Unfortunately, the majority of stories also feature how marketers fail miserably at establishing trust in these social media spaces, and most of that has to do with the attitude of the advertisers.

Too many times, marketer’s feel as through social media has been created for their benefit, when in reality it is a group of people with similar interests who joined into a community. A community where marketers are free to participate, but not free to overtly sell, that isn’t part of the social contract.

Users in these communities are looking for participation and contribution. And no – advertising your product and dropping links are not considered participation. Contribution is in the form of thoughts, opinions, and discussion.

Bottom line, social media networks are looking to hold hands, and not jump into bed on the first date. Marketers need to cool their jets and learn a little foreplay, otherwise, rejection is painful. To be viewed as a consumer is a little disconcerting for these contributors, and many feel just as violated, as if they were a ‘piece of meat.’

Facebook’s slap in the face

Facebook’s Beacon advertising program was the latest singles bar casualty. In promising free love for advertisers, Mark Zuckerburg forgot that romance is important. People were not using Facebook in order to give him a $15 Billion dollar valuation, they were using it to connect with friends and define themselves to the world. They didn’t want to be treated as whores for advertisers, and they spoke up vehemently. Beacon will now be a shadow of its intended purpose. All because marketers believed that consumers were there for their pleasure.

Thus, the tragic problem with marketers comes to the surface when they try social media. So many of them believe they only have to make a quick stop into the singles bar and then on to bed. However, consumers only want to hold hands.

Can We Hold Hands First?

Social Media was not created for marketing. Social Media existed before the modern internet and even preceded websites. Social Media is a creation of users for themselves to meet and connect, to think otherwise is foolish. No social media network was created for the express purpose of marketing (except for Webkinz, but that’s another story).

The image is reinforced of an overbearing bad date that cares about nothing more than getting into bed, when the consumer wants to talk and be heard. Many advertisers feign listening, some stomp off in disappointment, others are willing to become involved, maybe even commit to a long-term relationship.

But that is how marketers show themselves in many social media settings – concerned only with getting their message across. Rarely do they listening to any of the discussions or familiarize themselves with the intricacies of the social scene.

• Listen more than talk
• Be complimentary
• Don’t expect to score on the first date
• Don’t brag about your conquests
• Be willing to commit for the long-term

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For consumers, social media "gives them an opportunity to tell us exactly what they want and what’s important to them in an uninhibited environment," Andy Markowitz, Kraft’s director of digital media, said in an e-mail. "We’re listening and learning as we go."

It’s interesting comparing this to search engine marketing and what 360i refers to as Search Informed Research. Search engine marketing is all about meeting consumers’ explicit needs as they’re expressed (even though some queries may be for future needs, such as researching purchasing a car, which can have different types of searches over several months).

With conversation analysis and social media, there are two kinds of needs and wants expressed by consumers:

• Fleeting: Someone posting a message in a group or on a blog about something that matters to them right now
• Lasting: These are slower to change and generally are posted on parts of their profiles that don’t change as frequently, from their relationship status (on Facebook, a number of great ads have targeted me as someone who’s engaged – a status that has lasted a year but will ultimately change) to they’re favorite sports teams and TV shows. On Facebook, you can target these interests with their ad platform, rather than the immediate needs.

What’s important for marketers is to appreciate the difference between those types needs and interests and tailor their marketing accordingly. When I say that I’m engaged and a fan of The Office and Philip Roth, I’m expressing who I am. When I say I thought the last episode of The Office was pretty good is more useful as one opinion aggregated among many others.

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• Unofficialseoblog
• Coverage by other SEM communities
• Images

Below is an alphabetical index of our coverage:

• A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Effectively Leveraging Social networking
• Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM
  
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
  
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Micro Communities
• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

Coverage by other SEM communities:

• Affiliate Tip
• Aim Clear Blog
• Alt Search Engines
• Bruce Clay
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Round Table
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Marketing Gurus
• Square Oak
• Tamar.com
• Tannerhobin.com
• Top Rank Blog
• WebProNews

Images:

• Top Rank Blog

• Dennis Goedegebuure


• Hilarious pictures of Mr. Moderator

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Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies

First speaker of the day’s second session, “Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM” is Rob Key, CEO, Converseon who will talk about engaging community. Community is the crux of the entire web experience. Present are dozens of communities have people of similar interests or growing cultures. There, we can communicate better. As marketeers we haven’t been asked to be part of them. Communities are meant only for consumers and consumers. Henceforth, it should be a marketing ploy. In "2nd Life Liberation Army," a community in Second Life, there are avatars that take up commercial properties, such as Sony etc.

