Posts Tagged ‘Technorati’
How (and Why) to Map Your Company’s Digital Landscape
Friday, March 30th, 2012With more than 90% of companies now using social media to find employees and 82% having a Facebook page, there’s no question that business use of social media has become commonplace. But “use” and “success” are two different things. Many organizations, having now realized that the “build it and they will come” model doesn’t work in social media and that it isn’t just another channel for promoting news releases and marketing brochures, are stepping back and retooling their social media strategies.
If you’re developing a new social media program, revamping one that’s failed to achieve hoped-for results, or just trying to make an existing strategy more successful, one key component to start with is an analysis of your social media or digital landscape. This analysis will help you understand:
- • Where your prospective buyers are congregating in social media, and what they are talking about.
- • What your competitors are doing in social media.
- • Which voices are most influential in your market space.
Here’s a four step plan for creating a digital landscape analysis for your organization, to help build or rebuild a successful social media marketing strategy.
1. Evaluate how your competitors are using social media. For both strategic and benchmarking purposes, create a spreadsheet listing your top competitors and, for each, showing:
- • Social features on their website (e.g. do they have a blog, how prominently is it featured, social bookmarking links, social media account links, etc.).
- • Twitter metrics (followers, following, frequency of tweets, general level of interactivity).
- • Facebook / LinkedIn / Google Plus metrics (i.e. followers/fans/circles, how complete is their profile, level of activity).
- • YouTube metrics (total videos uploaded, subscribers, video views, recency of last update).
- • Other social activity and presence (Flickr, SlideShare, Wikipedia, etc.).
Collecting this information is Phase I. This will give you a rough benchmark for your own social media activity (if you already have an active program) and will help you identify any positive outliers—competitors who are far more successful than average in social media—to take a closer look at.
When creating your strategy, you’ll revisit this data and take a closer look at exactly what these competitors are doing (particularly the more successful ones). The point is not to copy anyone else’s strategy as your company’s approach should be designed to capitalize on your own unique strengths, but rather just to see what you can learn from competitors’ success and make sure you aren’t overlooking any obvious tactics or techniques.
2. Identify the key influencers in your market. The next step is to identify the influential voices in your community that you’ll want to reach out to, connect with, and begin building relationships with. These are the journalists, bloggers, analysts (industry or financial) and others who can help amplify your content, spread your story, and lend credibility to your messages.
If you’ve got the budget, the quickest and easiest way to build a list is by using a PR and social media monitoring tool such as Cision, Vocus or MyMediaInfo. If not, or to supplement the results from those paid tools, do some manual research using free tools like AllTop, Technorati and Google Blog Search.
These tools will tell you who is talking about a particular topic, but not necessarily how influential or important any individual source is. In an ideal world, there would be a standardized measure of some sort. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, use influencer rating tools like Klout and Kred in conjunction with checking which blogs are featured most often on blog rolls of target bloggers (an informative though imprecise measure of influence) and the Pagerank of each blog. Combing these measures provides at least a rough guide to the relative influence of various sources.
3. Find relevant groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. This is as simple as searching within “groups” on each social networking site for your primary keywords and recording the results. Note how many groups you find, how large the groups are, and how active they appear to be. Business-related topics will generally have more, larger groups on LinkedIn than Facebook, while the opposite is typically true for consumer topics.
Once you’re in the execution phase, you’ll of course want to monitor, contribute to and interact within the most important and active groups on your list. But in the digital landscape analysis, it’s enough to flag these groups for further investigation.
4. Look for other places where people are talking about your industry. Your prospective buyers are likely having conversations in places well beyond the big five social networking sites. If you’re using a professional (fee-based) social media monitoring tool, start there to identify these message boards, forums and other sites where people in your market are asking and answering questions.
An excellent free tool for conducting this research is Google Discussion Search (run a search on Google, click “More” in the left sidebar then click “Discussions”). It takes a bit of manual effort, but you can build a fairly comprehensive list of discussion forums and message boards by running multiple searches on Google Discussion Search, capturing the results to Excel using SEOquake, then sorting the list by frequency.
With these four steps completed, you’ll have a comprehensive picture of your company’s digital landscape in place to serve as a basis for developing a new or revised social media strategy and tactical plan.
