Getting Your Social Platforms Ready

We talk a lot about making sure your website is technically fit for purpose on the content marketing side of our business, and this is a similar step that needs to be taken when planning for social media monetization.

First up, make sure you have the basics right such as whether your profile & cover pictures across the platforms are relevant and optimised for instance.  Next, make sure your page/profile has a history of strong content.  By this I mean make sure if someone lands on your page they can see good content going at least a few days back – if your page is established this should be the case anyway, whereas if you’re creating a new page we’d suggest waiting a few days to grow some content out around the page before attempting to grow it.

Once the basics are in place, things get a little more fun.  Naturally you need to understand your target market (or your existing page audience) to add the all important insight into your strategy.  There’s a few ways to do this, but a lot of this is covered in Simon Penson’s recent piece so we won’t delve too far into it here.

Now you know who your audience is (or who you want them to be) and what they engage with on other platforms and pages, it’s time to get your audience to the size you want it to be.  As a general rule, Facebook or Twitter audiences need to be in the region of 10,000 likes/followers for effective monetization and to allow for rigorous data for optimisation, although results can be seen with a smaller initial audience.

Whilst your audience is growing (or straight away if you are already there) you need to be engaging your audience.  Based on the target market and the work you’ve done to identify who they are and what they engage with, you should be drawing up a content strategy that doesn’t include any product/affiliate links over the initial period (at least a few weeks).

The purpose of the content strategy is to focus your efforts, regardless of platform used, and to allow you to monitor your engagement whilst systematically trialing different content types and flow structures.  Over this period you should be learning when your audience is most likely to click your links, how to structure your content to achieve higher CTR’s, what kind of imagery works best for your audience and how to keep your engagement levels and reach high.

Once you’ve figured all of this out and optimised your content to learn the best times and ways to drive your audience to the places you want them to go, it’s time to start thinking about monetization!

Monetization Options

The first question a lot of people ask on the monetization front is – what should I be selling from my social networks?

There are a few approaches, and it largely depends as to your situation as a company.  If you’re a brand or a company with your own products and services then naturally it makes complete sense to primarily push your own product and service range, however you don’t have to limit yourself to that.  Whether you have your own products or not, it’s always worth signing up for affiliate deals with the likes of Affiliate Window or Rakuten Linkshare.

Being on an affiliate network gives you a huge choice of offers to post about, meaning that regardless of what you may already sell, when Valentines or Mothers Day roll around for instance, you can post a link with your relevant content to an affiliate deal for flowers. You can make a whole business from just affiliate links within social, as long as you pick a vertical or a niche with potential and grow within it.

The third option is selling access to your audience through sponsored postings.  These are technically against Facebook’s terms, and a ruling this month by the Federal Trade Commission in the States  has made it clear that any sponsored posts on Twitter must be stated clearly within the promotional Tweet.

This is a much harder route to go down, and one that I wouldn’t particularly recommend.  Whilst you can generate more revenue per post this way if sponsored, this is a much harder route to monetization, and one that requires significant investment in audience building as you will need audiences potentially in the hundreds of thousands to get advertisers interested.

Which Platform Is Easiest To Monetize?

In our experience, right now it’s Facebook.  Facebook gives you the ability to have image led, strong content that you can manipulate the reach of through promoted newsfeed amplification.  Also, through the use of content targeting, Facebook allows you to essentially split test (within Facebook parameters) such as males v females, people in the UK v USA and so on.

It goes without saying that Facebook has the biggest reach of the possible networks, and with the advertising options available, it allows you to create the audience you want as fast as you want, meaning that if you are starting from scratch Facebook is definitely the way to go.

Pinterest naturally lends itself to strong monetization due to the dedicated audience and highly visual nature of the platform, however reach is more limited and the platform is much harder to manipulate (in terms of gaining new followers and promoting content) due to the lack of advertising options.

Of the rest, Twitter is actually fairly difficult to monetize effectively.  Because of the 140 character limit and the general noise and lack of filtration available, Twitter is not at all set up for sales generation in this sense.

We’d recommend creating your content plan for monetization much like you would a media plan – below is an example we’ve used recently on a new project for instance:

Tips For Monetization Tracking 

If you’re tracking the sale of your own products I’d recommend having a read of our recent piece on the Zazzle Media blog on measuring social ROI through Google analytics and unique URLs.  For affiliate tracking, the big affiliate networks tend to have fairly comprehensive capabilities around tracking clicks and revenue, and adding in clickref parameters to your URLs allow you to track this by post to allow you to optimise your monetization efforts further.

Key Takeaways

1. You can monetize your social media presence or create a new presence to monetize

2. The key to success is in the data – optimise your content and commercial deals based on CTR’s and sales, as well as engagement

3. Get the basics right first – don’t instantly go for the money, create a passionate audience of a robust size first on your chosen platform to learn from and engage with

4. Track your monetization efforts at every stage – use affiliate networks and your own tracking systems (e.g. Google Analytics) to make sure you have a full view on what’s working

5. Create a content & media plan – plan your content (including commercial posts) and plan any spend to promote your content or page in a media plan to determine which channel will give you the best ROI

Are you successfully monetizing a network of pages or are you thinking about doing so?  Add your findings in the comments or tweet me: @benharper87

Title image courtesy of http://www.newincite.com/

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The Zazzle blog is a place of expertise and insight, looking out into our wider industry from a (hopefully) objective viewpoint. Often we discuss the latest SEO developments or content marketing techniques, but in this post I intend to retreat back behind the scenes and talk about how we manage the delivery of content campaigns, in particular ‘big bang’ content; the peaks in the flow of our client editorial calendars.

Whilst the mainstay of any content plan is the ‘little and often’ work, e.g. written content placement and blog posts, to gain real reach and authority we must supplement this foundation work with high impact, large scale projects. These can take much longer to plan and produce, and can be effective over much longer periods of time. It is essential that these pieces are unique and powerful to get the viral effectiveness the client is looking for.

I’m talking about things like interactive infographics, games, big data pieces… Jquery and HTML5-led development pieces and the like.

