Posts Tagged ‘Digg’
How to Use Article Marketing as Part of Your Social Media Strategy
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010Guest post by Beth Hrusch
As you may know by now, article marketing is an effective way to gain credibility and establish yourself as an expert in your field. By writing articles about topics of interest to your readers, and distributing them on article directories, you can give your content the kind of exposure that would be hard to get anywhere else. But, what many people don’t realize is that article marketing isn’t just for directories anymore.
Social media has become an effective vehicle for content distribution, and articles are no exception. According to the Small Business Success Index, sponsored by Network Solutions (2010), one in five small businesses are now actively using social media. About 75% of those surveyed have a company page on a social networking site. What makes social media so effective for marketing purposes? The simple answer is that it gives your content massive exposure across a wide range of platforms.
Articles can easily be distributed using social media news and bookmarking sites, for example. Each of these sites has strengths and weaknesses, and some will suit certain goals better than others. Here are 5 of the most popular:
1. Facebook- With over 250 million members, it’s got tremendous reach. Generate interest with fans and friends by talking about topics related to your industry then link to your articles on your fan page. Ping articles and blogs automatically, so your groups can see your latest posts.
2. Twitter- Similar to Facebook, Twitter allows you to market your articles automatically and in real time. As a micro-blogging service, it allows businesses to communicate and share the latest information with customers, and link to articles and other content using a url shortener.
3. LinkedIn- For professional networking, setting up a profile in LinkedIn allows you to share your expertise with others in your group. Market your articles by sending them to your account or have them pulled from another social media account, to show up under your updates.
4. Digg- A really popular news/bookmarking site that can bring your articles massive exposure. Submitting your article to Digg takes interested readers directly to your article and your site, where they can also browse archived articles and check you out.
5. YouTube- What do videos have to do with article marketing? Both are content, just in different formats. Turn your articles into videos, using your text as a script. This can be done inexpensively, so almost any budget can handle it. YouTube is the 4th most popular website in the world, and videos consistently rank high in the search engines, so the potential to go viral is huge.
There are many more social media sites that lend themselves to article marketing. Check out the handy chart put together by the folks at Seomoz.com for more tips on how to use each site to market your business.
Article marketing has the power to establish you as an authority and give interested consumers a way to access your business through links to your site. Social media supercharges your articles by giving them wide and deep distribution throughout the web. Together, they help you reach a large, targeted audience without the need for an expensive marketing campaign. Be sure, though, that you research the social media sites- how they work and what their terms of service are. Some will work better for you than others.
Also, remember that article marketing is only effective if you commit to creating and distributing fresh content every week or so. Maintain both aspects of your marketing strategy and you’ll see results.
Beth Hrusch is Senior Editor at Interact Media, a content marketing software company.
Don’t They Know Who You Are? Why Reputation Management is Crucial
Sunday, February 14th, 2010In the old days—like, six or seven years ago—if someone had a bad experience with a company, he or she generally vented about it to a few friends and that was the end of it. The emergence of social media changed all that of course, so now that person can vent online to, essentially, the entire world. And search engines love social media, which helps expose that rant to anyone searching for the company’s name.
Lee Odden recently framed this topic effectively in a post about digital reputation management, noting “There are plenty of CEOs, executives, brand and business managers that are facing the dilemma of what to do about their company and brand reputation online…Companies like Kryptonite Locks, Comcast, Dell, Walmart and Sony have all experienced what it’s like to ignore the influence of the social web and the subsequent effect on how their brands are reflected, both in the search results and within social media channels.”
This Time, It’s Personal
What these CEOs and other executives also need to appreciate is the importance of their personal brand. These individuals are often the “face” of their organizations; as they get quoted in press releases and news articles, pen bylined articles, speak at conferences, and talk to industry influencers and prospective customers, their names can become almost as well known as their brands. That makes it crucial for business leaders even at smaller companies who may not in the past have considered themselves “public figures” to manage not only their firms’ online reputations, but also their own.
