This couldn’t be more true than when it comes to Social Media. One wrong move could spell a PR nightmare. It feels like we are walking on egg shells sometimes. Just look at what happened with poor Beyoncé. She made a fantastic performance at the Superbowl and then this:

Why this became a meme can be chalked up to “a failure to understand how the Internet works by her PR team”.

It’s important to understand the impact that these Social Media nightmares have on reputations in the long term search results. What effect does a successful meme or social campaign actually have for a brand? Does “joining in” a meme in the right time have any real, long term lasting effect for a brand?

The Value Of A Well Timed Meme

I think a prime example we can use for this is the recent trend of “Harlem Shaking” that has been spreading around the Internet. It is pretty much over by now, perhaps thankfully before we all gave ourselves concussions.

All we can do is wait for the next big meme to bubble up. Then, jumping on board a trend like this takes quick action and precise execution.

Well, Not Really…

You pretty much just have to get it done.

And truthfully, all the value comes from that immediate moment that you take it live.

You will get:

• People talking about your brand
• Added affinity and a more human connection to your audience for relationship building
• Maybe (maybe) get a link or 2 out of it.

That’s not to say that there isn’t value in being “the first” to recreate the latest trend. But I can’t comfortably attribute long term success to the participation in an online meme.

I will prove it…

Celebrity PR Nightmares

What happens when they become the center of a social media disaster, or they themselves become an Internet meme?

Let’s explore a few recent “newsworthy” stories.

Beyoncé Looking Fierce

How has the recent “Beyoncé muscle” meme affected her? With the spike in overall interest from the Superbowl, I narrowed it down to show the trend which clearly had to do with the meme.

But when you look at the search results from today, there really has been no impact on her brand:

Obviously on more direct queries, these images will be front and center, but nothing really for her brand.

Manti Te’o and His Girl Troubles

Surely all the social media buzz and parodies about his “girlfriend” must have created some sort tarnish on his name queries, right?

One article on deadspin and one bad image about his alleged lady problems. Other than that, nothing really, and this is quite recent.

McDonalds

Plagued by two horrendous hashtag attempts, one being the utter failure that was #mcDstories and the other very awkward, but timely (since ‘tis the season) #shamrocking.

Have a look at how Shamrock Shakes trends consistently ever year.

And still, nothing affecting their results in the slightest:

So in conclusion, participate in all the memes you want, they will not help you rank long term…

False… Memes Do Help You Rank!

You might be thinking, Aaron, you just proved to me that they are useless in long term ranking. And on their own merits, this is true. In fact, it seems that these memes don’t help or hurt individuals at all for more general queries long term.

However, as a brand continuously participates in memes and other online trends, they demonstrate sides that make their audience feel a deeper connection to them. It sends the human message that “we can be fun and normal and not all business, so pay attention to us”. This is why Oreo practically won the Superbowl, despite what the scoreboard said.

People want to relate to a brand. Being top of the search engine doesn’t replace being top of mind. The Internet is a tool to drive people to your brand and memes are a creative outlet to help deepen this relationship. These quick and immediate wins are what keep your audience coming back for more.

Apparently, this is exactly how we should be thinking. At least, the way Facebook sees it.

Not to undermine that this could likely become something very valuable to users and marketers alike, it just seems like Facebook keeps solving problems that none of us knew we ever had before.

You see, when search originally started with engines, it was this active form of discovery. Some life event or moment of curiosity caused the “search” action to be taken.

Facebook, and other social networks alike, were different, however. These mediums brought along a much more passive form of discovery. My discovery was not because something influenced my life. It was simply due to my connection with my network. Based on nothing more then “hanging out” on the network, I would passively discover content. I wrote about this idea previously here.

And now, we have a whole new way of searching through this passive discovery.

Is Facebook Graph Search A Google Replacement?

With this new Graph Search, I have read that Facebook is going to be “killing” Google and replacing certain aspects for users.

Perhaps this will happen one day, but not in its current form. Facebook will not kill Google in the immediate future because of a fundamental flaw in Graph Search; it doesn’t contain all the Webs’ information.

Is this to say that they can’t gather it? No. In fact, if any one company is positioned to do that, I would argue Facebook would be it.

Where They Miss The Boat

The way I would define what social search is supposed to be would be as follows:

“Social search is a means of uncovering information, to fill a knowledge gap taking into account crowd sourced information from your network, which contains information from a reputable source within your network, giving more of a credible touch to the content.”

I had the chance to test out Graph Search, and Facebook does not appear to do any of this (I owe a big thank you to Mark Ginsberg for trusting me not to post random thoughts on his behalf). You may argue that there is Bing integration? Yes, it is present, but the two seem very independent from each other. Graph Search doesn’t layer over search results in ways that Google+ does to Google.