DISCLAIMER: Before I start, I’d like to make clear that I am not a qualified project manager in terms of Prince II etc. Everything I advise in this post is based on experience, both good and bad! There are lots of posts around with more technical project management tips for content marketing

The Team

As these projects tend to be split into very clear sections, creating the right team for your project can be a smooth process:

-       1. The Creative Minds

• After receiving the brief from the client, get your most creative minds in a room. Leave them there. For a few hours. Maybe give them some coffee now and again.

After this, have them propose their top 5 ideas and remove any you don’t think are relevant for the client. It’s always best to propose more than one concept, otherwise the client (and your team) can end up barking up the wrong tree and before you know it you’re 20% into the project and it’s too late.

-       2. The Designer

• Once the client has agreed on a concept, it’s time to build the design brief. The concept chosen will have a massive influence on the designer you choose… Is there animation involved? Questions like this will lead you to the designer with the most relevant skillset.  This is especially important if you have a team of designers at your disposal.

-       3. The Developer

• Similarly to your design choice, the developer you choose must have the skillset required. We find that a lot of our interactive pieces demand heavy Jquery and custom CSS usage, so ensure you can call upon someone with that in their arsenal.

-       4. The Outreachers

• Ensure your outreach team has skill in the relevant vertical for the piece. This part of the team may also include social experts, to execute social amplification campaigns.

The Project Manager

Someone who can appraise and action everything mentioned in this post is simply essential for creating big bang content, as the lines are blurred between design project and web build. Employing web project management practices (requirements, spec, roadmap etc) can be invaluable to a big bang content project, as with the inclusion of development, so many more risks can rear their heads.

A checklist for your big bang project manager:

-       5. Quote accurately and ensure costs and deliverables (e.g. who is responsible for hosting the piece? How many rounds of feedback are allowed?) are agreed before project commences

-       6. Be crystal clear on the measures of success. This will 100% affect the way you execute the project and how time/effort is distributed throughout the roadmap

-       7. Be realistic with your roadmap (the client will always push for less time), but also build in contingency time to accommodate delays or high levels of amends

-       8. Always confirm action points and who is responsible. This is especially important when working with very precise subject matters, e.g. finance, legal etc. It may be that the client is in a better position to execute the research or supply the data. That’s cool, as long as it is defined and agreed

-       9. Assess the requirements of the client and choose project tools accordingly (I’ll talk more about this in the Client and Tools sections of this post)

-       10. Be adaptable. All the planning in the world cannot prepare you for new ideas, delays and shifts in focus. As long as the spec isn’t breached, embrace the changes and be in a position to reprioritise

-       11. Speaking of the spec, never be afraid to reject additions to a project if they go beyond the spec. Scope creep is the PM’s nemesis, but it is up to the PM themselves to manage it.

-       12. Sign off everything, and get sign off on everything. Internal and external approval at regular intervals is the only way to ensure all stakeholders are bought in at every stage of the project

-       13. The brief is your best friend. Always refer back to it. A project that doesn’t meet the brief is never going to meet the original client requirements

-       14. Big bang content pieces often involve work post-build, i.e. outreach and placement, so ensure this is considered in all stages of your planning

The Client

15. The most important piece of the jigsaw, everything you do in this project should be tailored to the client’s needs. What is especially important is identifying the type of client you are working with, then tailoring communications to that type.

There are a few articles around, some informative and some more humorous (and some even more humorous) which define different types of client, but I have listed the most common elements to consider here:

• Is the client tech/dev savvy?
• What’s the client’s SEO knowledge level?
• Do they prefer to be heavily involved?
• Are they happy to stand back and trust in your work?
• Do they need constant updates?
• Where do SEO, content marketing and social media sit within the client’s marketing mix?
• Is their business process-driven?

The client’s happiness with progress throughout the build will ultimately affect the end result, particularly whether or not your deadline will be met. If the client needs very frequent comms, which usually results in lots of rounds of feedback, then adapting your build plan to this can help you meet those all important end goals.

The Tools

I’m not going to talk about the tools I/we use here at Zazzle, as they might not be relevant for you or your project. Instead I’ll talk about the types of tools you may want to consider, including examples.

-       16. Wireframing

• Balsamiq
  • Easily shareable, consistent

-       17. Task management

• Podio
  • Great for large teams
• Basecamp
  • Perfect for very structured projects
• Trello
  • Free!

-       18. Comms tools

• Google+ Hangout
  • Spot on for multi-stakeholder progress updates, easy to share info during the hangout, plus promotes relationship building via Circle adds with other stakeholders
• Skype
  • Classic!
• Not forgetting face-to-face and over the phone!

-       19. Planning tools

• Lucidchart
  • Great free Chrome app for workflows
• Excel/Gdocs
  • Create simple, clear roadmaps and Gantt charts (although you may decide to choose a more dedicated tool for your Gantts)
  • Also great for collating data and research in one place for all stakeholders to see and approve

iAcquire’s Mike King gives great tool tips in this recent Slideshare deck

20. With all of the above tools, especially the project tracking examples, the one question you’ll need to consider is: do I share in the client? The wrong decision could make or break your project. Base your decision on the client type you’re working with. You must manage the stream of work visible to the client and the client type will define how much or how little you should share, and how often.

Mark Leech is Operations Manager at Zazzle.

The post 20 Ways To Better Project Manage Your ‘Big Bang’ Content Campaigns appeared first on Zazzle Media.

However, for all football fans (especially if you love or hate United) the question now is who will take the reigns at the countries most successful club?

We’ve done a little social data mining across a variety of tools to come up with our index and have compared this to online bookmakers to show the audience sentiment vs the odds for the next manager.

On the social side, this table is sorted by social preference – judged by like and Tweet data, whereas the Paddy Power column is sorted by their latest odds (as of 10am, UK):

This shows some interesting differences.  Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville are preferred on social, however this is largely down to the like profiling scewing the data as they are Manchester United heroes already so have a lot of likes and sentiment from Manchester United fans already.  Pep Guardiola is a much more interesting one.  He’s by no means the favourite with the bookmakers as he is contracted to join Bayern Munich this summer, however Manchester United fans are obviously admirers.  His record at Barcelona explains this, but considering Barcelona twice beat Manchester United in Champions League finals this level of admiration is impressive.

