UPDATE: After posting about the Social Media Workshop, we received requests to give an additional seminar on SEO – search engine optimization. So, we added a One Day Seminar on “SEO – The Fundamentals of Optimizing your Site for Search”.  If you register for both the Social Media Workshop and the One Day SEO Seminar, you’ll get a 15% discount on both!

To register, click here

About the workshop

We will be covering:

• Key concepts of social media and online marketing
• Search engine optimization and why it’s important for social media marketing
• Identifying goals and audience
• How to use Twitter for marketing: Setting up profiles that work for business, building up community, promoting your profile, what and how to write, monitoring, measuring, the best tools, etc.
• Getting the most out of LinkedIn: Using your personal profile to achieve business goals, customizing your company page, understanding the power of LinkedIn groups and Questions
• YouTube: Why YouTube is a huge opportunity, creating and optimizing your YouTube channel, optimizing your YouTube videos, growing your community
• Using Facebook for business: Profiles, Pages, Groups, Questions. how to analyze Facebook Insights
• Managing your web presence: How to manage your social profiles, content, and campaigns, Social media dashboard options and setting up your dashboard, Monitoring tools
• Getting your site ready for social media activity: Optimization, capturing leads, shareability, email marketing, analytics, social buttons

View the full workshop schedule here and register

Lecturer: Miriam Schwab
This workshop will be taught by Miriam Schwab, the Friendly CEO of illuminea, who is recognized as a leading developer on the WordPress platform and regularly lectures and serves as a web marketing evangelist and resource to the broader internet community.

To see a list of the conferences and events that Miriam has spoken at, click here

Workshop details

Dates: July 20, 27, August 3, 2011 from 9:30am-1:30pm

Location: Tel Aviv area (Exact location to be announced)

Last day to register: July 13, 2011

The workshop will be taught in English.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions: info@illuminea.com

To register, click here

Related posts:

1. Talking to the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe: 7 tips for marketing yourself with blogs and social media This past Thursday I was privileged to speak to the...
2. Starting a facebook group is not a social media strategy First, a story: Almost a year ago, I met with...
3. Announcing Corporate Blogging and Social Media Seminar in Jerusalem I’m excited to announce the launch of a new course...

This person wanted to target people who liked the facebook Page of a particular chain of stores in Israel. This brand has an official Page on facebook, as well as a bunch of unofficial ones. Their official page alone has over 14,000 fans, yet when the person selected that Page under Likes and Interests in the Facebook Ad dashboard, they were told that the estimated reach was less than 20 people. I tested this out, and the results were the same, no matter what country or age group I entered (including all ages):

I was determined to get to the bottom of this, so I started running a bunch of tests. Eventually I realized the following:

If the title of a facebook Page has Hebrew in it, the Estimated Reach number is much lower than the number of fans. In fact, the number is always 20 or less – this goes for sites with 50,000 fans and up. And having English and Hebrew in the title doesn’t help. However, if a Page’s title is in English, even if the content is completely in Hebrew the Estimated Reach is in line with the number of fans of the Page.

I wanted to see if this is a problem with non-latin languages in general on facebook, so I decided to test a page with Arabic in the title: Al Jazeera Channel. The Page has over 1.2 million fans. I tested the Reach for this channel in a bunch of countries with large Arabic speaking populations: Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United States, United Kingdom, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt. The Estimated Reach for those countries ranged from 20 to 180 at the most. When I added all these countries, the estimated reach maxed out at 240 people, which doesn’t really make sense.

So unless I’m missing something, which could be, it seems that Facebook Ads have a problem with Facebook Pages with titles in Hebrew or Arabic. Which makes you wonder if there are any other issues with Pages with titles that include Hebrew, Arabic, or possibly other non-latin languages like Chinese or Russian. And if that’s the case, maybe Page owners should use English titles wherever possible for now.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Community Pages and Connections: what it means for brands, reputation management, and privacy Facebook made some drastic changes to its services and features...
2. Online marketers make fake ads look like real news – sometimes too successfully More and more studies are showing that internet users do...
3. How to Add a Suggest to Friends Tab on a Facebook Page Facebook is rolling out some major changes to how Pages...

Facebook is rolling out some major changes to how Pages work. Some are good, some not. The good changes include the new layout of facebook Pages with the tabs on the left sidebar instead of at the top, and, starting March 11, 2011, the ability to use iframes, HTML, Javascript and CSS without the FBML App! This is going to totally change how you can develop facebook Pages! Party time!

One of the recent changes in the “not so great” category is facebook’s decision to remove the “Suggest to Friends” link on facebook Pages. Admins of a page can still access this feature in the Edit Page area, but fans cannot. So, we’ve been flooded with requests to add an Invite Friends Tab to facebook Pages.  Here are the steps for how to create the Invite Friends Tab on a facebook Page, but keep in mind that as of March 11, 2011, facebook will be deprecating the FBML App.

1. Go to  Static FBML App and click on Add to Page in the top left corner of the page. You will then see a list of your facebook pages. Click “Add to Page” to add the application.
2. FBML is now added to your page.
3. Go to the facebook Page you’re working on and click Edit Page.
4. Click on Apps.
5. Click on the FBML Apps and click on Go to App.
6. Give the Tab a title like “Suggest to Friends.”
7. Copy and Paste the below code replacing illuminea with your organization.
   Important! The action URL on line 3 of the code MUST be http://example.com and NOT http://www.example.com. No WWW welcome at this party.
   
   If you don’t follow these rules, you will get an error that says “Sorry, your request could not be processed. Please try again.”

   <fb:request-form
   method="post"
   action="http://facebook.com/illuminea"
   type="illuminea"
   invite="true"
   content="Connect with iluminea
   <fb:req-choice url=http://www.facebook.com/illuminea label='Go' /> ">
   <fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="Invite your friends to connect with illuminea" rows="3" cols="3" showborder="true" />
   </fb:request-form>

8. Save Changes.
9. Go to Edit Page > Apps > Click on the Suggest to Friends App you created > Go to Edit Settings and click “Add” where it says Available (see screenshot).
   
10. You can see this in action on illuminea’s facebook Page.
11. When your friend receives the invitation it says “Friend has invited you to “Static FBML”. Not so pretty so for now make sure your message text is really good! I hope there will be a better solution for this.
    

Related posts:

1. How to create an image map for a static FBML tab on a facebook page When creating custom FBML tabs for facebook pages, it can...
2. Are you letting all of facebook look over your shoulder as you read? One of the latest types of apps that have emerged...
3. Facebook Community Pages and Connections: what it means for brands, reputation management, and privacy Facebook made some drastic changes to its services and features...

Logic might tell you that you should be able to comment on a photo you were tagged in but actually that is not what gives you the ability to comment. What will allow you to partake in discussions under a photograph with your lovely face in it is if you “Like” or are Facebook friends with the person or entity that posted the photo on Facebook.

So that’s what wasn’t working!

Related posts:

1. Israeli photo contests show brave use of social media. We’re always on the lookout for interesting uses of social...
2. Successful Ikea facebook campaign shows importance of offering deals to consumers on social media Ikea Sweden got some good coverage yesterday for a facebook...
3. Why the new Facebook groups suck The suckiness of Facebook groups is not a new subject....

Yesterday I attended the Cellcom Media Conference at Tel Aviv University. I’m assuming that Cellcom produces this mega event every year in order to strengthen its brand perception in the market. They almost managed to do that at yesterday’s event – if only they hadn’t ended up acting so cellphone-company-ish at the end.

Free lunch, great speakers: so far so good

Cellcom, one of Israel’s big-three cellphone companies, holds this conference every year, and this was the third one. It’s the first time I was invited to attend this free event and when I saw that Dennis Crowley from Foursquare was speaking, I jumped on the opportunity to hear him in person.

I got there for lunch (after getting lost – WITH my GPS), and was completely overwhelmed. The lobby was full of people swarming around (the Foursquare Swarm badge awarded to conference attendees was fitting) and lining up to get lunch. I could barely find a place to just stand and have a phone call without getting bumped. Cellcom had obviously gone all out, with one of the nicest venues I’ve seen for a conference, an amazing lunch, about 1000 participants, and top-level speakers they flew in from overseas.

