Social Media Isn’t about Getting People to ReTweet You!

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

I originally posted this on the popular SEO site, SEOmoz. I thought that it had enough merit that we should post it here as well. I wrote it for a very select community so just to be clear @randfish is Rand Fishkin who is the owner of SEOmoz. Enjoy!

The more integrated the social web becomes integrated into the search rankings the more we need to understand how to increase our brand on the social web. Let me get this straight — it is as important to influence social media influencers as it is to be an influencer yourself. Developing social media influence isn’t about how many times you can get @randfish to retweet you as it is how often he asks you questions or chooses on his own to interact with you. It’s more about establishing a relationship with that particular person through social media channels.

I’ve identified four different types of influencers.

Political Influencers
Academic Influencers
Cultural Influencers
Social Influencers

I know there are many more than this, but I believe these to be the main categories that most any other influencer type would be a combination of the two. Let’s define what we mean by each of these influencers and list some practical ways you can engage with these influencers.

Political Influencers are people involved in the political process. Now, it’s key to note two things, first that political influencers do not have to be elected officials. Some would say that John Stewart is a Political Influencer on some of his personal key issues. And second, that they don’t have to have influence over a general population but others involved in politics.

Academic Influencers are individuals who exist mainly in academic fields, such as research, education and University staff. These peoples’ opinions typically hold a lot of weight in and out of their fields of study.

Cultural Influencers are personalities or celebrities. You may have heard this group called the trend-setters, or fashionistas. These people can create influence rather than just guide it. This is why certain celebrities like Kim Kardashian have Twitter sections in their contracts. These may be the most difficult people to influence, first of all because there are so few of them.

Social Influencers are by far and away the most common influencers. In fact most everyone fits into this category. Unless you are out and out spamming everyone on Twitter, this category includes you, because you have influence it may be large or very small but we all have influence of some kind. We have our own way of talking about the stuff that we are interested in, the products we use, the brands that offend us and the people who encourage us.

Now the question comes how do we start to strategically influence influencers in the social media realm? This doesn’t have to be shady, or ugly this is about using your natural influence in ways that helps your business or brand.

The one overarching principle that guides these tactics is to try to get these influencers to notice you. Give them a reason to notice you; try to stay away from taking political sides that would negatively affect business. But ultimately you can’t get an influence anyone who doesn’t know you exist.

Political Influencers

Mention them in a press release, “Today we are setting out to accomplish, what Senator So-And-So challenged us to do.”
Retweet them and comment on their Facebook posts; engage with them in conversations.
Are you having a business open house? Invite them, they may even show up! Connect with their aides tell them about the message your trying to present and start connecting with them online (they won’t always work for that political figure). Now they are mentioning you, and you’ve taken a relationship to the next level.

Academic Influencers

Attend, listen to, or follow along with their events live and tweet them! Speaking from experience people love this! Remember they are talking about their life work. They love it when people understand and spread their information.
Ask them public questions related to their field of study.
Seek out opportunities to be in front of these influencers, if you get to meet them, say something nice about them publicly through your social network.

Cultural Influencers

Engage these people in your field of interest. Each industry and business segment has these people in them. Find out who they are and engage with them.
Ask them to do Twitter interview (twinterviews), and ask them 5 to 10 questions and have them respond over Twitter.

Social Influencers

Converse with these people a lot! Answer questions, respond to tweets, and invite them to your business events.
Hold a business Open house and make sure you get as many of these individuals there as possible.
Target people who are great social influencers in your area for your field of business or study and just get them involved in what you are doing. Often times people who are social media active understand the idea that their social influence can grow based on interactions with others. They will want to be involved with what you do online.

Remember social media isn’t about who follows you it’s about who you influence. Business leaders do not usually have the time to research and study various new things that would be valuable for their businesses; so they have others do it for them and present their findings and make recommendations. Based on those recommendations leaders can make informed decisions. Social media can work the same way; are you going to be there when someone needs your recommendation?

