This week's post has an initiative to use Twitter to create video art, a guide to watching the 2011 Oscars online and the results of Duke University's CMO survey.

The recent political events in Egypt have been dubbed the "Twitter Revolution," and, because this title, Jigar Mehta, a former New York Times video journalist has initiated an interesting project. The initiative will use crowdsourced images, posts and information, gathered from Twitter to create an "interactive documentary" of the issues and events in that took place. The project uses the hashtag #18DaysInEgypt and you can read the full story via Mashable here.

Many people now choose to watch their favourite TV and award shows online rather than on traditional channels. Well if you're one of those people, this guide will help you get the inside scoop on how you can access the content.

The CMO Survey performed by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association gives a insight analysis of the opinions of c-suite marketers.

Have a great weekend!

A recent study from Forrester titled, “How Consumers Find Websites in 2011 – Trends to Consider for Your 2011 Strategy,” Shar VanBoskirk analyzes current trends for the ways in which internet users come to websites and how you can incorporate those trends into your marketing strategy to improve your ROI.

The report found that natural search results are still the, “most commonly used resource to navigate websites,” and that online advertising has declined in popularity as a way to advertise sites while social media has risen in popularity (especially with young consumers).

Some other highlights from the report include:

• Natural search brings 61% of website visitors
• Referrals, not ads, drive traffic, paid search ads fell 10% since 2009 and are now the least popular traffic driver (3% of adults find websites this way)
• Multiple marketing touchpoints drive a single visit to a website 
• Social media has stayed consistent in its popularity for helping internet users find websites
• Social media has a growing influence over young subscribers while older users value referrals and compelling content

How does Forrester recommend putting this information to use?

1. Keep advertising in the mix
2. Plan for multiple goalsUse mobile search to reach young consumers

The report is full of useful information as well as further statistics and graphs. If you have a chance it’s definitely worth taking a look at.

Strong customer support is one of the key foundational elements of many B2B and B2C organizations. Having an effective support system for clients that are having issues is an important way to keep relationships with your customers strong and relevant.

1. Don’t listen. When customers call you looking for support, what they really want is for you to listen to what they’re going through, show your understanding and help them solve their problems. One of the biggest frustrations that clients have when they call for help is when they feel like they’re not being heard and this can turn a support situation ugly, very quickly. When tensions are already high the best thing a support specialist can do is to get a conversation off on the right foot by listening carefully to what the customer is saying.
2. Hoard your knowledge. There’s something to be sad for making yourself an invaluable resource to your customers, but, keeping them in the dark so they’re forced to come to you whenever they have an issue isn’t the right answer for any of the parties involved. Allowing your customers to be more self-sufficient in the way that they deal with their problems doesn’t mean they won’t need you anymore, it just means that they feel more capable of taking care of themselves. 
3. Blame the client. There is always the temptation when dealing with customers who know less than you about your product or services to blame them for every issue that arises, but, guess what? Customers know when you’re patronizing them or treating them like they're idiots, and they don't like it. So take a step back, remember that it doesn’t matter whose fault the issue is, and just help them come up with a solution. 
4. Forget what it’s like to be confused. At some point in time you were knew to your product or service and you were in the same situation that many of your customers are now. Empathizing with them can go a long way towards having a successful support interaction. 
5. Throw equality out the window. Most organizations have different levels of “client importance,” and, when there are some customers labeled, “high priority,” it’s easy to treat those ones better than the little guys. The problem with this is that those “minor” clients still most likely make up a big portion of your customer base, and, in the age of social media where word of mouth spreads at an alarming rate, you can’t afford to treat any client as a less valuable commodity than another one. 
6. Watch the clock. When it comes to support your customers, there shouldn’t be a time limit. There are always going to be customers that require more  support than others and there’s certainly a time when it’s important to say  enough is enough, but rushing your customers because you’re busy makes them feel like you’re not respecting their problems or concerns and it creates negative feelings and emotions towards your company in general.

This week's web marketing digest post has an infographic on small business and social media, and article on trends in social media and a report on social media and B2B marketing.

This infographic from Mashable shows some of the ways in which small businesses are using social media as part of their marketing efforts.



This article from Stanford University and HP discusses some of the continuing trends in social media: persistence and decay.

Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay
This presentation, put together from information gathered from the LinkedIn B2B Marketing Technology Community has useful information on trends.


Have a great weekend!

A few months ago I wrote a post outlining what Creative Commons (CC) Licenses are and have a brief explanation of why they are useful. In today’s post I would like to take a more in-depth look at exactly why these licenses are important for your overall we marketing strategy and how they can help you with both lead generation and brand promotion.

