Internet Marketing Blog

Social Bookmark Marketing Presentation

I am a del.icio.us addict. I save tons of things to my del.icio.us account and republish that content using their wonderful RSS feeds. It's just insanely useful. But as much as I love del.icio.us, there are a few things I'd change:

• In the Links For You section, why can't I accept all the tags from the person who sent me the link with just one click?
• Why can't I archive an entire page like you can with Yahoo! MyWeb?
• Why can't I use a minus sign when creating a tag search so that I can exclude links with a specific tag? e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/football+news-soccer, so I can get everything tagged with "football" and "news" but not "soccer".

Aside from those admittedly minor complaints, I heart del.icio.us. I've been using it for quite some time now, so I know the ins and outs. I have, therefore, a pretty good idea of how to use del.icio.us in particular and social bookmarking in general as a marketing tool, as well. (And, no, I'm not talking about spam. I'm never talking about spam because spamming doesn't work.)

This is a presentation on social bookmark marketing I recently put together for a seminar on the topic:

| View | Upload your own

You might also be interested in my post on social bookmarking demographics for a breakdown of the demographics of the users of various social bookmarking services.

Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

Punch Pizza Flickr Photo Contest Campaign

Punch Pizza was in the process of getting their web site built when they came across a blog post by local pizza blogger Aaron Landry that was mildly critical of Punch for prohibiting him from taking a photograph of their pizza oven, as was wren at Flickr.

Landry's post led them to Flickr and they realized that many people were posting they'd taken at Punch Pizza locations and the quality of those photos were striking. On Facebook, they found a Punch Pizza fan club.

If your product or service is great, then your customers are likely to fans as well. Punch has great food and as the Flickr photos and Facebook fan club illustrate, they have fans.

This social media activity inspired Punch to create the Punch Neapolitan Pizza "Capture Our Fire" Flickr photo contest. Though they had legitimate business reasons to keep people from taking pictures of their ovens, Punch Pizza eliminated the no-photos policy. As Landry's blog post and the photos of Punch at Flickr made clear, their customers were also fans. If they wanted to take photos, the potential of someone stealing trade secrets was outweighed by making their customers happy.

They are giving away $3000 worth of Punch Pizza dining cards to the winners and they'll use the contest entries for their new web site when it launches. That will certainly make customers very happy.

We helped punch Punch navigate the social media waters by building the infrastructure through which they could learn a new way of communicating with their customers.

Punch Pizza co-owner John Puckett wanted to let Aaron Landry know that they'd changed their photo policy and were launching the contest, so he emailed Aaron and invited him to take part in the contest.

With that, the contest was launched.

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

Social Bookmarking Demographics

In an article about social bookmarking in the Winter 07/08 issue of Search Marketing Standard, Joe Whyte cites Quantcast demographic data for some of the top bookmarking sites. This data is hard to come by, so it is valuable in helping to understand the respective services' audiences. Using eBizMBA's list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites, the following is a list of those sites with links to their demographic profiles at Quantacast:

1. Digg.com
2. Technorati.com
3. del.icio.us
4. Propeller.com
5. StumbleUpon
6. reddit.com
7. Fark.com
8. MyBlogLog.com
9. slashdot.org
10. kaboodle.com
11. Bloglines.com
12. newsvine.com
13. blinklist.com
14. netvouz.com
15. clipmarks.com
16. Furl.net
17. Mister-Wong
18. dzone.com
19. ma.gnolia.com
20. Tailrank.com
21. ShoutWire.com
22. simpy.com
23. BlogMarks.net
24. BlueDot.us
25. Spurl.net
26. Spotplex.com
27. linkswarm.com
28. Spotback.com
29. PlugIm.com
30. MyBookmarks.com

I Want A Healthy Serving Of Statistics With My Social Networks

I live and die by statistics.

I use Google Analytics and Webmaster, Statcounter, Performancing Metrics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, AddThis, ClickTracks and other for that very reason.

I've got great statistics for my web sites, blogs, and RSS feeds; so why can't I have them for my social networking and media sites?

The video sharing sites like Google Video and YouTube and Metacafe provide basic statistics on viewership for a given video. That's helpful but not enough. But at least it's better than the social networking sites, social media, and social bookmarking sites.

Most of these sites do not even have a function for adding code to your account and even if they do, as MySpace does, they do not allow you to add JavaScript code so that rules out using third party web analytics services such as Google Analytics to do the job. 

There are plenty of very good reasons to prohibit people from posting JavaScript code to their social sites, foremost among them the risk that someone will (and people will) post malicious code that will effect users who visit that page.

I understand. So instead, why can't the MySpaces and Facebooks, and LinkedIns, and Flickrs, and del.icio.uses and Twitters of the world give me those stats themselves.

I doesn't have to be anything fancy; the basics would do just fine: Number of unique visitor by hour, day, week, month and year, how they got to my page and where they came from, and if they used a search engine, which one did they use and what search phrase brought them to me.

That's all I ask. I might even be willing to pay a little for the service.

Right now, the only indicator of how highly trafficked your social media account is, are the number of friends or contacts you have or how many outside sites are linking to your page. But that doesn't count how many people are actually visiting your page. You could go out and find a bunch of friends but they may not ever visit your page again after the initial friend approval.

The volume of comments you get on your content is a better indicator of popularity and engagement with your page but that still offers no concrete numbers.

I want to know a lot more than that and I don't think I'm alone.

So here's a plea to the social networking and media sites please add some basic statistics to your services before some smart developer figures out a way to provide that service through a JavaScriptless widget.

AOL News Beta Integrates Social & Conversational Media

My daily contact with AOL is the start page that launches when I open the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) program. I scan that page as well as Yahoo! Instant Messenger's start page to see what headlines teens and young adults are seeing.

