Social Media Marketing Summit: Keynote 2 Shel Israel
I’m going to attempt to post this RIGHT after it’s done, so as I’m typing Shel Israel is talking. Don’t worry about not being rude. I have an uncanny knack of being able to type without looking at the screen. Nifty, huh? I digress, this presentation was given by:
- Shel Israel, writer, GlobalNeighbourhoods.net
Shel took most of the presentation to talk about people he’d interviewed. Some of the anecdotes were useful and some were just that – anecdotes. I only outlined some of the more interesting ones for you that might have some take-home value.
Bullet Point Review!
- Has been following social media since 2005, taking a business look at human stories.
- He gets paid to interview people about social media & how it impacts their business and culture.
- Whether you want to or not, social media is where it’s going.
- The internet came and gave us email, but it wasn’t as conversational as social media.
- The growth of social media has been more phenomenal than people realize.
- When they started their book in March 2005, there were about 4 million bloggers worldwide, not that impressive. If you add up all the social media content now you get close to half a billion people. And growing.
- There are great tools to find the conversation – Google Alerts, Radian6, Google Analytics.
- Since starting his project, he’s done 110 interviews, 33 countries, 5 continents (mostly bloggers).
- 2 billion people will be online by 2011.
- Michael Dell, Dell Computers.
- Dell might just be the world’s most prolific social media company.
- Conversations are more valuable than ads.
- Engagement beats impressions.
- Laurel Papworth, social networking strategies.
- Was invited to help set up a social network for Saudi women. Shel Israel asked her ‘what are they like’ and she said ‘they’re like all women’.
- They need anonymity online to avoid real world repercussions and need to support each other.
- Queen Rania of Jordan is on YouTube with near 4 million visitors doing almost daily posts & talks about the myths about Muslim women.
- Isaac Mao, China’s first blogger.
- The rate of growth for Twitter and Facebook seems to be higher than blogging in China.
- The Chinese blogging community has figured out how to bypass firewalls to publish outside of China through use of IPs, etc.
- Feeds the collective power of crowds.
- People’s voices will be heard – they are going to use these tools to have the conversations they used to have at the water cooler and now it’s amplified and can travel around the world very fast.
- Sun Microsystems is using a behind the firewall internal social network to collaborate and get products to market faster.
- Youth is the killer app. Its driving everything because social media is coming second nature to the upcoming workers of the world.
- Tools are allowing people to interact online much like they already interact offline.
- People are the same. Cultures differ.
- Useful info > pitches.
- Community now has the power.
- Generosity is competitively lethal.
- Adoption is faster than you think.
- Scalability is the new ROI.
- Measurement is being resolved. This is what people are super focused on this year.
- Using social media in a recession: it’s the most cost-effective option for communications with customers.
- 1 person can scale worldwide very quickly.
Points brought up during the Shel Israel Q&A
What would you have in your shopping cart for low cost options? He hasn’t a clue – when he started, it was just blogging, but now there’s a powerhouse of tools. Where are your customers? What tools are you the most comfortable with? There are basic tools, but you may be better with one over another so you have to decide.- Is there anything going on within the political campaign use of social media that businesses can learn from? They’re using incredible intelligence gathering tools and this is the first presidential election in history where social media is playing a role. Looking back during the next election will be interesting. This is a big step in a revolutionary process. People’s voices are being amplified.
Overall a good presentation, well done, with valuable case studies and a few ace takeaways. This is the first time I’ve heard Shel Israel speak, so it was a great opportunity that I hope to repeat at future conferences. There wasn’t much time for questions, but I get the impression that the questions would have gone on into generally tangential directions, so perhaps it was for the best.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Spamdexing
Spamdexing:
- Also called search engine spamming. It combines techniques employed by some Web marketers and designers to fool a search engine’s spider and indexing programs to ensure that their website always appears at or near the top of the list of search engine results.
I’m sure you’ve come across this without realizing it. You go to Google and search for something relatively common and the SERP has listings near the top that, upon clicking them, you find have nothing to do with what you’re looking for.
This is because the marketers behind that website (usually laden with affiliate links and poor or scrapped content) have gamed the system and used these tactics.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
CJU Course: Affiliate Marketing 101
As the first course of the conference yesterday, I’m sure there was a lot of pressure for this hour and fifteen minutes to really set the tone for the three days of Commission Junction University. Titled “Affiliate Marketing 101: Back to the Basics”, I attended hoping to maybe pick up some things I didn’t actually know considering I taught a lot of the basics to myself a couple years back. The speaker was:
- Jeremy Palmer, President, QuitYourDayJob.com
I converse with & follow him on twitter and I’ve heard great things about his last projects The Black Ink Projects and Black Ink 2, although haven’t had a chance to check it out myself. I won’t know until Thursday if this session really did set the appropriate tone for the conference or not, but it was definitely worth my attendance!
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- Choose Your Niche
- The niche you choose should be your passion – it’s the easiest foundation to build upon.
- Know a lot about your niche to be successful.
- Develop a Business Plan
- Put together a SWOT analysis for you AND your closest competitors – their weaknesses can be your opportunities.
- Just make it a simple spreadsheet.
- Have a unique selling proposition. It’s not enough to just copy someone else, you have to see what they’re doing and how you can do it better.
- Learn about the customer persona.
- Inventory your own skills objectively – what can you do yourself and what would you be best served by outsourcing?
