In This Chapter

• Attracting links with blogs
• Leveraging social news sites
• Defining media optimization
• Implementing social media optimization
• Gaining search visibility through social activity
• Building a community
• Adding interactivity to your website

In recent years, the world of online social networking (sites where people can meet and interact with one another online) has exploded in popularity. You may have heard of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which allow users to create their own web pages, publish content, and connect with other users all over the globe. This kind of social networking has expanded to include news sites, entertainment media, and beyond.

Social networking is another way to find and attract links. The majority of links from link magnets (media or articles created to attract links by offering something unique or engaging) comes from social networking sites. Social networking can also help you build your brand and a name for yourself. This is where true grassroots marketing begins — and if you’re creative and smart enough, you can use social networks to your advantage.

In this chapter, we discuss what you need to do to take advantage of: blogging, social news sites, social media optimization, community building, and interactive applications.

Making Use of Blogs

Blogs (short for web logs) are primarily an online conversation medium. Blogs can be anything — from people’s personal journals, in which they talk about their day, their trip to the hair salon, and the rude guy who cut them off on the way to the grocery store, to media and corporate blogs that describe new products and services. Blogs cover entertainment, politics, fashion, lifestyles, and technology. If you name it, you can probably find somebody out there blogging about it. Although the exact recommendations for a blog will vary by industry, blogs should be updated at least a few times per week.

One way to use blogs is to set up a blog on your own website. A blog can increase the amount of content (the text and media offered) on your site that relates to your subject matter because an actively used blog site builds content rapidly. A blog also helps you by improving user engagement on your site and strengthening your customer service: Blogs provide a place for you to hear from your users and to interact with them. (For more information on setting up a blog, see Book V, Chapter 7.) In general, blogs take a lot of attention and time, and although they may get links very quickly, they lose those links just as fast. Blogs, like all social media links, are high-maintenance and require consistent care.

Blogs can also benefit you when someone writes about your website or company and then links back to your site from an on-topic website. (Read about natural versus unnatural links in Chapter 3 of this minibook.) The worth of a link from a blog varies, however. If an authoritative blog — such as the political gossip blog Wonkette (www.wonkette.com) or the car enthusiast blog Jalopnik (www.jalopnik.com) — links to your website, that link could equal a whole lot of traffic for you, plus the prestige that comes along with such a link. On the other hand, most links from blogs are actually pretty worthless. You see an increase in traffic only within the first day or maybe just a few minutes; after that, the link cycles off the page, the blogger updates with new content, and your link is yesterday’s news. Links from most blogs are good for passing around link magnets, but not a whole lot else.

Most blogs allow users to comment on them. You can click a button at the end of the blog post and leave your thoughts, criticisms, or links of your own. Other users can reply to your comment, as can the author of the blog. Blog comments usually don’t pass any link equity (the worth of a link as defined by the search engines). The rel="nofollow" attribute (an HTML code that tells search engines not to follow a link) was actually invented for blog comments to stop spammers from crashing blogs and cluttering up the Comments page with useless, unrelated information. Most blog software programs apply a rel="nofollow" attribute to every link by default, so anything in the comments is not counted by a search engine.

However, don’t let the lack of link equity stop you from using the comments option and interacting with other readers on a blog. Like other forms of business networking, the comments section of a blog can be a great place to network with other people and find out what the guy on the street is saying about products or services in your industry. People interact with you in the comments section; they might decide to check out your site and wind up giving you a link from their websites.

This type of link building by relationship building is a much slower process than the normal heavy traffic that you would receive if you were linked through the blog, but these kinds of links (and the traffic gained from them) based on a relationship formed through a blog stick around longer. Don’t be afraid to interact in the comments section on a blog. Just be sure to practice good etiquette. Be who you are, not some fictitious persona. Also, don’t go around trolling on other blogs. Trolling is the act of deliberately being rude and offensive just to make people angry on blogs and other web forums, and it most definitely gets you banned from the blog or site.

If you are publishing a blog on your website, take care to make sure that the topics of your posts are always hyper-relevant to the main themes and don’t dilute the overall focus of your website. The Google penalty that demotes a site’s search rankings for low-quality content, known as Panda, may trigger if a blog looks like a sprawling collection of unrelated, unorganized articles. Read about the Panda algorithm and how the search engines penalize low-quality content in Book V, Chapter 2.

