. probably aren’t all that interested in the latest happenings from Northeast Indiana unless they grew up out here just as all the raving Hoosier, Boilermaker and Fighting Irish fans out here could care less what the George Washington Colonials are up to!

By organizing your contacts so you talk about your passions with those who care most about them, you show tremendous respect to your audience and increase the chances that your content will be seen and generate some reaction. More than any other social media platform, Google Plus provides an interface that not only speaks directly to specific audiences – it seems organized around that very concept!

So think about how you want to get things organized… draw up some topics. If you need help with this, just contact us at Cirrus ABS – we eat online visibility strategy for breakfast and would be glad to help you sort through what areas might generate the best results for you or your organization. In my next post I’ll identify tools you can use to help speak more directly to those interests (note, an editorial calendar might come in handy here), then wrap it up with how you can use your new found organization to people who might help your content get more attention.

[Update: to be clear gplus.to is NOT an official Google product!]

I went to several HTTP status code checkers and sure enough http://gplus.to/kevinmullett, as seen below, is a 302 redirect rather than the preferred 301 redirect. In short this means that any potential link juice stays with the domain gplus.to instead of being passed to https://plus.google.com/111355895099122965371 my actual Google+ account. At least that is the commonly held opinion based on what we’ve seen in the wild. Most URL shorteners like bit.ly use the 301 HTTP status code. It could and has been argued that some link juice will pass and that eventually Google figures out that it isn’t a temporary move. BING has indicated in the past they don’t index 302 URL’s, but in other instances indicated they treat 302′s the same as a 301′s. Either way I would feel a lot better if the correct 301 moved permanently status was given.

A larger point to be considered is who in the heck is gplus.to owned by and will they be around? I don’t know for sure, but research seems to indicate that it is hosted by Natro Communication in Turkey. See WhoIs and Netblock owner.

What does this all mean? It means I am not likely to be adding the gplus.to link to profiles and almost certainly will not be adding it to any printed materials.

Have you created a gplus.to link already? Does this change your mind on usage? Will you use it anyway? Comment below or hit me up on Google+ » http://gplus.to/kevinmullett. See what I did there?

This screen grab shows an alert from Skype showing that you can now download a beta version of their application which allows you to instant message your Facebook friends right from inside the native Skype window.

While this is hardly proof of what is to be announced on Facebook Live Wednesday, it certainly shows that in addition to other joint ventures, Skype and Facebook don’t have a hostile relationship such as the case with Google and Facebook.

What do you think it will be? Will you be listening in? Comment below and let me know.

Trick Google+ invite system into letting you in! We here at Cirrus ABS love social media and just couldn’t wait for the almighty Google to let us play with the new Google+ system. This Google+ invite trick should get you into the new Google+ interface, even if you were/are getting the Google+ “we are over capacity” message. Good luck, it doesn’t work 100% of the time, and let us know if you make it by commenting below or hit me up via @kmullett on Twitter.

Did it work for you? Comment below and let us know and if you like the video please consider subscribing to the Cirrus ABS YouTube channel or find us on Twitter or Facebook.

Editorial Calendars are one of a number of things you can do to improve your productivity when working on your internet marketing activities. Unless you work for a company that really understands how online visibility can impact your bottom line, more likely than not there are a number of people managing your social media presence as a part of their jobs.

Whether your organization’s commitment to online marketing is minimal or extensive, or your resources available to assign to those efforts are scarce or vast – an editorial calendar can be a great tool to make your efforts more effective.

The title of this post came from Andy Welfle, who blogs for Pencils.com and was a panelist at the Fort Wayne Social Media Breakfast (@SMBFW / #SMBFW) earlier this week. Speaking from experience, I agree with his sentiment – that while an editorial calendar can be set with the best of intentions in mind, if it is not implemented correctly it can do more to hinder your productivity than to help it.

Let’s start by looking at what it takes to be an effective online marketing manager:

• Creativity: hopefully you (or members of your team) are generating new, compelling content. To get that accomplished you must have at least one creative bone in your body!
• Determination: Nothing happens online without some effort, whether you’re trying to improve your search engine optimization, improve your audience in social media, or gain recognition as a subject matter expert in your industry. Identifying the areas you have an opportunity to improve your online visibility and attacking them, leaving no stone unturned, is critical to achieve your goals.
• Discipline: If you’ve had any success building an audience it takes regular updates to maintain that audience. Consistent updates with compelling content are critical, and it helps if that content is optimized for keywords that you are using to attract attention to your website.

Looking at those traits they seem counter-intuitive. It’s rare that you’ll find anyone that has these traits in equal proportion. I have a hard time finding people that have more than one of these traits. An editorial calendar can be used as a resource to spur creative ideas, focus your determination, or help enforce disciplined updates.

The key to using an editorial calendar effectively is to look at your operations and figure out how to implement its use in a way that compliments the work style of the folks working for your organization. The first step along this path would be to do some analysis of your resources that your organization can commit to your online marketing efforts. Use whatever tool you want to process this data, I prefer to use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) but there are lots of options there. Here are the key questions you need to answer:

1. Where are there opportunities to enhance your online visibility?
2. What factors make you different from your competition?
3. Who is available to help improve your visibility?
4. How much time do they have available to commit to this effort?
5. When are they available to help?

