Lousy Data About Social Networking Influence

So I just read this article that starts with a conclusion that online social networks do not influence most women's buying decisions. Forget that I'm in the internet marketing and social media business. I participate in social networks as a general user, and I see people interacting, and the premise of this article doesn't jibe with my personal observations.

Let me clarify what those observations are based on my Facebook experience, where I spend a bit of time. People talk about all kinds of things there, spanning business, health, relationships, entertainment, economics, politics and other news. (By the way - I wish they'd stop posting business stuff there - especially my professional peers!).

Anyway, I don't see a lot of specific questions or answers about products or services, or buying decisions. But there is no doubt in my mind that what we do share on these networks influences our friends buying decisions.

For example, as the summer of '09 wound down, I noticed a lot of friends posting pictures and comments from their vacations. I saw lots of responses about how great this looked, and how I wanna go there, and I am certain that the experiences shared by some will affect the plans of others for next year. Heck, they're our friends and family!

So thinking of myself as a rational guy, I want to rationalize my opinion with data. And I read on in this article. And what I see in some of the information cited in the article looks like just bad research. For all intents and purposes, they all but asked users if they relied on social networks to make buying decisions, and nearly 75% answered: "no." No big surprise, given the question. To me, "influence" and "relied on" are pretty different criteria.

Later in the article, other research quoted shows a statistic that 79% of women in a poll said that they use social networks to "Research Product and Service." Another simplistic statement that I think glosses over the powerful, if subtle phenomenon in human interaction.

I hope these two bad pieces of research cancel each other out. Makes me wonder: why isn't someone doing real research to test the influence of friends on online social networks.

I guess I'm a glutton for sensational information about my profession, and like most gluttons, I get a stomach ache from indulging...

The Importance of Context

Did you ever set out to get somewhere and part way into the trip, realize you were on the wrong road? Okay, good for you. But it happens to me sometimes - at least metaphorically.

I set out on a quest to brand "the" Gary Levine (me) online a little over a week ago, and its been an educational week to say the least. I updated profiles all over the place: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Naymz, Plaxo, Google, my personal blog, YouTube channel.

And I started reading articles and books and soliciting help from friends - all about "branding myself."

Well, I've had a slow epiphany (is that an oxymoron?). What I really wanted to do was to get the visibility of THIS Gary Levine to the first page of Google results over all those others. I was just like my clients! I didn't want to figure out what I had to say, no less why anyone else would care. I just wanted that ranking.

The more I read about "branding yourself," the more I realized that it involves more self discovery, and self disclosure, than maybe I wanted to engage in. Its all about substance and that kind of stuff. It requires work. I just want to be on page 1 of Google!

Oddly, I am not giving up on that goal - I still want to be up there with the other Gary Levines. But I've learned I need to go back and focus more what I've got to say and who cares in order to do it.

Clients, are you listening?

Opportunity in the Graying of the Internet

I was preparing for an interview this morning, and considering some of our recent successes with increasing traffic and conversions for our clients. It struck me that several of them deal with "graying" markets. People (like me?) who wouldn't qualify as "young" or "hip" but are definitely digital.

Take a look at this article from earlier this year citing the fastest growing online age demographics. There's a lot of us, and more of us are getting active online every day.

One of these clients, the National Association of Baby Boomer Women (http://www.NABBW.com) is by its very nature, serving a very specific niche with terrific online content. We worked with their original designer and developer on structural matters. That much content requires a good content management toolset, but it wasn't SEO friendly. With a series of changes, we've increased traffic almost 50% in 6 months, and there's more to come.

Another client who does trust and will legal services is also doing very well. They're getting as many as 20 online inquiries and many more direct phone calls from their website each month, up from almost none less than 9 months ago.

The Kensington Park Retirement Community was the third client who is new to search engine and online marketing, and has nearly doubled their visitor count and started generating significant conversions since we ramped up a program for them earlier this year. This one was a combination of content and SEO friendly structure, social media visibility and a bit of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

All in all, there are two things these businesses have in common: a growing online audience, and our efforts to help connect them to it. Its working all around. Lets hear it for us "Graying Guys!"

The End of Ugly Facebook URLs!

Facebook announced yesterday that beginning June 13, you will be able to create your own custom URL and account name, similar to what you can do with Twitter, Linkedin and other social networking sites. This will make it much easier to share your Facebook profile with friends.

I'm hoping you'll be able to do the same thing for Facebook pages. This will make it easier for businesses to promote their pages with traditional media as well as making it easier for people to find you or your business on Facebook and when using search engines such as Google. Choose your username carefully! Facebook says that once your username is set, you won't be able to change it.

If you have a common name, want to get a really cool URL or need to get some important keywords in your URL, you won't want to wait until June 14...it'll probably be too late! I see a mad scramble this Saturday!

