Simple idea: Create an infographic. Make the content tabloid enough/interesting enough to get linked to and offer code for people to embed it on their site with of course a link back to the site with your golden key words.

Already we’re seeing website and blog owners being emailed and asked for links to these infographics and to use certain keywords with the links. Nefarious to say the least especially when there isn’t any thought on who might be interested in the content. “We thought you might like this health insurance graphic since you er blog about food and please link with the text: cheap health insurance Ireland”

Photo owned by PV KS (cc)

It’s common for a client and an agency to want a quick win. Good traffic and lots of links. That’s the goal, right? Social media/online marketing is simple to set up, free to do and so people seem to think that there’ll be instant success as a result. The case studies we show and are shown make it seem that way too. Organic growth by creating content, interacting, getting feedback and moving on again is much more stable. But traditionally the marketing industry bought volume. Buy an ad on the Late Late, stick something in every paper and you’ll reach everyone with your very bland ad.

Quantity is still the catnip for many. That’s why you see so many company blogs mentioning celebrities and trying to shoehorn their offerings into some scandal. Good luck with aligning nipple slips into recruitment news lads. There was an old Irish Politics blog that started getting into mentioning all kinds of celebrity sex drivel. Traffic exploded but so did respect for the blog’s political analysis. This here blog for Mulley Comms gets 1/10th of the traffic as my personal blog and something blogged over there will do very well in Google but talking online marketing or online PR here means it won’t get first position on Google. That’s ok though as the blog here is new enough and still finding the way.

You see it too with Facebook campaigns that push for people to become fans. Win an iPad or iPhone for anyone that’s a fan of your Facebook Page. How many of your new Facebook fans genuinely care about what you do and how many clicked Like to enter the iPad draw?

Now counter that with what Sabrina Dent highlights for newsletter list building. She talks about Ciara Crossan going to Wedding Fairs. That’s where Ciara’s constituents are. Those who subscribe to her newsletter are the right demographic, not any old sod joining to get to the prize. Good leads at targeted events. There would be plenty of ways for Ciara to get 1000s of randomers on her mailing list but how many will take the content seriously then? A polluted database costs you more in the end.

So as clients, consultants and agencies should we keep pushing for the slow and more intelligent game instead of cheap tactics like link rigging and begging friends and strangers to Like client status updates? Should part of a company’s social media policy to ban staff from clicking on that Like button and leaving comments? The same way for competitions staff, their families and suppliers are banned from taking part? Should you train your own thoughts into thinking longterm?

Register your interest now. If you want to be a presenter too, let me know.

What is Measure It?
People that work and don’t work in social media come together to discuss case studies, share information and contribute to discussions around the broad theme of measuring social media campaigns. There are generally 3 quick presentations which focus on measurements and then the crowd are given a task to do after being split into groups. This is an information sharing event and a networking event. You should try and work with people you don’t already work with.

Here’s Drew’s take on his week of letting Twitter and Facebook decide for him on certain things.

Facebook tests a new box on profiles that shows all the Pages you’ve liked.

Twitter makes you a better CV maker? You’re still making CVs though…

Google Small Business has a blog. Hopefully some good tips on the way from them.

Brendan has a good post on generating leads from social media.

Lots of opportunities in using Google sets for research and insight.

Forrester tells marketers to stay away from the likes of Foursquare and other location services for now. Sure there’s only a few million highly influential people using it. Am sure the wait and see applied to the web in the early days too. It’s what you make of the medium that matters, be it 10, 1000 or a billion people on it.

Meanwhile PlacePop takes the location idea and applies it to vouchers.

I like this idea. Test drive a new Mazda via a Facebook game/app.

If you’re into PR then follow the PR Page from Facebook. Lots of tools and ideas for PR professionals.

Good analysis of the top Facebook Pages in Ireland from Brendan.

So no new records on Twitter for the World Cup final.

Location-based classifieds. Twitter mixed with Foursquare for Craigslist?

Facebook tool that allows you to get more data about the fans on your Facebook Page. See are they talking about you.

Mobile video capture is obviously on the rise.

• 71% of users looked at adverts on their Profile pages, 31% of users looked at adverts on the News Feed page (homepage).
• Users pay more attention (53% vs. 31%) to page updates in their News Feed Wall rather than adverts to the right-hand side of the Wall.

So we might have banner ad blindness going on around the web and maybe Google Ads on the right side of results don’t get much love but it seems for Facebook so far, ads work and people pay attention to them.

More importantly in my view is that people are naturally paying attention to information that shows up in their News Feed and a business is allowed to send their updates to this News Feed when someone Likes/Becomes a fan of the Business Page. So set up your Facebook Business Page and update on a regular basis. Tie it into a Marketing Calendar. The only cost is your time.

Not just iPhone (though still the giant for mobile Facebook usage) that sees mobile Facebook usage. Android usage for Facebook? 7 Million a month.

Webinar: How can Nokia recapture the Youth market. June 23rd.

The PSFK London conference in September has some early bird tickets available. Well worth going to.

Twithority. Twitter search with results linked to number of followers.

Ford shows off their new car on Facebook first.

Big spenders on social networks? Heavy users. Wonder why Google, Facebook and the like want you online more?