Despite the crowd I did manage to run into a few people I knew, who told me that the morning sessions were mostly good. These sessions included Jeremy Gutsche, founder of TrendHunter.com; Phil McKinney, CTO for HP’s Personal Systems Group; Kahina van Dyke, EVP and General Manager at MasterCard (at least they had one woman speaker); and Anthony E. Zuiker the creator and producer of the television series CSI.

Chad Stoller speaking at Cellcom Media Conference

After lunch we all filed in to the hall for the next lectures. The first speaker, Chad Stoller from BBDO, was really good and managed to keep his cool and sense of humor despite major technical issues with the projector. He spoke about how social media is changing the world of advertising, and showed the example of how BBDO implemented a facebook connection on BlueRay disks for the popular TV series Trueblood that allowed users to interact with the show and share scenes with friends on facebook. I particularly liked this idea of his: We used to gather then share – i.e. invite everyone over to see our photos. Now we share then gather – i.e. we post stuff online, and people gather around it.

Piers Fawkes speaking at Cellcom Media Conference

Next we had Piers Fawkes from PSFK, a highly influential guy from a highly influential trends and research group. He spoke to us (in a lovely British accent) about ways that retailers are integrating social media in their marketing activities. He brought some interesting examples, but overall I was generally too busy being appalled by the obsessive shopping culture in the US, where young girls’ main weekend activities are shopping and then showing people their plunder on YouTube. And we wonder why there aren’t more women in upper management, or why the US hasn’t had a female president. Yuck.

Cellcom needs to learn some social media lessons

During Piers’ talk I checked twitter to see what people were saying about the conference, and saw the following from Dvir Reznik:

http://twitter.com/#!/dvirreznik/status/4496142742061056

Apparently, Dennis Crowley wasn’t actually showing up at the conference – he was to speak via video conference.

Here’s what Crowley had to say about this:

http://twitter.com/#!/dens/status/4511795494522880

Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on video at Cellcom Conference

Having a speaker via videoconference is totally legitimate. But at least let people know – I mean, we’re all going to realize what’s really happening at some point. Cellcom listed Crowley with the rest of their speakers, so we all assumed that he’d be speaking in person too. This type of behavior on the side of Cellcom was inconsiderate and not-quite-honest. This type of not-quite-honestness reminded me, and others, of the many encounters we’ve had with Israel’s not-quite-honest cellphone companies:

http://twitter.com/#!/itamarw/status/4513870500597760

An overriding theme of the conference was social media. And overall, the conference was pretty good on that level: they invited “influencers” (there were many impressive people there) to a free conference, treated us all really well and gave us great content. But not being up front about Crowley was a fashla. Why not just tell it like it is? In the end, we felt like we’d been had.

Yaron Orenstein summed it up well on facebook (my translation from Hebrew):

Cellcom, who knew that Crowley would draw a lot of interest, put his talk at the end of the day in order to “secure” a captive audience. This is without doubt demeaning and exploitative behavior on the side of Cellcom.

I still appreciated the conference, so thank you Cellcom. I really enjoyed it. But maybe in the future, try to adopt the transparent style of social media that was so expounded upon all day, and don’t try to hide things, k?

Related posts:

1. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...
2. Israeli photo contests show brave use of social media. We’re always on the lookout for interesting uses of social...
3. What social media marketing is NOT – my presentation at Affilicon 2009 For the second year running I had the opportunity to...

What are the changes?

It actually took me around a week to find out about the changes but once I found out, it was clear as day that something was fishy in Facebook land.

I woke up and found my email inbox all but flooded with messages mainly from strangers that looked something like this:

Turned out that Facebook had made the following quite anthropologically interesting change:

People can now add their Facebook friends to groups without the friend’s permission.

To be clear, in general, there is almost nothing I’d ever want to do to anyone without their permission. And now, if I ever want to invite someone to a Facebook group, I am basically “forced” to force them into the group. No more suggestions. That would just be too civil, wouldn’t it?

The new automatic settings

Wait. It gets more amusing (and then more amusing). So now this person is in a group without even being aware of it. Now to add to the pushiness, the automatic notification setting is that members of Facebook groups receive messages to their email every time someone posts or comments there. Every time.

That explained all the emails I’d received. Mind you, 99% of them were not about the group but instead attacks on the creator of the group for adding all of us without our permission. (I stood up for him, explaining that it wasn’t his fault, but Facebook’s fault. Aren’t I kind?)

As for this notifications setting, it’s very easy to change but you’ve gotta be on the ball or else it’s very annoying. You just click on “Edit Settings” in the upper right-hand corner of the page when you’re in the group, then a window pops up and you edit it as you wish.

The grand finale – I’ll never ever forgive you!

Now, ready for this? This is the other end of the new ability to add people without their permission.

If my lovely friend added me to a group and I decided I am not interested in that group, I can opt out. That makes sense. The crazy part is that this means that my possibly-well-meaning friend will never be allowed to add me to another group again. Ever!

I must say that this part of the new set-up makes me think that whoever was behind it has super unhealthy personal relationships. Because seriously, assuming I am not on bad terms with any of my Facebook friends (I hope I’d remove anyone with whom I don’t want to be communicating at all), why would I want this to be so final? I probably opted out just because the group is not of interest to me. That doesn’t mean I never want my friend to be able to recommend any group to me ever again!

This, of course, is not to mention the fact that if, to begin with, the friend was sending me a suggestion instead of a forced joining, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

This change is actually childish, though even children usually only talk like that (“I never want to play with you again!”) and then 10 minutes later they’re playing as if nothing happened.

I do wish I wasn’t married to Facebook

So, those are some of the latest changes. I read a seriously lol-ful blog post about these changes by Danny Sullivan. The title is too long to quote here (I’d have to start paying for real estate) but it’s a great story about someone (true story) who was added to some highly embarrassing group just to prove the point I’m trying to prove here (that Facebook Groups are evil, of course).

Facebook so often does things that are so unfriendly that an urge arises from deep within me to leave Facebook. And then I remember… Too bad I have close to 90 photo albums and so much other information there. (I would absolutely love to have a way to download all my info from Facebook so I have it somewhere other than there.)

So instead of wishing I could leave, I just wish that Facebook would head on down to someone else’s office, say, Google, and ask them for some tips on how to make changes that gently fall into place and make the user’s experience just that much more pleasant and fun, instead of making changes that sort of slap you in the Face and make you wish you could take the Book and slap them back.

P.S. All of this is not to mention that really Facebook should take the pluses of groups and the pluses of pages and just put them together into one. But that’s for another post.

Related posts:

1. Starting a facebook group is not a social media strategy First, a story: Almost a year ago, I met with...
2. Facebook Ads can’t estimate reach for Pages with Hebrew or Arabic in the title Someone recently asked a question on the Digital Eve Israel...
3. Why can’t I comment on a photo I’m tagged in on Facebook?! Ever have that issue on Facebook? You see you’re tagged...

Inbal Hotel – the first in their field

Inbal Hotel Facebook photo contest

It’s easy to jump on the social media bandwagon once it’s already moving, but to be the first to get the bandwagon going in your field can feel a little daunting. As far as I know, the Inbal, a hotel in Jerusalem, is the first Israeli hotel to really go all the way, social media speaking. From their gung-ho presence “all over” Facebook and Twitter, it’s easily apparent that Ruth Waiman, the enthusiastic Executive Assistant along with Online Marketing Manager Pinny Orzach, the SEO/SEM person, have been given the OK to really give social media a try.

It really is a risk when a company decides to put a substantial amount of employee hours towards a social media presence. There could be growing pains when a conventional company puts itself out there in the world of social media. Often there is a slight image change as the company shows itself to be more hip and young through their social media presence.

You’ve got to be at least a little creative and really quite proactive to keep your social media presence alive and well. It’s not just about posting, “The chef is now cooking duck for dinner.” It’s about being cool, fun and interactive.