What’s the purpose of being a marketer? It’s all about being a cultural anthropologist. As marketeers there will be lot of backlash for trying to develop brands as we foray into social media communities.

8 Ways To Get Into Social Media Communities:

• Be an active member of the community.
• Make friends with elders in the community.
• Understand and respect them.
• Lead with altruism – come bearing gifts.
• Discover a community need.
• Learn the linguistics.
• Value and cultivate relationships.
• Leverage appropriately … over time.

Take the Second Life example:

Even at the beginning of the 3d web, there already are 7 million accounts. According to a majority of 200 respondents, they were all unhappy with Second Life’s real world company activities. Imagine, people within Second Life are agitating the sale of selling Second Life land to Starbucks.

Our Approach: Joined Second Life in 2006, understood and followed the norms of the community. Issues related to ecology are of prime importance in Second Life. This led to the launching of Second Chance Trees Islands. Through this, you could buy a tree for 300 Linden Dollars and at the same time, a real tree will be planted somewhere in the world. A Google Maps image shows the location of where your tree is planted in real life.

This project garnered so much attention that it was picked up by mainstream media. Won the OMMA award for best virtual world project and was in contention for winning an award for American Express.

The third speaker is Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies. If you are talking about social media, you have to be nimble as it requires multi-department coordination from PR & marketing, to the SEO team to the IT department. A lot of this revolves around money from ads. The leggl department is worried on whether you will do anything to get the brand’s image a backlash.

Common Pitfalls include:

• Lack of strategy
• lack of support and resources
• poor coordination
• Inappropriate and unnecessary contents
• no understanding in communities
• hiding affiliations
• being excessively emotional

Many a time, those who do not understand social media can do more harm than good.

Paths To Success:

• Selling upper management the concept
• Getting buy-in from all key departments
• Instilling a "give to gain" philosophy
• Finding the right people to manage the efforts
• Giving them what they need to be effective

Building credibility in social media sites’ communities take time. Also keep a check on links and traffic.

More to consider:

• How will you sustain your efforts over the long-term?
• What happens if your brand ambassador leaves the company?
• What about employees with their own personal profiles?
• How will you deal with negative responses and reactions?

Finding what works:

Hearst Magazine: An article they submitted called “The Daily Green” about the Lunar Eclipse brought in three times more views within a span of 2 days than an appearance on the homepage for the entire month.

Good Housekeeping: Good Housekeeping made to the first page of Digg, thanks to Dog costumes. The post garnered over 50 comments on a variety of points.

TV Guide: They hired a full-time brand ambassador who participates and regularly monitors social sites. There is full transparency within communities while there are network partner sites created for publicity efforts. Many promotions are created around exclusive content.

TV Guide promoted High School Musical 2. they came up with original and exclusive content for the film which was featured in an article. Word was passed through FaceBook etc. The outreach was a smash hit. Fansites and blogs picked it up too.

• 700% greater on the photo gallery
• 300% greater on Video
• 25% greater on page time
• 192% new visitors
• 1000% greater ratings and reviews

Last speaker of the session is Sarah Hofstetter, the Vice President of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i.

How do marketeers influence the influential? Its all about finding a place where marketeers can smartly put forth across social media so that they can be evangelists. What are the assets that you can use to promote your brand? Th answer is more than just saying, “my band rocks”. You have to include widgets, CD-ROM, etc.

First case Study: NBC’s Heroes

A Digger favorite. As it was going on a 7 week hiatus thanks to Dancing with the stars, they had to make sure that viewers would return. For this, NBC worked with PR, marketing etc. Together they came up with prormotions, games and other fun paraphernalia that would keep the audience and viewers engaged. A word of caution: Take care when your are pitching (Read "Bad Pitch Blog"), people should be interested in what you have to say.