At the most basic level, a CC License is a way to encourage internet users to share your content and disseminate it widely across the web. If you’re an organization (whether B2C or B2B) that is producing compelling content for the web, then using these licenses is a good way to promote the spread of your content to a wider audience than your organization alone may be able to reach effectively.  For smaller organizations that don’t have the reach that larger ones do, creative commons can be a blessing because it allows companies (and content creators)who aren’t as well known to increase their reach exponentially without the need for a large company behind them.

For some organizations the concept of “free” content can be terrifying, but, that doesn’t have to be the case. When you use a CC License you’re not giving up all rights to the content, you’re just modifying them from traditional copyright to allow users to share and utilize your content with varying degrees of attribution (as specified by you).
In terms of search engine optimization, cc licenses allow you to choose how your content is attributed back to you and this requires a link. That means that anyone who finds your content and wants to use it can, they just have to link back to you. Not only does this spread your content to wider audience, increasing brand recognition and hopefully driving traffic to your site, it also helps you build links, a foundational element of a strong SEO strategy.

Another factor that it’s important to keep in mind when it comes to CC licenses and content is that because so much of the content available on the web today is free, often if a user can’t access your content without paying they will simply click away to a website where they can get the content they want. In today’s web marketing environment, “free” is becoming the necessary standard to remain competitive.

Image by TilarX on Flickr.

A new Chrome extension was released by Google on Monday and it aims to help the search engine detect content farms by having users give “explicit feedback” on shallow, low-quality content. Essentially the extension allows users to block websites with poor content from their search results. Once a user blocks a site, a notification is sent to Google allowing them to, “study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for search results.” The extension also allows users to manage blocked sites, and unblock them at any time.

It seems like the goal of the extension is to utilize user feedback to locate the worst content offenders, and to then use that information to adjust search results, limiting the undesirable websites that end up ranking for users’ search queries. It’s an interesting concept, and while it will give users a little more control over which websites appear and their results and which won’t, it does have some weaknesses.

What are the problems with this kind of approach?

• People have to take the time to search out and download the extension
• People have to be using Chrome
• People have to continuously edit their results to keep data relevant
• Content farms can sabotage each other using the system

A similar process was recently adopted by a competitor search engine, Blekko, where they block the 20 most spam-filled sites from their results entirely based on user feedback.

If you want to download the extension and give it a try you can do so here.

What do you think? Do you think that using crowdsourcing techniques to develop effective content farm-detecting algorithms will be a successful approach?

DemandGen Report recently released their latest marketing automation report entitled, "The State of Marketing Automation 2011." The report looks at marketing automation's impact on marketing in the last decade and the ways in which using marketing automation software can help to improve your organization's sales and marketing funnel.

The report looks at several different aspects of marketing automation including:

• Technology trends in 2011: 3 Tactics to Optimize Marketing Automation
• The emergence of revenue performance management
• The new sales and marketing alignment paradigm
• New tools which are changing the demand generation approach
• Some of the ways in which custom content can drive sales

The report is full of useful information and is definitely worth taking a look at, especially if you work in the marketing automation space (like us) or you are thinking about or already have implemented a marketing automation system and you're looking to optimize you efforts.

It’s not often that a major news publication takes an interest in one organization’s SEO tactics, but that’s exactly what happened when The New York Times did a little investigative research into J.C. Penney’s link building strategy and the findings (published this past weekend) showed that the company was implementing some frowned-upon black hat SEO practices to help boost their rankings in Google search results.

The article which is called, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” addresses some of the ways in which J.C. Penney and other organizations can manipulate their ranking in results with poor link building practices. Basically what The New York Times discovered is that the company was using a link building scheme through which they left links on over 2,000 websites, most of which were defunct and had little to do with any of J.C. Penney’s products in an attempt to increase their back links and help their page rank.

After their research came back showing this extensive usage of black hat tactics, the publication contacted Matt Cutts, Google’s Webspam team lead who stated that, despite J.C. Penney’s denial of knowledge of the scam, that this was actually the third infraction of this type by the organization and that Google”absolutely [will]” be, “tak[ing] strong correction action.”

According to their research over the last few months the company had been repeatedly ranking first for a surprising range and number of keywords, despite their competition. A search done today for the same search terms doesn’t show J.C. Penny anywhere in sight in some cases dropping from the number one spot to as low as the 60th or 70th result.