The bookmakers are largely suggesting that this is now a two horse race between Jose Mourinho (the Real Madrid manager) and David Moyes of Everton.  Social data certainly backs up the Jose Mourinho claims.  His popularity amongst Manchester United fans is curious.  Manager of big rivals Chelsea for a number of years, before eventually reaching Real Madrid where he now manages an old United favourite in Cristiano Ronaldo, you would think he wouldn’t be liked by United fans.  However, nearly 85,000 United fans in the UK follow Jose Mourinho related pages and profiles on Facebook & Twitter, and when combined with the audience’s sentiment today places him as the social media favourite of the two big contenders.

Whilst this is all for fun and largely conjecture (with a little science behind it), this shows some of the great data that is available within social media platforms that can be leveraged for the benefit of your brand for online and offline activity.

Image courtesy of the BBC

The post The End Of An Era: What Social Can Tell Us About The Next Manchester United Manager appeared first on Zazzle Media.

There can be little doubt then of its continued dominance.

The problem is that with so much opportunity investment in the space will accelerate faster than ever, raising the barrier to entry for those looking to gain a larger piece of the pie.

Search marketing is the defacteo route to market for the vast majority of retailers attempting to grow revenues. The question is, however, is; is there a better way? A smarter way to get ahead of the curve and future proof your strategy away from a complete reliance on Google dollar? The answer is undoubtedly ‘yes!’

While search offers by far the strongest option at present there can be little doubt that social is catching up fast and as we become more accepting of the commercialisation of the major platforms we create opportunity for monetisation.

Go Social

If you’re in eCommerce, social should absolutely be a consideration when it comes to dividing up your marketing plans.  That’s not to say social should definitely take a big part of your marketing budgets, it all depends on the brand, the situation, and your return on investment calculations.

Once you’ve justified investing in social, the key question is, where should we focus?

Focus

For e-commerce stores it’s largely become a three-horse race between Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest when it comes to where brands should focus.  Unfortunately, the likes of Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and co don’t really cut the mustard when it comes to driving online sales right now.

The first thing you need to decide is what are your priorities and goals.  For the vast majority of online stores the only goal is driving sales, so your decision is all going to be driven by average order values, conversion rates and ultimately return on investment.  Some stores may be focussing more on ‘softer’ metrics from social, for example brand awareness, however the ultimate goal should always by ROI.

The Rise of Pinterest

For the past year, Pinterest has largely been seen as the social media saviour of e-commerce stores.  Pinterest doesn’t have the user base of Facebook & Twitter in the UK, but it is fast growing and the users it does have are prime eCommerce targets.  With the audience being predominantly female, and of a higher education level generally (anecdotally suggesting higher disposable incomes), brands that fit the audience interest profiles, particularly fashion and lifestyle stores are chomping at the bit to get involved.

A recent Shopify study has found that Pinterest is now level with Twitter when it comes to clickthroughs from social networks to Shopify powered stores.  Interestingly, 3.6% of traffic in that study is more than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined.

The same study also found that orders from Pinterest referrals had the highest average order value at $80, which is double that of referrals from Facebook, and much higher than Twitter.

Pinterest’s influence on e-commerce has been wider than just the rise of its network.  There has been a Pinterest-ization of the e-commerce experience more generally, with brands even as big as eBay going to a grid look & feel.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and plenty of brands clearly feel Pinterest are doing something right with their user experience.  This all plays into Pinterest’s hands.  Users are already in a semi-shopping mode, looking for ideas and creating boards (acting as wish lists in many cases) – the fact that this experience is now similar to many stores means the mindset is becoming even more purchase focussed.

However, the fundamental issue with Pinterest right now is that there is a lack of control for brands.  Unlike with Facebook, brands can’t promote their content or their presence in an organised way, meaning that Pinterest can take up a lot of time and effort with low returns.

How about F-Commerce?

Almost every brand fits into Facebook.  The main debate for brands over the next few months will be in where they direct their Facebook traffic.  There’s two main options; sending traffic straight to the e-commerce website itself, or to use an f-commerce app.  Intuitively, most brands want to send traffic to their websites, and rightly so as that transition takes the consumer to a buying mode as they are in a purchasing experience on your store.  With f-commerce stores, the app with your products is still within the Facebook frame which is still seen as an unnatural area for physically purchasing, however this mentality may change over time, allowing f-commerce to live up to its potential.  In the short term though there is evidence that f-commerce apps can work and drive sales, however these need to be properly conversion tested versus the performance of your website to allow you to determine where to send your traffic.

The main advantage of the Facebook platform is the potential of advertising your products in a controlled way.  For example, you can show a product post for a hat, and show it to the audience that you’ve built, but also to a whole new audience who are interested in hats in your target demographic, but have no current connection to your brand.  These new users can be shown your product with a link to purchase it in their Newsfeed, alongside content from friends, family, and pages they do like.  This gives your product a highly relevant placement that gets a lot of devoted attention and looks natural within the feed.

In terms of engagement, Facebook comes out on top.  As the only major player with a defined algorithm (EdgeRank), brands know what they need to do in order to ensure their content is seen by the most relevant members of their audience.  With Twitter, where all content is served up from brands users follow, it’s almost impossible to cut through the noise.  With Facebook, brands can stand out by having consistently engaging content which will mean their messaging will take a higher priority in users Newsfeeds.

Many brands decide to focus their attentions on Twitter.  Of the three, Twitter is actually the least suited to e-commerce.  As the above Shopify study showed, Twitter is level with Pinterest in terms of e-commerce traffic driving, however with a much larger user base to work from.  Combine this with lower average order values and Twitter begins to look like the ugly sister in this equation.

Twitter isn’t cut out for shopping

Twitter is largely a news and interest based platform, and is not suited to a shopping experience.  The text based nature of the Twitter feed, and the type of content users are expecting to see, means that product or incentive based posts don’t stand out and if they do they tend to jar with the rest of the Twitter experience.