Second case Study: Comedy central

For this they wanted to create awareness about the politically-related stuff on Comedy Central. They already had a good following. As comedy book lovers adore the Green Lantern,we drew an analogy and linked it to the site. This stirred a lot of controversy which bred a lot of intensity. Keep giving your audience something to write about. Feed their hunger. Everyone is looking for interesting things to write about.

Third case Study: Living with Ed

For this new HGTV TV show, the aim was to attract a new set of viewers that may have not watched the channel but used blogs, communities, forums etc. The biggest problem was that the first rank of “Living with Ed” showed “erectile dysfunction” and not television show.

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Recently we’ve affirmed that we’re not averse to using some manual intervention. We purposefully avoid using the word “mechanical” in describing how we work in the New York Times article. There’s a lot of people thinking all the time about how to improve search. We want to think algorithmically and in a scalable, enhanced way.—Matt Cutts, You & A with Matt Cutts

Social media is about making these communities work for me. It’s our job to do this with Google, now it’s our job to do this with others. Viral marketing is about stylistically different communities. —Rand Fishkin, SEO, Meet SMM

Social media can work for B2B, even Digg. You’re not trying to relate to those audiences, that’s okay. You don’t have to feature it on your site. I’ve been on Digg many times and even if 0.01% of that traffic/those links is/are actually on target, you’ll still get enough traffic and sales from that. —Neil Patel, SEO, Meet SMM

Digg’s not my audience, but if these young techie males can enjoy this content, I can get the links I need to bring my content to the correct audience.—Todd Malicoat, SEO, Meet SMM

We’re more worried about developing stickiness now. Build out of content and functionality. Sites will become research bases. Content aggregations, comparison wizards, mashups will all be popular. . . . Personalization is the scalable way to do social search. —Gord Hotchkiss, Personalized Search: Fear or Not?

Is personalization the death of SEO? No, nothing will be. There will always be a need for people to present themselves well and there’s always gonna be people who don’t have time to do it themselves. —Matt Cutts, Personalized Search: Fear or Not?

When you’re at 10% share in the US, that’s the challenge. . . . We must “crack the code of engagement” There are lots of people even trying Live search. The thing we want to do is how to get them to stay with us. . . . There should be no confusion in terms of our entire destiny and ability to make headway in search—it depends on keeping pace with MSN as a portal. —Satya Nadella, Keynote Conversation with Satya Nadella

[Bid management software is] a foundation by which you’re enabled to do other things. . . . Bid management allows you to focus your attention on areas outside your campaign that are valuable and quickly react. A bid management system can look at the world holistically. It can predict what customers need just like Google, Yahoo and MSN do. —Chris Zaharias, Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?

Real search marketers look at search marketing outside of just a bid placement tool. They don’t just look at immediate return. A keyword is just as important as your television ad. . . . It needs human influence—industry, consumer and marketer. It’s not just math. You limit yourself & search marketing and it will go away if you think of it as “just a keyword” and “just a bid.” —Misty Locke, Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?

Buy tangential keywords carefully or not at all. . . . Search engine marketing works because of direct relevance. If you really want to do it, maybe you should go with contextual ads. —Ben Perry, Pump Up Your Paid Search

What’s your favorite tool of any type (external)?

Greg Boser: Mine used to be Project Mayhem, now we use internal tools

Todd Friesen: Some Firefox extensions: Search Status, and the Web developer toolbar which lets you see all your header tags, alt text & CSS through overlays.

Cameron Olthuis: Serph (their tool)–it’s like social media meta search, getting results from Google Blog search, Technorati, etc.

Jim Boykin: Our Top 10 Analysis Tool on We Build Pages—you can compare your site to the top 10 sites ranking for your keyword.

Todd Friesen: Also, Aaron’s SEO for Firefox. And Xenu Link Sleuth gives you a list of URLS that are broken, shows redirect issues.

Alex Bennert: Xenu can produce a report—go back to the interface to export the crawl.

Todd Friesen: You can also do a multithreaded crawl—you can crawl your competitors.

Christine Churchill: Excel for keywords (a variety of tools), Rex Swain’s tool

Todd Friesen: Sam Spade has a desktop version of Rex Swain’s.