5 Ways To Increase the Quality of Your Email Marketing

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

In a Pew Research study performed in December of 2010, adults were asked what activities they participated in while online. An overwhelming 92% said that they send and read email. More than social networking, more than researching and conversing about a hobby, more than checking the weather – Email. In fact in 2010 107 trillion emails were sent. That’s 33,900,000 emails per second. Email is such a part of my life that even though my phone automatically checks for new email every minute I still navigate to Outlook and Gmail every time I log into my computer.

The greatest question any business can ask itself is, “how can I best leverage email for marketing?” which is a fantastic question, but one that also causes a great deal more questions. What about SPAM? How often do I send email? Who do I send them to?

Email Marketing can be the most frustrating form of Internet Marketing, but if done right, the most rewarding. So here are five ways you can boost your Email Marketing efforts:

Make it easy to sign-up: Put a single sign-up form or link to your sign-up form on every page of your website. At Pinnacle we put the entire form in the footer of our website so it’s on every page. For better results place your form or link in the top 750 pixels of your page.
Give them something to look forward to: Save some of your best content for your newsletter. Remember, the reason they are on your email list is because they requested to receive updates from you. Give them something worth reading.
Ask people to read: Use other channels of influence to increase your subscribers. Also, post links to your newsletter on Twitter and Facebook.
Send often, but not annoyingly often: The average person cleans out their inbox every 12-15 days. Sending two newsletters per month is often ideal. Test your list to see how often you should send messages to your followers.
Design a beautiful email: Use an HTML design for your email template. A newsletter that is all text is boring and hard to read. You need to grab the reader’s eyes immediately when they look at your message.

These are just some basic steps, but if you follow them it will increase the quality of your email marketing efforts.

A Quick Review of Internet Explorer 9

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

Just last night Internet Explorer 9 released. Freshly out of beta and ready for release, you can download it, and try it out for yourself. I’ve got to tell you that I am a proud user of Google Chrome and have been since about last summer, and the two years before that I was an avid user of FireFox. I honestly didn’t use IE8 at all until I was required to for several purposes here at Pinnacle. Let me just paint the picture a little more clearly for you – I am not an Internet Explorer fan. So when I heard that Microsoft was coming out with a new version of Internet Explorer so soon after the release of IE8 I wasn’t impressed, in fact, I didn’t even download the beta, or any of the release candidates.

Only seconds after the restart I quickly realized that Microsoft had jumped back into the browser wars. I was shocked to see how fast the internet moves in IE9, making the transitions between sites fluid and simple.

The navigation bar along the top is quite reminiscent of Chrome, removing the search box altogether and combining it with the address bar for simple searching capabilities.

The default settings do not include a status bar along the bottom of the browser window, as to allow for more website viewing. As of yet, I haven’t found a way to turn that function on.

There are several ways that Microsoft has integrated IE9 into Windows 7, least of which is the ability to pin your favorite websites to the taskbar for direct access. Also there is some functionality with the Windows snap feature to better handle on the fly resizing of content on the page.

I wanted to check what Microsoft had been saying about the CSS3 and HTML5 functionality of IE9 so I went to a couple of independent sites css3.info and html5test.com. Microsoft claims complete CSS3 compatibility and it checks out wonderfully. CSS3.info, says that out of 547 tests IE9 has implemented all 547 css3 elements. Although, Html5test.com states that IE9 only scores 130 out of 400 on HTML5 support, which I guess isn’t too bad, but hopefully we will get some updates to include the new and important form elements.

All around IE9 is worth the upgrade from IE8, and you might actually see some leave the worlds of FireFox and Chrome, I know I’m thinking about it. Have you tried IE9 yet, what do you think?

