Wellness Obsession

As the use of cell phones and smart phones expands, so do the number of options for consumers to discover and interact with brands. From web browsing to email to social networking and even shopping, more people are using their cell phones as portable computers. However, most sites are not optimized for hand-held devices such as cell phones. There are really two things to consider;  web site design and how customers are going to find the web site through mobile search. How do you design for the mobile platform? The good news is that in most cases, you don’t need a separate site, you just need a cascading style sheet (CSS) attached to your website that feeds up specific instructions to a mobile browser. For the most part, mobile browsers are a lot like the web used to be; mainly text and links. Granted, as the iPhone, Google/Android Phones and other more advanced devices come along, the browsing features also advance. Most smart phones like the iPhone view the web as it should be without anything stripped out. But, since everyone doesn’t own a smart phone just yet, it’s worth focusing on the what the mass mobile market has, basic handheld web browsers. When designing your CSS for handheld web browsers, here are a few things to consider: You have very limited screen real estate. About 2

Helpful for social platforms based on Drupal – would like to see relevant features of Friend Connect supported within Apache SocialSite (still hopefull that this effort gains more attention and traction). I’m happy to announce that Google Friend Connect features are now also available for Drupal and Joomla . Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features — all without writing a single line of code. Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins. Both Drupal and Joomla integrations include the latest Google Friend Connect features, like Interest Polls, AdSense, Newsletter Subscriptions, Featured Content, and well-known gadgets such as Members, Comments, Recommendations, Activities, Reviews and the Social Bar. When a user joins a Friend Connect site, an account is created and automatically associated with his or her external account of choice (Google, Yahoo, or Twitter, for example). The social gadgets can be placed anywhere in the site using the standard Drupal and Joomla administration interfaces. Site owners can moderate reviews and comments, create new polls to collect information about community members, and then advertise on the site using that information. The newsletter feature allows site owners to create and manage their newsletters using Friend Connect’s interface, and site members can subscribe and unsuscribe as desired using the newsletter gadget. Social Web Blog: Add social features to your CMS: Friend Connect now available for Drupal and Joomla Other relevant information: Friend Connect Drupal integration Google Friend Connect APIs (Labs) Social Graph API (Labs)

Getting More From Your Google Maps Profile This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Mobile and desktop surfers alike are turning to Google Maps to find local and sometimes nearby businesses. Optimizing your web pages for local search has become an extremely important part of the local marketing mix. Claiming and building strong profiles in the local search directories is another must for the new local search habits. Today’s post and accompanying video explains a bit of tweak that I suggest can make your Google Maps profile even more local search term friendly. As shown in the video above, once you claim your Google Maps Profile (Go to the Google Local Business Center ) you have the freedom to do lots of customization, including customizing the very important “category” listings, which Google relies very heavily upon to determine when to show your profile. You must choose one category suggested by Google, but are free to add up to four more that can contain city names as part of the category. In my opinion, Las Vegas plumber is a much stronger local category than just plumber. Watch this quick video and then go strengthen up your profile Related Posts: Adding YouTube Video to your Google Local profile Google Adds Wonderwheel Search Results Option More Local Marketing Tools from Google Some Video Thoughts on Social Media TweetDeck Adds Lists and LinkedIn Like this post? Share it with others

Thinking out loud for an upcoming paper… Social media means different things to different people. For some, it means a presence on Facebook (e.g., a fan page), or use of role-based accounts on Twitter (e.g., customer service), or availability of applications for mobile devices (e.g., Apple’s iPhone). For others, social media implies leveraging customer communities or use of social media by employees acting as brand ambassadors to the public. Internal use of social media in the context of an employee social network site or enterprise social networking initiative can also become part of strategic discussions. Confusion regarding what social media is, what governance model is appropriate, what resources are required, and what risks exist can stymie efforts to capitalize on social media’s potential unless leadership teams adopt a holistic approach involving both business and IT strategists. Many technologies are associated with social media. Some of the popular ones include blogs, wikis, tags/social bookmarks, communities and social network sites (including social profiles, social graphs and activity feeds), and micro-blogging. As people use social tools to participate in consumer or enterprise-sponsored environments, they construct social identities, assume social roles, and establish reputations in different communities. These activities, when leveraged effectively by organizations, can help improve employee engagement, information sharing, and collaboration within the enterprise. Externally, social media can augment customer relationship management (CRM) programs, strengthen brand awareness, and improve community outreach and social responsibility efforts. However, use of social media is not without risks. External use of Twitter accounts can lead to identity assurance concerns if profiles are unverifiable. There may be concerns that unfettered us of social media by employees will create situations where personal views can negatively affect brand reputation. In regulated industries, legal and compliance demands may require controls to satisfy discovery and audit needs. Even internal use of social media can encounter similar issues. Social network sites can lack robust identity and security-mechanisms that might cause accidental disclosure of intellectual property or confidential information. Use of social network analysis tools can enable employees to visualize relationships and information that might circumvent need-to-know policies. Absence of privacy controls can lead to HR issues. Despite such concerns, saying “no” is not the way IT organizations should respond to business strategists interested in social media. Instead, IT organizations should strive to work hand-in-hand with business areas, providing guidance on social media trends and use. For IT organizations to advise business decision-makers on how to mitigate social media risks, IT strategists should particularly understand the ramifications of social media on identity, privacy, and security.