What does this teach us? As we’ve said before, black hat SEO may have a high initial pay off, but in the long run it can be extremely detrimental to your company’s SEO strategy and website’s overall performance in search engine results. While white hat link building is a long and sometimes tedious process, in the long run, it will help your company to be more successful online. If you want to learn more about white hat link building strategies, take a look at our recent webinar, “How to Find Link Love.”

This post has an infographic on social commerce, a presentation on trends in teen communication and some tips on improving your mobile email marketing tactics.

This post from Copyblogger gives 5 tips on how to get better results out of your mobile email marketing. The tips include:

• Including plain text versions of emails
• Keep links uncrowded
• Have an effective subject line
• Use the right tags on your images
• Having a clear call-to-action

This infographic which we saw on flytip.com shows a "year in social commerce" and covers how several companies have monetized the social space.

    
This presentation from Pew gives insight into teen communication trends and social media usage and is definitely worth looking at.

We just finished today's SEO webinar on link building and as usual afterwards we give a quick recap of the main highlights of the webinar here. If you'd like to view our How to Find Link Love webinar you can see it and our other web marketing webinars on-demand in our resource section.

Why are links important?

• A link is like a vote for your website, it shows search engines that your content is relevant and worthwhile to searchers
• links  increases your website's visibility and drives website traffic 

What are the characteristics of a quality link?

• The link is from a reputable, high authority website
• The link has relevant anchor text
• The link is a one-way link vs. a reciprocal one
• The link doesn't have a "nofollow" tag on it

What are some common link building strategies?

• Social Media
• Link Baiting
• Directories and Listings
• Content syndication

What are some common link building scams?

• Link Farms
• Links from networked websites
• Link building proposals and outsourcing
• Links from websites with a low reputation
• Link exchange requests and paid link exchange offers

This is just a brief roundup of the topics covered in the presentation, If you want more detail on these topics you'll just have to download the webinar!

The good news in today’s post is that Nielsen recently released a report on the Superbowl’s most popular and more recalled ads for 2011. The bad news is that there is a fairly large discrepancy between the popularity of a commercial and its connection with a brand name. The most popular commercial of the superbowl this year was the Little Darth Vader Starts Car commercial from Volkswagon (see below) that’s a big deal for Volkswagon, but, the problem is that after watching the commercial few fans were actually able to identify the brand associated with the commercial. In terms of brand recall, the commercial doesn’t even rank in the top 10, whereas the Doritos “Pug Knocks Down Door” commercial (also below) has the best brand recognition but didn’t make it in to the top 10 most popular.






What’s the problem here? The problem is that it doesn’t matter how likeable or entertaining your commercial is if no one associates it with your brand. The entire purpose of a commercial is to advertise your company and if it isn’t doing that, then what’s the point in spending millions of dollars creating it? When it comes to commercials, advertisements and any other marketing campaign, you need to be able to make your brand stand out. Overshadowing or forgetting about your brand’s identity because of a flashy commercial or campaign, won’t be as effective has having a campaign that emphasizes your brand.

You can view the full list of most popular and most recalled commercials on Advertising Age's website here.

Blog posts should be optimized just like any other content on your website and that includes making sure that your blog posts are search engine friendly. Blog posts are invaluable in terms of long tail SEO, and it’s important to make sure that they are effective not just for your human readers but also search engine crawlers. As we’ve said before, search engine optimization is a constant process, but there are a few quick fixes you can make to help you blog posts rank better.

1. Use your keywords in your title. Often, when reading webpages, search engines give higher precedence to words that appear early on in the pages structure. By including your keywords in your page title you can help search engines understand which words are the most relevant and important on your page. Having your keywords in you title also helps when other websites are linking back to your post because many backlinks are created using the linked-to post’s title as the anchor text.
2. Use internal links. While external links are better for SEO than internal ones, search engines still pay attention to incoming links from your own website. This also makes your posts easier to read and encourages readers to explore your site further by offering them other relevant posts and webpages. 
3. Promote each post. If you want your posts to get seen by a larger audience (and consequently shared and linked to) you need to make sure they get access to it and one of the best ways to do this is to make sure you’re promoting each and every one of your posts. A quick and easy way to do this is to use social marketing platforms like Hootsuite (that’s what we use) which allows you to have your RSS feed automatically published to your social accounts every time you create a new post. 
4. Use your analytics. Website analytics are important for your blog as well as the rest of your website. Your website’s analytics will help you discover which terms your readers are using to arrive at your blog, what types of posts are the most popular and which search terms are the most relevant to your audience. That information is one of the best places to start optimizing your website for SEO. 