The key to choosing which network(s) to focus on and to what extent all comes down to your individual metrics.  As a general rule of thumb Facebook & Pinterest are most likely going to work best for you if you’re in e-commerce.  Facebook works for most brands, whereas Pinterest is more suited to female friendly brands, particularly those selling fashion, home, beauty and lifestyle products.  But, which is best for you depends on your return on investment calculations, your target audience and your ability to test, track, optimise, and monetise.  The key mantra should always be that you shouldn’t invest in something you can’t track through, which gives social a distinct advantage, as I previously discussed here.

Key Takeaways

1.   Base your decisions on data: don’t go with vanity metrics, or work solely based on your competitors actions.  Use your data to test and optimise for what is going to work best for your brand in line with your goals

 2.   Pinterest is small, but has high average order values: if your brand fits, Pinterest is a great environment where you can get good clickthrough rates and high average order values.  However, bear in mind that in the UK Pinterest is still very much in a growth and development stage

 3.   Facebook gives control: Facebook gives you the most control in terms of driving reach, ensuring engagement, and getting your products in front of a relevant audience at will

Questions or comments, get in touch below or on @benharper87 or @zazzlemedia

Title image courtesy of: www.posteurop.org

The post On Social, Where Should eCommerce Brands Focus? appeared first on Zazzle Media.

In the not too distant future the Internet is planning on being able to read your mind.

I haven’t just eaten a large slice of ‘space cake’. I’m not even that mad. But if you follow search and social patents with any degree of interest there is a lot of activity right now around how to better understand emotional interaction as the ultimate ‘metric’ for measuring the value/quality of content.

And while understanding your reaction to what you see may seem like pie-in-the-sky’ it’s actually not as far away as you might think.

That transformational tech has monumental repercussions for how search and social algorithms could work in the future.

MIT

Over at MIT in the USA a team of neurologists and tech experts are already beginning to figure it out. Led by a scientist called Rosalind Picard the Affective Computing Research Group has developed technology already being used by major brands to test out the emotional connection of new advertising on potential viewers/consumers.

Using inbuilt cameras and a new kind of sensor that picks up on ‘electrodermal response’ their ‘tech’ to read facial expressions and connecting brain response to work out what we really think, or feel, about what we are seeing. Clearly this has huge potential benefits for agencies creating content…

Facebook

The Facebook Like button is one of the most celebrated pieces of the Facebook success story. And it gives the Palo Alto Company huge mountains of personalization data from which they can serve you more of the good stuff and less of the people and content you don’t so much. But in the context of real world emotional understanding it is the equivalent of trying to perform keyhole brain surgery with a mallet.

As humans we don’t simply press a button to inform those around us what our emotional state is do we? Instead we use those telltale and universal facial expressions to share our feelings.

It is not difficult therefore to see how the world would change should our computers and mobile devices are equipped with technology that can read those subtle signs and inform our content choices as a result.

A smile would tell a search engine or social network that we should probably be seeing more of whatever it is we are looking at.

The connotations are immense. That level of data would take personalization to a new level, and would also mean the death of an icon – that Like button we mentioned earlier.

For Facebook it would turbocharge Edgerank to a new level, and may also put them in pole position in the race to provide a unique and personalized content experience for everyone.

It would also put the Palo Alto company in prime position to own not just the biggest audience online but to also own the tools to bring them the content that matters.

As recently as early April Facebook announced the first ‘live’ step in this long process by introducing ‘emoticon-based status updates’ to its main feed.

While this is pretty clunky right now it prove that Facebook is very interested in adding another layer to its ever-expanding data pile; that of how we feel. Why? Because ad dollars will flock to that like ducks to water and as marketers we can utilize such information too in creating content to fit moods as well as audience types.

Google

Imagine a semantic search engine powered by personalization technology that works not on links and the document retrieval system that Google is using currently but on facial expressions and real emotion.

Semantic association and co-occurrence is already something that has been well documented as a future Google direction and those that follow the company may also be aware that it has made a considerable hire in its quest to develop what it describes as a ‘computer brain’.

Ray Kurzweil is an Artificial Intelligence expert and joined the business to help it develop capabilities to understand human emotion and other things.

His input was crucial in a recent ‘test’ to attempt to simulate the processes of a human brain (yep that really happened!).

In that test Google scientists exposed a giant web of interconnected computers to YouTube over a number of days to see what it may begin to recognize.

The answer was, of course, CATS!

Picking up on emotion is a key component of that research and as Google described a ‘deep learning’ algorithm used within the test there can be little doubt of their intention to use this kind of AI in the Core algo of the future for ranking our websites, content and information.

Google patent expert Bill Slawski believes the company’s recent acquisition of Behav.io is the next step in its quest to accelerate intelligent data sorting.

He explained: “Google has released a couple of patent filings about collecting location-based data from mobile devices and quarantining that data, and finding ways to scrub personalized data out of it. Given Google’s work with predictive algorithms for Google Now, and similar technologies is going to be enhanced considerably with ideas from the people working on Behav.io. They are spending a lot of time and resource in building up a team capable of really moving this on quickly now.”

What it might mean for marketing

Being able to personalize content based on emotional reaction could open up a whole new area of opportunity for content planning and creation.

Without doubt such a system would skew content creation towards the humorous or emotional and stories that play on those strongest of human emotions would certainly take precedence in any plan.

A funny animated Gif or meme or jaw dropping photograph or real life story about a fight against cancer would seemingly gain more traction and visibility within such a system and there would have to be controls on how that is surfaced to prevent emotive spamming becoming the new black hat tactic of the moment.

It does however also offer great data insight as content and website design or whole ad campaigns could be tested prior to release to gauge the Emotive Value and ensure a hit.

Whatever emotional intelligence has in store the one thing we do know is that it is not going away. The guys and girls at MIT and those looking to commercialize it will make sure of that. And while planning for such a day may seem pie-in-the-sky so did personal mobile internet just a few years ago.