Crafting unmissable headlines which resonate with social web users is something which appears deceptively simple. Yet it’s an art form requiring writers, bloggers and marketers to craft thousands of headlines to perfect. As someone who has been successful with creating content that goes hot across social channels I’ve come to appreciate the art and challenge of crafting sticky headlines. In fact, crafting headlines is equally if not more challenging than leads and even content itself. Something many bloggers have down, but communications professionals aren’t always fluent in, is the art of crafting headlines specifically for social news sites/users. While there is no one formula for success, I’m going to share 5 things I’ve learned from experience as a blogger, social news user, PR pro and marketer. 1. Work backwards – content first, then headline If you’ve got an idea for a piece of content you think will be popular or if you’v done your homework and researched the types of content that resonate on social channels, great – the hardest part is done. Now jot down a title as a work in progress and create your content. After completion, bearing you know you’ve knocked out a winner, challenge yourself to re-create the headline specifically to resonate with your key audience. You’d be surprised at how much easier this is than working on the perfect headline up front. Having great content in front of you, then selling it through a sticky headline is always easier than writing it staring at a blank screen. 2. Leverage archetypes / formulas which work for others (especially outside your niche) Smashing Magazine has made page one of Digg more than 200 times , frequently using the same headline formula (number + adjective + design-related item + sticky message – i.e. 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen ). Why would they change something which is causing users to instinctively share posts like crazy? Also, don’t be afraid to use archetypes that work in categories external of yours – especially if no one in your niche is using them. 3. Headlines should be outrageous, engaging, emotional, useful, counter-intuitive or remarkable – not to the world, but to your community Your headline doesn’t have to make sense to everyone. There isn’t enough space to do that and still fit within something like a Tweet (only 140 characters + 20 character tiny URL) or Digg headline (60 characters). What it should do is conjure one or more of the adjectives listed above to the influencers – or 1%’ers as Jackie Huba calls them – of your community. To achieve this you must first understand your community – ideally by being a member yourself and able to empathize with them. 4. Don’t just create content, actually use social news sites You can’t understand social communities at the level necessary to permeate them consistently with your content/headlines without being a member of those communities. This is not optional, and if you’re a blogger or marketer who merely creates content but doesn’t participate you’re missing half the picture. Learn the hot buttons of the popular, macro communities and you’ll get a general sense of how to craft headlines for social news. Then, drill down and become a member of more targeted communities relevant to your niche to learn what resonates with specific groups. 5. SEO intersection – frequently forgotten, always vital A by-product of news stories which go popular on the social web is links. Content created goes popular, gets a ton of links up front and as a by-product the engine juice delivered helps create authority for that page. If the content is really good, it will continue to receive organic links months or years after it’s been posted due to visibility from search engines (and create a ranking that’s self-reinforcing). In other words, social news success can be long term: a story that’s successful has the potential to be a high visibility entry point to your site for years to come even after the initial wave of buzz.  Craft two headlines for your stories to help achieve this: 1 for search engines (title tag) and one for users (page title). Conclusion As social Diva Liz Strauss has pointed out , it’s not just about the headlines – you also need equally remarkable content to back it up in order to achieve any kind of worthwhile goal such as attracting subscribers or sales leads. But the importance of using clever headlines to help your content stand out in the first place is vital. As the firehose of real-time social content speeds up, the value of well-crafted headlines will increase. And the truth is, tips can only help so much. Writing headlines is more art than science. The best path is to consider it an iterative process, experiment with different structures, study your analytics and find what works for you. What are your tips for writing effective social news headlines?

