Category: Social Media

Discovery in Your Comments

Disqus keeps improving both as a commenting and discussion platform but especially as an advertising platform.

Disqus gets in right in a critical way. They aren’t selling their advertising strategy to only publishers or only advertisers. They also aren’t leaving out users.

Just as we talk of Discovery as a combination of three things (paid search, SEO and social media marketing), Disqus is using the term “Discovery” as the linchpin for their strategy towards both publishers and advertisers (and especially users).

From TheNextWeb:

In addition, it keeps on improving its algorithm to increase the targeting of the content it recommends. Relevance is key here; it means that publishers can boost page views and drive traffic to advertisers without annoying their readers. This is the challenge of Disqus’ model, but also its power, as it focuses on three parties at once: publishers, advertisers and users.

We’ll be experimenting with Disqus’ model in a few weeks with a new client and can’t wait to see the results. We’ll def report back when we have some hard data.

In the meantime, go explore how comments, discussion and user interaction can also mean a better experience for your business for you and the people you’re trying to have discover you.

Social TV Rating from Nielsen and Twitter

Fascinating on many levels but especially the notion of analytics and real-time engagement (something performance marketers have acknowledged for a while but larger brands are slowly realizing):

Nielsen and Twitter Establish Social TV Rating: “Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, and Twitter today announced an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the ‘Nielsen Twitter TV Rating’ for the US market. Under this agreement, Nielsen and Twitter will deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.”

Facebook Marketing and Why EdgeRank Matters

Fantastic post from Copyblogger on where we stand (as of Dec 2012 since Facebook is constantly changing things up) on Facebook and its paid marketing platform…

The State of Facebook: What’s Working Now | Copyblogger: “Facebook constantly changes. Not all of those changes work the way they’re supposed to. And the user experience may not be the same from page to page.

Everyone’s audience is different, and responds to different types of content. So watch your own statistics, try different things, and track your results. The magic formula is creating the good content and engaging updates that your audience craves.”

In all of our work with Facebook and various marketing campaigns, the one rule we keep trying to communicate to our clients is that Facebook alone is not a silver bullet to more conversions, signups, sales or engagement. Real success is tied to a customized program with clear goals (we call this “discovery marketing” when tied to SEO, paid search and perhaps an email newsletter).

Facebook uses an in-house formula called EdgeRank to figure out how to display posts (sponsored and organic) on users’ timelines. This is an insanely important algorithm much like Google’s constantly evolving PageRank equation that it uses to serve up search results and many other facets of its umbrella service.

EdgeRank, however, is a visible equation. Unlike PageRank, we know exactly plays into Facebook’s algorithm. And it ain’t pretty for most folks.

The reason so many business owners and marketing DIY’ers fail at Facebook Ads (or don’t have the wherewithal to climb the learning curve) is the affinity score (represented by Ue above).

What is affinity exactly? That depends on the context of course. Here, affinity refers to how often a person interacts or engages (shares, likes, clicks, etc) your content in the past. That affinity score determines the rest of the equation. Affinity determines the next steps of weight and time decay in the setup.

How do you raise your affinity score to increase engagement?

Short answer is you don’t.

You start with compelling content geared at the right audiences and find the right balance of visual content, audio content, text content and ad buying decisions.

It’s a little moneyball, a little algebra and a lot of sticktoitiveness.

However, like all social media marketing, it’s doable.

And it’s exciting and organic.

And that’s what we do. Our goal is to buy wins.

Retention, Not Acquisition

The mantra (I know, I hate using that term out of context as well) I use with my clients is “Retention, Not Acquisition.”

That means businesses should put 75% of their efforts into retaining customers or users or community or whatever the relationship-model is with their constituents and 25% of their efforts into acquiring new ones.

Twitter should hire me…

Twitter: The Tail That Wags the Dog – David Smith: “However, Twitter seems to have forgotten its roots. The long tail of Innovators and Early Adopters at the head of the adoption curve does not become irrelevant to your audience once you begin to welcome the Majorities. The same people who pioneered the adoption of your platform would also be the people leading an exodus. That exodus may have just begun.”

App.net as Dud or Savior?

Can’t wait to see how this turns out…

Think App.net is just a Twitter clone? Then you’re missing the point — Tech News and Analysis: “What Caldwell wants to do is create what he and others think Twitter could have been before it decided to become a global media entity: namely, a unified message bus for the social web, or a way of tying together multiple apps and services into a single real-time information delivery system.”