- Write Value Added Content
- Start writing content before you design your site.
- Content is the key to the site.
- Have 10-15 pages of content before you launch to improve Quality Score.
- Design Your Site
- You must have professional tools to create a professional site.
- Be objective about your experience and consider outsourcing.
- TOOL: 99Designs for design contests – you only pay for the winner, and you pay much less.
- Develop Your Site
- Outsourcing programming can be done on Elance or oDesk quite effectively.
- Be sure to write extremely detailed specifications on what you want the site to do and how it should be done when using outsourced talent.
- With these services you can escrow your payment so that no money is released until certain milestones are done – and done to your satisfaction.
- Test the Waters with PPC
- Google hates “rich pages” (also referred to as “thin landing pages”) where the only intent is a conversion.
- Google recently updated their algorithms and human QC when assigning Quality Scores, so be sure to read up.
- Essentially Google wants you to develop your own content: they want independent reviews, content not found directly on the merchant’s website, and the comparison of several merchants.
- Many affiliates have had good success with video reviews because they resonate more with consumers.
- Remember that Google isn’t the only game in town – test on Yahoo & MSN to discover what works in terms of keywords and ad copy.
- Test & Optimize
- Look at conversions using keywords.
- TOOLS: Tracking 202 (free), Prosper 202 (free), Optimize My Site (paid), Google Website Optimizer (free).
- Pay equal attention to conversion rate and click through rate.
- Don’t use vague or hype laden copy – it won’t convert well.
- Split test your landing pages.
- Build a Sustainable Business.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
- You want to thrive without Google just in case.
- Facebook Ads are growing with better ROI.
- Remember the viral marketing element (what can you do that people will pass on?)
- You want to be who people will think of when they think of your niche.
- Create a brand for yourself.
- Random Tips
- Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell and The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, & David Weinberger.
- When doing product comparisons, try throwing in a weaker competitor to enhance the value of the better products.
- DO NOT use the standard WordPress template when adding a blog to your site – make sure it looks like the rest of your site.
- Comparison pages only need to be very simple tables.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Mobile has great opportunities for merchants and advertisers, but it’s hard for affiliates. People are not (yet) likely to use mobile devices to make purchases.
- Outsourcing content? Elance is ok but Jeremy expressed some displeasure with what he’s got from that site. An audience member suggested PR Newswire and searching for keywords to find experts.
- My own suggestion is to try going to LinkedIn & looking for experts to approach for writing.
- Go where the good designers and writers hang out to find them – when you go to freelancing sites you’re getting the people who might be hard up for work and not that great of results.
- In regards to CJ, pay a lot of attention to the Network Earnings bar.
- Once your site’s Quality Score tanks, you’re done. You have to start over with a new site because there’s no way to get that back.
Jeremy did an excellent job mixing up the experience level of the information he put forth, knowing instinctively that most people attending wouldn’t quite be at the 101 education level in regards to affiliate marketing.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC):
- A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each click they refer to a merchant’s website. PPC offers some of the lowest commissions and high conversion ratio since visitors need to only click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.
The most common search engine utilizing PPC is Google AdWords, however some PPC affiliates are also fond of Yahoo and MSN due to the lack of saturation of the market there. The downside is that not as many consumers are using Yahoo or MSN to search than Google. Some of the most successful super affiliates are PPC affiliates.
PPC is the core of search engine marketing (SEM).
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Pay Per Call
Pay Per Call:
- A model of paid advertising similar to PPC, except advertisers pay for every phone call that comes to them from a search ad, rather than for every click through to their website landing page for the ad.
A simple Google search of “pay per call tracking” comes up with about 355,000 results for this fledgling model. Traditionally, affiliates have seen phone orders for a merchant as a commission leak. They could drive sales to a merchant’s website, but if the person then calls to place an order then the commission is lost.
More recently we’ve been seeing tracking come through for the affiliates when visitors call. This is still dependent on the visitor actually plugging in the code in over the phone or telling the operator so it’s not entirely fool proof to my knowledge.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Alexa Rankings & Google PageRank
What do they mean to you? I’m never sure how much weight to give to third party rankings like Alexa and Google PageRank. Let’s review…
Interesting… isn’t it? I know that it’s a higher ranking than another site of mine, FoodAskew.net, which has a ranking of 1,147,532. To give you some scale, Google has an Alexa ranking of 2, AffiliateSummit.com has a ranking of 104,661, and Facebook has a ranking of 5.
Alexa ranks all the sites on the web based on their traffic and that’s how the ranking comes up. I guess I should be happy in the range I’m in, but what can be done to increase your ranking? More traffic, as far as I can tell.
Page Rank is another beast all together. According to Wikipedia,
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
Much more complicated, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to boost my page rank. I know by checking that my page rank is 0. I can’t understand it considering that I have a decent number of inbound links as well as outbound links that aren’t affiliate links. Perhaps it’s because most the links are direct post links and not to just the domain? Someone who knows more about this has yet to tell me.
So how much weight should be put on these numbers? Different people across the web say different things. I like to believe that as long as I’m putting out good content, it doesn’t matter. I focus on bringing more traffic to my site right now because the more eyes that see it, the more likely it is that they’ll come back.
But, I’m far from being an expert on this. What’s your opinion?
To find your own Alexa Ranking, go to www.Alexa.com. Use this tool to check your Google PR:
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