A few examples. One executive I know, the president of a software company, shares the first page of Google with a biomedical researcher, a diplomat, a (not exactly best-selling) author, and the Facebook page of a college student from North Dakota. While that isn’t a terrible group to potentially be confused with, this executive has a sufficiently unique name that he should be able to own more of the real estate on this page, including the top spot (he’s currently #5), thereby making himself—and his company—easier to find.
Another executive acquaintance has things a bit worse. He shows up on the first page alright, but several of the links are to dot-com-meltdown era news articles about a company he worked with that had some of the typical problems of tech companies at the time (collapsing stock price, low on cash, disgruntled shareholders etc.). The full story is that he wasn’t the cause of these problems at all; he was hired to fix them, which he did, successfully taking the company prviate and turning it around. But a casual Googler wouldn’t get that story from the page one results without really digging.
On the other side of the ledger are individuals such as Jon Rognerud and Guy Kawasaki. Jon has a somewhat unusual name obviously (and the “Jon” spelling helps), but he isn’t the only person on the planet with that moniker. Yet he owns the first five pages of Google for his identity. Guy owns at least the first ten pages of Google (being a best-selling author
How To Be Seen
Granted, it may not be realistic for executives with more common surnames and less fame to achieve quite those levels, but most could nevertheless dramatically improve their personal online reputation management using the following techniques.
- Buy yourname.com if it is available. Use the domain to build a professional website (e.g., GuyKawasaki.com) or redirect it to a suitable page, such as the Management Team page on your corporate site.
- While you’re at it, spend the $95 to own your personal LookupPage.
- Make sure the Management Team page on your company website is optimized for your name.
- If you can make the time commitment, start your own blog. At the very least, look for opportunities to write guest-posts and/or get interviewed for blogs related to your industry.
- Write an article (or articles) for Google Knol on topics pertaining to your product or service. As an example, here’s one I wrote about records management. You can link to other blog posts, published articles, white papers or other informational content your company has produced about the topic.
- Record a short video introducing yourself and your company to potential customers and anyone else who may be interested. For examples, see the Pitches section on TechCrunch. Use your name in the title of the video (e.g. firstname-lastname-of-companyname.mp4). Upload the video to YouTube and Vimeo so it’s easy to share on blogs and other sites.
- Upload company-related photos—you, other executives on your team, your building, your products, screenshots (if there is any software component to your product), your logo, etc.—to photo-sharing sites like Flickr.
- Start Twittering. Use your real name in your profile.
- Create accounts on social bookmarking sites like Wikio, Mixx, Digg and/or StumbleUpon. Any time there is an online news story or blog post published about your company or product, submit it. Also submit other items that may be of interest to your customers and prospects.
- Hire a social media-savvy PR person to help you get interviewed by prominent bloggers and writers in your industry.
- Consider writing a Wikipedia page about yourself. Keep in mind, however, that you have to be considered a public figure (or at least be able to make the argument that you should be) or the Wikipedia cabal will reject the article and take it down. That means you’ll need to have links to third-party sources who have written about you, and the, er, idiosyncratic folks at Wikipedia will have to agree. For example, Tim Young the relief pitcher for the Expos and Red Sox has a Wikipedia page, but Tim Young, CEO of on-demand social networking platform Socialcast doesn’t.
- Create and maintain profile pages on social networking and directory sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Naymz, Jigsaw, Plaxo, ZoomInfo, CrunchBase (for technology executives), and VisualCV.
Professional corporate “evangelists” like Scott Monty and Christopher Barger, not surprisingly, tend to show up pretty well on search. But shouldn’t the CEO—particularly at smaller firms—be one of a company’s biggest evangelists? Stakeholders may very well think so. As a top executive, you are a public figure, and people will search for your name on the web. Online reputation management gives you at least some control over what they’ll find.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in January 2009.
