#SMBS12 #Buffalo presentation “Get Social or Die”

By Josepf Haslam on February 16, 2012 in Art of Marketing

Video of #SMBS12 “Get Social or Die” by Josepf Haslam

Promised Reference materials for #SMBS12 Get Social or Die

All of the following links may be found on Josepf Haslam’s Scoop.it site entitled Social Search & SEO:

SlideShare Presentation of “Get Social or Die” by Josepf Haslam at #SMBS12

Warning, the following Slideshare are the presentation slides, however, they are Story Elements mainly. Video of the presentation may be found above! Gist of the presentation is:

Google/Bing/Yahoo’s inherent promise to us is the most relevant Search Results.
What makes up or goes into search results has evolved quickly over time.
Social Signals and Social Conversations are influencing Search Results.
Social Platforms are increasingly becoming places where people “search”.
Statistic show that people are Socially influenced in their decision making.
IF people get “Trusted” reviews or recommendations they’ll typically take them over generic search.
YOU and your business need to get Social, now, today.
Study referenced below, shows that Social has already been proven to drive increased revenue!
IF you do NOT adopt Social you will lose SEO relevance and your competitors will win.

Video Transcript of “Get Social or Die”

Get social or die as presented at the social media business summit buffalo February sixteenth special thanks to Renee martinez and melinda sanderson from Canisius College
for the event.

We are at the dawn of a new Age with social media. It’s both an evolutionary and revolutionary age. It’s a truly disruptive technology and social system for businesses and individuals.

I assert that you need to get social or die if this is your view of social and believe me a couple years ago when i looked at twitter I had the idea perfect combination of narcissism ADHD and stalking for some people it still is for you and for businesses you need to change this you need to make it your force for being found and getting business.

Let me walk through this by first taking a look at the most obvious way getting found search engine results pages the promise of a google or a bing or a yahoo there is an implicit promise it’s the most relevant search result we use google sixty five percent of us because we believe it gives us the most relevant result how that result is formulated how people find you though has been changing and evolutionary way since the very begining now it’s proceeding to the revolution.

Let’s take a look at a search engine result page first let me point out that i am currently logged in right here to google note that as a result there are forty personal results people but i know who have said something about lawyers auto accident any keyword phrase I put up top there i will see some personal results for based upon my social network now let’s clear the page seventy percent of clicks on the search engines results page go to pay-per-click. Mind you this is how Google makes all of its billions. Some of us will click through the pay-per-click results; note here three percent of clicks will go to random other places than the search engine results page. They might click through to page two of the search engine results page or go to videos or images. Eighty percent of the results go to the top organic positions also called above the fold, its an old newspaper term, it’s what you see on your screen depending upon your screen size,
typically the top four or five results. Here we’re barely seeing three now, a couple of things of note. the item here in yellow is here because is somebody I was prospecting as potential
client and shows me that I visited this page two times and what my last visit was.

It is very very important to understand this. Google is working in social results Bing is doing the same thing they’re working social results into your search engine result page because they believe it’s going to make those results more relevant for you. I believe this as well, however, this is not the only way to be found. Very important for you to understand the entire space of engagement here. Let’s start with that, here’s a slide from David Armano from edelmandigital — this is the world of engagement. Let’s clear the four quadrants. The first thing is your own digital property. As a person, as a business you need to have an owned property. God forbid relying on facebook page, any page: google plus, linkedin, posterous, you need to have your own your own owned property your website, your custom built portal, for yourself. With that said let’s take a look at advertising

Advertising, or paid media, is not just pay-per-click or display ads or banner ads or anything else like that. It is those things, however it could also be any type of endorsement you may have. It could be a billboard, radio spot, t_v_ spot, could be a celebrity who’s promoting your product or services. The important thing is you want to capture relevance from those advertisements or publicity or PR and have it be SEO’d back to your owned properties.

Drive everything back to your owned properties. Now let’s take a look at your owned media. We had some very good examples earlier today from Ramon De Leon of Dominos who showing where he’s been talked about out in the world on blogs and other websites. He’s earned that position. You as a business also need to earn those positions need to find influencers need to find niche platforms where people will talk about you your products and your services. Again driving everything back to your owned properties. Let’s take a look at social platforms, they’re what Armano calls embassies, things like a facebook, a twitter, slideshare, linkedin, youtube and there’s also outposts, things like blogs and message boards and forums.

