Many people whom I know and respect have engaged in self-imposed Twitter bans recently. I have found myself fuming over tweets and fussed about it to people who don’t care, for ages and ages it seems. However, I totally rely on Twitter to keep me informed about absolutely everything that’s going on in our industry. If someone writes a blog post, I find out through Twitter. If Google decides to do something insane, I hear it through Twitter. I don’t rely on RSS feeds or bookmarks or word of mouth anymore; it’s just me and Twitter. However, Twitter is quickly killing my goodwill and sanity. The self-promotional tweets about how much money you just made or how many job offers you’ve just turned down turn my stomach. The bickering and bitching suck me in until I’ve read 10 blog responses to 1 inflammatory blog post, and hey, it’s time to go pick up the kids already. I no longer have time for such a mess.

What can you do though, if Twitter is your go-to source for information? Once you’ve been clued in for long enough, being out of the loop seems terrifying. What will you miss? Will so and so be fighting, again, and you won’t get to see the mean tweets back and forth? Will you not immediately know when some blog has published a post so that you can rush to comment on it and again and tell us how great you are? Will you stumble because you want to do something yet you’re unable to due to having become reliant upon follower feedback for every step you take? Does my new avatar make me look fat? Can you believe what this mean person said to me in my blog comments?

Think back a few years to how you consumed industry news pre-Twitter. There was Sphinn, which has gone away. There were RSS feeds which are still being used. We bookmarked blogs and checked them every now and again, and we participated in forums. Sometimes we had to actually dig for information. That was kind of fun, and not nearly as overwhelming as Twitter has become for me.

We now have Marketing Land and My SEO Community (both of which I am very proud to be a part of) and we have lots and lots and lots of curation. People are doing some seriously great roundups. Tamar Weinberg’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 was truly amazing, for example, and full of articles that were concerned with topics that aren’t just relevant for 3 days. We have Google Plus which already seems to be spammier than Facebook, with much of it being a repeat of what’s on Twitter and Facebook, but hey, there seems to be a bit less whining and bitching there right now. And, of course, there are still forums! There are private Facebook groups and group Skype chats. There ARE alternatives to staying informed.

My latest favorite way to keep an eye on this is by visiting Coconut Headlines, which is a fantastic overview of all the big SEO news. Just a quick glance at the headlines is helpful enough to keep you clued in on a basic level. You get the big SEO news site headlines, Q and A from Moz, forum topics, and more. Spend 5 minutes just skimming headlines here and you’ll save god knows how much time on Twitter.

But back to My SEO Community for a minute…our first blog entry in the Mad SEO contest truly blew my mind. In it, Pete Wise describes how to use Yahoo Finance to track what’s going on in Google.  He didn’t try this because Twitter irritated the pants off him or anything, but I think it’s a great idea. In the comments, Pete says “The more creative you can get with information filtering, the less you have to spend time sifting through it yourself.” We do have information overload so I like reading about great ways to stay posted on things but still be productive (and not keep giving a crap about what Joe said to Terry that was rude and now she’s going to get all her friends to block Joe.)

In the end though, I could never give up Twitter. It’s like smelling bad milk. You HAVE to do it. I’ve unfollowed some people who annoyed me the most but during calm moments, I kind of miss being so easily irritated by them. Just in writing this post, I think I’ve spent 2 hours reading tweets. After writing this piece, after thinking about alternative news sources, and after fussing and being annoyed, I’m probably still going to run right to Twitter to see what’s going on in the industry today. It’s just nice to realize that if I decide to give it up, I can still keep up.

Social media is critical for companies to get right. With low barriers to entry and the perception of ease of use, it may seem enticing to jump straight in but disaster can lurk in the shallows as well as the depths.

The media is never shy about reporting on major blunders by large corporations and so with everything from “my Dell hell” in 2005 through to Dr Pepper ‘s Facebook blunder, the search results are littered with examples of social media disasters.  If it isn’t Habitat abusing hashtags in Twitter to promote their sweepstakes then it is Walmart creating a fake blog. Some of these activities are now literally criminal.

In the past the only thing wrong with doing something against the rules was getting the domain banned from Google.  While that ban could ruin a business, there was no criminality attached to it (except perhaps the increase in your PI rates).  In fact, some SEOs see getting a domain banned as a badge of honour and not the disaster it can be.

Suddenly the EU has changed all that and any SEO operating within its borders has had to also look at the legal ramification of everything they are doing.  Where once legions of pretend consumers lived and worked in the EU, they have all had to now relocate to another country.  These social media advocates trying to spread the message of love for the brand they ‘loved’ were in fact fake, and this only recently violated the law adopted in the UK under the Consumer Protection Act.