From intent to purpose… Good friend Jeremiah Owyang recently wondered whether or not the real-time Web was fast enough to keep pace with our insatiable appetites for information and connectivity. As such, Jeremiah introduced the emergence of what he refers to as the “ Intention Web .” With event planning features, like Facebook events, upcoming.org, we’re starting to see people make explicitly public remarks on what they want to do, when, and with who.  Welcome plancast.com a startup by Mark Hendrickson formerly of Techcrunch who created this simple website that allows people to broadcast what they plan to do next using Twitter or Facebook. Owyang summarized the true opportunity for the Intention Web as follows… Bottom Line: Intention Web will provide consumers with contextualized experiences. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you. His reference to Plancast is indeed representative of an emerging medium to publish future activities and intentions. And as such, they trigger a social effect that introduces new opportunities end incites potential activity among those within an immediate social graph as well as those defining the friends of friends network. While Plancast is a new service, Facebook events, Upcoming, as well as travel services such as TripIt and Dopplr , among many others across multiple verticals, have long represented an emerging category for the publishing and sharing of planned activities and goals. These activities serve as as social objects as such, they reveal information that can transform activities into relevant content and experiences that are presented to us in the near future. The Predictive Web Social Media becomes less about a move-and-react strategy and sets the stage for engendering meaningful interactions as well as building more tuned business infrastructures to support anticipated activity based on the intelligence and insight extracted from online behavior. As 2010 begins a new decade, we also usher in a new genre of context and personalization in the evolution of an intelligent and semantic Web – a Web that Tim O’Reilly, refers to as Web Squared . Among the hottest trends taking place in and around The Golden Triangle of social, mobile and digital innovation is the emergence of geo-local networking (such as Loopt, FourSquare and Gowalla), augmented reality , and social filtering. In the Future of the Social Web , I discussed the materialization of technologies and applications that would introduce a new era of social context in 2010. The reality is that these capabilities have existed for quite sometime, however, the iteration of new products and underlying algorithms have matured to a point where we can consider solutions for mainstream applications. After several years of harnessing the power of participatory media, the wisdom sourced from crowds proves that crowdsourced insight it’s not an exact science. As Andrew Keen author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Amateur once observed, “Sometimes the Wisdom of the Crowds is not so wise after all.” On the other hand, the idea of collective intelligence is extremely promising as it registers and converts activity and interests based on how we as individuals interact with content and objects within a site or community and as patterns and paths emerge, the algorithm adapts to create more efficient passages. Jack Jia and Dr. Scott Brave of Baynote are fusing crowdsourced intelligence with social sciences. As such, they built a sophisticated platform that transcends mob rule into swarm intelligence – a form of artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.  Ants, for instance, wander randomly until food is found and returned. In the process, ants leave pheromone trails which eventually lead other ants to following and eventually optimizing the path. The greater the concentration of ants who pick up the trail in shorter periods of time, the denser the pheromone trail becomes. On the contrary, if other ants do not pick up on the path, pheromone evaporation occurs and over time, the path is lost. Baynote uses swarm intelligence to employ a type of ant colony optimization that enables an online system to automatically learn from organic behavior to personalize and enhance the online experience – reducing clicks paths and surfacing relevant content to connect people to relevance expeditiously. If you were searching for a particular product on Zappos.com, for example, you may have to sort through product after product until you finally matched the result with your choice of keywords. If Zappos.com integrated Baynote, as users replicated the activity, the system would automoatically identify the pattern and reorganize the content based on keywords and clicks to match products to people faster and more efficiently. Social Intelligence In many ways, we click aimlessly today, and as we search for information, people, and social objects, we do so until we stumble upon something that captivates our attention. We then react, save, share with others, but without movement on a mass scale, the direct path to the content or the experience is erased. To help, meme trackers (or trend watching) technologies such as Tweetmeme , TechMeme , Blogged.com , among others,  help create direct paths to the data online that enchants us en masse within fixed periods of time. Money doesn’t grow on trees, but it does grow on Tweets In a recent issue of MITSloan Management Review , the writers observed, There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores. It’s Twitter. The post captures something that I believe represents the defining spirit for excelling in what is shaping up to be an online Darwinian survival of the fittest . In a new era of socially conscious and responsible businesses, we will manually observe and maneuver the adaptation and streamlining of products and services as well as the customer experience based on online social activity. A majority of these events will follow the path proven by the likes of Baynote to herald a coveted, predictive Web that surfaces personalized