Top Internet Offers Net

A while back I had a Twitter discussion with a few smart Minnesota based marketers, @cbensen, @albertmaruggi and @bestbuyCMO about the importance of customer service and community building that turned to a variety of ancillary benefits. Connie mentioned that community building is a long term investment that continues to pay dividends. Albert pointed out that SEO & community building can be 2 separate tactics with SEO having nothing to do with community. Barry wanted more of an explanation, which motivated this long overdue post.

An increasing number community managers have become visible within social media sites like Twitter, on blogs and Facebook from various sized companies. We’ve even interviewed people with those types of responsibilities from Dell and Comcast.  I’ve been thinking about how the content creation and outreach efforts of a community manager can also be of benefit to an organization’s search engine optimization efforts. 

My opinion is that it would actually take extra effort to make community building work and not realize the positive effects for SEO.  Many search engine optimization consultants that engage social media channels have noticed how their efforts resulted in community building effects.  Building up profiles on various social media sites and participating in communities to share and promote content attract links, but it also builds trust.  

It makes perfect sense for off page SEO efforts to involve community building but as @TysonFoods mentioned recently, the best person to work in that capacity is a someone within the company, not an agency. That is a topic for another post though.

Community building with SEO effects in mind isn’t so different than Public Relations or Interactive Marketing with SEO in mind. Content + links = better search visibility. That’s simplifying things a bit, but you can get more search engine optimization basics here.

Community building with SEO benefits typically involves:

• Monitoring brand terms as well as keywords important to the organization using a social media monitoring tool
• Create content and interaction destinations: blogs, social profiles
• Content with unique urls can be linked to
• Content that is optimized with keywords and proper IA is good for search engines and good for users
• Content that is relevant and useful will attract links from those empowered to publish (bloggers, blog commenters, forums, consumer reviews, consumer generated content such as images, video, audio)

Social media monitoring is keyword based as is SEO.  Socia media monitoring counts links and SEO builds links.  Encouraging or “energizing” evangelists of a brand also builds content ala CGM and attracts links.  Some of those links go directly to the evangelists’ own content and some will go to the brand itself. Search engines discover and follow these links and when factoring in context and keywords used, will use that information when sorting documents in search results. ie, Content + links = better search visibility.

My question for community managers is, are you leveraging any SEO keyword research and insight to assist word choice when building profiles, creating content and outreach online?  I would not suggest any kind of overt keyword usage that wouldn’t otherwise make sense, but becoming better informed about keywords in a search context can add to the bottom line results of your efforts. And in this economy, who doesn’t want to show more value for their efforts?

            Subscribe to this Feed

I talk to a lot of business owners and in-house marketers every week. When someone is interested in our marketing software, I first ask them a bunch of questions about their goals, constraints, abilities and most importantly: their commitment. Some of them include:

• Why are you interested in inbound marketing? 
• How many leads and new clients do you need to hit your growth goals next month, next year?
• How are you doing now against the goals you set last year?
• How are you planning to hit your goals next year?
• Why is this important to you?
• What happens if you don’t hit these goals?
• How much time do you have to dedicate to this?
• Do you like to write? Are you good at writing?
• Do you like to build relationships with new people? 
• Are you decent at interpreting graphs and charts?
• Do you pick up new software fairly easily?
• Are you interested in learning some new skills?

I try to ask all of these questions before we talk about internet marketing. Of course, we talk specifics about blogging, SEO, keyword research, landing pages, lead capture best practices, etc.

But, what’s more important is whether they’re committed to doing all the work. Spending the time. Learning new internet marketing skills. 

The software they use certainly matters. I’d get fired if I said otherwise. But, it’s far less important than their committment level. 

If you’re considering inbound lead generation as a way to grow your business (and you should be), you should first answer the questions above. Then, you should talk to experts about how you’re going to pull it off and what data, software and skills you need. 

If you’ve made the committment to internet mareketing and you’re willing to share some of your answers to the questions above, it would certainly help people who haven’t made the full committment yet. Please share. 

(Photo by Eschipul.)

Webinar: Rethinking Marketing

Want to learn more about how you can use inbound marketing to grow your business? Download the free webinar to learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

If you haven’t read today’s piece in The Wall Street Journal about marketing on the social web, you should go read it now.

It’s a great summary of many of the principles of inbound marketing, written by professors from Babson and Bentley colleges after dozens of interviews with executives and managers.

There is just one problem with the article: The authors and The Journal aren’t following their own advice.