Where once love was espoused, silence.  Where once we were able to read about a boy wanting a PSP3 for Christmas or a couple driving their RV across America and loving Wallmart’s great staff while doing it, we have had to be content with the news or blogs written mostly about chocolate.  Where once a hashtag we followed about the protests in Iraq could lead us to a deal on garden furniture, now it simply brings us the news and drivel from spammers still seeking to invade the space.  This new law has made owning the social media space more difficult because we’ve been forced to tell the truth (or move our legions offshore).

Social media is vital for SEO though and a good social media strategy can result in increased visits and increased rankings in search.  It is important, if not essential, for brands to be active in the social media space, and do it correctly.  While the age of citizen journalism may not yet be in full flower, the power of word of mouth networks is now digital.  Mommy bloggers, passionate bloggers on food, alcohol, gadgets, and more all exist and have supporting communities, and tapping into these communities can yield rich results.  The deceptive ease of social networks and access to bloggers belies the danger in getting it wrong.

While social media blunders and gaffs abound, the question is how much brand damage is done by a bad social media execution.  Without the legions of ‘advocates’ able to be deployed at a moments notice, blunders in social media now have the potential to stick around for weeks if not years.  But is it really disastrous to have bad reviews about your business on Qype or someone have a moan about your brand on Twitter?  It depends.

The quickest way to screw up your social media strategy is to not have one.  Too many companies jump in with no idea of what they are hoping to accomplish by engaging over social media.  They have been sold a blog/twitter/facebook package by some social media guru and now they need to use it.  That lack of focus would never be allowed in a DM campaign and it shouldn’t be allowd in social media.

The website www.whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com could be a good first place to check to see what you might want to get out of social media engagement if you don’t already have a plan.  But really, if you’re already Facepartying your Twitter check-ins on your BlogTube, it might be too late.
Stop.
Take a breath.
Plan.
Now get back in there.

I recently got into a debate with someone about the benefits of social media. This person (who I won’t name because I think they were being an idiot) maintained that the biggest benefit to social media was getting links for SEO, and I have to admit my heart just sank. There is no denying that social media is great for building links, but it’s a side effect of a marketing technique that is far broader reaching and can have a much bigger impact for businesses that do it well.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the attitude of an individual, but something that is quite widespread in SEO, and it’s not only social media that is met with this attitude of irrelevance, quite often traditional marketing methods are met with similar derision. One of the reasons for this is, I think, is the ability to track ROI so accurately for SEO, we are held accountable in a way that our offline marketing counterparts aren’t, but social media means that we are going to have to learn to accept that the SEO way isn’t the only way, and for that we have to look backwards.

Until the internet, widespread pull marketing didn’t really exist (the yellow pages is perhaps as close as it came), TV, DM, Print, they’re all push marketing methods, working to gain brand awareness, and maintain a steady stream of marketing & advertising so that when someone was ready to buy, your business was at the front of their mind.  When you stop and think about it, social media is far more aligned with this than it is with SEO, but SEO’s are the ones in the position, and with the expertise to take advantage of it.

So what can we take from the decades of learning that traditional marketing offers us

Reporting Results

When traditional marketers track the results of a TV campaign, they don’t look at which ad slot generated the most sales, they can’t, what they look at instead is what uplift the campaign as a whole had on total sales. They may be able to get some additional data from a unique phone number or URL on the ad, but that will only give them a limited view of the overall impact of the campaign. In social media we can track a lot more data than this, looking at weather sales had a social media touchpoint, seeing which mentions had the biggest impact on visitors and more, but fundamentally a consumer may never click through on social media, but the persistent presence of a brand can increase click throughs through other channels, look at overall traffic uplift as well as direct referrals for more meaningful results.

Great Concepts Deliver Great Results

I doubt any advertising agency has ever walked into a pitch with the following “we’re going to talk to people through TV advertising, then we’re going to ask viewers how they feel about you”, yet we quite often hear “engage users through social media and monitor sentiment”. It’s the same idea, and equally useless. When you think about the TV campaigns you remember, they’re usually interesting, funny or shocking concepts, they’re always unique and can have a huge impact on sales for the businesses lucky enough to develop those campaigns.