There Is Some Value To Graph Search

Based on my testing, and as a marketer, I see a lot of future value in graph search. For example, quantifiably gathering data for persona building is an incredible idea. Not to mention the possibilities in link building outreach and Relationship Building.

But there are a few things I think Facebook seriously needs to consider improving.

Where Can Facebook Graph Search Improve?

1.  General Searching

Currently, and I hope this changes soon, Facebook is indexing the content on “the graph.” This means other pages and interests within Facebook. But that isn’t necessarily what I was looking for.

What Facebook has created appears to be some strange version of Boolean logic that allows a way to filter down what people connect themselves to on the Graph. I question how valuable something like this ever could be without ever “scraping” and “indexing” status updates and captions. I, for one, do not like or connect to every page I associate with offline.

Take for example a search on the show “Homeland.” Using Mark’s access again, I could not find myself at all because I didn’t actually “like” the page.

It seems as though this functionality is rolling out soon, but it’s not here yet.

Here is the strange part. When I search on Bing, that post that I wrote about does show up. 

Seems like there is a major disconnect between the two.

2.  Image Search

I was excited to be able to search for “fun” images. But this, again, was a big let down so far because of the tagging component.

Turns out, my images are un-searchable for this exact reason. They will not show up in searches that contain “Chicago” since I don’t geo tag them. They will also not show up in searches having to do with “ninja” since Facebook isn’t indexing the actual caption associate with the image, which seems strange to me since that is the main functionality for Instagram, and they own it.

3.  Facebook Auto Complete

Facebook has this form of auto complete that really irks me. In nearly every instance I tried, Facebook did not let me actually do the search I wanted. It miraculously changed it to what they could provide and what they felt was most appropriate.

In the above example, I wanted to search images that have cookies in them, but Facebook somehow interpreted that to mean “I want to see a list of friends who liked the page for Chocolate Chip Cookies, and are also in my images”, which seems like a rather strange request, anyway, and for sure not what I was looking for. Danny also expressed his frustration on this here.

4.  Facebook Is Just Plain Wrong At Times

I also discovered that Facebook appears to be interpreting things incorrectly.

I did a search for “Friends of Aaron Friedman who are Violinists” because I know of one in particular who actually is and builds them (cool, I know). What I got were the below two results. One is my friend Ari Nahmani.

I asked Ari if he was in fact a violinist…  he isn’t.

Turns out, his uncle is a musician and he “liked” the fan page. Somehow Facebook interpreted that as him being a violinist rather than a marketer. And no, my friend who builds them did not come up in a search.

My Advice To Facebook & Everyone

For Facebook: 

If this is truly going to become a search engine replacement, then it is going to have to function as an actual search engine. Consider expanding the search functionality to include status updates, image captions and 3^rd party applications. The information that you can glean from a friend on vacation and what they wrote about in their updates is invaluable.

For Marketers:

I can’t stress enough the importance of actually getting yourself and your clients on the Graph. If you want to start appearing in these searches and capturing this valuable equity, then connecting to pages you want your brand associated with is more important than ever. Find what matches your brand and make those connections.

As this expands and becomes more robust, I imagine some of these issues may correct themselves, as I mentioned above. But, why not stay ahead of the curve and make those connections on the Graph for yourself now?

After all, aren’t connections what social media is all about?

The obvious conclusion being: relationships are kind of important.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Yes, Relationships Are Important!

Well, perhaps I take that concept a little too literally because I have made some fantastic friends online, and in many cases, have taken those relationships offline, too. To put this in perspective, these relationships are those where I want nothing more than to help them reach their goals and succeed. And, I feel pretty confident that I can rely on these relationships to help me succeed as well.

Isn’t that what we are supposed to do? Isn’t that one of the basic life idioms “one good turn deserves another,” or even a guiding life principal of “do unto others…”?

The Push Back

I had the following interaction with a friend who I have known digitally for quite some time. But when I say we have known each other, I mean, we talk somewhat regularly, G-chat with each other and have tried to arrange in-person meetings on a couple of occasions with no success. (I know he is reading this. One day we will succeed!…  And by the way, he knows I am writing this, but we both chose to keep his name out of it.)

Anyway, I sent him a message on G-chat sharing a dopey little article I wrote and asking for RT (it’s here, by the way). I felt like I put my time into it, and it was light humor enough that I thought anyone would share it without batting an eyelash.

Later that day, I received the following email:

Wouldn’t it have been easier to just retweet the article? I was sorta’ taken aback. I didn’t think it was such a big deal since we were “friends,” so I responded back to him:

Shortly after, we jumped on G-chat and had a more in-depth discussion about sharing friends’ content online. We agreed to disagree, but my stance on the issue is that the relationships we build online and off should translate to helping each other succeed, within reason. Not blindly, of course. I would understand what I am sharing first, and although I may not 100% agree with what they said, I would make that known. Our community is open in that way and friendly disagreement is welcomed. But I want to see my friends succeed, so chances are really good that I would do my part to help them reach their goals.