Greg Boser: WebBug

Danny Sullivan: Groowe

Better Ways

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Click To Play

SMX policy prevents me from sharing more than 1 minute of continuous footage, hence the short clips, but Danny Sullivan did give his blessing for me to exceed that limit once and a while. Stay tuned for more clips!

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Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

Social media is about making these communities work for me. It’s our job to do this with Google, now it’s our job to do this with others. Viral marketing is about stylistically different communities.

What can SMM do for you? You can rule the SERPs, control your brand, earn link love, show the community you’re a participant (more link love), get traffic, and influence traditional media.

Social media sites in order of value: #1 YouTube—not directly influential in SERPs/rankings. You do get the potential for millions of views (his example had 22 million views in 5 months).

2. Wikipedia (Rand evokes Walt Whitman as he declares, “I will contradict myself.”)

3. Yahoo Answers

4. Yelp (disclosure: they’re an SEOmoz client)—for West coast local reviews, they’re the most popular

5. LinkedIn: personal networking source

6. Flickr (comments not nofollowed. Rand evokes Paris Hilton by declaring “That’s hott!”)

7. craigslist: highly temporal, but best of craigslist is good. Write cool material and get lots of votes.

8. Facebook

9. Amazon (especially for authors, who can have blogs) lists, reviews, etc.

10. MySpace

11. Technorati: People ask if you should be tagging your content? SEOmoz, for the right tags (and tags where Technorati is ranking well in SERPs), it’s good. Their links are not nofollowed.

12. Judy’s book (like Yelp)

13. Newsvine (Good for seeding stuff)

14. Twitter—is not useful. I’m skipping it. Unless you have a community. Danny says it sends you a lot of traffic.

15. CitySearch—a local directory; features user reviews and comments

16. Wikihow

What can viral media marketing do for you?

In Dec 05, what happened that make YouTube the most popular? Lazy Sunday

Viral media = branding (even people who don’t regularly watch TV recognize the Mac/PC ad)

Viral media = search rankings. Why? Write something really good, incredibly valuable: I’ll get something Dugg. Target your keyword in the title.

Viral media = growing your fan base. Linkbait = subscribers.

Where should you do this?

1. Digg

2. Reddit: more politically focused, more real-content-focused

3. StumbleUpon has 2.5 million users: sends traffic and phenomenal links

4. Del.icio.us.

5. Netscape features more serious news

6. TechCrunch: hard to get on unless you can give Mike Arrington something phenomenal traffic: 400-500 links

7. Newsvine

8. BoingBoing

9. Fark. Not very serious: immerse yourself in the community first

10. Engadget

11. Techmeme

12. Lifehacker—fantastic traffic

13. Yahoo Picks.

Viral Media Marketing = power

Neil Patel, Author, Pronet Advertising

Rules of social media

From the terms of service: no paying for votes (gaming the system), creating multiple accounts from same IP address, submitting illegal content (porn, how to get free DirecTV/Dish, etc.).

Breaking the rules: Neil did it so we don’t have to

He submitted a story on how to get free Pay-per-view, created 30 accounts on the same IP address, and paid for votes. Digg banned him within hours.

The social media audience is like a baby with a mohawk: they have an attitude, they’re arrogant, you don’t mess with them. Immature to the point of arrogance. The young audience is in early high school. The “middle age audience” is in their early 20s (laughs and groans from the audience). The older audience is 28, 29 maybe 30. Rarity—40s.

Unwritten rules of social media:

No self promotion (submit your own stuff); don’t add biased info (bad title/description); don’t ask friends for votes.

Users are quite rude (he gave an example of Digg comments), especially if you violate these rules.

Neil’s Golden Rules for Social Media

• Add tons of friends (people who are interested in things you’re submitting)
• Participate in the community (not just submitting/voting: leave comments, interaction: GET INVOLVED. Email, IM)
• Become a top user (yes, this is time consuming, you might be able to get away with self submission)
• Use their features against them (friends, comments, etc.)
• Create a social brand (create a fake name to self submit. Get icons, brand your user name that way.) For example: Neil’s a top Digger and people on Netscape recognize his name and vote for his submissions.