The Inbal Hotel’s latest photograph competition is exactly that – cool, fun and interactive. Actually, the beauty of their competition is that it isn’t about the Inbal. It’s about Jerusalem. You can enter the competition by posting up to three photographs you’ve taken of Jerusalem on their Facebook wall. At the end of October the best photograph will be chosen and the winner will get a night for two at the hotel.

When I wrote to Ruth about their latest contest, she explained:

To further boost our interactions on Facebook on both English and Hebrew walls, the photo competition was launched and has been receiving enthusiastic feedback from the outset.

Having now received close to 80 photos on the combined pages, we’ve definitely noticed an increase of fans and interactions and are hoping to involve external photography professionals for the judging due to take place early next month.

Ruth also mentioned all the events they’ve been hosting at the hotel, including the WordCamp afterparty (which we, as the WordCamp organizers, are really grateful for) at the beginning of September.

Nefesh B’Nefesh’s “This is my Israel” Campaign

Nefesh B'Nefesh This is My Israel campaign

Slightly before the Inbal’s competition commenced, Nefesh B’Nefesh (NBN), the organization that supports Jews who move to Israel, started a photo contest on their facebook page. To participate in this competition, people were requested to take a picture of themselves holding a sign that says “This is my ISRAEL” somewhere in Israel. The place where they are photographed should be one that they see as truly representing Israel for them.

Also, a fun campaign that is not about the actual organization behind the campaign, but instead about “you” and Israel.

What a wonderful use of social media to get people involved in an organization and, of course, more connected to each other and Israel.

It is currently voting time on the NBN campaign so you can go to the album and click “like” on your favourites. The winning photographer will receive a Flip video camera. Sweet.

Goals and drawbacks

The main goals of campaigns of this kind are exposure and building a certain image and relationship with your followers. As long as your campaign really is, as I said, fun, cool and interactive, and not all about you, the image and relationship aspects will probably be fine. The only problem with these types of contests is that if you want to participate in the contest, you might hesitate telling others about it since the last thing you need is more competition!

(Of course that brings up the question, why am I writing about it here if I plan on entering the Inbal contest? I suppose my blogging addiction is stronger than my “I need to win” attitude.)

Otherwise, both of these contests are a great and fun use of Facebook.

And here are my pictures

So yes, I plan to enter three of my pictures in the Inbal competition. Here are the photographs I’m considering. Which ones do you think could be winners? Help me choose! I really could use a night in a fancy hotel.

Related posts:

1. Announcing Corporate Blogging and Social Media Seminar in Jerusalem I’m excited to announce the launch of a new course...
2. Upcoming Jerusalem networking event with Jeff Pulver: social media marketing for non-profits I’ve been working on a new venture aimed at helping...
3. What social media marketing is NOT – my presentation at Affilicon 2009 For the second year running I had the opportunity to...

I was recently looking at a post on LinkedIn, and I noticed something I had never noticed before: underneath the poster’s profile picture is a link that allows me to “follow” them.

Follow? What is this, twitter?

I remember when LinkedIn announced that companies can now be followed. That kind of makes sense, since companies are entities. But I had never noticed the follow-people functionality, and I don’t love it.

LinkedIn is about quality

I like that every social network has its own unique flavor. Aside from the varying features of each network, I build different types of relationships in different ways on each social network. On twitter, I’m pretty open to following anyone I think has related interests, and of course anyone can follow me if they choose. On facebook, I’ve become more open about who I approve as a friend and I don’t actually have to have met them previously. But I still won’t confirm friendship with people who don’t seem to have anything in common with me (common being a very loose term – could apply to geographical location, interests, etc.) or who seem shady.

LinkedIn is the last remaining place on the web where I value quality over quantity. My connections there only consist of people I’ve met, whether on- or off-line, or with whom I’m building a business relationship. [Side rant: I don’t understand people who don’t know me and send me the default LinkedIn introduction message of “I’d like to add you to my professional network.” Take a  minute and introduce yourself, tell me why you want to connect, or where we’ve met!]

I think that this type of quality vs. quantity approach to LinkedIn is what gives anyone’s network there value. For example, a big part of LinkedIn is introducing people. If I don’t really know the people in my network, I can’t introduce them to others, and that reduces the value of my network. If I don’t really have a relationship with my connections, then they’re just numbers.

And that’s why I think adding follow functionality is inappropriate for LinkedIn. One-directional relationships there are not part of what LinkedIn networking is about. The value of connections there is when they’re mutual and people can use those connections to build and develop serious business relationships.

And besides: why does every network have to be a twitter wannabe? Yes, there are cool things about twitter, but come on. A little less copy-catting, and a little more innovating please.

How to see who you’re following, and who’s following you, on LinkedIn

Now that we know that this functionality exists in LinkedIn, You can manage all your followers and followings on LinkedIn as follows:

1. Click on Groups on the top navigation bar in LinkedIn.
2. From the tabs that appear on the top of the page, select Following.
   
3. You’ll see in the top-left corner of the page a list of links, including “People I’m Following” and “My Followers.”
   
4. Click on either of those links to see who you’re following, and who’s following you. You’ll notice that under each person, you have the option to follow/unfollow, and to get email alerts:
   
   If you choose to get email alerts about a person, you’ll get an email every time they do anything on LinkedIn. This is a good feature if you really want to keep a close eye on someone, but not if you just want to be connected.

LinkedIn automatically sets you to follow all your connections, and for your connections to follow you – that’s why you’ll see that you’re already following quite a lot of people.

So now you know how to manage following on LinkedIn. What do you think – is this a useful feature, or just another example of twitter wannabe syndrome?

Related posts:

1. Bill Gates joins much improved LinkedIn Bill Gates has just joined LinkedIn, and I can see...

If you don’t know what I’m talking about (i.e. have been hiding under a rock etc.), Old Spice launched a campaign that combined twitter, YouTube and a bit of facebook that took the web by storm. The campaign included some planned commercials that set the stage for the manly-manliness of Old Spice Man, and then a series of real-time videos made in response to people’s tweets on twitter and comments on facebook and YouTube. Here’s the original video launched in February which attracted 19 million viewers (this video was actually shot in one shot with minimal computer graphics):

A few weeks ago Old Spice Man returned with this commercial:

What’s so great about Old Spice Man?

• Old Spice Man – actor Isaiah Mustafa is just amazing. He gets the message across perfectly.
• The writing – the lines Isaiah says are brilliant. I mean, how great is a campaign that ends with the line “silver fish hand catch”?
  
  

  I have to applaud the @oldspice writers for “Silver Fish Hand Catch” a catchphrase that will last forever.Thu Jul 15 07:48:04 via TweetDeckIain Tait
  iaintait

• Multiple channels – the campaign is coordinated across multiple social media channels, utilizing each channel’s advantages and cross posting as required. Twitter is used for direct conversation, facebook for posting videos and status updates with longer text and accompanying responses by fans; and YouTube for centralizing the video content.
• Appeals to men and women – For example, I can’t stand beer commercials which are obviously targeting men, but this campaign appealed to both sexes which is good for a product like Old Spice body wash, which men use but women often probably buy.
• Combines traditional and new media – these videos are commercials, a type of advertising that has been around for decades. But the commercials have evolved to take advantage of social media by using the medium’s potential. Creating new videos in real time is not something you can do with TV; also, the very personal style, and personalized videos (he spoke to his daughter, and helped a guy propose marriage, and even answered his own question), are very social media. But commercials are old media and we’re seeing the two come together here.
• Personalization – how fun is it to get a personal video message from Old Spice Man? Thousands sent tweets and comments his way in the hope that he would respond to them, and getting a response was like winning the lottery. In order to create these videos, marketing agency Wieder + Kennedy’s team worked at a furious pace, creating over 180 videos in 24 hours!!
• Old Spice Man is a nice guy – many attempts at creating viral media involved tricking people into believing what they were seeing is real, or being mean to others in some way. Old Spice Man is just nice, and cool. He makes us laugh. It’s a refreshing.