If you’re going to develop a social media campaign, remember that you need a reason for people to engage, and you need to innovate, there are as many ideas possible for social media as there are for TV ads, we just need to get better at finding them (or work closely with an advertising agency, having done this a lot recently I can honestly say that creative advertising agencies are brimming with ideas they would love you to execute)

Plan for the long term

Most Marketing teams will have a plan, not for this month or next, but for the next 12 if not 18 months. They will plan campaigns and marketing outreach around key times in their business cycle, maximising their opportunities and accordingly their ROI. Social media should be equally well planned out, what are the opportunities in your market place, will that exciting idea you’ve had work better 6 months down the line. Online marketers are used to being able to do everything quickly, and see results equally quickly, but biding your time can have far greater results for your campaigns.

I’ve been talking to a lot of companies lately, who are starting to think that maybe they need a social media campaign. Their mum’s brothers dog suggested it, because, well, you’re not anyone these days unless you’re on twitter, right?

Upon further investigation, it seems that they have had a few social media agencies come and pitch to them, most of whom have provided no history on their business, or even the individuals history in social media, but these “social media agencies” have confidently advised these organisations that they “need a social media campaign”. In some cases I have seen the client be set up with a nicely skinned twitter account, a Facebook page with their logo, log in details and a wing and a prayer.

So I want to get a few things straight about social media,

This is not a bandwagon everyone should jump on

Social media is not suitable for everyone. If you truly think you can “do” social media, this fact should be jumping about slapping you in  the face when you meet one of these clients.  It might be that they are never going to be able to make the resource work for them, they may  have huge reputation  management issues, that are going to swamp them as soon as you open the flood gates, or they may simply not get it yet. This doesn’t mean that you as a “social media marketer” can’t work with them though. Each of these problems can be worked on, you start with educating them perhaps, or working on a strategy to help them get the processes and procedures they’re going to need in place. Just because someone isn’t in the right place to launch a social media strategy, doesn’t mean that you can’t work with them, just that you need to lay the ground work first.

A Twitter account is not a social media strategy

Nor is a Facebook account for that matter. These things are social media tools, nothing more. They are not the strategy any more than having a phone is a telesales strategy. The minute you set up a twitter account without a plan of what that account is going to say, what it’s aims are and who it is supposed to be talking to, you’ve failed. You need to know (or rather your client needs to know) what the process is for dealing with negative comments, you need to ensure that your tweeting is fully compliant with regulators. You become the companies public spokes person, So  you better be sure that you’re saying the right things before you start.

There are more than 3 social networks

So you’re creating a social media strategy. Great. Is your audience mass market? No? are you sure Facebook is going to be the most effective audience? Is it 20-30 something, affluent and left wing? No? Perhaps twitter isn’t going to be the medium for you. Is your audience very young? No? then stay the hell away from Bebo. There are hundreds, no make that thousands, of social networks out there. You’ve probably been using them for over a decade in some instances, but in the rush to get on twitter they are all but forgotten. Blogs, forums, yahoo groups, they’re all still hugely popular. What’s more (apart from the spam) they’re not marketed to. But they’re full of people who are interested in what you have to say.

There is one example of marketing to a targeted forum audience that always springs to mind for me, and it’s one you’ve probably all seen. Google has representatives in Webmasterworld they provide a service to the users of the forum, they are a port of call for webmasters all over the world. Is this marketing? Damn straight it is, and it’s one of the best examples I’ve ever seen.

There are so many ways to make a social media campaign work for an individual clients needs, targeting is the key. Lyndoman recently blogged that it’s not about the conversation, and I agree, for me it’s about the strategy.

Photo Credit: Stephen Poff

Before you all start writing blog posts titled “Shock revelation of new SEO Chick” please let me explain.

When I first started out in SEO, I remember looking at the blogs, the SEOmoz comments & the Sphinn submissions, thinking that I wanted to be just like the people I was seeing writing there. They were doing amazing things, achieving great results, and working on exciting client projects that required huge investment and brought in massive returns. These people had relationships with the heads of marketing for huge companies, and wielded their power and influence to do good.

At the time I was an almost SEO, I was a sales person, an account manager first and foremost. Learning about SEO as I went along, learning from the great people I worked with and the sites I was working on. These were small businesses in the most part, or rather businesses with a small web presence and even smaller marketing budgets. The search terms were niche, but effective and the strategy was simply to get them found, it was all they could afford, and in most instances it was all they needed.

I can still remember reading Webmaster world and being bamboozled, It was a long time before I dared start posting, and when I did it was cautiously, and never challenging. After all these were people who knew far more then I ever would, who was I to challenge them.

After a couple of years learning the ropes, I decided I wanted to tackle something bigger, so I went in house. Suddenly I was working on huge accounts, with massive marketing budgets. I was telling the heads of online marketing for FTSE100 companies how to implement online strategies. I didn’t feel like I was a real SEO though. I still wasn’t doing the amazing campaigns that the bloggers were doing. I wasn’t doing mega projects, generating millions of viral views, or creating social media campaigns that would be talked about on blogs from here to eternity.