Expect to see this integrated into social first as it makes much more sense as a key component of Edgerank, for instance as social should be driven more by emotional connection.

For Google the challenge is to be able to use AI at scale and across the web. While emotional signals will really help some niches (think food, automotive and other passion points) it will be limited in others (such as engineering and other less ‘sexy’ B2B markets).

In many ways it is the same challenge that faces the search giant in integrating social signals generally. While it would work well in niches where sharing is common it would die-a-death quickly in others.

I asked a number of respected industry experts their opinions on how such ‘technology’ may effect digital marketing in the future. Here is their take on the issue:

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz

“If search ever becomes truly intelligent, marketers likely will have far less opportunity to appear in a list of results like they do today.

“Your company/brand/product/content will either be THE answer to a query, or it won’t appear at all. This will mean a rise in importance of non-search channels for discovery and a fall in the opportunity that search provides.”

Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

“I love Kurzweil and believe we are headed that direction.  Marketing is always a mixture of art and science…so if the technology gives marketers greater hints at how to develop better messaging, then I’m all for it.”

Matt Wallaert, Behavioural Scientist at Bing

“Remember that the best salespeople have always been social humans, because of their ability to understand and adapt to the social signals of the people around them.”

“As computers become better at interpreting those signals, they’ll be able to do more of the things that human salespeople have always done, at lower costs.  And that means increasing automation in marketing, and shifting the role of the marketer to psychologist and artist.”

“On the one hand, marketers will increasingly be in charge of actually understanding how people think at a basic, scientific level, in order to correct the computer automation.  And on the other, marketers will need to be increasingly creative about using those psychological learnings.”

“At a macro level, this probably means a shift from demand generation (in the form of appealing ads, for example) to demand service (making it increasingly easy to act on authentic human desires).  Which in turn means less advertising and more lead gen – the good marketer will be the one who can make the actual experience of doing something the most rewarding.”

Bill Slawski, Webimax and SEObytheSea

“The capabilities that computers have in the areas of deep learning, and making more and better connections with data have been growing, but it’s
probably going to be a while before we see some really big impacts.”

“Applying deep learning approaches to that kind of wide-spread sensor-based data, and using it with predictive analytics is interesting, and may help identify potential health risks in our environment, how illnesses spread, which apps people are likely to download based upon where they live (mentioned as an example in one of the MIT patent filings regarding mobile sensor data), and much more.”

“”More “aware” computing may not just be a matter of more computing power and better algorithms, but also in providing more senses (more ways to collect data) to computing systems, as well as protecting privacy and information about individuals.”

Chad Pollitt, Director of Marketing, Digital Relevance/SlingshotSEO

“Marketers around the world struggle with determining the online sentiment of their campaigns. There’s lots of SaaS tools out there that take a stab at sentiment based on big data keyword mining, but many marketers are still forced to do a visual inspection of tweets, Facebook posts, blog comments, etc. because the available solutions are too inaccurate”

“Marketers have to manually assign sentiment by clicking on the smiley, neutral or frown face icon in one particular solution. This process is very time consuming and inefficient. The end result is that the data harvested from these tools can be considered untrustworthy or sketchy, at best.”

“Facebook’s new emoticons removes the need for big data sentiment keyword mining and eliminates the need for manual interpretation of sentiment. It empowers the content creator to define their own emotional intent. In this regard, it makes a marketers job much easier.”

The post Digital Marketing When Computers Can Think appeared first on Zazzle Media.

However, just as I was starting to learn how to quickly and effectively create innovative content ideas and write truly great content from them, I realised these were not the only two hurdles I would have to overcome…

As content marketing surges in popularity, the competition within the field is becoming increasingly fierce as a result – more and more people are trying to join the race in a bid to grab their own slice of the digital marketing cake. But, it’s not only this rise in competitors that’s hindering our ability to get to the finish line first – because, as more people join, more and more barriers are also starting to appear with them.

Getting The Message Right

Enter content marketing hurdle number three; attempting to improve conversion with the RIGHT message!

With every Tom, Dick and Harry now trying to jump on the content marketing bandwagon, it seems as though site owners and bloggers are becoming increasingly fussy when it comes to hosting guest content on their site – and it’s not just because you’ve caught them on a bad day.

Not only are response rates lowering, but if you do manage to charm them into sending you a reply, then it’s likely that they’ll only want you to write an article on x topic, with x amount of words, with only one do-follow link and absolutely no other authority in-content links whatsoever.

So, why are site owners becoming progressively picky?

Is it all down to what we say in our outreach emails? Could it be down to what ideas we propose to them? Or, is it because our outreach emails are getting lost amongst Tom, Dick and Harry’s?

Well, if I’m being honest, it’s a combination of all three.

Getting More Creative…With Data

Because, as bloggers’ inbox’s get clogged up with bog-standard, unimaginative and boring outreach emails from individuals only interested in getting links rather than creating great, relevant and original content, the genuine and passionate content marketers amongst are unfortunately starting to get tarnished with the same content spam brush.

So, how can we make sure our outreach emails stand out from Tom, Dick and Harry’s?

Well, just as we strive to do with our content, we need to create great outreach emails that contain groundbreaking information, suggestions and ideas in order to do so.

We need to restore the faith in bloggers to show them that there are writers out there who really do want to create fantastic content that will wow their audience, get tons of shares and greatly benefit their site as a result.

And, if you’ve paid any attention to the title then you may just be able to guess that data may be thing to help us…

Real Data Creates Real Content

As creative people, we can try to come up with all the ideas in the world. But quite often, many of these ideas are already staring us straight in the face – thanks to our good old friend the Internet.

And it was as I was researching potential ideas for a recent guest posting campaign that I suddenly thought to myself, “Surely there must be a way of finding out what kinds of things people actually want to read?”

Well, luckily for us, there is.

Because there are so many tools out there that can help us to come up with those innovative content ideas that we’re always on the look out for – thanks to the data they provide.

