2013 - Page 16 of 26 - Sam Harrelson

Stock Images and Your Search Results

Google’s Matt Cutts assures us that using stock images on our sites doesn’t affect search results, but you should care about the type of images you’re using nonetheless.

Google’s Matt Cutts: Stock Images Do Not Impact Search Engine Rankings: “Matt’s answer was very short, he said ‘no.’ There is no positive or negative impact on your organic Web ranking if you use stock imagery versus original imagery.”

While using stock images might not negatively impact your site on a search ranking level, it can (and does) impact how users landing on your page interact with your content and navigation.

Almost as importantly in some cases, Google Image Search is a major source of traffic for many sites that use mostly original images instead of relying on stock images.

With our own clients, we’ve seen very impressive numbers from Google Image search when we’ve worked with them on custom images targeting specific keywords.

Instagram is Facebook’s YouTube

Instagram adopting short videos will be insanely popular and businesses should be brainstorming ways to put this functionality to use for their (and their followers) benefits…

Source: Instagram Will Get Video On June 20 | TechCrunch: “Getting video on Instagram is a move that would make sense. Specifically, it looks like a direct response to the rising popularity of video-sharing services, namely Twitter’s Vine. It, and others like Viddy, Cinemagram and Socialcam, sometimes get described as ‘Instragram for video’ apps.”

From the many reports on Techmeme following an invite from Facebook central, it looks like video addition to the service will be formally announced on June 20.

Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for one billion dollars last year raised more than a few eyebrows as bloggers, skeptics and business papers wondered how people’s pictures of sushi could be worth that much to Faceobok (who was already dealing with a flopped IPO at the time).

However, Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing service was brilliant.

Instagram has become a major social network in its own right and the social interactions there go well beyond photo sharing. Middle schoolers, high schoolers and influentials in the highly prized 18-24 demographic are using Instagram at an incredibly high ratio and that’s only going to continue to expand upwards on the curve (even as the mothership of Facebook has shown slower growth and some fatigue from this demographic).

To put it another way, the kids are all moving to Instagram (and Kik, Snapchat etc) as the old folks flood into Facebook.

Adding video functionality to Instagram is a no-brainer as Twitter’s similar Vine service has been growing in popularity with its ability to broadcast looping 6 second videos.

Whether or not you understand what Vine and (soon) Instagram videos can do for your business, it’s important that you put on your thinking hat. This is going to be big.

To put it simply… Instagram is the YouTube of Facebook.

Make Sure Your Mobile Site Is Working Well or Get Penalized by Google

Google has so much to gain (and lose) on mobile as the web continues to evolve from the desktop to the device. Don’t get caught with a bad mobile site according to Google…

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Changes in rankings of smartphone search results: “This kind of redirect disrupts a user’s workflow and may lead them to stop using the site and go elsewhere. Even if the user doesn’t abandon the site, irrelevant redirects add more work for them to handle, which is particularly troublesome when they’re on slow mobile networks. These faulty redirects frustrate users whether they’re looking for a webpage, video, or something else, and our ranking changes will affect many types of searches.”

You don’t necessarily need to develop an app, but you should implement either responsive design or a design that allows for e-commerce to flow well on your site.

And no, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on a mobile responsive site designer despite what designers might throw at you. There are so many fantastic resources to make your site more mobile friendly in 2013:

– If your site is on WordPress, do a quick Google search for “WordPress responsive design” and boom.

– If you have something of a website but are paying way too much for hosting (probably the case), check out SquareSpace. It’s dead simple.

– If you’re on Joomla, Expression Engine or some sort of variant of Drupal, don’t spend $30,000 a year. Demand better from your web developer or marketing agency. It seriously doesn’t cost that much to make a site responsive.

– If you have no idea what any of this means but you’re spending way too much on a poorly designed site, we’d love to chat.

Otherwise, if you have any questions, get in touch with us.

Mobile is your friend (and a better web is ours), so let’s all embrace it.

Why Content Is Important for Your Marketing

Whether you’re creating unique content or curating existing content into forms that your viewers/users/readers will find relevant, having some notion of a content development strategy is essential to doing successful business on the web going forward.

The PR World’s Play For Content Marketing Clout – Holmes Report: “I just cannot envision how any organisation cannot have a content-first approach to their communications, whether’s it’s for reputation management or marketing purposes,” states Perry. “Clients are attracted to some of the shiny object stuff – what’s far less sexy but more important is making sure your organization is oriented to a new way of doing business.”

Folks like Scott Jangro talk a great deal about content marketing (and curation) as a rapidly growing channel for marketers, advertisers and publishers to find solid footing in what can often feel like a topsy-turvy media landscape.

The real trick to understanding content marketing is that there is no one template for doing it right. Content marketing is a very subjective exercise and should be carefully planned (even if you’re doing spontaneous events or collecting and curating web media for your audience in a “real-time” manner).

As the interesting article above points out, content marketing is becoming essential across various channels of advertising from PR to branding and leaving this variable out of the equation will cost you in the long-term. It’s a major part of what we mean when we talk about discovery marketing.

Original link via Steve Rubel on Twitter

Start Thinking About Your Company’s Facebook Hashtags Now

How to use Facebook hashtags safely and effectively – TechHive: “As part of the rollout, Facebook says you will also be able to click hashtags that originated on other services, such as Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. It also plans to roll out additional features, including trending hashtags, in the near future, it says.”

Since announcing the launch of hashtags on its platform earlier this week, Facebook has since cautiously said that hashtags aren’t for sale (yet) for marketers but that marketers should start using hashtags on their pages and in Facebook advertising campaigns.

It’s no secret that hashtags are important, though you probably aren’t using them yet in your marketing (you should be).

