Reason 5 for Search and Social Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, Social Media Specialist at Sitewire.

The equation is pretty simple:

SEO – Social Media Efforts = Missed Opportunities

Same goes when you have it the other way around:

Social Media Efforts – SEO = Missed Opportunities

Here’s why you need both, backed by SEOs and Social Media practitioners who are collaborative and cross trained:

1. Inbound marketing is almost always a high priority for the client.
2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.
3. You can’t do social media (or “today’s web”) without content.
4. Search engines are becoming more and more social every day.

The need for collective search and social media efforts is even truer and more important now that my fifth and final reason for search and social collaboration is official:

5. Google and Bing both use social signals to determine rankings.

Not long after I wrote about how search engines are becoming more and more social every day, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, published a post about the actual social signals search engines pay attention to when determining rankings. For some time, it’s been assumed that Google and Bing factor social signals such as likes and retweets into their algorithm, but after Danny’s interviews, there are fewer unanswered questions about what’s true.

Here’s a breakdown of what Danny Sullivan found out by interviewing Google and Bing:

The Takeaways:

Reason 4 for Search and Social Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, Social Media Specialist at Sitewire.

I really like digital marketing. But I don’t like disunion. Lack of communication. Missed opportunities. Duplicated efforts. Muddled vision of client objectives. You know, those kinds of things.

When we’ve got our heads down trying to finish a partial element of a larger client project, or when internal agency structure doesn’t facilitate cross-team communication, these aforementioned dislikes can be become quite common. So I’ve set out to explain how the evolving relationship between search and social media means we can no longer function in isolation within an agency. Cross-training, refined processes, improved communication, and increased flexibility among SEOs and social media strategists are all extremely important because:

1. Inbound marketing is almost always a high priority for the client.
2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.
3. You can’t do social media without content. (I really should have subbed “today’s web” for “social media” in this one).

4. Search engines are becoming more and more social every day.

If we take a look at how Google, Yahoo! and Bing have evolved over the recent years, there’s one underlying theme driving most major innovations: enhancing search results with social context.

To illustrate, here’s a non-extensive list that exemplifies how the three main search engines have become more social over time:

Google

• October 21, 2009 – Google partners with Twitter to add tweets to search results
• October 26, 2009 – Google launches Social Search to aggregate relevant content shared from your friend’s social media sites into search results
• December 7, 2009 – Google launches Realtime Search to incorporate live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and blogs, and public Facebook and Myspace updates
• June 8, 2010 – Google launches Caffeine to more quickly index the real-time web
• August 26, 2010 – Google improves Realtime Search, adding the ability to drill down by date, location, and conversation view. Realtime moves to its own subdirectory: http://google.com/realtime" class="linkification-ext">http://google.com/realtime" class="linkification-ext">google.com/realtime

Yahoo!

• June 28, 2005 – Yahoo! launches My Web 2.0 with the ability to bookmark and tag pages and search within a trusted network of saved pages shared by friends
• January 1, 2008 – Yahoo! tests adding Delicious bookmarks data to search results
• October 12, 2010 – Yahoo! enhances Image Search to enable browsing of friends’ Facebook and Flickr photo albums

Bing

• October 21, 2009 – Bing partners with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate status updates into search results
• March 31, 2010 – Bing adds a Foursquare application to overlay check-in and tip data in Bing Maps
• June 9, 2010 – Bing launches http://bing.com/social" class="linkification-ext">http://bing.com/social" class="linkification-ext">bing.com/social to aggregate public status updates from Facebook and Twitter as well as popular shared links from public, non-fan Facebook page updates
• October 13, 2010 – Bing partners with Facebook to add instant personalization to search results, making it easy to find and add friends and view what friends have liked on the web

Search engines use social data to contextualize our search experience in several ways: ...

Reason 3 Social and SEO Need Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, Social Media Specialist at Sitewire.

As digital marketing technologies become more intertwined, digital agencies need to deisolate internal teams. It’s all too easy for an SEO and social media teams working on the same client to provide contradicting recommendations, or to completely pass up an opportunity to integrate efforts to maximize results if nobody is talking.

I’ve already discussed a couple reasons why SEO and social media cross-team collaboration is vital, especially nowadays:

In August I discussed reason # 1. Inbound marketing is almost always a high priority for the client.

Last month, I wrote about reason # 2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.

What comes next?

3. You can’t do social media without content.

This month’s post focuses on what fuels social media: content. Content strategy is its very own discipline, yet it couldn’t be a more integral part of social media search engine optimization. Without it, there is little success to be had with either.

Let’s say a client contracted for just a social media strategy. A basic strategy answers, With whom will you engage, where will this engagement happen, and how will you be human?

Based on your recommended tactics, they know they need to start using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They feel energized about increasing awareness about their brand, growing their fan base and driving more traffic back to their website.

Yet, when either you or the client goes back to their desk to implement, what is there to publish? What...

5 Reasons Why Social Media and SEO Departments Need More Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, social media specialist at Sitewire.

Last month I wrote about how intertwined search and social have become, and I discussed one major reason why agencies’ social media and SEO teams need to collaborate more in order to achieve better inbound marketing results for clients. This month I’m back again with reason numero dos to explain why this collaboration and communication is so essential:

2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.