And, as well as helping us to master the thinking-of-great-content-ideas hurdle, this kind of data is perfect for helping us to master that new impressing-bloggers-with-great-outreach-suggestions hurdle, too.

Because, if you’ve taken the time to research a particular blog and select informative data from it, then you’re likely to prove to the blogger that you’ve:
a) taken a real interest in their blog,
b) actually read it rather than have just picked it out of a random Google search, and…
c) actually wanted to find out more about what kind of content is actually of real interest to their audience, so you can help them to create more of it.

Now, if that’s not grabbing the blogger’s attention, then I don’t know what else is.

So, to help you master that third hurdle, here are a few great tools that will help you do so with ease.

Semantic Data

As fully-fledged digital marketing professionals, I’m sure none of us can deny the power of semantics when it comes to our everyday jobs.

And here at Zazzle Media, it’s of so much value to us that it’s a fundamental part of our content idea creation process for every single one of our creative brainstorming sessions.

Semantic search attempts to decipher a searcher’s intent every time they use Google, using the relationships between keywords to help us understand a little bit more about what users are most searching for.

So, how exactly does data from semantic phrases help us with our outreach idea suggestions? Well, that’s exactly what I’m about to demonstrate, through the help of these great tools:

Übersuggest

So, for my previous post “Content Idea Generation > What To Do When The Inspiration Dries Up”, I briefly touched upon how Übersuggest can help you to come up with fantastic content ideas when your creative thinking is a bit rusty.

I believe it’s well worth a second mention, because as well as being the perfect tool for coming up with great content ideas, it’s also great for helping us to inform content suggestions when we’re doing outreach.

Übersuggest is a fantastic keyword suggestion tool that scours the web to bring up an alphabetical list of all of the most common phrases people are searching for, relative to the term you’re trying to find more about.

By helping us to understand more about what people are searching for, it can help us to understand more about what they actually like to read.

So, if Übersuggest has helped you to come up with a few article ideas, and you’ve used these to pitch some suggestions to a blogger, don’t just stop there; use the data to back-up your article idea suggestions.

Use it to say something along the lines of, “I’d love to write an article for your wonderful blog based on the topics a, b and c. After taking some time to research relative keywords, I have found the users are most searching for d, e and f. As a keen reader of your blog, I have noticed that you haven’t yet posted any content around this, and so as I feel it would be of interest to your readers, I’d love to write something for you.”

Now, not only will you be writing content that their audience will actually want to read, but you’ll also be offering the site owner content that maintains clear SEO benefits too.

Soovle

Soovle is very similar to Ubersuggest in that it uses Google Suggest to populate ideas around a specific idea. Obviously this is a strong argument in convincing a blogger to take your work if you can back it with data suggesting that people search for it.

The tool does this across not just Google but other key Expert Document sites also, such as Wikipedia etc. to supercharge your data.

Google Keyword Tool (not strictly semantic but useful to build the argument)

Although the Google Keyword Tool is not strictly a semantic tool it can be really useful in backing up the argument that your idea is a GREAT idea. The more data you have in your arsenal the better. It can also be a great tool for helping us to inform content ideas and suggestions when doing outreach in its own right of course to.

In the same way as Übersuggest, it uses data from the search engine to highlight keyword searches relative to a particular term.

But, rather than being a fairly general overview as Übersuggest is, it puts real numbers next to real terms in order to show you exactly what people have been searching for over time.

So, you can use it in exactly the same way as Übersuggest to put forward content ideas to your blogger – but rather than highlight the data generally, you can use the volumes highlighted in the global monthly searches and local monthly searches to really help back up your case.

Social Data

As well as semantic data, there’s also a whole host of social data available on the Internet than can really help to identify what people are reading, sharing and talking about, in order to help us suggest on-trend material to bloggers.

Zazzle MD Simon Penson recently wrote a more in depth piece on this over at Search Engine Watch if you want to read more.

No one can deny the power of social media, and no one can further deny the data it provides – not even your bloggers. After all, social media is what everyday people (like Tom, Dick and Harry) use on a day-to-day basis – so the data it provides is real life, real people data.

And, there are other tools that are perfect for providing you with this kind of data in order to help you inform content suggestions during your outreach:

Bottlenose

Bottlenose is a great tool that highlights what topics are trending around a particular keyword, around all social media platforms.

All you need to do is type in the chosen keyword that you’re looking to write more about and Bottlenose will instantly show you all of the popular stories, mentions and social commentaries, based on those words.

In a similar way to Übersuggest and the Google Keyword Tool, you can use the data it brings up to back-up your content suggestions by highlighting that what you want to write about is currently trending in the social media sphere.

As bloggers will want to make that all of their content is on-trend as possible, they won’t be able to refuse an offer of getting content that will fit in perfectly with what people are currently talking about.

Cognitive SEO Social Visibility Tool

The team at Cognitive has recently released a fabulous tool that helps you to use social data site in order to further inform content ideas and suggestions.

Although Bottlenose is great for grabbing data from the general social media field, Cognitive SEO’s Social Visibility tool is perfect for honing in on what’s doing well socially for a specific site.

Start by logging into your account (or signing up to one if you haven’t done so already), and start a new campaign using the URL of the particular blog you want to find out more about.

Then, head to the ‘Social Visibility’ tab at the top of your dashboard:

Here, the tool will bring up all of summary of all of the social data for all of the articles hosted on that particular URL.

For the purpose of using data to help and inform great content suggestions, I’d scroll down and use the ‘Most Shared Pages’ section.

Because here you can see which pieces of content have had the most Twitter, Facebook and Google+ shares in total in the history of the site.

And, it’s these results that can help you to come up with content suggestions that you know a site owner’s audience will be interested in.

Use the ranks to see what kinds of topics the top rankings covered, and use these topics to inform further suggestions to the site owner. Use them to say something along the lines of, “I’ve taken time to research your blog, and I have noticed that x, y and z articles have received the most social shares since they were posted back in [date]. I would love to write a follow-up piece to revisit topic x for your audience as I feel that it would not only interest them, but I feel that a second coverage could help to benefit your site socially even further.”