This campaign was a hit, with over 180 videos created, over 5.9 million views and 22,500 comments, as reported by Visible Measures. Visible Measures also reports that it is one of the fastest growing online video campaigns ever. Even once the videos have ended, people continued the trend. Reddit users created Old Spice Voicemail (with female and male versions), and some students at Bingham Young University created the a knockoff video encouraging people to study in the library.

Is this the future of social media marketing?

This is not the future of social media marketing. These guys created a groundbreaking campaign, but if companies copy this model, it will get stale. No one will enjoy this level of success because no one else can be first. Because when it comes down to it, success in social media is about creativity and originality, breaking out of the box and grabbing our attention. The next roaring success will have to be something else that’s never been done before.

References:

• Old Spice Mixes Social Media And Web Ads, Forbes.com
• Old Spice: The Archetype of a Successful Social Media Campaign, Mashable
• The making of Old Spice’s commercial: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Twit video with Leo Laporte
• How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made, ReadWriteWeb
• New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar, Harold B. Lee Library

Related posts:

1. Successful Ikea facebook campaign shows importance of offering deals to consumers on social media Ikea Sweden got some good coverage yesterday for a facebook...
2. Israeli photo contests show brave use of social media. We’re always on the lookout for interesting uses of social...
3. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...

As you can see, the Wall Street Journal greets new visitors with a custom tab called News, which acts like a landing page.

I’m not going to get into how to create a custom tab on a facebook page here since there are tons of tutorials around the web on how to do so. What we are going to discuss here is how to put an image map in your custom fbml page.

Step 1: Get your image

First, find the image that you want to make linkable. Maybe edit it in Photoshop or some other editing program and add text. It’s recommended to underline text you plan to make linkable to make them look like links. Let’s use the following image as an example:

If you mouse over the image, you’ll see that nothing happens, and there are no links. I’m going to make the words Social Icons a link to an icon search engine, and each image will link to a similar icon online that you can download.

Step 2: Upload your image to a server somewhere

In order for your image to appear in your facebook tab, it must be hosted somewhere online. That’s the only way facebook can “call” it in to the tab – it can’t call it from your hard drive on your desktop (unless your hard-drive is a publically accessible server, which is usually not the case). Here are two great places for uploading images for free: Photobucket and Image Shack. I like Image Shack for quick and dirty image uploads since you don’t have to create an account there – it’s optional, which is helpful if you later want to remove an image or have control over your images, but not required.

So let’s use Image Shack as our example. Follow the directions to upload your image, and you will get to a page that looks like this:

We care about the field above called Direct Link (I put a green box around it). Select and copy the whole URL in that field.

Step 3: Create an image map

The image map must be created with CSS. If you use HTML it won’t work in facebook. Lucky for us, there’s a great free tool online for creating CSS image maps: Image Map Tool.

1. Go to http://image-maps.com.
2. Once you’re in the Image Map Tool, enter the image URL you copied from the Image Shack page into the field that says “From a URL”:
   
3. Click on Start Mapping Your Image. You’ll come to a page that says that your image was uploaded successfully:
   
4. Click on the link “continue to next step.” That’s where the fun begins.
5. You need to select the parts of your image that you want to make into links. Most parts of the image can be selected with the Rectangle tool, but unusual shapes can be selected with the Custom Shape tool. In our case I’m going to use the Rectangle Tool.
6. When you click on the Rectangle tool, you get this floating thing that you can move around and resize, and enter the link and link title/alt text:
   
   As you can see above, I moved the floating box thing over the words Social Icons and resized it so it covers both words. I entered a link to an icon search engine Iconfinder, and entered the alt text for the link. Next, click Save.
7. Click on the Rectangle button again and repeat this process as many times as you need until all hotspots are created. Since I want four links in this image, I repeated this process another three times.
8. Now, choose the options that you want from the sidebar under Advanced Tool Box. There are some useful and advanced options there, and I recommend you check them out, but take note of the options to Show Text Links and Allow Backlink. If you choose to show text links, text links will appear under your image with links to the places you’ve linked your image to. This could be good for usability since you’ll offer a text version of the links in addition to the image links.
   The Allow Backlink option will put a text link under your image map to the Image Map site. If you can, it’s nice to give credit to this site for creating such an awesome free tool. But if you can’t, make sure to deselect that option.
9. Now click Get Your Code. This takes you to a very confusing page with lots of text and tabs at the top. Click on the CSS Code tab at the top of the page:
   
   You will see a bunch of code. It’s basically ready to copy and paste into your FBML tab, but you need to make one change to it first. Image Map Tool adds a dotted black line that appears when you mouse over any of the links on the image, which is pretty annoying so you probably want to get rid of it. So you need to get rid of lines of code that look like this:

   a.LINKx:hover {background:transparent; border:1px dashed black; color:black;}

   The x above represents a number. The above line of code will appear as many times as links that you created in the image, and the x will be a number. So if there are three links, the above line will appear three times, and the x will be the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in each line.

10. Once that’s done, paste the code into your FBML tab and you’ve got yourself a working image map in an FBML tab!

Sources:

• Design Your Facebook Page Like a Pro – Image Maps Tutorial
• “Image Map” on the Facebook Static FBML forum

Related posts:

1. How to Add a Suggest to Friends Tab on a Facebook Page Facebook is rolling out some major changes to how Pages...
2. How to create a personal brand by using online tools This past Wednesday (July 15, 2008) I presented at an...
3. Facebook Community Pages and Connections: what it means for brands, reputation management, and privacy Facebook made some drastic changes to its services and features...

Facebook also announced their new “Connections” system, which anyone who has logged into facebook since this was announced had to notice. Connections is a nasty feature that doesn’t allow you to control your profile information anymore. For example, if you want to say that one of your interests is Internet Marketing, your entry for that must link to a new automatically generated Community Page that facebook creates for Internet marketing. You can identify a Community Page by the lovely (not) logo that facebook plops in there automatically:

I’m guessing that at some point facebook will start to automatically enter images that they have deemed relevant to the content in the logo space, but in the meantime this meaningless DNA symbol is what we’ve got.

The pages automatically aggregate content related to the topic and displays it on the page. It places an emphasis on content from Wikipedia, Google Maps, posts from facebook, and content posted off of facebook. It seems to have the potential to become a pretty rich page, if we can judge from the Community Page for Jerusalem, Israel.

From what Facebook wrote in their introductory post on the subject, it seems that the goal is to help us have the things we “Like” appear in our facebook profile. They say that:

Some of you added information about yourself, such as your likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies, when you first joined Facebook. But we’ve noticed that more than three times as many of you have connected to Facebook Pages, such as those for bands, non-profits, universities or anything else you care about, as a way to express yourself. So to make it even easier to display your affiliations, we’ve improved the profile.

So Facebook is saying we’ve been more active Liking pages, than adding our likes to our profile info. So if we “Like” the page of a certain brand or entity, why wouldn’t we want that affinity to appear in our profile information, right? Well, kind of right, but here’s why their implementation of this idea doesn’t make sense:

Pages should be enough

People used to be able to easily see the Pages that we like on our Info tab on our profile. Why wasn’t that good enough? Now the Pages we like appear under Likes and Interests in an obscure link called Show other Pages:

You have to click on that to see all the Pages that person (me) has Liked, as follows:

If facebook really wanted to help us share our interests, why not prominently present the Pages we’ve liked in our Likes and Interests section? If they would do that, there’s no need for Community Pages.

Big brand discrimination

If facebook is trying to make a stronger connection between our profiles and the things we have actively Liked, why not help us link our Interests to existing Pages, rather than force us to link to their Community Pages? For example, I’d much rather have the link in the Employment section of my profile info for illuminea go to our illuminea page, rather than the useless illuminea Community Page that facebook created (see below).

And here’s what makes this even worse: if you want to enter a well-known brand or entity as part of your profile information – like Coca Cola, or 30 Rock – Facebook is helpful enough to offer up a link to those brands’ Pages! But if you’re (hypothetically) a tiny little company in Israel, fugetaboutit. Facebook helpfully creates a Community Page for your brand and ignores your existing Page cuz you’s too tiny to really know what’s good for yous.