Last week, an intriguing headline on the AIM start page  caught my interest enough to click: Mom Finds Osama Video Before Release. It was not, however, the fascinating story of a mom outwitting terrorists online that intrigued me after I'd clicked; it was what AOL was doing with their beta AOL News site.

The AOL News beta combines a news aggregator function with blogging, tagging, and embedding features to enable conversational media. The news, photos, and video are served up by content partners, primarily the Associated Press.

The left-hand sidebar features a "blog chatter" tag cloud with links to related content within blog posts powered by the blog search engine Sphere:

Also on the left-hand sidebar, the "blog chatter" tag cloud, are links to the most popular stories, most commented on stories, and the most recent comments:

This is where AOL begins to really enable conversational media as an integrated extension of modern journalism. One aspect of this is providing embeddable content that users can share at their own online homes such as their blogs or MySpace pages. AOL News is giving users embeddable video from the AP and other sources:

Here's the actual video:

In addition to sharing video, the AOL News beta site features links to top user-submitted news from Propeller, Netscape's digg-like social editing clone, tools for sharing stories on social bookmarking, a link to AOL forums to discuss stories, and, finally and most importantly, the blog commenting function for each story.

I think this must be the type of model traditional media must take if they are to survive in this environment. In order to maintain an audience large enough to sustain an advertising supported model, traditional media will need to use their content to enable conversations around that content and build themselves into the central gathering point for people to discuss learn about and discuss the events of the day.

From a PR and Internet marketing perspective, this conversational media is another opportunity for earned media and the a chance to engage targeted audiences with your client's story.

NFL.com Redesign & Search Engine Marketing Blunder

Darren Sharper Tackles Cedric Benson 
Originally uploaded by NicelySighted

The fundamentals in football are how to block, how to tackle, how to catch and how to pass. One of the fundamentals of redesigning a web site is to preserve, or at least account for, existing inbound links to the site.

So it was odd to discover after the redesign of NFL.com was unveiled amid much fanfare, that they changed the URL structure of the pages of individual football player's profiles but failed to account for all the links that pointed to the old player profiles.

Pro Football Bloggers' Links To NFL.com

According to Google, there are 22,800 inbound links to the root NFL.com domain. As of this writing, Technorati lists more than 67,000 blog posts linking to NFL.com. That's a lot of links representing a lot of traffic and a major marketing blunder.

As someone who blogs quite a bit about pro football, the league's failure to account for existing links to their site is especially annoying because all of the links I have to player profiles prior to the redesign are now broken.  This is obviously lost traffic to NFL.com, but, more importantly to me, the broken links create a horrible user experience for the readers of my blog posts. They get is an error page rather than the player profile they were expecting.

The extremely frustrating thing for me is that long ago I made it policy to link to a player's NFL profile under the reasonable assumption that the links wouldn't change. The problem of linking to team profiles is that players change teams though trades, free agency, and cuts and that results in broken links. It's reasonable to assume that many other football bloggers came to the same conclusion.

Perhaps I should only link to Wikipedia player bios from now on.

But it is not just links from blogs that have been broken, the links from the search engines are broken, too, and that's a user experience and branding problem for the NFL.

NFL.com's Search Engine Optimization

I'll use Minnesota Vikings safety Darren Sharper to illustrate NFL.com's previous URL structure for player profiles. The URL for Sharper's profile on NFL.com was http://www.nfl.com/players/4249.htm. The new URL is http://www.nfl.com/players/darrensharper/profile?id=SHA500479. Note that they've included the player's name in the URL itself, while the old URL only used an ID number.

As of this writing, this is what the Google search results look like for "Darren Sharper":

You'll notice from the screenshot above that the link for Sharper's old profile reads "NFL.com #42 Darren Sharper." That text is taken from the HTML TITLE Tag of the page. The new player profile pages use only the player's name in the TITLE Tag. Couple that with the inclusion of the player's name in the URL and it becomes obvious that the redesigned site is intended to be search optimized in order to boost the page's rankings on the search engine results pages.

If the NFL knew enough to optimize the redesigned site for search engines, wouldn't they know enough to account for existing inbound links? Apparently not.

When you click on the link to Sharper's profile from the search results, you get an error page. That creates a frustrating user experience for NFL.com and that frustration hurts the NFL brand.

Site Redesign Fundamentals

The fundamentals for dealing with an issue that many site's must deal with are well known and relatively painless: 1) permanent 301 redirects to seamlessly point an old page to a new one in a "search engine friendly" manner so that you do not lose your search ranking, and 2) using an XML sitemap to tell the search engines about your new pages. NFL.com does neither.

The NFL certainly doesn't need search engines to drive traffic to NFL.com. They've got television to do that. But the fact remains that NFL.com is listed in the search engines and accounting for broken links should have been done with the redesign. It's obvious the NFL has a pretty sizable Internet marketing budget, so you'd think their Internet marketing team would have planned for that.

Blogger Liaisons

Any organization with mass popular appeal that is likely to have a lot of people blogging about them--which is especially applicable to professional sports leagues--should think seriously of creating a blogger liaison. This person would have a blog themselves and reach out to bloggers, solicit their feedback, inform them of issues that may affect them and answer questions, etc.

An obvious example that will immediately spring to mind for those in the search marketing industry, is Matt Cutts who performs that very function for Google's relations with the search engine marketing community.

If the NFL had a blogger liaison and informed pro football bloggers about an upcoming site redesign, I'm absolutely certain those bloggers would have worried about broken links and the NFL would have become aware of the issue prior to the launch of their redesigned site.