Try some of these tips out and let us know how it helps your rankings! Do you have any other tips you like to use to help your posts rank better?

Image by marciookabe on Flickr.

The Superbowl is an enormously popular sporting event and it certainly gets its fair share of attention in the social space. Smart marketers are making use of social media to attract and engage with football fans who are using social networks on a daily basis. Recently I read about an interesting (and successful) social media marketing campaign that revolved around the Superbowl (and it was created by a Vancouver agency, way to go!)

The campaign was created by Think! Social Media,  a digital agency based in Vancouver, BC, that specializes in social media marketing and campaigns for the tourism industry. Their Superbowl campaign was run on behalf of the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau last week (the Superbowl was held in Dallas) and was meant to engage football fans and get people talking about Dallas as a travel destination. Using the concept that sports teams, especially football teams, have an "extremely passionate community" Think! Social  Media decided to try and connect these factions through a "shared passion."

Essentially, Think! reached out to popular travel/lifestyle bloggers based in Green Bay and Pittsburgh (the teams that played in the Superbowl, in case you're not a football fan, or have been living under a rock) and promoted the fact that a "mystery man" would be located in each of the cities and if a fan approached the "mystery man" and told him the secret phrase, "Have you been to  Dallas lately?" they would instantly win tickets to the Superbowl. Over the course of a week, the bloggers gave their readers more and more specific clues as to the mystery man's whereabouts and encouraged readers to discuss the campaign in detail over multiple social media sites. The results? An extremely popular viral campaign that reached a global audience thanks to the power of social media.

The campaign is a great example of how you can use a community, built around a connecting theme, and encourage them to participate and take part in your campaign. You can read a full description (plus the campaign results) on Think! Social Media's website.

Take a look and let us know what you think about the campaign!

This week's Web Marketing Digest post has a video on social media best practices, an interesting remake of "The Social Network" and a presentation on the future of social media in 2011. It's all about social media in today's Web Marketing Digest.

This video from msmiciklas (of Social Media Explorer blog) on Youtube gives a good visualization of 19 social media best practices.



For those of you who have seen The Social Network (recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture) you may appreciate this parody from Kids Act Out which we saw on Mashable earlier this week.

You’re watching Kids Act Out - The Social Network. See the Web's top videos on AOL Video

This Presentation from eMarketer gives their "Social Media Outlook for 2011" and it is definitely worth taking a look at.


Have a great weekend everyone!

Content stealing is a fairly controversial topic in the web marketing space. Many people feel that if content is made freely available then it is free to use, but when it comes down to it, using another organization’s or person’s content without permission or attribution is considered to be theft. One of the most common areas to see this is blog content. There have been many times when I’m researching content for a webinar, blog post or other piece of content and I’m reading some blog posts on the topic and I’ll come across a blog post that has been essentially copied and pasted into several different blogs, to the point where it’s hard to actually determine who wrote the original post.

The reason that web content theft is a tricky subject is because there is a fine line between sharing content and stealing it. Sharing content is crucial for many online businesses because it spreads word of mouth about their expertise, products and services, but stealing can be detrimental to an organizations online marketing strategy.

So what’s the difference?

Sharing – Taking content that someone else has created it and sharing it to your friends or followers through social media sites, email, blogging or social bookmarking with PROPER ATTRIBUTION and credit to the content creator is sharing content, and it is a vital component of online marketing strategy.

Stealing – Taking content that someone else has created and copying and pasting it or reproducing it on your website, blog, social media accounts, email or social bookmaking accounts without attribution or credit to the content creator. This often results in the content thief passing the content off as their own. Content theft is especially common when it comes to blogging (as I mentioned before) because it is relatively easy to take a blogs RSS feed and reproduce it on another blog. This process is often referred to as “blog scraping.”

What is Blog Scraping?

Generally a person trying to use your blog content is trying to make as much money online as they can quickly and easily. These blogs will take the full feed from your blog and add that content to their website or blog using a free blogging platform (like Wordpress or Blogger) using their own domain name. Once the blog is posting your content, they then cover the site in multiple advertisements like those from Google Adsense. Besides the fact that stealing content is an extremely unethical practice, stealing content in this fashion is actually not very lucrative. Most search engines are smart enough to tell when a website or blog is posting duplicate content, which means that the website won’t rank well, and won’t get the traffic it needs to actually generate any payback.