Reputation management nightmare

In continuation of the above, if your brand is too tiny to matter, your brand now has two homes on facebook: your Page and your Community Page. Check out this example for illuminea. Here’s a screenshot of our Page that we created:

And here’s how the Community Page looks:

You have no control over the Community Page and what shows up there. I’m not just talking about avoiding negative feedback about a brand – at least complaints would be related to the brand. I’m talking about garbage showing up there.

Orli Yakuel from GO2WEB20 posted the following on facebook:

The link in that update takes you to the Orli Community Page:

What the heck is that? But it might not seem so bad. I mean, the posts are all from Orli. It’s kind of like a duplication of her facebook profile, another home for her on the web. But if you scroll down on the page you see this beauty:

And that’s not all that Orli has to face. If you do a search for her on facebook, you get this:

You’d think with a unique name like Orli Yakuel she wouldn’t have to compete for her name online. At least she appears first.

But we can’t expect to always be first: Rena Reich recently posted on the Digital Eve Israel mailing list that she knows someone whose facebook Community Page for their brand is appearing higher in search results than their own Page. Yikes.

You want privacy? On our web? Hahaha

People might have interests that they only want to share with selected people. But if your info is linked to Pages, that means you appear in the list of people who like that page:

Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. (Connecting to Everything You Care About, The Facebook Blog)

And you can’t not link, because if you choose not to, the interest or info won’t appear in your profile any longer:

Connecting to Pages is now the main [I think they mean “only” – MS] way to express yourself on your profile. If you didn’t connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty. If you chose to not connect to Pages during the transition process, there will be the opportunity to connect to the suggested Pages later at the top of the “Info” tab on your profile, and of course, going forward, you will always be able to add new connections by Liking Pages and/or editing your profile. (Facebook Help Center)

People really seem to hate this. Here’s what one guy commented on the facebook blog:

Orwell’s 1984 is happening now!! one of the reasons i joined facebook was to connect with people I KNOW!!!! not to share private information about me to people i do not know or for facebook to remember my deleted information and make public sensitive information about me!

Let’s say that the reason facebook is doing this is that also want us to be able to network around general themes, like Internet marketing, and to do that they have offered to create Community Pages for these topics that we can all gather round. That’s a nice idea, but they shouldn’t be forcing us to link to these pages; it should be optional.

Don’t post it if you don’t want Mom to see it

Facebook has been chipping away at our privacy bit by bit over the past few years. Check out this snazzy infographic for a visualization of what information used to be private on facebook, and what is private now (almost nothing). Why is facebook doing this? Pete Cashmore from Mashable sums it up nicely in the title of a recent post:

Facebook “Likes” World Domination

Basically, Facebook is working hard to avoid the fate of other dead or dying social networks like Friendster and MySpace. They hope to do so by not only interacting with you on facebook.com, but all over the web. That’s why you can now Like pages that are off of facebook.com, for example. I think Pete sums it up well:

It’s in Facebook’s interests to lock up your social graph, and it’s in your best interests that it doesn’t [my bold]. If Twitter, Google or another player were to make your social graph portable, you wouldn’t need to store all of your information on Facebook — you could do whatever you please with it.

I’m not advocating that we all stop using facebook. But like anything in life, consumer responsibility is important here: know where you stand with facebook, and what it can and can’t do for you, and hopefully you can put good use to it. In short, use the Mom Visibility Quotient: don’t post anything on facebook (or anywhere on the web) that you wouldn’t want your mother to see, and you should be ok.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Ads can’t estimate reach for Pages with Hebrew or Arabic in the title Someone recently asked a question on the Digital Eve Israel...
2. How to Add a Suggest to Friends Tab on a Facebook Page Facebook is rolling out some major changes to how Pages...
3. Successful Ikea facebook campaign shows importance of offering deals to consumers on social media Ikea Sweden got some good coverage yesterday for a facebook...

I really enjoyed the event and here’s why:

• It was in Jerusalem: We Jerusalemites are always schlepping to Tel Aviv for internet and technology related events.
• Good networking: The crowd was awesome. I had a great time schmoozing.
• Impressive panelists: I may not have had to schlep, but some pretty amazing speakers did schlep from around the world to come to this event, like Vanessa Fox, Dixon Jones from Majestic SEO, and Tomer Honen from Google’s Ireland office.
• Good food: Especially the caesar salad and the hot chocolate cake thingy. Yes, I’m shallow. And the fact that I got a free pen really made this event aces in my book.
• Funny people: Sam Michelson from Five Blocks did not disappoint. His title slide said he was going to talk about “Reputation Management for the Mossad.” Turns out he was kidding (though right now they probably could use some rep management). Loved that. Gil Reich from Answers.com was pretty entertaining too (check out his post about the best everything at Sphinncon).

Here’s what I think could be better:

• More useful content from the speakers. I did learn a few new things, but the presentations I heard were nice but kind of fluffy. I got the feeling that the speakers didn’t want to share any really valuable information with the audience.

Check out Barry’s run-down of the event for more details, speaker information, and photos.

Update: I forgot to mention something very important. The last Sphinncon didn’t have any women panelists or speakers, and although I thought the event was great, that bugged me and I wrote about it. For some magical Google reason, if you search for the term Sphinncon Israel, that post is always in the top 10 results. Anyways, this Sphinncon really made up for that with a good number of women panelists. I wouldn’t say it was 50-50, but I think this industry is not 50-50. A quick glance at the crowd certainly seemed to indicate that this is a guy-dominated industry, which is fine, but it was nice to see women represented too. So thanks Barry!

WordPress for social media and SEO

I was on a panel about social media with Vanessa Fox, Debra Askanase and Roi Carthy. I spoke about how to set up WordPress to be the hub of your social media and SEO activity. Here are the main points. The presentation is embedded further on:

• Your internet presence must be based on a hub which is your blog, or website combined with a blog. WordPress is a great platform for creating that blog or website/blog.
• WordPress is great for SEO. Yes, there was recently a kind of “WordPress SEO showdown” between Michael Gray and Robert Rolfe about whether WordPress really is good for SEO. Rolfe says it’s not because the permalinks (URLs) that you can set up are limited and not perfect from an SEO point of view. Gray says that WP is not perfect, but its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
  Sidenote: before I got up to speak Barry told the audience he wanted them to see something. Then he searched for the term Sphinncon Israel in Google and our blog post about Sphinncon Israel two years ago appears on the first page.
• Social media should be used in conjunction with SEO, and vice versa. If you use the tactics of one without the other, you are missing out on a lot of untapped internet goodness like more keyword opportunities, diverse traffic streams, link building, long tail keywords, etc.
• Some good tools for integrating social media are Chat Catcher that aggregates all the conversation taking place about a post and publishing that conversation as comments on your blog; facebook fan box and facebook connect; flickr galleries, YouTube galleries; LinkedIn TypePad application called BlogLink for displaying an RSS feed on your LinkedIn profile – this app is better than the WordPress one because the WP one is limited to one WP rss feed while the TypePad app allows you to pull in any RSS feed.
• Track your feed subscriber stats with Feedburner. Make sure that auto-detect for feeds will find your feedburner feed URL, not the built-in WordPress feed URL. Can use a plugin, htaccess, or hard-code the header.php file.
• Don’t forget about email. Use RSS-to-email service to make your life easier. Feedburner is free but you can’t brand your mailings or add people to the list; MailChimp allows you to brand your mailings and add people to your mailing list, gives you more control.
• Track how you’re doing socially with the following tools: bit.ly for tracking how many people clicked on tiny URLs you posted on twitter etc.; tweetmeme; Topsy (check out the Topsy page for Sphinncon); PostRank
• Hootsuite allows you to fire and forget the sharing of your blog RSS feed with your various twitter profiles, facebook profile, facebook fan page, and LinkedIn.
• Don’t leave the growing mobile user demographic out in the cold: easily make a mobile version of your WordPress site with the WPtouch plugin.
• WordPress is itself a social network thanks to BuddyPress which allows you to create a social network on the WP platform. The most recent version of BuddyPress can be used on a single installation of WordPress, as opposed to only being compatible with WPMU (multi-user WordPress).
• WordPress and SEO – WordPress makes it easy to implement a lot of the SEO basics, like rel=canonical meta tags, redirect all pages to with or without www, add an XML sitemap. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you manage page and post title structure site-wide, control meta-descriptions, no-follow areas of the site like categories, and more. Yoast’s Meta Robots Tag overlaps a bit with All in One SEO, but it offers additional features too.
• Google recently started to display breadcrumbs in search results. Add breadcrumbs to your site with a plugin or by modifing your functions.php file.
• Check for broken links in your site, and correct them on the spot, with the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.
• Easily add internal links with SEO Smart Links plugin that allows you to enter a word, and then tell the system that whenever that word appears on the site, it should link to a specific page. There are quite a lot more plugins that I mention, but why not view them yourself in the presentation embedded below.
• Optimize your site for speed – the speed with which a page loads is apparently considered for its ranking. Therefore, you need to speed up your pages. Check out the presentation for some ways how.
• You also need to secure your WordPress site against hackers. Some ideas for that are in the presentation too.

