Central Perk

marți, 4 octombrie 2011

The Best SEO, Social + Content Strategy: Thought Leadership

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 02:34 PM PDT

I'm constantly recommending thought leadership as a marketing strategy and, frequently, getting a lot of pushback. It started when I was a consultant, but continues to this day. It usually goes something along the lines of:

Other Person: It's easy to be a thought leader in the fields you just showed, but what are the rest of us ordinary businesses supposed to do?

Me: Actually, I'm a strong believer that there's virtually no such thing as an industry or niche where thought leadership, interesting/share-worthy content and great inbound marketing can't work. Marketers said personal finance was boring until Mint. They thought online dating couldn't be a thought-leadership play until OKTrends. They said elevator installation couldn't have anything good, then Grant (an Australian firm) launched their great news section including awesome infographics like this one and earned #1 rankings for "Home Elevators."

Other Person: But those fields all have existing examples to draw inspiration from; I bet you can't name anyone in my particular practice of XYZ

Me: That's the best part! If no one else has risen up to claim the mantle of thought leadership; it's an even greater opportunity. The early adopters in thought leadership and content marketing often receive a disproportionate quantity of attention from links, social media, press, etc. ROI may take elbow grease, time and patience, but if you find a way to earn the attention of the web, you have a chance to build a truly amazing brand.

Other Person: There's no way we can invest that much energy and budget in thought leadership for marketing. We'd need to build a platform to host the content, we'd have to do design/artwork, we'd need to brainstorm and research the ideas, run them past layers of management for approval and

Me: In five minutes, you can have a Wordpress installation running in a subfolder of your site. You can do the brainstorming and execution by yourself at first - let's dream up three ideas together right now; I bet we can do it. If you really need design work, look how Cyrus did it here (for under $500). If you can't get executive approval; create your own blog/site, show them the success you're having and then 301 it over.

Other Person: Well, OK, maybe.

Me: Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful marketing story.

Other Person: Umm... My name is Steve.

Me: Oh. Sorry.

I recently gave this talk on the Death and Rebirth of SEO at Webcam in Bend:

The Death & Rebirth of SEO

And right after the talk, had very similar conversations to the above with several folks in attendance. To be fair, I completely understand how challenging the process of building thought leadership on the web can appear. But when you get into it, it's fun, addictive and surprisingly effective. There's no better way, in my opinion, to create a great brand on the web and simultaneously supercharge your social media, SEO and traffic-growth than thought leadership.

p.s. I've been enjoying a lot of shorter blog posts from folks like Brad Feld (whose post on thought leadership partially inspired this one) and Fred Wilson, so I thought I'd try my hand at slimming down my usual 1,000+ word count posts. Hopefully it's just as impactful/useful. Oh, and slide 65 in the deck above is a duplicate; sorry 'bout that.

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Now is Not the Time to Wave the White Flag on Clean Energy Jobs

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Now is Not the Time to Wave the White Flag on Clean Energy Jobs

Blog post from Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director

This morning, Chairman Cliff Stearns, who leads the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, told NPR that "We can't compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines."

This comment reflects exactly the sort of counterproductive defeatism that Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned against this weekend when he spoke to a group of America’s most promising young solar innovators:

“The United States faces a choice today: Will we sit on the sidelines and fall behind or will we play to win the clean energy race? Some say this is a race America can’t win. They’re ready to wave the white flag and declare defeat… Others say this is a race America shouldn’t even be in. They say we can’t afford to invest in clean energy. I say we can’t afford not to.

“It’s not enough for our country to invent clean energy technologies – we have to make them and use them too. Invented in America, made in America, and sold around the world – that’s how we’ll create good jobs and lead in the 21st century.”

The race for clean energy jobs and industries is on – and it is a race well worth winning. The International Energy Agency projects that in the coming decades, solar power could grow to more than 20 percent of the world’s electricity. Conservatively, this means that there is an economic opportunity worth trillions of dollars for whichever countries claim the lead. The global market for wind turbines is also growing exponentially.

But it’s not just the vast potential of jobs tomorrow – these industries employ a growing number of Americans today. In fact, business groups estimate that America’s solar industry accounts for about 100,000 jobs and the wind industry employs 75,000. Should we simply tell those workers that we’ve given up on them?

A study released last month showed that, in spite of the intense global competition, the U.S. remains a net global exporter of solar technology – with $5.6 billion in exports and an overall positive trade balance of $1.8 billion.

It is certainly true that China is playing to win. Last year alone, China offered its solar manufacturers $30 billion in government financing, vastly exceeding the U.S. investment. And China has overtaken the United States market share in solar power – a technology we invented.

Chairman Stearns and other members of his party in Congress believe that America cannot, or should not, try to compete for jobs in a cutting edge and rapidly growing industry. We simply disagree: the answer to this challenge is not to wave the white flag and give up on American workers. America has never declared defeat after a single setback – and we shouldn’t start now.

America’s entrepreneurs and innovators are still the very best in the world. Our workers are second to none – and we have never been afraid of a challenge. It’s time to do what we’ve always done in the face of a tough competitor: roll up our sleeves and recapture the lead. .

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Photo of the Day: Who Won the Science Fair?

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Photo of the Day: Who Won the Science Fair?