Exhaustive Look into the New Facebook Pages – Screenshots

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

This post was originally on my personal blog – joelwolfgang.com. I’m posting it hear because I believe that it’s extremely relevant. Facebook announced that their Pages are changing, and I think you’ll see that they are quite an improvement over what they used to be. Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Just yesterday Facebook opened up their new version of Facebook Pages, yes they have a new look, but that new look is similar to the Facebook Places Pages, so its not a completely unfamiliar redesign. They announced that you can upgrade your pages to the new look and design now, but that all Pages will move to the the new feature rich design on March 10, 2011. Lets take a look a the features that Facebook highlights in their tour.

Photos like the new Profile Pages

The latest photos section runs across the top of the screen much like it does across the rest of Facebook, this change shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but those of you who don’t have very many pictures on your Page should look to change that.

Navigation Bar moves to the left side of the Page underneath the profile Picture.

This may give us a look into some study that Facebook has been doing. Possibly saying that web users are more inclined to engage with a navigation bar on the left hand side than the top. They would probably have the best set of user data out there. Something to at least keep in mind for your next project.

Top Content

Facebook now allows you to show top content on your Facebook page. I believe this will be great for marketers. You no longer have to wait to post new content in fear of thwarting off users, and the best posts with the greatest conversations will remain near the top to increase the level of participation.

Use Facebook as your Page

This is addresses one my clients’ biggest concerns about Facebook. You can now communicate across Facebook as your Facebook page (make comments, like posts, etc.). Also the opposite is true you’ll now be able to comment on or like posts as yourself – the only way previously I found I was able to do this was through the iPhone app. You’ll also be able to get notifications in your email of when people post or comment on your Page.

New Settings

Facebook Showcases some new settings in their admin panel. Also adding this great new larger button that makes it easier to see and interact with.

Moderation

You can now create a moderation block list just add comma separated words to this text box and all posts containing those words will be treated like spam. Similarly you’ll be able to set a profanity blocklist, Facebook will block the most commonly reported words and phrases marked as offensive by the broader community.

Featured Administrators and Pages

You can now set featured administrators and pages for users to interact with. So if you wanted to promote other pages or administrators it would be entirely possible. Now there are a ton of new features, but a couple note worthwhile to mention. The width of the middle section of the Pages seems to be smaller – 492px instead of the 520px on the old format. There was no mention of this in the developer roadmap so I’m not sure if its a mistake or if its intentional. Also Facebook announced that its deprecating the Static FBML app and moving to completely iframe custom tabs. I believe that this is a good move for users because you’ll have much more control over the content that you’re custom tab can show. While still being able to use alot of the Facebook features that we’ve grown accustomed too. Overall I think the changes to the Facebook Pages are good and will help users engage more which only helps those with Pages. What do you think? Do you like the new Pages?

Getting Started With SEO – Keyword Targeting

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

Keywords seem to the all the rage in SEO lately and for good reason. You want people to search for certain keywords to find your website – that’s good SEO. The problem comes when you don’t know what keywords to use and where to find them. When I am evaluating a new SEO program for a website I make a list of 25 keywords or keyphrases that I want to be found on search engines for. Then I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help me find the best variations of keywords to target.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
You simply type is a word or phrase in the keyword tool box and it will come up with some suggestions. I typically sort these suggestions by the number of Global Monthly Searches. This is going to give me a good idea of what people are searching for within the topics I want to be found for. And thus helps me find subjects to write about and keywords to use in blog posts, site categories, articles and other content across our website.

This tool is one of the most used tools in my toolbox when it comes to SEO simply because I get to see (estimated) data from Google Search terms and number of results. Knowing what keywords you are trying to target is essential to a quality SEO plan.

You are not going to want to target just the keywords that get the most search hits because they may require more investment to attain. Instead pick a good mix of keywords to target over time you should see your placement rise if you are creating unique, quality content on your website.

Here are just a couple ideas of places to use your keywords:

Use those keywords and keyphrases in tweets with links to relevant pages in you Tweets
Share those links with keywords associated with them on Facebook
Put keywords in the titles of your blog posts