Ironically, even though I mention all the plugins above, if you really want to promote your site online, it shouldn’t be running too many plugins since that can seriously slow the site down. Many of the plugins I mentioned can be run briefly to accomplish something, and then deactivated once you don’t need them to do their deed anymore.

Here’s the presentation:

Related posts:

1. SphinnCon search marketing conference coming back to Israel SphinnCon is coming back to Israel on January 9, 2011,...
2. SphinnCon Israel summary…more to come later As I wrote a few days ago, SphinnCon came to...
3. SphinnCon Israel coming up…and not a woman to be seen (on a panel) SphinnCon Israel is sold out! SphinnCon Israel is a SphinnCon...

Of course, ranking in the search engines is not just about quantity; the content has to be relevant to the keywords being searched for, and there are certain quality checks that Google can do on pages to determine whether it contains spam or is stuffed with keywords. But a newish phenomenon is rising on the web that has been getting quite a lot of coverage from major blogs like ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch, and that is the “content farm.” Many of you may be familiar with the term “link farms,” which are sites that link out to hundreds or thousands of other sites, giving them the inbound links that many sites desire in order to rank higher in the search engines. This type of strategy worked for a while, but Google altered its algorithm so that not just any inbound link would contribute to a site’s ranking; in order for a link to be worth anything now it has to be from a quality and relevant source, among other factors.

“Content farms” are a new way of gaming Google. These types of sites pump out hundreds or thousands of new pages of content per day. The quality of this content is medium to low since the goal of the content is not to teach or inspire, but to create content for content’s sake, increase traffic and reap the rewards from ad revenues. Some examples of these types of sites are Demand Media and Answers.com. ReadWriteWeb reported that Demand Media produces 4000 pieces of content per day, and Answers.com (which has origins in Israel) has nearly 38 million pieces of web content. Both sites are in the top 20 web properties in the US.

At the moment, Google can generally identify, and penalize, very bad content. However, it cannot tell the difference between ho-hum content and great content. Ho-hum content is content that meets the rules of language syntax, and says something that can be understood by humans, but does not contribute to our store of knowledge. This type of content would be relatively harmless if it wasn’t being created on such massive scales, and if it wasn’t having such success in the search engines. The scale of this content’s production means that we may find a lot of ho-hum content taking over search results, and it will become increasingly difficult to find the really useful and thought-provoking content.

What this means for SEO, social media and the web

SEO professionals will increasingly face competing sites whose only redeeming factor is the number of pages they have published. In order to compete with those sites, they will have to create the same amount of content, or more. This is a matter resources (money), and very few web properties will have the budget to support this type of activity.

Unless Google figures out a way to determine whether content is quality or ho-hum, users will become more and more frustrated by the results and start to depend on their peers and social media to refer them to quality content. Highly retweeted posts on twitter, for example, may start to take on more value than the first result on Google.

And finally, if ranking well on the search engines is about who can produce the most content, which is theoretically infinite and linked to one thing only: money, this means that the winners on the web will not be those with brains, but those with brawn. Demand Media has $355 million in funding to put towards creating tons of mediocre content. If the winners are those with millions, this will destroy the much trumpeted democratic web.

But isn’t this just survival of the fittest?

The traditional news sites have been complaining about the hit they’ve taken by blogs and other forms of new media that, according to them, produce content that is not on the same level as that of news sites. Bloggers were quick to tell the news sites that they must adapt to the new realities or suffer the consequences. Now it seems that the bloggers are getting a taste of their own medicine as they face this new threat from low-level mass-produced content. Shouldn’t they just accept that things evolve, especially on the web, and that this new reality is par for the course?

I don’t think so (obviously I’m a bit biased). In my opinion, blogs add value to the web. High traffic blogs get so much traffic because they are written by authority figures who offer useful insights and breaking news that weren’t previously available on conventional news sites. Also, readers find the personal, casual style of blogs to be refreshing, and appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the conversation in the comments.

Content farms do not add anything refreshing or useful to the world of publication. Writers of content farm content are, on the most part, not writing with the goal of inspiring and educating. Instead, their goal is “produce 10 articles of 350 words by 5 pm.” This content is not ranking thanks to its value, but due to the sheer volume being created. Therefore, unless something changes we may find our web increasingly clogged by useless information.

Let’s just hope that it’s in Google and Co.’s interest to serve us useful content rather than increase their revenues from AdSense ads placed on content farms.

Related posts:

1. Sphinncon Israel: overview and my presentation on WordPress as social media and SEO hub Yesterday was the second time Sphinncon took place in Israel....
2. illuminea presents: Social Media Workshop and SEO Seminar starting July 20, 2011 in the Tel Aviv area illuminea is excited to announce a 3-part Hands-On Social Media...
3. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...

Personalized results are based on your previous activity, mainly what results you clicked on in the search results. Google gives the example of someone who searches for the term “recipes,” and clicks on the fourth result rather than the first, which is for epicurious.com. Next time this user searches for recipes, epicurious.com may appear higher in the results for them, but not necessarily for anyone else.

What this means is that we may all start seeing completely different search results. Watch the following video from Google for a short overview:

Personalized results are the default setting for all users, but users can choose to disable personalized results. However, considering that most people don’t even know what a browser is, I’m doubtful that people will be aware that their search results are personalized, let alone that they can opt out of these types of results or how to do so.

But why would people opt out of personalized results? They probably won’t want to. We have yet to see the quality of these results, but I’m assuming that results will be based on sites that Google has ranked as having adequate quality, combined with the personal preferences of the user. What this means is that users will still be choosing between sites ranked highly by Google, which isn’t so bad. I think we can assume that most people will continue to like the Google search experience.

What this means for SEO

I’m guessing here, but it is possible that if a user really likes a particular site, it will start to take up more spots in the search results, which means that other results will be pushed down and off the first page. You may have noticed that sometimes when you conduct a search, some sites have expanded results that also display further internal links and navigation to the user, like this:

Or a site gets two spots like this:

Maybe sites preferred by users will start to get expanded results, or multiple results.

But in any case, since most clicks happen on the first page of results anyways, chances are that most users will see some kind of varying order of the global top ten results, i.e. for John Site A is the first result and Site B is in third place, but for Jane it’s the opposite. In both cases, Site A and Site B stay on the first page of results. So in that scenario, site owners will still have to work on the usual things that help their sites rank (on-site factors like Title tags, off-site factors like inbound links, etc.) in order to ensure that their sites are exposed to searchers. As Danny Sullivan says:

SEO remains important to ensure that you’ve got that first shot at being considered.

What this means for social media…and SEO

At the same time, it means that site owners will have to work harder on the user-experience side of things to get people to click on their results in the SERPs. Sexier titles and meta descriptions will be necessary since these help the user decide whether to click through or not. And once a user clicks through, they’d better find themselves somewhere interesting and attractive, because if they click back right away to the search results, that’s a sign that the site was no good, and may affect that site’s ranking in future personalized search results.