StumbleUpon example: “send to spam (it’s not spam, it’s actually just sending a message)”: using their features against them. If you send a page to your friends, that will be the first thing they’ll see the next time they Stumble: there’s no way around it.

Conclusion

• Do what is ethical (you don’t want to do spammy stuff because you’ll have a hard time sleeping—unless you get tons of traffic and links)
• Don’t jeopardize your brand
• Think long term. It’s not a drug (quick fix). It can take week, a month, or 1-2 years.

Slides

Todd Malicoat, Internet Marketing Consultant, Stuntdubl

He’d just been reading a book that quoted a Rudyard Kipling story about self-made shipping tycoon. On deathbed he said of his competitors:

They copied all they could follow,
But they couldn’t copy my mind,
So I left them stealing and sweating,
And a year and a half behind.

Social media can leave your competitors that far behind.

Social media for strategic linking (outside of linkbaiting)

Benefits

• Control over anchor text, body copy, theme
• Lots of opportunity for links from trusted sites
• Increased rankings, traffic and sales
• Example: Todd’s Squidoo page has lots of links to many areas of his site

Caveat

The can use an “invisible” nofollow: a “hand job.” Doesn’t pass PageRank.

Any search engine will tell you: “Spam is determined by intent and extent.” (Apparently, this was emphasized by the search engines in the Penalty Box Summit very next day.) “Bots are stupid, but engineers aren’t.” If you do these maliciously, they’re not gonna work very long.

If you’re a large brand, you can get away with a lot more than if you’re a small brand:

Big brands get away with it. Determine strategy on how big you are & if you can handle the fall out

Strategies

• Build reputation neighborhoods: reputation management. Create something positive, if it’s justified & unique content
• Building hubs with social media links

See Gray Wolf’s tips for controlling the top ten.

• Sign up to everything you find
• Test the sites
• If they pass PageRank, get some links
• Build a neighborhood of sites
• Interlink them within reason
• Vary anchor text and copy
• Can be used for person, company or products

Sites: Squidoo, Naymz, Netscape, LinkedIn, Tagalag, Bill Hartzer’s 130 social media sites on WebmasterWorld (sub req).

Building a hub on a social media site works well for movies and timely content.

Movies have begun advertising their MySpace pages. This gets them on SERPs faster than starting their own site (http://www.myspace.com/johntucker versus johntucker.com)

How to find social media sites

Search Google dorks for examples of creativity, using different Google commands to find different types of sites. Use keywords “profile,” “web 2.0.” Go to directories: http://www.go2web20.net .

Testing sites

• Is it indexed? (The site and its pages.)
• Do the pages rank?
• Is the theme good?
• Placement (how many links?)
• Does the page pass link juice? Most difficult to test.

Methodology

• Run a site: command search on similar pages on the site. For example, site:myspace.com — profile pages are indexed
• Build a page on the social media site filled with nonsense
• Link to another nonsense page on your site

(see case studies on Wolf-howl)

Conclusions

Benefits: Social media is another tool for linking. Know how to use it and know what’s best for your goal.
Caveats: Size matters, as do intent & extent.

Use techniques and strategies.

Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works Inc.

(This one is almost entirely what was on her slides, since everything was written out there!)

Social media for brand awareness and brand management

Observations:

• Ubiquitous web adoption demands a higher level of interaction with brand
• Social media is the fastest way to move brand forward, or change its image
• Social network advertising spending is expected to triple by 2011 but the cost for participation on social networks is expected to remain free
• Social media provides a unique opportunity to encourage customers to incorporate your brand with their identity both on and offline.
• Appeal to a peer set which then influences people.

Securing your social presence

• Research relevant social networks: major social sites, niche/vertical social sites
• Social local sites (like localguides.com)
• Blogs & forums, wikis

Identify existing networks for your brand or your industry

Have a strategy: how many profiles do you need? Where should you direct traffic?