When does your marketing start for a product and when does it end, when do you do press for an event, what day will that press release go out, does it clash with anything internally and any event externally? We all know the Government trick of burying bad news with their news dumps on a Friday evening but the date and time of all communications is important for an organisation. Being able to get a quick overview of what is coming up is vital for a busy organisation big or small. This is where the communications calendar comes in.

Photo owned by Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis (cc)

Advantages of a comms calendar
The first advantage of a communications calendar is that in a glimpse you can see what’s happening internally and externally over the next few days, weeks and months. Another advantage is that when external events pop up you might be able to modify your communications instead of ploughing headlong into the event. Knowing you have buffers around a planned event brings in a level of comfort and makes you adapt to a situation while looking professional. You can easily scroll back and look at past events that worked and didn’t work and gain insight for the next event too.

What type of calendar?
I find Google Calendar or one of the other web based calendars to be excellent as you can share them with a group. Having them on a wall works well and maybe even creating an analog version of the web-based calendar can work but a digital shared version means no matter where your team is, they can access the data and update it if needs be. If you do go digital though, make sure to make backups just in case there are connection issues or data loss.

What should go into it?
Newspapers will have upcoming events in their business sections such as company AGMs, results announcements and key Government events like budgets. They ought to go into your calendar, especially if you think they will dominate the news the day they’re announced. Over time experience will tell you which of these is important.

Photo owned by Téo Brito (cc)

Measure results
With the calendar in place you can measure the effects of campaigns days, weeks and months after they have started and ended. If you add in resources put into the campaign and the impact of it you can visually see the value of the campaign for you and clients. Visual clues can often allow you to make better and faster decisions too compared to looking at data in just a spreadsheet.

Originally written for the Cork Independent and modified for this blog.

What do you want to get out of this?
If you’re going to invest time and resources creating content you need to be very certain what your endgame is. You need to figure out that if you are going to change the copy of your website, write some blog posts, work on status updates on Facebook or Twitter, that you are doing it for a purpose. For your business. What is that purpose? With your content, is it a way of showing off your authority, is it a case study of how you helped someone out, is it a direct way of making sales, is it a discount on goods, is it information that shows you care about the wider community? Lots of questions. Look at all the ones the communications bible brings up!

Who are those you want to energise?
Forget demographics, ask yourself who are the people you want to create good content for and as a result of good content, they interact with you and even help spread the word? Who exactly is the market for your products and services and what do they like online, on blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums etc.? Use the likes of the Facebook Ad system to figure out the volume of the people you are interested in interacting with and increase that by perhaps 30% for overall Internet numbers.

Themes
After figuring out what you want from working in an online media and who the people you want to work with are then you need a properly considered plan on when and what to send out. You can’t be doing anything adhoc or randomly. Unstructured might be more fun but a plan keeps you on message, allows you to measure how well you’re doing and makes people more comfortable and familiar by the fact you are interacting them on a regular basis. Themes could be a week long education initiative, a week of special offers/discounts, a week of tips on how to use your products more efficiently etc. Themes allow you to be repetitive with your overall message without using the same enforcing updates again and again.

Tweak their bits, get reactions
Interactions here are key. They might be weak emotional engagements but you every comment on a blog, every reply or ReTweet on Twitter, every comment or the weak but effective “Like” on Facebook is someone taking time out to react to your content. Not job done but certainly a recognition of sorts to what you’ve done. So figure out what people like by past experience or see how they presently interact with their friends on Twitter and Facebook, what content gets them going and see can you provide content like that. Getting interactions too might be as simple as asking for them. Solicit opinions with your content, go away from the broadcast type telling of news and lecturing. Ask on Facebook, blogs, Twitter: “What do you think?” “What do you think should be done?”

Update daily, measure weekly
On a weekly basis, evaluate how your content plan is going. Comments on the blog posts, links to the post. Interactions on Facebook using the Insights option. Views on your YouTube video, links to the video on YouTube. To start with you’ll be in prospecting mode, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. From that you’ll become more experienced with this, making it easier to gear up and plan well in advance and having much better knowledge what will work based on what worked before. The Insights tool especially will tell you what age groups and genders are being responsive and which are not which should give you crucial data on what to change and what to keep.

Content Curation
Knowing what people like, you can be the one that acts like a mini-newsfeed for them. Summarising industry news, interesting blog posts, showing videos they might like etc. Think of the daily papers they have on Newstalk or Morning Ireland, can you do the same with websites that apply to your area? The Fluffy Links blog posts I write are one such example of content curation.

Zeitgeists
Budgets, breaking news, elections, Apple products, volcanoes – They all impact people and all give us the opportunity to share our take and our authority on issues. Also, when you think about it, the marketing for these events has been done by the media already so it’s a nice opportunity to tie in to something relevant if you also have something relevant to add to the mix.

Games and Apps on Facebook will now be able to send email invites to play the game (and join Facebook)

Online campaigns influenced UK voters, it seems.

Ten guidelines for running an online competition.

Passing the 100+ (genuine) followers on Twitter threshold is good for business.

Is marketing on Twitter a waste of time? Seems not.

Old but fantastic all the same. Watch the real-time purchasing map from Zappos.