Real Relationships Translate To Online Success

Recently, I came across a great example that supported my view and thought perhaps it was time to write this down.

A friend of mine, Robyn Burgher, is a clinical consultant at NorthShore Pediatric Therapy in Chicago. She also runs their website and social media efforts. Needless to say, she is busy.

I notice on Facebook that she started a new blog called Little Red Mommy Hood. Didn’t really give it a second thought until I saw her posting how she had 300 views in the first hour, and 500 after the second. As a digital marketer, my ears perked, up and I asked her to send me the following chart.

I would say this is pretty impressive. And you know how it happened?

Through Relationships!

The back story is that Robyn, in her position at work, has developed a lot of relationships with people. She is in a lot of mommy groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other forums across the Web and has become a trusted authority online and in person. I asked her how she came up with the idea and she said:

I wanted to figure out a way to get my kids more interested and excited about eating Dinner.  So one night, while I was making Hotdogs and Hashbrowns, I told them how we are having all “H” foods.  Both my older kids got super excited about it and wanted to know what we were going to have for “I” the next night. It hit me that I could do a letter of the alphabet every night, and so I decided to post it on FB. I started getting posts, tons of private messages and emails for recipes for the A-Z Dinners for Kids so I decided to put it on a blog. I am obviously friends with tons of moms who are always looking for new dinner ideas, so I knew I had a great audience to share it with.

True, what she came up with was a clever idea, but there are lots of clever ideas out there that go unnoticed. I attributed the success greatly to her network.

This is what the power of your network can do.

Strengthen Your Network & Be “Real” Social

Here are some ways I have found that help deepen your connections with people; and I promise you, they all work:

1. Go to conferences – the relationships you will make at these are invaluable.
2. Skype or Google+ Hangouts – try to get face time with people
3. Engage in conversations with people on their blogs and forums
4. Attend Meetups – and share information that you are extremely passionate about
5. Twitter Chats – this is a great chance to meet people you otherwise might not have met as people tend to be more open to talking there (Here is the outcome of one)
6. Answer questions on LinkedIn – show your expertise
7. Instagram – yes, I share pictures of my kids there  and other things, too; I have also made some great connections there
8. Slideshare – I am a late comer to this network but already see a tremendous value in using it and am growing my network

What’s The Point?

Going back to our original discussion about friends sharing. I would never claim it to be a given that every piece of work my network puts together will get shared, but I have worked to develop a trusted network of people whom I believe in and if they personally send me something, it is likely because it’s important to them, and it, at the very least, will get my time.

And then again, there is always the possibility that I am too nice.

What do you think? Do we have this responsibility to help our network?

To be completely honest, I don’t follow politics that closely, so I wouldn’t be the guy to write that anyway. Unless of course, the post had nothing to do with politics and was entirely related to social media.

So that’s what we will do. Let’s present the facts and vote for the leader of the free world, entirely based on their social media usage.

Mainstream media might tell you that President Obama dominates when it comes to this, and they are right in a sense.

From a PR perspective, he does a fantastic job getting his name out there in social media.

But there are gaps in his methods. So, I wondered if Presidential Candidate Romney was doing any better.

So I broke our ‘ballot’ out into 4 primary categories:

• Owned Assets
• Technical Implementation
• Usefulness of the Content
• Marketing General Share of Voice

Let’s look at the facts we can gather from social media platforms and related signals.

Owned Social Media Assets

Obama: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Reddit, Google +, Linkedin, tumblr

Romney: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google+, LinkedIn, tumblr

What I like about the Obama campaign’s use of social media is that they completely remove the guise that he might be tweeting all this information. It is clearly labeled in the bio that if he tweets it will be sent from “-bo”, which leaves the audience something to desire.

Both candidates are clearly promoting themselves, but Obama’s staff also seems to be more active and paying closer attention to his audience by RT’ing them, and talking with them.

On the other side, it appears that Romney (based on the screen shots below) sends out a similar generic message every couple hours, which entirely removes the notion that he is there and that someone is paying much attention to the feed.

Bonus for both candidates: 

Both Michelle Obama and Ann Romney are highly active on Pinterest. It’s debatable who is doing better.

Technical Implementation

Anyone who reads my writing knows that I am big into Open Graph Tagging, Twitter Cards, controlling what people tweet and the small things we can do behind the scenes.

Let’s break down how well each of the campaigns have implemented these features.