After a while I gained a little confidence & started participating on SEOmoz, talking to some of the people I had been reading for years.

This was where something strange happened to me. Slowly, once people started to recognise my name, they started talking back. Not like they were talking to someone inferior, or less capable, they were talking to me like an equal, like someone whose opinion should be taken into consideration and given weight. I took a chance and wrote my first SEOmoz post, I remember shaking while I hit the submit button. After all I wasn’t a real SEO like the other people on SEOmoz and Sphinn. I was a faker, just someone who was working, doing a job.

I can’t say that first post was given popular acclaim, but it was published, and seemed to go down well. and something very slowly started to dawn on me; Everything is a matter of perspective. From my perspective the people blogging and commenting, and more recently tweeting, were spending all day every day working on these amazing strategies. It seemed like they were able to take on a new client and immediately get everything on the website fixed, and move onto the “real” SEO and social media campaigns. It took me a long time to realise that they had just the same issues, frustrations and challenges as I did, they were doing the same work I was doing. The only thing they did that I didn’t was look at it differently.

I realised then that even rubbish, viewed in the right light from the right perspective can look exciting and innovative. Most of what I was seeing was not great work it was a great perspective. Now I’m not trying to say that the SEO greats are just blagging it, far from it. You will never become an SEO “guru” if you don’t genuinely know your subject matter in side and out. It’s also helpful to get genuine results for your clients, and be willing to share the hard earned information you have with the wider community.

Truth be told, tenacity, a thick skin and a stubborn streak a mile wide will help too, not to mention the ability to drink like a fish until the sun comes up. What I am saying though, is that anyone can become a recognisable name, and maybe even an industry star, if you’re willing to try.

There is no one way to become known in a community (and this applies to any community) but, since realising that all the people I really admire are just people, I have looked more closely at what they do and how they do it, and i have realised that there are a few things they all do when they enter a new community;

1. Watch and learn – I have to emphasise this point. Every community, online and off, has a different culture and if you mis-judge it, it could leave you with a reputation that’s hard to shake. Walk into a room full of master woodworkers and tell them they’re using the wrong drill bit and the won’t tell you when the next meeting is. Log into an SEO site and ask for links and you’ll be blocked quicker then you can say captcha. Watch and learn for a little while first
2. Be conversational – for the love of Google, talk to people. I really can’t stress this enough, ask questions, respond back when someone talks to you. You’re the new kid on the block, you can’t afford to be “me me me” like other people might, you need to be the nice one, the likable one, you need to make the effort.
3. Don’t differentiate – the people you see as being awesome cool, are still just regular people, and they really don’t think of themselves the way you think of them. In fact they may be just as keen to talk to you as you are to them. (it’s not an SEO story, but I was once emailed by one of the biggest names in the rat fancy (hmm a sub bracket, I’m sure the grammar police will tell me off for this one, but just wanted to say, yes you read that right, there is such a thing as a rat fancy, and it does have it’s own superstars), saying how sorry she was to have missed me at a show. I nearly fell of my chair, as I didn’t even think she knew my name. suddenly she wasn’t so scary and unapproachable any more). So don’t stop yourself just because of who they are, if you have something interesting to say they’ll be happy to hear from you.
4. Don’t expect instant results – SEO Rockstar Rishil was telling us on twitter the other day how he started out on SEOmoz in mid 2007, it’s taken him less than  30 months to become one of the most recognisable names in SEO. However, we’re not all that awesome, so be prepared to rise slowly, just like a good SERP.
5. Get noticed - Speaking of Rishil, there is one thing that springs to most people’s minds when you think that name. Rishil certainly made sure he was noticed, with the sexiest avatar in the business. Making yourself recognisable from one site to the next will help people maintain their connection with you. It also makes people think you are around more then you are, as they remember you every time they see you.

Since realising how everyone is just as normal as me I have enjoyed what I do more and more, and been more and more vocal about it. Without this realisation, I would never have had the confidence to enter the SEO Chicks competition in the first place (in fact I shook sending the entry email to Lisa just the same as I did when I submitted that first post to SEOmoz)

So I hope you’ll all excuse the self indulgent first post, but I wanted to show anyone reading who wants to increase their exposure within the SEO community, or any community for matter, that it’s not about having the right job or the right clients, it’s just about having the right attitude.