Discovering Social News Sites

Today, the Internet puts the news right at your fingertips, and you can find hundreds of sources for news out there. You can go to a site such as CNN.com or any newspaper site and read articles at their source. But the Internet has turned news-reading into a social activity, too. A social news site is a site where users can vote on news stories and articles from anywhere on the web, and the audience — rather than the editors of the site or source — determines the importance of a story or article. Digg (digg.com) and StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) are social news sites, but far and away the most popular social news site out there is Reddit (www.reddit.com), which has dubbed itself with the slogan “The front page of the Internet.” With a social news network, users decide what stories are most important and entertaining. The stories and articles posted to Reddit are organized by thousands of categories called subreddits. There’s a subreddit for nearly every interest and topic under the sun, and users can vote and comment on stories, with the most popular stories rising to the top of the category page. If a link to your web page gets a lot of attention on Reddit, expect a sharp, temporary spike in traffic.

You can make your articles and web pages easy to post to Reddit and other social news sites by including social share buttons on the page. A share button is a graphic icon that readers can click to post the page they are reading to their favorite social website. When you read an article on a news site, a blog, or an Internet-savvy company’s website, near the top or bottom of an article, you can usually find share buttons to social news sites and other social media sites such as the ones shown in Figure 5-1.

When you find a story or article that you find interesting, you can click the share button for your preferred social networking site, which brings you to the social website where you can write a short description of the news item or article and then post it to the network. The most common networks with share buttons these days are the social news site Reddit and social media networks Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, which we talk about more in the next section.

With time, effort, and good luck, a site or article could make it to the first page. If it’s your site or article, congratulations! But sorry about the server crash. Reddit alone has 174 million unique visits a month. The higher you appear on its news pages, the more traffic you get. Success with a social news site can be both a blessing and a curse: It has the possibility of generating more permanent links, but your server might not be able to handle the traffic.

An article’s popularity varies from network to network because each network has its own unique appeal to different kinds of users. Reddit’s network tends to be generally young, male, liberal, and technology-savvy. You also can find smaller, more niche-oriented social news networks that focus on a particular interest, such as the technology-oriented Hacker News (www.news.ycombinator.com) and the politically leaning Newsvine (www.newsvine.com).

Promoting Media on Social Networking Sites

Social media sites are another way to get links via relationship building. Posts that promote your Engagement Objects are good forms of link magnets that can pay off with huge amounts of traffic and short term links. Taking advantage of the social media sites requires some advanced planning. After you identify which site would be best for your subject and audience, you still need to make some decisions about how, when, and what. If you plan to submit different forms of media to social networking sites, consider optimizing the content for those sites first. The media in question includes videos, podcasts, and images.

If you have videos, put them on your website, as well as on video-sharing sites such as YouTube. People who view them on the other video-sharing site read your description and hopefully follow the link back to your site that you include in the description, as shown in Figure 5-2.

Your media has to be engaging. Make it funny, creative, educational, and engaging or, if all else fails, controversial. You want to get people talking about it. Don’t be afraid to make people angry, if it comes right down to it. One of the fastest ways to get links to a blog is to write something that’s sure to make people angry — but turn the comments off. People go running back to their own blogs and newsfeeds to write what they think about you, including a link back to your site. This benefits you in terms of link equity. The thing about link equity is that Google doesn’t care if a link is positive or derogatory. Google still passes link equity.

Another thing to keep in mind about your content is not to be stingy with it. Share it! A comparison has been made about media and the card game Canasta. In Canasta, a good strategy to win is to give away all your best cards in the beginning so that you get them back at the end. Similarly, if you freely give away your media, people come to your website.

For example, you can put your images on the photo-sharing site Flickr (www.flickr.com) under the Creative Commons license, which allows you either to retain some rights over your image or to make it free for use in the public domain. (You can find out more about the Creative Commons license options at http://creativecommons.org.) You can make the images free for public use as long as they provide a link back to your site, which people generally more than happily provide. In any kind of photo-sharing network, you also have the option of tagging your photos with relevant keywords, as well as providing links to your site.

As with most links you want to attract, you want to attract media links naturally. You want links to come to you on their own because people find and enjoy the media you put out there and think your site is a relevant and entertaining place that they would recommend to other users to check out. You have to have a vested interest in creating quality content. Give the people out there something of value. For example, musician Jonathan Coulton makes all his songs available for public use on his website under the Creative Commons license (an alternative form of the traditional copyright that specifies the conditions under which a person may use copyrighted content). He allows others to use his songs for their videos and media projects, which allows him to introduce his music to a much wider audience. Go to YouTube and check out how many people are using his music for their own projects, and you’ll get an idea.