The next step is to outline a program that is actually going to fit the rhythm of your organization, particularly those who are going to be in a position to help with this effort. If you are leading a department and everyone in the department is going to have some role in this, it may be as simple as doling out assignments and putting them on a board. Not every organization is so lucky! In fact, even if they are your employees, sometimes just handing out assignments isn’t going to be the best way to get their participation. I know from experience we tried something similar at our office – it wasn’t very effective.

So how do you implement this? It depends on your situation. Here are a couple of scenarios where an editorial calendar can be useful with some tips for that particular environment:

• Corporate environment: The particular circumstances of this environment will vary from organization to organization, but a common challenge I’ve observed in any business is communication. Your editorial calendar can be a touchstone that every element of the organization can use to understand resource allocation and improve effective participation in your online marketing efforts.
• Team blogging environment: The amplification that comes from members of a team blog can be blisteringly effective. Use the editorial calendar to not only understand when you will be publishing content, but when to amplify that content via social media marketing channels. Remember that automated tools may not be the best method for doing this – by varying when and how the content is amplified as well as within which networks it is amplified to, you’ll be able to better promote the content being developed and will drive more traffic as a result.
• Planning a multichannel marketing strategy: The more elements you try to coordinate the more important it is to have a common frame of reference. You may be a one-person team, but understanding what you are going to do and when you’re going to do it is important just for setting personal deadlines for content development as well as recognizing what elements of your online marketing strategy are working better than others. An editorial calendar paired up with Google Analytics and a social media analysis tool like Crowdbooster can help you spend your time more effectively without sacrificing impact.

The important thing to remember is to not etch your editorial calendar in stone. Recognize upfront that there are other things going on in your organization or your personal life that may take priority over drawing attention to what you’re doing online. When I develop a calendar for general content updates I use it as a guide and try to stick to it as best I can. That said, if I’m developing an editorial calendar around a campaign, it’s important to you assign dates carefully and in a manner that ensures you’ll be able to meet them because you will have people who are depending on you successfully meeting assigned dates for different content elements.

What has been your experience with using an editorial calendar? Leave a comment with any questions you might have about making effective use of editorial calendars, or any tips or tricks you’ve found help make them work more effectively for you.

Greg Satell very effectively connects social media’s current state of affairs with the “Gartner Hype Cycle,” noting that as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have risen to the forefront of the social media landscape, social media itself has passed its “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and has entered into a “Trough of Disillusionment.”

This echoes what I was saying in my own, previous blog “2011 – the Year to ‘Processitize“: the hype curve for social media was being propped up by very vocal social media marketers who really didn’t understand marketing or social networks and often equated a large personal following on (insert social channel here) to a viable business model.  What I call “me-toos” have really dug up some bad press for social media marketing lately, and rightfully so. Sadly, where I thought the flurry of me-toos was ending, it looks to be picking up steam and turning off more and more businesses to the real value of social media as a channel.

I’ve spoken about our NetCentered concepts in many of my blog posts and how no one marketing silo should be over-, or under-considered for a business’s marketing mix. Going back to December 2010′s “MySpace is Dead… and Other Fallacies,” where I share what happened to me when a local business chose not to project up-to-date information on the Web, this latest discussion is no different: you need to go where your customers are, engage them (with a sound business case), and measure your effectiveness. Where social media struggles is in effectively converting the conversation into business. Typically, when the actual costs of a large-scale social media marketing campaign are compiled, the campaign is found to be prohibitively expensive – virtually all overhead; you must have someone tweaking, posting, etc., for your company, in your voice. And if you don’t have a solid strategy in place to track effectiveness, you may very well be spending disproportionately, perhaps seeing no return on your investment – or even experiencing a loss.

My opinion differs from the original article in that I believe social media marketing is far from dead. I also find dubious the proclamation that Social Network Marketing is becoming the focus of a future plateaued social marketing landscape. As the Hype Curve shows, social media marketing will end up on its “plateau of productivity,” and for many businesses and legitimate agencies it is already there. ROI can certainly be calculated with the proper analytic tools (and the  knowledge/experience to use them) as part of a contiguous (NetCentered) marketing strategy. Satell clarifies his position later in the comments area and states that it is possible but very difficult to effectively track SM ROI. He also points out that, in practice, most or the “ROI cases” he’s seen are an “absolute joke” – the me-toos strike again.

As for social network marketing, as technology makes the (frighteningly) large amount of personal social data more available to marketers, it will surely trickle into the hands of small businesses. I believe, however, it will have its own independent Hype Curve and relinquish itself to the realm of big business budgets for quite some time. In the end, maximizing your effort is about determining your goals for any outreach program. Social Media Marketing is just one piece of a larger puzzle. It can be cost-effective in helping small-to-midsized businesses build buzz and generate sales. Or it can be a total waste of effort.

Getting the results you want won’t be easy; social media marketing doesn’t magically work on its own. It’s up to you to take the first steps. Study real-world cases of social media  successes and failures, then start small by listening and observing what your competition is doing. Get to know your customer base within the context of each social channel and start engaging them with quality content. Don’t over-think your posts, but at the same time, don’t make light of your effort – time is money, and wasted time is … just wasted. Build your brand and your fan base. Get help setting up the metrics and analytics you need to determine your effectiveness. Learn how to isolate your traffic streams. And, above all, make sure you have a strong Web presence to drive traffic back to you for both informational purposes and conversion.

In short: Don’t believe the hype, make your own.

See additional Social Media Marketing blog posts and additional information on our Social Media Consulting Services.