Google Hummingbird FAQs by Danny Sullivan

Google announced this week that they had launched a major renovation to their algorithm last month.  The new algorithm is called Hummingbird and it has marketing professionals and search engine optimization (SEO) experts a bit anxious to see how the digital marketing industry will be effected by the changes.

Danny Sullivan posted a great blog answering the frequently asked questions about Hummingbird that is worth reading if you are even remotely associated with digital marketing.  

Seth Godin's Three Questions for Any Marketing Team

Seth Godin says there are three questions you should ask your marketing team:

Who are you trying to reach?

Why do they decide to support us?

What do you need to do to make it happen more frequently?

I might argue that you should also add in there, is it worth the effort?  It's important to measure the results and make sure that the benefits are worth the costs.

It's especially important when resources are limited, as is the case with many sales and marketing teams.

There's More Where That Came From

I was listening to Six Pixels of Separation, and this week Mitch Joel published an interview with Michael Hyatt, the author of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson). His book is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller, and recently, Forbes magazine named Michael one of the Top 50 Social Media Influencers of 2013.

Michael mentions in the podcast that often his clients want to give something away for free, but save their best work to be paid for.  The example he gives is someone who wants to publish a free e-book, but save their best material for the print book.  Michael says the reality is people don't want something for free unless it has value, and if it has value then free or not they will want to engage with your content.  

He goes on to say that creativity doesn't work in a scarcity model, it's an abundance model.  The more you create the more creative you will become.  If you think you only have one great idea, you're dead wrong.  The ideas will keep flowing once you get them out on the table or onto paper.  

You have to believe there's more where that came from.

When I Grow Up

Tomorrow is my birthday, we don't need to go into how old I'll be.  

I ran across an interesting blog post by Seth Godin and find it very appropriate as I reflect on growing up... maybe I was destined to be in marketing all along.  

I didn't know what I wanted to be when I was growing up, in fact I would argue that until about 4 years ago I was still trying to figure it out.  Even now, there is one thing that drives me professionally - I want to make a difference.  

It's what motivated me to go to school at night and learn as much about marketing as I could while I was employed as an inside sales representative.  

It's what drives me now, as I grow social media strategies for businesses that don't have someone with the skills, knowledge or experience than I have.  

I want to make a difference. 

Fight Club

Here's a new take on the very popular "Everything I Need To Know About Social Media I Learned In Kindergarten" post.

For your entertainment:

Everything I Know About Social Media, I Learned From Fight Club.

Side Note: I don't actually like Fight Club.

Successful Brands Use Social Media For Discovery Not Transaction

A good portion of my day is spent building brand awareness and loyalty on social media channels.  As businesses market in spaces that consumers use to interact with their friends and families in a very real and honest way, it's important to know what is too much.

I have always approached this task with the utmost respect for the brand's followers and target audience - if you're following a technology company I'm not going to post information about diapers and formula!

Peter Shankman was a guest of Mitch Joel's on Six Pixels of Separation back in June of this year, and Peter makes the astute observation that the most successful brands are those that use social media as a method of discovery rather than conversion.  He makes the claim that in social media, discovery and transaction are further apart and we need to accept that.  We are setting ourselves up for failure if we try to think direct response in social media will be the same as direct response in other channels which leads consumers directly into the sales funnel.

Most people aren't going to find it convenient to shop directly from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn because they aren't using those platforms for commerce.  By contrast, Pinterest does very well directing leads into the sales funnel because Pinterest's platform has embraced e-commerce and the shopping element of social media.

Peter's data shows that very few people come directly from a social activity into a commerce activity, and an even smaller percentage of normal of those folks will engage in commerce when they come through that path.  The interesting outlier is that sometimes, when people do engage in commerce through social media channels, they are more valuable transactions than when they come through other paths.

Mitch goes on to make a very interesting point that I have struggled with in my own career - how do you measure the consumer who interacts with your brand on social networks but purchases in an unrelated web browsing session or buys in person?

The attribution of these sales are lost to social media even though it may have played a large roll in the sales cycle.

Balancing Story and Selling in Social Media

Guest Blog by Marlena Ryan

I got into my job because I’m a writer. Not only do I not have a marketing degree. I kind of loathe marketers. I think of them as phonies. Professionals adept at playing a good mind game. And I like to think that writers are the opposite. Writers are good listeners, honest, and exacting.

However, both of these are generalizations. Marketers are not the devil and writers are not saints. And since I’m a social media community manager for music clients it’s important that I walk the line between providing figurative value and monetary value. (Which is like the most market-y sentence ever. I blame my boss… he likes that line)

But what I mean by that double speak is, I try to make my social pages compelling to a reader but also keep in mind that my company is paid to make fans buy more albums and tour tickets. I keep the balance by creating a social strategy that can balance these sometimes competing interests. The three main tactics I employ are:

1) Develop Narrative Tactics

For every client, my fellow community managers and I develop 20-30 social creative tactics. Creative tactics are tailored to a brand. We think about the audience and what they would engage with on social. For example, for a country music boy band, we include Pinterest inspiration quotes based on the band’s lyrics and acoustic performance series.

2) Geo-Targeting and Smart-Urling

For all our music clients, we use smart urls and geo-targeting to generate ticket and album sales. Geo-Targeting on Facebook is great because you can “guard” posts to hit certain markets you specify without inundating other fans with tour dates that aren’t near them. Smart urls help you see if all that geo-targeting is successful and if an album is making an impact with certain online retailers. We create smart urls for each ticket link and online retailer so we can track the click through rate for our analytics.

It’s not sexy, but like I said, it’s a balance and extremely important to remember we’re getting paid to sell records and tour tickets.

3) Social Graphics

The main differentiation between my company and the competition is our design team. Our in-house designers create gorgeous social skins, cover photos on Facebook and other social channels, and unique social graphics… like lyric cards and fan story graphics, our graphics set our pages apart with a look and feel completely different from other brands and artists.