More information is available on the Facebook blog.

Zero to 1,000 in 3 weeks

Can plumbing and air conditioning be the subject of a viral social media campaign? Hard to imagine anything less sexy.

We recently started doing social media and search engine optimization work for a mechanical contracting company named Blue Dot, in Baltimore, MD. Having offered plumbing and air conditioning services to a consumer market for over 40 years, they had some brand recognition and a nifty cartoon "mascot" character called Bluey, that they'd used over the years.

We wanted to leverage their existing market visibility to build an audience that they could reach easily and cost-effectively to generate more new business while their direct mail and other print media contributions were shrinking in performance, but not cost. Social media was an important leg in our strategy. The challenge was how to engage people in a social mindset.

We decided to create a Facebook fan page, but instead of doing it in the name of the company, we decided to personalize it with a Bluey Fan Page. We launched on May 12, 2009, and by May 31, our local company had over 1,000 fans. Ashton Kutcher and Lindsay Lohan are not looking over their cyber-shoulders, but this is pretty neat for our local service provider.

How'd they do it?

Bottom line, it was a team effort. We seeded some ideas, got some great ideas from their creative partner, and a visionary senior executive. First, there was a photo contest: take a picture of some Bluey dolls that have been used in promotions over the years. They came in from all over from both customers and employees.

Our client next decided to share the wealth and they promoted a charitable contribution: $100 contribution to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, for every 500 fans. They combined this with the Bluey pictures and offered to send out Bluey dolls for $10 + S&H, with each $10 going directly to the charity.

Ideas keep coming. The creative team came up with a coloring page to download for kids. And then along came Bluette. Bluey's got a girlfriend.

And Blue Dot is adding fans to their business every day. Social media for fun and profit!

You gotta love it.

Easy First Page Vanity Rankings

Around April 21, Google made it very easy to get ranked on the first page for a vanity search (searching for your own name).

If you don't already have a Google Profile, this might be the push you need to set it up. Do a vanity search (a search on your own name or someone else), you'll notice on the bottom of Google SERPs there is now a section for "Profiles Results". Google lists 4 profiles for the name searched plus links to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and Linkedin. According to Google's "Search for Me on Google" blog post this is to help give you more control over what appears when someone searches for your name. While this may be true, another reason might be to help launch Google deeper into social networking. While the "Profile Results" are at the very bottom of the first page and Google is still displaying 10 organic listings above the new section, this might be what Google needed to get more people to complete their profiles. And you can snag a cool, custom Google URL for yourself. I was too late to get "/profiles/clarktaylor" so I went with /profiles/seotaylor.

Personally, I think the most important part of setting up a Google Profile is that you can add links to your websites, other social media profiles, Twitter page and blogs. If there is still value in inbound links (and most SEO experts will agree), then inbound links from Google can't hurt!

Building a Community with Video

Ethoca, a privately held Dublin-based company with a breakthrough collaborative fraud fighting solution, is a great example of how to use video testimonials. Prominently displayed on their homepage is the CEO of TigerDirect, Gilbert Fiorentino explaining why online retailers (e-tailers) and virtually anyone in the business of taking customer-not-present payments should be part of Ethoca's Global Fraud Fighting Community. If you are in a business that suffers from payments fraud and you watch this video testimonial, you're going to want to join the community.

Steve Frook, VP of Member Recruitment at Ethoca, told me that they simply send their clients (members) a Flip video camera that costs about $200 and asks them for a video testimonial. The camera is portable, easy to use, and is customized with Ethoca’s logo and messaging (Ethoca calls their camera the Community Voice Camera). Frook adds “Prospective member of our community want to hear what existing members have to say – video makes this possible and assists us in achieving our goal of having existing members of the community recruit new members.” A brilliant idea that’s simple, cost effective and extremely powerful!

How can Ethoca take this a step further?

Ethoca has published the video on YouTube but it is not optimized for maximum exposure. The video is #8 if you Google "Gilbert Fiorentino". And I'm sure some people and perhaps Tiger Direct competitors are searching for information about him. At the time of this post, only 1 person made a comment about the video, saying "tigerdirect rules". This is fine, but Ethoca is not targeting fans of TigerDirect, they're looking for organization to join their community! I haven't done the keyword research, but I'd be willing to bet money that TigerDirect competitors, e-tailers and others in relevant businesses are Googling "reduce credit card risk", "risk management", "card-not-present payments", "credit card fraud", etc, etc.

Once Ethoca knows what their potential members are searching for they could use social media optimization techniques to improve the visibility. The video was published on Oct 31, 2008 but has only been viewed 490 times. The testimonial is powerful; now they just need more people to see it.