Numerous companies have sprung up just to provide analytic insight into the nature of hashtags on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram (HashTracking, TwitAHolic, Statweestics (winner for most clever name in this category) and hashtags.org to name a few).

So why should you care about Facebook hashtags?

– hashtags provide users across various social networks the ability to find information they care about… Facebook announced their hashtags will inter-operate with other services (this is important)

– hashtags are the best vehicles for in-the-moment advertising such as a power outage at the Super Bowl

– hashtags are going to be the main supplier of relevant results for Facebook’s floundering (but soon to be insanely powerful) Graph Search feature…FB knows they have to get this right and they’ll turn their full force of algorithmic magic towards making this a sticky feature that makes people want to use their service

As I’ve said before, spend less time trying to create clever hashtags that might (but probably won’t) go viral yourself and instead use your creative energy to tap into existing hashtags trends that already exist.

So start doing your research and thinking on Facebook hashtags now. It’s going to be an important part of your company’s bottom line very soon.

Let us know if you need help.

ShareThis Advances Web Marketing with SQI

ShareThis has always been something of an enigma for me. I’ve discussed how companies like ShareThis really are the future discovery motors that will ultimately replace search engines. Google itself gets this and is doing great things with Google Now to prevent itself from being usurped as the prime player in the mobile ad ecosystem.

You might have noticed I’ve added the ShareThis functionality (and a couple of our client blogs) to this site as I’ve been making the most of their platform. It’s been an interesting test to add the type of sharing functionality that moves conversations from a blog to a social outlet the way a commenting system might have done a few years ago.

More specifically, ShareThis has just added a new backend dashboard for publishers that really makes use of their data and your site’s data in a unique way (with a tie-in to Google Analytics).

Particularly interesting is the concept of SQI that plays into the dashboard:

Social Quality Index, SQI, measures the social quality of a website against the ShareThis Publisher Network. By favoring social interaction over broad reach, SQI puts the publisher’s audience and content into the spotlight. The SQI score measures social quality on a scale of 1 to 200, with 200 representing the highest social quality. This proprietary formula evaluates social metrics such as: outbound shares, inbound clickback traffic and page views to calculate the audience engagement of your site. Social quality denotes a good match between the publisher’s audience and the content and it is directly correlated with the number of times users return to the same page and the level of interaction with other media on the page, like ads.

It’s more than a semantic difference in approaches to marketing that ShareThis is promoting with the SQI concept. Rather than focus on silos like pageviews or clicks that (in reality) measure nothing, SQI provides a metric that actually has meat on the bone. It’s not a scarecrow but a tangible measurement that advertisers and publishers should be demanding in their campaigns. In effect, SQI take us beyond links as the currency of the web and gives us good reason to do so.

I’ve been a long time advocate of the idea that HTML and the web should evolve beyond the concept of a link for traffic flow. The “social web” of the last few years has definitely made that reality more possible than ever. However, companies and advertisers (and agencies) have been slow to pick up on that trend and we’ve been focusing most of our efforts at making a linked-based web marketing approach fit into what is now a share-based network of people.

My own mistake in the past has been to think of ShareThis as mostly a way to drive traffic on Facebook based on recommendations from readers/users/consumers. However, the real beauty of ShareThis lies in the analytics suite and API that allow for some pretty interesting implementations of data analysis.

Tools like ShareThis are taking us beyond a realized version of the web that still operates on the foundation of links (as it does in the HTML I’m writing this post in or the RSS pipes that you probably used to find out about and/or read this post) and even search but puts a layer on top that advances the discovery of relevant information, products or services.

The function of discovery through shared social currency is the key benefit of betting on services such as ShareThis over traditional and limited marketing channels that rely on more costly and less targeted consumer acquisition methods.

We’ve seen our clients marvel at the real benefits of discovery marketing compared to their previous methods of siloed channels because the reach, scope and golden fleece of “social media marketing” success becomes readily apparent when you analyze the data points between these methods.

That is the transformation that is so hard to grasp for many companies. Going from a model based on having results that come from money poured into a model based on time and cultivation is difficult. ShareThis and the whole economy of “sharing” changes the conversation from intention to attention.

Traffic flows on the web and that flow is very powerful if you properly set the channels for that flow to occur rather than trying to build irrigation channels for the flow to take right angles.

ShareThis functions very much as a link, or vehicle, to get web users/interested buyers from one place to another in much the same way Google has been our chauffeur for years. Those places include the traditional Facebook and Twitter malls but increasingly Google+ (and Google Now) is making an interesting stab at becoming what the search engine could not (which is why Google is throwing the mass of its own juggernaut behind the project).

SQI could evolve into something very important for this next iteration of marketing on the web. We’ll certainly be pushing our clients towards that realization. Conversation at scale is the real ingenuity here and something to keep an eye on.

The Golden Gut Exists

Why Don Draper Shouldn’t Be Your Ad Guy – Forbes: “As appealing as Don Draper’s (and your in-house guru’s) perfect instincts are, they are indeed fiction. Even experts often fail to correctly predict which ad will perform better than other ads. Chris Goward, founder & CEO of WiderFunnel and author of You Should Test That notes, ‘In every presentation I give to marketers, I ask them to vote on which test variation won. Remember, these are the cream of the crop of digital marketers. In most cases, their gut intuition is wrong.”

I would disagree with this.

As would Steve Jobs… sometimes you get what you pay for and you get a passionate person who knows that if you asked enough people what they wanted in a car, you would have gotten “faster horses” as a response.

There’s room for testing but don’t forget the innovators and the crazy ones.

We love data and testing. But we love guts, intuition, the liberal arts and humanity even more.

“The people who think they are crazy enough to change the world are the ones that do.”