If you have a classic-car customization website, for example, you can give away useful information by making a video about how to properly repair chipped paint on a classic car or fix a dented fender (or get a little silly and teach them to properly hang dice from a rearview mirror). But you want to do so in a way that is clever and entertaining. For instance, you might dress up as ninjas while repairing the chipped paint. The easiest way to draw people to your website is to be clever and entertaining. (This is why it’s a good idea to watch those social news networks, so you can see what is funny versus something that is definitely not funny.)

You can also allow people to take your content that is under the Creative Commons license and post it on their own sites, as long as they give you a link back. People are usually more than glad to give you a link.

Optimizing Social Media

Social media is any sort of online environment that allows social interaction, including blogs, social news sites such as Reddit and Digg, social networking sites such as Facebook (www.facebook.com), and others. Social media sites have become great for branding. Not only can they bring you inbound links, but they also provide great opportunities for reputation management because you can read and respond to what’s being said about your brand. Developing a strong following on Facebook is extremely useful for building a connection with your brand’s supporters.

Twitter (https://twitter.com) is a popular microblogging site that allows you to update your status via the web or through text messaging. (Microblogs are like blogs, but they allow you to update only a few words at time.) Because of how frequently Twitter is updated, Google and Bing rely on a direct feed straight from Twitter to keep their search indexes updated with the constant stream of content. This means that Twitter posts can rank in search results. But beyond the possible SEO opportunity, Twitter is a great way to control your branding because it allows you to go out and engage other users.

The important thing to remember is to snap up your brand name right away on each of the major social media sites. Go out and register your name and every variation that you can think of as fast as you can. You want to keep others from taking them and potentially using them to pretend to be you, damaging your online reputation (we go over this problem in the section “Building Community,” later in this chapter). This has happened many times, and when someone does take your name before you can register it, there’s not much you can do about it. So make sure you grab your own brand name.

There is an online service called KnowEm (http://knowem.com) that will register your name on hundreds of blogging, microblogging, bookmarking, photo and video hosting, and community sites. The basic plan (for a one-time fee of $85) gets your name registered and profile filled out on the 25 most popular social media profiles. There are also business and enterprise packages covering between 100 and 300 profiles, plus a program for ongoing registration on new social sites every month. Currently, KnowEm tracks and registers names on more than 500 social media sites.

One thing to think about when it comes to social media optimization is what your web pages look like when someone shares a link to your site on a social network. Facebook shows a preview of an article when a user shares a link. This preview might show up with a large image or a small image, plus a headline and a description. How do you think Facebook comes up with the image and text to put in the preview? The website can tell Facebook through some simple code on each page, or it tries to guess at the best image and text to use. Figure 5-3 shows how a link shows up with an image and descriptive text when it’s shared on Facebook.

No surprise here, but you should definitely take the opportunity to specify the image and text you want to show up in a Facebook preview and customize it to attract viewers to click through to your page. Twitter also has special code that you can add to your pages to customize the appearance of your content when it’s shared in a tweet. Learn about Facebook Open Graph tags in the Facebook Developers site (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#tags) and Twitter Cards from Twitter’s Developers documentation (https://dev.twitter.com/cards/overview).

Social Signals as Search-Ranking Factors

Social media optimization aims to improve how a piece of content performs on a social media network. For content posted to YouTube, taking care in crafting the video, the description, and your user profile are all things you might do to optimize a piece of media for discoverability and engagement on YouTube. Another way social media contributes to online marketing is through its influence on search engine results. When search engines use social media activity as part of their SERP ranking, those algorithm factors are called social signals.

Because search engines tend not to publish or confirm any individual ranking signals in their algorithms as a protection against spam, we don’t have a definitive list of social signals that affect search engine rankings. But we can draw some conclusions from tests and observations that point to a correlation effect of social activity on search rankings.

It’s generally believed that a page will tend to rank better over time if it goes viral — which means that a page suddenly gets a lot of mentions and links. The majority of links to viral content will come from social media networks, and the search engines may use buzz as a social signal, the sudden but temporary effect caused by a velocity of social media links. Buzz as a social signal likely has a temporary effect on search engine rankings. Viral content will also generate links from static pages, like news websites and blogs sharing that story with readers, and these are the links that have a more lasting benefit on a page’s search engine rankings.

One of the viral campaigns of 2014 was the Ice Bucket Challenge benefitting research to cure ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Celebrities and normal folks alike posted videos of themselves pouring buckets of ice water over their head and pledging donations in the name of ALS awareness. Along with the plentiful links from social media, major news organizations and other authoritative websites linked to the ALS Association website while reporting on the phenomenon that had swept the country. The links generated on social media caused a buzz effect, making the Ice Bucket Challenge a hot topic of discussion at the time it was happening and increasing Google searches for ALS-related terms by 90 percent, as shown in Figure 5-4. The links from static pages on authoritative websites brought the ALS Association website lasting SEO benefit.