focus and value. If we review a basic model of a tag or word cloud, not unlike the ecosystem that tracks and pools “trending topics,” we can visualize the most commonly used keywords related to most online activity. As Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston, and Elizabeth Winklery wrote in the MITSloan Management Review, We believe executives can make accurate predictions about sales trends by analyzing tweets that mention their products or services, and we have created a model based on Twitter’s keyword-search function to help them do that. I call this trendcasting, the ability to spot themes and pinpoint opportunities to deliver a solution to a need that either exists, is emerging, or is on the horizon based on the concentration of social conduct. But as we see in technology similar to Baynote, we can surface trends without the need for manual search, and I believe this technology exists today and will soon become prominent. Imagine improving the experience within social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and in turn, within every stop along a sales cycle, to ensure that in each instance, we’re presented with content that matters to us at the right moment, in the appropriate context. Improving the Signal to Noise Ratio While improving the signal to noise ratio is a never-ending quest, in social media, noise is amplified exponentially.  In an era of the predictive Web, platforms will emerge that present people and content based on who we are, what interests us, and how we navigate the Web. During the proliferation of RSS feeds and the feelings of of being overwhelmed by  those who over-subscribed to their favorite sources, services such as AideRSS (now PostRank) and also mSpoke created platforms that organized feeds based on our preferences, implied explicitly (something we say or do) and implicitly (how we interact with what’s presented.) The goal was to organize feeds to prioritize the content each system formulated would best match what we should read. Recently, My6Sense (note, I’m an advisor) recently launched a new iPhone app that channels social streams into a river of relevance. The app takes social and RSS feeds and analyzes content based a sophisticated algorithm (dubbed digital intuition) to serve tweets, updates, and posts without requiring manual input of preferences. Essentially, it predicts what you would find most interesting as determined by how you react to your content normally. Through a “top messages” function, you are presented with qualified content. It improves the more you use it and quickly, you’ll realize its potential for expediting the future of the predictive web. What if the technology powering My6Sense was built into your attention dashboard (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, or Tweetie)? What if digital intuition powered CNN or Techmeme , presenting only the stories, comments, and reactions across social networks that aligned to your interests? From Estimation to Prediction Suddenly the predictive Web comes into focus. The innovation that materializes into products and platforms creates an ecosystem that wires the individual human algorithm to the technology that will work on our behalf to mine and present data, content, products, people and companies that match what interests us based on who we are – not solely derived from what we have in common. Just because we viewed a common item, purchased a product or service based on our click patterns or share contacts within networks, doesn’t imply, nor does it guarantee, that we share interests, ideas, and ambitions. Therefore, the ability to predict is only as accurate as the technology that focuses on who we are defined by all we do. Make no mistake, the web will evolve from social chaos to genuine social “ME”dia to personalize experiences and solutions. Attention is a precious commodity and it is not to be taken for granted. Our attention only thins with every new and intersting object that traverses across our horizon. Technology will help save us from our insatiable appetite for information and eventually predict what it is that interests or benefits us before we may realize the need or desire. Connect with Brian Solis : Twitter , LinkedIn , Tumblr , Plaxo , or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster : — Image Source: Shutterstock

If you subscribe to the notion that social media is a discipline that is most appropriately aligned with public relations, customer service, customer relationship management and similar business channels, you probably have a hard time seeing social media’s link — pun intended — to search engine optimization. SEO probably comes across as a very scientific process, heavy on paid search strategies and with little relevance to the warm and fuzzies you get with social media. But measuring the warm and fuzzies can be challenging. CEOs understand the value of spending $1,000 on paid search if those clicks can translate to 100,000 website visitors and $10,000 worth of conversions. They don’t often nod and smile when you say, “Well, we have 40,000 Facebook Fans this month!” Unless, of course, they aren’t any more focused on the bottom line than you are if that’s your proof point. Chris Baggott and I have discussed search engine results and corporate blogging a lot recently. We’re working on a research project together you’ll hear more about soon. In a couple of conversations we’ve had, he has shared with me some ways he shows the value of corporate blogs to clients of Compendium Blogware , his company. I’ve been kicking around the idea and thought this might be useful for you to see. To prove the value (at least part of the value anyway) of what you’re doing in social media, let’s see what the search traffic equivalency of your organic keyword rankings is. (Hang in there, it’s a process, but easier than it sounds.) There’s a lot of disclaimers I need to throw in about this (largely so the SEO dorks don’t set fire to my blog) but I’ll save those for the end. To find out the monetary value of your organic search rankings, use