And, there are other tools that can further help you to do this too, including:

Facebook Power Editor

Increasingly the ad tools created by the powerhouse social platforms are becoming an integral part of all of our work around idea creation and Facebook’s Power Editor is perhaps the best as it can tell us more about how many people may be interested in a particular topic based on Likes.

This is really useful when it comes to arguing the case for something a little more ‘off-topic’ as you can prove relevance to the audience.

SEOMoz Fresh Web Index

For those not yet familiar with the fresh index from Moz take some time to play with it. It is not yet the finished article, but again it can be great as a tool to mine super fresh insight about topics or a brand. We use it to grab outreach targets as well as ideas for follow ups as it pulls the latest mentions of a keyword and where they came from.

This can be hugely useful if you have a topic preset but want to find a place to put it.

Final Thoughts

Not only will doing all of these help you to come up with great suggestions that you know people have enjoyed reading in the past, but doing so will also undoubtedly help to set you apart from the rest and give you that all-important outreaching head start against every other Tom, Dick and Harry running the content marketing race.

The post Using Data to Improve Content Outreach Conversion appeared first on Zazzle Media.

Zazzle MD Simon Penson was one of those asked to ‘speak’ and he was supported by a number of ‘Zazzlers’ who captured as many of the key takeaways from the event as possible. Below you will find the key points from the most impactful sessions, distilling the most useful ‘learnings’ for those that want the very latest opinions from the search marketing world:

UPDATES TO BE ADDED AS THEY HAPPEN (OR AS SOON AS WE HAVE WORKING WIFI:))

THURSDAY

Link Removal & Google Penalties Panel

• If your site is penalised, don’t panic. Calm down, sit back and analyse the data. Find out exactly what’s causing the problem.
• Use Google Analytics to pin point when the traffic/ rankings dropped.
• Google sent out 3 different responses to manual penalties
• Loss of traffic, no warning
• Loss of traffic, with warning
• Warning, with no traffic drop
• There seems to be threshold as to whether you lose rankings or not.
• There are two types of penalty messages
• One is a warning indicating Google has dealt with the unnatural links themselves
• One is a warning saying you need to deal with the unnatural links.
• Bing Webmaster Tools is more transparent than Google’s counterpart
• Go through all previous link building contacts you have to start removing the links.

How to sift through link data

• Use as many link sources as possible.
• Keep refreshing the link data to capture any new links found.
• Make sure you disavow and links you have removed and 404ed already so that Google is aware of it straight away.
• Disavow the full domains as much as possible,

How to Define a Bad links

• Duplicate IP clusters
• Check for dupe who is domain info
• Look for the use of the same email address as a way to discover link networks.
• Link Risk Management needs to be reviewed monthly.
• Can you just disavow links, Yes but its not recommended and highly unsuccessful. Do both link removal and disavow.
• Prove to Google you have changed your ways.
• Only reconsider if you are 100%  sure that you have a manual penalty. If you have an algorithmic penalty and you reconsider you are only flagging yourself up.
• When you have disavowed, you can reconsider for a manual penalty after 24 hours as the manual reviewer will compare your disavow list against your link profile.

Ross Hudgens:

• Content Marketing is a long term strategy that requires commitment and intensity to work. People quit too easily.
• Google Analytics Trackback is great for tracking links over time.
• Allinurl:/tag/BRAND advanced searches is a great way to track activity around a brand. Use the ‘by time’ dropdown to see over short or longer periods. Useful when looking for activity around bigger content campaigns.
• Create employee pages on your site to offer a better place to link to other than their Twitter page.
• Use your Twitter Bio to ask people to link to the RIGHT page for you when citing your work. This ensures links benefit you not Twitter.
• Email people that link to your Twitter to reclaim links.
• Use brand misspelling checks to find hidden links that you can convert into correct links.
• Yesware email plugin is really useful when it comes to tracking outreach. Watch for email opens and follow up.
• Image Raider is a new tool for tracking image use. Makes it easy to spot those using your images so you can ask for a link.
• Read Nudge, a business book about influencing people around decision making. Massively useful in converting people from your content.

Marcus Tandler:

• Google is getting smarter at discovering keyword stuffing, bad links, irrelevant content, content that’s not unique and spam.
• With the new Penguin algorithmic update, not afraid to hit big brands with penalties if they’re being pushy with any of the above.  Has to be able to TRUST links.
• Companies can apply for reconsideration in order to maintain visibility and page ranking.
• You can validate paid for links if it is not obvious they have been paid for – this is a way around the algorithm.
• You can disavow bad links if you believe that your site has been harmed by pool quality links – ONLY if you know what you are doing and if you’ve know exactly what you’ve done.
• Google is an effective algo and has an effective PR strategy which encourages brands to monitor their SEO strategy.
• Content marketing is best for sustainable link building, whereas infographics are best for organic link building. This is the rinse & repeat strategy.
• platforms, your industry, your niche and track your rivals. It’s important to identify linkerati within your nicke.
• As well as needing to trust links, it also needs to trust AUTHORS.
• Google+ is currently considered a social LAYER rather than a social NETWORK.
• User engagement is about shares, retweets and clicks. Need to identify who your engagement is and who likes the content.
• Google wont replace links with social signals – they consider it to be spam.
• Content now appears on different platforms across the web. Authors need to be trusted as anonymity may equal irrelevance as an author.
• Google+ needs to be spam proof before it can be algorithmed.
• To gain relevance as an author in the future, you need to:
  - Be active in your community
  - Be an industry expert
  - Product great, relevant content
  - Have opinions
  - Be controversial
• Links may carry different weight depending on the likelihood of the surfer clicking  them.
• The future of SEO is TRAFFIC – When google believes a user has found what they are looking for, the sites will be trusted.
• SEO agencies should use data to improve upon searches.
• Links may count for more if a search is satisfied.
• Build links for USERS not SEARCH ENGINES.
• Traffic encourages better SEO, better content and higher consideration of users.