Building Community

Community building involves managing how you build your reputation and brand via the social networks. Social networks are not traditional networks, and traditional advertising (such as “Our product is great, please buy it!”) generally doesn’t fly with the Internet audience. Companies that try to use the same types of traditional marketing messages that work in print and TV advertising do not do very well with Internet marketing. On the whole, Internet users are turned off by traditional marketing methods.

So what do you do in this situation? The solution is to give away control. That’s right: There is only so much you can do for your brand, and, at a certain point, you must allow it to work for itself. When you’re engaging others in a conversation on the Internet about your brand, you cannot control the conversation. You can only be a participant in it.

A website for a large car manufacturing company was able to find out about problems with its vehicles through its Internet forums (a message board where users can log on and post about topics on a related subject). If you are willing to use social networks and actually listen to what your users say, you can get some great feedback on your products and services, and on your competition as well. People are honest in their online comments (often, brutally so). Don’t disregard the positive or negative feedback. This is good, usable information. You can see what you are doing right and what your competition is doing right. On the flip side, you can also pinpoint your weaker areas, as well as where your competition is messing up.

Twitter is also a great resource for this. You can pay attention to what people are saying about you, and you have the ability to search and listen in. With Twitter, you can follow people (that is, read all their posts) and, in return, people follow you and read your posts. Figure 5-5 shows an example of a customized Twitter home page. Being a microblogging site, Twitter consists of nothing but short posts (the maximum you can type in one post is 140 characters, including spaces).

Companies can search for their names in public posts. A colleague tweeted (that’s what Twitter calls “posting”) about Southwest Airlines when his flight was late, and six minutes later, a Southwest Airlines representative was following him on Twitter.

Another example is a cable TV company that has used Twitter to help improve its reputation. The company does not have a great reputation when it comes to customer service. However, the organization assigned an employee to do nothing but manage a Twitter account for the company. His job is to sit on Twitter and catch tweets about problems with the company, respond, and then fix the problems. And he does. He offers technical solutions through Twitter, and then he calls and arranges for a service technician to come out to fix problems he cannot fix himself. This is an example of a company using social networks to the fullest. The company is using Twitter to fix problems and expand its reputation as a company that cares about its customers.

Another example is Zappos (www.zappos.com), an online shoe retailer. Every employee is on Twitter, and they are encouraged to talk. This is community building for the company. Even the CEO has his own Twitter account. For Zappos, it’s not just a product that the company is selling: It’s selling customer satisfaction. It’s selling its employees. With its products, the company provides free overnight shipping. It doesn't advertise this, but when a user makes a purchase, Zappos emails the customer and informs him that it has free overnight shipping. Plus, it has a very easy return policy. Simply call it, and you are sent a box with a label, for no charge, and you are given a refund. The point of Zappos is not how much money a customer spends, but whether its customer is satisfied. This is a grassroots marketing campaign that works not only because the company’s satisfied customers want to do business with it again, but also because those customers tell others about their experiences and bring in new customers to Zappos.

On the Internet, people are going to care more about a company that seems to be listening to them and engaging them. That is why it is important to always be genuine with your customers and with people on the social media sites. You have to be out there, talking to your customers. But be honest. People — on the Internet, and everywhere else — hate being lied to. If they find out you are not being genuine about yourself or your intentions, woe to you. As Shakespeare once (sort of) said, “Hell hath no fury like an Internet scorned.”

Astro-turfing is a term used for a fake grassroots market campaign (a term based on AstroTurf, which is artificial grass). For example, it was discovered that several blogs praising Walmart were fake. Supposedly these blogs were written by “real” customers, but they were actually written by Walmart’s public relations firm. This was uncovered because the bloggers sloppily provided links to their PR firm. Needless to say, that did not go over well with the Internet audience. Be warned: As soon as people find out they’re being deceived, they turn on you.

Lonelygirl15 was a popular video blog series on YouTube, until it was discovered that the girl was an actress, and the blogs were scripted. Lonelygirl15’s popularity dropped off sharply after that, and the video blog series is now defunct. If you are going to create something along these lines, be up front right away that it is not real. Don’t hide the fact that something is a marketing campaign. Users do not like feeling tricked.