• Meta Data: Both candidates have Title Tags and Descriptions found on their site; however, Google appears to be ignoring them and they are not being displayed in the search engine (not good).
• Open Graph: Both candidates have Open Graph Tags on their sites;  however, neither changes them from the Meta description, to tailor them to the unique audiences found on Facebook.
• Twitter Cards:
  • Obama: Has twitter cards implemented on his site/
  • Romney: Does not have Twitter cards implemented on his site.

• Authorship: Both candidates are using rel=”publisher” to confirm their association with their sites, but are missing the opportunity for authorship markup. It’s great that they are connecting their page to Google+ but they are missing the opportunity to show their headshots in the search engine as well as tie it back to their Google+ page.

I think that both candidates fall short in implementing these valuable assets across the site. I like that they are trying with rel=publisher, but someone missed the authorship part.

I will add, I especially like that Obama is using Twitter cards. Big win there.

Usefulness Of Content Posted

I have no major complaint with the content that both candidates are posting. They are posting friendly updates and images on Tumblr, they are putting up YouTube videos, and they are directing everyone where to actually vote. All of this is great. But can the search engines actually find all this content?

YouTube

I took a look at both Obama’s and Romney’s YouTube accounts.

Both Candidates are posting video updates. And if I had to compare them, I would say Obama is much more to the point, and Romney is much more flashy in your face with snowboarding and extreme sports (kind of the way Chrome and IE go at it), and its much longer (about 10 minutes).

This alone is not a problem, but where Obama excels in this is that a transcript of the video is put in the description of the video, which helps the video get indexed for relevant themes.

Blogging

Neither candidate is really blogging very much or sharing unique content that they pen regularly. I am not a political expert, but I do see this as an opportunity to rank higher for topics and policies they stand for. This would again tie back into authorship and associating the content with themselves.

Creativity

Obama appears to have done a fantastic job doing G+ hangouts on air, town hall meetings on Reddit, of course what gets the news is his slight spelling error.

But nevertheless, for holding a town hall meeting on Reddit, that should clinch the social media voting for him. I mean could he get any savvier?

Actually…

Hiding his logo in ASCII art on his website might be one of the geekiest Easter eggs around!

General Share Of Voice & Trends

I took a look at Google Trends and this is what I came up with:

There seems to be much more searching around Obama in general and he gets a lot more YouTube views:

Which implies to me at least, a larger presence digitally.

Conclusion

It seems like a close call to me. Both candidates are using the tools available to them. They do seem to “get it” to some extent, but I think there is still a lot of work they could have both done to boost up their presence and better share their messages. In future elections, political candidates can look to stretch these assets even further.

But since this is election day, let’s leave it to you to vote. Who do you think the winner should be?

A couple things recently happened which caused me to do a digital self evaluation:

• My Meta descriptions on my blog weren’t showing correctly (apparently Yoast and Thesis don’t play so nicely).
• I accidentally deleted my blog about page. (FML)
• Google sent me an email that they were going to start integrating my Gmail into my search results. (This came up in a meeting, and to be honest, I live in the world of archive. Inbox Zero yes, but Archive 100 Billion! It occurred to me how utterly useless this feature “might” be for me personally, but nevertheless still got me thinking.)

Once I noticed the above, I started thinking about other areas of my site and my social media presence which could probably use a tune-up.

I often read posts from others giving tips on social media success and ways to better connect with our audience.

Usually, these great tips include giving something away for free, or some kind of promotion. And for good reason, because when done properly, it really works.

In my recent interview with Duane Forrester, I noted that Share of Voice is an important signal that Bing (and likely Google) are both paying close attention to.

But how do we attain that Share of Voice? I suggested (as I have been for a while) getting active on Social Media. And that still stands.

And sometimes, we get a lucky break. Sometimes, the stupid things that happen to us open up all sorts of opportunities, and if we are smart about it, and leverage these things appropriately, we can take advantage of these events and reach the right channels, to improve our share of voice.

Real Brand Examples

So let’s talk about a few real examples where brands have taken advantage of this or have not taken advantage but should have.

Case 1: The Oatmeal vs. Charles Carreon

I have always had a deep respect for Matthew Inman. His comics are terrific, and I think he is brilliant. He understands people and knows how to reach them. So he has those merits alone which have made The Oatmeal extremely successful.

But when Charles Carreon sued Inman after stealing Inman’s work, Inman did what any normal person would do. He doodled on the lawsuit and launches a campaign which raises thousands of dollars for charity.

To quote one commenter on The Oatmeal after Inman posted this picture:

“You have beaten the internet… that was the last level…”

Source: TheOatmeal.com

If you were not familiar with The Oatmeal before this whole episode, that may have changed considering that it had been covered by all major mainstream media, thousands upon thousands of bloggers, tweets, etc. Not to mention, general interest in Inman has sky rocketed.