Photo Credits:
Shock-ed, photo by CarbonNYC
Dirty White trash (with Gulls) artwork by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, HE/SHE, 2003, Photo by Pashasha

Not long ago, I was invited to a bloggers evening for chocolate.  Most who know me well, know that my passion for chocolate has made me as discerning as some are for wine.  I can taste a chocolate and discern whether the bean is mixed origin, over-roasted, has added veggie oil, too much sugar, etc. I am passionate about chocolate.

I was invited to this chocolate tasting evening by PR firm Splendid who did a fabulous job with promoting Galler chocolate through Facebook.  They leveraged Facebook to promote something everyone loves but is also a very competitive environment.  The first push was a simple free giveaway and then they followed up with contests pushing the various products they were promoting.  The initial free chocolate bar giveaway created tremendous buzz and went viral.  They then followed up with other offers and promotions and engaged their audience.  Just like Splendid, there are several steps anybody should take in order to leverage social media effectively.  These generic steps can be used for almost any business.

First and foremost, ensure you have a well optimised web presence that fully explains your product offering to the audience you are targeting.  Nothing is more frustrating than trying to find a website for a company and there being nothing or it is all for a foreign country.

Make sure your product is up to scratch.  If you have doubts though, get the products right first, then go for the big push.  To push a poor product on to the market risks irreparable brand damage.  If you aren’t sure, don’t do it.

Accept the criticism along with the compliments.  Don’t alienate someone just because they don’t think your product is the bees knees.  If it is food based, everyone has different tastes.  If it is a service, your staff may have had an off day. If it is something else, you may not have been aware of the issue before launch and so take it on the chin, accept the comments and explain how you are going to fix it.  Use this as valuable consumer testing.

When you launch and create a social media page, ENGAGE.  The worst thing would be to create a fan page on Facebook and never talk to the people.  The reason Splendid did such a great job was because they engaged their audience and kept the buzz going.  Follow their example and ensure you don’t spam but alert fans when new contests go live, new discount codes are issues, new products are released or new services have gone live.

Fulfil your promises and deliver within expectations.  If you say you are giving away a free product, ensure you fulfil your promise.  Try and make sure the department responsible for getting the product to the fans ensures delivery right down to making sure the product arrives intact.  It will damage your brand if something sent  is destroyed in the post or never arrives.  China, glass, and other delicate items may do better being given way at an event rather than through the post.

Consider offline as much as online.  Many social media sites have real life gatherings that can number in the hundreds.  By sponsoring them you can get great buzz for your product and the goodwill generated will last far beyond the event.  These people are online and blogging or twittering or otherwise engaging right where you need to be.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep.  In the excitement of going live and out through social media, assumptions on take-up need to be made early on for stock or service levels to be committed to.  If, or rather when, these are exceeded due to the viral nature of social media, have a contingency plan in place to handle it.  End dates to offers, limited quantity warnings or sponsorship of events with capped attendance numbers can help.  Don’t promise the world and deliver Slough.

Make sure that when offers end and the main push ends you continue to engage.  The way to create brand advocates who will carry your message far and wide is through brand advocates so always remember them.  Offer them special incentives and if any reputation management needs to be handled in the future, you’ll have a group who will already be out there on the front lines, fighting for you.

Ultimately, social media and Facebook are not the traditional push media most companies are used to.  They require engagement as a pre-requisite.  Don’t use them as a way to broadcast your message but rather as a method of engagement.  Remember – just say no to social media spam.

Follow me on Twitter – @JudithLewis

It seems like years ago now that I moved into my own apartment and started looking at cable and Internet options. In actuality it was only two months ago. When I discovered that Verizon Fios was available in my location, I automatically went online to activate an account and schedule an installation. I wanted the fastest Internet possible!

The online activation was simple and easy to use. In about five minutes I put in my information and scheduled a date. One second later I got what I thought was a confirmation email. The email lacked any sort of number or code however. I called customer service to alert them about my order and their neglect on confirmation numbers. The customer service rep explained that sometimes ‘the system‘ takes 24 hrs to send a number and I might get the email tomorrow. I hate phone calls like this.

These sort of phone calls continued for a few weeks and I started to get really upset. I had to steal crappy internet at home and it was not fun! So I started expressing my Fios related sorrows on Twitter. Within a few minutes, I received a DM from the Fios twitter guy. Finally! We talked for a bit on Twitter (see pictures) and I got a call from a few new Fios people who helped me and got my Fios installed on A Sunday morning. Now I have the fastest internet evar!

The morale of the story is that if this Verizon Fios employee was not monitoring Twitter for brand mentions, my anger would have left me to some serious brand bashing. Instead of writing this nice blog post that includes a link to the Verizon Fios site.. I would have posted a negative blog post, continued to tweet about how awful they were, and possibly participated in forum bashing. Not that I have a huge voice but I’m louder than just a regular chick, because I’m and SEO chick!!