It also means that social marketing should be taken more seriously by SEOs. Many site owners and search engine optimization professionals (not the great ones, I admit, but still there are lots of them) see SEO as all about getting their sites to the top positions in the SERPs – and that’s it. But Google’s goal is to provide the best user experience, and therefore is experimenting with, and adding, many social features to their search service, like:

• “universal”, or mixed media search results – these results include non-traditional sources like video (most often from YouTube) and blogs
• search results based on your social circle (Google doesn’t call it a social graph) – these results identify your social networks through your Google Profile and serve you links that they have shared or created. Learn more about Google’s Social Search.
• real time search results – this is a search results page that is constantly updating with results from various social networks including twitter, facebook, FriendFeed and general news sites.

The reason for these new features are assumedly because Google figures that people will be most interested in, and most appreciate, results that are linked to trusted sources and connections. So site owners and SEOs will have to start taking user experience on their sites (content, navigation, and even design) much more seriously. Jill sums up the new SEO reality nicely on the High Rankings forum: “Good news…for moving people further and further away from traditional rank checking as a measure of success”; i.e. SEO can’t just be about ranking in first place anymore, it’s about results, conversions, and maybe even relationships.

It also means that with features like universal and real time search results, site owners should be optimizing social media activity for search engines as well. This means creating useful videos and uploading them to YouTube, creating fresh blog content, and using keywords in your tweets and facebook status updates.

And finally, long tail search rankings will play a more important role. Search engine ranking may become about diversity rather than laser focusing on particular keywords or search engines. The reason for this is that if you can’t know where your site is appearing in people’s search results, better to appear in more places where you have the chance of getting clicked on (pick me! pick me!). Creating new content for your blog on a regular basis that is related to a particular theme will help you rank for terms you would never have thought of.

In addition, social sites are becoming serious addresses for search. A recent Comscore Search Engine Rankings report showed that three of the top search engines in the Expanded Search Rankings category were social media sites: YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. Lee Odden at TopRank sums up what this means as follows:

Companies that focus their optimization efforts solely on Google.com will miss the continued trend towards social search or search within social networks.

So where do we go from here?

SEO professionals have had to evolve to meet new realities since the dawn of the search engine. What worked five years ago to get a site to the top certainly does not work today, and what works today won’t work five years from now. Barry Schwartz says he’s not worried (from Search Engine Roundtable):

Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them. I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried.

SEO professionals will evolve to meet this new challenge. But it is possible that we are at a turning point regarding what SEO means. The goals will probably stay the same: increasing traffic and conversions. However, the ways that these goals are achieved may change drastically over the coming months to include social activity and improved online relationship building. All in all, I think that we’re talking about a better web experience for the end user.

Some questions

But there are still a lot of unknowns about the new personalized search feature, and here are some questions I have:

• Ethics: Google is basically forcing all users to accept a new cookie and allow Google to track their search activity. Opt-out is only for the web savvy since most users won’t even know that Personalized Search exists. Shouldn’t people be given the choice whether they want to participate in personalized search or not by opting-in? Is this a sign that it’s time to move to Bing?
• Will my personal preferences affect your personal results? If lots of people click on Site A in results, does that mean that Joe will start to see Site A rank high in his own results?
• Are personalized results only affected when someone conducts the same exact search over and over (i.e. “recipes”), or will it affect related searches as well (i.e. “cooking,” “chocolate cake recipe,” even “buying new dishes”)?

Related posts:

1. SphinnCon search marketing conference coming back to Israel SphinnCon is coming back to Israel on January 9, 2011,...
2. Talking to the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe: 7 tips for marketing yourself with blogs and social media This past Thursday I was privileged to speak to the...
3. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...

Forsman and Bodenfors opened a facebook profile for the branch’s manager, Gordon Gustavsson. The profile was to be used for business purposes only, as is evidenced by the vanity URL chosen for Gustavsson’s profile: http://www.facebook.com/ikeagordon – note that his vanity URL is ikeagordon, and not gordongustavsson. Better hope he works at Ikea forever…

Over a two week period, the agency uploaded pictures from Ikea showrooms to Gustavsson’s facebook photo album, and then made the announcement that changed this from run-of-the-mill social media activity to a raging campaign: they announced that whoever was the first person to tag a product in the pictures with their name would win it. And boy did people rush to tag the photos:

Check out this video overview of the campaign and how it was set up:

Why this campaign worked

The coverage of this campaign focused on the agency’s ingenious use of facebook’s photo tagging feature. It definitely was an original and unique use of this feature of the world’s largest social network. However, in my opinion that usage is just technical, and the reason this campaign was so successful is because it delivered what consumers want when engaging online with brands: exclusive deals or offers.

Digital marketing company Razorfish recently released its third annual FEED study which charts how technology is changing the way consumers engage with brands. Among the other interesting pieces of info gleaned from their study is the reasoning behind people’s choice to follow a brand on twitter and facebook. In the cases of both networks, the majority of people cited that they follow brands in order to get “exclusive deals or offers.”

It makes sense. Unless your brand is Apple or something that makes people feel all warm and fuzzy, consumers don’t want to be your brand’s “friend.” They may like your product and use it on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean they want to create an ongoing and public relationship with you…unless there’s something really worthwhile that’s in it for them. In the case of this Ikea campaign, people were more than happy to tag and share photos of Ikea showrooms if it meant that they would get to take a couch home for free.

Another example of success through rewarding consumers is br.st. br.st is a new web-based twitter client that became one of the top trending topics on twitter yesterday as well:

While I’m sure this new twitter client is nice, it didn’t get this level of exposure because of their great features. They got it because they are handing out 4 MacBook Pros and 21 Nintendo Wiis to people who tweet about br.st. As br.st CEO Jared Stauffer says on the site’s home page:

Instead of spending money on advertising we decided to give it to you in the form of prizes. So help spread the word by telling your friends and enter to win some cool prizes.

In fact, most of their home page is dedicated to the contest, as opposed to reasons why you should use br.st. Take a look at the following screen shot of their home page – out of all the screen real estate, only the grey box on the right refers to why you should give br.st a try:

While br.st may have gone to the extreme with their prize campaign, it did succeed in getting them a lot of viral exposure for a new product.

Recipe for social media success: viral + free stuff

Many social media evangelists talk about how the social networks can help you and your brand create warm and fuzzy relationships with your consumers. It’s not true. Consumers don’t want a warm and fuzzy relationship with most businesses or products. But they will help you spread the word if you offer them something really worthwhile in return, like a free couch or Ninento Wii. So by combining the features on the social networks that have the potential to make your brand or campaign viral with consumers’ base interest in free stuff, you’ve got a great recipe for social media success.

Related posts:

1. Starting a facebook group is not a social media strategy First, a story: Almost a year ago, I met with...
2. What social media marketing is NOT – my presentation at Affilicon 2009 For the second year running I had the opportunity to...
3. Israeli photo contests show brave use of social media. We’re always on the lookout for interesting uses of social...

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com.

Agenda

Sept. 23: What exactly is social media, and how do I use it effectively?

Part 1: What is social media marketing? (1 hour)

• What makes something social? What is Web 2.0? We’ll look at the most important elements of social media today: RSS, Video, Widgets, Tagging, and more to get everyone on the same page.
• The importance of social media in your marketing activity
• Case studies: companies and organizations that have successfully and unsuccessfully used social media

Part 2: Planning effective strategies for social media activity (3 hours)

• Elements of an effective social media strategy
• Setting goals
• Important considerations before starting
• Research your space
• Implementation
• Monitoring & engaging – how, what
• DO NOT neglect the other “boring” stuff: SEO, email, advertising, etc.