Inman could have stopped there, but what he does next is pretty awesome. He goes and makes personal drawings for fans who donated to the cause. (Sadly, mine never showed up ;)

Tip # 1:

Take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself. And when someone does something completely idiotic, think about how you can leverage it for your own success.

Case 2: Free $250 Shopping Spree at Target

Giveaways actually do work… when they are real.

My friends, have you shared this post on Facebook?

Then the following message is for you:

If you share this post with 50 of your friends, you will get a special private email from Matt Cutts sharing the real Google Algorithm.

Come on! REALLY?!?!?

This scam has been making its rounds for some time now, and truly is ridiculous.

But with every scam comes opportunity.

Here is a great idea for Target. Acknowledge the scam. Counter it with a campaign to actually win a $250 store credit and at the same time, boost your social media presence. I think it could have a profound impact and really help build buzz.

(Turns out, while I was writing this article, Target coincidentally “stole” my suggestion and partnered with Ebony Magazine and launched a real $250 giveaway for the new city stores they are opening up in the Chicago, LA and Seattle. A Target spokesperson got back to me and was very clear to let me know that this CitySmart contest, which takes place on Twitter and is aimed at helping the company engage locally and connect with guests in a unique way,  was in no way a response to any Facebook scams.)

Tip # 2:

Props to Target for being so proactive and coming up with great ideas. However, from an overall “capturing share of voice”, I see this as a tremendous opportunity for Target. Respond on a national level and leverage a potentially bad situation. Growing your national Facebook fan base is worth $250 in my opinion.

Case 3: Free Uber Rides

While this one doesn’t involve a “bone head” move that someone tried to pull, it is a noteworthy move that as marketers we could all learn from.

I ask you, how would you like to do something to really improve your brands Share of Voice?

I first learned about UBER while at SMX Advanced from Casie Gillette, and it was truly love at first site. And now, I use UBER all the time. When you factor in that the tip is included, even the black car service often comes out to not all that much more than a standard taxi, with a significantly better experience. It might be my favorite startup.

And then, I get an email telling me that all rides are free for the week. WOOT!

You better believe I created buzz around that. And I know others did too, because my Twitter stream was full of people sharing this promotion.

Look at this:

What I would assume to be a pretty significant investment of money and resources, earned UBER a significant amount of new customers.

I reached out to UBER for a comment and learned the following:

• Their Twitter Following grew 10% since the campaign
• They had more taxi rides in the 3 days of the promotion than in the prior 8 weeks
• They created the largest number of new user sign ups in the 3 days in UBER History

Tip # 3:

Spend a little money to create the buzz. But do it the right way. UBER is giving away things that are fun and that people want. During those 3 days, I am sure people took taxis just because they could. Heck, I did. They got me.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what that gigantic spike around Jul 12^th was? Well, UBER was delivering Ice Cream all around Chicago. (I snapped this picture at about 2pm, but I know it got much bigger)

Be Yourself, But Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

Brands have to stay true to what they are. The exact tactics each of the above brands took might not work as well for a more conservative brand. But there is something that everyone can walk away from because I think the tips are universal.

So to sum up the tips:

1. Seize the moment. Take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.
2. Negative situations can be fixed. Turn a negative situation into one that benefits your brand
3. Invest a little money. If its something people want, then they will respond in turn

It sounds kind of cliché but do the best you can and try to be as original as you can. Hopefully those merits alone will help you create some buzz and capture share of voice.

The question I wondered out loud was, how do we as marketers leverage this new social visibility. How do we become one of the influencers that show up in a given search? Take a look at this image below.

This section is independent from your connections. Somehow, Bing has begun using social data, to determine who is an authority and worth listening too. This is a tremendous opportunity from a personal branding perspective and for brands.

I had the great pleasure of catching up with Duane Forrester, who runs the public outreach side of the Webmaster program for Bing, and we talked through this question and touched on many others. Duane left me with some great tips that I think everyone in the community will benefit from.

Disclaimer: If you are hoping for the silver bullet on getting listed in the “people who know section” this article will absolutely not answer that. However, it will give you some great advice on how to better build your brand online, and help make you more of an authority. Perhaps, if you heed this advice, you might make the people who know list.

SEO is about having a broad view. It can’t be looked at in a vacuum and as marketers we need to be aware of out surroundings. And I am speaking to the community when I say that I think we, as SEO’s, collectively do a good job at having this broader view.

It’s a balance of providing incredible content to our users, as well as having the engines discover our content and display it ahead of the competition. Many of the SEO’s I know understand that things change. Being open minded to change and adapting is the key.

Nobody sums this up better than Courtney Seiter (I love this tweet!):

Share Of Voice, Entities & Content Creation

Duane and I discussed this balance and touched on 3 different points which I will elaborate on below: Share of Voice, Entities, and Content Creation. Each one, while valuable on its own, is significantly enhanced by the other two. I will explain below.