a keyword research tool like SEO Book’s Competitive Research Tool or SEM Rush (which actually powers SEO Book’s tool) to get a list of the keywords your website ranks for. (If you know of a different tool, particularly a free one, please recommend it in the comments. Both of these offer some free results, but not a full report without paying for a subscription.) The results will give you a list of keywords your site ranks for, the position it ranks in a given search and the cost per click (CPC) value. (It gives more info, but these are the relevant pieces for now.) That value is what a paid search click sells for in a similar position in a paid search advertisement. (Bear with me.) For example, SocialMediaExplorer.com ranks No. 2 for “social media strategy” which goes for $0.05 per click; No. 1 for “corporate messaging” which goes for $6.04 per click and No. 3 for “educational blogs” which sells for $2.49 per click. (It ranks for more, but I’m keeping the examples short to explain the point succinctly.) Now go to your website analytics software. Click through to traffic sources, then search engines to view the keywords that bring you organic clicks. My analytics shows that I generated 644 visits in the last 30 days from the keyword “social media strategy.” The corresponding paid ad goes for $0.05, so my blog generated $32.20 in search traffic equivalency (organic value compared to paid search cost per click). Simply put, if I had to go out and buy 644 visits from that keyword search in paid advertising, it would cost me $32.20. SME had 11 visits from users clicking on our listing under the keyword “corporate messaging” which is worth $66.44. The keyword “educational blogs” brought 44 visitors last month, which is worth $109.56 in equivalent paid value. So, for those three keywords alone, my monthly efforts generated $208.20 in search traffic equivalency for Social Media Explorer. I didn’t have to spend $208.20, but did invest time and attention to those subject matters to write the posts that garnered those rankings. (More on this in the disclaimers.) If you added up all your organic traffic value based on this equation you could say to your boss, “Our social media activity brought in (let’s say) $45,000 in website traffic value this month.” But wait! There’s more! Organic search results draw in roughly 85 percent of all clicks on a SERP. Paid search is, to most users, less trusted and not clicked on as often as organic search results. So while our equation above makes sense if you’re comparing apples to apples, you’re actually comparing apples to oranges. The good news is that because organic search results are more trusted and clicked upon with more frequency, you can argue that your monthly value is not worth $45,000 in website traffic, but $45,000 AT A MINIMUM. It’s probably worth much, much more than that. The value of the additional? Not found a brain that big yet. If you have ideas, please drop them in the comments. Hopefully, this will give you some ROI fodder to think about or even incorporate into your reporting for your social media activities. As you give this process some thought, however, please keep the following disclaimers in mind: This is easy to do if your analytics are measuring a corporate blog or a devoted social media channel. It gets complicated if you want to be all-inclusive and measure the value of where your social outposts rank. (Maybe your Twitter account ranks high for a valuable keyword. You should measure that, but it’s going to take more work to do so and the results will be muddy since you don’t have Twitter account analytics.) It’s also complicated if your social media efforts take place on your corporate website as the social content (blogs, etc.) adds value to the overall domain’s search results. Unfortunately, so do the sales pages and other static content, the age of the site and more. But once you set up the spreadsheet or report and do the research the first time, it’ll go smoother the second go-around. Paid search advertisements normally deliver better conversions because, if done right, they lead searchers to exactly the type of information they’re seeking or at least the absolute type of message you are delivering. Organic results are served up based on what Google thinks your content is about, traffic to that page, the number and types of links that page has and from where, how recent the content is compared to other results and more. You don’t have much control over what Google serves up as organic results. So your $45,000 in traffic equivalency might have cost you that in pay-per-click ads, but with those ads, you might have converted customers at rates 30-50 percent higher (or more) than where the organic results sent folks. On the flip side, I wrote the SME post on the top education blogs one year ago this Wednesday. I pulled in $109.56 worth of search traffic equivalency last month without doing a single thing. It’s the long tail of good web content at play. That post drives search results for my blog to this day. And will continue to do so. If it has produced the same amount each month in the last year, then I spent 2-3 hours writing a single piece of content that has now driven $1,314.72 in value to SME. On a similar note, the history of your content’s ranking matters as well. I’ve ranked No. 1 or No. 2 for “educational blogs” for 12 months now. If a new post on another website hits tomorrow that suddenly has a ton of links, etc., it will still likely take that post a while to knock mine down a notch. The value of ranking high for a term over time has merit. The great news about all this information is that many smart SEO professionals read this blog. And every time I write about SEO, they provide as much, if not more, value in the comments. If I’m wrong on any of this or missed a few disclaimers you should keep in mind, they’ll tell you below. Feel free to ask for clarification from me or them in the comments, too. And when you get around to trying it, come back and tell us if you were surprised at the equivalent value of your efforts.