Sept. 30: Practical techniques for implementing your social media strategy

Part 1: Overview of important social networks – what they are, how to best use them for marketing (3 hours)

• How to use twitter for marketing: setting up profiles that work for business, building up community, promoting your profile, what and how to write, monitoring, measuring, the best tools, etc.
• Using facebook for business: profiles, Pages, applications, events, etc.: critical differences between each of them, how to choose the right ones for your purposes, setting up a facebook presence that works for marketing and promotion.
• YouTube and other video sites: why video is the next generation of web marketing, what to keep in mind when working with video, ideal length and content, how to promote your video to achieve your marketing goals
• Blogs – “old fashioned” but crucial: blogs are the hubs of an effective social media presence. What to keep in mind, how to set it up, how to integrate it with your other social media activity, ideal frequency for updates, what to write, how to write, how to promote.

Part 2: Personal branding (1 hour)

• What is personal branding?
• Why everyone should work on their online personal brand today
• How to create a successful personal brand with social media

Summing up: Where to go from here (0.5 hours)

• Key points to keep in mind when branching out into social media
• Putting it all together
• Working with (skeptical) upper management

About the speaker – me, Miriam Schwab

Miriam is the Friendly CEO of illuminea, and has been speaking and teaching about social media and blogging for business for over two years.

illuminea is a marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses and organizations use the social web effectively as an integrated part of their marketing mix. illuminea has extensive expertise in designing, developing and strategizing business blogs, and using these blogs as the hub for launching successful social media marketing activities. Part of illuminea’s day-to-day activities involve keeping up with the latest developments in the social web so that we are always able to offer our clients the best solutions for their needs.

Among illuminea’s clients are some of Israel’s leading companies and personalities, including Comverse, Commtouch, Natan Sharansky, and more. Click here to view testimonials from illuminea’s clients.

Here is a list of the conferences and events that Miriam has spoken at:

Wordcamp 2007 – moderator http://english.wordcamp-israel.info/ and the schedule

WordCamp 2008

Elephant

Techshoret 2007

Affilicon 2008

Affilicon 2009

Marchshoret, Nov. 2, 2008. Presentation is here

Partnership 2000, Nov. 12, 2008

Pradler Institute

SSVN, hosted by IBM on July 8, 2009. Read reviews. Presentation.

ISOC Israel:How to create a personal brand by using online tools- MP3 of lecture; presentation; article on The Com (Hebrew).

MEET Alumni Conference, August 4-5, 2009 Istanbul Turkey: “Blogging Secrets: Tips for marketing your business online.”

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com. Hope to see you there!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Related posts:

1. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...
2. What social media marketing is NOT – my presentation at Affilicon 2009 For the second year running I had the opportunity to...
3. Blogging and social media for marketing and creating videos – presentations from Techshoret About a month ago I spoke at the Techshoret Conference...

I have no problem with this as I see this practice as acceptable…as long as the writer has a clue who I am and why there’s a possible connection between their product and my interests.

But a few days ago I got the funniest pitch letter ever, and I mean “I’m laughing at them, not with them” funny. This letter was a form letter with all the options left in. I’m reprinting the first paragraph here for your entertainment, and I will omit the name of the of the writer, but not of the product because it actually seems useful. The “funny” parts are highlighted in red:

Hello,

We have just launched the “Real Time Board” at surchur.com and wanted to give you a first shot at helping us spread the news. Based on your passion for/interest in/blog that covers social media (or some other topic) at somedomain.com and your voice as an incluencer [sic] in the social media/search/real time search/media (pick one of these or something else related) community I’d honestly be grateful if you’d take a look at surchur.com, give us feedback but especially help spread the word on your blog or twitter account….

The writer left me hanging! Am I passionate or just interested in social media (or could it be race car driving)? Am I an incluencer? What is that? And if I am one, then is it in the social media, search, media or perhaps race car driving communities?

Don’t do online PR this way. The one thing bloggers HATE more than anything are mindless efforts to get their attention without taking the time to address them as a human being, rather than as another person on the mailing list. Take a few minutes to address me properly, and I’ll take a few minutes to see what it is what you want. Otherwise, into the Trash your email goes.

As for the product above, Surchur – well, I checked it out anyways and it seems worth looking at for tracking current trends. You can also search for any term and get a quick overview of activity around the web related to that term, from Google Blogsearch, IceRocket, Technorati, digg, delicious, twitter, flickr, Yahoo News, YouTube and more. And the results really are up-to-date, as opposed to what we’ve seen on other services that offer similar results.

Related posts:

1. Online marketers make fake ads look like real news – sometimes too successfully More and more studies are showing that internet users do...
2. How to create a personal brand by using online tools This past Wednesday (July 15, 2008) I presented at an...
3. Promote yourself online by NOT talking about yourself Talk to people. But I mean really talk to them....

Why?

In the past, creating a personal brand was solely the domain of celebrities. However, today everyone can create their own “brand,” thanks to the proliferation of online networks where one can create a branded profile, and blogs which allow owners to present their knowledge in a useful and accessible manner.

Aside from being good for one’s ego, why would people want to create their own personal brand? The reason is that it can give you a serious edge in today’s competitive business world, whether you want to secure the future of your career or promote your business. By creating quality focused content on your own blog, which you then promote via the social networks like facebook and twitter in order to increase your reach, you can position yourself as an expert in your field and even build up a community around your knowledge.

How?

There are a number of factors involved in creating a personal brand online, but they generally boil down to the following:

• Authenticity – Be yourself. Many people think that their personality is not great, and therefore they try to fake it both online and offline. Don’t. Your personality is what makes you unique and plays an important role in your UPS (Unique Selling Point). Embrace it, don’t fight it. Plus, it’s hard to keep up a facade of a personality that isn’t really you over the long-term, and people will pick up that something’s not quite right.
• Consistent look and feel - carefully select the image you will use to represent yourself online; use consistent colors, fonts etc.
• Quality content - create quality content on your blog about the topic you have chosen to focus on. Set up your facebook and twitter profile to automatically publish links to your content on your blog.
• Building up a relevant community – find and friend/follow others who share similar interests and/or could be good leads for your business.
• Continue your brand offline – make sure your offline activity, personality, and even appearance are in sync with your online brand, and vice versa. We all love the web, however nothing can ever replace the importance and impact of face-to-face meetings, so plan to spread your personal brand offline as well.

Rinse and repeat.

The presentation is below. Note that it’s mostly in Hebrew. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Promote yourself online by NOT talking about yourself Talk to people. But I mean really talk to them....
2. How to create an image map for a static FBML tab on a facebook page When creating custom FBML tabs for facebook pages, it can...
3. Create Now, Think Later For months I had thought about redoing my site, and...

The challenge of talking to a large group about social media is trying to make sure that the information is not too overwhelming for the newbies, but at the same time is not too boring for the seasoned users. The feedback from the audience was pretty enthusiastic, so I hope I managed to reach that happy medium.

The talk covers recent landmark events on twitter, such as Dell reaching $3m in sales via twitter, the success of the Iran Election protesters who used twitter to bring their cause to the world, and some other events. We looked at strategies, tips and tools for creating an effective online presence.

Without further ado, here’s the presentation:

Related posts:

1. Upcoming Jerusalem networking event with Jeff Pulver: social media marketing for non-profits I’ve been working on a new venture aimed at helping...
2. New! Course on Social Media Marketing for businesses After a long break I’ll be giving a course on...
3. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...

The reason I took this approach is that you can find lots of information out there about how fabulous social media marketing is for promoting your business, organization, or other goals. However, with all this hype I fear that people are a) overestimating what social media can do for them and b) unaware of the challenges involved in using social media for marketing.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of social media marketing. We’ve had good results with it here in our own company, and for clients. My point here is to provide a social media “chill pill” – some facts and realities about becoming active on the social web.

So here’s my presentation. I hope you find it useful, and as always would love to get your feedback and questions:

Related posts:

1. Talking to the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe: 7 tips for marketing yourself with blogs and social media This past Thursday I was privileged to speak to the...
2. Upcoming Jerusalem networking event with Jeff Pulver: social media marketing for non-profits I’ve been working on a new venture aimed at helping...
3. A quick-start guide to social media marketing Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about...