FRIDAY

Sean Walsh: How Social Media is Revolutionising Sports & Entertainment 

• Manchester United are a bad example as they inexplicably don’t have a Twitter account
• Man City are doing a great job across channels
• Social is no longer something that you shift onto your intern, need a thought out strategy with execution
• Connected stadiums – Man City created a #blueview hashtag where fans could tweet their views and then see them on screens in the concourse at half time
• Problem in many stadiums is poor connectivity which clubs are working to rectify
• 48 million people on Twitter follow a football team
• Sports teams need to focus on how they can leverage their offline presence to their advantage online.  Valencia FC in Spain are a good example, when they couldn’t get a shirt sponsor they put their Twitter handle across the front of their home kit
• City opened up data that fans could share – stats on possession, assists, goals etc
• Hearts FC in Edinburgh created an app where fans could order their half time pies from their seats based on social feedback
• Some sports have started using Ref head cams whereby the ref wears a head cam and the video is uploaded to YouTube for fans to see the game from the refs view
• Great examples in entertainment include ibelieveinharveydent.com which is a website that launched to build up to the release of The Dark Knight film.  It put the users into a distorted reality, as if they were part of the film – and the content on the page changed with the release of the film, as if the Joker had hacked it, creating a great content experience for users
• Bad examples in entertainment include the likes of Coronation St who regularly trend on Twitter when their episodes show but do not make the most of it
• Shops and other environments should start encouraging engagement through Twitter and other channels
• You should have an editorial calendar in place for social as well and have it align with your other channels
• Focus needs to be on engaging the audience, not broadcasting at them
• Twitter is the second screen now and brands need to come to terms and embrace this
• Launch of socialslurp.co.uk to showcase good and bad examples
• For all content as yourself: Who cares? Who wants to read this? Why will they find it interesting? Will anyone find it valuable?

Jeremy Waite: How much is a fan worth? (if anything…)

• Level of knowledge in the average boardroom is very low
• If they don’t understand the value of social they will continue to invest in things they do understand (even if they can’t measure them), e.g. TV, radio, print
• Social is about finding the people who matter most, there’s a misconception that social is cheap and easy and at a boardroom level there is an education piece around this
• Syncapse survey stated that a fan is worth $136 – this is not true as it’s completely variable by brand and the way they did it doesn’t quite work out
• 90% of content marketers only track engagement metrics – not ROI
• Social is one area where you can beat your competitors without having to match their spend – it’s a level playing field
• Just because we can measure everything, doesn’t mean that we should
• 5 ways to measure the worth of a fan – sales (e-commerce), brand awareness, brand preference, brand advocacy, ad recall
• Brands should be hiring more analysts and data scientists and less community managers
• The half life of a tweet is 6-7 minutes
• A fan and a like are completely different things
• Brand preference is survey led based on ad variation splitting with different sample sets
• ROI can only mean return on investment. Return on engagement/interactions/creativity etc is all irrelevant

Panel: Infographics, Data and Inbound Content

• Infographics have become much more difficult today, as there is increased competition
• Infographics still have 2-3 years left
• Infographics are swamped with spam

Brainstorming Process

• Identify your niche/target audience/content type
• Don’t decide on doing an infographic straight away, base that decision on research
• Group together people of different backgrounds to come up with different ideas
• Focus on client needs, what’s being talked about, and what is causing buzz
• Outreach to people for placements first else the content won’t have any use.
• Contact journalists and bloggers see what they’re interested in and what they’ve got coming up get them involved throughout the process to build a relationship for the future

Design

• Two sizes
• No control of location
• Creating content that hooks then brings into the proper location – more seo value
• Link to interactive piece
• Difficulty in planning and story rather than creation for interactive infographics
• Thinking in 3D for interactive
• Motion graphics
• Tools are not the answer but adds value to custom bespoke content that gets results
• Need to work to get infographic shares
• Wireframe with clients
• Black and white wireframe – focus on composition and content – remove emotional attachment

• Matlab
• Graphica
• Tablo a SVG into illustrator
• Infographics tend to either me data focused or story focused, analytical or emotive

Christoph Cemper: Risk in link building

• Link building used to be easy and a lot more fun
• All of our sites are slightly unnatural
• All agencies now need to have a link emergency plan
• Create a list of links and how to contact to remove them
• We should no longer think in terms of price per link, but in terms of RISK PER LINK
• We need to be spreading our risk profiles in terms of links
• Link Research Tools look at your link profile and decipher what are toxic links, high risk links, low risk links etc so that you can see your percentages and focus your attention on the areas of most danger
• We should be doing link profiles in this way on competitors to see their healthy links and seeing these as prospects
• The danger in link profiling competitors without looking at risk scores is that we do not know what they have disavowed
• A link is not always a link – a good link for one page, is a highly toxic link for another
• We should run a regular review to give us new awareness and then classify links by risk types and probability.
• We need to use this new checklist when link building:
• Is the link technically ok?
• Can I show this link to Matt Cutts?
• Can I show this link to my competitors?
• Am I able to remove the link?
• The future may be that links are valued on number of clicks, factoring in seasonality issues
• Also reviews of businesses will be factored in
• Use Link Detox what if rules to see what would happen if a set of new links were added to your link profile, how many are healthy, how many are toxic?

David Harling: Real Life SEO

• Relationships fuel content
• Vloggers, bloggers, journalists, influencers – they’re all people, think of them in this way
• Razorfish partner up with Cision which is a media database, and Linkdex for their author networking tools
• Outreach needs to standout amongst the crowd
• Crowdsource ideas, make the bloggers feel involved
• The three things that bloggers want most are products (not just freebies, but exclusive access), experiences, and to feel involved in the process
• Razorfish work with some great brands so have the ability to tie in offline experiences with their blogger outreach
• They don’t stipulate that people have to write or give links, but they know based on their past relationships and experiences that getting the right people to certain events will mean that links are built
• It’s not about how big the brand is or the budget, it’s about being as creative as possible with what you have
• Give people great experiences that they feel involved in and they will write about it and give you quality links
• Building relationships w/online influencers
• Outreach campaigns to fuel brand advocates
• Real life brand experiences and how they Impact online