This is where you’re going to concentrate your social engagement. It’s an intersection between earned media social platforms owned properties and also sometimes paid media, take a little care for that one, you’ll see influencer engagement called out here.

It’a very important, especially as you scale your business and your business presence, to understand who’s influencing those social platforms, those communities and those niches. Become friends of those people, engage those people, interact with those people. You do not have the ability if you have two hundred thousand followers to talk with or engage all two hundred thousand or million or even two thousand. You want to understanding who the key influencers are and engage them. That they in turn once you build a relationship well reference you as part of the earned media or what happened with social platforms and again is an excellent opportunity to get more visibility and increase traffic back to your owned properties.

So there’s been a huge evolution taking place in a very rapid period of time and back when i was dealing with dupont and apranet and martin marietta and others we would publish our own directories so people could get to our information. The internet wasn’t even really built yet (i never did see al gore anywhere by the way, never saw him). Then you had people like yahoo come in and they were publishing search results for us. We’d go to yahoo and we look something up, then we had altavista come in and count words on a page which led to keyword density and when Google came in as well lead to the SEO industry and people trying to optimize their websites for search engines.

It keeps getting more complicated; Google saw that people were spamming the external links so they started to look at a site and say this was a really good one, it has a authority it has credibility, and we’re going to give that page rank of nine this one’s not so good, give it a pagerank of one… Now what’s happening is they’re adding social voting. Think about it, so you as a consumer, you as a business person, if you’d like something you would talk about something, tweet it, put it on linkedin, and your votes are going to start to count. Showing up in search results both for yourself and also for your friends with people that you influence. So right now what we have is something like this: we’ve got a bunch of spiders runnign around, a bunch of bots, it’s all being hashed into math somewhere on a google server and we’re all feeling a little bit like we’re living in the matrix somewhat.

But that’s not what we want, this is what we want: we want the personalized recommendations. What somebody we know, we trust, that we care about, to tell us that you should try this! So I’m here in Buffalo and I’ll ask Renee Martinez “hey i want a really good Thai place” and she’ll tell me. I’ve done this before with Renee and she’s always spot on with the recommendations. I’m not gonna go google that! Yesterday, i wanted to run out to a bestbuy and asked her and Brian where should I go. He said to down to the galleria mall, do this, do that, we stopped at P.F.Changs we had a good lunch. They messed up our calamari; I tweeted them; they fixed it. I tweeted back “good customer service at PFChangs”. PFChangs talked back to me today “hey how was the rest of the meal”? That whole interaction was based on personal recomendations and interestingly enough Google and Bing are trying to figure out who you care about, who you interact with, and to the extent that you care and interact with people socially they’re putting that back into your search results so hold on to your hats here.

What’s going on, well I published a blog article and a bunch of links that are backing up everything i’m saying here today so you can click through and read articles and do some more research on this yourself. But three different articles range anywhere from seventy one to eighty three percent of people are using reviews to influence a purchase decision. Makes sense and I go out to Cnet all the time and read what’s going on. I’ll look at amazon dot com to take a look what people saying about the product. Eighty percent of people will change their decision because they see negative reviews of the product or service, eighty percent.