Determine who gets social profiles: brands, products, company icons (people/mascots)

Consider social profiles as portals to your brand

• Fosters a sense of shared experience & belonging
• Spend time on design & maintain brand standards
• Keep info fresh—weekly updates
• Manage multipile social profiles in centralized locations: photobucket/flickr for images, centralized control panels like fidgt.com (but you do want to have some unique content on each profile)
• Leverage email functionality, blogs & billboards

Create SEO’d profiles

Follow traditional SEO best practices

Focus on brand keywords (maybe ones that aren’t “okay” on your main site)

Interlink brand profiles to one another, and to the main site

Initiate friending campaigns

Drive traffic to the profile: natural search traffic, from your main site, PPC (complicated), PPP, banners, offline

Good MySpace profiles can pay to be featured profiles (ex: True dating service profile)

Manage your reputation

Use SEO to push detractors out of top positions

Send traffic to positive press

Participate in forums & groups for detractors & supporters: diffuse adversarial rhetoric, move conversations to a private sphere
Prevent problems: preemption, engagement, diplomacy

Address problems: transparency, candor, humility

Empower Brand Evangelists

Give them cool stuff: widgets, layouts, desktop themes, graphics, games, videos, podcasts, interactive surveys, customizable HTML & brand apps, promotional codes & deals, info on brand

Examples of MySpace layouts: Starbucks, True & LOST. There’s already a community in place for these brands. They’re building on that.
Starbucks features a widget to invite someone for coffee, desktop layouts, location finder, monthly featured beverages.

True has fun games (create-a-date, mixboard for love music) and a fortunes widget

LOST has wallpapers, skins, secrets from shows, interviews.

Embrace Convergence

Leverage existing marketing efforts

Overtly send TV, radio print traffic to profile pages

Release, promote & link to commercials on your profile pages: submit TV commercials to YouTube & other video sites; submit TV/radio to SingingFish or MySpace music

Link to information/press about the campaign from the profiles

Use profiles to get feedback.

Direct social network traffic

Direct traffic offline: host local meet-ups, in-store only coupons, use social profiles and integrate offline & online brand interactions: video uploads, scavenger hunts & offline games. Get people to participate in offline communities around your brand. Have them post results online & link there.

Direct traffic online: create a social media section of your main site. Link to all profiles from main site. Encourage visitors to add you as friends on your main site, encourage visitors to participate in forums & groups. Send them to your site to get promotions.

“Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store. After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about a brand forever.” (Laura & Al Ries)

Q&A

You’ve shown the profiles for those companies, but the LOST one was by Sky1 (UK television channel that it airs on). If you’re a reseller, would it be possible/ethical to “hijack” the community?

Rand: Riding on the coattails of a brand is fine. Hijacking, maybe not. This is subjective, but it’s potentially dangerous. For example, if I made a “Rand’s speaking at SMX” MySpace page: that’d be dangerous, if I were successful. There are legal ramifications, as well as partnership ramifications.

Cindy: On the other hand, people can create branded profiles out of enthusiasm for the product.

Neil: Make it the “unofficial” profile.

Todd: It’s the intent/extent thing. If you do it, don’t let it work too well. Then people will copy you & it will tamper your success.

If I were to promote my most bizarre content, that would get the most links/love? (a product reviews site)

Rand: When you start this process, you have to ask how are you going to use social media. I tell my clients, before you start submitting stuff, you are required to spend 2 weeks there reading what they submit. Understand the community; know what they promote and like. If you invest that time, it’s the best time to figure out the space. I wish we could just tell you what to do.

Neil: Bizarre is better for the young audience, but older audiences (Netscape, Newsvine) like appropriate reviews better.

Todd: Even if you’re getting bad press, the anchor text can great (“worst product reviews” has 2 good words…)

Neil: It’s not necessarily your real title: it’s submitted title. Make sure your website title has keywords, though.

Cindy: Plan ahead if you’re using the bizarre stuff. It’s not just what you do, but think about the next step.

Rand: A lot of people shy away from the space because it can’t be controlled. But the good thing there is that we, the small marketers and small and medium brands can own that space. We can outrank them there.

Would you equate social media to old school forum links?

Rand: It’s similar. You remember the Slashdot effect? Well, now you get tons of links because of blog proliferations in addition to traffic.

Neil: Like with the forums, you don’t really care about that direct link, but what you care about is the traffic and the people that will link to you.