Are people amplifying your content? Duane shared with me that this is one of the more important signals Bing is paying attention to. Take for example any article written. It could be the best article in the entire world; informative, well written, thought provoking etc.

But if no one is sharing it, does it actually mean anything? If no one is linking to is, is it really as good as you think? (Danny wrote an awesome post on link building.) If no one is sharing, it leaves the engines wondering; perhaps this post isn’t of the highest quality?

This is exactly where social can make a huge impact for your site. Having this presence, and I don’t mean literally just having it, I mean, embracing it and having real relationships with your audience. Check out Warby Parker on Facebook and Twitter. They are doing a solid job building these relationships. They communicate to their users on YouTube, who in turn respond back to them. This is a real dialogue and their users love it.

When that relationship exists, people will want to share your content. But that relationship doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from REALLY hard work. Building your personal brand takes time and consistency. John Doherty explains personal brand building real well and is himself real good at it. Personal experience dictates that this is undoubtedly the only way to help capture share of voice. 

Now,  this is something that people like David Harry and Bill Slawski have been talking about for a some time now, uncovering all sorts of patents and documents so we can better understand what directions the engines are going with this (I promise you, read anything they write, and you will be smarter for it).

The thing is, I am not convinced most people, at this time, know exactly what to do with this. It’s hard concept to grasp that entities are going to change how search results are displayed.

Talking with Duane, I took away a few important key points.

Time Line

We are probably a good 5-10 years away from having entities take over engines. Why? Simple. A few years ago, the engines told webmasters to adopt markup and there has been an extremely low percentage of implementation.

“It seems like businesses are just not ready for this yet” Duane told me. This is likely because it’s not clear what the return will be. For those of us in the industry, it’s our job to help educate our clients, so they can understand the long term benefits.

Entity Spam

While it may seem that entities have the potential to be the new alt spam, that’s not really the case. The example I gave was video or flash, which may contain little to no information about the content.

Duane assured me that while you may have amazing markup, engines pay close attention to the surroundings. Markup is there to support the content you have and if engines are unable to find information related to the entities on the page, then the markup is basically useless.

Entities Influence, They Don’t Change

Just because you add in entities, they themselves don’t change your visibility. It’s when the markup provides a better user experience for your users that it makes a difference.

The bottom line is, although markup might not be the biggest signal right now, it is helping. And will continue to help display your content.

One thing Duane stressed to me is that Bing is really big on producing compelling content and creating a strong user experience. Fair to assume Google is the same exact way.

And by the way, this should have come as no surprise to anyone.

So You Want To Make Good Content?

I had previously written about a method I like to use which utilizes data from twitter to gather content ideas. And while this method does work, there are other things that, as marketers we should be doing regularly to help us get ideas for content:

• Find a niche.  Matt Cutts has a pretty awesome article he wrote about finding that niche and creating great content when there is a need. Do the same. Fill the gap for your audience.

• Stay Current. Read industry trade publications. If you are reading this, that means you are reading Search Engine Land. Good start. Engines like fresh content. The more you keep up with the industry the better.

• Be Creative. I am a huge hypocrite for saying this, but don’t be afraid to try something new. It’s much easier to just write an article than it is to create a theme around that article, put together an infographic, or maybe a youtube response to a question. It can certainly be scary, but try. What is the worse that can happen?!?!

Keep Adapting

It is important to keep in mind the evolution that our industry experiences. These were three important topics that Duane and I talked about today. But they can change, and they will evolve over time.

Today they stand for Share of Voice, Entities and Content. But tomorrow, we could be dealing with voice being a power figure, and optimizing for variations of speech, or images. What if the SERP became more visual and understood pictures?

And that’s it. Like I said, there are no silver bullets. But this is how we should be approaching visibility. This is how we become more of an authority, and this is how we get seen.

* A special thank you to Duane for his help in putting this together.

Disavow Links

I wrote this in a comment on SERoundtable and Barry Schwartz beat me to the punch recently. Danny also addressed it in passing in a Q&A with Matt Cutts, but I wanted to elaborate on this even more.

Think of this as an open letter to Google, or just a general expression of how I feel about this conversation. It honestly doesn’t matter to me. The bottom line is that I think this issue could easily be avoided and search engines should have no issue implementing this.

What I think Google in particular is failing to realize, is that there are good SEO’s out there that want to help them succeed. I mean, of course we all want our clients to out rank their competitors, but there is a big part of us that I think Google has “won over”, so helping them improve their engine, would be a win for not just our clients but the SEO community as a whole.