Being a geek rarely means going out there and hitting the vibrant social scene around London, Toronto, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Auckland or any of the other cities of the world. Usually it means going to a “networking” event at a conference and drinking until it doesn’t hurt quite so much anymore. Well, funnily enough it’s conference season now that the weather has turned even rainier (how can anyone tell…?).

So what’s up and on for conference goers? TONS! In fact, there is so much going on, I’ve pared it back a bit and focused on the place I spend most of my life in – London. My underpants have yet to host a conference, being a single event, single attendee kind of venue. So what’s up and on in London town, you might ask, *BESIDES* SMX London and the great LondonSEO? Plenty!

While an actual social event, it is for geeks to roam free with others of our kind at the London GeekDinner with Carsonified and with those crazy folks at Carsonified being the focus, you can guarantee geeky goodness all around! Suw Charman, one of the strongest voices of social media, is giving a day seminar on Making Social Tools Ubiquitous

The Social Networking Conference London 2008 features a host of great speakers including me! I’ll be talking on “The Dark Side of Social Media” examining what went wrong, why and how to avoid it. It is at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington and Conference Centre which seems to be close to a tube station *phew*. Of course the main event of the week will be ad:tech – now into it’s third year in London, it’s a great place to catch up with the latest technology It’s a firm favourite on the conference calendar and I think there are both free and paid tickets available depending on what speakers you wish to see. I’m so sure there will be parties around this!

BarCamp London is almost impossible to get in to and this time it is being held at eBay. This popular weekend event attracts people from all over the world and is absolutely a must-do but it’s almost impossible to get tickets so I’ve never done it Social Media Marketing in Black + White is a half day covering everything you need to know about social media but didn’t know to ask. Short, sweet and to the point.

Starting off October with a bang is Unicom’s Social Tools Conference which will feature information about all sorts of tools and how they can be used in business. I’ll be speaking on Brand Reputation Management giving tips on how and wht to monitor and why. All that good stuff. It’s two days packed with information and good food. Last time it was near a Hotel Chocolat so added bonus! There is usually an evening social which is free for non-attendees so there’s a good looking prospect for getting geekily social

SocialMediaCamp London works like a barcamp in that you register for free then get there on the day and volunteer to give a session. I’m hoping to give one but no promises as I’ll have a busy month! But why not go and volunteer yourself? It’ll be an excellent geeky social. Just after the weekend, book yourself in to Widget Web Expo because everybody loves a good widget and here you’ll get everything you need to know about what you need to do to create a widget.

Future of Web Apps is going to be what everyone is going to be at and talking about. Everyone was buzzing about this and Future of Web Design and now it’s finally back in London! Be quick about signing up for tickets though – they regularly sell out and you don’t want to be left behind. There are always great parties associated with a fully paid-up ticket to this event so make sure you have your social calendar to hand once you’ve bought your ticket.

a4uexpo – Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition 2008 is a somewhat niche conference that is always a blast. Given the buzz around last year, it would be a crime to miss this one. With networking, parties, chill-out lounges and a great set of people from all over, including SEO, this is a worthwhile ticket to buy. They also sell a pure networking pass! I’ll be speaking on purely SEO stuff, as will other speakers so there will be lots of everyone who attends. Check out the 2.5 days of networking & learning for less than the price of SMX London.

Linux Expo and Mac Expo are currently FREE to sign up for and always boast a hoast of interesting booths to play with new technology at. Extending to include a weekend day (Sat) to ensure us geeks who can’t justify it as a work thing can go, I highly recommend this to everyone!

Of course, the event that everyone is waiting for is SMX London with added LondonSEO goodness! With excellent sessions aimed at an intermediate level (for the most part – some beginner stuff too!), SMX London has firmly entrenched itself as a must-attend conference on the conference calendar.

Late in the year coming on Dec 2-4 is the Online Information show with IMS. This year, there is a social media stream and with free admission to the expo and many seminars, it’s well worth the day out.

Go get work to give you some training and book those tickets. Remember always to have a plan to make sure you get the most out of the conference experience. Oh and remember to say hi if you see me. Introduce yourself and I might even share some chocolate with you!