Here’s what I mean:

(1) Very Few Links — The authors urge marketers to “Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.” Yet their entire article includes only two links, and even then they’re not links to related conversations. For example, since they offer a definition of Web 2.0, they should link to Tim O’Reilly’s seminal post on the topic, or, at the very least, the Wikipedia entry (whatever you say about Wikipedia, it is certainly a conversation).

(2) The Authors Aren’t Participating in the Comments — “Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.” That’s another one of the article’s excellent morsels of advice. Yet the authors fail to follow it. As of late Monday night, they weren’t participating in the comments, which means they’re talking at their readers.

(3) Ads Take Up Space Most Sites Devote to Comments – Most blogs put comments right below their articles. That encourages participation because readers see them after they finish, and dive in. That’s not the case on The Journal’s site. After the article all you see are ads. If you want to comment on the piece, you have to go back to a comment tab at the top of the page. The authors encourage marketers to “Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell,” yet by placing ads where most sites put the comments, The Journal is doing just that.

What do you think? Does the WSJ practice what it preaches? Does HubSpot?

This fall here in Cambridge, MA, we learned that Out of Town News, the news stand in the center of Harvard Square that’s sold magazines to students, professors and Cantabrigians for years, may be closing soon.

Although its future is highly uncertain, Out of Town News is a great model for marketers. At its peak, the news stand was what every marketer should strive for with their company web site: It was a hub for its community.

This was true both literally and figuratively. The stand was at the center of Cambridge’s busiest square, and everybody in the city passed through it. They stocked their shelves with carefully picked newspapers and magazines from all over the world. It was a destination and a meeting point — a place where people stopped to read The Economist (or Vedomosti) while waiting for friends or before getting on the subway.

Newsstands of the Web 

As the web evolves, many of its hubs of activity are beginning to resemble Out of Town News. On the web, as in real life, people gather in places where they get quality, well-curated information.

There’s no better example of this phenomenon than the site that calls itself a magazine rack: AllTop.

AllTop is actually a series of mini-sites devoted to specific topics, e.g. marketing, social media, egos. Each topical mini-site lists the latest headlines from blogs and other news sources handpicked by Alltop’s three staff members. The result is a series of pages that aggregate news and that are becoming a hub for their community.

Techmeme is another example of the growing importance of filtering. Techmeme and its sister site about politics, Memeorandum, weave together internet memes — groups of stories that are written about a similar topic and that, together, form a conversation. When it started, Techmeme’s filtering was done by software, but the site recently announced that it is starting to edit its pages by hand.

Aggregate on Your Site

As a marketer or a small business owner, you should be aware of the rise of sites like AllTop and Techmeme. These sites show that just like blogging, social media and search engine optimization, aggregation is a powerful way to build your company’s web site into a hub for your community.

It’s easy to get started with aggregation and filtering. You can publish links to outside articles on your blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, via Delicious or via voting tools like HubSpot’s Web Voter.

As you compile links to outside articles on your site, think of Out of Town News: They became a hub for their community, not because of the content they published, but because of the content they aggregated.

Don’t just turn your website in to a magazine, build a magazine rack.

Photo: rookiemom on flickr

If you haven’t read today’s piece in The Wall Street Journal about marketing on the social web, you should go read it now.

It’s a great summary of many of the principles of inbound marketing, written by professors from Babson and Bentley colleges after dozens of interviews with executives and managers.

There is just one problem with the article: The authors and The Journal aren’t following their own advice.

Here’s what I mean:

(1) Very Few Links — The authors urge marketers to “Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.” Yet their entire article includes only two links, and even then they’re not links to related conversations. For example, since they offer a definition of Web 2.0, they should link to Tim O’Reilly’s seminal post on the topic, or, at the very least, the Wikipedia entry (whatever you say about Wikipedia, it is certainly a conversation).

(2) The Authors Aren’t Participating in the Comments — “Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.” That’s another one of the article’s excellent morsels of advice. Yet the authors fail to follow it. As of late Monday night, they weren’t participating in the comments, which means they’re talking at their readers.

(3) Ads Take Up Space Most Sites Devote to Comments – Most blogs put comments right below their articles. That encourages participation because readers see them after they finish, and dive in. That’s not the case on The Journal’s site. After the article all you see are ads. If you want to comment on the piece, you have to go back to a comment tab at the top of the page. The authors encourage marketers to “Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell,” yet by placing ads where most sites put the comments, The Journal is doing just that.

What do you think? Does the WSJ practice what it preaches? Does HubSpot?