How I See This Working

We submit things to Google all the time. We submit, XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, and we even submit reconsideration requests and report shady practices when we see them happen. So to some extent, we do have an element of conversation with them. Sometimes it may feel one-sided, but I think they are listening.

Why not submit a list of shady links which point to our site? And I don’t mean just in Webmaster Tools. I mean, webmasters could create a page for all engines to publically crawl. Call it “yoursite.com/badlinks.xml” (not very clever, but you get the idea).

Let Webmasters Be Proactive

The engines aren’t perfect, and undoubtedly miss things. Eventually they will catch up, but why not let webmasters be proactive? This would accomplish 2 things:

1. It would make  people more selective about dishing out links, which actually would make getting a link that much more valuable.
2. It would give Google a dedicated page to crawl which provides them this information. In essence, they are getting great information and pawning off the work to webmasters who will be doing their dirty work for them.

The engines are already really good at crawling the Web, and are aware of the links that point to our sites. Why not match it up?

The Formula Is Simple

If a site points to me, and I as the webmaster think it looks shady, give me an opportunity to block it.

There is of course the possibility of spammers figuring out other alternatives and taking advantage of the system. But linking is already in trouble and spammers have already been taking advantage of this for years.

I humbly think this would accomplish far more than any other method. It lets us proactively and taking away the guesswork from the engines. This would make linking across the Web more effective, safe, and ultimately put this conversation to rest.

Because really, in today’s day and age, it’s ridiculous that Negative SEO should be part of the conversation. The engines should be smarter than that, and I believe they are. With the help of the good guys, we can help them refine the link graph and make it more accurate.

What do you think search engines should be doing to combat negative SEO?

To be clear, I have always been, and (unless proven other wise) will continue to be a proponent of quality. Having said that, I did at one point make the argument that quantity is a force not to be ignored and increasing quantity does have some merit to it.

This is why it’s always important to re-examine this and keep up with the changes.

Specifically with regards to Penguin, I hypothesized that social did in fact have a positive affect on sites, and that sites engaged in social benefited, whereas sites with a low social presence suffered.

Do Tweets Help Sites Post Penguin?

In order to get the best data possible, I asked my friends at Brightedge for a little help pulling some data and here is what we found:

“For close to 300K keywords across more than 200 domains, there was a common characteristic. Many sites which had strong social sharing before the update stayed about the same or showed a rank improvement. However, when tweets reduced even slightly the average rank for that page decreased disproportionately.”

Not Impressed yet? Well, I agree. Aside from giving justification to what many of us believed already, I don’t think this data is necessarily all that insightful either.

But just hold on a second…

It’s the next piece of data, layered on top of this, which gets more into the heart of social sharing, and the importance of Social Media.

In a different study done by Brightedge in conjunction with Tiny Prints, Feeding America and Twitter, they determined through mapping keywords in the tweets, that by reaching out to users using targeted keywords in a tweet:

“Tiny Prints saw a 300% rise in user engagement which, in turn, improved the average rank across keywords for targeted pages by 47%. This was over a four week period. Feeding America’s users responded positively to the Tweets since the content of the Tweets ( keywords and pages) matched their interests. This resulted in a 2.5X improvement in traffic for the pages mentioned in the Tweets.”

Keywords In Tweets Do Have An Impact

With this new insight, that increasing the levels of tweets, while including specific keywords can affect rankings, traffic and over all user engagement, this points directly to the quality of the content. With this in mind, the obvious next question is, as marketers, what can we do to improve the message we want people to share?

I have found two approaches to go about this and ensure you are effectively conveying your message.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

The first is something that my friend AJ Kohn does really well (and I will credit him for making this idea popular). In almost every post AJ writes, he leaves a TL;DR - which stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read.

This is probably one of the most effective ways I have ever come across to summarize the main points you are trying to get across in a piece of content.

Customize & Maximize Your Tweet

Most Twitter buttons on a site default to the title of the page or even the title tag element. Both of these are usually much less than the allotted 140 characters on Twitter.

Woah, it's a post inside a post... Inception!

What this really means is that if your title is not very descriptive, or if its short, you are letting the user fill in the blank, which may or may not work to your benefit. And all this really depends on if they got the main point of the article.

So, Why Not Control What They Tweet?

This is a quick work around that I came up with and my friend Josh (my go-to developer) who helped me put it together.