If you have a fan that’s built a fan profile, does it behoove the company to build an official site? Or should they feed the fan site?

Cindy: Evaluate the quality of the profile and the person keeping it up. You can get burned either way. If you endorse them & they become official, you have less control. But if you try to displace them with an official site, you could offend the existing community. It’s a face-to-face, one-on-one thing.

Rand: Let’s say there’s a crazed, rabid fan who’s going wild over your brand. I think that, yes, it pays you to create your official page and also to link to them. Say, “Man, we love this.” That fan will be so encouraged. You don’t’ even have to be a big brand. Endorse them, leave blog comments, etc. This is thrilling to them.

See the Barack Obama affair for an example of how it can go wrong.

Cindy: Having the “unofficial” fan site and your official version can be good for SEO; interlinked profiles.

It seems like a lot of the conversation is focused on links. What about widgets? What do you see as opportunities on Facebook platform? Isn’t that the better way to get distribution?

Todd: With us, it’s always about the links. The indirect benefit: relevant targeted traffic from SERPs. Links-traffic-sales. Now it’s one step further: social media-links-traffic-sales. I think there’s huge opportunity for widgets-links-traffic-sales. I’m all about the little guy.

Cindy: The widgets are cool and get the links, but they also get you brand recognition. That’s just so viral.

Neil: Links are great and all, but it’s very effective for branding. If it’s repeatedly popular, lots of people come back to your site and become readers. Make widgets hot somehow and use social media to push it out & get more visibility.

Rand: With widgets, think about why a user would do that. You need to have something a user would want to share. Best examples: something that people want to proclaim. How can I do this? An example: the SEOmoz Page Strength Tool badge. Play into people’s desire to proclaim their own greatness. (Also, the Web 2.0 Awards.) Lulu linked back to us in their header—now it’s on every page of the site. They’re proclaiming “That’s me!!”

There’s a rumor that Digg’s getting harder to linkbait. Why? Where should I go?

Todd: You should be genuine when you linkbait. If you do it a lot, people say that you’re linkbaiting constantly. Like I was hacked a while back and people said I did it as linkbait.

Neil: I’m personally a whore. You can’t target all of them with one piece of content. Network with top users and craft content specifically for their community. Make it useful content, enduring content.

Rand: if you can build up good relationships with prominent bloggers. they’ll put great content out there about/for you.

Shouldn’t it be related to your business?

Rand: I wish that it could be. That’s very traditional media. Now you have to think about also how can I get people who’d link to my site to my site. You’re getting it for branding and for links. That Apple campaign is a great branding campaign. It’s small, targeted, local businesses.

Who are these people and what have they got to do with my clients’ and customers?

Danny: Quick poll: How many of you equate social media marketing with Digg? How many of you use MySpace profiles? How many are totally hip—you use everything? (A few raise their hands each time.) There is a spectrum that’s out there. We’re getting more and more specialized social media sites. Shouldn’t Petco want to participate in Dogster? (Someone says they are.)

Neil: Social media can work for B2B, even Digg. You’re not trying to relate to those audiences, that’s okay. You don’t have to feature it on your site. I’ve been on Digg many times and even if 0.01% of that traffic/those links is/are actually on target, you’ll still get enough traffic and sales from that.

Todd: Digg’s not my audience, but if these young techie males can enjoy this content, I can get the links I need to bring my content to the correct audience.

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The World Wide Web (www) or the Internet is a superior way for individuals to connect with, to communicate with and to interact with other individuals. Some of course are using it to create other cyber-worlds where they can have a Second Life or even merely Twitter with their buddies. Others see the immense power it gives to support their activities in their First Life. For example it gives communities a way to strengthen their identity and provide a welcoming portal to encourage others to participate.

That was the theme of the Community 2.0 Conference held in Las Vegas last week by the Community Management & Marketing Council. This was billed as the inaugural event for forward-thinking organizations that recognize the need to harness the network effect of community to make smarter, faster, and better business decisions. Although it had a business focus, the same principles can apply to any organization including NGOs and indeed any social communities. Those interested can find a flood of interesting blog posts about the goings-on at this event.

Here in Montreal, the Gazette this morning points to a most welcome Community activity.

The Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) is a not-for-profit organization bringing together 24 English-language community organizations across Quebec for the purposes of supporting and assisting the development and enhancing the vitality of the English-language minority communities, as well as to promote and support the use of the English language in Quebec. This is undertaken principally through cooperation in the prioritization and development of projects and through the promotion of an effective coordinated approach.

On March 13th, the QCGN launched the Greater Montreal Community Development Initiative (GMCDI). Recently volunteers from the community have been hard at work consulting greater Montreal area residents on the issues that affect us the most by way of a series of community forums. The next major event is a public forum at the Hotel Hilton in downtown Montreal from 6:30 to 9:30 on the evening of Wednesday, April 11. You can keep up to date on what the Community is doing by subscribing to their Quarterly Newsletter.

Any business that is serious about Internet Marketing should be making sure that its Social Media Marketing (SMM) is developed with a constant attention to the communities it serves. It will turn out to be a win-win arrangement for both the business and the communities.

We’re not just talking blogging here, although that’s included too. As Wes Raynal of AutoNews mentions, the directive from road test editor Natalie Neff said, "Take the new S80 for a coupla days and write a blog about it." That’s fine but it isn’t the only way to tap into these Social Media.

I received a call from Jesse Ship of Matchstick and he followed up with an e-mail, which started off:

I work for Matchstick, Canada’s leading word of mouth marketing company. I am looking for people who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about luxury cars to whom we could potentially loan a 2007 Volvo S 80.

Provided among other things, that I was looking to purchase a new car within the next 12 months and was socially active and a source of information amongst friends, then it might well happen. That new car within 12 months ruled me out, but I found the approach most intriguing.

Matchstick bills itself as Canada’s word-of-mouth marketing company. They believe that the most powerful selling of products and ideas takes place not marketer to consumer, but consumer to consumer. They state that their innovative Product Seeding programmes leverage the power of consumer networks. The result? A natural groundswell of consumer buzz. They certainly have the clients to prove that it works: for example adidas, Motorola, Unilever, Palm, Reebok, Bootlegger, Perfetti Van Melle, Diageo, Campbell’s, Molson, Fujufilm, Panasonic, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, AOL and Starbucks. Now it’s Volvo.

Word-of-mouth marketing has now morphed into Social Media Marketing (SMM). Spreading the word in cyberspace is clearly much more powerful than directly going bouche à l’oreille (mouth to ear) as the French say. Certainly if the loan of a luxury sedan car cannot get those social media buzzing, what will?

Related: The All New Volvo S80
Volvo is looking for enthusiasts for its S80 sedan

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Social media are the new vehicles on the Internet that allow humans to interact with each other. They’re proliferating at an incredible rate. It can be as simple as a commenting system on a blog or voting on videos on YouTube. Most humans are sociable creatures and enjoy such interactions. Not surprisingly social media are becoming more and more popular.

It’s all very human and the normal rules of human behaviour apply. Regrettably people are often drawn to check out an accident or a fire. In the same way, bad news travels much faster than good news.

If proof were needed, a small case in the last two days illustrates the strength of this factor. Lee Odden of TopRankBlog ran a poll on the Best Forums for Search Marketing Tips. The blog post would undoubtedly have drawn a certain amount of traffic. However inadvertently Lee omitted from the poll one of the more popular forums, Cre8asite Forums (of which I am a moderator).

The Cre8asite Fourms have their own special character. When Forum members heard of the omission, they headed across in droves to add their comments and show their support for Cre8asite Forums. Undoubtedly the blog post has seen much more traffic than it otherwise would have seed.

Both the Blog and Cre8asite Forums have probably benefited significantly from this glitch. Lee has acknowledged that he had inadvertently omitted Cre8asite Forums from the list. It clearly was not intended as link-bait. Yet the final result is that it is more successful than it otherwise would have been.

[For those interested, at the time of writing Cre8asite Forums with 25 write-in votes in the Comments almost pipped the front runner in the poll, High Rankings Forum, which has 27 votes.]

It almost makes you wonder whether it is better to include some intriguing mistakes in blog posts rather than seeking perfection. That would be a distressing moral to draw from such incidents.

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