100+ Blog Directories and RSS Sites for Promoting Your Blog
Monday, October 25th, 2010Over time, the top source of traffic for most blogs is search. The two keys to search success are great content and links. Assuming you’ve already got great content, there are many places to get links (e.g. social networking profiles, social bookmarking sites, other bloggers). But two great sources are blog directories and RSS syndication sites. Not only do they provide valuable links, they can also supply direct traffic and help build your RSS subscriber list.
To give credit where it’s due, both the TopRank Online Marketing Blog and Robin Good have provided nice lists in the past, but as changes in the blog directory world can be challenging to keep pace with, both now include dead links and directories that have significantly changed their policies (e.g. charging for inclusion).
So, having recently completed a submission campaign for a client, here is an updated list of blog directories and RSS syndication sites that remain active and free. The list excludes sites that were, ahem, inappropriate for most blogs, had non-operational submission forms, appeared inactive, required a fee, or had a Google Pagerank of zero.
Preparation: What You’ll Need First
Before you get started with blog directory and RSS submission, here is a list of assets you’ll need to have ready in order to make your submission work productive. Create a plain text file, using Notepad or a similar tool, with the following information compiled:
Blog name/title (e.g., Webbiquity B2B Marketing Blog)
Blog URL (e.g., http://webbiquity.com)
Feed URL (e.g., http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webbiquity)
Meta description: (usually no more than 200 characters, e.g., “Webbiquity is the fusion of SEO, search marketing, social media, reputation management, content marketing and social PR to make you or your company omnipresent on the web for your unique search phrase.”)
Alternative short description (up to 255 characters, to take advantage of the slightly higher character limit offered by many directories, and to mix things up just a bit)
Keywords (6-8 core keyword phrases for your blog, e.g., “b2b marketing blog, SEO, search engine marketing, social media, SEM, online reputation management, content marketing, social PR”)
Long description (up to 500 characters)
About the author (up to 255 characters about you)
A user name, password and email address you’ll be using for the submissions. It’s simplest to use a common name and password across all of the sites, but if you’re concerned about security, use variations. Just keep a list in case you need to go back and edit details (e.g. change your email address) in the future.
100+ Blog Directories and RSS Submission Sites
Several of these sites require registration, and some require a reciprocal link, but at last check all were still active and free.
Blloggs
PR=1
Blogarama
PR=4
Blog.com
PR=6
Blogaz
PR=4
Blogbunch blog+rss
PR=3
Blogburst
“by invitation only” (not all blogs accepted)
PR=6
Blog-collector blog+rss
PR=2
Blogs-collection
PR=3
Blog-directory
PR=5
Blogdir
PR=4
(free) registration required
Blogdirectory001
PR=5
(free) registration required
Blogexplosion
PR=5
(free) registration required
Blogfinds
PR=3
Blogfolders
PR=3
Blogged
PR=6
Bloggapedia blog+rss
PR=5
(free) registration required
Bloggernity
PR=5
Bloghub
PR=5
Bloglisting
PR=3
Bloggernow
PR=3
Blogobbler
PR=1
Blogotion
PR=4
BlogPulse blog+rss
PR=6
Blogrankings
PR=6
Blogs.com
PR=7
Blogsearch
PR=6
Blog-search
PR=3
Blogsrating
PR=3
Blogville
PR=5
Blogz
PR=5
Buzzerhut
PR=3
Feedmap blog+rss
PR=3
Feednuts blog+rss
PR=5
Feedplex blog+rss
PR=3
Flookie
PR=4
FyberSearch
PR=3
Getblogs
PR=5
Globeofblogs
PR=7
Google
PR=10
Gozoof
PR=3
Grokodile
PR=3
Icerocket
PR=7
Info-listings
PR=4
Leighrss
PR=4
Loaded Web
PR=5
LSBlogs
PR=3
Minnesota blog+rss
PR=4
Mozdex
PR=3
Mvblogs
PR=4
Ontoplist blog+rss
PR=5
Regator (not all blogs accepted)
PR=5
Roask
PR=4
SmallBusiness.com
PR=5
Spicypage
PR=3
Submitblognow
PR=4
Technorati
PR=7
Theseoking
PR=3
Topblogarea
PR=5
TruthLaidBear
PR=5
Ubdaily
PR=4
Wilsdomain
PR=3
Weblogs.com
PR=6
Webloogle
PR=3 (a bit edgy)
Webworldindex
PR=3