Simply install this code in the place where you would place a Twitter share button:

<a href=”#” onclick=”tweetSelectedText()”><img src=”http://digitalhighrise.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tweet_button.gif” border=”0″ /></a>

       <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.min.js”></script>

       <script type=”text/javascript”>

       $().ready(function(){$(‘.tweetThis’).hide();});

       function tweetSelectedText(){

               var twtTitle = $(‘.tweetThis’).text() || $(‘title’).text();

               var twtUrl = location.href;

               var maxLength = 140 – (twtUrl.length + 1);

               if (twtTitle.length > maxLength) {

                       twtTitle = twtTitle.substr(0, (maxLength – 3))+’…’;

               }

               var twtLink = ‘http://twitter.com/home?status=’+encodeURIComponent(twtTitle + ‘ ‘ + twtUrl);

               newwindow=window.open(twtLink,’name’,'height=500,width=500′);

               if (window.focus) {newwindow.focus()}

       }

       </script>

Then, in the code of your post (beginning or end, it doesn’t make a difference) add this tag:

<p class= “tweetThis”>THIS IS WHERE YOUR MESSAGE GOES</p>

In this tag, you can craft your own message, which is descriptive, contains the targeted keywords and utilizes the allotted space.

When the share button is clicked, it will automatically use the message that you put in the tweet tag.

Perfect The Tweet

One final thought. I would suggest paying attention to a few key points when crafting this message to ensure the perfect tweet is sent out:

• Characters should be kept to about 120 to account for a Retweet plus user handles.
• Make sure the keywords you target in the post are in the tweet.
• Do NOT keyword stuff! (sorry, I got really passionate about that last one). The point here is to improve the user experience and make your tweets more engaging. Making spammy messages will not help you with this.
• Change it up. The message you start with for the first day might be different than the second. Change the message a day or two later to give a new experience to people and maybe catch people’s attention who didn’t respond well to the message the first time.

I hope these tips are useful. As always, I would love to hear your feedback or hear how other people have benefited using this strategy.

Happy Tweeting!

Sure, Twitter is great for connecting with people, brands monitoring their competition and sharing information in spurts, but what about systematically layering information from Twitter with other data sets to better understand your audience and create useful information for them? Is that even possible?

What I hope to present and explain below is the beginning of an effective methodology, which I suspect is not a completely unique approach, but is certainly a powerful approach for how to use Twitter to help us prioritize the long tail of search and ensure that we are sharing timely and fresh content.

A Quick Recap Of The Long Tail In Search

The concept of the long tail analysis is a statistical concept that explains how within a population, the largest distribution will be found at the tail end.

This concept was made popular in search marketing by Chris Anderson of Wired  in an article he wrote titled “The Long Tail“. What Anderson comes to prove is how crucial it is for businesses, specifically online businesses, to put a large focus on their inventory at the tail end.

Amazing drawing skills thanks to the Drawsome phone app :)

This is something which has been written about in length in the SEO community, specifically relating to keyword themes and how marketers can capture large percentages of queries by optimizing for it.

The simple practical application of this is looking through your analytics to discover themes and trends on what information is directing people to your site, and creating new, fresh and relevant content for those searchers, which we know search engines love too.

Twitter Beating Site Analytics To The Punch

Site analytics are a great way to discover themes around what people have been searching on, creating the opportunity for you to develop new content. But social media is great for discovering topics your audience is searching for now, as well as giving you more insight into who they are, creating leads for link building initiatives.

If this is true, then this methodology is exactly the way to prioritize which long tail queries to begin optimizing and targeting.

How Do We Do This?

Step 1

For starters, begin by looking through your site analytics and uncover themes that you see evolving in the recesses of all this data.

For the purposes of this example, I uncovered that my site showed up a number of times for queries around email and Facebook.

Understanding what long tail queries are driving people to your site is the first step. This information alone is helpful for marketers.

While these queries are driving small amounts of users to my site, I understand that its because of a previous article I wrote. I may want to revisit this and write a follow up topic on this anyway. But for the purposes of these discussions, let’s keep an eye on these long tail queries that are already driving small amounts of traffic.

Step 2

Next, head over to a free tool like Topsy or Social Mention, and do a quick search to see if there is a lot of activity around those queries. You might not see any right away, and should run these searches every couple weeks to see if they start to pick up steam (don’t forget this is the long tail we are going after).

If you would prefer, you could use this handy spreadsheet in Google Docs (h/t to Mashable for posting these free Google doc Spreadsheets), where you can actually set the keywords up in the spreadsheet and start tracking them ongoing to see what starts to buzz.

Step 3

This is the best part. Once you see something start to trend, the work is basically done for you. You have not only successfully uncovered the next topic you should write and the keywords you will want to target, you also have discovered a list of Twitter users who are already discussing the topic that you can reach out to.

Now, Go Tweet The Long Tail

This method is not meant to “replace” the work you are already doing, its meant to support and prioritize it to help you maximize results for the time you put in.

The opportunities are limitless and the methodology can be expanded and used many different ways. I hope you use it and customize it for your needs and the needs of your clients. Feel free to leave comments. I would love to hear more about how you are using it and collaborating to make it work even better.

Looking forward to discussing this more at SMX Toronto.