Author Archives: bcaiwa

B2B social media is no longer a “nice to know”, it’s a “need to know”.

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A thoughtful, well-executed B2B social media strategy can deliver a number of benefits, such as social proof — extracting external measures of your firm’s, or industry’s, image or success from social network platforms. It can provide significant exposure, engaging you and your audience with the credible transparency of millions of grass roots conversations. Meanwhile, paid and sponsored advertising on these sites can be highly targeted to your consumers. And the functions that drive inbound marketing results, such as search engine optimization or SEO, are distinctly accelerated by the professional use of social media.

To get started, make sure your business clearly outlines its social media goals. These may include revenue, membership, reputation, market share, or other objectives. Once identified,

* Content is always king, especially online; determine how relevant, engaging information will be consistently acquired and generated by your team.

* It’s not expensive to do right but it’s also not free; dedicate the adequate resources and appropriate people to maintain your site and manage your social network interactions at a high standard.

* Decide which online channels will most effectively reach your audience.

* Technology is the gateway; ensure that you have a robust, effective and well-written Web site that supports and enhances your social media strategy.

* Make return on investment a key metric; fully integrate your social media efforts into your sales, growth, and customer relationship management initiatives.

For B2B marketing, social media is no longer a “nice to know,” it’s a “need to know.” Properly designed, well managed, and creatively applied, social media can make a discernible impact on your business goals. It can also serve as a fast and effective tool in responding to diverse crises, handling employee or labor issues, addressing fast-moving investor issues, and quickly adapting to sudden changes in buyer and stakeholder demographics.

Carefully evaluate the potential for B2B social media as an essential element of your company’s strategic marketing program. It will prove to be a seductive, but sustainable, strategy that will keep you from drifting aimlessly in a sea of competition.

Kevin Stickney is a founder of Calypso Communications. He can be reached at KStickney@Calypsocom.com and 431-0816.

How to Become a Link Magnet

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Moderator:

Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz.org
Jennifer Slegg, CEO, JenSense.com
Aaron Kahlow, chairman and founder, Online Marketing Summit

How is a link magnet different than link bait?

Link bait: Content built to bring links in
Link magnet: Create a fundamental incentive to link; either emotionally or physically reward the linker to create an incentive.

The Web has become jaded. Think back to a few years ago. A great blog post would get 50,000 links from blogs in days. Now that same post would get about a dozen blog links, but a lot more people were linking in their social networks. Bloggers and journalists, or the “linkerati,” are smelling link bait and are suspicious.

The good news: people still link when it benefits them.

Thus, savvy marketers are rewarding linkers in non-financial ways. Yelp gave businesses an online Yelp badge that has great anchor text and links to that businesses profile. This earned them hundreds of thousands of super relevant links.

Ingredients in Link Magnet Soup

There’s an idea that great content gains links. He says this is a myth. It’s about branding and marketing and the ability to sell a concept, to nudge psychologically. That’s why content that rewards is so important.

Take Flickr for example. When you upload photos, you can license them for public use. People on the Web get their photos out there and used by others, and Flickr gets the links.

An Emotional & Obvious Hook

Twitter wasn’t on SEOmoz’s most linked to domains list two years ago. Now they are. People have an incentive to link to their own profile because they want followers. If you can play to the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (self-fulfillment, satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness, utility, safety), people will link.

Targeted Links & Anchor Text

A lot of the time when you create embeddable badges or link opportunities, you have full control of the anchor text and ALT text.

Strategy for Promotion & Spread

Unless you have a distribution mechanism, your great content won’t get links. Here are examples:

Vimeo: The video player looks really good. They’ve worked hard on upload speed. They allow for longer video embeds. When you try embed the video, you get an overlay that grays out the screen behind. That’s all good for users. What Vimeo gets out of embedded videos is three optimized links.
okcupid: They release lots of trends about what their users think of other users’ attractiveness and how often users message others. These trends are picked up by bloggers and media all the time. Virtually every company has statistical data in their niche that they can use to this effect.
Techmeme Leaderboard: A few hours after Techmeme released their Leaderboard of blogs, most of those blogs had linked to Techmeme to point out their accomplishment.
Next Aaron, @AaronKahlow, is going to wing his presentation because Rand went over time. He’s going to make this interactive.