If you’re not out there monitoring your own yelp profile and people are banging on your business or bang on your restaurant and you don’t even know it then yes the sales are going down. Not that many people in on Wednesday night anymore. And that’s the use social or die part. You will go out of business! Now this is fascinating, so does social media have a return on investment? Alright. well guess what? This just came out two weeks ago, ten days ago, fifty six billion, fifty six billion impressions two point seven billion clicks, thirteen billion dollars in revenue. When social media was in the stream of those clips eighty-four percent more revenue happened then natural search results alone. Eighty-four percent more revenue, you’re in business, would you like to have eighty-four percent revenue than your competitor because you’re using social? Fascinating, so we looked at this a little bit earlier today but basically when you have people out there in social they buy something from you, they really like it, they talk about it, they tell their friends, they have “social proof”. It creates this whole feedback loop where they’re working on awareness of other people because they like it. They’re getting you to consider, maybe i should try that. We see this all the time. You play around with tools, I’ll Tweet out something like I really like, suc as my Scoop.it. People say maybe i should try that, maybe i should check out Scoop it. So this is what you’re looking for, to get with social and we’ll break it down back to search engine results page of sean mcginnis who’ll be here later on today. We’re gonna tag-team here a little bit, he’s got a dive deeper on how you create some social links out there and help you with SEO. Matter of fact, walking in today the young lady handing me the bag first thoughtI was Sean, it was a great compliment. I didn’t know i was that good looking and smart. So you know but here’s the deal right up top here I’m signed in. I typed in Sean M that’s as far as i got. Autofill suggesting maybe i’m looking for sean mcginnis displaying his google plus profile. It gives me three other people i know socially. Shows me right here in the SERP, I haven’t even finished typing it yet I paused mid-typing and captured this with Camtasia. It’s showing me his goolge plus profile, showing me images for Sean that either he sent out or other people like paul biederman has sent out. It has his Twitter profile as shared by sean, his linkedin as shared by sean, the whole page and the second page results as shared by sean who I know. Okay, so autofill finds him because he’s in my social circle his G+ profile shows up, images show up, all the other first page search results are there because he shared them.

I go anonymous, I’m signed out he does not exist doesn’t exist can’t find him! Bunch of other people you probably recognized the names as they’re probably a little more famous out there in the world. Different complete different search results cause I’m signed out. He is nowhere to be found here the world as we have looked at it before was SEO and pay-per-click pretty well-known keyword research optimization a lot of maths in how you go about in social media world’s different. You always start out with research but it’s very very different it’s not about broadcasting as you’ve heard already today it’s about your audience segmentation your communities your influencers. Fascinating thing is all of this interacts back with SEO. It gets you found helps you get found more relevantly. Okay and then the important thing to talk about here is owning your profiles as well there’s a lot out there right, it can be a little bit confusing. This graphic dipicts the difference in the platforms: here Linkedin my skills include donut eating. Each platform has a little bit different purpose and you need to find out where your people are where they are engaging in what
they are trying to do and find a platform for them. This presentation, also the video, all the links I talked about are up on the web. Tweeted out already on this hashtag and you can at Tweet me and I’ll send out anything you want as well. Alright, so the good news is Ric Dragon is writing a book called social marketology. This graphic is also a chart from that book what you have is you have a, let me go ahead and come back okay so what have you have people out there and you want to say where do you belong where are communities out there do you need to create a community where are the influencers in that community once you have an idea of what that is you’ve always starts here, with profit you always start with what are your desired outcomes are, what are you trying to accomplish.

It comes back to your main business object and mission, your main marketing objectives you come out anywhere on this loop it doesn’t matter where you start start with yourself because work with them whom you’re targeting understand communities understand the influences within that community you do not have to talk with two hundred thousand people you have to talk with maybe twenty people who are really influencing those two hundred thousand people and you need to identify who they really are this is an action plan that it’s executed measured and reinvented anybody tells me that they don’t understand the ROI of social and and suggest that you can’t do it I literally just laugh at them that rude I just laugh at them because i measure everything i put out custom links i’ve put UTM tracking on anything I’m putting out there measure all but it’s very measureable if you understand what you are doing this here this whole process basically you go back and say are we meeting our desired outcomes or not do gap analysis go back to your plan revise your plan, you’re measuring all along the way, it is very doable different than SEO very different than SEO and pay-per-click but very very important and worthwhile where do you belong.

Back to SEO old-school short hand optimization reciprocal backlinks bullshit backlinks relevant connections newschool seo very different broader longtail based on relationships i want Ramon to blog about me cause you know we’ve met a couple times he met me here we had a good time time last night and he’s gonna talk about me I’m going to talk about him that’s true relevance
with relevant connection to this is being fueled by social media and connected together through social media both tweeting Facebook Linkedin and also through things like blogging as well.

in summary we’re really at a sea change here. A very very importance sea change still at the very beginning. The very beginning of understanding. The very beginning of the technologies of it. But it’s very very important do it and to get it. We’re cutting it short because of our time constraints here but in my little rainbow colored thing here: dragonsearch.net if you go onto the Blog there and also go online to the hashtag yet more background on this and later on this year will have the book on the process how to use social media, a soup to nuts guide including measuring analytics and the why and the wherefores available as well.

So thank you for your time.