President Barack Obama congratulates Google Science Fair winners, from left, Naomi Shah, Shree Bose, and Lauren Hodge in the Oval Office, Oct. 3, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Quick Poll: Is Google AdWords Remarketing a) Great for ROI or b) Annoying?
How to Use the New Delicious for Link Sharing
Top SEOptimise posts in September…

Quick Poll: Is Google AdWords Remarketing a) Great for ROI or b) Annoying?

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 09:41 AM PDT

There’s lots of mixed opinions on how useful Google AdWords remarketing is – so I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these are divided:

I’ll update this later in the week with the results – and if you have any comments please feel free to leave them below.

How to Use the New Delicious for Link Sharing

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 03:05 AM PDT

Bookmarks are now links. The artist formerly known as social bookmarking site Delicious.com has been relaunched by the new owners Avos, run by the former founders of YouTube.

The new site is clean, simple and image oriented.

Obviously Delicious has learned from the many image bookmarking sites out there that have sprung all over the Web in the recent years. On the other hand the new site focuses on social sharing and commenting as well.

The most important change is probably the new curation feature called “stacks”. Users can contribute so called “playlists for the web” [sic!]. A stack contains several links and images about one topic usually.

Said that there are also many features that have disappeared. I have tried to compile a list of both new features that have been added and old features that have been discontinued.

New Features

stacks (user curated groups of links)
one-click saving of links
two word tags with a blank space
tags separation by commas
“my inbox” with shared links
profile pictures (avatars)
featured stacks and links on home page

Old features missing

individual tag cloud
bookmark counts per tag in the sidebar
searching bookmarks in “your network”
subscribing to tags
blog/website widgets with bookmark count
news “floating around the Web”
Twitter integration

I think another main difference comparing the old and new Delicious is that now it’s about sharing links while in the past it was about saving bookmarks for yourself. So Delicious attempts to compete with big link sharing services like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I know they are called officially social networking but from a technical point of view the services are about sharing links. Linkless updates are allowed of course. Delicious focuses just on the links. This may be the remaining difference.

The new Delicious is less an aggregated bookmark collection and more a both curated and editorial publication.

There are no popular bookmarks anymore, there are “featured links”. The editorial team attempts to make Delicious appeal to the broad public as they push topic like politics, travel or entertainment. Until now Delicious was mostly used Web professionals who saved web development or design resources.

Also they want to stand out by making people subscribe to curated groups of links aka stacks like you can subscribe to a YouTube channel.

So it seems quite obvious to me that Delicious can once again be of use for getting website traffic. Also it seems to me that it takes less effort in the long run to get visitors to you site. Stacks can be established once and then once you get a few subscribers you can add a new link from time to time.

It’s not yet clear what the criteria are to get promoted to the frontpage.

I guess it’s mostly

potential mass appeal
visual attractiveness
a non-technical topic

as of now.

People can subscribe to your stack or follow it. New links show up on top so you can share your stack more than once and people will treat it like a link blog. In a way Delicious attempts to compete with Tumblr where many blogs are just link collection about a certain topic.

A user who has quickly grasped how to create useful stacks is sanclementejoe. He has created three stacks about SEO two of them I’d like to recommend: Best SEO resources and Google Webmaster Tools Guides. I have created a stack about SEO 2.0 myself so you can check this one out as well. Most other of the by now 150+ SEO related stacks are self-promotional in nature and either mediocre or downright spammy so there is still plenty of room to stand out.

Of course other more popular topics have more chances of getting decent exposure on Delicious as SEO is a niche topic even among the typical Delicious users. Also as I mentioned above Delicious wants to get out of the technology ghetto.

Choose a visually appealing topic.

Articles about SEO already fail here as most of them do not have inspiring imagery. Most of them use screen shots and diagrams. So arts or photography are probably good choices to get some editorial love.

To me the goal is always targeted traffic not the casual traffic of thousands of people who don’t care about a topic but the few dozens that really do. The new Delicious has potential to provide the people who care with the resources collection they seek and the content providers with the visitors they are after. As of now though the sharing features are rudimentary. There is no auto-suggest feature to address your followers when sharing links or stacks so you have the remember the exact user name.

You can’t share with all your followers.

You can’t even share with your followers at all, beacuse right now Delicious only displays the people you are following, not those you follow. I see only a 12 or so of them while I have at least a hundred people I follow on Delicious. Also at least half of them follows me as well as far as I remember.

So as of now you have to share your stacks on other social sites. That’s a good start though as a stack isn’t as ephemeral as a single link. You can share it today, a week from now again and in a month a third time. You’re not sharing just a link but a resource, a compilation of links.

For now I think a list of around 8 to 12 links is the best size for a stack.

Stacks that get updated continuously like a Tumblr blog could be also a viable and valuable option depending on the topic.

Personally I’m quite optimistic that Delicious will rise again. other than Digg where mismanagement led to a steady decline here two enthusiastic start-up entrepreneurs can fix it. The many years long impasse Delicious was subject to at Yahoo is over. The innovation is simple but useful. Link sharing is perhaps the most wide spread social networking activity right now and Delicious takes it to another level.

They are fixing the bugs, restoring missing bookmarks and features that have stopped working as well so they may retain many of their old users as well. Digg made the mistake of taking features away and insisting on removing them. Delicious is listening to its users.