He says first and foremost is having good content that’s informative or engaging. If you don’t have the content, there’s nothing worth linking to.

Next consider persona. Who are you and who do you want to be? Stick with it and be consistent, and be comfortable with who you are.

Then, think about how the content can be shared. Is this something that one of my colleagues would want to share on Facebook? Is it tweetable? Ask these questions every time and match your expectations with that.

Finally, consider who your friends are. Keep good company, in terms of who you’re linking to, and copy them. Then do better than they because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Suggestions:

Decide who your target market is and address them. You can’t geek out if your audience is not the geek. Think about who you’re tasking with the responsibility and make sure their content will match your audience interests.
Share and make it easy. Retweet buttons should be front and center. Leverage things like Facebook Connect and put these tools to good use. The blog is usually the most linkable content on a site. You don’t necessarily have to create the content if it’s a supporting strategy. It can be an RSS feed of other blogs and you’ll get the link back.
Decide what kind of magnet you want to be. SEO, marketing, PR, chick magnet… oh wait, maybe that last one isn’t covered in this session.

more: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2010/03/how-to-become-a-link-magnet-2/

Time-shift: how Bing changes the search results based on temporal events

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A new patent application of Microsoft indicates that Microsoft’s search engine Bing might deliver different results based on the intent of the searcher and the time of the year.

What is the search engine patent about?

Here’s the official abstract of the patent application:

“Techniques and systems are disclosed for returning temporally-aware results from an Internet-based search query. To determine if a query is temporally-based one or more query features are collected and input into a trained classifier, yielding a temporal classification for the query.

Further, if a query is classified as temporal, the query results are shifted by determining an alternate set of results for the query, and returning one or more alternate results to one or more users.

Based on user interactions with the one or more alternate results, the classifier can be updated, for example, by changing the query to a non-temporal query if the user interactions identify it as such.”

Different results at different times of the year

A meaning of a search query can shift over time. People searching for “independence day” probably mean the US Independence Day if the search is done around July 4th.

They can also mean the Indian Independence Day if the search is done around August 15th. It is also possible that people are searching for information about a movie if a movie with that name is in theaters at that time.

Based on temporal indicators, Bing wants to return the most probable results for the search.

How does Bing classify queries as temporal?

According to the patent application, Bing takes the following into account:

If the frequency of searches for certain queries increases, this can indicate a temporal nature if this happens around certain dates.
Increases of mentioned in blogs, microblogging services and increased updates in online encyclopedias can indicate a temporal nature.
A sharp increase in a click-through rate, abandonment, or reformulation of a query may indicate that a meaning for the query has shifted temporally.

To find out if a search query is still temporal, Bing might sometimes show alternative results to a number of searchers to see how they interact with the results.

Their responses could determine whether or not the search engine continues to show alternative search results based upon a temporal classification.

Bing might also change the classification from temporal to non-temporal

The way people respond to the alternative search results may result in the classification being changed:

Searchers do not choose results that have been added because of the temporal classification.
Searchers click on results that have not been added because of the temporal classification.
Searchers switch to another search engine after seeing the results.
Searchers don’t click on the refinement suggestions displayed on the result page due to the temporal classification.

Source: http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter442.htm#facts

5 Quick Google Analytics Hacks

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4) Track SEO Variables In Google Analytics

This is a nifty use of custom variables which I recently started using on a few sites. Imagine you’re running a hotels reviews website. Some of your reviews have 100s of reviews and are lovely content-rich pages. But some of your hotels are awaiting their first review. In that case, your hotel page might be very light on content and might only have the name and address of the hotel on the page (which is duplicated on 100s of other sites). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to segment your Google traffic by how many reviews your hotel page had? Well using page level custom variables this is as easy as the following code:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required.
'Num_Reviews', // The name of the custom variable. Required.
0, // Sets the value of "Num_Reviews" to 0. Required.
3 // Sets the scope to page-level. Optional.
]);

You don’t have to limit yourself to just using this for number of reviews, you could look at other factors that you think might be affecting your pages ability to rank and pass those into GA. For example, you could pass the length of the description of a page. Or the number of tweets it has or anything you can think of really!

Learn more about page level custom variables over here.