Recently I was visiting our blog’s Feedburner account to monitor our blog’s analytics when I was pointed to the fact that our feed was being used for several “uncommon” uses. Google define’s uncommon uses as:

“FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve catalogued thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the web. These include email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more, each outlined in detailed in the Subscriber section of your Analyze tab.

Beyond these known places, FeedBurner can also help identify “Uncommon Uses” of your feed content. These references could be a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers want to see where their content is republished and it’s very helpful to have something like FeedBurner to provide visibility into usage. When FeedBurner identifies an “uncommon” use, we highlight it in your main Analyze tab Dashboard and in the detailed Uncommon Uses section within this tab as well.”

The answer goes on to explain that:

“You may ask what you can do if you see a domain using your feed in a way that you feel is not appropriate (e.g., the feed content is posted on the site without proper credit to the source of the material). In this case, you should contact the domain or the domain host and take up the issue with them directly. You may also want to use the FeedBurner Creative Commons Service (on the Optimize tab) which adds a machine-readable Creative Commons copyright license to your feed.”

When I checked to see what these uncommon uses were, I came across a blog that was blatantly making use of our RSS feed and posts without any attribution to us, not even a backlink to our website. After checking a little further it became obvious that the blog is making use of the RSS feed of several different (and some very recognizable) feeds without any credit due the authors (I must admit, I’m pretty interested to see how well they monitor this blog. If it’s done poorly, it’s going to be pretty amusing to see this post show up in their feed. I’ll keep you all posted).

I think you’ll see the irony in the fact that the website has a prominent link to a disclaimer stating:

1. Copyright, Licenses and Idea Submissions.

The entire contents of the Site are protected by international copyright and trademark laws. The owner of the copyrights and trademarks are (I've taken out the name of the actual blog, we're just spreading awareness in this post), its affiliates or other third party licensors. YOU MAY NOT MODIFY, COPY, REPRODUCE, REPUBLISH, UPLOAD, POST, TRANSMIT, OR DISTRIBUTE, IN ANY MANNER, THE MATERIAL ON THE SITE, INCLUDING TEXT, GRAPHICS, CODE AND/OR SOFTWARE.

So what should you do?

Well, that depends. There are several courses of action you can take against those that are misusing your content and they will depend on the severity of the theft and how seriously you take it. First, it’s important to say that content theft is definitely not an uncommon occurrence (no matter what Feedburner chooses to categorize it as). In fact, content theft is almost as common place as content creation. If something has been written on the web, then somewhere there is most likely someone who will consider stealing it.

If you want to take action against those using your content there are several things you can do:

• Place a copyright or creative commons image in your feed footer
• Link to your other blog posts
• Contact the owner of the domain 
• Contact the domain’s advertisers and alert them to the issue 
• Take legal action

Why shouldn’t you take the theft too seriously?

In cases of blog posts (like the situation with our blog) we’re not very worried about the theft. Why is that? Well, after doing our research, we can tell that it is very unlikely that search engines won’t pick up the fact that this blog is stealing content, but there are also several other reasons:

• For one thing, the blog has only been around for 2 months (search engines tend to give more credence to older domains)
• the blog is using duplicate content from several different websites
• Taking the time to deal with the theft is time we could be spending promoting our blog 
• Most search engines are smart enough to judge by the quantity of  backlinks where the post originated

So, long story short, content stealing is unethical and in the long term, really not that worthwhile and while it may be annoying, it’s most likely not going to affect your overall traffic. Having said that, if you notice that someone is using your content consistently and it is influencing you success, then it is certainly worth taking action against. Every situation is different and you’ll have to judge for yourself if it’s worth taking action or not.

Image by Nisha A. on Flickr.

The Harvard Business Review has recently published a report (sponsored by SAS) on social media called, "The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action."The report focuses on common marketing ideas like word of mouth marking (WOMM) and the ways in which, "Conventional marketing wisdom long held that a dissatisfied customer tells ten people. But…in the new age of social media, he or she has the tools to tell ten million.” The report has some great information on social media from a business perspective and is definitely worth taking a look at. Some highlights from the report include:

• There has been an exponential increase in the use of social media yet 31% of companies don't measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts
• 75% of companies don't know where their customers are talking about them or what they're saying
• Only 7% of companies that took part in the study incorporate social media with the rest of their marketing
• 69% of the companies surveyed plan to increase their use of social media in the next year
• The most popular way to measure social media is to incorporate their social media monitoring solution with their other marketing solutions

The report gives a good breakdown of the business reasons for using social media in a more strategic way.