You also have to be concerned about the problem of people taking your brand and then using it to harm you. In one case on Twitter, a company supposedly had two IT guys, both with account names that included the brand name, giving out advice on how to fix problems. The trouble was that one of these IT guys was a fake; he did not work for the company and was giving out particularly bad advice. Unfortunately, the company couldn’t do much beyond letting people know that the person was not employed by that company. (This is also why it is important to keep track of your employees and what they’re supposed to be doing.)

If someone illegitimate does get hold of your brand name, you can't do a whole lot other than distance yourself from him and make sure that your customers know that the guy who stole your name or who is pretending to be you is not affiliated with you in any way.

The Internet is still like the Wild West. No law exists to deter someone who registers your brand name, and there are no punishments for people who pretend to be you. To protect your brand, the most you can do is proactively register your brand name and variations across social networks, like the service KnowEm helps with, and register your website under a federal copyright and hope that gives you enough teeth to take out someone who steals your name. (See Book V, Chapter 5 for more on copyright infringement.)

Incorporating Interactivity

One of the hallmarks of the Internet in its modern form is its interactivity. Society uses technology today to bring people together, enhance creativity, and stimulate conversation. The early Internet was made up of static pages without any means of interaction, but now users expect living sites that react to them and give visitors a way to affect the status of the page. Social networking sites, where you can upload your profile, talk to friends, and make new connections, are the most well-known aspect of the interactive web. There are also tools that can be incorporated onto all kinds of websites that let visitors interact with pages. A widget is a piece of HTML code that you can embed in a page and that a user can interact with. One social media professional likes to say that a widget is what's left of a page if you get rid of all the junk like the navigation, the template, and the footer, leaving only the content. That's pretty accurate.

Toward the goal of community building, the major social media networks have created widgets that can be embedded on a web page to encourage visitors to like or join the business’s social media community. If you decide that your customers use Twitter and you’d like to build your community on that social network, you can add the HTML code for the Twitter Follow button into your website design. Facebook has a similar widget that lets your website visitors follow your business’s Facebook page right from your website, as shown in Figure 5-6.

But you can use other kinds of custom widgets, as well. Many personal blogs include links to online quizzes. These quizzes can be about anything — personality, astrology, which TV show character you most resemble, or how long you can survive chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor. For the most part, these quizzes are for entertainment purposes only. But all these widgets feature a link for other users who see these quizzes and want to take them themselves, bringing other users into that website. The results of the quiz come with a line of HTML code that you can use to post your results on your personal blog or on a social networking page such as Facebook. The HTML coding presents an image that shows your results and a link back to the site that features the quiz.

A clever and entertaining widget can generate lots of traffic for your site and bring you plenty of links because all the widgets feature a link back to your site. These can be both fun and functional. For your classic car site, you could create a quiz that tells a person which classic car matches his or her personality most, along with an image and link back to your site.

It’s very important to prominently display your link and not try to hide it. If you are hiding something, the search engines might think you are doing something wrong. The link must also be relevant to the widget and to your website. Don’t hide links to other sites in the widget; otherwise, the links from the widget are discounted. Also, beware of using widgets for spam. Don’t use the widget for any sneaky, devious, or underhanded techniques. You will be caught and punished.

You can use other types of widgets for your site. Again, just make sure they’re relevant. You might have a widget on your site that can tell your users what time it is in Tokyo, but if it’s for your American classic car customization site, it wouldn’t be relevant. What might be better is a quiz that determines whether your driving skills enable you to outrun a herd of rampaging wildebeests (because people respond to cleverness and creativity, and, when all else fails, wildebeests are always entertaining).

Another type of widget that might be worthwhile is a poll. Polls ask questions and publish counts of people’s answers, like in Figure 5-7.

A poll is a way of engaging your audience and finding out what it is that they’re actually thinking. Your audience also checks back to see how the poll is doing, and, if you leave a comments section with the poll, your audience can interact with one another and discuss the poll. Even if the poll doesn’t actually mean anything, if you make it fun, it can help build community and bring you traffic. Another example of widgets includes a sports statistics ticker that constantly gives updates. It could include scores, who’s won, who’s on first, and so on. These are useful for sites that are related to sports in some way.

Stock market tickers are another excellent example of a widget. They give constant updates on how the stock market is doing that day — although these days, you might prefer to remain in the dark. These are useful for sites having to do with finances or brokerage firms. Pretty much anything you think of can be a widget. In most cases, if you have an idea for a widget, you need to build it yourself or hire a clever programmer to build it for you. Some companies do have widgets of their own that you can customize (like for a poll), but that's not always the case.

The primary results of widgets are traffic and engagement, and the secondary results are branding and linking. An effective and clever widget can be associated with your website and ultimately boost your brand.