Source：http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-quick-google-analytics-hacks

Baidu will be joining Russian market leader Yandex and Middle Eastern search engine Ayna at the International Search Summit London

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China, Russia and The Middle East are 3 of the fastest growing global internet markets, and a recent study has shown that web users in China and The Middle East spend more time online than in any other markets.

China’s leading search engine Baidu will be joining Russian market leader Yandex and Middle Eastern search engine Ayna at the International Search Summit London on 28th October.

Chief SEM specialist for Baidu, Zhang Tao, will be speaking on the Chinese search market and giving delegates insights into how marketers can use Baidu to reach a Chinese audience.

Google has removed the “Site Overlay” tool from Google Analytics

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Google has removed the “Site Overlay” tool from Google Analytics and replaced it with a new one called “In-Page Analytics.” It’s fairly similar to Site Overlay, but appears on first glance to offer better data visualization and an improved interface.

Source:http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/10/introducing-in-page-analytics-visual.html

B2B email market: 5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers

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5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers

As you are wrapping up details of your 2011 planning, take a moment to make these resolutions for the new marketing year:
1. Think about your audience.
We often tend to think about our own needs first, such as more leads or more revenue. This is especially true when economic times are tough. However, driving success in the digital channels depends heavily on building the relationship with your subscribers and then delivering relevant content to them.
The key is to identify the natural segments in your contact base and then create content that is meaningful to these different segments but which also meets your business objectives.

2. Think beyond your product.
We also tend to tout how great our products are rather than focusing on how we can provide a solution to our customer’s business problem.
Think about your answer to the subscriber’s question: “What’s in it for me?” Communicating an effective answer to your audience will help you establish a solution-provider leadership position beyond just the product you’re selling.

3. Think about the customer lifecycle.
Traditionally, e-mail campaigns were sent out on the marketer’s schedule. The newsletter is mailed in the second week of the month. We need leads, so we send out another e-mail to the base.
Today, marketers are starting to realize that the secret to executing high-performing campaigns is to map critical programs to the customer lifecycle. Identify key milestones and barriers to purchase along the lifecycle and build automated programs to address the subscriber’s specific needs.

4. Think multichannel.
It’s new, it’s got the buzz, and it works. Several recent reports are showing that social media and mobile use by B2B sales and marketing professionals is evolving in a similar fashion to that of consumers.
B2B users are now accessing mobile and social channels slightly more often than e-mail. Reinforcing your message across multiple digital channels will extend your reach, identify more leads, and drive more sales.

5. Think quality over quantity.
Marketers often focus on quantity (“How many total e-mail addresses do I have on my list?”) rather than the quality of those contacts. All too often, they tend to blast the entire list with the same message over and over again in hopes that the good leads will raise their hands.
This is the e-mail marketing equivalent of telemarketers harassing you at dinnertime to switch your long-distance carrier. Resolve to focus on boosting your opt-in permission for key segments, and focus on leads or revenue per e-mail as a key metric for the success and efficiency of your e-mail campaigns.

The Final Word: Lack of B2B email market awareness is “unforgiveable”

Cordell Brewer wrote in a post for Biz Community that the impressive results that can be achieved through B2B email marketing speak for themselves and, as such, to be unaware of this growing marketing area is to be behind the times.

He noted: “For a professional marketer or advertising person to be blissfully unaware of a tool that routinely provides a 48-times return on investment is just unforgiveable.”

Mr Brewer added that increasingly creative uses of the medium are likely to come to the fore as more marketing professionals embrace B2B email marketing.

Reference:
Lack of B2B email market awareness is “unforgiveable”
5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers

Ayna: Internet More Popular Than Television In The Middle East

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Here, Omar Khaled, Partner Relations Manager for Arabic search engine Ayna, talks about how search is evolving in the region and the opportunities available to both local and international markets.

What are the opportunities for marketers targeting users in the region?

Internet in our region retains a substantial audience. Latest studies have shown that the MENA internet users spend more time online than watching TV throughout the day. The studies have also showed that the internet usage in our region remains at its peak all day long compared to other media. This indicates that the internet has become the number one media consumed by users during the day, thus opening new opportunities for marketers to target users in the region. In addition, some countries in this region are continuing to heavily invest in the Information & Communication Infrastructure as part of the strategies to develop local economies and increase the number of web users.

read more:http://www.multilingual-search.com/internet-more-popular-than-television-in-the-middle-east/12/10/2010/