Sometimes, you cannot help but pity the poor people who come up with terrible marketing campaigns. I actually feel pretty bad for the people at Me.dium.com whose promotional video is nothing short of horrifying. Their software doesn’t appear to be bad, but the team in charge of approving that video should be fired. It’s supposed to be a parody and it’s supposed to be corny, but it’s the worst viral fail I’ve seen since P. Diddy thought you had to buy YouTube channels. I warn you: watching the video may induce the need to shoot yourself in the face. Of coure, this horrific car wreck of a campaign did act as linkbait in a way, as so many people linked to its awfulness. Notice that I’ve nofollowed my Me.dium.com link.

Technically, this was a viral marketing failure as opposed to linkbait, but it got me thinking about what does and what does not constitute link-worthy content.

Things That Could Be Linkbait

1. Sordid email and IM transcripts. Politicians know this quite well. It happens to them all the time, usually involving someone of or under the age of seventeen. It happened to the mayor of the town I lived in in 2005. Nothing so exciting had ever happened to Spokane, Washington and nothing as exciting has happened since. Here is an example of something that would be linkbait were it not for the big black rectangle in the middle of the good bits.

   

   If you can get your hands on someone’s email exchanges, or care to publish your own, and they’ve talked about anything other than who’s managing the company’s H3 tags or whether the loos on the second floor are still broken, people will love it.

2. Screenshots of epic stupidity. I’d not recommend adding the picture to StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg etc as simply a picture. You decrease the likelihood that people will link to it and increase the likelihood that they’ll just steal it. When I had a neat picture to put on Digg, I linked to the post rather than the picture. This way, it received scores of comments and was reproduced less / linked to more. But I digress. Posting pictures (and video, for that matter) of humanity at its worst will always get some attention.
3. AnonyBlogging. The SEO industry has been catching on to this lately, but it’s been around for a while. It comes in two forms: We have both SEO Hack and Slightly Shady SEO, neither of whom will tell the majority of us who they actually are. Then we have one-off ranters like SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog, and anonymousblogger from today’s helping of YOUmoz. Plenty of people like to speculate who SEO Bitch and anonymousblogger really are, which only adds to the buzz and links. I must, at this point, go on a tangent and point out the funny thing that happened when I was lazy and searched for “SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog” in order to find the post. Yes, I’m aware it wasn’t a good search phrase.

   

   That is indeed Matt Inman’s SEOmoz member profile. The problem with this approach is that it’s often hard for writers – especially good ones – to disguise their style. It’s almost as hard as faking an accent, and anyone who’s heard my botched up AustrAmeriKiwi voice will attest to how tough that is.

4. All things really fucking random. This is a perfect example where the bait and switch could be used. For some reason, we like domains with very little content. Silly little sites that usually serve no purpose whatsoever. We love them. We link to them. We Stumble them like they provided valuable content. They inform us of very important information such as whether or not it’s Christmas and show us dumb pictures. No, it’s not funny, is it? Then how in fuck does it have a PageRank of five? Milk it for what it’s worth and 301 it to somewhere else. Keep the cat if you’re concerned about ethics. (There is more content on this domain than just the cat, but the cat alone has 59,425 inlinks.)
5. Clever Photoshopping. A perfect example of a marriage of three things geeky, this image combines zombies, Twitter and Photoshop. There’s only one thing better than presenting people with one thing they like: cleverly combining multiple elements into one display of awesome.

But you’re SEOs and you knew that. How about some things that are definitively not linkbait?

1. Long dumb lists of stupid “did you know” facts. What in hell were they thinking? Let me list the fails:
   • White text on black background. I have 20/20 vision and can see from Seattle to Japan and I have trouble reading that.
   • Page as long as The Last Samurai. The last time I read a document that long, it was a text-only paper and it was for a sociology class that I didn’t want to take and which proved to be an utter waste of time.
   • Massive area of white black space at the bottom of the page for no reason.
   • Exists as the dillionth “did you know” list on the Internet. The Internet has had enough.
   • Anti-fail: The last “fact” is lovely, true or not.
2. Video of other people’s fireworks. Fireworks can be wonderful. The fireworks in Seattle from Gasworks Park this Independence Day were a thoroughly professional work of art. I could feel the sound-waves through my feet on my concrete patio. The way the sound echoed off Capitol Hill was amazing. But on a shitty video, reproduced on YouTube, the noise is fantastically annoying. Exception to the rule: Fireworks fuck-ups. Seattle’s New Year’s Eve display was positively painful. I had the pleasure of watching one of the biggest cockups in fireworks history take place out of both my living room window and on television.
3. Reproducing this. Again. And again. This too. Although it’s still funny.
4. Posts bitching about being asked to present a receipt upon leaving Circuit City. I understand. We’re honest adults who bought unnecessary sound-canceling headphones during our lunch break because it finally dawned on us that iPod headphones are crap. The security guard likely saw us at the check out, purchasing said headphones. The security guard may well have even seen the cashier hand us our receipt. But for Christ’s sake, is it really a human rights violation to show the dude the receipt as we walk out? Is it worth giving him the satisfaction of causing us a world of shit? If it is, I seriously suggest getting a hobby aside from blogging. The internet is rife with posts like this. Just show him the fucking piece of paper. He’s a Circuit City security guard, for Christ’s sake. Give him something to do. Surely you have some veal to eat or something.
5. Everything on this list. This is quite possibly the most wonderful thing Wikipedia has ever done.