Zimbio blog+rss
PR=6
RSS Feed Syndication Sites
4guysfromrolla
PR=4
5z5.com
PR=4
9rules.com
PR=4
Blogdigger
PR=6
Chordata Blog+Rss
PR=4
Devasp
PR=5
Feedagg
PR=6
Feedage
PR=6
Feedcat
PR=6
Rssfeeddirectory
PR=2
Feedest
PR=4
Feedgy
PR=4
FeedListing
PR=3
Feedmailer
PR=5
Feedsee
PR=5
Feeds4all
PR=5
Feedzie
PR=4
Finance-investing
PR=5
Goldenfeed
PR=4
Guzzle
PR=4
Jordomedia
PR=5
Keegy
PR=5
Leighrss
PR=4
Metafeeder
PR=3
Millionrss
PR=5
Moneyhighstreet
PR=4
Newsnow
PR=5
NGOID News Network
PR=5
Oobdoo
PR=5
Plazoo
PR=6
Rss001
PR=4
Rssmountain
PR=5
Rssmotron
PR=4
Rsstop10
PR=5
Rubhub
PR=6
Scribnia
PR=5
Solarwarp
PR=4
Swoogle
PR=6
Syndic8
PR=5
Urlfan
PR=5
Weblogalot
PR=6
Yopod
PR=5
Business Blogging – Do You Have What It Takes?
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010Though blogging provides significant business benefits (e.g. increasing a firm’s credibility and visibility in search), developing a blog isn’t the right move for every organization. The web is littered with abandoned blogs; according to Technorati, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs it tracks have been updated in the past four months, and just 50,000 to 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views. To illustrate these figures visually:
That’s a lot of writers trying to join a very small club. How do you get there? To make a blog really worthwhile—to join that elite 0.08% of successful blogs—requires (at least) the following six characteristics.
Curiosity. Successful business bloggers are interested in and knowledgeable about much more than just their own products and/or services. They study the bigger picture, keep up on trends, understand their customers’ issues and enjoy learning and sharing industry knowledge.
Passion. This is what makes a blog not just informative, but interesting. It brings life to the writing. It’s also a prerequisite for the persistence needed to keep writing, and making it interesting, long enough for the blog to really start getting traction and succeeding.
Organized thought. Whether you are sharing information primarily through writing, audio (podcasting) or video blogging, it all starts with the ability to tell a story, weave a narrative, or present an idea in an organized and coherent fashion.
Social skills. What separates blogs from other forms of writing (white papers, articles, e-books, etc.) is the interactivity–blogs are meant to be conversations, not monologues. Good bloggers are social creatures; they link to other bloggers, write copy that attracts links, leave relevant comments on other blogs, respond to comments on their own blogs, and interact with other bloggers through other social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter. The result is that other blogs and social networking sites become productive sources of blog traffic, as well as being helpful for search.
Patience. Even if you use best practices for a successful blog launch, building traffic still takes time. Why? The three primary sources of traffic to any website are direct visits, referrals (links) from other websites, and search. When a blog is new to the world, it doesn’t have high awareness to draw a lot of direct traffic, high credibility to attract links, or loads of content for search engines to index. It takes time to build that. Many bloggers fail at this point because they get discouraged and abandon their blogs. Many others succeed simply by being too stubborn to quit.
Commitment. To be successful, a blog must be continually updated and constantly promoted. This isn’t a “toe in the water” exercise (unless your plan is to join the 94.4% of abandoned blogs that unattractively litter the online landscape). Blogging is wasted effort unless you are willing to put in the time, even (especially) in the early ramp-up days when traffic seems disappointingly low, even when a post falls flat with readers, even when you expect tons of comments and get only a few (or none).
Blogging isn’t for everyone. But for those with passion, curiosity and determination, they can pay off by showcasing your company’s expertise, building its brand image and enhancing its search visibility in ways no ordinary corporate website can.