Before I get into the logic, let me restate the problem. Social media has only recently become an online marketing focus within the past two years. Prior to social media, it was all about websites – creating them, optimizing them, and advertising them. When social media hit the net-waves, search and social were considered two separate tactics, and they still are considered that way by most. But this is now the problem; the success of each tactic greatly depends on the other, yet SEOs and social media practitioners often remain isolated despite the fact that the parameters around their job functions are blurry.

The Logic

Social media properties aren’t simply networks where people talk about the tuna casserole they ate for dinner. Social media properties are search engines in themselves.

• Facebook allows you to search pages, people, groups, applications, events, posts, and the web.

• Next to Google, YouTube is the number 2 search engine in the United States, trumping both Yahoo! and Bing (comScore, June 2010).

• Flickr isn’t just a photo sharing site; it’s a search engine that aims to make it easy for people to discover photos by topic, date, and geography.

• Twitter is a real time discussion search engine.

• You get the point.

My point is that search engine optimization isn’t just about optimizing websites, content and social properties for Google or Yahoo!/Bing. Search engine optimization involves optimizing content for social search engines. And who is the right candidate in the agency to do it? The social team or the search team?

Check out our demo video of the new features and quick tips on how to use them:

You can access Realtime Search by typing www.google.com/realtime directly into your browser, or clicking the “Updates” link in the left-hand panel of your search results. Set up your Google Alerts at www.google.com/alerts. Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. The features are rolling out now, but you can use this link to see them right away.

8 reasons why Google is becoming a powerful social monitoring tool (more so than it was yesterday):

1. Search real time social discussions at www.google.com/realtime
2. Refine searches by geolocation to find conversations happening near you (or elsewhere)
3. You can now follow an entire discussion from its origin with the "Full conversation" view (which you can also do on Twitter)
4. Specify a date range to view conversations during a particular time (tweets date back to February 2010)
5. Sort results by relevance or published date
6. Search within results (ie: "fashion" within "lady gaga")
7. Easily subscribe to updates, blogs, etc. with Google Alerts; there's now a link at the bottom of the results
8. Free (this is not new)

Tools like Radian6 are still way better due to their ability to drill down by channel and populate charts and graphs, among other things. But the small business owner can get a lot of info just by using Google Realtime. The geolocation drill-down feature, for example, is something Radian6 doesn't offer, and knowing who is talking about a brand and where, depending on the business, can be extremely useful to know.

What are your thoughts?

5 Reasons Why Social Media and SEO Departments Need more Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, social media practitioner at Sitewire.

I have news that might not be new: gone are the days of treating search engine optimization and social media as separate methods.

Let me be clear. This is not to say that they are substitutes for one another or that they are mutually exclusive. This is to say that the success of each greatly depends on the other. Today SEO and social media are more intertwined than ever before.

The problem organizations tend to have is the compartmentalizing of the search and social media department. SEOs tend to know more about social media because offsite optimization and link building are necessary tactics whereas most social media practitioners are too focused on managing and monitoring communities that they forget about the need to be optimizing the content they publish or the actual social hubs they use to foster those communities.

The jobs of SEOs and social media practitioners are not minutely specialized like a bolt screwer in a Ford Model T assembly line. Instead, their jobs and skills are dynamic and highly interrelated. Is the lack of collaboration and cross-training between the two departments the missing piece that’s leading to miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities in your organization?

Starting today, if you’re a verified Google Places business owner, you can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the Place Page for your business. Engaging with the people who have shared their thoughts about your business is a great way to get to know your customers and find out more. Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). By responding, you can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers. For example, a thoughtful response acknowledging a problem and offering a solution can often turn a customer who had an initially negative experience into a raving supporter. A simple thank you or a personal message can further reinforce a positive experience. Ultimately, business owner responses give you the opportunity to learn what you do well, what you can do better, and show your customers that you’re listening.

Now, if only Google would add "Don't do what Amy B. of Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale did" as a fourth tip to their recommendations on how to respond to a customer review, the world might be a better place.

Should Your Business Consider Location-based Marketing?

by Shannon Johnson on June 23, 2010

Geo-location marketing has been picking up speed. If it’s not something you’ve already heard about, it will be soon. If you’ve heard of it, you’ve likely heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, or you know that Starbucks is “doing it.” Here’s the scoop: Maybe your business should be too.

The Purpose of Geo-Location Marketing

The purpose of geo-location marketing—from a business perspective—is to be on the radar when people near your establishment are ready to purchase in the here-and-now. There’s a timeliness aspect of geo-location marketing that provides consumers with the information they need to act on their needs and wants now rather than later. Once your business is on a potential customer’s radar, he or she can use your establishment’s social sphere to determine whether your business is worth their time. This input includes any tips, reviews, or opinions left behind by past customers. Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, and Yelp are all examples of platforms that allow for this possibility. From a user perspective, location-based services allow people to connect with people nearby, discover new places, and keep track of past itineraries and connections.

Geo-location marketing can be used to accomplish any of the following marketing objectives:

Last week Google announced that it had made several refinements to its search algorithm. Some of them are outlined below along with additional search and paid search developments that could help your business get discovered and get paid.

In Search

Refinements for Local Searches

Google is testing local search refinements in some 200 U.S. cities, but it won’t be long before it’s rolled out internationally. Now, when you search for a city name, Google provides links to popular searches related to hospitality, dining, and local activities and attractions within that city. Google figures that if you’re travelling somewhere, you are probably looking for both a place to stay and where to eat. Makes sense.

Implications...