I’ve been to two search marketing conferences in the past month and asked the crowd the same question at each show. The question was about a real-life example of the bait ‘n switch. There are a few different levels of bait ‘n switch and you’ll come across differing opinions as to which are ethical and which aren’t.

Level One
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to another location on the same site. The content doesn’t change. This barely counts.

Level Two
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to a different site. The content doesn’t change.

Level Three
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to another location on the same site. The content is noticeably different.

Level Four
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to a different site. The content is noticeably different.

By noticeably different, I mean that it no longer represents the content to which hundreds or thousands of independent websites originally linked. As linkers, we take this risk whenever we link to something that we don’t control; however, there is an inherent understanding that people won’t change the content and “force” us to link to something which we didn’t intend.

When the content doesn’t change, I don’t see anything wrong with changing its location. Within reason (commercial reasons included), moving content around makes little difference. Sometimes, a corporate website isn’t the place for linkbait or viral content, but once a social media campaign is complete, the content can be moved to a place on a company’s premier site. The Lenovo Tapes are a good example of this: originally displayed on a separate domain and purposefully disguised as being amateur, the page was eventually moved to Lenovo’s UK site. Sticklers for web etiquette still mightn’t like this, especially if they have a problem linking to corporate domains. However, I see no problem with this type of tactic and if you do, you should avoid linking to anything, ever.

Stickier situations come about when the content changes. If Lenovo had 301 redirected their linkbait to a products page, the situation would be entirely different. I fell for such a tactic recently and it was about this situation that I posed my question to two SMX crowds this April.

Last year, I was writing away at SEOmoz, as I’m prone to do, and I came across a benign but amusing piece of linkbait from a Floridian limousine company. They were featuring pictures of beached limos. Limos that have tried to drive over steep hills in towns like San Francisco and have become high-centred. Nice. Limousines are obscene. Who doesn’t find beached limos funny?

I linked to the linkbait. I used their most important keyword, “limousines”, in my anchor text. I was perfectly aware that the content was developed with links in mind, but being an SEO and having created similar commercially-minded content, I didn’t have a problem throwing them a followed link. Good on them; they topped Reddit and gave a few thousand people a giggle. Much later, I wanted to use this example in a presentation to highlight how boring businesses with mediocre websites can take advantage of social media. I went back to my own post to find the limousine company’s link.

I ended up at the Miami limousine rentals page, undoubtedly the company’s most profitable market.

Is that okay? Would I feel fine about doing this myself? Should I remove my link at SEOmoz? I felt that I should; however, I forgot to actually do it. I was distracted, probably by something shiny. The link was never removed and never nofollowed. I have the tab open to do it right now, but as per usual, I’m in the middle of a glass of Pinot and will probably forget again. Anyway.

I posed the question to the crowd at SMX Sydney: should I remove the link? Eighty percent of the crowd raised their hands. What an honest bunch of convicts. Either that, or they were just trying to impress us. I flew back to the U.S. and did nothing. A week later, at SMX Social Media in Long Beach, I asked the crowd the same question. Eight people put up their hands. The L.A. crowd didn’t see anything wrong with a 301 redirect being used in this way.

What do you think? I will probably amend the post to nofollow the link and add a note about how the content has changed. Personally, I wouldn’t use a redirect in this way: to me, a 301 should really indicate that a piece of content has moved permanently; doing this changes the content entirely. And it’s not like I’m the most morally upstanding member of society, either. Isn’t that right, Julie?

We had a discussion – one that ended up being around 250 comments in length – at SEOmoz last month about the ethics of widget-bait. Rightly or wrongly, a former colleague of mine is suffering from Google’s crackdown on such practices. How tough would it be for a search engine to recognise the bait ‘n switch and devalue its worth?

I have just decided that every SEO Chicks post I write will conclude with my most entertaining piece of Gmail Adsense from the recent past, as I was quite pleased with that particular post. Here is today’s offering: I always enjoy humour in my email advertising, especially of the self-deprecating variety.

Until next time!